Western Critical Theory and Interdisciplinary Fields: Structuralism to Posthumanism

This chapter answers the first part of Section XH2.4 of the Humanities and Social Sciences (XH) paper, “Critical Theories and Intellectual Traditions”: the “Theoretical Paradigms, Socio-Cultural Movements shaping Literary Studies: Structuralism, Marxism, Feminism, Existentialism, Poststructuralism, Modernism, Postmodernism, New Historicism, Postcolonialism, Posthumanism” and the “Interdisciplinary fields: Cultural Studies; Film and Media studies, Memory and Trauma studies, Dalit and Subaltern Studies, Environmental, Medical and Digital humanities.” XH2 English is one of the six optional sections, chosen at application. The chapter teaches what each paradigm claims, who founded it and in which key text, and how it reads a literary work, so that in the exam you can attribute a concept to the right thinker and tell close rival positions apart.

1. Structuralism and Poststructuralism

Structuralism takes the model of language built by Ferdinand de Saussure in his posthumous Course in General Linguistics (1916) and applies it to all cultural meaning. Saussure argued that the linguistic sign unites a signifier (sound-image) and a signified (concept), that the bond between them is arbitrary, and that meaning is differential — a term means what it does only through its difference from others in the system (langue, the shared system, versus parole, the individual utterance). A text is therefore read not for the author’s intention but for the underlying system of conventions that lets it signify. Lévi-Strauss read myths as combinations of binary oppositions; Roland Barthes in Mythologies (1957) exposed how bourgeois culture turns the contingent into the “natural,” and in “The Death of the Author” (1967) shifted authority from writer to reader.

Poststructuralism keeps Saussure’s premise that meaning is relational but denies that the system is ever stable or closed. Jacques Derrida, in Of Grammatology (1967), named the practice of deconstruction: Western thought rests on hierarchical binaries (speech over writing, presence over absence) that a text can be shown to undermine from within, and meaning is endlessly deferred along a chain of signifiers — his coinage différance fuses “to differ” and “to defer.” Michel Foucault shifted attention from the sign to discourse: what can be said in a period is governed by its episteme, and knowledge is inseparable from power; his “What Is an Author?” replaces the author with an “author-function.” Julia Kristeva coined intertextuality — every text is a mosaic of other texts.

⚠️ Structuralism and poststructuralism are not the same thing
Both descend from Saussure, so examiners pair them. The dividing line is the stability of the system: structuralism seeks the fixed deep structure that generates meaning; poststructuralism argues no such closure exists, because the play of signifiers never halts. “Binary oppositions as the key to meaning” is structuralist; “binary oppositions exposed and dismantled” is deconstructive.

2. Marxism and Feminism

Marxist criticism reads literature in relation to the economic base and the cultural superstructure it helps sustain, and treats a text as shaped by ideology — the ideas that make a class order seem natural. Later Marxists loosened the mechanical base–superstructure link: Antonio Gramsci theorised hegemony (rule by consent, not only force); Louis Althusser described how Ideological State Apparatuses form subjects through interpellation; the Frankfurt School (Adorno and Horkheimer) attacked the culture industry; Walter Benjamin analysed the loss of the artwork’s “aura” under mechanical reproduction; Raymond Williams developed cultural materialism, and Fredric Jameson urged critics to “always historicize.”

Feminist criticism asks how texts construct gender and how a male-centred canon has read women. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) tied women’s writing to material conditions; Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) argued “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” separating sex from gender. Second-wave work ranged from Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) to Elaine Showalter’s gynocriticism (the study of women as writers) and Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). French feminists — Hélène Cixous (écriture féminine), Luce Irigaray, Kristeva — linked writing to the female body and the semiotic. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) recast gender as performativity, a repeated doing rather than a fixed being.

3. Existentialism, Modernism and Postmodernism

Existentialism holds that existence precedes essence: there is no given human nature, so we are “condemned to be free” and must create meaning by our choices in an absurd or godless world. Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness) made this a system and coined bad faith (self-deceiving flight from freedom); Albert Camus explored the absurd; Simone de Beauvoir gave it a feminist and ethical turn. Its literary mark is the solitary chooser facing anguish, as in Sartre’s Nausea and Camus’s The Outsider.

