Evolutions of Literary Theory: The Afterlives of New Criticism, Structuralism, and Others

The publication of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, in some ways, marked the end of New Criticism. The two approaches—structuralism and New Criticism—represent two ways of seeing texts as unities, yet produce entirely different views on key issues, such as how texts might be grouped together, the importance of historical context to the literary text, and the role of broader cultural systems in shaping a text’s meaning. We might wonder now whether or not these issues and ideas from New Criticism and structuralism, rooted in mid-20th century literary theory, continue to offer valuable insights and methodologies.

We might consider questions such as the following, taken broadly. How well do New Critical approaches deal with texts which came after their time, in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Why did these movements concentrate on poetry, and are they also relevant to contemporary poetry? Are structuralist writings relevant to recent computational approaches in the digital humanities? How would Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss’s controversial reading of Baudelaire’s “Les chats,” published in 1962, be received today?

Both theoretical papers and applications to particular literary texts and periods are welcome. Other theoretical areas, such as Russian Formalism, poststructuralism/Deconstruction, in context, and linguistics, of course, are also of interest as pertinent (in an abstract sense) to the main ideas of this seminar.

Please do not hesitate to contact the organizer at:

[email protected]

Katherin Yu

PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature, Stanford University

https://dlcl.stanford.edu/people/katherin-yu