Critical Approaches to Literature

Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz - UESC

Departamento de Letras e Artes - DLA

Projeto de Extensão Dinamizando o Ensino da Língua Inglesa na UESC

Coordenação geral: Prof. Dr. Isaias Francisco de Carvalho

Disclaimer

Task: Read the summarized descriptions of a few critical approaches to literature. Answer the following questions [you are welcome to do research in other sources]:

1. What is the concept of "critical approach"? (everyone)

2. Among the critical approaches described below, which one(s) is (are) your favorite? Why? (everyone)

3. What are two major characteristics of Postcolonial Criticism? (X)

4. What are two major characteristics of Structuralism? (X)

5. What are two major characteristics of Marxist (Sociological) Criticism? (X)

6. What are two major characteristics of Feminist Criticism? (X)

7. What are two major characteristics of Gender Criticism? (X)

8. What are two major characteristics of Formalist Criticism? (X)

9. What are two major characteristics of the academic field called Cultural Studies? (X)

Part A

Excerpts from: Critical Approaches. Available here. Access on: 22 July 2009.

Contributing authors: Andrea Kaston, Eastern Michigan University / Michelle Ephraim, Worcester Polytechnic Institute / Ross Murfin, Southern Methodist University / Supriya M. Ray / Margaret Wald

Critical approaches to literature reveal how or why a particular work is constructed and what its social and cultural implications are. Understanding critical perspectives will help you to see and appreciate a literary work as a multilayered construct of meaning. Reading literary criticism will inspire you to reread, rethink, and respond. Soon you will be a full participant in an endless and enriching conversation about literature.

POSTCOLONIAL CRITICISM

A type of cultural criticism, postcolonial criticism usually involves the analysis of literary texts produced in countries and cultures that have come under the control of European colonial powers at some point in their history. Alternatively, it can refer to the analysis of texts written about colonized places by writers hailing from the colonizing culture. In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said, a pioneer of postcolonial criticism and studies, focused on the way in which the colonizing First World has invented false images and myths of the Third (postcolonial) World—stereotypical images and myths that have conveniently justified Western exploitation and domination of Eastern and Middle Eastern cultures and peoples. In the essay "Postcolonial Criticism" (1992), Homi K. Bhabha has shown how certain cultures (mis)represent other cultures, thereby extending their political and social domination in the modern world order.

Postcolonial studies, a type of cultural studies, refers more broadly to the study of cultural groups, practices, and discourses—including but not limited to literary discourses—in the colonized world. The term postcolonial is usually used broadly to refer to the study of works written at any point after colonization first occurred in a given country, although it is sometimes used more specifically to refer to the analysis of texts and other cultural discourses that emerged after the end of the colonial period (after the success of the liberation and independence movements). Among feminist critics, the postcolonial perspective has inspired an attempt to recover whole cultures of women heretofore ignored or marginalized—women who speak not only from colonized places but also from the colonizing places to which many of them fled.

Postcolonial criticism has been influenced by Marxist thought, by the work of Michel Foucault (whose theories about the power of discourses have influenced the new historicism), and by deconstruction, which has challenged not only hierarchical, binary oppositions such as West/East and North/South but also the notions of superiority associated with the first term of each opposition.

STRUCTURALISM

Structuralism is a theory of humankind in which all elements of human culture, including literature, are thought to be parts of a system of signs. Critic Robert Scholes has described structuralism as a reaction to "’modernist’ alienation and despair."

European structuralists such as Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes (before his shift toward poststructuralism) attempted to develop a semiology, or semiotics (science of signs). Barthes, among others, sought to recover literature and even language from the isolation in which they had been studied and to show that the laws that govern them govern all signs, from road signs to articles of clothing.

Structuralism was heavily influenced by linguistics, especially by the pioneering work of Ferdinand de Saussure. Particularly useful to structuralists was Saussure’s concept of the phoneme (the smallest basic speech sound or unit of pronunciation) and his idea that phonemes exist in two kinds of relationships: diachronic and synchronic. A phoneme has a diachronic, or "horizontal," relationship with those other phonemes that precede and follow it (as the words appear, left to right, on this page) in a particular usage, utterance, or narrative—what Saussure, a linguist, called parole (French for "word"). A phoneme has a synchronic, or "vertical," relationship with the entire system of language within which individual usages, utterances, or narratives have meaning—what Saussure called langue (French for "tongue," as in "native tongue," meaning language). An means what it means in English because those of us who speak the language are plugged into the same system (think of it as a computer network where different individuals can access the same information in the same way at a given time).

