LITERARY

CRITICISM
21ST CENTURY LITERARURE OF
THE PHILIPPINES AND THE
WORLD
LITERARY CRITICISM

is the study, evaluation, and 

interpretation of
 literature.
 Literary Criticism

Two kinds of judgment:

1. Assessment of quality and value.
2. Assessment of cultural, social, and
moral values they display.
Importance of Literary Criticism

1. Appreciation towards a certain

literary piece.
2. Understanding reality from fiction
3. Stimulate emotional responses
 APPROACHES
TO
LITERARY CRITICISM

1. Formalism 3. Sociological
Marxism
2. Gender
4. Philosophical
Feminism
Queer
FORMALISTIC APPROACH
Focuses on the words of the text rather than
facts about the authors life or the historical
milieu in which it was written.
Formalists use to explore the intense
relationships within a poem
Close reading, a careful step-by-step analysis and
explication of a text style, structure, features
unity within a text
...but the formalist critic is
concerned primarily with the work
itself.  Form and content can’t be
separated....
Questions to ask for literary
criticism:
 Who is the protagonist?
 What conflicts does the protagonist experience?
 What is the climax of the story?
 What is the protagonist’s role in the climax?
 How is the setting relevant for this particular story?  
 What is the theme of the story?
 How do character, plot and setting develop the story?
Gender Criticism

Examines how sexual identity influences the

creation and reception of literary works.
Feminist critics believe that culture has been
so completely dominated by men that
literature is full of unexamined ‘male-
produced’ assumptions.
1. How are women’s lives portrayed in the work?
2. Is the form and content of the work influenced by the writer’s gender?
3. How do male and female characters relate to one another? Are these relationships
sources of conflict? Are these conflicts resolved?
4. Does the work challenge or affirm traditional views of women?
5. How do the images of women in the story reflect patriarchal social forces that have
impeded women’s efforts to achieve full equality with men?
6. What marital expectations are imposed on the characters? What effect do these
expectations have?
7. What behavioral expectations are imposed on the characters? What effect do these
expectations have?
8. If a female character were male, how would the story be different (and vice versa)?
9. How does the marital status of a character affect her decisions or happiness?
 FEMINIST APPROACH
 This theory finally examines how women and men are represented and
deals with the importance of women in literature.
 Feminist literary critics have also examined:
1. How women write their own experiences and representations
2. How to make feminist readings visible to readers.
3. How women writers fared in given eras.
4. How traditional texts by women are subversive of the social
order.
 What is the protagonist’s attitude to male and female characters? How
is this evident? How does this affect your response to the characters?
 How are women represented in the text?
 What roles do men and women play within family, work situations, etc.
(hero, breadwinner, helper, cook, sex object)?
 What were the social and historical conditions for women in this period
that might help us understand their roles in the text?
  How do women exercise their power in the text?
  If you were to rewrite the text’s ending, what would happen to the
female protagonist? The male protagonist? ·
 How and to what degree are the women’s lives limited or restricted in
this text?
SOCIOLOGICAL CRITICISM

 examines literature in the cultural, economic, and

political context in which it is written or received.
explores the relationships between the artist and
society.
it looks at the sociological status of the author to
evaluate how the profession of the writer in a
particular milieu affected what was written.
1. What is the relationship between the characters and their society?
2. Does the story address societal issues, such as race, gender, and class?
3. How do social forces shape the power relationships between groups or
classes of people in the story? Who has the power, and who doesn’t?
Why?
4. How does the story reflect the Great American Dream?
5. How does the story reflect urban, rural, or suburban values?
6. What does the work say about economic or social power? Who has it and
who doesn’t? Any Marxist leanings evident?
 Here are some points that a Marxist literary critic
considers when analyzing a text:

 Literature expresses the ideas, beliefs, and values of a culture.

 Literature of any significance actively engages in controversy or argument.
 Literature reveals power struggles (sexual power, economic power, social power, and so
on) and how this operates and with what consequences.
 Literature reveals how the author, reader, and characters demonstrate an awareness or
lack or awareness of their economic and social situations and what oppresses them.
 Literature and authors can manipulate readers into sympathizing with rather than
critiquing the dominant (and oppressive) social order.
 What or whose ideological values structure the text? How are these evident? Who
has power (and of what sorts) in the texts? How does this power operate and change
as the text progresses?
 What “master” or dominant social narratives are perpetuated or critiqued and
disrupted in the text? (eg. the American Dream, whereby, with hard work and
individual effort, a poor person can achieve success)
 To what degree does the protagonist or other characters believe in and live by the
prevailing social order?
 At what point do characters recognize the oppressiveness of the prevailing social
order? How do they respond? What affects their options for changing things?
 How is social objectification evident and how does it operate in the text?
 What are the social forces that affect the author’s writing or the text’s marketing and
reception?
BIOGRAPHICAL CRITICISM

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.
sees how much an author’s experience shapes—
both directly and indirectly—what he or she
creates.
1. What aspects of the author’s personal life are relevant to this
story?
2. Which of the author’s stated beliefs are reflected in the work?
3. Does the writer challenge or reflect the values of her
contemporaries?
4. What seem to be the author’s major concerns? Do they reflect
any of the writer’s personal experiences?
5. Do any of the events in the story correspond to events
experienced by the author?
6. Do any of the characters in the story correspond to real people?
 Historical Criticism

 explaining a work’s literary significance for today’s readers than

with helping us understand the work by recreating, as nearly as
possible, the exact meaning and impact it had on its original
audience.
 explores how the time and place of its creation affected its
meaning.
 exploring the possible ways in which the meaning of the text has
changed over time
1. How does it reflect the time in which it was written?
2. How accurately does the story depict the time in which it is set?
3. What literary or historical influences helped to shape the form and content of the work?
4. How does the story reflect the attitudes and beliefs of the time in which it was written or
set? (Think beliefs and attitudes related to race, religion, politics, gender, society,
philosophy, etc.)
5. What other literary works may have influenced the writer?
6. What historical events or movements might have influenced this writer?
7. How would characters and events in this story have been viewed by the writer’s
contemporaries?
8. Does the story reveal or contradict the prevailing values of the time in which it was
written? Does it provide an opposing view of the period’s prevailing values?
9. How important is it the historical context (the work’s and the reader’s) to interpreting the
work?
 PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM

is applied to an idea which we have already adopted,

but which we remark that we have not deliberately
adopted.
the process which led to the acceptance of the ideas
 It supposes that this process is subject to the control
of the will; for its whole purpose is correction, and
one cannot correct what one cannot control.
1. What view of life does the story present? Which character best articulates this
viewpoint?
2. According to this work’s view of life, what is mankind’s relationship to God? To the
universe?
3. What moral statement, if any, does this story make? Is it explicit or implicit?
4. What is the author’s attitude toward his world? Toward fate? Toward God?
5. What is the author’s conception of good and evil?
6. What does the work say about the nature of good or evil?
7. Is good rewarded? Is evil punished?
8. Is the word ordered or random?
9. What does the work say about human nature?