Literary Criticism (EL 106) Report - The Adelphi College Inc.

The Adelphi College Inc. New Street East Lingayen, Pangasinan **LITERARY CRITICISM ( EL 106 )** **Part Nine: Additional Approaches** Reporters: **DELOS SANTOS, EDRIANE** **PIMENTEL, REZALYN** **LOMIBAO, GIRLIE** **LOMIBAO, LESLEY ANN** **PALMA, STEPHANIE** **DELA CRUZ, MENCHIE** **SINDAYE...

The Adelphi College Inc. New Street East Lingayen, Pangasinan **LITERARY CRITICISM ( EL 106 )** **Part Nine: Additional Approaches** Reporters: **DELOS SANTOS, EDRIANE** **PIMENTEL, REZALYN** **LOMIBAO, GIRLIE** **LOMIBAO, LESLEY ANN** **PALMA, STEPHANIE** **DELA CRUZ, MENCHIE** **SINDAYEN, GINELYN** **EVANGELISTA, FRAUKIE MAE** **VINLUAN, ANGEL** **MENDOZA, BRYAN** A. **GENRE CRITICISM** - Is a critical approach that analyzes and interprets texts by considering their relationship to specific genres and their conventions. - It examines how a work adheres to or deviates from typical genre expectations, and how these choices contribute to the overall meaning and effect of the work. - Some other traditional approaches, genre criticism has been given attention in this century, modifying what was accepted as genre criticism for some two thousand years. - Athenian citizens going to see a play by Sophocies knew in advance that the story would be acted out by a small group of actors, that they would be seeing and hearing a chorus as part of the production and that a certain kind of music would accompany the chorus. - When Virgil set out to write an epic for Augustan Rome, he chose to work within the genre that he knew already from Homer. - Genre criticism held sway through the eighteenth century, when it was even dominant. It was less vital as a form of criticism in the nineteenth century, although the conventional types, such as drama, lyric and romance, were still recognized and useful for terminology, as they still are. - Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. In his introduction Frye points to our debt to the Greeks for our terminology for and our distinctions among some genres, and he also notes that we have not gone much beyond what the Greeks gave us. - The purpose of criticism by genre is not so much to classify as to clarify such traditions and affinities. Thereby bringing out a large number of literary relationships that would not be noticed as long as there were context established for them. - All three of these works- those of Frye, Hirsch, and Scholes- although they are challenging and stimulating are sometimes difficult. - Part of the difficulty when they are dealing with genres derives from the fact that pieces of literature do not simply and neatly fall into categories, or genres, seemingly obvious as a narrative form partakes of the lyric and of the drama, the latter through its dialogue. B. **LINGUISTICS AND LITERATURE** - In the twentieth century linguistics, the study of language has become discipline in itself and in a university it is not unusual for the Department of literature or English. - Is the language of literature susceptible to the same kind of study that can be brought to bear, for example on language in its spoken form? - If it is so susceptible, then in what manner and in what areas can work of art be studied by a scientific or quasi-scientific discipline? - Surely this kind of study whether it derives from structural linguistics transformational-generative grammar, or some other modulation of modern linguistics. - Consequently, there is debate about linguistics as an approach to literature, and not the least of the difficulties in arguing it is the overlapping quality of what in this handbook we are separating, for the sake of convenience and clarification, into several different approaches to literature-the linguistic, the stylistic, the structuralism, and in some instances the rhetorical approaches. - There is no such thing as distinctive literary language, and if this true, it means that, though linguists may tell us a great about language, they tell us nothing about literature. - But although we might accept, at least partially, this cautionary view about the limitations of linguistics for literary analysis, there are the areas that we might investigate profitably from a linguistic perspective. - EUGENE V. MOHR, who cities these difficulties at the same time that demonstrates briefly but cogently some areas of successful overlap. - It easy to agree with Mohrs first point of view that a known about devices which were operative the earlier stages in the development of English, is helpful in literary interpretation Mohr cities the distinction between thou and you in an earlier day and how Shakespeare, among others could use the distinction - Second, he suggests that close analysis of the language criticism itself. - Another article that illustrates the qualified view of the literary critic who is willing to use linguistic techniques is by Stanley B. Greenfields. - Less helpful to the beginning of the students because of its bibliographical citations and annotations, in addition, it shows how linguistics and stylistics (Greenfield uses the term linguistics and stylistics and implicitly suggests how linguistic analysis shades into stylistics criticism). - From Mohr and Greenfield point of view of the usefulness of linguistics as an approach to literature we might move to more concerted efforts to bring the one of a kind of structural upon other. - The importance of structural linguistics in the development of structuralism as an approach to literature is increasingly and extensively recognized. - Whitehall\'s article we should note is part of the group of studies in that issue, intended \"English Verse and What It Sound Like\", which provide further evidence of what Linguistics critics try to do in Moderated\" by poet-critic John Crowe Ransom concludes that both the prosodists, and the linguist have something to tell each other. - Both the intensiveness and extensiveness of the linguistics approach to literature can be suggested by calling attention to essays on the Language of Literature. - In the preface the editors admonish their readers that causes of the rift, between the linguists