Perhaps most importantly, your interpretation will rely on your understanding and experience of the world you live in, on the assumptions and ideas that you take so for granted that you rarely question them. Your interpretation relies on your presuppositions , whether you are conscious of them or not.
Every body has presuppositions. As you know from your own experience, people make different interpretations of the novels, plays and poems they read and, of course, of the films and TV programmes they see, songs they hear and so on. For example, there are ways of interpretation influenced by explicitly political concerns and presuppositions; there are ways that have developed in response to concerns with ethnicity, gender and sexuality.
There are interpretations of texts that rely only on a deep knowledge of the historical period of the work in question and methods that rely on philosophical ideas about the nature of language and of how we understand reality. There are ways of interpreting literature that put ecological concerns to the fore and ways that have developed from psychology and psychoanalysis.
More than this, since there are lots of different forms of interpretation, we can also compare and contrast them and the presuppositions which underlie them. Each approach will show up things the other approaches miss. This encourages us to think about how we interpret, what happens when we interpret in different ways and how different presuppositions affect how we read texts. To reflect this all this, I have adapted my diagram see diagram 2. The arrows between the reader and the text represent the near-infinite different ways of interpreting texts, and different understandings of those texts that these produce.
The arrow that points to all the other arrows represents hermeneutics, comparing the different ways of interpreting and their presuppositions. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. Show More. Related Documents Value Of Studying Literature That experience is something that can humble us and change how we act for the better. Read More. Words: - Pages: 5. Words: - Pages: 3. Words: - Pages: 7. Words: - Pages: 4. Narrative Fiction Analysis For example, women have been an important role as they have worked hard for their independence and rights.
Summary Of C. Structural Reading Definition Reading a sentence consists of finding a way to interpret what thought is being expressed. Related Topics. New Historicist thought differs from traditional historicism in literary studies in several crucial ways. Text and context are less clearly distinct in New Historicist practice. Texts are examined with an eye for how they reveal the economic and social realities, especially as they produce ideology and represent power or subversion.
Afro-Caribbean and African writers—Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe—have made significant early contributions to the theory and practice of ethnic criticism that explores the traditions, sometimes suppressed or underground, of ethnic literary activity while providing a critique of representations of ethnic identity as found within the majority culture. Ethnic and minority literary theory emphasizes the relationship of cultural identity to individual identity in historical circumstances of overt racial oppression.
More recently, scholars and writers such as Henry Louis Gates, Toni Morrison, and Kwame Anthony Appiah have brought attention to the problems inherent in applying theoretical models derived from Euro-centric paradigms that is, structures of thought to minority works of literature while at the same time exploring new interpretive strategies for understanding the vernacular common speech traditions of racial groups that have been historically marginalized by dominant cultures.
Moreover, theorists like Homi K. The work of Gayatri C. Postcolonial theory has brought fresh perspectives to the role of colonial peoples—their wealth, labor, and culture—in the development of modern European nation states.
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 s.
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.
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. Gender theory achieved a wide readership and acquired much its initial theoretical rigor through the work of a group of French feminist theorists that included Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and Julia Kristeva, who while Bulgarian rather than French, made her mark writing in French.
French feminist thought is based on the assumption that the Western philosophical tradition represses the experience of women in the structure of its ideas. Their work beyond the descriptive stage becomes an intervention in the history of theoretical discourse, an attempt to alter the existing categories and systems of thought that found Western rationality.
French feminism, and perhaps all feminism after Beauvoir, has been in conversation with the psychoanalytic revision of Freud in the work of Jacques Lacan. Masculine gender theory as a separate enterprise has focused largely on social, literary, and historical accounts of the construction of male gender identities. Vince Brewton Email: vbrewton unanov. What Is Literary Theory? 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.
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.
References and Further Reading a. General Works on Theory Culler, Jonathan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, During, Simon. The Cultural Studies Reader. London: Routledge, Eagleton, Terry.
Literary Theory. Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Postcolonial Criticism. New York: Addison, Wesley, Longman, Rice, Philip and Waugh, Patricia. Modern Literary Theory: A Reader. Richter, David H. Bedford Books: Boston, Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, Literary and Cultural Theory Adorno, Theodor.
It also includes the study of the laws that determine the development of the various aspects of artistic-literary creation, laws related to the development of different genres, literary language, versification, and argument. In postmodernism, the evolution of literary theory can be roughly divided according to two dominant impulses.
According to the first, the primary goal of theory was to break with the idea of totality. Proponents of this view understood structure as a notion without determinant subject, and often privileged the function of literature itself as an artificial or highly reflexive form of representation by which language itself is unmasked as historically and ideologically motivated.
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