Literary Theory

Choose a question

What does literature represent?

Begin with competing accounts of poetry’s relation to truth, feeling, and education. A theory of imitation also makes assumptions about what a human being is and what a community needs.

• Plato — Republic

  Books II, III, and X ask what poetry teaches us to admire and whether imitation brings us closer to knowledge. Begin with the education of the guardians.

• Plato — Gorgias

  Examine the difference between persuasion and knowledge. What responsibilities accompany the power to move an audience?

• Plato — Symposium

  Compare the ascent toward beauty with the particular people and desires through which the dialogue presents it.

• Aristotle — Poetics

  Study plot, recognition, reversal, and catharsis. Ask how the arrangement of an action can make something intelligible.

• Aristotle — Rhetoric

  Follow the interaction of argument, character, emotion, and figurative language.

Try the comparison: Read a scene from a tragedy through Plato and Aristotle. Which details would each account emphasize, and what might each fail to explain?

How does language make meaning?

Metaphor, inherited stories, and imaginative activity can shape what a reader recognizes as reality. These works offer different accounts of that power.

• Snorri Sturluson — The Prose Edda

  Skaldskaparmal explains poetic diction and kennings through stories. Consider how much a metaphor depends on shared cultural knowledge.

• Coleridge — Biographia Literaria

  Distinguish imagination from fancy and consider how poetic form participates in thought.

• Nietzsche — On Truth and Falsity in Their Ultramoral Sense

  Ask what happens to our confidence in concepts when truth is examined through metaphor, convention, and forgetting.

• Emerson — Nature

  Follow the relationships among nature, language, perception, and spiritual meaning.

• Emerson — The Poet

  “The Poet” considers the poet as a maker of symbols and an interpreter of common experience.

Try the comparison: Choose one image whose meaning changes across a poem. Does the language illustrate a thought already formed, or help bring that thought into being?

What makes art valuable?

Questions about beauty and taste become sharper when readers disagree. These readings connect critical judgment with feeling, experience, form, and the conditions of artistic creation.

• Hume — Essays

  Read “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion” alongside “Of Eloquence.” Consider how judgment is cultivated and how expression affects an audience.

• Goethe — Literary Essays

  Explore imitation, style, genres, Shakespeare, criticism, and world literature. Compare the claims of individual essays rather than reducing the collection to one rule.

• Goethe — Maxims and Reflections

  The “Literature and Art” section invites short, contestable comparisons about making and judging art.

• Schopenhauer — The Art of Literature

  Read essays on authorship, style, criticism, reputation, and genius. Ask whether critical independence can become a new kind of authority.

• Schopenhauer — The World as Will and Idea, Volume 1

  Book III develops the account of aesthetic contemplation and the arts.

• Schopenhauer — The World as Will and Idea, Volume 3

  The supplements to Book III extend the discussion of genius, poetry, tragedy, and music.

• Nietzsche — The Birth of Tragedy

  Examine the Apollonian and Dionysian and the relationship between tragic art and suffering.

• Emerson — Art

  “Art” places artistic achievement in relation to nature and ordinary life.

• Emerson — Representative Men

  Read the essays on Shakespeare and Goethe as arguments about the writer’s representative power.

• Emerson — The Conduct of Life

  “Beauty” raises questions about form, perception, and the relation between aesthetic and practical life.

• Dewey — Experience and Nature

  Read “Experience, Nature and Art” with “Existence, Value and Criticism.” How does criticism grow out of experience and return to it?

Try the comparison: Have students defend different judgments of the same passage. Then identify the standard each judgment assumes and a detail that puts that standard under pressure.

What might a text reveal without saying?

Psychoanalytic readings attend to dreams, repetitions, jokes, contradictions, and desire. Treat an interpretation as a claim requiring evidence; a character, narrator, author, and reader occupy different positions.

• Freud — The Uncanny

  Begin with the relation between familiar and frightening, then examine doubles, repetition, and the special conditions of fiction.

• Freud — Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious

  Consider how verbal play and indirect expression make otherwise difficult wishes speakable.

• Freud — The Interpretation of Dreams

  Use condensation and displacement to formulate questions about imagery and narrative. Test where the analogy between a dream and a literary work holds.

