Revisiting literary theory twenty years after grad school

Twenty years ago at this time, I was limping to the end of my Master's in English. Although I'd been accepted into the Ph.D. program, by the final semester of getting my M.A., I had already turned them down and wanted only to collect a piece of paper to document the poor life choice going to graduate school had been before heading off in search of the elusive "real job."  

I'd probably gotten into literature in the first place for the same reasons many people do. Literature had offered to me, in the words of Harold Bloom, a chance to "enlarge a solitary existence." Far from enlarging it, though, graduate school seemed to make the solitariness more solitary. At the heart of this was something called literary theory.  

For most people who never get further into literary studies than an introductory survey class in college or maybe even the survey courses of high school, they might think that what literature students do is what your Eighth grade teacher taught you to do when you were reading Of Mice and Men. You read a bit about the author's life, then you read the story, then you list the main characters, the conflict, the setting, and maybe write a few paragraphs about theme. If there's any difference between what English majors do and what high school English students do, most people would probably guess it's a matter of degree. Say, you read a whole biography about the author instead of a few paragraphs, and then you follow up Of Mice and Men by reading more Steinbeck, until you're something of an expert on his work. Then you move on to the next canonical author. 

When I picked English as my major as an undergraduate (my fourth major in my first four semesters of college), I think that's also what I assumed it was. I guessed that you took survey courses up to the 300/400 level, when you started zeroing in on the authors you liked the most and got to take whole courses in them. But that whole time, I assumed that reading seriously meant mainly reading for things like setting, character, narrative arc, theme, and maybe, if you wanted to get a little crazy, trying to demonstrate how the work reflected social beliefs of the time of its creation. 

Theory ruins Eden

Imagine my shock, then, when I took a 300-level course in Baroque literature that spent far more time talking about Saussure, Derrida, de Man, and Foucault--theorists who wrote from the late 19th century to the late twentieth--than it did talking about, say, Pedro Calderon or other writers from the actual Baroque period. We got passages from these theorists that had been extracted from larger works, and I often could only vaguely guess what they were talking about. Maybe it was because I needed to read the whole work instead of just an extract, maybe it was because it was in translation, but it seemed like they were either making up words on every page or using words in ways I didn't recognize. 

They seemed to be saying that language was so slippery that nobody could ever really understand each other, but also that language was so iron-clad it could be used as a tool of the oppressor. To the extent I could understand them, it seemed like the things they said were either intentionally provocative and false--early versions of internet trolls--or so obvious, I didn't understand why they went through all those mental gymnastics to arrive at such commonplace conclusions. My professor, in any event, seemed to think this stuff was the most fascinating thing she'd ever encountered, and she looked at literature not for plot, structure, and theme, but for all the circumlocutions of language these theorists claimed made up all human discourse. 

It seemed to me like reading literature for everything except the reasons that made it worth doing in the first place, but once I became aware of theory's existence, I realized it was all over the study of literature. In fact, anyone who was considered a serious scholar was only talking about theory. Emotionally and cognitively engaging a text on a human level was the height of squareness. 

Because everyone seemed to treat it with so much seriousness, I tried to learn about it. My undergraduate school didn't have an "Introduction to Lit Theory" course, so I tried reading books about it. One I remember actually finishing was Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: an Introduction. Someone had recommended it to me, and really, there weren't a whole lot of other choices. Eagleton was a Marxist, and he gave the entirety of the history of literary theory from a Marxist perspective, which meant it wasn't always a very unbiased way of learning about what some schools of theory believed, but I at least found Marxist approaches refreshingly grounded. They were about something in the real world I could understand. To this day, I'm still much more sympathetic to Marxist theory and other social-minded theories, such as gender theory or queer theory or Afro-American theory, than I am to the linguistically-oriented Continental theorists. (Of course, to the extent that some socio-centric theorists rely on the language centric ones, I hate them, too.) 

What I privately imagine every deconstructionist theorist looks like

I understood enough about literary theory by the end of undergrad that I did okay on my English literature specific GRE, which was about half theory and half actual literature, but I never felt comfortable with it. In grad school, I often felt unprepared for what we were doing. What annoyed me most was that I didn't really believe most students who were aping the language of theory understood it any more than I did. I thought they were using buzz words the way people in my job now do, to cover over their own inadequacies and as a substitute for real thinking. But I also knew I wasn't a master of the subject enough to call them out. Grad school was a mix between workshops where I wrote stories (which I could no longer write in a natural way, because theory had made me question what a story even was) and literature classes where we mixed theory nobody understood with literature nobody had time to read because we were too busy trying to learn theory. 

