Literary theory is the systematic
study
Study or studies may refer to:
General
* Education
** Higher education
* Clinical trial
* Experiment
* Observational study
* Research
* Study skills, abilities and approaches applied to learning
Other
* Study (art), a drawing or series of ...
of the nature of
literature
Literature is any collection of Writing, written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to ...
and of the methods for
literary analysis
Literary criticism (or literary studies) is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of literature's goals and methods. ...
.
[ Culler 1997, p.1] Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of
intellectual history, moral philosophy, social prophecy, and interdisciplinary themes relevant to how people interpret
meaning.
In the
humanities
Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at t ...
in modern academia, the latter style of literary scholarship is an offshoot of
post-structuralism.
[ Searle, John. (1990)]
"The Storm Over the University"
''The New York Review of Books'', December 6, 1990. Consequently, the word ''theory'' became an umbrella term for scholarly approaches to
reading texts, some of which are informed by strands of
semiotics
Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes ( semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something ...
,
cultural studies,
philosophy of language
In analytic philosophy, philosophy of language investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of Meaning (philosophy of language), meanin ...
, and
continental philosophy.
History
The practice of literary theory became a profession in the 20th century, but it has historical roots that run as far back as ancient Greece (
Aristotle
Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of ...
's ''
Poetics'' is an often cited early example), ancient India (
Bharata Muni's ''
Natya Shastra''), and ancient Rome (
Longinus's ''On the Sublime''). In medieval times, scholars in the Middle East (
Al-Jahiz
Abū ʿUthman ʿAmr ibn Baḥr al-Kinānī al-Baṣrī ( ar, أبو عثمان عمرو بن بحر الكناني البصري), commonly known as al-Jāḥiẓ ( ar, links=no, الجاحظ, ''The Bug Eyed'', born 776 – died December 868/Jan ...
's ''al-Bayan wa-'l-tabyin'' and ''al-Hayawan'', and
ibn al-Mu'tazz's ''Kitab al-Badi'') and Europe continued to produce works based on literary studies. The
aesthetic
Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that comes out of aesthetics). It examines aesthetic values, often expressed t ...
theories of
philosopher
A philosopher is a person who practices or investigates philosophy. The term ''philosopher'' comes from the grc, φιλόσοφος, , translit=philosophos, meaning 'lover of wisdom'. The coining of the term has been attributed to the Greek th ...
s from
ancient philosophy
This page lists some links to ancient philosophy, namely philosophical thought extending as far as early post-classical history ().
Overview
Genuine philosophical thought, depending upon original individual insights, arose in many culture ...
through the 18th and 19th centuries are important influences on current literary study. The theory and
criticism
Criticism is the construction of a judgement about the negative qualities of someone or something. Criticism can range from impromptu comments to a written detailed response. , ''"the act of giving your opinion or judgment about the good or bad q ...
of literature are tied to the
history of literature.
However, the modern sense of "literary theory" only dates to approximately the 1950s when the
structuralist linguistics of
Ferdinand de Saussure began to strongly influence
English language
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the ...
literary criticism. The
New Critics and various European-influenced
formalists (particularly the
Russian Formalists) had described some of their more abstract efforts as "theoretical" as well. But it was not until the broad impact of structuralism began to be felt in the English-speaking academic world that "literary theory" was thought of as a unified domain.
In the academic world of the United Kingdom and the United States, literary theory was at its most popular from the late 1960s (when its influence was beginning to spread outward from elite universities such as
Johns Hopkins
Johns Hopkins (May 19, 1795 – December 24, 1873) was an American merchant, investor, and philanthropist. Born on a plantation, he left his home to start a career at the age of 17, and settled in Baltimore, Maryland where he remained for most ...
,
Yale, and
Cornell
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...
) through the 1980s (by which time it was taught nearly everywhere in some form). During this span of time, literary theory was perceived as academically cutting-edge, and most university literature departments sought to teach and study theory and incorporate it into their curricula. Because of its meteoric rise in popularity and the difficult language of its key texts, theory was also often criticized as
faddish or trendy
obscurantism
In philosophy, the terms obscurantism and obscurationism describe the anti-intellectual practices of deliberately presenting information in an abstruse and imprecise manner that limits further inquiry and understanding of a subject. There are two ...
