Template talk:Litcrit

Literature Template‑class

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As handy as it is to have a template to help navigate around topics to do with literature criticism, there are a few issues that I'd like to raise about this template.

First of all, the subdivision of 'literary theory' and 'Marxist school' seems to imply that the topic is split between these poles; not only does this ignore the many different critical approachs in the discipline but it also suggests that these are two separate poles, which is unfair given the obvious overlap between them. Marxist criticism is an important area of theory but why give that its own category and not, say, poststructuralist criticism? This has the additional problem of associating the subtopics in the template with these areas, which leads to some bizarre associations (while feminist criticism and deconstruction are two areas influenced by Marxism, they are by no means aspects of Marxist criticism so why are they banded as such?) which merely mislead people. This is a very complicated area, and one where trying to oversimplify things can actually make matters worse. The last thing we should be doing is trying to group all of these theories into two little pigeonholes as this does not represent the broad sepctrum of thought within literary criticism, or of the amount of overlap between many approaches to critical theory.

My alternative idea is to keep the template but merge the two parts into one. This does not represent which ideas are associated with which approach but it has the advantage of avoiding generalisations, which I think is a step forward from the current template. We can have a look at the articles linked to in the template as well and check how relevant they are (perhaps some of the more specific ideas such as 'thing theory' can be taken away as this is just meant to be a basic overview of approaches). I'd be interested to hear some feedback about this as I would like to know whether I'm on the right lines or not. Thank you, PamukSoundystem (talk) 13:06, 8 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]