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PRACTICAL CRITICISM APPLIED TO ENGLISH
LITERATURE.
FORMALIST APPROCHES (NEW CRITICISM).
- Definition.
- How analyse a work.
- Literariness, PRIEM, form and content.
- New Criticism.
Formalists see the literary work as an object in its own right. So, they tend to devote their attention to its own nature. They study the form of the work. Formalists seek to be objective in their analysis, focusing on the work itself and avoiding external considerations.
Formalists analyse a text focusing on its form, texture, image, symbol, fallacies, point of view, the speaker’s voice, tension, irony and paradoxes.
"Literariness" is an important concept. The idea is to have in mind the materiality of the work itself. Another concept is PRIEM, that is, a work is sum of procedures that integrate the work. Besides, they don’t separate the form and the content.
The New Criticism, an American approach to literature, is a type of formalism. But, their interest in historical material wasn’t formalist.
- Hamlet.
- Paradox.
- Parallels.
- Speculation.
Hamlet’s obsession with the paradox, at the beginning of the play, focuses his attention on Denmark as the model of nature and human frailty. Thus a pattern of increasing parallels between Denmark and the cosmos and between man and nature develops. Question and answer, dialogue and soliloquy, become a verbal unity of repeated words
and phrases, looking forward to larger thematic assertion. The play continues a vast poem in which speculation about nature, human nature, the health of the state, and human destiny intensifies into a passionate dialectic. Mystery, enigma and metaphysical question complicate the dialogue.
- To his coy mistress.
- Themes that it include.
- Words.
- Space.
- Time, carpe diem.
- Sexual motif.
- Conclusion: metaphors and images.
This poem is a proposition made by the stereotypical male to the stereotypical female. The motif of space and time shows this poem to be a philosophical consideration of time, of eternity, of pleasure (hedonism) and of salvation in an afterlife (traditional Christianity). In this way the poet includes in one short poem the range between lust and philosophy.
We find that the words used to imply this range tend to be suggestive, to change their meanings in order to readers read the poem on different levels at the same time. As for the space motif, it appears not only in obvious but also in cover allusions. The space motif climaxes in an image that incorporates the time motif. The time motif also appears in its own right, and not only by means of imagery. In the poem there is a carpe diem theme what gives the poem unusual power. Besides, there is another motif that is present, the sexual motif. This motif gradually emerges. The very concreteness provides an answer to the philosophical speculation about space, time and eternity. Obviously different, the motifs fuse to embody the theme of the poem.
In sum, a formalist reading of this poem can originate in a study of images and metaphors.
STRUCTURALIST AND SEMIOTIC LITERARY CRITICISM.
There is another possibility of this scheme, and is the following, which is center on Laertes as a Subject.
Subject: Laertes; Object: murder of Hamlet; opponent: Hamlet; helper: Claudio.
POSTSTRUCTURALISM, DECONSTRUCTION OR POSTMODERN CRITICISM.
- Definition.
- Saussure: sign.
- Roland Barthes.
- Deconstruction: definition.
- Jacques Derrida: binary oppositions.
The poststructuralism tries to deflate the scientific pretensions of structuralism. It thought has discovered the essentially unstable nature of the signification. The sign is not so much a unit with two sides as a momentary fix between two moving layers. Saussure had recognized that signifier and signified are two separate systems, but he didn’t see how unstable units of meaning can be when the systems come together. Having established language as a total system independent of physical reality, he tried to retrain a sense of the sign’s coherence.
Roland Barthes defines literature as a message of the signification of things and not their meaning. He stresses the process of signification.
Deconstruction
Deconstruction involves the close reading of texts in order to demonstrate that any given text has irreconcilably contradictory meanings, rather than being a unified, logical whole.
Deconstruction was both created and has been profoundly influenced by the French philosopher on language Jacques Derrida. Derrida, who coined the term deconstruction, argues that in Western culture, people tend to think and express their thoughts in terms of binary oppositions. Derrida suggests these oppositions are
hierarchies in miniature, containing one term that Western culture views as positive or superior and another considered negative or inferior. Through deconstruction, Derrida aims to delete the boundary between binary oppositions.
