Top 200 Concepts of Literary Theory and Criticism
SECTION I: Classical Criticism (Plato to Longinus)
1.
Mimesis — Imitation or representation of life and nature in
art. Plato viewed it as a mere copy of a copy (art imitates the physical world,
which itself imitates the eternal Forms); Aristotle rehabilitated it as a
natural, creative human instinct that produces knowledge and pleasure. Background:
Central to Plato's Republic (Bks II, III, X) and Aristotle's Poetics.
2.
Form of the Good — Plato's concept of the highest,
unchanging reality behind all appearances. Physical objects are copies of
Forms, and art (which copies physical objects) is therefore "thrice
removed from truth." Background: Basis of Plato's banishment of
poets from his ideal state.
3.
Catharsis — The emotional purgation or purification of pity and
fear that tragedy produces in its audience, leaving them emotionally cleansed. Coined
by: Aristotle, Poetics. Background: Aristotle's answer to
Plato's charge that tragedy feeds harmful emotions.
4.
Hamartia — The tragic hero's error of judgment or flaw (not
necessarily a moral vice) that precipitates his downfall. Coined by:
Aristotle. Background: Often mistranslated as "tragic flaw";
originally meant "missing the mark," an error of knowledge.
5.
Peripeteia — A sudden reversal of fortune or circumstance for
the protagonist, ideally occurring through a logical, probable chain of events.
Coined by: Aristotle, Poetics. Example: Oedipus's messenger
scene.
6.
Anagnorisis — The critical moment of recognition when
a character moves from ignorance to knowledge, often coinciding with peripeteia
for maximum tragic effect. Coined by: Aristotle.
7.
Mythos (Plot) — The structured arrangement of incidents
in a tragedy. Aristotle ranked it as the "soul" of tragedy, more
important than character. Source: Poetics.
8.
Ethos (Character) — The moral element revealing a
character's choices and disposition; second in Aristotle's hierarchy of the six
elements of tragedy.
9.
Dianoia (Thought) — The intellectual content, themes, and
reasoning expressed by characters; third element in Aristotle's schema.
10.
Lexis (Diction) — The verbal expression and choice of
words/verse style used in a drama; fourth element in Aristotle's hierarchy.
11.
Melos (Melody/Song) — The musical/choral element of Greek
tragedy; fifth in Aristotle's ranking.
12.
Opsis (Spectacle) — The visual, theatrical apparatus of
performance (costume, scenery); ranked lowest by Aristotle as the least
artistic element, most dependent on stagecraft rather than poetic skill.
13.
Decorum — The neoclassical principle that style, diction, and
tone must suit the genre, subject, and social status of characters. Source:
Horace, Ars Poetica.
14.
Ut Pictura Poesis — "As is painting, so is
poetry" — Horace's dictum equating the visual and verbal arts, emphasizing
that poetry should be vivid and pictorial. Source: Horace, Ars
Poetica.
15.
The Sublime — The quality of grandeur, loftiness, and
overwhelming greatness in thought and expression that transports and elevates
the reader beyond ordinary persuasion. Coined/theorized by: Longinus, On
the Sublime (Peri Hypsous).
16.
Hypsos — Greek term for the "height" or rhetorical
elevation/ecstasy achieved through noble thought, strong emotion, and
figurative language. Source: Longinus.
SECTION II: Renaissance & Neo-Classical Criticism
17.
Sweetness and Light (Dulce et Utile) — The dual Horatian
purpose of literature: to delight (dulce) and instruct (utile). Background:
"Sweetness and light" phrase later popularized by Matthew Arnold in Culture
and Anarchy, borrowed from Swift.
18.
Right Poets — Sir Philip Sidney's term (in An
Apology for Poetry) for true poets who create imaginatively, "growing
in effect another nature," to teach and delight, as opposed to versifiers
who merely record fact.
19.
Historical/Legal Defense — Sidney's rhetorical strategy in An
Apology for Poetry of defending poetry against Puritan attacks (notably
Stephen Gosson's School of Abuse) using legal/oratorical argumentation,
claiming poetry is superior to history and philosophy.
20.
Three Unities — Neoclassical dramatic rules requiring
unity of Action, Time (24 hours), and Place (single location), rigidly derived
by French/Italian critics (Castelvetro) from a loose reading of Aristotle, who
only insisted on unity of action.
21.
Examen — John Dryden's method of detailed critical analysis
of a single work, most famously applied to Ben Jonson's The Silent Woman
in An Essay of Dramatic Poesy. Dryden is often called the "Father
of English Criticism."
22.
Humours Theory — Ben Jonson's comic framework where
characters are dominated by one of the four bodily humours (blood, phlegm,
choler, melancholy), producing exaggerated "type" characters (as in Every
Man in His Humour).
23.
Nature as Reason — Alexander Pope's neoclassical equation,
in An Essay on Criticism, of following Nature with following the ancient
rules ("Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem; / To copy Nature is
to copy them").
24.
Wit
— Neoclassical faculty combining quickness of intellect, apt imagination, and
elegant, decorous expression. Pope defined true wit as "Nature to
advantage dressed, / What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."
25.
Universal Truth / General Nature — Samuel Johnson's
standard (in Preface to Shakespeare) that great literature endures by
representing "general nature" — truths common to all humanity —
rather than particular, transient details.
26.
Biographical Criticism — Critical approach connecting an
author's life to the interpretation of their work, pioneered systematically by
Samuel Johnson in Lives of the Poets (1779–81).
SECTION III: Romantic & Victorian Criticism
27.
Language of Conversation — William Wordsworth's prescription,
in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800/1802), that poetry should use
"a selection of language really used by men," especially rustic and
humble life, rejecting artificial 18th-century poetic diction.
28.
Emotion Recollected in Tranquillity — Wordsworth's famous
definition of poetic composition: poetry originates as "spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings" but is composed only after the emotion is
recollected calmly. Source: Preface to Lyrical Ballads.
29.
Primary Imagination — Samuel Taylor Coleridge's concept of
the universal, unconscious human faculty by which all people perceive and
organize the external world. Source: Biographia Literaria, Ch.
XIII.
30.
Secondary Imagination — Coleridge's higher, conscious artistic
faculty that "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates" perceptions in order
to recreate and idealize them into new unified wholes — the faculty of the
poet.
31.
Fancy — Coleridge's lower faculty, a mode of memory that
merely mechanically aggregates and arranges fixed, ready-made images without
transforming them, unlike the organically unifying imagination.
32.
Willing Suspension of Disbelief — Coleridge's concept
describing how readers voluntarily set aside skepticism to accept fantastic or
supernatural elements in poetry (developed regarding his own Rime of the
Ancient Mariner).
33.
Negative Capability — John Keats's ideal of the poet's
capacity "of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any
irritable reaching after fact and reason." Source: Letter to George
and Tom Keats, 1817.
34.
Egotistical Sublime — Keats's critical term (in a letter)
describing Wordsworth's poetry as one where the poet's own personality
dominates and colours everything, contrasted with the self-effacing
"camelion Poet."
35.
Chameleon Poet — Keats's ideal poet-type who has
"no self" and no fixed identity, instead taking delight in inhabiting
and imagining all other characters and existences (contrasted with the
Wordsworthian "egotistical sublime").
36.
Poetry as Criticism of Life — Matthew Arnold's formulation (in The
Study of Poetry) that the greatness of poetry lies in its high truth and
seriousness applied to life, judged under the laws of poetic truth and beauty.
37.
Touchstone Method — Arnold's comparative critical technique
of using short, indisputably excellent lines from classic poets (Homer, Dante,
Shakespeare, Milton) as touchstones to test and judge the quality of other
poetry.
38.
Philistines — Arnold's term (in Culture and
Anarchy) for the materialistic, narrow-minded English middle class,
contrasted with "Barbarians" (aristocracy) and "Populace"
(working class).
39.
Art for Art's Sake (L'art pour l'art) — Aesthetic doctrine
that art needs no moral, social, or didactic justification and exists purely
for beauty's sake. Defended by: Walter Pater (Studies in the History
of the Renaissance, esp. the "Conclusion") and Oscar Wilde;
originally a French Aesthetic Movement slogan (Théophile Gautier).
SECTION IV: Modernism & New Criticism
40.
Objective Correlative — T.S. Eliot's concept that emotion in
art is best evoked not by direct statement but through "a set of objects,
a situation, a chain of events" that objectively correspond to and evoke
that emotion. Source: "Hamlet and His Problems" (1919).
41.
Dissociation of Sensibility — Eliot's term for the historical
split (which he located in the 17th century after the Metaphysicals) between
thought and feeling in English poetry, where intellect and emotion became
separated.
42.
Unification of Sensibility — The fusion of thought and feeling
that Eliot praised in the Metaphysical poets (Donne), who could "feel
their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose."
43.
Impersonality of Poetry — Eliot's theory that poetic
creation is "not the expression of personality but an escape from
personality," requiring the poet's continual self-sacrifice/extinction of
ego. Source: "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919).
44.
Practical Criticism — I.A. Richards's pedagogical/critical
method of analyzing poems stripped of author name, date, and context, to train
objective close reading and expose readers' misreadings. Source: Practical
Criticism (1929).
45.
Intentional Fallacy — The error of judging or interpreting a
literary work based on the author's presumed intention rather than the text
itself. Coined by: W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley (1946).
46.
Affective Fallacy — The error of judging a work based on
its emotional effects on the reader rather than its internal qualities. Coined
by: Wimsatt and Beardsley (1949).
47.
Close Reading — The New Critical methodology of minute,
detailed textual analysis of a work's language, imagery, and structure,
independent of biographical or historical context.
48.
Heresy of Paraphrase — Cleanth Brooks's principle that a
poem's meaning is inseparable from its exact words, form, and structure — it
cannot be restated in different words without loss or distortion. Source:
The Well Wrought Urn (1947).
49.
Irony as a Principle of Structure — Brooks's idea that
poetic meaning arises from the tension and interplay of opposing contexts
within a poem, each qualifying and undercutting the others.
50.
Paradox — A statement that appears self-contradictory yet
reveals a deeper truth; New Critics (esp. Brooks) saw paradox as fundamental to
poetic language.
