Unit 8 - Literary Criticism: Theories & Approaches
UGC NET English Paper 2 Complete Study Material
📚 This comprehensive unit covers classical to postmodern critical theories, major critics, and analytical approaches essential for UGC NET English Paper 2 preparation.
Plato's Republic (banishment of poets), Aristotle's Poetics (catharsis, mimesis), Horace's Ars Poetica, Longinus' On the Sublime, Sidney's Apology for Poetry.
"Poetry is more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history." - Aristotle
Key Concepts: Mimesis, Catharsis, Three Unities, Didacticism, Decorum
Study Classical CriticismDryden's Of Dramatic Poesie, Pope's Essay on Criticism, Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare, Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge's Biographia Literaria.
• Spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings
• Poetry as emotional expression
• Rejection of neoclassical rules
Key Terms: Fancy vs. Imagination, Negative Capability, Poetic Diction, Organic Form
Explore Romantic TheoriesEliot's Tradition and Individual Talent, Richards' Practical Criticism, Wimsatt & Beardsley's Intentional Fallacy, Brooks' Well Wrought Urn.
"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion." - T.S. Eliot
Key Concepts: Objective Correlative, Heresy of Paraphrase, Close Reading, Autotelic Art
Analyze New CriticismMarx & Engels on literature, Lukács' Realism, Benjamin's Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Adorno & Horkheimer's Culture Industry.
Economic BASE → Cultural SUPERSTRUCTURE
(Material conditions determine consciousness)
Key Theorists: Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson
Study Marxist ApproachesFreud's Oedipus Complex, Lacan's Mirror Stage, Jung's Archetypes, Bloom's Anxiety of Influence, Gilbert & Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic.
"The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious." - Freud
Key Concepts: Uncanny, Repression, Symbolism, Phallogocentrism
Explore PsychoanalysisSaussure's Langue/Parole, Levi-Strauss' Myth Studies, Barthes' Death of the Author, Derrida's Deconstruction, Foucault's Discourse Analysis.
Key Terms: Différance, Binary Oppositions, Aporia, Intertextuality
Study StructuralismWoolf's A Room of One's Own, Showalter's Gynocriticism, Cixous' Écriture Féminine, Butler's Gender Trouble, Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet.
1. Women's writing (1960s)
2. Gynocriticism (1970s)
3. Gender as performance (1990s-)
Key Concepts: Patriarchy, Gaze Theory, Phallocentrism, Queer Theory
Analyze Feminist TheorySaid's Orientalism, Bhabha's Hybridity, Spivak's Subaltern, Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, Achebe's Colonialist Criticism.
"The empire writes back to the center." - Salman Rushdie
Key Concepts: Othering, Mimicry, Neo-colonialism, Diaspora
Study PostcolonialismIser's Implied Reader, Jauss' Horizon of Expectations, Fish's Interpretive Communities, Eco's Open Work, Riffaterre's Semiotics.
Text-Centered → Reader-Centered
(New Criticism) (Subjective Criticism)
Key Terms: Affective Fallacy, Interpretive Strategies, Concretization
Explore Reception TheoryWilliams' Cultural Materialism, Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Hall's Encoding/Decoding, Bennett's Outside Literature.
"The text is historical, and history is textual." - Louis Montrose
Key Concepts: Thick Description, Cultural Poetics, Power-Knowledge, Hegemony
Learn Cultural ApproachesLiterary Criticism Practice
Identify the Critical Approach
"This approach examines how economic and social power structures are reflected in literary texts."
Match the Critic to the Concept
Criticism Terminology
Which term describes T.S. Eliot's concept of artistic emotion made objective?
🚨 UGC NET LITERARY CRITICISM ALERT!
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