Module 2 – Frameworks of Literature

Learning Objectives:
At the end of the lesson, the student shall be able to:
 Identify the different frameworks of literature
 Develop research skills using various (library and online)
resources
 Demonstrate mastery of the key concepts of the discussed
theories
Introduction
When we read a poem, for example, we approach the text in a certain way
and, whether we are aware of this or not, we make assumptions about the text which,
in a broad sense, already constitute a framework for decoding what the text is, what it
tries to express, etc. Since our reading practice and our world view in general is
inevitably steeped in some ‘theory’ or another, we may just as well make an effort to
become more familiar with this underlying theory. After a while, we may find that our
vision has become clearer and that we can discern things in texts which we would not
have noticed without a theoretical background.
In this sense, theory is a bit like wearing glasses. Glasses can help you
sharpen your view, and aspects one did not notice before are suddenly thrown into
greater relief. At the same time, however, glasses can be tinted in different colors and
thus you may perceive an object one way while someone else sees it differently. The
same applies to literary theory. Theory can help us identify small and often minute
facets of a text. However, if one always wears the same theoretical lens, one risks
missing out on a lot of other features which may be equally fascinating but which
simply do not match the categories or concepts of one’s theory. In order to avoid that, students
should learn early on in their studies what types of theory are currently available and how to
engage with them critically.
Below or just a few of the many literary theories or lenses that you can use to view and talk
about art, literature, and culture.
1. Formalism
“Formalism” is, as the name implies, an interpretive approach that
emphasizes literary form and the study of literary devices within the text. The
work of the Formalists had a general impact on later developments in
“Structuralism” and other theories of narrative. “Formalism,” like “Structuralism,”
sought to place the study of literature on a scientific basis through objective
analysis of the motifs, devices, techniques, and other “functions” that comprise
the literary work. The Formalists placed great importance on the literariness of
texts, those qualities that distinguished the literary from other kinds of writing.
Neither author nor context was essential for the Formalists; it was the narrative
that spoke, the “hero-function,” for example, that had meaning. Form was the
content. A plot device or narrative strategy was examined for how it functioned
and compared to how it had functioned in other literary works. Of the Russian
Formalist critics, Roman Jakobson and Viktor Shklovsky are probably the most
well-known.
The Formalist adage that the purpose of literature was “to make the
stones stonier” nicely expresses their notion of literariness. “Formalism” is
perhaps best known is Shklovsky’s concept of “defamiliarization.” The routine of
ordinary experience, Shklovsky contended, rendered invisible the uniqueness
and particularity of the objects of existence. Literary language, partly by calling
attention to itself as language, estranged the reader from the familiar and made
fresh the experience of daily life.
Formalists disagreed about what specific elements make a literary work
"good" or "bad"; but generally, Formalism maintains that a literary work contains
certain intrinsic features, and the theory "...defined and addressed the
specifically literary qualities in the text" (Richter 699). Therefore, it's easy to see
Formalism's relation to Aristotle's theories of dramatic construction.
This approach views each piece of literature that possesses all of its
meaning inside the text. Meaning does not exist outside the text. In other words,
the history behind the text or its author’s biography do not contribute to the text’s
theme or content. To analyze literature through formalism, you will focus on the
style, structure, tone, imagery, etc. You will analyze how certain elements work
together to create meaning within a text.

2. Traditional Literary Criticism

Academic literary criticism prior to the rise of “New Criticism” in the

United States tended to practice traditional literary history: tracking influence,
establishing the canon of major writers in the literary periods, and clarifying
historical context and allusions within the text. Literary biography was and still is
an important interpretive method in and out of the academy; versions of moral
criticism, not unlike the Leavis School in Britain, and aesthetic (e.g. genre
studies) criticism were also generally influential literary practices. Perhaps the
key unifying feature of traditional literary criticism was the consensus within the
academy as to the both the literary canon (that is, the books all educated
persons should read) and the aims and purposes of literature. What literature
was, and why we read literature, and what we read, were questions that
subsequent movements in literary theory were to raise.

