Modern Theories of Criticism: An Overview [Note: This presentation and video recording are of Prof. Dilip Barad's session in the Refresher Course for College / University teachers. The Refresher Course was organised by UGC-HRDC, University of Mumbai.] Modern Literary Theory and Criticism refers to the examination and interpretation of literature using various theoretical frameworks that emerged in the 20th century. This approach encompasses diverse schools of thought such as Marxist, Feminist, Psychoanalytic, and Deconstructionist theory that offer a critical lens to analyze literary texts and reveal their deeper meanings and societal impact. The purpose of this introduction is to provide a comprehensive overview of the key concepts, influential figures, and historical developments in Modern Literary Theory and Criticism, highlighting its significance and impact in the field of literary studies.

1. Modern Theories of
Criticism
Refresher Course
UGC-HRDC, University of Mumbai
Dilip Barad
Prof. & Head
Department of English
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University, Gujarat
www.dilipbarad.com

2. Criticism is application of theories in the reading of
literature
• Matthew Arnold – A Study of Poetry (1888)
• T E Eliot – Tradition and Individual Talent (1919)
• I A Richards – Practical Criticism (1929)
• William Empson - Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930)
• Fallacies - William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley – ‘Intentional Fallacy’ >
Affective Fallacy
• Allen Tate – ‘Tension’ in Poetry (1938) > extension (literal meaning) + intension
(metaphorical meaning)
• Cleanth Brooks – Language of Paradox, The Well Wrought Urn (1947) and Modern
Poetry and the Tradition (1939)
• Archetypal Criticism – Maud Bodkin (1934) and Northrop Frye (1940-50)

3. • Structuralism > Semiotics > Stylistics
• Derrida and Deconstruction / Poststructuralism
• Eco-Criticism / Eco-Feminism
• Postcolonialism > Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha >
to > Contemporary times {Globalization & Climate Change}
• Cultural Studies
• Digital Humanities > Generative Literature & Big Data Analysis
of Literary Texts
Criticism is application of theories in the
reading of literature

4. Matthew Arnold > T.S. Eliot
• Touchstone method
• Real estimate > Historical fallacy and Personal fallacy
• Detachment and disinterestedness > Objective Criticism
• Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the
poet but upon the poetry.
• Poetic process > Depersonalization.
• Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from
emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from
personality.

5. New Criticism
• I A Richards
• Practical Criticism
• William Empson - Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930)
• Fallacies - William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley –
‘Intentional Fallacy’ > Affective Fallacy
• Allen Tate – ‘Tension’ in Poetry (1938) > extension (literal
meaning) + intension (metaphorical meaning)
• Cleanth Brooks – Language of Paradox, The Well Wrought Urn
(1947) and Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939)

6. • A health, a ringing health, unto the king
• Of all our hearts today! But what proud song
• Should follow on the thought, nor do him wrong?
• Unless the sea were harp, each mirthful string
• Woven of the lightning of the nights of Spring
• And Dawn the lonely listener, glad and grave
• With colours of the sea-shell and the wave
• In brightening eye and cheek, there is none to sing!
• Drink to him, as men upon an Alpine peak
• Brim one immortal cup of crimson wine,
• And into it drop one pure cold crust of snow,
• Then hold it up, too rapturously to speak
• And drink – to the mountains, line on glittering line,
• Surging away into the sunset –glow.

7. •Climb, cloud, and pencil all the blue
•With your miraculous stockade ;
•The earth will have her joy of you
•And limn your beauty till it fade.
•Puzzle the cattle at the grass
•And paint your pleasure on their flanks

8. Archetypal Criticism: Mythos Grid

9. Psycholinguistics > Jacques Lacan & Julia
Kristeva
• Reading Kamala Das’s Poems
• Deconstructive Reading of Sonnet 18

10. Eco-Criticism / Eco-Feminism
• The Silent Spring – Rachel Carson (1962)
• "Is female to male as nature is to culture?“ Sherry B. Ortner
(1974)

11. Postcolonial Studies
•Globalization
•Climate Change

13. Amitav Ghosh: Cli-Fi

14. Cultural Studies
• Four Goals:
• First, Cultural Studies transcends the confines of particular discipline
such as literary criticism or history.
• Second, Cultural Studies is politically engaged. The Power dynamics is
critiqued as part of this engagement.
• Thirdly, Cultural Studies denies the separation of “high’ and “low” or
elite and popular culture.
• Finally, Cultural Studies analyzes not only the cultural work, but also
the means of production.

