Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI), 2015-2016.

Unit 1 Study
Guide

COMENTARIO DE TEXTOS
LITERARIOS EN LENGUA INGLESA
GRADO

UNIT 1 GUIDE | APPROACHING THE LITERARY TEXTS IN ENGLISH

2022-2023
GRADO EN ESTUDIOS INGLESES:
LENGUA, LITERATURA Y CULTURA
Adriana Kiczkowski (co-ordinator)
Isabel Castelao
Inés Ordiz

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 Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa
STUDY GUIDE-UNIT 1
Approaching the Literary Texts in English

1. Introduction

2. What is Literature?

2.1. Introduction to Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory.

2.2. Activity

3. Classifying Literature: Genres, Literary Periods and Movements.

3.1.The Literary Genres.

Narrative texts.
Poetry.
Drama.

3.2. Activity
3.3. Literary Periods and Movements.
3.4. Activity

4. How do we approach the Literary Text? Literary Criticism, Critical Theories.

4.1. Theoretical approaches to Literature

Comprehension versus Interpretation.

5. Introduction to Literary Critical Schools

6. Activities

7. References

8. Further Resources

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1. INTRODUCTION
In this first unit we will reflect on the object of study of the course, that is, the literary text
and the ways in which we can approach it. We will also review some basic concepts such
as “genre” and “literary periods” that have served to organize the literary corpus
throughout history. The last part of the unit summarizes some of the most important
critical theories of the twentieth century.
Below, you will find the reading materials we have selected for each of the sections
that make up this unit. As you will see, most of the topics to be covered have been
developed by different authors who are specialists in the field. In order to facilitate your
study, we have incorporated some excerpts into these study materials. We recommend
that you do the readings in the order in which they are presented to get the most of them.
The different materials that we include in the Study Guides of each Unit, whether
textual or audio-visual, are obligatory contents to prepare the subject except for the
bibliography or webpages that you will find at the end in the "Further readings" section.
We are aware of the difficulties often faced when dealing with some theoretical
issues that require a level of abstraction to which we are often not accustomed, but we
hope that the pleasure of finding new ways to understand, interpret or feel the literary
text will make the effort worthwhile. We wish you the best of luck on this path and you
can count on the teaching staff as well as your tutors to help you with those aspects that
may be more complex.

2. WHAT IS LITERATURE?

Before you continue reading, THINK about the word “literature”. How would you define
it? That is, what is “literature” for you? WRITE this definition down.

Although the objective of this unit is not to find a unique and satisfactory answer,
the inquiry about the literary character of a text will be the central axis of our course.
In contemporary times, there is a certain consensus to embrace the lack of
specificity of literature, the inability to define it. The definition of any specific and
distinguishing features that literary works share, according to most critics, is a question
that “has been wrestled with without notable success” (Culler 21).
Mario Klarer considers that there is an inevitable “lack of substance in the attempts
to define it” (1). The definition of what literature is, according to Andrew Bennett and
Nicholas Royle, is “a question to which no one has yet provided an entirely satisfactory
or convincing answer” (1). However, as Álvarez Amorós attests, literary courses have
traditionally given for granted what literature consists of, evading the matter of the
definition of the object of study “learning it in deductive ways and reducing it to the works
that authors have written in a compulsory list of readings”, generally made through
uncontested historical or national criteria, that exposes without questioning “the nature
and existence of a phenomenon” that must be learnt, instead of “known” (15). Here, the
sense of “knowing” is precisely the process of understanding the undefined nature of the
object of study through questions and reflection, approaching the uncertainty of the
essence of literature on an open-ended basis of questioning.

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 In the past, the specificity of literature, that is, that literature is something precise and
systematized, was not put into question. This “specificity” of what literature is, the
understanding that “it exists and that it can be distinguished objectively from the rest of
linguistic products” belongs to a Romantic change of perspective born in the 19th c., when
literature came to be understood as an exceptional and different work written by an
author that includes “aesthetic worth in combination with general intellectual distinction”
becoming then an aesthetic phenomenon related to an imaginative process (Amorós 21).
Nevertheless, before the 14th c. the etymological root of literature, littera (“letter”), simply
meant anything in print, “whatever is written or printed” (closer to the contemporary
understanding of “written text”). The word literature was coined in English for the first
time in the 14th c. as the study and knowledge of books (related to the Spanish filología).
In the 17th c. it came to signify the profession of writing and the corpus of works related
to a period or culture (Amorós 21). From the mere “printed letter” to the “writing having
excellence of form and expression and expressing ideas of permanent or universal
interest” we see an evolution from a “descriptive” to an “evaluative” perception of
literature (Amorós 20).
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines literature in
current times as the following: “imaginative or creative writing, especially of recognized
artistic value”; but who recognizes this artistic value? Is it society? Or literary experts?
Even though literary works are esteemed and praised by the canon, the most important
thing is how we, as readers, are able to recognize the artistic value, thinking for ourselves
and being able to communicate what we appreciate about the imaginative and the artistic
quality of a work (Mays 2).
Our role as active readers relates to the fact that, even though dictionaries “define”
literature, what makes literature what it is is also very much related to the way we look at
texts: “With a bit of effort and imagination, we would suggest, any text can be read as
poetic—the list of ingredients on a box of breakfast cereal, for example. Or even the most
inane language of bureaucracy” (Bennet and Royle 2). The shopping list or the first line
of a philosophy book, if taken apart and treated as a text detached from its original
purpose can become literary to our literary eyes (our attention and imagination). For
example, if we read the following line from a cooking recipe,
‘Stir vigorously and allow to sit five minutes’
it could be a one line poem titled “Infatuation”, or a philosophy book first sentence:
‘A curious thing
about the ontological problem is its
simplicity’
the stanza of a poem.
Literary works are above all “texts”: “the word text is related to ‘textile’ and can be
translated as ‘fabric’: just as single threads form a fabric, so works and sentences form
a meaningful and coherent text” (Klarer 1), which before print were transmitted orally.
Texts have visual and acoustic elements, but with the modern printing press, as Klarer
emphasizes, “pure writing became more and more stylized as an abstract medium devoid
of traces of material or physical elements” (2). Literary texts generally maintain these
material and physical elements (visual and acoustic) and also share a creative wish to
last as expression outside the creator, communicating and sharing: “Underlying literary
production is certainly the human wish to leave behind a trace of oneself through creative
expression, which will exist detached from the individual and, therefore, outlast its
creator. The earliest manifestations of this creative wish are prehistoric paintings in
caves, which hold ‘encoded’ information in the form of visual signs” (Klarer 1).
Therefore, one of the conclusions that we can draw about literature is that, above all,
it is an experience, or a way of reading “literarily” and giving a particular “attention” to
texts, without any pragmatic purpose but the experience or process of reading in
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“mindfulness” within the creative world where it belongs. Literary reading is not pragmatic
reading because we are not looking for an objective, a solution to a problem, an action
to be taken, or a practical information we need; the importance is in the process we enjoy
or the experience we have, what happens during the reading: “The difference between
pragmatic and literary reading in other words, resembles the difference between a
journey that is only about reaching a destination and one that is just as much about fully
experiencing the ride” (Mays 3).
Reading literature is to “experience” through imagination, senses, feelings and
intellect because, as the Greek etymology of “poetry”, the verb poiein (“to make” or “to
do”), “words do not simply describe, but actually do things: they engage, entice, convince,
seduce” (Bennett and Royle 11). One characteristic that literary works such as stories,
poems and plays have is that “they help us move beyond abstraction by giving us
concrete, vivid particulars. Rather than talking about things, they bring them to life for us
by representing experience, and so they become an experience for us—one that
engages our emotions, our imagination, and all of our senses, as well as our intellects”
(Mays 3). Our purpose as students of literature is to be able to analyze and communicate
this experience through the methods and terminology from the discipline of literary
studies.

