 Hi friends, this video is going to be an extremely important video for all the English literature students out there because in this video, I'm going to be talking about all literary theories ranging from structuralism to Marxism, from feminism to queer theory. There are many many students who think that these literary theories are very difficult and also think about skipping these theories altogether if they are preparing for exams like UGC Net English or Gate English. If you are also one of them then please please please watch this video till the end because I am going to give you the simplest possible explanation of all these literary theory. This is going to be like a crash course where I am going to cover all the literary theories in detail. We will start with what is literary theory, why is it so important and then we will look at each literary theory in detail. Before starting our journey towards understanding literary theory, firstly, I want to break some of your myths around literary theory. The first one is literary theory is a very difficult topic. In fact, it is one of the most interesting parts of English literature. The first issue why people think it is difficult is because this topic is often not taught in most colleges and universities as a part of their curriculum. It is prescribed in BA or MA curriculum. So when students study this topic for first time on their own while they are preparing for UGC Net or Gate or any other competitive exam, they find it tough and confusing. And its not their fault, no one has taught them how to understand. The second reason why students find this tough is because in college, teachers don't study the literary theory properly. And its not their fault because sometimes they don't know themselves. If a teacher will learn something by using a complicated language, then tell them that they will understand it for an hour. The third reason, books which are often referred by the students for literary theory are written in super complicated language. For example, Peter Berry. And why I am telling you all this because I went through the same challenges when I was preparing for UGC Net. Even I didn't study literary theory, neither it was in my bachelor's nor it was in my master's. When I opened the book Peter Berry, I couldn't understand anything. But I was very keen on learning it anyhow. I knew that literary theory is very crucial and important segment of English literature and I won't be able to clear UGC Net or any other competitive exam of English literature if I skip literary theories. So I decided to take this Herculean task on my own shoulders and understand literary theory by myself. I watched an online in-depth course by Yale University, got a subscription of study.com and other literary websites just to get my basics right. Refer to dozens of YouTube videos and finally after so much effort and so much effort, finally I had a strong grip on this monster literary theory. And I tell you friends, once I started understanding the basics of literary theory, the journey forward became so exciting. I realized how interesting the subject is. So before I introduce you to this beautiful world of literary theories, Krippia, Durr or Kovko apne jeevan se mahar feek de. Look at it as a friend and not as an enemy. So now, are you ready? Fasten your seatbelts and we are all set to look at the first topic. What is literary theory? Literary theories are basically lenses through which we look at a novel, text or play. For example, if I give you pink sunglasses to wear, then everything you see becomes pink. If I give you green sunglasses, then the world becomes green. The world you see is same in both cases, but it's the lenses through which you are looking at the world that has changed. Similarly, we can analyze the novel Mansfield Park written by Jane Austen from different different angles. And these angles are literary theories. Each time we use a different literary theory in Mansfield Park, we come up with new interpretations of the text. For example, Marxism is all about looking at the class conflict between rich and poor. How rich behave differently with poor people or how rich people dominate the roles of the society they live in. In the Mansfield Park novel, you can see the differences in the lifestyle of Fanny Price and the lifestyle of family living in Mansfield Park. If you look at this novel through the lens of feminism, you'll see a different picture. We'll see how Fanny Price as a female character gets to evolve throughout the story. How many challenges she has to face, how gender inequality also plays a major role. And if we look at it from postcolonial point of view, you can see how there's a mention of British colonial expansion. Do you know that when we look at this text from postcolonial lens, we realize that there's a conversation that happens between Fanny and Sir Thomas Bertram on slave trade. Fanny is shocked by the silent response of Sir Thomas when Fanny asked him to comment on the slave trade which had in 1807 being made illegal in the British Empire. So basically by using literary theory, you give cultural and historic significance to any text. It helps you to come up with different interpretations of the same text. Still confused? To explain this concept in the best way, I don't think Bollywood set up an example. For example, if you see three idiots movie and apply different theories to it, then we will see it's not just a movie about three friends studying in a big college. It is a movie where they commented on feminism, how the life of female is governed by male. Bowman Irani in the beginning of the movie says that if a girl is not a doctor