Primer on Litcrit
New Critics, Feminists Phenomenology; Reader-Response critics Need no apology.
There are Formalists of Russia, Structuralists of France. Give Archetypal Critics More than a glance.
Marxists are strange birds, Like Speech-Act Theorists. And yet there’s no doubt Which theory is Queerest.
Diaologic critics And Deconstruction Both in their own way Love textual combustion.
There are some books - Aristotle’s Poetics Horace and others - That privilege rhetorics.
Samuel Johnson, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, All wrote books
T. S. Eliot And Wayne Booth, Mikhail Bakhtin Search for truth.
Harold Bloom Likes his Freud. Without Oedipal complexes He’d be unemployed.
New Historicists And Post-Colonials Spy out injustice And acts felonial.
Both Stanley Fish And Northrup Frye For subtleties Have a keen eye.
Roman Ingarden Is a critic pure; Jacques Derrida Is not Saussure.
Peter Leithart
Peter J. Leithart is President of Theopolis Institute. He is the author of numerous books on theology, literature, and culture, including Theopolitan, Defending Constantine, and Baptized Body.
In Medias Res
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