Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Literary Criticism


Literary Criticism
by: Gerard M. Gaza
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals. Though the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.
Whether or not literary criticism should be considered a separate field of inquiry from literary theory, or conversely from book reviewing, is a matter of some controversy. For example, the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary thinking and Criticism draws no distinction between literary theory and literary criticism, and almost always uses the terms together to describe the same concept. Some critics consider literary criticism a practical application of literary theory, because criticism always deals directly with particular literary works, while theory may be more general or abstract.
Literary criticism is often published in essay or book form. Academic literary critics teach in literature departments and publish in academic journals, and more popular critics publish their criticism in broadly circulating periodicals such as the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, The Nation, and The New Yorker.
Historical Criticism
Literary criticism has probably existed for as long as literature. In the 4th century BC Aristotle wrote the Poetics, a typology and description of literary forms with many specific criticisms of contemporary works of art. Poetics developed for the first time the concepts of mimesis and catharsis, which are still crucial in literary study. Plato's attacks on poetry as imitative, secondary, and false were formative as well. Around the same time, Bharata Muni, in his Natya Shastra, wrote literary criticism on ancient Indian literature and Sanskrit drama.
Later classical and medieval criticism often focused on religious texts, and the several long religious traditions of hermeneutics and textual exegesis have had a profound influence on the study of secular texts. This was particularly the case for the literary traditions of the three Abrahamic religions: Jewish literature, Christian literature and Islamic literature.
Literary criticism was also employed in other forms of medieval Arabic literature and Arabic poetry from the 9th century, notably by Al-Jahiz in his al-Bayan wa-'l-tabyin and al-Hayawan, and by Abdullah ibn al-Mu'tazz in his Kitab al-Badi.[1]
Key Text References
 Renaissance criticism
The literary criticism of the Renaissance developed classical ideas of unity of form and content into literary neoclassicism, proclaiming literature as central to culture, entrusting the poet and the author with preservation of a long literary tradition. The birth of Renaissance criticism was in 1498, with the recovery of classic texts, most notably, Giorgio Valla's Latin translation of Aristotle's Poetics. The work of Aristotle, especially Poetics, was the most important influence upon literary criticism until the late eighteenth century. Lodovico Castelvetro was one of the most influential Renaissance critics who wrote commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics in 1570.
Key Text References
 Enlightenment criticism
19th-century criticism
The British Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century introduced new aesthetic ideas to literary study, including the idea that the object of literature need not always be beautiful, noble, or perfect, but that literature itself could elevate a common subject to the level of the sublime. German Romanticism, which followed closely after the late development of German classicism, emphasized an aesthetic of fragmentation that can appear startlingly modern to the reader of English literature, and valued Witz – that is, "wit" or "humor" of a certain sort – more highly than the serious Anglophone Romanticism. The late nineteenth century brought renown to authors known more for critical writing than for their own literary work, such as Matthew Arnold.
Key Text References
The New Criticism
However important all of these aesthetic movements were as antecedents, current ideas about literary criticism derive almost entirely from the new direction taken in the early twentieth century. Early in the century the school of criticism known as Russian Formalism, and slightly later the New Criticism in Britain and America, came to dominate the study and discussion of literature. Both schools emphasized the close reading of texts, elevating it far above generalizing discussion and speculation about either authorial intention (to say nothing of the author's psychology or biography, which became almost taboo subjects) or reader response. This emphasis on form and precise attention to "the words themselves" has persisted, after the decline of these critical doctrines themselves.
Theory
