Reader-response theory may be traced initially to theorists such as I. A. Richards (The Principles of Literary Criticism, Practical Criticism and How to Read a Page) or Louise Rosenblatt (Literature as Exploration or The Reader, the Text, the Poem). For Rosenblatt and Richards the idea of a "correct" reading--though difficult to attain--was always the goal of the "educated" reader (armed, of course, with appropriate aesthetic apparatus). For Stanley Fish (Is There a Text in this Class?, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in "Paradise Lost" and Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of the Seventeenth-Century Reader), the reader's ability to understand a text is also subject a reader's particular "interpretive community." To simplify, a reader brings certain assumptions to a text based on the interpretive strategies he/she has learned in a particular interpretive community. For Fish, the interpretive community serves somewhat to "police" readings and thus prohibit outlandish interpretations. In contrast Wolfgang Iser argued that the reading process is always subjective. In The Implied Reader, Iser sees reading as a dialectical process between the reader and text. For Hans-Robert Jauss, however (Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, and Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics), a reader's aesthetic experience is always bound by time and historical determinants.

Key Terms:

Horizons of expectations - a term developed by Hans Robert Jauss to explain how a reader's "expectations" or frame of reference is based on the reader's past experience of literature and what preconceived notions about literature the reader possesses (i.e., a reader's aesthetic experience is bound by time and historical determinants). Jauss also contended that for a work to be considered a classic it needed to exceed a reader's horizons of expectations.

Implied reader - a term developed by Wolfgang Iser; the implied reader [somewhat akin to an "ideal reader"] is "a hypothetical reader of a text. The implied reader [according to Iser] "embodies all those predispositions necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect -- predispositions laid down, not by an empirical outside reality, but by the text itself. Consequently, the implied reader as a concept has his roots firmly planted in the structure of the text; he is a construct and in no way to be identified with any real reader" (Greig E. Henderson and Christopher Brown - Glossary of Literary Theory).

Interpretive communities - a concept, articulated by Stanley Fish, that readers within an "interpretive community" share reading strategies, values and interpretive assumptions (Barbara McManus).

Transactional analysis - a concept developed by Louise Rosenblatt asserting that meaning is produced in a transaction of a reader with a text. As an approach, then, the critic would consider "how the reader interprets the text as well as how the text produces a response in her" (Dobie 132 - see General Resources below).

Further References:

• Austin, J. L.How to Do Things with Words. 1962
• Bleich, David. Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism. 1978
• Bloom, Harold. A Map of Misreading. 1975.
• Booth, Stephen. An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets. New Haven: Yale UP, 1969.
• Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. 1981.
• Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader. 1979.
• Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980.
• Holland, Norman. 5 Readers Reading. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975.
• Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1974.
• ---. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.
• Jauss, Hans Robert. Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982.
• ---. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. U of Minneapolis P, 1982.
• Mailloux, Steven. Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction. 1982
• Holland, Norman. The Dynamics of Literary Response. 1968, 5 Readers Reading. 1975
• Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy. New York: Methuen, 1982.
• Richards, I.A. How to Read a Page. 1942.
• ---. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. 1929. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935.
• Riffaterre, Michael. Semiotics of Poetry. 1978.
• Rosenblatt, Louise. The Reader, the Text, the Poem. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1978.
• Suleiman, Susan R., and Inge Crosman, eds. The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation. Princeton UP, 1980.
• Tompkins, Jane, ed. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980.

Suggested Websites:

• "Reader Response: Various Positions" - Dr. John Lye - Brock University
• Reader Response Theory and Criticism - Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism
• Reader-Response Criticism - Wikipedia
• "The Author, the Text, and the Reader" - Clarissa Lee Ai Ling, The London School of Journalism
• Definition of Reader-Response Criticism - virtuaLit
• "Reader-Response Theory of Stanley Fish" by Chris Lang
• Wolfgang Iser (and reader-response theory) by David Albertson - Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and Arts

Contemporary Literary Theory is not a single thing but a collection of theoretical approaches which are marked by a number of premises, although not all of the theoretical approaches share or agree on all of the them.

