Biographical criticism

Deconstruction

A philosophically sceptical approach to the possibility of coherent meaning in language, initiated by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) in a series of works published in 1967 (later translated as Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology, and Writing and Difference), and adopted by several leading literary critics in the United States—notably at Yale University—from the early 1970s onwards. Derrida's claim is that the dominant Western tradition of thought has attempted to establish grounds of certainty and truth by repressing the limitless instability of language. This ‘logocentric’ tradition sought some absolute source or guarantee of meaning (a ‘transcendental signified’) which could centre or stabilize the uncertainties of signification, through a set of ‘violent hierarchies’ privileging a central term over a marginal one: nature over culture, male over female, and most importantly speech over writing. The ‘phonocentric’ suspicion of writing as a parasite upon the authenticity of speech is a crucial target of Derrida's subversive approach to Western philosophy, in which he inverts and dissolves conceptual hierarchies to show that the repressed or marginalized term has always already contaminated the privileged or central term. Thus, drawing on Saussure's theory of the sign, Derrida argues that the stable self-identity which we attribute to speech as the authentic source of meaning is illusory, since language operates as a self-contained system of internal differences rather than of positive terms or presences: writing, distrusted in the Western ‘metaphysics of presence’ because it displays the absence of any authenticating voice, is in this sense logically prior to speech.

Derrida's central concept (although in principle it ought not to occupy such a ‘hierarchical’ position) is presented in his coining of the term différance, a French portmanteau word combining ‘difference’ with ‘deferral’ to suggest that the differential nature of meanings in language ceaselessly defers or postpones any determinate meaning: language is an endless chain or ‘play of différance’ which logocentric discourses try vainly to fix to some original or final term that can never be reached. Deconstructive readings track down within a text the aporia or internal contradiction that undermines its claims to coherent meaning; or they reveal how texts can be seen to deconstruct themselves. Derrida's difficult and paradoxical attitude to the metaphysical tradition seeks to subvert it while also claiming that there is no privileged vantage-point from which to do this from outside the instabilities of language.

Deconstruction thus undermines its own radical scepticism by admitting that it leaves everything exactly as it was; it is an unashamedly self-contradictory effort to think the ‘unthinkable’, often by recourse to strange neologisms, puns, and other word-play. Although initially directed against the scientific pretensions of structuralism in the human sciences, it was welcomed enthusiastically into literary studies at Yale University and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, partly because it seemed to place literary problems of figurative language and interpretation above philosophers' and historians' claims to truth, and partly because it opened up limitless possibilities of interpretation. The writings of Paul de Man, Barbara Johnson, J. Hillis Miller, and Geoffrey Hartman in the 1970s and 1980s applied and extended Derrida's concepts to critical questions of interpretation, tending to challenge the status of the author's intention or of the external world as a source of meaning in texts, and questioning the boundary between criticism and literature. This ‘Yale school’ and other deconstructionists came under fierce attack for dogmatic nihilism and wilful obscurity. For an extended introduction to this sometimes bewildering school of thought, consult Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (1982). (Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms)

Existentialism

A current in European philosophy distinguished by its emphasis on lived human existence. Although it had an important precursor in the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard in the 1840s, its impact was fully felt only in the mid-20th century in France and Germany: the German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers prepared some of the ground in the 1920s and 1930s for the more influential work of Jean-Paul Sartre and the other French existentialists including Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In terms of its literary impact, the thought of Sartre has been the most significant, presented in novels (notably La Nausée (Nausea), 1938) and plays (including Les Mouches (The Flies), 1943) as well as in the major philosophical work L'Être et le néant (Being and Nothingness), 1943).

