The 20th Century Literary Theory Lecture One: Introduction - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

1 / 12
About This Presentation
Title:

The 20th Century Literary Theory Lecture One: Introduction

Description:

* Deconstruction Deconstruction emerged in the works of the French Jacques Derrida and ... * The Political Reading of Feminism Political criticism in general claims ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

Number of Views:169
Avg rating:3.0/5.0
Slides: 13
Provided by: Lenov153
Category:

less

Transcript and Presenter's Notes

Title: The 20th Century Literary Theory Lecture One: Introduction


1
The 20th Century Literary TheoryLecture
OneIntroduction
2
The problem of theory
  • literary criticism became theory-oriented,
    especially in the 1980s.
  • No interpretation of a text was considered to be
    serious without a theoretical background.
  • Theory can be seen as the armour of the critic.
  • It provides him or her with systematic inventory
    of points of view and techniques of textual
    interpretation
  • However, the danger of too much theory can be
    that it outgrows the text to be understood.
  • It becomes a mere technical jargon which rattles
    above the text.
  • Therefore, it precisely serves the avoidance of
    the experience based encounter.
  • This might even lead to a catharsis-resistent
    reading.

3
The problem of theory
  • The critic should remain in command of the
    various theories.
  • He or she should apply often more than one theory
    to the text.
  • The critic should select the most appropriate
    theories by paying close attention to the nature
    of the text.
  • The nature of the text will invite or even
    provoke certain theoretical approaches.

4
Theoretical Approaches
  • After the war of theories in the 1980s, some of
    the 20th century approaches dissolved into more
    recent ones.
  • Dominant theories tend to live side by side
  • Critics quietly adhere to their own favourites.
  • The dominant 20th century critical approaches can
    be put into two major categories
  • One tradition focuses primarily on the text,
  • The other, first and foremost, focuses on the
    context.

5
Theoretical Approaches
  • We are going to study four critical approaches
    that focus primarily on the text
  • New Criticism
  • Russian Formalism
  • Structuralism
  • Deconstruction
  • We are going to study two critical approaches
    that focus primarily on the context
  • The Political Reading of Feminism
  • Postcolonial Criticism and Theory

6
New Criticism
  • New Criticism emerged partly in Cambridge,
    England in the works of I.A. Richards and William
    Empson in the 1930s, and partly in the United
    States in the 1940s and 50s, represented by
    Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, Allan Tate,
    etc.
  • Its basic principle was the close reading of the
    text without taking into consideration the
    writers life, the historical background, etc.,
    and operated with such interpretative tools as
    metaphor, metonymy and irony.

7
Russian Formalism
  • Russian Formalism developed in the 1920s.
  • For a long time, it remained uninformed by
    Structuralism in the works of such theoreticians
    as Propp and Shklovsky.
  • A careful distinction was made between story
    and plot.
  • Shklovsky offered the concept of
    defamiliarization, which means that literary
    representation is able to show well-known
    phenomena in a totally new, startling light.

8
Structuralism
  • Today, structuralism is largely outdated but
    other theories has developed in an active debate
    with it e.g. Deconstruction
  • Structuralism first emerged as a linguistic
    theory developed by the Geneva linguist Ferdinand
    de Saussure at the beginning of the 20th century.
  • Saussure claims that language is a system of
    signs
  • The value of each sign is assigned to language by
    all the other signs making up the system.

9
Structuralism
  • It became a form of literary study in the works
    of Roman Jakobson, Gerald Genette, etc.
  • The main idea of literary Structuralism is that
    the total description of the system of signs
    constituting a literary work is identical with
    its meaning.

10
Deconstruction
  • Deconstruction emerged in the works of the French
    Jacques Derrida and the Belgian-American Paul de
    Man.
  • It is a response to both Structuralism and New
    Criticism.
  • The basic assumption is that a text is always
    more threatening and dynamic.
  • No description could exhaust its meaning.
  • A disturbing, unaccountable residue will always
    remain.
  • This residue will go on, generating newer
    meanings in an endless chain of signifiers.

11
The Political Reading of Feminism
  • Political criticism in general claims that
    literary texts always have a political dimension.
  • Literary texts can be shown to take specific
    stances to social issues, either through what
    they say or what they do not say.
  • Feminism has called attention to pervasive male
    bias in Western literature.
  • It has rediscovered forgotten female writers,
    rewriting the canon.
  • The major figures are Simon de Beauvoir, Virginia
    Woolf, Helene Cixous, Elaine Showalter.

12
Postcolonial Criticism and Theory
  • The postcolonial theory critically analyses the
    relationship between colonizer and colonized.
  • It focuses on the role of texts, literary or not,
    in the colonial enterprise.
  • It examines how the texts construct the
    colonizers masculine superiority and the
    colonizeds inferiority as well as the
    legitimization of colonialization.
  • The main thinkers of the theory are Homi Bhabha,
    Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak.
Write a Comment
User Comments (0)
About PowerShow.com