1. Meaning is assumed to be created by difference, not by "presence," (that is, identity with the object of meaning). As the revisionist Freudian Jacques Lacan remarks, a sign signals the absence of that which it signifies. Signs do not directly represent the reality to which they refer, but (following the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure) mean by difference from other words in a concept set. All meaning is only meaning in reference to, and in distinction from, other meanings; there is no meaning in any stable or absolute sense. Meanings are multiple, changing, contextual.

2. There is no foundational 'truth' or reality in the universe (as far as we can know)--no absolutes, no eternalities, no solid ground of truth beneath the shifting sands of history. There are only local and contingent truths generated by human groups through their cultural systems in response to their needs for power, survival and esteem. Consequently, values and identity are cultural constructs, not stable entities. Even the unconscious is a cultural construct, as Kaja Silverman points out in The Subject of Semiotics, in that the unconscious is constructed through repression, the forces of repression are cultural, and what is taboo is culturally formulated.

3. Language is a much more complex, elusive phenomenon than we ordinarily suspect, and what we take normally to be our meanings are only the surface of a much more substantial theatre of linguistic, psychic and cultural operations, of which operations we are not be fully aware. Contemporary theory attempts to explore the implications (i.e., the inter-foldings, from 'plier', to fold) of levels of meaning in language.

4. Language itself always has excessive signification, that is, it always means more than it may be taken to mean in any one context; signification is always 'spilling over', especially in texts which are designed to release signifying power, as texts which we call 'literature' are. This excessive signification is created in part by the rhetorical, or tropic, characteristics of language (a trope is a way of saying something by saying something else, as in a metaphor, a metonym, or irony), and the case is made by Paul de Man that there is an inherent opposition (or undecidability, or aporia) between the grammatical and the rhetorical operations of language.

5. It is language itself, not some essential humanness or timeless truth, that is central to culture and meaning. Humans 'are' their symbol systems, they are constituted through them, and those systems and their meanings are contingent, relational, dynamic.

6. The meaning that appears as normal in our social life masks, through various means such as omission, displacement, difference, misspeaking and bad faith, the meaning that is: the world of meaning we think we occupy is not the world we do in fact occupy. The world we do occupy is a construction of ideology, an imagination of the way the world is that shapes our world, including our 'selves', for our use.

7. A text is, as the etymology of the word "text" proclaims, a tissue, a woven thing (L. texere, to weave); it is a tissue woven of former texts, echoes of which it continually evokes (filiations, these echoes are sometimes called), woven of historical references and practices, and woven of the play of language. A text is not, and cannot be, 'only itself', nor can it properly be reified, said to be 'a thing'; a text is a process of engagements. Literary Theory advocates pushing against the depth, complexity and indeterminancy of this tissue until not only the full implications of the multiplicities but the contradictions inevitably inherent in them become more apparent.

8. The borders of literature are challenged by the ideas

a) that all texts share common traits, for instance that they all are constructed of rhetorical, tropic, linguistic and narrative elements, and

b) that all experience can be viewed as a text: experience insofar as it is knowable is consequently symbolically configured, and human activity and even perception is both constructed and known through the conventions of social practice; hence as a constructed symbolic field experience is textual.

While on the one hand this blurring of differentiation between 'literature' and other texts may seem to make literature less privileged, on the other hand it opens those non-literary (but not non-imaginative, and only problematically non-fictional) texts, including 'social texts', the grammars and vocabularies of social action and cultural practice, up to the kind of complex analysis that literature has been opened to.

9. So the nature of language and meaning is seen as more intricate, potentially more subversive, more deeply embedded in psychic, linguistic and cultural processes, more areas of experience are seen as textual, and texts are seen as more deeply embedded in and constitutive of social processes.

None of these ideas shared by contemporary theories are new to the intellectual traditions of our culture. It appears to many, however, that Literary Theory attacks the fundamental values of literature and literary study: that it attacks the customary belief that literature draws on and creates meanings that reflect and affirm our central (essential, human, lasting) values; that it attacks the privileged meaningfulness of 'literature'; that it attacks the idea that a text is authored, that is, that the authority for its meaningfulness rests on the activity of an individual; that it attacks the trust that the text that is read can be identified in its intentions and meanings with the text that was written; and ultimately that it attacks the very existence of value and meaning itself, the ground of meaningfulness, rooted in the belief in those transcendent human values on which humane learning is based.