In 1957 Northrop Frye published the influential Anatomy of Criticism. In his works Frye noted that some critics tend to embrace an ideology, and to judge literary pieces on the basis of their adherence to such ideology. This has been a highly influential viewpoint among modern conservative thinkers. E. Michael Jones in Degenerate Moderns argues that Stanley Fish was influenced by his adulterous affairs to reject classic literature that condemned adultery[2].
In the British and American literary establishment, the New Criticism was more or less dominant until the late 1960s. Around that time Anglo-American university literature departments began to witness a rise of a more explicitly philosophical literary theory, influenced by structuralism, then post-structuralism, and other kinds of Continental philosophy. It continued until the mid-1980s, when interest in "theory" peaked. Many later critics, though undoubtedly still influenced by theoretical work, have been comfortable simply interpreting literature rather than writing explicitly about methodology and philosophical presumptions.
Key Text References (20th-century texts)
History of the Book
Related to other forms of literary criticism, the history of the book is a field of interdisciplinary inquiry drawing on the methods of bibliography, cultural history, history of literature, and media theory. Principally concerned with the production, circulation, and reception of texts and their material forms, book history seeks to connect forms of textuality with their material aspects.
Among the issues within the history of literature with which book history can be seen to intersect are: the development of authorship as a profession, the formation of reading audiences, the constraints of censorship and copyright, and the economics of literary form.
The current state of literary criticism
Today interest in literary theory and Continental philosophy coexists in university literature departments with a more conservative literary criticism of which the New Critics would probably have approved. Disagreements over the goals and methods of literary criticism, which characterized both sides taken by critics during the "rise" of theory, have declined. Many critics feel that they now have a great plurality of methods and approaches from which to choose.
Some critics work largely with theoretical texts, while others read traditional literature; interest in the literary canon is still great, but many critics are also interested in minority and women's literatures, while some critics influenced by cultural studies read popular texts like comic books or pulp/genre fiction. Ecocritics have drawn connections between literature and the natural sciences. Many literary critics also work in film criticism or media studies. Some write intellectual history; others bring the results and methods of social history to bear on reading literature.
Questions to the value of academic criticism
The value of literary criticism has been questioned by some prominent artists. Vladimir Nabokov argued that good readers don't read books, and particularly literary masterpieces, "for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations".[3] Stephen Joyce, grandson of James Joyce, at a 1986 academic conference of Joyceans in Copenhagen, said “If my grandfather was here, he would have died laughing ... Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man can be picked up, read, and enjoyed by virtually anybody without scholarly guides, theories, and intricate explanations, as can Ulysses, if you forget about all the hue and cry." And he questioned if anything is added to the legacy of Joyce's art, by the 261 books of literary criticism stored by the Library of Congress; he summed up that Academics are "people who want to brand this great work with their mark. I don’t accept that."
Literary Criticism
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals. Though the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.
Whether or not literary criticism should be considered a separate field of inquiry from literary theory, or conversely from book reviewing, is a matter of some controversy. For example, the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary thinking and Criticism draws no distinction between literary theory and literary criticism, and almost always uses the terms together to describe the same concept. Some critics consider literary criticism a practical application of literary theory, because criticism always deals directly with particular literary works, while theory may be more general or abstract.
Literary criticism is often published in essay or book form. Academic literary critics teach in literature departments and publish in academic journals, and more popular critics publish their criticism in broadly circulating periodicals such as the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, The Nation, and The New Yorker.
Different Approaches of Literary Criticism

