Literary Theory Notes Pdf
Alyssa Dipiero
I must thank you for this helpful article. It helped me understand the very essential meaning of literary theory with its contexts. After reading a few articles, I was confused and almost gave up hope. And then, this site was opened with less hope. Many thanks again sir! I will be a regular reader now. Your writing style is friendly for students. keep up.
Thanks very much for your effort, I can say you are almost there.
I would like you to please do a video on how to critically analyze a text using any theory ( marxist perspective, ecocriticism, feminisms, negrotudism, post coloniality etc. )
I would like to thank the author of this article. I understood what literary theory is and also its differences with literary criticism. The article is written in a simple language and it really helped me. Please write about other literary theories in detail so that I can have a complete idea of different literary theories. thanks again!
To critique an art that can be catharsis or policy proposal and often is both, literary theory must contend with the slippery concepts of author, textual meaning, and the context of the text itself. Founded on hermeneutics, or the interpretation of scripture, literary theory has adopted a similar approach to literature. It examines literary texts with the assumption that, if written well, they contain all the complexity, linguistic richness, symbolism, sociology, history, and meaning of the Bible. This richness, this code within the text, then requires someone else to interpret and speak for it.
26-27 Eng lit was transformed at Cambridge after WW I under FR Leavis, QR Leavis and IA Richards, as the offspring of the provincial petty bourgeoisie entered universities for the first time. Leavises launched Scrutiny in 1932 and Eng lit became the important subject and established how it is discussed today.
42-43 New Critical methods offered a method of dissecting poetry. These critical instruments were a way of competing with hard sciences on their own terms and by 1940s and 1950s New Criticism was part of the Establishment, perfectly natural.
82-83 In structuralism images in a text only have meaning in relation to each other, not to external things. The content is much less relevant than the form; items in the text could be changed and it would still be structurally the same.
87 Structuralism is a method of enquiry and semiotics is the study of a system of signs (like struc. lit theory). But structuralism tends to use semiotics and struc reduces all things to systems of signs.
147-148 Literature draws attention to how something is said, not just what is said, unlike, say a textbook. The work will not be taken for the absolute truth and the reader is encouraged to think about this particular representation of reality. Bertolt Brecht. Avant-garde film-making vs Hollywood.
159 Harold Bloom rewrote literary history in terms of the Oedipus complex. A poet is overshadowed by a previous poet, like a son is a father, and tries to disarm that strength by revising and recasting the earlier poem. A return to Protestant Romanticism of heroic battling giants.
175-178 This is an arbitrary definition and should be an embarrassment to literary criticism. Lit crit tries to keep itself alive by adding, say, historical analysis or structuralism, but this only makes it obvious that other objects can have literary theory applied to them too. Literary theory, like literature, is an illusion, and should not be a discipline distinct from philsophy, linguistics, psychology, etc. This book is an obituary.
195-196 Marxist criticism languished since late 1970s. Western capitalism proved too strong for the mass movements that fought against it. So maybe new, smaller organisations and theories were needed. There was no longer a coherent system or unified history to be opposed, just a discrete set of powers, discourses, practices, narratives.
What we are seeing now, I think, is the nervous end of post-modernism. What replaces it? A humanist-romanticism? Or maybe post-modernism can't truly end w/out some major destruction of the west...which post-modernism helps happen.
Williams comes out of a Marxist tradition (as does Eagleton himself), and the basic thrust of his work is to ground cultural developments in broad social change, particularly industrialisation, mass production and the changing nature of 'popular culture'. His particular argument is that culture isn't just an expression of social change -- the classic Marxist superstructure/base dichotomy -- but that culture is entirely integrated into society. (I like this essay's summary, though it only scrapes the surface.)
I would must like you to know that this saved my life. I had to read this in THREE DAYS for a literature & psychoanalysis class and it was just not possible. You are a hero.
-thankful college student
Thanks so much for this work. I just had to read the first chapter for my literature class but I got curious and began searching in the internet. I certainly don't have time to read the whole book now and thanks to this I know what it is about.