2.1. READ the following text from the introduction to Terry Eagleton's
Literary Theory. (2008).

If there is such a thing as literary theory, then it would seem obvious that there is something called
literature which it is the theory of. We can begin, then, by raising the question: what is literature?
There have been various attempts to define literature. You can define it, for example, as
'imaginative' writing in the sense of fiction - writing which is not literally true. But even the briefest
reflection on what people commonly include under the heading of literature suggests that this will
not do. Seventeenth-century English literature includes Shakespeare, Webster, Marvell and
Milton; but it also stretches to the essays of Francis Bacon, the sermons of John Donne, Bunyan's
spiritual autobiography and whatever it was that Sir Thomas Browne wrote. It might even at a
pinch be taken to encompass Hobbes's Leviathan or Clarendon's History of the Rebellion. […]
Nineteenth-century English literature usually includes Lamb (though not Bentham), Macaulay (but
not Marx), Mill (but not Darwin or Herbert Spencer).
A distinction between 'fact' and 'fiction', then, seems unlikely to get us very far, not least
because the distinction itself is often a questionable one. It has been argued, for instance, that out
own opposition between 'historical' and 'artistic' truth does not apply at all to the early Icelandic
sagas. In the English late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the word 'novel' seems to have
been used about both true and fictional events, and even news reports were hardly to be considered
factual. Novels and news reports were neither clearly factual nor clearly fictional: our own sharp
discriminations between these categories simply did not apply. Gibbon no doubt thought that he
was writing the historical truth, and so perhaps did the authors of Genesis, but they are now read
as 'fact' by some and 'fiction' by others […]. Moreover, if 'literature' includes much 'factual' writing,
it also excludes quite a lot of fiction. Superman comic and Mills and Boon novels are fictional but
not generally regarded as literature, and certainly not as Literature. If literature is 'creative' or
'imaginative' writing, does this imply that history, philosophy and natural science are uncreative
and unimaginative?
Perhaps one needs a different kind of approach altogether. Perhaps literature is definable not
according to whether it is fictional or 'imaginative', but because it uses language in peculiar ways.
On this theory, literature is a kind of writing which, in the words of the Russian critic Roman
Jakobson, represents an 'organized violence committed on ordinary speech'. Literature transforms
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and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach
me at a bus stop and murmur 'Thou still unravished bride of quietness,' then I am instantly aware
that I am in the presence of the literary. I know this because the texture, rhythm and resonance of
your words are in excess of their abstractable meaning […]. Your language draws attention to
itself, flaunts its material being, as statements like 'Don't you know the drivers are on strike?' do
not.
This, in effect, was the definition of the 'literary' advanced by the Russian Formalists […]. The
Formalists emerged in Russia in the years before the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, and flourished
throughout the 1920s, until they were effectively silenced by Stalinism. […] For them, literature
was not pseudo-religion or psychology or sociology but a particular organization of language. It
had its own specific laws, structures and devices, which were to be studied in themselves rather
than reduced to something else. The literary work was neither a vehicle for ideas, a reflection of
social reality nor the incarnation of some transcendental truth: it was a material fact, whose
functioning could be analysed rather as one could examine a machine […].
Formalism was essentially the application of linguistics to the study of literature […].
Formalists passed over the analysis of literary 'content' (where one might always be tempted into
psychology or sociology) for the study of literary form. Far from seeing form as the expression of
content, they stood the relationship on its head: content was merely the 'motivation' of form, an
occasion or convenience for a particular kind of formal exercise. Don Quixote is not 'about' the
character of that name: the character is just a device for holding together different kinds of narrative
technique. […] they did not deny that art had a relation to social reality — indeed some of them
were closely associated with the Bolsheviks - they provocatively claimed that this relation was not
the critic's business.
[…] What was specific to literary language, what distinguished it from other forms of
discourse, was that it 'deformed' ordinary language in various ways. Under the pressure of literary
devices, ordinary language was intensified, condensed, twisted, telescoped, drawn out, turned on
its head. It was language 'made strange'; and because of this estrangement, the everyday world was
also suddenly made unfamiliar.
[…] The Formalists, then, saw literary language as a set of deviations from a norm, a kind
of linguistic violence: literature is a 'special' kind of language, in contrast to the 'ordinary' language
we commonly use. But to spot a deviation implies being able to identify the norm from which it
swerves. […] The idea that there is a single 'normal' language, a common currency shared equally
by all members of society, is an illusion. Any actual language consists of a highly complex range
of discourses, differentiated according to class, region, gender, status and so on, which can by no
means be neatly unified into a single homogeneous linguistic community. […] Even the most
'prosaic' text of the fifteenth century may sound 'poetic' to us today because of its archaism. If we
were to stumble across an isolated scrap of writing from some long-vanished civilization, we could
not tell whether it was 'poetry' or not merely by inspecting it, since we might have no access to that
society's 'ordinary' discourses; and even if further research were to reveal that it was 'deviatory',
this would still not prove that it was poetry as not all linguistic deviations are poetic. Slang, for
example. We would not be able to tell just by looking at it that it was not a piece of 'realist'
literature, without much more information about the way it actually functioned as a piece of writing
within the society in question.
[…] When the poet tells us that his love is like a red rose, we know by the very fact that
he puts this statement in metre that we are not supposed to ask whether he actually had a lover who
for some bizarre reason seemed to him to resemble a rose. He is telling us something about women
and love in general. Literature, then, we might say, is 'non-pragmatic' discourse: unlike biology
textbooks and notes to the milkman it serves no immediate practical purpose, but is to be taken as
referring to a general state of affairs. Sometimes, though not always, it may employ peculiar
language as though to make this fact obvious — to signal that what is at stake is a way of talking
about a woman, rather than any particular real-life woman. This focusing on the way of talking,
rather than on the reality of what is talked about, is sometimes taken to indicate that we mean by
literature a kind of self-referential language, a language which talks about itself.
There are, however, problems with this way of defining literature too. […] In much that is
classified as literature, the truth-value and practical relevance of what is said is considered
important to the overall effect. But even if treating discourse 'non pragmatically' is part of what is
meant by 'literature', then it follows from this 'definition' that literature cannot in fact be
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'objectively' defined. It leaves the definition of literature up to how somebody decides to read, not
to the nature of what is written. There are certain kinds of writing - poems, plays, novels - which
are fairly obviously intended to be 'non-pragmatic' in this sense, but this does not guarantee that
they will actually be read in this way. […] It is true that many of the works studied as literature in
academic institutions were 'constructed' to be read as literature, but it is also true that many of them
were not. A piece of writing may start off life as history or philosophy and then come to be ranked
as literature; or it may start off as literature and then come to be valued for its archaeological
significance. Some texts are born literary, some achieve literariness, and some have literariness
thrust upon them. Breeding in this respect may count for a good deal more than birth. What matters
may not be where you came from but how people treat you. If they decide that you are literature
then it seems that you are, irrespective of what you thought you were.
In this sense, one can think of literature less as some inherent quality or set of qualities
displayed by certain kinds of writing all the way from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, than as a number
of ways in which people relate themselves to writing. It would not be easy to isolate, from all that
has been variously called 'literature', some constant set of inherent features. In fact it would be as
impossible as trying to identify the single distinguishing feature which all games have in common.
There is no 'essence' of literature whatsoever. Any bit of writing may be read 'non-pragmatically',
if that is what reading a text as literature means, just as any writing may be read 'poetically'. If I
pore over the railway timetable not to discover a train connection but to stimulate in myself general
reflections on the speed and complexity of modern existence, then I might be said to be reading it
as literature. […] Even if we claim that it is a non-pragmatic treatment of language, we have still
not arrived at an 'essence' of literature because this is also so of other linguistic practices such as
jokes. In any case, it is far from clear that we can discriminate neatly between 'practical' and 'non-
practical' ways of relating ourselves to language. Reading a novel for pleasure obviously differs
from reading a road sign for information, but how about reading a biology textbook to improve
your mind? Is that a 'pragmatic' treatment of language or not? In many societies, 'literature' has
served highly practical functions such as religious ones; distinguishing sharply between 'practical'
and 'non-practical' may only be possible in a society like ours, where literature has ceased to have
much practical function at all. We may be offering as a general definition a sense of the 'literary'
which is in fact historically specific.
We have still not discovered the secret, then, of why Lamb, Macaulay and Mill are
literature but not, generally speaking, Bentham, Marx and Darwin. Perhaps the simple answer is
that the first three are examples of 'fine writing', whereas the last three are not. This answer has the
disadvantage of being largely untrue, at least in my judgement, but it has the advantage of
suggesting that by and large people term 'literature' writing which they think is good. An obvious
objection to this is that if it were entirely true there would be no such thing as 'bad literature'. […]
Value-judgements would certainly seem to have a lot to do with what is judged literature and what
isn't - not necessarily in the sense that writing has to be 'fine' to be literary, but that it has to be of
the kind that is judged fine: it may be an inferior example of a generally valued mode. Nobody
would bother to say that a bus ticket was an example of inferior literature, but someone might well
say that the poetry of Ernest Dowson was. The term 'fine writing', or belles lettres, is in this sense
ambiguous: it denotes a sort of writing which is generally highly regarded, while not necessarily
committing you to the opinion that a particular specimen of it is 'good'.
With this reservation, the suggestion that 'literature' is a highly valued kind of writing is
an illuminating one. But it has one fairly devastating consequence. It means that we can drop once
and for all the illusion that the category 'literature' is 'objective', in the sense of being eternally
given and immutable. Anything can be literature, and anything which is regarded as unalterably
and unquestionably literature - Shakespeare, for example – can cease to be literature. Any belief
that the study of literature is the study of a stable, well-definable entity, as entomology is the study
of insects, can be abandoned as a chimera. Some kinds of fiction are literature, and some are not;
some literature is fictional and some is not; some literature is verbally self-regarding, while some
highly-wrought rhetoric is not literature. Literature, in the sense of a set of works of assured and
unalterable value, distinguished by certain shared inherent properties, does not exist. […]
The reason why it follows from the definition of literature as highly valued writing that it
is not a stable entity is that value-judgements are notoriously variable. 'Times change, values don't,'
announces an advertisement for a daily newspaper, as though we still believed in killing off infirm
infants or putting the mentally ill on public show. Just as people may treat a work as philosophy in
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one century and as literature in the next, or vice versa, so they may change their minds about what
writing they consider valuable. They may even change their minds about the grounds they use for
judging what is valuable and what is not. This, as I have suggested, does not necessarily mean that
they will refuse the title of literature to a work which they have come to deem inferior: they may
still call it literature, meaning roughly that it belongs to the type of writing which they generally
value. But it does mean that the so-called 'literary canon', the unquestioned 'great tradition' of the
'national literature', has to be recognized as a construct, fashioned by particular people for
particular reasons at a certain time. There is no such thing as a literary work or tradition which is
valuable in itself, regardless of what anyone might have said or come to say about it. 'Value' is a
transitive term: it means whatever is valued by certain people in specific situations, according to
particular criteria and in the light of given purposes. It is thus quite possible that, given a deep
enough transformation of our history, we may in the future produce a society which is unable to
get anything at all out of Shakespeare. His works might simply seem desperately alien, full of
styles of thought and feeling which such a society found limited or irrelevant. In such a situation,
Shakespeare would be no more valuable than much present-day graffiti. […]
The fact that we always interpret literary works to some extent in the light of our own
concerns - indeed that in one sense of 'our own concerns' we are incapable of doing anything else
- might be one reason why certain works of literature seem to retain their value across the centuries.
It may be, of course, that we still share many preoccupations with the work itself; but it may also
be that people have not actually been valuing the 'same' work at all, even though they may think
they have. 'Our' Homer is not identical with the Homer of the Middle Ages, nor 'our' Shakespeare
with that of his contemporaries; it is rather that different historical periods have constructed a
'different' Homer and Shakespeare for their own purposes and found in these texts elements to
value or devalue, though not necessarily the same ones. All literary works, in other words, are
'rewritten', if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them; indeed there is no reading of a
work which is not also a 're-writing'. No work, and no current evaluation of it, can simply be
extended to new groups of people without being changed, perhaps almost unrecognizably, in the
process; and this is one reason why what counts as literature is a notably unstable affair.
I do not mean that it is unstable because value-judgements are 'subjective'. […] All of our
descriptive statements move within an often invisible network of value-categories, and indeed
without such categories we would have nothing to say to each other at all. It is not just as though
we have something called factual knowledge which may then be distorted by particular interests
and judgements, although this is certainly possible; it is also that without particular interests we
would have no knowledge at all, because we would not see the point of bothering to get to know
anything. Interests are constitutive of our knowledge, not merely prejudices which imperil it. The
claim that knowledge should be 'value-free' is itself a value-judgement.
It may well be that a liking for bananas is a merely private matter, though this is in fact
questionable. A thorough analysis of my tastes in food would probably reveal how deeply relevant
they are to certain formative experiences in early childhood, to my relations with my parents and
siblings and to a good many other cultural factors which are quite as social and 'nonsubjective' as
railway stations. This is even more true of that fundamental structure of beliefs and interests which
I am born into as a member of a particular society, such as the belief that I should try to keep in
good health, that differences of sexual role are rooted in human biology or that human beings are
more important than crocodiles. We may disagree on this or that, but we can only do so because
we share certain 'deep' ways of seeing and valuing which are bound up with our social life, and
which could not be changed without transforming that life. Nobody will penalize me heavily if I
dislike a particular Donne poem, but if I argue that Donne is not literature at all then in certain
circumstances, I might risk losing my job. […]
The largely concealed structure of values which informs and underlies our factual
statements is part of what is meant by 'ideology'. By 'ideology' I mean, roughly, the ways in which
what we say and believe connects with the power-structure and power-relations of the society we
live in. It follows from such a rough definition of ideology that not all of our underlying judgements
and categories can usefully be said to be ideological. It is deeply ingrained in us to imagine
ourselves moving forwards into the future (at least one other society sees itself as moving
backwards into it), but though this way of seeing may connect significantly with the power-
structure of our society, it need not always and everywhere do so. I do not mean by 'ideology'
simply the deeply entrenched, often unconscious beliefs which people hold; I mean more
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 particularly those modes of feeling, valuing, perceiving and believing which have some kind of
relation to the maintenance and reproduction of social power. The fact that such beliefs are by no
means merely private quirks may be illustrated by a literary example.
In his famous study Practical Criticism (1929), the Cambridge critic I. A. Richards sought
to demonstrate just how whimsical and subjective literary value-judgements could actually be by
giving his undergraduates a set of poems, withholding from them the titles and authors' names, and
asking them to evaluate them. The resulting judgements, notoriously, were highly variable: time-
honoured poets were marked down and obscure authors celebrated. To my mind, however, much
the most interesting aspect of this project, and one apparently quite invisible to Richards himself,
is just how tight a consensus of unconscious valuations underlies these particular differences of
opinion. Reading Richards' undergraduates' accounts of literary works, one is struck by the habits
of perception and interpretation which they spontaneously share - what they expect literature to
be, what assumptions they bring to a poem and what fulfilments they anticipate they will derive
from it. None of this is really surprising: for all the participants in this experiment were,
presumably, young, white, upper- or upper-middle-class, privately educated English people of the
1920s, and how they responded to a poem depended on a good deal more than purely 'literary'
factors. Their critical responses were deeply entwined with their broader prejudices and beliefs.
This is not a matter of blame: there is no critical response which is not so entwined, and thus no
such thing as a 'pure' literary critical judgement or interpretation. If anybody is to be blamed it is
I. A. Richards himself, who as a young, white, upper-middle-class male Cambridge don was unable
to objectify a context of interests which he himself largely shared, and was thus unable to recognize
fully that local, 'subjective' differences of evaluation work within a particular, socially structured
way of perceiving the world.
If it will not do to see literature as an 'objective', descriptive category, neither will it do to
say that literature is just what people whimsically choose to call literature. For there is nothing at
all whimsical about such kinds of value-judgement: they have their roots in deeper structures of
belief which are as apparently unshakeable as the Empire State building. What we have uncovered
so far, then, is not only that literature does not exist in the sense that insects do, and that the value-
judgements by which it is constituted are historically variable, but that these value-judgements
themselves have a close relation to social ideologies. They refer in the end not simply to private
taste, but to the assumptions by which certain social groups exercise and maintain power over
others. If this seems a far-fetched assertion, a matter of private prejudice, we may test it out by an
account of the rise of 'literature' in England.” (Eagleton 1-14)

