Literary and Critical Theory Review Guide

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the key theorists, frameworks, and concepts across Formalism, Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Psychoanalysis, Marxism, Gender Theory, Postcolonialism, Bakhtinian Dialogics, and Ecocriticism.

Close Reading

The New Critics' primary method and analytical tool for making sense of rich interpretive ambiguity within literary texts.

The Intentional Fallacy

A concept formulated by Wimsatt and Beardsley describing the romantic error of judging a literary work based on the author's intended meaning, emphasizing instead that a poem is embodied directly in language and subject to the uncertainty of exegesis.

The Heresy of Paraphrase

Cleanth Brooks's assertion that form and content in poetry are inseparable, meaning that reducing a poem to a prose summary does violence to its essential structure as a pattern of resolved stresses.

Langue and Parole

Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic distinction where langue represents the overarching structure, system, and social side of speech, while parole refers to the individual speech act.

Signifier and Signified

The two components of Saussure's sign model: the signifier is the sound-image, and the signified is the mental concept; their relationship is arbitrary, with meaning produced purely through differences in an environment.

Simulacrum

A material representation, specious likeness, or image that possesses merely the form or appearance of a certain thing without holding its underlying substance or proper qualities.

The Structuralist Activity

Roland Barthes's term for the process in which an analyst decomposes and recomposes an object to manifest its latent rules of functioning, producing a simulacrum of the object that wrests meaning from chance.

The Death of the Author

Roland Barthes's poststructuralist argument that writing constitutes the destruction of every voice and origin; attributing an Author to a work limits the text with a final signified, whereas meaning is unified in the reader.

Center (Derrida)

In Jacques Derrida's critique of Western metaphysics, the organizing principle postulated to govern, balance, and limit the freeplay of a structure while historically designating a reassuring constant of presence.

Freeplay

Jacques Derrida's term for the disruption of presence permitted by the absence or lack of a foundational center or origin, driven by the ongoing movement of supplementarity.

Supplement (Supplementarity)

A sign that enters to replace or compensate for an absent origin or center, revealing an inherent lack on the part of the signified that results in a superabundance of the signifier.

Precession of Simulacra

Jean Baudrillard's postmodern concept describing a condition where signs of the real are substituted for the real itself, leaving society with proliferating myths of origin and simulated authenticity.

Latent vs. Manifest Content

Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic distinction in dream analysis, where the manifest narrative experienced in the dream is decoded into its underlying latent psychological meaning through mechanisms like condensation and displacement.

The Mirror Stage

Jacques Lacan's developmental stage wherein an infant perceives its fragmented body as a unified Gestalt or Ideal-I in a reflective surface, inaugurating an alienating identity rooted in fictional autonomy and anticipation.

Méconnaissance

Jacques Lacan's term for the fundamental misrecognition through which the human ego constructs its illusion of autonomy and self-sufficient consciousness.

The Phallus (Lacan)

The privileged signifier in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire, representing that which the split subject permanently lacks and ceaselessly seeks.

Fetishism of Commodities

Karl Marx's concept explaining how manufactured goods take on a mystical character as social things whose perceived value is determined by exchange rather than their intrinsic use value.

Surplus Value

In Marxist economic theory, the unpaid value generated by laborers beyond the cost of their labor power, which is appropriated by capitalists as profit.

Ideology (Marx)

A system of ideas and imaginary conditions that frames real material conditions in a way that legitimizes and sustains the status quo and existing relations of production.

Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs)

Louis Althusser's term for plural, specialized institutions (such as schools, churches, and media) that secure submission to the ruling class through ideology, operating distinctly from the singular Repressive State Apparatus (RSA).

Interpellation

The process described by Louis Althusser through which an ideology hails individuals, transforming them into concrete ideological subjects.

Panopticon (Foucault)

Michel Foucault's diagram of disciplinary power in its ideal form, demonstrating how architectural surveillance induces a self-policing consciousness by dividing the normal from the abnormal.

Androgynous Mind

Virginia Woolf's concept (drawing on Coleridge) of an undivided, porous, and resonant creative intellect that transcends gender boundaries by being woman-manly or man-womanly.

Gender Performativity

Judith Butler's theory that gender attributes are performative rather than expressive, actively producing the illusion of a natural, stable gender identity as a regulatory fiction.

The Female Body Double Bind

Susan Bordo's diagnosis of the contradictory mandate requiring women to maintain an other-oriented emotional economy that contains hunger while simultaneously adopting masculine values in the professional sphere.

Orientalism

Edward Said's concept denoting the Western corporate institution, academic discourse, and imaginative style of thought that constructs the Orient as Europe's contrasting and subordinate Other.

Third Space

Homi Bhabha's ambivalent and contradictory space of enunciation and translation wherein cultural statements are produced, invalidating hierarchical claims to cultural originality or purity.

Hybridity (Bhabha)

A postcolonial condition characterized by tensions, ambivalence, and ongoing negotiation that opens an in-between space for new political discourse.

Mestiza Consciousness

Gloria Anzaldúa's borderlands consciousness marked by the cross-pollination of cultures, races, and languages, enabling a tolerance for contradictions, ambiguity, and plural identity.

Un Choque

Gloria Anzaldúa's term for the disorienting cultural collision that occurs when contradictory cultural frames of reference (e.g., white, Mexican, indigenous) violently clash within an individual.

Postmodern Blackness

bell hooks's critique of exclusionary postmodern discourses, urging theory to move beyond abstract difference to address the lived politics of racism and multiple experiences of Black identity.

Heteroglossia

Mikhail Bakhtin's concept describing the internal stratification of language into a multiplicity of distinct social voices, dialects, and socio-ideological perspectives, exemplified by the novel genre.

Centripetal vs. Centrifugal Forces

Bakhtin's dynamic of discourse where centripetal forces act to unify, centralize, and standardize language (as in poetic genres), while centrifugal forces act to decentralize, stratify, and multiply meanings (as in the novel).

Ecocriticism

The study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment, conducted with a spirit of commitment to environmental praxis and the deconstruction of human/nature binaries.

The Ecological Thought

Timothy Morton's concept of an active, thinking-as-doing praxis that acknowledges the radical interconnectedness of all beings while rejecting reified, alienated ideals of 'Nature.'