Literary Theory
Core philosophies, key arguments, ontology & epistemology, thinkers, terms, concepts, short-story applications, and questions to practice each major critical approach.
Psychoanalytic Criticism
Reads literature through the unconscious: desire, repression, dreams, the family romance, and the formation of the self.
Core Framework
Key Arguments
Texts encode unconscious desire; characters reenact Oedipal and other psychic dramas; form itself (gaps, repetitions, figurative language) is symptomatic; reading is a form of interpretation akin to the analytic session.
Ontology
Reality includes the psychic: drives, the unconscious, and the structures of the subject (id/ego/superego or Imaginary/Symbolic/Real). The literary text is a psychic and linguistic object, not merely a social document.
Epistemology
Knowledge of the psyche is indirect, inferential, and interpretive. We know the unconscious through its formations (dreams, slips, symptoms, literary figures). Certainty is limited; overdetermination is the rule.
Major Thinkers
Key Terms
Mental processes outside conscious awareness that influence thought, feeling, and behavior.
The exclusion of distressing impulses or memories from consciousness; they return in disguised form.
Child’s desire for the opposite-sex parent and rivalry with the same-sex parent; a model for later conflicts.
Dream-work (and literary) mechanisms: many ideas fused into one image; affect shifted onto a substitute.
(Lacan) The infant’s identification with its specular image; foundation of the Imaginary ego.
(Kristeva) That which is expelled from the self yet remains threateningly close; borders of identity.
Major Concepts (read more later)
What is shut out of consciousness reappears in symptoms, dreams, and literary form.
Read more →The speaking subject is divided; meaning and desire exceed conscious intention.
Read more →Texts use the same operations as dreams: figuration, secondary revision, overdetermination.
Read more →Later writers misread precursors to clear imaginative space for themselves.
Read more →- What desires or fears seem forbidden or unspeakable in the text, and how do they return?
- How do family structures, parent figures, or rivalries shape the characters’ actions?
- Where does the text use condensation, displacement, or figurative language that feels “symptomatic”?
- What gaps, repetitions, or silences invite a reading of the unconscious?
- How might the form of the story itself enact a psychic process (e.g. denial, projection)?
Marxist Criticism
Reads literature in relation to class, mode of production, ideology, and the material conditions that shape and are shaped by culture.
Core Framework
Key Arguments
Texts encode class relations and ideological struggle; “great” art often reveals contradictions in the dominant ideology; base and superstructure are mutually determining in complex ways; reading should historicize form as well as content.
Ontology
Material reality (forces and relations of production) is primary. Culture, law, politics, and art form a superstructure that both reflects and acts upon the base. Ideology is a real force that shapes lived experience.
Epistemology
Knowledge is historically situated. Class position and ideology condition what can be known and said. Critique aims to demystify ideology and recover the material conditions of production of the text and of meaning.
Major Thinkers
Key Terms
Economic foundation (base) and the legal, political, cultural forms (superstructure) that rest on and interact with it.
System of representations that naturalizes class relations and makes them appear inevitable or universal.
(Gramsci) Dominance secured not only by force but by consent, through culture and common sense.
(Lukács) Social relations appear as relations between things; human activity is objectified.
(Jameson) The buried narrative of class struggle that texts symbolically resolve or repress.
(Althusser) Ideological State Apparatuses — schools, media, family, literature — that reproduce ideology.
Major Concepts
Texts participate in the production of subjects who accept (or contest) existing relations.
Read more →Genre, narrative structure, and style are not neutral; they are shaped by and respond to material conditions.
Read more →Great works often expose social contradictions while offering symbolic resolutions or utopian glimpses.
Read more →- What class positions do the characters occupy, and how does that shape their options and worldview?
- Where does the text naturalize (or contest) existing social and economic relations?
- How do form, genre, or narrative structure reflect historical conditions of production?
- What contradictions does the text reveal but fail to resolve?
- Who benefits from the values or “common sense” the story seems to promote?
Feminist Criticism
Examines how literature constructs, challenges, or naturalizes gender; recovers women’s writing; analyzes power, the body, and representation.
Core Framework
Key Arguments
The literary canon is gendered; “universal” often means male; language and narrative forms can encode patriarchal values; recovering and rereading women’s texts is both archival and theoretical work; intersectionality matters (race, class, sexuality).
Ontology
Gender is socially constructed (though debates continue about the body and sex). Subjectivity is formed within patriarchal symbolic systems; women’s experience and writing constitute a distinct (and diverse) field of being and meaning.
