Twentieth-century continental literary theory reconceives literature and criticism as sites where the crisis of modernity, technological instrumentality, and human freedom are contested. Heidegger's ontology of dwelling and poetic disclosure, the Frankfurt School's critical theory of instrumental reason and aesthetic negativity, and existentialist and decolonial thought (Sartre, Beauvoir, Fanon) each theorize how language, art, and critique can resist domination, reification, and imposed identity while grounding subjectivity in situated freedom. Across these frameworks, the parent discipline is philosophy of literature/critical theory, tracing a lineage from phenomenology and Marxism to existentialism, feminist theory, and postcolonial theory.
Twentieth-century continental literary theory reconceives literature and criticism as sites where the crisis of modernity, technological instrumentality, and human freedom are contested. Heidegger's …