bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Aestheticism
Authors: Bristow Joseph
Published: May 2017

The
Oxford English Dictionary
states that the earliest usage of “aestheticism” appears in 1855 (see Brimley 1858). Aestheticism was a movement of critics, writers, and painters in the second half of the nineteenth century that emphasized the autonomy of art, the fact that it should be appreciated “for its own sake,” not for any social or moral purpose it might serve. The major antecedent theory of art at the time in England was that of John Ruskin, who contended that the best art served a moral end. English aestheticism, which had the most influence on Anglo‐American literature, from James Joyce to Kate Chopin, was born in reaction to Ruskin's moralism. The movement's legacy, particularly through the work of figures such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, has profoundly shaped modern attitudes toward art and the artist.
A
nglo‐
A
merican New Criticism
Authors: Meredith Brian
Published: May 2017

The “new criticism” is a general term for a diverse group of writers and scholars distinguished by their emphasis on formalist literary criticism. From the early 1920s, when I. A. Richards published his first works, to the 1960s, the new criticism dominated academic writing and teaching about literature, in part because its methodologies – a reliance on close reading (or “explication”) and the exclusion of most extratextual influences – both framed and delimited the object of criticism and made the most complex works of literature accessible to students. More important than these pragmatic concerns, however, was the new critic's assertion that the literary work was autonomous, free from the influences of politics, ideology, biography, and other historical forces. Poetry was a privileged genre for many new critics, because its verbal and rhetorical complexities were particularly well suited to close reading. The poem thus came to resemble, in William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley's phrase, a “verbal icon,” a self‐contained object the appreciation of which constituted for the reader a unique aesthetic experience. Two assumptions follow from this conception of poetry: one, that poetic language was distinct from “everyday” language and, two, that the poetic use of language was a worthy human activity in its own right. Thus the formalism of the new criticism at the same time sustained Matthew Arnold's belief that literature could provide a means of moral and aesthetic enrichment in a spiritually impoverished world.
A
rnold,
M
atthew
Authors: Caufield James Walter
Published: May 2017

Matthew Arnold (1822–88) was one of the most influential literary critics and cultural theorists in the nineteenth century. In the 1860s and early 1870s, he was a much admired poet, and he encouraged his contemporaries to practice the “grand style” in poetry and to aim, as he said the classical poets had, at “unity and profoundness of moral impression” (Arnold 1960–77, II:5, I:12). In Arnold's view, “poetry is at bottom a criticism of life,” and “the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life” (IX:46). He began his career as a school inspector, in part so that he could marry Frances Wightman, and by the 1860s had turned from poetry to literary and cultural criticism. Though his poetry is still widely anthologized, his criticism had become, by the late twentieth century, less a source of inspiration and insight than an object of controversy. As a literary critic, he focused on the ameliorative quality of literature and engaged in a vigorous debate with Thomas Huxley on the role literature should play in education. Arnold's provocative claim that great literature could fill the void created by the diminishing role of the Church of England, and thus serve as a source of social and moral guidance, influenced criticism well into the twentieth century, particularly the work of T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis. Despite the obscurity into which his criticism fell after the 1960s, Arnold's conception of culture had a profound effect on late twentieth‐century cultural studies (Young 1990; Said 1993; Pecora 1998).
A
uerbach,
E
rich
Authors: Green Geoffrey
Published: May 2017

Erich Auerbach (1892–1957) was one of the most important literary historians and comparativists of his generation. Though his work was grounded in philology and the close analysis of texts, he introduced into comparative studies a crucial historical dimension that has gained renewed importance in the wake of new historicist modes of criticism and theory. His ideas about mimesis and the development of a “mixed style” have proven useful to émigré, diaspora, and postcolonial theory, to postmodern literary and cultural theory.
B
enjamin,
W
alter
Authors: Satris Marthine
Published: May 2017

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a literary critic associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt (the “Frankfurt School” of critical theorists), and he is best known for his idiosyncratic blend of culture critique, Marxist philosophy, and Jewish Kabbalah mysticism. He was born in Berlin, the eldest of three children in a Jewish family assimilated into the bourgeoisie of the German Empire. His early life was quite privileged, and though he refused to follow his father into business, he depended on financial assistance from his parents until 1922. In his twenties, Benjamin lived the precarious life of a man of letters and literary critic. He became involved with the widespread German Youth Movement, founded in 1900, which embraced the idealism of youth and sought freedom from the traditions of German culture through reconnecting with nature. Benjamin wrote multiple articles for a journal of the movement,
Der Anfang
, in which he advocated schooling that encouraged active contribution from students rather than passive acceptance of frozen traditions. These articles impressed others in the movement and he began to gain a reputation as a writer in this period. He was also a university student at the universities of Berlin, Freiburg, and Munich between 1912 and 1917, attending lectures on art, philosophy, and philology.
C
ampbell,
J
oseph
Authors: Rhodes Royal W.
Published: May 2017

