Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author Explained
What does Death of the Author mean? Roland Barthes Death of the Author means that the meaning of a text…
Category
Literary Theory
Clear, structured notes on literary theory and criticism for students of English literature. This section covers major schools of thought including New Criticism, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction, Marxist criticism, Feminist theory, Postcolonialism, Psychoanalytic criticism, and Reader-Response theory. Ideal for UGC NET, RPSC First Grade, and MA English preparation, with explanations authored by a Fulbright award-winning educator.
Linguistic Sign in Saussurean Structuralism
What is a linguistic sign? A linguistic sign is the basic unit of meaning in Saussure’s theory of language, and…
Saussurean Structuralism for UGC NET English
What is Saussurean structuralism? Saussurean structuralism is the idea that language works as a system of differences. A word does…
Modernism Literature Between the Wars: Complete Guide
Modernism literature between the wars (roughly 1918–1939) was a radical break from traditional storytelling. Writers rejected Victorian conventions and experimented…
The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America
The Yale Critics, also called the Yale School, were a group of literary scholars based at Yale University who rose…
Logocentrism and Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher and founder of deconstruction, critiques logocentrism as the deep-rooted tendency in Western philosophy to privilege…
Derrida’s Structure Sign and Play Explained
Jacques Derrida’s “Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” is a 1966 essay that marked the…
Philosophical Influences on Poststructuralism
Philosophical influences on poststructuralism come mainly from thinkers who questioned fixed truth, stable meaning, and a fully present self. The…
Psycholinguistics: Meaning, Use in Literary Study
Psycholinguistics is the study of how the mind acquires, represents, understands, and produces language. It connects the structures of language…
The Language of Paradox: How Cleanth Brooks Redefined Poetic Truth
The language of paradox is the primary medium of poetry, according to Cleanth Brooks, because it allows writers to express complex emotional…