Literature studies through time


Greeks:  for early critics, literature was concern with human behavior and its relationship with       the  physical world, society and ethics. 


Romanticism: a belief that higher orders of human truth were possible thorugh trascending base concerns of pure reason, politics and worldy values. 


Scientific Determinism: is the belief that the world-objects, actions, and forces-arises from  clear causes that can be revealed through objective scientific inquiry.


New Criticism: has a focus on close reading with little to no concern for history, ideology, politics, biography, or other factors outside the text. 


Reader-response criticism: moves the emphasis of textual analysis from a singular focus on the text to one where the reader works in concert with a text to produce an interpretation.


Strucruralism: (Saussure's work)  Words were SIGNS made up of two component parts: a SIGNIFIER and a SIGNIFIED.


Poststructuralism: Negotiating not what a sign is, but what a sign is not.We know through difference.


Marxism: All texts contain subtexts which are extensions of historical and ideological conflict, the same conflicts being played out in real societies and not just in literary texts. 


Feminism: Devoted to describing and interpreting (or reinterpreting) women's experience through literature. 


Cultural poetics: History as the body of knowledge. Cultural poetics seesks to investigate these multiple discourses (history, law, economics, politcs, and even literary analysis itself) in order to explore the connections between all human activities and their role in making life meaningful. 


Postcolonial: It is definied as an approach to texts produced in colonized countries.It derives from multiple critical approaches, through topics such as nationalism, ethnicity, language, history and how these issues are dealt with when two (or more) cultures clash, usually with one dominant and one deemed inferior (cultural imperialism).