List of critical theory topics

List of topics relevant to the study of critical theory, categorized by major topic within the field.

Basic topics

* Critical theory
* Cultural studies
* Literary theory
* Major critical theorists
* Notable works in critical theory
* Truth theory

Gender studies

* Lauren Berlant
* Judith Butler
* Susan McClary
** Susan McClary's constructions of subjectivity in Franz Schubert's music
* Laura Mulvey

Marxist theory

* Frankfurt School
** Theodor Adorno
** Herbert Marcuse
** Walter Benjamin
** Jürgen Habermas
** Max Horkheimer
** Friedrich Pollock
* Louis Althusser
* Mikhail Bakhtin
* Étienne Balibar
* Antonio Gramsci
* Michael Hardt
* Fredric Jameson
* Ernesto Laclau
* Georg Lukács
* Chantal Mouffe
* Antonio Negri
* Valentin Voloshinov
* Hegemony
* Posthegemony

Post-colonialism

* Chinhua Achebe
**
* Homi Bhabha
* Frantz Fanon
** Dual consciousness
* Edward Said
** Orientalism

tructuralism

* Roland Barthes
* Ferdinand de Saussure
* Claude Lévi-Strauss
* Louis Althusser

Post-structuralism

* Roland Barthes
* Michel Foucault
* Julia Kristeva
* Bruno Latour

Deconstruction

* Geoffrey Bennington
* Hélène Cixous
* Jonathan Culler
* Jacques Derrida
* Werner Hamacher
* Geoffrey Hartman
* Martin Heidegger
* Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
* Jean-François Lyotard
* Paul de Man
* J. Hillis Miller
* Jean-Luc Nancy
* Christopher Norris
* Avital Ronell
* Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Postmodernism

* Gilles Deleuze
* Félix Guattari
* Ernesto Laclau
* Claude Lefort
* Cyborg theory

Reconstructivism

* Paulo Freire
* John Dewey

Psychoanalytic theory

* Félix Guattari
** Schizoanalysis
** Ecosophy
* Luce Irigaray
* Teresa de Lauretis
* Jacques Lacan
* Julia Kristeva
* Slavoj Zizek
* Sigmund Freud
** The Interpretation of Dreams
** On Narcissism
** Totem and Taboo
** Beyond the Pleasure Principle
** The Ego and the Id
** The Future of an Illusion
** Civilization and Its Discontents
** Moses and Monotheism

Queer theory

* Judith Butler
* Heteronormativity
* Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
* Gloria E. Anzaldúa
* New Queer Cinema
* Queer Pedagogy

emiotics

* Roland Barthes
* Julia Kristeva
* Charles Sanders Peirce
* Ferdinand de Saussure

Cultural anthropology

* René Girard

Theories of identity

* Private sphere
* Public sphere

Lingustical theories of literature

* Mary Louise Pratt