Joseph Campbell (1904–87), American author, lecturer, and editor, is best known as a popularizer of comparative mythology. He developed a method of symbolic interpretation grounded in a theory of the universal meaning and function of myth, which he regarded as a necessary component of psychological and spiritual health. Though he explored many elements of world mythology, he is best known for his writings on the role of the mythic hero in literature.
Carnival/Carnivalesque
Authors: Kershner R. Brandon
Published: May 2017

In his book
Rabelais and His World
(1984) and in parts of
Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
, the Russian critic Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin develops the concept of “carnivalization” in order to explore the literary effect of François Rabelais's comedic vision. Rabelais was a sixteenth‐century French doctor, author, and humanist whose romance
Gargantua and Pantagruel
relies on scatological and bodily imagery, caricature, and linguistic and rhetorical excesses of all kinds. For Bakhtin, the “carnivalesque” is an aspect of the medieval celebration known as “carnival,” the period of “licensed misrule” in which ordinary citizens could mock and defame the acknowledged authorities of church and state. A form of “theater without footlights” in which everyone participates through pageants, parades, and spectacles, the carnival undermines the concept of authoritative utterance and indulges in the rituals of crowning and de‐crowning of fools, mockery of all and sundry, foul language, the energetic utterance of nonsense, and the degrading of everything usually held as noble or sacred. One variant of the celebration in medieval times was known as the “Feast of Fools,” while our milder contemporary versions are usually associated with Mardi Gras, a period of revelry preceding Lent. Bakhtin values very highly this inversion of established values and regards carnival as the form of oppositional speech elicited by authoritative utterance, the natural expression of the powerless folk. Bakhtin particularly values the anarchic but life‐affirming laughter of carnival, which presents a rejuvenated version of the world in a mode for which James Joyce's term “jocoserious” seems appropriate.
C
hicago School Neo‐
A
ristotelian Literary Theory
Authors: Richter David H.
Published: May 2017

Chicago School neo‐Aristotelian literary theory refers to a group of literary critics and theorists at the University of Chicago who flourished in the 1950s and 1960s. Broadly speaking, the principal focal points of the Chicago School were a formalist genre theory and, at a metacritical level, an instrumental pluralism. The first generation of Chicago School critics were grouped around R. S. Crane, while a second generation found inspiration in the work of Wayne Booth, whose rhetorical theory of fiction remains influential among narrative theorists like James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz.
C
rane,
R. S.
Authors: Peters Michael
Published: May 2017

R. S. Crane (1886–1967) was a formalist critic of the Chicago School, and a prominent figure in the debates on how literature was to be read and studied. A professor, essayist, editor, and lecturer, Ronald Salmon Crane began his career at Northwestern University (1911–24) before moving to the University of Chicago where he remained until his death in 1967. In a 1935 essay, Crane claimed literary criticism was a legitimate academic practice equal to traditional historical scholarship – criticism and history were inseparable. Bold by 1935 standards, these statements inaugurated his role in defining the parameters of literary practice. His enduring contributions to literary theory remain his definition of criticism as a process which must contend with a multitude of literary forms and interpretations. In addition to being pluralistic, Crane believed that criticism should be a
self‐critical
practice. He believed that critics should be aware of their application of criticism because singular analysis limits the inherent multiplicity of readings. Critics also had to be aware of the system being applied to the literary work – the effects of which could create a predetermined analysis. His awareness of criticism as a process was essential to his concept of its uses because criticism ought to be aware of its role in shaping history.
Critical Theory/
F
rankfurt
S
chool
Authors: Sachs Carl B.
Published: May 2017

Critical theory is a branch of twentieth‐century Continental philosophy which emphasizes interdisciplinary collaborations with a variety of fields, including the social sciences, literary and cultural studies, and political theory, toward the goal of radical social change. The Frankfurt School is often referred to as the “first generation” of critical theorists, though major figures like Jürgen Habermas of the second generation maintain some continuity with the critical theory of the Institute. The Frankfürt School takes its name from its first institutional incarnation, the Institute for Social Research, founded in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt. It was founded by Friedrich Pollock and Felix Weil, with Carl Grünberg, an Austrian‐Marxist historian, as its first director. It was initially conceived of as an interdisciplinary research group composed of economists, sociologists, psychologists, and historians organized around an Austrian‐Marxist conception of social science. The task of the Institute was to further the Marxist project of comprehending the totality of diverse social phenomena in their interconnectedness and fundamental unity. Its members wanted to understand why revolutions failed to break out in the Western industrialized countries even when orthodox Marxism predicted that the conditions were ripe: low wages, stagnant economy, high unemployment, widespread dissatisfaction with the governments and so on. The larger intellectual and political context of the Frankfurt School included sociologists like Max Weber and Marxist critics like the Hungarian Georg Lukács, who used Weber's account of rationalization to deepen Marx's account of alienation.
Dialectics
Authors: McCall Tom
Published: May 2017

