Alright, with the preamble out of the way, let’s get to learning about literary theory!
You can find the rest of this series here:
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 0: What am I talking about?
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 1: What is Literary Theory?
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 2: The Hermeneutic Circle
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 3: Formalism
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 4: Structuralism
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 5: Deconstruction
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 6: Psychoanalytic Literary Theory
This series of posts is meant to stand on its own, but if you’d like to follow along with the course material, you can find the Yale Open Course page here and YouTube video lectures here. I found the video lectures to be difficult to follow, so I’m working from the book based on this course’s transcript, Theory of Literature (The Open Yale Courses Series). This book is really just a cleaned up version of the course’s transcript with nearly identical text and the same lecture and reading assignment structure, so either avenue works. You should also acquire The Critical Tradition Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends for the reading assignments. Again, if you’d prefer to just get the “quick” version and my commentary, there’s no need to look elsewhere, but note that I won’t be nearly as thorough or detailed: I’m interested in plundering this field to gain tools for my own use, not in learning academic history.
Session 1 – What is literary theory and why do we need it?
Before getting too deep into things, we should build a foundational context for ourselves. First off: what do we mean by “literary theory”? Note that the course’s title is “Introduction to the Theory of Literature”, but “Theory of Literature” and “Literary Theory” are the same thing. Now, when we talk about “literature” in this context, we’re talking about “any collection of written work”; we are not talking solely about prose fiction, drama, or poetry.: we are also discussing works of philosophy, religion, and sociology, politics, etc. “Theory” here means what you’d expect, but to really drive this home, we are not talking about any particular application or even any single conception: we’re talking about a collection of different perspectives which have been in constant flux for a long time and will continue to shift in the future.
We’re also not talking about literary criticism. Or, we’re not only talking about it. Our purpose here is not to figure out how to write better book reviews. Literary theory isn’t much concerned with how to evaluate or appreciate literature. Our purpose here is… frankly, kind of hard to define at this point. We’re considering what literature is, how we relate to it, and how we should relate to it.
The other important point to know before we really get started is that literary theory is a moving target. This field came about in response to specific questions and its course has been shaped be specific trends in thinking. To talk of “literary theory” is generally to talk about the state of these concepts and discussions only for the past century or so, but the field has roots going back much further. In particular, we need to look at religious exegesis and hermeneutics, which are direct predecessors to the modern field of literary theory. Both of these terms refer to interpretation of religious ideas: exegesis specifically refers to interpretation of text whereas hermeneutics refers to written, verbal, and non-verbal communication. Humans have been trying to figure out religion for pretty much as long as there have been humans. This took different forms in different cultures – most Americans are probably at least vaguely familiar with biblical exegesis and maybe Rabbinic literature like Talmud and midrash – but I doubt that any culture has ever lacked some similar practice of examining their own religious ideas.
But, that’s all pretty dry. I think it’s more illustrative to put ourselves into the position of a person somewhere in the past. For most times and places, you would have some religious beliefs. What do you do with them? Do you trust that your local religious authority has interpreted them correctly and treat their interpretation as fact and as the guidelines to live your life by? Historically, that’s a pretty popular way to personally engage with religion! I mean, why have a priest if they’re not going to figure that shit out for you: you’ve, statistically speaking, got thread to spin. Well, if that’s what you go with, then how does that priest determine what to tell you? If you ask modern popular media, you might think that it’s a deliberate scam, but most people throughout history believed their religion and were at least making some attempt to interpret things “correctly“. So, then, how does this priest interpret things? Maybe they receive formal training from someone else… but how did they figure it out? At some point, someone has to look at the scripture, listen to the songs, or find a mediator to get something textual and then they need to “read” that and figure out what it means. Well, how do they do that?
Bear in mind that this is important. Depending on the culture, you might be trying to ensure that the harvest goes well, win a god’s favor in the coming war, determine how to best prepare food, or provide guidelines for running a successful business. Maybe you’re trying to lay down the correct rules for castes and provide guidance for those in the ruling caste. Perhaps you’re more concerned with saving everyone’s soul from eternal damnation. This is really important stuff that most humans took (and continue to take) very seriously, at least as seriously as any modern topic in science or politics.
Maybe you’re not a priest or someone who listens to a priest. Let’s jump perspectives again. Now we’re someone who sees religion as something to be engaged with personally, like an early Protestant. You don’t trust the church to interpret your religion for you: you want to interpret it for yourself. But, how do you do that? You don’t have any training; you can’t even read the source artifacts used to produce the scripture that you are familiar with (if you can even read that.) You might not even know how the Bible was compiled or that there was ever a decision made to include some works and exclude others. Getting to the actual text, how do you interpret it? Is it all literal or can some of it be metaphorical? How historical is it: are the stories included to document a real history, as lessons on how to live life, or as clues to greater metaphysical truths? What does it all mean to you, personally, and where do you fit into it? How do you deal with inconsistencies or when your interpretation is tested by reality?
