The Criticism of Criticism A typology of contemporary theory based on Kenneth Burke
Intrinsic Criticism The text itself	Extrinsic Criticism The context the text Genetic—What births the text Implicational—What the text births
Formalism: New Criticism ü Reads the text in order to understand the manner in which style, language, image, and theme contribute to an organic unity. ü Evaluates texts by their achievement of this organic unity. ü Important Figures: Ransom, Brooks, Warren, Wimsatt and Beardsley Formalism: Russian Formalism ü Emphasizes poetics, particularly the way in which literary language in a particular text “defamiliarizes” our conventional use of language. ü Important Figures: Jakobsen Formalism: Deconstruction ü Reads texts in order to show that their apparent unities are, in fact, constructed from antinomies. ü Draws philosophically on Derrida’s deconstruction of the principles of structuralism in philosophy, anthropology, and linguistics. ü Important Figures: De Man, Hartmann, Bloom, Barthes	Biographical Criticism Psychoanalytic Criticism Historicism (Old and New) Cultural Studies
Structuralism—a close reading of individual texts in order to demonstrate universal properties (structures) of language, literature, and culture. As such, structuralism can be seen to be both intrinsic and extrinsic, though some would relate it more clearly to an intrinsic mode of criticism like poetics.
African American Criticism—strictly speaking, because African American criticism is defined primarily by a people group (much as we use the euphemism "French theory" as a short hand for a dizzying array of theoretical approaches), African American Criticism encompasses all types of approaches to literary criticism. However, African American criticism is rarely exclusively intrinsic in the sense of New Criticism. ü Intrinsic modes of African American criticism emphasize the ways in which African American literature work in relationship to what might be called an African American or African poetic, that is specifically African American ways of speaking, writing, performing, etcetera. ü Extrinsic modes of African American criticism emphasize the historical context of a work and/or the ways in which it is an intervention in that particular context. ü Important figures: Gates, Christian, Baker, hooks, West