Presentation on Literary Theory for University

Literary Theory
A presentation by Matias Machuca, Martin Velardez & Patricio Slapak

Part 1:
Defining Literary Theory

What do we mean by ‘Theory’?
Either a set of propositions. E.g.: The
Theory of Relativity
The opposite of practical or hands-on
OR
Well… None of those
Literary theory is treated as a series of ‘approaches’, each with
its theoretical positions and commitments.

But, why not ‘theories’ instead of ‘theory’?
Given that theoretical movements have a lot in common,
people talk about ‘theory’ and not just about particular
theories.

Theory as genre
Writings from outside the field of literary studies have
been taken up by people in literary studies because of
their new and persuasive insights on textual and cultural
matters

Theory and its effects
Theory is all about challenging common-sense views and
attempts to defend the position that those common-
sense notions are historical constructions.

Theory and its effects
Theory questions, for example:
● The conception that the meaning of an utterance or text is what the speaker ‘had in mind’,
● Or the idea that writing is an expression whose truth lies elsewhere, in an experience or a
state of affairs which it expresses,
● Or the notion that reality is what is ‘present’ at a given moment.
Some practical examples are:
Traditional ideas about sex: Foucault on sex
Traditional ideas about writing: Derrida on writing

Conclusion
We can agree on four statements:
● Theory is interdisciplinary – discourse with effects outside an original discipline
● Theory is analytical and speculative – an attempt to work out what is involved in
what we call sex or language or writing or meaning or the subject
● Theory is a critique of common sense, of concepts taken as natural
● Theory is reﬂexive, thinking about thinking, enquiry into the categories we use
in making sense of things, in literature and in other discursive practices.

What defines a piece of writing as literary?
Is it a matter of the features present in the text?
Is it a matter of the context in which you find the piece?
Actually, it’s both.

The nature of literature
Literature as…
- ...the foregrounding of language
- ...the integration of language
- ...fiction
- ...aesthetic object
- ...intertextual or self-reflexive construct

The nature of literature
In other words: Literature as…
- ...the ‘main event’
- ...the combination of elements
- ...experimentation on reality
- ...experimentation on beauty
- ...as a single gear in the machine that is discourse

Properties versus consequences
Nevertheless, these features do not seem to apply to
every work of what is considered literature. Thus we can
infer that the qualities of literature can’t be reduced
either to objective properties or to consequences of
ways of framing language
Language resists the frames we impose.

The functions of literature
Literature has been argued to…
- ...have the power to civilize people
- ...be ‘cultural capital’
- ...encourage resistance to capitalist values

The paradox of literature
To create literature is to write according to existing
formulas and conventions.
At the same time, writers often seek to flout those
conventions and experiment with language.

Part 3:
Literature and Cultural
Studies

What is the relation?
The objective of Cultural Studies is to understand the
functioning of culture in the modern world.
Cultural Studies includes and encompasses Literary
Studies, examining literature as a cultural practice.

The emergence of cultural studies
- Coming from French structuralism of the 1960s
- A second source is Marxist literary theory in Britain
(Raymond Williams’ ‘Culture and Society’, Richard
Hoggart’s ‘The Uses of Literacy’)

Tensions within cultural studies
The desire to recover popular culture & the study of mass culture as an
ideological imposition
On the one hand, the point of studying popular culture is to get in
touch with what is important for the lives of ordinary people – their
culture – as opposed to that of aesthetes and professors. On the
other, there is a strong impetus to show how people are shaped or
manipulated by cultural forces.

Tensions within cultural studies
Analyst’s desire to analyse culture as a set of alienating codes and
practices & analyst’s wish to find an authentic expression of value in
popular culture
On the one hand, how contextualized culture works within a
framework. On the other, recovering an authentic means of
expression within this framework.

The ‘literary canon’
The works regularly studied in schools and universities
and deemed to form ‘our literary heritage’.
Usually regarded as of ‘high culture’ and collectively
considered by society as having achieved the status of
‘classics’

Literary canon and cultural studies
- Literary excellence has never determined what is
studied
- Application of the criterion of literary excellence has
historically been compromised by non-literary criteria
- The notion of literary excellence has been subjected to
debate

Literary canon and cultural studies
This last point has been a catalyst for discussion, sparking questions
as:
● Have traditional literary standards been compromised?
● Are previously neglected works selected for their ‘literary
excellence’ or for their cultural representativeness?
● Is it ‘political correctness’, the desire to give every minority just
representation, rather than speciﬁcally literary criteria, that is
determining the choice of works to be studied?

What to study & What for
- Are works instances of something else? Should they be
studied on their own because of the beauty?
- Does work on present culture imply an intervention in
culture rather than mere description?
- Is cultural studies that ‘radical’?

