Literary Theory and Criticism: From the Metaphysics of Presence to Its Discontents
Literary theory and criticism occupies a peculiar yet crucial position within the domain of literary studies. It is not literature per se—it does not tell stories, compose poems, or dramatize human experience in the imaginative mode. Rather, it is a meta-genre, a form of writing that talks about literature. Literary theory reflects upon the nature, function, form, and significance of literary texts; it asks what literature is, how it works, why it matters, and how it should be approached.
In doing so, literary theory necessarily engages with a complex network of elements: language, text, author, history, culture, context, and reader. It informs us not only about literature but also about the conditions under which literature is produced, interpreted, and valued. Far from being a neutral or secondary activity, literary theory actively shapes how literature is read, taught, and understood. In many ways, it constructs the very “picture” within which literature takes place—even as literature itself reshapes that picture.
This article argues that literary theory and criticism, despite its internal diversity, can broadly be divided into two major orientations:
- Traditional Literary Theory and Criticism, and
- Modern Literary Theory and Criticism.
The basis of this division is not merely historical or methodological; it is fundamentally ontological. The traditional approach operates—often implicitly—within what may be called the metaphysics of presence, the assumption that there exists some stable, absolute, or universal truth, meaning, or reality which literature reflects, approximates, or reveals. The modern approach, by contrast, emerges through a sustained challenge to this metaphysical assumption, questioning the very ideas of presence, universality, stability, and fixed meaning.
Traditional Literary Theory and the Metaphysics of Presence
Traditional literary theory does not constitute a single, unified school with an explicit label. Instead, it is a long and continuous intellectual tendency, stretching from classical Greek philosophy to early twentieth-century criticism. Figures as diverse as Plato, Aristotle, Philip Sidney, Dryden, Pope, Samuel Johnson, the Romantic poets, and later critics such as T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis differ significantly in their views on poetry, imagination, reason, emotion, and form. Yet beneath these differences lies a shared ontological assumption: that literature is oriented toward something real, present, and meaningful beyond itself.
This assumption—what Derrida later terms the metaphysics of presence—manifests in the belief that literature relates to truth, moral order, human nature, or universal values, even if imperfectly. Disagreements within the tradition are largely epistemological (how truth is known) rather than ontological (whether truth exists).
Plato and Aristotle: Truth, Mimesis, and Approximation
The foundational debate in Western literary theory occurs between Plato and Aristotle. Plato’s suspicion of poetry is well known. In The Republic, he famously excludes poets from his ideal state, arguing that poetry is thrice removed from reality. The poet imitates the physical world, which itself is only an imitation of the eternal Forms. As such, poetry deals in appearances rather than truth and appeals to emotion rather than reason. It misleads the soul and distracts it from genuine knowledge.
Plato’s critique is rooted in a strong metaphysics of presence: truth exists as an absolute reality (the Forms), and anything that distances us from it is epistemologically and morally suspect. Poetry fails not because it speaks falsely intentionally, but because its very mode of representation is ontologically inferior.
Aristotle, while accepting the basic framework of mimesis, significantly revises Plato’s conclusions. In Poetics, Aristotle defends poetry on the principle of probability and universality. Poetry may not present literal truth, but it presents universal truth—what could or ought to happen according to human nature. For this reason, Aristotle famously claims that poetry is superior to history: history deals with particulars, whereas poetry deals with universals.
Here, poetry is no longer a mere imitation for imitation’s sake; it becomes a craft (technē) through which human beings can come to understand themselves. Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy illustrates this point. Through fear and pity, tragedy produces catharsis, a purgation or clarification of emotions. The tragic hero, marked by hamartia, allows the audience to recognize their own vulnerabilities and limitations. Literature thus becomes a means of ethical and psychological insight.
Despite their disagreement, Plato and Aristotle share an ontological commitment: there is truth, there is human nature, and literature relates meaningfully to both. Their divergence lies in how literature accesses that truth.
Philip Sidney and the Renaissance Defense of Poetry
The same metaphysical orientation appears in Renaissance criticism, particularly in Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry. Sidney responds to Stephen Gosson’s The School of Abuse, which levels four major charges against poetry:
- Poetry is a waste of time.
- Poetry is the mother of lies.
- Poetry corrupts morals.
- Poetry promotes idleness and immorality.
Sidney’s defense places poetry at the origin of all knowledge. He argues that poetry predates philosophy and history and is superior to both. History is too concrete, tied to particular events; philosophy is too abstract, dealing in rigid concepts. Poetry, by contrast, combines the strengths of both: it teaches universal truths through concrete and delightful representation.
Sidney’s famous claim that poetry “teaches and delights” reflects a deep belief in literature’s moral and epistemological function. Poetry does not merely entertain; it moves the reader toward virtue. Once again, the metaphysics of presence is evident: there are universal values and truths, and poetry is uniquely suited to communicate them.
Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and Ontological Continuity
At first glance, the Neoclassical and Romantic movements appear radically opposed. Neoclassicism values reason, order, balance, decorum, and wit, as seen in Dryden, Pope, and Johnson. Romanticism, by contrast, emphasizes imagination, emotion, spontaneity, and individual experience, as exemplified by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats.
However, this opposition is primarily epistemological, not ontological. Neoclassicists believe truth is accessed through reason and classical forms; Romantics believe it is accessed through imagination and emotion. Yet both assume that truth exists, that there is a real human nature, and that literature gives access to something essential and present.
Wordsworth’s belief in the healing power of nature, Coleridge’s theory of imagination, and Shelley’s vision of poets as “unacknowledged legislators of the world” all presuppose a metaphysical depth underlying appearances. Literature reveals, expresses, or participates in that depth.
Thus, like Plato and Aristotle, Neoclassicism and Romanticism differ in method but not in ultimate ontological commitment. Both remain within the metaphysics of presence.
Eliot and Leavis: The Last Custodians of Presence
With the advent of modernity, the metaphysics of presence begins to fracture. Scientific rationalism, historical relativism, and cultural fragmentation place increasing pressure on traditional assumptions. Yet critics such as T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis can be seen as the last major figures attempting to preserve that metaphysics, albeit in a transformed form.
Eliot’s concept of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” argues that literary greatness emerges from a dynamic relationship between the past and the present. The poet must surrender personal emotion to an impersonal tradition, yet also modify that tradition through originality. Implicit here is the belief that tradition possesses an objective value and coherence worth preserving.
Similarly, Leavis’s emphasis on moral seriousness, the “great tradition,” and close reading reflects a commitment to intrinsic literary value. Literature matters because it embodies ethical intelligence and cultural continuity.
While Eliot and Leavis acknowledge fragmentation and historical change, they still assume that meaning, value, and literary excellence are not entirely relative. In this sense, they represent the final effort to stabilize a collapsing metaphysical ground.
Traditional literary theory, from Plato to Leavis, is unified not by uniform doctrine but by a shared ontological faith: that literature relates to something present, meaningful, and ultimately real. Whether through imitation, imagination, moral instruction, emotional refinement, or cultural tradition, literature is seen as a bridge between human expression and universal significance.
Modern literary theory will emerge precisely by questioning this bridge—by interrogating presence, truth, authorial intention, stable meaning, and universal human nature. Structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, and deconstruction will challenge the very assumptions that traditional theory took for granted.
Understanding this deep ontological shift is essential. Without it, literary theory appears as a confusing collection of competing schools. With it, theory reveals itself as a profound intellectual drama: the gradual unraveling of the metaphysics of presence and the search for meaning in its aftermath.
Modern Literary Theory and the Crisis of Presence
Introduction
If traditional literary theory is characterized by confidence in presence—truth, meaning, human nature, moral order—modern literary theory begins with suspicion. The twentieth century witnesses a profound intellectual and cultural shift in which long-held assumptions about reality, knowledge, language, and subjectivity begin to erode. Two world wars, the rise of industrial capitalism, the influence of Darwin, Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, and the rapid advancement of science collectively destabilize the belief in fixed truths and universal meanings.
Modern literary theory emerges within this climate of uncertainty. Rather than assuming that literature reflects an already-present reality, modern theorists ask more unsettling questions: What if meaning is not present but produced? What if language does not transparently represent reality? What if the subject itself is unstable? In this sense, modern literary theory is not merely a methodological shift; it is an ontological challenge to the metaphysics of presence that had structured Western thought for centuries.
Although modern theories—Marxism, structuralism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, feminism, and others—appear diverse and sometimes contradictory, this article argues that they share a common impulse: the dismantling of presence as a stable ground of meaning. Each theory approaches this dismantling from a different angle—economic, linguistic, psychological, or cultural—but the destination is strikingly similar.
Marxism: Material Conditions over Transcendental Meaning
Marxist literary theory represents one of the earliest and most forceful challenges to the metaphysics of presence. Where traditional criticism often assumed universal human values or timeless truths expressed through literature, Marxism insists that literature is shaped by material conditions, class relations, and historical forces.
For Marxist critics, meaning does not originate from an abstract realm of ideas or moral absolutes. Instead, it arises from the economic base of society. Literature belongs to the superstructure, reflecting—and sometimes resisting—the ideological formations produced by modes of production. Concepts such as truth, beauty, and morality are not eternal; they are historically contingent and socially constructed.
In this framework, literature cannot be understood as an autonomous bearer of universal meaning. The author is not a transcendent genius expressing timeless truths but a subject embedded within class ideology. Even when literature appears to articulate universal human concerns, Marxist theory asks: Whose universality is this? Whose interests does it serve?
Thus, Marxism undermines metaphysics of presence by relocating meaning from an absolute realm to historical process. Meaning is not present in the text as an essence; it is produced within concrete socio-economic conditions. Reality itself becomes dynamic, conflict-driven, and unstable.
