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 ›
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 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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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, 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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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… Read More ›
The Feminist movement in America received great stimulus from the 1960s’ civil rights movement, and in Britain it has had a political orientation, insisting on situating both feminist concerns and literary texts within a material and ideological context. Thus Anglo-American… Read More ›
Introduced by Helene Cixous in her essay, The Laugh of the Medusa, ecriture feminine refers to a uniquely feminine style of writing characterised by disruptions in the text, such as gaps, silences, puns, new images and so on. It is… Read More ›
Kate Millett was the first notable feminist after Simone de Beauvoir to address the construction of woman within male writing. According to Millett, the man-woman relationship is deeply embedded in power structures with political implications – thus she derived the… Read More ›
A frequently heard feminist rallying cry, especially during the late 1960s and 1970s, and a central doctrine of the second-wave feminists, who used its underlying meaning in their writings, speeches, consciousness-rising, and other other activities, the concept “the personal is… Read More ›
Simone de Beauvoir‘s The Second Sex (1949) can be said to have inaugurated the second wave of feminism, with its central argument that throughout history, across cultures, woman has always occupied a secondary position in relation to man, being relegated… Read More ›