Sartrean existentialism, as distinct from the Christian existentialism derived from Kierkegaard, is an atheist philosophy of human freedom conceived in terms of individual responsibility and authenticity. Its fundamental premise that ‘existence precedes essence’, implies that we as human beings have no given essence or nature but must forge our own values and meanings in an inherently meaningless or absurd world of existence. Obliged to make our own choices, we can either confront the anguish (or Angst) of this responsibility, or evade it by claiming obedience to some determining convention or duty, thus acting in ‘bad faith’. Paradoxically, we are ‘condemned to be free’. Similar themes can be found in the novels and essays of Camus; both authors felt that the absurdity of existence could be redeemed through the individual's decision to become engagé (‘committed’) within social and political causes opposing fascism and imperialism. Some of the concerns of French existentialism are echoed in English in Thom Gunn's early collection of poems. The Sense of Movement (1957), and in the fiction of Iris Murdoch and John Fowles. See also phenomenology. For an introductory anthology, consult Paul S. Macdonald (ed.), The Existentialist Reader (2001).(Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms)

Feminist criticism

Feminist criticism is a textual interpretation that examines what the author is saying about women through the use of literary elements, figurative language, female stereotypes and patriarchal elements such as dominance and

subservience to men.

The first wave of feminist criticism began in the 1790’s, in reaction to feminine inequality, and an inability to obtain education (Mays 1323).

The second wave of feminism began in the 1960’s and 70’s when civil rights and antiwar protests were going on (Mays 1323).

Women in the 1970’s began to examine female authors and praise male authors who wrote about women in a more realistic way, this time period became known as gynocriticism (Guttman, WebTycho, Module 4).

Postmodern criticism interprets literature that contain male domination and female subordination rather than gender neutral (Stern, 557). 

Current feminist criticism examines things more from a formalist standpoint by applying biographical and historical history and reading  texts like diaries and biographies (Guttman, Webtycho, Module 4 )

Feminist critics evaluate: Representations of women in literature from a male, female and feminist points of view that is defined by culture and society  (Guttman, Webtycho Mod. 4).

New literature to add  texts to this theory (Guttman, Webtycho Mod. 4).

Male/female domination and subordination in a patriarchal society (Guttman, Webtycho Mod. 4).

The different ways men and women write (Guttman, Webtycho Mod. 4).

Guttman, Jane. “Module 2: Formalism” Document posted in University of Maryland University College ENGL 303 6380 online classroom. 16 June 2014.

    This module was used to define formalist theory and how it applies to feminist criticism.

Guttman, Jane. “Module 4: Feminist and Marxist Criticism” Document posted in University of Maryland University College ENGL 303 6380 online classroom. 16 June 2014.

Mays, Kelly J. The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11Th ed. New York. W.W. Norton & Company. 2014. 1323-25, A5, A7. Print.

Formalism

In the most general sense, the cultivation of artistic technique at the expense of subject‐matter, either in literary practice or in criticism. The term has been applied, often in a derogatory sense, to several kinds of approach to literature in which form is emphasized in isolation from a work's meanings or is taken as the chief criterion of aesthetic value. In modern critical discussion, however, the term frequently refers more specifically to the principles of certain Russian and Czech theorists: for this sense, see russian formalism. In the context of modern American poetry, the term has the specific sense of adherence to traditional metres and verse forms, as with the work of Howard Nemerov, Richard Wilbur, and the later poets of the New Formalism, in contrast with the more widely adopted use of free verse.(Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms 2008)

Gynocriticism

Gynocriticism is a term used in the second stage of feminist criticism to define women’s interpretation of literary texts in the 1970’s. The branch of modern feminist literary studies that focuses on women as writers, as distinct from the feminist critique of male authors. The term was coined by Elaine Showalter in her article ‘Toward a Feminist Poetics’ (1979), in which she explains that gynocritics is concerned ‘with woman as the producer of textual meaning, with the history, themes, genres, and structures of literature by women’. It thus includes critical works like Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (1977), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), and several other such studies published since the mid-1970s. Some writers have amended the term to ‘gynocriticism’, using ‘gynocritics’ to denote instead the practitioners of this kind of feminist study. Adjective: gynocritical.