Epistemology
Knowledge has been organized around male norms. Standpoint theory and “situated knowledge” argue that marginalized positions can yield critical insight. Reading as a woman (or against the grain of patriarchal norms) is a methodological choice.
Major Thinkers
Key Terms
Social system in which men hold primary power and women are systematically subordinated.
(Showalter) Study of women as writers; women’s literary tradition and female creativity.
(Cixous) Writing that inscribes the female body and disrupts masculine symbolic order.
(Gilbert & Gubar) Figure of the repressed female double in 19th-c. women’s writing.
(Butler) Gender is produced through repeated acts; not a stable interior essence.
Gender interacts with race, class, sexuality, etc.; oppression is not single-axis.
Major Concepts
Women writers form lineages that male canons have obscured.
Read more →Literature does not just reflect gender; it actively constructs it.
Read more →A critical stance that resists identifying with the male gaze or “universal” male subject.
Read more →- How are female (and male) characters constructed? What roles, limits, or powers are assigned by gender?
- Whose perspective does the narrative privilege, and what does that leave out?
- Does the text reinforce or resist patriarchal norms? Where are the cracks?
- How do race, class, or sexuality intersect with gender in the story?
- What would change if we centered a silenced or marginal female voice in the text?
New Criticism
Close reading of the text as an autonomous verbal object; irony, paradox, tension, and organic unity over authorial intention or historical context.
Core Framework
Key Arguments
Intentional and affective fallacies must be avoided; the poem is an organic whole; complexity (irony, ambiguity, paradox) is a mark of value; paraphrase is heresy — the work’s meaning is inseparable from its form.
Ontology
The text is a verbal icon, a structured object with intrinsic properties. It exists independently of author and reader as a set of interrelations among linguistic elements.
Epistemology
Knowledge of the work comes from careful, repeated close reading. Evidence is internal: diction, imagery, syntax, irony. Context may inform but does not determine meaning.
Major Thinkers
Key Terms
Detailed attention to the words on the page — diction, imagery, structure, irony.
Error of equating a work’s meaning with the author’s intention.
Error of equating a work’s meaning with its emotional effect on the reader.
Internal oppositions that the successful poem holds in unified balance.
Every part of the work contributes to a coherent whole; nothing is superfluous.
(Brooks) Reducing a poem to a prose statement destroys its meaning.
Major Concepts
The work is a made object whose meaning is internal to its form.
Read more →Value lies in reconciling conflicting attitudes without simplifying them.
Read more →- What ironies, paradoxes, or tensions structure the story?
- How do images, motifs, or verbal patterns create unity?
- What would be lost if we reduced the story to a simple thematic statement?
- Where does the text resist a single, stable meaning through ambiguity?
- Can the ending be read as an organic resolution of earlier conflicts?
Reader-Response Criticism
Meaning is not solely in the text; it is produced in the interaction between text and reader — through expectations, gaps, and interpretive communities.
Core Framework
Key Arguments
Meaning emerges in the reading process; texts contain gaps the reader fills; interpretive communities constrain and enable readings; the “ideal” or “implied” reader is a function of the text’s design.
Ontology
The literary work exists as an event or transaction between text and reader. It is not a fixed object alone; actualization requires a reading subject.
Epistemology
We know the text through the experience of reading. Different readers (and communities) produce different but not arbitrary meanings; validity is debated (textual constraints vs free play).
Major Thinkers
Key Terms
(Iser) The reader the text seems to require or construct through its cues and gaps.
Places in the text left open for the reader to fill; engines of engagement.
(Jauss) The set of cultural and formal expectations a reader brings to a work in a given period.
(Fish) Group that shares strategies for writing and reading texts; meaning is communal.
(Rosenblatt) Meaning arises from the reciprocal relationship between reader and text.
Major Concepts
The work is realized in time as the reader anticipates, revises, and synthesizes.
Read more →What counts as a valid reading depends on shared norms, not pure subjectivity.
Read more →- What expectations does the story set up, and how does it confirm or frustrate them?
- Where are the gaps, and what must the reader supply?
- How does your own background or community shape what you notice and value?
- How would a different “implied reader” change the experience of the text?
- At what points did you revise your understanding as you read?
Structuralist Criticism
Literature as a system of signs; deep structures (narrative, myth, binary oppositions) underlie surface variation.
Core Framework
Key Arguments
Surface texts are transformations of deep structures; binary oppositions organize meaning; the author is less important than the system; criticism should model the rules that generate texts, not just interpret single works.