51.
Ambiguity (Seven Types) — William Empson's theory, in Seven
Types of Ambiguity (1930), cataloguing seven distinct kinds of multiple
meaning and linguistic complexity in verse.
52.
Autotelic Text — The New Critical view of a literary
work as a self-contained, self-sufficient verbal artifact ("Verbal
Icon," per Wimsatt) whose meaning is complete within itself, independent
of author or reader.
53.
Tension — Allen Tate's term for the total unified meaning of
a poem, derived by combining "extension" (literal, denotative
meaning) and "intension" (figurative, connotative meaning). Source:
"Tension in Poetry" (1938).
SECTION V: Formalism & Structuralism
54.
Defamiliarization (Ostranenie) — The technique of
presenting familiar objects/experiences in unfamiliar ways to renew perception
and prolong the difficulty and length of aesthetic experience. Coined by:
Viktor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique" (1917), Russian Formalism.
55.
Fabula — The raw chronological sequence of events in a
narrative (the "story" in its natural order), as distinguished from syuzhet.
Source: Russian Formalism.
56.
Syuzhet — The artistic arrangement/plotting of events as
actually presented in the narrative discourse (may reorder, compress, or expand
the fabula).
57.
Literariness — The specific set of linguistic and
formal devices that distinguish literary language from ordinary language,
making a text "literary." Coined by: Roman Jakobson.
58.
Axis of Selection (Metaphor) — Jakobson's linguistic
axis of paradigmatic substitution based on similarity; associated with
poetry/lyric.
59.
Axis of Combination (Metonymy) — Jakobson's syntagmatic
axis based on contiguity/context; associated with prose/narrative.
60.
Sign
— Ferdinand de Saussure's basic unit of meaning, composed of the signifier and
the signified, joined arbitrarily. Source: Course in General
Linguistics (1916, posthumous).
61.
Signifier — The physical form of the sign — the sound-image or
written mark of a word.
62.
Signified — The mental concept or idea that the signifier
evokes.
63.
Langue — Saussure's term for language as an abstract,
systematic, collective structure/system of rules shared by a speech community.
64.
Parole — Saussure's term for individual, concrete speech
acts/utterances — actual language use by speakers.
65.
Mytheme — Claude Lévi-Strauss's term for the smallest
irreducible structural unit of a myth, which gains meaning only in
relation/opposition to other mythemes. Source: structural anthropology.
66.
Death of the Author — Roland Barthes's declaration that a
text's meaning is not fixed by authorial intention but is
produced/"born" in the act of reading. Source: essay "The
Death of the Author" (1967).
67.
Readerly Text (Texte Lisible) — Barthes's term for a
conventional, "closed" text that positions the reader as a passive
consumer of a fixed, singular meaning. Source: S/Z (1970).
68.
Writerly Text (Texte Scriptible) — Barthes's term for an
open, plural text that invites the reader into active production of multiple
meanings.
SECTION VI: Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction &
Psychoanalysis
69.
Différance — Jacques Derrida's neologism (a pun on the French
"differ" and "defer") describing how meaning is never fixed
but is endlessly deferred and produced through differences between signs. Source:
"Différance" (1968), Of Grammatology (1967).
70.
Logocentrism — Derrida's term for the Western
philosophical tradition's privileging of speech, presence, and a fixed
origin/truth (logos) over writing.
71.
Trace — Derrida's concept that every sign carries within it
the "trace" of what it is not (its absent opposites), undermining any
notion of pure, self-present meaning.
72.
Aporia — An irresolvable internal contradiction or logical
impasse in a text where its own rhetoric undermines its explicit argument — the
point deconstruction targets.
73.
Decentered Universe / Decentering of Structure
— Derrida's critique (in "Structure, Sign, and Play," 1966) showing
that the "center" that supposedly stabilizes any structure is itself
an unstable, constructed illusion.
74.
Discourse — Michel Foucault's term for systems of statements,
knowledge, and institutional practice that produce and regulate what counts as
"truth" and structure power relations. Source: The
Archaeology of Knowledge (1969).
75.
Episteme — Foucault's term for the underlying, often
unconscious, historical framework of knowledge and assumptions that governs
what can be thought/known in a given era. Source: The Order of Things
(1966).
76.
Panopticism — Foucault's metaphor (drawn from
Bentham's Panopticon prison design) for modern disciplinary power, whereby
subjects, aware of possible surveillance, internalize self-discipline. Source:
Discipline and Punish (1975).
77.
Mirror Stage — Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic concept
of the developmental phase (around 6–18 months) when an infant identifies with
its own mirror reflection, forming an illusory, unified sense of
"self"/ego (the "Ideal-I").
78.
The Symbolic Order — Lacan's register governed by language,
law, and social codes (the "Name-of-the-Father"), which the subject
enters upon acquiring language, marking loss of the imaginary unity.
79.
The Imaginary Order — Lacan's pre-linguistic register of
images, wholeness, and narcissistic identification, associated with the mirror
stage.
80.
The Real — Lacan's third register: the unrepresentable,
traumatic realm that resists symbolization and lies entirely outside language.
81.
Phallocentrism — Critical term for the structural
privileging of the phallus/masculine viewpoint as the central organizing
principle of language and culture (critiqued especially by French feminists).
SECTION VII: Marxism, Cultural Studies & New Historicism
82.
Base
— In Marxist theory, the economic foundation of society — the forces and
relations of production. Source: Karl Marx.
83.
Superstructure — The ideological institutions (law,
politics, religion, art, culture) that Marx argued are conditioned/determined
by the economic base.
84.
Hegemony — Antonio Gramsci's concept of ruling-class
domination achieved through cultural consent and ideological leadership rather
than coercive force alone. Source: Prison Notebooks.
85.
Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) — Louis Althusser's term
for institutions (schools, media, church, family) that reproduce and
disseminate dominant ideology through consent, as distinct from repressive
state apparatuses (police, army). Source: "Ideology and Ideological
State Apparatuses" (1970).
86.
Interpellation — Althusser's concept describing how
ideology "hails" or addresses individuals (e.g., "Hey, you
there!"), constituting them as ideological subjects who recognize/accept
that address.
87.
Cultural Materialism — British Marxist-influenced critical
movement (associated with Raymond Williams and, in literary studies, Jonathan
Dollimore/Alan Sinfield) analyzing texts within their material historical and
political conditions of production.
88.
Textuality of History — Louis Montrose's New Historicist
formulation that our access to history is always mediated through texts and
textual traces — we know the past only through its textualized remains.
89.
Historicity of Texts — Complementary New Historicist tenet
that every text is itself embedded in, and shaped by, the specific historical
power structures/discourses of its time.
90.
Thick Description — Clifford Geertz's anthropological
method of richly contextualized cultural interpretation, adapted by New
Historicists (esp. Stephen Greenblatt) to read literary and cultural
"texts" together.
SECTION VIII: Feminism, Postcolonialism & Reader-Response
91.
Gynocriticism — Elaine Showalter's framework for the
study of women's writing as a distinct literary tradition, focused on female
experience and creativity rather than on women as readers of male texts. Source:
A Literature of Their Own (1977), "Toward a Feminist Poetics"
(1979).
92.
Écriture Féminine — French feminist concept of a
distinctively feminine, bodily mode of writing that disrupts and subverts
patriarchal, phallogocentric language/syntax. Associated with: Hélène
Cixous ("The Laugh of the Medusa," 1975), Luce Irigaray.
93.
Performativity — Judith Butler's theory that gender is
not an innate essence but a repeated, stylized set of acts/performances that
produce the illusion of a stable gendered identity. Source: Gender
Trouble (1990).
94.
Orientalism — Edward Said's critique of how Western
scholarship, art, and discourse constructed a stereotyped, exoticized, and
inferior image of "the East" to justify colonial domination. Source:
Orientalism (1978).
95.
Subaltern — Term (from Gramsci) for socially, politically, and
geographically marginalized groups outside hegemonic power structures, adapted
by Gayatri Spivak to describe colonized/marginalized populations, especially
women, largely erased from historical record. Key essay: "Can the
Subaltern Speak?" (1988).
96.
Mimicry — Homi Bhabha's concept describing how colonized
subjects imitate the colonizer's culture/language, producing an ambivalent copy
that is "almost the same, but not quite" — subtly subversive of
colonial authority. Source: The Location of Culture (1994).
97.
Hybridity — Bhabha's concept of the "third space"
produced when colonizer and colonized cultures interact, generating new,
ambivalent, mixed identities that destabilize essentialist notions of pure
culture.
98.
Interpretive Communities — Stanley Fish's concept that
meaning is not inherent in the text or wholly subjective in the reader, but is
produced by shared interpretive strategies/conventions of a community of
readers. Source: Is There a Text in This Class? (1980).
99.
Implied Reader — Wolfgang Iser's concept of the
hypothetical reader-role constructed and anticipated by the structure and gaps
of the text itself. Source: The Implied Reader (1974), The Act
of Reading (1976); Iser is central to German Reception Theory (Constance
School).
100.
Horizon of Expectations — Hans Robert Jauss's concept
describing the set of cultural, moral, and literary expectations/criteria that
readers of a given historical period bring to a text, against which the text's
reception is judged. Source: Toward an Aesthetic of Reception
(1970); also a Constance School reception theorist.
SECTION IX: Structuralism & Narratology
101.
Diegesis — The narrated fictional world of a story, and the
"telling" mode of narration, as opposed to mimesis
(showing/enactment). Distinction traced to Plato's Republic, revived in
narratology.
102.
Heterodiegetic Narrator — Gérard Genette's term for a
narrator absent from the story world they narrate (a third-person,
non-participant narrator). Source: Narrative Discourse (1972).
103.
Homodiegetic Narrator — Genette's term for a narrator who is
also a character within the story being told (includes the
"autodiegetic" narrator who is the protagonist).
104.
Chronotope — Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the intrinsic fusion
of temporal and spatial relationships within literary narrative — how time
"thickens" and space becomes charged with historical meaning. Source:
"Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel."
105.