Historicism

Humanism

A 19th-century term for the values and ideals of the European Renaissance, which placed a new emphasis on the expansion of human capacities. Reviving the study of Greek and Roman history, philosophy, and arts, the Renaissance humanists developed an image of ‘Man’ more positive and hopeful than that of medieval ascetic Christianity: rather than being a miserable sinner awaiting redemption from a pit of fleshly corruption, ‘Man’ was a source of infinite possibilities, ideally developing towards a balance of physical, spiritual, moral, and intellectual faculties. Most early humanists like Erasmus and Milton in the 16th and 17th centuries combined elements of Christian and classical cultures in what has become known as Christian humanism, but the 18th-century Enlightenment began to detach the ideal of human perfection from religious supernaturalism, so that by the 20th century humanism came to denote those moral philosophies that abandon theological dogma in favour of purely human concerns. While being defined against theology on the one side, humanism came also to be contrasted with scientific materialism on the other: from the mid-19th century onwards, Matthew Arnold and others (including the New Humanists in the United States, led by Paul More and Irving Babbitt in the 1920s) opposed the claims of science with the ideal of balanced human perfection, self-cultivation, and ethical self-restraint. This Arnoldian humanism, which has enjoyed wide influence in Anglo-American literary culture, is one variety of the prevalent liberal humanism, which centres its view of the world upon the notion of the freely self-determining individual. In modern literary theory, liberal humanism (and sometimes all humanism) has come under challenge from post-structuralism, which replaces the unitary concept of ‘Man’ with that of the ‘subject’, which is gendered, ‘de-centred’, and no longer self-determining (Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms 2008)

Marxist criticism

A tradition of literary and aesthetic interpretation and commentary derived from the principles of Marxism (‘historical materialism’), and thus tending to view literature in the light of modes of production (feudal, capitalist) and their property relations and class struggles. Little in this tradition derives directly from the writings of Karl Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels, who provided no developed aesthetic theory, although they expressed doubts about the value of propagandist fiction and thus discouraged the simple judgement of literary works according to the degree of socialist sentiment they express. In general, the claims of Marxist literary analysis have been more compatible with literary history (in which the formative importance of economic factors in literary evolution has commonly been accepted) than with evaluative criticism itself. Critical positions claiming to be Marxist arose later in the two divergent currents of official Communist doctrine in the Soviet Union and its satellite parties (1917–95) on the one hand, and of ‘Western Marxism’ on the other. Russian Communist literary policy generated a short‐lived ambition for the proletarianization of literature and the rejection of the bourgeois inheritance, under the name of proletcult (memorably derided by Leon Trotsky in his Literature and Revolution, 1924), and then a more conservative doctrine of socialist realism, which tended to impose a bland official optimism upon writers while suppressing ‘decadent’ alternatives along with independent critical positions such as those of the Russian Formalists and of the Bakhtin group (see carnivalization, dialogic).

The more creative and ultimately more influential trends in Marxist criticism emerged from various Western Marxist thinkers, who tended to disagree on a range of questions including the requirement upon writers to be ‘committed’ to the socialist cause and the progressive or reactionary tendencies of realism and modernism. Notable figures here include the Hungarian writer Georg Lukács, who in Studies in European Realism (1950) and other works upheld the value of ‘bourgeois’ realism as a basis for socialist literature while attacking the allegedly apolitical pessimism of modernist writing; the German poet‐playwright Bertolt Brecht, who argued to the contrary in defending modernist experiment as potentially radical; and some writers associated with the Frankfurt School, notably Walter Benjamin, who interpreted the significance of Brecht's epic theatre and whose essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1935) is a widely admired classic of Marxist reflection upon modern culture.

Western Marxist criticism underwent renewal and diversification in the 1960s and 1970s, becoming more visible within academic literary studies and interacting with a range of other critical schools from structuralism, psychoanalytic criticism, feminist criticism, and postcolonial theory to deconstruction and new historicism. In this ‘neo‐Marxist’ phase, the traditional Marxist metaphor of economic causality in which a ‘superstructure’ of political and cultural forms grew up from a ‘base’ of economic forces and relations was either openly challenged (as it was by the British socialist critic Raymond Williams, who inspired the school of cultural materialism) or quietly set aside in favour of explorations of literature's relations with ideology and with the specific cultural contradictions of modern capitalist society. In English, the leading figures in this phase have been the American theorist Fredric Jameson (in Marxism and Form (1971), and later works) and the prolific British essayist Terry Eagleton (in Criticism and Ideology (1976), The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), and numerous other works). For a fuller account, consult Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976). Another helpful resource is the introductory anthology Marxist Literary Theory (eds. Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne, 1996).(Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms 2008)

