It differs from traditional theory, which focuses only on understanding or explaining society. With origins in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors. To help you decide on a literary theory and to begin analyzing your chosen text, consider the questions presented below: Aestheticism – often associated with Romanticism, a philosophy defining aesthetic value as the primary goal in understanding literature. New Historicism/Cultural Studies (1980s-present) 9. It maintains a stress on the importance of a better world. 87 Texts Every Critical Theorist Needs to Read. Feminists take for their study the subjects of marginalization and minority cultures, while New Historicists look at a text in relation to its historical context and influences. Even among those listed below, 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 pioneered by the New Critics, and de Man was trained in the European hermeneutic tradition). Critical Approaches to Literature Plain text version of this document. Start studying Critical Theories List. List the three basic theories of art criticism and explain each one. Specific theories are distinguished not only by their methods and conclusions, but even by how they define a “text.”. Rhetoric and philosophy both seek to study and understand the nature of human thought and how those thoughts are conveyed. This is not a chaos of subjectivity. Critical theory (also capitalized as Critical Theory to distinguish the school of thought from a theory that is in some way "critical" ) is an approach to social philosophy that focuses on reflective assessment and critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures. The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to critical theory: . Both formalism and New Criticism fall into the categories of aesthetics, as questions and answers about texts that stem from these schools of thought are more concerned with the literary or pleasurable qualities of a text rather than is influences and statements about society or culture. The Critical Race Theory training was exposed by Christopher Rufo, a contributing editor for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.. Broad schools of theory that have historically been important include historical and biographical criticism, New Criticism, formalism, Russian formalism, and structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism, feminism and French feminism, post-colonialism, new historicism, deconstruction, reader-response criticism, and psychoanalytic criticism. Critical theory reading list! 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 like Johns Hopkins, Yale, and Cornell) through the 1980s (by which time it was taught nearly everywhere in some form). Critical theories provide a specific framework of perspective for interpreting texts, politics, religion, events, the natural world, human development and behavior -- whatever the subject of inquiry is. The twenty-two selections in Critical Theory: The Essential Readings provide students with a lucid overview of the central themes and concerns of critical theory. Below is a list of sources that we have found valuable for understanding Critical Race Theory, mostly from within, though some sources that are critical of it are included as well. While his theories vary, Burke's theories often examined the nature of language as a symbolic action that motivates thought and behavior. Critical theory is a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole. Sanyika Shakur, aka Kody Scott, came to . Feminists take for their study the subjects of marginalization and minority cultures, while New Historicists look at a text in relation to its historical context and influences. The theories of Kenneth Burke underpin much of current rhetorical and philosophical discourse. Moral Criticism, Dramatic Construction (~360 BC-present) 2. The aesthetic theories of philosophers from ancient philosophy through the 18th and 19th centuries are important influences on current literary study. Listed below are some of the most commonly identified schools of literary theory, along with their major authors. Introduction to Literature In ancient times, Greek scholars took materialist and philosophical approaches to understanding and preserving historical contexts. Maintaining that ideologyis the pri… Functionalist Theory. Quotations are from X.J. What’s notable about critical theory is that it specifically distinguishes itself from ‘traditional’ theories through its emphasis on criticism. The proponents of each theory believe their theory is the theory, but most of us interpret texts according to the "rules" of several different theories at a time. Reader-Response Criticism (1960s-present) 6. By the early 1990s, the popularity of “theory” as a subject of interest by itself was declining slightly even as the texts of literary theory were incorporated into the study of almost all literature. In modern times, most literary criticisms and theories fall into the categories of aesthetics and politics. Post-Structuralism/Deconstruction (1966-present) 8. Just like everything else in life, art has its critics. Strictly speaking, when we interpret a literary text, we are doing literary criticism; when we examine the criteria upon which our interpretation rests, we are doing critical theory. What does "common sense" say about this? The practice of literary theory became a profession in the 20th century, but it has historical roots as far back as ancient Greece (Aristotle’s Poetics is an often cited early example), ancient India (Bharata Muni’s Natya Shastra), ancient Rome (Longinus’s On the Sublime) and medieval Iraq (Al-Jahiz’s al-Bayan wa-‘l-tabyinand al-Hayawan, and ibn al-Mu’tazz’s Kitab al-Badi). Felix Weil’s father, Herman, made his fortune by exporting grain from Argentina to Europe. Introduction to Literature. Psychoanalytic theory seeks to understand and critique literature and its implications about culture from a Freudian perspective, often examining literary content and its reflection of society or government as a symbolism of basic human motives. 