Outline of critical theory

Template:Short description The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to critical theory:

Critical theory has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in social science and the other in literary criticism. The term "Critical Theory" was first coined by Max Horkheimer in his 1937 essay "Traditional and Critical Theory". While academic traditions differ, critical theorists have contended with the impossibility of objective knowledge and the social and historical conditions of the subject. Karl Marx's Critique of Political Economy is considered, with the Communist Manifesto, to be the bread and butter of the form because each were written within and against an existing theory or set of theories; the former, on the work of Adam Smith and the latter on the catechism. The word "critical" in this context comes from the Greek root of "crisis". Critical theory can thus be understood as the throwing into crisis established patterns of thinking with reference to philosophy, politics and anthropology.

Essence of critical theory

• Critical theorists –
• Works in critical theory –
• Dialectical method –

Concepts

• Aesthetics
• Ideology
• Politics
• History

• Historicity

• Humanism
• Technology
• Law
• Wages
• Anthropology

Branches of critical theory

• Social science –
• Anthropology –

• Political theory –

• Aesthetics –

• Modernism –

• Post-modernism –

• Realism –

Actor–network theory

Commonly used terms

• Articulation (sociology)
• Assemblage (philosophy)
• Blackboxing

African-American studies

• Henry Louis Gates Jr. –
• Frantz Fanon –

Gender studies

• Lauren Berlant –
• Judith Butler –
• Raewyn Connell –
• Susan McClary –
• Laura Mulvey –

Postcolonialism

• Chinua Achebe –
  • "An Image of Africa" –
• Frantz Fanon –
  • "The Wretched of the Earth" –
• Homi Bhabha –
  • Double consciousness –

Structuralism

• Roland Barthes –
• Ferdinand de Saussure –
• Claude Lévi-Strauss –
• Louis Althusser –

Post-structuralism

• Roland Barthes –
• Michel Foucault –
• Julia Kristeva –
• Bruno Latour –

Commonly used terms

• Critical apparatus
• Event (philosophy)
• Genealogy (philosophy)
• Heterotopia (space)

Deconstruction

Commonly used terms

• Bricolage

Postmodern philosophy

• Jean-François Lyotard –
• Gilles Deleuze –
• Félix Guattari –
• Ernesto Laclau –
• Claude Lefort –
• A Cyborg Manifesto –

Reconstructivism

• Paulo Freire –
• John Dewey –

Schizoanalytic theory

• Félix Guattari –
• Gilles Deleuze –
• Deleuze and Guattari –

Commonly used terms

• Assemblage (philosophy)
• Body without organs
• Rhizome (philosophy)

Queer theory

• Judith Butler –
• Heteronormativity –
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick –
• Gloria E. Anzaldúa –
• New Queer Cinema –
• Queer pedagogy –

Semiotics

• Roland Barthes –
• Julia Kristeva –
• Charles Sanders Peirce –
• Ferdinand de Saussure –

Commonly used terms

• Semiotic square

Literary theory

• Mikhail Bakhtin
• Mary Louise Pratt –
• René Girard –

Commonly used terms

• Carnivalesque
• Chronotope
• Dialogic
• Narratology
• Heteroglossia

Theories of identity

• Private sphere – certain sector of societal life in which an individual enjoys a degree of authority, unhampered by interventions from governmental or other institutions. Examples of the private sphere are family and home. The complement or opposite of public sphere.
• Public sphere – area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. It is "a discursive space in which individuals and groups congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment".
• Creolization

Major works

• Bloch, Ernst (1938–47). The Principle of Hope
• Fromm, Erich (1941). The Fear of Freedom (UK)/Escape from Freedom (US)
• Horkheimer, Max; Adorno, Theodor W. (1944–47). Dialectic of Enlightenment
• Barthes, Roland (1957). Mythologies
• Habermas, Jürgen (1962). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
• Marcuse, Herbert (1964). One-Dimensional Man
• Adorno, Theodor W. (1966). Negative Dialectics
• Derrida, Jacques (1967). Of Grammatology
• Derrida, Jacques (1967). Writing and Difference
• Habermas, Jürgen (1981). The Theory of Communicative Action

External links

• Critical Theory, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• "Theory: Death is Not the End", n+1 magazine's short history of academic critical theory. Winter 2005.
• Critical Legal Thinking: A critical legal studies website which uses critical theory in an analysis of law and politics.
• L. Corchia, Jürgen Habermas. A Bibliography: works and studies (1952-2010), Pisa, Edizioni Il Campano – Arnus University Books, 2010, 344 pp.