Myth criticism

A kind of literary interpretation that regards literary works as expressions or embodiments of recurrent mythic patterns and structures, or of ‘timeless’ archetypes. Myth criticism, which flourished in the 1950s and 1960s, is less interested in the specific qualities of a given work than in those features of its narrative structure or symbolism that seem to connect it to ancient myths and religions. An important precedent for many myth‐critical studies was J. G. Frazer's speculative anthropological work The Golden Bough (1890–1915), which proposed a cycle of death and rebirth found in fertility cults as the common basis for several mythologies. The most influential modern myth critic, Northrop Frye, translated this hypothesis into a universal scheme of literary history in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), in which the major narrative genres are related to the seasonal cycle. Other leading myth critics have included Gaston Bachelard, Richard Chase, and Leslie Fiedler. More recently, myth criticism has been widely dismissed as a form of reductionism that neglects cultural and historical differences as well as the specific properties of literary works.(Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms)

Myth criticism

A kind of literary interpretation that regards literary works as expressions or embodiments of recurrent mythic patterns and structures, or of ‘timeless’ archetypes. Myth criticism, which flourished in the 1950s and 1960s, is less interested in the specific qualities of a given work than in those features of its narrative structure or symbolism that seem to connect it to ancient myths and religions. An important precedent for many myth‐critical studies was J. G. Frazer's speculative anthropological work The Golden Bough (1890–1915), which proposed a cycle of death and rebirth found in fertility cults as the common basis for several mythologies. The most influential modern myth critic, Northrop Frye, translated this hypothesis into a universal scheme of literary history in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), in which the major narrative genres are related to the seasonal cycle. Other leading myth critics have included Gaston Bachelard, Richard Chase, and Leslie Fiedler. More recently, myth criticism has been widely dismissed as a form of reductionism that neglects cultural and historical differences as well as the specific properties of literary works (Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms 2008).

Narratology

A term used since 1969 to denote the branch of literary study devoted to the analysis of narratives, and more specifically of forms of narration and varieties of narrator. Narratology as a modern theory is associated chiefly with European structuralism, although older studies of narrative forms and devices, as far back as Aristotle's Poetics (4th century bce) can also be regarded as narratological works. Modern narratology may be dated from Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928), with its theory of narrative functions. (Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms)

New Critcism

A movement in American literary criticism from the 1930s to the 1960s, concentrating on the verbal complexities and ambiguities of short poems considered as self-sufficient objects without attention to their origins or effects. The name comes from John Crowe Ransom's book The New Criticism (1941), in which he surveyed the theories developed in England by T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and William Empson, together with the work of the American critic Yvor Winters. Ransom called for a more ‘objective’ criticism focusing on the intrinsic qualities of a work rather than on its biographical or historical context; and his students Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren had already provided a very influential model of such an approach in their college textbook Understanding Poetry (1938), which helped to make New Criticism the academic orthodoxy for the next twenty years. Other critics grouped under this heading, despite their differences, include Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, W. K. Wimsatt Jr, and Kenneth Burke. Influenced by T. S. Eliot's view of poetry's autotelic status, and by the detailed semantic analyses of I. A. Richards in Practical Criticism (1929) and Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), the American New Critics repudiated ‘extrinsic’ criteria for understanding poems, dismissing them under such names as the affective fallacy and the intentional fallacy. Moreover, they sought to overcome the traditional distinction between form and content: for them, a poem was ideally an ‘organic unity’ in which tensions were brought to equilibrium. Their favoured terms of analysis—irony, paradox, imagery, metaphor, and symbol—tended to neglect questions of genre, and were not successfully transferred to the study of dramatic and narrative works. Many later critics—often unsympathetic to the New Critics' Southern religious conservatism—accused them of cutting literature off from history, but their impact has in some ways been irreversible, especially in replacing biographical source-study with text-centred approaches. The outstanding works of New Criticism are Brooks's The Well-Wrought Urn (1947) and Wimsatt's The Verbal Icon (1954) (Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms 2008).

Phenomenology

Philology

A field of scholarly study that investigates languages and their literatures, especially in their historical evolution. It covers a wide range of scholarly endeavour, from the decipherment of ancient scripts and textual criticism to the interpretation of literary texts; but since the emergence of linguistics as a distinct and professedly scientific discipline in the early 20th century, ‘philology’ has tended to refer to the 19th-century tradition of historical and comparative linguistic studies. Its older and broader meaning survives in the names of some university departments and academic journals. A researcher in this scholarly field is a philologist (Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms 2008).

