Day: February 5, 2023

Does Literary Theory Help in Reading Process?

The reading process is a tricky business. Even readers themselves are rarely familiar with their own personas.

Use of Literary Theory in Reading

The reading process is a tricky business. Even readers themselves are rarely familiar with their own personas let alone their past, present, and future including their cultural upbringings which all impact the reading process. The reason is when readers read something, they are fully immersed in that text with all these aspects of their personas. Hence, reading is a highly complex task with a complex process. The same complex process is at work in writing that piece that a reader has to read. Therefore, the meaning making process becomes easier to understand when the reading process involved in interpreting is taken into account. However, practical criticism, too, which merely includes a short or detailed explanation and interpretation of the text, becomes a highly complex phenomenon. It cannot be executed properly without help from other branches of knowledge. It is here that literary theory comes to help the readers and the interpreters. It presents a multidimensional view of the book from cultural perspectives involved in its writing, individual mental makeup, and the cultural background of the readers and the cultural milieu in which the work appears.

Practical Example of Literary Theory in the Reading Process

Literary theory intervenes when a specific perspective is to be explored or a reader comes across some specific details about some theoretical assumptions. For example, if the book is placed in its historical setting when it has appeared on the scene, removing it from its writer, it may have different interpretations and the literary theory applied to it may focus on only its historical dimensions and not other dimensions. The problem here arises that the readers reading the book from this perspective only focus on this aspect and ignore all other aspects. For example, a person reading Charles Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities may only focus on the French revolution and its workings. This compartmentalization of work is done in a way that different readers arrive at different conclusions after analyzing the same work. This poses a question about the relationship of the reader with the text. It could be interactional or transactional.

Literary Theory and Relation of the Reader with the Text

The relationship is interactional in that the reader interacts with the text and deduces meanings at which he/she arrives during his/her reading process. However, it happens that after a few months or years, he/she comes across the same text again and arrives at an entirely different conclusion. This is another way of interacting with the text. In the same way, a transactional relationship entails that meanings do not reside in the minds of the readers. Instead, the readers bring with them an attitude and a whole cultural makeup before reading the text. This helps them to draw meanings from the process in which they involve their whole cultural upbringing. For example, various eastern readers rather demonstrate horror when they read about sexual escapades in western fiction or poetry first time.

Literary Theory and Meanings

Whatever relationship a reader may have with the text, he/she arrives at some meanings. Literary theory comes to help him/her in this situation where he/she draws meanings according to his/her own theoretical perspective. Sometimes these theoretical perspectives differ on account of the application of different literary tropes, say figures of speech, or type of word choice, say diction. Still, they stay within the limits of one or the other theoretical lens. Saying it in a different way, it means that though each reader may show a different theoretical lens when interpreting a text, some readers may arrive at the same understanding. For example, a reader may see Kate Chopin’s story “The Story of an Hour” from a feminist perspective, while another may see it from a patriarchal perspective whereas both have almost the same meanings under the broad umbrella of a single theoretical lens of feminism.

Different Literary Theories

Such interpretations lead to different schools of criticism where one could be Marxism and the other could be New Historicism or Postmodernism or Postcolonialism. In fact, these various schools bombard the text with a plethora of questions. When readers answer these questions, they arrive at different understandings. The interpretation through a theoretical lens rather becomes a new jouissance for the readers, making their process not just a passive activity but an active activity that they enjoy and carry on with another set of reading from a different perspective. Therefore, literary theory makes the reading process an enjoyable activity.

Suggesting Readings
  1. Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction. Washington D. C. Pearson Education. 1990. Print.
  2. Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. SIU Press, 1994. Print.
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Emergence of Literary Theory

Despite having roots in the classical Greece literary tradition,

Birth of Literary Theory

Despite having roots in the classical Greece literary tradition, literary theory owes much to the modern world for its emergence. Most literary theorists are consensual about the emergence in the 50s and 60s when a structuralist, Ferdinand de Saussure, started impacting literary criticism. Some others, however, claim that it was the German higher criticism of hermeneutics that led to theoretical criticism of literature. This was a scriptural interpretation of the biblical tales with narratives from other religious cultures or theologies which led to the emergence of “structuralism” and then “new historicism.” Specifically, after the introduction of these theoretical concepts, French cultural critics and sociologists came forward with new aspects and theoretical dimensions. During that time, a French critic, Charles Augustin, asserted that the biographical details of a writer are essential for the interpretations of their works. Marcel Proust, another French writer, lashed out at him, rejecting his claims altogether. Roland Barthes, then, contended it with his popular “Death of the Author” to which various authors and critics refuted and seconded during the second half of the twentieth century. This is perhaps the beginning of the emergence of literary theory. Friedrich Nietzsche was the second to impact the landscape of theory.

Nietzsche and Literary Theory

Nietzschean epistemological suspicion led many of his successors to doubt the very facts and their interpretation, leading to the emergence of various schools and theories including skepticism, absurdism, or existentialism. Specifically, his argument that heaven was a place full of ideas led several thinkers to question his argument, giving rise to skepticism and even more commentary upon morality, truth, power, and the very meaning of life. That is why his impact on it is tremendous as he has commented upon every other aspect of life that falls under theory and consequently under theory.

Russian Formalism as a Literary Theory

On the other hand, Russian formalists, too, were at the forefront, bringing in-depth transformations in theory and its application in literature. The teaching of literature at Yale, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins also contributed to this meaning making drive through the application of theory. And it became the catchword in the west by the end of the 80s.

Proliferation of Theory and Literary Theory

It has now become popular in third world academies and has gripped the minds of literary critics as well as writers and experts in other areas of social sciences, specifically international relations, marketing, and advertising. In fact, literary theory has never been as relevant as it is today when communication has witnessed transformation due to the arrival of the internet and fast communication platforms as a slight cultural change in one part of the world creates ripples across the globe. And it is interesting that even literary theories of the yore era are still relevant as stated by Chris Long in his article “A Brief History of Literary Theory.”

Christ Long on Literary Theory

Christ Long’s article states one thing that it has always been there. Only the quest started during the previous century. Chris Long states that the movement for finding real meanings has started with the author and moved toward the reader giving birth to different theories until Derrida announced the death of the author and termed text everything. However, this is not all, for the reader is also there as Fish’s theoretical lens radically altered it, putting the reader at the center. From there to onward, literary theory has become part and parcel of literary criticism, explication, and explanation process. The journey from the author to the text and the reader, then, entered the communities and cultures, giving birth to a host of other literary theories, canons, tropes, isms, ideas, and approaches.

Exact Date of Birth of Literary Theory

However, there is no exact date when, say, a university department has announced that it is going to launch it. In fact, its emergence has been gradual, encompassing classical, medieval, neo-classical, and then global ideas to give birth to a holistic term of literary theory where authors, philosophers, critics, and writers from across the globe have their ideas mixed up to draw out generalizations about eras and cultural spaces.

Suggested Readings
  1. Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly guide. Routledge, 2014. Print.
  2. Waugh, Patricia, ed. Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. Oxford University Press on Demand, 2006. Print.
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