and literary critics are less important than its repair. - The interrelationship between linguistics and stylistics as approaches to literature can be further illustrated by an older work, Leo Spitzer\'s Linguistics and literary History C. **STYLISTIC** - He has traditionally been a concernof rhetoric section, the rhetorical approach but recently style had such development in its own right that we will at it here not only as a division of the new rhetoric but also an approach in its own right as stylistics. - Stylistics, defined in a most rudimentary way, is not study of the words and grammar an author uses words and grammar as well as other elements both within the sentence and within the text as a whole. - Although the distinction between linguistics and stylistic as approaches to literature is difficulty make we offer the following parallel statements. - Linguistics is the study of the materials available to users of language the syntactic forms, the grammar- materials in other words, available to all users by virtue of the user\'s ability to recognize and to duplicate sentence patterns. - Stylistics is a study of the particular choices an author makes from the available materials, choices that are largely culture oriented and situation bound. - This distinction seems to be Roger Fowler\'s meaning when says: \"A text is structured in a certain way because it is a distinct use of certain distinctive materials given in advance; we need to make a fundamental division between the linguistic materials available and the use made of them. - Fowler recognizes the assistance offered the literary critic by the linguist, but calls for a sufficiently rich theory of linguistic performance. - Language, he asserts has a cultural dimensioned so that not merely \"grammatical competence\" but \"sociolinguistic competence\" is important to the mature member of the English of English speaking Community-and of course to the author reader therein. - The performance, consequently. Becomes the crucial element in the stylistic approach to a literary work. - A language is structured repository of concept, and every use of the language is particular ordering in a circumscribed cultural situation. - Because of its emphasis on choices and performance, stylistics concerns the full text rather than the sentence, although it way moves toward evaluation of texts this last point is debated. - According to Lodge, the stylistician looks at a linguistic element in the context of the language as a whole, whereas the critic takes as his context the text as a whole, more importantly, the stylistician is less concerned with questions. - Greenfield, whose annotations will be great help to anyone seeking to go further in these related approaches, expresses his concern being. D. **THE RHETORICAL APPROACH** - The Rhetorical criticism in the second half of this century, like several of other approaches treated in this chapter. - Rhetorical criticism is that mode of internal criticism which considers the interaction between the work, the author, and the audience. - As such, it is interested the product, the process, and the effect of linguistic activity, whether of the imaginative kind, or the utilitarian kind. - When the rhetorical criticism is applied imaginative literature, it regards the work not so much as an object of aesthetic contemplation but as an artistically structured instrument for communication. - While dealing with self, rhetorical criticism considers external factors insofar as it \"uses the text of its readings about the author and the audience.\" - As a matter of fact, literary criticism itself really had some of its beginnings in the rhetorical analysis, for our first critics Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, and Horace were devoted students indeed formulators of rhetoric. - As already indicated a rhetoric approach helps us to stay inside the work. although we may go outside it for terms and naming strategies, being always aware that the original author was person who chooses between available options. - In this methodology, the rhetorical analysis on one hand, but on the other hand, may go beyond it. E. **PHENOMENOLOGICAL CRITICISM** - Through much of Henry James's famous novel, the ambassadors, the reader's shares with the central intelligence, Lambert Strether, a particular set of notions and beliefs, only to find at a later time a long with strether that a considerable reorientation and reinterpretation of apparent facts is necessary. - Conversely, the text, which has been waiting for begins to come alive, for the text can live only when read. - In addition, the manner in which we live, learn and experience in real life, a subjective consciousness is in involved in that world, and seemingly objective data are important to as in so far as they merge into subjective consciousness is involved in that world, and seemingly objective data are important to us in so far as they merge into subjective consciousness. - In criticism of consciousness, some critics would pursue not only the text, but the whole range of texts of an author-his or her corpus- so that the critics consciousness tries to identify with the authors consciousness, a union of subject an approach not particularly. - Associated with this approach is the called Geneva school, which includes, for example Georges Poulet and, in this country. - Literature is a form of consciousness, and literary criticism is the analysis of this form in all its varieties, though literature is made of words, these word embody states of mind and make them available to others. - The comprehension of literature is a process of what Gabriel Marcel calls "Intersubjectivity", criticism demands above all that gift of participation, that power to put oneself within the life of another person, which Keats called negative capability. F. **SOCIETY STUDY AND RELATED APPROACHES** - The kind of approach or the set of related approaches, discussed in this section does not have a generally accepted name. - We might call the approach genetic, because that is the word sometimes used when a work considered in terms of its origin. - We would find the term