Literary Devices: Criticism and Theory
Introduction
Literary theory and literary criticism are interpretive tools that help us think more deeply and insightfully about the literature that we read. Over time, different schools of literary criticism have developed, each with its own approaches to the act of reading. (Sparksnotes, n. pag.)
Literary Criticism and literary theory
There was a time when literary criticism and literary theory seemed two different and almost unrelated things. Criticism was about the actual meaning of a poem, a novel, or a play, while theory seemed alien to what the study of literature was really about because its generalizations could never do justice to individual texts. In the last thirty years, however, criticism and theory have moved closer and closer to each other. In fact, for many contemporary critics and theorists criticism and theory cannot be separated at all. They would argue that when we interpret a text we always do so from a theoretical perspective, whether we are aware of it or not, and they would also argue that theory cannot do without interpretation. (Bertens, P 3)
Richard Rorty speaks of a new, mixed genre that began in the nineteenth century: ‘Beginning in the days of Goethe and Macaulay and Carlyle and Emerson, a new kind of writing has developed which is neither the evaluation of the relative merits of literary productions, nor intellectual history, nor moral philosophy, nor social prophecy, but all of these mingled together in a new genre.’ The most convenient designation of this miscellaneous genre is simply the nickname theory, which has come to designate works that succeed in challenging and reorienting thinking in fields other than those to which they apparently belong. (Culler, n. pag.)
‘A theory must be more than a hypothesis: can’t be obvious; it involves complex relations of a systematic kind among a number of factors; and it is not easily confirmed or disproved. As a result, theory is intimidating. One of the most dismaying features of theory today is that it is endless. It is not something that you could ever master, not a particular group of texts you could learn so as to ‘know theory’, writings from outside the field of literary studies have been taken up by people in literary studies because their analyses of language, or mind, or history, or culture, offer new and persuasive accounts of textual and cultural matters. Theory in this sense is not a set of methods for literary study but an unbounded group of writings about everything under the sun. (Culler, n.pag.)
Impact of Literary criticism on literary studies.
Theory has enormously enriched and invigorated the study of literary works, as literature is an institution that lives by exposing and criticizing its own limits, by testing what will happen if one writes differently’.
However, literary studies itself has never been unified around a single conception of what it was doing, traditional or otherwise; and since the advent of theory, literary studies has been an especially contentious and contested discipline, where all kinds of projects, treating both literary and non-literary works, compete for attention. (Culler, n.pag.)
Theory is often an argumentative critique of common-sense notions, and further, an attempt to show that what we take for granted as ‘common sense’ is in fact a historical construction, a particular theory that has come to seem so natural to us that we don’t even see it as a theory. (Culler, n.pag.)
What are commonly seen as ‘schools’ of literary criticism or theoretical ‘approaches’ to literature are, from the point of view of hermeneutics, dispositions to give particular kinds of answers to the question of what a work is ultimately ‘about’: ‘the class struggle’ (Marxism), ‘the possibility of unifying experience’ (the New Criticism), ‘Oedipal conflict’ (psychoanalysis), ‘the containment of subversive energies’ (new historicism), ‘the asymmetry of gender relations’ (feminism), ‘the self-deconstructive nature of the text’ (deconstruction), ‘the occlusion of imperialism’ (post-colonial theory), ‘the heterosexual matrix’ (gay and lesbian studies). (Culler, n.pag.)
The theoretical discourses named in parentheses are not primarily modes of interpretation: they are accounts of what they take to be particularly important to culture and society. Many of these theories include accounts of the functioning of literature or of discourse generally, and so partake of the project of poetics; but as versions of hermeneutics they give rise to particular types of interpretation in which texts are mapped into a target language. What is important in the game of interpretation is not the answer you come up with. What’s important is how you get there, what you do with the details of the text in relating them to your answer. (Culler, n.pag.)
Now even at that time, when the nature of the literariness of literature was a question that every good theorist had to address, it was clear that in some sense theory was displacing the literary—clear, at least to all those who attacked theory, accusing it of foreswearing literary values and undermining the prestige or the special character of literature.
The special status of literature as privileged object of study was in an important sense undermined, but the effect of this sort of study was to locate a “literariness” in cultural objects of all sorts and thus to retain a certain centrality of the literary.
Uses of literary theory
The nature of theory is to undo, through a contesting of premises and assumptions, what you thought you knew, so the effects of theory are not predictable. You have not become master, but neither are you where you were before. You reflect on your reading in new ways. You have different questions to ask and a better sense of the implications of the questions you put to works you read.
Only a theory which locates literary criticism — and literature—as part of a socially rooted and hence socially regulated system of communication makes possible an understanding of its historically structured relationships. (Hohendahl, n.pag.)
The institution of literary study depends on the twin facts that (1) such arguments are never settled, and (2) arguments have to be made about how particular scenes or combinations of lines support any particular hypothesis. You can’t make a work mean just anything: it resists, and you have to labour to convince others of the pertinence of your reading. For the conduct of such arguments, a key question is what determines meaning which texts are mapped into a target language.
Conclusion
What is important in the game of interpretation is not the answer you come up with – as my parodies show, some versions of the answer become, by definition, predictable. What’s important is how you get there, what you do with the details of the text in relating them to your answer.
Works Cited
‘Literary Theory and Criticism’. Sparksnotes.con , Section 6. 2011. N.p, n.dWeb. 14 July 2011.
Bertens, Hans, ‘Preface’,Literary Theory: The Basics; 2001, preceding p1, 2p, UNITED States, Taylor & Francis Ltd / Books (2008)Web. 2 July 2011
Culler, J. Literary Theory:‘A Very Short Introduction’. London: Oxford University Press. 2007. Web. 12 July 2011
Culler, Jonathan; Butler, Judith; Guillory, John; Thomas, Kendall. ‘What’s Left of Theory?’, 2000, p273-292, 12p. (Book Chapter) web. 10 July 2011.
Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. ‘Literary Criticism’. New German Critique, West Germany, Duke University Press, n.d. Winter76 Issue 7, p3, 18p. Web. 14 July 2011
