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What were the significant contributions of Freud, the young Eliot, Beauvoir, Woolf, and Spivak to their literary criticism schools?

Freud has had a significant impact on literary criticism, especially psychoanalytic criticism, because he theorized that humans not only have an unconscious, but an unconscious that is patterned or structured in a similar way in all people, and that literature is a means to uncover these patterns. For example, Freud named his Oedipal complex, the idea that little boys desire to kill their fathers and marry their mothers, after Sophocles' play Oedipus Rex, in which Oedipus does indeed kill his father and marry his mother. Since Freud's time, literary theorists have been looking at the way literature reveals unconscious patterns in the human psyche.


Virginia Woolf is one the foremothers of contemporary feminist criticism and feminism owes her a huge debt. In her A Room of One's Own, written in the 1920s, she examines why there are so few great women writers and links it to women's lack of economic independence and privacy. She argues that with a room of their own and an income of 500 pounds a year, women could also become great writers. This moved the conversation away from notions of women's "innate" inferiority to an examination of the outward circumstances that blocked female talent. It would be hard to imagine current feminist studies without her.


Beauvoir also had a huge impact on current feminist criticism, especially through her book The Second Sex. She argued that gender attributes are not inborn but socially constructed, a line picked up later by influential theorists such as Judith Butler. Like Woolf, Beauvoir saw men casting women in the role of the Other, a term she capitalized, which meant that men saw women not as people but first, as stereotypes onto which they projected their own desires; second, as mysterious; and third, as in need of being subordinate in patriarchy. Her concept of the Other would become important not just to feminist but to post-colonial literary theory as critics such as Edward Said examined the way both white men and European civilization made false assumptions about cultures and people not like them.


Spivak rose to fame as a translator of Derrida, but has made her own name primarily in post-colonial studies by focusing on the way sub-altern or oppressed peoples are forced to adopt the ways of knowing and understanding of the dominant social group and thus their own voices get diluted. She argues that we need to allow sub-altern groups to speak in their own voices.

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