Literary Criticism and Theory Flashcards
Grade 12 · English · Flashcards
12 flashcards on the major schools of literary criticism, their key concepts, and their founding figures.
Flashcards
- New Criticism
- Critical school emphasizing close reading of the text as a self-contained object, independent of author or history.
- Intentional fallacy
- New Critics' term for the error of using the author's stated intentions to determine a text's meaning.
- Close reading
- Careful, detailed analysis of a text's language, structure, imagery, and techniques — the foundational skill of literary study.
- Death of the author
- Barthes' concept: meaning is made by readers, not locked in by authorial intent. Published texts belong to their readers.
- Deconstruction
- Derrida's approach revealing the instabilities and contradictions within texts — no fixed, stable meaning exists.
- Feminist criticism
- Examines gender construction, patriarchal ideology, and the silencing of women's voices in literary texts and the canon.
- Marxist criticism
- Examines how literature reflects, reinforces, or challenges class ideology and economic power structures.
- Postcolonial criticism
- Examines how literature produces and perpetuates colonial power relations — Said's Orientalism is the founding text.
- Psychoanalytic criticism
- Applies Freudian/Lacanian concepts — repression, the unconscious, desire — to interpret texts and characters.
- Reader-response theory
- Meaning is created by the reader's encounter with the text — different readers in different interpretive communities produce different meanings.
- Literary canon
- The body of works deemed essential and authoritative — challenged by feminist and postcolonial critics for excluding marginalized voices.
- Orientalism
- Edward Said's 1978 work demonstrating how Western literature constructed a distorted image of 'the East' to justify imperial domination — the founding text of postcolonial studies.
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