Trauma theory in literary criticism investigates how extreme experiences—war, genocide, violence, displacement, and catastrophe—are registered in language as fragmentation, repetition, silence, and narrative rupture. It is grounded in psychoanalysis, historiography, and cultural memory studies. 1. CATHY CARUTH — Trauma as Belated Experience Dimension Position Core focus Psychological and narrative structure of trauma Orientation Foundational trauma […]

Ecocriticism examines literature through the lens of environmental thought, ecological interdependence, and the critique of anthropocentrism. It shifts literary focus from human-centered meaning to the complex interaction between human culture and the nonhuman world. 1. CHERYLL GLOTFELTY — Foundational Ecocriticism and Environmental Literary Studies Dimension Position Core focus Literature and environmental awareness Orientation Foundational ecocriticism

Queer theory in literary criticism interrogates how texts produce, regulate, and destabilize normative constructions of sexuality, gender, desire, and identity. It challenges fixed categories and reveals identity as historically contingent, discursively produced, and performatively enacted. 1. MICHEL FOUCAULT — Sexuality as Historical Discourse Dimension Position Core focus History of sexuality and power Orientation Genealogical theory

Postcolonial literary theory examines how literature is shaped by colonial domination, imperial knowledge systems, cultural displacement, and resistance to epistemic control. It reconfigures texts as sites where power, identity, language, and history are contested after empire. 1. EDWARD SAID — Orientalism and the Construction of the “Other” Dimension Position Core focus Western representation of the

New Historicism reconfigures literary interpretation by refusing the separation between literary text and historical context. Instead, literature is understood as part of a circulation of power, discourse, institutions, and cultural practices in a specific historical moment. Meaning is not inside the text alone, but produced through its embeddedness in networks of power/knowledge. 1. STEPHEN GREENBLATT

Reader-response theory shifts the locus of meaning from the text or author to the reader as an active co-producer of literary meaning. Texts are not self-sufficient structures but events completed in the act of reading. 1. WOLFGANG ISER — The Implied Reader and Textual Gaps Dimension Position Core focus Interaction between text and reader Orientation

Post-structuralism arises as a critical rupture with structuralism’s confidence in stable systems. It replaces the idea of underlying order with instability, discontinuity, textual excess, and the entanglement of language with power. Meaning is no longer “found” but perpetually produced, deferred, and destabilized. 1. JACQUES DERRIDA — Deconstruction and the Endless Deferral of Meaning Dimension Position

Poststructuralism emerges as a critical response to structuralism’s assumption of stable systems. It argues that structures are never closed, meaning is never fixed, and texts are governed by instability, différance, and power relations rather than coherent systems. 1. JACQUES DERRIDA — Deconstruction and Différance Dimension Position Core focus Instability of meaning in language Orientation Deconstruction

Structuralist literary theory treats literature not as individual expression but as a system of relations governed by underlying structures—especially linguistic, mythic, and cultural codes. Meaning is produced through difference, position, and relational systems rather than authorial intention. 1. FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE — Linguistic Structuralism and the Sign System Dimension Position Core focus Language as system

Psychoanalytic literary theory reads literature as a manifestation of unconscious processes, where texts are structured like dreams: shaped by repression, desire, displacement, and symbolic condensation. 1. SIGMUND FREUD — The Unconscious, Repression, and Psychic Conflict Dimension Position Core focus Unconscious mind, repression, desire Orientation Foundational psychoanalysis Key concept Id–Ego–Superego structure View of literature Expression of