FEMINISM- a development and movement in critical theory and in the evaluation of literature. It is an attempt to describe and interpret women's experience as depicted in various kinds of literature. It questions the long-standing, dominant, male ideologies, patriarchal attitudes and male interpretations in literature. It attacks male notions of value. In addition it challenges traditional and accepted male ideas about the nature of women and about how women feel, act and think or are supposed to feel, act and think and how in general they respond to life and living. Feminism has it origins in the struggle for women's rights which began late in the 18th c., more particularly with Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In the late 1960s there began a spate of diverse criticism, often on a polemical nature, which shows no sign of abating. Much of it was often political and expressed anger and a sense of injustice that women had been oppressed and exploited by men. Indeed, a substantial amount of feminist criticism goes well beyond literature to explore the socio-economic status of women and where literature is concerned, to look at women's economic position as authors and the problems they have with prejudiced male publishers. Whereas Anglo-American critics and theorists have been primarly concerned with thematic studies of writings by and about women, French feminist critics have been concerned with the theory of the role of gender in writing. In their theories they have been influenced by theories of post-structuralism, semiotics. They maintain that all or most Western lgs are male-dominant and male-engendered.
Marxist criticism is very complex and its tenets are numerous. To break it down a bit, there are a few Marxist ideas that are relatively easy to identify. Some key words and ideas that Marxist critics concentrate on are economics and class relationships. Buzzwords may include, but are not limited to, dialectics, materialism, bourgeoisie, and proletariat.
For Marxists, the root cause of all forms of oppression consists in the division of society into classes. For many feminists, on the other hand, the oppression of women is rooted in the nature of men. It is not a social but a biological phenomenon. This is an entirely static, unscientific and undialectical conception of the human race. It is an unhistorical vision of the human condition, from which profoundly pessimistic conclusions must flow. For if we accept that there is something inherent in men which causes them to oppress women, it is difficult to see how the present situation will ever be remedied. The conclusion must be that the oppression of women by men has always existed and therefore, presumably, will always exist. Marxism explains that this is not the case. It shows that, along with class society, private property and the state, the bourgeois family has not always existed, and that the oppression of women is only as old as the division of society into classes
Marxist feminism states that private property, which gives rise to economic inequality, dependence, political confusion and ultimately unhealthy social relations between men and women, is the root of women's oppression in the current social context. It looks at the family in a very negative and critical way.
According to Marxist theory, the individual is heavily influenced by the structure of society, which in all modern societies mean a class structure; that is, people's opportunities, wants and interests are seen to be shaped by the mode of production that characterizes the society they inhabit. Marxist feminists see contemporary gender inequality as determined ultimately by the capitalist mode of production. Gender oppression is class oppression and women's subordination is seen as a form of class oppression which is maintained (like racism) because it serves the interests of capital and the ruling class. Marxist feminists have extended traditional Marxist analysis by looking at domestic labour as well as wage work in order to support their position.
RUSSIAN FORMALISM- a literary theory which developed in Russia in the early 1920s. Practitioners and followers were called “Formalists”, a pejorative term to imply limitations. “RF” was also a pejorative label. It was finished by 1930 bc of Stalinist and Socialist-Marxism pressures on the individuals involves. The theory of RF had begun earlier in the Moscow Linguistic Circle and in OPOJAZ (an acronym for The Society for the Study of Poetic Language). The main figure in the Moscow LC was Roman Jakobson who helped to found the Prague School in 1926. The RF were primarily interested in the way that literary texts achieve their effects and in establishing a scientific basis for the study of literature(e.g. emotions, ideas) did not possess, for them, any significance in defining what was specifically “literary” about the text. The writer is of negligible importance. All the emphasis is on the “literariness” of the formal devices of a text.The F. also developed a theory of narrative, making a distinction between plot and story.The plot refers to the order and manner in which events are actually presented in the narrative, while the story refers to chronological sequence of events.
This movement of literary criticism is characterized by a concern with the text itself and with the literary aspects of the text. The Russian formalists were interested more with words and literary devices rather than the actual meaning of the words themselves. Russian Formalists viewed a text as an object of art itself and as different from everyday speech and objects and thus worked to figure out what made it so. Key functions of literature for Russian Formalists are defamiliarization of life through its representation in literature and exposure of the literature functions by calling attention to literary forms and conventions.
