Critical theory and literary studies
Critical theory has had a significant influence on literary studies. Roland Barthes, A.J. Greimas, and Tzevetan Todorov studied literature as a distinct discourse and helped develop, along with Vladimir Propp and Claude Lévi-Strauss, “narratology,” an approach which breaks down narratives into universal patterns, codes, and tropes that are repeatedly reused. For more, we recommend Wolf Schmid’s Narratology (2010) and Narratology (2014), edited by Susana Onega and José Angel García Landa. Mikhail Bakhtin argued that all narratives exist without fixed meaning and are open to multiple interpretations, and he proposed that literature is deeply “intertextual,” or constantly engaged with other texts (an idea developed further by Julia Kristeva). From these strands of critical theory grew reader-response or reception theory, which aimed to understand how the identity, place, time, and culture of a reader affects the reading experience and their interpretation of the text. Meanwhile, new historicists like Stephen Greenblatt and cultural materialists such as Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore argued that artistic production was influenced by the power struggles of its historical moment. For more on these theories, see Greenblatt’s Learning to Curse (1990, [2015]), Catherine Gallagher and Greenblatt’s Practicing New Historicism (2020), Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy (2010), and Sinfield’s Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality (2006).
Significant French philosophers: Lacan, Derrida, Foucault
Another important development in critical theory is Jacques Lacan’s reinterpretation of psychoanalysis, especially his ideas of the Imaginary and Symbolic realms. Infants begin in the Imaginary realm, the pre-self-conscious state, before entering the “mirror stage,” or the first moment of self-recognition (when a child recognizes their reflection). After about 18 months, according to Lacan, we enter the Symbolic stage, the realm of social language. Feminist theorists were particularly interested in these stages in terms of learned gender. The Imaginary realm is associated with the mother, while the Symbolic realm is associated with the father, a realm of patriarchal language which oppresses women. (See Elizabeth Grosz’s Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction [2002] for more on feminist uses for Lacan’s ideas.)
Another influential French critical theorist is Jacques Derrida. Derrida is known for “deconstruction,” his proposed method of critique for literary and philosophical texts as well as political systems. Responding to structuralism’s dependence on binary oppositions, Derrida argued that the binaries to which Western thinking gravitates (white/black, masculine/feminine, conscious/unconscious, normal/abnormal) are actually hierarchies, skewed such that one side of the binary is deemed superior to the other. Derrida aimed to erase that boundary while questioning the hierarchy itself, revealing it as constructed.
Michel Foucault also responded to structuralist binaries and made essential contributions to critical theory. Drawing upon Gramsci’s ideas of hegemony, Foucault proposed that systems of power rely on the marginalization and exclusion of certain groups in the name of “order.” These unconscious hierarchies pervade society; knowledge means categorization, power depends upon marginalization, and order relies on systemized control (Sim and Van Loon, 2014). In History of Madness (1961, [2013]), Foucault examines the removal of the mentally ill (anyone whose behavior deviated from societal norms) to asylums. In Discipline and Punish (1975, [1995]) and The Birth of the Clinic (1963, [2012]), Foucault examines the prison system and the medical system, respectively, as their own sites of imposed order upon individuals and marginalization of those who do not conform. In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969, [2012]), Foucault provides an overview of his methodology, which aimed to reveal the suppressed discourses of Western society through historical research, or “archaeologies.”
Twentieth-century “deaths”
Twentieth-century critical theorists proclaimed the “death” of many concepts. Roland Barthes declared the “death of the author” in his landmark 1967 essay of the same name (reprinted in Authorship [1995]), and Foucault reconsidered this idea in “What is an Author?” (1969). Barthes was particularly interested in how the relationship between the writer and the reader had changed (with the reader taking on a more active role), while Foucault was interested in issues of the complex relationship between the author and the text they create. The “death of man,” or the death of the Enlightenment-era subject, was also heralded thanks to the effects of critical theory: we cannot be self-conscious subjects with the power to dominate the world around us if we are, in fact, controlled by systems and unconscious drives. New materialism and posthumanism argued that the Enlightenment’s ideal “man” had always excluded many categories of human, and that the very boundary between human and inhuman is more porous than we may think. Francis Fukuyama declared the “death of history” with the fall of the Soviet Union, while Mark Fisher’s “hauntology” declared a death of the future.
Identity and interdisciplinary studies
While the original Critical Theorists focused on capitalism, class, and consumerism, later scholars have expanded those ideas to examine different reified structures of power. Feminism, queer theory, postcolonialism, and related theories — like gender performativity and intersectionality — investigate how identities are constructed, maintained, and hierarchized by structures around us. The relationship to critical theory is clear in the names of critical race theory and critical disability theory, both of which take up critical theory’s aims of exposing, critiquing, and combating power structures.
Critical theory has always been interdisciplinary, and it continues to propel scholarship across disciplines. Today’s literary theory is particularly reliant on critical theory. In Using Critical Theory (2020), Lois Tyson supplies a guide to incorporating theory into studies of literature. Critical theory’s interest in societal power structures makes it useful to the social sciences, as argued by the authors of the collection No Social Science without Critical Theory (2008), edited by Harry Dahms. Even science has been influenced by critical theory: Habermas, Critical Theory and Health (2013), edited by Graham Scambler, turns a critical eye to health and medical systems, and critical theorists are interested in issues of automation, artificial intelligence, and the internet (see David M. Berry’s Critical Theory and the Digital [2014] and Thomas Allmer’s Critical Theory and Social Media [2015] for just two examples).
Critical theory’s relevance today
The original suspicion with which Horkheimer endowed critical theory — its refusal to take for granted “categories of better, useful, appropriate, productive, and valuable” — is what keeps critical theory relevant today — and keeps scholars like Darrow Schecter questioning its relevance, at least in its original form. As Schecter writes in Critical Theory in the Twenty-First Century, to insist on the permanent relevance of the Frankfurt School “would be very much against the spirit of the thinkers in question as well as an inadequate response to current socio-economic and political realities” (2013).
However, critical theory’s commitment to critique, political awareness, and practical aspirations motivate meaningful scholarship even as specific theories, and societies, change. As Alan How neatly summarizes,