appropriate in the studying the growth and development of the work, it genesis as from its sources, however the term seems affectively to have been preempted by critics for the method of criticism that as David Daiches says accounts for the characteristics of the writer\'s work, by looking at the sociological and psychological phenomena out of which the work grew. - More precisely, then by source study and related approaches we mean the growth and development of works has been through a study of the authors manuscript during the stages of composition of the work, of notebooks, of sources and analogues and of various other influences. G. **HERMENEUTICS** - Hermeneutics refers to the theory of interpretation, the term was originally used by nineteenth century German theologians to designate a new kind of interpretation both as the formulation of rules regarding how meaning is established in reading and as exegesis or commentary on meanings expressed in text. - Those theologians strove to maintain some sense meaning or truth in the bible without necessarily always admitting literary H. **DIALOGICS** - Dialogics is the key term used to describe the narrative theory of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975) and is specifically identified with his approach to questions of language in the novel. - Dialogics refers to the inherent addressivity of all language; that is all is addressed, never uttered without consciousness of a relationship between the speaker and the addressee. - In this humanistic approach, Bakhtin departed from linguistically based theories of literature and from other Russian formalist. He also felt suspicious of what was to become the psychological approach to literature, for he was such an approach as the materialization of a human soul and an attendant sacrifice of human freedom. - The writings of Bakhtin go back to the 1920s and 1930sm his thought emphasizes language as an area of social conflict, particularly of the ways the discourse of characters in a literary work may disrupt and subvert the authority of ideology as expressed in a single voice of a narrator. He contrasts the monologic novels of writer such as Leo Tolstoy with the dialogic works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. - Instead of subordinating the voices of all characters to an overriding authorial voice. A writer such as Dostoyevsky creates a polyphonic discourse in which the author\'s voice is only one among many, and the characters are allowed free speech. - Bakhtin\'s constant focus is thus on the many voices in a novel, especially the way that some authors in particular such as Dostoyevsky, allow characters\' voices free play by actually placing them on the same plane as the voice of the author. - As many of his works have been translated, Bakhtin has become very important to critics of many literatures and has been found to be especially appropriate to the many-voiced open-ended American novel. - Biographical introduction to Bakhtin\'s The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, Micheal Holquist tells that Bakhtin was born into an old famility of nobility in prerevolutionary Russia. After finishing his education, he join historical and philological faculty of university in Odessa in 1913 but soon transferred to Saint Petersburg University. - In 1918, he moves to a western city, Nevel, where he taught school for two years and first met with other intellectuals in shat to be known as Bakhtin\'s circle, discussing philosophical, religious, and political sube - In 1920 he moved again to deska refuge for avant-grade artists and thinkers with lively journals, lectures, and discussion groups. - In 1930 Bakhtin return to Saransk as chairman of the literature department where he remained until his retirement in 1961 and lived in Moscow in ill health until his death in 1975. - Bakhtins best known idea is dialogicity, which moves past genre to describe language. In his last years, he finally received some of the fulfillment he had long deserve. His other works began to be published and translated around the world. He is now known as one of the greatest theorists of the novel who ever lived. - Bakhtins major principles of the novel include the freedom of the hero, special placement of the idea in the polyphonic design, and the principles linkage that shape the novel into a whole including multiple choices, ambiguity, multiple genres, stylization, parody, the use of negatives, and the function of the double address of the world both to another word and to another speaker of words. - He brilliantly describes how the novelist may voice a moral concern through narrative technique, particularly the power of knowledge to enact a design on that which is known. - Marxism places literature within a wide context of social, political, economic and historical forces and for a method it explicitly or implicitly offers dialectic, the constant opposition as the inevitable course of the class struggle. - But the systematic doctrines that spawned socialism and communism came from the writings of Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), especially their Communist Manifesto (1848) and Marx's Kapital (1867). - To Marx and Engels, the scientific scrutiny of history inevitably must reveal an undeviating evolutionary, dialectic process, the inevitable fusion of history thus becomes the succession of class struggle. - For some persons, Marxism was an attempt to help the poor and the weak, the laborers who abored for others. From the Marxist perspective any society can be understood only in terms of its base. The conditions of producing goods in making them available to satisfy the groups requirements for food, clothing and shelter. - Varieties of the base have been nomadic, agrarian, and industrial societies, each generating its typical ways to produce and distribute the material essentials of life. - The Marxist critics would note a society creates its own culture, the prevailing ideology, politics, myths, religion, morality, art, education, and literature, called the superstructure. - During the 1930s, a number of writers expressed special vest in social reform, and