Hey! Professor Hitch here! And today, I want to talk to you about literary theories. Specifically,
what are they and how do we use them in our essays? Well, to answer the first question, I'll
give you a very textbook answer: What are literary theories? Literary theories are a philosophical
discussion on the goals and methods of literature theories, [they] are a way of talking about
and sort of imagining what literature is trying to do. Now, if you know anything about books,
you know that there are so many of them, and it can sometimes be really hard to have a discussion
about what literature is trying to do when really it's trying to do so many different things.
Therefore, there are actually very many literary theories out there, each theory talking about
one specific goal and perhaps several different methods and even maybe several different goals
that literature could have. There's feminist criticism, marxist criticism, historical
criticism, new criticism ... uh, incidentally, not old criticism though, not sure what that's about,
and each of these different types of criticism or literary theory is trying to do a very specific
thing about literature's goals and methods. Now, how do you use these in an essay? Well, this is
a somewhat controversial statement that I'm about to give you because it's definitely not textbook,
but I do think it'll help you with writing this paper. When you think about literary theories,
consider them like themes. Um, consider them like restrictions; you can only write within the
theme of your literary theory; you are restricted to your literary theory and cannot include things
that are outside the scope of what you're writing about. For example, if you were
writing about Romeo and Juliet, you could write about the historical context of Romeo and Juliet,
you could take a look at the text itself and use New Criticism to study the very intricacies of
Shakespearean writing, or you could also use feminist criticism and try to study the gender
roles in patriarchal society that may or may not be reflected in Romeo and Juliet. If I was going
to apply feminist criticism to Romeo and Juliet, that would mean that I kind of want to stay away
from historical information, that I don't want to look too closely at what might be going on in the
text. My focus should really be on gender and gender alone. Now, with that in mind,
now that I've narrowed my focus to gender and gender alone, actually literary theories
don't really change the nature the structure of your essay. You still have a thesis statement,
you still have topic sentences, you still have to support with evidence from the text,
and outside sources, you still have an intro and conclusion. The only difference is that you now
have a theme. If I'm using feminist criticism, as I keep saying, then my theme would be gender. Now,
each literary theory has a lot of different elements to it. Even [with] feminist criticism,
I could talk about gender gender roles, I could talk about patriarchal society...
Here's something else you need to know about how to use literary theories in your essay. You are
never required to use every different aspect of a literary theory in your essay! More often than
not, if you attempt to do that, you will end up with a very convoluted paper or paper that does
not explore things in detail, and that's what we want in college writing, detail, so much detail.
Um, so as you attempt to apply this or that literary theory, keep in mind that you only really
need to focus on one specific thing, perhaps two specific things, on a case-by-case basis.
Well, that's all for now! For more on literary theories,
check out some of my other videos on YouTube.