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Literary Theory: a short introduction

August 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

brief guide to critical approaches to literary studies

This introductory guide to literary theory comes from a new series by Oxford University Press. They are written by specialists, aimed at the common reader, and offer an introduction to the main cultural and philosophical ideas which have shaped the western world. Jonathan Culler avoids the common approach of explaining the various schools of literary criticism by choosing instead a set of topics and showing what various literary theories have to say about them.

Literary Theory: a short introduction There’s a certain amount of sleight of hand. In explaining ‘theory’ in its modern sense he doesn’t acknowledge the profound difference between this loose use of the term and a scientific theory, which can be proven or disproven. Nor does he acknowledge the sort of special pleading and self justification which is passed off as ‘philosophy’ in the work of someone such as Michel Foucault. But he does have a persuasive way of explaining some of these difficult ideas in terms which the common reader can understand.

The topics he chooses turn out to be very fundamental questions such as ‘What is literature?’ – that is, are there any essential differences between a literary and a non-literary text. These are questions to which common sense supplies rapid answers, but when Theory is applied, unforeseen complexities arise.

In fact when he looks more closely at the nature, purpose, and the conventions of literature, he claims that one of the purposes of Theory is to expose the shortcomings of common sense.

There’s an interesting chapter on language and linguistic approaches to literary theory where he discusses Saussure and Chomsky, the differences between poetics and hermeneutics, and reader-response criticism. Any one of these approaches is now the basis for a whole school of literary theory.

When he gets to genre criticism there’s a useful explanation of lyric, epic, and drama – though it’s not quite clear why he separates narrative (stories and novels) into a chapter of its own.

However, when it does come, his explanation of narrative theory is excellent. His account of plot, point of view, focalisation, and narrative reliability will help anyone who wants to get to grips with the analysis of fiction.

He ends with brief notes explaining the various school of literary theory which have emerged in the recent past – from New Criticism, through Structuralism, Marxism, and Deconstruction, to the latest fashions of Post-Colonialism and Queer Theory.

In one sense the book’s title is slightly misleading. It should be Modern Literary Theory. But this is a very interesting and attractive format – a small, pocket-sized book, stylishly designed, with illustrations, endnotes, suggestions for further reading, and an index.

© Roy Johnson 2005

Literary Theory   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Literary Theory   Buy the book at Amazon US


Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.149, ISBN: 019285383X


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Filed Under: 19C Literature, 20C Literature, Literary Studies, Theory Tagged With: Literary studies, Literary theory, Theory

Literary Theory: the basics

May 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

schools of literary criticism 1900-2000 explained

Despite its title, this is a survey of modern literary criticism. Hans Bertens starts from a critique of Matthew Arnold’s liberal humanist and essentially romantic appeal that literature exists on a higher spiritual plane that we are invited to visit. He then goes on to show the links with T.S.Eliot, Ivor Richards, F.R.Leavis, and the New Criticism of the United States in the early decades of the last century. Then its on to the Russian formalists and Prague structuralism – Shklovsky, Propp, and Jakobson .

Literary Theory: the basicsThese progress by a slightly dog-legged chronology to the French structuralists of the 1960s and 1970s. Roland Barthes picks up Saussure and runs with the ball of structuralism. Genette develops the same lines in his theories of narratology. When it came to Marxism I had a minor quibble with his account of ideology and I think he lets Georgy Lukacs off rather lightly – but on the whole it’s an even-handed treatment.

I enjoyed his explanations of feminism, race, and gender theory, and I couldn’t help feeling that his own interests were transmitted more infectiously as his story approached the present. What a rich choice of approaches any young student of literature has today.

When he arrives at the ‘poststructuralist revolution’ you have to be prepared for an excursion into the realms of philosophy. Literature seems a long way off, but you’ll get an account of Derrida which makes him seem almost accessible. The same is true of his chapter on Lacan

We know now that the deconstructionists took literary theory to a point where it appeared that nothing certain could be said about a text. So what happened afterwards? Well – it’s interesting that the fashions in literary theory which followed tend to focus upon on a single topic – race, class, sexuality, colonialism, or gender, and erect a series of abstact generalisations upon it.

Bertens gives very generous considerations to these late twentieth-century developments. The strength of this approach is that the theories are explained very well. The weakness is that we don’t get to see them applied. Literary texts themselves seem a long way off, and only get the occasional mention. It’s really difficult to see what ‘queer theory’ can tell us about Bleak House or The Odyssey. Go on – prove me wrong.

