What is Literature?

If there is such a thing as literary theory, then it would seem obvious that there is something
called literature which it is the theory of. We can begin, then, by raising the question: what is
literature? There have been various attempts to define literature. You can define it, for
example, as 'imaginative' writing in the sense of fiction - writing which is not literally true.
But even the briefest reflection on what people commonly include under the heading of
literature suggests that this will not do.
Seventeenth-century English literature includes Shakespeare, Webster, Marvell and Milton;
but it also stretches to the essays of Francis Bacon, the sermons of John Donne, Bunyan's
spiritual autobiography and whatever it was that Sir Thomas Browne wrote. It might even at a
pinch be taken to encompass Hobbes's Leviathan or Clarendon's History of the Rebellion.
French seventeenth-century literature contains, along with Corneille and Racine, La
Rochefoucauld's maxims, Bossuet's funeral speeches, Boileau's treatise on poetry, Madame
de Sevigne's letters to her daughter and the philosophy of Descartes and Pascal. Nineteenth-
century English literature usually includes Lamb (though not Bentham), Macaulay (but not
Marx), Mill (but not Darwin or Herbert Spencer).
A distinction between 'fact' and 'fiction', then, seems unlikely to get us very far, not least
because the distinction itself is often a questionable one. It has been argued, for instance, that
out own opposition between 'historical' and 'artistic' truth does not apply at all to the early
Icelandic sagas. In the English late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the word 'novel'
seems to have been used about both true and fictional events, and even news reports were
hardly to be considered factual. Novels and news reports were neither clearly factual nor
clearly fictional: our own sharp discriminations between these categories simply did not
apply. Gibbon no doubt thought that he was writing the historical truth, and so perhaps did
the authors of Genesis, but they are now read as 'fact' by some and 'fiction' by others;
Newman certainly thought his theological meditations were true but they are now for many
readers 'literature'. Moreover, if 'literature' includes much 'factual' writing, it also excludes
quite a lot of fiction. Superman comic and Mills and Boon novels are fictional but not
generally regarded as literature, and certainly not as Literature. If literature is 'creative' or
'imaginative' writing, does this imply that history, philosophy and natural science are
uncreative and unimaginative? Perhaps one needs a different kind of approach altogether.
Perhaps literature is definable not according to whether it is fictional or 'imaginative', but
because it uses language in peculiar ways. On this theory, literature is a kind of writing
which, in the words of the Russian critic Roman Jakobson, represents an 'organized violence
committed on ordinary speech'. Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language,
deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur
'Thou still unravished bride of quietness,' then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence
of the literary. I know this because the texture, rhythm and resonance of your words are in
excess of their abstractable meaning - or, as the linguists might more technically put it, there
is a disproportion between the signifiers and the signifieds. Your language draws attention to
itself, flaunts its material being, as statements like 'Don't you know the drivers are on strike?'
do not.
Literature, then, we might say, is 'non-pragmatic' discourse: unlike biology textbooks and
notes to the milkman it serves no immediate practical purpose, but is to be taken as referring
to a general state of affairs. Sometimes, though not always, it may employ peculiar language
as though to make this fact obvious - to signal that what is at stake is a way of talking about a
woman, rather than any particular real-life woman. This focusing on the way of talking,
rather than on the reality of what is talked about, is sometimes taken to indicate that we mean
by literature a kind of self-referential language, a language which talks about itself.
There are, however, problems with this way of denning literature too. For one thing, it would
probably have come as a surprise to George Orwell to hear that his essays were to be read as
though the topics he discussed were less important than the way he discussed them. In much
that is classified as literature, the truth-value and practical relevance of what is said is
considered important to the overall effect. But even if treating discourse 'nonpragmatically' is
part of what is meant by 'literature', then it follows from this 'definition' that literature cannot
in fact be 'objectively' defined. It leaves the definition of literature up to how somebody
decides to read, not to the nature of what is written. There are certain kinds of writing -
poems, plays, novels - which are fairly obviously intended to be 'non-pragmatic' in this sense,
but this does not guarantee that they will actually be read in this way. I might well read
Gibbon's account of the Roman empire not because I am misguided enough to believe that it
will be reliably informative about ancient Rome but because I enjoy Gibbon's prose style, or
revel in images of human corruption whatever their historical source. But I might read Robert
Burns's poem because it is not clear to me, as a Japanese horticulturalist, whether or not the
red rose flourished in eighteenth-century Britain. This, it will be said, is not reading it 'as
literature'; but am I reading Orwell's essays as literature only if I generalize what he says
about the Spanish civil war to some cosmic utterance about human life? It is true that many
of the works studied as literature in academic institutions were 'constructed' to be read as
literature, but it is also true that many of them were not. A piece of writing may start off life
as history or philosophy and then come to be ranked as literature; or it may start off as
literature and then come to be valued for its archaeological significance. Some texts are born
literary, some achieve literariness, and some have literariness thrust upon them. Breeding in
this respect may count for a good deal more than birth. What matters may not be where you
came from but how people treat you. If they decide that you are literature then it seems that
you are, irrespective of what you thought you were.
