Literary Criticism Theories

• Literary theories consist of ideas and methods to interpret literature, focusing on literature's meaning rather than specifics.
• Literary theories explore relationships between authors, texts, and themes like race, class, and gender.
• Biographical and textual analysis are considered within literary theories.
• Literary theories examine historical context, linguistic aspects, genre evolution, and formal literary structures.
• Literary theories emphasize how texts reflect and influence culture.
• Deborah Appleman describes literary theories as lenses for viewing art, literature, and culture.

Formalism and New Criticism

• Formalism and New Criticism involve close textual analysis, focusing on form, structure, and literary devices.
• The authorial intent and historical context are ignored within Formalism and New Criticism.
• Russian Formalists like Roman Jakobson and Viktor Shklovsky sought a scientific study of literature through analyzing motifs and narrative functions.
• New Criticism, led by Cleanth Brooks and John Crowe Ransom, treats literature as a unified aesthetic object, highlighting paradox, irony, and metaphor.
• T.S. Eliot shared similar views with New Criticism, which continues to influence literary studies through close reading.

Marxism and Critical Theory

• Marxist literary theory highlights class conflict and economic inequality, favoring authors critical of capitalism and supportive of the working class.
• Georg Lukács studied historical materialism in literary form.
• Walter Benjamin analyzed aesthetics and art reproduction.
• The Frankfurt School, including Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, developed Critical Theory.
• Critical Theory argues that mass culture serves capitalist domination by suppressing critical thought.
• Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson expanded Marxist literary analysis, influencing New Historicism and Cultural Materialism.

Structuralism and Post-Structuralism

• Structuralism, influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure, focuses on underlying language structures, emphasizing "differences" and formal analysis.
• Historical or social content are less important within Structuralism.
• Key figures of Structuralism include Roland Barthes.
• Barthes played a pivotal role in the shift to Poststructuralism, challenging fixed meanings in language.
• Meaning within Poststructuralism is considered deferred and dependent on shifting differences.
• Movements like Deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis emphasize fluid interpretation and the impact of external forces in shaping self and language.
• Michel Foucault showed how knowledge and power are constructed through discourse, influencing New Historicism and highlighting domination ideologies.

New Historicism and Cultural Materialism

• "New Historicism," coined by Stephen Greenblatt, analyzes texts within their historical and cultural context.
• Formalist approaches of movements like New Criticism and Structuralism are rejected within New Historicism.
• Both literary and non-literary texts are viewed as embedded in the material conditions of their time.
• Social power and ideology are revealed within literary and non-literary texts.
• New Historicism challenges the separation of high and popular literature.
• Interest in marginalized groups and subversive behaviors help to understand how power legitimizes itself within New Historicism.
• Influenced by Foucault, Gramsci, and Levi-Strauss, New Historicism continues to shape literary studies.

Ethnic Studies and Postcolonial Criticism

• "Ethnic Studies" and "Postcolonial Criticism" stem from Euro-American imperialism's effects and focus on marginalized ethnic groups.
• Ethnic Studies examines literature/art produced by subordinated ethnic groups, focusing on identity and cultural experiences formed by racial oppression.
• Postcolonial Criticism investigates colonizer/colonized dynamics post-colonization.
• Influential theorists W.E.B. Du Bois, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak have shaped both fields.
• Postcolonialism critiques Western dominance and the binaries justifying colonialism.
• Postcolonial Criticism challenges ideological/economic divides between West and East.

Gender Studies and Queer Theory

• Gender theory, rooted in feminist thought, views gender as a repeatedly enacted social construct.
• Theorists like Judith Butler and Simone de Beauvoir challenge biological and cultural distinctions between man and woman.
• French feminist theorists like Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva critique male-dominated Western philosophical tradition.
• New theoretical interventions highlight repressed female experiences.
• Masculine gender theory and Queer Theory further deconstruct normative sexual identities and explore how gender and sexuality are socially constructed.
• Theorists like Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick question heterosexual identity's dominance and homosexuality's representation in Western society.

Cultural Studies

• "Cultural Studies" emerged in the 1980s as an interdisciplinary movement to examines the global culture industry.
• Includes media, entertainment, and technology are studied through diverse theoretical perspectives.
• Cultural Studies critiques cultural artifacts, and politics/ideologies that shape contemporary culture.
• Pop culture and mass consumption are the focus within Cultural Studies, moving beyond traditional literary studies.
• Stuart Hall and Meaghan Morris question cultural categories and emphasize shifting boundaries between various forms of expression.

