CRITICAL RATIONALISM AS A LITERARY THEORY IN THE POSTMODERN CONTEXT (original) (raw)
Various literary theories have been put forward by different scholars in the postmodern epoch and because they generally represent an underlying postmodern philosophy, much controversy surrounds them, not the least of which is to do with their relativistic nature. In this essay, I aim to explicate a recently formulated theory based on the philosophical school of Critical Rationalism (CR). While being similar in some respects to postmodern theories, a literary theory based on CR overcomes many of the weaknesses inherent in postmodernism. I begin by articulating the major epistemological debates that surround postmodernism and modernism. Within this context, I show how CR approached these debates and enlivened the discussion with a new paradigm. I then briefly discuss Gadamer and Bakhtin’s literary theories as a sample of what postmodernism has to offer literature before explicating how CR can be used as a literary theory based on the formulations of Ali Paya (2018) and Thomas Trzyna (2017). I conclude with some of the benefits of using a CR approach that postmodernism cannot offer.
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