By ABS, The Literary Scholar
A.K.A. The One Who Read Between the Lines and Found Footnotes Arguing With Each Other
Theoretical Disclaimer:
This scroll may cause:
Overthinking
Aggressive footnoting
Fear of metaphors
Sudden bursts of clarity followed by existential dread
Reader discretion is advised. Especially if you liked the book “just for the story.”
Structuralism: There’s a System to the Madness (Unfortunately)
We begin with Structuralism, the theory that believes literature isn’t personal—it’s architectural. You’re not just reading a novel. You’re decoding a building made of signs, oppositions, and suspiciously symmetrical floor plans.
Brought to life by Ferdinand de Saussure (a Swiss linguist who accidentally became a literary godfather), Structuralism says:
Words don’t mean anything on their own.
A word only means something because of what it’s not.
A rose isn’t a rose because of flowers—it’s a rose because it’s not a potato.
Everything is structured in binaries:
Good vs. Evil
Hero vs. Villain
Light vs. Dark
Tea vs. Coffee (yes, it’s in the syllabus now)
Stories, myths, and texts are not unique—they’re just variations of the same universal patterns. Claude Lévi-Strauss applied this to myths and discovered that no matter where you go, someone’s uncle gets eaten and someone marries their cousin. Literature, it seems, loves repetition—with minor wardrobe changes.
Post-Structuralism: Just Kidding, Nothing’s Stable
Then came the literary equivalent of a midlife crisis in a philosophy department: Post-Structuralism. It looked Structuralism in the eye and whispered:
“That structure you built? It’s made of sand and secrets.”
Enter Jacques Derrida, the man who ruined dinner parties by deconstructing the menu.
Post-Structuralism said:
Meaning isn’t fixed.
Words don’t just point to other words—they delay meaning indefinitely.
And binary oppositions? They’re just social lies with good PR.
“There is nothing outside the text,” Derrida claimed.
Meaning: you can’t escape interpretation. Not even in your shopping list.
Derrida’s main weapon? Deconstruction—a technique that takes a text apart not to destroy it, but to show that it was already arguing with itself. Deconstruction doesn’t kill the author. It invites them to a semantic duel.
Modernism: Art, Anguish, and Ambiguity
Literary theory met Modernism and saw stars—existential, metaphysical, and sometimes in Latin.
Modernist criticism said:
Let’s not just read what’s on the page. Let’s examine how it’s told.
The stream of consciousness isn’t just a technique—it’s a reflection of modern psychological fragmentation.
T.S. Eliot’s footnotes are not decoration. They are mini-theses that imply you’re under-read.
In this lens, Modernism was a reaction to a world that no longer made sense, and literature responded by writing with more sense than anyone could possibly process.
So if you felt overwhelmed reading Ulysses—don’t worry. That’s the correct emotional response. You’ve passed the test.
Postmodernism: Irony, Interruption, and Infinite Jest
Modernism wept for meaning. Postmodernism mocked it with jazz hands.
Postmodern literary theory says:
The author is dead.
The narrator is unreliable.
And the ending is either ambiguous or a metafictional prank.
Thinkers like Roland Barthes told us to stop caring about authorial intent. The text is a playground. You, the reader, are in charge. (Good luck with that.)
Novels became:
Self-referential
Self-aware
And sometimes self-loathing
Theories began performing themselves, and literary criticism became a genre of avant-garde theatre.
Marxist Theory: Class Warfare in the Pages
Marxist literary criticism enters the chat like a revolutionary with a red pen and a very strong opinion on Dickens.
It doesn’t ask “Is this a good book?” It asks:
“Whose labor built this narrative?”
“Who’s being exploited in this plot?”
“Why does the protagonist have a country house and three surnames?”
Rooted in the ideas of Karl Marx (and carried into lit crit by thinkers like Georg Lukács, Terry Eagleton, and Fredric Jameson), Marxist theory views literature as a reflection and product of material conditions.
Everything is class. Everything is ideology. Even that symbol of a rose?
It’s not just love—it’s bourgeois property disguised as sentiment.
A Marxist critic will read Pride and Prejudice and conclude:
Darcy = landed gentry
Lizzy = precariously positioned middle class
Mr. Collins = real estate horror story
And marriage? An economic alliance with decent tailoring.
They’re not wrong.
Feminist Theory: The Canon Meets Its Match
Enter Feminist literary theory, wearing boots and carrying a list of male authors who forgot women had thoughts.
Feminist critics ask:
Where are the women?
What roles do they play?
Who’s writing the stories, and whose stories aren’t being told?
From Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” to Judith Butler’s performative gender theories, Feminism cracked open literature’s drawing room and found centuries of repression, resistance, and revolutionary women hiding behind plot devices.
Suddenly, Ophelia isn’t a tragic minor character—she’s a critique of silencing.
Jane Eyre isn’t a love story—she’s a woman negotiating power, class, and madness with gothic lighting.
Even The Little Mermaid got reevaluated: she gives up her voice for a man?!
Feminist theory doesn’t just read the text. It shouts back.
Queer Theory: Flipping the Script (and the Pronouns)
Queer Theory doesn’t knock. It enters dramatically, critiques the heteronormativity in the décor, and reinterprets every character’s motives through the lens of desire, identity, and coded longing.
Born from the works of Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler, Queer Theory challenges the idea of fixed identities in literature:
Gender? Performed.
