Owl purdue literary theory

Owl purdue literary theory

Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social prophecy, and interdisciplinary themes relevant to how people interpret meaning. In the humanities in modern academia, the latter style of literary scholarship is a development of critical theory. Consequently, the word theory •The Purdue University Writing Lab • Heavilon Hall • •And visit blogger.com •Or email owl@blogger.com Welcome to the Purdue OWL This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue (blogger.com). When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice at bottom. Contributors:Allen Brizee, J. Case Tompkins. Summary: This resource will help you begin the process of understanding literary theory and schools ofFile Size: KB

Introduction to Literary Theory // Purdue Writing Lab

Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. The practice of literary theory became a profession in the 20th century, but it has historical roots that run as far back as ancient Greece Aristotle 's Poetics is an often cited early exampleancient India Bharata Muni 's Natya Shastraancient Rome Longinus 's On the Sublime and medieval Iraq Al-Jahiz 's al-Bayan wa-'l-tabyin and al-Hayawanand ibn al-Mu'tazz 's Kitab al-Badi.

The theory and criticism of literature are tied to the history of literature. However, the modern sense of "literary theory" only dates to approximately the s when the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure began to strongly influence English language literary criticism. In the academic world of the United Kingdom and the United States, literary theory was at its most popular from the late s when its influence was beginning to spread owl purdue literary theory from universities such as Johns HopkinsYaleand Cornell through the s by which time it was taught nearly everywhere in some form.

By the early s, the popularity of "theory" as a subject of interest by itself was declining slightly along with job openings for pure "theorists" even as the texts of literary theory were incorporated into the study of almost all literature. One of the fundamental questions of literary theory is "what is literature? Specific theories are distinguished owl purdue literary theory only by their methods and conclusions, but even by how they create meaning in a " text ", owl purdue literary theory.

However, some theorists acknowledge that these texts do not have a singular, fixed meaning which is deemed "correct". Since theorists of literature often draw on a very heterogeneous tradition of Continental philosophy and the philosophy of languageany classification of their approaches is only an approximation. There are many types of literary theory, which take different approaches to texts, owl purdue literary theory. Even among those listed below, many scholars combine methods from more than one of these approaches for instance, owl purdue literary theory, the deconstructive approach owl purdue literary theory Paul de Man drew on a long tradition of close reading pioneered by the New Criticsand de Man was trained in the European hermeneutic tradition.

Broad schools of theory that have historically been important include historical and biographical criticismNew CriticismformalismRussian owl purdue literary theoryand structuralismpost-structuralismMarxismfeminism and French feminismpost-colonialismnew historicismdeconstructionreader-response criticismand psychoanalytic criticism. The different interpretive and epistemological perspectives of different schools of theory often arise from, and so give support to, different moral and political commitments.

For instance, the work of the New Critics often contained an implicit moral dimension, and sometimes even a religious one: a New Critic might read a poem by T.

Eliot or Gerard Manley Hopkins for its degree of honesty in expressing the torment and contradiction of a serious search for belief in the modern world. Meanwhile, a Marxist critic might find such judgments merely ideological rather than critical; the Marxist would say that the New Critical reading did not keep enough critical distance from the poem's religious stance to be able to understand it.

Such a disagreement cannot be easily resolved, because it is inherent in the radically different terms and goals that is, the theories of the critics. Their theories of reading derive from vastly different intellectual traditions: the New Critic bases his work on an East-Coast American scholarly and religious tradition, owl purdue literary theory, while the Marxist derives his thought from a body of critical social and economic thought, the post-structuralist's work emerges from twentieth-century Continental philosophy of language, and the Darwinian from the modern evolutionary synthesis.

In the late s, the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye attempted to establish an approach for reconciling historical criticism and New Criticism while addressing concerns of early reader-response and numerous psychological and social approaches.

His approach, laid out in his Anatomy of Criticismwas explicitly structuralist, relying on the assumption of an intertextual "order of words" and universality of certain structural types. His approach held sway in English literature programs for several decades but lost favor during the ascendance of post-structuralism.

For some theories of literature especially certain kinds of formalismthe distinction between "literary" and other sorts of texts is of paramount importance.

Other schools particularly post-structuralism in its various forms: new historicism, deconstruction, some strains of Marxism and feminism have sought to break down distinctions between the two and have applied the tools of textual interpretation to a wide range of "texts", including film, non-fiction, owl purdue literary theory, historical writing, and even cultural events. Mikhail Bakhtin argued that the "utter inadequacy" of literary theory is evident when it is forced to deal with the novel ; while other genres are fairly stabilized, the novel is still developing.

Another crucial distinction among the various theories of literary interpretation is intentionality, the amount of weight given to the author's own opinions about and intentions for a work.

For most preth century approaches, the author's intentions are a guiding factor and an important determiner of the "correct" interpretation of texts, owl purdue literary theory.

The New Criticism was the first school to disavow the role of the author in interpreting texts, preferring to focus on "the text itself" in a close reading.

In fact, as much contention as there is between formalism and later schools, they share the tenet that the author's interpretation of a work is no more inherently meaningful than any other.

Listed below are some of the most commonly identified owl purdue literary theory of literary theory, along with their major authors. In many cases, such as those of the historian and philosopher Michel Foucault and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Straussthe authors were not primarily literary critics, but their work has been broadly influential in literary theory. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, owl purdue literary theory.

The systematic study of the nature of literature. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources.

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May Learn how and when to remove this template message. Inside HigherEd. Washington, DC. Jay treats it [theory] as transformative progress, but it impressed us as hack philosophizing, amateur social science, superficial learning, or just plain gamesmanship.

JSTOR Literary criticism. Archetypal criticism Biographical criticism Chicago school Cultural materialism Darwinian criticism Deconstruction Descriptive poetics Ecocriticism Feminist criticism Formalism Geocriticism Marxist criticism New Criticism New historicism Postcolonial criticism Postcritique Psychoanalytic criticism Reader-response criticism Russian formalism Semiotic criticism Sociological criticism Source criticism Thing theory, owl purdue literary theory.

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This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue (blogger.com). When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice at bottom. From the OWL resource Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism This resource was written by J. Case blogger.com Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism Summary: This resource will help you begin the process of understanding literary theory and schools of criticism and how they are used in the academy. Contributors:Allen Brizee, J. Case Tompkins, Libby Chernouski, Elizabeth Boyle Last Edited: S/he Purdue OWL: Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism Hopefully, after reading through and working with the resources in this area of the OWL, literary theory will become a little easier to understand and use. Although philosophers, critics, educators and authors have been writing about writing since ancient times, contemporary schools of