Major Schools of Literary Criticism

Why This Matters

Literary criticism isn't just about having opinions on books—it's about understanding how we make meaning from texts and why different readers arrive at radically different interpretations of the same work. You're being tested on your ability to recognize these critical frameworks, apply them to unfamiliar texts, and understand how each school's assumptions shape the questions it asks. Whether an exam asks you to analyze a passage through a Marxist lens or explain how a feminist critic would read a character differently than a formalist, you need to know what each approach prioritizes and what it deliberately ignores.

These schools cluster around fundamental questions: Is meaning located in the text, the reader, or the context? Should we analyze literature as an autonomous art form or as a cultural document? Whose voices and experiences matter in interpretation? Don't just memorize names and dates—know what interpretive problem each school tries to solve and how it relates to others. A strong essay connects these frameworks to each other, showing where they overlap, where they conflict, and when each approach is most useful.

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Text-Centered Approaches

These schools share a conviction that the literary text itself should be the primary object of analysis. The meaning you're looking for is on the page, not in the author's biography or the reader's feelings.

Formalism

• Close reading of literary form—analyzes how language, style, rhythm, and literary devices create meaning within the text
• Text as autonomous object—rejects historical, biographical, or social context as irrelevant to interpretation
• "Literariness" as the goal—asks what makes literature literary, focusing on defamiliarization and artistic technique

New Criticism

• The text as self-contained artifact—meaning exists entirely within the work, independent of author or reader
• Intentional and affective fallacies—argues that authorial intent and reader emotion are irrelevant to valid interpretation
• Focus on tension and paradox—prizes irony, ambiguity, and complexity as markers of literary value

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Structure and System Approaches

These schools view individual texts as part of larger systems of meaning. Literature doesn't exist in isolation—it operates through codes, structures, and conventions that transcend any single work.

Structuralism

• Underlying structures govern meaning—influenced by Saussurean linguistics, analyzes how binary oppositions and narrative patterns create significance
• Literature as sign system—texts participate in broader cultural codes that readers unconsciously recognize
• Focus on relationships, not content—meaning emerges from differences between elements (hero/villain, nature/culture), not from elements themselves

Post-structuralism

• Meaning is unstable and plural—challenges structuralism's faith in fixed systems, arguing that language always exceeds our attempts to control it
• Context and power shape interpretation—recognizes that who reads, when, and where affects what a text can mean
• Decentering the subject—questions the idea of a unified author or reader who controls meaning

Deconstruction

• Revealing textual contradictions—a specific method (associated with Derrida) that exposes how texts undermine their own apparent meanings
• Binary oppositions are unstable—shows how pairs like good/evil or speech/writing depend on each other and can be reversed
• Meaning is always deferred—the concept of différance suggests meaning is never fully present, always pointing elsewhere

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Reader and Psychology Approaches

These schools shift attention from the text to the minds engaging with it—whether the reader's conscious interpretation or the unconscious forces shaping characters and authors.

Reader-Response Criticism

• The reader creates meaning—interpretation is subjective, varying based on individual experience, emotion, and cultural background
• Reading as dynamic process—meaning emerges from the interaction between text and reader, not from the text alone
• Interpretive communities—Stanley Fish argues that shared reading conventions (not individual whims) shape how groups interpret texts

Psychoanalytic Criticism

• Unconscious desires drive narrative—applies Freudian concepts (repression, the Oedipus complex, dream logic) to characters, authors, and readers
• Literature as symptom—texts reveal hidden anxieties, forbidden wishes, and psychological conflicts
• Beyond Freud—Lacanian approaches focus on language and the symbolic order; object relations theory examines attachment and identity formation

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Ideology and Power Approaches

These schools insist that literature cannot be separated from the social, economic, and political structures that produce and consume it. Texts don't just reflect reality—they participate in struggles over power.

Marxist Criticism

• Literature reflects class struggle—analyzes how texts represent economic inequality, labor, and material conditions
• Ideology critique—examines how literature reinforces or challenges dominant beliefs that serve ruling-class interests
• Base and superstructure—culture (including literature) is shaped by economic foundations, though the relationship is complex, not mechanical

Feminist Criticism

• Gender as analytical category—examines how texts represent women, construct femininity and masculinity, and reinforce or challenge patriarchy
• Recovery and critique—both rediscovers forgotten women writers and critiques how canonical texts perpetuate sexism
• Intersectionality matters—contemporary feminist criticism recognizes that gender intersects with race, class, sexuality, and other identities

Postcolonial Criticism

• Empire shapes literature—analyzes how colonialism and its aftermath influence both colonizer and colonized cultures
• Representation and resistance—examines how colonial narratives construct the "Other" and how colonized peoples write back against those representations
• Hybridity and identity—explores how colonial encounters create complex, mixed cultural identities (Bhabha's "third space")

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Identity and Representation Approaches

These schools foreground questions of who gets represented, how, and by whom—challenging assumptions about "universal" human experience.

Queer Theory

• Challenges heteronormativity—questions the assumption that heterosexuality is natural, normal, or default in literary representation
• Sexuality and identity as constructed—influenced by Foucault, argues that categories like "gay" and "straight" are historically produced, not timeless
• Reading against the grain—finds queer possibilities in texts that don't explicitly address sexuality, examining desire, deviance, and non-normative identities

Cultural Studies

• Literature as cultural practice—breaks down boundaries between "high" and "low" culture, analyzing popular texts alongside canonical ones
• Interdisciplinary by design—draws on sociology, anthropology, media studies, and political theory
• Culture as contested terrain—examines how cultural products shape and reflect struggles over meaning, identity, and power

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Context and Environment Approaches

These schools insist that texts must be read in relation to their historical moment or their environmental context—literature is never timeless or placeless.

New Historicism

• Texts and contexts are intertwined—rejects the idea that literature transcends its historical moment; history shapes texts, and texts shape history
• Power circulates through culture—influenced by Foucault, examines how literature participates in the production and negotiation of power
• Anecdotes and juxtaposition—often reads literary texts alongside non-literary documents (court records, medical treatises) to reveal shared cultural assumptions

Ecocriticism

• Literature and environment—analyzes how texts represent nature, ecology, and human-environment relationships
• Beyond pastoral nostalgia—contemporary ecocriticism addresses climate change, environmental justice, and the Anthropocene
• Nature as more than backdrop—challenges the assumption that the natural world exists only as setting or symbol for human drama

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Form and Convention Approaches

Postmodernism

• Skepticism toward grand narratives—questions universal truths, stable meanings, and the distinction between "original" and "copy"
• Metafiction and intertextuality—texts that self-consciously comment on their own construction; meaning emerges through references to other texts
• Fragmentation and play—embraces discontinuity, parody, pastiche, and the blurring of boundaries between genres, media, and cultural registers

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Quick Reference Table

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Self-Check Questions

1. Which two schools both reject authorial intent but for different theoretical reasons? How do their justifications differ?

2. A critic argues that a Victorian novel reinforces middle-class values by depicting poverty as a moral failing. Which critical approach is this, and how would a postcolonial critic extend or challenge this reading?

3. Compare and contrast structuralism and post-structuralism: what does each assume about the stability of meaning, and how would each approach a recurring symbol in a text?

4. If an FRQ asks you to analyze how a text "constructs gender," which two or three schools would be most relevant, and what different questions would each ask?

5. A reader-response critic and a psychoanalytic critic both want to explain why readers find a particular character disturbing. How would their explanations differ in focus and method?