In its philosophical sense, dialectics brings to mind a focused discussion or dialogue (a word cognate with “dialectic”) that converges on truth, not from memorized arguments but in real‐time inquiries building on step‐by‐step clarifications. These are achieved through appraisals of the strongest insights and statements about given matters dealing with “generally accepted opinions” involving a degree of speculation and uncertainty, in contrast to assertions based on “the primary and true” first principles of science (Aristotle 1968: 104a3–105a9). Dialectics, in this pedagogical, performative sense, builds on Aristotle's logical form to achieve a mode of analysis that moves past the common‐sense or face values of the issues under discussion and patiently reveals their underlying structures. It does not take a transcendent or a priori position outside them (e.g., by making deductions from first principles) but immanently unfolds within the subject as thought. By virtue of its power (or promise) to dissolve the factuality of the given world, to loosen the hold of immediate, given reality, dialectics has enjoyed a special allure and authority, especially in Continental philosophy beginning with Kant. For its exemplary practitioners – and here the names of Plato and G. W. F. Hegel may stand unquestionably as ancient and modern exemplars – dialectics begins with (but does not necessarily end with) its chief problem: understanding phenomenal reality, which dialectics shows ironically to be an effect of dialectics itself.
E
liot,
T. S.
Authors: Rogers Gayle
Published: May 2017

One of the most influential poets and critics of the twentieth century, Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) revitalized and, in many important respects, redefined the nature of literary texts and traditions and the role of criticism in relation to them. In numerous essays and lectures, he argued that neither poetry nor criticism should be a genteel and belletristic enterprise; rather, the two work together analytically in the construction of literary history. This approach to the literary artifact, part of a larger modernist attempt to understand the role of the critic in relation to literature, enabled a number of critical methodologies, particularly the kinds of practical criticism and close reading favored by new critics like I. A. Richards and Cleanth Brooks.
Formalism
Authors: Petrov Petre
Published: May 2017

Formalism, despite being hampered by historical circumstances, was of paramount importance to the intellectual life of early twentieth‐century Russia, Europe, and North America. Its influence on the humanities, particularly the study of literature, is largely owing to the originality and variety of formalist conceptions and the rigor of formalist methods. Formalism developed, especially in the West, on a double path: a theory about language and a methodology for reading texts.
Functions (Linguistic)
Authors: Fry Paul H.
Published: May 2017

In his seminal essay “Linguistics and poetics” (1960), Roman Jakobson enumerated six functions for all utterances, going on to argue that the nature of any given utterance can be determined by observing which of these functions is the “dominant,” or motivating feature, of the utterance. The focus of attention in that particular essay is one of these functions, the “poetic function,” as it is Jakobson's task to show that linguistics and poetics must not isolate themselves from each other.
Imaginary/Symbolic/Real
Authors: Lundell Michael
Published: May 2017

Jacques Lacan's conception of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real orders constitutes one of the most important developments in post‐Freudian psychoanalysis. Based in part on Freud's thinking about the Oedipal complex and the unconscious, Lacan's triad provides a mechanism for describing different orders of psychic reality. In part because he never defined these terms explicitly, and in part because the relationship among the different orders is unstable, they remain in some ways enigmatic. Nevertheless, Lacan's own usage, and that of his protégés and successors, provides us with a fairly clear sense of their nature and function. The terms “imaginary,” “symbolic,” and “real” have proven extremely influential and have paved the way for a resurgence of interest in psychoanalytic approaches to literary and cultural texts, especially in cultural studies, film theory, feminist theory, and the study of sexuality and gender.
Ingarden,Roman
Authors: Fothergill Anthony
Published: May 2017

Roman Ingarden (1893 – 1970) was one of the most important twentieth‐century philosophers to influence literary theory and criticism, applying the philosophy of phenomenology to literary and other artistic works, in seeking objectively to define the ontological nature of the work of art. Though his philosophical publications were massive in number and formidably broad‐ranging in topic, it is with his works on aesthetics, most notablyThe Literary Work of Art(1931), andThe Cognition of the Literary Work of Art(1937), that his impact in the English‐speaking world has been greatest. Ingarden's influence can be found, on the one hand, in the formalist theory of Rene Wellek and the new critics and, on the other, in reader‐response criticism and reception theory. These lines of development reflect the two foundational aspects of Ingarden's thinking: the idea of the autonomous work of art but also the role of the reader in realizing or “concretizing” it.
Intentional Fallacy
Authors: Fry Paul H.
Published: May 2017

