Non-theory dept?

[AnimeChic101!]

I'm just here to chat instead of losing my mind over applications.Maybe I should post this in the chat section lol.

 

This season I heard people talk about looking for non-theory heavy departments. What in the world does that mean? How does one study literature without theory? Is that a thing? Wouldn't we just call that New Crit.? Are there people out there reading books without using theory? I think that i'm surprised only because I was taught to use theory starting in highschool and anything besides that doesn't exist in my mind anymore lol.

 

I'm just here to ramble. Ramble with me. Enlighten me. Let's just talk about the stuff we love and ignore the applications that are out right now  

 

[Yanaka]

Interested! What's New Crit.? 

[AnimeChic101!]

2 minutes ago, Yanaka said:

Interested! What's New Crit.? 

new criticism. Simply put, it's a theory that emphasizes closely reading the text alone and that every text is self-contained.

[Yanaka]

Oh! Thanks... Yes, confirmed: I'm too "young" and innocent to get into a PhD.  

[Caien]

There are theory suspicious professors, and in the UK and Ireland the default is basically old historicism. A major reason I'm applying to the US is that you guys are much more theory friendly. I'm a narratologist (right now anyway) and the options are severely limited for me here. I had one professor (whom you would call a new critic) tell us outright he didn't like theory, and that his strategy since the seventies had been basically to bury his head in the sand and hope it went away (as of 2015 he had concluded it had, I don't know about that).

On the continent literature departments are so theory orientated from our perspective they would more closely resemble philosophy or linguistics departments than English departments, and its more common to have programs like cultural studies or European studies rather than separate out disciplines like we do in the Anglo-American world.

The Irish case particularly is quite historicist as WB Yeats (and others, but Yeats had an ability to impose his opinions on culture at large) wrote a great deal of literary criticism in the late 19th century in which he essentially analysed Irish writers based on their worth as accurate portrayals of some vacuous inherent Irish 'spirit' or 'nature'. Since then critics have tended to read Irish lit almost as historical sources.

[savay]

As I'm not applying this season, I haven't been on these boards as much as before so maybe I've missed this trend, but it seems equally strange on the surface to me as well. I'm experiencing a completely different feeling -- I'm craving more theory. I transitioned from a theory heavy undergrad (concentrated in post-structural ethics...) to an Area Studies Literature program. I chose my current department largely because of the fact that for an Area Studies dept, they tended to orient themselves largely on theoretical lines as opposed to nationality, philology, or history. It's been very lovely so far, but I have had some initial worries that maybe it's not the best fit in the long run (maybe I belong in one of those Comp Lit departments where no one actually reads literature ). My advisor and I have had a lot of discussions regarding my desire for more theoretically oriented coursework and them cautioning me not to let it detract from gaining familiarity in the literature I'm supposed to be becoming an expert in. I have a feeling we will continue to have these conversations for awhile. My department does have a required theory & methods course for grad students, which I'm currently taking and enjoying. It is largely focused on literary theory though, and some of the cultural/area studies students in the course have at times not found it extremely relevant. Sadly, the Comp Lit department at my university recently got rid of their theory certificate program, so I'll continue to scour the course listings of each humanities department each quarter with my fingers crossed. They told me they encouraged grad students in my dept to study broadly...

I'm wondering also, if certain fields within Textual Scholarship would be considered a-theoretical? Certainly methodological, but something like stemmatics or other bibliographic or material-centered research. These things certainly can be theoretically informed, but maybe not necessarily? 

Similarly to @Caien, while my dept is theory-friendly, there are certainly faculty who find it (or perhaps certain types of theory) threatening, and associate it with a falsely inflated sense of rigor, preferring to do more "fact-based scholarship." I had a faculty member remark to me recently that they specifically didn't mention a certain French deconstructionist when they were applying for a position so that they wouldn't risk not getting the job.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

This faculty member and I have bonded over our love of theory and after they gave a guest lecture on postcolonial theory and the limits of epistemic objectivity to my theory and methods course I asked them to be on my committee. For me, personally, I can't imagine doing the scholarship I'm interested in without theory. 

Edited December 2, 2016 by savay

[Glasperlenspieler]

I think there are (at least) two ways of understanding "atheoretical."

A theory is really just a particular way of looking at things. In this sense, you can't really avoid theory. No matter how hard you try to avoid it, you will always be coming to a text from a certain perspective, and thus you will have your own theory. So in this sense, being atheoretical is naively unrealistic. And given that we are all working from certain perspectives, it's important to critically examine what these perpectives are and how they inform our research and understanding of the texts we deal with. So avoiding theory altogether is a sort is almost certainly a mistake.

That being said, the idea of "theory" has often become associated with a particular group of thinkers and approaches (primarily French post-structuralism and it's descendents as well as an increasing role for gender and race theory). Given this understanding of "theory," the desire to be atheoretical is not all so strange. If you think, as I often do, that most of French post-strucutalism is a wrong turn in intellectual history, then you may have good reason to avoid it or at least to avoid atmospheres in which it is seen as essential to literary study (That being said, given its wide ranging influence, I think it's still a good idea to have at least a basic understating of the main ideas that are involved here.).

Edited December 2, 2016 by Glasperlenspieler