there was considerable stress of the uses of literature in the proletarian revolt and on seeing literature as a projection of the movement of social history. - From a different perspective of this renewed interest in Marxist criticism is the opinion of many that the formalist approach, especially as practiced by the New Critics, has been inadequate in treating the literary work. - Gregory Lucas associates with one particular direction of postwar Marxist critics, the reflection theory. Lukas and his followers stress literatures reflection, conscious or unconscious of the social reality surrounding it, not just a reflection of a flood of realistic detail but a reflection of the wholeness or essence of a society. - The Marxist critics will wish to go beyond mere concern with literatures inevitable disclosure of tensions and contradictions within a society. I. **THE NEW HISTORICISM** - The new historicism is concerned with reading, writing, and teaching as actions rather than as descriptions of actions; it has allied itself in varying degrees to such activist approaches as Marxism and feminism since its inception. - New historicists have consciously resisted identifying their approaches with a single methodology, for they believe that as history and culture must be described as constantly changing constructions made by variously interested men and women. - On the one hand new historicists describe how texis and other agencies contest or subvert a dominant culture. J. **READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM** - Reader response theory, one of the important recent developments in literary analysis arose in large measures as a reaction against the New Criticism, which dominated this field for roughly a half-century. - Its meaning emerges when readers scrutinize it and it alone, without regard to any of the aforementioned considerations. - The aim of formalist criticism is to show how the work achieves its meaning. - Formalism sees literature as a unique and peculiar kind of knowledge which presents humans with the deepest truths related to them, truths that science is unable to disclose. - Reader- response critics feel that readers have been ignored in discussions of the reading process instead of being the central concern as they should have been. A text does not even exist, in a sense, until it is read by some reader. If a text does not have a reader, it does not exist-or at least, it had no meaning. - It is readers with whatever experience they bring to the text, who give its meaning. - In literary interpretation, the text is not the most important component: the reader is. In fact, there is no text unless there is a reader. - The reader creates the text much as the author does. - Critics should reject the autonomy of the text and concentrate on the reader and the reading process, the interrelation that takes place between the reader and the text. - Reader-response theory is that it based on rhetoric, the art persuasion. It now refers to the myriad devices or strategies used to get the reader to respond to the literary work in certain ways. - Using a different terminology. Prince adopts a perspective similar to Gibson\'s wondering why critics have paid such close attention to narrators (omniscient, first person, unreliable, etc.) and have virtually ignored readers. - Prince too posits a reader, whom he calls the narrate, one of a number to hypothetical readers to whom the story is directed. - These readers actually produced by the narrative include the real reader, with book in hand; the virtual reader, for whom the author thinks he is writing; and the ideal reader of perfect understanding and sympathy; yet none of these is necessarily the narrate. - The critics mentioned so far-except Prince-are the pioneers, or perhaps more accurately, the advance guard of the reader-response movement. - Phenomenology stresses the perceiver\'s (in this case, the reader\'s) role in any perception (in this case, reading experience) and asserts the difficulty. - According to Iser, the critic should not explain the text as an object but its effect on the reader. - Readers experiences will govern the effects the text produces on them. Iser\'s stance, then, is phenomenological: at the center of interpretation lies the readers experience. - Another kind of reader-oriented criticism, also rhetorically grounded, is reception theory, which documents reader responses to authors and/or their works in any given period. - A text may be an object in that it is paper (or other matter) and print, but it\'s meaning depends on the symbolization in the minds of readers. Meaning is not found; it is developed. - Sanely Fish, who calls his technique of interpretation affective stylistics. - Fish rebels against so-called rigidity and dogmalism of the New critics and especially against the tenet that a poem is a single, static object, a whole that has to be understood in its entirety at once. - Fish\'s pronouncements on reader-response theory have come in stages. In an early stage, he argued that meaning in a literary work is not something to be extracted, as a dentist might pull a tooth; meaning must be negotiated by readers. a line at a time. - Fish later modified the method described above by attributing more initiative to the reader and less control by the text in the interpretive act. - Fish\'s altered position holds that readers actually create a piece of literature as they read it. - Fish concludes that every reading results in a new interpretation that comes about because of the strategies that reader use. - Two distinguishing features characterize response criticism. One is the effect of the literary in the reader, hence the moral-philosophical-psychological-rhetorical emphases in reader-response analysis. Does the work affect the reader, and what strategies have come into play in the production of those effect. The second feature is the relegation of the text to importance. - Readers bring their own cultural heritage along with them in their responses to literary texts, a fact which allows for the principle that texts speak to other texts only through the intervention of particular readers.