Maybe you just figure it out the best you can on your own, ask around to see what your friends and family think, and go on with your life… or maybe you keep thinking about these topics until you realize that some of these threads lead all the way to the foundation of your worldview. What does “real” mean when you’re considering topics that are extremely important but also cannot be directly seen or proven. Faith is great, but faith in what? If there are inconsistencies, who’s to say that what we see is “more real” than what we believe? Human senses are flawed and can make mistakes: do you want to bet your soul on your eyes and ears or on something more profound? Personal experiences with the divine can be intensely powerful, but how can you tell whether they’re really connections to God and not tricks from the devil… or just a hallucination. How can you determine how you relate to your scripture without first having a solid definition of yourself and your own consciousness? Let’s first at least establish whether you are “real”. Well, what is real?
We’re trying to get to literary theory here, right, so let’s try to skip over as much of ontology and epistemology as we can. Maybe we can take a shortcut: the part of you that is thinking is definitely real, or else how is the thinking happening? Cogito, ergo sum. Applied to our engagement with scripture: something is reading the text and trying to make sense of it and that something and that something is the same something that asks the question “Do I exist?” In any case, either we exist and are having a real sensory experience… or meaning is too strange for us to get into right now. Let’s just assume that we exist and that at least our senses as we perceive them are “real”.
Whether our sensory experience reflects an objective reality that we are engaging with or not is another question: even if our thoughts are real, are these reflections of an objective world? Are we looking out through a window into the same world that everyone else sees, or is our presumably real thought process just dreaming? Or maybe something in-between? Even if there is an objective world out there, what’s the nature of our engagement with it? Is it possible to know things as they truly are? Can we know a “thing in itself“?
You can start to go a bit crazy if you go this deep. No, really, this line of thought quickly brings us to question our sanity. It can also lead us to question the soundness of our social order and the relationship between the ideology of the ruling class and the subordinate class. It may feel as though we’re straying too far from our original point, but these questions are still real and still important. It’s telling that “Freudo-Marxism” has its own Wikipedia page and these were both figures that brought some of these questions out of a space of pure theory and into a space where everyday people had a stock in them. What’s more, we’re not merely talking about our eternal souls or the divine order of the world here, now we’re talking about medicine, economics, and politics too. Hell, maybe we’re starting to wonder whether anything matters at all.
A perfectly natural response to this line of thought is to wonder whether I’m perhaps a bit too stoned to have a serious discussion right now. This is some really skeptical, suspicious shit. Things have been working just fine without many of us digging too deep into these questions for a long time, right? Do any of these concepts really change your day-to-day, either for our hypothetical Protestant or for you yourself? I mean, it’s 2022 and we still have a rich diversity of religions and worldviews. Catholicism survived the Protestant reformation and Abrahamic religion as a whole survived Darwin. Clearly most people aren’t really examining their beliefs…
Well, except that people absolutely did (and do!) care. Whether our hypothetical Protestant is from the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, or even 21st century, there’s a good chance that they’re heavily invested in figuring out how to reconcile their scripture with a continually changing world. I get the impression that some atheists think that Christians don’t critically analyze their beliefs, but have you talked to one of them? You can think that Christian apologetics are full of shit, but you can’t argue that just a massive amount of energy is spent trying to reconcile scripture with reality. Even if we ultimately decide to abandon our scripture, that doesn’t solve our problems at all: we still need to figure out a way to interpret the world, perhaps a method rooted in our own personal agency as human beings. I’ve definitely met enough Rick and Morty fans to know that 21st century atheists and nihilists don’t have things figured out any better than our hypothetical Protestant.
This is where our first session leaves off: we have a bunch of questions and not a lot of answers. What I’ve hopefully established is that we really need a way to reason about how we relate to all this confusing shit we have written down, otherwise known as “literature”. We can pivot our focus towards novels, poems, films, and even video games too, but much of the historical drive behind this theory came from a need to interpret religion and philosophy.
With that established, let’s move on to the state of literary theory recently, over the past century. Let’s talk about authors.
Session 2 – What is an author and should I even care?
If you’re following along with the reading assignments, now’s the time for Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” and Foucault’s “What Is an Author”, both in The Critical Tradition. These were published in 1967 and 1969.
Okay, so, last session got pretty far out there: let’s take things down a notch, at least for now. Let’s think about how we read things. When you read a book, watch a movie, or play a game, does it matter who made it, when they made it, and how it was made?
I imagine that your answer is “it depends”. If it’s something pretty old, then some context from the time might help, if only to understand different idioms. If it’s something really weird or something that you’re really into, then it might not be necessary, but you could just be curious. I talked a fair bit about authors in my post on Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories. Did I have to? Well, probably not, but knowing a bit about M. R. James definitely added some additional context. Knowing about Lovecraft certainly wasn’t necessary to understand the stories themselves – he had nothing to do with them – but it enabled me to look at the stories not just as stories but as a particular moment in ghost stories and weird fiction historically. How about The Matrix Ressurections? Did I need to know anything about Lana Wachowski to understand the film? I mean, I did to understand the scene where a designer makes the claim: “Obviously The Matrix is about trans politics”. Then again, maybe you feel as though the movie suffered for referencing itself too often; I really liked the movie specifically for stuff like that, but maybe some people hated it? It really feels like whether the author matters to the work is a matter of circumstance, goal, and taste.
