Literary Theory

In the time span of last 30 or 40 years literary theory has
been playing a central role in academic studies that are related
to social science and humanities. Various competing or
non-competing perspectives, principals and approaches granted
most of the scholar awareness about importance of
methodological concerns in literary theory. Criticism no longer
confines itself to the study of literature, it discourses are now
stretched beyond literature. It also covers anthropology,
philosophy, psychology, linguistics, political science and much
else. However, for literary researchers it covers all forms of
cultural productions, despite them being literary or non-literary.
In a traditional manner criticism still covers exegesis, evaluation
and interpretation but it is now stretching its range over
theory. Whether you consider theory as a discussion or debates
on the basis of certain definition, as the search for necessary
and sufficient values for critical practice, or consider theory as
a process for making social, historical or ideological
pre-suppositions. No matter which option you chose, it will be
hard to figure out a clear boundary between theory and
criticism. However, they stumble into each other on various
situations.
Literary theory is a set of ideas and methods that help a
reader or researcher to understand the literature better. These
ideas provide guidance for researchers during the practical
process of interpretation. Most people think that literary theory
is all about the meaning of the literature. But it isn't a
full-truth. Literary theory does not just refer to the
interpretation of the text; it is all about 'What should be the
meaning of the text?' Methods and ideas that are described in
literary theory act as principals for critics. They use them as
criteria about art, literature and even culture. These various
criteria allow critics to consider works of art on the basis of
certain assumptions within the school of theory. They also help
critics to maintain their focus on particular objects of a work
that is considered important by them. For instance,
Consider a critic that is working on certain Marxist theories, he
will try to focus on the interaction made by various characters
in the story on the basis of their economical condition. And
consider another critic that is working with post colonial
theories. It is certain that he will use same assumptions as the
first critic. But it is well know how colonial powers treat
characters from India, Africa, Caribbean and other conquered
regions; it leaves a great impact on the preset assumptions as
they are proven wrong. However, after reading and working
through multiple resources literary theory becomes easy to
understand and use too.