About Critical Theory

"Deconstruction is inadequate because it has no way of talking sensibly about the meaning of indisputable human verities such as birth, life, love, and death. There are all sorts of things, obviously, which are social constructs, dependent upon the accidents of history, upon the manipulations of the powerful, upon the differences between genders, classes, and races. Literature may indeed fall into this category, but this does not mean that everything that literature describes, like death, does, too. You can't deconstruct death. Christian readers, by contrast, no matter how critical they may be, are, with at least one part of their being, attuned to meaning, and, when faced with death, they understand (and speak) the language of hope.

I would suggest, then, that we must recover in our scholarship and teaching of literature a greater degree of innocence. We must recapture some of the child-like wonder, which, one would guess, even the most jaded critic once had in the power and pleasure of words. Much of what we enjoy most in literature does lies right at the surface: the narrative thread (what's going to happen next?), the sound of the language, and the author's message. What is he or she trying to say to me or us? This last (now unfashionable) question presupposes a sort of submission on the part of the reader, a willingness to take a leap of imaginative faith that transcends the distance, temporal, geographical, and cultural, that may separate us from the author, a loving forbearance of an author who may indeed be of a different sex, or of a different time, or of a different political mindset, and a preliminary assumption that the author has something he or she wishes to say to us, on which it is the reader's duty and delight to put the best construction. Such a position does not simply replicate the traditional "humanist" confidence in human reason and "reasonability" as the basis for communication, but instead views language as an effectual activity grounded in God's love, in which humans, made in the image of God, may joyfully participate--or, which, like any other aspect of God's grace, we may disparage, manipulate, and reject. We should, then, in our study of literature, be amateurs in the strict sense of the word. Love is God's motive for communicating with humans, and it is also the backdrop for all Christian interrelations, including the way we respond to and ourselves use word.

--The Hermeneutics of Innocence: Literary Criticism from a Christian Perspective
by Carl P.E. Springer PhD

I just wanted to save this thought. I like the idea of approaching literature with innocence, with hope, and with love...words are His gift to us!