Feminist Criticism

• Feminist criticism examines how literature and cultural productions reinforce or challenge the oppression of women.
• It critiques patriarchal structures in culture, revealing explicit and subtle misogyny including excluding women from the literary canon.
• It highlights broader societal issues like the marginalization of women in fields such as medicine, where research often neglects female subjects.

Poetry Basics

• Metrical writing is also referred to as verse
• Productions of a poet are poems
• Poetry is writing that formulates a concentrated awareness of experience in language
• The the language is chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm.
• Poetry can be likened to beauty of expression.
• Poetry is composed of a lot of elements which form its structure and meaning.
• A lot of it's impact comes from the writing template
• A poem is a precise reflection of our experiences in life, from everything we think to the things we do
• Poetry is a form of literature that follows a flow of rhythmic lines.
• Descriptive language is used and offer's readers an emotional insight into a given subject.
• Poets play around with words and sound to create a written masterpiece and reflects their thoughts and emotions.

Elements of poetry

• A line is similar to a sentence, except that writers aren't obliged to use periods to end each line.
• The natural pause is to signal a break in the flow of a poem.
• This is considered to be a tool that controls the rhythm of the piece. Stanzas are an equivalent of a paragraph in an essay or short story and is composed of a series of lines that are grouped together to form the structure of a poem.
• Couplet = two lines
• Tercet = three line
• Quatrain = 4 lines
• Cinquain = 5 lines
• Sestet = 6 lines
• Septet = 7 lines
• Octave = 8 lines
• Quatrain is considered to be one the most popular because easy it is to group rhyming words in such a structure.
• Rhythm and rhyme refer to two different concepts.
• Rhythm can include rhyme but does not need to.
• Including similar sounding words or sounds to make each line of a poem match is a way to make a poem memorable.
• Imagery is figurative language used to represent a certain action, object, and idea in a way that would appeal to the five senses. uses an arrangement of figurative words.
• A reader is fed with an arrangement of figurative words.
• The creative use of imagery makes a poetic piece sound even more powerful

Theme, Symbolism and Density

• Theme is a general idea that a poet wants his or her readers to grasp and could be anything from a story to a thought that is being portrayed in the poem.
• Without a theme, it can make it difficult for readers to understand the overall purpose and message that a poet wishes to convey.
• Symbolism is used to express one's thoughts gracefully yet gently as well as a reflection of our emotions written artistically to keep readers engaged as they embark on a journey inside a poet's complex mind.
• Density is what makes poetry different from normal speech and writing patterns
• This involves a thorough process of cutting off what is referred to as "extra fat” without affecting the logical progression of your poem.

Types of poems

• There are 12 main types of poems
• Sonnets are synonymous with Shakespeare,
• Sonnets have originated in 13th century Italy which usually deals with love and has two common forms with 14 lives: the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean
  • Petrarchan Sonnet: Two stanzas presents, an argument, observation, or question in the first eight lines.
  • Shakespearean Sonnet: Three quatrains (4 lines each) and a couplet (2 lines) that usually forms a conclusion. Rhyme scheme: ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG
• Villanelle has 19 lines, Five stanzas of 3 lines each, One closing stanza of 4 lines.
• The haiku originated in 17th century Japan with the pattern 5,7,5.
• Ekphrastic Poems comes from the Greek word for "description,” vividly describing a painting, statue, photograph, or story.
• Concrete Poetry is designed to take a particular shape or form on the page.
• An Elegy usually is written in mourning following a death.
• Epigrams are short, witty, and often satirical and usually take the form of a couplet or quatrain (2-4 lines in length).
• Limericks are humorous with 5 lines, 2 longer lines (usually 7-10 syllables), 2 shorter lines (syllables 5-7 syllables), 1 closing line to bring the joke home (7-10 syllables). Rhyme scheme: AABBA
• Ballad usually take a narrative form to tell us stories and are arragned in groups of 4 lives
• An Epitaph is much like an elegy, only shorter.
• Odes address a specific person, thing, or event and believed to have been invented by the ancient Greeks, who would sing their odes.
• Free Verse has no rules.

Explore literary criticism theories, including New Historicism, Marxism, Frankfurt School, Ethnic Studies, and Postcolonial Criticism. Questions cover Formalism, New Criticism, Structuralism, and Poststructuralism, examining their approaches to literary analysis and interpretation.