PRACTICAL CRITICISM (Falta Mythological y Cultural Criticism) (Aplicar a Hamlet y Coy Mistress)
Approaches:
PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM:
Psychoanalytic criticism originated in the work of Austrian psychoanalyst
Sigmund Freud, who pioneered the technique of psychoanalysis. Freud developed a
language that described, a model that explained, and a theory that encompassed
human psychology. His theories are directly and indirectly concerned with the nature of
the unconscious mind.
The psychoanalytic approach to literature not only rests on the theories of
Freud; it may even be said to have begun with Freud, who wrote literary criticism as
well as psychoanalytic theory. Probably because of Freud’s characterization of the
artist’s mind as “one urged on by instincts that are too clamorous,” psychoanalytic
criticism written before 1950 tended to psychoanalyze the individual author. Literary
works were read—sometimes unconvincingly—as fantasies that allowed authors to
indulge repressed wishes, to protect themselves from deep-seated anxieties, or both.
After 1950, psychoanalytic critics began to emphasize the ways in which
authors create works that appeal to readers’ repressed wishes and fantasies.
Consequently, they shifted their focus away from the author’s psyche toward the
psychology of the reader and the text. Norman Holland’s theories, concerned more with
the reader than with the text, helped to establish reader-response criticism. Critics
influenced by D.W. Winnicott, an object-relations theorist, have questioned the
tendency to see the reader/text as an either/or construct; instead, they have seen
reader and text (or audience and play) in terms of a relationship taking place in what
Winnicott calls a “transitional” or “potential space”—space in which binary oppositions
like real/illusory and objective/subjective have little or no meaning.