Following Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist, studied hundreds of myths, breaking them into their smallest meaningful units, which he called "mythemes." Removing each from its diachronic relations with other mythemes in a single myth (such as the myth of Oedipus and his mother), he vertically aligned those mythemes that he found to be homologous (structurally correspondent). He then studied the relationships within as well as between vertically aligned columns, in an attempt to understand scientifically, through ratios and proportions, those thoughts and processes that humankind has shared, both at one particular time and across time. Whether Lévi-Strauss was studying the structure of myths or the structure of villages, he looked for recurring, common elements that transcended the differences within and among cultures.

Structuralists followed Saussure in preferring to think about the overridinglangue, or language of myth, in which each mytheme and mytheme-constituted myth fits meaningfully, rather than about isolated individual paroles, or narratives. Structuralists also followed Saussure's lead in believing that sign systems must be understood in terms of binary oppositions (a proposition later disputed by poststructuralist Jacques Derrida). In analyzing myths and texts to find basic structures, structuralists found that opposite terms modulate until they are finally resolved or reconciled by some intermediary third term. Thus a structuralist reading of Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) might show that the war between God and the rebellious angels becomes a rift between God and sinful, fallen man, a rift that is healed by the Son of God, the mediating third term.

Although structuralism was largely a European phenomenon in its origin and development, it was influenced by American thinkers as well. Noam Chomsky, for instance, who powerfully influenced structuralism through works such as Reflections on Language (1975), identified and distinguished between "surface structures" and "deep structures" in language and linguistic literatures, including texts.

MARXIST CRITICISM

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. Rather than viewing texts as repositories for hidden meanings, Marxist critics view texts as material products to be understood in broadly historical terms. In short, literary works are viewed as a product of work (and hence of the realm of production and consumption we call economics).

Marxism began with Karl Marx, the nineteenth-century German philosopher best known for Das Kapital (1867; Capital), the seminal work of the communist movement. Marx was also the first Marxist literary critic, writing critical essays in the 1830s on such writers as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and William Shakespeare. Even after Marx met Friedrich Engels in 1843 and began collaborating on overtly political works such as The German Ideology (1846) and The Communist Manifesto (1848), he maintained a keen interest in literature. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels discuss the relationship between the arts, politics, and basic economic reality in terms of a general social theory. Economics, they argue, provides the base, or infrastructure, of society, from which a superstructure consisting of law, politics, philosophy, religion, and art emerges.

The revolution anticipated by Marx and Engels did not occur in their century, let alone in their lifetime. When it did occur, in 1917, it did so in a place unimagined by either theorist: Russia, a country long ruled by despotic czars but also enlightened by the works of powerful novelists and playwrights including Anton Chekhov, Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Russia produced revolutionaries like Vladimir Lenin, who shared not only Marx's interest in literature but also his belief in its ultimate importance. Leon Trotsky, Lenin's comrade in revolution, took a strong interest in literary matters as well, publishing Literature and Revolution (1924), which is still viewed as a classic of Marxist literary criticism.

Of those critics active in the Soviet Union after the expulsion of Trotsky and the triumph of Stalin, two stand out: Mikhail Bakhtin and Georg Lukács. Bakhtin viewed language—especially literary texts—in terms of discourses and dialogues. A novel written in a society in flux, for instance, might include an official, legitimate discourse, as well as one infiltrated by challenging comments. Lukács, a Hungarian who converted to Marxism in 1919, appreciated pre revolutionary realistic novels that broadly reflected cultural "totalities" and were populated with characters representing human "types" of the author's place and time.

Perhaps because Lukács was the best of the Soviet communists writing Marxist criticism in the 1930s and 1940s, non-Soviet Marxists tended to develop their ideas by publicly opposing his. In Germany, dramatist and critic Bertolt Brecht criticized Lukács for his attempt to enshrine realism at the expense not only of the other "isms" but also of poetry and drama, which Lukács had largely ignored. Walter Benjamin praised new art forms ushered in by the age of mechanical reproduction, and Theodor Adorno attacked Lukács for his dogmatic rejection of nonrealist modern literature and for his elevation of content over form.