In this sense, one can think of literature less as some inherent quality or set of qualities
displayed by certain kinds of writing all the way from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, than as a
number of ways in which people relate themselves to writing. It would not be easy to isolate,
from all that has been variously called 'literature', some constant set of inherent features. In
fact it would be as impossible as trying to identify the single distinguishing feature which all
games have in common. There is no 'essence' of literature whatsoever. Any bit of writing may
be read 'non-pragmatically', if that is what reading a text as literature means, just as any
writing may be read 'poetically'. If I pore over the railway timetable not to discover a train
connection but to stimulate in myself general reflections on the speed and complexity of
modern existence, then I might be said to be reading it as literature. John M. Ellis has argued
that the term 'literature' operates rather like the word 'weed': weeds are not particular kinds of
plant, but just any kind of plant which for some reason or another a gardener does not what
around. Perhaps 'literature' means something like the opposite: any kind of writing which for
some reason or another somebody values highly. As the philosophers might say, 'literature'
and 'weed' are functional rather than ontological terms: they tell us about what we do, not
about the fixed being of things. They tell us about the role of a text or a thistle in a social
context, its relations with and differences from its surroundings, the ways it behaves, the
purposes it may be put to and the human practices clustered around it. 'Literature' is in this
sense a purely formal, empty sort of definition. Even if we claim that it is a non-pragmatic
treatment of language, we have still not arrived at an 'essence' of literature because this is also
so of other linguistic practices such as jokes. In any case, it is far from clear that we can
discriminate neatly between 'practical' and 'non-practical' ways of relating ourselves to
language. Reading a novel for pleasure obviously differs from reading a road sign for
information, but how about reading a biology textbook to improve your mind? Is that a
'pragmatic' treatment of language or not? In many societies, 'literature' has served highly
practical functions such as religious ones; distinguishing sharply between 'practical' and 'non-
practical' may only be possible in a society like ours, where literature has ceased to have
much practical function at all. We may be offering as a general definition a sense of the
'literary' which is in fact historically specific.
With this reservation, the suggestion that 'literature' is a highly valued kind of writing is an
illuminating one. But it has one fairly devastating consequence. It means that we can drop
once and for all the illusion that the category 'literature' is 'objective', in the sense of being
eternally given and immutable. Anything can be literature, and anything which is regarded as
unalterably and unquestionably literature - Shakespeare, for example – can cease to be
literature. Any belief that the study of literature is the study of a stable, well-definable entity,
as entomology is the study of insects, can be abandoned as a chimera. Some kinds of fiction
are literature and some are not; some literature is fictional and some is not; some literature is
verbally self-regarding, while some highly-wrought rhetoric is not literature. Literature, in the
sense of a set of works of assured and unalterable value, distinguished by certain shared
inherent properties, does not exist.
