Two friends leave the same film. One says, "That was a love story." The other says, "That was about money." Both can point to scenes. Both feel the other has missed something obvious. Neither has said anything silly, and neither has noticed that they just did literary theory: each chose a question to ask of a story, and the question decided what counted as an answer.
That is all this subject is, and it is why people who studied it keep a habit for life. When they read a poem, a news story or a speech, a second voice in the back of the head asks: what is this text doing, who is it for, what does it leave out, and what am I bringing to it? The schools of criticism are the great, argumentative answers to those questions. This piece gives each school in its own best terms, then the arguments between them.
The plain-reader view says: the meaning is in the text, so just read it. Theory begins when you notice that two careful readers can disagree, and that the disagreement is usually about which question is worth asking rather than about the words. A theory of criticism is a standing question. "What does this form do?" is one. "Who profits from this world?" is another. "What is the author not saying?" is a third.
The useful discipline is to name the question you are asking. That makes you fairer to the poem, because you can say what your question cannot see. Below, one very short poem, William Blake's "The Sick Rose" (from Songs of Experience, 1794; public domain, punctuation modernised), meets nine questions. Press each button and read what that school would look at. These are the questions each school is known for, not verdicts.
Notice that one lens (the postcolonial one) says it finds little here. Honest critics admit when a question does not fit the text, and a good reading says so.
The graduate's habit is not to pick the best lens in advance. It is to ask, of any text, which question would make this one come alive?
The oldest modern move is to stop talking about the author's life and the reader's feelings and look at the made object. Russian Formalists in the 1910s and 20s (Viktor Shklovsky's essay "Art as Technique", 1917) asked what makes language literary, and answered: it makes the familiar strange, slowing perception down. In Britain and the US the New Critics took the same stance. I. A. Richards ran Practical Criticism (1929) by giving Cambridge students unsigned poems to judge and finding they misread them badly. William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) showed how much a line can hold. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy" (1946) argued that what the author meant to do is neither available nor the standard for judging; the poem is.
The rule of thumb that survives is this: anything you claim about a poem must be traceable to its words and its design. Look for patterns of sound, repeated words, rhyme, pivots in the argument. Try it. The finder below marks Blake's rhymes and lets you light up any sound.
The rhymes are worm / storm and joy / destroy; the other four lines rhyme with nothing. The two rhyme pairs are the poem's two ideas pinned by sound: the thing that is hidden and the pleasure it ruins. A formalist is happy here. The caution is also fair: count enough letters and you will find "patterns" in anything, so the question is always whether a pattern does work in the poem or is merely there.
Structuralism took the formal idea from poems to everything. Following Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1916, assembled from his students' notes), it holds that a word means what it does only by difference from other words in the system: "cat" is not "bat". Claude Lévi-Strauss applied this to myths, as bundles of oppositions (raw and cooked, nature and culture) being worked out. Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928) found the same sequence of moves in a hundred Russian fairy tales. Roland Barthes and Gérard Genette built tools for narrative on this base. The lasting idea: look for the system a work belongs to, because a single item means little alone.
Paul Ricœur called one family of readers "masters of suspicion": Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, who taught people to ask what a surface hides. Three schools in literature descend from them.
Marxist criticism holds that stories grow out of how a society produces and divides its wealth, and that they can either hide this or expose it. Georg Lukács praised novels that show a whole society in motion; Raymond Williams talked about a period's "structure of feeling"; Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious (1981) opens with the instruction "Always historicize!" The best case for it is that no text floats free of money, class and work, and that the things a book finds natural are precisely the things worth examining.
Psychoanalytic criticism starts with Sigmund Freud, who read Oedipus Rex and Hamlet in The Interpretation of Dreams (published November 1899, dated 1900). It asks what a text cannot say directly: what is displaced, repressed or repeated. Jacques Lacan recast it through language; Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence (1973) read poets as wrestling with their predecessors. Its critics, from Karl Popper onward, say Freud's claims can't be tested; its defenders reply that a reading is not an experiment, and that it finds patterns nothing else does.