Post colonial literature

A category devised to replace and expand upon what was once in Britain called Commonwealth Literature. As a label, it thus covers a very wide range of writings from countries that were once colonies or dependencies of the European powers. There has been much debate about the scope of the term: should predominantly white ex-colonies like Ireland, Canada, and Australia be included? why are the United States exempted both from the accepted list of former colonies and from the category of colonizing powers? In practice, the term is applied most often to writings from Africa, the Indian sub-continent, the Caribbean, and other regions whose histories during the 20th century are marked by colonialism, anti-colonial movements, and subsequent transitions to post-Independence society. Critical attention to this large body of work in academic contexts is often influenced by a distinct school of postcolonial theory which developed in the 1980s and 1990s, under the influence of Edward W. Said's landmark study Orientalism (1978). Postcolonial theory considers vexed cultural-political questions of national and ethnic identity, ‘otherness’, race, imperialism, and language, during and after the colonial periods. It draws upon post-structuralist theories such as those of deconstruction in order to unravel the complex relations between imperial ‘centre’ and colonial ‘periphery’, often in ways that have been criticized for being excessively abstruse. The principal luminaries of postcolonial theory after Said have been Gayatri C. Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha. For fuller accounts, consult A. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (1998) and Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory (1997) (Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms 2008).

Queer theory

A body of academic writings that has since the early 1990s attempted to redefine and de‐stabilize categories of sexuality in the light of post‐structuralist theory, and especially under the influence of Michel Foucault's La Volonté de savoir (1976). Rooted in the lesbian and gay activism of the 1970s but now more sceptical about inherited conceptions of ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ as simple or given ‘identities’, certain gay and lesbian intellectuals and activists adopted the more controversial but also more inclusive label ‘queer’ to cover a range of sexual orientations and sub‐cultures. Queer theory stresses the historical variability, fluidity, and provisional or ‘performed’ nature of sexualities (see performative), notably in the writings of Judith Butler, whose book Gender Trouble (1990) is a key text of this school. The pursuit of these concerns in the reading of literary texts is more often associated with the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose Between Men (1985) and Epistemology of the Closet (1990) investigate the paradoxes of ‘homosocial’ male bonding and homophobia in English fiction. For a fuller account, consult Annamarie Jogose, Queer Theory (1996).

Reader- response theory- A general term for those kinds of modern criticism and literary theory that focus on the responses of readers to literary works, rather than on the works themselves considered as self‐contained entities. It is not a single agreed theory so much as a shared concern with a set of problems involving the extent and nature of readers' contribution to the meanings of literary works, approached from various positions including those of structuralism (see competence), psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. The common factor is a shift from the description of texts in terms of their inherent properties to a discussion of the production of meanings within the reading process. Important contributions to this debate include Wolfgang Iser's The Act of Reading (1978), which sees readers as ‘actualizing’ texts by filling in their ‘gaps’ or indeterminacies of meaning, and Stanley Fish's Is There a Text in this Class? (1980), which gives the reader an even more active role as the text's true producer. A somewhat distinct line of historical investigation is represented by the reception theory of Hans Robert Jauss. For a fuller account, consult Elizabeth Freund, The Return of the Reader (1987).

Reception theory- A branch of modern literary studies concerned with the ways in which literary works are received by readers. The term has sometimes been used to refer to reader‐response criticism in general, but it is associated more particularly with the ‘reception‐aesthetics’ (German, Rezeptionsästhetik) outlined in 1970 by the German literary historian Hans Robert Jauss. Drawing on philosophical hermeneutics, Jauss argued that literary works are received against an existing horizon of expectations consisting of readers' current knowledge and presuppositions about literature, and that the meanings of works change as such horizons shift. Unlike most varieties of reader‐response theory, then, reception theory is interested more in historical changes affecting the reading public than in the solitary reader (Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms 2008).

