You should know these New Theories to crack JRF | UGC NET June 2026 English

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]It's around 40 to 45 days left to the English exam of the UGC NET 2026 June cycle. And imagine one day you feel like studying literary theory or revising literary theory. What is it that you're going to study? What are the topics that you will study? You will obviously study structuralism, you will study postructuralism, you will study formalism, you'll study new criticism, you'll study althuser, you'll study ghamshi, you will study bakin and so on and so forth. But are you going to study affect theory? Are you going to study blue humanities? Are you going to study posthumanism? Are you going to study biopolitics?

[00:00:37]Probably not.

[00:00:39]But what if I tell you if you study these topics, these emerging literary theories in English literature and literature in general which UGCNET seems to be prioritizing now, you considerably increase your chances of getting JRF because a lot of questions have been coming from these new emerging literary theories and if you are missing out on them, you are missing out on free marks.

[00:01:06]So, in this video, I'm going to talk about eight emerging literary theories that will significantly just a second increase your chances of getting JRF in the UGCNET June 2026 cycle. So, are you ready? Now, before we begin with the video, I want you to have a look at this question.

[00:01:29]Pause the video, try to answer the question. If you don't have the answer to this question, you will figure out the answer to this question by the end of this video. Right? And if you WhatsApp us personally with the correct option, which is the answer to this question, you will get 30% discount on all our offerings. Right now on our website, the literary.com, you are already getting a 20% discount by using the coupon code Hamlet. But if you message us the answer to this question, you have to personally message us. Do not comment. Please do not comment. You have to personally message us the answer to this question. And if you are correct, you are getting 30% discount on whatever offering you want to buy from our website. That having said, let's now start with the video. What I will be doing in this video is that I will be giving you a brief yet comprehensive idea of the eight literary theories that I'm going to talk about. I will give you key theorists, key ideas, a key understanding of the whole theory. But that is obviously not enough. You will have to study more. We can work on individual lectures on these individual literary theories. If you want that, write that down in the comment section.

[00:02:42]But for now, I am just here to give you a general idea of all these literary theories. Apart from that, all the key concepts, key theories, key ideas, key figures that I mention in this video, I'm going to write those names down, those terms down in the description. So, if you have difficulty with a certain name, you can just go to the description and find that particular term or figure and read about them on your own. So, let's start with something that is more familiar than the other theories that will be mentioned in this particular video.

[00:03:15]Let's start with queer theory. So queer theory is a discipline that emerged in the early 1990s and the term queer theory was famously coined by uh this person called uh Teresa D. Lorites in the in 1990. Now prior to queer theory there used to be gay and lesbian studies and the way they would look at this whole thing was very different from how queer theory looks at it. So gay and lesbian studies would accept the assumption that being gay, being a homosexual, being a lesbian or being queer is essentially away from the normal. On the other hand, queer theory is something that is directly challenging this idea of the normal. It is questioning what exactly this normality is. And that is where the term heteronormativity comes from. So queer theory in that sense is challenging the so-called regime of the normal. And one important theorist here is Michelle Fuko. Michelle Fugo talks about power discourse and how uh power creates ideas, knowledge, um identities.

[00:04:31]And as far as sexuality is concerned, Fuko's ideas tell us that sexuality is also something that perhaps is not biologically determined. It is something that is talked about by the powerful discourse and shaped in a certain way.

[00:04:51]So it's socially constructed in that sense, right? And that is how social constructionism uh forms sort of a bedrock of this idea. Another key term that queer theory is rejecting here is biological essentialism which basically argues that your sexual identity, your gender is biologically determined, right? And that is how we come to uh Judith Butler. You would have heard of the work gender trouble that came in 1990. And in gender trouble, Judith Butler talks about gender performativity. The fact that a man acts like a man because they have learned to perform like that. It's not a function of their biology but it's a function of their social situations.

[00:05:43]I am acting the way I am acting. I am performing the way I'm performing because I have been socially constructed to uh act that particular way. So basically gender is a social performance. It is not naturally determined. Another important theorist here is Eve Kosovski Sedwick, important theorist. She wrote uh the epistemology of the closet and she defines queer as an open mesh of possibilities. Right? Uh basically implying that identities are fluid. Uh they're overlapping. They're often unstable and they're often multiple. Okay. Now let's move on to critical race theory and intersectionality. These are two related concepts. and critical race theory often called CRT emerged around 1989. And important scholars of the school would be Derek Bell, would be Richard Delgado and would be Kimberly Khaw. So CRT is arguing something very important. It is saying that racism is not something which is exceptional. It is ordinary. It is not only happening in the exceptional extreme events but it is happening in daytoday happenings in the most ordinary events it is happening in the most mundane conversations it is happening and that is true for almost all social injustices right a lot of times gender violence for example is an extreme manifestation of misogyny but misogyny can be seen in everyday conversations Sexism can be traced in everyday conversations in the most mundane conversations of all. Similarly, CRT argues the same thing for racism. It is also structural and it is also socially constructed. Racism is not something that is biologically determined. Again, going against the biological essentialist attitude of races, you know that white race is superior to the black race and so on and so forth. Rather racism is something that is socially practiced and socially performed and socially determined and constructed.

