Critical Theory Reading List PDF

1 Critical Theory Reading List Aim for inclusive coverage from all categories. Theory Before “Theory” 1. Plato Republic, Book X 2. Aristotle Poetics 3. Horace Ars Poetica 4. Longinus...

1 Critical Theory Reading List Aim for inclusive coverage from all categories. Theory Before “Theory” 1. Plato Republic, Book X 2. Aristotle Poetics 3. Horace Ars Poetica 4. Longinus On the Sublime 5. Samuel Johnson Preface to Shakespeare 6. David Hume “Of the Standard of Taste” 7. Immanuel Kant from Critique of Judgment 8. William Wordsworth Preface to Lyrical Ballads 9. Samuel Taylor Coleridge from Biographia Literaria 10. G. W. F. Hegel Introduction to The Philosophy of Art 11. Matthew Arnold “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” 12. Friedrich Nietzsche from The Birth of Tragedy, “On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense” 13. T.S. Eliot “Tradition and the Individual Talent” 14. Mikhail Bakhtin from Discourse in the Novel 15. Virginia Woolf Shakespeare's Sister from A Room of One's Own 16. Kenneth Burke “Literature as Equipment for Living” 17. Jean-Paul Sartre “Why Write?” 18. Simone de Beauvoir “Myths: Of Women in Five Authors” (Second Sex) 19. Northrop Frye “Archetypes of Literature” (Anatomy of Criticism) 20. Erich Auerbach “Odysseus' Scar” (Mimesis) 21. Hans-Georg Gadamer The Elevation of the Historicality of Understanding to the Status of the Hermeneutical Principle Formalisms 22. Victor Schlovsky “Art as Technique” 23. Cleanth Brooks “Irony as a Principle of Structure” Structuralism, Semiotics, and Deconstruction 24. Ferdinand de Saussure “Nature of the Linguistic Sign” 25. Claude Lévi-Strauss “The Structural Study of Myth” 26. Roman Jakobson from Style in Language 27. Vladimir Propp Morphology of the Folktale 28. Gérard Genette “Frontiers of Narrative” 29. Jacques Derrida Of Grammatology (including Spivak introduction) 30. Roland Barthes S/Z 31. Kaja Silverman from The Subject of Semiotics 32. Michel Foucault “What is an Author?” 33. Paul de Man “Semiology and Rhetoric” 34. Cynthia Chase from Decomposing Figures 35. Barbara Johnson from The Critical Difference  2 36. Jonathan Culler On Deconstruction, 1-3 37. Geoffrey Hartman Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy Intentionality and Speech Act Theory 38. Wimsatt and Beardsley “The Intentional Fallacy” 39. E.D. Hirsch from Validity in Interpretation 40. John Searle from Speech Acts 41. J. L. Austin How To Do Things With Words 42. Stanely Cavell from Must We Mean What We Say? 43. Jacques Derrida Limited Inc. 44. Knapp and Michaels “Against Theory” 45. Stanley Fish “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech” 46. Judith Butler “Sovereign Performatives” Reader-Response Criticism 47. Wolfgang Iser “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach” 48. Stanley Fish “Is There a Text in this Class?” 49. Jane Tompkins from Sensational Designs Psychoanalytic Theory 50. Sigmund Freud Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Civilization and its Discontents 51. Paul Ricoeur Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation 52. Harold Bloom Anxiety of Influence, introduction (“A Meditation upon Priority 53. Jacques Lacan Ecrits 54. Jane Gallop from Reading Lacan 55. Deleuze and Guattari from Anti-Oedipus 56. Jacqueline Rose from The State of Fantasy 57. Neil Hertz The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime Marxist Criticism 58. Karl Marx Capital (Part I of Vol. I), The German Ideology 59. Walter Benjamin “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” 60. George Lukács “The Ideology of Modernism” 61. Theodor Adorno “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment,” Minima Moralia 62. Antonio Gramsci The Prison Notebooks 63. Louis Althusser “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” excepts from Reading Capital 64. Raymond Williams “Pastoral and Counter-pastoral” from The Country and the City; Culture and Society, chapter 1 65. E.P. Thompson “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”  3 66. Perry Anderson In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, chapter 1 67. Terry Eagleton Criticism and Ideology 68. Fredric Jameson The Political Unconscious, chapter 1 69. Pierre Bourdieu from Outline of a Theory of Practice 70. Jürgen Habermas from The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 71. Martin Jay from Marxism and Totality 72. Laclau and Mouffe from Hegemony and Socialist Strategy 73. Hardt and Negri “The Political Constitution of the Present” (Empire) New Historicism and Cultural Studies 74. Pierre Bourdieu “The Market of Symbolic Goods,” 75. Clifford Geertz “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” 76. Edward W. Said Introduction to Orientalism 77. Stephen Greenblatt “Invisible Bullets” 78. D.A. Miller The Novel and the Police, Chapter 1 79. Jean-François Lyotard Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge 80. Fredric Jameson “Postmodernism; Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” New Left Review 146 (1984) 81. Constance Penley "Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture" 82. Stuart Hall “Encoding, Decoding” 83. Michel de Certeau “Walking in the City” 84. Stallybrass and White from The Politics and Poetics of Transgression 85. Dick Hebdige “From Culture to Hegemony” 86. Andrew Ross Introduction and Chapter One of No Respect Feminist Literary Criticism / Gender Studies and Queer Theory 87. Gilbert and Gubar “Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship” 88. Laura Mulvey "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" 89. Hélène Cixous "The Laugh of the Medusa" 90. Michel Foucault The History of Sexuality, Vol. I 91. Julia Kristeva from Powers of Horror 92. Luce Irigaray "This Sex Which Is Not One" 93. Teresa de Lauretis Technologies of Gender 94. Gayle Rubin “Thinking Sex” 95. David Halperin “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality” 96. Judith Butler Gender Trouble 97. Ann Laura Stoler from The Education of Desire 98. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Epistemology of the Closet, “Introduction: Axiomatic” 99. Leo Bersani “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Homos 100. Michael Warner from The Trouble with Normal  4 Multiculturalism and the Canon Wars 101. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "Writing, 'Race,' and the Difference It Makes" 102. John Guillory Cultural Capital, chapter 1 103. Barbara Christian “The Race for Theory” 104. Homi K. Bhabha “The Location of Culture” 105. Cornel West “The New Cultural Politics of Difference” 106. Chandra Mohanty Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism Postcolonial Theory 107. Ngugi wa Thiong’o Decolonizing the Mind 108. George Lamming “The Occasion for Speaking” from The Pleasures of Exile 109. Chinua Achebe “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” 110. Gayatri Spivak “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 111. Paul Gilroy The Black Atlantic, Introduction 112. Homi Bhabha “Signs Taken for Wonders,” in Location of Culture 113. Arjun Appuradai “Playing with Modernity The Decolonization of Indian Cricket,” from Modernity at Large 114. Mary Louise Pratt from Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Tranculturation 115. Simon Gikandi Maps of Englishness, Introduction 116. Anne McClintock from Imperial Leather