Before we analyze any literary text -- so we'll call this the text here -- before we
analyze the text we need to make sure that we take a step back and think a
little bit about methodology. Which method are we going to use to analyze
the text? Now we might assume that there's only one, but in fact there are
lots of ways to approach a particular text and interpret it. In this video then
what I'd like to do is spend a little bit of time thinking about this act of
communication -- about how we interpret the text. And we're just going to introduce
very broadly the field of literary theory. So what kind of critical
approaches are out there, and, most important of all, where where do
they focus? What is the focal point of different textual and critical
approaches? So, we're going to start here with a fairly basic kind of diagram. We
have a text. We also have an author typically, although it may be an
anonymous text if we don't know who the author is. And then the author writes the
text -- maybe even performs it. Then we have the audience -- you and me -- although we
can of course also posit different audiences. We can talk about the initial
audience -- the people who first read the text -- and later audiences, and maybe
even imaginary audiences, or hypothetical audiences, or intended audiences. There
are lots of different audiences we can talk about. We see then that the
author is trying to communicate something to the audience,
and one of the critical ideas here is that this communication occurs over time.
There is a time difference here. The audience might be in some kind
of now moment, but the author is usually in the past. Even if the author is
still alive and has written a text, you know, yesterday, and it just came out,
there's still a time gap, and usually with time comes change and
some kind of difference. This concept of difference is a really tricky one.
In fact there are some postmodern critics that have really investigated
what difference means in terms of whether the text is still readable,
whether the text can create its own meanings, or whether we need the author
kind of present to be able to tell us what that text actually meant. A lot
of different questions come up then as soon as we start thinking about time. So
we have this kind of fairly basic diagram, and the next question to
consider then is, well, where are we going to focus? If we think of ourselves as
having this kind of, you know, magnifying glass (kind of a crappy
picture here but you get the idea), where are we going to put this magnifying
glass? Should we focus on the text? On the author? On the audience? Well, different
literary theories do one or more of those things, and so why don't we start
with the text. What would it look like to start with the text? Well, a lot of
theories that start with the text are referred to as formalist theories.
They look at the form of the text and one of the things that formalist theories
like to do is actually suggest that the content, the message of the text, is
related to the form. There's this wonderful kind of slogan you might say
that form equals content. Form is important, and just to give one example,
for instance, if you think about an epic text, a text that tells an epic
story, then it wouldn't make sense to have a really short text to do that. If
you had a haiku for instance ... a haiku is only three lines long. Can you think of a
haiku as being epic? Well, no, because the the form, the length of the poem in
this case does not match the content. We want something to be a little bit longer
than that to be epic. That's just one example of where form really does matter.
So we have quite a few formalist theories, and I'll give you a few examples here.
Some of these are not necessarily always called formalist,
but one way to approach the text is what's sometimes called new criticism.
New criticism isn't new at all. In fact, the heyday of
new criticism was in the the mid 20th century ...
and at that point people were really saying that we should read the
text by itself in a sense. We should ignore or at least bracket the
historical, social context and be able to see the text as an artifact that creates
meaning through patterns, through contrasts. It creates a sense of unity. We
can study its aesthetics -- so aesthetics is the study of
beauty, and we can really look at how the text has this sort of beauty all by
itself. So we can look at metaphors and similes and all of those kinds of things
to see how that works. New criticism has fallen out of
fashion in many ways because people say, well, we need to know more! We need to
know about the historical context, and all of these other things. But these days
we still do what's called close reading, and I think maybe this is a way that we
don't use the term new criticism anymore but the effect is still there, and this
movement, this literary theory kind of movement, has taught us a
tremendous amount about how to do a proper and meticulous close reading.
There is some tension, however, between these kinds of close readings and again
this more postmodern attitude, because if we think about post-modernism then
post-modernism actually challenges the idea that there's a unity
to the text. Post-modernism suggests that maybe the text sometimes breaks
down. Now another thing to observe here as we look at the text is that texts are
not written in isolation. We can really see that there are probably multiple
texts that have some similarity. That's going to get a bit messy, but if
we think of this [horizontal] movement as having to do more with time, then the vertical
movement has to do more with the similar
texts that we can find. Of course, some of these may be written earlier or later,
but they have a lot of similarity. And so one thing we can do is called genre study.
We can look at how this text fits in with other similar texts from the same
or even different genres. We can also do ... a form of
structuralism -- so a structural analysis -- and what that looks like is that we
might look at particular patterns and structures that we find in this text
that we can also see in other texts, or even in different parts of the same text.
To give one example here, let's say we're analyzing fairy tales and we
observe that a lot of these stories have a scene, a moment, that include a helper
figure. Every time we come across the scene where the the main
character needs some help and then some helper figure comes in,
whether it's a fairy godmother, or, you know, somebody else who kind of helps out.
Well, that's structuralism. That's actually seeing how these structures
repeat themselves and create meaning. And so we're still really focusing
here on the text. Another way to approach the text is through something called
narratology. This is getting messy but we will write it in here. ...
