Schools of Literary Criticism – Flashcards

Originated in the early 1900s and arose out of the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and literary criticism. Structuralism is all about trying to look at literature with scientific objectivity. Literature is seen as a system with a structure that can be studied. In this way of looking at narratives, the author becomes less important and the text is seen as the function of a system, not of an individual. Structuralism argues that no piece of writing is original, and that every text, and every sentence we speak or write, is made up of the "already written." Since structuralism examines underlying structure, a structuralist would note that West Side Story has the same structure as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.-- Ferdinand de Saussure, Noam Chomsky, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan.

Began in Russia in the 1920s and 1930s, as a reaction against interpreting texts by considering their historical circumstances or intentions of the author. Formalism flourished in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s and is still popular today. Formalists study the form of the work rather than the content. They focus on the features of the text itself rather than on its creation or its reception.

(a type of formalism) An American approach to criticism that reached its height in the 1940s and 1950s. It advocates a close reading of the text itself and rejects criticism based on extrinsic information. New Critics see the text as complete with in itself and not dependent on its relation to the author's life, intent, or history. Weaknesses: Ignores diversity Ignores fact that literature can be important represents values that a segment of the culture believes are important, or because it can help us understand our history. Ignores fact that context is just as important as form to understanding a work.

Originated in the work of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who pioneered the technique of psychoanalysis. His theories are concerned with the unconscious mind. After 1950, psychoanalytic critics began to emphasize the ways in which authors create works that appeal to readers' repressed wishes and fantasies. Consequently, they shifted their focus away from the author's psyche toward the psychology of the reader and the text.

is a type of criticism in which literary works are viewed as tainted products of exploited labor. Marxist critics look at the role of class, ideology, and revolutionary thought as reflected in texts. They are concerned more with the historical context than hidden meanings.--Terry Eagleton, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels.

Arose in the 1960s as a reaction against New Criticism, which ignores the role of the reader in determining the meaning of a text. Reader-response criticism suggests that a text is given meaning by the reader and that the reader "co-authors" the text by the act of reading and interpreting it. It is similar to new historicism in that it values the reader. However, unlike new historicist critics, reader-response critics are not interested in exploring the writer's intentions. It is the total opposite of formalism and new criticism, text-oriented theories in which don't take the reader's role interpreting literary works into account.--Norman Holland, Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, Hans-Robert Jauss, Roland Barthes, Louise Rosenblatt, C.S. Lewis.

began in France but became popular in the United States in the mid-to late 1960s. It arose as a reaction against structuralism and the belief that language can represent logical, finite truths. The goal of poststructuralists is to show, by examining texts, that truth is resistant to scientific methodology. Poststructuralists see 'reality' as fragmented, diverse, and tenuous Since we live in a linguistic universe, and linguistic sis made up of symbols, we can only speak of only what we have symbols (language) for. So, there is a limit to knowledge and it is impossible to arrive at final theories or final truths. --Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser.

a critical approach that debunks single definitions of meaning based on the instability of language. It "is not a dismantling of a structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself."

America, 1970s. Goals: to examine how female characters are portrayed in literature to expose the patriarchal ideology implicit in the literary canon to increase awareness of sexual politics in language to uncover the female tradition of writing (which may include rediscovering old texts) to study writings by women to find out how women writers across the ages have perceived themselves. However, feminists of color, third wave feminists, postcolonial feminists, and lesbian feminists stress that women are not defined solely by the fact that they are female. Other factors, such as religion, class, and sexual orientation, are also important, and make the problems and goals of one group of women different from those of another.-- Isobel Armstrong, Nancy Armstrong, Barbara Bowen, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Laura Brown, Margaret Anne Doody, Eva Figes, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, Toril Moi, Lisa Tuttle.

A paradigm that proposes that categories of sexual identity are social constructs and that no sexual category is fundamentally either deviant or normal; this paradigm emphasizes the importance of difference and rejects as restrictive the idea of innate sexual identity.

also called "Contextualism," developed in the 1980s and was popular in the 1990s. A reaction against the new criticism, it focuses on a work's historical content and the relationship between the text and other factors, such as the author's life or intentions in writing the work. New historicism was influenced by the poststructuralist and reader-response theories of the 1970s and by the feminist and Marxist critics of the 1980s.

Type of cultural criticism that involves the analysis of literary texts produced in countries that have come under the control of European colonial powers at some point in their history. Postcolonial criticism focuses on the way in which the colonizing First World invents false, stereotypical images of the Third (postcolonial) World to justify its exploitation. Postcolonial critics look at the literature that arises after the colonizer has left as its victims grapple with the consequences of having been exploited. Common themes: rape metaphor (J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace), racial self-hatred, the struggle to resurrect native culture/folklore. -- Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Frantz Fanon, Homi K. Bhabha, Chinua Achebe.