Carnivalesque — Bakhtin's concept of literary
depictions of carnival-like inversion, where social hierarchies, official
norms, and taboos are temporarily suspended, mocked, or overturned. Source:
Rabelais and His World (1965).
106.
Heteroglossia — Bakhtin's term for the coexistence and
interplay of multiple social dialects, voices, and registers within a single
novelistic text, which the novel (unlike poetry) is uniquely able to
orchestrate.
SECTION X: Psychoanalysis & Post-Structuralism
107.
Abjection — Julia Kristeva's concept of the horror/repulsion
experienced when the boundary between self and other (or self and
body/waste/corpse) breaks down. Source: Powers of Horror (1980).
108.
Jouissance — French term for an intense, excessive
pleasure/bliss that exceeds and disrupts ordinary satisfaction and
signification; used by Lacan (psychoanalysis) and Barthes (The Pleasure of
the Text, 1973) to describe radical textual pleasure.
109.
Simulacra — Jean Baudrillard's concept of copies/images that no
longer refer to any original reality, replacing the real with a
self-referential "hyperreal." Source: Simulacra and
Simulation (1981).
110.
Rhizome — Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's model of a
non-hierarchical, horizontally networked structure of knowledge/thought,
connecting any point to any other, opposed to hierarchical "tree"
(arborescent) models. Source: A Thousand Plateaus (1980).
111.
Phallogocentrism — Derrida's composite term merging phallocentrism
(privileging of the masculine) and logocentrism (privileging of
speech/presence) to critique the joint linguistic-patriarchal foundation of
Western thought.
SECTION XI: Marxism & Cultural Studies
112.
Structure of Feeling — Raymond Williams's concept for the
shared, lived, but not-yet-fully-articulated values and experiential qualities
characteristic of a particular generation or historical moment. Source: Marxism
and Literature (1977).
113.
Circuit of Culture — Stuart Hall's model showing that any
cultural artifact/meaning must be traced through five interlinked moments:
production, representation, consumption, regulation, and identity.
114.
Encoding/Decoding — Stuart Hall's model of mass
communication whereby media producers "encode" messages with a
preferred meaning, but audiences may "decode" them via dominant,
negotiated, or oppositional readings. Source:
"Encoding/Decoding" (1973).
115.
Political Unconscious — Fredric Jameson's concept that all
narratives/literary texts are structured, at a deep level, by repressed
historical and class contradictions that criticism must uncover. Source:
The Political Unconscious (1981).
116.
Culture Industry — Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's
critique of how capitalist mass media standardizes and commodifies culture,
turning art into passive, formulaic entertainment that pacifies consumers. Source:
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).
SECTION XII: Eco-Criticism & Queer Theory
117.
Anthropocentrism — The worldview/philosophical stance
placing human beings and human interests at the center of existence, a key
target of eco-critical critique.
118.
Pathetic Fallacy — John Ruskin's term (coined critically,
somewhat pejoratively) for the literary device of attributing human emotions to
inanimate nature; now central to eco-critical analysis of nature writing. Source:
Modern Painters (1856).
119.
Environmental Racism — The disproportionate exposure of
marginalized racial/economic communities and Global South nations to
environmental hazards, pollution, and ecological degradation — a key concept in
eco-criticism's intersection with postcolonial/environmental justice studies.
120.
Heteronormativity — The institutionalized social
assumption/structure that treats heterosexuality as the default, natural, and
privileged sexual orientation. Coined/popularized by: Michael Warner.
121.
Homosocial Desire — Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's term for
non-sexual bonds between men, often structured through the mediating exchange
or exploitation of women (linked to "erotic triangles"). Source:
Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985).
SECTION XIII: Postcolonialism & Diaspora
122.
Strategic Essentialism — Gayatri Spivak's idea that
marginalized/subaltern groups may temporarily adopt a unified group identity as
a strategic, provisional political tool, even while acknowledging internal
difference.
123.
Contrapuntal Reading — Edward Said's method of reading
colonial/canonical texts by simultaneously attending to what is explicitly
stated and what is silenced, excluded, or colonially implicated. Source:
Culture and Imperialism (1993).
124.
Imperial Eyes — Mary Louise Pratt's concept describing
how European travel writing constructed both the colonizing
"seeing-man" subject and the dominated colonial landscape/peoples. Source:
Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992).
125.
Contact Zone — Pratt's term for social spaces where
culturally disparate peoples meet and interact, typically within highly
asymmetrical relations of power (colonialism, slavery), producing improvisation
and transculturation.
SECTION XIV: Genre, Narrative Devices & Related
Classical/Modern Concepts
126.
Verisimilitude — The quality of a fictional work
appearing true-to-life or plausible; a key concern of both classical
(Aristotelian probability) and realist criticism.
127.
Deus ex Machina — "God from the machine" — a
contrived plot device resolving a story through an improbable, external
intervention. Background: From ancient Greek theatrical stage machinery
lowering actors playing gods; criticized by Aristotle in the Poetics.
128.
Didacticism — Literature whose primary purpose is
moral or intellectual instruction rather than aesthetic pleasure; the term is
often used pejoratively in criticism valuing art's autonomy.
129.
Allegory — A narrative in which characters, events, and
settings systematically represent abstract ideas or moral/political meanings
beyond the literal level (e.g., Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Bunyan's The
Pilgrim's Progress).
130.
Archetype — A recurring symbol, character type, or narrative
pattern (hero, quest, death-rebirth) found across cultures and myths, believed
to originate from the collective unconscious. Associated with: Carl Jung
(psychology); literary application by: Northrop Frye.
131.
Monomyth (The Hero's Journey) — Joseph Campbell's
theory that a single archetypal narrative pattern of
departure–initiation–return underlies heroic myths across cultures. Source:
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949).
132.
Anatomy of Criticism / Modes — Northrop Frye's
systematic theory classifying literature into historical "modes"
(myth, romance, high mimetic, low mimetic, ironic) based on the hero's power
relative to us and the environment. Source: Anatomy of Criticism
(1957).
133.
Displacement (Frye) — Frye's term for the process by which
mythic archetypal patterns are adapted and made more
"realistic"/plausible as literature moves toward the ironic mode.
134.
Implied Author — Wayne C. Booth's concept of the
authorial persona/set of values inferable from a text, distinct from the real
biographical author and from any narrator. Source: The Rhetoric of
Fiction (1961).
135.
Unreliable Narrator — Booth's term for a narrator whose
account of events is not to be trusted, due to bias, limited knowledge,
madness, or deliberate deception; also introduced in The Rhetoric of Fiction.
136.
Free Indirect Discourse — A narrative technique blending a
character's voice/perspective with the third-person narrator's voice, without
direct quotation marks or explicit tags — common in Austen, Flaubert, Woolf.
137.
Stream of Consciousness — A narrative technique attempting
to represent the continuous, unstructured flow of a character's thoughts and
perceptions; associated with Modernist fiction (Woolf, Joyce). Term coined
by: psychologist William James.
138.
Epiphany — A sudden moment of spiritual or psychological
revelation/insight experienced by a character, central to James Joyce's short
fiction (Dubliners) and aesthetic theory.
139.
Verfremdungseffekt (Alienation/Estrangement Effect)
— Bertolt Brecht's technique of deliberately breaking theatrical illusion to
prevent emotional identification, provoking critical, political reflection in
the audience instead.
140.
Epic Theatre — Brecht's model of drama designed to be
non-illusionistic, episodic, and didactic, encouraging audience detachment and
critical judgment rather than cathartic emotional absorption (opposed to
Aristotelian drama).
141.
Theatre of the Absurd — Dramatic movement (Beckett, Ionesco)
depicting a meaningless, illogical universe through fragmented plots and
language, reflecting existentialist philosophy. Term coined by: critic
Martin Esslin (1961).
142.
Existentialism — Philosophical movement emphasizing
individual freedom, choice, and the confrontation with a meaningless/absurd
universe, deeply influencing 20th-century literature. Key figure:
Jean-Paul Sartre.
143.
Bad Faith (Mauvaise Foi) — Sartre's concept of self-deception
whereby individuals deny their own freedom and responsibility by conforming to
fixed roles or external determinism.
144.
Phenomenology — Philosophical method of describing
structures of consciousness and experience "as they present
themselves," influencing reader-response and Geneva School criticism. Founder:
Edmund Husserl.
145.
Hermeneutics — The theory and methodology of
interpretation, especially of texts; central to reader-response and reception
theory. Modern development: Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey.
146.
Hermeneutic Circle — The idea that understanding a text
requires movement between part and whole — understanding the parts depends on
the whole, and vice versa, in an ongoing interpretive spiral. Associated
with: Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer.
147.
Fusion of Horizons — Hans-Georg Gadamer's concept describing
how interpretation occurs through a dialogic merging of the reader's own
historical "horizon" of understanding with that of the text. Source:
Truth and Method (1960).
148.
Transactional Theory of Reading — Louise Rosenblatt's
reader-response theory describing reading as a dynamic transaction between
reader and text, each shaping the other. Source: Literature as
Exploration (1938).
149.
Aesthetic vs. Efferent Reading — Rosenblatt's
distinction between reading for the lived, felt experience of the text
(aesthetic) versus reading merely to extract/carry away information (efferent).
150.
Verbal Icon — W.K. Wimsatt's term (title of his 1954
essay collection) describing the poem as a self-contained, autonomous verbal
object whose meaning is inseparable from its concrete form.
SECTION XV: Structuralism, Semiotics & Speech-Act Theory
151.
Binary Opposition — The structuralist principle (from
Saussure, developed by Lévi-Strauss) that meaning is generated through paired
oppositions (e.g., nature/culture, raw/cooked, light/dark) rather than positive
terms alone.
152.
Bricolage — Lévi-Strauss's concept of "mythical
thought" as a form of intellectual tinkering, assembling new
structures/meanings from a finite set of pre-existing cultural materials, as a
"bricoleur" would with tools at hand.
153.
Grand Narrative / Metanarrative — Jean-François
Lyotard's term for totalizing, legitimizing stories (e.g., Marxism,
Enlightenment progress) that claim universal historical/philosophical truth;
postmodernism is defined by "incredulity toward metanarratives." Source:
The Postmodern Condition (1979).
154.
