Dear Mom,
Remember how you always wanted to take a crash course in critical theory? Well, here’s your chance. I’ve compiled the most comprehensive hyperlinked glossary of modern and postmodern literary theory terms ever assembled. Consider it an early birthday present. (Non-Mother others, feel free to use as well.)
Before we start, you’ll want to read through
this very short but concise introduction to the major schools of critical theory (courtesy of Purdue University). Now as I walk you through this, I want you to keep in mind that a) my system of classification is somewhat arbitrary, as many of these categories overlap, and b) I’ve used Wikipedia only when absolutely necessary.
OK. Here we go. I’ve classified the critical orientations into the following ten clusters:
Cluster 1: Marxist, Marxian, New Historicist and Postcolonial Theories
Cluster 2: Formalists, Conservatives, and Anti-Structuralists
Cluster 3: Structuralists and Semiotics
Cluster 4: Post-structuralists and Deconstruction
Cluster 5: Reception Theory
Cluster 6: Narratology
Cluster 7: Pschoanalytic Criticism
Cluster 8: Postmodernism
Cluster 9: Feminism and Gender
Cluster 10: Miscellany
Remember, I’m not here to explain things in any detail; the linked sources will take care of that. Think of me as a kind of Virgil leading you, Dante, through the fiery rings of hell.
Cluster 1: Marxist, Marxian, New Historicist and Postcolonial Theories
Let’s start with
Marxism and its key terms:
historical materialism,
alienation,
commodity fetishism,
reification,
base and superstructure,
mediation,
praxis,
literary mode of production (Terry Eagleton’s term),
cultural materialism (
Raymond Williams’s term),
dialectics, and
commodity.
Next, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with Italian Marxist
Antonio Gramsci and his notion of
hegemony.
Then there’s the
Frankfurt School (1930-1960s), which began in Germany before the war and was absorbed into the American New Left in the 1960s. Its chief task was to apply Marx’s economic theories to the realm of culture: from this we get “
cultural Marxism.” Key members included Max Horkheimer,
Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse,
Walter Benjamin, Jurgen Habermas and Leo Lowenthal. The school contributed to the rise of
cultural studies and the
sociology of literature.
Among German-born
Adorno’s important notions are the
culture industry,
authoritarian personality, and
negative dialectics.
Next we have the Hungarian Marxist
Georg Lukács, who expanded upon Marx’s notion of
reification, and helped to develop the Soviet theory of
montage.
You’ll also want to take a look at French Marxist
Pierre Macherey’s writings on “
ideological horizons” and absence.
Next is French philosopher
Louis Althusser, whose key terms include “structure in dominance,” overdetermination (originally Freud’s term),
ideology and
apparatus,
problematic,
interpellation (subject, subjectivity of ideology),
ideological state apparatus (in contrast to repressive state apparatus), and “
symptomatic reading.”
We’ll also want to review the aesthetic theories of
socialist realism, and the “
epic theater” and “
distancing [or alienation] effect” (Verfremdungseffekt) of
Bertold Brecht:
Now before we move to New Historicism, we’ll want to quickly review the “
old historicism” of
Hegel,
Marx, and
Franz Boas. We’ll also want to look at
Karl Popper’s critique of historicism.
Also key to understanding New Historicism is American anthropologist
Clifford Geertz and his notion of “
thick description,” which the New Historicists would later borrow.
Chief among the New Historicists is
Stephen Greenblatt, whose key concepts include: [the circulation of]
social energy,
subversion and containment,
negotiations, and the
anecdote.
There’s also New Historicist
Louis Montrose, who developed the idea of “historicity.”
Next, there are the
postcolonial critics. They argue that our notions about the “Orient,” or, more broadly, about the non-Western world, are largely constructions of the Western imperial imagination.
Edward Said uses the term “
Orientalism” to refer to the discourse employed by Western scholars to explain the non-Western world. Because postcolonial critics argue that this discourse arose out of particular material, social and historical conditions (e.g., Western imperialism, economic and technological domination, etc.), I’ve placed postcolonial theories in this cluster alongside Marxian theories. Aside from Said, other key proponents of this school include
Frantz Fanon,
Gayatri Spivak and
Homi Bhabha.
You’ll also want to review some of the key terms of
postcolonialism, including abrogation and appropriation,
hybridity,
primitivism, the
noble savage,
slave narratives, and Spivak’s writings on the “
subaltern.”
Also see this
general glossary of Spivak’s terms, and this summary of Spivak’s seminal essay, “
Can the Subaltern Speak?”
