Literary Theories Flashcards
What are the 4 classifications of literary criticism?
Text Centered, Author Centered, Reader Centered, Context Centered
What is the context centered approach to analyzing a text?
- looks at the societal aspect.
- generally focused on the world/society’s condition when text was written
- example: Marxism, Feminism, New Historicism
What is the word that envelopes a persons “personal experiences” in which activates a meaning of a text? It is a reader’s background knowledge.
Schema
What do you mean by “close reading”?
It is when readers pay attention to details and how the language was used to derive a message.
Joelle starts looking through the text to answer a question or support a claim. What is this action called and what kind of approach is she using?
Textual evidence; Text-centered approach
What defines a literary period?
- Large Scale Event
- Existing Institutions
- Popular Movement
- Representative Author
- Entitled Backwards, periods are titled after they are finished.
What was the first literary genre?
Rituals
What is the most basic theory?
Formalism
How does formalism see texts?
They see it as independent. It is not to be connected to the author, context, or even seen as a reflection of social reality.
What is always involved when doing a formalist analysis?
Close Reading
What is the formalist belief surrounding “Defamiliarization”?
Artistic vs Everyday Language; Literature’s role is to make the familiar unfamiliar
What is the core principle of Postcolonialism Theory?
Literature reveals what happens when two cultures come into contact and when one culture is dominated by another.
What are the central concepts in Postcolonialism Theory?
- Cultural Colonization: strong culture aims to replace weaker culture
- Double Vision: contrasts perspectives of both colonizer and colonized
- Unhomeliness: culturally displaced; no sense of belonging to neither culture
- Hybridity/Syncretism: mixture of native and colonial culture
- Mimicry: colonized culture mimics the stronger culture
What concept does ethnocentrism falls under? What exactly is it?
Mimicry; belief of one culture being better than the other
Where is the term “Third world” derive from and why is it considered an effect of colonialism?
From the west; this idea of a “third world” came from the view of colonizers
What is Humanism?
Literature that teaches moral and ethical values to enhance human life.
Under Humanism there are 2 main concepts: moral value
and aesthetic value*. Explain the latter.
Aesthetic value incorporates reader’s own experience
What is the Reader-Response Theory? What is its main principles?
That a literary text’s beauty* and meaning can only be activated or enhanced through transaction with the reader’s schema.
According to Reader-Response Theory, we activate an analyze a text through our schema. So what are we looking for when we are using RRT?
- Close relationship between text and reader
- Effect of text to reader
note: Text isdeadif there is no reader
What are the defining characteristics of Structuralism?
- That there is only ONE definite truth.
- text is not autonomous
- there are conventional patterns/formulaic structure according to each genre
- there should be 2 opposing forces → “binary thinking”
Structuralism introduces the idea of “sign”, briefly explain what this means.
Language is composed of signifier and signified.
Signifier = concrete; written/spoken
Signified = abstract; reference/meaning of signifier
Structuralism defines an object by what it is not. Make an example that illustrated this.
This is a cat because this is not water.
What is the defining feature of Deconstruction Theory?
- That there are multiple truths
- Reversal of Binary Opposition; aims to find a middle ground
- Difference: Defines something by what it lacks
What is the main principle of New Historicism?
Literature reflects multiple perspectives and discourses about society at a given period in history.
- literature isn’t a product of a single mind
- acknowledges that their own criticism has biases
