BYU Studies Quarterly Volume 53 | Issue 3 Article 3 9-1-2014 Toward a Mormon Literary Theory Jack Harrell Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq Recommended Citation Harrell, Jack (2014) "Toward a Mormon Literary Theory," BYU Studies Quarterly: Vol. 53 : Iss. 3 , Article 3. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol53/iss3/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the All Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in BYU Studies Quarterly by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact
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[email protected]. Harrell: Toward a Mormon Literary Theory Toward a Mormon Literary Theory Jack Harrell ast year I walked into a literary theory course on the campus of L Brigham Young University–Idaho. The teacher was a colleague of mine, Jeff Slagle, a gifted young professor well-versed in criticism and theory. I was auditing the course that semester, revisiting theories and approaches I’d first encountered years before as a BYU undergraduate. The main text for the course was The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, and the names on the reading list were familiar—Cleanth Brooks, Louis Althusser, Wolfgang Iser, Jacques Derrida, Annette Kolodny, Henry Louis Gates Jr. But this was dense material—complex writing, challenging ideas, texts that can forever change the way a person thinks and reads. Just as I had experienced at BYU, taking similar courses from Bruce Young and Cecilia Konchar Farr, I found value in each of the texts Jeff assigned—feminists extolling the roles of women, cultural critics challenging modern material- ism, language theorists writing of the presence or absence of extralinguistic reality.