15. Digital Humanities
•Close Reading of literary texts:
•Search Engines
•Art Database [eg.
https://artsandculture.google.com/
•DT for Data Analysis and Processing
•nGram Google Book
•Tools for Corpus Linguistics
• Collection of such tools > https://corpus-analysis.com/
• CLiC – for Analysis of Literary Texts

16. Corpus Linguistics in Context
•The CLiC web app has been developed as part of
the CLiC Dickens project, which demonstrates
through corpus stylistics how computer-assisted
methods can be used to study literary texts and
lead to new insights into how readers perceive
fictional characters.
• Key Word In Context (KWIC) is the most common format
for concordance lines. The term KWIC was first coined by Hans Peter
Luhn
•The Activity Book

18. The Poem Solemn and gray, the immense clouds of even
Pass on their towering unperturbed way
Through the vast whiteness of the rain-swept heaven
The moving pageants of the waning day;
Heavy with dreams, desires, prognostications,
Brooding with sullen and Titanic crests,
They surge, whose mantles’ wise imaginations
Trail where Earth’s mute and languorous body rests;
While below the Hawthorns smile like milk splashed down
From Noon’s blue pitcher over mead and hill;
The arrased distance is so dim with flowers
It seems itself some coloured cloud made still,
O how the clouds this dying daylight crown
With the tremendous triumph of tall towers!

19. In fact, Hawthorn shrubs full of white flowers give the
impression of splashed milk over meadows and hill, when
seen from up above the sky, from cloud’s perspective.

20. Noon’s blue pitcher is reference to Susan Noon’s painting
• This was the most difficult
image to connect in the
poem.
• Thanks to Google Image
Search to give this image.
• The fallen flowers out
side blue pitcher is
compared with the way
white flowers of
Hawthorn were visible to
the cloud – like splashed
milk over mead and hill.

21. From Creative Literature to Generative Literature
•Generative literature, defined as the production of
continuously changing literary texts by means of a specific
dictionary, some set of rules and the use of algorithms, is a
very specific form of digital literature which is completely
changing most of the concepts of classical literature.
•Texts being produced by a computer and not written by an
author, require indeed a very special way of engrammation
and, in consequence, also point to a specific way of reading
particularly concerning all the aspects of the literary time.
• Principles and Processes of Generative Literature: Questions to Literature: Jean-Pierre Balpe

23. https://forms.gle/fthgVeDBgw7MLicW8

24. Poem Generator
Machines
Generative
Literature
is text produced through computers
with the help of set of rules,
dictionaries . . . Algorithm.

25. Matthew Jockers: Microanalysis

26. Aiden and Michel
Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture

27. • New Challenges . . .
• The Artificial Intelligence & the Unconscious Bias
• Kirti Sharma & Robin Hauser
• Can we protect AI from human biases?
• The Question of Morality -
http://moralmachine.mit.edu/

29. • http://moralmachine.mit.edu/
• A platform for gathering a human perspective on moral decisions
made by machine intelligence, such as self-driving cars.

30. •While the literary project for making
humans humane is yet not over, the
humanities people have new challenges
to make robots humane!

31. सा विद्या या विमुक्तये ।
तमसो मा ज्योततर्गमय ।
Reinventing Human Being.

32. Conclusion
1888 to the present . . .
• Matthew Arnold – A Study of Poetry (1888)
• T E Eliot – Tradition and Individual Talent (1919)
• I A Richards – Practical Criticism (1929)
• William Empson - Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930)
• Fallacies - William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley – ‘Intentional Fallacy’ > Affective Fallacy
• Allen Tate – ‘Tension’ in Poetry (1938) > extension (literal meaning) + intension (metaphorical meaning)
• Cleanth Brooks – Language of Paradox, The Well Wrought Urn (1947) and Modern Poetry and the
Tradition (1939)
• Archetypal Criticism – Maud Bodkin (1934) and Northrop Frye (1940-50)
• Structuralism > Semiotics > Stylistics
• Derrida and Deconstruction / Poststructuralism
• Eco-Criticism / Eco-Feminism
• Postcolonialism > Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha > to > Contemporary times
{Globalization & Climate Change}
• Cultural Studies
• Digital Humanities > Generative Literature, AI & Big Data Analysis of Literary Texts