Literary Theory Starter Kit



Literary Theory Starter Kit

Your Critical Theory/Literary Theory Touchstone

Critical theories were developed as a means to understand the various ways people read the world. Literary theories grew out of critical theory as a means to understand the various ways people read.

The proponents of each theory believe their theory is the theory, but most of us interpret texts according to the "rules" of several different theories at a time. All literary theories are lenses through which we can see texts.

There is nothing to say that one is better than another or that you should read (texts or the world) according to any of them, but it is sometimes fun to "decide" to read a text with one in mind because you often end up with a whole new perspective on your reading.

What follows is a summary of some of the most common schools of critical and literary theory. These descriptions are extremely cursory, and none of them fully explains what the theory is all about. But it is enough to get the general idea. Enjoy!

Social Class Theory

Whom does it benefit if the work or effort is accepted/successful/believed, etc.?

What is the social class of the author?

Which class does the work claim to represent?

What values does it reinforce?

What values does it subvert?

What conflict can be seen between the values the work champions and those it portrays?

What social classes do the characters represent?

How do characters from different classes interact or conflict?

How does the dominant class hold others down?

Who has the power/money? Who does not? What happens as a result?

This school of critical theory focuses on power, social class, and money in works of literature. For example, it could be said that 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is about the upper class attempting to maintain their power and influence over the lower class by chasing Ichabod, a lower-class citizen with aspirations toward the upper class, out of town. This would explain some of the numerous descriptions of land, wealth, and hearty living through Ichabod's eyes.

Social Class Literary Theory

Social Class Literary Theory – also referred to as Marxist Literary Theory - is a sociological approach to literature that views works of literature or art as the products of historical forces that can be analyzed by looking at the material conditions in which they were formed. In this lens, what we often classify as a world view (such as the Victorian age) is actually the articulations of the dominant class. This lens generally focuses on the clash between the dominant and repressed classes in any given age and also may encourage art to imitate what is often termed an “objective” reality.

So what does that mean? The Social Class Literary Theory is a way to look at literature, media, and the world through a lens that has both obvious and implied assumptions and values about matters such as culture, race, class, and power. Social Class criticism typically aims at not only revealing and clarifying ideological issues, but also correcting social injustices. Some people who use Social Class Literary Theory use literature to describe the competing socioeconomic interests that too often advance capitalist interests such as money and power rather than socialist interests such as morality and justice. They argue that literature and literary criticism are essentially political because they either challenge or support economic oppression. Because of this strong emphasis on the political aspects of texts, this criticism focuses more on the content and themes of literature than on its form.

Write a one-sentence definition in your own words. What does Social Class literary theory ask you to focus on as you read a text? What perspective are you taking as you use Social Class theory? What questions can you ask as you use Social Class theory?

Notes

Feminist Theory

How is the relationship between men and women portrayed?

What are the power relationships between men and women (or characters assuming male/female roles)?

How are male and female roles defined?

What constitutes masculinity and femininity?

How do characters embody these traits?

Do characters take on traits from opposite genders? How so? How does this change others’ reactions to them?

What does the work reveal about the operations (economically, politically, socially, or psychologically) of patriarchy?

What does the work imply about the possibilities of sisterhood as a mode of resisting patriarchy?

What does the work say about women's creativity?

What does the history of the work's reception by the public and by the critics tell us about the operation of patriarchy?

What role the work play in terms of women's literary history and literary tradition? (Tyson)

Is this good for womankind?

How are women being portrayed?

Feminist criticism (very simply put) champions the downtrodden of the “war of the sexes,” critiquing patriarchal texts and championing neglected (and recent) “pro-woman” literary works. Like classism, feminism quite often teams up with post-structuralism in its critique of the dominant male “hegemony.” One might conveniently divide feminism into two “camps”:

1) Those who posit an innate (and culturally repressed) “female” way of writing, reading, even thinking (essentialist); and

2) Those who see sex or gender as conically conditioned and linguistically constructed (constructivist). Either way, patriarchal dominance/oppression has been—and continues to be, to a great extent (as you see on MTV)—the order of the day.

A feminist critic sees cultural and economic disabilities in a "patriarchal" society that have hindered or prevented women from realizing their creative possibilities and women's cultural identification as a merely negative object, or "Other," to man as the defining and dominating "Subject."

There are several assumptions and concepts held in common by most feminist critics.

1. Our civilization is pervasively patriarchal – or male dominated (male

president, male business leaders, male religious heads, and so on).

2. The concepts of "gender" are largely, if not entirely, cultural constructs, affected by the universal patriarchal biases of our civilization.

3. This patriarchal ideology (way of thinking) also pervades those writings that have been considered great literature. Such works lack independent female role models, are addressed to male readers, and leave the woman reader an alien outsider or else ask her to identify against herself by assuming male values and ways of perceiving, feeling, and acting.

This is somewhat like Social Class criticism, but instead of focusing on the relationships between the classes it focuses on the relationships between the genders. Under this theory you would examine the patterns of thought, behavior, values, enfranchisement (admittance to different areas of society), and power in relations between the sexes.

Define “hegemony” in your own words.

Define patriarchal.

Write a one-sentence definition in your own words. What does Feminist literary theory ask you to focus on as you read a text? What perspective are you taking as you use Feminist theory? What questions can you ask as you use Feminist theory?