Semiotics

The systematic study of signs, or, more precisely, of the production of meanings from sign‐systems, linguistic or non‐linguistic. As a distinct tradition of inquiry into human communications, semiotics was founded by the American philosopher C. S. Peirce (1839–1914) and separately by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), who proposed that linguistics would form one part of a more general science of signs: ‘semiology’. Peirce's term ‘semiotics’ is usually preferred in English, although Saussure's principles and concepts—especially the distinctions between signifier and signified and between langue and parole—have been more influential as the basis of structuralism and its approach to literature. Semiotics is concerned not with the relations between signs and things but with the interrelationships between signs themselves, within their structured systems or codes of signification (see paradigm, syntagm). The semiotic approach to literary works stresses the production of literary meanings from shared conventions and codes; but the scope of semiotics goes beyond spoken or written language to other kinds of communicative systems such as cinema, advertising, clothing, gesture, and cuisine. A practitioner of semiotics is a semiotician. The term semiosis is sometimes used to refer to the process of signifying. For a fuller account, consult Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (1977) (Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms 2008).

Structuralism

modern intellectual movement that analyses cultural phenomena according to principles derived from linguistics, emphasizing the systematic interrelationships among the elements of any human activity, and thus the abstract codes and conventions governing the social production of meanings. Building on the linguistic concept of the phoneme—a unit of meaningful sound defined purely by its differences from other phonemes rather than by any inherent features—structuralism argues that the elements composing any cultural phenomenon (from cooking to drama) are similarly ‘relational’: that is, they have meaning only by virtue of their contrasts with other elements of the system, especially in binary oppositions of paired opposites. Their meanings can be established not by referring each element to any supposed equivalent in natural reality, but only by analysing its function within a self‐contained cultural code. Accordingly, structuralist analysis seeks the underlying system or langue that governs individual utterances or instances. In formulating the laws by which elements of such a system are combined, it distinguishes between sets of interchangeable units (paradigms) and sequences of such units in combination (syntagms), thereby outlining a basic ‘syntax’ of human culture.

Structuralism and its ‘science of signs’ (see semiotics) are derived chiefly from the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), and partly from Russian Formalism and the related narratology of Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928). It flourished in France in the 1960s, following the widely discussed applications of structural analysis to mythology by the anthropologist Claude Lévi‐Strauss. In the study of literary works, structuralism is distinguished by its rejection of those traditional notions according to which literature ‘expresses’ an author's meaning or ‘reflects’ reality. Instead, the ‘text’ is seen as an objective structure activating various codes and conventions which are independent of author, reader, and external reality. Structuralist criticism is less interested in interpreting what literary works mean than in explaining how they can mean what they mean; that is, in showing what implicit rules and conventions are operating in a given work. The structuralist tradition has been particularly strong in narratology, from Propp's analysis of narrative functions to Greimas's theory of actants. The French critic Roland Barthes was an outstanding practitioner of structuralist literary analysis notably in his book S/Z (1970)—and is famed for his witty analyses of wrestling, striptease, and other phenomena in Mythologies (1957): some of his later writings, however, show a shift to post‐structuralism, in which the over‐confident ‘scientific’ pretensions of structuralism are abandoned. For more extended accounts of this enterprise, consult Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (1977), Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (1975), and Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction (1974) (Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms 2008).

Aestheticism

The doctrine or disposition that regards beauty as an end in itself, and attempts to preserve the arts from subordination to moral, didactic, or political purposes. The term is often used synonymously with the Aesthetic Movement, a literary and artistic tendency of the late 19th century which may be understood as a further phase of Romanticism in reaction against philistine bourgeois values of practical efficiency and morality. Aestheticism found theoretical support in the aesthetics of Immanuel Kant and other German philosophers who separated the sense of beauty from practical interests. Elaborated by Théophile Gautier in 1835 as a principle of artistic independence, aestheticism was adopted in France by Baudelaire, Flaubert, and the Symbolists, and in England by Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and several poets of the 1890s, under the slogan l'art pour l'art (‘art for art's sake’). Wilde and other devotees of pure beauty—like the artists Whistler and Beardsley—were sometimes known as aesthetes. See also decadence, fin de siècle. For a fuller account, consult Leon Chai, Aestheticism (1990) (Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms 2008).

Aristotelian

Arthurian

Bayuex  Tapestry