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CRITICISM
A. What is criticism? Criticism is the overall term for studies concerned with defining, classifying, analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating works of literature (Abrams 39 – 41). Theoretical criticism proposes a theory of literature, in the sense of general principles, together with a set of terms, distinctions, an categories, to be applied to identifying and analyzing works of literature, as well as the criteria (the standards or norms) by which these works and their writers are to be evaluated. The earliest great work of theoretical criticism was Aristotle’s Poetics (fourth century B.C). Especially influential works of theoretical criticism in the first half of the present century are I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924); Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941, rev. 1957(; Eric Auer Bach, Mimesis (1946); R. S. Crane, ed., Critics and Criticism (1952); and North Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Since the 1970s there has been a flood of writings, Continental, America, and English, proposing diverse novel and radical forms of critical theory. These are discussed in the section of the Glossary titled “Modern Theories of Literature and Criticism,” beginning on p. 223; see especially post structuralism in that section, for a description of the special sense of the term “theory” in current usage. Practical criticism, or applied criticism, concerns itself with the discussion of particular works and writers; in an applied critique, the theoretical principles controlling he mode of the analysis, interpretation, and evaluation are often left implicit, or brought in only as the occasion demands, among the more influential works of applied criticism in England are the literary essays of Dryden in the Restoration, Dr. Johnson’s Liver of the English Poets (1977 – 81), Coleridge’s chapters on the poetry of Wordsworth in Biographia Literaria (1817) and his lectures on Shakespeare, Matthew Arnold’s Essay in Criticism (1865 and following), I. A. Richards’ Practical Criticism (1930), T. S. Eliot’s Selected Essay (1932), and the many critical essays by Virginia Woolf, R. R. Leavis, and Lionel Trilling. Cleanth Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn (1947) is an instance of the “close reading” of single text which was the typical mode of practical criticism in the American New Criticism. Practical criticism is sometimes distinguished into impressionistic and judicial criticism: Impressionistic criticism attempts to represent in words the felt qualities of a particular passage or work, and to express the responses (the “impression”) that the work directly evokes
from the critic. As William Hazlitt put in his essay “On Genius and Common Sense” (1824): “You decided from feeling, and not from reason; that is from impression of a number of things on the mind…….though you may not able to analyze or account for it in the several particulars.” And Walter Pater later said that in criticism “The first step toward seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realize it distinctly,” and posed as the basic question, “What is this song or picture……….to me ?” (Preface to Studies in the History of the Renaissance 1873). At its extreme this mode of criticism becomes, in Anatole France’s phrase, “the adventures of a sensitive soul among masterpieces.” Judicial criticism, on the other hand, attempts not merely to communicate, but to analyze and explain the effects of a work buy reference to its subject, organization, techniques, and style, and to base the critic’s individual judgments on general standards of literary excellence. Rarely are these two modes of criticism sharply distinct in practice but good examples of primarily impressionistic commentary can be found in the Greek Longinus (see the characterization of the Odyssey in his essay On the Sublime), Hazlitt, Walter Pater (the locus classicus of impressionism is his description of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa in The Renaissance, 1873), and some of the twentieth century critical essays of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. Types of traditional critical theories and applied criticism can be usefully classified according to whether, in explaining and judging a work of literature, they refer the work primarily to the outer world, or to the reader, or to the author, or else treat the works as an entity in itself: 1) Mimetic criticism Views the literary works as an imitation, of reflection, or representation of the world and human life, and the primary criterion applied to a work is that of the “truth” of its representation to the subject matter that it represents, or should represent. This mode of criticism, which first appeared in Plato and (in a qualified way) in Aristotle, remains characteristic of modern theories of literary realism. (See imitation). 2) Pragmatic criticism Views the work as something which is constructed in order to achieve certain effects on the audience (effects such as esthetic pleasure, instruction, or kinds of emotion) and it tends t judge the value of the work according to its success in achieving that aim. This approach, which largely dominated literary discussion from the versified Art of Poetry by the Roman Horace (first
“Textual Scholarship,” in Joseph Gibaldi, ed., Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Language and Literature (1981); and Jerome McGann, A Critque of Modern Textual Criticism (1983). It is also common to distinguish types of criticism which bring to bear upon literature various special areas of knowledge and theory, in the attempt to identify the conditions and influences which determine the particular characteristics of literary work. Accordingly, we have “historical criticism,” “biographical criticism,” “sociological criticism” (see sociology of literature and Marxist criticism ), psychological criticism (a subspecies is psychoanalytic criticism ), and archetypal or myth criticism (which undertakes to explain the formation of types of literature by reference to the theories of myth and ritual in modern cultural anthropology.