The reason why it follows from the definition of literature as highly valued writing that it is
not a stable entity is that value-judgements are notoriously variable. 'Times change, values
don't,' announces an advertisement for a daily newspaper, as though we still believed in
killing off infirm infants or putting the mentally ill on public show. Just as people may treat a
work as philosophy in one century and as literature in the next, or vice versa, so they may
change their minds about what writing they consider valuable. They may even change their
minds about the grounds they use for judging what is valuable and what is not. This, as I have
suggested, does not necessarily that they will refuse the title of literature to a work which
they have come to deem inferior: they may still call it literature, meaning roughly that it
belongs to the type of writing which they generally value. But it does mean that the so-called
'literary canon', the unquestioned 'great tradition' of the 'national literature', has to be
recognized as a construct, fashioned by particular people for particular reasons at a certain
time. There is no such thing as a literary work or tradition which is valuable in itself,
regardless of what anyone might have said or come to say about it. 'Value' is a transitive
term: it means whatever is valued by certain people in specific situations, according to
particular criteria and in the light of given purposes. It is thus quite possible that, given a deep
enough transformation of our history, we may in the future produce a society which is unable
to get anything at all out of Shakespeare. His works might simply seem desperately alien, full
of styles of thought and feeling which such a society found limited or irrelevant. In such a
situation, Shakespeare would be no more valuable than much present-day graffiti. And
though many people would consider such a social condition tragically impoverished, it seems
to me dogmatic not to entertain the possibility that it might arise rather from a general human
enrichment.

Literary criticism 
Literary criticism (or literary studies) is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of
literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is
the philosophical discussion of literature's goals and methods. 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, is a matter of some controversy. For example, the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary
Theory 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.
Medieval period
In the Christian Middle Ages criticism suffered from the loss of nearly all the ancient critical
texts and from an ant pagan distrust of the literary imagination. Such Church Fathers as
Tertullian, Augustine, and Jerome renewed, in churchly guise, the Platonic argument against
poetry. But both the ancient gods and the surviving classics reasserted their fascination,
entering medieval culture in theologically allegorized form. Encyclopaedists and textual
commentators explained the supposed Christian content of pre-Christian works and the Old
Testament. Although there was no lack of rhetoricians to dictate the correct use of literary
figures, no attempt was made to derive critical principles from emergent genres such as the
fabliau and the chivalric romance. Criticism was in fact inhibited by the very coherence of the
theologically explained universe. When nature is conceived as endlessly and purposefully
symbolic of revealed truth, specifically literary problems of form and meaning are bound to
be neglected. Even such an original vernacular poet of the 14th century as Dante appears to
have expected his Divine Comedy to be interpreted according to the rules of
scriptural exegesis.
The Renaissance
Renaissance criticism grew directly from the recovery of classic texts and notably from
Giorgio Valla’s translation of Aristotle’s Poetics into Latin in 1498. By 1549 the Poetics had
been rendered into Italian as well. From this period until the later part of the 18th century
Aristotle was once again the most imposing presence behind literary theory. Critics looked to
ancient poems and plays for insight into the permanent laws of art. The most influential of
Renaissance critics was probably Lodovico Castelvetro, whose 1570 commentary on
Aristotle’s Poetics encouraged the writing of tightly structured plays by extending and
codifying Aristotle’s idea of the dramatic unities. Classicism, individualism, and national
pride joined forces against literary asceticism. Thus, a group of 16th-century French writers
known as the Pléiade—notably Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay—were
simultaneously classicists, poetic innovators, and advocates of a purified vernacular tongue.
The ideas of the Italian and French Renaissance were transmitted to England by Roger
Ascham, George Gascoigne, Sir Philip Sidney, and others.
Enlightenment criticism
In the Enlightenment period (1700s to 1800s), literary criticism became more popular. During
this time literacy rates started to rise in the public; no longer was reading exclusive for the
wealthy or scholarly. With the rise of the literate public, the swiftness of printing and
commercialization of literature, criticism arose too. Reading was no longer viewed solely as
educational or as a sacred source of religion; it was a form of entertainment. Literary
criticism was influenced by the values and stylistic writing, including clear, bold, precise
writing and the more controversial criteria of the author's religious beliefs. These critical
reviews were published in many Magazines, Newspapers, and journals. This development –
particularly of emergence of entertainment literature – was addressed through an
intensification of criticism. Many works of Jonathan Swift, for instance, were criticized
including his book Gulliver's Travels, which one critic described as "the detestable story of
the Yahoos".
19th-century Romantic criticism
The British Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century introduced
new aesthetic ideas to literary studies, 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 their literary criticism than for
their own literary work, such as Matthew Arnold.

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 in the United States, came to dominate the
study and discussion of literature in the English-speaking world. 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.
In the 1920s and 1930s the far-reaching questions in literary studies raised by T.S.Eliot, I. A.