2.2. Activity 1 (Not compulsory)

REFLECT on the text you have just read. Terry Eagleton exposes three aspects that
have been considered when defining what literature is:

1. Literature as an “imaginative” writing.

2. Literature as a peculiar way of using language.
3. Literature as non-pragmatic discourse.

According to the author, what problems do each of them have in defining what literature
is?
The following video may help you to better understand the text.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yWf-kzJPaU&ab_channel=ShisukaFurada
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Go back to the definition of literature you wrote down before reading this section. Did it
align with one of the three aspects underlined by Eagleton? Has your understanding of
literature changed? How?

You can SHARE your reflections with other students in the thread created for this
activity in the Unit 1 Forum or in the tutorial sessions.

3. CLASSIFYING LITERATURE: GENRES, LITERARY

PERIODS AND MOVEMENTS.

 REFLECT and WRITE

What comes to mind when you think of the word “genre”? What is your favorite genre,
whether literary or filmic (movie genre)? What are the main characteristics of that
genre?

As in all disciplines, whether scientific, social or humanistic, literary studies have

attempted to organize and structure works, thus giving rise to classifications that have
taken into account the genre (that is, the type of text); the literary period (that is, the
historical moment to which the text belongs); and the artistic-literary movement to which
it adheres. As Mario Klarer claims:
As early as Greco-Roman antiquity, the classification of literary works into different genres has
been a major concern of literary theory, which has since then produced a number of divergent and
sometimes even contradictory categories. Among the various attempts to classify literature into
genres, the triad epic, drama, and poetry has proved to be the most common in modern literary
criticism. Because the epic was widely replaced by the new prose form of the novel in the
eighteenth century, recent classifications prefer the terms fiction, drama, and poetry as designations
of the three major literary genres. The following section will explain the basic characteristics of
these literary genres […]. (Klarer 10).

3.1 The Literary Genres

Classification by genre, although it has been questioned over time for various
reasons, is undoubtedly one of the most widespread categorizations. The excerpts that
follow, which are taken from Tison Pugh and Margaret E. Johnson’s Literary Studies. A
Practical Guide and from Kelly J. Mays’s The Norton Introduction to Literature, offer
simple definitions the most common categories:
All academic disciplines have systems of classification, or taxonomies, as well as jargon.
Biologists, for example, classify all organisms into a series of ever-smaller, more specific
10
categories: kingdom, phylum or division, class, order, family, genus, and species. Classification
and comparison are just as essential in the study of literature. We expect a poem to work in a
certain way, for example, when we know from the outset that it is a poem and not, say, a factual
news report or a short story. And— whether consciously or not— we compare it, as we read, to
other poems we’ve read in the past. If we know, further, that the poem was first published in
eighteenth- century Japan, we expect it to work differently from one that appeared in the latest
New Yorker. Indeed, we often choose what to read, just as we choose what movie to see, based on
the ‘class’ or ‘order’ of book or movie we like or what we are in the mood for that day— horror or
comedy, action or science fiction.
As these examples suggest, we generally tend to categorize literary works in two ways: (1)
on the basis of contextual factors, especially historical and cultural context— that is, when, by
whom, and where it was produced (as in nineteenth century literature, the literature of the Harlem
Renaissance, American literature, or African American literature)— and (2) on the basis of formal
textual features. For the latter type of classification […] the key term is genre, which simply means,
as the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, ‘A particular style or category of works of art; esp. a
type of literary work characterized by a particular form, style, or purpose.
Applied rigorously, genre refers to the largest categories […] fiction, poetry, and drama
(as well as nonfiction prose). The word subgenre applies to smaller divisions within a genre, and
the word kind to divisions within a subgenre. Subgenres of fiction include the novel, the novella,
and the short story. Kinds of novels, in turn, include things like the bildungsroman or the epistolary
novel. Similarly, important subgenres of nonfiction include the essay, as well as biography and
autobiography; a memoir is a particular kind of autobiography, and so on.
However, the terms of literary criticism are not so fixed or so consistently, rigorously used
as biologists’ are. You will often see the word genre applied both much more narrowly— referring
to the novel, for example, or even to a kind of novel such as the epistolary novel or the historical
novel.
The way we classify a work depends on which aspects of its form or style we concentrate
on, and categories may overlap. When we divide fiction, for example, into the subgenres novel,
novella, and short story, we take the length of the works as the salient aspect. (Novels are much
longer than short stories.) But other fictional subgenres— detective fiction, gothic fiction,
historical fiction, science fiction, and even romance— are based on the types of plots, characters,
settings, and so on that are customarily featured in these works. These latter categories may include
works from all the other, length- based categories. There are, after all, gothic novels (think
Stephenie Meyer), as well as gothic short stories (think Edgar Allan Poe). A few genres even cut
across the boundaries dividing poetry, fiction, drama, and nonfiction. A prime example is satire—
any literary work (whether poem, play, fiction, or nonfiction) ‘in which prevailing vices and follies
are held up to ridicule’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Examples of satire include poems such as
Alexander Pope’s Dunciad (1728); plays, movies, and television shows, from Molière’s Tartuffe
(1664) to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) to South Park and The Daily Show; works of
fiction like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Voltaire’s Candide (1759); and works
of nonfiction such as Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (1729) and Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s
Dictionary (1906). Three other major genres that cross the borders between fiction, poetry, drama,
and nonfiction are parody, pastoral, and romance.
Individual works can thus belong simultaneously to multiple generic categories or observe
some conventions of a genre without being an example of that genre in any simple or
straightforward way. The Old English poem Beowulf is an epic and, because it’s written in verse,
a poem. Yet because (like all epics) it narrates a story, it is also a work of fiction in the more
general sense of that term.

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 Given this complexity, the system of literary genres can be puzzling, especially to the
uninitiated. Used well, however, classification schemes are among the most essential and effective
tools we use to understand and enjoy just about everything, including literature (Mays 4-6).

Below we suggest a brief outline of each of the three literary genres as defined by Pugh,
Johnson and Mays. They are narrative text (prose fiction), poetry and drama. We will
study them in depth in the following units.