On the other hand, 'theory people' point out that theory does is not erase literature but expands the concept of the literary and renews the way texts in all areas of intellectual disciplines are or can be read; that it explores the full power of meaning and the full embeddedness of meanings in their historical placement; that it calls for a more critical, more flexible reading.

It is the case that Literary Theory challenges many fundamental assumptions, that it is often skeptical in its disposition, and that it can look in practice either destructive of any value or merely cleverly playful. The issue is whether theory has good reasons for the questioning of the assumptions, and whether it can lead to practice that is in fact productive.

© 1997, 2000 by John Lye. This text may be freely used, with attribution, for non-profit purposes.
As are all of my posts for this course, this document is open to change. If you have any suggestions (additions, qualifications, arguments), mail the author: jlye@brocku.ca

Franz Stanzel set out to derive a comprehensive typology of all conceivable narrative structures. His intent, he said,was "to systematize the various kinds and degrees of mediacy." (Mittelbarkeit) [1] that result from the shifting relationship between the story and how it is being told. Stanzel says that his project is to show how novels and short stories "render their mediacy."[2] and thus affect the structure of the narrative. "Render" is the translation of the German verb gestalten and connotes the act of in-forming and shaping. Stanzel writes:

Whenever a piece of news is conveyed, whenever something

is reported, there is a mediator- the voice of a narrator is

audible. I term this phenomenon "mediacy."[3]

Three basic narrative positions:

1 First-person narrative: The world of the characters is identical to the world of the narrator.

2 Authorial narrative situation: The narrator is outside the world of the characters.

3 Figural narrative situation: There is no apparent narrator. A reflector character thinks, feels and perceives. An illusion of im-mediacy is created.

(In fact, all narration is first-person because there is always a narrator between the reader and the story.)

The constitutive elements of mediacy

1 Person: The narrator either exists as a character within the world of the fictional events of the story, or he exists outside it.

2.Perspective: Perspective may be internal (limited), located in the story, in the protagonist or in the centre of the action, or it may be external (omniscient) outside the story or or its centre of action located in a narrator who does not belong to the world of the characters, or who is merely a subordinate figure.

3 Mode: Who is narrating? The narration may be highly personalized or relatively invisible. Mode distinguishes between what Stanzel calls reportorial narration and scenic presentation. (Otherwise distinguished as "showing" and "telling" or mimesis and diegesis.) Modal possibilities constitute a continuum.

Dominance:

In each of the three narrative situations, another constitutive element or pole of the binary opposition associated with it attains dominance over the other constitutive elements and their poles.

1 Authorial narrative situation: Dominance of external perspective.

2 First-Person narrative situation: Dominance of fictive world.

3 Figural narration: Dominance of the reflector mode.

Possibilities of narrative mediation:

Does the narrator belong to the world of the story, or does he remain in another realm of existence?

2 Does the narrator give the reader an external view of the narrated events, or does he present them from within?

Does the narrator directly convey information to the reader, or does he filter it through the consciousness of one or several characters?

Prototype:

Stanzel uses the term "prototype" for the narrative situation most widely used in any particular period. Victorian writers preferred the authorial narrative or the quasi-autobiographical form of the first-person narration. Twentieth century writers combine authorial and figural elements. At any time, some writers deviate from the historic norm by defamiliarizing the conventions through estrangement. This accounts for the historical development of the form.

Stanzel's typology is used to determine the predominance of the narrative situations in a work. It should be understood that the narrative situation can change at any point. A work is complex of basic narrative forms whose profile may be charted. As well, an individual reader reads according to reading strategies which may very from reader to reader(the indeterminacy of the reader, who through a kind of inertia maintains his spatio-temporal orientation until the text conspicuously signals a change).

Profile of a narrative: The alternation between diegetic-narrative and mimetic-dramatic parts of a narrative (and the overlapping of the two structural elements in "indirect speech" and "free indirect style."

Rhythm of a narrative: The succession of the basic forms of narration( summary, report, description, commentary, scenic presentation interspersed with action report).

