Recent Literary Theory, a brief history of
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
The following is an introduction.
Literary Theory is an episteme that seeks to describe the philosophical and ontological significance of the acts both of reading and writing. If you don't know what 'episteme' or 'ontological' means, you're probably in some trouble. Literary theory, you see, resides on a very complex set of assumptions and a truly immense body of background works. As such, rather than explain the entire history of human thought every time you want to make even the smallest point, literary theorists, in concert with philosophers of various stripes and a few other groups of academics, have developped a series of technical terms to signify very broad concepts. Hence the problem that if you ever ask anyone to define, say, 'postmodernism', you're likely either to get a half-hour monlogue or a non-answer. If you don't understand the code-words in which the thought has been developed, understanding lit. theory is like understanding partial differential equations when all you know how to do is add and subtract. 1 I'm going to try to avoid such lingoism, sometimes at the cost of precision, and occasionally relegate certain more technical discussions to the realm of footnotes. If you are a hard-core lit.-crit. junkie, and my imprecision offends you, I encourage you to come up with better, still accesible, ways of saying what I do. Post 'em on the discussion board, and I'll act as editor, at least until this thing gets approved. (wink, wink; nudge, nudge)
Also, a note on the title of this article: by 'recent', I mean 'modern', in the sense that contemporary historians mean it. The problem is that a bunch of literary theorists went and called themselves 'modernists' a few years ago, thereby committing perhaps the greatest terminological crime ever inflicted on mankind, and leaving everyone scrambling for ways to say 'modern' without actually saying 'modern'. Not to mention the inevitable 'postmodern', a semantic disaster if ever there was one.
OK, here we go, your five-miute crash course in literary theory.
