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