Before we go anywhere with fancy words like “structuralism”, “postcolonialism”, and the highly-anticipated “psychoanalysis”, let’s start by looking at the idea of “theory” itself. I’m sure you’ve seen the word before, and have used it (or derivations of it) in your day-to-day speech: “oh yes, Communism is perfect in theory”, “I’ve quite forgotten the Pythagoras Theorem”, and “theoretically speaking, eating all this chocolate will only motivate me to jog for three hours and so it can only do me good.” But when it comes down to it, what is theory? And more specifically, what is literary theory?

Continue reading »