3.1.1. Narrative texts

The essence of prose fiction, as opposed to drama, is narration, the recounting or telling of a sequence
of events or actions. The earliest works of fiction relied almost exclusively on narration, with speeches
or dialogue being reported rather than quoted directly.
Narrative texts or prose fiction can be classified into different subgenres. Short stories focus on a
few characters, who, given the genre’s compressed form, achieve a key, if partial, insight by the
narrative’s end. The vast scope of novels allows for more complex storylines and numerous rich, fully
developed characters whose motivations readers come to understand. Novellas typically run about one
hundred pages and feature deeper complexity than short stories but do not share the expansive scope
of novels. Miscellaneous genres of prose fiction include anecdotes, jokes, and parables, which further
illustrate that the basic requirements of prose fiction include characters undertaking actions and the
ensuing consequences. Also, while the term prose fiction denotes the imaginative aspects of this genre,
the oxymoronic conflation nonfiction novel highlights how some authors employ the narrative
strategies of fiction for such forms as memoirs, biographies, and other accounts of real life. Despite
the variety of these forms of prose fiction, they share numerous key features uniting them into a
coherent subsection of literature, including plot structure, point of view, characters and
characterization, setting, theme, and style and tone (Pugh and Johnson 129).

3.1.2. Poetry

Poetry invites readers to revel in the inherent beauty of language, to luxuriate in its rhythm and flow
while pondering the author’s themes and insights. Poems often challenge readers as well, asking them
to interpret words, phrases, images, and symbols conjoined in striking ways. Whereas one might think
that the goal of language is to communicate simply and directly, to express ideas with as little
ambiguity as possible, the goal of poetry is also to communicate—but to do so with keen attention to
the nuances and aesthetic qualities of language through sound, meter, images, voice, and genre. Poets
remove words from their everyday milieu, encouraging readers to enjoy the play of language and the
rewards of immersing oneself in its cadences (Pugh and Johnson 93).
Poems may be classified into subgenres based on various characteristics, including their length,
appearance, and formal features (patterns of rhyme and rhythm, for example); their subject; or even
the type of situation and setting (time and place) they depict. (A sonnet, for example, has fourteen
lines. Defined broadly, an elegy is simply any poem about death.) A single poem might well represent
multiple subgenres or at least might contain elements of more than one. (Mays 702)

3.1.3. Drama

Unlike novels and other forms of prose fiction, plays must be performed in front of audiences to
achieve their artistic potential. As Tennessee Williams passionately stated, ‘a play in a book is only

12
 the shadow of a play and not even a clear shadow of it…The printed script of a play is hardly more
than an architect’s blueprint of a house not yet built or built and destroyed’ (747). The performative
aspect of plays, in that a director, actors, and crew must bring to life the playwright’s vision, separates
the theatre from other literary forms, which do not require intermediaries between author and reader.
Indeed, the necessity of performing theatrical works is encoded etymologically in its terminology: the
word theatre derives from the Greek word meaning to behold or to view, and the word audience hails
from the Latin word meaning listening. When plays are performed in a theatre, the audience engages
through multiple senses as the story comes alive before them. At the same time, plays include similar
narrative and aesthetic elements as fiction and poetry: like fiction, plays need characters, settings, and
plots. Like poetry, plays pay detailed attention to language and its oral presentation. Like both poetry
and fiction, plays employ symbols and themes to communicate the deeper significance of their
storylines (Pugh and Johnson 155).

3.2. Activity 2 (Not compulsory)

Make a chart with the different literary genres, subgenres, and kinds that are mentioned
in this section as well as others that you know and that are not here. You can share it
with your classmates in the thread dedicated to this activity in the Unit 1 Forum or
in the tutorial sessions.

3.3. Literary Periods and Movements

Apart from the classification by literary genres, literature is also ordered according to
historical periods in which different artistic expressions usually share common
characteristics and are grouped in what we know as literary movements. Mario Klarer
classifies these periods as follows:
The following survey encompasses the most important movements of literatures written in English in
their historical succession. In spite of many discrepancies and inconsistencies, some terms and criteria
of classification have established themselves as standard in Anglo-American literary criticism. The
convention of periodical classification must not distract from the fact that such criteria are relative and
that any attempt to relate divergent texts—with regard to their structure, contents, or date of
publication—to a single period of literary history is always problematic. The criteria for classification
derive from fields such as the history of the language (Old and Middle English), national history
(colonial period), politics and religion (Elizabethan and Puritan age), and art (Renaissance and
modernism) (Klarer 67).

Periods of English literature

Old English period fifth-eleventh century

Middle English period twelfth-fifteenth century
Renaissance sixteenth-seventeenth century
Eighteenth century eighteenth century

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Romantic period first half of nineteenth century
Victorian age second half of nineteenth century
Modernism World War I to World War II
Postmodernism 1960s and 1970s

Periods of American literature

Colonial or Puritan age seventeenth-eighteenth century
Romantic period and Transcendentalism first half of nineteenth century
Realism and naturalism second half of nineteenth century
Modernism World War I to World War II
Postmodernism 1960s and 1970s

The Old English or Anglo-Saxon period, the earliest period of English literature, is regarded as
beginning with the invasion of Britain by Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) tribes in the fifth century AD and
lasting until the French invasion under William the Conqueror in 1066. The true beginnings of
literature in England, however, are to be found in the Latin Middle Ages, when monasteries were the
main institutions that preserved classical culture. Among the most important Latin literary texts is the
Ecclesiastical History of the English People (AD 731) by Beda Venerabilis (673–735). As in other
parts of Europe, national literatures developed in the vernacular parallel to the Latin literature. The
earliest texts, written between the eighth and the eleventh centuries, are called Old English or “Anglo-
Saxon.” The number of texts which have been handed down from this period is very small, comprising
anonymous magic charms, riddles, and poems such as “The Seafarer” (c. ninth century) or “The
Wanderer” (c. ninth-tenth centuries), as well as epic works such as the mythological Beowulf (c. eighth
century) or The Battle of Maldon (c. AD 1000), which is based on historical facts.
When the French-speaking Normans conquered England in the eleventh century, a definite rupture
occurred in culture and literature. From the later half of this Middle English period, a number of texts
from various literary genres have been preserved. The long list includes lyric poetry and epic “long
poems” with religious contents, such as Piers Plowman (c. 1367–70), which has been attributed to
William Langland. The romance, a new genre of a secular kind, developed in this period and includes
the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (fourteenth century) and Thomas Malory’s (c. 1408–
71) Le Morte d’Arthur (1470). This form indirectly influenced the development of the novel in the
eighteenth century. Middle English literature also produced cycles of narratives, such as Geoffrey
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1387), similar to Giovanni Boccaccio’s II Decamerone (c. 1349–51)
in Italy and comparable works of other national literatures, which are important models for the short
story of the nineteenth century. However, among the most striking literary innovations of the later
Middle English period are mystery and miracle plays. After almost an entire millenium in which theater
had little or no significance, drama re-emerged in these religiously inspired plays towards the end of
the Middle Ages and has thus indirectly influenced the development of modern drama in the
Renaissance.
The English Renaissance is also called the early new English period, a term which focuses on the
history of the language, and the Elizabethan age (Queen Elizabeth I) or Jacobean age (King James),
divisions based on political rule. Particularly notable in this period is the revival of classical genres,
such as the epic with Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen (1590; 1596), and modern drama with William
Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and others. Their revival of Greco-Roman genres was to influence
14
and dominate the further course of English literary history. Besides the adaptation of drama and epic,
the English Renaissance also produced relatively independent prose genres, as for example, John
Lyly’s (c. 1554–1606) romance Euphues (1578) or Philip Sidney’s (1554–86) Arcadia (c. 1580). […]
The prohibition of drama for religious reasons and the closure of public theaters during the “Puritan
interregnum” greatly influenced English literary history. The outstanding literary oeuvres of this time
were written by John Milton (1608–74), whose political pamphlets and religious epics (Paradise Lost,
1667 and Paradise Regained, 1671) mark both the climax and the end of English Renaissance. In
literary history the era after the Commonwealth is also referred to as the Restoration or sometimes—
rather vaguely—as Baroque.
The next period which is commonly regarded as an independent epoch is the eighteenth century,
which is also referred to as the neoclassical, golden, or Augustan age. In this period, classical literature
and literary theory were adapted to suit contemporary culture. Authors such as John Dryden, Alexander
Pope, Joseph Addison (1672–1719), and Jonathan Swift wrote translations, theoretical essays, and
literary texts in a variety of genres. This was also a time of influential changes in the distribution of
texts, including the development of the novel as a new genre and the introduction of newspapers and
literary magazines […]. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Samuel Richardson’s Pamela
(1740–41) and Clarissa (1748–49), Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), and Laurence Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy (1759–68) marked the beginning of the novel as a new literary genre. It soon assumed
the privileged position previously held by the epic or romance and became one of the most productive
genres of modern literary history.
Much of the literary writing in America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is religiously
motivated and therefore may be subsumed under the rubric Puritan age or colonial age. This period
can be seen as the first literary phenomenon on the North American continent. Early American texts
reflect, in their historiographic and theological orientation, the religious roots of American colonial
times. […] In recent years there has been an increased interest in works by African American slaves
[…] these texts provide new outlooks on the social conditions of the period from a non-European
perspective.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Romanticism marks the beginning of a new period in
traditional English literary history. The first edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1798) by William
Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge is commonly considered to be the beginning
of a new period in which nature and individual, emotional experience play an important role.
Romanticism may be seen as a reaction to the Enlightenment and political changes throughout Europe
and America at the end of the eighteenth century. […] In America, Romanticism and
transcendentalism more or less coincide.
Influenced by Romantic enthusiasm for nature and German idealism, American
transcendentalism developed as an independent movement in the first half of the nineteenth century.
[…] In transcendentalism, nature provides the key to philosophical understanding. From this new
perspective, man must not be satisfied with natural phenomena, but rather transcend them in order to
gain a philosophically holistic vision of the world. […] Subsequent to this period, America and
England generally followed the course of the most important international literary movements. Toward
the end of the nineteenth century, representatives of realism and naturalism can be found in both
countries. Realism is often described as the movement that tries to truthfully describe “reality” through
language. Naturalism, on the other hand, concentrates on the truthful portrayal of the determining
effects of social and environmental influences on characters. While in the US these trends manifest
themselves mostly in fiction, England is also famous for its dramas of this period […].
English and American modernism can be seen as a reaction to the realist movements of the
late nineteenth century. While realism and naturalism focused on the truthful portrayal of reality,
modernism discovered innovative narrative techniques such as stream-of consciousness, or structural
forms such as collage and literary cubism. “Modernism” is a blanket term which encompasses the