Cluster 2: Formalists, Conservatives and Anti-Structuralists
What binds together the varied schools of this cluster is their underlying “
formalism,” i.e., a critical orientation toward the text itself, rather than toward the world, author or reader. By my count, the earliest formalists (excepting Aristotle, of course) were the
Russian formalists (1914-1930s), whose key members included
Roman Jakobson,
Victor Shklovsky and
Mikhail Bakhtin, each of whom was associated with the
Moscow linguistic circle (active from 1915-1924). Key concepts developed by this group include:
skaz,
heteroglossia,
foregrounding, thematology,
literariness,
defamiliarization,
fabula (story) and sjuzhet (plot), and deviation (from normal speech).
Bakhtin, the most influential critic of this group, developed the following key concepts:
dialogic/dialogism,
polyphony,
assimilation,
microdialogue (i.e., internal dialogue),
utterance, popular culture,
polyglossia,
polyphonic,
Menippean satire,
monoglossia (heteroglossia), and
embedding. Make sure you read each of those articles carefully, Mother.
The American version of the Russian Formalists— the New Critics, who reigned from the early 1920s through the 1960s— emphasized
close reading,
unity,
intrinsic criticism,
explication, analytical criticism,
impersonality,
organicism, and
irony. Two of the school’s key proponents, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, warned us not to fall prey to the
intentional fallacy. Also associated with this school were
F.R. Leavis (his followers are called Leavisites), Cleanth Brooks, and
I.A. Richards.
Brooks is remembered for his work
The Well-Wrought Urn, in which he explains the importance of
paradox.
I.A. Richards is remembered for, among things, his advocacy of
practical criticism, and for his division of the
metaphor into two parts: tenor (eg, world) and vehicle (eg, stage).
We should also keep in mind that it was proto-New Critic
Irving Babbitt who revived the liberal
humanist tradition of
Matthew Arnold, sparking the movement that came to be known was as
New Humanism. The works of
Lionel Trilling and
F.R. Leavis can be seen as extensions of this earlier movement.
As mentioned, Aristotle was a sort of proto-Formalist. His division of the elements of
tragedy into mythos (plot), peripateia (reversal), anagnorisis (recognition), hamartia (tragic flaw), catharsis (purification), mimesis (imitation), and subplot served as a sort of rulebook for dramatists during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. However, in the 19th century the Romantics began to question some of his assumptions, and by the 20th century many modernist writers came to reject two of Aristotle’s key concepts, plot and mimesis. Formed in the mid-1930s, the Chicago School of Critics sought to revive Aristotle’s reputation and re-implement his theories.
The most prominent critics of the
Chicago school were
Ronald Crane and
Wayne Booth. In his
The Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth develops some of his key concepts regarding
rhetorical criticism, including his notions of
pluralism and the
unreliable and naïve narrators.
Finally, I should point out that, unlike their Russian counterparts, the American Formalists (i.e., New Critics, Chicago School critics) emphasized
pragmatic and
practical criticism over theoretical criticism.
Cluster 3: Structuralism and Semiotics
Now on to Structuralism, which began with the work of Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure. A member of the
Geneva School of
Structural Linguistics, Saussure’s ideas about
signified and signifier,
referrer and referent,
langue (linguistic system) and parole (verbal utterance), and
diachronic and synchronic relations revolutionized the way we view language. It might even be said that all subsequent developments have been but extensions of his theories.
One American semiotician particularly under the influence of Saussure was
Charles Peirce, who developed his own theories about the
index, icon and symbol.
Founded in 1929 and disbanded in 1938, the
Prague linguistic circle included Russian émigrés
Roman Jakobson,
Nikolai Trubetzkoy, as well as Czech literary scholars
Rene Wellek and J
an Mukarovsky.
For now, you’ll want to focus on Jakobson’s key ideas about
poetic function,
metaphor and metonymy (aka,
synecdoche; metaphor being typical of romantic and symbolist writers, metonymy of realist writers), and
contiguity.
Finally, there’s French critic
Roland Barthes, who’s a little harder to pin down. Some say he’s more post-structuralist than structuralist, others say he’s equally both. I’ll put him right here on the border: at the end of the structuralist cluster and the beginning of the post-structuralists (continued in my next post). For now, Mother, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with his work,
S/Z, as well as with some of his more important
terms such as
doxa, demythologizing, death of author, play, text, ecriture,
readerly text vs. writerly text, closure (closed text vs. open text),
writing degree zero (or, zero degree of writing), narratology,
ecrivant, and
lexia (i.e., arbitrary excerpts).
In the
next post, Mother, we’ll continue with Clusters
4, 5, and 6.
Your dutiful son,
Ryan
