Rivkin Julie - Literary theory a practical introduction

The books in this series all written by eminent scholars renowned for their teaching abilities show students how to read, understand, write, and criticize literature. They provide the key skills which every student of literature must master, as well as offering a comprehensive introduction to the field itself.

Published

How to Study Theory Wolfgang Iser

How to Write a Poem John Redmond

How to Read a Shakespeare Play David Bevington

How to Read the Victorian Novel George Levine

How to Read World Literature David Damrosch

Literary Theory A Practical Introduction Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan

THIRD EDITION

Michael Ryan

This third edition first published 2017
2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (1e, 1999); Blackwell Publishing Ltd (2e, 2007)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title

Hardback ISBN: 9781119090021

Paperback ISBN: 9781119061755

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Barbara Kruger: Untitled (No Radio), photograph 51 68, 1988.

Collection Don/Doris Fisher, San Francisco, courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York

For E. P. Kuhl and Robert Scholes, for teaching me how to read

This book should be used with the following literary texts:

Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems

Elizabeth Bishop, In the Village (see Appendix)

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

Alice Munro, Selected Stories

Alice Munro, Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 19952014

William Shakespeare, King Lear

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

The 1997 National Theatre production of King Lear directed by Richard Eyre and starring Ian Holm is an especially good way to get students to engage with the play. It is available on DVD.

Literary theory begins as a scholarly enterprise with the Greek Enlightenment that occurred in the schools of Athens 2,500 years ago. Humans had been producing literature long narrative poems recited orally for several hundred years before that, but with the emergence of the staged stories in Athens written by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle were prompted to study the products of human culture for the first time, and literary theory was born.

Aristotle devoted his attention to how literature worked, while Plato was more concerned with the universal truths it expressed. The two dimensions of literature that they noted form and matter, technique and meaning continue to define what literary theory is about. Literature (and film and theater and television) is a technical enterprise that requires skill in the manipulation of devices from storytelling or narration to figuration or metaphor. It is also an imaginary recasting of human life in all of its dimensions, from personal relations to class politics. Literature draws together all the aspects of our lives and makes them available for study. Indeed, another name for our enterprise might simply be Life Studies.

For example, Shakespeares play King Lear is a portrait of failed family relationships, an argument about politics in early seventeenth-century England, a reflection of Renaissance gender roles, a meditation on what might be called the human condition that we are all a bare forked animal, yet we dress in clothes that distinguish us one from the other , a covert queer coming-out story, and a portrait of hunger and deprivation during a time of crop failure and famine. But the play is also structured as a dual narrative that has consequences both for the evolution of the story and for the meanings it proposes. Its poetic speeches merit study for Shakespeares use of classic rhetorical forms such as chiasmus that, like the dual narrative structure, assist the plays meaning while lending complex form to its ideas. To study the play properly and fully, you need to draw on both Plato and Aristotle, on both the formal tradition of literary analysis and the semantic dimension of literary meaning.

After the fall of Rome, the study of literature was confined to religious texts for many centuries. The arguments that animated them now seem quaint, but some of the models of analysis that emerged such as hermeneutics (which tied the meaning of each part to the meaning of the whole) and historical criticism (which sought to reconstruct the original context in which texts were written) remain pertinent. After the Renaissance, scholars, with the help of the newly translated Greek texts of Aristotle especially, once again began to study secular literature, and down through the nineteenth century theorists reflected on the nature of literary art and its function in human life. They were primarily concerned with prescribing what literature should do, such as imitate nature. Another important classical idea was the three unities of time, place, and action. A play that begins in Athens should not jump around implausibly from one location to another. Like Plato, Philip Sidney felt that literature should provide moral instruction, and Samuel Johnson shared Aristotles belief that art provided access to universals.