Literary Theories or Approaches: Included in K-12 Senior High School Curriculum Core Subject: Reading and Writing HUMSS Specialized: Creative Nonfiction

1. ITERAR
THEORIES
L Y
Andrea A. Tiangco
12th Grade-Isaac Newton
Humanities and Social Sciences: Creative Nonfiction

2. • Systematic study of the nature of
literature and of the methods for
analyzing literature
• Considerations of intellectual history,
moral philosophy, social prophecy, and
other interdisciplinary themes which are
of relevance to the ways humans interpret
meaning
• As a consequence, the word “theory” has
become an umbrella term for a variety of
scholarly approaches to reading texts.
LITERARY THEORY

3. One of the fundamental questions of literary theory is:
What is literature?

4. Theorists must
acknowledge that
texts do not have a
singular, fixed
meaning which is
deemed “correct”.

5. COMMON LITERARY THEORIES
1.Biographical
2.New Criticism
3.Formalism
4.Structuralism
5.Marxism
6.Feminism
7.New Historicism
8.Deconstruction
9.Reader response
10.Psychoanalytic
11.Post-colonialism
12.Queer theory
13.Romanticism

6. BIOGRAPHICAL
• Analyzes a writer’s biography to
show the relationship between
the author’s life and their works
of literature
• A critical method that “sees a
literary work chiefly, if not
exclusively, as a reflection of its
author’s life and times.
• Dates back at least to the
Renaissance period
• All literary works are situated in
specific biographical contexts
from which they are generated
• Rejects the concept that literary
studies should be limited to the
internal or formal characteristics
of a literary work
• Insists that literary studies
includes a knowledge of the
contexts in which the work was
created

7. FORMALISM
• Study of a text without taking
into account any outside
influence
• Rejects notions of culture or
societal influence, authorship,
and content
• Focuses on modes, genres,
discourse, and forms
• Analyzes, interprets, or evaluates
the inherent features of a text
• Rose to prominence in the early
20th century as a reaction against
romanticist theories
• Places the text itself back into
the spotlight to show how the
text was indebted to forms

8. NEW CRITICISM
• Formalist movement that
dominated American literary
criticism in the middle decades
of the 20th century
• Emphasized close reading,
particularly of poetry, to discover
how a work of literature
functioned as a self-contained,
self-referential aesthetic object
• Excludes the reader’s response,
the author’s intention, historical
and biographical contexts, and
moralistic bias from analysis
• Believed the structure and
meaning of the text were
intimately connected and should
not be analyzed separately

9. STRUCTURALISM
• Relates the text to a larger
structure, which may be a
particular genre, a range of
intertextual connections, a model
of a universal narrative structure,
or a system of recurrent patterns
or motifs
• The literary banter of a text can
lie only in new structure, rather
than in the specifics of character
development.
• Argues that there must be a
structure in every text, which
explains why it is easier for
experienced readers than for
non-experienced readers to
interpret a text
• Everything that is written seems
to be governed by specific rules

10. MARXISM
• Literary works are viewed as
reflections of the social
institutions from which they
originate
• Literature itself is a social
institution and has a specific
ideological function, based on
the background and ideology of
the author.
• Aims to explain the literary work
more fully: a sensitive attention
to its forms, styles and,
meanings
• Determines whether its social
content or its literary form are
progressive
• Analyzes the class constructs
demonstrated in the literature

11. FEMINISM
• Formed by feminist theory, or
more broadly, by the politics of
feminism
• Uses feminist principles and
ideology to critique the language
of literature
• Analyzes and describes the ways
in which literature portrays the
narrative of male dominion
• Seeks to interpret symbolism of
women’s writing so that it will not
be lost by the male point of view
• Intends to analyze women writers
and their writings from a female
perspective, and increase
awareness of the sexual politics
of language and style

12. NEW HISTORICISM
• Aims to understand intellectual
history through literature, and
literature through its cultural
context
• First developed in the 1980’s
• Indebted to Marxism, but takes a
more nuance view of power
extending throughout society
• Sees society as consisting of
texts relating to other texts
• Bases assumptions on the
connection between texts and
their historical context

13. DECONSTRUCTION
• Consists in conducting readings
of texts with an ear to what runs
counter to the structural unity or
intended sense of a particular
sense
• Aims to expose that the object of
language is complex, unstable,
or impossible
• “words have meaning only
because of contrast effects with
other words…”-Rorty

14. READER RESPONSE
• Focuses on the reader and their
experience in contrast to other
theories that focus on the author
• Recognizes the reader as an
active agent who imparts real
existence to the work and
completes its meaning through
interpretation
• Argues that literature should be
viewed as a performing art in
which each reader creates their
own, possibly unique, text
related performance

15. PSYCHOANALYTIC
• Influenced by the tradition of
psychoanalysis begun by
Sigmund Freud
• Psychoanalysis of the author or
of a particularly interesting
character in a given work
• May view characters as
psychological case studies,
attempting to identify concepts
as the Oedipus complex,
Freudian slips, and demonstrates
how they influence the thoughts
and behaviors of the characters
or the author

16. POST COLONIALISM
• Focuses on the influences of colonialism in literature,
especially regarding the historical conflict resulting from the
exploitation of less developed countries and indigenous
peoples by Western nations

17. QUEER THEORY
• Examines, questions, and criticizes the
role of gender identity and sexuality in
literature

18. ROMANTICISM
• A philosophy defining aesthetic value as
the primary goal in understanding
literature

19. REFERENCES:
• Sullivan, P. “Reception Moments”, Modern Literary Theory, and the
Teaching of Literature. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy pp.
568-577
• Searle, J. (1990) The Storm Over the University, The New York
Review of Books
• “Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism”. Purdue OWL
© Andrea Tiangco, 2018