(and many academic satire novels of the period, such as those by
David Lodge, feature theory prominently). Some scholars, both theoretical and anti-theoretical, refer to the 1980s and 1990s debates on the academic merits of theory as "the theory wars".
By the early 1990s, the popularity of "theory" as a subject of interest by itself was declining slightly (along with job openings for pure "theorists") even as the texts of literary theory were incorporated into the study of almost all literature. By 2010, the controversy over the use of theory in literary studies had quieted down, and discussions on the topic within literary and cultural studies tend now to be considerably milder and less lively. However, some scholars like
Mark Bauerlein
Mark Weightman Bauerlein (born 1959) is an English professor emeritus at Emory University and senior editor of ''First Things'' journal. He also serves as a visitor of Ralston College, a start-up liberal arts college in Savannah.
Early life ...
continue to argue that less capable theorists have abandoned proven methods of
epistemology
Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics.
Epi ...
, resulting in persistent lapses in learning, research, and evaluation. Some scholars do draw heavily on theory in their work, while others only mention it in passing or not at all; but it is an acknowledged, important part of the study of literature.
Overview
One of the fundamental questions of literary theory is "what is
literature
Literature is any collection of Writing, written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to ...
?" – although many contemporary theorists and literary scholars believe either that "literature" cannot be defined or that it can refer to any use of
language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...
. Specific theories are distinguished not only by their methods and conclusions, but even by how they create meaning in a "
text". However, some theorists acknowledge that these texts do not have a singular, fixed meaning which is deemed "correct".
Since theorists of literature often draw on a very heterogeneous tradition of
Continental philosophy and the
philosophy of language
In analytic philosophy, philosophy of language investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of Meaning (philosophy of language), meanin ...
, any classification of their approaches is only an approximation. There are many types of literary theory, which take different approaches to texts. Even among those listed below, many scholars combine methods from more than one of these approaches (for instance, the
deconstructive approach of
Paul de Man drew on a long tradition of
close reading
In literary criticism, close reading is the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of a text. A close reading emphasizes the single and the particular over the general, effected by close attention to individual words, the syntax, ...
pioneered by the
New Critics, and de Man was trained in the European
hermeneutic tradition).
Broad schools of theory that have historically been important include historical and
biographical criticism,
New Criticism,
formalism
Formalism may refer to:
* Form (disambiguation)
* Formal (disambiguation)
* Legal formalism, legal positivist view that the substantive justice of a law is a question for the legislature rather than the judiciary
* Formalism (linguistics)
* Scien ...
,
Russian formalism, and
structuralism,
post-structuralism,
Marxism
Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...
,
feminism
Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism incorporates the position that society prioritizes the male po ...
and
French feminism,
post-colonialism,
new historicism,
deconstruction
The term deconstruction refers to approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. It was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who defined it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms and essen ...
,
reader-response criticism, and
psychoanalytic criticism.
Differences among schools
The different interpretive and epistemological perspectives of different schools of theory often arise from, and so give support to, different moral and political commitments. For instance, the work of the
New Critics often contained an implicit moral dimension, and sometimes even a religious one: a New Critic might read a poem by
T. S. Eliot or
Gerard Manley Hopkins for its degree of honesty in expressing the torment and contradiction of a serious search for belief in the modern world. Meanwhile, a
Marxist
Marxism is a left-wing to far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict and a dialecti ...
critic might find such judgments merely ideological rather than critical; the Marxist would say that the New Critical reading did not keep enough critical distance from the poem's religious stance to be able to understand it. Or a
post-structuralist critic might simply avoid the issue by understanding the religious meaning of a poem as an allegory of meaning, treating the poem's references to "God" by discussing their referential nature rather than what they refer to.