So, knowing about the author may be useful in some cases… but are there cases where it’s actually bad? Do we all really want to know Lovecraft’s views on race if we want to enjoy his stories? I used to love Cosby’s “Chicken Heart” routine, but I’m not sure if I do anymore. How many films and shows have been ruined by what we’ve all learned from the “Me Too” movement? Ever read Lincoln’s Lyceum address? How about the Lincoln-Douglas debates? Does anyone want Lincoln’s views on BLM?
It’s not all about cancelling sex criminals and racists, of course. Sometimes it’s just about disliking arguments from authority. In law, we often need to fill in some gaps by considering the law’s intent: should this be based on the modern conception of it or on the author’s original intent? In philosophy, the course of a theory changes over time, often splitting into branches based on rival interpretations. Does it matter which branch the theory’s founder would have preferred, or can we move past them? If it does matter, does it only matter in that it provides us some historical context or should we treat them as a visionary whose opinions are still valuable long after they’re dead? If we’re being really cynical, maybe we should consider whether the people who think that the author matters are only saying that because it happens to support their position.
The course material states that the 60s and 70s were a period of particularly heated political discourse in American universities… I always hear this, but honestly, I kind of have the impression that political discourse is always heated in American universities and whether any particular time was uniquely heated feels more of a construction of when the speaker was most active in school. If you’re not paying attention, that’s an example of me contradicting the content of this lecture based on my perception of the lecturer himself: right or wrong, I’m definitely mindful of the author here. Regardless, the two reading assignments for this session are both from the late 60s and have a generally antagonistic view towards authors. After all, authors are a form of “authority” and holding them in higher regard than readers definitely feels at least a bit elitist. This certainly rings true to me, personally. I mean, I’m definitely cutting out a lot of name-dropping from the lectures here: does it matter to anyone reading this which of our reading assignment authors asked whether Shakespeare’s name would change its meaning if we discovered that he didn’t really live in the house we thought he lived in?
Well, sometimes it can be convenient for demarcating the work. It was Foucault, by the way, and he also made the point I’m explaining right this moment. Using a founder’s name can be convenient for referring to a broad theory. We certainly could come up with a different name for “Marxism“, but the term serves just fine. On the other hand, having an author is also convenient when we find the work transgressive and want to serve punishments. Hey, Marxism is a good example for that too. Sometimes we also want authors when we want to show how great our side is by demonstrating that our ideology’s authors are impressive, virtuous people. For better or worse, one role of an author is as a “founder of discourse”, who demarcates the discussion starting with their ideas.
That’s one role of an author, but it’s kind of specific to just a small number of people behind large theories… and, honestly, I’m not even sure I buy that. Why not just come up with a different term that refers specifically to the theory or discourse, rather than the individual? It seems to me that Foucault was just trying to come up with a reason to keep his own name in the running without coming off as a hypocrite. After all, most of the “great men” who “founded” various forms of discourse were really only one of many people who were involved. Fuck ’em. To be perfectly honest, I always feel a little angry when I hear someone describe themself primarily as the follower of some person. Every time Chidi mentioned that he was a Kantian, I cringed a little. But, I really hate labels in general. This perspective came up during this lecture as well, where I learned the phrase “subject prison”. Why allow yourself to be bound up by some subject – any subject – that isn’t your own mercurial self? Even within this view, however, there are some variations. Is it more important to discover autonomous subjectivity or to discover an “effacement of the ego” or freedom from self-hood within the instability of any and all subject positions? I hope we have the time to come back to this later, but let’s move on for now.
Linguistically, the author is really just the person who writes “I”. Hypothetically, does the author even need to be a real person? Even if a person is transcribing the words, are they still the “author” if they’re merely transcribing words generated by some simulacrum with no original? Can we even tell the difference? This might seem a bit abstract, but it comes up in science fiction all the time. Did everyone catch season three of Westworld? What if a writer isn’t hearing the words of a machine but of a god?
Were the writers of sacred scripture the “authors”, or just the transcribers? Is there a difference between “inspiration” and “puppetry”?
Let’s get even more mundane: am I the “author” of this sentence, or merely a puppet of determinism? If it is determinism… does it do any good to recognize it as such, or would we be much happier not knowing? Well, if all we’re concerned with is learning the context necessary to properly understand a work, maybe this actually makes things easier! Rather than knowing the author as a person, we can just look up the various factors that determined them. If the work is popular, we can probably find that on Wikipedia: much easier than getting to know an actual person. In fact, this really is how we often treat authors. How many times have you looked up some bit of media to find out what year it came out or what the author’s nationality or political party was?
As will be common in this series, we’re not going to end this session with many answers, but we do have more questions, and we’re starting to learn some ways to think about these questions. Maybe, once we’ve finished the course, we can come back to the beginning and start finding some answers. I wonder if there’s a word to describe this that we’ll talk about more next post.