Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide

Critical Theory Today is a textbook for undergraduate English majors in the United States to introduce them to the core concepts in the field of critical theory and their applications to literary analysis. Critical theory is a philosophical system that analyzes power relations and knowledge development and transmission in order to transform society. 

Although its methods are drawn from historical philosophical and ideological practices, such as dialectical materialism and Freudian psychoanalysis, critical theory began to coalesce as an epistemology and praxis through the work of the Frankfurt School in the 1920s. Frankfurt School scholars like Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin sought to build on the theories of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx to better understand how society functions. The term “critical theory” to describe this nascent field was coined by German philosopher and sociologist Max Horkheimer in 1937, in the essay “Traditional and Critical Theory.” The theory is “critical” because it expresses a normative view of what society should be like and aims to use the tools at its disposal to create that world.