Such a disagreement cannot be easily resolved, because it is inherent in the radically different terms and goals (that is, the theories) of the critics. Their theories of reading derive from vastly different intellectual traditions: the New Critic bases his work on an East-Coast American scholarly and religious tradition, while the Marxist derives his thought from a body of critical social and economic thought, the post-structuralist's work emerges from twentieth-century Continental philosophy of language.
In the late 1950s, the Canadian literary critic
Northrop Frye
Herman Northrop Frye (July 14, 1912 – January 23, 1991) was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.
Frye gained international fame with his first book, '' Fearful Symm ...
attempted to establish an approach for reconciling historical criticism and New Criticism while addressing concerns of early reader-response and numerous psychological and social approaches. His approach, laid out in his ''
Anatomy of Criticism'', was explicitly structuralist, relying on the assumption of an intertextual "order of words" and universality of certain structural types. His approach held sway in English literature programs for several decades but lost favor during the ascendance of post-structuralism.
For some theories of literature (especially certain kinds of formalism), the distinction between "literary" and other sorts of texts is of paramount importance. Other schools (particularly post-structuralism in its various forms: new historicism, deconstruction, some strains of Marxism and feminism) have sought to break down distinctions between the two and have applied the tools of textual interpretation to a wide range of "texts", including film, non-fiction, historical writing, and even cultural events.
Mikhail Bakhtin argued that the "utter inadequacy" of literary theory is evident when it is forced to deal with the
novel; while other genres are fairly stabilized, the novel is still developing.
[Bakhtin 1981, p.8]
Another crucial distinction among the various theories of literary interpretation is intentionality, the amount of weight given to the author's own opinions about and intentions for a work. For most pre-20th century approaches, the author's intentions are a guiding factor and an important determiner of the "correct" interpretation of texts. The New Criticism was the first school to disavow the role of the author in interpreting texts, preferring to focus on "the text itself" in a
close reading
In literary criticism, close reading is the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of a text. A close reading emphasizes the single and the particular over the general, effected by close attention to individual words, the syntax, ...
. In fact, as much contention as there is between formalism and later schools, they share the tenet that the author's interpretation of a work is no more inherently meaningful than any other.
Schools
Listed below are some of the most commonly identified schools of literary theory, along with their major authors:
*
Aestheticism – associated with
Romanticism
Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate ...
, a philosophy defining aesthetic value as the primary goal in understanding literature. This includes both literary critics who have tried to understand and/or identify aesthetic values and those like Oscar Wilde who have stressed
art for art's sake.
**
Oscar Wilde,
Walter Pater,
Harold Bloom
* African-American literary theory
* American
pragmatism and other American approaches
**
Harold Bloom,
Stanley Fish,
Richard Rorty
Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 – June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher. Educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University, he had strong interests and training in both the history of philosophy and in contemporary analytic ...
*
Cognitive literary theory – applies research in
cognitive science and
philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are add ...
to the study of literature and culture.
**
Frederick Luis Aldama, Mary Thomas Crane, Nancy Easterlin, William Flesch, David Herman,
Suzanne Keen, Patrick Colm Hogan, Alan Richardson,
Ellen Spolsky,
Blakey Vermeule
Emily Dickinson Blake "Blakey" Vermeule (born July 14, 1966) is an American scholar of eighteenth-century British literature and theory of mind. She is a Professor of English at Stanford University.
Biography
Vermeule is the daughter of classic ...
,
Lisa Zunshine
*
Cambridge criticism – close examination of the literary text and the relation of literature to social issues
**
I.A. Richards,
F.R. Leavis,
Q.D. Leavis,
William Empson.
*
Critical race theory
*
Cultural studies – emphasizes the role of literature in everyday life
**
Raymond Williams
Raymond Henry Williams (31 August 1921 – 26 January 1988) was a Welsh socialist writer, academic, novelist and critic influential within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the media and literature contrib ...
,
Dick Hebdige
Dick Hebdige (born 1951) is an expatriate British media theorist and sociologist, and a professor of art and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work is commonly associated with the study of subcultures, and its ...
