• Otto Maria Carpeaux
  Otto Maria Carpeaux
  Otto Maria Carpeaux , born Otto Karpfen, was a Brazilian literary critic born in Austria and multilingual scholar.Carpeaux was born in 1900 in Vienna, Austria, to a Jewish family, and lived there until 1939...
  
  
  • History of Western Literature

• M. H. Abrams
  M. H. Abrams
  Meyer Howard Abrams is an American literary critic, known for works on Romanticism, in particular his book The Mirror and the Lamp. Under Abrams' editorship, the Norton Anthology of English Literature became the standard text for undergraduate survey courses across the U.S...
  
  
  • The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition

• Theodor Adorno
  • Aesthetic Theory
  • Negative Dialectics

• Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer
  Max Horkheimer
  Max Horkheimer was a German-Jewish philosopher-sociologist, famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the 'Frankfurt School' of social research. His most important works include The Eclipse of Reason and, in collaboration with Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment...
  
  
  • Dialectic of Enlightenment
    Dialectic of Enlightenment
    Dialectic of Enlightenment , is one of the core texts of Critical Theory explaining the socio-psychological status quo that had been responsible for what the Frankfurt School considered the failure of the Enlightenment...
    
    

• Louis Althusser
  Louis Althusser
  Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy....
  
  
  • For Marx
  • Lenin and Philosophy

• Erich Auerbach
  Erich Auerbach
  Erich Auerbach was a philologist and comparative scholar and critic of literature. His best-known work is Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, a history of representation in Western literature from ancient to modern times.-Biography:Auerbach, who was Jewish, was born in...
  
  
  • Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
    Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
    Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature is a book of literary criticism by Erich Auerbach, and his most well known work. Written while Auerbach was teaching in Istanbul, Turkey, where he fled after being ousted from his professorship in Romance Philology at the University of...
    
    

• Mikhail Bakhtin
  Mikhail Bakhtin
  Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language...
  
  
  • Discourse in the Novel
  • Rabelais and his World
    Rabelais and His World
    During World War II Mikhail Bakhtin submitted a dissertation on the French Renaissance writer François Rabelais which was not defended until some years later. The controversial ideas discussed within the work caused much disagreement, and it was consequently decided that Bakhtin be denied his...
    
    

• Roland Barthes
  Roland Barthes
  Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
  
  
  • Image, Music, Text
  • Mythologies

• Jean Baudrillard
  Jean Baudrillard
  Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism.-Life:...
  
  
  • The Perfect Crime
  • Simulation and Simulacra

• Walter Benjamin
  Walter Benjamin
  Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual, who functioned variously as a literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist...
  
  
  • Illuminations
  • The Origin of German Tragic Drama
    The Origin of German Tragic Drama
    The Origin of German Tragic Drama or Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels was the doctoral dissertation submitted by Walter Benjamin to the University of Frankfurt in 1925, and was later published as Benjamin's first and only book. The book is a study of German drama during the baroque period and...
    
    

• Homi K. Bhabha
  Homi K. Bhabha
  Homi K. Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University. He is one of the most important figures in contemporary post-colonial studies, and has coined a number of the field's neologisms and...
  
  
  • The Location of Culture

• Pierre Bourdieu
  Pierre Bourdieu
  Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher.Starting from the role of economic capital for social positioning, Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location,...
  
  
  • La distinction
    La Distinction
    La Distinction is a book by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu , based on Bourdieu's empirical research on French culture. Taken from studies conducted by Bourdieu in 1963 and concluded in 1967-68, the book was originally published in France in 1979...
    
    

• Kenneth Burke
  Kenneth Burke
  Kenneth Duva Burke was a major American literary theorist and philosopher. Burke's primary interests were in rhetoric and aesthetics.-Personal history:...
  
  
  • A Rhetoric of Motives
  • A Grammar of Motives

• John Brannigan
  • New Historicism and Cultural Materialism

• Cleanth Brooks
  Cleanth Brooks
  Cleanth Brooks was an influential American literary critic and professor. He is best known for his contributions to New Criticism in the mid-twentieth century and for revolutionizing the teaching of poetry in American higher education...
  
  
  • The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry

• Sean Burke
  • The Death and Return of the Author

• Judith Butler
  Judith Butler
  Judith Butler is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley.Butler received her Ph.D...
  
