theoretical approaches to literature
177-194. Moreover, theorists like Homi K. Bhabha have questioned the binary thought that produces the dichotomies—center/margin, white/black, and colonizer/colonized—by which colonial practices are justified. The Conceptual Framework. University of Michigan; Drafting an Argument. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953. “Higher,” or “source criticism,” analyzed biblical tales in light of comparable narratives from other cultures, an approach that anticipated some of the method and spirit of twentieth century theory, particularly “Structuralism” and “New Historicism.” In France, the eminent literary critic Charles Augustin Saint Beuve maintained that a work of literature could be explained entirely in terms of biography, while novelist Marcel Proust devoted his life to refuting Saint Beuve in a massive narrative in which he contended that the details of the life of the artist are utterly transformed in the work of art. A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (1980) Cultural Studies, including Stuart Hall¶s Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973) and Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms (1980) Theoretical Question 3: Is literature about the possibilities or failures of communication or representation through language? Many social science research papers fit into this rubric. About.com Psychology; Gezae, Michael et al. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2017; Trochim, William M.K. Marxist approaches to literature require an understanding of the primary economic and social bases of culture since Marxist aesthetic theory sees the work of art as a product, directly or indirectly, of the base structure of society. “Cultural Studies” brings scrutiny not only to these varied categories of culture, and not only to the decreasing margins of difference between these realms of expression, but just as importantly to the politics and ideology that make contemporary culture possible. Feminist gender theory is postmodern in that it challenges the paradigms and intellectual premises of western thought, but also takes an activist stance by proposing frequent interventions and alternative epistemological positions meant to change the social order. The philosopher Roland Barthes proved to be a key figure on the divide between “Structuralism” and “Poststructuralism.” “Poststructuralism” is less unified as a theoretical movement than its precursor; indeed, the work of its advocates known by the term “Deconstruction” calls into question the possibility of the coherence of discourse, or the capacity for language to communicate. “Critical theory” sees in the structure of mass cultural forms—jazz, Hollywood film, advertising—a replication of the structure of the factory and the workplace. Like Plato, Saussure regarded the signifier (words, marks, symbols) as arbitrary and unrelated to the concept, the signified, to which it referred. Approaching Literary Theories. To that end, the following roles served by a theory can help guide the development of your framework. Theories arise from repeated observation and testing and incorporates facts, laws, predictions, and tested assumptions that are widely accepted [e.g., rational choice theory; grounded theory; critical race theory]. “New Historicism” in America had been somewhat anticipated by the theorists of “Cultural Materialism” in Britain, which, in the words of their leading advocate, Raymond Williams describes “the analysis of all forms of signification, including quite centrally writing, within the actual means and conditions of their production.” Both “New Historicism” and “Cultural Materialism” seek to understand literary texts historically and reject the formalizing influence of previous literary studies, including “New Criticism,” “Structuralism” and “Deconstruction,” all of which in varying ways privilege the literary text and place only secondary emphasis on historical and social context. “Literary theory,” sometimes designated “critical theory,” or “theory,” and now undergoing a transformation into “cultural theory” within the discipline of literary studies, can be understood as the set of concepts and intellectual assumptions on which rests the work of explaining or interpreting literary texts. 1. Articulating the theoretical assumptions of a research study forces you to address questions of why and how. Gender theory came to the forefront of the theoretical scene first as feminist theory but has subsequently come to include the investigation of all gender and sexual categories and identities. Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social prophecy, and interdisciplinary themes relevant to how people interpret meaning. Terms in this set (8) discusses the characters' or the author motivates in terms of subconscious drives. “Postcolonial Criticism” offers a fundamental critique of the ideology of colonial domination and at the same time seeks to undo the “imaginative geography” of Orientalist thought that produced conceptual as well as economic divides between West and East, civilized and uncivilized, First and Third Worlds. Said argues that the concept of “the Orient” was produced by the “imaginative geography” of Western scholarship and has been instrumental in the colonization and domination of non-Western societies. (Thornburg, 2000) 2.1 Introduction Collaborative learning through structured blending of online tutorials, ⦠As we aim to cover a representative set of ⦠“Deconstruction,” Semiotic theory (a study of signs with close connections to “Structuralism,” “Reader response theory” in America (“Reception theory” in Europe), and “Gender theory” informed by the psychoanalysts Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva are areas of inquiry that can be located under the banner of “Poststructuralism.” If signifier and signified are both cultural concepts, as they are in “Poststructuralism,” reference to an empirically certifiable reality is no longer guaranteed by language. Writing@CSU. Focuses on the values of a society and how those views are reflected in a text Emphasizes the economic, political, and cultural issues within literary texts Core Belief: Literature ⦠Colorado State University; Lynham, Susan A. Masculine gender theory as a separate enterprise has focused largely on social, literary, and historical accounts of the construction of male gender identities. Think of theories as the conceptual basis for understanding, analyzing, and designing ways to investigate relationships within social systems. Academic literary criticism prior to the rise of “New Criticism” in the United States tended to practice traditional literary history: tracking influence, establishing the canon of major writers in the literary periods, and clarifying historical context and allusions within the text. An explicit statement of theoretical assumptions permits the reader to evaluate them critically. Theory of Literature is a book on literary scholarship by René Wellek, of the structuralist Prague school, and