, and
Stuart Hall (
British Cultural Studies);
Max Horkheimer and
Theodor Adorno;
Michel de Certeau
Michel de Certeau (; 17 May 1925 – 9 January 1986) was a French Jesuit priest and scholar whose work combined history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the social sciences as well as hermeneutics, semiotics, ethnology, and religion. He was ...
; also
Paul Gilroy,
John Guillory
* Dark Side of the Rainbow – a strategy of analyzing works with the accompaniment of music and finding and extrapolating thematic similarities between the two, named after a popular practice that came about in the 1970s
*
Darwinian literary studies Darwinian literary studies (also known as literary Darwinism) is a branch of literary criticism that studies literature in the context of evolution by means of natural selection, including gene-culture coevolution. It represents an emerging tr ...
– situates literature in the context of evolution and natural selection
*
Deconstruction
The term deconstruction refers to approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. It was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who defined it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms and essen ...
– a strategy of "close" reading that elicits the ways that key terms and concepts may be paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning undecidable
**
Jacques Derrida,
Paul de Man,
J. Hillis Miller
Joseph Hillis Miller Jr. (March 5, 1928 – February 7, 2021) was an American literary critic and scholar who advanced theories of literary deconstruction. He was part of the Yale School along with scholars including Paul de Man, Jacques Derri ...
,
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe ( , ; 6 March 1940 – 28 January 2007) was a French philosopher. He was also a literary critic and translator. Lacoue-Labarthe published several influential works with his friend Jean-Luc Nancy.
Lacoue-Labarthe was ...
,
Gayatri Spivak,
Avital Ronell
*
Descriptive poetics
**
Brian McHale
*
Feminist literary criticism
Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or more broadly, by the politics of feminism. It uses the principles and ideology of feminism to critique the language of literature. This school of thought seeks to an ...
*
Eco-criticism
Ecocriticism is the study of literature and ecology from an interdisciplinary point of view, where literature scholars analyze texts that illustrate environmental concerns and examine the various ways literature treats the subject of nature. It ...
– explores cultural connections and human relationships to the natural world
*
Gender
Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most culture ...
(see
feminist literary criticism
Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or more broadly, by the politics of feminism. It uses the principles and ideology of feminism to critique the language of literature. This school of thought seeks to an ...
) – which emphasizes themes of gender relations
**
Luce Irigaray,
Judith Butler
Judith Pamela Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory. In 1993, Butler b ...
,
Hélène Cixous,
Julia Kristeva,
Elaine Showalter
*
Formalism
Formalism may refer to:
* Form (disambiguation)
* Formal (disambiguation)
* Legal formalism, legal positivist view that the substantive justice of a law is a question for the legislature rather than the judiciary
* Formalism (linguistics)
* Scien ...
– a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text
* German
hermeneutics
Hermeneutics () is the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts. Hermeneutics is more than interpretative principles or methods used when immediate ...
and
philology
Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined as ...
**
Friedrich Schleiermacher,
Wilhelm Dilthey,
Hans-Georg Gadamer
Hans-Georg Gadamer (; ; February 11, 1900 – March 13, 2002) was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 '' magnum opus'', '' Truth and Method'' (''Wahrheit und Methode''), on hermeneutics.
Life
Family ...
,
Erich Auerbach
Erich Auerbach (November 9, 1892 – October 13, 1957) was a German philologist and comparative scholar and critic of literature. His best-known work is '' Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature'', a history of represe ...
,
René Wellek
René Wellek (August 22, 1903 – November 10, 1995) was a Czech-American comparative literary critic. Like Erich Auerbach, Wellek was an eminent product of the Central European philological tradition and was known as a vastly erudite a ...
*
Marxism
Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...
(see
Marxist literary criticism
Marxism was introduced by Karl Marx. Most Marxist critics who were writing in what could chronologically be specified as the early period of Marxist literary criticism, subscribed to what has come to be called "vulgar Marxism." In this thinkin ...
