A colleague's Hoover theory: applied.

A good friend of mine, a fellow English professor, has an interesting literary theory that's far more widely applicable than just to literature. She calls it her "Hoover theory," and it's a reaction to a theory that states that the good literary critic doesn't look at anything but the text: they're not to pay attention to the historical context the text was written in, the lives of the authors, or anything else but the author's word choice, characterization, plot progress, etc.

My colleague thinks that that particular theory is far too narrow to offer a serious literary critic, which most English professors tend to be, a useful lens through which to view and discuss the work and its meaning. Her "Hoover theory" states that "Nothing is created in a vacuum"--in other words, that everything should be taken into account when a reader is trying to determine what an author intended in a text, or sometimes what an author put in without having intended to.

Not all literary theories are equally applicable to the real world--New Criticism, for example, holds that there is one, single, correct interpretation for any work, and that all others are wrong. Queer theory holds that either every character (person) is either repressing their own latent homosexuality, or their own fears that they are. Gender criticism makes everything about how the patriarchy has abused women. Marxist theory deals with social class, class differences, and how the different classes interact.

Granted, each theory is applicable to a greater or lesser extent to real life, but each is a very narrow lens which occasionally has an unfortunate tendency to convince those using that particular lens to view all works of literature, and all events surrounding them, through the ideology of that theory. What makes my colleague's theory superior to any of these, in my opinion, is that it takes them all, and a few more besides, into account in interpreting texts. What's more, this theory is as easily applicable to real life as it is to literature.

For example, in the recent brouhaha about the Nobel Prize for Literature Awards Commission's statement that American fiction is too self-centered to be good enough to win the Nobel Prize, we found buried in the story a reference to why they thought so: the literature submitted for review is all about American pop culture, and the themes really aren't that applicable to the rest of the world. In other words, Americans aren't reading world literature, and since many write what they read, what's written in American literature doesn't resonate anywhere but here. Americans write in a vacuum, and thus, modern American writers don't produce the quality of work that will withstand the test of time.

The interesting thing about this is not that American literature is written in a vacuum so much as why it is: literature departments nationwide no longer focus on the literature, but on the social statements that the theorists read into the literature. No longer do most survey classes teach a basic appreciation for the great works that form our culture, but instead teach a narrow, politicized theory about how all literature of all periods do nothing but demonstrate how this or that minority were oppressed by the white, upper class, male majority. Thus, our population learns that literature is nothing worthwhile, and stops reading literature. The minority who keep reading (usually English majors) learn that what makes a novel a great work is relative, and that messages don't have to resonate with the masses to be worth delivering. The minority who keep reading are the ones who write the next generation of "literature," in all its naval-gazing, self-flagellating glory.

Nothing is created in a vacuum. Not literature, and not the growing irrelevance of the departments that teach it.