15
 extensive literary innovations in the first decades of the twentieth century which manifest themselves
under the influence of psychoanalysis and other cultural-historical phenomena. […]
In postmodernism, modernist issues regarding innovative narrative techniques are taken up
again and adapted in an academic, sometimes formalistic way. This literary movement of the second
half of the twentieth century indirectly deals with Nazi crimes and the nuclear destruction of World
War II while structurally developing the approaches of modernism. Narrative techniques with multiple
perspectives, interwoven strands of plot, and experiments in typography characterize the texts of this
era. […]
In the 1980s, the avant-garde works of postmodernism, many of which seem exaggerated
today, were overshadowed by women’s and “minority” literatures, that is literature written by
marginalized groups including women, gays, or ethnic minorities, the latter mostly represented by
African Americans, Chicanos, and Chicanas. These literatures, which have gained considerably in
importance over the last few decades, sometimes return to more traditional narrative techniques and
genres, often privileging sociopolitical messages over academic, structural playfulness. […]
In addition to women’s literature, post-colonial literature has recently become another center
of attention. This vast body of texts is also categorized under Commonwealth literature, literatures in
English or Anglophone literatures. Literatures from former British colonies of the Caribbean, Africa,
India, or Australia have contributed to a change in contemporary literature. In many cases—but by no
means in all— dimensions of content have regained dominance and act to counterbalance the academic
playfulness of modernism and postmodernism. […] The general trend seems to privilege less
complicated and apparently more traditional narrative techniques, while at the same time focusing
attention on content more than in earlier, exaggerated narrative forms.
This overview of the most important literary movements in English has only skimmed the
surface of this wide and complex topic […]. Any survey of literary history confronts the issue of
whether an exact classification of authors and their works is possible; such a classification must resort
to conventions, in the absence of set guidelines (Klarer 68-73).

4. HOW DO WE APPROACH THE LITERARY TEXT?

LITERARY CRITICISM, CRITICAL THEORIES.
4.1. Theoretical Approaches to Literature

In the previous sections we have seen the different categories used to organize
literary texts and, from there, to analyze them within a series of determined patterns. In
this part we are going to look at the theoretical tools used to interpret a literary text. In
the following excerpt, Klarer explains the origins, influences and main elements of some
common approaches to textual analysis and interpretation:
As with the classification systems of genres and text types, the approaches to literary texts are
characterized by a number of divergent methodologies. […] Literary interpretations always reflect
a particular institutional, cultural, and historical background. The various trends in textual studies
are represented either by consecutive schools or parallel ones, which at times compete with each
other. On the one hand, the various scholarly approaches to literary texts partly overlap; on the
other, they differ in their theoretical foundations. The abundance of competing methods in
contemporary literary criticism requires one to be familiar with at least the most important trends
and their general approaches.

16
Historically speaking, the systematic analysis of texts developed in the magic or religious realm,
and in legal discourse. At a very early date in cultural history, magic and religion indirectly
furthered the preservation and interpretation of oracles and dreams forms the starting point of
textual analysis and survives as the basic structures in the study of the holy texts of all major
religions. […]
The interpretation of encoded information in a text is important to all religions; it usually centers
on the analysis or exegesis of canonical text such as the Bible, the Koran, or other holy books. As
with dream and oracle, the texts which interpretations consequently decode are considered to
originate from a divinity and are therefore highly privileged. It is important to observe that the
interpretation of these kinds of texts deals with encoded information which can only be retrieved
and made intelligible through exegetic practices. This religious and magical origin of textual
studies can be traced from preliterate eras all the way to contemporary theology and has always
exerted a major influence on literary studies.
Partly influenced by religion, legal discourse also had a decisive impact on textual studies. As with
religious discourse, in law a fixed legal text had to precede jurisdiction. Juridical texts, like
religious ones, are only indirectly accessible since by nature they demand interpretation with
regard to a particular situation. The overall importance of legal texts in everyday life consequently
led to an extensive body of literature concerning their application and interpretation. Even today,
the exegesis of legal texts remains the form of interpretation most regularly confronted by the
majority of people. Since most religions also include legal elements, such as Judaic Law, Islamic
Law, or canon law in Christianity, religious and legal discourses have constantly coincided. The
approaches and methodologies associated with both (the exegesis of the Bible and the
interpretation of legal text) have always indirectly influenced literary studies.
Literary criticism derived its central term interpretation from […] two areas of textual
study (religious and legal). The exegesis of religious and legal texts was based on the assumption
that the meaning of a text could only be retrieved through the act of interpretation. Biblical
scholarship coined the term hermeneutics for this procedure, and it has been integrated into
literary interpretation over the past several centuries. Since literary criticism as a discipline holds
a variety of opinions -and, indeed, contradictory ones- concerning the purpose and applicability of
textual interpretation, a number of theoretical trends and methodological approaches characterize
the field.
Although each academic discipline tries to define and legitimate its scholarly work by terms like
“general validity”, “objectivity”, and “truth”, most disciplines are subject to a number of variable
factors including ideologies, sociopolitical conditions, and fashions. The humanities in general and
literary studies in particular are characterized by a multiplicity of approaches and methodologies.
Within the field of literary studies, literary theory has developed as a distinct discipline influenced
by philosophy. Literary theory analyses the philosophical and methodological premises of literary
criticism.
[…] Among the many diverse methods of interpretation it is possible to isolate four basic
approaches which provide a grid according to which most schools or trends can be classified.
Depending on the main focus of these major methodologies, one can distinguish between text-,
author-, reader-, and context-oriented approaches. The following theoretical schools can be
subsumed under these four basic rubrics:

17
Text Author Reader Context
Philology Biographical Reception theory Literary history
criticism
Rhetoric Psychoanalytic Reception history Marxist literary
criticism theory
Formalism and Phenomenology Reader-response Feminist literary
structuralism criticism theory
New Criticism New Historicism
and Cultural
Studies.
Semiotics and Post-colonialism
deconstruction
Ecocriticism

The text-oriented approach is primarily concerned with questions of the “materiality” of texts,
including editions of manuscripts, analysis of language and style, and the formal structure of
literary works. Author-oriented schools put the main emphasis on the author, trying to establish
connections between the work or art and the biography of its creator. Reader-oriented approaches
focus on the reception of texts by their audiences and the texts’ general impact on the reading
public. Contextual approaches try to place literary texts against the background of historical, social,
or political developments while at the same time attempting to classify texts according to genres
as well as historical periods. (Klarer 75-78)

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Comprehension versus Interpretation

In the preceding paragraphs, Klarer develops the concept of interpretation and its
importance in the context of literary studies. However, we often tend to confuse
comprehension with interpretation and vice versa. Herman Rapaport explains the
difference between these terms when we analyze a text:
Comprehension concerns the conceptual assembly of textual information in a way that is precise
and literally accurate. In order to discuss a literary work, the critic needs to know how personages
are described and characterized, how settings are depicted and what details they include and
possibly exclude, what actions take place and in what order, and what sorts of figural details and
narrative devices the author has included. A good comprehension of a literary work will also
include the ability to identify points of view, major themes, and key allusions (references to
historical occurrences, myths, or passages in other influential texts, for example, the Bible).
Everything that falls under the term comprehension has to do with gathering and assembling of
evidence that can be used for justifying interpretations […]
In university, the teaching of literature tends to stress skills in interpretation. This exceeds mere
literal comprehension and requires the ability to see problems and offer hypotheses. For example,
why is the order of events in a story told in a sequence that is unchronological, and why in the case
of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, do we not begin with the materials of Book 6 (Satan’s revolt in
heaven), which is much closer to the epic’s real beginning? Books 1 and 2 start us out right after
the rebellious angels have fallen down into hell after their revolt. Or, why does William Faulkner
in the novel The Sound and the Fury not have Caddy Compson narrate a section of her own? How
does this silencing of woman function in the novel? As sexual repression, if not sexism? As the
19
 deliberate formation of a lacuna in the text that impedes our ability to totalize the narrations that
are given? As a perspective Faulkner expects us to construct for ourselves, which then makes it
much more a part of ourselves? To answer such questions requires interpretation. Here one is
required to perceive a significant problem, conceptualize that problem, analyze textual evidence,
and offer some hypotheses and solutions.
Literary interpretation occurs when critics begin asking questions about what they have observed.
(Rapaport 2-3).

5. INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY CRITICAL SCHOOLS

Classifying schools of thought inevitably leads us to a simplification or

schematization of issues that are very complex and that have developed over centuries,
as well as a consequence of the conjunction of various disciplines. What is important to
emphasize is that the different critical currents we use to analyze literature are forms or
methods of interpretation or study that respond in some way to the cultural and social
changes that have occurred throughout history, as well as to the prevailing ideologies.
Likewise, it is important to bear in mind that none of these schools of thought or criticism
are closed compartments; on the contrary, they have been feeding back on each other.
Before we go on to define the main schools of academic criticism, have a look at
these basic concepts outlined by John Peck and Martin Coyle:
It should become clear that what a critic says about a book depends to a large extent upon the
critical approach he adopts. As a student of literature you are likely, consciously or unconsciously,
to be influenced by some of these critical approaches. Before dealing with such complicated
matters, however, it seems logical to look at some more basic questions.
(i) What is literary criticism? Literary criticism is usually regarded as the analysis,
interpretation and evaluation of literary works: it does not mean 'finding fault with'. Criticism as
an academic activity expresses the reader's sense of what is happening in a text.

(ii) What are the basic guidelines? As criticism starts with the reader's response it would
be possible to produce impressionistic criticism in which you wrote about your feelings, perhaps
saying how moving you found a poem. Academic criticism, however, must be more analytic than
this, commenting on the subject matter and method of the text. Criticism thus involves spotting the
general themes of the work and then seeing how the text presents and develops these themes. […]

In a sense you have to 'look through' the text and see what kind of common experience,
feeling or problem is being examined. Then, to comment on the text, you have to show how the
various choices the author has made - for example, the details he has included or the words he has
used - serve to illustrate, develop or give a fresh slant on what you perceive to be the central issue.
Your critical account becomes something more substantial than a mere summary the moment you
begin to highlight some of the distinctive ways in which the author handles his theme.