Nevertheless, I think this is a book worth recommending to people embarking on literary studies at undergraduate level, if for no other reason than it gives a reasonable account of what these theories claim without shirking from their weaknesses. And as he points out, although the latest of them tend to claim the intellectual high ground, their predecessors are still in general circulation.

Each separate chapter is followed by an annotated bibliography of further reading. I mention the annotation because this makes it far more useful to the reader than the long bare listings you usually find in books of this kind.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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Hans Bertens, Literary Theory: The Basics, Abingdon: Routledge, 2nd edition 2007, pp.264, ISBN: 0415396719


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Filed Under: 19C Literature, 20C Literature, Literary Studies, Literature, Theory Tagged With: Critical theory, Literary criticism, Literary studies, Literary theory, Theory

The Double

April 29, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Double is sometimes known under its German name, the Doppelganger. It is a cultural phenomenon most often present in literature and studies of psychology. The term is used to describe situations in which one person appears to be a duplicate of or a close parallel to another. The scenario is often presented in a manner which cannot easily be explained.

The Double

The similarities between the two figures might be physical, or psychological, or both. In some cases the first person is very conscious of being shadowed or threatened by the existence of the second person or double figure. In other cases the two figures are merely presented simultaneously, and the observer (the reader) is left to draw the inference that they are being offered as twin examples of the same or very similar characteristics.

Alternatively, the two figures might throw psychological light on each other. They are often used in such a way that reflects the complex divisions or contradictions that might exist within an individual personality. These divisions are often known under the collective phrase ‘the divided self’.

In fiction, the unsettling nature of this phenomenon is normally perceived or related from the first person’s (character’s) point of view. That is, the principal character becomes aware of the second character who often threatens, displaces, or triumphs over the first.

The double is sometimes interpreted as an exploration of two sides of the same personality. That is, the fictional creation is perceived as the representation of some innate duality in human psychology. This might be seen as the ‘good’ and the ‘evil’ that are potential in human nature. In such cases the two figures may be presented as opposites – but with some inexplicable attraction to each other or purpose in common.

In Freudian psycho-analytic terms such binary figures can be seen as battles between the Super-ego and the Id, taking place within the individual’s Ego. The human being (Ego) is trying to abide by a set of rules or moral standards dictated by a notion of what is ‘right’. These rules are dictated by the Super-ego or conscience. But the Ego’s efforts are thwarted by the human desire to satisfy all sorts of forbidden or irrational impulses. These deeply submerged impulses are dictated by the Id or the unconscious.

Literary tradition

There is a long tradition of stories which deal with ‘the double’ theme. These are narratives featuring a character who feels the presence of, thinks he perceives, or sometimes even sees another character who has the same appearance or name as himself. The second character might succeed in society where the first character fails, or the second might perform some anti-social act for which the first character is blamed. Examples include Edgar Alan Poe’s Wiliam Wilson (1839), Fyodor Dostoyevski’s The Double (1846), and Vladimir Nabokov’s The Eye (1930).

Very often these stories are first person narratives in which it becomes clear to the reader that the second character does not actually exist, but is a projection of the narrator’s imagination – an ‘alternative’ personality, or ‘another self’ representing a fear or a wish-fulfilment.

Very often other characters in the narrative are either unaware of the second ‘doubling’ figure – or they might mistake one person for the other, because they are so similar. You can see some of these variations in the examples that follow.


The Double – further reading

The Double Karl Miller, Doubles in Literary History – Amazon UK

The Double Karl Miller, Doubles in Literary History – Amazon US

The Double Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny – Amazon UK

The Double Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny – Amazon US

The Double Otto Rank, Double: A Psychoanalytic Study – Amazon UK

The Double Otto Rank, Double: A Psychoanalytic Study – Amazon US

The Double Andrew Hock, The Double in Literature< – Amazon UK

The Double Andrew Hock, The Double in Literature – Amazon US


The Double – examples

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is a wonderful example of the double presented as two apparent opposites. Victor Frankenstein is young, refined, well educated, and in love with his beautiful fiance Elizabeth. He creates a Monster who is giant-sized, crude, and savagely violent. However, they are locked in a very symbiotic relationship.

