Scribd
Upload
22 views

Module 3

Uploaded by

NEAH SANTIAGO
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
22 views

Module 3

Uploaded by

NEAH SANTIAGO
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 13

ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC AND

PROFESSIONAL PURPOSES
Approaches in Literary Criticism
Objective
Assessment
Approaches in
Literary
Criticism
1. Formalist Criticism

• - This approach regards literature as “a


unique form of human knowledge that needs
to be examined on its own terms.” All the
elements necessary for understanding the
work are contained within the work itself. Of
particular interest to the formalist critic are
the elements of form—style, structure, tone,
imagery, etc.— that are found within the text.
A primary goal for formalist critics is to
determine how such elements work together
with the text’s content to shape its effects
upon readers.
2. Gender Criticism

• - This approach “examines how sexual identity influences the


creation and reception of literary works.” Originally an offshoot of
feminist movements, gender criticism today includes a number of
approaches, including the so-called “masculinist” approach recently
advocated by poet Robert Bly. The bulk of gender criticism,
however, is feminist and takes as a central precept that the
patriarchal attitudes that have dominated western thought have
resulted, consciously or unconsciously, in literature “full of
unexamined ‘male-produced’ assumptions.” Feminist criticism
attempts to correct this imbalance by analyzing and combatting
such attitudes—by questioning, for example, why none of the
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 “examining how the images of men and women
in imaginative literature reflect or reject the social forces that have
historically kept the sexes from achieving total equality.”
3. Historical Criticism

• - This approach “seeks to


understand a literary work by
investigating the social, cultural,
and intellectual context that
produced it—a context that
necessarily includes the artist’s
biography and milieu.” A key goal
for historical critics is to
understand the effect of a literary
work upon its original readers.
4. Reader-Response Criticism

• - This approach takes as a


fundamental tenet that
“literature” exists not as an
artifact upon a printed page but
as a transaction between the
physical text and the mind of a
reader. It attempts “to describe
what happens in the reader’s
mind wh
5. Media Criticism

• - It is the act of closely examining and


judging the media. When we examine the
media and various media stories, we
often find instances of media bias. Media
bias is the perception that the media is
reporting the news in a partial or
prejudiced manner. Media bias occurs
when the media seems to push a specific
viewpoint, rather than reporting the news
objectively. Keep in mind that media bias
also occurs when the media seems to
ignore an important aspect of the story.
This is the case in the news story about
the puppies.
6. Marxist Criticism

• - It focuses on the economic and political


elements of art, often emphasizing the ideological
content of literature; because Marxist criticism
often argues that all art is political, either
challenging or endorsing (by silence) the status
quo, it is frequently evaluative and judgmental, a
tendency that “can lead to reductive judgment, as
when Soviet critics rated Jack London better than
William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Edith
Wharton, and Henry James, because he
illustrated the principles of class struggle more
clearly.” Nonetheless, Marxist criticism “can
illuminate political and economic dimensions of
literature other approaches overlook.”
7. Structuralism

• - It focused on how human behavior is


determined by social, cultural and
psychological structures. It tended to
offer a single unified approach to
human life that would embrace all
disciplines. The essence of
structuralism is the belief that “things
cannot be understood in isolation,
they have to be seen in the context of
larger structures which contain them.
For example, the structuralist analysis
of Donne’s poem, Good Morrow,
demands more focus on the relevant
genre, the concept of courtly love,
rather than on the close reading of the
formal elements of the text.

You might also like