Notesale: Turn your study into money

Document Preview

Extracts from the notes are below, to see the PDF you'll receive please use the links above

---

Literary Criticism:
An Overview of Approaches
The Three-fold Purpose of Criticism:
To help us solve a problem in the reading
...

To enable us craft interpretative, yet scholarly judgments about literature
...
Historical / Biographical Approach: Historical / Biographical critics see works as the reflection of an
author’s life and times (or of the characters’ life and times)
...

Advantages: This approach works well for some works--like those of Alexander Pope, John Dryden, and Milton-which are obviously political in nature
...

Disadvantages: New Critics refer to the historical / biographical critic’s belief that the meaning or value of a work
may be determined by the author’s intention as “the intentional fallacy
...

A Checklist of Historical Critical Questions:
When was the work written? When was it published? How was it received by the critics and public and why?
What does the work’s reception reveal about the standards of taste and value during the time it was
published and reviewed?
What social attitudes and cultural practices related to the action of the word were prevalent during the time
the work was written and published?
What kinds of power relationships does the word describe, reflect, or embody?
How do the power relationships reflected in the literary work manifest themselves in the cultural practices
and social institutions prevalent during the time the work was written and published?
To what extent can we understand the past as it is reflected in the literary work? To what extent does the
work reflect differences from the ideas and values of its time?
Checklist of Biographical Critical Questions:
What influences—people, ideas, movements, events—evident in the writer’s life does the work reflect?
To what extent are the events described in the word a direct transfer of what happened in the writer’s actual
life?
What modifications of the actual events has the writer made in the literary work? For what possibly
purposes?
What are the effects of the differences between actual events and their literary transformation in the poem,
story, play, or essay?
What has the author revealed in the work about his/her characteristic modes of thought, perception, or
emotion? What place does this work have in the artist’s literary development and career?
2
...
Practitioners include Matthew Arnold (works must have
“high seriousness”), Plato (literature must exhibit moralism and utilitarianism), and Horace (literature should be
“delightful and instructive”)
...
It is also useful when considering the themes of works (for example, man’s inhumanity to
man in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn)
...

Disadvantages: Detractors argue that such an approach can be too “judgmental
...


LiteraryCriticism/Livesay 1

Checklist of Moral/Didactic Critical Questions:
What enduring truth is revealed in the theme of this work?
How are the actions of the protagonist rewarded and the actions of the antagonist punished?
3
...
bedfordstmartins
...
html
New Criticism http://bcs
...
com/virtualit/poetry/critical_define/crit_newcrit
...
Formalistic
critics believe that all information essential to the interpretation of a work must be found within the work itself;
there is no need to bring in outside information about the history, politics, or society of the time, or about the
author's life
...
They are also
interested in the work's setting, characters, symbols, and point of view
...

Objective correlative - originated by T
...
Eliot, this term refers to a collection of objects, situations, or
events that instantly evoke a particular emotion
...
Virtually all critical approaches must begin here
...
Formalism ignores the context of the work
...
It tends to reduce literature to little more than a collection of rhetorical devices
...
Psychological Approach: Psychological critics view works through the lens of psychology
...
Most frequently, psychological critics apply Freudian and/or Jungian
(archetypes) psychology to works
...
bedfordstmartins
...
html
A Freudian approach often includes pinpointing the influences of a character’s psyche (Greek for “soul”), which
consists of the:
Id (reservoir of libido or pleasure principle in the unconscious)
Superego (the moral censoring agency and repository of conscience/pride that protects society)
Ego (the rational governing agent of the unconscious that protects the individual)
Freudian critics steer toward the sexual implications of symbols and imagery, since Freud theorized that all human
behavior (drives) derives from libido/sexual energy
...

Convex Images, such as skyscrapers, submarines, obelisks,
etc
...

Water = birth, the female principle, the maternal, the
womb, and the death wish
...

Advantages: A useful tool for understanding some works, in which characters manifest clear psychological issues
...

Disadvantages: Psychological criticism can turn a work into little more than a psychological case study, neglecting
to view it as a piece of art
...
Critics tend to see sex in everything, exaggerating this aspect of
literature
...

