Critical Theory

As Jürgen Habermas has documented, during the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century various modes of political, literary, and cultural criticism emerged from the salons, public houses, and other sites of the bourgeois public sphere, leading to the production of journals and books that discussed the latest cultural fashions and political trends. Major eighteenth-and nineteenth-century writers such as Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, and Edgar Allan Poe practiced forms of criticism, as did nineteenth-century novelists such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot.

Critical discourse in a broad range of cultural criticism developed from philosophical and critical responses to genres of art and evaluative responses to specific art works. From Aristotle's Poetics through Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis in the literary arts, critical aesthetic theories attempted to define the key features of genres and to distinguish what constituted artistic excellence and experience.

Critical approaches in literature, art, music, dance, and the arts began emerging as a specific discipline in the nineteenth century throughout the Western world. In the first decades of the twentieth century, critics such as György Lukács, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin began applying Marxist theory to a broad range of the arts. Freudians such as Ernest Jones began using psychoanalytic theory to study culture, while Herbert Read deployed Jungian theory. By the 1950s, a variety of schools of critical theory started using major theoretical discourses of the period to discuss, analyze, interpret, and critique the arts. There was a reaction against this theory turn, however, both from those who wanted a more scientific approach to the aesthetic work, such as I. A. Richards, and from those who wanted a more empathetic immersion in cultural artifacts, such as some members of North American New Criticism, who advocated close readings of literary texts without what they saw as the blinders of theory.

Some critical theories and methods such as Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and semiotics were taken up in the 1960s in the new disciplines of film and media theory, which also developed their own autonomous discourses and methods. Critical approaches to mass communication and culture, however, were first developed by the Frankfurt School, which generated its own concept of critical theory.