Frankenstein and his Monster are like contradictory parts of the same person. The Monster is the active, physical side of Frankenstein (the scholar) but also more obviously the ‘evil’ side. He performs acts almost on Frankenstein’s behalf (to carry out his subconscious wishes) daring to do what Frankenstein can not. As Masao Miyoshi has observed ‘The common error of calling the Monster ‘Frankenstein’ has considerable justification. He is the scientist’s divided self.’

It is possible to take this analysis even further by regarding Frankenstein and the Monster as one and the same being. They are like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The justification for this view turns largely on the fact that Frankenstein is always ‘absent’ when the murders are commuted, and nobody else in the novel ever sees Frankenstein and the Monster together in the same scene. For an essay that explains this interpretation in further detail, see Frankenstein: the romance, the double, the psyche

William Wilson

Edgar Allen Poe’s story William Wilson (1839) (from his famous collection Tales of Mystery and Imagination) is an account of someone who, from his schooldays onward, feels he is being hampered and challenged by a figure who has the same name as himself. Not only has he the same name, but the same birthday, the same clothes, and the ability to appear at crucial moments, issuing warnings and advice.

The double has a habit of appearing at crucial moments, just as William Wilson is going to commit some anti-social act. He ruins a young nobleman by cheating at cards, and finally is about to seduce a young married woman when he is challenged by his conscience and double. He plunges his rapier into the double, only to discover himself in front of a full length mirror covered in blood. In killing his ‘better self’ he has brought about his own death.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) is a perfect example of this literary trope. The story is that Dr Jekyll is an upright and well-respected member of the community in Edinburgh. But a series of malicious attacks on innocent people are perpetrated by a Mr Hyde.

Jekyll and Hyde are polar opposites. Jekyll is tall, upright, honest, and philanthropic. Hyde is small and malignant to the extent that he commits murder. They seem to be representations of the conscious and the unconscious mind – the Ego and the Id. It transpires they are actually one and the same person. Jekyll has been experimenting with drugs that will allow him to transform himself into another identity.

Almost every element in the story has a parallel or a double. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are two aspects of the same man. Jekyll’s house has two entrances – one the respectable public front entrance, the other a partly hidden, secret, and locked rear entrance. Thus the main subject of the novella is reinforced its thematically linked details.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray features an interesting twist on the ‘double’ theme. There are two two figures in the story – but one of them is a painting. Dorian Gray is a beautiful young man who has his portrait painted at the start of the narrative. He puts the painting in an attic and gives himself up to a life of self-indulgence.

As the years go by his ego centrism is responsible for the suffering of people around him, and he even kills a close friend – and yet he remains as youthful and beautiful as ever. However, the painting in the attic is meanwhile ageing.

Eventually he is oppressed by feelings of guilt, but feels that the painting has somehow cheated him. He resolves to destroy it, but in the final scene the painting has become young again, whilst Dorian is dead with a knife in his heart – a wrinkled, withered, and age-ravaged old man.

The painting acts as an ‘objective correlative’ of Dorian Gray’s self-indulgence, and the evil his corruption has generated, whilst leaving him apparently unchanged in outward appearance. The image of ‘a painting in the attic’ has become a popular metaphor and reference when commenting about people who seem to have unfairly escaped the ageing process.

The Secret Sharer

Joseph Conrad’s celebrated novella The Secret Sharer (1910) is explicitly packed with the features of the double theme. Its young unnamed narrator is a ship’s captain who at night takes on board an escapee from another nearby ship. This man Leggatt, has saved his own ship during a storm but in doing so has killed a malicious fellow seaman.

The young captain and Leggatt are of similar age. They attended the same elite sailor’s training school. They are both bare footed when they meet. The captain gives Leggatt his own sleeping suit to wear, so that they look the same, and he puts him into his own bed in order to conceal him. The captain immediately (and throughout the tale) refers to Leggatt as his ‘double’ and ‘secret self’. Leggatt was chief mate on the Sephora – and presumably the young captain had previously been a mate before promotion to captain.

The two men echo each other’s gestures. The captain feels that they are both ‘strangers on board’. Leggatt is a stranger because he comes from another ship, the captain is a stranger in that he has only recently taken up his command. The captain refers to Leggatt as if he is looking in a mirror. Eventually, he assists Leggatt to evade detection and allows him to escape to a nearby island.

Conrad often creates stories in which someone is presented with a moral dilemma or an existential crisis. This experience might also involve confronting ethically complex situations or other characters who have dared to cross the line between good and evil.

