This concept traces the evolution of twentieth-century North American literary criticism through successive theoretical paradigms: the Harlem Renaissance's grounding of literary value in vernacular/oral black culture; New Criticism's formalist doctrine of close reading, textual autonomy, and rejection of authorial intent (the "intentional fallacy") and paraphrase; reader-response theory's relocation of meaning to "interpretive communities"; Northrop Frye's archetypal/mythic systematization of literature; feminist criticism's reconstruction of a female literary tradition and its later intersectional critique; the Black Arts movement's essentialist black aesthetic; and postmodernism's embrace of intertextuality, metafiction, and historiographic metafiction, debated between Jameson's Marxist critique (postmodernism as symptom of late capitalism) and Lyotard's celebration of plurality and the sublime. It belongs to literary criticism and theory, tracing a disciplinary arc from formalism to historicism/pluralism.
This concept traces the evolution of twentieth-century North American literary criticism through successive theoretical paradigms: the Harlem Renaissance's grounding of literary value in vernacular/o…