3. Reader Response Criticism

This approach views “literature” not as an object, like formalism does,
but as a dynamic interaction between the text and reader. This theory holds that
there are many different ways to interpret the text based on the reader’s cultural,
religious, economic, etc. background. In other words, readers bring their own
thoughts, views, experiences and attitudes to the text and interpret the story
through a personal lens. This critical theory is often used to discuss a text in a
classroom setting where students are supposed to provide their own insights on
the literature read.
At its most basic level, reader-response criticism considers readers'
reactions to literature as vital to interpreting the meaning of the text. However,
reader-response criticism can take a number of different approaches. A critic
deploying reader-response theory can use a psychoanalytic lens, a feminist
lens, or even a structuralist lens. What these different lenses have in common
when using a reader-response approach is they maintain "...that what a text is
cannot be separated from what it does" (Tyson 154).
Tyson explains that "...reader-response theorists share two beliefs: 1)
that the role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature
and 2) that readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them
by an objective literary text; rather they actively make the meaning they find in
literature" (154). In this way, reader-response theory shares common ground
with some of the deconstructionists discussed in the Post-structural area when
they talk about "the death of the author," or her displacement as the
(author)itarian figure in the text.
4. New Criticism
The “New Criticism,” so designated as to indicate a break with
traditional methods, was a product of the American university in the 1930s and
40s. “New Criticism” stressed close reading of the text itself, much like the
French pedagogical precept “explication du texte.” As a strategy of reading,
“New Criticism” viewed the work of literature as an aesthetic object independent
of historical context and as a unified whole that reflected the unified sensibility of
the artist. T.S. Eliot, though not explicitly associated with the movement,
expressed a similar critical-aesthetic philosophy in his essays on John Donne
and the metaphysical poets, writers who Eliot believed experienced a complete
integration of thought and feeling. New Critics like Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe
Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and W.K. Wimsatt placed a similar focus on the
metaphysical poets and poetry in general, a genre well suited to New Critical
practice. “New Criticism” aimed at bringing a greater intellectual rigor to literary
studies, confining itself to careful scrutiny of the text alone and the formal
structures of paradox, ambiguity, irony, and metaphor, among others. “New
Criticism” was fired by the conviction that their readings of poetry would yield a
humanizing influence on readers and thus counter the alienating tendencies of
modern, industrial life. “New Criticism” in this regard bears an affinity to the
Southern Agrarian movement whose manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, contained
essays by two New Critics, Ransom and Warren. Perhaps the enduring legacy
of “New Criticism” can be found in the college classroom, in which the verbal
texture of the poem on the page remains a primary object of literary study.

