Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is the founder of psychoanalysis. He lived and worked in Vienna, Austria, from 1881. His work, known as “classical psychoanalysis,” is foundational to psychoanalytic critical theory and its application to literary works. Freud’s most “radical insight” is the theory that human behavior is driven by unconscious needs and desires that are repressed. By understanding the unconscious through psychoanalysis and dream analysis, one can correct dysfunctional, defensive behaviors. His theory was predicated on the analysis of family conflicts that shape our self-identity, such as the notion of sibling rivalry.

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was a French psychoanalyst who developed a nontraditional interpretation of psychoanalysis. Lacan’s works are notoriously difficult to understand. Lacan’s theory of the psychological development of the infant is foundational to Lacanian interpretations of literary works. Lacan believed that from birth, infants do not differentiate themselves from their environment. Around six to 18 months, infants in the mirror stage develop an imaginary order, or a system of images as a way to understand the world. When a child begins to acquire language, they enter the symbolic order that separates themselves from unity with their mother. In an attempt to reestablish this unity, humans pursue an object, known as objet petit a, that they believe will reconnect them with this earlier stage.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) is the founder of Marxism. He was a German political economist whose work Das Kapital analyzed and critiqued capitalism and the impacts of the Industrial Revolution. Marx believed that the political economy and, therefore, society was driven by class struggle between the bourgeoisie (those who owned the capitalist means of production) and the proletariat (the working-class laborers). He advocated for working-class people to set aside their differences and unite against the capitalist class in order to overthrow capitalism and establish a more egalitarian economic system. His ideas are foundational to Marxist readings of literary works.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a French philosopher and feminist. Her landmark work The Second Sex (1949) is a detailed, phenomenological analysis of the experience of women under patriarchy. This work “created a theoretical basis for materialist feminists for decades to come” (81). Beauvoir is best known for her formulation that “[o]ne is not born a woman; one becomes one” (81), an articulation of how gender roles are socially constructed rather than biologically determined. Her feminist theory contributes to feminist readings of literary works.

Kimberlé Crenshaw (b.1959) is a scholar of critical race theory and a law professor. She is best known for her articulation of the theory of intersectionality, or the way in which a variety of elements of personal identity contribute to one’s oppression or privilege. For example, a white lesbian might experience oppression on the basis of her lesbian identity due to antigay bias and sexism, but a Black lesbian might experience racist, antigay, and sexist discrimination. Although it began as a legal theory used in cases such as Degraffenreid v General Motors (1976), which charged that Black women experienced workplace discrimination more than their white female and Black male peers, intersectionality and its representation is a lens of literary analysis used in many critical theories.

Stanley Fish (b.1938) is a law professor and literary theorist whose theory of affective stylistics is used by reader-response critical theorists. Affective stylistics is the theory that undergirds the method of “slow-motion” close reading that analyzes “the structure of the reader’s response as it occurs moment to moment” (155). It focuses on how a sentence creates expectations and then confirms or subverts those expectations.

Wolfgang Iser (1926-2007) was a German literary scholar and phenomenologist whose theories contributed to the field reader-response critical theory. Iser’s theory of the implied reader posited that who the “text seems to be addressing” can be analyzed through attention to the narrative’s style and “attitude” (165). Tyson also focuses on Iser’s theory of indeterminacy, or the notion that a text has both a determinate meaning (facts) and indeterminate meaning (“gaps” in the text). A reader psychologically projects to fill in the “gaps” using the text itself as a guide. Effectively, “the text itself guides us through the process involved in interpreting (projecting meaning onto) it” (154).

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) was a Swiss linguist and semiotician who developed the field of structural linguistics. Saussure posited that languages can be understood based on common structures, or rules, that underlie language and its functions. He referred to the structure as langue, French for “language,” and the specific expressions of that structure as parole, French for “speech.” Saussure believed language is structured around defining differences between things in binary oppositions (e.g., hate/love, red/greed). Saussure also theorized that words are linguistic signs that represent both the signifier and signified. These theories were used by structuralists and deconstructivists in their literary analyses.