  
  • Bodies That Matter
  • Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

• Cathy Caruth
  Cathy Caruth
  Cathy Caruth is Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters at Cornell University and is appointed in the departments of English and Comparative Literature. She taught previously at Yale and at Emory University, where she helped build the Department of Comparative Literature. She received...
  
  
  • Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...
  
  
  • Biographia Literaria

• Jonathan Culler
  Jonathan Culler
  Jonathan Culler is a class of 1966 Harvard graduate and Professor of English at Cornell University. He is an important figure of the structuralism movement of literary theory and criticism.- Background and career:...
  
  
  • Structuralist Poetics
  • The Pursuit of Signs
  • Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction

• Gilles Deleuze
  Gilles Deleuze
  Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...
  
  
  • Difference and Repetition

• Gilles Deleuze
  Gilles Deleuze
  Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...
  
   and Félix Guattari
  Félix Guattari
  Pierre-Félix Guattari was a French militant, an institutional psychotherapist, philosopher, and semiotician; he founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy...
  
  
  • Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (pt.1) and A Thousand Plateaus (pt.2)

• Jacques Derrida
  Jacques Derrida
  Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
  
  
  • Of Grammatology
    Of Grammatology
    De la grammatologie is a book by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, first published in 1967 by Les Éditions de Minuit. Of Grammatology, the English translation by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, was first published in 1976 by Johns Hopkins University Press...
    
    
  • Writing and Difference

• Peter Dews
  Peter Dews
  Peter Kenneth Dews is a British philosopher, in the fields of critical theory and continental philosophy. He made his name with the Logics of Disintegration, on the limitations of post-structuralism. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex.His first degree was in English, at...
  
  
  • The Limits of Disenchantment
  • The Logic of Disintigration

• Terry Eagleton
  Terry Eagleton
  Terence Francis Eagleton FBA is a British literary theorist and critic, who is regarded as one of Britain's most influential living literary critics...
  
  
  • Marxism and Literary Criticism
  • The Idea of Culture

• Antony Easthope
  • The Unconscious

• William Empson
  William Empson
  Sir William Empson was an English literary critic and poet.He was known as "燕卜荪" in Chinese.He was widely influential for his practice of closely reading literary works, fundamental to the New Critics...
  
  
  • Seven Types of Ambiguity
  • Some Versions of Pastoral
  • The Structure of Complex Words

• Norman Fairclough
  Norman Fairclough
  Norman Fairclough is emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Lancaster University. He is one of the founders of critical discourse analysis as applied to sociolinguistics. CDA is concerned with how power is exercised through language...
  
  
  • Language and Power
  • Critical Discourse Analysis

• Frantz Fanon
  Frantz Fanon
  Frantz Fanon was a Martiniquo-Algerian psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer whose work is influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism...
  
  
  • Black Skins, White Masks

• Stanley Fish
  Stanley Fish
  Stanley Eugene Fish is an American literary theorist and legal scholar. He was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island...
  
  
  • Is There a Text in this Class?

• Michel Foucault
  Michel Foucault
  Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
  
  
  • Discipline and Punish
  • History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge
  • The Order of Things
  • The Archaeology of Knowledge

• Northrop Frye
  Northrop Frye
  Herman Northrop Frye, was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century....
  
  
  • Anatomy of Criticism
    Anatomy of Criticism
    Herman Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays attempts to formulate an overall view of the scope, theory, principles, and techniques of literary criticism derived exclusively from literature...
    
    

• Gerald Graff
  Gerald Graff
  Gerald Graff is a professor of English and Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He received his B.A. in English from the University of Chicago in 1959 and his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Stanford University in 1963...
  
  
  • Literature Against Itself

• Jürgen Habermas
  Jürgen Habermas
  Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'...
  
  
  • Legitimation Crisis
  • The Theory of Communicative Action, volumes 1 & 2
  • The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity

• Wolfgang Iser
  Wolfgang Iser
  -Biography:He was born in Marienberg, Germany. His parents were Paul and Else Iser. He studied literature in the universities of Leipzig and Tübingen before receiving his PhD in English at Heidelberg with a dissertation on the world view of Henry Fielding...
  
