LITERARY CRITICISM

JHCSC

Summer 2023
 Literary Criticism: objectives
• Detail the approaches to lit cri to be used to
study a literary piece;
• Use the approaches before, during and after
reading the piece;
• Explore specific approach to read, interpret,
evaluate, analyze, integrate a lit piece; and
• Produce an analysis via an essay.
 Literary criticism
• APPROACHES TO LIT CRI

Source: Skylar Hamilton Burris

 Differentiate the approaches
• Formalism • Symbolic/Archetypal
• Deconstructionism • Psychological
• Historical • Marxist
• Intertextual • Feminist
• Mimetic
 The formalist approach

Formalist 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.
 The deconstructionist approach

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.
 The historical approach

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.
 The intertextual approach

Intertextual 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.
 The reader response approach

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.
 The mimetic approach

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.
The symbolism or archetypal approach

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.
 The Marxist approach

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.
 The feminist approach

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.
References:

• Dobie, Ann B.  (2009). Theory into Practice: An Intro to

Literary Criticism. Australia: Wadsworth Cengage
Learning.
• Fry, Paul H. (2013). Theory of Literature. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
• Habib, M. R. (2011). A History of Literary Criticism: From
Plato to Present. UK: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing.
• https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/owlprint/722/
• http://editorskylar.com/litcrit.html
•
RUBRIC FOR A LITERARY CRITIQUE
 METHODOLOGY OF TEACHING
LITERATURE

The Handbook of English Linguistics

Edited by Bas Aarts, April McMahon
Copyright ©2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
 Language and literature: Stylistics
Peter Stockwell
1 Introduction Much of this contentiousness has
arisen out of the historical baggage
It might seem obvious to the accumulated by institutionalized
non-specialist that literature, the disciplines, out of territorial self-
most culturally valued and interest, and (it must be said) out of
aesthetically prestigious form of intellectual laziness, as well as the
language practice, is best studied legitimate arguments around the
validity and scope of linguistics.
using the resources developed in
the field of linguistics. However,
this truism has not always been
obvious to a wide range of
disciplines, all of which claim a
different stake in the study of the
literary.
 Stylistics
Peter Stockwell
Stylistics is the discipline
that has bridged these areas,
and stylisticians have found
themselves engaged in
arguments not only with
literary critics, cultural
theorists, philosophers,
poets, novelists and
dramatists, but also with
practitioners of linguistics.
On the one hand it is argued that
the artistic endeavor of literature
cannot be amenable to the sort of
rigorous analytical procedures
offered by linguistic analysis; on
the other hand it is argued that
descriptive linguistics cannot be
applied to artificial texts and
readerly interpretations.
 Stylistics
Peter Stockwell

For one group, stylistics

simply and reductively
dissects its object; for the
other, the object simply
cannot be described in a
scientifically replicable and
transparent manner.
 Stylistics
Peter Stockwell
The multivalent position of
stylistics has its roots in the
histories of language study
and literary criticism, and
the institutional make-up of
modern universities and
department divisions which
fossilize particular
disciplinary boundaries and
configurations.
Stylistics has therefore come to
be regarded as an essentially
interdisciplinary field, drawing
on the different sub-disciplines
within linguistics to varying
degrees, as well as on fields
recognizable to literary critics,
such as philosophy, cultural
theory, sociology, history, and
psychology.
 Stylistics
Peter Stockwell
However, by the end of this
article, I would like to argue
that stylistics is in fact a
single coherent discipline: in
fact, is naturally the central
discipline of literary study,
against which all other
current approaches are
partial or interdisciplinary.
In order to arrive at that
position, we must consider the
history of stylistics, the status
of stylistic analysis, some
examples of stylistic practice,
and a review of the latest
paradigms and principles in
stylistics research.
 2 A Brief History of Stylistics
Peter Stockwell
Broadly viewed as the
analysis of linguistic form
and its social effects,
stylistics can be seen as a
direct descendant of rhetoric,
which constituted a major
part of the training of
educated men for most of
the past two and a half
millennia.
Specifically, stylistics overlaps
considerably with ‘elocutio,’
the selection of style for an
appropriate effect. (The other
four divisions of rhetorical
skill were: invention, the
organization of ideas,
memory, and delivery).
In
 2 A Brief History of Stylistics
Peter Stockwell
It is important to note the
dual aspect in the discipline:
rhetoric was concerned not
only with linguistic form but
also inextricably with the
notion of the appropriacy of
the form in context. The
context was typically and
primarily for spoken
discourse, though rhetorical
discussion was also applied
to written texts.
In the course of the twentieth
century, stylistics developed
with an almost exclusive
focus on written literature,
while at the same time the
link between formalism and
readerly effects became
weakened.
In
 2 A Brief History of Stylistics
Peter Stockwell

According to Fowler (1981), The latter, though also

there were three direct encompassing textual editing
influences which produced
and manuscript scholarship,
stylistics: Anglo-American
mainly focused on the
literary criticism; the emerging
field of linguistics; and
‘practical criticism’ of short
European, especially French, poems or extracts from longer
structuralism. Early twentieth- prose texts.
century literary criticism tended
either to be historical and based
in author-intention, or more In
focused on the texture of the
language of literary works.
• Such ‘close reading’ was largely informed by a few descriptive terms
from the traditional school-taught grammar of parts of speech.
• This British practical criticism developed in the US into the ‘New
Criticism.’ Where the former placed readerly interpretation first with
the close reading to support it, the New Critics focused on ‘the
words themselves.’
• Famous essays by Wimsatt and Beardsley (1954a, 1954b) and others
argued for the exclusion of any considerations of authorial intention
or the historical conditions of contemporary production of literary
works, and also against any psychologizing of the literary reading
experience.
• Despite the rather uncompromising stance taken by New Criticism, the belief that a
literary work was sufficient unto itself did not amount to a purely descriptive account of
literary texts.
• Interpretative decisions and resolutions simply remained implicit in terms of the social
conditions and ideologies that informed them, while being dressed up in an apparent
descriptive objectivity. A more rigorous descriptive account was being developed in the
field of linguistics.
• As Fowler (1981) points out, Bloomfieldian structural linguistics evolving between the
1920s and 1950s offered a precise terminology and framework for detailed analyses of
metrical structure in poetry.
• Chomskyan transformational-generative grammar from 1957 onwards provided a
means of exploring poetic syntactic structure with far more sensitivity to detail than had
ever been possible in literary criticism.
• And Hallidayan functionalism added a socio-cultural dimension that began to explain
stylistic choices in literary texts.
• The third area which influenced stylistics was European structuralism, aris-
ing out of Saussurean semiology and Russian Formalism through the work
of Jakobson, Barthes, Todorov, Levi-Strauss, and Culler, among others.
• Branded ‘formalists’ by their detractors, many of the main concerns of
modern poetics were in fact developed by the Moscow Linguistic Circle,
the St Petersburg group Opayaz, and later the Prague School linguists.
• These concerns included studies of metaphor, the foregrounding and
dominance of theme, trope and other linguistic variables, narrative
morphology, the effects of literary defamiliarization, and the use of theme
and rheme to delineate perspective in sentences.
• The Formalists called themselves ‘literary linguists,’ in recognition of their
belief that linguistics was the necessary ground for literary study.
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