1. At the heart of the theories in this chapter is social stratification by class and power, and they are the most “politicized” of all criminological theories. Critical theories also try to explain group differences in crime rates in terms of the larger social environment; some focus on class differences, some on gender differences, and some on societal differences in crime. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools. While each of these approaches examines a different area of oppression, all are critical approaches to enact great social changes, not only in western societies, but in cultures worldwide. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Karl Marx’s ideas challenged the status qu… In 1923, Felix decided to use his father’s money to found an institute specifically devoted to the study of German society in the light of a Marxist approach. 1. Marxism and capitalism are two familiar political philosophies that also serve as critical theories for interpreting and analyzing past historical trends, as well as current events. Similarly, New Criticism is a critical theory that explores literary texts as self-contained works that stand apart from any influences of the world, including its author. For centuries, scholars, thinkers, authors and readers have pondered fundamental questions about how, why and what we read. Literary criticism and theory has a long and varied past. As literary theory is used to interpret and explain texts, scholars use historical theories to understand and critique historical events. Psychoanalytic theory seeks to understand and critique literature and its implica… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_theory. Copyright 2020 Leaf Group Ltd. / Leaf Group Education. Literary Theories: A Sampling of Critical Lenses Literary theories were developed as a means to understand the various ways people read texts. “The methodology underpinning much of the social justice perspective is known as critical theory. This handbook grants the reader access to the tradition and the core concepts and approaches of critical theory. Oftentimes, one critical theory contradicts or rejects another, and an insightful academic debate is born. In history, major critical theories abound. American pragmatism and other American approaches, Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty, Cognitive Cultural Studies – applies research in cognitive neuroscience, cognitive evolutionary psychology and anthropology, and philosophy of mind 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, Lisa Zunshine, Cultural studies – emphasizes the role of literature in everyday life, Raymond Williams, Dick Hebdige, and Stuart Hall (British Cultural Studies); Max Horkheimer andTheodor Adorno; Michel de Certeau; also Paul Gilroy, John Guillory, Darwinian literary studies – situates literature in the context of evolution and natural selection, Deconstruction – 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, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Gayatri Spivak, Avital Ronell, Gender (see feminist literary criticism) – which emphasizes themes of gender relations, Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous, Elaine Showalter, Formalism – a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Erich Auerbach, René Wellek, Marxism (see Marxist literary criticism) – which emphasizes themes of class conflict, Georg Lukács, Valentin Voloshinov, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, 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, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, 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 in literature, especially regarding the historical conflict resulting from the exploitation of less developed countries and indigenous peoples by Western nations, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Declan Kiberd, 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, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Maurice Blanchot, Post-structuralism – a catch-all term for various theoretical approaches (such as deconstruction) 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, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Psychoanalysis (see psychoanalytic literary criticism) – explores the role of consciousnesses and the unconscious in literature including that of the author, reader, and characters in the text, Sigmund Freud, 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, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michel Foucault, Reader-response criticism – focuses upon the active response of the reader to a text, Louise Rosenblatt, Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland, Hans-Robert Jauss, Stuart Hall, Structuralism and semiotics (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, Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Yurii Lotman, Umberto Eco, Jacques Ehrmann, Northrop Frye and morphology of folklore, Eco-criticism – explores cultural connections and human relationships to the natural world, Other theorists: Robert Graves, Alamgir Hashmi, John Sutherland, Leslie Fiedler, Kenneth Burke, Paul Bénichou, Barbara Johnson, Blanca de Lizaur, Dr Seuss. 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