Introduction (Literary Theory)

About Introduction

Having already journeyed through a vast network of interlocking terms, ideas, and concepts that will help you immeasurably in your own writing and your ability to comment on the writing of others, it is finally time to pitch forward into the most advanced field of knowledge that exists in the area of literary studies: literary theory, or just theory for short. Some students feel somewhat uncomfortable with grammar, while a few find memorizing lists of literary terms quite difficult, while still others balk at the idea of learning Greek and Latin words to describe things that they are doing in English class, but literary theory, far more than any other system of ideas or body of knowledge in literary studies, makes students cry out in fear and terror. I remember in my own undergraduate days, feeling confident that I had the basics of the literary world well in hand. I could write an essay effectively, confident that it was well written both mechanically and stylistically, and I had achieved a level where rhetorical terms were, almost, as easy for me to use as everyday expressions. Then, suddenly, I was expected to know something else, something completely different. It was not enough that I had good ideas about literary works, or that I knew which critics said what about a given novel or poem; now, I had to think about which theoretical perspective I brought to my examination of the text, what assumptions I carried with me from essay to essay, book to book, and how these assumptions differed from the assumptions made by various different groups of scholars I had never heard of, or had only heard mentioned in silent whispers of awe and foreboding. In short, once I thought I had things down, I was presented with an entire, complex field of ideas that made all of what I knew seem simple and feeble in comparison. I had to learn theory.

Sadly, I, like most students who advance to a given level in their literary investigations, got what theory I did incidentally, through essays we read and through professors' mentioning certain ideas in class. This on-the-fly education in theory usually gives students some understanding of various political and identity theories, like Marxism and feminism, as well as some psychological theory from Freud, and possibly Jung. However, as far as the strictly artistic, literary schools of theory were concerned, we were left to fend for ourselves, without much to go on. After all, anyone attending university today surely knows, to some degree, what feminism stands for. From here, it is not too much of a stretch to figure out how a feminist approach to a literary work, or to literature itself, might go. However, what could a "new critical" approach possibly involve, and what did "structuralism" have to do with anything? These words were like talismans of power for those who could wield them, and some classes seemed like dark magic indeed when a particularly bright, ambitious, and well trained student engaged the professor in a discussion about theory. The rest of us watched with awe, trying to make some sense of what was going on, but to little avail.

Most of us just gave up, while some of us, who liked school enough to want to keep going, learned all we needed to the hard way, teaching ourselves, and picking up what we could from introductory texts that were often not clear, and almost just as often politically positioned in such a way that certain theories were obviously being praised over others. In this series, I want to help you enter the world of theory in a much easier, more direct and basic way. Starting from the basics of what theory even is, and moving on through various approaches, this series will provide you with the foundation you will need to tackle more advanced, specialized work in theory, and literary studies in general.

Theory: The How's and Why's of Literature

What is Theory?

Part of the difficulty so many have with theory is not simply the groups of concepts that the term is usually used to describe, but rather the term itself, taken on its own. People have a general idea of what a theory is, and we use the term almost every day. "My theory is that television is designed to addict you to it, and then to all the products that it advertises" is an example of how the term can be used in everyday life to mean something like "the idea I have about what is really behind something." Taken in this way, a theory can be almost anything, ranging from a mild suspicion cast in the vaguest terms to a well thought-out explanation for something that goes a long way toward showing how and why it operates. Literary theory, properly conceived, is on the latter half of this continuum, rather than the former, but this common definition does not really do it justice.

Another popular and common way of looking at theory is in opposition to practice, or in opposition to reality. Most people have heard the familiar phrase which is used to subtly mock communism: "Oh sure, communism works in theory, but look what happens every time a country tries it!" When used in this way, theory takes on definite negative connotations, and begins to resemble something highly abstract and inapplicable to the real world. The pervasive opposition between "street-smarts" and "book-smarts" positions theory as the unfortunate consequence of spending too much time with thoughts and ideas, and not enough time actually doing anything and interacting with people in day-to-day situations. If you call someone street-smart, for example, they will most likely take it as a compliment. If, however, you are referring to someone as book-smart, you will most of the time be insulting them; by referring to someone in this manner, you are implying that, while they may have knowledge, it is not practical and applicable knowledge, and therefore is useless. In short, the person has no common sense.

This feeds into the definition of theory as being something abstract and difficult. For example, take any novel and begin to read it. Now, so long as you are literate, you will be able to read the book and figure out what is going on (unless you are reading one of the very rare works of fiction that consciously tries to resist your making sense of it, which is another topic for another day). This seems like a useful thing to be able to do, and there is an obvious action that is taking place here. After, you could discuss the work with someone, and the two of you could have an excellent conversation about what you read, what happened in the story, and what you both liked about it. Now, say your reading buddy is an English professor, and starts talking about the Marxist implications of the work, and begins to describe it in terms of Marxist theory. At this point, the person has taken the conversation from the concrete (the work and its events) to the abstract (ideas and systems that go far beyond the work itself), and in so doing, makes extra demands of you. You are now expected to know something else, in addition to the work you just read, and this leads to the perception that this other thing, this theory you don't know, is advanced and beyond your scope. It sounds so intelligent and uses so many foreign terms that you feel intimidated, and either remain silent in incomprehension, or dismiss it as abstract, useless theorizing, philosophizing, or speculation.