or a boy is not an engineer, then what did you do? Kind of that conversation. The dynamic between the two sisters, Karina and the one who is pregnant in the movie also highlight important feminist issues. So now understand how helpful literary theory is. When we use literary theory and look at the same story with different lenses and take a multiple interpretation, it makes the subject more and more interesting. With all this information in the background, let's start our journey and look at the first literary theory. But before that, if you are new to this channel, then please hit the subscribe button and press the bell icon so that every Sunday, as soon as I upload a new video, you're the first one to know about it. We are proud to share that we are India's largest youtube channel right now in the field of UGC-Net English exam preparation. The first important literary theory is New Criticism. New Criticism was developed in Britain in 1920s. Its name was taken by an essay of the same name by John Crow Ransom. It was a shift from old criticism and hence the name New Criticism. Now in all criticism, you take in consideration author's background, his childhood experiences, his personal opinion while analysing his or her own work. For example, we see how Paradise lost as a reflection of Milton's religious views or how Charlotte Bronte worked as a governess herself and that's why even in her work Jane Eyre, the central character is also governess. On the other hand, New Criticism theory says that the meaning is generated only through the written text. You closely read the text and derive its meaning. The author's intention or background is not important. There's a beautiful essay written on the New Criticism titled Intentional Fallacy. Here the word fallacy means false and intention means author's intention. The essay talks about how we should disassociate text from author's personal life. Since we don't know the author's intention while he was writing the work, how can we judge that the work was based on his intentions? For example, agar main writer n, aur main ek novel mein mention kiya that Radhika ke room ke curtains blue karar ke the. Now as a reader, you cannot say that main hai isn liye likha kyunki blue is associated with gloomyness and I as a writer wanted to show how gloomy Radhika's life is. Ho satta hai blue mein a favorite kalar ho isliye main ek likhte vak curtains ka kalar blue rikha. How can you know main ek kya sochke likha? We cannot trace the thoughts of writer when he was writing this work. To summarize, New Criticism basically says that you should read the book or piece of literature which is in front of you and analyze only that. The intention of the author is not important and we cannot understand the thoughts of the author while he was writing the literature since most of these authors whose work we read in literature today are dead. We can't even call them and ask hi bhaiya apne aisa kyuni khata bataw zara. That is what New Criticism is all about. Formalism is the next literary theory that we are going to talk about. Formalism also came around 1920s. Around 1920s in Britain we had New Criticism and at the same time in France and Russia we had Formalism. Formalism and New Criticism both talk about the same thing. Formalists say that you need to analyze literature by the form of it. Elements like structure, symbol, style are very important. You need to analyze the text on the basis of how it was written. So, Formalism is looking at the form of the text. New Criticism focuses on closed reading. Basically, both of them are talking about the same thing but in different countries. Now there are two types of Formalism. Russian Formalism and French Formalism. The two main leaders of Formalism are Viktor Shavavsky from Moscow Literary Circle and Roman Jakobsen from Prague Linguistic Circle. We have talked about both of them in detail in our online course since this is a crash course. I would not be able to get into the details of it. The detail list of all these theories that you should study in order to clear UGC-Net Paper 2. You must go to our website and check out the list free of cost which is available on our website arpitaakarva.com. I would highly recommend you to visit our website. Download this detail list of theories so that you know the names of all the theorists from which questions are asked in NetExcel. Now let's talk about the third important literary theory which is Structuralism. As the name suggests, this theory talks about the structure of the literature. According to Structuralism, everything in the universe is a structure. In order to understand one element of the structure, you need to understand the other element of the structure. For example, if you want to understand the position of India in the Milky Way, you need to first understand the position of Asia, then understand the position of Earth, then understand the position of solar system. If you don't understand universe and its parts, then you won't be able to fully understand India. Everything in a structure can be understood only in relation to the other parts of the structure. To understand the novel, you need to understand the language in which the novel was written. If the novel is written in English, then you can understand grammatical rules related to sentences and words and only after understanding this, you will be able to interpret the novel. Without knowing all these structure, you won't understand the novel. For example, let's take a sentence. Dog bark bird at. The sentence doesn't make any sense. Why? Because no words have any meaning in relation to the other words of the sentence. But if we reframe