Postmodern Condition — Lyotard's diagnosis of contemporary
culture/knowledge as fragmented, skeptical of grand narratives, and dominated
by localized, plural "language games."
155.
Pastiche — Fredric Jameson's term for a postmodern imitation
of style that, unlike parody, lacks satirical intent or a stable norm to mock —
a "blank," neutral imitation reflecting the loss of historical depth.
Source: Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(1991).
156.
Hyperreality — Jean Baudrillard's concept describing a
condition in which simulations/media representations become more
"real" than reality itself, collapsing the distinction between the
two.
157.
Intertextuality — The concept that every text is
constructed from a mosaic of other texts, quotations, and cultural codes, and
can only be understood in relation to this network. Coined by: Julia
Kristeva (1966), building on Bakhtin's dialogism.
158.
Semiotics — The general study of signs and sign systems,
encompassing both linguistic and non-linguistic modes of meaning-making. Founders:
Ferdinand de Saussure (semiology) and Charles Sanders Peirce (semiotics),
working independently.
159.
Peirce's Triad: Icon, Index, Symbol — Charles Sanders
Peirce's threefold classification of signs: Icon (resembles its object, e.g., a
portrait), Index (causally/physically linked, e.g., smoke for fire), Symbol
(arbitrary, conventional link, e.g., words).
160.
Speech Act Theory — J.L. Austin's theory that utterances
can perform actions, not merely describe/state facts. Source: How to
Do Things with Words (1962).
161.
Performative Utterance — Austin's term for statements that
themselves enact the action they describe (e.g., "I now pronounce you
married"), as opposed to "constative" statements that merely
describe.
162.
Illocutionary / Perlocutionary Act — Austin's (and John
Searle's) distinction between the illocutionary force of an utterance (what it
does in saying, e.g., promising) and its perlocutionary effect (the actual
effect produced on the hearer, e.g., persuading).
163.
Dialogism — Mikhail Bakhtin's concept that all
language/utterance is inherently dialogic, shaped by and responsive to other
voices and social contexts — meaning is never monologic or self-contained.
164.
Polyphony — Bakhtin's term for the coexistence of multiple,
independent, and equally valid character-voices/consciousnesses within a novel,
without being subordinated to the author's single controlling voice;
exemplified for Bakhtin by Dostoevsky. Source: Problems of
Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929).
165.
Grotesque Realism — Bakhtin's concept (from Rabelais and
His World) of a bodily, exaggerated, carnivalesque aesthetic celebrating
the "lower bodily stratum" (eating, excretion, sex, birth) to invert
official hierarchies.
SECTION XVI: New Historicism, Frankfurt School & Cultural
Theory
166.
Self-Fashioning — Stephen Greenblatt's New Historicist
concept describing how Renaissance individuals (and literary characters)
consciously constructed their identities according to socially available
cultural codes. Source: Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980).
167.
Poetics of Culture — Greenblatt's description of the New
Historicist method of reading literary texts alongside non-literary cultural
documents as part of a shared circulation of social energy.
168.
Anxiety of Influence — Harold Bloom's theory that poets are
driven by an Oedipal anxiety/struggle against the overwhelming influence of
strong poetic predecessors, leading them to creatively "misread"
precursors. Source: The Anxiety of Influence (1973).
169.
Misprision (Misreading) — Bloom's term for the deliberate,
creative misreading through which a later poet distorts a precursor's work in
order to clear imaginative space for original work.
170.
Canon Formation — The critical process (and object of
critique) by which certain texts/authors come to be regarded as authoritative,
"great," and worthy of study, often interrogated by feminist,
postcolonial, and cultural critics as ideologically constructed.
171.
Great Chain of Being — The medieval/Renaissance cosmological
concept of a strict hierarchical order of all creation from God down to
inanimate matter, often invoked as historical background to Renaissance
literature (e.g., Shakespeare's history plays).
172.
Negative Dialectics — Theodor Adorno's philosophical method
resisting neat conceptual synthesis, insisting on preserving contradiction and
non-identity between concept and object. Source: Negative Dialectics
(1966).
173.
Public Sphere — Jürgen Habermas's concept of a
discursive arena of civil society (coffeehouses, press, salons) where private
individuals could engage in rational-critical public debate, historically
enabling democratic culture. Source: The Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere (1962).
174.
Communicative Action — Habermas's theory of rational,
consensus-oriented dialogue/action grounded in mutual understanding rather than
strategic self-interest.
SECTION XVII: Eco-Criticism
175.
Deep Ecology — A radical environmental philosophy
asserting the intrinsic value of all living beings regardless of their
usefulness to humans, calling for fundamental shifts in human
self-understanding. Coined by: Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (1973).
176.
Bioregionalism — An eco-critical/environmental concept
advocating that human communities organize socially, culturally, and
economically around natural ecological regions ("bioregions") rather
than political boundaries.
177.
Ecofeminism — Theoretical movement linking the
domination of women and the domination/exploitation of nature under patriarchal
systems, arguing both must be addressed together.
SECTION XVIII: Queer Theory & Gender Studies
178.
Camp
— Susan Sontag's concept of a sensibility/aesthetic taste valuing artifice,
exaggeration, and stylization, often associated with queer culture. Source:
"Notes on Camp" (1964).
179.
Against Interpretation — Sontag's polemical argument (title
essay, 1964) that criticism's obsessive search for hidden "meaning"
diminishes direct sensory/aesthetic engagement with art; she called for an
"erotics of art" instead of a hermeneutics.
180.
Compulsory Heterosexuality — Adrienne Rich's concept describing
heterosexuality as an institutionalized, enforced social norm rather than a
natural default, which suppresses alternative female bonds/desires. Source:
"Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (1980).
181.
Lesbian Continuum — Rich's concept describing a broad range
of woman-identified experience and bonding (not necessarily genitally sexual)
across history, resisting narrow definitions of lesbian identity.
182.
Queer Theory — A theoretical field (emerging early
1990s, drawing on Foucault, Butler, Sedgwick) that challenges fixed categories
of sexuality and gender identity, viewing them as socially constructed and
unstable rather than essential/natural.
SECTION XIX: Feminist Criticism
183.
The Madwoman in the Attic — Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's
influential concept/book title describing the recurring "madwoman"
figure (e.g., Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre) in women's writing as a
symbolic double representing repressed female rage against patriarchal
constraint. Source: The Madwoman in the Attic (1979).
184.
Anxiety of Authorship — Gilbert and Gubar's revision of Bloom's
"anxiety of influence" for women writers, who historically faced
anxiety not over rivaling precursors but over the very legitimacy of female
authorship within a male literary tradition.
185.
The Angel in the House — Coventry Patmore's Victorian poem
(1854) idealizing self-sacrificing domestic femininity; Virginia Woolf's essay
"Professions for Women" (1931) famously describes the necessity of
"killing" this internalized ideal to write freely.
186.
Androgynous Mind — Virginia Woolf's concept, in A Room
of One's Own (1929), of an ideal creative mind that transcends and
harmoniously blends masculine and feminine faculties, free from gendered
self-consciousness.
187.
The Second Sex / Woman as "Other" — Simone de
Beauvoir's foundational feminist argument that woman has been historically
constructed as the deviant "Other" against a normative male
"Self" ("One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman"). Source:
The Second Sex (1949).
SECTION XX: Postcolonial, Diaspora & Contemporary Theory
188.
Negritude — A literary/ideological movement affirming and
celebrating Black African identity, culture, and consciousness against colonial
denigration. Founders: Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Léon Damas
(1930s Paris).
189.
Unhomeliness (Unheimlich) — Homi Bhabha's postcolonial
adaptation of Freud's concept of the "uncanny" to describe the
disorienting condition of postcolonial/diasporic subjects who feel
simultaneously "at home" and estranged, unable to fully belong to
either colonizer's or native culture.
190.
Third Space — Bhabha's concept of the ambivalent,
in-between cultural space produced by colonial encounter/hybridity, from which
new, unpredictable forms of cultural meaning and identity can emerge.
191.
Magical Realism — A narrative mode blending realistic
depiction with matter-of-fact incorporation of fantastic/magical elements,
often associated with postcolonial and Latin American fiction (GarcÃa Márquez,
Rushdie) as a strategy to challenge Western rationalist narrative norms.
192.
Diaspora Studies — Field examining the dispersal,
displacement, and cultural identity-formation of populations living outside
their ancestral homelands, central to postcolonial literary criticism.
193.
Trauma Theory — Critical framework (drawing on
psychoanalysis) examining how literature represents/enacts the structure of
traumatic memory — its belatedness, repetition, and resistance to direct
narration. Key figure: Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience (1996).
194.
Testimonio — A first-person narrative genre, often from Latin
American contexts, giving witness/testimony to collective political oppression
or trauma, blurring literature and historical documentation.
SECTION XXI: Posthumanism, Affect & Contemporary Cultural
Theory
195.
Affect Theory — A body of theory (drawing on Spinoza,
Deleuze, Sylvan Tomkins) examining pre-cognitive, bodily intensities and
emotional forces in texts and culture, distinct from named/categorized
"emotion." Key figures: Brian Massumi, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
196.
Posthumanism — Theoretical movement critiquing
humanism's privileging of a unified, rational human subject, exploring instead
human entanglement with technology, animals, and non-human systems.
197.
A Cyborg Manifesto — Donna Haraway's influential essay
(1985) using the cyborg (hybrid of organism and machine) as an ironic political
myth to dismantle rigid boundaries between human/machine, male/female, and
nature/culture.
198.
Disability Studies — Critical field examining disability as
a social/cultural construction (rather than purely medical deficit) and
analyzing its representation in literature and culture; critiques
"ableism" as a structuring norm.
199.
Cultural Capital — Pierre Bourdieu's concept of
non-financial social assets (education, taste, manners, credentials) that
confer social status and reproduce class hierarchy, closely tied to habitus
(internalized dispositions) and field (structured social arenas). Source:
Distinction (1979).
200.
Symbolic Violence — Bourdieu's concept describing the
subtle, often invisible imposition of dominant cultural norms/values as
"natural" or "common sense," through which social
inequality is legitimized and reproduced without overt coercion.