(iii) Is there a correct view of what a text is about? No, there is not, and it is this fact that
makes the study of literature both difficult and fascinating: the text is a source of endless
speculation and argument as critics compete to offer the most persuasive reading. Initially it might
appear that all critic is purely subjective, as if every reader will see the book differently, but a
response is also conditioned by the social and cultural context within which the book is read. For
example, up to and including the eighteenth century the main view of literature was as 'pleasurable
teaching', and criticism was concerned with how the text achieved its moral effect upon the reader.
In the romantic period the emphasis changed. The romantics stressed the importance of the
20
 individual, and, consequently, much of the focus of romantic criticism was on the unique value of
what the individual author had to say. This can be called an expressive theory of literature - it
concentrates on what the author says or expresses - and is still a widely held view. Indeed, many
readers could see little point in studying literature if they did not believe that the author has
something profound to communicate to us.

(iv) What are the main features of twentieth-century criticism? Twentieth-century

criticism as a whole can be characterised as displaying a shift from an emphasis on the author to
an emphasis on the text and then a shift from the text to the reader. Expressive criticism at its worst
can confine itself exclusively to the author's ideas, as if the works themselves were subsidiary.
Similarly, some historical and social criticism, which looks at the context in which a work was
written, always seems to stop short of actually discussing the text. As English became established
as an academic discipline, however, there developed an increasing focus on the text itself rather
than on the author or background. This is seen in England in the work of such a critic as F. R.
Leavis and in America in the work of the 'New Critics': the call was for dose attention to the words
on the page. Such critics did not reject expressive criticism, indeed they were very concerned with
the value of what an author has to say, but they also looked at the text as an aesthetic construct,
appreciating it first and foremost as literature rather than as a social document or philosophical
statement by the author. It is this blend of attention to the text and the importance of what it says
that is the most common approach to literature at school and university today. Indeed, it might
seem such a natural response - looking at the text in order to appreciate both its intellectual and
aesthetic qualities, or what it says and how it says it - that it might be hard to conceive that any
other approach could be valid. Yet recent criticism and critical theory, particularly structuralist and
post-structuralist thinking, has frequently been more single-minded in its emphasis on the text
itself, especially the language of the text, and has also emphasised the extent to which the reader
possibly creates, rather than perceives, the meaning of a text.

(v) What Is critical theory? Critical theory is concerned with establishing general
principles about how literature works and how criticism works. In recent years there has been a
great surge of such thinking, much of which challenges established ideas about literature and
rejects the assumptions inherent in traditional criticism. One effect of such thinking has been to
stimulate a number of new developments in critical practice. (Peck and Coyle 149-151).

Activity 3 (Not compulsory)

The following activity is adapter from Peter Barry’s book Beginning theory (not a
compulsory reading for this course). Before you start reading about different approaches
to literary study, in what may be a new chapter in your involvement with the topic, it could
be sensible to reflect on your own literary education until now. The purpose of this is to
bring to light methods of literary analysis that you might be using subconsciously because
they have become so familiar to you and may no longer be visible or obvious.

To carry out this activity, answer the following questions:

- In your previous literary studies, what authors and books did you study? What
did they have in common?
- Can you think of books and authors that were absent from your previous
education? Why do you think this might be?

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 - Do you think your own identity (in terms of ideology, age, gender, sexual
orientation, country of origin, background, life experience, etc.) shapes the way
you approach/have approached literary texts in the past? How and why?
- What have you learnt (about the world and/or about literature, in general) from
your previous studies?

Spending some time reflecting on these issues should prove helpful to understand the
rest of this unit. The information in the following sections is a bit abstract, so it is sensible
to have a firm starting point based on your previous experience and knowledge.

You can SHARE your reflections with other students in the thread created for this
activity in the Unit 1 Forum or in the tutorial sessions.

The following are excerpts from Jonathan Culler, Michael Ryan Tison Pugh and
Margaret Johnson’s manuals summarizing some of the main schools of literary criticism
of the 20th century. The intention of this section should not be for you to learn each and
every one of their characteristics, but to see that there exists a variety of positions
regarding literary criticism and understand the principal approaches. In the following units
we will study some of them in greater depth --Feminism, Poststructuralism and
Postcolonialism.

5.1. Russian Formalism

Russian formalism was a movement which emerged in Russia during the second decade
of the twentieth century. The Formalists rejected the subjectivism in the approach to
criticism and, thus, believed that literature could be approached scientifically and
objectively. They were interested in examining the internal mechanics of literature, as
opposed to the semantics or the extraliterary systems (such as ideology, politics,
economics, etc.):

The Russian Formalists of the early years of the twentieth century stressed that critics should concern
themselves with the literariness of literature: the verbal strategies that make it literary, the
foregrounding of language itself, and the ‘making strange’ of experience that they accomplish.
Redirecting attention from authors to verbal ‘devices’, they claimed that ‘the device is the only hero
of literature’. Instead of asking ‘what does the author say here?’ we should ask something like ‘what
happens to the sonnet here?’ or ‘what adventures befall the novel in this book by Dickens?’ Roman
Jakobson, Boris Eichenbaum, and Victor Shklovsky are three key figures in this group which
reoriented literary study towards questions of form and technique (Culler 122).

What does Formalism look for in a literary text?

• What are the major elements of the work’s form? Is the meaning of the work embedded as much
in how it is done or written as in what it is about?
• How is the narrative organized or constructed? Can it be mapped as a logical structure of causes
and consequences?
• What is the perspective from which the story is told and how does that affect what is told or can
be told?
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 • What metaphors or images are used? What thematic purposes do the metaphors serve?
• How do such elements of poetic construction as rhyme and rhythm affect meaning? (Ryan 121)

5.2. New Criticism

New Criticism is a movement in literary criticism that arose in the United States during
the 1930s and 1940s. Its emergence reacted against extrinsic approaches to the
literary text: that is, those studies that believed texts could make a moral or
philosophical statement about a given cultural and/or historical phenomenon. New
Critics believed in the evaluation of the literary text without its context and promoted
the use of tools such as close reading:

What is called the ‘New Criticism’ […] focused attention on the unity or integration of literary works.
Opposed to the historical scholarship practised in universities, the New Criticism treated poems as
aesthetic objects rather than historical documents and examined the interactions of their verbal features
and the ensuing complications of meaning rather than the historical intentions and circumstances of
their authors. For new critics (Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, W. K. Wimsatt), the task of
criticism was to elucidate individual works of art. Focusing on ambiguity, paradox, irony, and the
effects of connotation and poetic imagery, the New Criticism sought to show the contribution of each
element of poetic form to a unified structure.

The New Criticism left as enduring legacies techniques of close reading and the assumption that the
test of any critical activity is whether it helps us to produce richer, more insightful interpretations of
individual works. But beginning in the 1960s, a number of theoretical perspectives and discourses –
phenomenology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, structuralism, feminism, deconstruction –
offered richer conceptual frameworks than did the New Criticism for reflecting on literature and other
cultural products. (Culler 122-123)

What does New Criticism look for in a literary text?

• What is the text’s surface meaning, and what is its secondary meaning?

• What patterns and symbols does the text use repeatedly, and what effect do they achieve?

• What ambiguities, ironies, and paradoxes arise in the text, and how do they create
complementary or contrasting interpretations?

• Does the text achieve organic unity, or does it fail to do so? Explain either how the various
elements of the text unite into a seamless whole or how they succumb to fragmentation.

• Consider the relationship between form and theme. How does the author’s structuring of the
text reflect its themes? (Pugh and Johnson 227)

5.3. Phenomenology

Phenomenology arises from the work of the early twentieth-century philosopher Edmund
Husserl. It is a philosophy of experience which was also used in the study of literature.
For this philosophy, the lived experience of human beings is the ultimate source of all
meaning:

Phenomenology […] seeks to bypass the problem of the separation between subject and object,
consciousness and the world, by focusing on the phenomenal reality of objects as they appear to
consciousness. We can suspend questions about the ultimate reality or knowability of the world and

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 describe the world as it is given to consciousness. […] But more important has been ‘reader-response
criticism’ (Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser). For the reader, the work is what is given to consciousness;
one can argue that the work is not something objective, existing independently of any experience of it,
but is the experience of the reader. Criticism can thus take the form of a description of the reader’s
progressive movement through a text, analysing how readers produce meaning by making connections,
filling in things left unsaid, anticipating and conjecturing and then having their expectations
disappointed or confirmed.
.
Another reader-oriented version of phenomenology is called ‘aesthetics of reception’ (Hans Robert
Jauss). A work is an answer to questions posed by a ‘horizon of expectations. The interpretation of
works should, therefore, focus not on the experience of an individual reader but on the history of a
work’s reception and its relation to the changing aesthetic norms and sets of expectations that allow it
to be read in different eras. (Culler 123)

5.4. Structuralism

Structuralism is a theory of culture that focuses on the relationship between different

elements as they form a broader structure, or a system. In linguistics and literary
criticism, Structuralist study centres on how meaning is produced:

[S]tructuralism originated in opposition to phenomenology: instead of describing experience, the goal

was to identify the underlying structures that make it possible. In place of the phenomenological
description of consciousness, structuralism sought to analyse structures that operate unconsciously
(structures of language, of the psyche, of society). Because of its interest in how meaning is produced,
structuralism often (as in Roland Barthes’s S/Z ) treated the reader as the site of underlying codes that
make meaning possible and as the agent of meaning.

Structuralism usually designates a group of primarily French thinkers who, in the 1950s and 1960s,
influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of language, applied concepts from structural linguistics
to the study of social and cultural phenomena. Structuralism developed first in anthropology (Claude
Lévi-Strauss), then in literary and cultural studies (Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette),
psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan), intellectual history (Michel Foucault), and Marxist theory (Louis
Althusser). Although these thinkers never formed a school as such, it was under the label
‘structuralism’ that their work was imported and read in England, the United States, and elsewhere in
the late 1960s and 1970s.

In literary studies structuralism promotes a poetics interested in the conventions that make literary
works possible; it seeks not to produce new interpretations of works but to understand how they can
have the meanings and effects that they do (Culler 123-125).

