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Critical Theory Cheat Sheet

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Critical Theory Cheat Sheet
Critical Theory Cheat Sheet
Donald E. Hall. Literary and Cultural Theory: From Basic Principles to Advanced Applications. Houghton Mifflin, 2001.
Theory
Formalism /New
Criticism
1920’s forward

Reader Response

Rhetorical Analysis

Marxist/Materialist
Analysis

Psychoanalytic
Analysis

Key Ideas
-analysis of literary structures (genre; character, plot, setting, etc.)
-rejected literature’s historical and biographical contexts
-intrinsic meaning of texts; literature expresses
“universal truths”
-critic’s task to explore precisely through language and form how that truth is expressed
-“Close reading”; the TEXT holds THE meaning
-emphasis on reader’s role in creating meanings
-meanings generated by a transaction between reader and a text; meaning is not wholly intrinsic to the text

-“an authorial presence [in a text] that leads the text’s rhetorically attuned reader toward an authorially desired interpretation or response” (44)
-based on Marx’s theories of class and cultural production -importance of class and economic conditions; power relationships and class ideologies presented within a text -concept of the unconscious, conscious, ego and id
-human activity not always conscious
-nature/ nurture
-developmental stages; childhood trauma and its effect on development

Theorists

Comments

-Aristotle (The Poetics)
-Plato (The Republic)
-John Crowe Ransom
-Cleanth Brooks
-T.S. Eliot

-Louise Rosenblatt (The
Reader, The Text, and
The Poem)
-Robert Probst
(Response and
Analysis)
-Wolfgang Iser
-Stanley Fish
-Norman Holland
-Wayne Booth

-Terry Eagleton
-Karl Marx
-Frederich Engles

-Sigmund Freud
-Jacques Lacan
-Northrup Frye

1

Structuralism and
Semiotic Analysis

-principles of scientific linguistic study applied to literature -signified (the concept), signifier (the word), sign
(combination of concept and word)
-making meaning through binaries (oppositions)
-no sign is ever fully

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