“The intentional fallacy,” the famous essay of 1946 by William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, is easy to misunderstand and has quite frequently been misunderstood. Its purport is clearly that a poem should speak for itself. In urging criticism to look for internal coherence in a poem rather than for extraneous evidence of an author's guiding intention, Wimsatt, Beardsley, and their colleagues (who came to be called “the new critics” after the title of John Crowe Ransom's book,
The New Criticism
[1941]) were engaged in part in a continuation of the attack on romanticism and its late nineteenth‐century variants that emerged after the turn of the twentieth century by T. S. Eliot, T. E. Hulme, and Ezra Pound, all of whom emphasized authorial impersonality. A poem is not an “expression” of feeling, but rather a discrete, independent verbal object, a complex of meaning. Wimsatt and Beardsley and the other new critics tended to emphasize poetry, suggesting that a poem with its smaller scope and denser texture exhibits a more complex unity than a novel or a play. The new criticism did eventually turn its attention to novels and plays, but always drew from the model of the poem in reading them.
Intentionality and Horizon
Authors: Armstrong Paul B.
Published: May 2017

“Intentionality” and “horizon” are related terms that describe how consciousness is directed toward a world of objects and how our understanding of anything, from objects to ideas, is limited by our point of view. The term “intentionality” has a long history in philosophy, going back to Aristotle, but its modern significance is the result of extensive analyses of the structure ofconsciousness and experience initiated by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. While they are grounded in philosophical discourse, “intentionality” and “horizon” have become key concepts in phenomenological theories about the mode of existence of literary works, the experience of reading, and the process of interpretation.
I
talian Neo‐Idealistic Aesthetics
Authors: Ryan Kathleen
Published: May 2017

Italian neo‐idealistic aesthetics is an early twentieth‐century theory of art that developed within the larger framework of Italian neo‐idealism. A fusion of metaphysics, aesthetics, and literary criticism, it defines art as a dialectical synthesis of intuition and cognition, and is itself a synthesis of the theories of Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, the leading philosophers in early twentieth‐century Italy. In addition to the countless poets they wrote about and reviewed, important influences on neo‐idealistic aesthetics included the Italian Neapolitan Hegelians Bertrando Spaventa and Francesco De Sanctis as well as Giambattista Vico, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, and G. W. F. Hegel.
K
lein,
M
elanie
Authors: Chatterjee Ranita
Published: May 2017

Melanie Klein (1882 – 1960) was an Austrian‐born, British psychoanalyst whose theories about early infant attachments helped establish fields within psychoanalysis devoted to children and object relations theory. Klein worked first in Vienna and Berlin before settling in London in 1926. Like her contemporary, Anna Freud, Klein significantly modified Freud's theories. Her theories shifted the focus away from the Freudian emphasis on the little boy and the Oedipal complex (the stage of his development associated with sexual awareness) toward the early infant emotions or drives aimed at the mother, especially her breast. Since Klein was directly involved with children, she devised a therapeutic technique involving free play, which stood in opposition to Freudian free association, in order to observe and analyze her young patients. Play theory assumes that through playing games, preverbal children reveal their urges, fantasies, anxieties, and fears. With her own three children, Klein was able to perfect her play technique to help her disturbed young patients. Her theories of normal emotional and psychosexual human development thus originated in her active interactions with infants and not from the adult Freudian patient's recollections of infantile experiences. Klein started publishing her findings in 1921 in the
International Journal of Psycho‐Analysis
and then published numerous articles and books that were eventually collected and published in four volumes as
The Writings of Melanie Klein
(1975).
L
eavis,
F. R.
Authors: Fothergill Anthony
Published: May 2017

From 1930 through the 1970s, Frank Raymond Leavis (1895 – 1978) was a towering influence in the formation of English studies as a university discipline in England. His impact lay as much in his undertaking a fundamental revaluation of the prevailing canon of English, and the terms by which he understood its fundamental relation to the broader language and culture, as in the specific judgments he made. Through his teaching and writing while at Cambridge, he had a profound impact on generations of students (“Leavisites”), who continued with his missionary zeal to establish the cultural centrality of English as an academic discipline and to transform the teaching of it in schools throughout Britain and in English‐speaking countries throughout the world. His rhetorical style was famously authoritative and his judgments of works (and other critics) often iconoclastic and acerbic, but his primary aim was the pedagogic one of creating, by example, a “collaborative community” of “common readers” who shared his foundational vision of (re)creating English literature as the carrier, through its language, of a collective historically grounded national culture.
Materialism
Authors: Hawkes David
Published: May 2017

The term “materialism” has two main philosophical meanings. First, it refers to the belief that matter is all that exists, so that ideas and concepts are illusory. This outlook is often known today as “eliminative materialism.” Second, it can also designate the belief that ideas are determined by the material circumstances in which they arise and develop. In one sense, the former kind of materialism is a more extreme version of the latter, but there is also an important sense in which the two types of materialism are mutually exclusive, for the former admits the objective existence of ideas, while the latter denies that ideas have any real existence at all.
Merleau‐Ponty,Maurice
Authors: Pangborn Matthew H.
Published: May 2017

