eduify | write faster

Name dropping works a lot better while writing a paper than while having a conversation in real life. An activity that makes you look foolish in real life can be highly effective while writing a paper. Why?

Looking at a topic through a theoretical or philosophical lense can add a deeper level of understanding. Theory and philosophy are in practice everywhere, from politics to psychology to art to literature. Literary theory is something that every English major in college is expected to understand. Not only does theory add more layers of understanding to any literary work, but it also helps readers analyze works in deeper and more meaningful ways.

That said, college students often flagrantly name drop theorists like Deleuze, Baudrillard, Althusser, Derrida, et. al. without truly understanding a word of their theories. While taking higher level seminars in college, I often heard my fellow students talking about Lacan in ways that obviously showed they never really read Lacan beyond his Wikipedia page. While I don’t condone the irresponsible application of misunderstood theories to any of your critical papers, I do believe that a basic understanding of certain theories is highly useful for any person studying literature, not just because it will heighten your comprehension of literary works, but also because you will see firsthand the many ways that literature has power in the world beyond the physical pages of a book by applying theory into practice.

The purpose of this post is to hopefully inspire students to read literary theory outside of class. Not only will understanding theory make your reading more scholarly, more perceptive, and even more interesting, but it will also serve you well in writing papers. So here are 5 famous thinkers every student should know, and some links to their works.

5. Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure has had an enormous impact on liguistics and critical theory due to his writings on structural linguistics and semiotics. If you’ve ever heard people discussing the terms sign, signifier, and signified, they are referring to the school of structuralist thought founded by Saussure. Structuralists believed that language is the complicated workings of many structural parts, which can be individually dissected and analyzed in the search for meaning. Not only can language be intrepreted in this manner, but all of life itself can be seen as the complex workings of signals and signs. For more on structuralism, this resource is a great place to begin. For those who want to read Saussure, his Course in General Linguistics is the best place to begin.

4. Jacques Derrida. Derrida is a post-structuralist philosopher who became a prominent thinker due to his contribution to the field of deconstruction. From the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory, deconstruction is: “A school of philosophy that originated in France in the late 1960s, has had an enormous impact on Anglo-American criticism. Largely the creation of its chief proponent Jacques Derrida, deconstruction upends the Western metaphysical tradition. It represents a complex response to a variety of theoretical and philosophical movements of the 20th century, most notably Husserlian phenomenology, Saussurean and French structuralism, and Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis.” While Of Grammotology is perhaps not the easiest place to start reading Derrida, it’s considered by many to be his best known work.

3. Judith Butler. Judith Butler, a post-structuralist thinker, has greatly contributed to feminist theory and queer theory. This page from Theory.org is a great place to begin discovering Butler’s works. Butler has written that gender is a fluid concept that is not tied to a person’s sex, and “Butler argues that sex (male, female) is seen to cause gender (masculine, feminine) which is seen to cause desire (towards the other gender). This is seen as a kind of continuum. Butler’s approach — inspired in part by Foucault — is basically to smash the supposed links between these, so that gender and desire are flexible, free-floating and not ’caused’ by other stable factors.” Understanding that the term “gender” is a myth is important for any kind of deeper analysis of works relevant to feminist studies or gender studies.

2. Edward Said. Said’s seminal work, Orientalism, is required in every post-colonial curriculum. Written in 1978, Said argued that the type of academic thinking prevalant during that time actually created more divide between the Western and non-Western worlds than any kind of greater understanding. “A rejection of Orientalism entails a rejection of biological generalizations, cultural constructions, and racial and religious prejudices… It is an erasure of the line between ‘the West’ and ‘the Other.’ Said argues for the use of “narrative” rather than “vision” in interpreting the geographical landscape known as the Orient…” Readings of works by writers like Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, and Daniel Defoe, all of which are commonly read in high school and college courses, are of interest to post-colonial thinkers due to their imperialist undertones.

1. Jacques Lacan. Lacan was a psychoanalytical thinker who made great contributions to literary studies. His concept of ‘the other’ is often discussed in literary studies. “We depend on the existence of the Other to fill in the gap of our desires, to create, if only for a moment, the wholeness before our subjectivity, before there was an Other… Images constitute the self. Images of the literal Other create both a separation because it is through that difference that we are constituted but also as we look toward the Other, it is with the desire of being a unified self.” If you Google “Lacanian reading of” you find thousands of links to different writings that apply Lacan to everything from Langston Hughes to Wallace Stevens to Shakespeare. It makes sense: for every character, there is a foil, or an ‘other’. Because theory incorporates and attempts to explain the world around us, it of course has application to literature, which does the same except in a fictional setting.