Literary criticism is the evaluation, analysis and interpretation of a piece of literature. That is the technical, academic explanation. Essentially, it is a means of describing how a piece of literature moves the reader. There are several literary criticism theories, dating back from 360 B.C .to the present, with just a few of the major modern ones being Reader-Response Criticism, Post-Colonial Criticism, New Historicism, Feminist Criticism and Deconstruction Theory.
1. Reader-Response Criticism
Reader-Response Criticism is about interpreting a piece of literature not solely on the merits of the piece of literature but rather as an interaction between the reader and the piece of literature. The reader's reaction, how the piece affects the reader, is taken into consideration when interpreting a piece. Essentially what this theory means is that the text itself has meaning and the interaction between the reader and the text also carries meaning. The interpretation in Reader-Response Criticism lies between the intersections of these two sets of meaning when evaluating a text.

2. Post-Colonial Criticism
Post-Colonial Criticism examines works written by colonial powers and its subjects. Post-Colonial Criticism considers many lenses through which to evaluate a piece---including politics, power, culture, language and religion. A seminal piece often used in teaching this theory is Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart," about his native Nigeria's experience of colonialism. This theory fleshes out what it means to be colonized on a social level, and even more closely, on an individual level, exploring how colonialism shapes and affects identity.

3. New Historicism

For New Historicists, a piece of literature is shaped by the time period in which it was written and thus must be examined and interpreted in the context of that time period. This theory attempts to tie the characters, events and language in a piece of literature to events from the time period in which it was written. It also looks at mainstream and marginalized populations as well as traditional and subversive discourses of the era when interpreting a text. New Historicists also take into consideration political and cultural events that the author lived through. All of these various pieces, along with the time period the piece of literature is set in, are part of the interpretation process for New Historicist.

4. Feminist Criticism

Feminist Criticism analyzes text through the lens of how women have historically been portrayed in literature. It examines the political, social and economic subjugation of women in society. It further looks at how the characters, the dialogue, the events and resolution of a piece of literature can serve to either reinforce or challenge stereotypical representations of women.

Three primary purposes of Literary criticism

(1) To help us resolve a difficulty in the reading.

The historical approach, for instance, might be helpful in addressing a problem in Thomas Otway's play Venice Preserv'd. Why are the conspirators, despite the horrible, bloody details of their obviously brutish plan, portrayed in a sympathetic light? If we look at the author and his time, we see that he was a Tory whose play was performed in the wake of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Bill Crisis, and that there are obvious similarities between the Conspiracy in the play and the Popish Plot in history. The Tories would never approve of the bloody Popish Plot, but they nonetheless sympathized with the plotters for the way they were abused by the Tory enemy, the Whigs. Thus it makes sense for Otway to condemn the conspiracy itself in Vencie Preserv'd without condemning the conspirators themselves.

(2) To help us choose the better of two conflicting readings.

A formalist approach might enable us to choose between a reading which sees the dissolution of society in Lord of the Flies as being caused by too strict a suppression of the "bestial" side of man and one which sees it as resulting from too little suppression. We can look to the text and ask: What textual evidence is there for the suppression or indulgence of the "bestial" side of man? Does Ralph suppress Jack when he tries to indulge his bestial side in hunting? Does it appear from the text that an imposition of stricter law and order would have prevented the breakdown? Did it work in the "grownup" world of the novel?

(3) To enable us to form judgments about literature.

One of the purposes of criticism is to judge if a work is any good or not. For instance, we might use a formalist approach to argue that a John Donne poem is of high quality because it contains numerous intricate conceits that are well sustained. Or, we might use the mimetic approach to argue that The West Indian is a poor play because it fails to paint a realistic picture of the world.

Psychoanalytic literary criticism refers to literary criticism which, in method, concept, theory, or form, is influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalytic reading has been practiced since the early development of psychoanalysis itself, and has developed into a rich and heterogeneous interpretive tradition.
It is a literary approach where critics see the text as if it were a kind of dream. This means that the text represses its real (or latent) content behind obvious (manifest) content. The process of changing from latent to manifest content is known as the dream work, and involves operations of concentration and displacement. The critic analyzes the language and symbolism of a text to reverse the process of the dream work and arrive at the underlying latent thoughts.
Freud wrote several important essays on literature, which he used to explore the psyche of authors and characters, to explain narrative mysteries, and to develop new concepts in psychoanalysis (for instance, Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva and his influential readings of the Oedipus myth and Shakespeare's Hamlet in The Interpretation of Dreams). His followers and later readers, such as Carl Jung and Jacques Lacan, were avid readers of literature as well, and used literary examples as illustrations of important concepts in their work (for instance, Lacan argued with Jacques Derrida over the interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter").
Jung and another of Freud's disciples, Karen Horney, broke with Freud, and their work, especially Jung's, led to other rich branches of psychoanalytic criticism: Horney's to feminist approaches including womb envy, and Jung's to the study of archetypes and the collective unconscious. Jung's work in particular was influential as, combined with the work of anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Joseph Campbell, it led to the entire fields of mythocriticism and archetype analysis.

