jazzy_dave | Book 41 - Jonathan Culler "Literary Theory"

Jonathan Culler "Literary Theory : A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford U.P)

This very Short Introduction book gives you a quick overview on the importance of literary theory. It is a little introduction on the history and the progression of literary studies. It was interesting how the book looked at literary criticism as a field of studies that is losing a battle to cultural studies. Even though this field stems from the study of literature, people seem more interested in studying music, movies and TV than literature. Cultural studies seem to be pushing out literary studies and, sadly, the two fields may merge.

I was glad that Culler organized the work thematically rather than by critical schools. Given that many of the best theorists overlap in many fields - is Judith Butler a psychoanalyst or feminist? is Althusser a structuralist or Marxist? and what is Foucault? - I think Culler's approach best represents how theory actually works. After all, poststructuralism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis tend to do much the same thing in a theoretical context: they all call 'the natural' (of language, of the state and economics, of the personality) into question and thereby transform the self into subject. That denaturalization is the key difference from what came before, not the differences between, say, a politically informed and a merely linguistic poststructuralism.

Moreover, even though it originally appeared about 10 years ago, its refusal to split theory into various schools preserved it from obsolescence. The pure Lacanian died out in 1999 or so, and now the best critics draw on everything.

Highly recommended.