Richards, William Empson and F.R. Leavis set the direction taken by criticism until the
1960s. The work of Eliot, Wimsatt and Empson resulted in a movement known as the New
Criticism. This group of Criticism came to problems at the beginning of the early 20th
century; most of them are American critics. The term New Criticism was made current by the
publication of John Crowe Ransom's book The New Criticism in 1941. The focus of the
movement was on the working out of a general theory of criticism. The American critics were
deeply interested in the form or structure of literary and especially poetry. They believe that
the best way to analyse literary is to consider them as existenly in a vacuum. They did not get
importance to intentions of response of the reader or the historical and political context of a
work of literature. They concentrated on the text which they considered to be a self-
referential context. The new critics help to popular artist the method of close reading, the
style of analyse that gives close attention to the form and structure of text. It is consider it
related to what the text says and how it says it. The emphasis of New criticism on a literary
work in isolation from its social, historical and emotional context link it with Formalism.
T. S. Eliot
The poet and critic T. S. Eliot gave shape to many of the concerns that would eventually
coalesce as New Criticism. Eliot articulated a sense of literary tradition that wrenched
criticism away from historical and biographical assessment. In essays such as "Tradition and
the Individual Talent," rather than emphasizing the greatness of the individual poet, Eliot
stressed the importance of directing criticism upon the poem itself. In turn, the tradition of
poetry became the collective vessel through which cultural greatness was transmitted. By
distinguishing levels of poetic appreciation, he stressed the benefit of technical appreciation
as opposed to the more popular (and coarse) emotional. The aim of the critic was to mine
"significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the
poet" (Eliot, p. 11). Eliot, then, was establishing a way of reading poetry that acknowledged
Western tradition as a continuum dating back to Greek antiquity, in which "art never
improves, but that material of art is never quite the same" (p. 6).
I. A. Richards
I. A. Richards, William Empson and, slightly later, F. R. Leavis were the main proponents of
the new English at Cambridge. Richards, whose background was in philosophy (aesthetics,
psychology and semantics), produced his widely influential Principles of Literary Criticism in
1924. In it he innovatively attempted to lay down an explicit theoretical base for literary
study. Arguing that criticism should emulate the precision of science, he attempted to
articulate the special character of literary language, differentiating the ‘emotive’ language of
poetry from the ‘referential’ language of non-literary discourse.
F. R. Leavis
Ivor Armstrong Richards was born at Cheshire in England in the year 1893. His Principles of
Literary Criticism was published in the year 1924. The essay titled “The Two Uses of
Language is taken from this book.  I.A. Richards was a great critic who developed a new way
of reading poetry. His great contribution to literary criticism was the distinction he made
between the ‘two uses of language’ – the referential and the emotive.  I. A. Richards is
considered as one of the founders of modern literary criticism better known as the New
Criticism.  He thought that criticism should emulate the precision of the exact sciences. 
Aesthetics, psychology and semantics were brought together in this new approach to
criticism. Thus “New Criticism” has been developed.

Archetypal Criticism
Archetypal literary criticism is a type of analytical theory that interprets a text by focusing on
recurring myths and archetypes (from the Greek archē, "beginning", and typos, "imprint") in
the narrative, symbols, images, and character types in literary works. Archetypal criticism
argues that archetypes determine the form and function of literary works that a text's meaning
is shaped by cultural and psychological myths. Archetypes are the unknowable basic forms
personified or concretized in recurring images, symbols, or patterns which may include
motifs such as the quest or the heavenly ascent, recognizable character types such as the
trickster or the hero, symbols such as the apple or snake, or images such as crucifixion (as
in King Kong, or Bride of Frankenstein)--all laden with meaning already when employed in a
particular work.
Archetypal critics find New Criticism too atomistic in ignoring intertextual elements and in
approaching the text as if it existed in a vacuum. After all, we recognize story patterns and
symbolic associations at least from other texts we have read, if not innately; we know how to
form assumptions and expectations from encounters with black hats, springtime settings, evil
stepmothers, and so forth. So surely meaning cannot exist solely on the page of a work, nor
can that work be treated as an independent entity.
Archetypal images and story patterns encourage readers (and viewers of films and
advertisements) to participate ritualistically in basic beliefs, fears, and anxieties of their age.
These archetypal features not only constitute the intelligibility of the text but also tap into a
level of desires and anxieties of humankind.
