Tag: Criticism

Reader-Response Criticism is the conventional notion that a writer or speaker has an "idea," encodes it—that is, turns it into words—and the reader or listener decodes it, deriving, when successful, the writer or speaker's "idea." The reader-response critics assume, however, that such equivalency between sender and receiver is impossible. The ... Read More

Post-colonial criticism is similar to cultural studies, but it assumes a unique perspective on literature and politics that warrants a separate discussion. Specifically, post-colonial critics are concerned with literature produced by colonial powers and works produced by those who were/are colonized. Post-colonial theory looks at issues of power, economics, politics, ... Read More

For the deconstructionist, language consists just in black marks on a page that repeat or differ from each other and the reader is the only author, one who can find whatever can be found in, or be made to appear in, those detached, isolated marks. The deconstructionist conception of literature ... Read More

A philosophical system that provides the basis for a contemporary school of criticism. Phenomenology is a method that inspects the data of consciousness without presuppositions about epistemology—the nature of knowledge—or ontology—the nature of being. To the phenomenologist any object, although it has existence in time and space, achieves meaning or ... Read More

Heavily influenced by film critique, neoformalism suggests that art and literature seek to defamiliarize the beholder so to defamiliarize the beholder/reader within the context of the work. (Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

Nihilism, in short, is "the loss of all sense of contact with anything that is ultimately true or meaningful." (The Canalization of Nihilism) ... Read More

This school, influenced by structuralist and post-structuralist theories, seeks to reconnect a work with the time period in which it was produced and identify it with the cultural and political movements of the time (Michel Foucault's concept of épistème). New Historicism assumes that every work is a product of the ... Read More

In a strict sense the term applies to the criticism practices by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren, and Clench Brooks; it is derived from Ransom's book The New Criticism (1941), which discusses a movement in America in the 1930s that paralleled movements in England ... Read More