The Eye

As a Russian novelist, Vladimir Nabokov was very well aware of the double tradition in literature, and used the device frequently – often to comic or macabre effect. In his early novella The Eye (1930) he creates a neurotic un-named first person narrator who is a double in two senses. First he attempts suicide half way through the story, and then afterwards (having failed) refers to himself in the third person, as if he were observing himself from outside the story. He claims ‘In respect to myself I was now an onlooker’.

Then in the second part of the story he circulates in fashionable society where he meets a man called Smurov. He finds this man very charming and attractive, attributing to him all sorts of positive virtues and social success. Smurov however behaves in a clumsy and insensitive manner, and is eventually revealed as a liar. It becomes clear to the reader that Smurov and the narrator are one and the same person.

In this variation on the double theme it is the narrator who is a failure, and he makes his double a success – a projection of what he wishes to be. But because he is a hopelessly neurotic person, his efforts fail.

Despair

In his novel Despair (1932) Nabokov offers a further variation of the double theme. His first person narrator Hermann decides to fake his own death in order to claim on an insurance policy. At the same time he also wishes to commit the ‘perfect crime’. In order to do this he finds a man whom he believes to be his exact double. He befriends this man (Felix), they exchange clothes, and he then murders him.

The story is related entirely from Hermann’s point of view, but Nabokov scatters clues throughout the tale which enable the reader to realise the truth. Felix is nothing like Hermann: he is not a double at all. Hermann is deranged, and at the end of the story he in hiding, waiting to be arrested by the police.

The renaissance double

We can see from these examples that the double was largely a phenomenon of the nineteenth century. But since it now seems to reveal something fundamental about human consciousness, it is also possible to see examples in earlier works. For instance, it is possible in a renaissance work such as Othello to see the two main characters of Othello and Iago as opposite sides of the same character

Othello is proud, honest, unsophisticated, and some would say naive. Iago on the other hand is scheming, deceitful, and villainous. They also both have designs on the same woman – Desdemona. Iago is the murky, unprincipled sub-conscious or id to Othello’s super-ego. Iago will stoop to any depths to achieve his ends, whilst Othello is doing only what is right until he is tricked into murdering his own wife – still thinking he is doing right

A Tale of Two Cities

There are elements of the double in A Tale of Two Cities. The hero of the novel is Charles Darney, an upright and honourable young Englishman. His opposite is Sydney Carton, a disreputable and alcoholic lawyer who takes a cynical and self-serving view of everything that life presents to him. Yet the two men look like each other, and they are both in love with the same woman – Lucy Minette

When Darney is eventually captured by the French revolutionaries and imprisoned in the Bastille, Carton secures his escape and offers himself as a look-alike substitute. He goes to his death on the guillotine as an act of noble self-sacrifice saying ‘It is a far better thing I do than I have ever done’. The once dissolute Carton redeems himself personally and morally by the sacrifice of his wicked self to his good self.

© Roy Johnson 2017


Filed Under: 19C Literature, 20C Literature Tagged With: Cultural history, English literature, Literary studies, Literary theory

The Short Story: the reality of artifice

July 6, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the history and development of the short story genre

In this classic study of the short story, Charles May traces its development as a genre from its origins as a Renaissance conte to its maturity in the twentieth century. Of course single episodes extracted from texts as old as the Bible and the Koran might have features in common with the short story, but May identifies Boccaccio and Chaucer in the fourteenth century as the first writers of shorter fiction to move out of the mythic and supernatural towards the realistic mode. He places these at the beginning of a first chapter which provides an overview, from the fourteenth century to the present day.

The Short Story: the reality of artificeThis sets out the ground for what follows. The short story as a literary form in its own right really begins in the nineteenth century. I was surprised at the omission of E.T.A.Hoffmann, but he settles quickly into his stride with Gogol, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and of course Edgar Allan Poe, who both wrote stories and theorised about the form too.

He offers interesting reasons to support his claim that the short story took off most emphatically in the US (no copyright agreements at the time) but most of his attention is focussed on to a close examination of seminal examples – Nathaniel Hawthorne’s’Young Goodman Brown’, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, and Herman Melville’s “Bartelby the Scrivener’ – all of which, as he rightly points out, combine elements of the allegory and an almost supernatural element, along with a realistic surface.

