Modern and Contemporary Literary Theory

Feminist literary criticism

Feminist literary criticism reads literary texts, authors and the institutions of literature with attention to gender. It asks how texts represent women, how women writers have been included in or excluded from the literary canon, and how literature reproduces or challenges unequal power between the sexes. A central concept is patriarchy, which in feminist literary theory refers to a social system in which men hold primary power in political, economic and cultural institutions and male perspectives are treated as the norm. It is a structure of power, not a genre, a style or a historical period. Elaine Showalter, in A Literature of Their Own, argues that a continuous tradition of women's writing forms a canon of women authors. She divides that tradition into three phases. In the Feminine phase (1840–1880), women writers largely imitated the models of male authors. The Feminist phase, beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, is marked by protest against patriarchal attitudes. The Female phase, by contrast, is marked by women writers exploring female experience, including sexuality, as a source of creativity rather than by disavowing it. Among the foundational texts, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) argues that women need financial independence and a room of their own in order to write. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) is another landmark, read as a critique of the medical control of women.

Post-structuralism and intertextuality

Post-structuralism questions the stability of meaning, the closure of the text and the authority of the author. It holds that a text is not a single, fixed message but a space where many writings meet. Roland Barthes expresses this view in ‘The Death of the Author’: a text is made of multiple writings drawn from many cultures, entering into relations of dialogue, parody and contestation, and its meaning is located in the reader rather than in the author. The idea that every text is woven from other texts is called intertextuality, a term that stresses the plurality of sources behind any work. Post-structuralist reading also depends on the translation history of Jacques Derrida's work. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak translated Derrida's De la grammatologie as Of Grammatology in 1976, which introduced his method to English readers. Deconstruction is a mode of reading associated with Derrida that exposes the binary oppositions and internal contradictions on which texts depend. Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller, both members of the Yale School, applied deconstructive reading to literary texts. Thinkers whose work lies outside literary deconstruction, such as Kate Soper, who writes on realism, consumption and ecology, are not usually classed as deconstructionists.

New Criticism and the well-wrought urn

New Criticism is an American school that holds that a literary work should be read closely as an autonomous, unified object, whose meaning is found in its own language and structure rather than in external facts. Cleanth Brooks's essay ‘The Well Wrought Urn’ (1947) develops the idea of the well-wrought urn as a model of organic unity. Brooks reaches it by a close reading of John Keats's ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, in which tensions and apparent contradictions are resolved into a coherent poetic structure. Brooks's concept of paradox, developed in The Language of Paradox (1947), treats paradox as the essential language of poetry. A paradoxical statement combines contradiction and qualification, so that opposed attitudes are held together and reconciled rather than simply cancelled. Brooks associates this structure with wonder and with irony. A related New Critical principle is the intentional fallacy, a term introduced by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in 1946. It names the error of interpreting or judging a poem by the author's intention, and it asks the critic to attend to the text itself.

Eliot's impersonal theory of poetry

T. S. Eliot's impersonal theory of poetry, set out in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), holds that poetry should not be the expression of the poet's personality, and that the good poet is one who subordinates personal feeling to a larger order. Eliot argues that the individual poet is measured against the tradition, and that a poet's originality is itself rooted in what the dead poets have achieved. For this reason, a poet's difference from predecessors, especially immediate predecessors, should not be the defining mark of a good poet, since the most individual parts of a work may be those in which the dead poets assert their immortality most vigorously. The past is therefore a living presence in good poetry. Poetry, in Eliot's account, is not a release of emotion but an escape from emotion, and not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. The process is a controlled transformation of feeling, and it requires considerable emotional detachment on the part of the poet. Eliot notes that this escape presupposes that one has personality and emotions to escape from, so impersonality does not mean the absence of a self.

Minor literature (Deleuze and Guattari)

In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use the writing of Franz Kafka, a Jewish writer in Prague who wrote in German, as the central case for their concept of minor literature. The concept does not mean literature written in a minor or small language. It means the literature that a minority produces within a major language. Such writing deterritorialises the major language, so that its established forms are made to carry other experiences, and it has three typical features: a strong political urgency, a collective rather than purely individual enunciation, and a close connection between the individual case and social or political life. Minor literature is not a form of popular literature, since its purpose is to disrupt the dominant language and not to win mass appeal.

Spivak and the subaltern

The term subaltern, borrowed from Antonio Gramsci, refers to social groups excluded from hegemonic power and from the structures through which they could be heard. In ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues that intellectuals who claim to speak for the subaltern tend to appropriate the subaltern's voice, and in doing so they reinscribe the subaltern as an object of knowledge rather than a speaking subject. Spivak points out that the double meaning of representation, as portrayal in writing and as speaking on someone's behalf, makes it easy to mistake writing about the subaltern for the subaltern speaking for herself. She does not claim that all women are subaltern, and she insists that the speech of intellectuals about the subaltern and the speech of the subaltern herself are not equivalent.

New Historicism

New Historicism, associated with critics such as Stephen Greenblatt, reads literature and history together. It rejects the older view of traditional Historicism that history is an objective narrative of events unfolding in linear time, and treats historical accounts as constructed narratives shaped by discourse. Because history is understood as a set of texts, New Historicism does not draw a strict line between literary and non-literary writing. Legal records, letters, travel accounts and other documents are read with the same analytical attention as poems and novels. It takes a particular interest in the textualisation of the material world, that is, in how objects, currency, clothing and social practices are inscribed with meaning and represented in texts. The approach does not treat history as a mere background or context for literary works; history and literature are seen as mutually constituted discourses.