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c. LITERARY THEORY
Introduction to Literary Criticism
Definition: Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature.
Why practise criticism at all? Because it's interesting, and opens the door to a wider appreciation of literature, particularly that in other languages.
There are different approaches for the practice for literary criticism. Here we have a summary of the main ones. We are not going to chose one of them, but we are going to use them all to some extent.
Approach Literature is its purpose methodology implications
Formalism
New Criticism
autonomous object; unified in terms of form and meaning; features irony, paradox, and complexity has a single valid interpretation
aesthetic appreciation of verbal art and technique.
Literature valued as a high art whose meaning can transcend time.
focus on structure and elements of the work, especially how form and meaning are related. Establish unity of the work through interrelation of all its parts.
revolutionized the study of literature; helped create literature as a serious object of inquiry; became official way to teach literature--anyone could learn to do a formalist explication-- didn't need to research social, biographical, and historical contexts.
Genre Studies
organized by categories and derives meaning through its relationship to other works with similar characteristics. It is based on generic expectations
Purpose and value depends on the genre. For Aristotle, the purpose of tragedy was catharsis, the purging of the emotions of fear and pity.
Identify characteristics of different genres of literature and categorize individual works.
Literary work can't be read out of the context of other works similar to it. Authors write within certain traditions and conventions, even if they break with them.
Rhetorical
a means to an end, an instrument for getting something done; features strategies and techniques designed to govern the reader's response
moral instruction, inform and persuade the reader ;
Consider author's purpose and intention, how they want the audience to act;
literature is rhetorical since it is always about ideas, and often touches on ultimate questions about the nature of humankind etc. Author always writes to an audience and the author's conception of the audience alters the work of art.
Reader-Response
(Fish)
Phenomenology
Psychology (Holland)
is an experience; text is not separate from its realization by a reader; meaning is transactional--the result of the transaction
to alter reader's assumptions and characteristic ways of viewing the world; results in reader's self- discovery to achieve a reading that feels right
Study the complex process of a reader constructing meaning from the words, what reader brings to the text and gets from the experience of it; study reception of the work in its time and
Reader is really an ideal or implied reader and often is fantastically talented, erudite; Reception approach notes that the meaning of a text changes over time and that readers get more
between the reader and a text
over time; sophisticated from learning to read new literary styles. RR diametrically opposed to formalism--no objective reality to the literature outside of the transaction with a reader.
Structuralism
based on linguistic theories of Saussure-- langue, parole, signifier, signified, sign
an individual instance of a larger system of language and structure ; literature is a special kind of language use that has its own rules and conventions which govern how individual works are formed.
a way to learn more about the system of language and structures that determine cultural production; can lead to a science of signs
Study sets or genres to determine the rules that govern them. Divide the work up into divisible components based on functional codes to do with the plot, suspense, character development, social knowledge, and themes
very rationalistic-- assumes that meaning is understood through difference as expressed through binary oppositions (light/dark; male rationality/female emotionalism; written vs. oral language etc.)
Deconstruction
Post-structural-
ism
text whose meaning is known only through difference. Language is arbitrary; truth claims and intentions of a text are undermined by its own contradictions; meaning is finally indeterminate.
textual meaning is not finite; close attention to the play of language yields pleasure
doesn't just reverse the hierarchy but undermines the idea of the opposition as valid. Locate the point of contradiction, where the text "breaks free of the constraints imposed by its own realistic form"
Like Formalism, involves close reading of language, but denies unity of form and meaning; uses the discovery of rules in Structuralism to undermine idea of rational rules; recognizes author's intentions, as in rhetorical criticism, places power to make meaning of the text, as in reader response.
Approach Literature is its purpose methodology implications
Literary Tradition
grows out of previously written forms and works, especially in specific genre. Ex. Some Shakespeare sonnets parody earlier Petrarchan sonnets.
Literature builds and improves on a great tradition. Reader appreciates literature in context of other great works.
Identify and explain how a work uses traditional forms and materials and how it departs from them. View the work in terms of preceding and succeeding literature in similar style, genre and theme.
fits in with historical, new historical, reader- reponse, genre criticism, and others.
Historicism
is not autonomous but is an expression of the powerful ideas and world view of the author's culture and era.
Literature provides cultural and historical insight.
Identify systems of thought and large historical forces that determine and inform literary expression in an era.
is basic in literary study--to see the work in terms of historical background. It has given way to New Historicism.
difference from oppressive tradition.
minority traditions
Sociological "a document of social phenomena or a product of those same phemonena"
Literature illuminates the study of social phemonena and vice versa.
Look at relationship between authors and audiences; the effect of the organization of the book trade; explicit and implicit political ideas in literary works.
links individuals and texts to collective phenomena, like Feminist, Marxist, New Historicist, but tries to be more "objective" in its analysis.
Marxist reflects the material forces operative at a specific time and promotes or impedes progress towards socialist utopia.
Literature has great moral force. Can raise consciousness about nature of capitalism and the plight of the workers.
Analyze the ways in which the human subject is formed and socialized through a manufactured view of reality and truth. Analyse how a work reveals class structure as a political construct.
In some cases, adheres to a rigid version of society and politics. Very frank in its political aims.
Taken from: http://jupiter.phy.ohiou.edu/~rouzie/307j/litcrittable1.html See also: http://www2.anglistik.uni-freiburg.de/intranet/englishbasics/Theory01.htm Some of these approaches are applied to a poem by Emily Dickinson in http://www-as.phy.ohiou.edu/ ~rouzie/307j/critgroup/literarycriticism.html
