Assignment No.
:
(1)
Class:
BS-ENG-VI
Subject:
Literary Theories
Topic:
What is Theory?
What is importance of theory in literature?
Submitted to:
Prof. Muazz Farooq Sb
Submitted by:
Asad Mahmood
Roll No. 05
Q-1. What is Theory?
Gelso (2006) claimed that,
“a theory can be thought of as a statement of a testable relationship that may exist between and among a
set of variables associated with a certain phenomenon”.
According to Stem (2007),
“a theory is a group of logically organized sentences of a relationship that constitutes a set of
observations”.
According to Orley and Gioia (2011)
“theory is a statement of concepts and their interrelationships that shows and/or why a phenomenon
occurs” (p. 12).
General Concept of a Theory:
In general, a theory may be a strategy we utilize to deliver us understanding. One of the major
purposes of a theory is to supply a reply to the address ‘why?’. Inquiring, ‘why?’, to
extend your information of a subject area and realign your contemplations and suppositions is
an basic aptitude for anyone who needs to memorize and develop.
‘Why’ is one of the exceptionally first questions that children ask:
“Can you get prepared for bed now?” … “Oh why?”
“Why is snow cold?”
“Why do I need to go to school tomorrow?”
“Why is the sky blue?”
Questions like these, from children, can be unending. Frequently finding
or giving appropriate clarifications can be depleting and disappointing – maybe we resort to saying, “Well
it fair is!” At the premise of such questions be that as it may, are a child’s to begin with endeavors to get
it the world around them, and create their possess speculations of why things are the way they are.
Characterizing ‘theory’, subsequently, must take under consideration the ‘why?’ question, but
a theory is more profound than that. The focuses underneath go a few way to making a difference with a
definition. A theory is an attempt to clarify why and so to supply understanding.
A theory isn't fair ‘any’ clarification - a theory comes into being when a series of thoughts come to be held
and acknowledged by a more extensive community of individuals.
A theory isn't fundamentally truthfully based – how we get it and give clarifications emerges from
our social foundation and how we see the world.
"Literary theory," sometimes designated "critical theory," or "theory," and now undergoing a
transformation into "cultural theory" within the discipline of literary studies, can be understood as the set of
concepts and intellectual assumptions on which rests the work of explaining or interpreting literary texts.
Literary theory refers to any principles derived from internal analysis of literary texts or from knowledge
external to the text that can be applied in multiple interpretive situations. All critical practice regarding
literature depends on an underlying structure of ideas in at least two ways: theory provides a rationale for
what constitutes the subject matter of criticism—"the literary"—and the specific aims of critical practice—the
act of interpretation itself. For example, to speak of the "unity" of Oedipus the King explicitly invokes
Aristotle's theoretical statements on poetics. To argue, as does Chinua Achebe, that Joseph Conrad’s The
Heart of Darkness fails to grant full humanity to the Africans it depicts is a perspective informed by a
postcolonial literary theory that presupposes a history of exploitation and racism. Critics that explain the
climactic drowning of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening as a suicide generally call upon a supporting
architecture of feminist and gender theory. The structure of ideas that enables criticism of a literary work
may or may not be acknowledged by the critic, and the status of literary theory within the academic
discipline of literary studies continues to evolve.
Importance of theory in Literature:
A “Theory” or “Literary theory” is the body of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of
literature. By literary theory we refer not to the meaning of a work of literature but to the theories that reveal
what literature can mean. Literary theory is a description of the underlying principles, one might say the
tools, by which we attempt to understand literature. All literary interpretation draws on a basis in theory but
can serve as a justification for very different kinds of critical activity. It is literary theory that formulates the
relationship between author and work; literary theory develops the significance of race, class, and gender
for literary study, both from the standpoint of the biography of the author and an analysis of their thematic
presence within texts.
In other words, when we try to understand literature, we use certain methods to help us understand
the meaning, and those methods comprise literary theory.
Literary theory offers varying approaches for understanding the role of historical context in
interpretation as well as the relevance of linguistic and unconscious elements of the text. Literary theorists
trace the history and evolution of the different genres—narrative, dramatic, lyric—in addition to the more
recent emergence of the novel and the short story, while also investigating the importance of formal
elements of literary structure. Lastly, literary theory in recent years has sought to explain the degree to
which the text is more the product of a culture than an individual author and in turn how those texts help to
create the culture.
Literary theories include formalism, historicism, deconstructionism, gender approaches,
psychological approaches, and several other methods critics and readers use to understand meaning. For
example, if a reader wants to understand every element of Nathanial Hawthorne's short story "Young
Goodman Brown," who has a dream that changes his entire outlook on his family and society, a critic
using the historical theory of criticism might look at the Puritan belief system in order to see what elements
of Puritanism appear in the story and affect the story's outcome. Using biographical theory, which
postulates that an author's life may affect the way he or she writes, a biographical approach would require
the critic to look for any evidence in Hawthorne's life that he felt negatively about Puritanism. Such an
approach would discover, for example, that Hawthorne actually changed his last name, which was
originally spelled without the w, because he was appalled that one of his ancestors was a judge at the
Salem witch trials in 1692-93.
A literary theory, like anything else, has many purposes. The prime purpose of any good literary
theory should be to help readers and writers look at reading and writing from a perspective that has never
before been codified in the particular way that the author is attempting. Typically, though, even the
progenitor of a theory is well-known, even famous, even before authoring the theory, it takes time —
several years, at least, and most likely several decades — before the theory is accepted and widely
utilised.
Conclusion:
The purpose of a literary theory is to give you a certain way of looking at a text. A good reader will
actually apply multiple lenses to the same text and see how different theories and different texts inter-
connect with each other. This type of reading makes every text richer. Theory with zero multi-disciplinary
applications and intersections is just garbage, not theory.
Look at science. Physics gives us the physical structure of an atom. But Chemistry tells us that
every atom also has chemical properties. Put those two things together and that combined knowledge
changes our perspective on Biology. Put Physics, Chemistry, and Biology together and now you have
different ways of making wood products. And so it goes, for ever and ever.
The End
