Critical Theory

10 November 2025

More information on my studies, looking more at critical theory and how that directed my dissertation research.

20 August 2012

For those of my readers who believe that the ‘professor’ went right off the deep end in his blogpost last week, I beg your patience–it was/is relevant to the story of “how I got this way,” and even more important for the troubling world in which we find ourselves, where one can become ‘an offender for a word.’ Any word in any language only has meaning if the hearer or reader of the word gives it meaning, otherwise, it is merely a collection of sounds with no connection to anything in reality. In other words (pun intended), a word can ‘offend’ us only if we choose to be offended by the word, because again, any ‘word’ is merely a collection of arbitrary sounds that have no meanings in themselves–the ‘offense’ is not in the word itself, or in the speaker of the word, but in the meaning given the word by the hearer. The old adage, one I hated as a child, since it meant I was supposed to ignore the ‘name-calling’: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me. Those ‘names’ we were all called, whatever they were, and regardless of the intent, were merely collections of sounds that had no meaning until we gave them meaning. In this age of ‘political correctness’ this simple adage seems more relevant all the time–how much have we forgotten of value in our rush forward, divesting ourselves of anything deemed ‘traditional!’

Enough of these dismal and esoteric rantings!

I finished my PhD coursework in the Spring of 2000, not suffering any supposed Y2K computer glitches, and began a year of study for my qualifying exams. A PhD student chooses a time period (mine is 19-20th century British Literature), a genre (the novel), and a third area–this can be a particular figure (like Shakespeare), a second time period, or a special topic area: I chose ‘Tolkien & fantasy’ as my special topic area, my third ‘specialty’ as a professor. The student then puts together a reading list for each of these areas, that can include both original literary texts and criticisms. For the first two areas, in my case the time period and the genre, there are accepted authors and critics that are common to these reading lists, with some leeway within each area. For the third, special topic area, the student is free to determine the content of the reading list, although all three lists must be approved by the student’s committee, which consists of three professors in the student’s department, along with a fourth professor from a different, although related, department–I chose a philosophy professor, since my intent, at that point, was a more theoretical approach to Tolkien and fantasy. As such, my special topics reading list included most of the criticism on fantasy that was, at that time, available. Once these reading lists are approved, which generally happens in the final semester of course work, the student then begins to study all the works on all three lists. The lists are not short and would probably be the equivalent of the books the average layman would read in his entire life (although considering how little the average person reads currently, it might be more accurate to say the lifetime reading of ten average people), all these over about a year, since the wise student begins studying the summer before! Meanwhile, the committee chair solicits questions from the committee, questions based on the student’s reading lists, and shortly before the end of the Spring semester, the committee chooses the questions for the written exams. These take place over a week, usually on three days, each day for each area of specialty. On each of those days, I started at 9:00 am and was given two questions, my choice of which to answer, and I spent the morning answering the question–I was allowed the use of my laptop, to type my answers, finishing by noon, then coming back at 1:00 pm, for a second pair of questions, finishing at 4:00 pm, and I did this for three days–Monday, Wednesday, & Friday. I then got a week to prepare for an oral exam, in which the four committee members read my answers and formulated further questions that I had to answer on the spot. The oral exam lasted about two hours, and one feels as if one has been ‘wrung out,’ completely; I passed with flying colors, and my chair later told me that it was the best oral exam he had ever attended!

Once these exams are passed, the student moves from ‘doctoral student’ to ‘doctoral candidate’ and begins work on his dissertation. I wanted to explore some of the possible sources for the ideas in Tolkien’s 1939 lecture, “On Fairy-Stories,” which was his ‘fantasy manifesto,’ his attempt to explain why he wrote ‘fairy-stories,’ our modern fantasy genre. I began this research as an undergraduate, in the practical half of the critical theory courses–the one in which we put into practice the theories. The professor for this course would later become my thesis chair, and studied under Derrida at UC-Irvine (my source for these theories); she chose the topic of ‘angels in literature’ as there was, at the time, much interest in the subject. I wrote a research paper that semester that examined angels in Tolkien’s work–recall that Tolkien was a devout Catholic. Thus began my study of Tolkien’s lecture, and I later presented a version of the angels essay at the Christianity and Literature conference at Seattle Pacific U (If the reader is interested, the text of that presentation can be read on this site, under “Professional Writings”).

As I continued to study literature and Tolkien’s lecture, I noticed resonances in his ideas with figures like Sir Philip Sidney, Joseph Addison, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and these similarities led directly to a Master’s thesis on the relationship between these figures’ ideas to each other and to Tolkien–there are places in his lecture where he seems to be responding directly to statements & ideas of these figures in literature, ideas about artistic creation, the power of language to create images in the mind, and the god-like abilities of the poet/writer. These formed the bulk of my thesis, and later became the core of my dissertation, since I saw, as I finished my thesis, that there was much more to do and understand. And so, when I began work on my dissertation, I knew I needed to add chapters on each of the above figures, along with a chapter on Oscar Wilde’s quirky “The Decay of Lying,” in which he posits the ‘art of lying,’ or storytelling as a lost art that should be recovered, and gives a defense of ‘imaginative literature.’ Once I had completed the introduction–a survey of fantasy criticism–and the chapters on the above four figures, I began a chapter on Tolkien’s lecture, and its relation to all these figures, and I discovered that Tolkien had not only defended fantasy, he had also created a framework for interpreting these works, the ‘qualities’ common to all fantasy works, so I spent the second half of my dissertation drawing out the four qualities and applying them to contemporary fantasies by Zelazny, Donaldson, Eddings, and Rowling.

When this realization struck me, I thought, as Tolkien had (who was writing The Lord of the Rings at the time he gave his lecture), that these theories are only useful if they can be put into actual practice. I again took up my epic, set aside for about 8 years, reread my friend’s honest criticism, and rewrote some of the first chapters. I was stunned by the difference 8 years’ study of literature and theory had made in my writing; I began anew, re-envisioning the entire sequence, quickly discovering that my ‘trilogy’ was insufficient for the story that I had in mind, and the change, for the better, my writing had undergone.

To be continued. . . .