What is cutting edge in Literary Theory right now. If nothing is cutting edge, why not...

I think the truth is a bit more frightening, if you think about it. I was friends with these chicks around 2008/2009, way before all this SJW shit really blew up. It could be just one example, and it could probably be argued against, but it seems to me like a case of the academic intelligentsia setting the trend for us to follow. That is, they started talking about that shit and pushing it everywhere, and it finally caught on and is now everywhere, specially in mainstream media.

So it's the elites at a few exclusive universities setting the trends for the rest of the country to follow. According to one interpretation, at least. I'm sure there's hundreds of cases where academia was trying to push one thing, and it never really caught on.

I remember the guy who does the Yale online lit. theory lectures saying he thought evolutionary, Darwinian, biologically determined ideas were going to have an influence on theory in the future. Don't quote me on that though; I might be misremembering.

It'd be cool to reclaim Darwin from the fedora though, steal one of their central figures. Mischievous af.

so like, evolutionary psychology as literary analysis?

>so like, evolutionary psychology as literary analysis?

Dunno desu. I kinda stopped watching the lectures cuz of time etc.

I'm assuming he means analyzing literature in terms of the idea that our consciousness is created, or determined by biological impulses. But I really don't know what form that would take, and there's probably only a few works that it would be fruitful to apply that to

yeah its not a very productive field even by itself really, mostly it's untestable just-so stories about how X or Y is hardwired into the brain by millions of years as an ape in the savannah. it can only really work by almost completely ignoring the fact that we can reflect on our actions. I can't see it contributing much to literary theory, I'd be interested to see someone try but I doubt it would be very insightful.

bump

I don't know how 'new' these things are, but look for ecocriticism, evocriticism, affect theory, theories of 'deep time' and so on. You could also delve into media studies and cultural studies to study literature in the 'digital age'.

>evolutionary, Darwinian, biologically determined ideas
I dunno man, it's possible but it seems to me that it would just be rejected straight out of hand.

Post-colonial (whoah that character is black!)
Feminist (whoah that character is a chick!)
LGBTQ (whoah that character is gay!)

I like to think that somewhere out there some higher tier scholars are working on more coherent lines of critique and that my uni is just stuck in the 90s with this crap. But I'm afraid I'm probably wrong.

I don't have anything against women, or gays or the analysis of colonialism, but all these approaches seem way more concerned with reading things INTO the text and applying concepts that the author was likely unaware of or didn't really put emphasis on to the study of a work. And anachronism triggers me very very hard. Discussing anything outside of its own cultural context is pointless.

Its all garbage.

nah

This here. People are also beginning to take a new perspective on poststructuralism, which was plagued by a lot of inept scholarship. The study of literary history is also still going strong. But nothing nearly as radical to our current perception of literature as the new critics or poststructuralism.

>Post-colonial (whoah that character is black!)
>Feminist (whoah that character is a chick!)
>LGBTQ (whoah that character is gay!)

Dude, all that happened in the 70s and 80s. All the movements emphasised their own individual alternative canons when they first started gaining traction, but pretty fast all of them moved on to focus their attention to more abstract issues, eg., how women / minorities / queers are treated in literature, both by historical and contemporary authors.

>applying concepts that the author was likely unaware of or didn't really put emphasis on to the study of a work

How about dat dere New Criticism? We can never be sure of what the author intended, and even if we could that is only one aspect we should look at. After all, most readers have no idea what type of a person a certain author is/was when reading the text.

The point of proper analysis of literature is to bring out your own theoretical framework for others to critique, which is what differentiates literary studies from literary criticism. If you think authorial intent is overlooked too easily then that is an issue you should focus on instead of trying to combat every random post-70s analysis that comes along. There are dozens of important books on authorial intent (and you pretty much have to venture into interxtuality and the theory of if you go down this road), and hundreds of articles. So, plenty for you to go through and show why you're right.
Wiki's refs are a good starting point: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorial_intent

I mean, one thing that obviously jumps out is the emphasis part. Culture changes, and so does the way we read texts. It is important to be aware of the cultural context and that one's reaction to a text might be anachronistic, but it doesn't change the fact that the reader reacted in a way completely beyond the author's imagination. I mean, if you really think this is an important thing then we would have to ban the reading of books unless the reader could prove to have a sufficient degree of understanding of the work's context, which, considering the breadth of the modern canon, is pretty much impossible for 99% of the population to even attempt for more then a handful of authors. Academia, of course, is different, but academics also want to study how text are actually read, not how they should be read.