Feminist criticism asks who writes, who is written about and how. Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) tied women's writing to money and space. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) and Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970) turned the question on male authors; Elaine Showalter's "Toward a Feminist Poetics" (1979) turned it toward recovering women's tradition; Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) read Bertha, the confined wife in Jane Eyre, as the book's buried anger. Black feminist critics such as Barbara Smith (1977) pointed out that "women" had been quietly assumed to be white.
All three can be tried on one famous sentence. Pick a word from the opening of Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen, 1813, public domain) and see what each lens does with it.
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
Notice the twist the last button shows: the novel is already suspicious of its own opening, so the critic is sometimes late to a joke the text has told. That is a standing risk of suspicion: it can announce, as a discovery, what the work already says out loud.
Postcolonial criticism asks how empire shaped literature, whose voices that literature records and whose it erases. Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961) is a root. Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) argued that Western writing and scholarship about "the Orient" built a picture of a static, strange East that suited Europe's power over it. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988) asked whether the poorest and most excluded can be heard at all through the voices that claim to speak for them, and warned that well-meaning accounts often silence the very people they describe. Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture (1994) looked at the mixing and unease at the border between ruler and ruled.
The fight over Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899, public domain) is the classic case. Chinua Achebe, in a 1975 lecture at Amherst, argued that the book makes Africa a backdrop for a European's breakdown, and Africans a mass without language, and that calling it a great work does not cancel this. Defenders answer that Conrad's narrator mocks the empire: the book itself says the conquest of the earth, "which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much" (Conrad, 1899). Achebe granted the irony and held that the book still makes the people it describes a foil. Both sides read the same pages. Which question counts as the main one is the dispute.
There are fights inside the school, too. Bernard Lewis argued in 1982 that Said got the history of Orientalist scholarship wrong; Aijaz Ahmad's In Theory (1992) argued from the left that "postcolonial" theory flattened very different countries and made its home in Western universities. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Decolonising the Mind (1986) took a different step: he vowed to write in Gikuyu, not English, because a language is also a way of holding the world.
If the author doesn't fix meaning, and the text alone can't, perhaps the reader does. Reader-response theory made that its centre. Louise Rosenblatt (Literature as Exploration, 1938) said every reading is a transaction between a reader and a text. Wolfgang Iser (The Act of Reading, English 1978) argued that texts are full of gaps that readers must fill. Stanley Fish (Is There a Text in This Class?, 1980) went further: readers belong to interpretive communities whose shared habits produce the readings. Roland Barthes's essay "The Death of the Author" (1967) made the same point more sharply: a text is a weave of quotations that the reader unpicks.
Try the gaps for yourself. Two short sentences below leave almost everything open. Choose what you assume.
"She read the note twice and put the kettle on. When the knock came, she did not go to the door."
Nine possible stories from two sentences, and the text decided none. That is Iser's point. The counter-point from critics, the New Critics among them, is that not every reading is equal: some are better supported by the words, and "the reader decides" can slide into "anything goes". Fish's reply was that communities of readers keep that in check.
Deconstruction comes from Jacques Derrida (Of Grammatology, 1967). The basic move is to find a pair that a text treats as a hierarchy (speech over writing, nature over culture, original over copy) and show that the favoured term depends on the one it pushes down. Derrida's coined word différance plays on French "differ" and "defer": meaning is always put off, because each word is explained by other words. His line "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" is usually translated "there is nothing outside the text" and has been taken to mean that nothing is real. He said he meant that no reading can step out of context into a place with no interpretation. Critics (the philosopher John Searle in 1977, the literary scholar M. H. Abrams) said deconstruction makes all argument unstable, including its own; its defenders say close attention to a text's self-contradictions is exactly what good reading is.
Most criticism treats a river or a forest as a symbol of something human. Ecocriticism asks about the river. Cheryll Glotfelty's working definition, in The Ecocriticism Reader (edited with Harold Fromm, 1996), is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment. The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment was founded in 1992, and Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination (1995) made the case for books in which the nonhuman world is more than a backdrop. Its questions: what places does this text imagine, who is allowed to count as a character, and what does a pastoral hide about the labour in the field (a point Raymond Williams made in 1973 in The Country and the City)? The novelist Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement (2016) asks a sharper one: why did the modern novel, so good at individual lives, find the climate crisis so hard to narrate? The school's own critics ask whether "nature" itself is a cultural idea, and whether the wilderness tradition suits writers outside the English-speaking world.