By combining the code-bound conventions of allegory and romance with the contextually based realistic conventions of the novel, Hawthorne creates a story that has both the unity of allegory, held together by a powerful idea and an overall intentional pattern, and the hallucinatory effect of dream reality, made realistic by psychological plausibility and the specificity of concrete detail – all elements of short fiction that have persisted to the present day.

Having established these ground rules, he moves quickly through the rest of the nineteenth century figures who developed the form – Ambrose Bierce, O.Henry, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad – with a very persuasive reading of ‘The Secret Sharer’.

It was Anton Checkhov who is credited with posing the modern alternative to the whiplash ending or the surprise denouement which had been the norm until the end of the nineteenth century (including Guy de Maupassant, who is not mentioned). Checkhov introduced mood, tone, understatement, and careful selection of impressionistic detail as a substitutes for plot and dramatic incident.

James Joyce and Sherwood Anderson seem oddly to bring the century to an end rather than to start a new one – but May’s reading of ‘The Dead’ is exemplary.

Moving into the twentieth century proper, he sees Hemingway as a natural descendant of Checkhov – a creator of dialogue which implies much more than it says on the surface, a master of understatement.

His other central figures of mid-century are writers who I sense are not much read these days – Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, John Cheever, Bernard Malamud, and Eudora Welty. Time will tell if their influence was important or not.

The principal omissions so far as the development of the modern short story is concerned are Virginia Woolf and Nadine Gordimer – but that’s just my opinion.

May comes up to date with a round-up of influential short story writers of the last quarter of a century – Jorge Luis Borges, John Cheever, He makes a particularly large claim for the importance of Raymond Carver.

He ends with a chapter which traces the development of criticism of the short story from Poe to the present. This will be of particular interest to the audience at whom this study is aimed – teachers and students at undergraduate level.

There’s a very useful chronology, giving dates of significant publications, full notes and references. and annotated suggestions for further reading. Despite the obvious US weighting here, for anyone who needs an overview of the short story and an insight into its development as a literary form, this is an excellent place to start.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Charles E. May, The Short Story: the reality of artifice, London: Routledge, 2002, pp.160, ISBN: 041593883X


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Filed Under: The Short Story Tagged With: Literary studies, Literary theory, Short stories, The Short Story

What is Literature?

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

classic statement of literature and political commitment

What is Literature? is a now-famous polemic, written in 1948 following the turmoil of the second world war. Sartre was coming into his own as the most influential philosopher and writer of the existentialist movement. He thinks out loud in his customary [slightly rambling] fashion about the role of the writer in the post-war world. What he was trying to do was reconcile and even fuse his impulses towards writing and politics. In the first part he discusses the differences between literature and other arts such as music and painting.

What is Literature? His argument is that prose writing is different than all other media because of the relationship between the individual and language itself. We might not know anything about musical scales for instance, but we cannot not know about language. At this point fifty years on, we are unlikely to agree with all his conclusions, but his engagement with the relationship between writing and society is certainly thought-provoking.

In the next part he deals with ‘Why We Write’. There are some fascinating and vigorous reflections on the psychology of writing and reading – some of which anticipate forms of literary criticism which were not developed until twenty years later. For instance, he explains that the meaning of writing remains only latent until it is brought alive in the reader’s mind – and his observation that “reading is directed creation” is Reader-Response Theory summed up in four words.

It’s a long, tough-minded argument, much of it drifting into the realms of philosophy. Some of the weaknesses in his argument come from over-generalising particular cases. There’s also lots of argument spun out of abstract and metaphysical notions such as ‘freedom’ and ‘commitment’ which were fashionable at the time.

The centre of the book is a long meditation on the relationship between writers and their readers. This is largely a tour through French literature from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.

He finishes with a chapter on the role of the writer in 1948. This is a passionate and well-argued plea for social engagement on the part of the writer. It also debates the temptations and the reasons for resisting the call of the Left (which at that time was the Communist Party).

You have to be prepared for a lot of history and politics, but ultimately this is a robust and bracing read which should be of interest to anybody who wants to think about the relationship between ideology and literary culture.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature, (first pub 1948) London: Routledge, 2001, pp.251, ISBN: 0415254043


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Filed Under: 20C Literature, Literary Studies, Literature, Theory Tagged With: Cultural history, Jean Paul Sartre, Literary studies, Literary theory, Theory, What is Literature?

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