Literary Criticism
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This document outlines several approaches to literary criticism: - Moralist criticism examines the values and human experiences conveyed in a work. Formalist criticism focuses on the artistic elements of a work's structure, style, and form. - Historical criticism analyzes the historical context in which a work was produced. Marxist criticism looks at power struggles and political/economic elements in a work. - Gender/feminist criticism explores how works portray gender relationships and male domination. Reader-response criticism describes the creative process of individual reader's interpretations of a text.
Literary Criticism
- 2. Moralist Criticism Treatment of underlying or overarching issue concerning human experience
- 3. It is concerned with content and values. The approach is as old as literature itself, for literature is a traditional mode of imparting morality, philosophy, and religion. It does not only concern to discover meaning but also to determine whether works of literature are both true and significant.
- 4. Formalist Criticism Overall artistic value of the structure and elements of the selection.
- 5. 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.
- 6. It is the study of a text without taking into account any outside influence. It rejects notions of culture or societal influence, authorship, and content. Its focus is on modes, genres, discourse, and forms.
- 7. It refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. These features include not only grammar and syntax but also literary devices such as meter and tropes. The formalist approach reduces the importance of a text’s historical, biographical, and cultural context.
- 8. Gender CriticismGender relationships of characters
- 9. Feminist
- 10. This school of thought seeks to describe and analyze the ways in which literature portrays the narrative of male domination in regard to female bodies by exploring the economic, social, political, and psychological forces embedded within literature
- 11. Elaine Showalter describes the development of feminist theory as having three phases. 1. The first she calls "feminist critique", in which the feminist reader examines the ideologies behind literary phenomena. 2. The second Showalter calls "gynocriticism", in which the "woman is producer of textual meaning". 3. The last phase she calls "gender theory", in which the "ideological inscription and the literary effects of the sex/gender system are explored".
- 12. Historical CriticismRelevance of the selection to the historical context during which it was produced
- 13. 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.
- 14. Marxist CriticismPower struggles of characters
- 15. It focuses on the economic and political elements of art, often emphasizing the ideological content of literature. It 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.” It can illuminate political and economic dimensions of literature other approaches overlook.
- 16. Reader-Response CriticismPersonal significance of the selection to the reader
- 17. 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 while interpreting a text” and reflects that reading, like writing, is a creative process. Literary texts do not “contain” a meaning; meanings derive only from the act of individual readings.
- 18. Reader-response criticism, then, emphasizes how “religious, cultural, and social values affect readings. It also overlaps with gender criticism in exploring how men and women read the same text with different assumptions.” Though this approach rejects the notion that a single “correct” reading exists for a literary work, it does not consider all readings permissible: “Each text creates limits to its possible interpretations.”
Editor's Notes
- #10: 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 “examin[ing] 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.”