I had to decide to either keep diving deeper into something I suspected didn't really have anything to it at the bottom, or I had to start all over in life. I chose to start over. I think I made the right choice. From what I know of what happened to literary theory after I left the academy and the "theory is dead" cries that went up a few years after I'd gone away, I might have been just a few years ahead of my time.

Return to theory

In the last few years, though, I've sometimes wished I had a little more grounding in theory. I've now written over 100 entries in this blog analyzing short stories, along with a few on novels, movies, or TV shows. Anytime you're trying to examine what a text is doing and how it's doing it, you're kind of delving into theory. Yes, I can get by with my kind of cobbled-together half understanding (and I even sometimes tell myself this is an advantage as I try to be a bridge between an academic reviewer and an everyman reviewer), but I still think I'd benefit from having a better grounding in theory, even if I mostly reject it. 

Ten years after leaving grad school (which is now ten years ago almost to the day), I decided to start writing fiction again. When I did, I tried something I'd never actually done the whole time I'd been a literature/creative writing student: I read a few introductory books on writing. It certainly helped. So I'm doing the same thing now with theory. Since I never had an "Introduction to Theory" class, I'm slowly putting myself through one now. I'm piecing together my own introductory course, one that might take me up to a year to complete, since I'm doing it on my own time and with huge, competing intellectual priorities interrupting. I've been at it about a month or so, and I've already made a couple of discoveries that I think are useful:

• I've learned that my own, private way of thinking of literature as a replacement for religion isn't really original. Matthew Arnold saw "the great works" as a way of replacing religion, too. Arnold, however, didn't think of this replacement as a private matter, like I do, but a public one. He was concerned that as religion was losing its ability to keep society together, British society would fracture. He proposed inculcating the newly emergent middle classes into the same sort of literary exposure the upper classes had already been doing. By directing their tastes and moral sensibilities, Arnold hoped, the upper classes could maintain their influence. It kind of worked. This is also the birth of what we now know as English literature. There's a reason all that study of plot, character, and theme appeals to me so much and scratches such a similar itch to the one religion used to: because it was designed to do that. It's always good to understand that the ideas one comes up with have probably been thought by someone else, and it's also good to be able to place one's own beliefs in history. I realize my preferred approach was originally meant to be used as a tool of political conservatism, and I therefore am a little bit more circumspect about it.
• Speaking of realizing other people think the same things you thought you came up with on your own, I was already, by the end of grad school, trying to sketch out my own response to language-centric theories that emphasized the futility of communication. I now realize that there was a school of thought all along that was building a philosophy similar to what I was coming up with on my own, except much better. It's called neo-pragmatism. It's favored by a lot of scientists who bother to think about these things, and it particularly appeals to me. One of my books for my self-made theory class is by Richard Rorty, high priest of the school of neo-pragmatism. 
• I've also reconsidered my ideas on the intent of the author in relation to the intent of the text and the intent of the reader. Peter Rabinowitz, in particular, has given me some useful vocabulary to think of these things, such as the "authorial audience" and his focus on the importance of conventions in reading and writing. These things will probably subtly change my approach to stories.

Best American Short Stories comes on in a week. I'm going to try for another year of tackling all twenty stories in it. Looking into my medium-term future, I'm eligible to retire in a little over five years. With the way prices of everything are going up, I doubt I'll be able to retire, but it'll be there as an option. In retirement, I might want to make criticism my main outlet (along with my own writing, of course). If so, I kind of need to fill in some gaps in my education in the meantime. The end of the canon as the basis of literary education was very freeing, but it meant that I kind of spent a lot of my time in school doing whatever I found interesting at the time and not getting enough exposure to influential writers I really should know. 

I'm also looking into moving the blog to another platform, maybe Substack. I picked Blogger years ago because I'm lazy and it was easy, but I've often regretted that choice since then. I'm no less lazy now, so I might still never move it, but I'm going to force myself to at least do some half-assed looking around.