Checklist of Psychological Critical Questions
What connections can you make between your knowledge of an author’s life and the behavior and
motivations of characters in his or her work?
How does your understanding of the characters, their relationships, their actions, and their motivations in a
literary work help you better understand the mental world and imaginative life, or the actions and
motivations of the author?
How does a particular literary work—its images, metaphors, and other linguistic elements—reveal the
psychological motivations of its characters or the psychological mindset of its author?
To what extent can you employ the concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis to understand the motivations of
literary characters?
What kinds of literary works and what types of literary characters seem best suited to a critical approach that
employs a psychological or psychoanalytical perspective? Why?
How can a psychological or psychoanalytical approach to a particular work be combined with an approach
from another critical perspective—for example, biographical, formalist, or feminist criticism?
(b) Jungian Approach: http://www
...
edu/users/d/daniels/Jungsum
...
Psychological critics are generally concerned with his
concept of the process of individuation (the process of discovering what makes one different form everyone else)
...
The persona must be flexible and be able to balance the components of the
psyche
...
e
...
According to the
psychologist Carl Jung, mankind possesses a “collective unconscious” (a
cosmic reservoir of human experience) that contains these archetypes and that is
common to all of humanity
...
They believe that these archetypes are the
source of much of literature's power
...
It works well with works that are highly symbolic
...

Checklist of Mythological Critical Questions
What incidents in the work seem common or familiar enough as actions that they might be considered
symbolic or archetypal? Are there any journeys, battles, falls, reversals of fortune, etc
...
Feminist Approach:
http://bcs
...
com/virtualit/poetry/critical_define/crit_femin
...
It usually begins with a critique
of patriarchal culture
...
Finally, it includes a search
for a feminine theory or approach to texts
...
Feminists often argue
that male fears are portrayed through female characters
...

Elaine Showalter's Theory:
In A Literature of Their Own, Elaine Showalter argued that literary subcultures all go
through three major phases of development
...
”
Feminist Stage -- involves “protest against these standards and values and
advocacy of minority rights
...
”
Advantages: Women have been underrepresented in the traditional cannon, and a feminist approach to literature
attempts to redress this problem
...
” When arguing for a distinct feminine writing style, they tend to relegate women’s literature to
a ghetto status; this in turn prevents female literature from being naturally included in the literary cannon
...

Checklist of Feminist Critical Questions
To what extent does the representation of women (and men) in the work reflect the place and time in which
the work was written?
How are the relationships between men and women or those between members of the same sex presented in
the work? What roles do men and women assume and perform and with what consequences?
Does the author present the work from within a predominantly male or female sensibility? Why might this
have been done, and with what effects?
How do the facts of the author’s life relate to the presentation of men and women in the work? To their
relative degrees of power?
How do other works by the author correspond to this one in their depiction of the power relationships
between men and women?

LiteraryCriticism/Livesay 4

6
...
bedfordstmartins
...
html
Marxist criticism is a type of criticism in which literary works are viewed as the product of work and whose
practitioners emphasize the role of class and ideology as they reflect, propagate, and even challenge the prevailing
social order
...
In short, literary works are viewed as a product of work
(and hence of the realm of production and consumption we call economics)
...

Bourgeoisie: wealthy class that rules society
...
This superstructure includes all social and
legal institutions, all political and educational systems, all religions, and all art
...

Alienation -- Marx believed that capitalist society created three forms of alienation:
First, the worker is alienated from what he produces
...

Finally, in capitalist society people are alienated from each other; that is, in a competitive society people are
set against other people
...
”
For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own -- one's capacity to transform the
world -- is tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature; it is a spiritual loss
...
Society had progressed from one economic
system to another—from feudalism to capitalism, for example
...
As history advanced, the failures of the preceding
system would lead to the adoption of a new one
...
According to Marx, capitalism was the result of conflict between lords and serfs in feudal
society and between guild masters and journeymen in precapitalistic society
...

Derived from Hegel’s dialectic, the belief that truth (synthesis) emerges from a comparison of a thesis and
anti-thesis
...
g
...
)?
7
...
One shared assumption is that culture is dialectical in nature: we make culture and we are made by
culture
...
As part of the dialectic of culture, resistance is always present in that a dominant
cultural process will generate its own critical response
...
And again like
Marxist criticism, Cultural Studies focuses on the relationship between social practices commonly separated so that
culture is seen as a whole way of life, a social totality

---