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42-406: Textuality is not just about the written word; it also comprises the placement of the words and the reader’s interpretation. There is not a set formula to describe a text’s textuality; it is not a simple procedure. This summary is true even though the interpretation that a reader develops from that text may decide the identity and the definitive meanings of that text. Textuality, as a literary theory ,

84-421: A close reading . In fact, as much contention as there is between formalism and later schools, they share the tenet that the author's interpretation of a work is no more inherently meaningful than any other. Listed below are some of the most commonly identified schools of literary theory, along with their major authors: Post-structuralism Post-structuralism is a philosophical movement that questions

126-583: A love–hate relationship with structuralism developed among many leading French thinkers in the 1960s. The period was marked by the rebellion of students and workers against the state in May 1968 . In a 1966 lecture titled " Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences ", Jacques Derrida presented a thesis on an apparent rupture in intellectual life. Derrida interpreted this event as

168-1018: A " text ". However, some theorists acknowledge that these texts do not have a singular, fixed meaning which is deemed "correct". Since theorists of literature often draw on very heterogeneous traditions of Continental philosophy and the philosophy of language , any classification of their approaches is only an approximation. There are many types of literary theory, which take different approaches to texts. Broad schools of theory that have historically been important include historical and biographical criticism , New Criticism , formalism , Russian formalism , and structuralism , post-structuralism , Marxism or historical materialism , feminism and French feminism , post-colonialism , new historicism , deconstruction , reader-response criticism , narratology and psychoanalytic criticism. The different interpretive and epistemological perspectives of different schools of theory often arise from, and so give support to, different moral and political commitments. For instance,

210-488: A "decentering" of the former intellectual cosmos. Instead of progress or divergence from an identified centre, Derrida described this "event" as a kind of "play." A year later, in 1967, Roland Barthes published " The Death of the Author ", in which he announced a metaphorical event: the "death" of the author as an authentic source of meaning for a given text. Barthes argued that any literary text has multiple meanings and that

252-565: A colloquium at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 titled "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man", to which such French philosophers as Jacques Derrida , Roland Barthes , and Jacques Lacan were invited to speak. Derrida's lecture at that conference, " Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences ", was one of the earliest to propose some theoretical limitations to Structuralism, and to attempt to theorize on terms that were clearly no longer structuralist. The element of "play" in

294-419: A metalanguage, symbols replace words and phrases. Insofar as one metalanguage is required for one explanation of the first-order language, another may be required, so metalanguages may actually replace first-order languages. Barthes exposes how this structuralist system is regressive; orders of language rely upon a metalanguage by which it is explained, and therefore deconstruction itself is in danger of becoming

336-484: A metalanguage, thus exposing all languages and discourse to scrutiny. Barthes' other works contributed deconstructive theories about texts. The occasional designation of post-structuralism as a movement can be tied to the fact that mounting criticism of Structuralism became evident at approximately the same time that Structuralism became a topic of interest in universities in the United States. This interest led to

378-440: A post-structuralist period: Some observers from outside of the post-structuralist camp have questioned the rigour and legitimacy of the field. American philosopher John Searle suggested in 1990: "The spread of 'poststructuralist' literary theory is perhaps the best-known example of a silly but non-catastrophic phenomenon." Similarly, physicist Alan Sokal in 1997 criticized "the postmodernist /poststructuralist gibberish that

420-665: A profession in the 20th century, but it has historical roots that run as far back as ancient Greece ( Aristotle 's Poetics is an often cited early example), ancient India ( Bharata Muni 's Natya Shastra ), and ancient Rome ( Longinus 's On the Sublime ). In medieval times, scholars in the Middle East ( Al-Jahiz 's al-Bayan wa-'l-tabyin and al-Hayawan , and ibn al-Mu'tazz 's Kitab al-Badi ) and Europe continued to produce works based on literary studies. The aesthetic theories of philosophers from ancient philosophy through

462-467: A relatively simple relationship between language and writing. Jacques Derrida , a leading post-structuralist, questions this relationship, aiming his critique primarily at Ferdinand de Saussure , who, he claims, does not recognize in the relationship between speech and writing "more than a narrow and derivative function". For Derrida, this approach requires putting too much emphasis on speech: Barry says that "one of structuralism's characteristic views

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504-416: A replacement for the older idea in literary criticism of the "work", which is always complete and deliberately authored. A text must necessarily be thought of as incomplete, indeed as missing something crucial that provides the mechanics of understanding. The text is always partially hidden; one word for the hidden part in literary theory is the subtext . The concept of the text in structuralism requires

546-501: A text one would first have to read the complete literary work as a whole; this enables the reader to make supported judgements on the personality and individuality of the text. The text is always hiding something. Although the reading may define and the interpretation may decide, the text does not define or decide. The text rests as operationally and fundamentally indecidable. Roger Webster frequently uses metaphors of ‘weaving’, ‘tissue’, ‘texture’, ‘strands’, and ‘filiation’ when talking about

