Thoughts on Theory

Once, a friend asked me about literary theory. He explained he’d taken a literary theory class and he still wasn't sure what theory was or why it was called “theory.” He explained his confusion stemmed from the fact the class used a single text, The Great Gatsby, and applied every theoretical approach they discussed to it. He approached the class with a scientific perspective, expecting it to be a matter of testing theories and hypotheses on a literary text, and that proving one would invalidate the others.

Well, literary theory doesn't work like that. I explained that literary theory is more about the approach a reader takes when studying a text.

A reader can take, for example, a feminist approach to one text, and they will focus on the portrayal of gender and gender relationships. Another reader may take a structuralist approach to the same text and they will walk away with a reading that focuses on how the story is set up. And someone doing a Reader-Response reading will focus on how the text impacts the reader.

A literary theory isn't so much a hypothetical statement as it is a school of thought that addresses issues that emerge in literature and how those issues are read and understood; and literary theorists are constantly responding to, complicating, criticizing, validating, and even disproving (or attempting to) the work of other literary theorists. So what is the point? The goal of all of this is to learn how literature tells us something more than just, well, what the literature itself is: about how we live our lives, engage in culture and society, and with each other, etc.

Allow me to share a classic example of a prevalent issue in literary theory: authorial intention.

Authorial intention basically asks two questions: First, whether or not it is possible to know what the author intended by what they wrote. Answering this question generally deals with what is known about the author, their life, their goals, their personal philosophies, and how that biographical and historical information intersects with the text so we as readers can find the author's purpose in their writing.

Seems simple enough, right? Then there's the second question: whether or not the author themselves were aware of what their intentions were, i.e. to what extent were they subconsciously motivated, or attributing too much intention to what could be coincidences. I've told people this before and people, generally the more hard-science minded, scoff at this idea, retorting with “How can you not know what you intended?” But it has been a serious issue in literary theory, and stems from other philosophical ideas about our own ability to self-perceive and self-conceive, to understand just what's going on in our own heads.

And there are literary theorists who argue that authorial intention is a moot point: that it isn't an issue worth addressing or it is impossible to answer, while others still try to decipher the author's intention from the texts they study. What complicates this is there isn't necessarily anything right or wrong about any of these perspectives. It isn't necessarily a matter of right or wrong, but much more a matter of how. How do you read and understand a piece of literature? How do you interpret it? What details and kinds of information do you consider appropriate?

Regardless of the approach, literary theory aims to discover how a piece of writing is more than just words on a page. Literary theorists look to literature to discover what literature says about society, culture, the human condition, philosophy, psychology, history, and even how literature comments on literature itself. Literary analysis, in any form, should go beyond what the piece of literature itself says.

Studying literature is a journey, and the theoretical approach you take is merely the path you take. Not every path will take you to the same place, but you will likely come close to and even cross a few other paths on your way there.