literary theory

literary theory
Name	Literary theory
Field	Humanities
Notable figures	Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Sir Philip Sidney, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Friedrich Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, I. A. Richards, M. H. Abrams, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Edward Said, Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Lionel Trilling, Erich Auerbach, Georg Lukács, Frantz Fanon, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, J. Hillis Miller, Homi K. Bhabha, Helen Vendler, Susan Sontag, Elaine Showalter, Eugene Onegin

}}

literary theory

Literary theory examines the methods, assumptions, and goals that underlie reading, interpreting, and evaluating texts, engaging figures across the humanities such as Plato, Aristotle, Friedrich Schiller, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, T. S. Eliot in dialogue with institutions like University of Oxford, Harvard University, Sorbonne and events such as the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. It interrelates with movements and works including Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Adorno's critiques, Derrida's writings, and organizational sites like the Modern Language Association and the American Comparative Literature Association.

Definition and Scope

The field articulates principles for interpreting texts ranging from epic poems such as Gilgamesh and The Aeneid to novels like Don Quixote and Madame Bovary and plays by William Shakespeare, Sophocles, Henrik Ibsen, integrating thinkers such as I. A. Richards, M. H. Abrams, Northrop Frye, Mikhail Bakhtin while operating within academic contexts at Cambridge University, Yale University, Columbia University, University of Chicago and cultural institutions like the British Library and the Library of Congress. Scope covers textual analysis, aesthetic evaluation, institutional practices exemplified by Nobel Prize in Literature deliberations and the curatorial choices of museums like the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Historical Development

From antiquity—where Plato and Aristotle debated mimesis and catharsis in relation to dramas by Euripides and Aeschylus—through Renaissance critics such as Sir Philip Sidney and neoclassical voices like Horace and Longinus, the discipline evolved through epochs marked by the French Revolution, the Romanticism of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the realist critiques of Gustave Flaubert and George Eliot, the formalist turn represented by Viktor Shklovsky and Roman Jakobson in Russia and the structuralist/post-structuralist shifts led by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida anchored in institutions like the Collège de France and journals such as New Literary History.

Major Schools and Approaches

Prominent approaches include formalism and New Criticism associated with I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis; structuralism linked to Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson; psychoanalytic criticism drawing on Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan; Marxist criticism grounded in Karl Marx and extended by Georg Lukács, Louis Althusser, and Raymond Williams; feminist criticism represented by Elaine Showalter and Simone de Beauvoir; postcolonial criticism with figures like Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; queer theory influenced by Michel Foucault and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; and deconstruction linked to Jacques Derrida and debates in venues such as The New York Review of Books.

Methods and Critical Practices

Analytical practices range from close reading championed by Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler; narratological techniques derived from Gérard Genette and Mieke Bal; comparative methods employed by scholars at Princeton University and Stanford University; archival and philological work associated with editors of The Oxford English Texts and projects at the Bodleian Library; ideological critique drawing on Pierre Bourdieu and Theodor W. Adorno; reception history tracing responses documented around events like the Romantic Revival and the Harlem Renaissance; and digital humanities methods used in collaborations with The British Library and Europeana.

Applications and Interdisciplinary Connections

Literary-critical methods inform pedagogy in departments at University of California, Berkeley, University of Toronto, and King's College London; influence film studies centered on works by Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, and Ingmar Bergman; intersect with philosophy via texts by Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel; connect to history through archives related to the American Civil War and the Russian Revolution; and shape cultural policy discussed in forums such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and funding bodies like the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Contemporary Debates and Criticisms

Current debates address canons contested in symposia at Yale and Oxford and in public controversies involving prizes like the Booker Prize and institutions such as the Library of Congress, disputes over pedagogy in curricula at Columbia University and University of Chicago, the role of theory in creative writing programs exemplified by Iowa Writers' Workshop, tensions between computational methods used at MIT and humanistic hermeneutics advocated by scholars such as J. Hillis Miller, and ethical questions raised by postcolonial critiques around Empire and migration crises. Critics from conservative outlets like The Wall Street Journal and progressive venues such as The New Yorker continue to debate value, method, and institutional practice.

Category:Humanities