LITERARY CRITICISM.docx

One useful way to think about the different approaches or schools of literary criticism is to regard them as different methodologies. An earlier chapter in this textbook (Section 1.3: Fields of Inquiry) talked about the different methodologies employed by different academic disciplines. We defined a...

One useful way to think about the different approaches or schools of literary criticism is to regard them as different methodologies. An earlier chapter in this textbook (Section 1.3: Fields of Inquiry) talked about the different methodologies employed by different academic disciplines. We defined a methodology there as a "a system of methods that an academic discipline uses to carry out its research and pursue the answers to its questions, combined with an overarching philosophical attitude and interpretive framework for applying those methods." That's a good guide to understanding the nature of the different literary critical theories/methodologies. There's a whole host of different interpretive methodologies for approaching works of literature. You'll learn more about these in the next section. Collectively, these individual methodologies or theories add up, more or less, to the larger realm of literary theory as a whole. **Schools of Literary Criticism** To put meat on these bones, here are brief descriptions of some of the most prominent schools of literary criticism. (Bear in mind that this is hardly a comprehensive list!) When you research the available scholarly writings on a given work of literature, you may come across essays and articles that use one or more of these approaches. We've grouped them into four categories---author-focused, text-focused, reader-focused, and context-focused---each with its own central approach and central question about literary works and effective ways to understand them. **Author-Focused: How can we understand literary works by understanding their authors?** **Biographical** criticism focuses on the author's life. It tries to gain a better understanding of the literary work by understanding the person who wrote it. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following: - - - **Psychological** criticism applies psychological theories, especially Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian archetypal depth psychology, to works of literature to explore the psychological issues embedded in them. It may analyze a story's characters or plot, a poet's use of language and imagery, the author's motivations for writing, or any other aspect of a literary work from a psychological perspective. It can be classified as an author-focused approach because its emphasis is on reading the work as an expression of the author's unconscious processes, such that one can analyze and interpret the work in the same way a psychoanalyst would do with a patient's dream. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following: - - - - **Text-Focused: How can we understand literary works in terms of themselves?** **Formalism**, along with one of its more conspicuous modern iterations, **New Criticism**, focuses on a literary text itself, aside from questions about its author or the historical and cultural contexts of its creation. Formalism takes a story, poem, or play "on its own terms," so to speak, viewing it as a self-contained unit of meaning. The formalist critic therefore tries to understand that meaning by paying attention to the specific form of the text. New Criticism was a particular kind of Formalism that arose in the mid-twentieth century and enjoyed great influence for a time. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following: - - - - **Reader-Focused: How can we understand literary works by understanding the subjective experience of reading them?** **Reader-response **criticism emphasizes the reader as much as the text. It seeks to understand how a given reader comes together with a given literary work to produce a unique reading. This school of criticism rests on the assumption that literary works don't contain or embody a stable, fixed meaning but can have many meanings---in fact, as many meanings as there are readers, since each reader will engage with the text differently. In the words of literature scholar Lois Tyson, "reader-response theorists share two beliefs: (1) that the role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature and (2) that readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by an objective literary text; rather they actively make the meaning they find in literature." Typical questions involved in this approach include the following: - - - **Context-Focused: How can we understand literary works by understanding the contextual circumstances---historical, societal, cultural, political, economic---out of which they emerged?** **Historical** criticism focuses on the historical and social circumstances that surrounded the writing of a text. It may examine biographical facts about the author's life (which can therefore connect this approach with biographical criticism) as well as the influence of social, political, national, and international events. It may also consider the influence of other literary works. New Historicism, a particular type of historical criticism, focuses not so much on the role of historical facts and events as on the ways these things are remembered and interpreted, and the way this interpreted historical memory contributes to the interpretation of literature. Typical questions involved in historical criticism include the following: - - - - **Feminist** criticism focuses on prevailing societal beliefs about women in an attempt to expose the oppression of women on various levels by patriarchal systems both contemporary and historical. It also explores the marginalization of women in the realm of literature itself. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following: - - - **Post-colonial** criticism focuses on the impact of European colonial powers on literature. It seeks to understand how European hegemonic political, economic, religious, and other types of power have shaped the portrayals of the relationship and status differentials between Europeans and colonized peoples in literature written both by the colonizers and the colonized. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following: - - - - **Critical race theory** focuses on systemic racism and interrogates the dynamics of race and race relationships. In origin, it is a specifically American school of critical theory that sees White racism as an everyday fact of life in America, visible throughout all aspects of culture and society. As such, it encompasses all aspects of life, including literature. Its purpose is to expose and overturn the factors that enable systemic racism to exist. As a literary critical approach, its typical questions include the following: - - -