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Advanced Literature — Literary Theory

Major schools of literary criticism and theory

D
deconstructed_d 25 terms Jul 30, 2025
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Terms 25

1
New Criticism
Close reading of text itself; intentional fallacy; affective fallacy; autonomy of literary work
2
Intentional Fallacy
Wimsatt & Beardsley: author's intent is irrelevant to interpretation; meaning in text
3
Affective Fallacy
Reader's emotional response is irrelevant to meaning; confuses poem with its effects
4
Structuralism
Saussure: language as system of differences; signs, signifiers, signifieds; binary oppositions
5
Semiotics
Study of signs; icon (resemblance), index (causal), symbol (arbitrary) — Peirce
6
Narratology
Structural study of narrative; story vs discourse; Genette's temporal structures
7
Deconstruction
Derrida: texts undermine their own assumptions; binary oppositions unstable; différance
8
Différance
Derrida's coinage: meaning deferred and different; no stable origin of meaning
9
Poststructuralism
Critiques structuralism's stable systems; meaning unstable, context-dependent, power-laden
10
The Death of the Author
Barthes: author's intention irrelevant; text open to reader interpretation; reader's birth
11
Psychoanalytic Criticism
Freudian/Lacanian concepts applied to texts; unconscious desires, repression, the Other
12
Lacanian Mirror Stage
Subject forms ego through identification with image; split between self and Other
13
Feminist Criticism
Analyzes how gender shapes texts; challenges patriarchal assumptions; gynocriticism, écriture féminine
14
Gender Performativity
Butler: gender is performed, not natural; citation of norms; no prior authentic gender identity
15
Queer Theory
Challenges normative sexuality and gender; heteronormativity; destabilizes stable identities
16
Marxist Criticism
Literature reflects economic base and class ideology; Althusser, Gramsci (hegemony), Jameson
17
Hegemony
Gramsci: dominant ideology naturalizes itself; not maintained by force alone but consent
18
New Historicism
Greenblatt: text and history mutually constitutive; power circulates through cultural artifacts
19
Postcolonial Theory
Said, Spivak, Bhabha: analyses of colonial discourse, Orientalism, hybridity, subaltern
20
Orientalism
Said: Western construction of 'the East' as exotic Other; serves imperial ideology
21
Subaltern
Spivak: colonized group without access to speak; 'Can the Subaltern Speak?'
22
Hybridity
Bhabha: colonial encounter produces neither pure colonizer nor colonized but hybrid third space
23
Ecocriticism
Examines relationship between literature and the natural environment; anthropocentrism critique
24
Reader-Response Theory
Meaning created in transaction between text and reader; Fish's interpretive communities
25
Formalism vs Historicism
Central tension: text as autonomous object vs text as product of historical conditions