Modes of analysis and interpretation
- Interpreting cultural objects as complex structures,
usually related to literary studies
- Analysing cultural objects as symptoms of social
totalities, often connected to cultural studies
In the end, either mode can go with either sort of
cultural object

Part 4:
Language, meaning &
interpretation

Some useful questions
Is literature a special kind of language or is it a special
use of language? Is it language organized in distinctive
ways or is it language granted special privileges?

Different types of meaning
There are three main types of meaning:
● The meaning of a word
● The meaning of an utterance
● The meaning of a text

Saussure’s theory of language
According to Saussure, language is a system of differences, which is to
say, what gives meaning to each element is its contrast to another
element.
E.g.: Up is identified as the opposite of down and vice versa.

Saussure’s theory of language
For Saussure, a language is a system of signs and the key fact is what he calls the arbitrary
nature of the linguistic sign.
This means two things:
- First, the sign (for instance, a word) is a combination of a form (the ‘signifier’) and a
meaning (the ‘signified’) and the relation between form and meaning is based on
convention, not natural resemblance.
- Both the signifier (form) and the signified (meaning) are themselves conventional
divisions of the plane of sound and the plane of thought respectively

Language and thought
How language relates to thought has been a major issue for recent theory. At
one extreme is the common-sense view that language just provides names for
thoughts that exist independently; language offers ways of expressing pre-
existing thoughts.
There seems no way of demonstrating that there are thoughts of one
language that can’t be thought or expressed in another, but we do have
massive evidence that one language makes ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ thoughts that
require a special effort in another.

Linguistic analysis
To understand a language as a functioning system is to look at
it synchronically (focusing on a language as a system at a
particular time, present or past), trying to spell out the rules
and conventions of the system that make possible the forms
and meanings of the language.

Poetics vs hermeneutics
There is a basic distinction between two kinds of projects:
● One, modelled on linguistics, takes meanings as what have to be
accounted for and tries to work out how they are possible.
● The other, by contrast, starts with forms and seeks to interpret
them, to tell us what they really mean.
In literary studies, this is a contrast between poetics and hermeneutics.

Poetics starts with attested meanings or effects and asks how they
are achieved. (What makes this passage in a novel seem ironic? What
makes us sympathize with this particular character? Why is the ending
of this poem ambiguous?)
Hermeneutics, on the other hand, starts with texts and asks what they
mean, seeking to discover new and better interpretations.
Hermeneutic models come from the ﬁelds of law and religion, where
people seek to interpret an authoritative legal or sacred text in order
to decide how to act.
Meaning
Text
Text
Meaning

The linguistic model suggests that literary study should take the ﬁrst
track, of poetics, trying to understand how works achieve the effects
they do, but the modern tradition of criticism has overwhelmingly
taken the second, making the interpretation of individual works the
payoff of literary study.

Readers and meanings
The idea of literary competence focuses attention on the implicit knowledge
that readers (and writers) bring to their encounters with texts. If a literary
work is conceived as a succession of actions upon the understanding of a
reader, then an interpretation of the work can be a story of that encounter,
with its ups and downs: various conventions or expectations are brought into
play, connections are posited, and expectations defeated or conﬁrmed.

Interpretation
Focus of historical and social variations emphasizes that interpretation is a
social practice.
What are commonly seen as ‘schools’ of literary criticism or theoretical
‘approaches’ to literature are, from the point of view of hermeneutics,
dispositions to give particular kinds of answers to the question of what a
work is ultimately ‘about’.

Interpretation
● ‘the class struggle’ (Marxism),
● ‘the possibility of unifying experience’ (the New Criticism),
● ‘Oedipal conﬂict’ (psychoanalysis),
● ‘the containment of subversive energies’ (new historicism),
● ‘the asymmetry of gender relations’ (feminism),
● ‘the self- deconstructive nature of the text’ (deconstruction),
● ‘the occlusion of imperialism’ (post-colonial theory),
● ‘the heterosexual matrix’ (gay and lesbian studies).

Meaning, intention and context
So what determines meaning?
...Sometimes we say that the meaning of an utterance is what someone means
by it, as though the intention of a speaker determined meaning.
...Sometimes we say meaning is in the text, as if meaning were the product of
the language itself.
...Sometimes we say context is what determines meaning: to know what this
particular utterance means, you have to look at the circumstances or the
historical context in which it ﬁgures

Part 5:
Rhetoric, Poetics & Poetry

Some definitions
● Poetics is the attempt to account for literary effects by describing
the conventions and reading operations that make them possible.
● Rhetoric is the study of the techniques of language and thought
that can be used to construct effective discourses.
● Poetry is language that makes abundant use of figures of speech
and language that aims to be powerfully persuasive.