5. Marxism and Critical Theory

Marxist literary theories tend to focus on the representation of class
conflict as well as the reinforcement of class distinctions through the medium of
literature. Marxist theorists use traditional techniques of literary analysis but
subordinate aesthetic concerns to the final social and political meanings of
literature. Marxist theorist often champion authors sympathetic to the working
classes and authors whose work challenges economic equalities found in
capitalist societies. In keeping with the totalizing spirit of Marxism, literary
theories arising from the Marxist paradigm have not only sought new ways of
understanding the relationship between economic production and literature, but
all cultural production as well. Marxist analyses of society and history have had a profound
effect on literary theory and practical criticism, most notably in the
development of “New Historicism” and “Cultural Materialism
The Frankfurt School of philosophers, including most notably Max
Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse—after their emigration to
the United States—played a key role in introducing Marxist assessments of
culture into the mainstream of American academic life. These thinkers became
associated with what is known as “Critical theory,” one of the constituent
components of which was a critique of the instrumental use of reason in
advanced capitalist culture. “Critical theory” held to a distinction between the
high cultural heritage of Europe and the mass culture produced by capitalist
societies as an instrument of domination. “Critical theory” sees in the structure
of mass cultural forms—jazz, Hollywood film, advertising—a replication of the
structure of the factory and the workplace. Creativity and cultural production in
advanced capitalist societies were always already co-opted by the
entertainment needs of an economic system that requires sensory stimulation
and recognizable cliché and suppressed the tendency for sustained
deliberation.
6. Structuralism
“Structuralism” sought to bring to literary studies a set of objective
criteria for analysis and a new intellectual rigor. “Structuralism” can be viewed
as an extension of “Formalism” in that that both “Structuralism” and “Formalism”
devoted their attention to matters of literary form (i.e. structure) rather than
social or historical content; and that both bodies of thought were intended to put
the study of literature on a scientific, objective basis. “Structuralism” relied
initially on the ideas of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure. Like Plato,
Saussure regarded the signifier (words, marks, symbols) as arbitrary and
unrelated to the concept, the signified, to which it referred. Within the way a
particular society uses language and signs, meaning was constituted by a
system of “differences” between units of the language. Particular meanings
were of less interest than the underlying structures of signification that made
meaning itself possible, often expressed as an emphasis on “langue” rather than
“parole.” “Structuralism” was to be a metalanguage, a language about
languages, used to decode actual languages, or systems of signification. The
work of the “Formalist” Roman Jakobson contributed to “Structuralist” thought,
and the more prominent Structuralists included Claude Levi-Strauss in
anthropology, Tzvetan Todorov, A.J. Greimas, Gerard Genette, and Barthes.
7. Psychoanalytical Criticism
Based on the theories of Freud, this criticism centers on the psychology
of the characters and analyzes character motivation, behavior and actions. If
you can figure out the protagonist’s psychology, then you can use that to
interpret the text. The theory is also used to analyze the author’s state of mind.
There are two main offshoots of this critical theory:
 It investigates the psychology of particular writer focusing how an author’s
biographical situations affect or influence their selection of theme and use
of literary techniques.
 It analyzes fictional characters using the concepts, terms and methods of
psychological theories.
8. New Historicism Criticism
Here, you research the historical time period and discuss the work
within its historical context. This theory looks at the cultural makeup of a
certain era and the ideas and values that define that era. The text serves as a
“retelling of history” and, if viewed as a historical document, can supply a
radically different viewpoint than what is commonly known about an event, era
and/or person. New Historicism also provides cultural and historical critique as
well as helping the reader to find new meanings in a text.
“New Historicism,” a term coined by Stephen Greenblatt, designates a
body of theoretical and interpretive practices that began largely with the study
of early modern literature in the United States. “New Historicism” in America
had been somewhat anticipated by the theorists of “Cultural Materialism” in
Britain, which, in the words of their leading advocate, Raymond Williams
describes “the analysis of all forms of signification, including quite centrally
writing, within the actual means and conditions of their production.”
According to “New Historicism,” the circulation of literary and non-
literary texts produces relations of social power within a culture. New
Historicist thought differs from traditional historicism in literary studies in
several crucial ways. Rejecting traditional historicism’s premise of neutral
inquiry, “New Historicism” accepts the necessity of making historical value
judgments. According to “New Historicism,” we can only know the textual
history of the past because it is “embedded,” a key term, in the textuality of the
present and its concerns. Text and context are less clearly distinct in New
Historicist practice.

9. Post-Colonial Criticism

Using this critical method, you will analyze issues that are caused by
centuries of colonialism, like England’s economic role in India and Africa in the
1800 and 1900s. This theory includes the dynamics of racism and Third World
politics. If you applied this theory to “The Things They Carried,” you would
research Vietnam as a former colony of France and how/why the United
States, as a powerful and wealthy country, became involved in a civil war
there.
10. Gender Studies and Queer Theory
Gender theory came to the forefront of the theoretical scene first as
feminist theory but has subsequently come to include the investigation of all
gender and sexual categories and identities. Feminist gender theory followed
slightly behind the reemergence of political feminism in the United States and
Western Europe during the 1960s. Political feminism of the so-called “second
wave” had as its emphasis practical concerns with the rights of women in
contemporary societies, women’s identity, and the representation of women in
media and culture. These causes converged with early literary feminist
practice, characterized by Elaine Showalter as “gynocriticism,” which
emphasized the study and canonical inclusion of works by female authors as
well as the depiction of women in male-authored canonical texts.
Feminist gender theory is postmodern in that it challenges the
paradigms and intellectual premises of western thought, but also takes an
activist stance by proposing frequent interventions and alternative
epistemological positions meant to change the social order. In the context of
postmodernism, gender theorists, led by the work of Judith Butler, initially
viewed the category of “gender” as a human construct enacted by a vast
repetition of social performance. The biological distinction between man and
woman eventually came under the same scrutiny by theorists who reached a
similar conclusion: the sexual categories are products of culture and as such
help create social reality rather than simply reflect it.