Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction📖

Literary theory is a very difficult subject to introduce. It’s one of those areas in which if you have little idea of what it is about, it’s very difficult to wrap your head around it. It also very quickly touches on lots of different areas of knowledge and gets complex very quickly.

Typical introductions to these academic subjects usually mostly cover a superficial historical account. Culler avoids this, although he presents one such account in an appendix. Instead he presents problems that theory deals with. This way, the reader can start understanding the kinds of problems that literary theory deals with and have an idea about how it is practiced.

It is still a dense book to go through. Even though it’s thin, each page has lots of content. I did support reading it with reading some supplemental material and a couple of sections I re-read to further understand. All this, though, is probably more the responsibility of the subject itself than the author’s.

I think it’s a great first approximation for someone interested in theory, although it’s best taken with a good mental energy reserve.