War of the Proses: The Tale of Literary Theory [Part II - Schools and Critical Views on Theory]
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Many books have been written about books, and, when successful, they are able to extend and transform the original work. But the story of literary theory is also one worth telling. With a history stretching as far back as Ancient Greece, it’s a surprisingly lively account of conflict between rival ideas with a scope, like literature, as broad as the human experience. It has produced a long list of often-divergent ways to think about literature (called ‘schools’), many of which are influenced by cultural, political, and economic ideas.
The views of literary critics
The opinions of prominent critics vary regarding the nature and scope of theory and criticism. For Northrop Frye, literary theory must become systematic and scientific if it is to progress from its present state where bias and value-judgements formed by personal preferences predominate - a “history of taste and fashionable prejudice” as he described it.
He believed that the absence of systematic criticism allowed ‘neighbouring’ disciplines including history, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology to be imposed upon literary analysis and interpretation.
“What critics now have is a mystery-religion without a gospel, and they are initiates who can communicate, or quarrel, only with one another.”
(Frye, 2020)
In The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life, Harold Bloom describes literary theory as something personal, passionate, and unencumbered by philosophy, politics, or religion. An appreciation of the work is most important and wrote that great poetry can ‘transport and elevate’. He, like Frye, warned against the encroachment of ideology upon literary study.
“In the long Age of Resentment, intense literary experience is merely “cultural capital,” a means to power and glory within the parallel “economy” that Bourdieu labels the literary field. Literary love is a social strategy, more affectation than affect.”
(Bloom, 2011)
In Literary Theory: A Short Introduction, Jonathon Culler approaches a definition of theory as something involving conjecture and “complex relations among many factors”. He stresses its vague nature and the difficulty in defining something that, whatever it is, is not an account of literature and the methods of its study.
Part of the reason for this, he writes, is the incursion of seemingly unrelated academic fields into literary studies since the 1960s. The primary value of theory, Culler states, is the arguments it raises against ‘common sense’ notions of writing and literature (that is, it challenges norms in ways that enrich the study of the discipline).
“Theory in this sense is not a set of methods for literary study but an unbounded group of writings about everything under the sun…”
(Culler, 2000)
In ‘An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory’ Bennett and Royle describe how, in the 1980s and 1990s, politics became a focus of critical analysis and debate, and readings emerged around Michel Foucault’s idea that ‘power is everywhere’ (Foucault, 1981, p. 93).
Frye makes a similar point rather more bluntly:
‘…there are critics who enjoy making religious, anti-religious, or political campaigns with toy soldiers labelled “Milton” or “Shelley” more than they enjoy studying poetry…”
(Frye, 2020)
Literary theory as it is today can perhaps be understood as a study of culture based upon the interpretation of texts as cultural artefacts, to which divergent meanings can be, and are, ascribed or attributed.
Literary schools
In examining a text, a critic might ask: how important is the author’s intention in assessing a work’s meaning? How does historical context affect our understanding of its message? What does the treatment of female characters say about the role of women in society? Is the meaning of a text created through the process of reading?
The questions each critic does ask, or finds meaningful or interesting to examine, vary significantly and often depend on the critic’s personal worldview and cultural or political inclinations; their ‘school’. Most of these schools are a long way from Aristotle’s objective examination of poetry or Frye’s call for an inductive, empirical, and inclusive approach that leaves personal preferences and agendas at the door. The extent of diversity in approach is evident in the number and variety of critical schools that have existed and continue to appear:
Theoretical schools and influences | |||
Semiotics | Psychoanalysis | Marxism | Existentialism |
Stylistics | Narratology | Hermeneutics | Formalism |
Structuralism | Post-structuralism | Deconstruction | New Historicism |
Cultural materialism | New Criticism | Eco-criticism | Feminism |
Post-colonialism | Gender studies | Post-modernism | Aesthetics |
In brief, there are broadly two camps when it comes to analysing literature: those concerned with the understanding and appreciating a text and its relative merit, and those who draw on non-literary theories and disciplines to create a broader context not at first apparent to readers (non-theorists) of the work.
Many post-structuralist schools did not arise from, or for, the study of literature, but instead out of diverse fields such as linguistics, psychoanalysis, sociology, politics, economics, and anthropology. For them, literature is often used as an object to illustrate points about ideas the early formalists might have called ‘extrinsic’. The latter approach is dominant in university English departments today, and is described by Abrams as follows:
Prominent in the poststructural climate of opinion is an explicit opposition to the established grounds, standards, and procedures in all provinces of Western intellection. Sometimes the adversarial stance is qualified as aiming merely to "challenge," "interrogate," "problematize," or "unsettle" a standard way of thinking. But in many instances the undertaking is explicitly to "undermine," "subvert," "dismantle," or "undo"; and what the theorists propose to undo is not merely literary humanism but, as John Searle has pointed out, "the Western Rationalistic Tradition" and its core concepts of reality, truth, rationality, and objective knowledge…at the political end of the spectrum, they are subverted as ideological constructs whose actual function is to mask the realities of coercion, domination, and exploitation and to inhibit any attempts to transform these social inequities.
(Abrams, 1997)
Continued in Part III...
Reference & Reading List
Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton University Press, 2020
Culler, Jonathon, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2000
Bloom, Harold, The Anatomy of Influence, Yale University Press, 2011
Aristotle, Poetics, Public Domain
Barry, Peter, Beginning Theory: An introduction to literary and cultural theory, Manchester University Press, 2017
Bennett, Andrew and Royle, Nicholas, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, Routledge, 2016
Cuddon, J.A &. Habib, M.A.R, Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory, 2013
Abrams, M.H, The Transformation of English Studies: 1930 -1995, 1997, www.jstor.org, April 2024,
Goldberg, S.L., The Deconstruction Gang, www.lrb.co.uk, 1980, April 2024, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n10/s.l.-goldberg/the-deconstruction-gang
Brooks, Cleanth, The Formalist Critics, 1951, www.jstor.org, April 2024, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4333214?read-now=1&seq=10#page_scan_tab_contents
Norton, Andrew, The decline of the humanities, andrewnorton.net.au, April 2024, https://andrewnorton.net.au/2023/07/04/the-decline-of-the-humanities/
University of Sydney, ENGL1017: The Idea of the Classic, 2024, March 2024,
University of Sydney, ENGL3655: The Literary in Theory, March 2024, https://www.sydney.edu.au/units/ENGL3655
University of Sydney, April 2023, University of Sydney’s English program ranked first in Australia, www.sydney.edu.au, April 2024,
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