Basic Definitions
Theorists
Buzz Words
100
Responding to a text is a process. Descriptions of that process are valuable because one person's response may enrich another reader's response.
What is Reader-Response?
100
His early work emphasized how the text controls the reader's experience; the task of criticism is to describe that experience. His later work presented the idea that a reader creates a reading of the text using certain interpretative strategies and that it is the critics job to persuade the interpretative community to accept that particular reading.
Who is Stanley Fish?
100
The one below, the other, the dispossessed, the oppressed.
What is "subaltern"?
200
Meaning is made by binary oppositions; and in every binary relationship, one item is favored over the other one.
What is Structuralist/Deconstruction?
200
He argued that words do not refer directly to things, words always refer to other words. His most famous saying was, "There is nothing outside the text."
Who is Jacques Derrida?
200
The group of works that are usually reprinted, assigned, read, taken most seriously, etc.
What is "the canon"?
300
Creative writing represents the disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish or fear.
What is Psychological Criticism?
300
They argued that women writers both accept and reject the angel vs. seductress stereotypes, thereby creating their own distinctive vision.
Who is Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar? (see "Madwoman in the Attic")
300
This calls for the reader to create, in a sense, a certain kind of mask for the speaker. It points to the multiple meanings of a single assertion. A text with [----] is complex, meaning potentially more than one thing. It is used to point to unified complexity.
What is irony? (New Criticism)
400
Your interpretation is influenced by your own status; and literature is an arena for influencing social change.
What is feminist and queer theory criticism?
400
She argued that females have been depicted as either Mary or Eve, the angelic mother or evil seductress. Such representations serve to make women unreal, other, the absence of maleness, rather than anything positively female or mutually human. The work of the reader than is to expose the opposition or idealization thereby undermining its power.
Who is Simon Beauvoir?
400
A fictional composite created by the critic in order to set aside their own idiosyncrasies and try to play the role intended by the author.
What is "implied reader"? (reader-response)
500
Great literary works are marked by some kind of complexity, as levels of meaning, oppositions, tensions, ironies, and ambiguities are unified.
What is New Criticism?
500
She argued that gender is performative, created by what one does, not what one is.
Who is Judith Butler?
500
It seeks to show how a text contains within itself a trace of its own contradiction. A spatial idea, dividing an apparent unity.
What is "differance"? (deconstruction)
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