) – which emphasizes themes of class conflict
**
Georg Lukács,
Valentin Voloshinov,
Raymond Williams
Raymond Henry Williams (31 August 1921 – 26 January 1988) was a Welsh socialist writer, academic, novelist and critic influential within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the media and literature contrib ...
,
Terry Eagleton,
Fredric Jameson,
Theodor Adorno,
Walter Benjamin
*
Narratology
*
New Criticism – looks at literary works on the basis of what is written, and not at the goals of the author or biographical issues
**
W. K. Wimsatt,
F. R. Leavis,
John Crowe Ransom
John Crowe Ransom (April 30, 1888 – July 3, 1974) was an American educator, scholar, literary critic, poet, essayist and editor. He is considered to be a founder of the New Criticism school of literary criticism. As a faculty member at Kenyon ...
,
Cleanth Brooks,
Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905 – September 15, 1989) was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the lit ...
*
New historicism – which examines the work through its historical context and seeks to understand cultural and intellectual history through literature
**
Stephen Greenblatt,
Louis Montrose,
Jonathan Goldberg, H. Aram Veeser
*
Postcolonialism – focuses on the influences of
colonialism
Colonialism is a practice or policy of control by one people or power over other people or areas, often by establishing colonies and generally with the aim of economic dominance. In the process of colonisation, colonisers may impose their reli ...
in literature, especially regarding the historical conflict resulting from the exploitation of less developed countries and
indigenous peoples
Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original people ...
by
Western nation
The Western world, also known as the West, primarily refers to the various nations and states in the regions of Europe, North America, and Oceania. s
**
Edward Said,
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
Homi Bhabha and
Declan Kiberd
Declan Kiberd (born 24 May 1951) is an Irish writer and scholar with an interest in modern Irish literature, both in the English and Irish languages, which he often approaches through the lens of postcolonial theory. He is also interested in th ...
*
Postmodernism – criticism of the conditions present in the twentieth century, often with concern for those viewed as social deviants or the
Other
**
Michel Foucault,
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes (; ; 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western pop ...
,
Gilles Deleuze,
Félix Guattari and
Maurice Blanchot
*
Post-structuralism – a catch-all term for various theoretical approaches (such as
deconstruction
The term deconstruction refers to approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. It was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who defined it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms and essen ...
) that criticize or go beyond
Structuralism's aspirations to create a rational science of culture by extrapolating the model of linguistics to other discursive and aesthetic formations
**
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes (; ; 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western pop ...
,
Michel Foucault,
Julia Kristeva
*
Psychoanalysis
PsychoanalysisFrom Greek: + . is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques"What is psychoanalysis? Of course, one is supposed to answer that it is many things — a theory, a research method, a therapy, a body of knowledge. In what might ...
(see
psychoanalytic literary criticism
Psychoanalytic literary criticism is literary criticism or literary theory which, in method, concept, or form, is influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud.
Psychoanalytic reading has been practised since the early ...
) – explores the role of consciousnesses and the unconscious in literature including that of the author, reader, and characters in the text
**
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies explained as originating in conflicts i ...
,
Jacques Lacan,
Harold Bloom,
Slavoj Žižek,
Viktor Tausk
*
Queer theory – examines, questions, and criticizes the role of gender identity and sexuality in literature
**
Judith Butler
Judith Pamela Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory. In 1993, Butler b ...
,
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
Michel Foucault
*
Reader-response criticism – focuses upon the active response of the reader to a text
**
Louise Rosenblatt
Louise Michelle Rosenblatt (23 August 1904 in Atlantic City, New Jersey – 8 February 2005 in Arlington, Virginia) was an American university professor. She is best known as a researcher into the teaching of literature.
Biography
Rosenblatt was ...
,
Wolfgang Iser
Wolfgang Iser (22 July 1926 – 24 January 2007) was a German literary scholar.
Biography
Wolfgang Iser was born in Marienberg, Germany. His parents were Paul and Else (Steinbach) Iser. He studied literature in the universities of Leipzig and ...
,
Norman Holland
Norman N. Holland (September 19, 1927, New York City - September 28, 2017) was an American literary critic and Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar Emeritus at the University of Florida.
