Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide

“What are the concrete ways in which we can benefit from an understanding of critical theory? […] [T]heory can help us learn to see ourselves and our world in valuable new ways, ways that can influence how we educate our children […] how we behave as voters and consumers; how we react to others with whom we do not agree on social, religious, and political issues; and how we recognize and deal with our own motives, fears, and desires. And if we believe that human productions […] are outgrowths of human experience and therefore reflect human desire, conflict, and potential, then we can learn to interpret those productions in order to learn something important about ourselves as a species.”

This quote lays out Lois Tyson’s goal for Critical Theory Today and the message that she hopes the work will transmit to its readers. The use of the word “concrete” in the first sentence is notable because it is a tacit repost to the common criticism of critical theory as an overly subjective, overly theoretical mode of analysis with no bearing on the “real world.” The many real-world examples of how this theory can be applied that Tyson provides support her argument that critical theory can have “concrete” applications, contributing to The Relationship Between Language and Reality.

“As you read the following chapters, I hope it will become clear to you that even our ‘personal,’ ‘natural’ interpretations of literature and of the world we live in—interpretations ‘unsullied’ by theory—are based on assumptions, on ways of seeing the world, that are themselves theoretical and that we don’t realize we’ve internalized. In other words, there is no such thing as a nontheoretical interpretation.”

In this quote, Tyson underlines how theoretical understandings shape literary experiences, even if we have “naturalized” them, i.e., we have adopted them so entirely we can no longer recognize them. The role of critical theory as presented by Tyson is to make visible the ideologies that we have “internalized” and understand how they shape our understandings of the world and literature. The use of quotes around “personal,” “natural,” and “unsullied” indicates Tyson’s skepticism about these concepts.