Reddit reviews Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction

Here is the textbook I used for my Critical Theory Class at UCLA. It's called the Norton Anthology of Critical Theory. While this is a good introduction to many theorists, I also suggest you to research supplemental materials on databases - ie. JSTOR - to understand movements/concepts.

There is also a comic book series that's descent depending on what you pick. While I enjoyed Foucault for Beginners, I hated Derrida for Beginners.

Lastly, Jonathan Culler's Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction is an excellent entry point. I actually met Culler when I visited Cornell. He's an awesome guy. Anyways, I think Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction should also be an excellent resource, although I haven't read it myself.

I went in basically unprepared while still a third-year undergrad and did fine.

There is definitely a little old and middle english to be aware of, so it might help to at least glance at that.

If you know your basic poetry rules, that will help a lot. Simple to look up. I only point it out because I know a couple people who went in without knowing sonnet forms. That seems to show up regularly.

Make sure you know some of the bigger names/categories in theory. Culler's Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction is more than enough.

The biggest thing is just being well read. When I took the test, I had a good two pages full of nothing but Henry Fielding questions that could be answered by anybody who had read the first couple books of Tom Jones but that would have tanked the score of anybody who hadn't.

Think about it like Jeopardy. You're taking a test on trivia knowledge, not applied skills. Skim everything you're unsure of so that you have a sense of the style. Read summaries of anything you can think of that might be on the test but that you don't have time to read. Memorize some dates associated with periods, major authors, etc. There just isn't much else that you can do.

/u/savdec449 is right - you ask a tough question. One little (literally) resource that I've found helpful is the Oxford Very Short Introduction to Literary Theory, which sketches out some of the big 'moves' over the history of theory, and has a decent Further Reading section for whatever takes your fancy.

I find it quite difficult to keep straight how the different schools and traditions relate to one another, and I don't really think it's the kind of thing you can totalize without years of experience or, I suppose, living through one of the sea changes in its epicentre (which I haven't done, but I imagine would be rather intense, and possibly not very pleasant in terms of day-to-day collegiality when Old and New crash together).

One strategy that you could use to combat the overwhelming nature of All of the Theory is to pay attention to your own scholarly disposition: what are you, personally, interested in when you read texts? Is it their structure, their nuts-and-bolts, and how they keep the illusion of mimesis alive? Maybe focus on structuralism or narratology. Are you interested in why certain texts arose when they did? Check out the history (ha!) of New Historicism, or maybe print culture studies or even materialist criticism. Are you into how the words sound, and how they create images and arguments? Look into poetics, rhetoric, and aesthetic theory. Are you interested in how certain key aspects of the human condition are represented and dealt with? Check out memory studies, posthumanism and animal studies, or ecocriticism. Are you drawn to certain genres of texts? Genre criticism!

Remember, it's easiest to figure out how a puzzle comes together when you have a little section done first. Work within your preferences and likes to develop some knowledge on a piece of the puzzle that you enjoy, and then build out from there towards things that are wheelhouse-adjacent, and then beyond.

Beginning Theory: Introduction to Literary Culture and Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction were two helpful supplemental texts from a literary criticism class I took in graduate school.


This is more theory of literature, though, and wouldn't speak to style necessarily, but would give you some idea of the lenses that many folks out there use to look at literature.

I also recommend reading around /r/AskLiteraryStudies for some ideas, too.

If you're really keen to develop your understanding, here are two books on literary theory to digest that will help you with this:

Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction
The Very Short Introduction series is excellent. My wife is a philosophy teacher and we have about a dozen of them on our shelf. Fantastic entry points to building a solid foundation of understanding on just about any academic topic.

Seven Types of Ambiguity
This is one of the seminal works of modern literary criticism, and it's an engaging read.

Good luck! You are on a beautiful path and I hope you keep working at it because a deeper understanding and love of literature is truly a life-enriching pasttime.

I personally enjoy reading Aristotle and he's pretty foundational to a lot of medieval and renaissance criticism so there's no good reason not to start with him. The thing about criticism (like most philosophy) is that it rapidly became a series of responses to other critics/philosophers which can be hard to follow. Like jumping into a story halfway through. So it's best to start with the greeks. Plato's got some interesting thoughts too, but more on the philosophical purpose of literature in a society so that might not be germane to your interests. On the other hand, I can't think of a good reason anyone shouldn't read The Republic at some point in their life.

If you're largely unfamiliar with literary criticism, then I would recommend this book