o In classical and neoclassical criticism, the relationship between the literary sign and its object seems all-important: the representational element of literature is in the foreground. Literature is seen as a reflection or an imitation (mimesis ) of reality--classical and neoclassical theories of literature are often called mimetic.
o Medieval criticism, basically religious in nature, concentrates on the moral effects of the work on the audience.
o Romantic critics are mainly concerned with problems of creative inspiration, of expression, of sincerity. In our century, much psychoanalytical criticism is also concerned with this pole of the literary phenomenon: it studies the work as a symptom of the author's neuroses, obsessions, or fantasies. All these belong to the second element of Bühler's scheme, the area of the sender. Romantic theories of literature are often called expressive.
o The aestheticist theories of literature of the later nineteenth and the twentieth century (such as the New Criticism) are concerned with the study of the work in itself, with the message in our scheme considered not as a message but as an object existing and having value in its own right. This approach is often called immanentist or intrinsic .
o Structuralism is sometimes accused of immanentism, but this is an error. The structural criticism of literature which has developed from the 30s to our own days seeks to dissolve the study of the work into the study of the codes it is constituted or governed by. It is what in Jakobson's terms we would call a metalingual approach.
o To finish with, many contemporary approaches, such as reader-response criticism and the Marxist, feminist, and deconstructive criticism of the 70s and 80s are concerned mainly with the fourth element of the communicative situation in Bühler's figure, the reader. Reader-response criticism and deconstruction often insist on the indeterminacy of meaning, the possibility of different interpretations, the active role of the reader in the construction of meaning, the existence of open-ended works, etc.