Frazer
The Golden Bough (1890–1915), written by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George
Frazer, was the first influential text dealing with cultural mythologies. Frazer was part of a
group of comparative anthropologists working out of Cambridge University who worked
extensively on the topic. In The Golden Bough Frazer identifies practices and mythological
beliefs shared among primitive religions and modern religions. Frazer argues that the death-
rebirth myth is present in almost all cultural mythologies, and is acted out in terms of
growing seasons and vegetation. The myth is symbolized by the death (i.e., final harvest) and
rebirth (i.e., spring) of the god of vegetation.
Jung
While Frazer's work deals with mythology and archetypes in material terms, the work of Carl
Gustav Jung, the Swiss-born founder of analytical psychology, is, in contrast, immaterial in
its focus. Jung's work theorizes about myths and archetypes in relation to the unconscious, an
inaccessible part of the mind. From a Jungian perspective, myths are the "culturally
elaborated representations of the contents of the deepest recess of the human psyche: the
world of the archetypes" (Walker 4).
Jungian analytical psychology distinguishes between the personal and collective unconscious,
the latter being particularly relevant to archetypal criticism. The collective unconscious, or
the objective psyche as it is less frequently known, is a number of innate thoughts, feelings,
instincts, and memories that reside in the unconsciousness of all people.
Frye
Frye's (Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye) work breaks from both Frazer and Jung in
such a way that it is distinct from its anthropological and psychoanalytical precursors. For
Frye, the death-rebirth myth, that Frazer sees manifest in agriculture and the harvest, is not
ritualistic since it is involuntary, and therefore, must be done. As for Jung, Frye was
uninterested about the collective unconscious on the grounds of feeling it was unnecessary:
since the unconscious is unknowable it cannot be studied. How archetypes came to be was
also of no concern to Frye; rather, the function and effect of archetypes is his interest. For
Frye, literary archetypes play an essential role in refashioning the material universe into an
alternative verbal universe that is humanly intelligible and viable, because it is adapted to
essential human needs and concerns.
There are two basic categories in Frye's framework, comedic and tragic. Each category is
further subdivided into two categories: comedy and romance for the
comedic; tragedy and satire (or ironic) for the tragic. Though he is dismissive of Frazer, Frye
uses the seasons in his archetypal schema. Each season is aligned with a literary genre:
comedy with spring, romance with summer, tragedy with autumn, and satire with winter.
Comedy is aligned with spring because the genre of comedy is characterized by the rebirth of
the hero, revival and resurrection. Also, spring symbolizes the defeat of winter and darkness.
Romance and summer are paired together because summer is the culmination of life in the
seasonal calendar, and the romance genre culminates with some sort of triumph, usually a
marriage. Autumn is the dying stage of the seasonal calendar, which parallels the tragedy
genre because it is, above all, known for the "fall" or demise of the protagonist.
Satire is metonymized with winter on the grounds that satire is a "dark" genre; satire is a
disillusioned and mocking form of the three other genres. It is noted for its darkness,
dissolution, the return of chaos, and the defeat of the heroic figure. The seasons are associated
with narrative parallels:
Summer – comedy. The birth of the hero.
Autumn – tragedy. Movement towards the death or defeat of the hero.
Winter – irony or satire. The hero is absent.
Spring – romance. The rebirth of the hero.
Examples in literature
Femme Fatale: A female character type who brings upon catastrophic and disastrous
events. Eve from the story of Genesis or Pandora from Greek mythology are two such
figures.
The Journey: A narrative archetype where the protagonist must overcome a series of
obstacles before reaching his or her goal. The quintessential journey archetype in Western
culture is arguably Homer's Odyssey.
Archetypal symbols vary more than archetype narratives or character types. The best
archetypal pattern is any symbol with deep roots in a culture's mythology, such as
the forbidden fruit in Genesis or even the poison apple in Snow White. These are examples of
symbols that resonate with archetypal critics.
Archetypes are said, by archetypal critics, to reveal shared roles among universal societies.
This archetype may create a shared imaginary which is defined by many stereotypes that have
not separated themselves from the traditional, biological, religious and mythical framework.

Formalism
Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with
structural purposes of a particular text. It is the study of a text without taking into account any
outside influence. Formalism rejects or sometimes simply "brackets" (i.e., ignores for the
purpose of analysis) notions of culture or societal influence, authorship, and content, and
instead focuses on modes, genres, discourse, and forms.