Modernism (roughly the 1890s to the 1940s) broke with realist convention under the slogan “make it new” (Ezra Pound): formal experiment, fragmentation, mythic method, and stream of consciousness in Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner, with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) as its emblem. Postmodernism (from the mid-twentieth century) answers it with “incredulity toward metanarratives” (Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 1979): pastiche, parody, playful self-reference, and metafiction. Jean Baudrillard described the simulacrum and hyperreality; Linda Hutcheon named historiographic metafiction; Jameson read postmodernism as “the cultural logic of late capitalism.”

🎯 Modernism is a period style; postmodernism answers it
Both fragment form, but for opposite reasons. Modernist fragmentation mourns a lost order and often strains after a new wholeness through myth or art. Postmodern fragmentation celebrates the loss, doubts that any order was ever real, and refuses the depth model of hidden meaning. “Fragmentation as tragic loss” is modernist; “fragmentation as play” is postmodern.

4. New Historicism, Postcolonialism and Posthumanism

New Historicism, associated with Stephen Greenblatt (who used the term and wrote Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 1980), reads a literary work alongside non-literary documents of its moment as equal parts of one “text,” tracing the circulation of social energy and borrowing Foucault’s link of power and discourse and Geertz’s “thick description.” Its British cousin, cultural materialism (Dollimore and Sinfield, after Raymond Williams), stresses dissidence and present-day politics. Against older historicism, it denies that history is a stable background the poem merely reflects.

Postcolonialism studies the culture of colonialism and its aftermath. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) showed how Western scholarship produced “the Orient” as a governable Other, drawing on Foucault and Gramsci; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) questioned whether the silenced can be represented, and she is also associated with the term strategic essentialism; Homi K. Bhabha (The Location of Culture, 1994) theorised hybridity, mimicry and ambivalence in the colonial encounter. Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth) is the shared precursor, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Decolonising the Mind) made language the battleground.

Posthumanism decentres the human: it criticises the liberal-humanist idea of a bounded, autonomous Man and attends to the entanglement of human, animal, machine and environment. Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) broke the boundaries of body and machine; N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman questioned the dream of disembodied information; Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman offered an affirmative, materialist version. Keep it distinct from transhumanism, which wants to enhance and perfect the human rather than displace it from the centre.

5. Cultural Studies, Film and Media, Memory and Trauma

Cultural Studies grew from Britain’s Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Richard Hoggart (The Uses of Literacy) and Raymond Williams (Culture and Society) widened “culture” from high art to “a whole way of life,” and Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model showed that audiences read media messages in dominant, negotiated or oppositional ways. It takes popular culture, subcultures and everyday practices as serious objects of study.

Film and Media studies analyses the moving image as a signifying system. Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) named the male gaze, by which classical cinema positions the spectator as male and woman as object of looking; auteur theory (from Cahiers du cinéma) treats the director as author; Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” directs attention to form over content. Memory and Trauma studies asks how the unspeakable is represented: Cathy Caruth (Unclaimed Experience) theorised trauma as a wound that returns belatedly; Maurice Halbwachs coined collective memory; Pierre Nora named sites of memory (lieux de mémoire); Marianne Hirsch coined postmemory for the second generation’s inherited memory.

6. Dalit and Subaltern Studies; Environmental, Medical and Digital Humanities

Subaltern Studies, the historiographic project begun by Ranajit Guha, rewrites South Asian history “from below,” recovering the agency of peasants and the colonised rather than elites; Spivak’s essay is its most-cited intervention, and Dipesh Chakrabarty (Provincializing Europe) extended it. Dalit studies and Dalit aesthetics centre caste and lived experience: critics such as Sharankumar Limbale (Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature) argue that anubhava (authentic lived experience) and the goal of liberation, not classical beauty, should judge Dalit writing, with Jotirao Phule and B. R. Ambedkar as intellectual sources and testimonial works like Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan and Bama’s Karukku as landmarks.