Northrop Frye (1912-1991) was a Canadian literary theorist whose structuralist analysis of the Western canon, Anatomy of Criticism (1957), is a foundational text of literary criticism. Frye posited a theory of mythoi that described the “structural principles underlying literary genres: specifically, comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony/satire” (192). Frye’s method is known as “archetypal criticism” because it analyzes archetypes, or recurring formal elements, across works. Frye also developed a theory of modes to classify fiction via the comparison of the protagonist’s power to take action and the power of their environment.

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a French literary theorist and semiotician who was tragically killed after being hit by a truck. In his landmark work Mythologies (1957), Barthes developed a method of semiotics in which every “sign system” can be analyzed like a literary text. A sign system can incorporate both “linguistic and nonlinguistic objects and behaviors” (188). Examples include advertising, ceremonial events, and consumer products. Barthes’s semiotics is a tool used to analyze both textual and extratextual structural elements of cultural products. Tyson summarizes Barthes’s semiotic analysis of professional wrestling as an example of this process.

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was a French Algerian philosopher and a foundational theorist of deconstructivism or post-structuralism. As Tyson notes, the deconstructive criticism was particularly dominant in the American academy in the 1970s. Derrida built on Saussure’s notion of (sign = signifier + signified) by arguing that both signifier and signified are not concrete, but rather mentally held in a perpetual state of deferral that references infinite related concepts that are characterized by their difference from other concepts. He termed this quality différance, a combination of “to defer” and “to differ.” Derrida believed that this quality of language allows the construction of new meanings and “new modes of thinking (an activity called bricolage)” (217).

Judith Butler (b.1956) is an American feminist philosopher and gender studies scholar. Butler’s theory of gender performance is foundational to feminist and queer critical theory. They argue that “gender isn’t a natural characteristic” (291), but rather that gender expression is a learned performance. This theory of gender identity contests the notion that gender differences are biologically determined and innate.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., (b.1950) is an African American literary critic and professor. His research is foundational to African American literary criticism. Gates argues for the “distinctiveness” of Black literature predicated on its specific articulation of the poetics, experiences, and culture of Black Americans. Tyson focuses on Gates’s work The Signifying Monkey, which describes a foundational element of African American literature, the practice of signifying, which is drawn from the Black American culture practice of “indirect, clever, ironic, and playful ways of giving your opinion about another person” (338). In literature, this is manifest in the way works by African Americans “cop[y], alte[r], or parod[y] one another’s literary devices” (338), such as when Ralph Ellison “signifies” Richard Wright’s silent, present protagonist Bigger Thomas through the “invisible” protagonist in Invisible Man.

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) was a Black American writer and literary theorist best known for her novels The Bluest Eye (1970) and Beloved (1987). Tyson frequently references these works in her examples of applying different modes of critical theory. For example, Tyson notes that a Marxist analysis of The Bluest Eye would illustrate how it “undermines classist values by illustrating the injustices suffered under the class system imposed by American capitalism in the early 1940s” (57). 

Tyson also references Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination as a foundational text in African American criticism. In the text, Morrison advances a theory of “the Africanist presence in American history” (342). The term “Africanist” refers to the way white American authors use Eurocentric, racist stereotypes in their representations of Black characters in literature in a way that reflects their “own fears, needs, desires, and conflicts” (342). The Africanist presence is used as a point of contrast for white authors to assert the relative “civilization” of white culture when measured against Black “savagery.”

Edward Said (1935-2003) was a Palestinian American literary theorist and political activist whose work Orientalism (1978) is a foundational text in postcolonial critical theory. Orientalism is a form of “Eurocentric othering” used to “produce a positive national self-definition for Western nations by contrast with Eastern nations on which the West projects all the negative characteristics it doesn’t want to believe exist among its own people” (367). Tyson focuses on Said’s method of analyzing a “canonized literary work” by moving those on the margins to the center of the analysis. For instance, Said analyzed the relationship of minor character Thomas Bertram to the slave trade in Mansfield Park by Jane Austen to highlight the colonialist practices that underpin the pastoral domestic narrative.