Narrative Forms :

Narrative modes

overt mediacy covert mediacy

indirect direct

personalization impersonalization

telling showing

summary scenic presentation

report 1. Scene with extensive dialogue and brief

impersonal allusions to the context and action.

description

comment 2. Reflection of the fictional events in the

consciousness of a fictional character.

Non-narrative forms:

dramatic forms:

speech

dramatised scene

The Opposition Mode: Teller Character and Reflector Character

a)Teller mode: The teller is there to tell, report, witness, comment, anticipate, recapitulate. He provides a generalized summary or a complete record of events.

b) Reflector mode: The reflector is there to mirror in his own consciousness what is going on in the world outside(or inside). He pretends to be giving an unmediated view, as if the reader were presented with the thing itself. Mediation is camouflaged. He provides arbitrary details, apparently the result of existential situations.

The value of any detail is determined by the mode.

:link source: http://130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/Stanzel_Narration.html

Postcolonialism ( postcolonial theory, post-colonial theory) is a set of theories in philosophy, film, and literature that deal with the cultural legacy of colonial rule.

As a literary theory (or critical approach), it deals with literature produced in countries that once were colonies of other countries, especially of the European colonial powers Britain, France, and Spain; in some contexts, it includes countries still in colonial arrangements. It also deals with literature written in colonial countries and by their citizens that has colonised people(s) as its subject matter. Colonised people, especially of the British Empire, attended British universities; their access to education that still unavailable in the colonies created a new criticism, mostly literary, and especially in novels. Postcolonial theory became part of the critics resources in the 1970s; most take Edward Said's book Orientalism as its foundation work.


Subject matters

Postcolonialism deals with the cultural identity matters of colonised societies: the dilemmas of developing a national identity after colonial rule; the ways in which writers articulate and celebrate cultural identity (often reclaiming it from and often maintaining strong connections with the coloniser); how a colonised people's knowledge served the coloniser's interests, and how the subordinate people's knowledge is generated and used; and the ways in which the colonist's literature justified colonialism via images of the colonised as a perpetually inferior person, society, and culture.

The creation of binary opposition structures the way we view others. In colonialism's case, the Oriental and the Westerner were distinguished as different from each other (i.e. the emotional, decadent Orient vs. the principled, progessive Occident). This opposition justified the 'white man's burden', the coloniser's self-perceived "destiny to rule" naturally sub-ordinate peoples.

In Post-Colonial Drama: theory, practice, politics, Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins state: "the term postcolonialism — according to a too-rigid etymology — is frequently misunderstood as a temporal concept, meaning the time after colonialism has ceased, or the time following the politically determined Independence Day on which a country breaks away from its governance by another state, Not a naïve teleological sequence which supersedes colonialism, postcolonialism is, rather, an engagement with and contestation [sic] of colonialism's discourses, power structures, and social hierarchies ... A theory of postcolonialism must, then, respond to more than the merely chronological construction of post-independence, and to more than just the discursive experience of imperialism."[1]

Colonised peoples reply to the colonial legacy by writing back to the center, when the indigenous peoples write their own histories and legacies using the coloniser's language (i.e. English, French, Dutch, et cetera) for their own purposes.[2] "Indigenous decolonization" is the intellectual impact of postcolonialist theory upon communities of indigenous peoples, thereby, their generating postcolonial literature.

A single, definitive definition of postcolonial theory is controversial; writers have strongly criticised it as a concept embedded to identity politics. Ann Laura Stoler, in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, argues that the simplistic oppositional binary concept of Coloniser and Colonised is more complicated than it seems, because it is a category that in reality is fluid and shifting; postcolonial works emphasise the re-analysation of categories assumed to be natural and immutable.

Postcolonial Theory, as metaphysics, ethics, and politics, addresses matters of identity, gendre, race, racism, and ethnicity with the challenges of developing a post-colonial national identity, of how a colonised people's knowledge was used against them in service to the coloniser's interests, and of how knowledge about the world is generated under specific relations between the powerful and the powerless, repetitively circulated and finally legitimated in service to certain imperial interests. Yet, postcolonial theory encourages thought about the colonised's creative resistance to the coloniser, and how that resistance complicates and gives texture to European imperial colonial projects.