In addition to opposing Lukács and his overly constrictive canon, non-Soviet Marxists took advantage of insights generated by non-Marxist critical theories being developed in post—World War II Europe. Lucien Goldmann, a Romanian critic living in Paris, combined structuralist principles with Marx’s base superstructure model in order to show how economics determines the mental structures of social groups, which are reflected in literary texts. Goldmann rejected the idea of individual human genius, choosing instead to see works as the "collective" products of "trans-individual" mental structures. French Marxist Louis Althusser drew on the ideas of psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan and the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who discussed the relationship between ideology and hegemony, the pervasive system of assumptions and values that shapes the perception of reality for people in a given culture. Althusser’s followers included Pierre Macherey, who in A Theory of Literary Production (1966) developed Althusser’s concept of the relationship between literature and ideology; Terry Eagleton, who proposes an elaborate theory about how history enters texts, which in turn may alter history; and Frederic Jameson, who has argued that form is "but the working out" of content "in the realm of the superstructure."

FEMINIST CRITICISM

Feminist criticism became a dominant force in Western literary studies in the late 1970s, when feminist theory more broadly conceived was applied to linguistic and literary matters. Since the early 1980s, feminist literary criticism has developed and diversified in a number of ways and is now characterized by a global perspective.

French feminist criticism garnered much of its inspiration from Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal book, Lé Deuxiéme Sexe (1949; The Second Sex). Beauvoir argued that associating men with humanity more generally (as many cultures do) relegates women to an inferior position in society. Subsequent French feminist critics writing during the 1970s acknowledged Beauvoir’s critique but focused on language as a tool of male domination, analyzing the ways in which it represents the world from the male point of view and arguing for the development of a feminine language and writing.

Although interested in the subject of feminine language and writing, North American feminist critics of the 1970s and early 1980s began by analyzing literary texts—not by abstractly discussing language—via close textual reading and historical scholarship. One group practiced "feminist critique," examining how women characters are portrayed, exposing the patriarchal ideology implicit in the so-called classics, and demonstrating that attitudes and traditions reinforcing systematic masculine dominance are inscribed in the literary canon. Another group practiced what came to be called "gynocriticism," studying writings by women and examining the female literary tradition to find out how women writers across the ages have perceived themselves and imagined reality.

While it gradually became customary to refer to an Anglo-American tradition of feminist criticism, British feminist critics of the 1970s and early 1980s objected to the tendency of some North American critics to find universal or "essential" feminine attributes, arguing that differences of race, class, and culture gave rise to crucial differences among women across space and time. British feminist critics regarded their own critical practice as more political than that of North American feminists, emphasizing an engagement with historical process in order to promote social change.

By the early 1990s, the French, American, and British approaches had so thoroughly critiqued, influenced, and assimilated one another that nationality no longer automatically signaled a practitioner’s approach. Today’s critics seldom focus on "woman" as a relatively monolithic category; rather, they view "women" as members of different societies with different concerns. Feminists of color, Third World (preferably called postcolonial) feminists, and lesbian feminists have stressed that women are not defined solely by the fact that they are female; other attributes (such as religion, class, and sexual orientation) are also important, making the problems and goals of one group of women different from those of another.

Many commentators have argued that feminist criticism is by definition gender criticism because of its focus on the feminine gender. But the relationship between feminist and gender criticism is, in fact, complex; the two approaches are certainly not polar opposites but, rather, exist along a continuum of attitudes toward sex, sexuality, gender, and language.

Part B

Excerpts from: SEDGWICK, Eve Kosofsky. Gender Criticism: what isn’t gender. In: Cultural theory network. Available at: <http://dystopictimes.blogspot.com/2005/12/gender-criticism-what-isnt-gender.html>. Access on: 22 July 2009.

Gender Criticism: What Isn't Gender

"Gender criticism" sounds like a euphemism for something. In practice it is a euphemism for several things, and more than that. One of its subtexts is gay and lesbian criticism. There can be no mystery about why that highly stigmatic label, though increasingly common, should be self-applied with care--however proudly--by those of us who do this scholarship. For instance, I almost never put "gay and lesbian" in the title of undergraduate gay and lesbian studies courses, though I always use the words in the catalog copy. To ask students to mark their transcripts permanently with so much as the name of this subject of study would have unpredictably disabling consequences for them in the future: the military, most churches, the CIA, and much of the psychoanalytic establishment, to mention only a few plausible professions, are still unblinking about wanting to exclude suspected lesbians and gay men, while in only a handful of places in the U.S. does anyone have even nominal legal protection against the routine denial of employment, housing, insurance, custody, or other rights on the basis of her or his perceived or supposed sexual orientation. Within and around academic institutions, as well, there can be similarly persuasive reasons for soft-selling the challenge to an oppression whose legal, institutional, and extrajudicial sanctions extend, uniquely, quite uninterruptedly up to the present.

