ETS has put more stress on literary theory than they have in the past. For this reason, your exam will have more theory on it than your practice tests do. Most likely, you will be given 4-5 questions on theory. One of them will probably be five interpretations of the same text from different perspectives; your job will be to match up the interpretation with the school of thought.
Two schools of thought that I have not included here are Feminism and Marxism, but I think in generally those schools of thought are easily distinguished from the ones below.
ETS will not make you choose between two very similar schools of thought. So, for example, they will not ask you to distinguish between New Criticism and Formalism because they are just too similar.
Formalism
Formalism – approaches to interpreting or evaluating literary works that focus on features of the text itself (especially properties of its language) rather than on the contexts of its creation (biographical, historical or intellectual) or the contexts of its reception. Formalism was also a Russian movement spearheaded by Viktor Shklovsky, who contributed two of the movement’s most well-known concepts: defamiliarization and the plot/story distinction.
New Criticism
New Criticism was the dominant trend in English and American literary criticism of the mid twentieth century, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. Its adherents were emphatic in their advocacy of close reading and attention to texts themselves, and their rejection of criticism based on extra-textual sources, especially biography. n 1954, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published an essay entitled “The intentional fallacy“, in which they argued strongly against any discussion of an author’s intention, or “intended meaning.”
*I.A. Richards
*Wimsatt & Beardsley
* T.S. Eliot
* F.R. Leavis
* William Empson
* Robert Penn Warren
* John Crowe Ransom
* Cleanth Brooks
Structuralism
In literary theory structuralism is an approach to analyzing the narrative material by examining the underlying structure. For example, a literary critic applying a structuralist literary theory might say that the authors of the West Side Story did not write anything “really” new, because their work has the same structure as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In both texts a girl and a boy fall in love (a “formula” with a symbolic operator between them would be “Boy +LOVE Girl”) despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other (“Boy’s Group -LOVE Girl’s Group”) and conflict is resolved by their death. The versatility of structuralism is such that a literary critic could make the same claim about a story of two friendly families (“Boy’s Family +LOVE Girl’s Family”) that arrange a marriage between their children despite the fact that the children hate each other (“Boy -LOVE Girl”) and then the children commit suicide to escape the arranged marriage; the justification is that the second story’s structure is an ‘inversion’ of the first story’s structure: the relationship between the values of love and the two pairs of parties involved have been reversed. Structuralistic literary criticism argues that the “novelty value of a literary text” can lie only in new structure, rather than in the specifics of character development and voice in which that structure is expressed.
Structuralism was pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure.
Post-structuralism
Post-structural practices generally operate on some basic assumptions:
* Post-structuralists hold that the concept of “self” as a singular and coherent entity is a fictional construct. Instead, an individual is composed of conflicting tensions and knowledge claims (e.g. gender, class, profession, etc.). Therefore, to properly study a text the reader must understand how the work is related to their own personal concept of self. This self-perception plays a critical role in one’s interpretation of meaning.
* The meaning the author intended is secondary to the meaning that the reader perceives. Post-structuralism rejects the idea of a literary text having one purpose, one meaning or one singular existence.
* A post-structuralist critic must be able to utilize a variety of perspectives to create a multifaceted (perhaps even conflicting) interpretation of a text. It is particularly important to analyze how the meanings of a text shift in relation to certain variables (usually involving the identity of the reader).
Major contributors included Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva.
Deconstructionism
Deconstruction’s central concern is a radical critique of the Enlightenment project and of metaphysics, including in particular the founding texts by such philosophers as Plato, Rousseau, and Husserl, but also other sorts of texts, including literature. Deconstruction identifies in the Western philosophical tradition a “logocentrism” or “metaphysics of presence” (also known as phallogocentrism) which holds that speech-thought (the logos) is a privileged, ideal, and self-present entity, through which all discourse and meaning are derived. This logocentrism is the primary target of deconstruction.
One typical form of deconstructive reading is the critique of binary oppositions, or the criticism of dichotomous thought. A central deconstructive argument holds that, in all the classic dualities of Western thought, one term is privileged or “central” over the other. The privileged, central term is the one most associated with the phallus and the logos.
Common terms include: Différance, Trace, Écriture, Hymen / Phallocentrism, Pharmakon
Vade Mecum 