PONDICHERRY UNIVERSITY

DEFINING LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM

AND THE IMPORTANCE OF IT.

NEYA . S ( 18356062 )

ENGL 504 – LITERARY THEORY

DR. H. KALPANA

8 AUGUST 2019
LITERARY THEORY

The term theory has its origin from the Greek word ‘theoria’ meaning contemplation or

speculation. Literary theory is the speculation of literature in its broad sense. It is the systematic

account of the nature of literature and helps in understanding the relation of a text to its author,

reader as well as the society. It is an equivalent of the first principles of the study of literature.

Literary theory in simple terms, provide different frameworks which in turn is used to evaluate

and interpret a particular literary work through various perspectives.

Theory in general is abstract and is completely objective and so is literary theory because

it gives the rules and regulations upon which a literary work should be written. It is intertwined

with philosophy, history and other majors of Humanities making it an inter-disciplinary

approach. Literary theory which has initially started from Liberal Humanism has now branched

out to various vivid fields.

LITERARY CRITICISM

The term Criticism is from the Greek word ‘kritikos’ meaning judgement. Literary

criticism thus means judging literature. It is also the study, evaluation and the interpretation of

literature. It judges the value of any work and evaluates the work according to its aesthetic value,

historical, social, cultural significance of the work and also the usage of language.

Literary criticism is the application of the techniques, hypothesis and perspectives of

literary theory to some objects of literary studies like a text or a group of texts, a writer or a

group of writers, a literary movement or an era. While literary theory is the study of the
principles of literature, its categories, criteria and the like; literary criticism is the study of

concrete works of art. On the other hand the subject- matter of literary criticism is an art, and

criticism is evidently something of an art too. Literary criticism could be thus considered as a

parasitic form of literary expression, an art based on pre-existing art, a second hand imitation of

creative power.

Literary criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge existing in its own right, with

some measure of independence from the art it deals with. In technical terms, literary theory is

epistemological whereas literary criticism is ontological.

IMPORTANCE OF LITERARY THEORY

Literary theory answers certain questions like ‘What is Literature?’, ‘What techniques do

the writers of literature deploy?’, ‘What is the connection between literature and other aspects of

human culture? , ‘What is the connection between words and meaning in literature?’ and so on.

It also helps a reader to apply multiple lenses to the same text and see how different texts

inter-connect with each other because the entire conceptual apparatus of human beings is

grounded in our acquisition of language and pattern matching skills.

Literary theory in a way liberated literary works from the siege of the so called ‘elitist

readers’, who claimed that the works of literature can be appreciated only by people from a

particular cultural and literary breeding. It thus threw open the literary works to a kind of

analysis in which anyone could participate.

 Some critics ironically are of the opinion that literary theory comes in between the reader

and the work. Only with the application of any theory could one know what a ‘literary work’ is

in the first place or how one should read it. Hostility to theory usually means an opposition to

other people’s theories and oblivious of one’s own.

People generally have a notion that literature is ordinary and is instantly available to

anyone and could be understood by anybody. Literary theory defies this and proves to be

complex and a bit different from this ‘image’ of literature. Its complexity lies in the systematic

approach just like any other scientific theory and thus it shows that literature is no inferior to

science.

Theory is often a pugnacious critique of commonsense notions, and further, an attempt to

show that what readers take for granted as “common sense” is in fact a historical construction, a

particular theory that has come to seem so natural to the readers that they don’t even think of it

as a theory.

Literature has to be studied with language, otherwise it wouldn’t be an academic subject.

Literary theory thus deals with the rules of language along with the themes and other such

components of a literary text.

Literary theory broadly includes three topics – literary criticism, literary history and

theory in the literal sense. Literature doesn’t exist in vacuum and so does literary theory. It

encompasses many fields such as politics, economics, anthropology, psychology, gender and so

on.
 Theory now is not restricted to literary texts or literary approaches to, say, the novel, but

has widened out into other domains especially into non- literary fields like comics, movies, video

games, art and architecture.

Literary theory in recent years has sought to explain the degree to which the text is all the

more the product of a culture than an individual author and in turn how those texts help to create

the culture thus leading to the emergence of a new field – the cultural theory.

Technically theory seeks changes in the social realms of reading or the making of

meaning in the law or even the acts of writing histories – in the sense it helps a reading practice,

a political commitment and a mode of interpretation.

REFERENCE

 Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. New York; Sterling. 2009.

Print.

 Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory.

London; Oxford University Press. 2018 (4th edition). Print.

 Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Great Britain; Blackwell Publishers,

1983. Print.

 Nayar. K, Pramod. Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: From Structuralism to

Ecocriticism. Hyderabad; Pearson, 2010. Print.

 Nagarajan, M. S. English Literary Criticism and Theory: An Introductory History.

Chennai; Orient Black Swan, 2006. Print.

 Wellek, Rene. “Literary Theory, Criticism and History”. The Sewanee Review. 1960.

Vol.68, pp. 1- 19.

 Bennett, Tony. Outside Literature. New York; Routledge, 1990. Print.

 Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. New Jersey; Princeton University Press, 1957.

Print.