Besides code-naming a range of gay and lesbian-centered theoretical inquiries, "gender studies" also stands in a usably unmarked relation to another rubric, "feminist studies." Feminist studies might be defined as the study of the dynamics of gender definition, inequality, oppression, and change in human societies. To the extent that gender is thus at the definitional center of feminist studies, "gender studies" can sometimes be used as an alternative name for feminist studies, euphemistic only in not specifying, as the "feminist" label more than implicitly does, how far inequality, oppression, and struggle between genders may be seen as differentially constituting gender itself. Women's studies today is commonly defined, at least in practice, by the gender of its object of study (at my university, for instance, Women's Studies will not cross-list courses unless a majority of the texts read are by women); by contrast to women's studies, feminist studies, whose name specifies the angle of an inquiry rather than the sex of either its subject or its object, can make (and indeed has needed to make) the claim of having as privileged a view of male as of female cultural production.

What, then, can or does distinguish the project of gender studies from that of feminist studies? In some cases, as I have suggested, "gender studies" is another, equally appropriate way of designating "feminist studies"--the reasons for offering the emollient name no more than tactical. In other cases, however, "gender studies" can mean "feminist studies" minus feminism; or, in another version of the same deadening equation, "women's studies" (in the most positivist meaning of the term) plus sonme compensatory entity called "men's studies." Although they offer an illusion of enhanced inclusiveness, these are the arithmetics that can give "gender studies" a sinister sound to the very scholars most involved in active gender critique. The assumptions behind these usages are intellectually as well as politically stultifying. To assume that the study of gender can be definitionally detached from the analysis and critique of gender inequality, oppression, and struggle (that is, from some form of feminism) ignores, among other things, the telling fact that gender analysis per se became possible only under the pressure of the most pointed and political feminist demand. It ignores, that is to say, the degree to which the otherwise available analytic tools of Western culture had already been structured by precisely the need to naturalize or to deny, and hence to allow the continuance of, a gender inequality already assumed. To figure gender studies as a mere sum of women's studies plus something called "men's studies," on the other hand, reduces both women's studies and the supposedly symmetrical men's studies to static denominations of subject matter, and reduces any understanding of relations between genders to something equally static and additive. That genders are constituted as such, not only in dialectical relation to one another, but in relation to the oppression historically exercised by one over the other, is a knowledge repressed by this impulse toward the separate-but-equal. Things get even worse when the rationale for an additive gender-studies agenda involves, not a nominally depoliticized and positivist study of women-as-women and men-as-men, but rather the conscious promotion of masculist viewpoints (under the men's-studies rubric) as a remedial "balance" against feminist ones. One can only summon up the foundational feminist assertion that colleges don't need something called "men's studies" because so much of the rest of the curriculum already fulfills that function: the function, that is, not only of studying the cultural production of men, but of furthering the interest many of them have in rationalizing, maintaining, or increasing their gender privilege over women.

It seems, then, that insofar as "gender studies" actually is the study of gender, its most substantive and intellectually respectable meanings make it coextensive with "feminist studies," and gender criticism coextensive with feminist criticism. Where, in that case, to look for the distinctive projects of gender criticism beyond its overlap with feminist criticism? In the context of this volume, where feminist criticism has its own topical assignment, distinct from this chapter as it is from that devoted to women's literature, it seems particularly possible to insist on the question. And where, for that matter, to look for the already fecund connection of gender criticism with the agendas of gay and lesbian-centered critique to which I began by alluding? Homosexual is not, after all, today understood as the name of a gender, though it alludes to gender and is defined by reference to it. Nor has the feminist analysis of mutually-constitutive relations and oppressions between genders proven to have an adequate purchase on how relations, identities, and oppressions are constituted, as in the exemplary gay instance, within them. Yet so far the greatest success--institutionally as well as intellectually--of gender criticism per se has been specifically in gay and lesbian criticism.