Top 200 Concepts of Literary Theory and Criticism
SECTION I: Classical Criticism (Plato to Longinus)
1.
Mimesis — Imitation or representation of life and nature in
art. Plato viewed it as a mere copy of a copy (art imitates the physical world,
which itself imitates the eternal Forms); Aristotle rehabilitated it as a
natural, creative human instinct that produces knowledge and pleasure. Background:
Central to Plato's Republic (Bks II, III, X) and Aristotle's Poetics.
2.
Form of the Good — Plato's concept of the highest,
unchanging reality behind all appearances. Physical objects are copies of
Forms, and art (which copies physical objects) is therefore "thrice
removed from truth." Background: Basis of Plato's banishment of
poets from his ideal state.
3.
Catharsis — The emotional purgation or purification of pity and
fear that tragedy produces in its audience, leaving them emotionally cleansed. Coined
by: Aristotle, Poetics. Background: Aristotle's answer to
Plato's charge that tragedy feeds harmful emotions.
4.
Hamartia — The tragic hero's error of judgment or flaw (not
necessarily a moral vice) that precipitates his downfall. Coined by:
Aristotle. Background: Often mistranslated as "tragic flaw";
originally meant "missing the mark," an error of knowledge.
5.
Peripeteia — A sudden reversal of fortune or circumstance for
the protagonist, ideally occurring through a logical, probable chain of events.
Coined by: Aristotle, Poetics. Example: Oedipus's messenger
scene.
6.
Anagnorisis — The critical moment of recognition when
a character moves from ignorance to knowledge, often coinciding with peripeteia
for maximum tragic effect. Coined by: Aristotle.
7.
Mythos (Plot) — The structured arrangement of incidents
in a tragedy. Aristotle ranked it as the "soul" of tragedy, more
important than character. Source: Poetics.
8.
Ethos (Character) — The moral element revealing a
character's choices and disposition; second in Aristotle's hierarchy of the six
elements of tragedy.
9.
Dianoia (Thought) — The intellectual content, themes, and
reasoning expressed by characters; third element in Aristotle's schema.
10.
Lexis (Diction) — The verbal expression and choice of
words/verse style used in a drama; fourth element in Aristotle's hierarchy.
11.
Melos (Melody/Song) — The musical/choral element of Greek
tragedy; fifth in Aristotle's ranking.
12.
Opsis (Spectacle) — The visual, theatrical apparatus of
performance (costume, scenery); ranked lowest by Aristotle as the least
artistic element, most dependent on stagecraft rather than poetic skill.
13.
Decorum — The neoclassical principle that style, diction, and
tone must suit the genre, subject, and social status of characters. Source:
Horace, Ars Poetica.
14.
Ut Pictura Poesis — "As is painting, so is
poetry" — Horace's dictum equating the visual and verbal arts, emphasizing
that poetry should be vivid and pictorial. Source: Horace, Ars
Poetica.
15.
The Sublime — The quality of grandeur, loftiness, and
overwhelming greatness in thought and expression that transports and elevates
the reader beyond ordinary persuasion. Coined/theorized by: Longinus, On
the Sublime (Peri Hypsous).
16.
Hypsos — Greek term for the "height" or rhetorical
elevation/ecstasy achieved through noble thought, strong emotion, and
figurative language. Source: Longinus.
SECTION II: Renaissance & Neo-Classical Criticism
17.
Sweetness and Light (Dulce et Utile) — The dual Horatian
purpose of literature: to delight (dulce) and instruct (utile). Background:
"Sweetness and light" phrase later popularized by Matthew Arnold in Culture
and Anarchy, borrowed from Swift.
18.
Right Poets — Sir Philip Sidney's term (in An
Apology for Poetry) for true poets who create imaginatively, "growing
in effect another nature," to teach and delight, as opposed to versifiers
who merely record fact.
19.
Historical/Legal Defense — Sidney's rhetorical strategy in An
Apology for Poetry of defending poetry against Puritan attacks (notably
Stephen Gosson's School of Abuse) using legal/oratorical argumentation,
claiming poetry is superior to history and philosophy.
20.
Three Unities — Neoclassical dramatic rules requiring
unity of Action, Time (24 hours), and Place (single location), rigidly derived
by French/Italian critics (Castelvetro) from a loose reading of Aristotle, who
only insisted on unity of action.
21.
Examen — John Dryden's method of detailed critical analysis
of a single work, most famously applied to Ben Jonson's The Silent Woman
in An Essay of Dramatic Poesy. Dryden is often called the "Father
of English Criticism."
22.
Humours Theory — Ben Jonson's comic framework where
characters are dominated by one of the four bodily humours (blood, phlegm,
choler, melancholy), producing exaggerated "type" characters (as in Every
Man in His Humour).
23.
Nature as Reason — Alexander Pope's neoclassical equation,
in An Essay on Criticism, of following Nature with following the ancient
rules ("Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem; / To copy Nature is
to copy them").
24.
Wit
— Neoclassical faculty combining quickness of intellect, apt imagination, and
elegant, decorous expression. Pope defined true wit as "Nature to
advantage dressed, / What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."
25.
Universal Truth / General Nature — Samuel Johnson's
standard (in Preface to Shakespeare) that great literature endures by
representing "general nature" — truths common to all humanity —
rather than particular, transient details.
26.
Biographical Criticism — Critical approach connecting an
author's life to the interpretation of their work, pioneered systematically by
Samuel Johnson in Lives of the Poets (1779–81).
SECTION III: Romantic & Victorian Criticism
27.
Language of Conversation — William Wordsworth's prescription,
in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800/1802), that poetry should use
"a selection of language really used by men," especially rustic and
humble life, rejecting artificial 18th-century poetic diction.
28.
Emotion Recollected in Tranquillity — Wordsworth's famous
definition of poetic composition: poetry originates as "spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings" but is composed only after the emotion is
recollected calmly. Source: Preface to Lyrical Ballads.
29.
Primary Imagination — Samuel Taylor Coleridge's concept of
the universal, unconscious human faculty by which all people perceive and
organize the external world. Source: Biographia Literaria, Ch.
XIII.
30.
Secondary Imagination — Coleridge's higher, conscious artistic
faculty that "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates" perceptions in order
to recreate and idealize them into new unified wholes — the faculty of the
poet.
31.
Fancy — Coleridge's lower faculty, a mode of memory that
merely mechanically aggregates and arranges fixed, ready-made images without
transforming them, unlike the organically unifying imagination.
32.
Willing Suspension of Disbelief — Coleridge's concept
describing how readers voluntarily set aside skepticism to accept fantastic or
supernatural elements in poetry (developed regarding his own Rime of the
Ancient Mariner).
33.
Negative Capability — John Keats's ideal of the poet's
capacity "of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any
irritable reaching after fact and reason." Source: Letter to George
and Tom Keats, 1817.
34.
Egotistical Sublime — Keats's critical term (in a letter)
describing Wordsworth's poetry as one where the poet's own personality
dominates and colours everything, contrasted with the self-effacing
"camelion Poet."
35.
Chameleon Poet — Keats's ideal poet-type who has
"no self" and no fixed identity, instead taking delight in inhabiting
and imagining all other characters and existences (contrasted with the
Wordsworthian "egotistical sublime").
36.
Poetry as Criticism of Life — Matthew Arnold's formulation (in The
Study of Poetry) that the greatness of poetry lies in its high truth and
seriousness applied to life, judged under the laws of poetic truth and beauty.
37.
Touchstone Method — Arnold's comparative critical technique
of using short, indisputably excellent lines from classic poets (Homer, Dante,
Shakespeare, Milton) as touchstones to test and judge the quality of other
poetry.
38.
Philistines — Arnold's term (in Culture and
Anarchy) for the materialistic, narrow-minded English middle class,
contrasted with "Barbarians" (aristocracy) and "Populace"
(working class).
39.
Art for Art's Sake (L'art pour l'art) — Aesthetic doctrine
that art needs no moral, social, or didactic justification and exists purely
for beauty's sake. Defended by: Walter Pater (Studies in the History
of the Renaissance, esp. the "Conclusion") and Oscar Wilde;
originally a French Aesthetic Movement slogan (Théophile Gautier).
SECTION IV: Modernism & New Criticism
40.
Objective Correlative — T.S. Eliot's concept that emotion in
art is best evoked not by direct statement but through "a set of objects,
a situation, a chain of events" that objectively correspond to and evoke
that emotion. Source: "Hamlet and His Problems" (1919).
41.
Dissociation of Sensibility — Eliot's term for the historical
split (which he located in the 17th century after the Metaphysicals) between
thought and feeling in English poetry, where intellect and emotion became
separated.
42.
Unification of Sensibility — The fusion of thought and feeling
that Eliot praised in the Metaphysical poets (Donne), who could "feel
their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose."
43.
Impersonality of Poetry — Eliot's theory that poetic
creation is "not the expression of personality but an escape from
personality," requiring the poet's continual self-sacrifice/extinction of
ego. Source: "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919).
44.
Practical Criticism — I.A. Richards's pedagogical/critical
method of analyzing poems stripped of author name, date, and context, to train
objective close reading and expose readers' misreadings. Source: Practical
Criticism (1929).
45.
Intentional Fallacy — The error of judging or interpreting a
literary work based on the author's presumed intention rather than the text
itself. Coined by: W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley (1946).
46.
Affective Fallacy — The error of judging a work based on
its emotional effects on the reader rather than its internal qualities. Coined
by: Wimsatt and Beardsley (1949).
47.
Close Reading — The New Critical methodology of minute,
detailed textual analysis of a work's language, imagery, and structure,
independent of biographical or historical context.
48.
Heresy of Paraphrase — Cleanth Brooks's principle that a
poem's meaning is inseparable from its exact words, form, and structure — it
cannot be restated in different words without loss or distortion. Source:
The Well Wrought Urn (1947).
49.
Irony as a Principle of Structure — Brooks's idea that
poetic meaning arises from the tension and interplay of opposing contexts
within a poem, each qualifying and undercutting the others.
50.
Paradox — A statement that appears self-contradictory yet
reveals a deeper truth; New Critics (esp. Brooks) saw paradox as fundamental to
poetic language.
