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Literary Theories and Movement­s: An In-Depth Analysis

640 Words / ~2½ pages sternsternsternstern_0.25stern_0.3 Author Konrad M. in Apr. 2010
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Poetry and Theory

 

Three theoretical modes:

·         reflection of language, representation and categories of critical thought undertaken by deconstruction and psychoanalysis

·         analyses of the role of gender and sexuality in every aspect of literature and criticism by feminism and then gender studies and Queer theory

·         development of historically oriented cultural criticisms studying a wide range of discursice practices involving many objects nor previously thought of as having a history

 

Theoretical movements

Russian Formalism

·         critics should concern themselves with the literariness of literature

·         redirecting attention from authors to verbal devices

·         instead of asking 'what does the author say here?' one should ask 'what happens to the    sonnet here?'

·         key figures: Roman Jakobson, Boris Eichenbaum, Victor Shklovsky

 

New Criticism

·         arose in the US in the 1930s and 1940s

·         focuses attention on the unity or integration of literary works

·         treats poems as aesthetic objects rather than historical documents

·         examined interactions of verbal features rather than historical intentions and circumstances of their authors

·         elucidate individual works of art

·         focusing on ambiguity, paradox, irony and effects of connotation and poetic imagery New Criticism sought to show the contribution of each element to form to a unified structure

·         key figures: Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, W.K. Wimsatt

 

Phenomenology

·         emerged from the work of philosopher Edmund Husserl

·         trying to bypass the problem of seperation between subject and object, consciousness and the world

·         focusing on the phenomenal reality of objects as they appear to consciousness

·         reader-response criticism

·         readers producing meaning by making connections, filling in things left unsaid, anticipating and conjecturing

·         key figures: Georges Poulet, J. Hillis Miller, Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser

 

Structuralism

·         focus on how meaning is produced

·         origins in opposition to phenomenology

·         goal: to identify the underlying structures that make experience possible

·         analyse structures that operate unconsciously (structures of language, psyche, society)

·         seeks not to produce new interpretations of works but to understand how they can have meanings and effects that they do

·         not easy to distinguish structuralism from semiotics

·         key figures: Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes Gérard Genette

 

Post-Structuralism

·         developed since thinkers realized that it is impossible to describe a complete or coherent signifying system because systems are always changing

·         emphasize a critique of knowledge, totality and the subject

·         key figures: Roland Barthes, Jaques Lacan, Michel Foucault

 

Deconstruction

·         critique of the hierarchical oppositions that have structured Western thought: inside/outside, mind/body, literal/metaphorical, speech/writing etc.

·         key figures: Jaques Derrida

 

Feminist Theory

·         version of post-structuralism trying to deconctruct the opposition man/woman

·         two strands: women's writings as representations of the experience of women and a theoretical critique of the heterosexual matrix

·         rejection of psychoanalysis as well as brilliant rearticulation of psychoanalysis

·         feminism has effectet a substantial transformation of literary education in the US and GB

·         key figures: Elaine Showalter, Jaqueline Rose, Mary Jacobus, Kaja Silverman

 

Psychoanalysis

·         impact on literary studies as mode of interpretation and as theory about language, identity and the subject

·         authoritative meta-language or technical vocabulary which can be applied to literary works

·         subject as an effect of language

·         transference

·         key figure: Jaques Lacan

 

Marxism

·         texts belong to a superstructure determined by the economic base

·         to interpret cultural products is to relate them back to the base

·         subject is an effect constitutet in the processes of the unconscious, of discourse and of the relatively autonomous practices that organize society

·         key figure: Louis Althusser

 

New Historicism/Cultural Materialism

·         British cultural materialism defined as 'the analysis of all forms of signification, including quite central writing, within the actual means and conditions of their production.'

·         US new historicism centred on the Renaissance

·         key question for new historicists 'subversion and containment'

·         key figures: Raymond Williams, Stephen greenblatt, Louis Montrose

 

Post-Colonial Theory

·         understand the problems by the European colonization and its aftermath

·         attempt to intervene in the construction of culture and knowledge

 

Minority Discourse

·         study of black, Latino, Asian-American and Native American writing

 

Queer Theory

·         uses the marginal to analyse the cultural construction of the centre – heterosexual normativity

·         key figures: Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler


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