Let me suggest that the most distinctive task of gender criticism-not-coextensive-with-feminist criticism may be, not to do gender analysis, but to explore what resists it: to ask, with respect to certain categories that can't be a priori disentangled from gender, nonetheless what isn't gender. "Gender criticism" might here be taken to mean, then, not criticism through the categories of gender analysis, but criticism of them, mapping of the fractal borderlines between gender and its others. And if gay and lesbian criticism is so far the typifying site of such interrogations of gender analysis, then the first other of gender would seem to be, in this defining instance, sexuality.

Part C

Excerpts from: ESCH, Stacy Tartar. Critical approaches to literature. West Chester University. Available here. Access on: 08 Aug. 2008.

"It's inevitable that people will ponder, discuss, and analyze the works of art that interest them."

X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama

Standard critical thinking tools, so useful elsewhere, are readily adaptable to the study of literature. It's possible to analyze, question, interpret, synthesize, and evaluate the literary works you read in the course of pondering, analyzing and discussing them. Literary criticism is the field of study which systematizes this sort of activity, and several critical approaches to literature are possible. Some of the more popular ones, along with their basic tenants, are listed below:

FORMALIST CRITICISM

1. Literature is a form of knowledge with intrinsic elements--style, structure, imagery, tone, and genre.

2. What gives a literary work status as art, or as a great work of art, is how all of its elements work together to create the reader's total experience (thought, feeling, gut reactions, etc.)

3. The appreciation of literature as an art requires close reading--a careful, step-by-step analysis and explication of the text (the language of the work). An analysis may follow from questions like, how do various elements work together to shape the effect on the reader?

4. Style and theme influence each other and can't be separated if meaning is to be retained. It's this interdependence in form and content that makes a text "literary." "Extracting" elements in isolation (theme, character, ploy, setting, etc.) may destroy a reader's aesthetic experience of the whole.

5. Formalist critics don't deny the historical, political situation of a work; they just believe works of art have the power to transcend by being "organic wholes"--akin to a being with a life of its own.

6. Formalist criticism is evaluative in that it differentiates great works of art from poor works of art. Other kinds of criticism don't necessarily concern themselves with this distinction.

7. Formalist criticism is decidedly a "scientific" approach to literary analysis, focusing on "facts amenable to "verification" (evidence in the text).

BIOGRAPHICAL CRITICISM

1. Real life experience can help shape (either directly or indirectly) an author's work.

2. Understanding an author's life can help us better understand the work.

3. Facts from the author's life are used to help the reader better understand the work; the focus is always on the literary work under investigation.

BIOGRAPHICAL CRITICISM [source: here]

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. Anyone who reads the biography of a writer quickly sees how much an author’s experience shapes—both directly and indirectly—what he or she creates. Reading that biography will also change (and usually deepen) our response to the work. Sometimes even knowing a single important fact illuminates our reading of a poem or story. Learning, for example, that Josephine Miles was confined to a wheelchair or that Weldon Kees committed suicide at forty-one will certainly make us pay attention to certain aspects of their poems we might otherwise have missed or considered unimportant. A formalist critic might complain that we would also have noticed those things through careful textual analysis, but biographical information provided the practical assistance of underscoring subtle but important meanings in the poems. Though many literary theorists have assailed biographical criticism on philosophical grounds, the biographical approach to literature has never disappeared because of its obvious practical advantage in illuminating literary texts.

It may be helpful here to make a distinction between biography and biographical criticism. Biography is, strictly speaking, a branch of history; it provides a written account of a person’s life. To establish and interpret the facts of a poet’s life, for instance, a biographer would use all the available information—not just personal documents like letters and diaries, but also the poems for the possible light they might shed on the subject’s life. A biographical critic,however, is not concerned with recreating the record of an author’s life. Biographical criticism focuses on explicating the literary work by using the insight provided by knowledge of the author’s life. Quite often biographical critics, like Brett C. Millier in her discussion of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” will examine the drafts of a poem or story to see both how the work came into being and how it might have been changed from its autobiographical origins.