Maurice Merleau‐Ponty (1908 – 61), one of the most influential figures in French intellectual culture after World War II, strove to overcome the impasse between materialism and what he called “intellectualism” by emphasizing the importance of embodiment in human experience. Central to his deeply anti‐Cartesian project was a rejection of what he termedpensées de survol, or “high‐altitude, surveying thought” (1968 [1964]). Merleau‐Ponty was, along with Jean‐Paul Sartre, one of the leading inheritors of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology. His work has had a tremendous impact on thinkers as diverse as Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan.
Modernist Aesthetics
Authors: Rogers Gayle
Published: May 2017

Modernist aesthetics developed through a series of arguments and practices that rejected both Romantic and realist notions of aesthetics, claiming instead the autonomy of the art object – whether a literary text, a piece of visual art, or a musical composition – with respect to social, political, and historical forces. Modernist writers used this notion of autonomy to produce boldly experimental texts that broke new ground for succeeding literary generations. Their works, in a variety of genres, are characterized by the use of literary strategies such as impressionism, psychological realism, dense and allusive mythological structures, depersonalization, expressive form, antimi‐meticism, and radically experimental styles. The modernists’ interest in innovation went well beyond the merely new object or technique, for they were primarily interested in new ways to create. Ezra Pound's dictum, “make it new,” could then be read in a way that emphasized the
making
rather than the made object. Flourishing in a volatile historical moment, modernist aesthetics have shaped the ideas of a number of critical thinkers and schools, and they continue to inform debates in contemporary literary and cultural theory.
P
ound,
E
zra
Authors: Rizzo Christopher
Published: May 2017

EzraPound (1885 – 1972), apoet, critic, translator, essayist, and editor, played a major role in the development of the modernist movement. An American expatriate in Europe, he proved adept at finding out extraordinary new talent in poetry and fiction, and used his influence on editorial boards to bring the young T. S. Eliot and James Joyce to wider audiences. His primary interests included aesthetics, politics, religion, economics, and education as they inflected the condition of modern culture. Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, and began his studies, in 1901, at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met W. C. Williams and H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), both of whom would later be acknowledged as major modernist writers. After only two years of coursework, however, Pound transferred to Hamilton College. Upon completion of his PhB in 1905, Pound returned to the University of Pennsylvania to earn his MA in Romance Philology in 1906. After a brief professorship at Wabash College, Indiana, he set off for Europe, eventually residing in Venice. In 1908, Pound self‐published his first book of poems
A Lume Spento
and, in the same year, he moved to London and self‐published his second,
A Quinzaine for This Yule
. Although Pound would later call his early works “stale creampuffs,” they clearly established his ambivalent relation to medieval Romantic literature and the Romanticism of the classical literary tradition firmly established by nineteenth‐century verse (Pound 1976: vii).
Propp,Vladimir
Authors: Seckler Dawn
Published: May 2017

Vladimir Iakovlevich Propp (1895 – 1970), one of the most important thinkers in the formalist tradition, who devised a revolutionary methodology for analyzing folk tales, was born into a family of German heritage in St Petersburg, Russia. After graduating from St Petersburg University in 1918 with a degree in Russian and German philology, he taught German in a high school. In 1932, four years after publishing his best‐known work –Morphology of the Folktale– he returned to his alma mater, renamed Leningrad University, as a professor of folklore. Propp's preference for a methodological approach based on evidence and fact aligns him with the Russian formalist tradition, which strove for scientific rigor in the analysis of literature. In 1966, reacting to Claude LEevi‐Strauss's critique ofMorphology, Propp said of himself: “I am a mere empiricist, but a true empiricist” (1976[1960]: 278). However, despite this assertion and despite the fact that many scholars have labeled him a Russian formalist, Propp's career began as the formalist movement was curtailed by the shift in politics that accompanied Joseph Stalin's rise to power.
R
ichards,
I. A.
Authors: Meredith Brian
Published: May 2017

Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893 – 1979) was a Cambridge professor whose theoretical work helped shape English studies in the twentieth century, and whose influence can still be felt in the fundamentals by which high school and college students are taught to read literature. This legacy was built on Richards's prolific publications from the 1920s and ‘30s. Two books in particular,
Principles of Literary Criticism
(1925) and
Practical Criticism
(1929), pioneered a conceptual framework for detailed analysis of both language and language form, enabling equally attentive discussion of the reading experience. The former is a variety of close reading that has affinities with critical methods in the new criticism. His influence may also be traced in teachers’ ubiquitous use of concepts like the tenor and vehicle of metaphor, the distinction between a poem's speaker and author, or the idea that a poem's meter can “cooperate” in the production of meaning. At the same time, the formal system for literary study that Richards designed, much of it drawn from other disciplines like psychology, contributed to the general trend in English studies to emulate research methods and techniques found in the natural and social sciences.
Semiotics/Semiology
Authors: Ezzaher Lahcen E.
Published: May 2017