it and say dog barks at the bird, then it makes sense. Now every word is understandable in relation to the other words. This is what structuralism is all about. Ferdinand Sashoor is the most important theorist of structuralism. He had given a theory of semiotic. A semiotic ya hai? It is the study of signs. Every word or image we see is a sign. Now every sign is made up of two things. Signifier and signified. Signifier is the word or the image. Signified is the concept that strikes in our brain when we look at the word or the image. For example, let's do this experiment. If I say the word dog, on listening to this word, all of us will have a different image of dog in our brain. If I love pugs, I will have a image of pugs associated to the word dog. If you think of dog, you might think of a street dog. Here signifier is the word dog and signified is the image that is developed in our brain. If I ask a child to define a dog, he will talk about a four-legged animal who barks and begs his tail. These characteristics are the concept of signified. If we see color red, then we symbolize love for someone. It might symbolize danger for someone else. So red is a signifier and the concept that occurs in your brain is the signified. For the same signifier, there can be different signified. Comment below, what do you think of red color? The important thing is to understand that the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary. That means this relationship is culturally determined. It is not fixed. If you teach a kid that red color symbolizes peace, then gradually he will start linking peace with red. So red doesn't automatically mean love, danger or war. These meanings have gradually come over through a period of time due to repetitive use of red for words like war, danger and love. When you read structuralism, you will find that understanding of these structures help you to understand any novel or text. By the way, what I just explained is one percent of what structuralism literary theory actually is. We provide detailed video lectures on literary theory and criticism in our online video course wherein we explain all these literary theories with engaging and real-life examples to reinforce these concepts. The demo lectures of the same are available on our website arpithakarva.com and also on other website courses.arpithakarva.com. You can check out the same right after you finish watching this video. The next theory that comes to our mind when you think about structuralism is poststructuralism or deconstructionism. As the name suggests, it opposes the idea placed by a structuralist thinker. Poststructuralist thinkers say that communication is not that easy and I cannot communicate exactly what I want to communicate. If I say yellow dog, then we all will have a different image of yellow dogs in our brain. The image of a yellow dog in my brain will 100% be different from the image created in your brain. I might visualize an animated yellow dog that I saw in Cartoon Network while you might imagine a golden retrieval with this difference How can I communicate effectively? If I give you a description of a person like his height, clothing, personality, do we all imagine the same person? No! We all think of certain different kinds of people. I cannot communicate the image that is in my brain to you and this is where language fails. Poststructuralists say language itself is un-centered. You still don't understand? Wait! I'll give you another example. Have you ever played that word association game? The one in which I say a word and then within a second you have to say another word which you associate with that word. For example, if I say rose, you might say love. As you associate rose with love and this goes on. Then I will say rose and you will say a new word and this list goes on. But someone else might say thorns in response to rose. So, you see different people will associate different things with different words. Jack the Reader is a great post-structuralist thinker. In his work of Grammatology, he mentions that every signifier leads to another signifier and will never reach to signified. The entire sign becomes obsolete. For example, if you read the word lion, it will not lead to an image of lion but instead it leads to another concept. For example, you might associate lion with king and then you associate king with crown. You associate crown with empire. So, in this way you never reach a signified. You went through one signifier to other and this process continues. Jack the Reader also talks about an important concept of aporia which basically means confusion. It says that we need to be happy in the state of confusion. If you start doing something structurally, you'll find that there is no center in anything. So, we should be happy in the state of confusion which he calls aporia. Another important literary theory is post-modernism. This theory talks about fragmentation and chaos. Did you know why it talks about such concepts? It is because this theory started after World War II. The world wars had devastated the world's economy. So, post-modernism talks about how fragmentation is more important than unity. It focuses on disorder, chaos, multiplicity. One key figure associated with post-modernism is my favorite, Gene Baldur. Gene Baldur gave a very influential theory in his work, Saim-ul-Lakra and Timulation. Now he talks about two important things, Saim-ul-Lakra and hyper-reality. According to him, there was a time when only reality existed. Like, we know rat, an animal, which existed from ages. But then, Mickey Mouse started to exist in the post-modern society. Mickey Mouse is not an actual mouse. It is