KNOW-HOWS IN CRITIQUING A LITERARY WORK

“Literary criticism involves

the reading, interpretation, and
commentary of a specific text or
texts which have been
designated as literature.”
 "Literary criticism is the
evaluation of literary works.
This includes the classification
by genre, analysis of structure,
and judgement of value."

Beckson & Ganz

 "Literary criticism asks what
literature is, what it does, and
what it is worth."
 “ Literary criticism is the
method used to interpret any
given work of literature. The
different schools of literary
criticism provide us with
lenses which ultimately reveal
important aspects of the
literary work.’’
- To take a critical eye or sharper
look at literature.

- Focusing in on the literature

and doing a close reading in
order to perform criticism.
- 1. It helps us understand what is
essential about the text.
- 2. It allows us to see the
relationship between the author,
reader, and text
- 3. It enhances the enjoyment of
our reading of the literary work.
- Literary critics use the term
“lenses” to discuss the
perspective through which they
will analyze the work of
literature.
▪ Literary criticism is a view or
opinion on what a particular
written work means. It is about
the meanings that a reader finds
in an author's literature.
• Literary theories can offer various
ways of reading, interpreting, and
analyzing literature, but they do
not offer any easy solutions as to
what literature is, or what its study
should be.
• Ideas that act as different “lenses”
that critics use to view and talk
about art, literature, and even
culture.
• The different lenses also allow
critics to focus on particular
aspects of a work of literature
that they consider important.
▪ These theories aim to explain, or at
times demystify, some of the
assumptions or beliefs implicit in
literature and literary criticism.
▪ Literary theory also addresses
questions of what makes literary
language literary, as well as the
structures of literary language and
literary texts, and how these work.
▪ Literary theory is also concerned with
the study of the function of the
literary text in social and cultural
terms, which in turn leads to a
construction of its value.
 “Big Questions” about Literature

Literary Theories/Critical Theories are attempts to

answer some of these questions:

▪ What is “literature”?
▪ Does the author matter?
▪ What are the influences on how we read a text?
▪ How do we make connections to others in distant
lands and times through a work of literature?
 The Basic Idea
▪ The point of criticism is to argue your point of view
on a work of literature.
▪ You don’t have to “criticize” a text (but you can)
▪ You do have to analyze a text and support your
assertions with specific evidence from experts and
the text.
▪ It’s crucial to go beyond plot development and into
more abstract, higher-level thinking like theme, tone,
purpose, etc.
 The Basic Idea

▪ A critical analysis is an in-depth examination of

some aspect of the literary work
▪ you may examine any element of the text:
character development, conflicts, narrative point
of view, etc.
▪ Literary critical theories inform us of certain ways
to approach big ideas in the novel.
 The Basic Idea
▪ There are many different approaches we can take
to critical analysis
▪ Literary theories provide a framework for our
discussion of a text
▪ We don’t have to identify the theory we’re using,
though.
▪ We use it as a starting point for our own ideas
and opinions
LITERARY THEORIES/
APPROACHES
WHAT IS
FEMINISM?
▪Has three important FEMINISM
definitions:
 FEMINISM
▪1.The theory of the
political, economic, and
social equality of the
sexes.
 FEMINISM
Feminism DOES NOT
just refer to the
experience of women.
 FEMINISM
It is not just about
advancing the rights and
equality of women.
 FEMINISM
It is really about bringing
BOTH of the sexes to an equal
level in terms of political
power, economic power, and
social freedom/ liberation.
 FEMINISM
2. Organized activity
on behalf of women’s
rights and interests.
This is usually the FEMINISM
mental image that we
often have of what it
means to be a feminist.
 FEMINISM
3. Against gender
stereotypes and
gender-based
observations.
Stereotypes harm FEMINISM
both men and
women.
▪ “LITERATUREis largely a
male-dominated domain.” FEMINISM

▪ Nobel Prize Laureates and

National Artists for
Literature are generally
populated by men.
FEMINISM

▪ VIRGINIA WOOLF’S “A Room of One’s

Own”

hypothesized that if any woman has the

same literary prowess as Shakespeare, she
would have been deprived of the opportunity
to write and gain fame.
 COMMON SPACE IN
▪ Though a number of different FEMINIST THEORIES
approaches exist in feminist
criticism, there exist some areas of
commonality. This list is excerpted
from Tyson:
 COMMON SPACE IN
FEMINIST THEORIES
1. Women are oppressed by
patriarchy economically, politically,
socially, and psychologically;
patriarchal ideology is the primary
means by which women are
oppressed.
 COMMON SPACE IN
FEMINIST THEORIES

2. In every domain where patriarchy

reigns, woman is other: she is
marginalized, defined only by her
difference from male norms and
values.
 COMMON SPACE IN
FEMINIST THEORIES

3. 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.
 COMMON SPACE IN
FEMINIST THEORIES

4. While biology determines our sex

(male or female), culture determines
our gender (scales of masculine and
feminine).
 COMMON SPACE IN
FEMINIST THEORIES