- Hamlet.
- Coherence.
- Carnival.
This approach is most clearly in stage productions. There, you could think of it as simply a mixture of styles. The label deconstruction is applied to productions which self- consciously show little regard for consistency in character, or for coherence in telling the story. Characters are dressed in costumes from very different historical periods, and carry both modern and ancient weapons. Deconstruction often revels in the cleverness of its own use of language and accepts all kinds of anomalies and contradictions in a spirit of playfulness or “carnival”. It abandons any notion of the organic unity of the play, and rejects the assumption that Hamlet possesses clear patterns or themes.
PSYCHOLOGICAL.
- Definition (introduction).
- Premises.
- Psychic zones.
During the 20 th^ century, psychological criticism has been associated with a particular school of thought, the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and his followers.
Freud
He discriminates between the levels of conscious and unconscious mental activity. He further emphasizes the importance of the unconscious by pointing out that even the most conscious processes are conscious for only a short period; this is the first major premise in Freud. The second is that all human behaviour is motivated ultimately by what we would call sexuality. His third major premise is that because of the powerful social taboos attached to certain sexual impulses, many of our desires and memories are repressed. Besides, another important concept is Freud’s assignment of the mental processes to three psychic zones: the id (it is the primary source of all psychic energy),
about society in the process of change. In these changed times Hamlet finds himself and powerless, unable to rely on older certainties.
The most notable early challenge to traditional criticism was made by the Polish critic Jan Kott. Kott saws parallels between the violence and cruelty of the modern world and the worlds of tyranny and despair that Shakespeare depicted in his tragedies. He argues that history, rather than fate or the gods, is the cause of tragedy. He is acknowledged by the director Michael Almereyda as the inspiration for his film of Hamlet set in the business corporation climate of contemporary New York.
For political critics, Denmark is very much a prison. It is a closed and secretive world where characters conceal their motives and purposes.
MORAL, PHILOSOPHICAL AND RELIGIOUS.
- Marxism versus religious and philosophical ideas.
- (^) Knowledge to be able to interpret works.
The opposite to the Marxist historicism that condemns religion, is the contextual study that tries to establish what the religious and philosophical ideas, beliefs and experiences were for the writers. Different approaches to Christianity and knowledge of classical philosophy are important in interpreting works.
An examination of what this poem propounds morally and philosophically reveals the common theme of carpe diem. This type of poetry exhibits fundamental moral attitudes towards the main issue this poem treats, sex. These attitudes reflect an essentially pagan view.
Readers may see how the poem might be interpreted as the impassioned utterance of a man who has lost anything resembling a religious or philosophical view of life.
An important fact in Hamlet is the idea of religion. In one of his intentions to avenge he does not kill Claudius because he was praying. And, in addition he knows that if he kills his uncle, he is infringing the law. So, in this play the religious moral has an important place.
MARXIST.
- Definition.
- Marx.
- Bakhtin.
- Lúkacs.
- Louis Althusser.
Marxist criticism is a type of criticism in which literary works are viewed as the product of work and whose practitioners emphasize the role of class and ideology as they reflect, propagate, and even challenge the prevailing social order. Rather than viewing texts as repositories for hidden meanings, Marxist critics view texts as material products to be understood in broadly historical terms. In short, literary works are viewed as a product of work.
Marx comments that philosophers interpret the world but that this fact has to change it. Besides, marxists give more importance to the social aspects of the society rather than the individual aspects.
Bakhtin, a Soviet critic, viewed literary texts in terms of discourses and dialogues. A novel written in a society in flux, for instance, might include an official, legitimate discourse. Lukács appreciated pre revolutionary realistic novels that broadly reflected cultural "totalities" and were populated with characters representing human "types" of the author's place and time.
French Marxist Louis Althusser drew on the ideas of psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan and the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who discussed the relationship between ideology and hegemony, the pervasive system of assumptions and values that shapes the perception of reality for people in a given culture.
- Hamlet.
