I foresee the terms literary theory and literary criticism getting used a lot on this site. Since an agreement of terms is the basis for constructive communication, let’s look at what each of these terms means in the context of examining and discussing works of art, in the case of GeekLitTheory.com these will usually be stories in written form.

The above sentence holds the key difference between the terms. Examination and discussion.

LITERARY THEORY refers to schools of thought through which someone examines a literary work. There’s a lot of them. A LOT. Since the 1970’s it seems that schools of literary theory have been spreading like an ever-evolving zombie plague. I was going to go and list some of the fun ones, but we’ll get to those as we post about them from the geek perspective. Also, most schools aren’t an “all or nothing” game. Think of the whole of literary theory as those multi-lens goggles you sometimes see steampunk fans wearing. Each lens represents a school of lit theory. When we examine a piece of literature, we can lower any number of the lenses we want to help give us a different perspective on that work. Not all lenses are appropriate to every literary work. For example: If a book is told in a traditional, straightforward, beginning-middle-end narrative, viewing it through a Structuralist perspective isn’t going to give us much in the way of new ideas about the book, or literature as a whole. However, we could use a Structuralist perspective on say The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemison, which bounces back and forth between third and second PoV and is told in the present tense. How do those choices inform the work? Likewise, we could use Structualism to examine books such as A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, which has lots of tense and PoV shifts, as well as a chapter told in powerpoint presentations. I could go on and on with examples using Feminism, New Historicism, Post Colonialism, Gender Studies, (queue Yule Brenner) et cetera, et cetera, et cetera…

LITERARY CRITICISM is the discussion of literary works when using one or more lenses of Literary Theory, whether it’s through writing or speaking about it in a presentation, panel at a convention, or on YouTube. Yes, I realize that it’s a subtle distinction, but sometimes those subtle distinctions are the most important when going as deep as I hope to on this site. I’m sure some people will disagree with my definition — I’m waxing academic on the internet after all. I’m happy to disagree with people. I do it often. However, for the purposes of discussions on this site, these are the definitions we’ll be using.

A bit more clarification about Literary Criticism. It’s more than saying, “I liked this piece,” or “I didn’t like this piece.” When we’re engaging in criticism, even when viewing a work through the lens of something like Reader Response Theory, we want to do more than say,  “I liked this piece,” or “I didn’t like this piece.” Criticism means to engage the work with a reflective and attentive attention analysis of the work. We want to balance examining a work’s merits and faults so that we can arrive at a sound, well-rounded assessment of the work as a whole unit, rather than those bits we approve or disapprove of. This is largely the difference between the reviewer and the critic. This is not to say one is better, more noble or intellectual, than the other. It’s just a clarification of the purposes of a review and that of true literary criticism.

It’s important to become familiar with the schools of LIterary Theory because each carries certain privileges and blind spots, favoring some aspects of a work over others. All of them have some intellectual agenda at their core. In understanding this, we can take care to not allow these biases and agendas to affect our opinion of a work as a whole. We can use that understanding to appreciate that view of the work and not to get into arguments with misplaced energy.