“Semiotics” and “semiology” are terms used to refer to the general science of signs and signification. The term “semiology” is associated primarily with the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, while the term “semiotics” is often linked to the American philosopher and mathematician, Charles Sanders Peirce. In both cases, the thrust of semiological study is to explore how signs, understood as social constructs, are shaped by and through language. The study of signs has been taken up by academic disciplines such as linguistics, information theory, formal logic, and structural anthropology, though semiotic analysis is a common strategy across the spectrum of poststructuralist theories.
S
hklovsky,
V
iktor
Authors: Flickinger Brigitte
Published: May 2017

Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky (1893 – 1984), Russian literary theorist, critic, and writer of experimental prose, film scenarios, and memoirs (on Lev Tolstoy, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Sergei Eisenstein), was one of the initiators and leading representatives of Russian Formalism. Stimulated by his experience of Russian Futurism, he gave formalism many of its crucial concepts and key words. His theoretical works and analyses of literature and film influenced the Prague Linguistic Circle, morphology, and structuralism. Shklovsky coined the term “
ostranenie”
(ocTpaHeHHe, estrangement), one of the most important “devices” of poetic language and an essential concept for the “scientific method” of formalist textual analysis. Though he was well known in Russia from the late 1910s, it was not until the 1950s that Western thinkers began to take notice of his provocative ideas about literary form.
Speech Acts
Authors: Degooyer Stephanie
Published: May 2017

Modern speech act theory derives from the work of Oxford University philosopher John Langshaw Austin and his student John R. Searle. In the 1950s, Austin argued against the main tenets of logical positivism – that philosophical language should be purely factual, that the meaning of a word should be tied down to a reference in the world – by revealing types of verbal utterance that
do
or make things happen rather than simply name or report them. Although Austin himself did not originate the term “speech act,” his lectures, collected posthumously in
How to Do Things with Words
and
Sense and Sensibilia
(both published in 1962), develop key concepts for contemporary theories of performative speech in literary criticism, linguistics, and philosophy of language.
Structuralism
Authors: Solomon Jack
Published: May 2017

Structuralism is the name given to a variety of analytic methods and practices that, in the first half of the twentieth century, dominated studies in linguistics, anthropology, literary theory, and semiology. According to structuralist theory, human knowledge and practice is constituted by structural relations between terms in a system governed by codes that assign meaning to each term. The figure most often associated with origins of structuralism is Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 – 1913), whose
Course in General Linguistics
(1916) advanced the then novel idea that language is a system that is present in its entirety in each individual utterance. Linguistics after Saussure shifted from the study of utterances to the study of the rules that give rise to utterances. The idea that language use is governed by a linguistic system and that meaning is a function of difference
within the system itself
has had a profound effect on literary and cultural theory.
Totality
Authors: Rice Doug , Kim Koonyong
Published: May 2017

The terms “totality” and “totalization,” as they are used in literary and cultural theory, refer to the possibility and practice of complete, unified closure. Typically associated with social and cultural formations, totalization defines the processes by which disparate and unrelated phenomena are understood in connection with a larger complex totality. Often contrasted with a wide array of disunifying forms and practices, such as fragmentation, alienation, atomization, reification, and the like, totality and totalization have been for some Marxist critics a long‐sought‐after ideal while for others, especially poststructuralists and postmodernists, these terms represent an imperializing or mystifying authority that attempts to annihilate difference. Western philosophy has long offered holistic perspectives, though it was not until the time of G. W. F. Hegel that the concept of totality enters modern philosophy through the theory of dialectics.
W
imsatt,
W
illiam
K.
and
B
eardsley,
M
onroe
C
Authors: Swanson Cecily
Published: May 2017

William Kurtz Wimsatt (1907 – 75) and Monroe Curtis Beardsley (1915 – 85) are best known for their co‐authorship of “The intentional fallacy” and “The affective fallacy,” essays that articulate what have come to be considered the fundamental tenets of the American New Criticism. Originally published in the
Sewanee Review
in 1946, both essays were reprinted in their seminal formalist study,
The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry
(1954). Wimsatt and Beardsley co‐authored a third essay, “The concept of meter: An exercise in abstraction” (1959), which was reprinted in Wimsatt's
Hateful Contraries
in 1965. This text has generated much less debate than the essays on the fallacies, but it did produce some heated discussion immediately following its publication. Although none of the three essays are as commonly taught, nor as frequently referenced, as they were once, their ideas continue to lie at the heart of most literary criticism and instruction. As Jonathan Culler has commented, “In a sense, whatever critical affiliations we may proclaim, we are all New Critics now, in that it requires a strenuous consciousness of effort to escape notions of the autonomy of the literary work, the importance of demonstrating its unity, and the requirement of ‘close reading’” (Culler 1981: 3).
A
frican
A
merican Literary Theory
Authors: Price Jason
Published: May 2017