588-558: A textual community and form a part of the necessary cultural competence of its members", result-texts, "bids that have just been accepted and entered circulation, as well as those that have done so some time ago but are still being considered recent arrivals by their recipients", mediated by an operational memory, "a shared (and internally contradictory) mental space of the cultural community and its various subgroups where texts are produced and processed", which contains different kinds of knowledge, standards and codes shared to different extent by

630-498: A theory or what it means to theorize within/about/alongside literature or other cultural creations. One of the fundamental questions of literary theory is "what is literature ?" and "how should or do we read?" – although some contemporary theorists and literary scholars believe either that "literature" cannot be defined or that it can refer to any use of language . Specific theories are distinguished not only by their methods and conclusions, but even by how they create meaning in

672-456: Is an individual and uncertain skill that will always be read and interpreted in texts in different ways, by different people, and at different times. It is a literary tool that can never be defined like an exact science and that will always be influenced by the writer's life, such as, their upbringing, education, culture, age, religion, gender, and multiple other persuading factors. Textuality can be seen, heard, read, and interacted with. Each of

714-419: Is impossible, because history and culture actually condition the study of underlying structures, and these are subject to biases and misinterpretations. Gilles Deleuze and others saw this impossibility not as a failure or loss, but rather as a cause for "celebration and liberation." A post-structuralist approach argues that to understand an object (a text, for example), one must study both the object itself and

756-400: Is intentionality, the amount of weight given to the author's own opinions about and intentions for a work. For most pre-20th century approaches, the author's intentions are a guiding factor and an important determiner of the "correct" interpretation of texts. The New Criticism was the first school to disavow the role of the author in interpreting texts, preferring to focus on "the text itself" in

798-536: Is now hegemonic in some sectors of the American academy." Literature scholar Norman Holland in 1992 saw post-structuralism as flawed due to reliance on Saussure 's linguistic model, which was seriously challenged by the 1950s and was soon abandoned by linguists: Saussure's views are not held, so far as I know, by modern linguists, only by literary critics and the occasional philosopher. [Strict adherence to Saussure] has elicited wrong film and literary theory on

840-437: Is that which constitutes a text in a particular way. The text is an undecidable (there is an inexistence of an effective or "strict" method of writing or structure). Being textual includes innumerable elements and aspects. Each and every form of text and text in that form of literature embraces and consists of its own individual and personal characteristics; these may include its personality, the individuality of that personality,

882-430: Is the notion that language doesn’t just reflect or record the world: rather, it shapes it, so that how we see is what we see". This is closely linked to " post-structuralism " which is in fact, closely linked also to textuality. And Barry believes that the "post-structuralist maintains that the consequences of this belief are that we enter a universe of radical uncertainty…". Derrida further states: In short, textuality

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924-523: The humanities in modern academia, the latter style of literary scholarship is an offshoot of post-structuralism . Consequently, the word theory became an umbrella term for scholarly approaches to reading texts , some of which are informed by strands of semiotics , cultural studies , philosophy of language , and continental philosophy , often witnessed within Western canon along with some postmodernist theory. The practice of literary theory became

966-433: The systems of knowledge that produced the object. The uncertain boundaries between structuralism and post-structuralism become further blurred by the fact that scholars rarely label themselves as post-structuralists. Some scholars associated with structuralism, such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault , also became noteworthy in post-structuralism. The following are often said to be post-structuralists, or to have had

1008-427: The 18th and 19th centuries are important influences on current literary study. The theory and criticism of literature are tied to the history of literature . Some scholars, both theoretical and anti-theoretical, refer to the 1980s and 1990s debates on the academic merits of theory as "the theory wars ". Proponents and critics of the turn to theory take different (and often conflicting) positions about what counts as

1050-636: The Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye attempted to establish an approach for reconciling historical criticism and New Criticism while addressing concerns of early reader-response and numerous psychological and social approaches. His approach, laid out in his Anatomy of Criticism , was explicitly structuralist, relying on the assumption of an intertextual "order of words" and universality of certain structural types. His approach held sway in English literature programs for several decades but lost favor during

1092-562: The Marxist would say that the New Critical reading did not keep enough. Or a post-structuralist critic might simply avoid the issue by understanding the religious meaning of a poem as an allegory of meaning, treating the poem's references to "God" by discussing their referential nature rather than what they refer to. Such a disagreement cannot be easily resolved, because it is inherent in the radically different terms and goals (that is,

1134-412: The ascendance of post-structuralism. For some theories of literature (especially certain kinds of formalism), the distinction between "literary" and other sorts of texts is of paramount importance. Other schools (particularly post-structuralism in its various forms: new historicism, deconstruction, some strains of Marxism and feminism) have sought to break down distinctions between the two and have applied

1176-489: The author was not the prime source of the work's semantic content. The "Death of the Author," Barthes maintained, was the "Birth of the Reader," as the source of the proliferation of meanings of the text. In Elements of Semiology (1967), Barthes advances the concept of the metalanguage , a systematized way of talking about concepts like meaning and grammar beyond the constraints of a traditional (first-order) language; in