What does Structuralism look for in a literary text?

• What is the structure of the work? Can you draw a map of it such that all of its elements make
sense in relation to one another? Can the structure be seen as embodying a scheme of values? Are
the characters the bearers of values? What might they be said to represent?
• Does the narrative follow a logical progression? Does it embody an argument regarding the world
– i.e., is it making a statement regarding values or people in the world, and if so, how does the
narrative work out that argument through opposition and resolution?
• Is the meaning of the work shaped and determined by codes and signs? What are those codes and
how do they manifest themselves in signs within the work? (Ryan 38)

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5.5. Poststructuralism and Deconstruction/Deconstructivism

Poststructuralism is understood as a radical development in literary theory that emerged

in response to some of the main events of the second half of the twentieth century, such
as the World Wars and the advent of new technologies. These convoluted experiences
are believed to have undermined some of the most prominent established notions of
Western cultural thought. Poststructuralism is concerned with the indeterminate and
complex nature of meaning and the arbitrariness of the constructions of knowledge,
putting great emphasis on the workings that ideology and power have on human
subjectivity:

The term post-structuralism is used for a broad range of theoretical discourses in which there is a
critique of notions of objective knowledge and of a subject able to know him or herself. Thus,
contemporary feminisms, psychoanalytic theories, Marxisms, and historicisms, all partake in post-
structuralism. But post-structuralism also designates above all deconstruction and the work of Jacques
Derrida, who first came to prominence in America with a critique of the structuralist notion of structure
in the very collection of essays that brought structuralism to American attention (…).

Deconstruction is most simply defined as a critique of the hierarchical oppositions that have structured
Western thought: inside/outside, mind/body, literal/metaphorical, speech/writing, presence/absence,
nature/culture, form/meaning. To deconstruct an opposition is to show that it is not natural and
inevitable but a construction, produced by discourses that rely on it, and to show that it is a construction
in a work of deconstruction that seeks to dismantle it and reinscribe it – that is, not destroy it but give
it a different structure and functioning. (Culler 125-126)

What does Deconstructivism look for in a literary text?

• Does the work assume a concept of what truth is? If so, what form does that truth take? Is it
presented as the foundation of the fictional world, something that is beyond debate, absolute, and
universal? Or is it presented as something more changeable, non-absolute, and contingent?
Something “contingent” would be dependent on circumstances.
• What difference does the notion of truth in the work make for the events or lives depicted? Does
the philosophical assumption of the work connect to other assumptions about, for example,
morality or politics?
• Idealist notions of truth as something absolute and universal often are associated with nature.
Does such an association appear in the work? Is the ideal of nature juxtaposed to characters,
events, or institutions associated with all that is not natural – that is, for example, artificial,
fabricated, simulated, or false? What are the implications of such distinctions in the work? Are
certain characters portrayed as being better because they are closer to nature while those who are
closer to non-natural artifice are portrayed as bad in some way? (Ryan 84)

5.5. Feminist Theory

Feminist theory, as a social and intellectual movement, is more than a form of literary
criticism. When applied to literature, Feminist theory aims at locating and describing the
different ways in which literary texts reproduce the structures of male domination
embedded in societies. As a twentieth and twenty-first literary theory, it is closely related
to post-structuralism:

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 In so far as feminism undertakes to deconstruct the opposition man/woman and the oppositions
associated with it in the history of Western culture, it is a version of post-structuralism, but that is only
one strand of feminism, which is less a unified school than a social and intellectual movement and a
space of debate. On the one hand, feminist theorists champion the identity of women, demand rights for
women, and promote women’s writings as representations of the experience of women. On the other
hand, feminists undertake a theoretical critique of the heterosexual matrix that organizes identities and
cultures in terms of the opposition between man and woman. Elaine Showalter distinguishes ‘the feminist
critique’ of male assumptions and procedures from ‘gynocriticism’, a feminist criticism concerned with
women authors and the representation of women’s experience. Both of these modes have been opposed
to what is sometimes called, in Britain and America, ‘French feminism’, where ‘woman’ comes to stand
for any radical force that subverts the concepts, assumptions, and structures of patriarchal discourse. […]
In its multiple projects, feminism has effected a substantial transformation of literary education in the
United States and Britain, through its expansion of the literary canon and the introduction of a range of
new issues. (Culler 126-128)

What does Feminist criticism look for in a literary text?

• How are women and men depicted? What era is the text produced in and how might that make a
difference in how the two genders are portrayed?
• How are gender relations constructed in the work? Are they equal or unequal?
• Is one gender privileged over another? If so, how and for what reasons?
• Is gender stable or unstable in the work? Can the text be queered by showing how its gender
constructs are indeterminate or contingent? (Ryan 103)

5.6. Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis as a set of theories and treatment techniques was famously developed

at the end of the nineteenth century by Sigmund Freud. Since then, its theoretical
formulations have had an enormous influence on literary criticism:

Psychoanalytic theory had an impact on literary studies both as a mode of interpretation and as a theory
about language, identity, and the subject. On the one hand, along with Marxism it is the most powerful
modern hermeneutic: an authoritative meta-language or technical vocabulary that can be applied to
literary works, as to other situations, to understand what is ‘really’ going on. This leads to a criticism
alert to psychoanalytic themes and relations. But on the other hand, the greatest impact of psychoanalysis
has come through the work of Jacques Lacan, a renegade French psychoanalyst who set up his own
school outside the analytic establishment and led what he presented as a return to Freud. […] The truth
of the patient’s condition […] emerges not from the analyst’s interpretation of the patient’s discourse but
from the way analyst and patient are caught up in replaying a crucial scenario from the patient’s past.
This reorientation makes psychoanalysis a poststructuralist discipline in which interpretation is a
replaying of a text it does not master. (Culler 128)

What does Psychoanalytic criticism look for in a literary text?

• Are the actions, feelings, and ideas depicted in a work signs of health or
illness? If of illness, what kind of illness is it? How does it manifest itself in behavior or statements
by the characters?
• How might the work itself be said to be a manifestation of psychological or emotional problems
in the writer?

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 • How are relations between the characters depicted? Are they characterized by excess or obsession?
What might such behavior be a symptom of?
• Does the work have an unconscious dimension? Are there aspects of the work that seem to arise
from sources that are not conscious?
• How is the form of the work a way of dealing with psychological or emotional problems? Does
the writer seem to be working on psychological or emotional problems in the work? (Ryan 63).

5.7. Marxism

A Marxist interpretation of literature understands its object of study as an expression of

class struggle. A text is therefore understood to be intrinsically connected to the social
and political realities of its time. According to Marxism, literature is a social institution
with a specific ideological function connected to the identity and background of the
author. It is based, obviously, on the theories of Karl Marx (1818-1883).

For Marxism, texts belong to a superstructure determined by the economic base (the ‘real relations of
production’). To interpret cultural products is to relate them back to the base. [Marxist theorist Louis]
Althusser argued that the social formation is not a unified totality with the mode of production at its
centre but a looser structure in which different levels or types of practice develop on different time-
scales.

Social and ideological superstructures have a ‘relative autonomy’. Drawing on a Lacanian account of the
determination of consciousness by the unconscious for an explanation of how ideology functions to
determine the subject, Althusser maps a Marxist account of the determination of the individual by the
social onto psychoanalysis. The subject is an effect constituted in the processes of the unconscious, of
discourse, and of the relatively autonomous practices that organize society.

This conjunction is the basis of much theoretical debate in Britain, in political theory as well as literary
and cultural studies. Crucial investigations of relations between culture and signification took place in
the 1970s in the film studies magazine Screen, which, deploying Althusser and Lacan, sought to
understand how the subject is positioned or constructed by the structures of cinematic representation.
(Culler 129)

What does Marxism look for in a literary text?

• How might the work be said to be political? Does it advocate a position in a public debate?
• Does it seem to support or advocate ideals, values, ways of thinking, etc. that distract attention
from the inequities of capitalism or that conceal the true nature of capitalist society?
• Is the work critical and negative in regard to social inequality and injustice (under capitalism, for
example)?
• Does the work seem to posit or propose an alternative to the world it criticizes?
Is that alternative implicit or explicit? (Ryan 75)

5.8. New Historicism/Cultural Materialism

New historicism is a method of literary analysis that is based on the reading of literary
and non-literary texts side-by-side. As Peter Barry puts it, “new historicism refuses (at
least ostensibly) to ‘privilege’ the literary text: instead of a literary ‘foreground’ and a
historical ‘background’ it envisages and practises a mode of study in which literary and

27
non-literary texts are given equal weight and constantly inform or interrogate each other”
(Barry 166):

The 1980s and 1990s in Britain and the United States have been marked by the emergence of vigorous,
theoretically engaged historical criticism. On the one hand, there is British cultural materialism, defined
by Raymond Williams as ‘the analysis of all forms of signification, including quite centrally writing, within
the actual means and conditions of their production’. Renaissance specialists influenced by Foucault
(Catherine Belsey, Jonathan Dollimore, Alan Sinfield, and Peter Stallybrass) have been particularly
concerned with the historical constitution of the subject and with the contestatory role of literature in the
Renaissance. In the United States, New Historicism, which is less inclined to posit a hierarchy of cause
and effect as it traces connections among texts, discourses, power, and the constitution of subjectivity, has
also been centred on the Renaissance. Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, and others focus on how
Renaissance literary texts are situated amid the discursive practices and the institutions of the period,
treating literature not as a reflection or product of a social reality but as one of several sometimes
antagonistic practices. A key question for the new historicists has been the dialectic of ‘subversion and
containment’: how far do Renaissance texts offer a genuinely radical critique of the religious and political
ideologies of their day and how far is the discursive practice of literature, in its apparent subversiveness, a
way of containing subversive energies? (Culler 129-139)

What does New Historicism look for in a literary text?

