AP English Literature: Modern Literary Theories

the reader or audience reaction, emphasizing the role of the reader in actively constructing meaning rather than passively consuming the text.

Stanley Fish

David Bleich

Wolfgang Iser

1960s

Explains how a reader's "expectations" is based on your past reading and literary ideas, which affects how you understand a story. It's influenced by your time and history.

Hans Robert Jauss

Reader Response Theory

An imagined ideal reader for a text. The implied reader holds the attitudes needed for the text to have an impact, shaped by the text itself, not real-world experiences. This idea comes from the text's structure and isn't a real reader.

Wolfgang Iser

Reader Response Theory

Meaning comes from the interaction between a reader and a text. In this approach, a critic thinks about how the reader understands the text and how the text makes the reader react.

Louise Rosenblatt

Literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author, and all characters in an author’s work are projections of the author's psyche.

Sigmund Freud

Jacques Lacan

Early 1900s

the irrational part of the psyche unavailable to a person's consciousness except through dissociated acts or dreams.

Id, Ego, Superego

completely unconscious part of the psyche that serves as a storehouse of our desires, wishes, and fears.

mostly/partially conscious part of the psyche that processes experiences and operates as a referee or mediator between the id and superego.

Often thought of as one's "conscience"; the superego o__perates "like an internal censor__ [encouraging] moral judgments in light of social pressures"

Looking at literature alongside other cultural products of a particular historical period to show how concepts, attitudes, and ideologies and cultures operated through time, and this analysis helps to situate artistic texts both as products of a historical context and as the means to understand cultural and intellectual history.

Since there is biases based on historical position and beliefs, the meaning of text is fluid based on time, and not fixed in time

Michael Foucault

Stephen Greenblatt

1970s-1980s

Refers to how different groups (like the law, medicine, or the church) use language to show power dynamics between people.

New Historicism

Key part of how individuals are formed, along with ethics and truth. Power and knowledge are closely linked: having knowledge gives you power, but you can also control what knowledge is considered true or false in certain situations.

New Historicism

A belief that each person is alone in a world without inherent truth or meaning. Life is seen as moving between nothingness, creating a sense of anguish and absurdity. Choices become significant in a world without clear purpose, which Sartre described as the main challenge of human existence.

Albert Camus

Franz Kafka

Jean-Paul Sarte

Søren Kierkegaard

mid-to-late 19th Century; peaked in mid-20th Century France.

a term used to describe existence--a world without inherent meaning or truth.

Existentialism

to make choices based on an individual __code of ethics rather than because of societal pressure__s (A choice made just because "it's what people do" would be considered inauthentic)

Existentialism

although religion was inherently unknowable and filled with risks, faith required an act of commitment (the "leap of faith"); the commitment to Christianity would also lessen the despair of an absurd world.

Existentialism

during the 19th and early 20th century; voting rights

early 1960s; Reproductive rights and challenging gender roles

early 1990s; redefine feminism as a more inclusive and evolving movement, uprising of social media

began around 2012; gender equality, reproductive rights, workplace discrimination, and combating various forms of gender-based violence, using more social media.

Simone de Beauvoir's

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Betty Friedan

1. theories aimed at defining or establishing a feminist literary canon or theories seeking to __re-interpret and re-vision literatur__e (and culture and history and so forth) to be less patriarchal

2. theories focusing on sexual difference and sexual politics.

suggests a world in which sex-roles are not rigidly defined, a state in which ‘the man in every woman' and the ‘woman in every man' could be integrated and freely expressed.’; neither masculinity or femininity is dominant.

Feminism

The belief in a uniquely feminine essence untouched by culture (the mirror image of biologism which for centuries justified the oppression of women by proclaiming the natural superiority of men)

Feminism

Male-dominated structures and social arrangements elaborate the oppression of women. Patriarchy almost by definition also exhibits androcentrism, meaning male-centered.

Feminism

Viewing works of literature or art as the products of historical forces that can be analyzed by looking at the material conditions in which they were formed. Generally focuses on the clash between the dominant and repressed classes in any given age

Karl Marx

Terry Eagleton

Friedrich Engels

mid-nineteenth century;

Marxist literary theory systematized in 1920s

The attitude of valuing things not for their utility but for their power to impress others or for their resale possibilities

Marxism

Theory that history develops neither in a random fashion nor in a linear one but instead as struggle between contradictions that ultimately find resolution in a synthesis of the two sides. (For example, class conflicts lead to new social systems.)

Marxism

A work of literary art should be regarded as autonomous, and so should not be judged by reference to considerations beyond itself.

I. A. Richards

T. S. Eliot

Cleanth Brooks

the late 1920s and 1930s

equating the meaning of a poem with the author's intentions.

New Criticism

Confusing the meaning of a text with how it makes the reader feel. A reader's emotional response to a text generally does not produce a reliable interpretation.

New Criticism

Detailed analysis of the text itself to arrive at an interpretation without referring to historical, authorial, or cultural concerns

New Criticism

Refers to "a collection of theoretical and critical strategies used to examine the culture of former colonies of the European empires, and their relation to the rest of the world."

Chinua Achebe

Salman Rushdie

Jamaica Kincaid

Refers to any people or ethnic population forced or induced to leave their traditional ethnic homelands, being dispersed throughout other parts of the world, and the ensuing developments in their dispersal and culture.

The practice (conscious or otherwise) of placing emphasis on European concerns, culture and values at the expense of those of other cultures.

Extending the control or authority over foreign entities as a means of acquisition and/or maintenance of empires