In literary theory
In literary theory, formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate
the inherent features of a text. These features include not only grammar and syntax but also
literary devices such as meter and tropes. The formalistic approach reduces the importance of
a text's historical, biographical, and cultural context.
Formalism rose to prominence in the early twentieth century as a reaction
against Romanticist theories of literature, which centered on the artist and individual creative
genius, once again placing the text itself in the spotlight to show how the text was indebted to
forms and other works that had preceded it. Two schools of formalist literary criticism
developed, Russian formalism, and soon after Anglo-American New Criticism.
Russian formalism
Russian Formalism refers to the work of the Society for the Study of Poetic Language
(OPOYAZ) founded in 1916 in St. Petersburg (then Petrograd) by Boris Eichenbaum, Viktor
Shklovsky and Yury Tynyanov, and secondarily to the Moscow Linguistic Circle founded in
1914 by Roman Jakobson. (The folklorist Vladimir Propp is also often associated with the
movement.) Eichenbaum's 1926 essay "The Theory of the 'Formal Method'" (translated in
Lemon and Reis) provides an economical overview of the approach the Formalists advocated,
which included the following basic ideas:
 The aim is to produce "a science of literature that would be both independent and
factual," which is sometimes designated by the term poetics.
 Since literature is made of language, linguistics will be a foundational element of the
science of literature.
 Literature is autonomous from external conditions in the sense that literary language
is distinct from ordinary uses of language, not least because it is not (entirely)
communicative.
 Literature has its own history, a history of innovation in formal structures, and is not
determined (as some crude versions of Marxism have it) by external, material history.
 What a work of literature says cannot be separated from how the literary work says it,
and therefore the form and of a work, far from being merely the decorative wrapping
of an isolable content, is in fact part of the content of the work.
According to Eichenbaum, Shklovsky was the lead critic of the group, and Shklovsky
contributed two of their most well-known concepts: defamiliarization (ostraneniye, more
literally, 'estrangement') and the plot/story distinction (syuzhet/fabula). "Defamiliarization" is
one of the crucial ways in which literary language distinguishes itself from ordinary,
communicative language, and is a feature of how art in general works, namely by presenting
the world in a strange and new way that allows us to see things differently. Innovation in
literary history is, according to Shklovsky, partly a matter of finding new techniques of
defamiliarization. The plot/story distinction separates out the sequence of events the work
relates (the story) from the sequence in which those events are presented in the work (the
plot). Both of these concepts are attempts to describe the significance of the form of a literary
work in order to define its "literariness." For the Russian Formalists as a whole, form is what
makes something art to begin with, so in order to understand a work of art as a work of art
(rather than as an ornamented communicative act) one must focus on its form.

Marxist Criticism:
Definitions

Class a classification or grouping typically based on income and education

Alienation a condition Karl Heinrich Marx ascribed to individuals in a capitalist economy
 who lack a sense of identification with their labor and products
Base the means (e.g., tools, machines, factories, natural resources) and relations (e.g.,
Proletariat, Bourgeoisie) or production that shape and are shaped by the
superstructure (the dominant aspect in society)
Superstructure the social institutions such as systems of law, morality, education, and their
related ideologies, that shape and are shaped by the base
Marxism borrows some concepts from the nineteenth-century writings of Karl Heinrich
Marx, though many of Marx’s ideas gained popularity in the twentieth century. A premise of
Marxist criticism is that literature can be viewed as ideological, and that it can be analyzed in
terms of a Base/Superstructure model. Marx argues that the economic means of production
in a society account for its base. A base determines its superstructure. Human institutions and
ideologies that produce art and literary texts comprise the superstructure. Marxist criticism
thus emphasizes class, socioeconomic status, and power relations among various segments of
society.
Marxist criticism places a literary work within the context of class and assumptions about
class. A premise of Marxist criticism is that literature can be viewed as ideological, and that it
can be analyzed in terms of a Base/Superstructure model. Karl Heinrich Marx argues that the
economic means of production within society account for the base. A base determines its
superstructure. Human institutions and ideologies—including those relevant to a patriarchy—
that produce art and literary texts comprise the superstructure. Marxist criticism thus
emphasizes class, socioeconomic status, power relations among various segments of society,
and the representation of those segments. Marxist literary criticism is valuable because it
enables readers to see the role that class plays in the plot of a text.
