Introduction

As students in College Composition, you will be asked to interpret literature, or analyze a literary work in light of concepts known as literary theory. As you read in the Literary Interpretation chapter, analyzing literature often requires you to employ the lens of a particular literary methodology, or theory.  So, you might be asking yourself, just what is literary theory?

Literary theory is written by people who pay particular attention to the way that language affects meaning. Where a casual or practical reader reads the surface of a text to understand the basic content and to find the immediately obvious meaning communicated in any text, literary theorists look deeper. Theorists identify and explore the multiple effects, influences, and implied meanings created by the particular way language is used. Writing students then use the ideas and concepts developed by literary theorists—their theories—to unpack literary texts.

Essentially, literary theory provides us with multiple ways of talking about literary texts, or literature. If you have ever had a heated conversation with a friend or family member, you know that language does not always convey transparently exactly what we are thinking, and that even the most innocently intended comment can be interpreted differently by audiences who notice different connotations in the choice of words. Literary theorists study the way that meaning is created in that exchange between writers/speakers, readers/listeners, and the complexity of language itself. We use literary theory to help us uncover and make sense of those subtle, below-the-surface effects of language.

Literary theory does not mean making hypotheses or guesses about literature. In the field of English studies (and most academic disciplines), theory refers to the study of the underlying assumptions we make about the nature of language, authors, readers, texts, human subjectivity, narrative, aesthetics, power, culture, and other major elements of literary production and reception. The practical application of these theories emerges in literary criticism, where we make concrete arguments often supported by close readings of textual details about the way our underlying assumptions play out in a particular text or texts.

At the end of this chapter, you will find a list that identifies key theoretical questions, theories, and theorists who may help you explain and refine the underlying assumptions you already make when reading and analyzing literature. First, however, we want to look briefly at why we study literary theory.

Why Study Literary Theory?

In his essay “Disliking Books at an Early Age,” literary scholar Gerald Graff talks about how he struggled as a child to see the point of literature. “Literature and history,” he recalls, “had no apparent application to my experience.” Even in college, Graff says, he “continued to find ‘serious’ reading painfully difficult and alien.” This all changed for Graff when he encountered critical debates over the interpretation of Mark Twain’s novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1876). He read about critics who disagreed over the book’s meaning, value, and attitudes toward race. He realized that the conversations he’d been having with his classmates about the book in class discussion “were not too far from the thoughts of famous published critics,” which gave Graff a feeling of power and excitement about reading he’d never felt before.

We hope you will feel that same power and excitement about reading as you learn about critical debates in literary study and begin to contribute to them in your own papers. Literature isn’t made up of inscrutable texts that can be deciphered only by a chosen few who have learned to speak in a secret code. Literature is written by people—talented people perhaps, but people nonetheless. And the concerns of literary critics are concerns that many people share: What does this work say about the human condition? How does it convey its message? Does it portray its subjects fairly? What political or social ideas does it advance? Literature has many potential meanings, and literary theory gives scholars different avenues to uncover those meanings.

By asking theoretical questions of the novels, stories, poems, plays, and essays that you read in your class, you can begin to grasp works that may seem ineffable—impenetrable—if you try to uncover a single, “correct” interpretation for them. In short, literary theory can give you a toolbox for approaching any literary text: a set of interpretive moves that can help you figure out where to start when your instructor asks you to comment on a work in class or develop a paper topic.

Over the years, as literary critics argued about the best ways to interpret literature, many “schools” or “theories of criticism” have emerged. As you can imagine—given that they were developed by sophisticated specialists—some of these theoretical approaches are quite sophisticated and abstract.

Next, we’ll look at a few of the many literary theory schools of thought, providing brief definitions of each. These definitions are meant only to introduce these concepts, each of which are highly complex. We encourage you to research these terms further as you decide which one might be useful in your paper.