Rhetorical figures
A rhetorical figure is generally defined as an alteration of or swerve
from general usage.
● Metaphor (linking two elements by similarity)
● Metonymy (linking two elements by contiguity)
● Synecdoche (part of sth standing for the whole)
● Irony (what happens is the opposite of what is expected)
The main idea of rhetoric as a discipline is that there are basic
structures of language which underlie and make possible the
meanings produced in a wide variety of discourses

Literary genres
Genres are sets of conventions or expectations.
Many theorists have divided works among three classes:
● Poetic/Lyric (1st person narrator)
● Epic/Narrative (1st person narrator & characters having their
own voice)
● Drama (the characters do all the talking)

About poetry
● A poem is both a structure made of words and an event. The
relation between the act of the author who writes the poem and
the ‘voice’ that speaks there is extremely important; poets
imagine another voice speaking the words they write.
● Poets often use extravagant language to reach for the ‘sublime’,
provoking awe or passionate intensity
● Poems babble, foregrounding non-semantic features of language
to produce charm or incantation (also found in nursery rhymes
and ballads)

Interpreting poems
● The lyric is based on a convention of unity and autonomy
● Poems are different from bits of conversation in that you need
the context to explain those bits. Poems, on the other hand, have
a structure of their own.
● You can ask yourself: is the poet trying to contrast two elements?
Or is he/she trying to equate them?

Narrative
The theory of narrative (‘narratology’) has been an active branch of literary
theory, and literary study relies on theories of narrative structure: on notions
of plot, of different kinds of narrators, of narrative techniques. The poetics of
narrative, as we might call it, both attempts to understand the components of
narrative and analyses how particular narratives achieve their effects.

Plot
What are the elemental requirements of a story?
According to Aristotle, stories must have a beginning, middle, and end, and
that they give pleasure because of the rhythm of their ordering.
Theorists have further proposed that a plot requires a transformation. There
must be an initial situation, a change involving some sort of reversal, and a
resolution that marks the change as signiﬁcant.

Presentation
Confronted with a text (a term that includes ﬁlms and other representations),
the reader makes sense of it by identifying the story and then seeing the text
as one particular presentation of that story; by identifying ‘what happens’, we
are able to think of the rest of the verbal material as the way of portraying
what takes place.

Presentation
Some key questions that identify meaningful variation.
Who speaks? By convention every narrative is said to have a narrator, who may stand outside the story or be a
character within it.
Who speaks to whom? The author creates a text which is read by readers. Readers infer from the text a narrator, a
voice which speaks. The narrator addresses listeners who are sometimes implied or constructed, sometimes
explicitly identiﬁed.
Who speaks when? Narration may be situated at the time at which events occur.
Who speaks what language? Narrative voices may have their own distinctive language, in which they recount
everything in the story, or they may adopt and report the language of others.
Who speaks with what authority? To tell a story is to claim a certain authority, which listeners grant.

Focalization
Who sees? From whose perspective are the events brought into focus and presented? The focalizer may or
may not be the same as the narrator.
Temporal: Narration may focalize events from the time at which they occurred, from shortly afterwards, or
from long afterwards.
Distance and speed: The story may be focalized through a microscope, as it were, or through a telescope,
proceeding slowly with great detail or quickly telling us what happened.
Limitations of knowledge: At one extreme, a narrative may focalize the story through a very limited
perspective – a ‘camera’s eye’ or ‘ﬂy on the wall’ perspective – recounting actions without giving us access
to characters’ thoughts. At the other extreme lies what is called ‘omniscient narration’ where the focalizer
is a godlike ﬁgure who has access to the innermost thoughts and hidden motives of the characters.

What stories do
First, they give pleasure – pleasure, Aristotle tells us, through their imitation of life
and their rhythm. The narrative patterning that produces a twist, as when the biter
is bitten or the tables are turned, gives pleasure in itself, and many narratives have
essentially this function: to amuse listeners by giving a new twist to familiar
situations.
Stories also have the function, as theorists have emphasized, of teaching us about
the world, showing us how it works, enabling us – through the devices of
focalization – to see things from other vantage points, and to understand others’
motives that in general are opaque to us.

Part 7:
Performative language &
literature

Performatives & Constatives
● Constative utterances make a statement, describe a state of
affairs and are true or false.
● Performative utterances do not describe but, rather, perform the
action they designate. The possibility to use ‘hereby’ shows that
an utterance is performative.

Performatives & Literature
The literary utterance too creates the state of affairs to which it
refers: the performative brings to centre stage a world-making use of
language, which helps us to conceive of literature as act or event. This
notion contributes to a defence of literature being among the acts of
language that transform the world.

Performative-Constative relations
● Constative: language claiming to represent things as they are, or
to name things that are already there.
● Performative: rhetorical operations, that undermine this claim by
imposing linguistic categories, bringing things into being,
organizing the world rather than representing what is already
there.
A performative theory on gender and sexuality influenced by Judith
Butler’s works has emerged and it argues that gender is performative
as society is seen to impose a set of gender norms.