51.
Ambiguity (Seven Types) — William Empson's theory, in Seven
Types of Ambiguity (1930), cataloguing seven distinct kinds of multiple
meaning and linguistic complexity in verse.
52.
Autotelic Text — The New Critical view of a literary
work as a self-contained, self-sufficient verbal artifact ("Verbal
Icon," per Wimsatt) whose meaning is complete within itself, independent
of author or reader.
53.
Tension — Allen Tate's term for the total unified meaning of
a poem, derived by combining "extension" (literal, denotative
meaning) and "intension" (figurative, connotative meaning). Source:
"Tension in Poetry" (1938).
SECTION V: Formalism & Structuralism
54.
Defamiliarization (Ostranenie) — The technique of
presenting familiar objects/experiences in unfamiliar ways to renew perception
and prolong the difficulty and length of aesthetic experience. Coined by:
Viktor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique" (1917), Russian Formalism.
55.
Fabula — The raw chronological sequence of events in a
narrative (the "story" in its natural order), as distinguished from syuzhet.
Source: Russian Formalism.
56.
Syuzhet — The artistic arrangement/plotting of events as
actually presented in the narrative discourse (may reorder, compress, or expand
the fabula).
57.
Literariness — The specific set of linguistic and
formal devices that distinguish literary language from ordinary language,
making a text "literary." Coined by: Roman Jakobson.
58.
Axis of Selection (Metaphor) — Jakobson's linguistic
axis of paradigmatic substitution based on similarity; associated with
poetry/lyric.
59.
Axis of Combination (Metonymy) — Jakobson's syntagmatic
axis based on contiguity/context; associated with prose/narrative.
60.
Sign
— Ferdinand de Saussure's basic unit of meaning, composed of the signifier and
the signified, joined arbitrarily. Source: Course in General
Linguistics (1916, posthumous).
61.
Signifier — The physical form of the sign — the sound-image or
written mark of a word.
62.
Signified — The mental concept or idea that the signifier
evokes.
63.
Langue — Saussure's term for language as an abstract,
systematic, collective structure/system of rules shared by a speech community.
64.
Parole — Saussure's term for individual, concrete speech
acts/utterances — actual language use by speakers.
65.
Mytheme — Claude Lévi-Strauss's term for the smallest
irreducible structural unit of a myth, which gains meaning only in
relation/opposition to other mythemes. Source: structural anthropology.
66.
Death of the Author — Roland Barthes's declaration that a
text's meaning is not fixed by authorial intention but is
produced/"born" in the act of reading. Source: essay "The
Death of the Author" (1967).
67.
Readerly Text (Texte Lisible) — Barthes's term for a
conventional, "closed" text that positions the reader as a passive
consumer of a fixed, singular meaning. Source: S/Z (1970).
68.
Writerly Text (Texte Scriptible) — Barthes's term for an
open, plural text that invites the reader into active production of multiple
meanings.
SECTION VI: Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction &
Psychoanalysis
69.
Différance — Jacques Derrida's neologism (a pun on the French
"differ" and "defer") describing how meaning is never fixed
but is endlessly deferred and produced through differences between signs. Source:
"Différance" (1968), Of Grammatology (1967).
70.
Logocentrism — Derrida's term for the Western
philosophical tradition's privileging of speech, presence, and a fixed
origin/truth (logos) over writing.
71.
Trace — Derrida's concept that every sign carries within it
the "trace" of what it is not (its absent opposites), undermining any
notion of pure, self-present meaning.
72.
Aporia — An irresolvable internal contradiction or logical
impasse in a text where its own rhetoric undermines its explicit argument — the
point deconstruction targets.
73.
Decentered Universe / Decentering of Structure
— Derrida's critique (in "Structure, Sign, and Play," 1966) showing
that the "center" that supposedly stabilizes any structure is itself
an unstable, constructed illusion.
74.
Discourse — Michel Foucault's term for systems of statements,
knowledge, and institutional practice that produce and regulate what counts as
"truth" and structure power relations. Source: The
Archaeology of Knowledge (1969).
75.
Episteme — Foucault's term for the underlying, often
unconscious, historical framework of knowledge and assumptions that governs
what can be thought/known in a given era. Source: The Order of Things
(1966).
76.
Panopticism — Foucault's metaphor (drawn from
Bentham's Panopticon prison design) for modern disciplinary power, whereby
subjects, aware of possible surveillance, internalize self-discipline. Source:
Discipline and Punish (1975).
77.
Mirror Stage — Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic concept
of the developmental phase (around 6–18 months) when an infant identifies with
its own mirror reflection, forming an illusory, unified sense of
"self"/ego (the "Ideal-I").
78.
The Symbolic Order — Lacan's register governed by language,
law, and social codes (the "Name-of-the-Father"), which the subject
enters upon acquiring language, marking loss of the imaginary unity.
79.
The Imaginary Order — Lacan's pre-linguistic register of
images, wholeness, and narcissistic identification, associated with the mirror
stage.
80.
The Real — Lacan's third register: the unrepresentable,
traumatic realm that resists symbolization and lies entirely outside language.
81.
Phallocentrism — Critical term for the structural
privileging of the phallus/masculine viewpoint as the central organizing
principle of language and culture (critiqued especially by French feminists).
SECTION VII: Marxism, Cultural Studies & New Historicism
82.
Base
— In Marxist theory, the economic foundation of society — the forces and
relations of production. Source: Karl Marx.
83.
Superstructure — The ideological institutions (law,
politics, religion, art, culture) that Marx argued are conditioned/determined
by the economic base.
84.
Hegemony — Antonio Gramsci's concept of ruling-class
domination achieved through cultural consent and ideological leadership rather
than coercive force alone. Source: Prison Notebooks.
85.
Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) — Louis Althusser's term
for institutions (schools, media, church, family) that reproduce and
disseminate dominant ideology through consent, as distinct from repressive
state apparatuses (police, army). Source: "Ideology and Ideological
State Apparatuses" (1970).
86.
Interpellation — Althusser's concept describing how
ideology "hails" or addresses individuals (e.g., "Hey, you
there!"), constituting them as ideological subjects who recognize/accept
that address.
87.
Cultural Materialism — British Marxist-influenced critical
movement (associated with Raymond Williams and, in literary studies, Jonathan
Dollimore/Alan Sinfield) analyzing texts within their material historical and
political conditions of production.
88.
Textuality of History — Louis Montrose's New Historicist
formulation that our access to history is always mediated through texts and
textual traces — we know the past only through its textualized remains.
89.
Historicity of Texts — Complementary New Historicist tenet
that every text is itself embedded in, and shaped by, the specific historical
power structures/discourses of its time.
90.
Thick Description — Clifford Geertz's anthropological
method of richly contextualized cultural interpretation, adapted by New
Historicists (esp. Stephen Greenblatt) to read literary and cultural
"texts" together.
SECTION VIII: Feminism, Postcolonialism & Reader-Response
91.
Gynocriticism — Elaine Showalter's framework for the
study of women's writing as a distinct literary tradition, focused on female
experience and creativity rather than on women as readers of male texts. Source:
A Literature of Their Own (1977), "Toward a Feminist Poetics"
(1979).
92.
Écriture Féminine — French feminist concept of a
distinctively feminine, bodily mode of writing that disrupts and subverts
patriarchal, phallogocentric language/syntax. Associated with: Hélène
Cixous ("The Laugh of the Medusa," 1975), Luce Irigaray.
93.
Performativity — Judith Butler's theory that gender is
not an innate essence but a repeated, stylized set of acts/performances that
produce the illusion of a stable gendered identity. Source: Gender
Trouble (1990).
94.
Orientalism — Edward Said's critique of how Western
scholarship, art, and discourse constructed a stereotyped, exoticized, and
inferior image of "the East" to justify colonial domination. Source:
Orientalism (1978).
95.
Subaltern — Term (from Gramsci) for socially, politically, and
geographically marginalized groups outside hegemonic power structures, adapted
by Gayatri Spivak to describe colonized/marginalized populations, especially
women, largely erased from historical record. Key essay: "Can the
Subaltern Speak?" (1988).
96.
Mimicry — Homi Bhabha's concept describing how colonized
subjects imitate the colonizer's culture/language, producing an ambivalent copy
that is "almost the same, but not quite" — subtly subversive of
colonial authority. Source: The Location of Culture (1994).
97.
Hybridity — Bhabha's concept of the "third space"
produced when colonizer and colonized cultures interact, generating new,
ambivalent, mixed identities that destabilize essentialist notions of pure
culture.
98.
Interpretive Communities — Stanley Fish's concept that
meaning is not inherent in the text or wholly subjective in the reader, but is
produced by shared interpretive strategies/conventions of a community of
readers. Source: Is There a Text in This Class? (1980).
99.
Implied Reader — Wolfgang Iser's concept of the
hypothetical reader-role constructed and anticipated by the structure and gaps
of the text itself. Source: The Implied Reader (1974), The Act
of Reading (1976); Iser is central to German Reception Theory (Constance
School).
100.
Horizon of Expectations — Hans Robert Jauss's concept
describing the set of cultural, moral, and literary expectations/criteria that
readers of a given historical period bring to a text, against which the text's
reception is judged. Source: Toward an Aesthetic of Reception
(1970); also a Constance School reception theorist.
SECTION IX: Structuralism & Narratology
101.
Diegesis — The narrated fictional world of a story, and the
"telling" mode of narration, as opposed to mimesis
(showing/enactment). Distinction traced to Plato's Republic, revived in
narratology.
102.
Heterodiegetic Narrator — Gérard Genette's term for a
narrator absent from the story world they narrate (a third-person,
non-participant narrator). Source: Narrative Discourse (1972).
103.
Homodiegetic Narrator — Genette's term for a narrator who is
also a character within the story being told (includes the
"autodiegetic" narrator who is the protagonist).
104.
Chronotope — Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the intrinsic fusion
of temporal and spatial relationships within literary narrative — how time
"thickens" and space becomes charged with historical meaning. Source:
"Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel."
105.
