Literary Theory

“Literary theory” is the body of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of literature. By
literary theory we refer not to the meaning of a work of literature but to the theories that reveal what
literature can mean. Literary theory is a description of the underlying principles, one might say the tools,
by which we attempt to understand literature. All literary interpretation draws on a basis in theory but
can serve as a justification for very different kinds of critical activity. It is literary theory that formulates
the relationship between author and work; literary theory develops the significance of race, class, and
gender for literary study, both from the standpoint of the biography of the author and an analysis of
their thematic presence within texts. Literary theory offers varying approaches for understanding the
role of historical context in interpretation as well as the relevance of linguistic and unconscious elements
of the text. Literary theorists trace the history and evolution of the different genres—narrative, dramatic,
lyric—in addition to the more recent emergence of the novel and the short story, while also investigating
the importance of formal elements of literary structure. Lastly, literary theory in recent years has sought
to explain the degree to which the text is more the product of a culture than an individual author and in
turn how those texts help to create the culture.

Table of Contents

1. What Is Literary Theory?

2. Traditional Literary Criticism
3. Formalism and New Criticism
4. Marxism and Critical Theory
5. Structuralism and Poststructuralism
6. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism
7. Ethnic Studies and Postcolonial Criticism
8. Gender Studies and Queer Theory
9. Cultural Studies
10. References and Further Reading
1. General Works on Theory
2. Literary and Cultural Theory

1. What Is Literary Theory?

“Literary theory,” sometimes designated “critical theory,” or “theory,” and now undergoing a
transformation into “cultural theory” within the discipline of literary studies, can be understood as the
set of concepts and intellectual assumptions on which rests the work of explaining or interpreting
literary texts. Literary theory refers to any principles derived from internal analysis of literary texts or
from knowledge external to the text that can be applied in multiple interpretive situations. All critical
practice regarding literature depends on an underlying structure of ideas in at least two ways: theory
provides a rationale for what constitutes the subject matter of criticism—”the literary”—and the specific
aims of critical practice—the act of interpretation itself. For example, to speak of the “unity” of Oedipus
the Kingexplicitly invokes Aristotle’s theoretical statements on poetics. To argue, as does Chinua
Achebe, that Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness fails to grant full humanity to the Africans it
depicts is a perspective informed by a postcolonial literary theory that presupposes a history of
exploitation and racism. Critics that explain the climactic drowning of Edna Pontellier in The
Awakening as a suicide generally call upon a supporting architecture of feminist and gender theory. The
structure of ideas that enables criticism of a literary work may or may not be acknowledged by the critic,
and the status of literary theory within the academic discipline of literary studies continues to evolve.

Literary theory and the formal practice of literary interpretation runs a parallel but less well known
course with the history of philosophy and is evident in the historical record at least as far back as
Plato.The Cratylus contains a Plato’s meditation on the relationship of words and the things to which
they refer. Plato’s skepticism about signification, i.e., that words bear no etymological relationship to
their meanings but are arbitrarily “imposed,” becomes a central concern in the twentieth century to both
“Structuralism” and “Poststructuralism.” However, a persistent belief in “reference,” the notion that
words and images refer to an objective reality, has provided epistemological (that is, having to do with
theories of knowledge) support for theories of literary representation throughout most of Western
history. Until the nineteenth century, Art, in Shakespeare’s phrase, held “a mirror up to nature” and
faithfully recorded an objectively real world independent of the observer.

Modern literary theory gradually emerges in Europe during the nineteenth century. In one of the earliest
developments of literary theory, German “higher criticism” subjected biblical texts to a radical
historicizing that broke with traditional scriptural interpretation. “Higher,” or “source criticism,”
analyzed biblical tales in light of comparable narratives from other cultures, an approach that
anticipated some of the method and spirit of twentieth century theory, particularly “Structuralism” and
“New Historicism.” In France, the eminent literary critic Charles Augustin Saint Beuve maintained that
a work of literature could be explained entirely in terms of biography, while novelist Marcel Proust
devoted his life to refuting Saint Beuve in a massive narrative in which he contended that the details of
the life of the artist are utterly transformed in the work of art. (This dispute was taken up anew by the
French theorist Roland Barthes in his famous declaration of the “Death of the Author.” See
“Structuralism” and “Poststructuralism.”) Perhaps the greatest nineteenth century influence on literary
theory came from the deep epistemological suspicion of Friedrich Nietzsche: that facts are not facts until
they have been interpreted. Nietzsche’s critique of knowledge has had a profound impact on literary
studies and helped usher in an era of intense literary theorizing that has yet to pass.