• Freud — A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis

  An introduction to dreams, symptoms, and interpretive method that can clarify the assumptions behind a psychoanalytic reading.

• Freud — Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex

  Examine the historical account of sexuality and development behind Freud’s theories of desire.

• Freud — Psychopathology of Everyday Life

  Ask how slips, forgetting, and apparently minor actions become material for interpretation.

• Freud — Beyond the Pleasure Principle

  Explore repetition and the difficulty of explaining human action entirely through the pursuit of pleasure.

• Freud — Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego

  Consider identification, attachment, and the individual’s relationship to a group.

• Freud — Civilization and Its Discontents

  Read desire, aggression, guilt, and social order as an unstable accommodation.

• Jung — Psychological Types

  Chapters on Schiller, poetry, the Apollonian and Dionysian, and aesthetics connect psychological distinctions to artistic interpretation.

• Jung — Psychology of the Unconscious

  Compare accounts of fantasy, myth, and symbolic transformation.

• Jung — Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

  Examine relations between consciousness and the unconscious as background for interpreting divided selves.

• Jung — Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology

  A wider collection for comparing Jung’s developing methods and their assumptions.

• Jung — The Theory of Psychoanalysis

  Trace agreements and disagreements within psychoanalytic explanation.

• Jung — Studies in Word-Association

  Methodological background on association and emotionally charged language; distinguish experimental findings from a literary interpretation.

• Jung — The Psychology of Dementia Praecox

  Historical clinical background for Jung’s account of complexes. Its diagnostic framework requires scrutiny and should not become a shortcut for labeling characters.

Try the comparison: Read a repeated image first as a feature of narrative form, then through Freud or Jung. What does the second reading disclose, and what evidence could make you revise it?

How do stories carry collective meanings?

These works supply contrasting approaches to myth, ritual, religion, and symbolism. Their explanatory ambitions and historical assumptions are themselves subjects for discussion.

• Frazer — The Golden Bough

  Examine comparisons among ritual, seasonal change, sacrifice, and myth. Ask what is lost when different traditions are placed in a single pattern.

• Jessie Weston — From Ritual to Romance

  Follow a particular argument connecting Grail romance with ritual. Distinguish evidence for a historical connection from a suggestive resemblance.

• Durkheim — The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

  Consider how shared practices and symbols help constitute a social world.

• William James — The Varieties of Religious Experience

  Compare the emphasis on individual experience with explanations centered on collective life.

• Rudolf Otto — The Idea of the Holy

  Investigate the numinous and the difficulty of describing religious feeling in ordinary conceptual language.

• Freud — Totem and Taboo

  Study Freud’s speculative links among prohibition, desire, and social origins, testing the assumptions of the comparison.

• Freud — The Future of an Illusion

  Ask how wishes, authority, and cultural inheritance enter an explanation of religious belief.

Try the comparison: Choose a creation story or ritual scene. Compare two theories while identifying something specific to the tradition that neither adequately explains.

Who gets to write, speak, and be heard?

These works provide foundations for feminist, materialist, and race-conscious interpretation. They differ in purpose and historical setting; their application to literature needs to be argued.

• Virginia Woolf — A Room of One’s Own

  Connect authorship and literary history to money, space, education, and gender. Attend to the essay’s narrative strategies as well as its claims.

• Wollstonecraft — A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

  Examine education and the production of supposedly natural differences between women and men.

• Mill — The Subjection of Women

  Investigate how custom and unequal power shape arguments about capacity and character.

• Marx and Engels — The Communist Manifesto

  Use class relations and historical change to ask how material interests enter a literary world. The manifesto supplies a foundation, not a complete method of literary criticism.

• Adam Smith — The Wealth of Nations

  Compare accounts of labor, exchange, and social organization before applying economic categories to a narrative.

• Du Bois — The Souls of Black Folk

  Explore double consciousness, the veil, music, and the interplay of personal experience with historical argument.

• Du Bois — The Talented Tenth

  Examine education, leadership, and cultural authority alongside the broader account in The Souls of Black Folk.

Try the comparison: Ask whose labor, education, or testimony a narrative makes visible. Then consider how its voice and form invite readers to accept or question that distribution of attention.

How does literature participate in history?