The object of psychoanalytic literary criticism, at its very simplest, can be the psychoanalysis of the author or of a particularly interesting character. In this directly therapeutic form, it is very similar to psychoanalysis itself, closely following the analytic interpretive process discussed in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. But many more complex variations are possible. The concepts of psychoanalysis can be deployed with reference to the narrative or poetic structure itself, without requiring access to the authorial psyche (an interpretation motivated by Lacan's remark that "the unconscious is structured like a language"). Or the founding texts of psychoanalysis may themselves be treated as literature, and re-read for the light cast by their formal qualities on their theoretical content (Freud's texts frequently resemble detective stories, or the archaeological narratives of which he was so fond).

Like all forms of literary criticism, psychoanalytic criticism can yield useful clues to the sometime baffling symbols, actions, and settings in a literary work; however, like all forms of literary criticism, it has its limits. For one thing, some critics rely on psychocriticism as a "one size fits all" approach, when in fact no one approach can adequately illuminate a complex work of art. As Guerin, et al. put it in A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature[1],
The danger is that the serious student may become theory-ridden, forgetting that Freud's is not the only approach to literary criticism. To see a great work of fiction or a great poem primarily as a psychological case study is often to miss its wider significance and perhaps even the essential aesthetic experience it should provide.
Critical Approaches to Literature Plain text version of this document.

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:
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?”

The psychological study of a particular artist, usually noting how an author’s biographical circumstances affect or influence their motivations and/or behavior.
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.”

Literary Criticism and Theory

There are many different approaches to literary criticism today.  This briefly explains some of the most common.

·         Traditional Approaches
·         Type of criticism that dominated until the 1930s

Study of literature was mostly biography or history

Two types: historical-biographical or moral-philosophical

Historical-Biographical: Art seen as a reflection of author’s life and times (or of the characters’ life and times). Necessary to know about the author and the political, economical, and sociological context of the time period to understand a work.

Moral-Philosophical: The larger purpose of literature is to teach morality and probe philosophical issues.

Advantages
·         Works for some works obviously political or moral in nature.
·         Helps place allusions in proper classical, political, or biblical background as well as to consider the themes of works.
·         Recognizes that the message of a work—not just the vehicle for that message—is important

Disadvantages

“The Intentional Fallacy”—The New Critics’ term for the belief that the meaning or value of a work lies in determining the author’s intent, which, unless the author has put into writing his/her intent, is not reliably discernable. New Critics believe such an approach reduces art to the level of biography and makes art relevant to a particular time only rather than universal. Some argue that such an approach is too judgmental.


Checklist of Biographical Critical Questions
·         What influences—people, ideas, movements, events—evident in the writer’s life does the work reflect?
·         To what extent are the events described in the word a direct transfer of what happened in the writer’s actual life?
·         What modifications of the actual events has the writer made in the literary work? For what possibly purposes?
·         What are the effects of the differences between actual events and their literary transformation in the poem, story, play, or essay?
·         What has the author revealed in the work about his/her characteristic modes of thought, perception, or emotion? What place does this work have in the artist’s literary development and career?

Checklist of Historical Critical Questions
·         When was the work written? When was it published? How was it received by the critics and public and why?
·         What does the work’s reception reveal about the standards of taste and value during the time it was published and reviewed?
·         What social attitudes and cultural practices related to the action of the word were prevalent during the time the work was written and published?
·         What kinds of power relationships does the word describe, reflect, or embody?
·         How do the power relationships reflected in the literary work manifest themselves in the cultural practices and social institutions prevalent during the time the work was written and published?
·         To what extent can we understand the past as it is reflected in the literary work? To what extent does the work reflect differences from the ideas and values of its time?

Formalistic Approach (New Criticism)
·         Close reading and analysis of elements such as setting, irony, paradox, imagery, and metaphor
·         Reading stands on its own
·         Awareness of denotative and connotative implications
·         Alertness to allusions to mythology, history, literature
·         Sees structure and patterns

Primarily used during the first two-thirds of the 20th century

This is the “AP” style of analysis, involving a close reading of a text and the assumption that all information necessary to the interpretation of a work must be found within the work itself.

