Literary Criticism Theories

1. Formalism - is a theoretical position that favours form over the thematic

concerns within a text or its relationship with the world outside. The formalists
argued that the study of literature should be exclusively about form, technique,
and literary devices within a work of literature.
2. Deconstructionism - as applied to literary criticism, is a paradox about a
paradox: It assumes that all discourse, even all historical narrative, is essentially
disguised self-revelatory messages. Being subjective, the text has no fixed
meaning, so when we read, we are prone to misread.
3. The Marxist criticism definition is an approach to diagnosing political and
social problems in terms of the struggles between members of different socio-
economic classes. Drawing from this approach, criticism does not aim at the
flaws of particular individuals, even if they have attained positions of power.
Instead, such an approach focuses on how social life is structured by class
oppositions that are determined by laboring relationships. Or in other words,
Marxist criticism seeks to show how the economically powerful exploit and
dominate the economically disadvantaged. Moreover, Marxist criticism also
points to how class conflict is obscured and hidden in ideology.
4. Feminist literary criticism looks at literature assuming its production from a
male-dominated perspective. It re-examines canonical works to show how
gender stereotypes are involved in their functioning. It examines (and often
rediscovers) works by women for a possible alternative voice.
5. Postmodern literary theory is characterised by the critique of modernity and a
digression from modernist aesthetic and literary style. Postmodernist fiction
rejects the idea of the absolute and embraces chaos, disorder, and fragmentation
of reality.
6. Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the
reader (or “audience”) and their experience of a literary work, in contrast to other
schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content
and form of the work.
7. Psychoanalytic literary criticism is one of the most well-known (and most
controversial!) literary theories. Psychoanalytical readings focus on the
relationship between literature, the unconscious mind and our conscious actions
and thoughts. More specifically, psychoanalytic literary criticism focuses on the
following:
A. The mind of the author: psychoanalytic literary criticism treats the work of the
author as a manifestation of their own unconscious desires. A psychoanalytic
reading may attempt to relate certain aspects of a text to its author’s life to give
the text a psychoanalytically biographical meaning.
B. The mind of the characters: psychoanalytic literary criticism can be used to
analyse and explain the motivations and actions of certain characters in an
author's work. This is the most common form of analysis, which we will apply to
Hamlet (below).
C. The mind of the audience: Freud makes references to universal anxieties and
desires that we, as human beings, all innately share. Psychoanalytic literary
criticism can be used to explain why certain works are very appealing to a wide
audience, as it appeals to the universal unconscious mind.
D. The text: psychoanalytic literary criticism can be used to analyse why certain
linguistic and symbolic choices are made by the author to be used in a text.