Holland's scholarship focused largely on psychoanalytic criti ...
,
Hans-Robert Jauss
Hans Robert Jauss (german: Jauß; 12 December 1921 – 1 March 1997) was a German academic, notable for his work in reception theory (especially his concept of horizon of expectation) and medieval and modern French literature. His approach was d ...
,
Stuart Hall
*
Realist
**
James Wood
*
Russian formalism
**
Victor Shklovsky,
Vladimir Propp
*
Structuralism and
semiotics
Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes ( semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something ...
(see
semiotic literary criticism) – examines the universal underlying structures in a text, the linguistic units in a text and how the author conveys meaning through any structures
**
Ferdinand de Saussure,
Roman Jakobson,
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss (, ; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair of Social Anthr ...
,
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes (; ; 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western pop ...
,
Mikhail Bakhtin,
Juri Lotman,
Umberto Eco,
Jacques Ehrmann,
Northrop Frye
Herman Northrop Frye (July 14, 1912 – January 23, 1991) was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.
Frye gained international fame with his first book, '' Fearful Symm ...
and
morphology of folklore
* Other theorists:
Robert Graves
Captain Robert von Ranke Graves (24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985) was a British poet, historical novelist and critic. His father was Alfred Perceval Graves, a celebrated Irish poet and figure in the Gaelic revival; they were both Celt ...
,
Alamgir Hashmi,
John Sutherland,
Leslie Fiedler,
Kenneth Burke,
Paul Bénichou
Paul Bénichou (; 19 September 1908 – 14 May 2001) was a French/Algerian writer, intellectual, critic, and literary historian.
Bénichou first achieved prominence in 1948 with ''Morales du grand siècle'', his work on the social context of the F ...
,
Barbara Johnson,
Blanca de Lizaur
Maria Blanca de Lizaur Guerra (born 1966), commonly known as Blanca de Lizaur, is a writer and researcher specialized in cultural studies, communications and literature. She was born in Mexico City, Mexico, to Spanish parents.
She has a doctora ...
See also
Notes
References
*
Peter Barry. ''Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory''. .
*
Jonathan Culler. (1997) ''Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction''. Oxford: Oxford University Press. .
*
Terry Eagleton. ''Literary Theory: An Introduction''. .
* Terry Eagleton. ''After Theory''. .
* Jean-Michel Rabaté. ''The Future of Theory''. .
* ''The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism''. .
* ''Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader.'' Ed.
David Lodge and Nigel Wood. 2nd Ed.
* ''Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent.'' Ed.
Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral. .
*
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981)
The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays'. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans.
Caryl Emerson
Caryl Emerson is an American literary critic, slavist and translator. She is best known for her books and scholarly commentaries on the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. She has translated some of Bakhtin's most influent ...
and Michael Holquist. Austin and London: University of Texas Press.
*
René Wellek
René Wellek (August 22, 1903 – November 10, 1995) was a Czech-American comparative literary critic. Like Erich Auerbach, Wellek was an eminent product of the Central European philological tradition and was known as a vastly erudite a ...
. ''A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950''. Yale University Press, 1955-1992, 8 volumes.
Further reading
*
* Castle, Gregory. ''Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory''. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
*
Culler, Jonathan. ''The Literary in Theory''. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.
*
Terry Eagleton. ''Literary Theory''. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. (http://www.upress.umn.edu/)
* ''Literary Theory: An Anthology''. Edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
*
Lisa Zunshine, ed
Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010
External links
Aristotle's ''Poetics'' (350 BCE)Longinus's On the Sublime (1st century CE)*
ttp://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/texts/quotes.html "Some Literary Criticism quotes", by Tim LoveThe Litcrit Toolkit*
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
"Literary Theory," by Vince BrewtonAnnotated bibliography on literary theoryEncyclopedia of PhilosophyPurdue OWL Johns Hopkins Guide
{{DEFAULTSORT:Literary Theory
Interpretation (philosophy)
Communication theory