Journal 6

Students always struggle a good deal with literary theory. What do you think of theory at this point? What do you think it is? How much sense does it make to you? What things are you doing to help yourself understand it more fully? And how would you describe your own “theory” of what literature is and how it works at this point?

At this point, literacy theory is still pretty new to me. We talk about it in class and we discuss what views each theory look at a story from, but sometimes, I still do not quite get it. I think the idea that you can use one specific view of a story and gain so much insight is really very neat. I really like the concept because it gives you a chance to really see different situations in a different type of person’s point of view. In my opinion a theory is basically a perspective that can be used to view a story. The theories themselves make a lot of sense to me. Like the ideas and concepts of each individual one. What I do not get is how to apply those in a paper. I do not know really how one would go about writing a paper and incorporating which theory they used to view the story and how that shaped their paper. I could not really understand whether you plainly state what theory you are using or if you just analyzed the story using that view and had that reflect in your paper. To understand the theories more fully I really have just been trying to go over the notes that we have taken in class and reading over what is in the book. To more fully understand I think I should probably read a few papers using different theories to see how to thoroughly understand and analyze literature. As far as my own theory goes, I like to read a story and see how it relates literally to what I have learned from life and also how it relates symbolically to what I have read about and what I have learned. I think that probably goes along with the new critics theory, but I am also pretty interested in how the author’s personal history can help to shape what happens in a story.