GRE Review: Schools of Theory in a nutshell

Hey Readers,

Who knew that Literary Criticism could be so fascinating? ( maybe my subconsious? ).  The notes below plus my current Literature class are a nice review ( Also a nice prompt for reflection: most of the criticisms I wrote in college were inspired by Marxism and Identity Criticisms.  I think I tried to get into the whole Linguistic thing, but my limited knowledge of the English language (just/always developing/forming) hindered/impeded/slowed down any analytical attempts.  Of course, the Psychological school with its emphasis in universal consciousness et. al. was also difficult because from a Marxist's perspective, "universality" was often standardized by the "hegemony." ).

Notes from my GRE Lit Review Book:

"In general, modern criticism makes use of insights drawn from three broad schools of theory:"

Marxist: With emphasis in economic situation and Socialism and its keywords: base/material economic reality, cultural superstructure, class, proletariat, means of production, bourgeoisie, imperialism, dialectical materialism
-New Historicism- specifics of culture matter profoundly: language, ideology, encoded ideology supporting the dominant class and also the struggling voice of the oppressed ideological subject, Euro-American patriarchy's typical marginalization of the other, phallocratic hegemony
--Feminist Criticism (Patriarchy, sexism, sexist language, etc.)
--Black Criticism
--Post-Colonial Criticism
---Identity Criticisms- Investigate definitions of self and constructions of self (synthesis of 3 broad schools of theory)

Linguistic: With a focus on Language and influential to early 20th century critics and the necessity to "professionalize" their discipline making it less speculative
-Formalist Criticism- (Russian inspired) Investigates formations of literary texts through defamiliarization because of devices of plot, story, and voice making language unfamiliar because writing is an aesthetic and literary object
-New Criticism- Questions the foundations (speculations about authorial intent, subjectivity, beauty and emotion) of the literary schools using the intentional fallacy, the affective fallacy, the heresy of paraphrase, close reading (the actual text, especially in poems); popular in England and the U.S.
-Structuralism- Popular in Continental Europe thanks to linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and his research in Semiotics because meaning is not intrinsic but produced by structure with terms, such as sign, signifier, signified, binary oppositions, spatial metaphors (center/periphery, vertical/horizontal axis)
-Post-Structuralism- Employs terms: mimesis, alterity, marginality, desire, and lack, while criticizing Structuralism using:
--Deconstruction, which focuses on the displacements, the excesses, the gaps, the exceptions with jargons: erasure, trace, bracketing, differance, slippage, dissemination, logocentrism, indeterminancy, and decentering
-Reader-Response Criticism- Insists that the reader's experience of a text is the literary event, thus involving an implied/ideal reader, horizon of expectations, Resception Aesthetics, also a synthesis of the 3 broad schools of theory

Bridge
Lacanian Criticism is the bridge between Linguistic and Psychological because language comes first and "structures the unconscious thus discontinuity between signifiers and signified, and the signifiers 'float' in an endless chain of substitution."  Other keywords to remember: mirror, phallus, signifier/ signified, substitution, desire, jouissance, objet petit a, and the three orders: imaginary, symbolic, and real

Psychological: Concerns with universals of human consciousness (factored in personality and biography of individual authors)
-Freudian Criticism and its jargon: Oedipal complex, libido, id, ego, superego, subconcious, repression, resistance.  Harold Bloom's 'strong-poet' (authors subconsciously position their work against an earlier author, their literary father) SEX!
-Archetype/Myth Criticism from Freud's collaborator Carl Jung with a focus on myth, ritual, recurring symbols, motifs, character types, plots, mythic hero, collective unconscious, etc..