5. All feminist activity, including

feminist theory and literary criticism,
has as its ultimate goal to change the
world by prompting gender equality.
 COMMON SPACE IN
FEMINIST THEORIES

6. 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 (91).
3 WAVES
FEMINISM
 Late 1700s-early
1900's: writers like
Mary Wollstonecraft
(A Vindication of the FIRST WAVE
Rights of Women,
1792) highlight the
FEMINISM
inequalities between
the sexes.
 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. SECOND WAVE
FEMINISM
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.
 Early 1990s-present: resisting the
perceived essentialist (over generalized, over
simplified) ideologies and a white, heterosexual, THIRD WAVE
middle class focus of second wave feminism,
third wave feminism borrows from post-
FEMINISM
structural and contemporary gender and race
theories to expand on marginalized populations'
experiences.
 Involves looking at literature
FEMINIST
through the lens of a feminist CRITICISM
perspective; looking at the
relationships between men and
women, power dynamics, money
dynamics, social and cultural
freedom, and gender-based
expectations.
 FEMINIST
1. Literary criticism informed CRITICISM
by feminist theory, or more
broadly, by the politics of
feminism.
 FEMINIST
CRITICISM
- We are looking at the interaction
between genders and relate it to
the oppression of women in the
system of patriarchy.
 FEMINIST
2. It uses feminist principles and CRITICISM
ideology to critiques the language
of literature.
 FEMINIST
CRITICISM
*critique – does not necessarily
mean to talk about the negatives
but instead, to look closer/perform
a closer reading.
 FEMINIST
We may look at the author’s CRITICISM
messages and ideologies we can
find in the text that are related to
the dynamics between the
genders: the political, economic,
and social inequality of the sexes.
 FEMINIST
3. This school of thought seeks CRITICISM
to analyze the ways in which
literature portrays the narrative
of male domination by exploiting
the economic, social, political,
and psychological forces
embedded within literature.
 FEMINIST
economic, social, political, and CRITICISM
psychological forces

-these four ideas are what we

should be looking for when we are
reading a certain literary piece.
 Feminist criticism attempts to correct
this imbalance by analyzing and
combatting such attitudes—by FEMINIST
questioning, for example, why none of the CRITICISM
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
FEMINIST
“examin[ing] how the images of men and CRITICISM
women in imaginative literature reflect or
reject the social forces that have
historically kept the sexes from achieving
total equality.”
Like the other approaches, FEMINIST
feminist approach to literary CRITICISM
criticism reads a text within a
social context.
 FEMINIST
In particular, it analyzes textual
CRITICISM
representations from the woman’s
perspective, such as those that
involve the stereotyping and
“objectification” of womanhood.
▪ How is the relationship between men
and women portrayed?
▪ What are the power relationships TYPICAL
between men and women (or characters
assuming male/female roles)? QUESTIONS:
▪ How are male and female roles defined?
▪ What constitutes masculinity and
femininity?
▪ How do characters embody these traits?
▪ Do characters take on traits from
opposite genders? How so? How does
this change others’ reactions to them?
TYPICAL
▪ What does the work reveal about the QUESTIONS:
operations (economically, politically,
socially, or psychologically) of patriarchy?

▪ What does the work imply about the

possibilities of sisterhood as a mode of
resisting patriarchy?
▪ What does the work say about women's
creativity?
TYPICAL
▪ What does the history of the work's
reception by the public and by the critics
QUESTIONS:
tell us about the operation of patriarchy?

▪ What role does the work play in terms of

women's literary history and literary
tradition? (Tyson)
▪ To what extent does the representation
of women (and men) in the work reflect
the time and place in which the work
was written? TYPICAL
QUESTIONS:
▪ How are the relationships between men
and women presented in the work?

▪ Does the author present the work from

within a predominantly male or female
perspective?
▪ How do the facts of the author’s life
relate to the presentation of men and TYPICAL
women in the work? QUESTIONS:
▪ How do other works by the author
correspond to this one in their depiction
of the power relationships between men
and women?
KARL
MARX
KARL MARX
Karl Marx (1818-1883) was primarily a
theorist and historian. After examining social
organization in a scientific way (thereby creating
a methodology for social science: political
science), he perceived human history to have
consisted of a series of struggles between
classes--between the oppressed and the
oppressing.
MARXIST
CRITICISM
 KARL MARX

• German philosopher (1818-1883)

• Most notable work is The
Communist Manifesto (1848)

• “All I know is I am no Marxist”