Carnivalesque — Bakhtin's concept of literary
depictions of carnival-like inversion, where social hierarchies, official
norms, and taboos are temporarily suspended, mocked, or overturned. Source:
Rabelais and His World (1965).
106.
Heteroglossia — Bakhtin's term for the coexistence and
interplay of multiple social dialects, voices, and registers within a single
novelistic text, which the novel (unlike poetry) is uniquely able to
orchestrate.
SECTION X: Psychoanalysis & Post-Structuralism
107.
Abjection — Julia Kristeva's concept of the horror/repulsion
experienced when the boundary between self and other (or self and
body/waste/corpse) breaks down. Source: Powers of Horror (1980).
108.
Jouissance — French term for an intense, excessive
pleasure/bliss that exceeds and disrupts ordinary satisfaction and
signification; used by Lacan (psychoanalysis) and Barthes (The Pleasure of
the Text, 1973) to describe radical textual pleasure.
109.
Simulacra — Jean Baudrillard's concept of copies/images that no
longer refer to any original reality, replacing the real with a
self-referential "hyperreal." Source: Simulacra and
Simulation (1981).
110.
Rhizome — Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's model of a
non-hierarchical, horizontally networked structure of knowledge/thought,
connecting any point to any other, opposed to hierarchical "tree"
(arborescent) models. Source: A Thousand Plateaus (1980).
111.
Phallogocentrism — Derrida's composite term merging phallocentrism
(privileging of the masculine) and logocentrism (privileging of
speech/presence) to critique the joint linguistic-patriarchal foundation of
Western thought.
SECTION XI: Marxism & Cultural Studies
112.
Structure of Feeling — Raymond Williams's concept for the
shared, lived, but not-yet-fully-articulated values and experiential qualities
characteristic of a particular generation or historical moment. Source: Marxism
and Literature (1977).
113.
Circuit of Culture — Stuart Hall's model showing that any
cultural artifact/meaning must be traced through five interlinked moments:
production, representation, consumption, regulation, and identity.
114.
Encoding/Decoding — Stuart Hall's model of mass
communication whereby media producers "encode" messages with a
preferred meaning, but audiences may "decode" them via dominant,
negotiated, or oppositional readings. Source:
"Encoding/Decoding" (1973).
115.
Political Unconscious — Fredric Jameson's concept that all
narratives/literary texts are structured, at a deep level, by repressed
historical and class contradictions that criticism must uncover. Source:
The Political Unconscious (1981).
116.
Culture Industry — Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's
critique of how capitalist mass media standardizes and commodifies culture,
turning art into passive, formulaic entertainment that pacifies consumers. Source:
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).
SECTION XII: Eco-Criticism & Queer Theory
117.
Anthropocentrism — The worldview/philosophical stance
placing human beings and human interests at the center of existence, a key
target of eco-critical critique.
118.
Pathetic Fallacy — John Ruskin's term (coined critically,
somewhat pejoratively) for the literary device of attributing human emotions to
inanimate nature; now central to eco-critical analysis of nature writing. Source:
Modern Painters (1856).
119.
Environmental Racism — The disproportionate exposure of
marginalized racial/economic communities and Global South nations to
environmental hazards, pollution, and ecological degradation — a key concept in
eco-criticism's intersection with postcolonial/environmental justice studies.
120.
Heteronormativity — The institutionalized social
assumption/structure that treats heterosexuality as the default, natural, and
privileged sexual orientation. Coined/popularized by: Michael Warner.
121.
Homosocial Desire — Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's term for
non-sexual bonds between men, often structured through the mediating exchange
or exploitation of women (linked to "erotic triangles"). Source:
Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985).
SECTION XIII: Postcolonialism & Diaspora
122.
Strategic Essentialism — Gayatri Spivak's idea that
marginalized/subaltern groups may temporarily adopt a unified group identity as
a strategic, provisional political tool, even while acknowledging internal
difference.
123.
Contrapuntal Reading — Edward Said's method of reading
colonial/canonical texts by simultaneously attending to what is explicitly
stated and what is silenced, excluded, or colonially implicated. Source:
Culture and Imperialism (1993).
124.
Imperial Eyes — Mary Louise Pratt's concept describing
how European travel writing constructed both the colonizing
"seeing-man" subject and the dominated colonial landscape/peoples. Source:
Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992).
125.
Contact Zone — Pratt's term for social spaces where
culturally disparate peoples meet and interact, typically within highly
asymmetrical relations of power (colonialism, slavery), producing improvisation
and transculturation.
SECTION XIV: Genre, Narrative Devices & Related
Classical/Modern Concepts
126.
Verisimilitude — The quality of a fictional work
appearing true-to-life or plausible; a key concern of both classical
(Aristotelian probability) and realist criticism.
127.
Deus ex Machina — "God from the machine" — a
contrived plot device resolving a story through an improbable, external
intervention. Background: From ancient Greek theatrical stage machinery
lowering actors playing gods; criticized by Aristotle in the Poetics.
128.
Didacticism — Literature whose primary purpose is
moral or intellectual instruction rather than aesthetic pleasure; the term is
often used pejoratively in criticism valuing art's autonomy.
129.
Allegory — A narrative in which characters, events, and
settings systematically represent abstract ideas or moral/political meanings
beyond the literal level (e.g., Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Bunyan's The
Pilgrim's Progress).
130.
Archetype — A recurring symbol, character type, or narrative
pattern (hero, quest, death-rebirth) found across cultures and myths, believed
to originate from the collective unconscious. Associated with: Carl Jung
(psychology); literary application by: Northrop Frye.
131.
Monomyth (The Hero's Journey) — Joseph Campbell's
theory that a single archetypal narrative pattern of
departure–initiation–return underlies heroic myths across cultures. Source:
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949).
132.
Anatomy of Criticism / Modes — Northrop Frye's
systematic theory classifying literature into historical "modes"
(myth, romance, high mimetic, low mimetic, ironic) based on the hero's power
relative to us and the environment. Source: Anatomy of Criticism
(1957).
133.
Displacement (Frye) — Frye's term for the process by which
mythic archetypal patterns are adapted and made more
"realistic"/plausible as literature moves toward the ironic mode.
134.
Implied Author — Wayne C. Booth's concept of the
authorial persona/set of values inferable from a text, distinct from the real
biographical author and from any narrator. Source: The Rhetoric of
Fiction (1961).
135.
Unreliable Narrator — Booth's term for a narrator whose
account of events is not to be trusted, due to bias, limited knowledge,
madness, or deliberate deception; also introduced in The Rhetoric of Fiction.
136.
Free Indirect Discourse — A narrative technique blending a
character's voice/perspective with the third-person narrator's voice, without
direct quotation marks or explicit tags — common in Austen, Flaubert, Woolf.
137.
Stream of Consciousness — A narrative technique attempting
to represent the continuous, unstructured flow of a character's thoughts and
perceptions; associated with Modernist fiction (Woolf, Joyce). Term coined
by: psychologist William James.
138.
Epiphany — A sudden moment of spiritual or psychological
revelation/insight experienced by a character, central to James Joyce's short
fiction (Dubliners) and aesthetic theory.
139.
Verfremdungseffekt (Alienation/Estrangement Effect)
— Bertolt Brecht's technique of deliberately breaking theatrical illusion to
prevent emotional identification, provoking critical, political reflection in
the audience instead.
140.
Epic Theatre — Brecht's model of drama designed to be
non-illusionistic, episodic, and didactic, encouraging audience detachment and
critical judgment rather than cathartic emotional absorption (opposed to
Aristotelian drama).
141.
Theatre of the Absurd — Dramatic movement (Beckett, Ionesco)
depicting a meaningless, illogical universe through fragmented plots and
language, reflecting existentialist philosophy. Term coined by: critic
Martin Esslin (1961).
142.
Existentialism — Philosophical movement emphasizing
individual freedom, choice, and the confrontation with a meaningless/absurd
universe, deeply influencing 20th-century literature. Key figure:
Jean-Paul Sartre.
143.
Bad Faith (Mauvaise Foi) — Sartre's concept of self-deception
whereby individuals deny their own freedom and responsibility by conforming to
fixed roles or external determinism.
144.
Phenomenology — Philosophical method of describing
structures of consciousness and experience "as they present
themselves," influencing reader-response and Geneva School criticism. Founder:
Edmund Husserl.
145.
Hermeneutics — The theory and methodology of
interpretation, especially of texts; central to reader-response and reception
theory. Modern development: Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey.
146.
Hermeneutic Circle — The idea that understanding a text
requires movement between part and whole — understanding the parts depends on
the whole, and vice versa, in an ongoing interpretive spiral. Associated
with: Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer.
147.
Fusion of Horizons — Hans-Georg Gadamer's concept describing
how interpretation occurs through a dialogic merging of the reader's own
historical "horizon" of understanding with that of the text. Source:
Truth and Method (1960).
148.
Transactional Theory of Reading — Louise Rosenblatt's
reader-response theory describing reading as a dynamic transaction between
reader and text, each shaping the other. Source: Literature as
Exploration (1938).
149.
Aesthetic vs. Efferent Reading — Rosenblatt's
distinction between reading for the lived, felt experience of the text
(aesthetic) versus reading merely to extract/carry away information (efferent).
150.
Verbal Icon — W.K. Wimsatt's term (title of his 1954
essay collection) describing the poem as a self-contained, autonomous verbal
object whose meaning is inseparable from its concrete form.
SECTION XV: Structuralism, Semiotics & Speech-Act Theory
151.
Binary Opposition — The structuralist principle (from
Saussure, developed by Lévi-Strauss) that meaning is generated through paired
oppositions (e.g., nature/culture, raw/cooked, light/dark) rather than positive
terms alone.
152.
Bricolage — Lévi-Strauss's concept of "mythical
thought" as a form of intellectual tinkering, assembling new
structures/meanings from a finite set of pre-existing cultural materials, as a
"bricoleur" would with tools at hand.
153.
Grand Narrative / Metanarrative — Jean-François
Lyotard's term for totalizing, legitimizing stories (e.g., Marxism,
Enlightenment progress) that claim universal historical/philosophical truth;
postmodernism is defined by "incredulity toward metanarratives." Source:
The Postmodern Condition (1979).
154.