  • Environmental humanities / ecocriticism studies the relationship between literature and the physical environment. Cheryll Glotfelty helped institutionalise the term, and Lawrence Buell (The Environmental Imagination) is a founding critic; a “first wave” celebrated nature writing and wilderness, a “second wave” turned to environmental justice, toxicity and the urban, with ideas like Rob Nixon’s slow violence.
  • Medical humanities brings literature, ethics and the arts to medicine: narrative medicine (associated with Rita Charon) trains clinicians to read patients’ stories, and illness narratives or pathographies (Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller) treat the experience of illness as a text worth close reading.
  • Digital humanities applies computational methods to humanistic study: text encoding and digital archives, computational text analysis, data visualisation, and distant reading (Franco Moretti), which analyses thousands of texts as data rather than reading each one closely — a complement, not a replacement, for close reading.

7. Attribution quick-reference: who said what

Concept, originator and defining text
ConceptOriginatorDefining text
Signifier / signified; langue / paroleSaussureCourse in General Linguistics (1916)
Binary oppositions in mythLévi-StraussStructural anthropology
Myth as naturalised ideology; death of the authorBarthesMythologies (1957); “The Death of the Author” (1967)
Deconstruction; différanceDerridaOf Grammatology (1967); the essay “Différance” (1968)
Episteme; discourse and power; author-functionFoucaultThe Order of Things; “What Is an Author?”
IntertextualityKristevaHer essays of the late 1960s
HegemonyGramsciPrison Notebooks
InterpellationAlthusserEssay on Ideological State Apparatuses
Gender as performativityButlerGender Trouble (1990)
Existence precedes essence; bad faithSartreExistentialism Is a Humanism (1946) for the formula; Being and Nothingness (1943) for bad faith
Incredulity toward metanarrativesLyotardThe Postmodern Condition (1979)
OrientalismSaidOrientalism (1978)
Hybridity, mimicry, ambivalenceBhabhaThe Location of Culture (1994)
The male gazeMulvey“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975)
The cyborgHaraway“A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985)
⚠️ The three commonest swaps
Examiners pair neighbours. Barthes announced the death of the author; Foucault answered with the author-function. Said wrote Orientalism, Spivak the subaltern essay and Bhabha the work on hybridity and mimicry. Beauvoir separated sex from gender; Butler made gender performative. Check the verb in the stem: “announced”, “answered”, “separated” and “performative” each point to one name.

Key takeaways

  • Structuralism applies Saussure’s sign (arbitrary signifier/signified, langue/parole, differential meaning) to culture; poststructuralism keeps the relational premise but denies closure — Derrida’s deconstruction and différance, Foucault’s discourse/power, Kristeva’s intertextuality.
  • Marxism reads base/superstructure and ideology (Gramsci’s hegemony, Althusser’s interpellation, the Frankfurt School, Jameson); feminism runs from Woolf and Beauvoir’s sex/gender distinction to gynocriticism, écriture féminine and Butler’s performativity.
  • Existentialism: existence precedes essence (Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir). Modernism fragments to mourn lost order (“make it new”, Eliot); postmodernism is incredulity toward metanarratives (Lyotard), pastiche and metafiction (Baudrillard, Hutcheon, Jameson).
  • New Historicism (Greenblatt) reads literary and non-literary texts together via power and social energy; postcolonialism runs Said’s Orientalism, Spivak’s subaltern and Bhabha’s hybridity/mimicry; posthumanism (Haraway, Hayles, Braidotti) decentres the human and is not transhumanism.
  • Cultural Studies (Birmingham; Hoggart, Williams, Hall’s encoding/decoding) studies everyday culture; Film studies gives Mulvey’s male gaze and auteur theory; Memory/Trauma gives Caruth’s belated wound, Halbwachs’s collective memory, Nora’s lieux de mémoire, Hirsch’s postmemory.
  • Subaltern Studies (Guha) writes history from below; Dalit aesthetics (Limbale) judges by anubhava and liberation, rooted in Phule and Ambedkar; environmental, medical and digital humanities bring ecocriticism, narrative medicine and distant reading (Moretti) to literary study.

