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?
- The text itself, independent of author biography or historical context.
- What is the 'heresy of paraphrase' in New Criticism?
- 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?
- The error of judging a text based on the author's intended meaning rather than the text itself.
- In structuralism, what are binary oppositions?
- 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?
- Claude Lévi-Strauss
- What concept did Jacques Derrida introduce to challenge the stability of meaning?
- Deconstruction, which argues that texts contain internal contradictions undermining their apparent meaning.
- Reader-response criticism locates the source of literary meaning in what?
- 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'?
- 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?
- An 'interpretive community', a shared set of conventions and expectations shaping how members read texts.
- What is the 'hermeneutic circle' in textual interpretation?
- The circular process where interpreting parts depends on understanding the whole, and vice versa.
- Marxist criticism analyzes literature primarily through what lens?
- Economic systems, class relations, and ideology.
- In Marxist literary theory, what does 'ideology' refer to?
- A system of beliefs and values that naturalizes and justifies existing economic and power structures.
- Feminist criticism examines how literature represents and constructs what?
- Gender roles, power relations between men and women, and patriarchal ideologies.
- What does the concept of 'the male gaze' in feminist criticism refer to?
- 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?
- Unconscious desires, repression, defense mechanisms, and symbolic meanings within the narrative.