Austrians use methodological individualism as their methodology. Which literary theory are Austrians more akin to? Which is the complete opposite?
- Aestheticism- often associated with Romanticism a philosophy defining aesthetic value as the primary goal in understanding literature. This includes both literary critics who have tried to understand and/or identify aesthetic values and those like Oscar Wilde who have stressed art for art’s sake.
- American pragmatism and other American approaches
- Cultural studies - emphasizes the role of literature in everyday life
- Comparative Literature - confronts literatures from different languages, nations, cultures and disciplines to each other
- Darwinian literary studies - situates literature in the context of evolution and natural selection
- Deconstruction - a strategy of close reading that elicits the ways that key terms and concepts may be paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning undecidable
- Gender (see feminist literary criticism) - which emphasizes themes of gender relations
- Formalism
- German hermeneutics and philology
- Marxism (see Marxist literary criticism) - which emphasizes themes of class conflict
- Modernism
- New Criticism - which looked at literary works on the basis of what is written, and not at the goals of the author or biographical issues
- New historicism - which examines a text by also examining other texts of the time period
- Postcolonialism - focuses on the influences of colonialism in literature, especially regarding the historical conflict resulting from the exploitation of less developed countries and indigenous peoples by western nations
- Post-modernism - criticism of the conditions present in the twentieth century, often with concern for those viewed as social deviants or the Other
- Post-structuralism - a catch-all term for various theoretical approaches (such as deconstruction) that criticize or go beyond Structuralism’s aspirations to create a rational science of culture by extrapolating the model of linguistics to other discursive and aesthetic formations
- Psychoanalysis (see psychoanalytic literary criticism) - Explores the role of consciousnesses and the unconscious in literature including that of the author, reader, and characters in the text
- Queer theory - examines, questions, and criticizes the role of gender identity and sexuality in literature
- Reader Response - focuses upon the active response of the reader to a text
- Russian Formalism
- Structuralism and semiotics (see semiotic literary criticism) - examines the universal underlying structures in a text, the linguistic units in a text and how the author conveys meaning through any structures
- Eco-criticism - Explores cultural connections and human relationships to the natural world.
- Other theorists: Robert Graves, Alamgir Hashmi, John Sutherland, Leslie Fiedler, Kenneth Burke, Paul Bénichou, Barbara Johnson