/lit/ - Literature

>>6319167
>a collection of movements and ideologies that share a common goal: to define, establish, and achieve equal political, economic, cultural, personal, and social rights for women. This includes seeking to establish equal opportunities for women in education and employment.

Feminist Theory aims to understand the nature of gender inequality by examining women's social roles and lived experience; it has developed theories in a variety of disciplines in order to respond to issues such as the social construction of sex and gender.

Taking that into consideration it's not unfair or incorrect to apply these theories to works of literature like Milton's Paradise Lost.

>>6319188
Milton predates feminism but it's not unfair to look at his work from a feminist perspective because the whole function of the feminist project is to uncover the ways in which gender roles and inequality are constructed, among other things.

The thing about Milton's sexual politics is that it would have consequences in its own society and would also have consequences in our own society. Art often informs people's view on certain issues.

What is this work saying? How does it function? Those are valid questions and it's naive to think its gender politics are irrelevant when we still praise this work as a great piece of literature and central to the Western canon and so on.

>>6297070
No. The conspiracy theorists say that the Frankfurt School, who had some Jews in their midst, wanted to indoctrinate good little white boys and girls into accepting things like multiculturalism and political correctness because they're evil.

Critical theory, in terms of literature and broader cultural apparatuses (film,art, sculpture, etc), is just using different methods founded upon critique - Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, eco-critical, etc - in order to better understand how a text functions.

The theorist shifts focus away from the question usually asked in high school classes ("What does X mean?") and instead asks, "How does X function, and how might that function produce meaning?"

Even movements that are seemingly apolitical, like New Criticsm, operates with a theory of how to approach literature. Their intent was to look at the text itself for its own meaning, and used methods like close reading. Even though it wasn't looking for the way in which the text would reflect or subvert society's dominate ideology, it was still a theory.

Returning to the Frankfurt School, some of them took Marxist and Freudian ideas and applied them to things like literature and film, but there was no grand conspiracy like /pol/ and other right-wing American thinkers imagine and it's not as harmful as people imagine. Inside academia you'd be laughed at for using the term "cultural Marxism" because it's a misnomer.

If you want to learn more about theory & criticism and the kinds of questions people ask when approaching texts then check this out: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/722/01/