Another reason the term theory can be so scary for students of literature is that there is yet another association we make with the word theory, and this is the idea of the scientific theory, bolstered by the scientific method, which is exacting, specific, and demanding. The theory of relativity, for instance, is one of the foundational principles of modern science, especially physics. Developed by Einstein, known to be one of the greatest minds ever to have lived, it is therefore not surprising that most consider the theory of relativity to be a remarkably mathematical, difficult, concept, even though they have no idea what it might be about. They mark it off, and put it in the little subfolder of their minds labeled "abstract conceptions I will never need, nor understand," and think of it only in these terms, assuming it is both unattainable by the average person, and completely irrelevant at the same time. In reality, conceptually speaking, the idea of relativity, while somewhat counter intuitive, is not very difficult to comprehend at all; it is the belief that it will be that causes people to treat it as they do.

Early students of literature, therefore, see theory as something more applicable to the sciences. After all, book are books, literature is literature, and the way we go about dealing with them is standard and intuitive; you don't need to have abstract theories to enjoy a good book or poem, since it happens automatically. And while it may be useful to receive some literary training so that you can quickly and more thoroughly identify important themes, character traits, and stylistic features that can help you to come to a deeper, richer experience of the work, this has nothing whatsoever to do with theory, and certainly nothing to do with science, the scientific method, or anything of the sort.

Of course, while I disagree with this position, I would never argue that there is anything wrong with this approach to literature. There are hundreds of different ways people can derive enjoyment, satisfaction, and intellectual pleasure from reading and studying literature, and I am certain that much of what motivates even academics who sleep and breathe theory is the same as what motivates the child who loves to read a mystery novel or comic book before going to bed - the sheer enjoyment of the work. Literature, after all, is a complex phenomenon whose primary function is to make us want to read it. Literature exists only to be read, and what better way to tempt us into reading it than to make it an enjoyable experience? The love of the story, and the magic of the words is what weaves literature's spell over the reader, and the reader willingly enters the trance, intent on experiencing something which is not to be found elsewhere.

Following the magic analogy, while some are interested in seeing magic tricks performed, while others are interested in performing them themselves, there is another group, whose members may or may not overlap with either of the first two, who want to know how the magic happens, how it works, and why it has the effect on the audience that it does. If we liken the first group to readers, and the second to authors, the third group are the critics and theorists, those who want to know the how's and why's of the performance, who are in love with the inner workings which take place out of common sight but which, when positioned correctly in conjunction with one another, spell out the answers to the mysteries we witness.

In the case of literary theory, a little piece of each of the common definitions of the term applies, though many of the misapprehensions about it misconceive what it is all about. The opposition between theory and practice, first of all, is a notion that must be dispensed with when coming to an understanding of this term as it is used in academic circles. Most of the time we can simply go about doing whatever we do in life without thinking too broadly about why we are doing it. The relationship between cause and effect is often so evident that it needs no elaboration, and our motivations are equally transparent. I wake up in the morning. Why? Because I have to go to work. I brush my teeth and shower. Why? Because I don't want to smell bad around others to discomfort them and make them judge me negatively. Why am I even going to work? Because I need money, without which I cannot buy food, clothing, and shelter, which are all necessary for life. Thankfully, none of us (unless you suffer from certain diagnosable psychiatric illnesses) needs to remind ourselves of our motivations for doing things like this, nor of the connection between one action and another. Everyday life does not need theory in order to move forward.

However, in academic endeavors, we are immediately dealing with disciplines that go further than the practice of everyday life, or that, in a way, go above these practices. For example, you might go to buy the new, wildly popular, Elmo doll for your child, younger sibling, or even for yourself during this holiday season. For you, this purchase requires little or no thought, and comes almost as naturally as anything else you might do today. Why are you buying the doll? Because you need to get your child a Christmas present, and he specifically asked for it. This is a true no-brainer, and there is certainly nothing wrong with this kind of unconscious reasoning. However, if we want to examine this behavior in more detail, we can begin taking the questioning into the realm of the generally un-asked, or always assumed. Why, for instance, do you need to buy your child a Christmas present? Well, because he expects it, I like to give it, and it is a Christmas tradition. Why is it a Christmas tradition, and is it a good one that will make life better? Well, I think it is nice to give, and I know a story about how the wise men gave Jesus gifts.... Why are so many children interested in this particular doll? Because, I think, maybe because it is funny, furry, colorful...I really don't know.

Thankfully, we don't have an annoying questioner asking us these kinds of things constantly (we would likely want to strangle them in a very short period of time). However, there are people who want to understand what lies behind our day-to-day behavior, and who want answers to the questions posed above. These people make such things, in this case, social habits, long established traditions, consumer behavior, and sociology, their object of study. Their goal is to find the reasons why things that happen without any real consideration happen at all, what prompts them in such large numbers, and so on; in short, they seek to come up with explanations that give the underlying reasons why things happen the way they do. Another way to say this, is that they observe the situations, gather data, and look for patterns of cause and effect. These patterns become the theory of a given behavior, situation, action, and so on.