O my god! You've no idea how thankful I am for this peice of work! Got my exams in two days and this 'incomprehensible' book is a small part of the syllabus! There was no way I could have finished it, at all..! Thank you really..God Bless
Thank you so much for this!!! Reading this book was a small piece of my summer work for my senior year high school english class. Honestly, it was too much for me, and this helped me get my work done. You're a god.
WOW!!! this saved my life! i have three days to prepare for my literary theory paper and i have tons to read coz of which eagleton is going to be pretty much ignored but i guess this would be of great help!!! and the relation between paris and post structuralism is not that complex. because the student movement failed, disillusionment set in among the students and intellectuals so political activity waned and instead it had its manifestations in theories of language. france was the centre of intellectual activity. think derrida, foucault, lacan all sitting at a table in a cafe!! feminists also took up on derrida and decentring!! you should the comic books on these theories and theorists> they are very lucid and interesting!
and thanks again!!!
This entry is primarily focused on the critical theory of theFrankfurt School, but broadens outward at various points to discussengagements by that tradition with a range of critical theories andsocial developments. The need for a broad approach to critical theoryis prompted today by a range of contemporary social, political,economic, and ecological crises and struggles as well as the critiqueof Eurocentric forms of knowledge production.
Other key figures of the first generation include Theodor W. Adorno,Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin, along with Erich Fromm,Friedrich Pollock, Leo Lwenthal, Franz Neumann, OttoKirchheimer, and figures like Siegfried Kracauer, who belonged to thebroader circle for a few years (for rich historical accounts, see Jay1973, Buck-Morss 1977, Dubiel 1978, Wiggershaus 1986, Wheatland 2009).The work of the largely Jewish members of the first generation wasdeeply marked by the rise of National Socialism, the experience ofexile, and, for some of its inner circle, their return to Germanyafter 1945. After the Nazis closed the Institute, Horkheimer, who hadalready moved it to Geneva, re-established it at Columbia Universityin 1934, where he was soon joined by Pollock, Marcuse, andLwenthal, while Adorno did not emigrate to the US until 1938.Horkheimer, Adorno, and Pollock moved the Institute from New York toLos Angeles in 1941. Those three reestablished the Institute inGermany after the War, with Horkeimer as director from 1951 to 1958and Adorno from 1958 to 1969. Key figures who worked with firstgeneration figures during this period emerged as the secondgeneration: Jrgen Habermas, Alfred Schmidt, Albrecht Wellmer,Oskar Negt, and Claus Offe.
One way of categorizing work by later generations of the FrankfurtSchool is to note how, even when drawing on a range of theoreticalresources, they give pride of place to the legacy of a particularfigure like Kant, Hegel, Marx, or Nietzsche (often via Foucault), orhow they combine approaches. For instance, Honneth and Jaeggi are moreHegelian while Forst is more Kantian, and Benhabib is, like Habermas,a Hegelianized Kantian, and Fraser draws heavily on Marx in recentwork while Amy Allen and Martin Saar are influenced by Foucauldiangenealogy. The latter is part of a broader engagement between theFrankfurt School and post-structuralism, ranging from the morecritical (Habermas 1985) through the more sympathetic (Honneth 1985,Menke 1988, 2000) to attempts to combine deconstructive andreconstructive approaches to critical theory (McCarthy 1991; see alsoFraser 1989).
It is not easy to capture key features of an intellectual traditionshaped by such a variety of influences, including multiple figureswhose own thinking changed over time, and a body of work addressing avast range of topics spanning from the 1930s to the present. The restof this section outlines some of the main arguments and focal pointsof key texts by key figures. It is not meant to be exhaustive, but toidentify influential methodological approaches, arguments, and themesthat are indicative of the work of the Frankfurt School and stillprovide important reference points for contemporary debates.
The focus on authoritarianism continued into exile, with Neumann andKirchheimer focusing more on distinctly political phenomena such aslaw, the state structure, and competing political groups under theNazi regime (see Neumann 1944, Scheuerman 1996). Neumann andKirchheimer were the main legal and political analysts of the firstgeneration, but were outside the inner circle and less influential onthe trajectory the Frankfurt School took in the 1940s (see Scheuerman1994 and Buchstein 2020 for attempts to revive interest in their legaland political analysis).
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