Pragmatism is a collection of many different ways of thinking. Most of the thinkers who describe themselves as pragmatists point to some connection with practical consequences or real effects as vital components of both meaning and truth. Some pragmatists object to the view that beliefs represent reality and argue that beliefs are dispositions which qualify as true or false depending on how helpful a disposition proves in accomplishing the believer's goals. For this type of pragmatist it is only in the struggle of intelligent organisms with the surrounding environment that theories acquire meaning, and only with a theory's success in this struggle that it becomes true. Pragmatists do not hold that anything that is practical or useful, or that anything that helps to survive merely in the short-term, should be regarded as true. Instead, most of them argue that what should be taken as true is that which contributes the most good over the longest course.

Deconstruction is used to denote a philosophy of meaning that deals with the ways that meaning is constructed and understood by writers, texts, and readers. One way of understanding the term is that it involves discovering, recognizing, and understanding the underlying — and unspoken and implicit — assumptions, ideas, and frameworks that form the basis for thought and belief. It has various shades of meaning in different areas of study and discussion, and is, by its very nature, difficult to define without depending on "un-deconstructed" concepts. Deconstruction is neither an analysis, a critique, a method, an act, nor an operation, but an attempt to demonstrate that Western thought has not satisfied its quest for a "transcendental signifier" that will give meaning to all other signs.

Feminist literary criticism is informed by feminist theory, or by the politics of feminism more broadly. In the most general and simple terms, feminist literary criticism before the 1970s -- the first and second waves of feminism -- was concerned with the politics of women's authorship and the representation of women's condition within literature. With the more complex conceptions of gender and subjectivity and third-wave feminism, feminist criticism has taken a variety of new routes. It has considered gender in the terms of existing relations of power, and as a concrete political investment. While it has been closely associated with the birth and growth of queer studies, the more traditionally central feminist concern with the representation and politics of women's lives remains.

Formalism/New Criticism: While these two schools are separate and distinct, they can also be looked at together as both privledge the text itself over what goes into the making or reading of the text. They sometimes refers to inquiry into the form (rather than the content) of works of literature, such as plot, genre concerns (such as with a captivity narrative) but usually refers broadly to approaches to interpreting or evaluating literary works that focus on features of the text itself (especially properties of its language) rather than on the contexts of its creation (biographical, historical or intellectual) or the contexts of its reception. Adherents were/are emphatic in their advocacy of close reading and attention to texts themselves, and their rejection of criticism based on extra-textual sources, especially biography.

Marxist criticism is a loose term describing literary criticism informed by the philosophy and/or the politics of Marxism. The simplest goals of Marxist literary criticism can include an assessment of the political "tendency" of a literary work, determining whether its social content or its literary form are "progressive"; however, this is by no means the only or the necessary goal. Marxist literary critics have also been concerned with applying lessons drawn from the realm of aesthetics to the realm of politics. Marxist criticism can be about identifying the class struggle within a text.

New Historicism is an approach to literary criticism and theory based on the premise that a literary work should be considered a product of the time, place and circumstances of its composition rather than as an isolated creation of genius. It had its roots in a reaction to the "New Criticism" of formal analysis of works of literature that were seen by a new generation of professional readers as taking place in a vacuum. New Historicists aim simultaneously to understand the work through its historical context and to understand cultural and intellectual history through literature, which documented the new discipline of the history of ideas. Michel Foucault based his approach both on his theory of the limits of collective cultural knowledge and on his technique of examining a broad array of documents in order to understand the episteme of a particular time. New Historicism is claimed to be a more neutral approach to historical events, and is sensitive towards different cultures.

Post-colonialism (also known as post-colonial theory) grapples with the legacy of colonial rule. As a literary theory or critical approach it deals with literature produced in countries that were once, or are now, colonies of other countries. It may also deal with literature written in or by citizens of colonizing countries that takes colonies or their peoples as its subject matter. Post-colonialism deals with many issues for societies that have undergone colonialism: the dilemmas of developing a national identity in the wake of colonial rule; the ways in which writers from colonized countries attempt to articulate and even celebrate their cultural identities and reclaim them from the colonizers; the ways knowledge of colonized people have served the interests of colonizers, and how knowledge of subordinate people is produced and used; and the ways in which the literature of the colonial powers is used to justify colonialism through the perpetuation of images of the colonized as inferior. The creation of binary oppositions structure the way we view others. Such opposition was used to justify a destiny to rule on behalf of the colonizer, or 'white man's burden'.

Psychoanalytic literary criticism is criticism which, in method, concept, theory or form, is influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud. The object of psychoanalytic literary criticism, at its very simplest, can be the psychoanalysis of the author or of a particularly interesting character. In this directly therapeutic form, it is very similar to psychoanalysis itself, closely following the analytic interpretive process discussed in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. The concepts of psychoanalysis can be deployed with reference to the narrative or poetic structure itself, without requiring access to the authorial psyche (an interpretation motivated by Lacan's remark that "the unconscious is structured like a language").

Reader-response criticism is a literary theory that arose in response to the textual emphasis of New Criticism from the 1940s to the 1960s in the West. New Criticism had emphasized that only that which is within a text is part of the meaning of a text. No appeal to the authority or intention of the author, nor to the psychology of the reader, was allowed for the most orthodox New Critics. Reader-response criticism is a group of approaches to understanding literature that have in common an emphasis on the reader's role in the creation of the meaning of a literary work. Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts "real existence" to the work by reading it and completes its meaning "by applying codes and strategies". It is concerned with the reader's contribution to a text. It stands in total opposition to the text-oriented theories of formalism and the New Criticism, in which the reader's role interpreting literary works are not taken into account. In general, one can group reader-response theorists into three groups: those who focus upon the reader's experience and psychology, those who concentrate on the linguistic and rhetorical dynamic of audience, and those who concentrate on readers as cultural and historical ciphers.

Structuralism is an approach to analysing narrative material by examining the underlying invariant structure. For example, a literary critic applying a structuralist literary theory might say that the authors of the West Side Story did not write anything "really" new, because their work has the same structure as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In both texts a girl and a boy fall in love (a "formula" with a symbolic operator between them would be "Boy +LOVE Girl") despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other ("Boy's Group -LOVE Girl's Group") and conflict is resolved by their death. The versatility of structuralism is such that a literary critic could make the same claim about a story of two friendly families ("Boy's Family +LOVE Girl's Family") that arrange a marriage between their children despite the fact that the children hate each other ("Boy -LOVE Girl") and then the children commit suicide to escape the arranged marriage; the justification is that the second story's structure is an 'inversion' of the first story's structure: the relationship between the values of love and the two pairs of parties involved have been reversed. Structuralistic literary criticism argues that the "novelty value of a literary text" can lie only in new structure, rather than in the specifics of character development and voice in which that structure is expressed.

Type any of the above terms into wikipedia.org and you'll see where I got my summaries, and then some.