According to Marxists and to other scholars in fact, literature reflects those social institutions
out of which it emerges and is itself a social institution with a particular ideological function.
Literature reflects class struggle and materialism: think how often the quest for wealth
traditionally defines characters. So Marxists generally view literature "not as works created in
accordance with timeless artistic criteria, but as 'products' of the economic and ideological
determinants specific to that era" (Abrams 149). Literature reflects an author's own class or
analysis of class relations, however piercing or shallow that analysis may be. Marxist
criticism thus emphasizes class, socioeconomic status, power relations among various
segments of society, and the representation of those segments. Marxist literary criticism is
valuable because it enables readers to see the role that class plays in the plot of a text.
The Marxist critic simply is a careful reader or viewer who keeps in mind issues of power
and money, and any of the following kinds of questions:
 What role does class play in the work; what is the author's analysis of class relations?
 How do characters overcome oppression?
 In what ways does the work serve as propaganda for the status quo; or does it try to
undermine it?
 What does the work say about oppression; or are social conflicts ignored or blamed
elsewhere?
  Does the work propose some form of utopian vision as a solution to the problems
encountered in the work?
Key figures in Marxist theory include Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukács, and Louis Althusser.
Although these figures have shaped the concepts and path of Marxist theory, Marxist literary
criticism did not specifically develop from Marxism itself. One who approaches a literary text
from a Marxist perspective may not necessarily support Marxist ideology.

Feminist Criticism (1960s-present)

Feminist criticism is concerned with "the ways in which literature (and other cultural
productions) reinforce or undermine the economic, political, social, and psychological
oppression of women" (Tyson 83). This school of theory looks at how aspects of our culture
are inherently patriarchal (male dominated) and aims to expose misogyny in writing about
women, which can take explicit and implicit forms. Feminist criticism is also concerned with
less obvious forms of marginalization such as the exclusion of women writers from the
traditional literary canon: "...unless the critical or historical point of view is feminist, there is
a tendency to underrepresent the contribution of women writers" (Tyson 84).
COMMON SPACE IN FEMINIST THEORIES
Though a number of different approaches exist in feminist criticism, there exist some areas of
commonality. This list is excerpted from Tyson (92):
 Women are oppressed by patriarchy economically, politically, socially, and
psychologically; patriarchal ideology is the primary means by which women are
oppressed.
 In every domain where patriarchy reigns, woman is other: she is marginalized,
defined only by her difference from male norms and values.
 All of Western (Anglo-European) civilization is deeply rooted in patriarchal ideology,
for example, in the Biblical portrayal of Eve as the origin of sin and death in the
world.
 While biology determines our sex (male or female), culture determines our gender
(scales of masculine and feminine).
 All feminist activity, including feminist theory and literary criticism, has as its
ultimate goal to change the world by prompting gender equality.
 Gender issues play a part in every aspect of human production and experience,
including the production and experience of literature, whether we are consciously
aware of these issues or not.
Feminist criticism has, in many ways, followed what some theorists call the three waves of
feminism:
First Wave Feminism - late 1700s-early 1900's: writers like Mary Wollstonecraft (A
Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792) highlight the inequalities between the sexes.
Activists like Susan B. Anthony and Victoria Woodhull contribute to the women's suffrage
movement, which leads to National Universal Suffrage in 1920 with the passing of the
Nineteenth Amendment.
Second Wave Feminism - early 1960s-late 1970s: building on more equal working conditions
necessary in America during World War II, movements such as the National Organization for
Women (NOW), formed in 1966, cohere feminist political activism. Writers like Simone de
Beauvoir (Le Deuxième Sexe, 1949) and Elaine Showalter established the groundwork for
the dissemination of feminist theories dove-tailed with the American Civil Rights movement.
Third Wave Feminism - early 1990s-present: resisting the perceived essentialist (over
generalized, over simplified) ideologies and a white, heterosexual, middle class focus of
second wave feminism, third wave feminism borrows from post-structural and contemporary
gender and race theories to expand on marginalized populations' experiences. Writers like
Alice Walker work to "...reconcile it [feminism] with the concerns of the black community...
[and] the survival and wholeness of her people, men and women both, and for the promotion
of dialog and community as well as for the valorization of women and of all the varieties of
work women perform" (Tyson 107).