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Introduction to Literary Theory

Approaching literary texts is not an easy business and it cannot be a random activity nor can it be based on simplistic immature thought nor reduced to personal opinions.  It requires deep careful organized thoughts that should be based on precise established modes of thinking each based on a set of coherent principles not subject to contradictions. In that respect, literary theory constitutes the non exhaustive blueprint or database encompassing all the possibilities about the nature of literature that helps us approach texts in a more organized and purposeful way. Depending on the theoretical angle through which we approach a given text, theory helps bringing into light a precise aspect about that text. The theoretical machinery helps us discover meanings, techniques, processes as well as artistic, intellectual and philosophical implications about the text that we couldn't have discovered otherwise. Theory is important in that it provides us with a deeper understanding of t...
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Psychoanalytic Criticism

Freudian Criticism:  Broadly speaking, so called Freudian criticism or classical psychoanalytic criticism - which is often speculative - is concerned with the quest for and discovery of (and the subsequent analysis of) connections between the artists (creators, artificers) themselves and what they actually create (novels, poems, paintings, sculpture, buildings, music, etc.). As far as literature is concerned it analyses characters 'invented by authors', the language they use and what is known as 'Freudian imagery'. Thus in the Freudian method a literary character is treated as if a living human being; whereas, for example, in the method of Jacques Lacan literature is seen as the symptom of the writer. (from Penguin's Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory) Psychoanalytic criticism adopts the methods of "reading" employed by Freud and later theorists to interpret texts. It argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unco...
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Feminism and Post-colonialism

(From Post-colonial Studies Reader by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin) In many different societies, women, like colonised subjects, have been relegated to the position of ‘ Other ’ , ‘ colonised ’ by various forms of patriarchal domination. They thus share with colonised races and cultures an intimate experience of the politics of oppression and repression. It is not surprising therefore that the history and concerns of feminist theory have paralleled developments in post-colonial theory. Feminist and post-colonial discourses both seek to reinstate the marginalised in the face of the dominant, and early feminist theory, like early nationalist post-colonial criticism, was concerned with inverting the structures of domination, substituting, for instance, a female tradition or traditions for a male-dominated canon. But like postcolonial criticism, feminist theory has rejected such simple inversions in favour of a more general questioning of forms and modes, a...
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