Attention to the etymology of the term “theory,” from the Greek “theoria,” alerts us to the partial nature
of theoretical approaches to literature. “Theoria” indicates a view or perspective of the Greek stage. This
is precisely what literary theory offers, though specific theories often claim to present a complete system
for understanding literature. The current state of theory is such that there are many overlapping areas of
influence, and older schools of theory, though no longer enjoying their previous eminence, continue to
exert an influence on the whole. The once widely-held conviction (an implicit theory) that literature is a
repository of all that is meaningful and ennobling in the human experience, a view championed by the
Leavis School in Britain, may no longer be acknowledged by name but remains an essential justification
for the current structure of American universities and liberal arts curricula. The moment of
“Deconstruction” may have passed, but its emphasis on the indeterminacy of signs (that we are unable to
establish exclusively what a word means when used in a given situation) and thus of texts, remains
significant. Many critics may not embrace the label “feminist,” but the premise that gender is a social
construct, one of theoretical feminisms distinguishing insights, is now axiomatic in a number of
theoretical perspectives.

While literary theory has always implied or directly expressed a conception of the world outside the text,
in the twentieth century three movements—”Marxist theory” of the Frankfurt School, “Feminism,” and
“Postmodernism”—have opened the field of literary studies into a broader area of inquiry. Marxist
approaches to literature require an understanding of the primary economic and social bases of culture
since Marxist aesthetic theory sees the work of art as a product, directly or indirectly, of the base
structure of society. Feminist thought and practice analyzes the production of literature and literary
representation within the framework that includes all social and cultural formations as they pertain to
the role of women in history. Postmodern thought consists of both aesthetic and epistemological
strands. Postmodernism in art has included a move toward non-referential, non-linear, abstract forms; a
heightened degree of self-referentiality; and the collapse of categories and conventions that had
traditionally governed art. Postmodern thought has led to the serious questioning of the so-called
metanarratives of history, science, philosophy, and economic and sexual reproduction. Under
postmodernity, all knowledge comes to be seen as “constructed” within historical self-contained systems
of understanding. Marxist, feminist, and postmodern thought have brought about the incorporation of
all human discourses (that is, interlocking fields of language and knowledge) as a subject matter for
analysis by the literary theorist. Using the various poststructuralist and postmodern theories that often
draw on disciplines other than the literary—linguistic, anthropological, psychoanalytic, and
philosophical—for their primary insights, literary theory has become an interdisciplinary body of
cultural theory. Taking as its premise that human societies and knowledge consist of texts in one form or
another, cultural theory (for better or worse) is now applied to the varieties of texts, ambitiously
undertaking to become the preeminent model of inquiry into the human condition.
Literary theory is a site of theories: some theories, like “Queer Theory,” are “in;” other literary theories,
like “Deconstruction,” are “out” but continue to exert an influence on the field. “Traditional literary
criticism,” “New Criticism,” and “Structuralism” are alike in that they held to the view that the study of
literature has an objective body of knowledge under its scrutiny. The other schools of literary theory, to
varying degrees, embrace a postmodern view of language and reality that calls into serious question the
objective referent of literary studies. The following categories are certainly not exhaustive, nor are they
mutually exclusive, but they represent the major trends in literary theory of this century.

2. Traditional Literary Criticism

Academic literary criticism prior to the rise of “New Criticism” in the United States tended to practice
traditional literary history: tracking influence, establishing the canon of major writers in the literary
periods, and clarifying historical context and allusions within the text. Literary biography was and still is
an important interpretive method in and out of the academy; versions of moral criticism, not unlike the
Leavis School in Britain, and aesthetic (e.g. genre studies) criticism were also generally influential
literary practices. Perhaps the key unifying feature of traditional literary criticism was the consensus
within the academy as to the both the literary canon (that is, the books all educated persons should read)
and the aims and purposes of literature. What literature was, and why we read literature, and what we
read, were questions that subsequent movements in literary theory were to raise.

3. Formalism and New Criticism

“Formalism” is, as the name implies, an interpretive approach that emphasizes literary form and the
study of literary devices within the text. The work of the Formalists had a general impact on later
developments in “Structuralism” and other theories of narrative. “Formalism,” like “Structuralism,”
sought to place the study of literature on a scientific basis through objective analysis of the motifs,
devices, techniques, and other “functions” that comprise the literary work. The Formalists placed great
importance on the literariness of texts, those qualities that distinguished the literary from other kinds of
writing. Neither author nor context was essential for the Formalists; it was the narrative that spoke, the
“hero-function,” for example, that had meaning. Form was the content. A plot device or narrative
strategy was examined for how it functioned and compared to how it had functioned in other literary
works. Of the Russian Formalist critics, Roman Jakobson and Viktor Shklovsky are probably the most
well known.

The Formalist adage that the purpose of literature was “to make the stones stonier” nicely expresses
their notion of literariness. “Formalism” is perhaps best known is Shklovsky’s concept of
“defamiliarization.” The routine of ordinary experience, Shklovsky contended, rendered invisible the
uniqueness and particularity of the objects of existence. Literary language, partly by calling attention to
itself as language, estranged the reader from the familiar and made fresh the experience of daily life.

