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Formalism
Formalism rose to prominence in the early twentieth century as a reaction against Romanticist theories of literature, which centered on the artist and individual creative genius, and instead placed the text itself back into the spotlight to show how the text was indebted to forms and other works that had preceded it. Two schools of formalist literary criticism developed, Russian formalism, and soon after Anglo-American New Criticism. -
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Structuralism
Developed in the early 20th century, mainly in France and the Russian Empire, in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague, Moscow,and Copenhagen schools of linguistics. In the early 1960s, structural linguistics faded in importance and scholars borrowed Saussure's concepts for use in other fields like anthropology, sociology, psychology, literary criticism and economics. Associated with structuralism are Claude Lévi-Straus, Jakobson and Lacan. -
Ferdinand de Saussure - "Course in General Linguistics"
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Russian Formalism
Russian formalism is distinctive for its emphasis on the functional role of literary devices and its original conception of literary history. Russian Formalists advocated a "scientific" method for studying poetic language, to the exclusion of traditional psychological and cultural-historical approaches.
Important names included Vladimir Propp, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson.
Russian Formalism had a huge influence on Mikhail Bakhtin and structuralism in general. -
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Marxism
Based on the theories of Karl Marx (and so influenced by Hegel), this school concerns itself with class differences, economic and otherwise, as well as the implications and complications of the capitalist system.
Theorists working in the Marxist tradition, therefore, are interested in answering the overarching question, whom does it [the work, the effort, the policy, the road, etc.] benefit?
Important names include: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson -
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The Frankfurt School
The term Frankfurt School informally describes the works of scholarship and the intellectuals who were the Institute for Social Research, an adjunct organization at Goethe University Frankfurt, Important names included Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), and Walter Benjamin. They drew on Hegel, Marx, and Freud in attempting to revive the “negative dialectics” or negative, revolutionary potential of Hegelian Marxist thought. -
The Prague School
A school of linguistic thought and analysis established in Prague in the 1920s by Vilém Mathesius. It included among its most prominent members the Russian linguist Nikolay Trubetskoy and the Russian-born American linguist Roman Jakobson. Linguists of the Prague school stress the function of elements within language, the contrast of language elements to one another, and the total pattern or system formed by these contrasts, and they have distinguished themselves in the study of sound systems. -
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Psychoanalysis
The psychoanalytic theory was developed by Sigmund Freud in the late 19th Century and was subsequently developed by his successors, most notably Jacques Lacan. -
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Post-Structuralism
Although it is often presented in the form of a set of prescriptions and precepts, poststructuralism developed in a series of practical encounters with the text.
(Barthes - Balzac, Lacan and Derrida - Hamlet) Poststructuralism proposes that the meanings of words, images, or stories are not to be found elsewhere, in the mind of the author or the world depicted. Since they have no external guarantees, meanings are unfixed, discontinuous, and unstable. -
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Feminist 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 analyze and describe the ways in which literature portrays the narrative of male domination by exploring the economic, social, political, and psychological forces embedded within literature -
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Tel Quel Magazine
Tel Quel was founded in 1960 in Paris by Philippe Sollers and Jean-Edern Hallier. Important essays working towards post-structuralism and deconstruction appeared here.
Though the journal originally published essays more in line with what current literary theory calls "structuralism," it would eventually feature work that reflected the revaluation of literary, artistic, and music criticism that began in France in the 1960s
Authors included Derrida, Lacan, and Kristeva. -
Jacques Derrida - "Of Grammatology"
Translated into English in 1976.
Derrida argues that throughout the Western philosophical tradition, writing has been considered as merely a derivative form of speech, and thus as a "fall" from the "full presence" of speech. He deconstructs this position as it appears in the work of several writers. Derrida does not claim to be giving a critique of the work of these thinkers, because he does not believe it possible to escape from operating with such oppositions. -
Roland Barthes - "The Death of the Author"
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Roland Barthes - "S/Z: An Essay"
S/Z, published in 1970, is Roland Barthes' structural analysis of "Sarrasine", the short story by Honoré de Balzac. Barthes methodically moves through the text of the story, denoting where and how different codes of meaning function. Barthes' study made a major impact on literary criticism and is historically located at the crossroads of structuralism and post-structuralism. -
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Gender Studies and Queer Theory
Gender studies and queer theory explore issues of sexuality, power, and marginalized populations (woman as other) in literature and culture. Much of the work in gender studies and queer theory, while influenced by feminist criticism, emerges from post-structural interest in fragmented, de-centered knowledge building (Nietzsche, Derrida, Foucault), language (the breakdown of sign-signifier), and psychoanalysis (Lacan). -
Luce Irigaray - "Speculum of the Other Woman"
Irigaray's first major book Speculum of the Other Woman, based on her second dissertation, was published in 1974, In Speculum, Irigaray engages in close analyses of phallocentrism in Western philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, analyzing texts by Freud, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant. The book's most cited essay, "The Blind Spot of an Old Dream," critiques Freud's lecture on femininity. -
Julia Kristeva - "Revolution in Poetic Language"
Its account of two new areas of discourse, the semiotic and the symbolic, proposed new ideas on the formation of identity, especially the mother-child relationship, which have transformed ideas of women’s function and significance. -
Hélène Cixous - "The Laugh of the Medusa"
In the essay, Cixous issues an ultimatum: women can either read and choose to stay trapped in their own bodies by a language that does not allow them to express themselves, or they can use the body as a way to communicate. She describes a writing style, écriture féminine, that she says attempts to move outside of the conversational rules found in patriarchal systems. She argues that Écriture feminine allows women to address their needs by building strong self-narratives and identity. -
Edward Said- "Orientalism"
Orientalism is the construction of a system of knowledge about the East by and for the West. It is a process of misinterpretation of the East used the West to redefine itself.
Since Said, critical theory has increasingly questioned the Western assumptions about the East. Orientalism has also become a crucial part of the relationship between Western cultures and imperialism. -
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New Historicism
Heavily inspired by Foucault, New Historicism drew upon the idea that history is discontinuous and that power is always unstable because every act of power generates resistances. New Historicism rejected the authorial genius and the power of the established canonical works and tried to redefine the connections between literary and non-literary texts. Important names included Stephen Greenblatt and
Harold Aram Veeser. -
Jean Baudrillard - "Simulacra and Simulation"
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Donna Haraway - "A Cyborg Manifesto"
"A Cyborg Manifesto" is an essay written by Donna Haraway and published in 1985 in the Socialist Review. In it, the concept of the cyborg is a rejection of rigid boundaries, notably those separating "human" from "animal" and "human" from "machine".
The "Manifesto" criticizes traditional notions of feminism and encourages instead coalition through affinity. -
Judith Butler' - "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity"
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity is a book by the philosopher Judith Butler, in which the author argues that gender is a kind of improvised performance. The work is influential in feminism, women's studies, and lesbian and gay studies, and has also enjoyed widespread popularity outside of traditional academic circles. Butler's ideas about gender came to be seen as foundational to queer theory and the advancing of dissident sexual practices during the 1990s. -
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Post-Colonialism
Post-colonial critics are concerned with literature produced by colonial powers and works produced by those who were/are colonized. Post-colonial theory looks at issues of power, economics, politics, religion, and culture and how these elements work in relation to colonial hegemony
Important names include Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said.