Postcolonial writers object to the colonised's depiction as hollow "mimics" of Europeans or as passive recipients of power. Consequent to Foucauldian argument, postcolonial scholars, i.e. the Subaltern Studies collective, argue that anti-colonial resistance accompanies every deployment of power.


Middle East, Postcolonialism, and National identity

In the last decade, Middle Eastern studies and research produced works focusing upon the colonial past's effects on the internal and external political, social, cultural, and economic circumstances of contemporary Middle Eastern countries; cf. Raphael Israeli's "Is Jordan Palestine?" in Israel, Hashemites and the Palestinians: The Fateful Triangle, Efraim Karsh and P.R. Kumaraswamy (eds.)(London: Frank Cass, 2003), pp.49-66 and Nazih Ayubi's Overstating the Arab State (Bodmin: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2001) pp.86-123
A particular focus of study is the matter of Western discourses about the Middle East, and the existence or the lack of national identity formation:[3]

“... [M]ost countries of the Middle East, suffered from the fundamental problems over their national identity. More than three-quarters of a century after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, from which most of them emerged, these states have been unable to define, project, and maintain a national identity that is both inclusive and representative”.[4]

As the quotation notes, independence and the end of colonialism have not ended social fragmentation and war in the Middle East. As Larbi Sadiki understood and noted in The Search for Arab Democracy: Discourses and Counter-Discourses (2004), because European colonial powers drew borders discounting peoples, ancient tribal boundaries, and local history, the Middle East’s contemporary national identity problem is traceable from imperialism and colonialism.

Indeed, ‘in places like Iraq and Jordan, leaders of the new state were brought in from the outside, [and] tailored to suit colonial interests and commitments. Likewise, most states in the Persian Gulf were handed over to those who could protect and safeguard imperial interests in the post-withdrawal phase’,[5]

Thus, the Middle East's difficulties in defining national identity partly stem from state boundaries defined by colonial boundaries; ‘with notable exceptions like Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, most [countries] ... had to [re-]invent, their historical roots’ after colonialism. Therefore,‘like its colonial predecessor, postcolonial identity owes its existence to force’.[6]

Criticism of focusing up on national identity

Scholars criticise and question the recent post-colonial focus on national identity. The Moroccan scholar Bin 'Abd al-'Ali argues that what is seen in contemporary Middle Eastern studies is 'a pathological obsession with ... identity'.[7]Nevertheless, Kumaraswamy and Sadiki argue that the problem of the lack of Middle Eastern identity formation is widespread, and that identity is an important aspect of understanding the politics of the contemporary Middle East. Whether the countries are Islamic regimes (i.e. Iran), republican regimes (i.e. Egypt, Syria, and Algeria), quasi-liberal monarchies (i.e. Jordan and Bahrain), democracies (i.e. Israel and Turkey), or evolving democracies (i.e. Iraq and Palestine), ‘the Middle Eastern region suffers from the inability to recognize, integrate, and reflect its ethno-cultural diversity.’ [8]
Ayubi (2001) questions if what Bin 'Abd al-'Ali described as an obsession with national identity may be explained by 'the absence of a championing social class?'[9] [more information, visit this link]

The alienation effect (from the German Verfremdungseffekt) is a theatrical and cinematic device "which prevents the audience from losing itself passively and completely in the character created by the actor, and which consequently leads the audience to be a consciously critical observer."[1] The term was coined by playwright Bertolt Brecht to describe the aesthetics of epic theatre.

Origin

The term of Verfremdungseffekt is rooted in the Russian Formalist notion of the device of making strange or "priem ostranenie"[2], which literary critic Viktor Shklovsky claims is the essence of all art. Not long after seeing a performance by Mei Lanfang's company in Moscow in the spring of 1935[3], Brecht coined the German term to label an approach to theater that discouraged involving the audience in an illusory narrative world and in the emotions of the characters. Brecht thought the audience required an emotional distance to reflect on what is being presented in critical and objective ways, rather than being taken out of themselves as conventional entertainment attempts to do.