Austin Warren, a self-described "old New Critic". The once widely-held conviction (an implicit theory) that literature is a repository of all that is meaningful and ennobling in the human experience, a view championed by the Leavis School in Britain, may no longer be acknowledged by name but remains an essential justification for the current structure of American universities and liberal arts curricula. Means by which new research data can be interpreted and coded for future use. It permits you to intellectually transition from simply describing a phenomenon you have observed to generalizing about various aspects of that phenomenon. Theories are meant to be tested and their underlying assumptions challenged; they are not rigid or intransigent, but are meant to set forth general principles for explaining phenomena or predicting outcomes. Abend, Gabriel. A theoretical framework specifies which key variables influence a phenomenon of interest and highlights the need to examine how those key variables might differ and under what circumstances. Email: [email protected] The following sections show that literary interpretations always reflect a particular institutional, cultural, and historical background. theoretical approaches to literature As with the classification systems of genres and text types, the approaches to literary texts subscribe to a number of divergent methodologies. Adapted from: Torraco, R. J. The course will focus on one or more theories or compare a range of different theories. Such work generally lacks feminisms’ activist stance and tends to serve primarily as an indictment rather than a validation of male gender practices and masculinity. (This dispute was taken up anew by the French theorist Roland Barthes in his famous declaration of the “Death of the Author.” See “Structuralism” and “Poststructuralism.”) Perhaps the greatest nineteenth century influence on literary theory came from the deep epistemological suspicion of Friedrich Nietzsche: that facts are not facts until they have been interpreted. Until the nineteenth century, Art, in Shakespeare’s phrase, held “a mirror up to nature” and faithfully recorded an objectively real world independent of the observer. “Literary theory” is the body of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of literature. The assumption of psychoanalytic critics is that a work of literature is correlated with its author's mental traits. Conceptual Framework: What Do You Think is Going On? These causes converged with early literary feminist practice, characterized by Elaine Showalter as “gynocriticism,” which emphasized the study and canonical inclusion of works by female authors as well as the depiction of women in male-authored canonical texts. Reference to the author's personality is used to explain and interpret a literary work. All critical practice regarding literature depends on an underlying structure of ideas in at least two ways: theory provides a rationale for what constitutes the subject matter of criticism—”the literary”—and the specific aims of critical practice—the act of interpretation itself. Theoretical Framework and Literature Review We are on the cusp of a completely ânew eraâ, and changes must be made in education to ensure that all students leave school prepared to face the challenges of a redefined world. "A very basic way of thinking about literary theory is that these ideas act as different lenses critics use to view and talk about art, literature, and even culture. Although there may still be those who disdain the mystery novel and its heirs, specialists in modern literature⦠According to “New Historicism,” we can only know the textual history of the past because it is “embedded,” a key term, in the textuality of the present and its concerns. Just like any good introduction, the introduction section of your literature review should introduce the purpose and layout (organisation) of the ⦠“Theoria” indicates a view or perspective of the Greek stage. If you're asked to apply an existing theory to a research problem, the analysis may include the expectation, Your findings suggest that the theory does not explain, The study reveals a finding that is significantly incongruent with what the theory attempts to explain or predict, or, Your analysis reveals that the theory overly generalizes behaviors or actions without taking into consideration specific factors [e.g., factors related to culture, nationality, history, gender, ethnicity, age, geographic location, legal norms or, Philipsen, Kristian. Second edition. Richard Swedberg, editor. Overview of this literature review In section 1, common educational objectives across national and international educational systems are reviewed. The moment of “Deconstruction” may have passed, but its emphasis on the indeterminacy of signs (that we are unable to establish exclusively what a word means when used in a given situation) and thus of texts, remains significant. This is precisely what literary theory offers, though specific theories often claim to present a complete system for understanding literature. Neither author nor context was essential for the Formalists; it was the narrative that spoke, the “hero-function,” for example, that had meaning. While “Postcolonial Criticism” emerged in the historical moment following the collapse of the modern colonial empires, the increasing globalization of culture, including the neo-colonialism of multinational capitalism, suggests a continued relevance for this field of inquiry. In, Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Paper. “What Theory is Not.” Administrative Science Quarterly 40 (September 1995): 371-384. “New Criticism” stressed close reading of the text itself, much like the French pedagogical precept “explication du texte.” As a strategy of reading, “New Criticism” viewed the work of literature as an aesthetic object independent of historical context and as a unified whole that reflected the unified sensibility of the artist. Although literature offers diverse theoretical OL perspectives (see overview in Bontis, Crossan, & Hulland, 2002), we focus on selected viewpoints to achieve a valuable trade-off between representativeness and depth of analysis as appropriate for our investigation. The theoretical framework is the structure that can hold or support a theory of a research study. “Ethnic Studies,” sometimes referred to as “Minority Studies,” has an obvious historical relationship with “Postcolonial Criticism” in that Euro-American imperialism and colonization in the last four centuries, whether external (empire) or internal (slavery) has been directed at recognizable ethnic groups: African and African-American, Chinese, the subaltern peoples of India, Irish, Latino, Native American, and Philipino, among others. The Hungarian theorist Georg Lukacs contributed to an understanding of the relationship between historical materialism and literary form, in particular with realism and the historical novel. Developing Theory from Practice. 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