SOCIAL CRITICISM You may want to investigate and use three other, much more specialize approaches to examining literature: social criticism, psychological criticism, and archetypal criticism. Social criticism is similar to historical criticism in recognizing literature as a reflection of its environment (Kelley, 116). It would focus, for example, on the ways in which Jane Austen’s novel depicts the emphasis on decorum and etiquette by the English country gentry around the turn of the nineteenth century. But in recent times, social criticism has described a particular economic and social theory. Social critics were most active in the 1930s during the Great Depression. They applauded literature that depicted the struggles of the poor and downtrodden, especially when they engaged in strikes against oppressive capitalist bosses. Examples of literature with such strong “proletarian” elements are the works of Carl Sanndburg, Emile Zola, Maxim Gorky, Nikolai Gogol, Frank Norris, Charles Dickens, Richard Wright, John Steinbeck, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and James T. Farrel. The social critics usually approved of a socialist solution to the problems of the oppressed, and they sometimes judged the quality of works solely on the basis of their Marxist orientation. Partly because of this narrowness of focus and rigidity of standards, the social approach has lost some of its appeal since the 1930s. It showed, however, that many works do reflect society in great detail that they sometimes attempt to reform society, and that understanding them means in part grappling with the social issues they reflect. A well-known and thoroughgoing work of social criticism is Granvile Hicks’s The Great Tradition: an Interpretation of American Literature since the Civil War (New York: Macmillan, 1953)
If the social approach seems relevant to the work you want to write about, you should first define the social situation the work describes and identify the author’s attitude toward it. Does the author, for example, seem to have solutions in mind? Does he or she feel that society has to be the way he or she describes it? If you suspect that the author depicts a historical situation and you want to compare his or her treatment with the actual events, then you will need to seek out reliable secondary sources. (Primary and secondary sources are discussed in chapter
- And if you want to argue that particular economic or social theories help to explain the author’s social concerns in a work, you will need reliable explanations of those theories.
PSYCHOLOGICAL CRITICISM A second highly specialized approach is psychological criticism , which attempts to apply modern psychological theories to authors and their works (Kelley, 117). Because of the predominance of Freudian psychology in the twentieth century, psychological criticism usually relies upon the theories of Sigmund Freud. Freud’s ideas are complex and multiple; not all of them relate to literature. But literary critics find three of them very attractive: the dominance of the unconscious mind over the conscious, the expression of the unconscious mind through symbols (most notably in dreams), and the primacy of sexuality as a motivating force in human behavior. These three ideas are related. Freud believed that sexual drives reside in the unconscious, that the conscious mind represses them, and that unconscious symbols usually represent this repressed sexual energy. Freudian critics see literature as a kind of “dream” and thus a source of insight into the authors themselves. This area of psychological criticism is biographical rather than literary criticism. But psychological critics also look on characters as having motivations, conflicts, desires, and inclinations similar to those of real people. And these critics look for psychological clues to the makeup of literary characters, especially the unconscious symbolic expressions fond in dreams and repeated patterns of behavior and speech. In Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, for example, whenever Mary Tyrone raises her hands to her hair, she unconsciously expresses anxiety about her wrecked youth, health, and innocence. May authors purposely incorporate psychological theories in their works? Eugence O’Neil, D. H. Lawrenfce, Sherwood Anderson, and Tennessee Williams, for example, were familiar with Freudian psychology. Some writers employ structural devices drawn from psychological theories.
The basic premise of reader-based or reader-response critical theory is that literature does not exist separate from those who read it. The critical approach reflected in this book is reader-based. Readers are encouraged to respond personally to fiction, to think about the ways their backgrounds influence their response, and to support their responses with references to the story itself. Throughout this book, readers have been encouraged to supplement this reader-based approach with other perspectives. Discussion of the elements of fiction and close reading and textual analysis in Chapter 3 and 4 rely on text-, context-, and author-based approaches. A reader-response approach to “Eveline” might emphasize the reader’s identification with the protagonist in the story. The students’ writer of the essay in the Case Study in Research (p.338), for example, compares his situation with Eveline’s. He cites passages that remind him of his own situation and draws support from both his own life and the text of the story to illustrate similarities and differences. An example of a reader-response approach to “Everything that Rises Must Converge” might include identification with or personal reactions to Julian, his mother, or the woman and her son on the bus. Readers might pass judgments on Julian or his mother or imagine how they would have behaved in Julian’s situation. They might address which character is most like them; identify characters that remind them of people they know, and comment on how these personal connections affect their responses.
2. Context – Based Criticism 1. Formalism Formalism seeks to objectify the text – to examine it in isolation from its reader, its context, and its author. New Criticism , the most popular type of formalism, is not new. It was given its name more than half a century ago as a reaction to the older biographical and historical approaches that preceded it. Though its popularity has now declined, it was the most dominant form of literary criticism in the twentieth century. As the designation “formalism” suggests, this approach closely examines elements of form / structure and language such as genre, plot, characterization, narration, tone, irony, diction, imagery, metaphor, and symbol. A formalistic critic constructs meaning by focusing exclusively on the elements of the text and on the way they work together to form a unified, coherent whole.
