In big bookshops, there are sections not just for fiction, poetry, plays and so on, but also for something called ‘literary theory’. A recent survey of all university English departments revealed that four out of every five taught a compulsory first year course on ‘literary theory’. Three quarters thought knowing about ‘literary theory’ was, quite simply, essential: the remainder thought it to be desirable. Overall, ‘literary theory’ was seen to be more important than having a knowledge of the canon of English literature. Despite its importance in English at university level, what’s called ‘theory’ isn’t taught much on A-level courses. In the last twenty years or so, the issues raised by ‘literary theory’ have caused terrible arguments and divisions between students and teachers of English in schools, colleges and universities all over the English speaking world. So what is it?

Read is doing

One way to answer this question is to ask what happens when we read. Look at diagram (1). There is, obviously, a reader, you, and there is a text to be read, a novel, for example. But there is also something between the two: an arrow that represents the your interpretation of that text. When you read, you actively do something. Your reading doesn't just happen, as if it were a natural process (you wouldn’t have English classes if it did). To read a literary text, to think about it and perhaps to write about it is to make an interpretation. ‘Doing English’ means, perhaps more than anything else, making interpretations. The result of your interpretation -- what you think about a text -- will depend on all sorts of things. For example, it will be influenced by what questions are in the front of your mind when you’re reading and by the context in which you are reading (do you read a novel for fun in the same way that you read a book for your course?). Your interpretation will also be influenced by your wider expectations and ideas about what literature is and should be. Perhaps most importantly, your interpretation will rely on your understanding and experience of the world you live in, on the assumptions and ideas that you take so for granted that you rarely question them. Your interpretation relies on your presuppositions, whether you are conscious of them or not. Every body has presuppositions. Just as you can’t jump higher than your shadow, it is impossible to be ‘neutral’ or without presuppositions.

As you know from your own experience, people make different interpretations of the novels, plays and poems they read (and, of course, of the films and TV programmes they see, songs they hear and so on). People’s interpretations of texts are different because people have different presuppositions (which in turn stems from the hardly contentious fact that people are different). As the differences in people’s experience of the world, their different aims, beliefs, expectations, interests and so on have become much more widely recognised and accepted in general, and especially in education, different ways of interpreting literature have developed to reflect -- and to revel in -- that difference. And it is these newish ways of interpreting that have appeared in the last thirty years or so that are known, in a rather slapdash, catch-all sort of way, as ‘literary theory’. For example, there are ways of interpretation influenced by explicitly political concerns and presuppositions; there are ways that have developed in response to concerns with ethnicity, gender and sexuality. There are interpretations of texts that rely only on a deep knowledge of the historical period of the work in question and methods that rely on philosophical ideas about the nature of language and of how we understand reality. There are ways of interpreting literature that put ecological concerns to the fore and ways that have developed from psychology and psychoanalysis. More than this, since there are lots of different forms of interpretation, we can also compare and contrast them and the presuppositions which underlie them. Each approach will show up things the other approaches miss. This encourages us to think about how we interpret, what happens when we interpret in different ways and how different presuppositions affect how we read texts. (Traditionally, the study of different methods of interpretation has been called ‘hermeneutics’ – the science of interpretation). To reflect this all this, I have adapted my diagram (see diagram 2). The arrows between the reader and the text represent the (near-infinite) different ways of interpreting texts, and different understandings of those texts that these produce. The arrow that points to all the other arrows represents hermeneutics, comparing the different ways of interpreting and their presuppositions.

This may sound abstract but think about what happens when you actually read: on a small scale, think in terms of the questions that you ask yourself. For example, you (or the essay title!) ask questions like: what happens in the plot here? Is this character likeable? How are metaphors being used to achieve a certain effect? Each of these three rather basic questions will draw your attention to different parts of the text. (The question of character will make you concentrate on what that character says and does, the question on metaphor will make you concentrate on how the language is woven together, the question about plot will make you look at the events the text describes). Each of these questions will lead you to a different interpretation of the text by focussing your attention on different aspects of it. Sometimes the questions you approach a text with will be more open-ended. For example: how does this text represent the relationships between women and men? What is it telling us about its historical period? Philosophically, is revenge (for example) ever justified? Because these are at the forefront of your mind, each of these questions will structure your interpretation. When you read about or hear someone (your teacher?) talk about a work of literature, ask yourself: what unspoken questions does this answer? By uncovering these questions, you will learn a lot about that particular method of interpretation and its presuppositions, about what that person thinks is really important. A greater challenge is to ask yourself what questions haven’t been answered, or haven’t even been raised.