  
  • The Act of Reading: a Theory of Aesthetic Response

• Leonard Jackson
  • The Poverty of Structuralism

• Fredric Jameson
  Fredric Jameson
  Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends—he once described postmodernism as the spatialization of culture under the pressure of organized capitalism...
  
  
  • The Political Unconscious
  • Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
    Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
    Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is a 1991 book by Fredric Jameson offering a critique of modernism and postmodernism from a Marxist perspective. The book started its life as a 1984 article in the New Left Review....
    
    
  • The Prison-House of Language

• Frank Kermode
  Frank Kermode
  Sir John Frank Kermode was a highly regarded British literary critic best known for his seminal critical work The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, published in 1967 ....
  
  
  • Romantic Image

• Julia Kristeva
  Julia Kristeva
  Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, sociologist, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She is now a Professor at the University Paris Diderot...
  
  
  • Desire in Language
  • Powers of Horror

• Jacques Lacan
  Jacques Lacan
  Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's...
  
  
  • Ecrits
  • The Seminars

• F.R. Leavis
  • The Great Tradition

• Ania Loomba
  • Colonialism/Postcolonialism

• Herbert Marcuse
  Herbert Marcuse
  Herbert Marcuse was a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory...
  
  
  • Reason and Revolution. Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory
  • Eros and Civilization
    Eros and Civilization
    Eros and Civilization is one of German philosopher and social critic Herbert Marcuse's best known works. Written in 1955, it is a synthesis of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Its title alludes to Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents...
    
    
  • Soviet Marxism. A Critical Analysis
  • One-Dimensional Man
    One-Dimensional Man
    One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society is a book written by philosopher Herbert Marcuse, first published in 1964....
    
    

• Toril Moi
  Toril Moi
  Toril Moi is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University. Previously she held positions as a lecturer in French at the University of Oxford and as Director of the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Bergen, Norway...
  
  
  • Sexual/Textual Politics

• I.A. Richards
  • Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement
  • Principles of Literary Criticism

• K.K. Ruthven
  • Critical Assumptions

• Edward Said
  Edward Said
  Edward Wadie Saïd was a Palestinian-American literary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism...
  
  
  • Culture and Imperialism
  • Orientalism
    Orientalism
    Orientalism is a term used for the imitation or depiction of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West by writers, designers and artists, as well as having other meanings...
    
    

• Jean-Paul Sartre
  Jean-Paul Sartre
  Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
  
  
  • What is Literature?

• Ferdinand de Saussure
  Ferdinand de Saussure
  Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
  
  
  • Cours de linguistique générale

• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was an American academic scholar in the fields of gender studies, queer theory , and critical theory. Her critical writings helped create the field of queer studies...
  
  
  • Between Men
  • Epistemology of the Closet

• Susan Sontag
  Susan Sontag
  Susan Sontag was an American author, literary theorist, feminist and political activist whose works include On Photography and Against Interpretation.-Life:...
  
  
  • Against Interpretation
  • Styles of Radical Will
  • Under the Sign of Saturn
  • Where The Stress Falls

• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian literary critic, theorist and a University Professor at Columbia University. She is best known for the essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?", considered a founding text of postcolonialism, and for her translation of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. She...
  
  
  • "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
  • In Other Words

• Raymond Tallis
  Raymond Tallis
  Raymond Tallis F.Med.Sci., F.R.C.P., F.R.S.A. is a British philosopher, humanist, poet, novelist, cultural critic and retired medical doctor.-Medical career:...
  
  
  • Not Saussure

• Scott Wilson
  Scott Wilson
  Scott Wilson was a judge on United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit from 1929 to 1942.-Early life:Scott Wilson was born on January 11, 1870, in Falmouth, Maine. He graduated from Bates College in Maine in 1892 and then studied at the University of Pennsylvania...
  
  
  • Cultural Materialism

• W.K. Wimsatt
  • The Verbal Icon

• Virginia Woolf
  Virginia Woolf
  Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
  
  
  • A Room of One's Own

• Slavoj Žižek
  Slavoj Žižek
  Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, critical theorist working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory, and theoretical psychoanalysis....
  
  
  • The Sublime Object of Ideology
  • The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology

See also

• Critical Theory basic topics
• List of major critical theorists
• Paulo Freire, "Pedagogy of the oppressed"