The Study of Literature

In the western culture the study of literature has been in constant change, the conception of what is literature is something they have been asking since long ago. The first ones that studied and read literature were the greeks; thats where the history of literature starts in western culture.


Greeks (5th b.C. C.): The greeks legacy to the study of literature is that they introduced the first ideas of literature; they thought that literature was an imitation of life and a guide to people of how to behave in a civil society. The key concepts are Ontology: is the philosofical study of the nature of being, existence or reality; and Epistemology: is the branch of the philosophy concerned with the nature and limitations of knowledge.

Romanticism (E. 19th C.): In this period the idea was that poetry was a reflection of everyday life; an expression of feeling; and it was written in common language.

Scientific Determinism (Mid 19th C.): From Charles Darwin's publication of the origin of the species, the science became very popular. People started using science to answer all quiestion, including literature. So books became scientific studied, this mean they applied the scientific method.

New Criticism (E. 20th C.): The new criticism propose that the only thing important and object of study was the text itself. Not even the author and his history was relevant. They didn't care about the context of the book creation. The book was independent.

Reader-Response Criticism: This is a response to the new criticism period. People wanted to make their on reflections on a text based on their life experience.

By José Tomás Gré

Structiralism: Saussure proposed this theory which consist in that words were signs, made by a signifier and a signified. This mean that a word is composed by the letter of the words it self (Signifier) and by an imaginary picture of the word (Signified).

Post-Structuralism: The idea of this is that we concive language because we can make difference. So if someone say me the word cat I know what he is not trying to say me, so I get to the conclution of what he mean, by knowing what he doesn't mean.

Marxism: This applies the same ideas of the marxism in the politics to the texts. And that idea would be: "The root of the conflict is anchored in social class and economic differences". All text have a subtext with an ideaological thinking or any event that is happening at the time the author wrote it.

Feminism: Women use literature to express their experiences and also they interpret it.

Cultural Poetics: If we follow this idea at the moment of reading a book, we should investigate everything that surround the time when the text was written, all the history: of the author and what was happening at that time. Because we can know all the answers by this method.

Post-Colonial Criticism: The nationality of the author of a book is seen in the text. In the counrties that were colonies the people use literature to talk about their situations, thats what the post-colonial criticism is about. The history of the author do matters. And the text tell us about real situation that they were living.