If there are an infinite number of ways of interpreting texts and if, as teachers and lecturers often say, there is no right answer in English, then why is it that your course work and essays can get bad marks as well as good marks? If there’s no right answer, why do you still lose marks for getting it wrong?

Imagine diagram (2) in which one of the arrows, one of the ways of interpreting, was thought to be much bigger and more important than all the others. This is how English as a subject used to be (and in some ways and in some places, particularly at A-level, still is). The one swollen arrow was so much larger than all the others that people assumed it was the only way of interpreting literature. People said that if you didn’t follow that one approach, if you didn’t share that one way of looking, then it meant that you were doing it ‘wrong’, that you had ‘no feeling for literature’, or that you weren’t doing English. What this really meant was that ‘your way of interpreting’ (a ‘wrong’ way) didn’t share the same presuppositions as ‘the way of interpreting’ (the ‘right’ way). A ‘right answer’ is one that shares the same interpretation as the person marking your work. Of course, there is some flexibility, over details and ambiguities, but, in general, to be ‘right’ means that you share the same presuppositions (or, often, you try to pretend to share them to get the ‘right answer’). These presuppositions are usually unspoken and taken for granted. However, this consensus of taken for granted ideas has been challenged in the last thirty or so years. The challenges have come both from the intellectual world, where ideas have moved on and developed, and from the wider world, where rapid social change has made the more tradition acceptance of ‘the one way of interpreting’ look dated, to say the least, and perhaps even suspicious. In English, these challenges, as I have suggested, are called, in a loose way, ‘theory’, and, as you might expect, they have caused more than a little friction in the past in their different ways. In fact, English as a subject – summed up by A-level syllabuses, for example - is still caught, mid-leap, between wanting to return to the safety of the ‘one right way’ and embracing a wide range of possible ways of interpreting literature. And this tension between the idea of ‘one right way’ and ‘many ways’ is, in no small part, what leads to the paradox that, although there is no right answer, there are still thought to be wrong ones.

You, as a reader, studying English, should be free to explore other methods of interpretation, or to hop from one to the other, or to experiment with a selection. By consciously discovering new ways of reading, using different ways of interpretation, motivated by different presuppositions to our own, we can bring to light, learn about and, perhaps, challenge our own presuppositions which are all too often unquestioned and taken for granted. Studying different ways of interpreting offers not only perspectives on works of literature that are new, interesting and exciting, but also helps to generate new ideas and understandings about our world and our own selves. This is one of the things than makes English such a valuable and wonderful subject. English is not just about what we read, it’s about how we read. How we read and interpret tells us about ourselves, about others and about the world. And perhaps we learn most when we try to understand how other people read and interpret: we learn what others consider to be central to their lives. The realisation underlying literary theory, that how we interpret is as important as what we interpret, is perhaps the most important innovation in the study of literature in the last thirty years. It has changed English completely as a subject and given it a new burst of life, helping the subject to teach us about literature, ourselves, others and the world. This is why literary theory – using and understanding many different ways of interpretation – is essential to doing English.

Bennett, A., and Royle, N. (1995) An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (1995), Havester Wheatsheaf.

Bergonzi, B., (1990) Exploding English: Criticism, Theory and Culture, Clarendon Press

Culler, J. (1997) Literary Theory: A very short introduction, Oxford University Press.

Eagleton, T., (1996) Literary Theory (2^nd ed.), Blackwell.

Salusinszky, I., (1987), Criticism in Society, Routledge.

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Last updated 14 September 2000
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