- (^) Soviets.
- Raymond Williams.
- Walter Cohen.
- Michael D. Bristol.
Another group practiced the "gynocriticism," studying writings by women and examining the female literary tradition to find out how women writers across the ages have perceived themselves and imagined reality.
Today’s critics view "women" as members of different societies with different concerns. Feminists of colour, Third World (preferably called postcolonial) feminists, and lesbian feminists have stressed that women are not defined solely by the fact that they are female; other attributes (such as religion, class, and sexual orientation) are also important, making the problems and goals of one group of women different from those of another.
Many commentators have argued that feminist criticism is by definition gender criticism because of its focus on the feminine gender. But the relationship between feminist and gender criticism is, in fact, complex; the two approaches are certainly not polar opposites but, rather, exist along a continuum of attitudes toward sex, sexuality, gender, and language.
- Hamlet.
- Gertrude and Ophelia.
- Sex.
- Rebecca Smith.
- Elaine Showalter.
Gertrude and Ophelia suffer not only at the hands of the men in the play, but also in the writings of male critics who too often adopt Hamlet’s own misogynistic viewpoint. Claudius, the Ghost and Hamlet all seen obsessed with Gertrude as a sex object. Hamlet’s feelings for her are expressed in the demeaning language of sexual disgust. Feminist critics point out that much traditional criticism and performance has adopted this male view of Gertrude as a lustful, false woman. Rebecca Smith’s criticism seems very much in the character study. But her emphasis on how film versions construct character is crucial. Elaine Showalter’s own approach to Ophelia is to study of her representation. She interprets how portrayals of Ophelia over the centuries have embodied male attitudes to female sexuality and insanity.
In the poem, the speaker manipulates his female subject, rendering her both as his idealized beloved and, eventually, as his vision of impending death. In the course of his
invitation, he portrays her as alternately desirous and repulsive, but ultimately he identifies the female body itself as a loathsome symbol of human decay.
CULTURAL (INCLUDING NEO-HISTORICIST AND POSTCOLONIAL).
- Types.
- Cultural materialism. Leavis.
- Historicists.Focault.
- Postmodernism. Analyses.
- (^) Postcolonial studies. Influence.
There are five types of cultural studies: cultural materialism, new historicism, multiculturalism, postmodernism and popular culture, and postcolonial studies.
The cultural materialism is an anthropological approach that gives priority to material conditions over the socio-cultural ones. Cultural materialism began with the work of Leavis that sought to use the education system to distribute literary knowledge and appreciation. He promoted the great tradition to improve the moral sensibilities of a wider range of readers than just the elite.
Historicists, like formalists and their critics, acknowledge the importance of the literary text, but they also analyze the text with an eye to history. New historicist critics also tend to define the discipline of history more broadly than did their predecessors. They view history as a social science like anthropology and sociology, whereas older historicists tended to view history as literature's "background" and the social sciences as being properly historical. Many new historicists have acknowledged to the writings of Michel Foucault. Foucault refused to see history as an evolutionary process, a continuous development from cause to effect, from past to present toward the end, a moment of definite closure, a Day of Judgment. Foucault saw history in terms of power as a complex of forces that produces what happens.
Postmodernism is a critique of the aesthetic of the preceding age and they celebrat the very act of dismembering tradition. As for the popular culture, there are four main types of its analyses: production analyses, textual analyses, audience analyses and historical analyses. These approaches view culture as a narrative or story-telling process in which particular texts or cultural artifacts consciously or unconsciously link themselves to larger stories at play in the society.
MYTH AND ARCHETYPAL.
- Definition.
- Motifs.
- Archetypes.
- Northrop Frye.
The myth critic is concerned to seek out those mysterious elements that inform certain literary works and that elicit.
Motifs or themes may be found among many different mythologies, and certain images that recur in the myths of people widely separated in time and place tend to have a
common meaning or tend to elicit comparable psychological responses and to serve similar cultural functions.
Such motifs and images are called archetypes. Archetypes may be found in even more complex combinations as genres or types of literature that conform with the major phases of the seasonal cycle.