just a copy of something that doesn't have any original image. Original Mickey Mouse to Hainina. It's a false copy. The image of Mickey Mouse is Saim-ul-Lakra. Saim-ul-Lakra are things which are false copies or copies that don't have any originals. All these animated stuff that we see these days, it is all Saim-ul-Lakra. Saim-ul-Lakra is the process of replacement of original and Saim-ul-Lakra is the copy of something that doesn't have any original. And then comes the term hyper-reality, which is hyper-reality means something which is more real than reality. Like the image of beauty presented in the media. The beauty portrayed by these commercials of face cream, perfumes that do not exist in reality till all this Photoshop world. They are creating an idealistic image which is outperforming reality. That is what hyper-reality is all about. Other than that, Gene Baldur, there are so many other thinkers of post-modernism like Julia Cristiva, who talks about Kora, a concept of Kora. Then we have Gene Francis Neutard, who talks about the concept of meta-narrative. All these thinkers and their theories are very very important from UGC net point of view. So ensure that you cover them all. We cover all of them in detail in our online video course. If you are preparing for UGC net paper one or paper two, MA entrance, PhD entrance, PGT, TGT, UPSC gate, set or any other competitive exam related to English literature, then I invite you to check out the detailed online courses that we offer. We offer detailed online courses for all these exams. In all these online courses, we provide you topic-wise video lessons with rich animation covering all important topics in a step-by-step manner, which works even when you've not done any previous preparation. We also provide you high-quality PDFs and revision notes that cover syllabus-wise topics comprehensively and ensure that you qualify your dream exam in just one attempt. Along with video lectures and PDFs, we also offer test series that consist of more than 3,000 unit-wise questions that comes with detailed explanation. Plus after every test you get performance report and you're ranking in all India leaderboard, which will help you to spot your week and your strong areas. We cover all these important topics, writers, works in our online course, the detail list of all the theorists that we are talking today and many more which I did not talk about are covered in our online course and is available free of course on our website at Pritakarva.com. Even if you are preparing for these exams on your own, we would highly recommend that you visit our website, download this list of writers and theorists, check out the solved past year papers from the past year paper section and then start your preparation. The link of our website and all the courses are given in the description box below. You can check out the course details from our website and even watch free demo lectures and attempt free demo mock test before you decide to enroll in our course. For more information related to our courses, feel free to shoot your queries on the WhatsApp number displayed on the screen and me and my team will be more than happy to assist you. Now let's move on to the next literary theory which is psychoanalytical criticism or psychoanalytical theory. Now psychoanalysis deals with the exploration of subconscious mind and understanding how it functions. It explores the inner desires of a person. Whenever we are looking at a character in the novels, we see how the inner desires of that character plays a crucial role in the decision making process. This is the part of psychoanalytical criticism. The key figure of this literary school is Sigmund Freud. He has written a work called The Interpretation of Dream and it is an amazing work like I have read it multiple times, something I would recommend every student to check out. In this book he talks about how dreams are important and how we can find out our inner desire or repressed emotions through the symbols which we see in our dreams. We have so many novels in which characters dream about fox, bull, cat and all these figures are symbolic of their repressed emotions. When we analyze these symbols we are able to see the subconscious working of the character. Dreams are very important and dreams need to be decoded in order to understand the character. In the psychoanalytical school of criticism, we also have the theory of Idibus complex and Electra complex. This theory says that when a small boy like one or two year old boy sits with his mother, he feels so affectionate that he doesn't want to share his mother with anyone. When he sees the bond between his father and mother, he gets so jealous that he desires internally for his father to die. Then he wants to marry his mother but this desire is so morally wrong that the child suppresses this desire and later in his life it comes up as an Idibus complex. Idibus complex has been talked about in a play by Sophocles and that plays Idibus Rex. At the same time in D. H. Lauren's work Sons and Nour, the same theory has been taken up. Now if we talk about Electra complex, it is used to describe the female version of the Idibus complex. It involves a girl aged between two to three years becoming subconsciously sexually attached to her father and increasingly hostile towards her mother. Carl Jung developed the theory in 1913. Then there is another theorist called Sigmund Freud, how I just talked about. Now he gives emphasis on the theory of the subconscious brain where he talks about three parts of the brain, 8 ego super ego. According to him it is the part of the brain that works on the pleasure principle. You