A human reads perhaps a few thousand books in a lifetime; the nineteenth-century British novel alone ran to tens of thousands. Franco Moretti, in "Conjectures on World Literature" (New Left Review, 2000), proposed distant reading: instead of reading a few books closely, count and map thousands of them. Matthew Jockers's Macroanalysis (2013) did this with computed features of novels. The oldest and best-known case predates computers' fashion: in the 1960s Frederick Mosteller and David Wallace used the rates of tiny words to decide who wrote twelve disputed Federalist papers (1787–88), concluding Madison.
You can run the idea. The word upon is something Hamilton liked and Madison almost never used. Counting the Project Gutenberg edition of The Federalist for essays whose authors are not in doubt, I got these rates: in Hamilton's 51 essays, about 3.3 upon per 1,000 words; in Madison's 14, about 0.2. (Mosteller and Wallace reported similar figures.) The simulator draws random passages with those real rates and tries to guess the author. The question is how much text you need.
A simulation: passages are drawn at random from word rates measured in the real text, then guessed by comparing how likely each author is to produce those counts. It is a teaching model, not the Mosteller and Wallace analysis.
At 100 words the guesser using only upon is right about 65% of the time, averaged over the two authors (a coin flip is 50%); at 2,000 words, with five clues, it is right about 99% of the time. Your numbers will wobble a little with each draw. That is the whole logic of stylometry: small signals, very many of them, add up. Distant reading has its critics. Nan Z. Da's "The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies" (Critical Inquiry, 2019) argued that many such studies are statistically weak or tell us what close reading already knew, and others replied that she had mistaken the field's exploratory tools for finished claims. The honest position is that counting finds patterns and close reading explains them, and each is blind alone.
The schools are not stages in a progress. They are standing quarrels, each with a point.
| Quarrel | One side | The other |
|---|---|---|
| Where is meaning? | In the words and design (New Criticism). | In the reader's act (Iser, Fish) or in the author's life and time (historicists). |
| Is art autonomous? | Form has its own logic; do not reduce it to politics. | Every form is shaped by class, gender, empire (Marxist, feminist, postcolonial). |
| Can we trust a hidden meaning? | Suspicious readings reveal what texts hide (Freud, Marx). | They can overreach, finding the theory they brought; some critics now urge "surface" reading. |
| Whose canon? | Great works earn their place by lasting. | Who gets to last was decided by who held the power (feminist, postcolonial). |
| Close or distant? | Meaning lives in the particular sentence. | Patterns across thousands of books show what no reader can see (Moretti). |
No one has won any of these. The useful skill is to say which side of each you are standing on while you read, and why.
Literary theory is the habit of naming the question you are asking. Formalists look at design, structuralists at the system, suspicious readers at what is hidden, postcolonial critics at who speaks, reader-response critics at what the reader adds, deconstructionists at where a text undoes its own hierarchy, ecocritics at the world beyond the metaphor, and distant readers at the pattern across thousands of books. Each sees something the others miss, and none has won.
Try this: this week, take one short thing you read anyway (a headline, an advert, a song you know) and put two different questions to it, say "who is this for?" and "what is it leaving out?". Notice how the answer changes.
Sources. The schools, authors and dates are standard in the textbooks above. Blake's "The Sick Rose" (Songs of Experience, 1794), Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) are in the public domain; the Conrad sentence was checked against the Project Gutenberg text (ebook 219). The Federalist word rates were computed from the Project Gutenberg edition (ebook 1404): Hamilton's 51 essays (114,260 words) have 374 uses of upon (3.27 per 1,000); Madison's 14 (39,181 words) have 7 (0.18 per 1,000); by: 7.49 and 11.61; to: 40.4 and 32.3; whilst: 0.01 and 0.31; enough: 0.29 and 0. Mosteller and Wallace, Inference and Disputed Authorship: The Federalist (1964). Moretti 2000 is given as the origin of "distant reading" by the reference literature. Nan Z. Da, Critical Inquiry 45 (2019). Open Yale ENGL 300 page checked. Interactive numbers were computed in node.