The “New Criticism,” so designated as to indicate a break with traditional methods, was a product of the
American university in the 1930s and 40s. “New Criticism” stressed close reading of the text itself, much
like the French pedagogical precept “explication du texte.” As a strategy of reading, “New Criticism”
viewed the work of literature as an aesthetic object independent of historical context and as a unified
whole that reflected the unified sensibility of the artist. T.S. Eliot, though not explicitly associated with
the movement, expressed a similar critical-aesthetic philosophy in his essays on John Donne and the
metaphysical poets, writers who Eliot believed experienced a complete integration of thought and
feeling. New Critics like Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and W.K. Wimsatt
placed a similar focus on the metaphysical poets and poetry in general, a genre well suited to New
Critical practice. “New Criticism” aimed at bringing a greater intellectual rigor to literary studies,
confining itself to careful scrutiny of the text alone and the formal structures of paradox, ambiguity,
irony, and metaphor, among others. “New Criticism” was fired by the conviction that their readings of
poetry would yield a humanizing influence on readers and thus counter the alienating tendencies of
modern, industrial life. “New Criticism” in this regard bears an affinity to the Southern Agrarian
movement whose manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, contained essays by two New Critics, Ransom and
Warren. Perhaps the enduring legacy of “New Criticism” can be found in the college classroom, in which
the verbal texture of the poem on the page remains a primary object of literary study.
4. 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. Marxist theorists use traditional techniques of
literary analysis but subordinate aesthetic concerns to the final social and political meanings of
literature. Marxist theorist often champion authors sympathetic to the working classes and authors
whose work challenges economic equalities found in capitalist societies. In keeping with the totalizing
spirit of Marxism, literary theories arising from the Marxist paradigm have not only sought new ways of
understanding the relationship between economic production and literature, but all cultural production
as well. Marxist analyses of society and history have had a profound effect on literary theory and
practical criticism, most notably in the development of “New Historicism” and “Cultural Materialism.”

The Hungarian theorist Georg Lukacs contributed to an understanding of the relationship between
historical materialism and literary form, in particular with realism and the historical novel. Walter
Benjamin broke new ground in his work in his study of aesthetics and the reproduction of the work of
art. The Frankfurt School of philosophers, including most notably Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno,
and Herbert Marcuse—after their emigration to the United States—played a key role in introducing
Marxist assessments of culture into the mainstream of American academic life. These thinkers became
associated with what is known as “Critical theory,” one of the constituent components of which was a
critique of the instrumental use of reason in advanced capitalist culture. “Critical theory” held to a
distinction between the high cultural heritage of Europe and the mass culture produced by capitalist
societies as an instrument of domination. “Critical theory” sees in the structure of mass cultural forms—
jazz, Hollywood film, advertising—a replication of the structure of the factory and the workplace.
Creativity and cultural production in advanced capitalist societies were always already co-opted by the
entertainment needs of an economic system that requires sensory stimulation and recognizable cliché
and suppressed the tendency for sustained deliberation.

The major Marxist influences on literary theory since the Frankfurt School have been Raymond
Williams and Terry Eagleton in Great Britain and Frank Lentricchia and Fredric Jameson in the United
States. Williams is associated with the New Left political movement in Great Britain and the
development of “Cultural Materialism” and the Cultural Studies Movement, originating in the 1960s at
Birmingham University’s Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Eagleton is known both as a
Marxist theorist and as a popularizer of theory by means of his widely read overview, Literary Theory.
Lentricchia likewise became influential through his account of trends in theory, After the New Criticism.
Jameson is a more diverse theorist, known both for his impact on Marxist theories of culture and for his
position as one of the leading figures in theoretical postmodernism. Jameson’s work on consumer
culture, architecture, film, literature and other areas, typifies the collapse of disciplinary boundaries
taking place in the realm of Marxist and postmodern cultural theory. Jameson’s work investigates the
way the structural features of late capitalism—particularly the transformation of all culture into
commodity form—are now deeply embedded in all of our ways of communicating.