Northrop Frye indicates the correspond genres for the four seasons as follows: the mythos of spring, comedy; summer, romance; fall, tragedy; and, winter, irony.
- To his coy mistress.
- Stanzas, time.
- (^) Sun.
- Age-old dilemma.
- Sexuality.
It is superficially a love poem but, in a deeper sense, it is a poem about time. As such, it is concerned with immortality, a fundamental motif in myth. In the first two stanzas we encounter an inversion or rejection of traditional conceptions of human immortality. The concluding stanza, radically altered in tone, presents a third kind of time.
We encounter the sun archetype whose images of life and creative energy are fused with the sphere.
In representing the age-old dilemma of time and immortality, Marvell employed a cluster of images charged with mythic significance. His poet-lover seems to offer the alchemy of love as a way of defeating the laws of naturalistic time. If life is to be judged by its intensity, Marvell’s lovers, during the act of love, will achieve a kind of immortality by devouring time or by transcending the laws of clock time.
To conclude, we can see that the sexuality is, in a mythic sense, suggestive of a profound metaphysical insight.
- Hamlet.
- Legend; Elizabethans.
- Oedipus.
- Moral norms.
Performance critics note how much Hamlet uses the language of theatre such as “play”. Performance critics are therefore concerned with the staging of the play in the theatre or on film and video. It is part of what is often called the “afterlife” of Hamlet. The instability begins with the existence of three versions of the play, the First and Second Quartos and the Folio.
Hamlet has been a popular play. With the exception of the 18-year period when all theatres were closed under the Commonwealth. Besides, there are very different versions of Hamlet.
The widespread availability of films of Hamlet on video and DVD has made performance criticism even more significant in the twenty-first century. Film offers valuable opportunities to analyse aspects of performance in different productions.
READER-ORIENTED.
- Gadamer.
- Iser.
- Fish, Riffaterre ad Bleich.
The reader-oriented theories study the individual items that look different in different context, and even within a single field of vision they will be interpreted according to whether they are seen as “figure” or “ground”.
In 1967, literary works pay attention to the reception theory. Jauss abandoned the classic studies about the author, the work and the context, and he centred on the reader. He tried to achieve a compromise between Russian Formalism which ignores history, and social theories which ignore the text. He says that a literary work is not an object which stands by itself and which offers the same face to each reader in each period. It isn’t a monument which reveals its timeless essence in a monologue.
Gadamer, another critic, argues that all interpretations of past literature arise a dialogue between past and present. At the same time, we seek to discover the questions which the work itself was trying to answer in its own dialogue with history.
Wolfgang Iser who draws heavily on the phenomenological aesthetician Roman Ingarden and on the work of Gadamer. Unlike Jauss, Iser decontextualizes and dehistoricizes text and reader.
Other inflections of reader-oriented theory are represented by Stanley Fish, Riffaterre and Bleich. The first one developed a perspective called an “affective stylistics” and separated his approach very self-consciously from all kinds of formalism. Riffaterre agrees with the Russian Formalists in regarding poetry as a special use of language. He takes this formalist view from Jakobson. And, to finish, Bleich derived approaches to reader theory from psychology.
It’s an intriguing paradox: just as a reader wrestles with the many meanings of Marvell’s images (just as the She might), the reader identifies with their inventor who knows their meaning. To remain passive or reserved (“coy”) when interpreting Marvell’s work is to assume the position of the female. The active mastery of the image or idea is for the male reader.
- Cartesian and Copernican.
Todd A Borlik situates Hamlet within the emergent discourse of ethical vegetarianism in early modern England. Hamlet, after the death of his father, avoids meat because he wants to escape from his own flesh, to dissociate himself from his carnal nature. Hamlet’s anxiety about what to eat or not to eat shows us the complexity of the character. By blurring the animal / human boundary, the tragedy problematizes the unthinking acceptance of carnivorism as divinely ordained by the Judeo-Christian tradition. He experiences both Cartesian and Copernican doubt that undermines the assumption that mankind occupies the zenith of creation.