all have that inner child right? Who wants to eat ice cream, chocolate, do many things which are morally adult won't do. Then this part of our brain is called Idibus. Then we have a moral principle which is super ego. Har kuch idam Bhagwan Ram ki tare ho na chahiye types. All the moral things or all the social norms that we follow come under this part of our brain that is super ego. And in between is ind and super ego is the part of the brain which is called ego. That balances the two extremes and helps us lead a happy life. Closely connected with the psychoanalytical school of criticism we have another type of criticism called archetypal criticism or archetypal theory that talks about the archetypes that are present in myths and in legends. Archetypes are universal symbols for example. The symbol of star-crossed lovers is Romeo-Juliet. Whenever we see a loving couple bhi se haare, ita indam Romeo-Juliet jese lagre. Romeo and Juliet have become a universal symbol of love. Similarly there are so many other universal symbols which are very prominent in literature. I want to know one of your favorite archetypes of literature. Please make sure you comment below. I would love to see whether we have some commonalities in this field. By the way, if you are commenting, please let me know in the comments that the work Golden Boy is written by home. It's a work in which the author talks about the world of archetypes and this work has been repeatedly asked to the UGC net exam. So comment below let me find out how intelligent are my subscribers. The next important literary theory is feminism and it is one of my personal favorites too. Feminism as a literary movement talks about the condition of female portrayed in the literature. It also talks about how a female is being represented in a movie or a play. Feminism had three waves. The first wave was begun by Mary Wolf-Toncraft. She was somebody who wrote this beautiful work called Vindication of the Rights of the Women and another important work called Education for Daughters. In both these works she focused on the importance of education for women. She said that only it is through education that you can become an equal companion to your male counterpart. The next important figure in feminist theory is Margaret Fuller. Margaret Fuller had given the theory of endrogene. Now what is endrogene? According to her, no male is having all the masculine qualities and no female is actually having all the feminine qualities. Every male has some masculinity and some femininity in him. Similarly every female has some part of femininity and masculinity in her. Now we move on to the second wave of feminism. In second wave of feminism we have the great Virginia Wolf. Virginia Wolf talks about Judith Shakespeare and asks the reader that if Shakespeare would have had a sister then would that sister be as feeble as Shakespeare? She talks about this in her work Room of One's Own. Also she had written another book called Professional of Women. All these works that I'm just mentioning the name of are covered in detail in my online video course. Since it's a crash course I would not be able to touch upon these works in detail but if you really want to master literary theory and want to ensure that you get all the questions right in the UGZNet exam paper then I would recommend you to check out our detailed video course for UGZNet English literature. Moving ahead we have another literary theorist associated with feminism and her name is Simon de Beauvoir. Simon de Beauvoir had written a work called Second Sex in which she says that no woman is born as a woman she becomes one. The gender roles have been trained in her and gradually she takes up all the womaness and all the characteristics of how to be an ideal female. When a child is born that child doesn't know what it likes to act like a boy or a girl. It is being told to the child gradually. Due to this societal implication that child becomes a man or a woman. It basically talks about how gender and sex are two different things. We are born as male or female but the traits of man and traits of women is something that we learn gradually. We have another important feminist critic named Helen Sixus. Helen Sixus' work Laugh of Medusa is a work very very important from the point of view of feminist literature. Now in this work she talks about how a female is tortured since ages and how all the repressed emotions are still there in her mind. In the third wave of feminism we have Keet Mileth. Keet Mileth has written the book titled Sexual Politics a very important work from UGC Netpoint of View. In this work she talks about how every girl has repressed her emotions since childhood because as a kid when she roams around the house she realizes that she will never become the heir of father's wealth. That feeling of being less makes her a suppressed person and takes a toll of her self image. We also have psycho feminism and black feminism as a part of the third wave of feminism. We have questions coming from these two topics every year. We cover all these topics as I said as a part of our online video course. By the way if you're looking for past year papers of UGC Net English then please visit our website www.atpatakarva.com. We have provided past 10 years paper along with Ansaki free of cost on our website. You can simply go and download the past year papers and start your preparation right away. Now the next literary theory we are going to talk about is post-colonial literary theory. Post-colonial literary theory deals with the condition of colonized countries. How the native people have been affected after colonization and how society has changed