5. Structuralism and Poststructuralism

Like the “New Criticism,” “Structuralism” sought to bring to literary studies a set of objective criteria for
analysis and a new intellectual rigor. “Structuralism” can be viewed as an extension of “Formalism” in
that that both “Structuralism” and “Formalism” devoted their attention to matters of literary form (i.e.
structure) rather than social or historical content; and that both bodies of thought were intended to put
the study of literature on a scientific, objective basis. “Structuralism” relied initially on the ideas of the
Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure. Like Plato, Saussure regarded the signifier (words, marks,
symbols) as arbitrary and unrelated to the concept, the signified, to which it referred. Within the way a
particular society uses language and signs, meaning was constituted by a system of “differences”
between units of the language. Particular meanings were of less interest than the underlying structures
of signification that made meaning itself possible, often expressed as an emphasis on “langue” rather
than “parole.” “Structuralism” was to be a metalanguage, a language about languages, used to decode
actual languages, or systems of signification. The work of the “Formalist” Roman Jakobson contributed
to “Structuralist” thought, and the more prominent Structuralists included Claude Levi-Strauss in
anthropology, Tzvetan Todorov, A.J. Greimas, Gerard Genette, and Barthes.
The philosopher Roland Barthes proved to be a key figure on the divide between “Structuralism” and
“Poststructuralism.” “Poststructuralism” is less unified as a theoretical movement than its precursor;
indeed, the work of its advocates known by the term “Deconstruction” calls into question the possibility
of the coherence of discourse, or the capacity for language to communicate. “Deconstruction,” Semiotic
theory (a study of signs with close connections to “Structuralism,” “Reader response theory” in America
(“Reception theory” in Europe), and “Gender theory” informed by the psychoanalysts Jacques Lacan and
Julia Kristeva are areas of inquiry that can be located under the banner of “Poststructuralism.” If
signifier and signified are both cultural concepts, as they are in “Poststructuralism,” reference to an
empirically certifiable reality is no longer guaranteed by language. “Deconstruction” argues that this loss
of reference causes an endless deferral of meaning, a system of differences between units of language
that has no resting place or final signifier that would enable the other signifiers to hold their meaning.
The most important theorist of “Deconstruction,” Jacques Derrida, has asserted, “There is no getting
outside text,” indicating a kind of free play of signification in which no fixed, stable meaning is possible.
“Poststructuralism” in America was originally identified with a group of Yale academics, the Yale School
of “Deconstruction:” J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartmann, and Paul de Man. Other tendencies in the
moment after “Deconstruction” that share some of the intellectual tendencies of “Poststructuralism”
would included the “Reader response” theories of Stanley Fish, Jane Tompkins, and Wolfgang Iser.

Lacanian psychoanalysis, an updating of the work of Sigmund Freud, extends “Postructuralism” to the
human subject with further consequences for literary theory. According to Lacan, the fixed, stable self is
a Romantic fiction; like the text in “Deconstruction,” the self is a decentered mass of traces left by our
encounter with signs, visual symbols, language, etc. For Lacan, the self is constituted by language, a
language that is never one’s own, always another’s, always already in use. Barthes applies these currents
of thought in his famous declaration of the “death” of the Author: “writing is the destruction of every
voice, of every point of origin” while also applying a similar “Poststructuralist” view to the Reader: “the
reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a
single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.”

Michel Foucault is another philosopher, like Barthes, whose ideas inform much of poststructuralist
literary theory. Foucault played a critical role in the development of the postmodern perspective that
knowledge is constructed in concrete historical situations in the form of discourse; knowledge is not
communicated by discourse but is discourse itself, can only be encountered textually. Following
Nietzsche, Foucault performs what he calls “genealogies,” attempts at deconstructing the
unacknowledged operation of power and knowledge to reveal the ideologies that make domination of
one group by another seem “natural.” Foucaldian investigations of discourse and power were to provide
much of the intellectual impetus for a new way of looking at history and doing textual studies that came
to be known as the “New Historicism.”

6. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism

“New Historicism,” a term coined by Stephen Greenblatt, designates a body of theoretical and
interpretive practices that began largely with the study of early modern literature in the United States.
“New Historicism” in America had been somewhat anticipated by the theorists of “Cultural Materialism”
in Britain, which, in the words of their leading advocate, Raymond Williams describes “the analysis of all
forms of signification, including quite centrally writing, within the actual means and conditions of their
production.” Both “New Historicism” and “Cultural Materialism” seek to understand literary texts
historically and reject the formalizing influence of previous literary studies, including “New Criticism,”
“Structuralism” and “Deconstruction,” all of which in varying ways privilege the literary text and place
only secondary emphasis on historical and social context. According to “New Historicism,” the
circulation of literary and non-literary texts produces relations of social power within a culture. New
Historicist thought differs from traditional historicism in literary studies in several crucial ways.
Rejecting traditional historicism’s premise of neutral inquiry, “New Historicism” accepts the necessity of
making historical value judgments. According to “New Historicism,” we can only know the textual
history of the past because it is “embedded,” a key term, in the textuality of the present and its concerns.
Text and context are less clearly distinct in New Historicist practice. Traditional separations of literary
and non-literary texts, “great” literature and popular literature, are also fundamentally challenged. For
the “New Historicist,” all acts of expression are embedded in the material conditions of a culture. 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. Like much of the emergent European social history
of the 1980s, “New Historicism” takes particular interest in representations of marginal/marginalized
groups and non-normative behaviors—witchcraft, cross-dressing, peasant revolts, and exorcisms—as
exemplary of the need for power to represent subversive alternatives, the Other, to legitimize itself.