Postmodern Condition — Lyotard's diagnosis of contemporary
culture/knowledge as fragmented, skeptical of grand narratives, and dominated
by localized, plural "language games."
155.
Pastiche — Fredric Jameson's term for a postmodern imitation
of style that, unlike parody, lacks satirical intent or a stable norm to mock —
a "blank," neutral imitation reflecting the loss of historical depth.
Source: Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(1991).
156.
Hyperreality — Jean Baudrillard's concept describing a
condition in which simulations/media representations become more
"real" than reality itself, collapsing the distinction between the
two.
157.
Intertextuality — The concept that every text is
constructed from a mosaic of other texts, quotations, and cultural codes, and
can only be understood in relation to this network. Coined by: Julia
Kristeva (1966), building on Bakhtin's dialogism.
158.
Semiotics — The general study of signs and sign systems,
encompassing both linguistic and non-linguistic modes of meaning-making. Founders:
Ferdinand de Saussure (semiology) and Charles Sanders Peirce (semiotics),
working independently.
159.
Peirce's Triad: Icon, Index, Symbol — Charles Sanders
Peirce's threefold classification of signs: Icon (resembles its object, e.g., a
portrait), Index (causally/physically linked, e.g., smoke for fire), Symbol
(arbitrary, conventional link, e.g., words).
160.
Speech Act Theory — J.L. Austin's theory that utterances
can perform actions, not merely describe/state facts. Source: How to
Do Things with Words (1962).
161.
Performative Utterance — Austin's term for statements that
themselves enact the action they describe (e.g., "I now pronounce you
married"), as opposed to "constative" statements that merely
describe.
162.
Illocutionary / Perlocutionary Act — Austin's (and John
Searle's) distinction between the illocutionary force of an utterance (what it
does in saying, e.g., promising) and its perlocutionary effect (the actual
effect produced on the hearer, e.g., persuading).
163.
Dialogism — Mikhail Bakhtin's concept that all
language/utterance is inherently dialogic, shaped by and responsive to other
voices and social contexts — meaning is never monologic or self-contained.
164.
Polyphony — Bakhtin's term for the coexistence of multiple,
independent, and equally valid character-voices/consciousnesses within a novel,
without being subordinated to the author's single controlling voice;
exemplified for Bakhtin by Dostoevsky. Source: Problems of
Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929).
165.
Grotesque Realism — Bakhtin's concept (from Rabelais and
His World) of a bodily, exaggerated, carnivalesque aesthetic celebrating
the "lower bodily stratum" (eating, excretion, sex, birth) to invert
official hierarchies.
SECTION XVI: New Historicism, Frankfurt School & Cultural
Theory
166.
Self-Fashioning — Stephen Greenblatt's New Historicist
concept describing how Renaissance individuals (and literary characters)
consciously constructed their identities according to socially available
cultural codes. Source: Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980).
167.
Poetics of Culture — Greenblatt's description of the New
Historicist method of reading literary texts alongside non-literary cultural
documents as part of a shared circulation of social energy.
168.
Anxiety of Influence — Harold Bloom's theory that poets are
driven by an Oedipal anxiety/struggle against the overwhelming influence of
strong poetic predecessors, leading them to creatively "misread"
precursors. Source: The Anxiety of Influence (1973).
169.
Misprision (Misreading) — Bloom's term for the deliberate,
creative misreading through which a later poet distorts a precursor's work in
order to clear imaginative space for original work.
170.
Canon Formation — The critical process (and object of
critique) by which certain texts/authors come to be regarded as authoritative,
"great," and worthy of study, often interrogated by feminist,
postcolonial, and cultural critics as ideologically constructed.
171.
Great Chain of Being — The medieval/Renaissance cosmological
concept of a strict hierarchical order of all creation from God down to
inanimate matter, often invoked as historical background to Renaissance
literature (e.g., Shakespeare's history plays).
172.
Negative Dialectics — Theodor Adorno's philosophical method
resisting neat conceptual synthesis, insisting on preserving contradiction and
non-identity between concept and object. Source: Negative Dialectics
(1966).
173.
Public Sphere — Jürgen Habermas's concept of a
discursive arena of civil society (coffeehouses, press, salons) where private
individuals could engage in rational-critical public debate, historically
enabling democratic culture. Source: The Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere (1962).
174.
Communicative Action — Habermas's theory of rational,
consensus-oriented dialogue/action grounded in mutual understanding rather than
strategic self-interest.
SECTION XVII: Eco-Criticism
175.
Deep Ecology — A radical environmental philosophy
asserting the intrinsic value of all living beings regardless of their
usefulness to humans, calling for fundamental shifts in human
self-understanding. Coined by: Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (1973).
176.
Bioregionalism — An eco-critical/environmental concept
advocating that human communities organize socially, culturally, and
economically around natural ecological regions ("bioregions") rather
than political boundaries.
177.
Ecofeminism — Theoretical movement linking the
domination of women and the domination/exploitation of nature under patriarchal
systems, arguing both must be addressed together.
SECTION XVIII: Queer Theory & Gender Studies
178.
Camp
— Susan Sontag's concept of a sensibility/aesthetic taste valuing artifice,
exaggeration, and stylization, often associated with queer culture. Source:
"Notes on Camp" (1964).
179.
Against Interpretation — Sontag's polemical argument (title
essay, 1964) that criticism's obsessive search for hidden "meaning"
diminishes direct sensory/aesthetic engagement with art; she called for an
"erotics of art" instead of a hermeneutics.
180.
Compulsory Heterosexuality — Adrienne Rich's concept describing
heterosexuality as an institutionalized, enforced social norm rather than a
natural default, which suppresses alternative female bonds/desires. Source:
"Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (1980).
181.
Lesbian Continuum — Rich's concept describing a broad range
of woman-identified experience and bonding (not necessarily genitally sexual)
across history, resisting narrow definitions of lesbian identity.
182.
Queer Theory — A theoretical field (emerging early
1990s, drawing on Foucault, Butler, Sedgwick) that challenges fixed categories
of sexuality and gender identity, viewing them as socially constructed and
unstable rather than essential/natural.
SECTION XIX: Feminist Criticism
183.
The Madwoman in the Attic — Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's
influential concept/book title describing the recurring "madwoman"
figure (e.g., Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre) in women's writing as a
symbolic double representing repressed female rage against patriarchal
constraint. Source: The Madwoman in the Attic (1979).
184.
Anxiety of Authorship — Gilbert and Gubar's revision of Bloom's
"anxiety of influence" for women writers, who historically faced
anxiety not over rivaling precursors but over the very legitimacy of female
authorship within a male literary tradition.
185.
The Angel in the House — Coventry Patmore's Victorian poem
(1854) idealizing self-sacrificing domestic femininity; Virginia Woolf's essay
"Professions for Women" (1931) famously describes the necessity of
"killing" this internalized ideal to write freely.
186.
Androgynous Mind — Virginia Woolf's concept, in A Room
of One's Own (1929), of an ideal creative mind that transcends and
harmoniously blends masculine and feminine faculties, free from gendered
self-consciousness.
187.
The Second Sex / Woman as "Other" — Simone de
Beauvoir's foundational feminist argument that woman has been historically
constructed as the deviant "Other" against a normative male
"Self" ("One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman"). Source:
The Second Sex (1949).
SECTION XX: Postcolonial, Diaspora & Contemporary Theory
188.
Negritude — A literary/ideological movement affirming and
celebrating Black African identity, culture, and consciousness against colonial
denigration. Founders: Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Léon Damas
(1930s Paris).
189.
Unhomeliness (Unheimlich) — Homi Bhabha's postcolonial
adaptation of Freud's concept of the "uncanny" to describe the
disorienting condition of postcolonial/diasporic subjects who feel
simultaneously "at home" and estranged, unable to fully belong to
either colonizer's or native culture.
190.
Third Space — Bhabha's concept of the ambivalent,
in-between cultural space produced by colonial encounter/hybridity, from which
new, unpredictable forms of cultural meaning and identity can emerge.
191.
Magical Realism — A narrative mode blending realistic
depiction with matter-of-fact incorporation of fantastic/magical elements,
often associated with postcolonial and Latin American fiction (GarcÃa Márquez,
Rushdie) as a strategy to challenge Western rationalist narrative norms.
192.
Diaspora Studies — Field examining the dispersal,
displacement, and cultural identity-formation of populations living outside
their ancestral homelands, central to postcolonial literary criticism.
193.
Trauma Theory — Critical framework (drawing on
psychoanalysis) examining how literature represents/enacts the structure of
traumatic memory — its belatedness, repetition, and resistance to direct
narration. Key figure: Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience (1996).
194.
Testimonio — A first-person narrative genre, often from Latin
American contexts, giving witness/testimony to collective political oppression
or trauma, blurring literature and historical documentation.
SECTION XXI: Posthumanism, Affect & Contemporary Cultural
Theory
195.
Affect Theory — A body of theory (drawing on Spinoza,
Deleuze, Sylvan Tomkins) examining pre-cognitive, bodily intensities and
emotional forces in texts and culture, distinct from named/categorized
"emotion." Key figures: Brian Massumi, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
196.
Posthumanism — Theoretical movement critiquing
humanism's privileging of a unified, rational human subject, exploring instead
human entanglement with technology, animals, and non-human systems.
197.
A Cyborg Manifesto — Donna Haraway's influential essay
(1985) using the cyborg (hybrid of organism and machine) as an ironic political
myth to dismantle rigid boundaries between human/machine, male/female, and
nature/culture.
198.
Disability Studies — Critical field examining disability as
a social/cultural construction (rather than purely medical deficit) and
analyzing its representation in literature and culture; critiques
"ableism" as a structuring norm.
199.
Cultural Capital — Pierre Bourdieu's concept of
non-financial social assets (education, taste, manners, credentials) that
confer social status and reproduce class hierarchy, closely tied to habitus
(internalized dispositions) and field (structured social arenas). Source:
Distinction (1979).
200.
Symbolic Violence — Bourdieu's concept describing the
subtle, often invisible imposition of dominant cultural norms/values as
"natural" or "common sense," through which social
inequality is legitimized and reproduced without overt coercion.