Literary Criticism And Theory

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Rasa Theory

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connotes a concept in Indian arts about the aesthetic flavour of any visual, literary or musical work that evokes an emotion or feeling in the reader or audience but cannot be described.[2] It refers to the emotional flavors/essence crafted into the work by the writer and relished by a 'sensitive spectator' or sahṛdaya, literally one who "has heart", and can connect to the work with emotion, without dryness.Rasas are created by bhavas:[3] the state of mind.

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Cognitive literary theory

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applies research in cognitive neuroscience, cognitive evolutionary psychology and anthropology, and philosophy of mind to the study of literature and culture.Frederick Luis Aldama, Mary Thomas Crane, Nancy Easterlin, William Flesch, David Herman, Suzanne Keen, Patrick Colm Hogan, Alan

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Darwinian literary studies

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situates literature in the context of evolution and natural selection

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Formalism

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a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text

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Marxism

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see Marxist literary criticism) – which emphasizes themes of class conflictGeorg Lukács, Valentin Voloshinov, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin

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New criticism

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looks at literary works on the basis of what is written, and not at the goals of the author or biographical issuesW. K. Wimsatt, F. R. Leavis, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, T.S. Eliot

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Postcolonialism

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focuses on the influences of colonialism in literature, especially regarding the historical conflict resulting from the exploitation of less developed countries and indigenous peoples by Western nationsEdward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Declan Kiberd

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Postmodernism

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criticism of the conditions present in the twentieth century, often with concern for those viewed as social deviants or the OtherMichel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Maurice Blanchot

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Post structuralism

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catch-all term for various theoretical approaches (such as deconstruction) that criticize or go beyond Structuralism's aspirations to create a rational science of culture by extrapolating the model of linguistics to other discursive and aesthetic formationsRoland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva

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Psychoanalysis

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see psychoanalytic literary criticism) – explores the role of consciousnesses and the unconscious in literature including that of the author, reader, and characters in the textSigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Harold Bloom, Slavoj Žižek, Viktor Tausk

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Queer theory

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examines, questions, and criticizes the role of gender identity and sexuality in literatureJudith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michel Foucault

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Reader-response criticism

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– focuses upon the active response of the reader to a textLouise Rosenblatt, Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland, Hans-Robert Jauss, Stuart Hall

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Structuralism and semiotics

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see semiotic literary criticism) – examines the universal underlying structures in a text, the linguistic units in a text and how the author conveys meaning through any structuresFerdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Yurii Lotman, Umberto Eco, Jacques Ehrmann, Northrop Frye and morphology of folklore

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Puritanical person

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Strict, straight laced, and unsmiling, someone who is puritanical follows moral or religious rules to the letter. Describing someone as puritanical is usually a bit of a criticism, since the word implies that the person is not just religious, but overly rigid in his or her beliefs and not a lot of fun to be around.

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Ideology in literary theory

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Ideologies are the changing ideas, values, and feelings through which individuals experience their societies. They present the dominant ideas and values as the beliefs of society as a whole, thus preventing individuals from seeing how society actually functions.

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Formalism

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Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text. It is the study of a text without taking into account any outside influence.

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Organic unity

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Organic unity is the idea that a thing is made up of interdependent parts. For example, a body is made up of its constituent organs, and a society is made up of its constituent social roles.Organic unity was propounded by the philosopher Plato as a theory of literature