STRUCTURALISM- is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field (for instance, mythology) as a complex system of interrelated parts. It began in linguistics with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). But many French intellectuals perceived it to have a wider application, and the model was soon modified and applied to other fields, such as anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary theory and architecture. This ushered in the dawn of structuralism as not just a method, but also an intellectual movement that came to take existentialism's pedestal in 1960s France. It is concerned with lg in a most general sense: not just the lg of utterance in speech and writing. It is concerned with signs and thus with signification. Everything in the theory of S. is the product of a system of signification or code. Codes are arbitrary and without them we cannot apprehend reality. S. challenges the long-standing belief that a work of literature reflects a given reality. Saussure made a number of important original contributions: the concept of lg as a sign system or structure whose individual components can be understood only in relation to each other and to the system as a whole rather than to an external reality; a distinction between langue and parole, langue representing a langualge as a whole and parole representing uterrance.
Structuralism holds that meaning is produced by the structuring of units within systems. For example, language is a system, and is analyzed for its semiotic components. Keywords for structuralism are wing and signifier. Another key concept for structuralists is to set up binary oppositions as a means to examine a text, but so do post-structuralists and deconstructionists.
PSYCHOANALYSIS- Psychoanalysis differs greatly from other schools of criticism as it emphasizes universal conditions over particular historical periods. As a school of theory, its history is complex and takes on many forms. However, an easy way to identify this kind of criticism is to look for keywords such as repression, id and ego, Oedipal Complex, trauma, subconscious and unconscious, death drive, phallus, desire, lack, and anything that emphasizes mothers or early childhood experiences. Think Freud. The psychoanalytic theory focuses on dreams and the effect that the unconscious has on the individual.
Psychoanalysis is a body of ideas developed by Austrian Physician Sigmund Freud and his followers, which is devoted to the study of human psychological functioning and behavior.
Psychoanalysis has three applications:
a method of investigation of the mind;
a systematized set of theories about human behaviour;
Under the broad umbrella of psychoanalysis there are at least twenty-two different theoretical orientations regarding the underlying theory of understanding of human mentation and human development. The various approaches in treatment called "psychoanalytic" vary as much as the different theories do. In addition, the term refers to a method of studying child development.
Freudian psychoanalysis refers to a specific type of treatment in which the "analysand" (analytic patient) verbalizes thoughts, including free associations, fantasies, and dreams, from which the analyst formulates the unconscious conflicts causing the patient's symptoms and character problems, and interprets them for the patient to create insight for resolution of the problems.
The specifics of the analyst's interventions typically include confronting and clarifying the patient's pathological defenses, wishes and guilt. Through the analysis of conflicts, including those contributing to resistance and those involving transference onto the analyst of distorted reactions, psychoanalytic treatment can clarify how patients unconsciously are their own worst enemies: how unconscious, symbolic reactions that have been stimulated by experience are causing symptoms.
Is concerned with the quest for and discovery of connections between the artists themselves and what they actually create. As far as literature is concerned it analyses characters invented by authors, the lg they use and what is known as Freudian imagery. Thus, in Freudian method a literary character is treated as if a living human being; whereas for example in the method of Jacques Lacan literature is seen as a symptom of the writer.
NEW CRITICISM- was a dominant trend in English and American literary criticism of the mid twentieth century, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. Its adherents were emphatic in their advocacy of close reading and attention to texts themselves, and their rejection of criticism based on extra-textual sources, especially biography.
New Criticism is a type of formalist literary criticism that developed in the 1920s-30s and peaked in the 1940s-50s. The movement is named after John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism. New Critics treat a work of literature as if it were self contained. They do not consider the reader's response, author's intention, or historical and cultural contexts. New Critics perform a close reading of the text, and believe the structure and meaning of the text should not be examined separately. New Critics especially appreciate the use of literary devices in a text. The New Criticism has sometimes been called an objective approach to literature, similar to the approach students in public schools are taught to take. The notion of ambiguity is an important concept within New Criticism; several prominent New Critics have been enamored above all else with the way that a text can display multiple simultaneous meanings. Studying a passage of prose or poetry in New Critical style requires careful, exacting scrutiny of the passage itself. Formal elements such as rhyme, meter, setting, characterization, and plot were used to identify the theme of the text. In addition to the theme, the New Critics also looked for paradox, ambiguity, irony, and tension to help establish the single best interpretation of the text