Ontology
Structures (linguistic, narrative, mythic) are real organizing principles. Individual works instantiate systemic possibilities. The “subject” is an effect of structure.
Epistemology
We know structures by abstraction and comparison — finding invariants across cases. Science of signs (semiotics) and narrative grammar aim at systematic knowledge.
Major Thinkers
Key Terms
(Saussure) Sound-image and concept; the sign is their arbitrary relation.
The system of language vs individual utterances.
Paired contrasts (nature/culture, raw/cooked) that structure meaning.
(Lévi-Strauss) Basic unit of myth, analogous to the phoneme.
Systematic study of narrative structures, levels, and functions.
(Barthes) Emphasis shifts from authorial intention to the play of signs and the reader.
Major Concepts
Surface stories transform a limited set of underlying roles and functions.
Read more →Myths, fashion, food, and literature can be read as signifying systems.
Read more →- What binary oppositions organize the story’s meaning?
- Can the plot be described as a sequence of narrative functions or roles?
- How does this story resemble others in its genre at a structural level?
- Where does the text play with or invert expected narrative patterns?
- What would a “grammar” of this kind of story look like?
Deconstructive Criticism
Undermines stable meaning, hierarchical binaries, and the metaphysics of presence; shows how texts undo their own claims to coherence.
Core Framework
Key Arguments
There is no pure origin or final meaning; every reading is a misreading in a strong sense; the margins and footnotes of a text can unsettle its main claims; deconstruction is not destruction but a demonstration of instability.
Ontology
No transcendental signified anchors meaning. Being is always already inscribed in language and difference. Presence is an effect of absence and deferral.
Epistemology
Knowledge claims are never fully secure. We work within language’s constraints, exposing aporias and double binds rather than reaching a final ground.
Major Thinkers
Key Terms
(Derrida) Differing and deferring of meaning; no term is fully present to itself.
An unresolvable paradox or impasse within a text’s logic.
Something added that both completes and reveals a lack in the original.
The mark of an absent other within every present term.
Oppositions in which one term is privileged; deconstruction inverts and displaces them.
The text supports conflicting readings that cannot be finally resolved.
Major Concepts
Figurative language and logical claims often conflict; the text’s rhetoric undermines its thesis.
Read more →(Derrida) We never escape textuality; context is itself textually structured.
Read more →- What binary oppositions structure the text, and which term is privileged?
- Where does the text’s figurative language conflict with its explicit claims?
- What margins, footnotes, or secondary details unsettle the main argument or plot?
- Can the story’s “message” be inverted without breaking the text?
- Where does meaning seem undecidable rather than merely ambiguous?
New Historical & Cultural Criticism
Literature and history are mutually constitutive; power, discourse, and anecdote link literary texts to non-literary ones in a shared cultural field.
Core Framework
Key Arguments
Literary and non-literary texts are read together; power is productive (Foucault); anecdote and thick description open cultural circulation; subversion and containment often coexist; the critic must historicize herself.
Ontology
Social reality is discursively constructed. Power relations and representations are material. Texts are events in a cultural field, not isolated objects.
Epistemology
Knowledge is situated and partial. Archives, anecdotes, and parallel texts enable a “cultural poetics.” Objectivity is replaced by reflexive, motivated reading.
Major Thinkers
Key Terms
(Foucault) Systems of statements that produce objects and subjects of knowledge.
Power and knowledge are intertwined; knowledge is not neutral.
(Greenblatt) Social energy moves between literary and non-literary zones.
Small archival story used to open a cultural field and unsettle grand narratives.
Apparent resistance may be absorbed by dominant power; the relation is complex.
(Williams) Lived, emergent quality of social experience not yet fully articulated.
Major Concepts
Texts are historical events; history is only available through textual traces.
Read more →Reading literature as one practice among others in a culture’s making of meaning and power.
Read more →- What non-literary texts from the same period illuminate this story?
- How does the story participate in discourses of power (law, medicine, race, gender)?
- Where does the text seem to subvert dominant norms, and where might that subversion be contained?
- What “social energy” or cultural anxiety does the story circulate?
- How does your own historical position affect your reading?
African American Criticism
Centers Black literary tradition, vernacular theory, double consciousness, and the politics of race and representation in the United States and diaspora.
Core Framework
Key Arguments
Black literature draws on vernacular (blues, spirituals, signifying); the “Black tradition” is intertextual; race is constructed yet has real effects; representation of Black subjects has been a site of struggle; intersection with gender and class is essential.