Louis Montrose, another major innovator and exponent of “New Historicism,” describes a fundamental
axiom of the movement as an intellectual belief in “the textuality of history and the historicity of texts.”
“New Historicism” draws on the work of Levi-Strauss, in particular his notion of culture as a “self-
regulating system.” The Foucaldian premise that power is ubiquitous and cannot be equated with state
or economic power and Gramsci’s conception of “hegemony,” i.e., that domination is often achieved
through culturally-orchestrated consent rather than force, are critical underpinnings to the “New
Historicist” perspective. The translation of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin on carnival coincided with the
rise of the “New Historicism” and “Cultural Materialism” and left a legacy in work of other theorists of
influence like Peter Stallybrass and Jonathan Dollimore. In its period of ascendancy during the 1980s,
“New Historicism” drew criticism from the political left for its depiction of counter-cultural expression
as always co-opted by the dominant discourses. Equally, “New Historicism’s” lack of emphasis on
“literariness” and formal literary concerns brought disdain from traditional literary scholars. However,
“New Historicism” continues to exercise a major influence in the humanities and in the extended
conception of literary studies.

7. Ethnic Studies and Postcolonial Criticism

“Ethnic Studies,” sometimes referred to as “Minority Studies,” has an obvious historical relationship
with “Postcolonial Criticism” in that Euro-American imperialism and colonization in the last four
centuries, whether external (empire) or internal (slavery) has been directed at recognizable ethnic
groups: African and African-American, Chinese, the subaltern peoples of India, Irish, Latino, Native
American, and Philipino, among others. “Ethnic Studies” concerns itself generally with art and literature
produced by identifiable ethnic groups either marginalized or in a subordinate position to a dominant
culture. “Postcolonial Criticism” investigates the relationships between colonizers and colonized in the
period post-colonization. Though the two fields are increasingly finding points of intersection—the work
of bell hooks, for example—and are both activist intellectual enterprises, “Ethnic Studies and
“Postcolonial Criticism” have significant differences in their history and ideas.

“Ethnic Studies” has had a considerable impact on literary studies in the United States and Britain. In
W.E.B. Dubois, we find an early attempt to theorize the position of African-Americans within dominant
white culture through his concept of “double consciousness,” a dual identity including both “American”
and “Negro.” Dubois and theorists after him seek an understanding of how that double experience both
creates identity and reveals itself in culture. 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.

Though not the first writer to explore the historical condition of postcolonialism, the Palestinian literary
theorist Edward Said’s book Orientalism is generally regarded as having inaugurated the field of
explicitly “Postcolonial Criticism” in the West. Said argues that the concept of “the Orient” was produced
by the “imaginative geography” of Western scholarship and has been instrumental in the colonization
and domination of non-Western societies. “Postcolonial” theory reverses the historical center/margin
direction of cultural inquiry: critiques of the metropolis and capital now emanate from the former
colonies. Moreover, theorists like Homi K. Bhabha have questioned the binary thought that produces the
dichotomies—center/margin, white/black, and colonizer/colonized—by which colonial practices are
justified. The work of Gayatri C. Spivak has focused attention on the question of who speaks for the
colonial “Other” and the relation of the ownership of discourse and representation to the development of
the postcolonial subjectivity. Like feminist and ethnic theory, “Postcolonial Criticism” pursues not
merely the inclusion of the marginalized literature of colonial peoples into the dominant canon and
discourse. “Postcolonial Criticism” offers a fundamental critique of the ideology of colonial domination
and at the same time seeks to undo the “imaginative geography” of Orientalist thought that produced
conceptual as well as economic divides between West and East, civilized and uncivilized, First and Third
Worlds. In this respect, “Postcolonial Criticism” is activist and adversarial in its basic aims. 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. While “Postcolonial Criticism” emerged in the
historical moment following the collapse of the modern colonial empires, the increasing globalization of
culture, including the neo-colonialism of multinational capitalism, suggests a continued relevance for
this field of inquiry.

8. 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. Feminist gender
theory followed slightly behind the reemergence of political feminism in the United States and Western
Europe during the 1960s. Political feminism of the so-called “second wave” had as its emphasis practical
concerns with the rights of women in contemporary societies, women’s identity, and the representation
of women in media and culture. These causes converged with early literary feminist practice,
characterized by Elaine Showalter as “gynocriticism,” which emphasized the study and canonical
inclusion of works by female authors as well as the depiction of women in male-authored canonical
texts.

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. In the context of postmodernism, gender
theorists, led by the work of Judith Butler, initially viewed the category of “gender” as a human construct
enacted by a vast repetition of social performance. 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. As an important consequence of this systematic
intellectual repression and exclusion, women’s lives and bodies in historical societies are subject to
repression as well. In the creative/critical work of Cixous, we find the history of Western thought
depicted as binary oppositions: “speech/writing; Nature/Art, Nature/History, Nature/Mind,
Passion/Action.” For Cixous, and for Irigaray as well, these binaries are less a function of any objective
reality they describe than the male-dominated discourse of the Western tradition that produced them.
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. Kristeva’s work draws heavily on Lacan. Two concepts
from Kristeva—the “semiotic” and “abjection”—have had a significant influence on literary theory.
Kristeva’s “semiotic” refers to the gaps, silences, spaces, and bodily presence within the
language/symbol system of a culture in which there might be a space for a women’s language, different
in kind as it would be from male-dominated discourse.