Notes

Critical Race Theory

Is this good for people of color (not “colored people”)?

How does this portray people of color?

The term critical race theory typically refers to a specific set of practices and theories advanced in the 1990s primarily by African American, Latino, and Asian American legal scholars. A more expansive definition of critical race theory refers to a broad constellation of historical and contemporary theories that have actively engaged the general racial theories of particular times and/or social contexts.

With class and gender, race may be said to complete the main set of three oppressed social groups “writing back” against dominant Western culture. But with such demeaning labels as “African-American Studies” and “Native American Studies,” much of the scholarship here may also be said to be truly on the “outside lookin’ in.” And yet the criticism of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Houston Baker, Jr., and bell hooks makes African-American literary criticism one of the more fascinating and powerful braches of literary scholarship today.

Contemporary critical race theory demonstrates many of the following distinguishing features and/or preoccupations:

• Critical race theory typically strives to advance a social justice framework. Unlike traditional scholarly research that investigates and/or explains how race and racism are organized and operate, critical race theory also aims to redress social inequalities. This is what makes it “critical.”

• Critical race theory is often not immediately recognizable as theory. Because critical race theory interests academics as well as a wider public, many critical race scholars write with multiple audiences in mind and may create different versions of their work for different constituencies.

• Critical race theory draws upon paradigms of intersectionality, the study of intersections between different groups of minorities. Recognizing that race and racism work with and through gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality and/or nation as systems of power, contemporary critical race theory often relies upon and/or investigates these intersections.

• Cultural studies and discourse analysis, encompassing work on areas as diverse as the body, ideologies, and the significance of mass media and popular culture.

Define redress

Define intersectionality

Write a one-sentence definition in your own words. What does CRT ask you to focus on as you read a text? What perspective are you taking as you use CRT lens? What questions can you ask as you use CRT?

Notes

Gender Studies

What elements of the text can be perceived as being masculine (active, powerful) and feminine (passive, marginalized) and how do the characters support these traditional roles?

What sort of support (if any) is given to elements or characters who question the masculine/feminine binary? What happens to those elements/characters?

What elements in the text exist in the middle, between the perceived masculine/feminine binary? In other words, what elements exhibit traits of both (bisexual)?

How does the author present the text? Is it a traditional narrative? Is it secure and forceful? Or is it more hesitant or even collaborative?

What does the work reveal about the operations (socially, politically, psychologically) homophobic?

How does the literary text illustrate the difficulties related to sexuality and sexual "identity". That is, the ways in which human sexuality does not fall neatly into the separate categories defined by the words homosexual and heterosexual?

Gender Studies

Gender Studies is a field of interdisciplinary study which analyzes race, ethnicity, sexuality, and location. Gender study has many different forms. One view exposed by the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said: “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.” This view proposes that in gender studies, the term “gender” should be used to refer to the social and cultural constructions of masculinities and femininities, not to the state of being male or female in its entirety. However, all gender theorists do not hold this view. Other areas of gender study closely examine the role that the biological states of being male or female have on social constructs of gender. Specifically, in what way gender roles are defined by biology and how they are defined by cultural trends. The field emerged from a number of different areas: the sociology of the 1950s and later; the theories of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan; and the work of feminists such as Judith Butler.

Gender studies explore issues of sexuality, power, and marginalized populations (woman as other) in literature and culture. Much of the work in gender studies, while influenced by feminist criticism, emerges from post-structural interest in fragmented, de-centered knowledge building (Nietzsche, Derrida, Foucault), language (the breakdown of sign-signifier), and psychoanalysis (Lacan).

A primary concern in gender studies is the manner in which gender and sexuality is discussed: "Effective as this work [feminism] was in changing what teachers taught and what the students read, there was a sense on the part of some feminist critics that...it was still the old game that was being played, when what it needed was a new game entirely. The argument posed was that in order to counter patriarchy, it was necessary not merely to think about new texts, but to think about them in radically new ways" (Richter 1432).

Therefore, a critic working in gender studies might even be uncomfortable with the binary established by many feminist scholars between masculine and feminine: "Cixous (following Derrida in Of Grammatology) sets up a series of binary oppositions (active/passive, sun/moon...father/mother, logos/pathos). Each pair can be analyzed as a hierarchy in which the former term represents the positive and masculine and the latter the negative and feminine principle" (Richter 1433-1434).

In-Betweens

Many critics working with gender theory are interested in the breakdown of binaries such as male and female, the in-betweens (also following Derrida's interstitial knowledge building). For example, gender studies maintains that cultural definitions of sexuality and what it means to be male and female are in flux: "...the distinction between "masculine" and "feminine" activities and behavior is constantly changing, so that women who wear baseball caps and fatigues...can be perceived as more piquantly sexy by some heterosexual men than those women who wear white frocks and gloves and look down demurely" (Richter 1437).

Moreover, Richter reminds us that as we learn more about our genetic structure, the biology of male/female becomes increasingly complex and murky: "even the physical dualism of sexual genetic structures and bodily parts breaks down when one considers those instances - XXY syndromes, natural sexual bimorphisms, as well as surgical transsexuals - that defy attempts at binary classification" (1437).

Define social construct.

Define binary.

Write a one-sentence definition in your own words. What does Gender Studies ask you to focus on as you read a text? What perspective are you taking as you use Gender Studies? What questions can you ask as you use Gender Studies?

Notes

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