Narratology is not a huge field in literary theory, but i think it's a
really interesting one. Narratology looks particularly at stories,
how stories are put together. Stories often have common ways to
narrate events. They have a narrator, they have a point of view, they may
have a climax. So if we look at the structure of
stories we call that narratology. You can see now that all of these different
approaches -- many of them formalists -- are ... paying some kind of
attention to the form of the text. All of these approaches are really primarily
focused on the text itself without having to zoom out too much, although I
should add that they're not exclusively focused on the text.
More and more these days we find that people use multiple approaches, so
they take the best of a number of different theories that apply to the
text they're studying and they move almost seamlessly back and forth between
those different approaches. Next, we'll look at what it might
look like to focus on the author more. So if we're going to focus on the author
then we can focus on the author specifically, and we call that of course
biography -- the writing of a person's life -- and we can take all sorts of critical
viewpoints to the author's life. One viewpoint might be something like
psychology. We can do a psychoanalytic reading of the author's life -- the
author experienced some trauma in his childhood. You could do a Freudian
reading if you want, and you can apply that then to the the production of the
text. But even beyond that very basically you can talk about what actually caused
the author to write the text -- what was going on in his or her life. So we can
focus on the author, but we can also zoom out a little bit and talk about the
social background of what was happening at the time. We might call
this [the] social background or historical background, and if we think
about that background we could just study it straight up, you might say, and
just look at what was going on. But we can also take a more theoretical
approach. And these theoretical approaches that we have -- there's quite a
few of them but I'm just going to mention a couple. Probably the one that's
still very dominant and very influential, even though people might not
call themselves this, is the Marxist approach ... so some version of Marxism . You
don't have to be a Marxist or communist to do this kind of theoretical study of
an author's background, but what Marxism typically tends to do is it tends to
suggest that the text is some kind of product
of the social background. This raises all kinds of questions. It
certainly raises questions about free will. Does the author have free will
or is the author constrained by the social and and intellectual limitations
of his time? That's a really profound question and certainly something that's
that's worth studying. A more specific kind of brand of Marxism that was very popular
in the 1990s, and still is today to some extent, is called New
Historicism. You can look this up yourself if you like, but
again New Historicism really looked at how the text is influenced by historical
things that we might not even be aware of and New Historicism is somewhat
Marxist I would say, but it tends to have a more diffuse sense of power. So
power is not necessarily a form of propaganda of the ruling classes and
so on, but power is channeled through society in ways that are even beyond
people's control and that creates these interesting tensions between different
viewpoints, different ideas, and the text is a product of that.
Again we're looking at the social and cultural background and we want to root
the text in this material sense of production, the
real gritty background of the text. Those are just a few ways to think about the
author, but we can also look at the audience, and you can see this is getting
very messy! But if we look at the audience, one prominent approach is
called reader-response theory. What reader response theory
suggests is that the meaning of the text is in many ways actually made up by the
audience. Every audience reads the text
differently, and so that meaning keeps changing. That's why we should
really study audiences -- how different audiences react. Now this is fairly new
in a sense, this reader response theory, but more broadly people have always
talked about how audiences respond. If you think about Aristotle, for instance,
Aristotle talked about this notion of catharsis, and catharsis is a
kind of release, an emotional release, or a purification or purgation, that happens
when you go to see a play, let's say. You feel differently after you watch a play.
You feel ... that maybe some kind of emotional release has
happened to you. Aristotle called this catharsis. There we're really
focusing on audience reactions, and that can be an interesting kind of study in
itself. Alright, as you can see, literary theory is very messy because there are
so many different approaches and sometimes it's hard to know where to
start. My suggestion to you would be to be really eclectic in your approach
and try to find the approach, the theory, that you find most useful for each
particular text -- and that can actually be different. So ... when you study
one particular text, maybe the biography really matters, and for another text
maybe it doesn't, because you don't even know who the author is or you can't be
certain about who wrote this. Then maybe a closer reading might actually
ignore the author. But I would as much as possible think about all of these
theories as providing some kind of perspective that's valid and useful.
The worst thing to do is to have your own pet theory. You just ignore
every other theory and you always rigorously apply one theory because
that's all you're interested in. There are lots of other theories that we
haven't even mentioned. So there's feminism, there is post-colonial studies,
and there are lots of other theories that you can apply. But I hope
at least that what this diagram has shown to you is that each theory tends
to have its primary focus: author, text, or audience, and then we're
always thinking about this movement in time. One last point here, then: the
best kind of analyses I think are ones that focus on something
but they're always aware of what else is happening. If we think about
formalism, there is something now called the new formalism, as people try to
update this, and the new formalism is really interested in again this concept
of time. If we look at a genre, is that genre just a hypothetical construct
or is it something that's really historical -- that's related to
what was going on at the time and that's a fascinating question!
That's what makes this theoretical approach still so current. So now we
know our basic idea of what methodology is. In the next video, as we keep looking
at Wordsworth's poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" (this is the series that
we're doing) we're going to talk more about a close reading. We're going to
start with the text itself -- analyzing it -- and then over time we'll zoom out to
some of these other parts of the picture.