Literary Theory

Why Do We Use Literary Theory to Analyze Literature?

In addition to the vocabulary of literary and figurative devices, literary theory provides readers with an additional conceptual vocabulary to analyze and interpret literary works. Literary theory facilitates the use of knowledge external to the text that provides a framework that helps to focus intellectual questions and analysis.

As noted by Lois Tyson in Critical Theory Today, critical literary theory provides tools for analysis that “not only can show us our world and ourselves through new and valuable lenses but also can strengthen our ability to think logically, creatively, and with a good deal of insight” (3).

Literary Theories Defined

For an overview of literary theories and their definitions, review the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Literary Theory page.

Literary Theorists and Contributions

• Mikhail Bakhtin: Russian formalism–chronotopes, dialogism, heteroglossia, polyphony
• Jacques Lacan: psychoanalytic criticism–post-Freudian, the mirror stage, the symbolic
• Louis Althusser: Marxist criticism–ideology and ideological state apparatuses, interpellation
• Cleanth Brooks: New criticism–irony, paradox
• Ferdinand de Saussure: Semiotics–sign=signifier and signified
• Roland Barthes: Structuralist criticism–readerly and writerly, sign systems
• Jacques Derrida: Deconstructive criticism–deconstruction, différance, the trace
• Michel Foucault: New historicist–discourse and power/knowledge
• Stephen Greenblatt: Cultural criticism–ethical/political orientation, freedom/lack of thought or moment, popular culture, oppressed groups, models of practice and social structures, social understandings,
• Elaine Showalter: Feminist criticism–gynocriticism
• Judith Butler: Lesbian, gay, and queer criticism–gender construction, gender performativity
• Edward Said: Post-Colonial criticism–orientialism, other/othering
• Julia Kristeva: Poststructuralist feminist criticism–abject, abjectification
• bell hooks: Black feminist criticism–intersectionality of racism and gender
• Gloria Anzaldúa: Chicana feminism/queer theory–borderlands identity, mestizaje

How Do We Apply Literary Theories

There are numerous theories that allow for analysis of literary works, and writers often apply more than one.

How We Use Specific Theories to Pose Questions and Apply Vocabulary

The vocabulary that we apply to analysis and the types of questions that we pose depends on our theoretical lens or lenses. For this course, the literary critical theories that are central to readings of texts in this course are feminist and post-colonial theory.

Feminist Criticism

According to Lois Tyson, “Broadly defined, feminist criticism examines the ways in which literature (and other cultural productions) reinforces or undermines the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of women” (83).

Post-Colonial Criticism

Lois Tyson asserts that “postcolonial criticism seeks to understand the operations—politically, socially, culturally, and psychologically—of colonialist and anticolonialist ideologies” (418).

New Historicist and Cultural Criticism

Lois Tyson distinguishes the concerns new historical and cultural criticism share about literary texts as cultural artifacts: “For new historicist critics . . . the literary text and the historical situation from which it emerged are equally important because the text (the literary work) and context (the historical conditions that produced it) are mutually constitutive: they create each other,” whereas, “[f]or cultural critics, a literary text, or any other kind of cultural production, performs cultural work to the extent to which it shapes the cultural experience of those who encounter it, that is to the extent to which it shapes our experiences of members of a cultural group” (291-2, 297).

Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.