Different Approaches of Literary Criticism

Formalism / New Criticism is placed at the center because it deals primarily with the
text and not with any of the outside considerations such as author, the real world,
audience, or other literature. Meaning, formalists argue, is inherent in the text.
Because meaning is determinant, all other considerations are irrelevant. It was also
once called New Criticism, which involves a close reading of a text.
When reading the literary analysis of a New Critic, you might come across the
following terms:

 Tension is the integral unity of the work and often involves irony or paradox.
 Formalistic critics refer to the belief that the meaning of a work may be
determined by the author's intention as the intentional fallacy.
 In New Criticism, the belief that the meaning or value of a work may be
determined by its effect on the reader is called the affective fallacy.
 The external form is the outer trappings of a work. For example, in a poem, the
external form would include the rhyme scheme, meter, and stanza form.
 The objective correlative, a term originated by T.S. Eliot, refers to a collection of
objects, situations, or events that immediately evoke a specific emotion.

Deconstructionist criticism also subject texts to careful, formal analysis; however,

they reach an opposite conclusion: there is no meaning in language. They believe that
a piece of writing does not have one meaning and the meaning itself is dependent on
the reader.

Historical criticism relies heavily on the author and his world. In the historical view,
it is important to understand the author and his world in order to understand his
intent and to make sense of his work. In this view, the work is informed by the
author’s beliefs, prejudices, time, and history, and to fully understand the work, we
must understand the author and his age.

Inter-textual criticism is concerned with comparing the work in question to other

literature, to get a broader picture. One may compare a piece of work to another of the
same author, same literary movement or same historical background.

Reader-response criticism is concerned with how the work is viewed by the

audience. In this approach, the reader creates meaning, not the author or the work.
Once the work is published, the author is no longer relevant.
Mimetic criticism seeks to see how well a work accords with the real world. How does
a piece of literature accurately portrays the truth is the main contention of this literary
approach.

Psychological criticism attempts to explain the behavioral underpinnings of the

characters within the selection, analyzing the actions and thoughts committed fall
under any of the identifiable neuroses, whether a psychological disorder is evident
among them. Aside from the characters, the author and even the reader may be
criticized as why they exhibit certain behavior during the actual writing and reading
experience.

Archetypal criticism assumes that there is a collection of symbols, images,

characters, and motifs (i.e. archetypes) that evokes basically the same response in all
people which seem to bind all people regardless of culture and race worldwide. This
can also be labelled as Mythological and Symbolic criticisms. Their critics identify
these archetypal patterns and discuss how they function in the works.
Some examples of archetypes follow:

 archetypal women - the Good Mother, the Terrible Mother, and the Soul Mate
(such as the Virgin Mary)
 water - creation, birth-death-resurrection, purification, redemption, fertility,
growth
 garden - paradise (Eden), innocence, fertility
 desert - spiritual emptiness, death, hopelessness
 red - blood, sacrifice, passion, disorder
 green - growth, fertility
 black - chaos, death, evil
 serpent - evil, sensuality, mystery, wisdom, destruction
 seven - perfection
 hero archetype - The hero is involved in a quest (in which he overcomes
obstacles). He experiences initiation (involving a separation, transformation,
and return), and finally he serves as a scapegoat, that is, he dies to atone.

Marxist criticism concerns with the analysis of the clash of opposing social classes in
society, namely; the ruling class (bourgeoisie) and the working class (proletariat) as it
shaped the events that transpired in the story.
Feminist criticism concerns with the woman’s role in society as portrayed through
texts. It typically analyzes the plight of woman as depicted in the story. Generally, it
criticizes the notion of woman as a construct through literature.

In A Literature of Their Own, Elaine Showalter argued that literary subcultures

all go through three major phases of development:

 The Feminine Stage involves "imitation of the prevailing modes of the dominant
tradition" and "internalization of its standards."
 The Feminist Stage involves "protest against these standards and values and
advocacy of minority rights...."
 The Female Stage is the "phase of self-discovery, a turning inwards freed from
some of the dependency of opposition, a search for identity.

The Moral / Philosophical Approach

Moral / philosophical critics believe that the larger purpose of literature is to teach
morality and to probe philosophical issues. Practitioners include Matthew Arnold, who
argued works must have "high seriousness," Plato, who insisted literature must
exhibit moralism and utilitarianism, and Horace, who felt literature should be
"delightful and instructive."
Historical criticism, literary criticism in the light of historical evidence or based on
the context in which a work was written, including facts about the author’s life and
the historical and social circumstances of the time. This is in contrast to other types of
criticism, such as textual and formal, in which emphasis is placed on examining the
text itself while outside influences on the text are disregarded. New Historicism is a
particular form of historical criticism. See also literary criticism.

Dramatism, a technique of analysis of language and thought as basically modes of

action rather than as means of conveying information. It is associated with the critic
Kenneth Burke.

Biblical criticism, discipline that studies textual, compositional, and historical

questions surrounding the Old and New Testaments. Biblical criticism lays the
groundwork for meaningful interpretation of the Bible.

Intentionality, in modern literary theory, the study of authorial intention in a literary

work and its corresponding relevance to textual interpretation. With the ascendancy of
New Criticism after World War I, much of the debate on intentionality addressed
whether information external to the text could help determine the writer’s purpose and
whether it was even possible or desirable to determine that purpose.

Formalism, also called Russian Formalism, Russian Russky Formalism, innovative

20th-century Russian school of literary criticism. It began in two groups: OPOYAZ, an
acronym for Russian words meaning Society for the Study of Poetic Language, founded
in 1916 at St. Petersburg (later Leningrad) and led by Viktor Shklovsky; and the
Moscow Linguistic Circle, founded in 1915. Other members of the groups included
Osip Brik, Boris Eikhenbaum, Yury Tynianov, and Boris Tomashevsky.

Deconstruction, form of philosophical and literary analysis, derived mainly from work
begun in the 1960s by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, that questions the
fundamental conceptual distinctions, or “oppositions,” in Western philosophy through
a close examination of the language and logic of philosophical and literary texts.
Deconstruction in philosophy
The oppositions challenged by deconstruction, which have been inherent in Western
philosophy since the time of the ancient Greeks, are characteristically “binary” and
“hierarchical,” involving a pair of terms in which one member of the pair is assumed to
be primary or fundamental, the other secondary or derivative.
Deconstruction in literary studies
Deconstruction’s reception was coloured by its intellectual predecessors, most notably
structuralism and New Criticism. Beginning in France in the 1950s, the structuralist
movement in anthropology analyzed various cultural phenomena as general systems
of “signs” and attempted to develop “metalanguages” of terms and concepts in which
the different sign systems could be described. Structuralist methods were soon applied
to other areas of the social sciences and humanities, including literary studies.

Freudian criticism, literary criticism that uses the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund
Freud to interpret a work in terms of the known psychological conflicts of its author
or, conversely, to construct the author’s psychic life from unconscious revelations in
his work.