Austin’s view compared to Butler’s
● For Austin, the concept of the performative helps us to think
about a particular aspect of language neglected by prior
philosophers.
● For Butler, it is a model for thinking about crucial social processes
where a number of matters are at stake.
● Austin is interested in how the repetition of a formula on a single
occasion makes something happen
● For Butler this is a special case of the massive and obligatory
repetition that produces historical and social realities

Part 8:
Identity, Identiﬁcation, and
the Subject

The subject
A lot of recent theoretical debate concerns the identity
and function of the subject or self. The dominant modern
tradition in the study of literature has treated the
individuality of the individual as something given, a core
which is expressed in word and deed and which can
therefore be used to explain action.

The subject
I did what I did because of who I am, and to
explain what I did or said you should look back at
the ‘I’ (whether conscious or unconscious) that my
words and acts express.

Literature and identity
Literature has always been concerned with questions about identity, and
literary works sketch answers, implicitly or explicitly, to these questions.
Narrative literature especially has followed the fortunes of characters as
they deﬁne themselves and are deﬁned by various combinations of their past,
the choices they make, and the social forces that act upon them.

Literature and identity
Literary works offer a range of implicit models of how identity is formed.
There are narratives where identity is essentially determined by birth: the son of a king
raised by shepherds is still fundamentally a king and rightfully becomes king when his
identity is discovered.
In other narratives characters change according to the changes in their fortunes, or
else identity is based on personal qualities that are revealed during the tribulations of a
life.

Representing or producing?
Thus the question arises: Does discourse represent already existing identities
or does it, to a certain extent, produce them?
The modern individual, in this sense, is a person whose identity and worth are
thought to come from feelings and personal qualities rather than from his or
her place in the social hierarchy. This is an identity gained through love and
centred in the domestic sphere rather than in society.

Psychoanalysis
Recent theory has fleshed out what was often implicit in discussions of literature in
treating identity as formed by a process of identification. For Freud, identification
is a psychological process in which the subject assimilates an aspect of the other
and is transformed, wholly or partially, according to the model that the other
provides.
Later psychoanalytic theories as Jacques Lacan’s, account of what he calls ‘the
mirror stage’, locating the beginnings of identity in the moment when the infant
identifies with his or her image in the mirror, perceiving himself or herself as
whole, as what he or she wants to be.

Group identities
Identiﬁcation also plays a role in the production of group
identities. For members of historically oppressed or
marginalized groups, stories prompt identiﬁcation with a
potential group and work to make the group a group by
showing them who or what they might be.

Part 9:
Theoretical schools and
movements

Russian formalism
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’ (Roman Jakobson, Boris Eichenbaum, and Victor
Shklovsky)

New criticism
What is called the ‘New Criticism’ arose in the United States in the 1930s and
1940s. It 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. (Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, W. K.
Wimsatt)

Phenomenology
Phenomenology emerges from the work of the early twentieth-century
philosopher Edmund Husserl. It 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. (Edmund Husserl)

Structuralism
Reader-oriented theory has something in common with structuralism, which
also focuses on how meaning is produced. Bus structuralism originated in
opposition to phenomenology: instead of describing experience, the goal was
to identify the underlying structures that make it possible. (Roman Jakobson,
Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette)

Post-structuralism
Once structuralism came to be deﬁned as a movement or school, theorists
distanced themselves from it. It became clear that works by alleged
structuralists did not ﬁt the idea of structuralism as an attempt to master and
codify structures. (Barthes, Lacan, and Foucault)

Deconstruction
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.

Feminist theory
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.

Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalytic theory had an impact on literary studies both as a mode of
interpretation and as a theory about language, identity, and the subject.

Marxism
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. Social and ideological superstructures have a
‘relative autonomy’. The subject is an effect constituted in the processes of
the unconscious, of discourse, and of the relatively autonomous practices
that organize society.

New Historicism/Cultural Materialism
There is British Cultural materialism, deﬁned as ‘the analysis of all forms of
signiﬁcation, including quite centrally writing, within the actual means and
conditions of their production’.
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

Post-colonial theory
A related set of theoretical questions emerge in post-colonial theory: the
attempt to understand the problems posed by the European colonization and
its 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.

Minority discourse
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’.

Queer theory
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. 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.

Conclusion
There may be a general lesson here. Theory, we might conclude, does not give
rise to harmonious solutions. It doesn’t, for instance, teach us, once and for
all, what meaning is: how much the factors of intention, text, reader, and
context each contribute to a sum that is meaning.
Theory doesn’t tell us whether poetry is a transcendent vocation or rhetorical
trick or how much of each.
Theory, then, offers not a set of solutions but the prospect of further
thought. It calls for commitment to the work of reading, of challenging
presuppositions, of questioning the assumptions on which you proceed.

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