Literary Theory post World War II

Overview

A useful map divides post-war theory by what it decentres. Structuralism decentres the individual author and the individual text by showing that both operate inside systems, of language, of narrative, of myth, that precede them. Poststructuralism decentres the system itself, arguing that systems are unstable, that meaning slides, and that no structure can close itself completely. Psychoanalytic criticism decentres the conscious subject, showing desire, repression, and the unconscious at work in texts and readers. Feminist and postcolonial theory decentre the universal subject, showing that the supposedly neutral human of earlier criticism was often male, European, and bourgeois. New historicism decentres the separation of literature and history, showing texts and contexts circulating power together. Reader theory decentres the text as sole bearer of meaning, showing reading as production. Keep this map in mind, because examination questions often ask not for a summary of a theory but for a comparison: what does this theory see that another misses, and what does it miss that another sees?

Literary Theory post World War II: structuralism, poststructuralism, and their successors

Structuralism begins from language as a system of differences. A word means not by pointing directly to a thing but by differing from other words in the system, and that system, langue, governs individual utterances, parole. Applied to literature, structuralism looks for underlying structures: binary oppositions such as nature and culture, raw and cooked, hero and villain, that organise stories, and narrative functions that recur across tales regardless of surface detail. A structuralist reading of a novel might map its oppositions and show how the plot mediates them, rather than praising its characters. Its strength is systematic comparison across texts and cultures; its limit is that it can make texts look like illustrations of a universal grammar, flattening historical and political specificity. Poststructuralism accepts the system but denies its stability. Meaning is produced by difference and deferral: a signifier points to other signifiers, not to a final signified that would anchor meaning once and for all. Deconstruction is a reading practice within this outlook: it finds the binary opposition a text depends on, shows that the privileged term depends on the suppressed term, and reveals moments where the text undermines its own apparent argument. A text that claims to privilege speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion may, on close reading, rely on the devalued term to make its case. Deconstruction does not mean that texts mean nothing; it means that meanings are multiple, unstable, and produced in reading, and that a responsible reading must show that instability in evidence rather than asserting it in general. The death of the author argument follows from this: the author is not the origin and guarantor of meaning, but a function, a figure constructed by texts, institutions, and readers. Biography and intention remain interesting, but they cannot close meaning. Intertextuality extends the point: every text is woven from other texts, quotations, genres, and discourses, so originality is recombination and transformation, not creation from nothing. Psychoanalytic criticism, drawing on ideas of the unconscious, desire, repression, and identification, reads texts for what they repress as well as what they state, for slips, repetitions, dreams, and symptoms, and for how readers identify with characters and positions. Its strength is attention to desire and to the unsaid; its risk is reducing every text to a single family drama or universal pattern. Feminist theory after the war expanded from recovering women writers to questioning gender itself: how texts construct femininity and masculinity, how the male gaze organises looking, how language marks gender, and how gender intersects with race, class, and nation. Postcolonial theory questioned the universal subject of European humanism, analysed colonial discourse, mimicry, hybridity, and the subaltern voice that dominant archives may not record, and read formerly colonised writing as rewriting empire from inside and outside its language. New historicism rejected the separation of literary foreground and historical background, treating texts as part of a circulation of social energy and power, where anecdotes, institutions, and literary works mutually shape each other, and where history itself is textual, made in narratives that select and exclude. Discourse and power, in the influential account associated with this period, means that knowledge and power produce each other: institutions, disciplines, and languages define what can be said, who can say it, and what counts as true, so that literary value itself is part of a field of power. Reader theory, including reception theory and the idea of the implied reader, made reading a historical and productive act: texts contain gaps, blanks, and indeterminacies that readers fill, and different historical readers fill them differently, so literary history is also a history of readings. The examination discipline for all of this is the same: name the theory's question, show its move on a specific feature of a specific text, and state its limit. A deconstructive reading must find a real binary and a real reversal in the text, not merely declare meaning unstable. A feminist reading must show gender at work in language, plot, or point of view, not merely note that a character is a woman. A postcolonial reading must show colonial discourse or hybridity in form and language, not merely note a setting. Theory earns its place by changing what you notice.

Post-war theories: question, move, limit

Author, text, reader: who makes meaning