The proper English translation of Verfremdungseffekt is a matter of controversy. The word is sometimes rendered as defamiliarization effect, estrangement effect, distantiation, distancing effect or alienation effect. Fredric Jameson, in his book Brecht and Method, translates it as "the V-effekt", and many scholars simply leave the word untranslated.

Techniques

The Alienation-effect is achieved by the way the "artist never acts as if there were a fourth wall besides the three surrounding him [...] The audience can no longer have the illusion of being the unseen spectator at an event which is really taking place." [4] The use of direct audience-address disrupts stage illusion and generates the A-effect. In performance the performer "observes himself"; his object "to appear strange and even surprising to the audience. He achieves this by looking strangely at himself and his work." [5]

By disclosing and making obvious the manipulative contrivances and "fictive" qualities of the medium, the viewer is alienated from any passive acceptance and enjoyment of the film as mere "entertainment". Instead, the viewer is forced into a critical, analytical frame of mind that serves to disabuse him of the notion what he is watching is necessarily an inviolable, self-contained narrative. This alienation effect serves a didactic function insofar as it teaches the viewer not to take the style and content for granted, since the medium itself is highly constructed and contingent upon many cultural and economic conditions.

In theater musical and pantomimic effects are used as barriers to empathy; in film self-reflexive film techniques are employed to disrupt the narrative flow and break the fourth wall to draw attention to the film-making process itself by addressing the viewer.


Notes

1. ^ Brecht, Bertolt, "Brecht on Theater", page 91. Hill and Wang, 1957
2. ^ Brecht, Bertolt "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting", page 99. Hill and Wang, 1964
3. ^ Brecht, Bertolt "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting", page 99. Hill and Wang, 1964.
4. ^ Brecht, Bertolt "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting", page 91. Hill and Wang, 1964.
5. ^ Brecht, Bertolt "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting", page 92. Hill and Wang, 1964.

::source: wikipedia

Literary theory is the theory (or the philosophy) of the interpretation of literature and literary criticism. Its history begins with classical Greek poetics and rhetoric and includes, since the 18th century, aesthetics and hermeneutics. In the 20th century, "theory" has become an umbrella term for a variety of scholarly approaches to reading texts, most of which are informed by various strands of Continental philosophy.


Literary theory and literature

One of the fundamental questions of literary theory is "What is literature?", though many contemporary theorists and literary scholars believe either that "literature" cannot be defined or that it can refer to any use of language. Specific theories are distinguished not only by their methods and conclusions, but even by how they define a "text." For some scholars of literature, "texts" comprises little more than "books belonging to the Western literary canon." But the principles and methods of literary theory have been applied to non-fiction, popular fiction, film, historical documents, law, advertising, etc., in the related field of cultural studies. In fact, some scholars within cultural studies treat cultural events, like fashion or football riots, as "texts" to be interpreted. By this measure, literary theory can be thought of as the general theory of interpretation.

Since theorists of literature often draw on a very heterogeneous tradition of Continental philosophy and the philosophy of language, any classification of their approaches is only an approximation. There are many "schools" or types of literary theory, which take different approaches to understanding texts. Most theorists, even among those listed below, combine methods from more than one of these approaches (for instance, the deconstructive approach of Paul de Man drew on a long tradition of close reading pioneered by the New Critics, and de Man was trained in the European hermeneutic tradition).

Broad schools of theory that have historically been important include the New Criticism, formalism, Russian formalism, and structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism, feminism and French feminism, new historicism, deconstruction, reader-response criticism, and psychoanalytic criticism.

History

The practice of literary theory became a profession in the 20th century, but it has historical roots that run as far back as ancient Greece (Aristotle's Poetics is an often cited early example) and ancient Rome (Longinus' On the Sublime and Horace's Ars Poetica), and the aesthetic theories of philosophers from ancient philosophy through the 18th and 19th centuries are important influences on current literary study. The theory and criticism of literature are, of course, also closely tied to the history of literature.

The modern sense of "literary theory," however, dates only to approximately the 1950s, when the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure began strongly to influence English language literary criticism. The New Critics and various European-influenced formalists (particularly the Russian Formalists) had described some of their more abstract efforts as "theoretical" as well. But it was not until the broad impact of structuralism began to be felt in the English-speaking academic world that "literary theory" was thought of as a unified domain.

