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Masterworks
of English Literature
Critical
Approaches to Literature
Described below are nine common
critical approaches to the literature. Quotations are from X.J. Kennedy and
Dana Gioia’s Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama,
Sixth Edition (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), pages 1790-1818.
- Formalist Criticism: This approach regards
literature as “a unique form of human knowledge that needs to be
examined on its own terms.” All the elements necessary for understanding
the work are contained within the work itself. Of particular interest to
the formalist critic are the elements of form—style, structure,
tone, imagery, etc.—that are found within the text. A primary goal for
formalist critics is to determine how such elements work together with
the text’s content to shape its effects upon readers.
- Biographical Criticism: This approach “begins with
the simple but central insight that literature is written by actual
people and that understanding an author’s life can help readers more
thoroughly comprehend the work.” Hence, it often affords a practical
method by which readers can better understand a text. However, a
biographical critic must be careful not to take the biographical facts
of a writer’s life too far in criticizing the works of that writer: the
biographical critic “focuses on explicating the literary work by using
the insight provided by knowledge of the author’s life....
[B]iographical data should amplify the meaning of the text, not drown it
out with irrelevant material.”
- Historical Criticism: This approach “seeks to
understand a literary work by investigating the social, cultural, and
intellectual context that produced it—a context that necessarily
includes the artist’s biography and milieu.” A key goal for historical
critics is to understand the effect of a literary work upon its original
readers.
- Gender Criticism: This approach “examines how
sexual identity influences the creation and reception of literary
works.” Originally an offshoot of feminist movements, gender criticism
today includes a number of approaches, including the so-called
“masculinist” approach recently advocated by poet Robert Bly. The bulk
of gender criticism, however, is feminist and takes as a central precept
that the patriarchal attitudes that have dominated western thought have
resulted, consciously or unconsciously, in literature “full of
unexamined ‘male-produced’ assumptions.” Feminist criticism attempts to
correct this imbalance by analyzing and combatting such attitudes—by
questioning, for example, why none of the characters in Shakespeare’s
play Othello ever challenge the right of a husband to murder a
wife accused of adultery. Other goals of feminist critics include
“analyzing how sexual identity influences the reader of a text” and
“examin[ing] how the images of men and women in imaginative literature
reflect or reject the social forces that have historically kept the
sexes from achieving total equality.”
- Psychological Criticism: This approach reflects the
effect that modern psychology has had upon both literature and literary
criticism. Fundamental figures in psychological criticism include
Sigmund Freud, whose “psychoanalytic theories changed our notions of
human behavior by exploring new or controversial areas like
wish-fulfillment, sexuality, the unconscious, and repression” as well as
expanding our understanding of how “language and symbols operate by
demonstrating their ability to reflect unconscious fears or desires”;
and Carl Jung, whose theories about the unconscious are also a key
foundation of Mythological Criticism. Psychological
criticism has a number of approaches, but in general, it usually employs
one (or more) of three approaches:
1.
An
investigation of “the creative process of the artist: what is the nature of
literary genius and how does it relate to normal mental functions?”
2.
The
psychological study of a particular artist, usually noting how an author’s
biographical circumstances affect or influence their motivations and/or
behavior.
3.
The
analysis of fictional characters using the language and methods of
psychology.
- Sociological Criticism: This approach “examines
literature in the cultural, economic and political context in which it
is written or received,” exploring the relationships between the artist
and society. Sometimes it examines the artist’s society to better
understand the author’s literary works; other times, it may examine the
representation of such societal elements within the literature itself.
One influential type of sociological criticism is Marxist criticism,
which focuses on the economic and political elements of art, often
emphasizing the ideological content of literature; because Marxist
criticism often argues that all art is political, either challenging or
endorsing (by silence) the status quo, it is frequently evaluative and
judgmental, a tendency that “can lead to reductive judgment, as when
Soviet critics rated Jack London better than William Faulkner, Ernest
Hemingway, Edith Wharton, and Henry James, because he illustrated the
principles of class struggle more clearly.” Nonetheless, Marxist
criticism “can illuminate political and economic dimensions of
literature other approaches overlook.”
- Mythological
Criticism: This approach emphasizes
“the recurrent universal patterns underlying most literary works.”
Combining the insights from anthropology, psychology, history, and
comparative religion, mythological criticism “explores the artist’s
common humanity by tracing how the individual imagination uses myths and
symbols common to different cultures and epochs.” One key concept in
mythlogical criticism is the archetype, “a symbol, character,
situation, or image that evokes a deep universal response,” which
entered literary criticism from Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. According
to Jung, all individuals share a “‘collective unconscious,’ a set of
primal memories common to the human race, existing below each person’s
conscious mind”—often deriving from primordial phenomena such as the
sun, moon, fire, night, and blood, archetypes according to Jung “trigger
the collective unconscious.” Another critic, Northrop Frye, defined
archetypes in a more limited way as “a symbol, usually an image, which
recurs often enough in literature to be recognizable as an element of
one’s literary experience as a whole.” Regardless of the definition of
archetype they use, mythological critics tend to view literary works in
the broader context of works sharing a similar pattern.
- Reader-Response Criticism: This approach takes as a
fundamental tenet that “literature” exists not as an artifact upon a
printed page but as a transaction between the physical text and the mind
of a reader. It attempts “to describe what happens in the reader’s mind
while interpreting a text” and reflects that reading, like
writing, is a creative process. According to reader-response critics,
literary texts do not “contain” a meaning; meanings derive only from the
act of individual readings. Hence, two different readers may derive
completely different interpretations of the same literary text;
likewise, a reader who re-reads a work years later may find the work
shockingly different. Reader-response criticism, then, emphasizes how
“religious, cultural, and social values affect readings; it also
overlaps with gender criticism in exploring how men and women read the
same text with different assumptions.” Though this approach rejects the
notion that a single “correct” reading exists for a literary work, it
does not consider all readings permissible: “Each text creates limits to
its possible interpretations.”
- Deconstructionist Criticism: This approach “rejects the
traditional assumption that language can accurately represent reality.”
Deconstructionist critics regard language as a fundamentally unstable
medium—the words “tree” or “dog,” for instance, undoubtedly conjure up
different mental images for different people—and therefore, because
literature is made up of words, literature possesses no fixed, single
meaning. According to critic Paul de Man, deconstructionists insist on
“the impossibility of making the actual expression coincide with what
has to be expressed, of making the actual signs [i.e., words] coincide
with what is signified.” As a result, deconstructionist critics tend to
emphasize not what is being said but how language is used
in a text. The methods of this approach tend to resemble those of formalist
criticism, but whereas formalists’ primary goal is to locate unity
within a text, “how the diverse elements of a text cohere into meaning,”
deconstructionists try to show how the text “deconstructs,” “how it can
be broken down ... into mutually irreconcilable positions.” Other goals
of deconstructionists include (1) challenging the notion of authors’
“ownership” of texts they create (and their ability to control the
meaning of their texts) and (2) focusing on how language is used to
achieve power, as when they try to understand how a some interpretations
of a literary work come to be regarded as “truth.”
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