Theorists Primary Concerns

So this is my diagram, and I apologize for the fact that it isn't super tidy and computer generated, but that is my way of saying that sometimes theory is messy.

I decided to organize the diagram according to the primary concerns of these theorists. Obviously, we read them because their ideas are applicable to literary criticism, but some of these people were developing structures to help us understand the world through art. Others wanted to change the world, or analyze the way words work. Some wanted to defend their own practices. For this reason, I began by dividing the theorists into two main camps. The ones who dealt with the world outside of literature as a focus, and the ones interested in what makes good art. I put Kant, Hume, and Sidney in the category of general aesthetics, because their concern is answering the most basic questions, such as: What is beauty? Or taste? Or the purpose of art? Hegel and Nietzche also fit in this category, but I gave them their own group because they have a particular bias for music, suggesting that language and image are not as adequate as a form of expression.

On the Reality side of things I have three categories: Philosophical, Practical, and Scriptural. The distinction I make between the practical and the philosophical is that the people on the practical side had an agenda, whereas the philosophers were more concerned with their thoughts and just understanding the way the world works in general. Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, and Nietzsche belong there, in my opinion. The Scripture club is clearly made up of Augustine, Schleiermacher, and Maimonides. The practical side has two categories. There are the psychologists, whose theories were the ones that they themselves used, then there are those who hoped for large scale cultural change which they could not effect in and of themselves. This cultural change fell into the categories of gender and economic reform. Although Lacan had a psychiatric practice, he is much more of a theorist, so I connected him to de Saussure.

De Saussure is on his own line in between art and reality because the study of linguistics shows how language works as a system in our day to day "real" world, thus lying somewhere between the realms of art and reality.