Reader-response criticism is rooted in the belief that a reader's reaction to or interpretation of a text is as valuable a source of critical study as the text itself.
More Complex Description (From EBSCO Knowledge Advantage, see link below):
... Reader-Response theory, is an approach in literary analysis that emphasizes the reader's role in creating meaning from a text. Unlike traditional methods that focus on the author's intent or the text's structure, Reader Response advocates for a reader-oriented perspective where individual experiences shape interpretations. The theory, supported by theorists like Louise Rosenblatt, Stanley Fish, and Wolfgang Iser, posits that reading is a dynamic transaction between the reader and the text, with no single correct interpretation.
In this framework, readers engage with various genres—such as novels, poems, and short stories—by bringing their own contexts, emotions, and backgrounds into the reading experience. This process fosters critical thinking, enhances appreciation of diverse perspectives, and encourages open dialogue about interpretations. Reader-Response theory also promotes collaborative activities like literature circles and book clubs, where readers discuss their responses and gain insights from one another. Ultimately, this method champions the idea that meaning is not fixed but is co-constructed through interaction with the text, making literature a personal and participatory endeavor.
Important Quote: "The critic is right to think that the text should speak to us. The point which needs to be grasped clearly by the critic is that a text cannot be made to speak to us until what it says has been understood." --E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (1967)
Prominent People: E. D. Hirsh, Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish
Note: Reader Response Theory is generally seen as being at odds with Practical Critism, Formalism, and ideas such as "The Death of the Author."
Simple Description (From MasterClass, see link on Literary Theory page of this LibGuide):
Socialist thinker Karl Marx established this branch of literary theory alongside Marxism, his political and sociological ideology. Marxist theory examines literature along the lines of class relations and socialist ideals.
More Complex Description (Introduction to Modern Literary Theory, by Dr. Kristi Siegel. See the link on Literary Theory page of this LibGuide):
A sociological approach to literature that viewed works of literature or art as the products of historical forces that can be analyzed by looking at the material conditions in which they were formed. In Marxist ideology, what we often classify as a world view (such as the Victorian age) is actually the articulations of the dominant class. Marxism generally focuses on the clash between the dominant and repressed classes in any given age and also may encourage art to imitate what is often termed an "objective" reality. Contemporary Marxism is much broader in its focus, and views art as simultaneously reflective and autonomous to the age in which it was produced.
Important Quote: "Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower." – Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843)
Simple Description (From MasterClass, see link on Literary Theory page of this LibGuide):
Using Sigmund Freud’s principles of psychoanalysis—like dream interpretation—psychoanalytic criticism looks to the neuroses and psychological states of characters in literature to interpret a text's meaning.
More Complex Description (The Johns Hopkins Guide to Contemporary Literary & Cultural Theory, see link on Literary Theory page of this LibGuide):
Several of Sigmund Freud’s contemporaries as well as later writers produced studies of literary figures and literary works that established elementary models of psychoanalytic criticism along the lines of Freud’s own forays into literary criticism … Such models typically assumed relative transparency between the fictional product and the creative artist: read psychoanalytically, the literary work disclosed the author’s unconscious fantasies. The aim of this criticism was typically psychobiographical; the exact, manifest terms of the narrative were subordinated to those patterns of wish and defense revealed by analytic discovery of “latent content.” The best examples of this style of criticism (still in practice) refuse to subordinate art to neurosis and deploy the tools of psychoanalysis to explore precise terms of language, metaphor, and character.
Important Quote: “All literary works, in other words, are 'rewritten,' if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them" – Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)
Prominent People: Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva
Simple Description (From MasterClass, see link on Literary Theory page of this LibGuide):
Post-modernist literary criticism emerged in the middle of the twentieth century to reflect the fractured and dissonant experience of twentieth-century life. While there are many competing definitions of postmodernism, it is most commonly understood as rejecting modernist ideas of unified narrative.
More Complex Description (The Johns Hopkins Guide to Contemporary Literary & Cultural Theory, see link on Literary Theory page of this LibGuide):
… postmodernism is probably best understood as marking the site of several related, but not identical, debates among artists and intellectuals during the last four de cades of the twentieth century. These conflicts revolved around the relation of artworks to social context, art and theory to political action and the dominant social order, cultural practices to the transformation or maintenance of society in all its aspects, the collapse of traditional philosophical foundations to the possibility of critical distance from and effective critique of the status quo, and an image dominated consumer society to artistic practice, and around the future of a Western tradition that appears more heterogeneous than previously thought at the same time that it appears insufficiently tolerant of (open to) multiplicity. At the very least, postmodernism signals the multiplication of voices, questions, and conflicts that shattered what seemed to be (without ever really being) the placid unanimity of the great tradition and the West that gloried in it.
Important Quote: “A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern." Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984)
As the feminist [political] movement gained steam in the mid-twentieth century, literary critics began looking to gender studies for new modes of literary criticism.
The Johns Hopkins Guide to Contemporary Literary & Cultural Theory (see link on Literary Theory page of this LibGuide):
Feminist literary theory, criticism, and scholarship form one strand of the knowledge produced in the field of feminist studies, which investigates gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, class, and sexuality as categories that organize social and symbolic systems. … Feminist literary critics [seek to] analyze the paradigms that mainstream practitioners used to select, interpret, and evaluate texts.
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (See link, below):
Feminist literary criticism looks at literature assuming its production from a male-dominated perspective. It re-examines canonical works to show how gender stereotypes are involved in their functioning. It examines (and often rediscovers) works by women for a possible alternative voice.