In the academic world of the United Kingdom and the United States, literary theory was at its most popular from the late 1960s (when its influence was beginning to spread outward from elite universities like Johns Hopkins and Yale) through the 1980s (by which time it was taught nearly everywhere in some form). During this span of time, literary theory was perceived as academically cutting-edge research, and most university literature departments sought to teach and study theory and incorporate it into their curricula. Because of its meteoric rise in popularity and the difficult language of its key texts, theory was also often criticized as faddish or trendy obscurantism (and many academic satire novels of the period, such as those by David Lodge, feature theory prominently). Some scholars, both theoretical and anti-theoretical, refer to the 1970s and 1980s debates on the academic merits of theory as "the theory wars."

By the early 1990s, the popularity of "theory" as a subject of interest by itself was declining slightly (along with job openings for pure "theorists") even as the texts of literary theory were incorporated into the study of almost all literature. As of 2004, the controversy over the use of theory in literary studies has all but died out, and discussions on the topic within literary and cultural studies tend now to be considerably milder and less acrimonious (though the appearance of volumes such as Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, edited by Daphne Patai with Will H. Corral, may signal a resurgence of the controversy). Some scholars draw heavily on theory in their work, while others only mention it in passing or not at all; but it is an acknowledged, important part of the study of literature.

Differences among schools

The intellectual traditions and priorities of the various kinds of literary theory are often radically different. Even finding a set of common terms to compare them by can be difficult.

For instance, the work of the New Critics often contained an implicit moral dimension, and sometimes even a religious one: a New Critic might read a poem by T.S. Eliot or Gerard Manley Hopkins for its degree of honesty in expressing the torment and contradiction of a serious search for belief in the modern world. Meanwhile a Marxist critic might find such judgments merely ideological rather than critical; the Marxist would say that the New Critical reading did not keep enough critical distance from the poem's religious stance to be able to understand it. Or a post-structuralist critic might simply avoid the issue by understanding the religious meaning of a poem as an allegory of meaning, treating the poem's references to "God" by discussing their referential nature rather than what they refer to.

Such a disagreement cannot be easily resolved, because it is inherent in the radically different terms and goals (that is, the theories) of the critics. Their theories of reading derive from vastly different intellectual traditions: the New Critic bases his work on an East-Coast American scholarly and religious tradition, while the Marxist derives his thought from a body of critical social and economic thought, and the post-structuralist's work emerges from twentieth-century Continental philosophy of language. To expect such different approaches to have much in common would be naïve; so calling them all "theories of literature" without acknowledging their heterogeneity is itself a reduction of their differences.

In the late 1950s, Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye attempted to establish an approach for reconciling historical criticism and New Criticism while addressing concerns of early reader-response and numerous psychological and social approaches. His approach, laid out in his Anatomy of Criticism, was explicitly structuralist, relying on the assumption of an intertextual "order of words" and universality of certain structural types. His approach held sway in English literature programs for several decades but lost favor during the ascendence of post-structuralism.

For some theories of literature (especially certain kinds of formalism), the distinction between 'literary' and other sorts of texts is of paramount importance. Other schools (particularly post-structuralism in its various forms: new historicism, deconstruction, some strains of Marxism and feminism) have sought to break down distinctions between the two and have applied the tools of textual interpretation to a wide range of 'texts', including film, non-fiction, historical writing, and even cultural events.

Bakhtin argued that the "utter inadequacy" of literary theory is evident when it forced to deal with the novel; other genres are intact already stabilized while the novel is still young and developing.[1]

Another crucial distinction among the various theories of literary interpretation is intentionality, the amount of weight given to the author's own opinions about and intentions for a work. For most pre-20th century approaches, the author's intentions are a guiding factor and an important determiner of the 'correct' interpretation of texts. The New Criticism was the first school to disavow the role of the author in interpreting texts, preferring to focus on "the text itself" in a close reading. In fact, as much contention as there is between formalism and later schools, they share the tenet that the author's interpretation of a work is no more inherently meaningful than any other. [source: wikipedia]