Practice questions (16)

Attempt each one before opening the answer. Every explanation names the tempting wrong option as well as the right one, because that is where marks are lost.

  1. In Saussure’s account of the linguistic sign, the bond between the signifier (sound-image) and the signified (concept) is said to be:

    1. Causal, so that each concept produces its own sound-image
    2. Naturally motivated, as the sound imitates the thing it names
    3. Arbitrary, fixed only by the conventions of a given language
    4. Universal, identical across every human language
    Show answer

    Answer: C — Arbitrary, fixed only by the conventions of a given language

    Saussure’s first principle is the arbitrariness of the sign: there is no natural or necessary link between a signifier and its signified, which is why different languages use different sounds for the same concept. The ‘imitation’ option describes onomatopoeia, which Saussure treats as a marginal exception, not the rule.

  2. An essay argues that once a work is written the writer’s intention ceases to anchor its meaning, which is instead produced at the point of reading. Who is most associated with announcing this “death of the author”?

    1. Roland Barthes, in his essay on the death of the author
    2. Michel Foucault, who proposed the “author-function” in its place
    3. Ferdinand de Saussure, in his lectures on general linguistics
    4. Jacques Derrida, in his work on grammatology
    Show answer

    Answer: A — Roland Barthes, in his essay on the death of the author

    The slogan “the death of the author” is Roland Barthes’s. The tempting choice is Foucault, who responded with “What Is an Author?” and the notion of the author-function — but that essay complicates rather than announces the author’s death, so it is a reply to Barthes, not the source of the phrase.

  3. Derrida coins the term différance to make a single point about meaning. Which statement captures that point most precisely?

    1. Meaning is the private mental image that each individual reader forms and that no one else can share
    2. Meaning is a timeless deep structure beneath the surface that rigorous criticism can finally recover and fix
    3. Meaning resides securely in the author’s conscious intention and can be recovered by reading it correctly
    4. Meaning arises from differences between signs and is endlessly deferred, never fully present
    Show answer

    Answer: D — Meaning arises from differences between signs and is endlessly deferred, never fully present

    Différance deliberately fuses “to differ” (meaning is relational, as in Saussure) and “to defer” (presence is always postponed along the signifying chain). The ‘timeless deep structure’ option is the structuralist position Derrida argues against, and the others locate meaning in intention or private psychology, which deconstruction rejects.

  4. Consider these claims. P: a text can be shown to undermine its own hierarchical binaries. Q: a single stable deep structure generates all meaning and criticism’s task is to recover it. R: knowledge is inseparable from power, so what counts as true in a period is shaped by power-laden discourse. S: the play of signifiers never halts, so meaning is deferred. Which are characteristically poststructuralist rather than structuralist?

    1. P — a text undermines its own binaries
    2. Q — one stable deep structure to be recovered
    3. R — knowledge and truth shaped by power
    4. S — signification never halts, meaning deferred
    Show answer

    Answer: A — P — a text undermines its own binaries; C — R — knowledge and truth shaped by power; D — S — signification never halts, meaning deferred

    P (deconstruction), R (Foucault’s knowledge–power link) and S (deferral of meaning) are all poststructuralist. Q is the structuralist premise — a recoverable deep structure and closed system — which poststructuralism denies, so it is the one claim left out.

  5. The claim “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” which separates biological sex from socially constructed gender, comes from:

    1. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own
    2. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex
    3. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble
    4. Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic
    Show answer

    Answer: B — Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex

    The sentence is Simone de Beauvoir’s, from The Second Sex (1949), and is the founding statement of the sex/gender distinction. Butler later radicalised the idea into performativity, but the quoted line is Beauvoir’s, not Butler’s.

