Author Archives
-
Ecocriticism: An Essay
Ecocriticism is the study of literature and environment from an interdisciplinary point of view where all sciences come together to analyze the environment and brainstorm possible solutions for the correction of the contemporary environmental situation. Ecocriticism was officially heralded by… Read More ›
-
Cultural Studies
Arising from the social turmoil of the 1960-s, Cultural Studies is an academic discipline which combines political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, art history/ criticism etc. to study cultural phenomena in various societies…. Read More ›
-
Hermeneutics
The term “hermeneutics”, a Latinized version of the Greek “hermeneutice” has been part of common Ianguage from the beginning of the 17th Century. Nevertheless, its history stretches back to ancient philosophy. Addressing the understanding of religious intuitions, Plato used this… Read More ›
-
Psychological Reader‑response Theory
Psychoanalytic critic Norman Holland believes that readers’ motives strongly influence how they read. Despite his claim, at least in his early work, that an objective text exists (indeed, he calls his method transactive analysis because he believes that reading involves… Read More ›
-
Subjective Reader Response Theory
In stark contrast to affective stylistics and to all forms of transactional reader response theory, subjective reader-response theory does not call for the analysis of textual cues. For subjective reader-response critics, led by the work of David Bleich, readers’ responses… Read More ›
-
Affective Stylistics
Affective stylistics is derived from analyzing further the notion that a literary text is an event that occurs in time—that comes into being as it is read—rather than an object that exists in space. The text is examined closely, often… Read More ›
-
Interpretive Communities: A Brief Note
Unlike Wolfgang Iser who analyses individual acts of reading, Stanley Fish situates the reading process within a broader institutional perspective. In Is There a Text in the Class? (1980), Fish proposes that competent readers form part of “interpretive communities”, consisting of… Read More ›
-
Wolfgang Iser as a Reader Response Critic: A Brief Note
Negating the Formalist notion of objective reality and autotelic text that nullifies the participation of the readers, Wolfgang Iser in The Implied Reader, follows the phenomenological theories of Husserl and Ingarden, and formulates two aspects of a literary work: the… Read More ›
-
Reception Theory: A Brief Note
Conceptualized by Hans Robert Jauss in his Toward an Aesthetic of Reception in the late 1960s, Reception Theory refers to a historical application of the Reader Response theory, emphasizing altering interpretive and evaluative responses of generations of readers to a… Read More ›
-
Transactional Reader Response Theory
Often associated with the work of Louise Rosenblatt, who formulated many of its premises, transactional reader-response theory analyzes the transaction between text and reader. Rosenblatt doesn’t reject the importance of the text in favor of the reader; rather she claims… Read More ›
-
Reader Response Criticism: An Essay
Reader Response, primarily a German and American offshoot of literary theory, emerged (prominent since 1960s) in the West mainly as a reaction to the textual emphasis of New Criticism of the 1940s. New Criticism, the culmination of liberal humanist ideals,… Read More ›
-
New Historicism and Cultural Materialism
A term coined by Raymond Williams and popularised by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (in their collection of essays Political Shakespeare), Cultural Materialism refers to a Marxist orientation of New Historicism, characterised by the analysis of any historical material within… Read More ›
-
Foucault’s Influence on New Historicism
The anti-establishment ethos of New Historicism wasprofoundly influenced by Foucault‘s theories of Power/Knowledge and Discourse. Foucault observed that the discourse of an era brings into being concepts, oppositions and hierarchies, which are products and propagators of power, and these determine… Read More ›
-
New Historicism’s Deviation from Old Historicism
New Historicism envisages and practises a mode of study where the literary text and the non-literary cotext are given “equal weighting”, whereas old historicism considers history as a “background” of facts to the “foreground” of literature. While Old historicism follows… Read More ›
-
The Concept of Self-Fashioning by Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Greenblatt, in his Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980) studies the sixteenth-century life and literature that spawned a new era of scholarly inquiry. Greenblatt examined the structure of selfhood as evidenced in major literary figures of the… Read More ›
-
The Textuality of History and the Historicity of Texts
Louis Montrose, in Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture claimed that New Historicism deals with the “textuality of history and the historicity of texts.” While “historicity of texts”refers to the “cultural specificity and social embedment of all… Read More ›
-
New Historicism: A Brief Note
A critical approach developed in the 1980s in the writings of Stephen Greenblatt, New Historicism is characterised by a parallel reading of a text with its socio-cultural and historical conditions, which form the co-text. New Historians rejected the fundamental tenets… Read More ›
-
Radical and Lesbian Feminism
Contemporary lesbian feminism and action owes greatly to the thoughts of Adrienne Rich who argued that “compulsory heterosexuality” ensured a woman’s continuous subjugation by continually privileging man’s needs. She points out that such an ideology forces the girl/daughter to turn… Read More ›
-
Feminism and Environmental Studies
Ecofeminist thought emerges from the assumption that patriarchal society’s values and beliefs have resulted in the oppression of both women and nature. These feminists suggest that the “natural” qualities of women and the “feminine” qualities of nature are both attributed… Read More ›
-
Judith Butler’s Concept of Performativity
Claiming that “Identity is performatively constituted”, Judith Butler in her path breaking Gender Trouble (1990) formulated a postmodernist notion of gender, in line with the deconstructive ethos and contradictory to the traditional notion’, that genders are fixed categories. Butler defined… Read More ›
You must be logged in to post a comment.