African American literary theory since 1966 has responded to both the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ‘70s and the contemporaneous influx of Western literary theory in the academy. Theoretical arguments in this field address questions of the critic's audience and responsibilities, the use of European theory in reading black texts, and representations of gender, race, and sexuality in African American literature. The theoretical responses to these issues reveal a multiplicity of positions from critics as varied as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Barbara Smith, and Charles I. Nero and a wide range of theoretical approaches too, including structuralism, poststructuralism, and European feminism.
A
merican
I
ndian Literary Criticism and Theory
Authors: Parker Robert Dale
Published: May 2017

The criticism of American Indian literature began earlier and has a longer history of theoretical engagement than is ordinarily recognized. Before European writing systems reached what are now known as the Americas, the people now known as Indians or Native Americans had their own writing systems of various kinds, from Mayan glyphs to wampum and petroglyphs. Moreover, American Indians, like all peoples, have always had an extensive oral literature and a history of thinking about their own and their neighbors’ oral literature. That history continues into contemporary times, both through oral tradition and through the dialogue between oral and written traditions.
Authorial Intention
Authors: Mitchell Kaye
Published: May 2017

Arguments over authorial intention – and the relevance of this to the interpretation of a text – go back many centuries, having a notable force and currency in the discussion of religious texts. However, contemporary debates about authorial intention in the literary sphere can be quite precisely dated to the publication of a seminal article, entitled “The intentional fallacy,” by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, which first appeared in 1946 in the
Sewanee Review
. In that article, Wimsatt and Beardsley, who are generally associated with the school of literary criticism known as new criticism, argue that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a literary work of art” (1962[1946]: 92). Although they are, as the quotation reveals, primarily concerned with questions of value, this article served to initiate a discussion about the relationship between authorial intention and textual meaning that has continued, in different forms, to this day. The debates around intention touch on many of the most fundamental questions in literary criticism: the determinacy and determinability (or not) of textual meaning; the proper object of literary criticism; the author's authority (and the level of control he/she can wield over the meanings of his/her own work); the functions and methods of criticism; the resolution of interpretative disagreements; the role of the reader; and the nature of literary value. Such debates also, of course, spill over into the contiguous realms of art criticism and art history, aesthetics, philosophy, theology, film and theater studies, translation studies, and any discipline in which interpretation is key.
B
habha,
H
omi
Authors: Mukherjee Ankhi
Published: May 2017

Homi K. Bhabha is a foundational figure for postcolonial theory. He was born in Bombay, India, in 1949, educated at the University of Bombay and Christ Church, Oxford, and is at present Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English and American Literature at Harvard University.
B
raidotti,
R
osi
Authors: Stoate Robin
Published: May 2017

Rosi Braidotti is a feminist philosopher and theorist, most widely known for her work on the notion of “nomadic” subjectivity, which responds to and builds upon the theories of Continental philosophers in order to theorize an account of both a politically viable female subject, and a more general notion of positive difference.
B
utler,
J
udith
Authors: Mitchell Kaye
Published: May 2017

Judith Butler (b. 1956) is one of the leading theorists working in the field of the humanities in the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries. Having established her international reputation with the publication of
Gender Trouble
in 1990, she is best known for her work in gender and sexuality studies and is often cited as one of the “founders” of queer theory, but her work extends far beyond these fields, and its influence can be felt within philosophy, literary criticism and critical theory, cultural studies, sociology, art theory and criticism, media and communication studies. After completing her PhD at Yale in 1984, Butler taught at Wesleyan University and at Johns Hopkins University; she is currently Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
Caruth,Cathy
Authors: Kilby Jane
Published: May 2017

Cathy Caruth (b. 1955) is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Comparative Literature at Emory University, and her prominence in the field of literary and cultural theory is due to her thinking on trauma. She received her PhD from Yale University in 1988 and taught at Yale from 1986 to 1994, first as Assistant, then as Associate Professor. She then moved to Emory as Associate Professor and was promoted a few years later to Winship Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative Literature and English, before finally taking up her fully endowed Chair. She is the author ofEmpirical Truths and Critical Fictions(1991) andUnclaimed Experience(1996); she editedTrauma(1995) and is coeditor, with Deborah Esch, ofCritical Encounters(1995). Alongside other influential thinkers such as Shoshana Felman and Geoffrey Hartmann, Caruth's early work is most readily understood as a response to the criticism that poststructuralism is politically and ethically paralyzing since it does not allow language the power of referring directly to reality. Taking up the question of experience and history throughout all of her writing, Caruth argues instead that poststructuralism does not deny the possibility that language can give us access to reality, but rather that it refuses a model of reference based on the laws of physical perception. Indeed, according to Caruth (1991), even John Locke'sEssay Concerning Human Understanding, the founding text of British empiricism, can be read as a narrative complicating its doctrinal status. Influenced in her reading by Paul de Man and the insights associated with deconstruction, Caruth's aim is not then to deny the possibility of accessing reality, but rather to open up the possibility of a rethinking of empiricism in order to attempt to understand anew the critical traditions that are defined in terms of it, such as Romanticism and critical philosophy.
Core and Periphery
Authors: Morton Stephen
Published: May 2017

