What should I read to have good knowledge in Literary Thoery? Which philosophers? Which social theorists? Which linguists? Which literary theorists? Should I read Aesthetics? Ethics? Freud? Foucault? Kant? Derrida? Help me making this path.
I already know that I need to read Plato and Aristotle.
Thanks in advance.
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Literary theory is trash. All modern philosophy is trash. Philosophy begins with Socrates and ends with Darwin, who is ignored by the "i fucking love science" crowd.
Look at the yale lecture course for free on youtube, do the supplemental readings (focus on primary sources), and then develop from there.
russian formalism/american new criticism is when the discourse really became institutionalised. following that structuralism had a big impact - indluenced by de sussure and roman jakobson among others, then came roland bathes, and that;s when it took off. psychoanalysis (especially lacan) was always buzzing around so was marxist criticism. there are some really good introductory lectures on lit theory that yale posted on youtube. they're real informative and are great back ground to the discourse on the whole. I'll find a link and post it up now. from there you can find where you're interest is. the discourse is really heterogeneous right now (for better of worse), so just follow your interest.
Nice. I'll watch those Yale videos, thanks!
Read Kenneth Burke, start with Counterstatement, then try:
Permanence & Change
Philosophy of Literary Form OR Attitudes Toward History, then the other.
Fucking based, thank user!
What I care : the version of the text you care about, is it what the author said, or what you say the author said ? I think, you can not talk of what the author said : you are not the author, you are yourself.
So you talk of the text, according to the author (you make him talk) according to you (you think it, by yourself ?)
Littérature is too subjective ... What ever what people say ...
Umberto Eco, Octavio Paz, more recs, anyone? Don't let this thread die
You should focus on reading well before getting into literary theory.
Don't read any literary theory at first, but merely focus on reading as much as possible and reading as well as possible. Read "How to Read a Book" as it will teach you text analysis, rather than analyzing a book without showing you how to do it.
Then read the classics: start with the Greeks. Try to read everything in it's original language: the study of languages will teach you how your own works.
Once you have gotten 4-5 authors under your belt (a good benchmark for having understood a great work is that you can lecture on that work for about 90 minutes without preparation) you can begin to move towards criticism. I like Harold Bloom, and T.S. Elliot's critical essays are good. I don't like Woolf, but she says some intelligent stuff when talking of other authors.
Foucault is actually a genius, but I wouldn't read him for the sake of literary theory, because in general I like to study a philosopher's output as a whole, so as not to get a distorted view of his thought, and IMO most of Foucault's work is irrelevant to literary theory proper. (Most contemporary """literary theorists""" also misread Foucault and make him a good domesticated lefty, and I think this is really terrible.) Have read no Derrida, so I cannot judge his merits, but anecdotally the two Derridians that I have met are insufferable mid-wits, so I don't know if I would start there.
Good luck OP.
>I think it's worth saying a word or two about the word "Introduction"
There are different schools of literary theory.
>Hermeneutics
"fourfold meaning of the scripture", "Hermeneutic circle", Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Gadamer.
>Structuralism
especially Russian Formalism and Roland Barthes
>Post-structuralism and deconstruction
for God's sake don't even touch that bullshit: it's pure drivel
>Intertextuality
there are different literary theories labeled as "Theory of Intertextuality"; the most famous one is by Julia Kristeva
>various psychoanalytic approaches
There are also some famous outliers which can't be assigned to any of those schools: for example Susan Sontag (especially "Against Interpretation"), Michel Foucault or Walter Benjamin.
Aristotle's Poetics is worthwhile; but unlike philosophers most literary "scientists" don't value antique thinkers much, unfortunately.
Already heard about Kristeva, I'm going to search more about her
Ignore this poster. He is disingenious and expresses both ignorance of literary theory and an outmoded theory simultaneously. Ignorance of one’s theoretical paradigm does not exempt one from the entrappments of that paradigm.
I'll not let this thread die, I need recs.
Bakhtin
"The Dialogic Imagination"
This post is trash
>literary theory
>read Plato and Aristotle
Yes, please, get into the bucket of the Plato readers who have read Ion, Phaedrus and Republic X and whose only knowledge of Aristotle consiste in vaguely understood notions from the Poetic.
Drop literary theory and read philosophy. The first thing you'll notice when you read this is that whatever key of interpretation is chosen to study texts is chosen on completely arbitrary grounds. Literary theory is basically 'how do I apply this random philosophy/psychology book which I barely understand to read books so that I can repeat the words and sentences that sounded cool in it'. Stay away from that shit, it is the lowest level of the humanities.
There are a couple really great lit theory anthologies on b-ok. You can find the web link in the sticky and search from there.
The Norton anthology and the Rivkin anthology are both wonderful but they're absolute bricks so it may benefit you to pick a specific field of lit theory to study first (Marxism, Phenomenology, Structuralism, (Post)Modernism, etc.) and then deep dive into those writers.
Basically the inch-wide-mile-deep versus mile-wide-inch-deep approach.
Here let me help you friend