Sexuality? Fluid.
Binary oppositions? A boring party you don’t have to attend.
Books you thought were innocent? Queer Theory says: “Look again.”
The Picture of Dorian Gray? A decadent love letter with moral panic in velvet gloves.
Moby-Dick? A rugged sea tale of masculinity, obsession… and suggestive whaling.
The Great Gatsby? Nick Carraway might be in love—with Gatsby. Discuss.
Queer Theory doesn’t ask for permission. It reclaims subtext, and throws a party in the margins.
Psychoanalytic Criticism: The Book on the Couch
What does Hamlet want? Why does Heathcliff obsess? Why does the author keep mentioning shadows?
Psychoanalytic literary theory, inspired by Freud, Lacan, and the collective therapy bill of Western literature, says:
Let’s not analyze the plot. Let’s analyze the neuroses beneath it.
Freud gave us:
The Oedipus complex
The id, ego, and superego
And the unsettling belief that all symbolism is either about your parents or your repressed desires
Lacan took this further:
“The unconscious is structured like a language.”
In response, every English major wrote essays trying to prove they understood that sentence.
Psychoanalysis in lit crit asks:
What does the character repress?
What desires are displaced?
Is that forest a setting… or a metaphor for the author’s mother?
It’s heavy. It’s haunting. It’s also kind of hot in Wuthering Heights.
Ecocriticism: Literature Goes Green (and a Little Existential)
Ecocriticism doesn’t just read texts—it composts them. It’s the branch of literary theory that asks:
“What is the environment doing in this book?”
“Are we ignoring it again?”
“Why does no one ever water the symbolic garden?”
Rooted in the growing awareness that nature isn’t just a backdrop—it’s a participant, a victim, and sometimes a narrator—Ecocriticism brings trees, rivers, climate, and planetary collapse into the heart of literary analysis.
It’s especially fond of:
Pastoral poetry (spoiler: it’s never just sheep)
Dystopian fiction (turns out the apocalypse isn’t always metaphorical)
And any novel where the weather feels like a character with attitude
From the Eden of Paradise Lost to the melting ice caps of The Road, Ecocriticism reminds us:
Nature doesn’t just set the scene.
It’s watching.
Postcolonial Theory: The Empire Writes Back
Where once literary criticism admired the colonizer’s prose, Postcolonial theory turns the telescope around.
It asks:
Who got to tell the story?
Who got silenced?
Whose history was overwritten with a quill made of power?
This theory is deeply informed by thinkers like Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak, who revealed how literature often reflects, reinforces, or resists colonial ideologies.
Suddenly:
Heart of Darkness becomes a meditation on Eurocentric madness, not African mystery
Jane Eyre isn’t just about Jane—it’s about Bertha, the “madwoman in the attic” and symbol of silenced colonial trauma
And The Tempest? Postcolonial theorists see Caliban not as a monster, but as a metaphor for the colonized, educated into submission, then discarded
Postcolonial theory reads with fire and asks:
“Is this story yours?
Or is it a version someone else edited to sound like peace?”
Cultural Studies: Pop Culture Enters the Syllabus
Cultural Studies kicked the canon’s door down and said,
“Why are we only reading about dukes and dead poets when the Kardashians exist?”
Born from the Birmingham School, and powered by thinkers like Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, this theory treats television, fashion, memes, TikToks, and toothpaste ads as legitimate texts.
It reads:
Harry Potter as a capitalist mythos
Barbie as a plastic embodiment of gender ideology
And Beyoncé’s Lemonade as a thesis in black feminist theory, trauma, healing, and narrative sequencing with cinematic precision
Cultural Studies believes everything is text. Even your cereal box.
Especially your cereal box.
Reader-Response Theory: It’s Not the Book, It’s You
What if the novel doesn’t matter until you read it?
That’s the argument of Reader-Response Theory, which shifts the spotlight from author and text to the reader’s experience.
Here, the meaning of a work:
Changes based on who reads it
Evolves over time
And might not even exist until someone emotionally panics on page 53
Critics like Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser championed this approach, which gives agency to:
Your interpretation
Your feelings
Your annotated margins filled with passive-aggressive underlining
If you read The Metamorphosis and cried, laughed, or suddenly called your therapist—that’s part of the meaning now. Reader-Response Theory says:
“Welcome to the story. You’re a character now.”
And So, We Theorize On
This scroll has taken us from structure to subconscious, from gender to geopolitics, from trees to tweets. Literary theory doesn’t offer one answer. It offers twenty, all arguing over coffee and footnotes.
It teaches us that:
Every text is a lens
Every reader brings a mirror
And literature, at its best, makes you both look outward and in
Final Scroll:
ABS closes the scroll slowly, with ink-smudged fingers and a half-eaten Derrida essay tucked under one arm. As the scroll folds, the theories keep whispering—not to be solved, but to be sat with. With a wink, a quote, and a well-timed dramatic pause, ABS disappears into a library where the books read each other.
They came with terms, turned pages into battlegrounds, and taught us that stories aren’t just told—they’re interrogated, inverted, and infinitely interpreted. In every margin, a revolution. In every theory, a mirror.
Signed,
ABS, The Literary Scholar
By ABS, The Literary Scholar
A.K.A. The One Who Rode Through Centuries on a Comma and Edited History with a Quill