  6. A critic explains how a ruling order secures the willing consent of the ruled through institutions such as schools, churches and the press, not through force alone. This concept is most associated with:

    1. Theodor Adorno’s culture industry
    2. Fredric Jameson’s political unconscious
    3. Walter Benjamin’s aura
    4. Antonio Gramsci’s hegemony
    Show answer

    Answer: D — Antonio Gramsci’s hegemony

    Rule secured by consent rather than by force alone is Gramsci’s hegemony. The culture industry (Adorno) names the mass production of standardised culture, the aura (Benjamin) concerns the artwork’s uniqueness, and the political unconscious (Jameson) is a method of interpretation — none is the consent-versus-force idea.

  7. An advertisement addresses its viewer as a “discerning customer,” and in recognising herself in that address the viewer is constituted as a particular kind of subject. Which concept names precisely this process of being “hailed” into subjecthood by ideology?

    1. Interpellation, in Althusser’s account of ideology
    2. Reification, the turning of relations into things
    3. Hegemony, in Gramsci’s sense of consent
    4. Defamiliarisation, in the Russian Formalists’ sense
    Show answer

    Answer: A — Interpellation, in Althusser’s account of ideology

    Althusser’s interpellation is exactly the “hailing” by which ideology recruits individuals as subjects who recognise themselves in its address. Hegemony is the broader securing of consent; reification and defamiliarisation belong to different problems (Lukács’s commodity analysis and Formalist poetics), so they do not name the hailing.

  8. Which of the following statements about feminist literary criticism are correct?

    1. Showalter’s gynocriticism studies women specifically as producers of literature
    2. Cixous’s écriture féminine links women’s writing to the female body
    3. Butler holds that gender is a fixed biological essence present at birth
    4. Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own ties women’s writing to material conditions
    Show answer

    Answer: A — Showalter’s gynocriticism studies women specifically as producers of literature; B — Cixous’s écriture féminine links women’s writing to the female body; D — Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own ties women’s writing to material conditions

    Gynocriticism (women as writers), écriture féminine (writing the body) and Woolf’s material argument are all correct. The Butler statement reverses her position: she treats gender as performativity, a repeated social doing, precisely not a fixed biological essence, so it is the false claim.

  9. The proposition that “existence precedes essence” — there is no fixed human nature, and we make ourselves through our choices — is the central tenet of:

    1. Structuralism
    2. New Historicism
    3. Existentialism
    4. Postmodernism
    Show answer

    Answer: C — Existentialism

    “Existence precedes essence” is Sartre’s formula and the defining claim of existentialism. Structuralism and New Historicism are methods of reading, and postmodernism is defined instead by incredulity toward metanarratives, so none of them owns this proposition.

  10. The definition of the postmodern as “incredulity toward metanarratives” appears in which of the following works?

    1. Being and Nothingness, a philosophical treatise on freedom and bad faith
    2. The Postmodern Condition, a report on knowledge in advanced societies
    3. The Waste Land, a long modernist poem built from fragments and allusions
    4. Orientalism, a study of Western discourse about the East and its power
    Show answer

    Answer: B — The Postmodern Condition, a report on knowledge in advanced societies

    The phrase is from Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979), a report on knowledge in advanced societies. Being and Nothingness is Sartre’s existentialist treatise, The Waste Land is Eliot’s modernist poem, and Orientalism is Said’s postcolonial study: different authors and different projects.

  11. A novel shatters chronology and voice, yet its fragments strain toward a lost wholeness recovered through myth, and the breakdown is presented as a cultural catastrophe to be mourned. This handling of fragmentation is most characteristic of:

    1. Modernism, which mourns a lost order and reaches for a new wholeness
    2. Postmodernism, which welcomes fragmentation as liberating play with no lost order
    3. Structuralism, which seeks the underlying system that generates surface meanings
    4. Realism, which reproduces the observable surface of ordinary social life
    Show answer

    Answer: A — Modernism, which mourns a lost order and reaches for a new wholeness

    Mourning a lost order and striving after a new wholeness through myth is the modernist signature (as in Eliot’s mythic method). Postmodernism would treat the same fragmentation as play and doubt that any order was ever real; structuralism and realism do not foreground fragmentation in this way at all.

