Literary Theorists Web (Portfolio 4)

Upon making my diagrammatic outline, I found that I was much more interested in how the theorists we’ve studied thus far invoke one another. Yes, each theorist comes within (more or less) a larger movement; we can, for example, name Coleridge as a “Romantic” and Barthes as a “Structuralist”. However, I have valued our discussion of how many theorists overstep the boundaries of those movements they are associated with. Eliot, although a “New Critic” who criticizes Romanticism, invokes Coleridge’s secondary imagination. Freud and Marx & Engels, fathers of Psychoanalytic and Marxist theories respectively, have connections to Saussure and Structuralism. We gain a richer, more complex understanding of the evolution of literary criticism when we view theorists as individuals within unique movements and as pieces of an interdependent milieu.

I therefore decided to place the theorists we’ve studied thus far in relation to one another by making a web. Theorists within movements are grouped together, but the names of these movements have been omitted in order to emphasize other aspects of connectivity; if we needed to know who belonged to, say, Marxist critique, we could just look at the syllabus!

I think that my diagram will be helpful for the second portion of Portfolio 4, the critical analysis of “The Los Alamos Museum” by Arthur Sze, and other critical analyses to come. My diagram visually represents how some theorists from different movements (or, in Portfolio 4’s case, different columns) relate and speak to each other about a text. But, the diagram also shows where contentions easily arise; outlier Sir Phillip Sydney’s notion that art’s purpose is to “teach and delight” could provide unique readings and challenges to other theorists.

Please comment below if you think of any other connections between the theorists and I will add them! I also considered using red lines to show where theorists reject one another, but I’m afraid it is beyond my tech-savvy to do so. I am also aware and “so-sure” that I spelled Saussure wrong on my diagram… I framed each picture and inserted names on an online software and I can’t make changes. Whoops!