-
400
Greeks
For early critics, Literature was concern with human behavior and its relationship with the physical world, society and ethics. Key Concepts:
ONTOLOGY is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality.
EPISTEMOLOGY is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and limitations of knowledge. -
Period: 400 to
Literary Studies
-
Romanticism
Romanticism: a belief that higher orders of human truth were possible thorugh trascending base concerns of pure reason, politics and worldy values. KEY IDEAS: Romantics believed in poetry as an expression of feeling, a reflection on everyday life and nature expressed through common language. -
Scientific Determinism
Scientific Determinism is the belief that the world-objects, actions, and forces-arises from clear causes that can be revealed through objective scientific inquiry. KEY IDEAS: Science became the popular application to all questions including those of literarure. Literary texts, then, became the object of scientific study. -
New Criticism
New Criticism has a focus on close reading with little to no concern for history, ideology, politics, biography, or other factors outside the text. KEY IDEAS:
The text became the main focus.
The text is a self-contained object that exists independently from all extrinsic forces, including the author. -
Reader Response
Reader-response criticism moves the emphasis of textual analysis from a singular focus on the text to one where the reader works in concert with a text to produce an interpretation. KEY IDEAS: Reader's personal experience might very well play a substantial role in enhancing an encounter with a text. KEY CONCEPTS
Horizon of expectations
Interpretative communities -
Structuralism
SAUSSURE'S work: Words were SIGNS made up of two component parts: a SIGNIFIER and a SIGNIFIED. Language is arbitrary: there is no inherent connection between any word and its referent. -
Poststructuralism
Negotiating not what a sign is, but what a sign is not.
We know through difference. Sometimes replaced by Postmodernism or Deconstruction. -
Marxism
All texts contain subtexts which are extensions of historical and ideological conflict, the same conflicts being played out in real societies and not just in literary texts. KEY IDEAS:
The root of the conflcts is anchoredd in social class and economic differences. -
Femenism and Gender studies
Feminism
Devoted to describing and interpreting (or reinterpreting) women's experience through literature. KEY IDEAS: Uncovering essential differences between women and men, or challenging male representations of women and society, or rediscovering previously overlooked or ignored women writers and texts or any combination of the three. Gender Studies
Explores sexual identity, questions of reproduction, sexuality, gender, family, love and marriage. -
Cultural Poetics
History as the body of knowledge.
Cultural poetics seesks to investigate these multiple discourses (history, law, economics, politcs, and even literary analysis itself) in order to explore the connections between all human activities and their role in making life meaningful. -
Postcolonial criticism
It is definied as an approach to texts produced in colonized countries.
It derives from multiple critical approaches, through topics such as nationalism, ethnicity, language, history and how these issues are dealt with when two (or more) cultures clash, usually with one dominant and one deemed inferior (cultural imperialism).
