Good Question: How do you define theme?

Post date: Mar 16, 2012 4:31:34 AM

On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 1:26 PM, Joanna Petrone wrote:

how do y'all define "theme" in your classrooms?

On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 3:22 PM, Jessica A. Ross wrote:

This is an excellent question, Joanna! Themes are hard to teach. Will everybody who has something useful please share - with me at least?

I describe it as a single sentence describing the universal message the author wants to get across.

A format my CT teaches to help come up with a theme statement is:

Noun - Qualifier - Verb - Noun

For example: "Love usually trumps all obstacles." It's basic, but it's a start!

Here's a website with some useful information and an example of a well-known theme that might help hook students: "It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all" by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

jess

On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 8:23 PM, Joanna Petrone wrote:

Very interesting. I have always taught-- and understood-- the theme of the work to be its, or one of its, foundational ideas.

"It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all" is what I would call a moral or a lesson.

Everyone else, please, I'm going to be talking about themes with my CT tomorrow, and I'd love to know a definition or example of theme you've worked with.

On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 9:24 PM, Vanessa Siino wrote:

As we discussed in tech, I learned it this way too. For instance, I took a class on narrative and desire in college, where we looked at desire and narrative as both themes and structures in texts.

Another example from my college years: the theme of hybridism in Kim by Rudyard Kipling - Kim is straddling two worlds in multiple ways (British and Indian, childhood and adulthood)

Others: death, love, power, freedom (Huck Finn, the river), marriage (Jane Austen), independence, noble savage (Romanticism), etc.

From "A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms" (which I have been using for nigh on 12 years now):

Theme

A significant idea in a literary text, sometimes used interchangeably with MOTIF. Theme is also used to describe a recurring idea in a number of texts. (It is used in this sense in this book in the entries on ALIENATION, DEATH, LOVE, and TIME, for example.) One problem with the varied uses of the term is the tendency to employ it as the equivalent of MORAL, as in "The theme of this novel is that mindless conformity is the greatest threat to freedom."

As a result of its ambiguous and imprecise uses, some critics have advocated abandoning the term, but its usefulness as a way of organizing the reading of a text, of connecting one text to another (see INTERTEXUALITY), and of applying reading to the experience of life, appears to be indispensable to understanding literature. This is particularly true in contemporary literature in which PLOT and CHARACTER are often obscure, while theme offers a consistent thread through which the reader can unify the narrative.

Thematic criticism (also known as "Thematics") is the term for a critical approach to literature through themes. Significant examples of the range of thematic criticism include George Bataille's Literature and Evil (1973); Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel (1966); Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor (1979), and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989); and Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992).

--

A perceptive overview is Russell Brown's "Theme" in Encyclopedia of Contemporary LIterary Theory, edited by Irena Makaryk (1993). The Return of Thematic Criticism, edited by Werner Sollors (1993), is a collection of essays on theory and practice.

From the same book:

Death

As a literary theme, death is most prominent in TRAGEDY, although it also plays a central role in LYRIC and NARRATIVE forms and even, implicitly at least, in COMEDY.

...

The Renaissance also saw the development of the association of death with sexual LOVE. The love/death connection (in German, liebstod), perhaps a residue of religious guilt, or perhaps rooted, as Freud has suggested, in the desire for the unindividuated, womblike unioin with the mother, assumes a major role in the literature of the period. The association of love and death is evident in romantic tragedies such as Romeo and Juliet, in which Death is represented as Romeo's rival for the love of Juliet, and in the love poems of John Donne, in which the pun on "die" as a reference to orgasm (echoed in the French term le petit mort) suggests the intimate relationship of eros, sexual love, and thanatos, the death with.

. . .

The theme reappears in the CONFESSIONAL POETRY of Sylvia Plath, in which suicide is a major theme, in the death-haunted plays and novels of Samuel Beckett, and in the literature of AIDS, notably in Tony Kushner's Angels in America (1989).