after you know they fought against the colonial situations. In this regard we have so many literary theorists who have given their own theories on post-colonial literature. We will be discussing some of them in this video. To begin with we have one very important post-colonial theorist called Franz Fanon. Franz Fanon had written this work called White Skin, White Mask. He has written another work called French of the Earth. In both of them he talks about how a native person wants to become an English man because the image of a superior man is always associated with English on being white. Every native or black person wants to become the man but in his mind only white or English people can be that man. So to become one he tries to take all the things that are a part of Western culture and transform his personality by mimicking the West. Then we have another important literary theorist named Edward Said. Edward Said had given the theory of Orientalism. In his work he talks about how people in the West have gained the knowledge and understanding of the culture of the East and they use this knowledge and understanding to dominate the East. For example if you want to kill or torture a person you need to know about his weakness right? When you know about a person weakness thoroughly then it becomes easier for you to manipulate or influence that person. The same thing is done by the people of the West. They studied the culture of the East and then they use that knowledge to dominate the East. He also talks about how the Western people have tried to depict East as primitive or savage or barbaric in their books. We can see the same if we look at Tempest from post-colonial perspective. The third important literary theorist is Homike Bhava. Homike Bhava has given a very important theory about mimicry and hybridity. In his work Myth of Mimicry and Men he talks about how European culture has dominated the entire world by using the concept of hybridity and mimicry. Every man wanted to be an English men or white in his nature, his behavior and his etiquettes. He feels that he behaves like an English man only then the society will respect him. But during this process of adapting English culture he finds himself stuck in the state of hybridity which means he is neither able to be a complete English man nor he remains pure Indian. Can you comment below a Bollywood movie where you saw a person like this who tries to mimic Britishers? We have another post-colonial theorist named Gayatri Spiba. She had written a work called Can the Subaltern Speak? Subaltern means people who live in a society where they don't have any say. For example people living in Dharavi slums in Mumbai they haven't written any literature most of them don't even know how to read and write. Neither they have any say in the matters of city or they do not take part in the political discussions. There are certain writers who write about these people from Dharavi slum. Gayatri Spiba says that such writers are not doing justice to the people who are living in subaltern areas. If a person is not staying in Dharavi he cannot write about the people living there truthfully. He doesn't know the challenges of the kind of lifestyle people live there. When they write about subaltern people they are not able to represent them in the complete or truthful sense. If I write a story about the people who are living in Dharavi slums will I be able to do justice? No because I never stayed with them. Neither I have this feeling that how they would feel in such kind of situation. So by trying to represent them in novels or works I end up misrepresenting them. Gayatri Spiba goes on and talks about females from these colonised countries. According to her such females suffer twice due to the societal condition first because of the patriarchal society and second because of colonisation. So you see a woman who is living in India at the time of colonisation she has to be killed by her family members plus she has to be jailed because of the colonisation. So they are suffering twice. So this was what Gayatri Spiba talked about in her work. This is all about the post-colonial theories. There are many more theorists that you should be studying if you want to ace UGC net exam. I would suggest you to get the list from my websites. Study about them and their works and make your own notes. There are many other theories in this module such as Marxism which talks about the class conflict in our. Bourgeoisie are influencing the working class people. Then we have reader response theory which says how the background and experiences of a reader affects the understanding of the written material. Then we have cultural studies which talks about how the culture around the author influences author's writing. There are so many other theorists also which are a part of literary theory module. I would want to conclude that I have given you a complete description of what literary theory is all about and how you should proceed further. If you found this video helpful then please like this video by giving it a big fan thumbs up and also share it with other fellow aspirants who are struggling with literary theory. I'm quite eager to know how you felt about this video. Did you like it? Did you not like it? Did you find it helpful? Please share your views in the comments below. Also if you have any questions and doubts about literary theory please feel free to put that in the comment section as well. With that note I would like to take your leave. I'm going to meet you very soon with my next video lecture. Till the time we meet next happy learning. Keep loving literature and stay tuned to arpitakarbar.com