Ontology
Racial identity is historically produced, not natural. The Black subject is formed under conditions of double consciousness and resistance. Literary form itself can encode vernacular and political knowledge.
Epistemology
Knowledge of Black experience has been distorted by dominant (white) frameworks. Vernacular theory and insider/outsider debates shape how texts are read. Testimony, oral tradition, and counter-archives matter.
Major Thinkers
Key Terms
(Du Bois) Sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of a racist society; two-ness.
(Gates) Black vernacular practice of repetition with difference, irony, and revision.
Theory grounded in Black oral and musical traditions (blues, spirituals, toasts).
Sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, and transformed.
Intertextual continuum of African American literature across periods.
Major Concepts
Later texts rewrite earlier ones with a difference; the tradition is dialogic.
Read more →(Morrison) American literature has been shaped by an often unspoken Africanist presence.
Read more →- How does race structure the characters’ possibilities and the narrative’s conflicts?
- Does the text draw on vernacular forms (oral, musical, linguistic)? How?
- Where is double consciousness visible in perspective or theme?
- How does this story relate to other texts in the African American tradition?
- What does the representation of Blackness (or whiteness) do in the story?
Postcolonial Criticism
Analyzes literature in relation to empire, colonial discourse, hybridity, resistance, and the politics of representation of the colonized and the colonizer.
Core Framework
Key Arguments
Colonial discourse constructs the Other; the subaltern’s speech is constrained; hybridity and mimicry unsettle colonial authority; nation and narration are intertwined; reading must account for place, language, and power.
Ontology
Colonial subjects and spaces are produced through discourse and material domination. Identity is hybrid, not pure. The nation is an imagined community with real effects.
Epistemology
Western knowledge about the non-West is implicated in power (Orientalism). Subaltern knowledge has been suppressed; recovery and translation are political acts. Positionality of the critic matters.
Major Thinkers
Key Terms
(Said) Western discourse that constructs the East as Other in order to dominate it.
(Spivak/Gramsci) Subordinated groups whose voice is structurally difficult to hear in dominant discourse.
(Bhabha) Mixing of cultures that produces new, unstable identities and undermines purity.
(Bhabha) Colonial imitation that is “almost the same but not quite” — ambivalent and potentially subversive.
Process of defining a group as different and inferior in order to secure the self’s identity.
(Ngũgĩ) Rejecting colonial languages and cultural dominance in favor of indigenous forms.
Major Concepts
Knowledge and representation as instruments of imperial power.
Read more →Postcolonial texts rewrite canonical imperial narratives from the periphery.
Read more →- How does the text represent colonizer and colonized? What stereotypes or resistances appear?
- Whose voice is centered, and whose is marginalized or silenced?
- Does the story hybridize languages, forms, or cultural references? To what effect?
- How does place (colony, metropole, border) shape identity and power?
- Does the text “write back” to a canonical imperial narrative?
Anarchist Criticism
Reads literature through anti-authoritarian ethics: mutual aid, critique of the state and hierarchical power, prefigurative politics, and the imagination of non-domination.
Core Framework
Key Arguments
The state, capitalism, and other hierarchies are historically contingent; literature can rehearse or resist domination; form itself (open, collaborative, anti-hierarchical) can enact anarchist values; mutual aid and voluntary association are ethical and aesthetic principles.
Ontology
Human beings are capable of cooperation without coercive authority. Social order can emerge from free association. Domination is a relation to be abolished, not an essence of the social.
Epistemology
Knowledge from below — from workers, communities, and lived resistance — is privileged over official or state knowledge. Critique aims at demystifying authority and recovering practices of freedom.
Major Thinkers
Key Terms
(Kropotkin) Cooperation as a factor of evolution and a basis for free society.
Building the desired future in present practices (non-hierarchical organization, mutual aid).
Rejection of unjustified hierarchy and coercive authority.
Social organization based on free agreement rather than compulsion.
Historically contested idea that action can inspire revolt; also, literature as exemplary action.
Major Concepts
Texts that expose or refuse the legitimacy of hierarchical power.
Read more →Open, polyvocal, or collaborative forms can enact anti-authoritarian values.
Read more →- How does the story depict authority (state, boss, parent, institution)? Is it naturalized or questioned?
- Where do characters practice mutual aid or voluntary cooperation?
- Does the narrative form itself distribute power (e.g. multiple voices, open ending)?
- What alternatives to domination does the text imagine — or fail to imagine?
- Who is allowed to speak and act, and who is subordinated by the plot’s structure?