Literary Theory and Its Discontents
John R Searle's essay Literary Theory and Its Discontents, published in New Literary History in 1994, critically examines contemporary literary theory, mainly focusing on the nature of textual meaning...
Literary Criticism and Its Discontents
Geoffrey Hartman's essay Literary Criticism and Its Discontents is a reflective and nuanced exploration of the evolving field of literary criticism. Hartman examines the challenges, transformations, a...
Discourse in the Novel
Discourse in the Novel by Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin is an essay that forms part of his larger body of work on literary theory, especially his exploration of the novel as a unique literary genre. Wr...
The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles
Roman Jakobson's The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles explores two fundamental linguistic and cognitive operations —metaphor and metonymy —offering a framework for understanding human communication, art...
The Formalist Critics
In The Formalist Critics, Cleanth Brooks outlines and defends the principles of formalist literary criticism, a method that became central to the New Criticism movement of the mid-20th century. The es...
New Criticism
New Criticism is a formalist approach to literary analysis that emerged in the early to mid-20th century, primarily in the United States and Britain. This movement emphasised the close reading of text...
Formalism
Formalism is a school of literary theory and criticism that focuses on the formal elements of a text —such as its structure, language, style, and use of literary devices —rather than its content, hist...
Structuralism and the Qualities of Literature
Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature explores the qualities of literature through the lens of structuralism. He defines structuralism as a th...
Structuralism and Beyond
Structuralism, primarily associated with linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, is a theoretical approach that seeks to understand human culture by identifying structures that underlie all social phenomena. ...
Voiced and Voiceless Sounds
In linguistics, sounds produced in human speech are categorised into two main types: voiced and voiceless. These terms refer to the presence or absence of vibration of the vocal cords during articulat...