Literature Studies Throughout Time

5th C. -> The Greeks

Greeks: Literature was concern with the human behavior and its relationship with the physical word, society and ethics.

Key Concepts: Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality.Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and limitations of knowledge. 

Early 19th C. -> Romanticism

Romanticism: a belief that higher orders of human truth were possible through transcending base concerns of pure reason, politics and world values. 

Key Ideas: Romantics believed in poetry as an expression of feeling, a reflection on everyday life and nature expressed through common language. 

Mid 19th C. -> Scientific Determinism

Scientific Determinism: It is the belief that the world-objects, actions, and forces-arises from clear causes that can be revealed through objective scientific inquiry. 
Key Ideas:: Science became the popular application to all questions including those of literature. Literary texts, then, became the object of scientific study.

Early 20th C. -> New Criticism
New Criticism: New Criticism has a focus on close reading with little to no concern for history, ideology, politics, biography, or other factors outside the text. Key Ideas: The text became the main focus. The text is a self-contained object that exists independently from all extrinsic forces, including the author.

Early 20th C. -> Reader-Response
Reader-Response: Moves the emphasis of textual analysis from a singular focus on the text to one where the reader works in concert with a text to produce an interpretation.
Key Ideas: Reader's personal experience might very well play a substantial role in enhancing an encounter with a text.

Early 20th C. -> Structuralism 
Saussure's work: Words were signs made up of two component parts: a signifier and a signified. Language is arbitrary: there is no inherent connection between any word and its referent.

Mid 20th C. -> Poststructuralism
Negotiating not what a sign is, but what a sign is not. We know through difference. Sometimes replaced by Postmodernism or Deconstruction.

Mid 20th C. -> Marxism
All texts contain subtexts which are extensions of historical and ideological conflict, the same conflicts being played out in real societies and not just in literary texts.
Key Ideas: The root of the conflicts is anchored in social class and economic differences.

Mid 20th C. -> Feminism (Gender Studies)
Feminism devoted to describing and interpreting (or reinterpreting) women's experience through literature.
Key Ideas: Uncovering essential differences between women and men, or challenging male representations of women and society, or rediscovering previously overlooked or ignored women writers and texts or any combination of the three.
Gender Studies explores sexual identity, questions of reproduction, sexuality, gender, family, love and marriage.

Mid 20th C. -> Cultural Poetics

History as the body of knowledge. Cultural poetics seeks to investigate these multiple discourses (history, law, economics, politics, and even literary analysis itself) in order to explore the connections between all human activities and their role in making life meaningful. 

Mid 20th C. ->  Post colonial criticism 
It is defined as an approach to texts produced in colonized countries.It derives from multiple critical approaches, through topics such as nationalism, ethnicity, language, history and how these issues are dealt with when two (or more) cultures clash, usually with one dominant and one deemed inferior (cultural imperialism).