Masculine gender theory as a separate enterprise has focused largely on social, literary, and historical
accounts of the construction of male gender identities. Such work generally lacks feminisms’ activist
stance and tends to serve primarily as an indictment rather than a validation of male gender practices
and masculinity. The so-called “Men’s Movement,” inspired by the work of Robert Bly among others,
was more practical than theoretical and has had only limited impact on gender discourse. The impetus
for the “Men’s Movement” came largely as a response to the critique of masculinity and male domination
that runs throughout feminism and the upheaval of the 1960s, a period of crisis in American social
 ideology that has required a reconsideration of gender roles. Having long served as the de facto “subject”
of Western thought, male identity and masculine gender theory awaits serious investigation as a
particular, and no longer universally representative, field of inquiry.

Much of what theoretical energy of masculine gender theory currently possesses comes from its
ambiguous relationship with the field of “Queer theory.” “Queer theory” is not synonymous with gender
theory, nor even with the overlapping fields of gay and lesbian studies, but does share many of their
concerns with normative definitions of man, woman, and sexuality. “Queer theory” questions the fixed
categories of sexual identity and the cognitive paradigms generated by normative (that is, what is
considered “normal”) sexual ideology. To “queer” becomes an act by which stable boundaries of sexual
identity are transgressed, reversed, mimicked, or otherwise critiqued. “Queering” can be enacted on
behalf of all non-normative sexualities and identities as well, all that is considered by the dominant
paradigms of culture to be alien, strange, unfamiliar, transgressive, odd—in short, queer. Michel
Foucault’s work on sexuality anticipates and informs the Queer theoretical movement in a role similar to
the way his writing on power and discourse prepared the ground for “New Historicism.” Judith Butler
contends that heterosexual identity long held to be a normative ground of sexuality is actually produced
by the suppression of homoerotic possibility. Eve Sedgwick is another pioneering theorist of “Queer
theory,” and like Butler, Sedgwick maintains that the dominance of heterosexual culture conceals the
extensive presence of homosocial relations. For Sedgwick, the standard histories of western societies are
presented in exclusively in terms of heterosexual identity: “Inheritance, Marriage, Dynasty, Family,
Domesticity, Population,” and thus conceiving of homosexual identity within this framework is already
problematic.

9. Cultural Studies
Much of the intellectual legacy of “New Historicism” and “Cultural Materialism” can now be felt in the
“Cultural Studies” movement in departments of literature, a movement not identifiable in terms of a
single theoretical school, but one that embraces a wide array of perspectives—media studies, social
criticism, anthropology, and literary theory—as they apply to the general study of culture. “Cultural
Studies” arose quite self-consciously in the 80s to provide a means of analysis of the rapidly expanding
global culture industry that includes entertainment, advertising, publishing, television, film, computers
and the Internet. “Cultural Studies” brings scrutiny not only to these varied categories of culture, and
not only to the decreasing margins of difference between these realms of expression, but just as
importantly to the politics and ideology that make contemporary culture possible. “Cultural Studies”
became notorious in the 90s for its emphasis on pop music icons and music video in place of canonical
literature, and extends the ideas of the Frankfurt School on the transition from a truly popular culture to
mass culture in late capitalist societies, emphasizing the significance of the patterns of consumption of
cultural artifacts. “Cultural Studies” has been interdisciplinary, even antidisciplinary, from its inception;
indeed, “Cultural Studies” can be understood as a set of sometimes conflicting methods and approaches
applied to a questioning of current cultural categories. Stuart Hall, Meaghan Morris, Tony Bennett and
Simon During are some of the important advocates of a “Cultural Studies” that seeks to displace the
traditional model of literary studies.

10. References and Further Reading

a. General Works on Theory

 Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997.
 During, Simon. Ed. The Cultural Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1999.
 Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
 Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
 Moore-Gilbert, Bart, Stanton, Gareth, and Maley, Willy. Eds. Postcolonial Criticism. New York:
Addison, Wesley, Longman, 1997.
 Rice, Philip and Waugh, Patricia. Eds. Modern Literary Theory: A Reader. 4th edition.
 Richter, David H. Ed. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. 2nd Ed.
Bedford Books: Boston, 1998.
 Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael. Eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Malden, Massachusetts:
Blackwell, 1998.