Psychoanalysis: The Decentered Subject
If Marxism destabilizes meaning by historicizing it, psychoanalytic theory—especially in Freud and later Lacan—destabilizes meaning by fracturing the subject. Traditional literary theory largely assumed a coherent self: an author who knows what they mean and a reader who consciously interprets.
Freud challenges this assumption by introducing the unconscious. Human behavior, creativity, and language are no longer governed by rational self-awareness but by repressed desires, unresolved conflicts, and symbolic substitutions. Literature, in this view, becomes a site where unconscious forces find indirect expression.
Lacan radicalizes this insight by linking the unconscious to language itself. The subject, Lacan argues, is constituted by language and is perpetually divided. Meaning is never fully present to consciousness; it is always deferred, displaced, and structured by absence.
In psychoanalytic criticism, then, there is no stable authorial intention to recover, no transparent self behind the text. The subject is decentered, and presence gives way to lack. Literature does not reveal a unified human essence; it exposes fragmentation at the heart of subjectivity.
Structuralism: Meaning without Origin
Structuralism marks a decisive turn away from metaphysical thinking by focusing on systems rather than substances. Influenced heavily by Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics, structuralism argues that meaning is not inherent in things but arises from relations within a system.
Saussure’s distinction between signifier and signified destabilizes the idea of natural or intrinsic meaning. Words do not correspond directly to reality; they function through differences. “Tree” means what it does not because of any essential connection to the object but because it differs from “rock,” “plant,” or “bush.”
Applied to literature, structuralism shifts attention away from authorial intention, historical truth, or moral depth and toward underlying narrative structures, codes, and conventions. Myths, stories, and genres are analyzed as systems governed by rules, not expressions of metaphysical truths.
In this framework, presence is no longer necessary. Meaning does not reside in a transcendent reality or human nature; it emerges from structural relations. Literature becomes a play of forms rather than a mirror of truth.
Poststructuralism: The Collapse of Presence
Poststructuralism emerges as both an extension and a critique of structuralism. While structuralists believed systems could stabilize meaning, poststructuralists argue that systems themselves are unstable.
Thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes dismantle the last remaining traces of metaphysics of presence. Derrida’s concept of différance shows that meaning is endlessly deferred—never fully present, always arriving too late or too early. Language does not anchor meaning; it disperses it.
Derrida directly exposes the metaphysics of presence as a foundational illusion in Western thought—the belief that there is a final signified, an ultimate truth, a stable center. Deconstruction reveals that texts undermine their own claims to coherence. Meaning arises not from presence but from absence, contradiction, and play.
Barthes’ proclamation of the “death of the author” further intensifies this rupture. The author is no longer the source of meaning; the text becomes a site of multiple interpretations generated by the reader. Meaning is not discovered but produced.
Foucault, meanwhile, replaces truth with discourse and power. Knowledge is not neutral or universal; it is constructed within regimes of power. Literature, like all discourse, participates in these regimes rather than transcending them.
Feminism and Cultural Theories: Situated Meaning
Feminist criticism and later cultural theories continue the dismantling of presence by exposing how claims to universality often conceal exclusion and domination. What traditional theory presented as “human nature” is revealed to be gendered, racialized, and culturally specific.
Feminist theorists question the supposed neutrality of language, canon formation, and literary value. Meaning is not universal but situated. Literature does not express timeless truths; it reflects power relations embedded in culture.
Once again, presence gives way to plurality. There is no single center, no absolute perspective. Meaning becomes relational, contextual, and contested.
A Shared Ontological Shift
Despite their differences, modern literary theories converge on a single ontological insight: there is no stable presence grounding meaning. Whether through class struggle, unconscious desire, linguistic systems, discursive power, or cultural positioning, meaning is always mediated, deferred, and constructed.
Traditional literary theory asked: What truth does literature reveal?
Modern theory asks: How is truth produced, by whom, and at what cost?
This shift does not merely change how literature is interpreted; it changes what literature is. Literature becomes not a window onto universal reality but a site where reality is negotiated, contested, and destabilized.
Conclusion: From Presence to No-Thingness
Modern literary theory marks the culmination of a long intellectual movement away from metaphysical certainty. The metaphysics of presence—once taken for granted—comes under sustained interrogation. Meaning is no longer anchored in God, reason, human nature, or tradition. It floats, disperses, fragments.
In this sense, modern literary theory reflects a deeper cultural movement toward no-thingness—not nihilism, but the recognition that reality cannot be fully captured, named, or stabilized by language. Literature no longer reveals a pre-existing truth; it exposes the limits of representation itself.
Understanding this shift allows us to see literary theory not as a chaotic field of competing schools but as a coherent historical response to the collapse of presence. What began as confidence in truth ends as attentiveness to absence—and it is within this tension that modern literary criticism continues to operate.