[00:07:47]Derek Bell gives a very important concept called the interest convergence.

[00:07:52]He says that any racial improvement or any improvement in terms of racism will come to the society when the white elites when the people who are in the power would in some way or the other subtly benefit from that. Otherwise there is no reason for that reform to happen. And the other concept intersectionality u coined by Kimberly Krenshaw in 1989 is a very important concept and it is something that has become part of our regular conversations right intersectionality. I think uh a lot of you would understand what intersectionality is. It basically means that any social injustice does not exist in isolation. there is a nexus of several social oppressions which combine and create a collective uh discourse around injustices.

[00:08:45]So a woman is not only oppressed because she's a woman, she might also be oppressed because she is a black woman, right? in the American context, in the Indian context, it could be a Dalith man being marginalized, but a Dalith woman being doubly marginalized because firstly she's Dalith and secondly she's also a woman. So that exactly is intersectionality. So all these marginalizations of race, of class, of cast, of gender, they're interacting together. They aren't existing in isolated boxes. Now let's talk about biopolitics. Another important topic again you might have heard of it. It mainly comes from Michelle Fuko. Now Michelle Fuko notices a historical change. He notices that earlier state used to control life in a way where it could let live or kill. That is where the state had the power. But now after the progress of the medical world, we have statistics, we have diseases, we have illnesses, we have bodies that are normal and we have bodies that are away from the normal that deviate from the normal. In that light, the modern state is not either taking life or letting live. It is fostering life or disallowing it to the point of death.

[00:10:05]This is a crucial difference in biopolitics. You are not explicitly killing somebody. You are not explicitly letting somebody live. But you are incentivizing prioritizing certain kinds of life such that the lives which are not incentivized or not prioritized will end up getting destroyed. So this could be through statistics, this could be through health care, this could be through birth rates, this could be through sexuality, this could be through surveillance, this could be through mortality data and so on and so forth.

[00:10:39]Another important theorist here is George Agimin, an Italian theorist and he adds to this idea and creates the distinction of the Greek word Zoey, which means life and by this word he means bare life, naked life.

[00:10:58]and bios. Bios is political life or qualified life. The life that is allowed, the life that is prioritized by the state. So somebody who is reduced to bare life to Zoey will eventually be destroyed. And this is how biopolitical control takes place in the modern state.

[00:11:21]In literature, you can think of 1984 by George Orwell where the state controls life. You can also think of the handmade tale by Margaret Artwood uh where the female sexuality is controlled in a certain way in that particular dystopian vault. Important sub areas of biopolitics can be disability studies wherein you look at abbleism as a construct determined by the status quo as to who is somebody with capacity and that is how the state the status quo prioritizes a certain kind of life.

[00:12:04]Another important sub area of biopolitics can be thanto politics coming from the word than theos which means death.

[00:12:12]Thanos the character also comes from there. It looks at the voices of the people who are left to die by this biopolitical regime. Now another important theory is ecoiticism. Now the coinage of this term is generally credited to William Ryukurt an American literary critic u who wrote an essay in 1978 called literature and ecology an experiment in ecoitism wherein he tried to explore the application of ecological ideas in literature. Cheryl Lordfelt is another important name which revived this discipline in 1989. Eco-criticism basically asks how is literature representing nature? How are humans relating to nature and how is culture determining, characterizing and defining nature? This is also called green theory in uh the UK but usually we use the term ecoitism. An important key word here is anthroposine which basically means the age where human intervention has largely determined the trajectory of nature.

[00:13:20]Another important branch of eco-criticism is eco feminism which links the oppression of women with the exploitation of nature. It basically argues that patriarchy harms both genders and environment. Environmental racism is another field here which looks at how climate change and climate catastrophe will impact the marginalized, the poor, the oppressed first, the minority communities first and the rich will be safe. Lastly, blue humanities. It looks at oceans, seas, water bodies from the point of view of literature.

[00:14:01]Now the way we live our lives in the 21st century often presupposes the idea that we humans are at the center of everything. We are at the center of the universe, at the center of ecology, at the center of technology, at the center of evolution and whatnot.

[00:14:18]This is anthropocentrism.

[00:14:21]The theory that we are talking about here posthumism rejects anthropocentricism.