  12. What chiefly distinguishes New Historicism from the older historical criticism it replaced?

    1. It reduces a text wholly to the biography and psychology of its individual author
    2. It treats history as a fixed, stable backdrop that the literary work faithfully mirrors
    3. It confines interpretation to the formal devices internal to the poem itself, excluding history
    4. It reads literary and non-literary texts together as one field of circulating social energy
    Show answer

    Answer: D — It reads literary and non-literary texts together as one field of circulating social energy

    New Historicism, following Foucault and Geertz, sets literary and non-literary documents side by side as parts of one cultural text and traces the circulation of social energy. The ‘fixed backdrop the text mirrors’ option is precisely the old historicism it rejects; biography-only and form-only describe other approaches.

  13. Match the idea to its originator. P: Orientalism as a Western discourse about the East — Said. Q: the question “Can the Subaltern Speak?” — Spivak. R: hybridity and mimicry in the colonial encounter — Bhabha. S: the “male gaze” — Said. Which pairings are correct?

    1. P — Orientalism / Said
    2. Q — Can the Subaltern Speak? / Spivak
    3. R — hybridity and mimicry / Bhabha
    4. S — the male gaze / Said
    Show answer

    Answer: A — P — Orientalism / Said; B — Q — Can the Subaltern Speak? / Spivak; C — R — hybridity and mimicry / Bhabha

    Said (Orientalism), Spivak (the subaltern essay) and Bhabha (hybridity, mimicry) are the three founding figures of postcolonial theory and are paired correctly. The “male gaze” belongs to Laura Mulvey in film studies, not to Said, so S is the wrong pairing.

  14. In Edward Said’s Orientalism, “the Orient” is best understood as:

    1. A neutral geographical fact faithfully recorded by disinterested European scholars
    2. A discursive construction by which the West defined and ruled an “Other”
    3. A purely literary genre of travel writing with no political content at all
    4. A body of authentic self-representation produced by Eastern societies themselves
    Show answer

    Answer: B — A discursive construction by which the West defined and ruled an “Other”

    Said argues that “the Orient” is produced by Western knowledge as a manageable Other, so that scholarship and empire reinforce each other. The ‘neutral fact’ and ‘authentic self-representation’ options miss his central point that the Orient is constructed by the West, not described by it or by itself.

  15. A theorist rejects the idea of the human as a bounded, autonomous master of nature and instead stresses how the human is entangled with animals, machines and the environment. This stance, and its distinction from a rival, is best described as:

    1. Transhumanism, which likewise seeks to decentre the human from the natural world
    2. Humanism, which places the autonomous rational Man at the centre of all value
    3. Posthumanism, as distinct from transhumanism, which seeks to enhance the human
    4. Existentialism, which denies any entanglement beyond the individual’s free choice
    Show answer

    Answer: C — Posthumanism, as distinct from transhumanism, which seeks to enhance the human

    Decentring the human and stressing entanglement is posthumanism, and the exam point is its contrast with transhumanism, which keeps the human at the centre and seeks to perfect or enhance it. The transhumanism option wrongly equates the two; humanism and existentialism both retain the centred human subject.

  16. Which of the following field-and-figure pairings are correct? P: the encoding/decoding model — Stuart Hall (Cultural Studies). Q: distant reading — Franco Moretti (Digital Humanities). R: postmemory — Marianne Hirsch (Memory studies). S: slow violence — Laura Mulvey.

    1. P — encoding/decoding / Stuart Hall
    2. Q — distant reading / Franco Moretti
    3. R — postmemory / Marianne Hirsch
    4. S — slow violence / Laura Mulvey
    Show answer

    Answer: A — P — encoding/decoding / Stuart Hall; B — Q — distant reading / Franco Moretti; C — R — postmemory / Marianne Hirsch

    Hall’s encoding/decoding, Moretti’s distant reading and Hirsch’s postmemory are correctly attributed. “Slow violence” is Rob Nixon’s term from environmental humanities; Mulvey is the critic of the male gaze, so S is the wrong pairing.