The distinction between the core and the periphery is a spatial distinction, which has shaped the mapping of global political and economic power relations from the seventeenth century to the present. This distinction is often associated with the world‐systems theory of the Marxist economist Immanuel Wallerstein, who has argued that the global capitalist economy has been expanding since the seventeenth century, and that this expansion has involved massive economic imbalances between the core, or “the West,” and the periphery, or “the non‐West.” Yet this distinction between “the West” and “the non‐West” is also an invention of the Western cultural imagination in an attempt to assert the dominance of the core over the periphery.
Deconstruction
Authors: Ryan Michael , Sands Danielle
Published: May 2017

Deconstruction is a term coined by the philosopher Jacques Derrida to name his critique of Western philosophy. Western philosophy, according to Derrida, is founded on an architecture of values that are never examined. Those values favor presence, proximity, selfsameness, animation, naturalness, and substantiality over non‐presence, otherness, technique, repetition, substitution, difference, and artifice in the determination of what counts as true and good. Invariably, Western philosophy claims that identity is prior to difference, presence to representation, nature to technique, thought to signification, speech to writing, substance to fabrication, and so on. Deconstruction consists of reading philosophical texts carefully to find moments where the conceptual scheme and value structure employed break down. Derrida usually finds that notions of identity or selfsameness that seem to be secure foundations of truthfulness are in fact products of differentiation, a process that remains outside the conceptual framework of philosophy because it cannot be assigned an identity and grasped by consciousness as a presence in the mind. Derrida develops a new kind of thinking that takes the differential constitution of identity into account. Difference means that one thing relates to another to be what it is. It can therefore have no identity “of its own.” It exists instead in a relationship with something other (hence the use of the term “alterity” or “otherness” to characterize the way identity is split in two by difference). Another term used to characterize this change in how we conceive of identity in philosophy is “mediation,” which means that one concept exists through the medium of another (in the way that the idea of light is mediated by a related term such as darkness). The meaning of one term is determined by the meaning of another. Finally, space and spatialization are bound up with difference since the relationship of one thing to another means that there is a spatial interval between them. Taking these new elements of philosophy into account means thinking without the assistance of simple values founded on notions of unproblematic identity. A more complex, multivariable kind of philosophy is required. One must think differentially.
Deleuze,Gilles
Authors: Aldea Eva
Published: May 2017

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) is best known for the two volumesAnti‐Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia(1977[1972]) andA Thousand Plateaus(1987[1980]), co‐authored with Félix Guattari, and considered by many to be central post‐1968 texts. However, Deleuze's philosophical work had started already in the 1950s. He wrote numerous monographs on philosophers (Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson, Spinoza, Foucault, Leibniz), all of which, at the same time as being rigorous considerations of philosophical concepts, are at an angle to received wisdom about these subjects. In addition, he produced a handful of books on artists and writers (Proust, Kafka, Sacher‐Masoch, Bacon) as well as a two‐volume work on cinema. All of his oeuvre shows a preoccupation with similar metaphysical ideas, adding up to an eclectic but consistent philosophy most coherently articulated in his two central philosophical thesesDifference and Repetition(1994[1968]) andThe Logic of Sense(1990[1969]).
Eco,Umberto
Authors: Francioso Monica
Published: May 2017

Umberto Eco, semiotician and novelist, was born in Alessandria, Italy in 1932. Eco graduated from the University of Turin with a thesis on Thomas Aquinas's aesthetics under the supervision of the Italian philosopher Luigi Pareyson, whose theory of interpretation and formativity influenced Eco's early works. After a few years at RAI, Italian national television, where he worked in cultural and artistic production, Eco started his academic career and in 1971 he was appointed to the University of Bologna, where he has worked ever since. From his early book,Opera aperta(1962;The Open Work, (1989), Eco has shown interest in the study of signs, in the creation of a theory of semiotics and in theoretical problems of interpretation.
Écriture Féminine
Authors: Donadey Anne
Published: May 2017

L'écriture feminine
is a concept coined by French feminist Hélène Cixous in her landmark manifesto “The laugh of the Medusa” in 1975. Translated into English the following year, the essay became particularly influential in US academic feminism and continues to be taught in feminist theory classes. The translators rendered
écriture feminine
as the more generic “women's writing,” with the result that the French term has become common usage in Anglophone academic feminism.