Introduction to Literary Criticism
Definition of literary criticism
· The practice of describing, interpreting, and evaluating literature (Morner and Rausch, 1998:121)
- Literary Criticism helps readers understand a text in relation to the author, culture, and other texts.
- 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.
- Why do we have to analyze everything????
- Talking about experiences enhances our enjoyment of them
- Talking about experiences involves the search for meaning which increases our understanding of them
- Because Socrates said so: "The life which is unexamined is not worth living."
To further explain
Literary criticism helps us to understand what is important about the text
- its structure
- its context: social, economic, historical
- what is written
- how the text manipulates the reader
- Literary criticism helps us to understand the relationship between authors, readers, and texts
- The act of literary criticism ultimately enhances the enjoyment of our reading of the literary work
You’re going to study 6 paradigms
- Historical
- Cultural
- Social
- Political
- Gender
- Post – modernism
HISTORICAL CRITICISM
- Apply to text specific historical information about the time in which the author wrote.
- History, in this case, refers to the social, political, economic, cultural, and/or intellectual climate of the time.
- For example, William Faulkner wrote many of his novels and short stories during and after World War II, which helps to explain the feelings of darkness, defeat, and struggle that pervade much of his work.
- Examines the events surrounding the setting of the text. A text cannot be read in a vacuum.
- Readers must understand the literary and historical events that impacted the author and the production of the text.
- For example, to fully appreciate a text written about life in NYC after 9-11, readers would need to be familiar with that tragedy. Though this may seem obvious, think of other events in history and how they might have impacted texts.
- Hansel and Gretel
Focus Questions
- What historical events are of significance to the setting of the text?
- What events in society influenced the author in the writing of the text?
- How do the text, author, and culture context work together to produce meaning?
- What specific historical events were happening when the work was being composed? (See timelines in history or literature texts.)
- What historical events does the work deal with?
- In what ways did history affect the writer's outlook?
- In what ways did history affect the style? Language? Content?
- In what ways and for what reasons did the writer alter historical events?
CULTURAL CRITICISM
- In its broadest sense, - refer to any kind of analysis of any aspect of culture.
- The following questions can help us to begin examine the kinds of cultural work performed by a literary text (Stephen Greenblatt)
- What kinds of behaviour, what models of practice, does this work seem to enforce?
- Why might readers at a particular time and place find this work compelling?
- Are there differences between my values and the values implicit in the work I am reading?
- Upon what social understandings does the work depend?
- Whose freedom of thought or movement might be constrained implicitly or explicitly by this work?
- How does the text promote ideologies that support and/or undermine the prevailing power structures of the time and place in which it was written and/or interpreted?
SOCIAL CRITICISM
- Practitioners of cultural criticism view a text in relation to the dominant or competing ideologies (belief systems) of the time and place in which the text was written.
- Works are therefore considered in light of their historical and cultural contexts. For example, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness may be read in terms of practices of European imperialists, race relations in Africa, or the economic history of ivory and other raw products in the continent.
Some questions:
- What is the social and familial structure presented in the text?
- What is the relationship between the characters and their society?
- Does the story address societal issues, such as race, gender, and class?
- What does the work/text say about economic or social power? Who has it and who doesn’t?
- How do economic conditions determine the direction of the characters’ lives?
- Can the protagonist’s struggle be seen as a symbolic of a larger class struggle?
- What sort of society does the author describe? (How is it set up? What rules are there? What happens to people who break them? Who enforces the rules?)
- What does the writer seem to like or dislike about this society?
- What changes do you think the writer would like to make in the society? And how can you tell?
- What sorts of pressures does the society put on its members? How do the members respond to this pressure?
