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"No artist produces great art ... by a deliberate attempt to express his personality. He expresses his personality indirectly through concentrating upon a task which is a task in the same sense as the making of an efficient engine or the turning of a jug or a table-leg," says T. S. Eliot (as quoted in Leitch 1089).

According to Eliot, "[t]he only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that, when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked" (as quoted in Leitch 1090).

Defining literary criticism as "the disinterested exercise of intelligence ... the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste ... the common pursuit of true judgment" (quoted in Leitch 1090), Eliot became a major influence on the New Critics who took to heart the concepts contained in these quotations.
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Topics

1. Orientation
2. Criticism, theory, and literature3. Literature and the linguistic turn
  • New Criticism
  • Formalisms
  • Structuralism
  • Poststructuralism
  • Deconstruction and postmodernism
4. Literature and history
  • Marxisms
  • Cultural Studies
  • New Historicism
  • Postcolonial literary theory
5. Literature, subjectivities, and identities
  • Archetypal criticism
  • Psychoanalytic criticism
  • Feminisms
  • Gender and queer theory
6. Literature and its readers
  • Rhetoric
  • Hermeneutics
  • Reception and reader-response theories
7. Synthesis
References:
  • Vincent B. Leitch’s “T. S. Eliot” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
  • Louis Markos’s “Lecture One: Thinking Theoretically” in From Plato to Postmodernism
  • Hazard Adam’s “General Introduction” and “Introduction: The Modern Era” in Critical Theory Since Plato
  • Paul H. Fry's "Introduction to Literary Theory" (two parts) in Literary Theory featured in the Open Yale Courses on Academic Earth
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