The connection between practice and theory is an intimate one, because theory can not exist unless it has some explanatory power with regard to the phenomenon it takes as its object of study. To pick up our previous example, it is evident that there can be no marketing theory, or social theory, unless there is a market and a society to theorize about. Theory that has no connection to its chosen body of examination, or which fails to explain (or does not even attempt to explain) some aspect of that body, is not even properly called theory. A theory can be right or wrong, weaker or stronger, but in order to be worthy of the name at all, it must say something about the entity or phenomenon it is about. Theory is always about something, and even when, in literary studies, we use the term theory on its own, what we really mean is literary theory. The thing upon which the theory is based is what makes it meaningful and possible; theory is a dependent entity, and must always be in service to something else.

If academic disciplines strive to provide theories of the things they set as the objects of their study, this makes them collections of interrelated theories; any collection of theories that are interrelated can be subsumed into a larger theory, and so it is possible to conceive of academic disciplines themselves as elaborate theories. This is where the idea of theory vs. practice comes in, especially with regard to academics. A behavior or action is seen as being real and legitimate, while the study of that discipline, the theory of it, is seen as being unreal and illegitimate. The people at the "top" (producing and working in the theory), it is believed, do not really understand what is going on at the "bottom" (in the actual existence of the phenomenon in question or the people who have daily interactions with it), and so the theory is considered inapplicable or inaccurate, and therefore useless. Of course, I would argue that any theory that did not take account of the phenomenon at its most basic level is no good theory at all, but this is beside the point, and the usual division will continue to exist in the popular imagination, though hopefully not in reality.

Now, this is where the real difficulty with understanding literary theory comes in. If any academic discipline is a theory of something, this means that literary studies (usually known simply as English in the English-speaking west) is the theory of literature. This makes sense, it seems, until we consider the term literary theory. If literary studies is a theory of literature, or a complex interwoven collection of theories about literature, seeking to explain how literature works and what it is, then what could the term literary theory possible add to that? This is a key question, and one that gets to the root of what this series will be striving to explain.

All academic disciplines take for their objects some area of interest, and make these the targets of their investigations. These targets range from the living and highly concrete (plants for botanists), to the non-living and highly abstract (imaginary numbers, or even regular numbers, for mathematicians). Finding underlying assumptions and interrelations is the goal of the discipline, but it is also evident that the discipline itself will function according to certain underlying assumptions, and will posses unexpected and novel unities that go largely unexamined in the day-to-day practice of the discipline. The uncovering and examination of these assumptions and relations is the theory of a discipline.

When considering the theory of a given discipline, things become somewhat more abstract, because you are now looking not at the things that move, breathe, and exist at the level of common observation or nature, but that exist themselves as tools used to study these more basic things. You have essentially moved "up" a level in your considerations, and while I hesitate to use the word "up" as it implies somehow a superior or better level, I think it does give a good idea of how the perspective of your analysis changes. You see something best from a vantage point somewhere above it, and if you are looking at something as broad and diverse as literary studies, you need to perch on the highest vantage point possible to see it in its entirety.

According to the model I am outlining here, literary theory can be described as theory whose object of examination is literary studies. At the base, we have literature and reading, which are common throughout most of the world, and which many people find interesting, even necessary, in their daily lives. Literary studies, or English, is the academic field dedicated to the study of literature, focused on finding out how it works and what it is as fully as possible. Literary theory is the discipline concerned with how the discipline of literary studies works. It examines its assumptions, its reason for being, its aims, and its effectiveness.

However, note that, at this level of abstraction, the relationship between the theory of a given discipline and the practice that the discipline engages in is not merely one-way, as it might be between the discipline and the "real-world" phenomenon it studies. For example, the algae studied by a biologist is not going to be affected by the theory that botanists create about it. The algae is a passive object, amenable to and available for intense study, but unable to respond to the findings that result from this study. The biologist, on the other hand, is aware of what theoretical information is available about the discipline in which she works, and so, rather than merely being descriptive, the theory dedicated to biology can also be prescriptive, making not only observations about how things are, but how they could be with improvements, or should be if things were done optimally. In this way, we can see that theory and practice are even more tightly intertwined at the level of academic disciplines. Each has an influence on the other.

In the particular case of literary theory, then, we have an organized approach to literary studies that both describes and guides the discipline. It arose as an offshoot to literary studies, as people in that discipline began to ask some important questions about their own practice. Why, for example, are we even studying literature? What do we want to know about it? Why do we care about interpretation and meaning so much? What vantage points of analysis are vying for dominance in the field? How can we merge the multiple perspectives, and should we? Rather than talking about specific works of literature, then, literary theory talks about literary studies and how it has, does, and will conduct itself. It helps to determine what is valid and what is not, what approaches are central and which are peripheral, and how the study of literature can best interact with the literature it examines. As a result, a large part of the study of literary theory is the study of the different critical perspectives that can be taken when examining literature, and so much of the rest of this series will be dedicated to the exploration of various literary theories that, when combined, comprise literary theory.