• How is the historical moment present in the work? How is the work – in language, form, and theme
– a product of its particular historical era?
• Do some research on the time period when the work was written. What was going on that might
have been a significant influence on the work?
• Does the work make an argument that is part of a contemporary debate?
• How are the characters in the work “historical”? How do they represent types or figures who are
specific to a particular time?
• Are the positions the author takes or the values and ideals the work endorses shaped by historical
circumstances?
• Finally, does the work pertain to a particular discourse and does it contend with another discourse?
(Ryan 195)

5.9. Post-Colonial Theory

Postcolonialism is the name given to the study of the legacy and impact of colonialism-- whether
cultural, political, or economic. It primarily focuses on the problems and consequences of the
exploitation of colonized peoples and their lands by imperial powers (usually European), from
colonial times to their contemporary aftermath.

In this legacy, post-colonial institutions and experiences, from the idea of the independent nation to the
idea of culture itself, are entangled with the discursive practices of the West. Since the 1980s a growing
corpus of writings has debated questions about the relation between the hegemony of Western discourses
and the possibilities of resistance, and about the formation of colonial and post-colonial subjects: hybrid
subjects, emerging from the superimposition of conflicting languages and cultures. Edward Said’s
Orientalism (1978), which examined the construction of the oriental ‘other’ by European discourses of
knowledge, helped to establish the field. Since then, post-colonial theory and writing has become an
attempt to intervene in the construction of culture and knowledge, and, for intellectuals who come from
post-colonial societies, to write their way back into a history others have written. (Culler 130-131)

What does Postcolonialism look for in a literary text?

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 • How does the work represent race or ethnicity? What meaning does race or ethnicity have in the
work? It is a stigma or a source of pride and self-identity?
• Is it a way of questioning the authority of powerful social groups or a way of asserting that
power? Is race used ideologically to justify one group’s power over another?
• Is one ethnic group’s perspective or point of view given more prominence or value than that of
another group? If so, what is the reason for this? Is the ethnic group in question in a position of
power or dominance or is it subordinate and disempowered? How are relations between
dominant and subordinate racial groups represented?
• Is race portrayed as a natural feature that justifies racialist attitudes? Or is it treated sociologically
as a mechanism for branding and excluding people from resources and power?
• In works dealing with colonialism, how are the relations between colonizers and colonized
depicted? Does the work justify or critique colonialism? How are home and nation related in the
minds of post-colonial subjects living in conditions of diaspora?
• In international works, how are national cultures and the differences between cultures
represented? How are characters in these works the same as or different from characters in other
kinds of literature and culture? What is international about the imagery used or the themes
explored? Does the work describe an international culture or international cultural imperialism?
(Ryan 115)

5.10. Minority Discourse

Minority discourse in literature refers to the study of texts created by ethnic minorities
traditionally marginalized from the cultural canon:

One political change that has been achieved within academic institutions in the United States has been
the growth of study of literatures of ethnic minorities. The main effort has been to revive and promote
the study of black, Latino, Asian-American, and Native American writing. Debates bear on the relation
between the strengthening of cultural identity of particular groups by linking it to a tradition of writing
and the liberal goal of celebrating cultural diversity and ‘multiculturalism’. Theoretical questions swiftly
become entangled with questions about the status of theory, which is sometimes said to impose ‘white’
questions or philosophical issues on projects struggling to establish their own terms and contexts. But
Latino, African-American, and Asian-American critics pursue the theoretical enterprise in developing
the study of minority discourses, defining their distinctiveness, and articulating their relations to
dominant traditions of writing and thought. Attempts to generate theories of ‘minority discourse’ both
develop concepts for the analysis of specific cultural traditions and use a position of marginality to
expose the assumptions of ‘majority’ discourse and to intervene in its theoretical debates. (Culler 131)

5.12. Queer Theory

Queer theory in literature studies and theorizes the presence of gender and sexual
practices existing outside of cis-heterosexuality, often with the aim of challenging the
understanding of heterosexual desire as ‘the norm’:

Like deconstruction and other contemporary theoretical movements, Queer theory […] uses the marginal
– what has been set aside as perverse, beyond the pale, radically other – to analyse the cultural
construction of the centre: heterosexual normativity. In the work of Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and
others, Queer theory has become the site of a productive questioning not just of the cultural construction
of sexuality but of culture itself, as based on the denial of homoerotic relations. As with feminism and
versions of ethnic studies before it, it gains intellectual energy from its link with social movements of
liberation and from the debates within these movements about appropriate strategies and concepts.
Should one celebrate and accentuate difference or challenge distinctions that stigmatize? How to do
both? Possibilities of both action and understanding are at stake in theory (Culler 131-132).
29
 What do Queer Criticism look for in a literary text?

• How does sexual desire function in the text? In the cultural world that the author creates, what
are the rules of attraction?

• Which characters are vilified, and which are praised, for their choices in partners?

• How and why are some sexualities coded as suspect while others are coded as laudatory?

• How are homosocial relationships depicted in the text? Who engages in them, what do they gain
from them, and do normative or taboo desires circulate in them?

• How are erotic triangles and open secrets depicted? How do they reveal the characters? (Pugh
and Johnson 246)

5.13. Ecocriticism

Ecocriticism refers to the use of ecological concepts in the study of literature. In practice, literary
ecocriticism illustrates environmental concerns and examines the way literary texts portray
nature:

The world of literary theory in the latter part of the twentieth century and through the opening years of
this one has been marked by the appearance of numerous innovative approaches to reading and studying
works old and new. One of the most recent critical perspectives to gain substantial interest goes by many
names. You may have heard it referred to as literary ecology, the term Joseph Meeker used to designate
‘the study of biological themes and relationships which appear in literary works.’ […] More commonly,
it is called ecocriticism, a term first used by William Rueckert in his 1978 essay “Literature and Ecology:
An Experiment in Ecocriticism” in reference to ‘the application of ecology and ecological concepts to
the study of literature.’ […] What all the perspectives on the field have in common is that they are
interested in examining the relationship of literature and nature as a way to renew a reader’s awareness
of the nonhuman world and his or her responsibility to sustain it. Sharing the fundamental premise that
all things are interrelated, they are actively concerned about the impact of human actions on the
environment. According to Gotfelty, consciousness raising is ecocriticism’s most important task.
[…] It is helpful to note some of the ways in which ecocriticism differs from other critical
approaches. For example, its social purpose establishes it as a direct contrast to the Formalists, who tried
to separate a text from the world. Instead, ecocritics want to use texts as a way to get at the world itself.
They also differ from postmodernists by rejecting the idea that everything is socially and/or linguistically
constructed. To them, nature really exists as a force that affects human beings and which human beings
can affect. […] It can be said that ecocriticism stands apart from literary theory in general because instead
of focusing on writers, texts, and the world, as most critical approaches do, ecocriticism attempts to
examine writers, texts, and the entire ecosphere (Dobie 238-240).

Finally, once we have read about some of the most important critical theories of the 20th and 21st
century, it is important to keep in mind that, literary theories help readers to ask questions and thus to
develop interpretations of texts. Unlike fables, a genre that ends by explicitly stating its moral, most great
literature challenges readers to interpret multiple levels of meaning. To probe the significations and
contradictions of a text effectively, readers should use the insights of the various schools of interpretation
[…] but they should never be slaves to them. On the contrary, readers should question the underlying
premises of these theories, as well as seeking connections among them that will lead to insights
30
 unavailable from a single viewpoint. It is less useful to identify oneself as an adherent of a particular
critical school and to follow its tenets single-mindedly than to move nimbly among these many interpre-
tive frameworks, using their various perspectives […] (Pugh and Johnson 256).

6. Activities (NOT compulsory)

Below, you will find two activities that will help you in your study; neither of them is
compulsory, nor will they be checked by the teaching staff, they are simply tools that
will facilitate your learning in a collaborative way.

6.1. Activity 4

SUMMARIZE the contents of this unit or some of its sections using one of the visuals
you find on this website:

https://www.worksheetworks.com/miscellanea/graphic-organizers.html

Once you have individually created your organiser containing the main information on
that Unit or section of the Unit you will upload it on “Foro de estudiantes” for your
classmates to check and study or discuss them in your tutorial sessions.

6.2. Activity 5

WATCH the video of the class given by Professor Terry Eagleton at Lancaster
University in June 2021: “Literary Theory. An Introduction.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR1XSHUrruA&ab_channel=LancasterWords

Please comment in the thread created for this purpose in the Unit 1 Forum or in
your tutorial sessions on any of the ideas that are of most interest to you.

6.2. Activity 6

Have another look at the questions in Activity 3. After learning about different approaches to the
study of literature, would you answer them differently?

Please comment in the thread created for this purpose in the Unit 1 Forum or in your
tutorial sessions.

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7. REFERENCES

Álvarez Amorós, José A. Teoría literaria y enseñanza de la literatura. Ariel. 2004.

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory. An introduction to literary and cultural theory.
Manchester University Press. 2017.
Bennett, Andrew and Royle, Nicolas. Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory.
Pearson Education Limited. 2004.
Briellenburg Wurth, Kiene and Rigney, Ann. The Life of Texts. An Introduction to
Literary Studies. Amsterdam University Press. 2006.
Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory. A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.
2000.
Dobie, Ann B. Theory into Practice. An Introduction to Literary Criticism. Wadsworth
Cengage Learning. 2012.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. An Introduction. University of Minnesota Press. 2011.
Klarer, Mario. An Introduction to Literary Studies. Routledge. 2004.
Mays, Kelly J. The Norton Introduction to Literature. Norton & Co. 2017.
Peck, John and Coyle, Martin. Literary Terms and Criticism. A Student’s Guide.
MacMillan. 1984.
Pugh, Tison and Johnson, Margaret E. Literary Studies. A Practical Guide. Routledge.
2014.
Rapaport, Herman. Literary Theory Toolkit: A Compendium of Concepts and Methods.
Wiley, 2011.
Ryan, Michael. An Introduction to Criticism. Literature/Film/Culture. Wiley-Blackwell.
2012.

8. FURTHER RESOURCES
Introduction to Modern Literary Theory:
http://www.kristisiegel.com/theory.htm
Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism. Purdue OWL.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ah
UKEwi_14LF_qf6AhVlxYUKHYxmA-
sQFnoECAcQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmseffie.com%2Fassignments%2Fheart_
of_darkness%2FPurdue%2520OWL%2520Literary%2520Theory.pdf&usg=AOvVa
w13nLtCjxkp8JEjgu2xAuiM
Introduction to Theory of Literature. Paul H. Fry. Yale University.
https://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-300

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