b. Literary and Cultural Theory

 Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Ed. J. M. Bernstein.
London: Routledge, 2001.
 Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy: And Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1971.
 Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.  Trans.
 Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953.
 Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination.  Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist.
Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981.
 Barthes, Roland. Image—Music—Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.
 Barthes, Roland.  The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang,
1975.
 Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Tr. H.M. Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1953.
 Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York:
Schocken, 1988.
 Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry.  New York:
Harcourt, 1947.
 Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins,
1976.
 Dubois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches.  Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co.,
1903.
 Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive
Communities. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.
 Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1. An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley.
Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1981.
 Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.  New York:
Vintage, 1973.
 Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American
Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
 hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press, 1981.
 Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments.
Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
 Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985.
 Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1999.
 Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. London: Routledge, 2001.
 Lemon Lee T. and Reis, Marion J. Eds. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln,
NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1965.
 Lukacs, Georg. The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. Lincoln, NE:
University of Nebraska Press, 1962.
 Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.
 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage,
1969.
 Plato. The Collected Dialogues.  Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1961.
 Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence
Kilmartin. New York: Vintage, 1982.
 Said, Edward. Orientalism.  New York: Pantheon, 1978.
 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men. Between Men: English literature and
Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky Epistemology of the Closet. London: Penguin, 1994.
 Showalter, Elaine. Ed. The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature,
and Theory. London: Virago, 1986.
 Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: the Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
 Wellek, Rene and Warren, Austin. Theory of Literature. 3rd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace,
1956.
 Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Poetry analysis: The Red Wheelbarrow, by W. C.

Williams

The 1932 poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" is the most famous poem that the doctor/poet William Carlos
Williams wrote. It's in many anthologies, where it is often the shortest poem, unless the anthology also
.contains haiku

It consists of one sentence, broken up into two-line stanzas. Everything except for the first stanza
depicts a concrete image: "a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens."
What stands out the most, on first reading, are the colors - the red wheelbarrow, the white chickens. The
image is simple and soothing, and has a Zen quality to it. All the words are short, only one or two
syllables each (wheelbarrow and rainwater would have three syllables, but in the poem they are each
written as two words, which keeps the maximum syllable count to two). The simplicity and directness of
.the words adds to the Zen feeling

The first stanza, though, is different. It says "so much depends upon."
Unlike the rest of the poem, this is an abstract statement. It's also mysterious, leading the reader to ask,
What is it that depends upon (the red wheelbarrow and the white chickens)? Why does so MUCH
 ?depend upon that

I think there are two basic ways to answer those questions. You can consider the objects in the poem,
and say that it is wheelbarrows and chickens that matter, perhaps because they are useful objects, or
because of their everyday nature, or because the countryside matters more, in some sense, than the
 .cities

Alternately, you can say that it's not the objects themselves that matter, but the image that they create.
It's the redness of the wheelbarrow and the whiteness of the chickens that matters, and the pleasing
contrast those colors make when found next to each other. The line "glazed with rain water" appears to
.support this interpretation, with its suggestion of a painter or a potter's decorative glaze

Finally, the form of the poem is interesting. Lines in poetry are usually measured in syllables, but here
the lines are measured instead in words. Each stanza has one line with three words and one line with
one word. But the three-word lines do not all have the same meter. half have three syllables and half
.have four

:Here is the complete poem

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

.chickens

You might also enjoy this animated video inspired by the poem, which I think beautifully captures the
poem's spirit - the red wheelbarrow video

The Red Wheelbarrow Symbolism, Imagery & Wordplay

There’s more to a poem than meets the eye.

Welcome to the land of symbols, imagery, and wordplay. Before you travel any further, please know that

there may be some thorny academic terminology ahead. Never fear, Shmoop is here. Check out our

"How to Read a Poem" section for a glossary of terms.

Farm Stuff

 Line 1-2: The word "depends" makes us think that this is one

special wheelbarrow, and we almost feel like the wheelbarrow

is being personified at this moment.

 Line 3-4: Our speaker uses enjambment to split the word

"wheel" from the word "barrow." This makes us think about

wheelbarrows more carefully. We realize that, just like the

word "wheelbarrow," a wheelbarrow is composed primarily of

two parts: a wheel and a barrow (the part you put stuff into).

 Line 3-4: That image of the red wheelbarrow is pretty darn

powerful. We see it very clearly in our minds, and all our

speaker has to do to paint the image for us is to tell that it is a

"red wheelbarrow." If that isn't magic, we don't know what is.

 Line 6: The assonance of "beside" and "white" gives this line

momentum and movement.

 Line 7: Our speaker uses enjambment to break apart "white

chickens." By placing "chickens" on its own, we feel like these

must be some important chickens.

Nature
  Line 1: We don't know about you, but we hear alliteration in

the first line, thanks to all of those "s" sounds. These sounds

make us think about the sound of rain.

 Line 5: The assonance of that long "a" sound in "glazed" and

"rain" helps us to see the shiny surface of the wheelbarrow,

somehow.

 Line 5-6: Enjambment alert! Our speaker splits "rainwater" into

"rain" and "water," making us pay attention to that which rain is

composed of: water.

Free Verse
"The Red Wheelbarrow" features a single sentence divided up into four couplets (a couplet is a stanza
composed of two lines). On its own, the sentence reads, "so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow
glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens." 

