English 123 - Big Theories & Critical Lenses

Adaptation Theory

Studies how stories move across media and contexts; sees adaptations as both a product (formal remake in a new medium/genre/context) and a process of reinterpretation that reanimates stories for new audiences.

Queer Theory

Critical approach that, drawing on Foucault and Butler, treats sexuality and gender as socially constructed, challenges heteronormativity, and resists fixed identities.

Psychoanalytic Theory

Uses Freud’s ideas about the unconscious, dreams, the id/ego/superego, and defense mechanisms to read characters’ desires, fears, and symbolic patterns.

Humanism

Reads texts for universal human experience, dignity, and moral growth, emphasizing empathy and individual agency rather than structural or purely formal analysis.

Marxist Theory

Focuses on class, labor, and power under capitalism: alienation, exploitation, ideology, and how class position shapes consciousness, taste, and social relations.

Reader-Response Theory

Broad approach that argues meaning is completed by readers, not just put into the text by authors; emphasizes personal, historical, and cultural context in interpretation.

Reception Theory

A specific reader‑response model (Jauss, Hall) that says audiences “decode” texts in dominant, negotiated, or oppositional ways depending on their horizon of expectations.

Participatory Culture

Jenkins’ term for cultures where people easily create/share media (fanfic, videos, etc.), mentor one another, and build communities around shared stories.

“Death of the Author” (Barthes)

Argument that the author’s intentions don’t fix meaning; a text is a weave of multiple voices, and the reader’s activity is central to interpretation.

Foucault’s “Repressive Hypothesis”

Challenges the idea that modernity simply silenced sex; instead, modern societies talk more than ever about sexuality in order to regulate and normalize it.

Christmas Effects

Queer-theory concept from lecture about how mainstream, heteronormative Christmas media can still produce intense, sometimes queer, emotional attachments and feelings of belonging/exclusion for viewers over time.

Intertextuality

The network of relationships between texts