The New York Public Library (See link, below):
..feminist criticism aims to reinterpret literature from a female point of view. This is accomplished in several ways. Some feminist critics seek to interpret the works of male authors, with particular attention to women characters, in order to explore the moral, political and social restrictions women traditionally faced. Other feminist critics choose to analyze the works of women authors that have been previously overlooked by male critics.
Important Quote: “In their traditional exhibitionist role, pumpkin spice lattes are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” - Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)
Prominent People: Laura Mulvey, Simone de Beauvoir, Elaine Showalter, Hélène Cixous
Note: Feminist Criticism is often connected to Queer Studies
Simple Description (From MasterClass, see link on Literary Theory page of this LibGuide):
Queer theory followed feminist theory by further interrogating gender roles in literary studies, particularly through the lens of sexual orientation and gender identity.
More Complex Description (The Johns Hopkins Guide to Contemporary Literary & Cultural Theory, see link on Literary Theory page of this LibGuide):
Queer theory is the radical deconstruction of sexual rhetoric. It has sought to develop links between various forms of progressive activism (the lesbian and gay movement, the women’s movement, HIV/AIDS activism, and movements for racial justice, among others), and the analytical rigor of poststructuralism (especially that of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Paul de Man). It interrogates the binaristic thinking that has traditionally characterized sexual politics, in particular such familiar oppositions as heterosexuality/homosexuality, masculine/ feminine, sex/gender, closeted/out, enter/margin, conscious/unconscious, nature/ culture, and normal/pathological, to name a few.
Important Quote: “Self pity becomes your oxygen. But you learned to breathe it without a gasp. So, nobody even notices you're hurting.” – Paul Monetter, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (1988)
Note: Often connected to Feminist Studies
Simple Description (From MasterClass, see link on Literary Theory page of this LibGuide):
Postcolonial theory challenges the dominance of Western thought in literature, examining the impacts of colonialism in critical theory.
More Complex Description (The Johns Hopkins Guide to Contemporary Literary & Cultural Theory, see link on Literary Theory page of this LibGuide):
“Postcolonial Criticism” investigates the relationships between colonizers and colonized in the period post-colonization. … “Postcolonial” theory reverses the historical center/margin direction of cultural inquiry: critiques of the metropolis and capital now emanate from the former colonies.
Moreover, theorists like Homi K. Bhabha have questioned the binary thought that produces the dichotomies—center/margin, white/black, and colonizer/colonized—by which colonial practices are justified. … “Postcolonial Criticism” offers a fundamental critique of the ideology of colonial domination and at the same time seeks to undo the “imaginative geography” of Orientalist thought that produced conceptual as well as economic divides between West and East, civilized and uncivilized, First and Third Worlds. In this respect, “Postcolonial Criticism” is activist and adversarial in its basic aims. Postcolonial theory has brought fresh perspectives to the role of colonial peoples—their wealth, labor, and culture—in the development of modern European nation states. While “Postcolonial Criticism” emerged in the historical moment following the collapse of the modern colonial empires, the increasing globalization of culture, including the neo-colonialism of multinational capitalism, suggests a continued relevance for this field of inquiry.
Important Quote: “The study of world literature might be the study of the way in which cultures recognize themselves through their projections of ‘otherness.’” – Homi K. Bhabha, The World and the Home, (1992)
Prominent People: Edward Said, Homi Bhabha
Note: Often connected to Ethnic Studies
From The Johns Hopkins Guide to Contemporary Literary & Cultural Theory (see link on Literary Theory page of this LibGuide):
Cheryll Glotfelty succinctly defines “ecocriticism” as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment [taking] an earth-centered approach to literary studies” (xviii). Glotfelty insists on defining the term in part to help establish ecocriticism as a legitimate branch of literary studies even as she acknowledges both an earlier (and perhaps original) coinage by William H. Rueckert that integrates the science of ecology and literature, as well as the choice of other critics in the field to use other terms. Ultimately, the appeal of ecocriticism for literary studies as framed by Glotfelty’s definition is its openness. Indeed, Scott Slovic has felt confident enough to assert that “there is not a single literary work anywhere that utterly defies ecocritical interpretation” (“Forum”). Presumably, this opens the field up to infinite possibilities.
Important Quote: “An environmental text is any writing in which nonhuman nature—not just human interest—is a presence sufficiently articulated to affect the human— or humanly imagined—course of events." Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (2005)
Simple Description (From MasterClass, see link on Literary Theory page of this LibGuide):
Critical race theory emerged during the civil rights movement in the United States. It is primarily concerned with examining the law, criminal justice, and cultural texts through the lens of race.
What is Critical Race Theory? (From the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), see link, below):
Critical Race Theory, or CRT, is an academic and legal framework that denotes that systemic racism is part of American society — from education and housing to employment and healthcare. Critical Race Theory recognizes that racism is more than the result of individual bias and prejudice. It is essentially an academic response to the erroneous notion that American society and institutions are “colorblind.”
Critical Race Theory recognizes that racism is embedded in laws, policies and institutions that uphold and reproduce racial inequalities. According to CRT, societal issues like Black Americans’ higher mortality rate, outsized exposure to police violence, the school-to-prison pipeline, denial of affordable housing, and the death rates of Black women in childbirth are not unrelated anomalies.
The scholarly framework holds that racism goes far beyond just individually held prejudices, and that it is in fact a systemic phenomenon woven into the laws and institutions of this nation.
Important Quote: “The problem is not bad people. The problem is a system that reproduces bad outcomes. It is both humane and inclusive to say, ‘We have done things that have hurt all of us, and we need to find a way out.’” Mari Matsuda
Prominent People: Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda, Derrick Bell, Ibram X. Kendi