Because the background, values, and feelings of the reader and the author cannot be objectively evaluated, formalism sees them as irrelevant or erroneous in the construction of a stable meaning. It classifies reliance on a reader’s emotional responses as an affective fallacy and reliance on knowledge of an author’s life or intentions as an intentional fallacy. A formalist response to “Eveline,” for example, would stick closely to the text of the story. It might try to establish the meaning of the story through analysis of the language, images, symbols, narrator’s tone, and how they work together to build and to support Eveline’s decision at the end of the story. A similar approach to the O’Connor story might consider how well the plot structure sets up the terrible climax of the story. It might examine the elements of the plot and details of characterization and the way these parts form an organic unity – how the structure of the story naturally culminates in the final desperate moment.
2. Deconstrution Like formalism, deconstruction focuses exclusively on the text and requires close reading. Unlike formalism, however, which examines parts and relationships to construct a whole, the intention of deconstruction, as its name suggests, is to break down the whole – to deconstruct its meaning. While formalism emphasizes structure and the stability of interpreting the text in isolation, deconstruction insists on the instability and transitory nature of the text. An early proponent of deconstruction was Jacques Derrida, who explained in through the French word difference, which means both “to differ” and “to defer.” First, this view asserts that nothing can be known in isolation. We can know the meaning of something only by how it differs from something else to which it is related. All knowledge is base on difference, and all language is rational. We can know “dark” only in relation to “light,” “up” to “down,” good” to “evil.” Second, any stable or definitive meaning or interpretation must be deferred or put off perpetually because meaning, like the world, is always changing. What authors intend is different from what they write or what readers read. No text has a definitive meaning. So we can not say that one interpretation is right and another is wrong. Rather than attempting to construct an interpretation of its own, a deconstructionists approach to either “Eveline” or “Everything That Rises Must Converge” might try to reveal any number of alternative meanings for the stories. It might question the credibility of the narrators in
women, assumptions about women generated by male writers, the recurring pattern in literature of male dominance, female passivity, and sexism in literature as it reflects the societies that fostered it. A feminist response to “Eveline” might consider the nature of a father – daughter relationship that has required Eveline to gibe up her life to take care of her father. It might conjecture that if Eveline were male, she would not be pressured to be responsible for her father and would be given the freedom to build her own life independent of the men who demand her attention. A similar approach to “Everything That Rises Must Converge” might emphasize the mother’s reliance on Julian and how her narrow – mindedness results from training by a system that makes women value themselves only as social adornments not thinkers, questioners, or leaders.
5. Political – Economic Criticism Political – economic criticism focuses on the influence and the consequences of the economic social order in literature. Its most popular form is Marxist Criticism , which argues that literature reflects the class structure and class struggle that produced it. It emphasizes the social content of literature and scrutinizes the economic circumstances of literature for instances of exploitation. It also analyzes the ways in which text, author, and readers reveal class attitudes. A Marxist view of “Eveline” might emphasize the poor economic situation of Eveline and her father – how their economic plight and its consequence – and his demands and her unending labor to make ends meet – have crated circumstances that make it impossible for them to have a reasonable relationship and family life. A similar view of “Everything That Rises Must Converge” might expose the haughtiness of the mother as typical of the class she comes from – and how her condescending treatment of the mother and child on the bus illustrates this class separation. 6. Psychoanalytic Criticism Derived from the psychological theory of Sigmund Freud, psychoanalytic criticism emphasizes the underlying meaning in the narrative, actions, and dialogue of literature. Sexual
symbols, dreams, and repressed feelings are central to a psychological analysis of the characters. The creative process and psychological make up of the author may also be of special interest. A psychoanalytic view of “Eveline” for example, might focus on the repressed feelings of the protagonist sand the mixed emotions she feels about her father and about herself as a replacement for the dead mother. It might also focus on Frank and what Eveline both loves and fears in what he represents. Given the love / hate relationship between Julian and his mother I “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” a psychoanalytic critic might be over whelmed with material for exploration. What does Julian’s mother represent to him? Despite his objections to what she says and does, he continues to rely on her. What is he repressing in this relationship? Why is he so horrified at the end of the story? What has he lost?
7. Archetypal Criticism Derived from the theories of psychologist Carl Jung, this approach assumes that we share a “collective unconscious” that has been shaped by the repeated experiences of our ancestors. It asserts that through this collective unconscious, we indirectly share knowledge of archetypes: universal images, patterns, and forms like the seasons, the sun, the moon, the wise old man or woman, fire, night, and blood. Of special inters to an archetypal critic are images, descriptive detail, plot patterns, and types of characters that appear frequently in literature and that seem to evoke non-rational but powerful responses from our unconscious memory. An archetypal, for example, might approach “Eveline” by identifying some of the more powerful images and symbols in the story. Both the protagonist’s and the reader’s responses to the religious artifacts as archetypal images might prompt some rich exploration. A similar view of “Everything That Rises Must Converge” might explore the images, symbols, and symbolic actions that seem to drive both mother and son throughout the story. 3. Author – Based Criticism Author-based, or biographical , criticism emphasizes the relationship between authors’ lives and their works. Finding out about an author’s life, of course, requires reading a biography or autobiography of the author. An effective literary biography brings the author’s work and life
