Major schools of literary criticism such as New Criticism, structuralism, and reader-response theory.
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- New Criticism emphasizes what aspect of a text as the primary focus of analysis?
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The text itself, independent of author biography or historical context.- What is the 'heresy of paraphrase' in New Criticism?
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The belief that a poem cannot be reduced to or paraphrased as prose without losing its essential meaning.- What is the 'intentional fallacy' in New Criticism?
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The error of judging a text based on the author's intended meaning rather than the text itself.- In structuralism, what are binary oppositions?
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Pairs of contrasting concepts (like nature/culture, self/other) that structure meaning in language and culture.- Which structuralist critic analyzed mythology through binary oppositions and kinship systems?
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Claude Lévi-Strauss- What concept did Jacques Derrida introduce to challenge the stability of meaning?
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Deconstruction, which argues that texts contain internal contradictions undermining their apparent meaning.- Reader-response criticism locates the source of literary meaning in what?
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The reader and the reading process, not the author's intent or the text alone.- What is Wolfgang Iser's concept of the 'implied reader'?
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The idealized reader that a text anticipates and addresses through its structure and conventions.- What does Stanley Fish's reader-response theory call the interpretive framework readers use?
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An 'interpretive community', a shared set of conventions and expectations shaping how members read texts.- What is the 'hermeneutic circle' in textual interpretation?
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The circular process where interpreting parts depends on understanding the whole, and vice versa.- Marxist criticism analyzes literature primarily through what lens?
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Economic systems, class relations, and ideology.- In Marxist literary theory, what does 'ideology' refer to?
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A system of beliefs and values that naturalizes and justifies existing economic and power structures.- Feminist criticism examines how literature represents and constructs what?
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Gender roles, power relations between men and women, and patriarchal ideologies.- What does the concept of 'the male gaze' in feminist criticism refer to?
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The perspective that frames women as objects of male desire rather than independent subjects.- In psychoanalytic criticism, what does a critic examine in a text?
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Unconscious desires, repression, defense mechanisms, and symbolic meanings within the narrative.
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