Processes of Thematizing in Literary criticism

Although the theme of a work has an important role in literary and art criticism, it has been less discussed as a methodological process. Persian Researches concern more explication and introduction of the theme of literary works than discussing the processes, methods and strategies of discovering and understanding the theme. This paper, relying on examples of literary and art criticism, introduces two thematizing processes: direct and indirect. The first and prevailing process obtains themes through the evident signs and explicit meanings of a text. Three of these evident signs include the direct utterances of the text, elements of fabula, and literary conventions. This process usually displays familiar themes and without justification. In contrast, the indirect process achieves the theme of a work by relying on implicit and constructed meanings, using strategies such as the concepts of literary theories, formal devices, extracting non-objective motifs, or combining these. The second type of themes, due to their strangeness, must be justified by a critic precisely and for this reason, they display that the critic is aware of his strategies.