Literary Theory Overview

Literary Theory

• Literary theory explores the methods we use to understand literature.
• It doesn't define the meaning of literature, but explains how we can interpret it.
• Literary Theory tackles the relationship between the author and the work.
• It explores the significance of race, class, and gender in literature, both in authors' lives and within the text.
• It examines the role of historical context and linguistic and unconscious elements influencing texts.
• It traces the history and evolution of genres like narrative, drama, and lyric, including the rise of novels and short stories.
• It investigates the importance of literary structure.
• It explores the degree to which texts are shaped by culture, and how they create culture.

Classical Theory

• Plato's "Mimesis" suggests that art imitates reality.
• Literature should be judged by its accuracy in reflecting reality (good if real, bad if it hides the truth).
• Horace believed literature's purpose is to teach or entertain.
• Longinus proposed three styles: low, middle, and high.
• There's a fourth style called "sublime", which is considered the highest form of beauty.

Historical-Biographical Approach

• Historical criticism examines the social, cultural, and intellectual contexts of a literary work, including the author's biography and social environment.
• It investigates the period's impact on the work, also considering how meaning changes through time.
• It explores how time and place of creation affect the meaning of the work.
• Biographical criticism emphasizes the author's life experiences, recognizing how they can influence their work.
• Understanding the author's life can aid in understanding the text.
• Facts about the author's life are used to interpret the work, focusing always on the literary work itself.

Romantic Approach

• This approach focuses on the artist and their relationship with the work.
• Poetry is an expression rather than a mimetic art.
• It emphasizes the artist's state of mind and individual, subjective experiences.
• Recurring themes include imagination, idealism, inspiration, intuition, and individualism.
• It often criticizes the past, stresses sensitivity, the writer's isolation, and celebrates nature.

New American Criticism

• This approach focuses on the language of literary texts.
• It emphasizes the text's internal structure, form, and style.
• It shifts the focus from external factors (like the author's life or historical context) to the text itself.
• Misconception - It is assumed that creativity in language is specific to literary writing.
• Misconception – It is assumed that stylistic analyses are purely about analyzing language, when actually they aim to gain insights into linguistic structure and function.

Stylistics

• Stylistics analyzes the language of texts, particularly literature, but also encompasses other forms of communication.
• It examines language's role in conveying meaning and creating effects.
• It explores language in its context, acknowledging that utterances are bound by time, place, culture, and cognition.
• It involves exploring language, especially creativity in language use.
• It sheds light on language systems by examining texts where rules are bent, stretched, or broken.
• Stylistics aims to describe formal features of texts to understand their function and meaning, or relate literary effects to their linguistic causes.
• Stylistic analysis should be rigorous, retrievable, and relevant.

Transitivity

• Transitivity focuses on how language constructs meaning through verbs and their participants.
• It explores the way people are depicted as acting and being acted upon.
• It asks: Who are the actors? Who are acted upon? What are the processes involved?
• Halliday believes reality is comprised of processes of going on, happening, doing, sensing, meaning, being, and becoming.
• Transitivity focuses on individual clauses, examining the actors, acted upon, and processes involved.

Types of Processes

• Material processes involve actions and events, with an actor and a goal (the entity affected).
• Mental processes include perception, cognition, affection, and desire.
• Relational processes describe relationships between entities, often expressed with the verb "be" or copular verbs.

Minor Processes

• Behavioral processes represent outward expression of inner states, actions, and feelings.
• Verbal processes represent the act of saying, involving a sayer, receiver, and the content of the statement.
• Existential processes express states of being, existing, or happening, typically using the verb "be".

Components of Situations

• Each situation type is composed of a process, its participants, and circumstances.
• The process is realized by a verb and describes the action or state.
• Participants are represented by nominal groups and answer questions about who is doing what.
• Circumstances are represented by adverbial groups and include the manner, time, place, reason, and association of the action or state.

This quiz delves into literary theory and classical critiques, examining methods for interpreting literature and the cultural contexts that shape texts. It emphasizes the relationship between authors and their works, alongside discussions on race, class, and gender in literature.