Literary Criticism (5) Flashcards
- Deconstructive Theory
Late 1960s to present/ deconstruction has been a predominant theory started by Jacques Derrida/ He focused closely on reading texts and looking for opposition between the words in the piece’s meaning/ The true meaning comes from examining these contradictions
- Deconstructive Theory critics include
Geoffrey Hartman/ Barbara Johnson
- Feminist Theory
It includes several ideas and approaches to literature that focus on sexual differences described through sexual stereotypes found/ Other critics rediscover female literature of the past to reinterpret it using more modern ideas
- Feminist Theory critics include
Elaine Showalter/ Annette Kolodny/ Virginia Woolf/ Simone de Beauvoir
- Formalist Theory
Was viewed as a dangerous way of digging deeper into literature because its main focus was to help readers defamiliarize themselves with the world around them so they could see it clearly/ Stalin cracked down on formalists in 1930 and prevented much publication
- Formalist Theory critics include
Victor Sklovsky/ Yuri Tynyanov/ Vladimir Propp
- Literary Criticism
Involves interpreting/ analyzing and critiquing an author’s work/ usually according to a specific theory
- Marxist Theory
1970s teachings of Karl Marx guided a new approach to find meaning in literature determined by historic and economic conditions by understanding the time period in which the work was written/ It is still used today especially in connection with deconstruction and feminist theory
- Marxist Theory critics include
Raymond Williams/ Edmund Wilson
- New Criticism Theory
Began at the same time as formalism but saw literature itself as a way to further one’s understanding of the world/ Author’s intended meaning was not important because it was never truly known/ All that mattered was meaning found in the text itself/ New Critics also believed that every text contained multiple meanings that co-existed
- New Criticism Theory critics include
T.S. Eliot/ W.K. Wimsatt/ I.A. Richards
- Psychoanalytic Theory
Sigmund Freud changed the way people thought of themselves/ He and Carl Jung carried over their ideas of psychoanalysis into the study of literature/ The small tools and concepts apply to evaluating a work’s author/ primary character/ or audiences as one would evaluate a patient
- Psychoanalytic Theory critics include
Sigmund Freud/ Carl Jung/ Northrop Frye/ Jacques Lacan
- Platonic Theory
Based on the opinions of Plato/ especially his words in Phaedrus/ Ion/ and Republic/ Plato/ the pupil of Socrates/ and a teacher to Aristotle/ The theories that we’ve reviewed so far are very modern/ but Platonic Theory is a sense of Neoclassicism
Reader Response Theory
- Became popular in 1940s by theorists who believe the only meaning in a piece of literature is the meaning created by the reader’s interaction with the text.
- Each reader brings his own frame of reference and culture, history, language, and psychology to impact what he gets out of the text
- Reader Response Theory Critics Include
- Stanley Fish
- Wolfgang Iser
- Structuralist Theory
- After WWII structuralism became popular with idea of linguistics to break down languages into smallest possible parts
- Each action or narrative by itself needs to be analyzed but that’s only part of the puzzle. The next part is looking carefully at how all of those small pieces come together in the work.
- It ran from 1960s to 1970s as it lost popularity
Structuralist Theory Critics Include
- Roland Barthes
- Umberto Eco
- Claude Levi-Strauss