[00:14:26]It rejects the humanentric approach.

[00:14:29]That is why it's posthuman. There are several theorists here. One is Nancy Katherine Hails, a chemist by profession, but her work, how we became posthuman, is very important in this regard. She argues that our consciousness is not something special.

[00:14:47]The fact that we are aware of the fact that we can think perhaps is just the result of human evolution. Perhaps it's just a consequence of our material reality.

[00:14:58]She also argues that our bodies the human bodies are already extended by technology by tools and that is why she says there is no essential or absolute difference between machines and humans and that brings us to the idea of cyborgs. Donna Harowway in her work the cyborg manifesto talks about this and she says that we are all chimeas. We are all a combination a mix of humans and machines. So we are all so we are all cyborgs. We are humans and we are machines. The machines that we use to live our daily lives are part of our existence.

[00:15:41]And this theory essentially questions what exactly is human? What are the boundaries of human? Now, one should not confuse posthumanism with transhumanism.

[00:15:51]Transhumanism basically is the idea that more technology, AI, tools and so on can aid human life. So adding technology to human life to make it more efficient, to make it better and so on. However, posthumanism is more philosophical where it questions the very idea of what human is, what are the human individual boundaries. Next up is a effect theory.

[00:16:17]Now, affect theory is an intersectional theory used in literature and humanities which looks at bodily experience, intensities, emotions, effect of something as a precursor to conscious thought, cognitive thought and language.

[00:16:36]And in that sense it can also be seen as a response to the post structuralist emphasis on language and language preceding thought. This theory is also a response to the effective fallacy which is one of the central concepts in new criticism uh which says that you cannot determine the meaning of a text based on how it impacts a certain reader and this theory is also closely linked with feminist theory and theorists such as Eve Kosovski, Sedick, Sara Ahmed and Brian Masumi these are important figures in affect theory Effect has to be distinguished as a concept from emotions. Emotions are something that you can articulate. But a effect as I said precedes thought. It precedes language. It perhaps precedes consciousness as per affect studies. So it is the primordial the preconcious phenomenon in that sense and in that light S Ahmed calls this unqualified intensity. Now we talked about some philosophical foundations of a effect theory. We will also talk about some key concepts.

[00:17:55]One key concept is the concept of cruel optimism given by Lauren Berland. Cruel optimism is an effect theory that talks about a state where a person is so attached to a desire, to a thought, to a relationship, to a job which eventually ends up hindering their personal mental well-being. For example, think of Willie Lman in Death of the Salesman and how his mental well-being, his family life, his physical health is hindered by this attachment with the idea of the American dream. Another idea in effect theory is the idea of feminist killjoy given by Sara Ahmed which talks about how people who point out sexism and injustices in society are often blamed to be killing the joy. Right?

[00:18:51]That would be feminist killjoy. Okay.

[00:18:54]Let me ask you a philosophical question.

[00:18:57]The world that is existing around you, is it existing because you are experiencing it through your consciousness or is it existing independent of your consciousness? What that means is that the world around you had you not been there, had the experienced as it is. Now a lot of people who follow correationalism would say that the world outside only exists because there is a consciousness that is illuminating that material reality. Otherwise it existing or not existing does not make sense.

[00:19:41]Speculative realism that is our next theory actually rejects this idea. It tries to understand the existence of the external world as something that can exist outside of human experience as something that can exist independent of human consciousness and perception.

[00:20:01]Graham Herman calls this idea objectoriented ontology O where we try to figure out the ontology the existence of an object outside of human perception. Ray Brazier is another important figure here who highlighted how nature external world is indifferent of humanity. Right? So you see it's kind of a posthuman it's kind of an anti-anthropocentric idea where we are again desentering the human. Now how is this relevant to literature? You can think of certain literary movements for example romanticism which tried to desenter the human and bring nature to the forefront tried to show the existence of nature as it is slightly but still away from the human experience. Now finally we can think about anti- theory. Anti- theory can be seen as a movement against this complex jargonish theory that has overpowered the interpretation of literature. There are people like Steven Knap uh Walter Ben Michaels who argued that theory is not necessarily needed to understand literature. It does not have to be so complex. It takes the pleasure away. But here is a question or rather food for thought for you. When we say theory is too complex and these politically excessive ideas that have overpowered the interpretation of literature that should not be there is that idea not another theory where we are actively disengaging with a certain temperament towards literature. So anti- theory in that sense ends up becoming another kind of theory. That my friends brings us to the end of this video. I hope you liked the video. I hope you got something to learn out of this video. So if that is the case, like the video, comment down below, let us know, subscribe to the channel if you still haven't. And if you are preparing for UGCNet, and if you think we may help you more in this journey, you can check our courses, our offerings on the literary.com.

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