Between the Lines

The male and female signs that greet us at the toilet door offer us two very binary options, but in reality sex and gender is far more complicated than those signs suggest. Sex is never as simple as a binary choices, and it is this that queer theory wants you to understand; that all our pre-conceived ideas about gender roles and sexual identities are in fact unstable, and can be destabilized by simply picking them apart. Queer Theory is a relatively new cultural theory which emerged out of the 1990s, but very much has its origins in the work of Michel Foucault . It looked to establish sexual orientation as a fundamental category of analysis and understanding, and thus it has both a social and political aim. It is a criticism informed by a resistance to homophobia and heterosexism by exposing the ideological and institutional practices of heterosexual privilege. It was the feminist critics of the 70s that first began to explore and dissect gender, but the feminist outlook soon began ...

Does a text have an author? At face value this may seem an absurd question. Surely the author of a text is the person who wrote it? That may seem a perfectly sensible answer, but it is one deeply problematic to literary theory.  If a text has an author then they are the authority over said text and preside over its meaning. The task of textual analysis becomes the process of deciphering the author's intention, and the author's intention is the definitive meaning.  Taking our lead from the skeptical thinkers in my last blog , we know we can undermine the author's authority by claiming that the writer is unaware of their own thought process. We can claim there are sociological, psychological, and historical factors that influence the texts meaning. The author's choice of language may give insights into the unconscious, the ideologies of society, or several other influences that the writer is unaware of at the time of writing. Furthermore, to give the writer a...

I am very happy to have been offered the opportunity to study a masters in English Literary Studies at the University of Exeter. During the course, I will be specialising in an area that has always engaged me during my undergraduate degree; that of literary theory and criticism. Literary theory can be a daunting world of abstract thoughts and philosophies; so I thought I would begin a series of blogs in which I will break down this broad area of literary studies into easily digestible guides. In these guides I intend to provide an overview of the paradigms and debates that make up literary theory; providing the reader with a good basic introduction, and myself the opportunity to consolidate my own knowledge. Literary theory is a difficult term to pin down. It is a term that incorporates elements of cultural, philosophical and sociological studies, and is made of numerous different approaches, many of which will feature in future blogs. Essentially literary theory is the study o...