Literary works inherit forms and values while sometimes challenging them. These philosophical and cultural writings help frame questions about recognition, historical change, education, and national literature.

• Hegel — The Phenomenology of Mind

  Use questions of recognition and developing consciousness to examine conflicts between a self-understanding and the world that tests it.

• Hegel — The Philosophy of History

  Interrogate the relationship between freedom and historical narrative, including the exclusions built into a universal account.

• Nietzsche — On the Genealogy of Morals

  Investigate how values acquire authority and how their histories may trouble their apparent naturalness.

• Nietzsche — Beyond Good and Evil

  Examine perspective, inherited moral assumptions, and the relationship between an argument and the person making it.

• Nietzsche — The Joyful Wisdom

  Read experiments in perspective, art, and knowledge while attending to aphorism, voice, and shifts in tone.

• Whitman — Democratic Vistas

  Ask what kind of literature democratic life requires and whether cultural aspirations match social realities.

• Whitman — Specimen Days

  Read the reflections on poets, regional literature, and literary tests alongside Whitman’s account of lived experience.

• José Enrique Rodó — Ariel

  Consider education, beauty, cultural identity, and the critique of narrowly utilitarian values.

• Dewey — Democracy and Education

  Connect the interpretation of experience to education, participation, and shared life.

Try the comparison: Put Goethe’s account of world literature beside Whitman or Rodó. Who is imagined as the audience, what counts as cultural achievement, and whose experience is left outside the frame?

Questions for comparison

• Where does meaning reside? Compare an account that emphasizes form with one that emphasizes readers, unconscious desire, or social history. What would count as evidence for each?
• Can the same feature support incompatible readings? Choose an image or narrative silence. Explain two interpretations before deciding what could distinguish between them.
• What does the theory assume about a person? Ask whether its reader or character appears primarily as a desiring subject, a social participant, a maker of symbols, or something else.
• Who has the authority to judge? Compare Hume, Woolf, and Du Bois on the conditions under which judgment and cultural authority develop.
• What would make you change your mind? Identify a passage that your preferred interpretation has difficulty explaining. Revise the claim rather than treating the difficulty as irrelevant.

Teaching with these readings

Let the problem precede the terminology. Begin with a short literary passage that produces disagreement. Ask students to describe what they notice and formulate the question their disagreement raises. Introduce a theoretical reading that gives that question greater precision.

Read the theorist as carefully as the literary work. Have students identify a claim, the reasoning behind it, and an assumption it depends on. Attend to dialogue, essay, aphorism, and polemic as forms that shape the claim. A memorable sentence is a starting point for inquiry.

Give competing interpretations their strongest case. Groups can return to the same passage through different theories. Each should explain what becomes newly visible, cite the words supporting its interpretation, and identify a detail it still cannot explain. Let students question one another before revising.

Make revision the intellectual achievement. For a short response, ask students to trace how their reading changed: an initial observation, a theoretical claim, a resistant detail, and a revised interpretation. Encourage them to explain the theory’s usefulness and limits in this particular encounter.

Keep historical differences in view. Compare the purposes and audiences of the theoretical works. A resemblance between an ancient account and a later method can open discussion without establishing that their assumptions are the same.

Related readings: literature examines itself

Return from theoretical claims to works in which reading, storytelling, and artistic aspiration become part of the action. A character’s aesthetic theory remains something the narrative can complicate.

• Cervantes — Don Quixote

  Ask how inherited books shape perception and how the novel teaches us to judge its competing accounts.

• Jane Austen — Northanger Abbey

  Compare the defense of novel reading with the consequences of reading life through Gothic expectations.

• Laurence Sterne — Tristram Shandy

  Investigate digression, sequence, and the reader’s participation in making a life into a story.

• James Joyce — A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

  Set Stephen’s account of beauty and artistic vocation beside the experiences through which it develops.

• Thomas Mann — Death in Venice

  Test an artist’s ideal of disciplined form against desire, perception, and self-deception.

• Marcel Proust — Swann’s Way

  Explore how memory, habit, and artistic experience alter what becomes available to consciousness.

Try the comparison: Let a passage resist the theory you bring to it. Develop a revised interpretation that preserves the detail that first made the theory inadequate.