"The 20th Century saw a remarkable expansion of critical theory and
its evolution. The earlier Marxist Theory created a paradigm for
understanding the individual, society and their interaction. The
Renaissance Enlightened Man had persisted up until the Industrial
Revolution when the romantic vision of noble action began to fade.
Humanism, which enshrined the nobility of man, lost validity
particularly after the Great War and the Nazi Holocaust.

Modernism, exemplified in the literary works of Virginia Woolf and
James Joyce, wrote out God, then antihumanists such as Louis Althusser
and Michel Foucault and structuralists such as Roland Barthes presided
over the death of the author and man himself. As critical theory
developed in the later 20th century, post-structuralism queried the
very existence of reality. Jacques Derrida placed reality in the
linguistic realm stating ‘There is nothing outside the text’, while
Jean Baudrillard theorised that signs and symbols or simulacra had
usurped reality, particularly in the consumer world. This concept is
explored in the postmodernist film Blade Runner.