Advantages
·         Performed without research
·         Emphasizes value of literature apart from its context

Disadvantages
·         Text is seen in isolation
·         Ignores context of the work
·         Cannot account for allusions
·         Tends to reduce literature to just a few narrow rhetorical devices, such as irony, paradox, and tension

Checklist of Formalistic Critical Questions
·         How is the work structured or organized? How does it begin? Where does it go next? How does it end? What is the work’s plot? How is its plot related to its structure?
·         What is the relationship of each part of the work to the work as a whole? How are the parts related to one another?
·         Who is narrating or telling what happens in the work? How is the narrator, speaker, or character revealed to readers? How do we come to know and understand this figure?
·         Who are the major and minor characters, what do they represent, and how do they relate to one another?
·         What are the time and place of the work—it’s setting? How is the setting related to what we know of the characters and their actions? To what extent is the setting symbolic?
·         What kind of language does the author use to describe, narrate, explain, or otherwise create the world of the literary work? More specifically, what images, similes, metaphors, symbols appear in the work? What is their function? What meanings do they convey?

Psychological Approach (Freudian)
·         Most controversial, most abused, least appreciated form
·         Associated with Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and his followers;Emphasis on the unconscious aspects of the human psyche.
·         Experimental and diagnostic; closely related to biological science;All human behavior is motivated ultimately by the prime psychic force, libido.

Because of the powerful social taboos attached to sexual impulses, many of our desires and memories are repressed. The psychoanalytic critic tends to see all concave images as female symbols and all images whose length exceeds their diameter as male symbols. Such activities as dancing, riding, and flying are symbols of sexual pleasures

Pitfalls: the practitioners of the Freudian approach often push their critical theses too hard at the expense of other relevant considerations; they often simplify and distort

Advantages
·         Helpful for understanding works whose characters have psychological issues
·         A valuable too in understanding human nature, individual characters, and symbolic meaning

Disadvantages
Psychological criticism can turn a work into little more than a psychological case study, neglecting to view it as a piece of art. Critics tend to see sex in everything, exaggerating this aspect of literature. Some works simply do not lend themselves to this approach

Checklist of Psychological Critical Questions
·         What connections can you make between your knowledge of an author’s life and the behavior and motivations of characters in his or her work?
·         How does your understanding of the characters, their relationships, their actions, and their motivations in a literary work help you better understand the mental world and imaginative life, or the actions and motivations of the author?
·         How does a particular literary work—its images, metaphors, and other linguistic elements—reveal the psychological motivations of its characters or the psychological mindset of its author?
·         To what extent can you employ the concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis to understand the motivations of literary characters?
·         What kinds of literary works and what types of literary characters seem best suited to a critical approach that employs a psychological or psychoanalytical perspective? Why?
·         How can a psychological or psychoanalytical approach to a particular work be combined with an approach from another critical perspective—for example, biographical, formalist, or feminist criticism?

Mythological and Archetypal Approaches

Appeals to some very deep chord in all of us; Illuminates dramatic and universal human reactions
concerned with the motives that underlie human behavior. Speculative and philosophic; affinities with religion, anthropology, and cultural history. Myth is ubiquitous in time as well as place, unites past with present, reaches toward future and is interested in prehistory and the biographies of the gods, Probes for the inner spirit which gives the outer form its vitality and enduring appeal; Sees the work holistically, as the manifestation of vitalizing, integrative forces arising from the depths of humankind’s collective psyche

Posted by at

1 comment:

  1. tinarathoreJune 2, 2011 at 7:43 PM

    Wow! I have never found any article that gives such an amazing insight into literary criticism and theories. In fact, you have done a great job putting them all together. It is certainly a great resource. Thanks a ton! Bookmarking it for future reference.

    I am glad I came across your blog. Thanks, again.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)