What is a Text?
What literary theory tells us and why it matters
Why do we engage with texts? Why do we read books and articles, watch films and TV shows, go to the theatre, listen to songs? We all have a sense of knowing the answers to these questions, but those answers are profoundly difficult to articulate. Undoubtedly, we get something real and substantial from our engagement with texts. The question of ‘why’ is related to the question of ‘what’. What is a text? What does engaging with a text involve? We could go on and on, multiplying questions indefinitely. What makes a text literary? What is literature? What makes a text canonical? By what standards can a text be judged and assessed? What is the purpose of literature? What purpose does the kind of analysis we do in the course of criticism, theory and the study of English/ English literature, serve? What is the nature and degree of the overlap of that academic enterprise and simple enjoyment of the text? That’s a big one. We always used to question what the point of English was in high school. What practical use is it? Now, all these years later, I get it.
I’ve also discovered that there is a disjunction between the seriousness of scholarship about classic works of literature and the spirit in which many of those works were created. What would Shakespeare make of the plethora of studies his work has spawned and the…