 MARX’S VIEWS
 Was a materialist – to understand society, we have
to understand how it organizes production
 Forces of Production – land, technology, skills,
knowledge, etc.
 Social Relations of Production – who controls the
forces of production, and how
 The forces of production will come into conflict with
the relations of production
 CLASS STRUCTURE OF SOCIETY
▪ Those is the top class control the wealth, and those
in the lower class do most of the work that produces
the wealth = exploitation
▪ This exploitation is the basis of class conflict
▪ Historical examples of class conflict i.e. slave vs slave
holder, feudal lord vs peasant; can you think of
modern examples??
▪ Capitalists (bourgeoisie) vs workers (proletariat) are
Marx’s focus
▪ Bourgeoisie alienates proletariat
▪ Those in the top class control the wealth,
and those in the lower class do most of the
work that produces the wealth = exploitation
▪ This exploitation is the basis of class conflict
▪ Historical examples of class conflict i.e.
slave vs slave holder, feudal lord vs peasant
▪ Capitalists (bourgeoisie) vs workers
(proletariat) are Marx’s focus
▪ Bourgeoisie alienates proletariat
 THE ECONOMIC BASE AND
SUPERSTRUCTURE

▪ Economic Base – the forces and relations of production

(i.e. the bourgeoisie and proletariat)
▪ Superstructure – the legal and political structures of
society
▪ The economic base influences the superstructure;
economic power is the basis of all other types of power
▪ The bourgeoisie, therefore, control society’s institutions
to help maintain the status quo (capitalism)
 DIALECTICAL UNDERSTANDING OF
CLASS SOCIETY

 Eventually the bourgeoisie and proletariat will conflict

giving rise to a new economic system
 The large workforce under capitalism will realize they
are being exploited, and will mobilize a start a popular
revolution
 This will create a new social order where the workers
are in charge of production
MARXISM IN LITERATURE
 COMMUNISM/SOCIALISM
 In his writings, Marx says very little about what a socialist or
communist society would look like

What he does say:

 Cooperation rather than division
 Economy democratically controlled
 Social equality exists and all forms of oppression would disappear
 The environment would be respected
 No profits for a minority of people
 Work would be fulfilling
MARXIST CRITICISM
▪According to Marxists, literature reflects
those social institutions out of which it
emerges and is itself a social institution with
a particular ideological function.
 MARXIST CRITICISM
▪Tend to focus on the representation of class
conflict as well as the reinforcement of class
distinctions.
 MARXIST CRITICISM
▪Champions authors sympathetic to the working
classes and authors whose work challenges
economic equalities found in capitalist societies.

▪ Theories arising from the Marxist paradigm have

sought new ways of understanding the relationship
between economic and cultural production as well
as literature.
 MARXIST CRITICISM
▪ Marxist theorist often champion authors
sympathetic to the working classes and
authors whose work challenges economic
equalities found in capitalist societies.
MARXIST CRITICISM
▪ 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
▪ Based on the theories of Karl Marx (and so influenced by
philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel), this school
concerns itself with class differences, economic and
otherwise, as well as the implications and complications
of the capitalist system.
▪ Is there an outright rejection of socialism in the work?
▪ Does the text raise fundamental criticism about the
emptiness of life in bourgeois society?
MARXIST CRITICISM
▪ How well is the fate of the individual linked organically to the
nature of societal forces? What are the work's conflicting
forces?
▪ At what points are actions or solutions to problems forced or
unreal?
▪ What role does class play in the work; what is the author's
analysis of class relations?
▪ How do characters overcome oppression?
MARXIST CRITICISM
▪ 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?
 MARXIST CRITICISM
▪ What is the economic situation of the characters, and
what happens to them as a result of this status?
▪ To what extent are the lives of characters influenced or
determined by social (i.e. how an individual is expected to
behave in a given circumstance), political (i.e. the
directives of the state), and economic (i.e. the interplay
between production, supply, and demand) forces?
▪ What social forces and institutions are represented in the
work?
▪ How do you think historical
influences are reflected in the
text?

▪ What key historical figures appear

or are alluded to in the text?

▪ What commonly held beliefs of

the period are shown in the text?
▪ How are discoveries/ inventions/
technology of the period evident in
the text?

▪ What do the historical elements of

the text teach us about the actual
history of the period?
▪ What are the author's political
inclinations? Do we see any
reflections on historical events in
this work?

▪ What aspects of culture are

important to this work?
▪ This approach stresses the attachment or strong
connectionism of an individual reader’s mind to the
piece at hand. The reader herself can put meaning and
interpret every part of the text. The text is nothing unless
it has been read and interpreted by the reader.
▪ The reader’s reaction and interaction made out of the
piece recreates and develops a further depth of
meaning. The manner a poem or a short story is read or
delivered strengthens and invokes visuals and
imagination to a much sought individual appreciation.
▪ In such a case, a reader who happened to read the
same text may find the experience different from the first
against the second time.
References
▪ Feminist Literary Criticism Lecture by Maureen Wiley
(www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lc7cJuaBtU)
▪ "What is the feminist perspective of "Girl"?" eNotes, 14 Oct. 2010,
https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-feminist-perspective-girl-207355.
Accessed 18 July 2018.
▪ https://public.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/marxist.crit.html
▪ https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-difference-between-old-historicism-new-
73643. Accessed 20 July 2018
 LECTURE ON LITERARY CRITICISM (LITERARY
APPROACHES)

Prepared by

ANGELICA P. JOVEN, LPT

CBSUA-CDE Instructor