1218-412: The carriers of the culture. According to Raud, this model is complementary to a model of cultural practices, in which the production, distribution and transmission of meaning is regarded in the context of individual participation and activity, while a textuality is necessarily shared and perceived by its carriers to be an objective, albeit constructed, reality. The word text arose within structuralism as

1260-555: The concept of binary opposition , in which frequently-used pairs of opposite-but-related words (concepts) are often arranged in a hierarchy; for example: Enlightenment / Romantic , male/female, speech/writing, rational/emotional, signified/signifier, symbolic/imaginary, and east/west. Post-structuralism rejects the structuralist notion that the dominant word in a pair is dependent on its subservient counterpart, and instead argues that founding knowledge on either pure experience ( phenomenology ) or on systematic structures (structuralism)

1302-448: The definitions of these signs are both valid and fixed, and that the author employing structuralist theory is somehow above and apart from these structures they are describing so as to be able to wholly appreciate them. The rigidity and tendency to categorize intimations of universal truths found in structuralist thinking is a common target of post-structuralist thought, while also building upon structuralist conceptions of reality mediated by

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1344-534: The idea of interpreting media (or the world) within pre-established, socially constructed structures. Structuralism proposes that human culture can be understood by means of a structure that is modeled on language . As a result, there is concrete reality on the one hand, abstract ideas about reality on the other hand, and a "third order" that mediates between the two. A post-structuralist critique, then, might suggest that in order to build meaning out of such an interpretation, one must (falsely) assume that

1386-491: The interrelationship between signs. Writers whose works are often characterised as post-structuralist include Roland Barthes , Jacques Derrida , Michel Foucault , Gilles Deleuze , and Jean Baudrillard , although many theorists who have been called "post-structuralist" have rejected the label. Post-structuralism emerged in France during the 1960s as a movement critiquing structuralism . According to J. G. Merquior ,

1428-469: The objectivity or stability of the various interpretive structures that are posited by structuralism and considers them to be constituted by broader systems of power . Although post-structuralists all present different critiques of structuralism, common themes among them include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of structuralism, as well as an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute its structures. Accordingly, post-structuralism discards

1470-450: The popularity, and so on. The textualities of the text define its characteristics. However, the characteristics are also closely associated with the structure of the text ( Structuralism ). Peter Barry's discussion of textuality notes that "its essence is the belief that things cannot be understood in isolation – they have to be seen in the context of the larger structures they are part of". To form an opinion, criticise, or completely interpret

1512-430: The structure of texts. He also agrees that "instead, the text is a surface over which the reader can range in any number of ways that the text permits." Textuality is a practice. Through a text’s textuality, it makes itself mean, makes itself be, and makes itself come about in a particular way. Through its textuality, the text relinquishes its status as identity and affirms its condition as pure difference. In indifference,

1554-711: The text "dedefines" itself, etches itself in a texture or network of meaning, which is not limited to the text itself. Barry describes this as a "structuralist approach to literature, there is a constant movement away from the interpretation of the individual literary work and a parallel drive towards understanding the larger, abstract structures which contain them". A different view of textuality has been put forward by Rein Raud , according to whom textualities are "ordered sets of texts of different status that are related to each other and come with pre-arranged modes of interpretation". A textuality consists of base-texts, "those that define

1596-468: The theories) of the critics. Their theories of reading derive from vastly different intellectual traditions: the New Critic bases his work on an East-Coast American scholarly and religious tradition, while the Marxist derives his thought from a body of critical social and economic thought, the post-structuralist's work emerges from twentieth-century Continental philosophy of language. In the late 1950s,

1638-541: The three forms of medium – oral , print , and electronic – has a different form of textuality that reflects the way the sensory modalities are stimulated. Literary theory Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis . Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history , moral philosophy, social philosophy, and interdisciplinary themes relevant to how people interpret meaning . In

1680-679: The title of Derrida's essay is often erroneously interpreted in a linguistic sense, based on a general tendency towards puns and humour, while social constructionism as developed in the later work of Michel Foucault is said to create play in the sense of strategic agency by laying bare the levers of historical change. Structuralism , as an intellectual movement in France in the 1950s and 1960s, studied underlying structures in cultural products (such as texts ) and used analytical concepts from linguistics , psychology , anthropology , and other fields to interpret those structures. Structuralism posits

1722-425: The tools of textual interpretation to a wide range of "texts", including film, non-fiction, historical writing, and even cultural events. Mikhail Bakhtin argued that the "utter inadequacy" of literary theory is evident when it is forced to deal with the novel ; while other genres are fairly stabilized, the novel is still developing. Another crucial distinction among the various theories of literary interpretation

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1764-463: The work of the New Critics often contained an implicit moral dimension, and sometimes even a religious one: a New Critic might read a poem by T. S. Eliot or Gerard Manley Hopkins for its degree of honesty in expressing the torment and contradiction of a serious search for belief in the modern world. Meanwhile, a Marxist critic might find such judgments merely ideological rather than critical;

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