Culler Appendix Definitions

Question	Answer
Structuralism	-identifying the underlying structures that make describing/reading an experience possible
Structuralism (authors?)	Structuralism developed first in anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss), then in literary and cultural studies (Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette), psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan), intellectual history (Michel Foucault), and Marxist theory (Louis Althusser).
Structuralism What does it do? What did it do?	In literary studies structuralism promotes a poetics interested in the conventions that make literary works possible; it seeks not to produce new interpretations of works but to understand how they can have the meanings and effects that they do. It opened the way to symptomatic readings of literary works and encouraged cultural studies to try to spell out the signifying procedures of different cultural practices.
Post-Structuralism	Once structuralism came to be defined as a movement or school, theorists distanced themselves from it.
Post-Structuralism some authors	Barthes, Lacan, and Foucault, for example, were identified as post-structuralists
Post-Structuralism critics?	how texts create meaning by violating any conventions that structural analysis locates. They recognized the impossibility of describing a complete or coherent signifying system, since systems are always changing. In fact, post-structuralism does not demonstrate the inadequacies or errors of structuralism so much as turn away from the project.
Deconstruction	Deconstruction is most simply defined as a critique of the hierarchical oppositions that have structured Western thought: inside/outside, mind/body, literal/metaphorical, speech/writing, presence/absence, nature/culture, form/meaning.
Post-Colonial Theory	the attempt to understand the problems posed by the European colonization and its aftermath. cf. Orientalism
Minority Discourse	he main effort has been to revive and promote the study of black, Latino, Asian-American, and Native American writing. cf. Adichie, .. vs. majority discourse
Russian Formalism	-question of form and technique. concern themselves with the literariness of literature: -the verbal strategies that make it literary, -the foregrounding of language itself -the ‘making strange’ of experience that they accomplish. Redirecting attention from authors to verbal ‘devices’: ‘what does the author say here?’ we should ask something like ‘what happens to the sonnet here?’ or ‘what adventures befall the novel in this book by Dickens?
Russian Formalism authors	Roman Jakobson, Boris Eichenbaum, and Victor Shklovsky
New Criticism	It focused attention on the unity or integration of literary works New Criticism treated poems as aesthetic objects rather than historical documents and examined the interactions of their verbal features and the ensuing complications of meaning rather than the historical intentions and circumstances of their authors. -individual works of art! -Focusing on ambiguity, paradox, irony, and the effects of connotation and poetic imagery, the New Criticism sought to show the contribution of each element of poetic form to a unified structure. -New Criticism left enduring legacies techniques of close reading and the assumption that the test of any critical activity is whether it helps us to produce richer, more insightful interpretations of individual works.
Phenomenology author	Husserl
Phenomenology	bypass the problem of the separation between subject and object, consciousness and the world, by focusing on the phenomenal reality of objects as they appear to consciousness.
version of phenomenology: reader-response criticism authors	Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser
reader response criticism	For the reader, the work is what is given to consciousness; one can argue that the work is not something objective, existing independently of any experience of it, but is the experience of the reader. analysing how readers produce meaning by making connections, filling in things left unsaid, anticipating and conjecturing and then having their expectations disappointed or confirmed.
another version of phenomenology: aesthetics of reception author?	Hans Robert Jauss
another version of phenomenology: aesthetics of reception	A work is an answer to questions posed by a ‘horizon of expectations’. The interpretation of works should, therefore, focus not on the experience of an individual reader but on the history of a work’s reception and its relation to the changing aesthetic norms and sets of expectations that allow it to be read in different eras.
Feminist Theory	a version of post-structuralism because it deconstructs the opposition man/ woman and the oppositions associated with it in the history of Western culture On the one hand: feminist theorists champion the identity of women, demand rights for women, and promote women’s writings as representations of the experience of women. On the other hand: feminists undertake a theoretical critique of the heterosexual matrix that organizes identities and cultures in terms of the opposition between man and woman.
Psychoanalysis	had an impact on literary studies both as mode of interpretation and as a theory about language, identity, and the subject. on one hand: most powerful modern hermeneutic: an authoritative meta-language or technical vocabulary that can be applied to literary works, as to other situations, to understand what is ‘really’ going on. on other hand: Jacques Lacan, a renegade French psychoanalyst who set up his own school outside the analytic establishment and led what he presented as a return to Freud --> emphasizes the crucial role in analysis of what Freud called transference, in which the analysand casts the analyst in the role of authority figure from the past (‘falling in love with your analyst’). The truth of the patient’s condition, in this account, emerges not from the analyst’s interpretation of the patient’s discourse but from the way analyst and patient are caught up in replaying a crucial scenario from the patient’s past. This makes Psychoanalysis a post-structural discipline
Marxism author	Louis Althusser
Marxism	Althusser led his readers to Lacanian theory and provoked a gradual transformation by which, ‘post-structuralism came to occupy much the same space as that of its host culture, Marxism’ For Marxism, texts belong to a superstructure determined by the economic base (the ‘real relations of production’).
New Historicism/Cultural Materialism	cultural materialism: the analysis of all forms of signification, including quite centrally writing, within the actual means and conditions of their production New Historicism: the analysis of all forms of signification, including quite centrally writing, within the actual means and conditions of their production treating literature not as a reflection or product of a social reality but as one of several sometimes antagonistic practices. A key question for the new historicists has been the dialectic of ‘subversion and containment’: how far do Renaissance texts offer a genuinely radical critique of the religious and political ideologies of their day and how far is the discursive practice of literature, in its apparent subversiveness, a way of containing subversive energies?

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