English Literature And Theory This blog contains the explanation of various critical theories that provide a new insight to view literature and interpretation of various literary texts.

This theory argues that there is no literary text beyond the meanings created by the reader's interpretation. To put in other words, the text which the critic analyzes is not the literary work but the written response of the readers. To understand how there is no literary text beyond the meanings created by readers' interpretations; we need to understand the concept of David Bleich and how he defines the literary text. Like many other reader- response critics, he differentiates between real objects and symbolic objects.

Real objects are physical objects such as tables, chairs, cars, books and the like.

The experience created when someone reads the printed passage of the text like language itself is symbolic object as it occurs not in physical world but in the conceptual world(in the mind of readers). This is why Bleich calls reading - the feelings, associations, and memories that occur as we react subjectively to the printed words on the page i.e. symbolization. Our perception and reading experience create a symbolic world in our mind as we read, so, when we interpret the meaning of the text, we are actually interpreting the meaning of our symbolization. If we are interpreting the meaning of our own conceptual experience, it is an act of interpretation of re-symbolization. Re-symbolization occurs when our experience of the text produces in us a desire for explanation. Our evaluation of the text's quality is also an act of re-symbolization. Actually, we don't like or dislike a text; rather we like or dislike our symbolization of it. Hence, the text we talk about is not really a text on the page: it is the text in our mind.

Deconstructionism a text is similar to breaking a house to see what mistakes were made in its building. When a reader deconstructs a text he is examining it for prejudice and bias that the author might have used for purpose of control. For example, a deconstructionist reading the declaration of Independence would note that the phrase "all men are created equal" excludes women, and while it talks of freedom, it was written by a white male slave- owner. Sexism and slavery contradict the language of liberty. The Deconstructionists look for deception or bad faith, which might be consciously or unconsciously (the Freudian element) motivating a particular author/artist/politician. Note also, that what is absent (gender or ethnic group) from a text may appear large in a deconstructionist interpretation of a text. They refer to this as "the presence of absence"

The task of Deconstructionists, therefore, is to discover contradictions, to show the hidden and suppressed meanings that inhere in a text, whether it is a literary work, or a social institution. Since the official meaning of a discourse is determined by those "in power," Postmodern critics "deconstruct those meanings" to discover what is hidden or suppressed in a text, thereby dishonoring the establishment which stands behind the text and gaining the "right" to overthrow its authority.

The ultimate aim of an interpretation is to construct a meaning that accounts for one's own experience or that of a group. For example, a revisionist historian might write a history of Columbus' discovery of the New World which might benefit those who were oppressed by the white Europeans. Just as we have "spin doctors" in politics and the news media, we have "spin scholarship."

In literary theory, structuralism is an approach to analyzing the narrative material by examining the underlying invariant structure, which is based on linguistic sign system of Ferdinand de Saussure. The structuralists claim that there must be a structure in every text, which explains why it is easier for experienced readers than for non-experienced readers to interpret a text. Hence, they say that everything that is written seems to be governed by specific rules, a "grammar of literature", that one learns in educational institutions and that are to be revealed. For example, a literary critic applying a structuralist literary theory might say that the authors of West Side Story did not write anything "really" new, because their work has the same structure as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In both texts a girl and a boy fall in love(a "formula" with a symbolic operator between them would be "Boy + Girl") despite the fact that they belong to two groups tat hate each other ("Boy's Group - Girl's Group" or "Opposing forces") and conflict is resolved by their death.

The versatility of structuralism is such that a literary critic could make the same claim about a story of two friendly families (""Boy's Family + Girl's Family) that arrange a marriage between their children despite the fact that the children hate each other ("Boy - Girl") and then the children commit suicide to escape the arranged marriage; the justification is that the second story's structure is an 'inversion' of the first story's structure: the relationship between the values of love and the two pairs of parties involved have reversed.

Structuralist literary criticism argues that the "novelty (new) value of a literary text" can lie only in new structure, rather than in the specifics of character development and voice in which that structure is expressed. One branch of literary structuralism, like Freudianism, Marxism, and transformational grammar, posits both deep and surface structure. In Freudianism and Marxism the deep structure is a story, in Freud's case the battle, ultimately, between the life and death instincts, and in Marx, the conflict between classes that are rooted in the economic base.