Citizen Sector

At your next cocktail party, when an English professor drops by with his tweed jacket with elbow pads or her rhinestone glasses and Jane Austen tote bag, here’s a quick way to have some fun at their expense.

Using the list below,
a) ask her/him to explain any of the following theories in 1 sentence (for extra credit have her/him do it rhymed iambic-pentameter—they love this stuff)
b) ask which literary theory s/he ascribes to and then comment that you heard it’s no more valid than ____ (pick any other theory)
c) ask her/him to explain in depth the theory they appreciate most and then dismiss it as too simple
d) ask her/his favorite book and then say, “oh yeah, was that based on the movie?”

# American pragmatism
# Cultural studies
# Comparative Literature
# Darwinian literary studies
# Deconstruction
# Gender
# Formalism
# German hermeneutics and philology
# Marxism
# Modernism
# New Criticism
# New historicism
# Postcolonialism
# Post-modernism
# Post-structuralism
# Psychoanalysis
# Queer theory
# Reader response
# Russian Formalism
# Structuralism and semiotics
# Eco-criticism
(list provided by the Academic Cotton Candy: Wikipedia)

As a master’s of English student, my world consists of texts, meanings, and interpretations (though you may not have known it, you can’t just read something). While I knew there were interpretations I did not know of the enormous variety nor the vehement opinions pinned to each.
At the center of my world are texts. I’ll skip all the academic debate about what constitutes a text and go right into the reading of it. From here, we can delve into a variety of ways to make sense of a text (or you may be content NOT to make sense of it but that is also an interpretation). Wikipedia, the equivalent academic cotton candy (some love it: it’s so big and fluffy; some hate it: it just doesn’t have real substance) lists twenty-one recognized schools of literary theory. Trust me; there are more (though many of which are subdivisions or variations).
So why might I ask do we “need” twenty-one plus ways to interpret literature? Why can’t we simply read it and enjoy it or not (that is the question of a reader response approach by the way). Why the hard feelings between one school and another (and there really are some hard feelings)?
I believe academics (behind the stereotypes, immense vocabularies, and intimidating intellects) are people too and have the common need to feel validated. That may sound elementary, but too often when delve into scholarship, we forget the woman or man staring at their writing imagining its reception by the academic world. They hope to see their critique, their interpretation, their lens, their approach to the world as the most valid. (When I say valid I only mean scientifically correct in smallest degree). Why else would there be such defensive posturing in support of a theory? English scholars know that English departments are the only places in a university (and larger society) that seriously discuss Freud and Marx as currently useful theorists. Literary academics are not searching for scientific verification because that is the beauty (or perhaps bane) of literature interpretation: you’re always right (and you’re always wrong). The goal of literary circles no longer seems to be to figure out what is the truth (how passé), but who agrees with you and how much sway can you produce in the writing microcosm (to, shall we say, validate you).
I think I’ll trademark this as my own new theory: validation criticism (though I have an uneasy feeling that it will be tucked within psychoanalysis). I hope it gains support though, after all grad students are people too.