If we break this sentence down, English class-style, we realize that the subject of the sentence is "so
much," the verb of the sentence is "depends," and the direct object is "the red wheelbarrow." So, even
though, "the red wheelbarrow" is the featured item of the poem's title, it is not the subject of the
sentence. Why is this important? Well, it just helps us poet detectives understand whether we should be
more interested in the "so much" or in "the red wheelbarrow." What do you think? 

You'll notice that there is no punctuation and that no words within the poem are capitalized. You'll also
notice that, in each couplet, the first line is way longer than the second line, making it appear (visually)
as though the first linedepends upon the second line, or as though the second line supports the first.
Only 14 words and 19 syllables form the bones of this poem. Our speaker uses enjambment to break up
words like "wheelbarrow" and "rainwater" and to keep our eye moving from one line to the next. Do you
feel like there is a lot of movement in this poem, or do you feel like it is pretty static?

Speaker Point of View

Who is the speaker, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?

Our speaker is invisible. We know he is wise, because he apparently knows what depends upon a red

wheelbarrow, while we are stumped. We know he is an appreciator of life, and, in particular, of the small

things in life. For some reason, our speaker reminds us of someone who has lived a long and full life.

There's something about the way in which our speaker reflects so fully and simply on an object as

ordinary as a wheelbarrow that makes us think he has learned a thing or two about life. He seems to be

a wise, somewhat lonely, lover of life.

What’s Up With the Title?
To tell the truth, "The Red Wheelbarrow" was originally untitled. It appears in Williams's collection of

poems and prose Spring and All as simply XXII, or number 22. Over time, however, the poem has

adopted the title, "The Red Wheelbarrow," and, in our humble opinion, we think this title works.

When we look at a painting, our eye is often drawn to one specific place in that painting, usually

because it's particularly juicy or colorful. Check out this painting by Claude Monet, entitled Impression:

Sunrise. What do your eyes grab hold of first? We don't know about you, but that little rowboat is pretty

interesting. Not to mention that orangey sun. The same is true with "The Red Wheelbarrow" – our eyes

can't seem to let go of the image of the red wheelbarrow. The title, "The Red Wheelbarrow," helps to

focus our eyes on that red wheelbarrow from the beginning. To us, such a title accentuates the painting-

like nature of this poem.

William Carlos Williams’s Calling Card
What is the poet’s signature style?

American Idiom, Simplicity, Paintingness

Unlike many of his contemporaries (T.S. Elliot, Ezra Pound, et.c), William Carlos Williams wasn't into

writing complex poems that take the reader a lot of work to unlock and digest. In fact, he criticized T.S.

Elliot and Ezra Pound openly, describing them as "conformists preoccupied with rehashing the literary

glories of the past" (source: The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol. 1, 2003). 

Think of Williams as a kind of poet-rebel. He felt like the poets of his time were going in the wrong

direction, and he sought to revolutionize the way poets and readers thought about poetry. He wrote to

the editor of Poetry magazine in 1913, saying, "Verse to be alive must have infused into it something of

the same order, some tincture of disestablishment, something in the nature of an impalpable revolution,

an ethereal reversal" (source: The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol. 1, 2003).

To put it plainly, Williams felt poets, scholars, and readers needed to rethink poetry and its purpose, and

he felt that poetry needed a fresh pair of clothes, ones that reflected current and future fashions.

Perhaps more than anything, he wanted to capture the rhythms of American speech in his poem,
because he felt that American poetry was beginning to form an identity and sound of its own, and one

that was very different from that of British poetry. This was very exciting for him, because he felt there

was something uniquely delicious about the sound of American speech.

Many of Williams's poems seem like they could be paintings. This comes from his desire to capture

moments and objects in his poems like photographers capture scenes with their cameras, or like

painters capture scenes with their paints and canvases. Williams sought to give notice to the things that

often go unnoticed.

The Red Wheelbarrow Setting

Where It All Goes Down

It's a boring, rainy day. We can't go out and do chores on the family farm, because it's way too wet. So,

we are stuck indoors. We're staring out the kitchen window (because maybe our Scrabble game is over,

and we ate the last piece of candy in the house). Lo and behold! We see our wheelbarrow outside. And

it's red! But not just any red, it's like firetruck red. We haven't seen our wheelbarrow look so pretty in

years. In fact, we didn't think it was that cool anymore, and so we've just kind of left it outside, rather

than putting it away in the barn. The rain has washed it clean. But then, Mabel and Marta, the family

chickens, appear. Mabel hops on top of the red wheelbarrow, while Marta kind of dances around. This is

quite an image. We almost want to take a picture or, better yet, paint! So we get our art supplies and

proceed to Vincent van Gogh our way through the day. Suddenly, things aren't so boring anymore. Life

is pretty.This is just one possible scenario for a setting. How do you imagine it?
The Red Wheelbarrow Summary

Our speaker reflects on how important a certain red wheelbarrow is. This wheelbarrow is wet from a

recent rain, and there happen to be white chickens hanging out with the wheelbarrow. The End.