A reader, however, must use biographical interpretations cautiously. Writers are notorious for revising the facts of their own lives; they often delete embarrassments and invent accomplishments while changing the details of real episodes to improve their literary impact. John Cheever, for example, frequently told reporters about his sunny, privileged youth; after the author’s death, his biographer Scott Donaldson discovered a childhood scarred by a distant mother, a failed, alcoholic father, and nagging economic uncertainty. Likewise, Cheever’s outwardly successful adulthood was plagued by alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, and family tension. The chilling facts of Cheever’s life significantly changed the way critics read his stories. The danger in a famous writer s case—Sylvia Plath and F. Scott Fitzgerald are two modern examples—is that the life story can overwhelm and eventually distort the work. A savvy biographical critic always remembers to base an interpretation on what is in the text itself; biographical data should amplify the meaning of the text, not drown it out with irrelevant material.

Eg. Isolation of Emily Dickinson as Revealed in Her Poems; Walt Whitman: A Lover of Death;

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; A Biographical Study of David Copperfield

HISTORICAL CRITICISM

1. Historical criticism investigates the social, cultural, and intellectual context that produced it. This investigation includes the author's biography and the social milieu.

2. Historical criticism often seeks to understand the impact of a work in its day, and it may also explore how meanings change over time.

3. Historical criticism explores how time and place of creation affect meaning in the work.

HISTORICAL CRITICISM [source: here]

Historical criticism 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. Historical critics are less concerned with 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. A historical reading of a literary work begins by exploring the possible ways in which the meaning of the text has changed over time. The analysis of William Blake’s poem “London”, for instance, carefully examines how certain words had different connotations for the poem’s original readers than they do today. It also explores the probable associations an eighteenth— century English reader would have made with certain images and characters, like the poem’s persona, the chimney-sweeper—a type of exploited child laborer who, fortunately, no longer exists in our society.

Reading ancient literature, no one doubts the value of historical criticism. There have been so many social, cultural, and linguistic changes that some older texts are incomprehensible without scholarly assistance. But historical criticism can even help us better understand modern texts. To return to Weldon Kees’s “For My Daughter,” for example, we learn a great deal by considering two rudimentary historical facts—the year in which the poem was first published (1940) and the nationality of its author (American)—and then asking ourselves how this information has shaped the meaning of the poem. In 1940, war had already broken out in Europe and most Americans realized that their country, still recovering from the Depression, would soon be drawn into it; for a young man, like Kees, the future seemed bleak, uncertain, and personally dangerous. Even this simple historical analysis helps explain at least part of the bitter pessimism of Kees’s poem, though a psychological critic would rightly insist that Kees’s dark personality also played a crucial role. In writing a paper on a poem, you might explore how the time and place of its creation affected its meaning. For a splendid example of how to recreate the historical context of a poem’s genesis, read the following account by Hugh Kenner of Ezra Pound’s imagistic “In a Station of the Metro.”

PSYCHOLOGICAL CRITICISM

1. These critics hold the belief that great literature truthfully reflects life and is a realistic representation of human motivation and behavior.

2. Psychological critics may choose to focus on the creative process of the artist, the artist's motivation or behavior, or analyze fictional characters' motivations and behaviors.

PSYCHOLOGICAL CRITICISM [source: here]

Modern psychology has had an immense effect on both literature and literary criticism. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories changed our notions of human behavior by exploring new or controversial areas like wish-fulfillment, sexuality, the unconscious, and repression. Freud also expanded our sense of how language and symbols operate by demonstrating their ability to reflect unconscious fears or desires. Freud admitted that he himself had learned a great deal about psychology from studying literature: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dostoevsky were as important to the development of his ideas as were his clinical studies. Some of Freud’s most influential writing was, in a broad sense, literary criticism, such as his psychoanalytic examination of Sophocles’ Oedipus.

This famous section of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) often raises an important question for students: was Freud implying that Sophocles knew or shared Freud’s theories? (Variations of this question can be asked for most critical approaches: does using a critical approach require that the author under scrutiny believed in it?) The answer is, of course, no; in analyzing Sophocles’ Oedipus, Freud paid the classical Greek dramatist the considerable compliment that the playwright had such profound insight into human nature that his characters display the depth and complexity of real people. In focusing on literature, Freud and his disciples like Carl Jung, Ernest Jones, Marie Bonaparte, and Bruno Bettelheim endorse the belief that great literature truthfully reflects life.

Psychological criticism is a diverse category, but it often employs three approaches. First, it investigates the creative process of the artist: what is the nature of literary genius and how does it relate to normal mental functions? (Philosophers and poets have also wrestled with this question, as you can see in selections from Plato and Wordsworth in the “Criticism: On Poetry” ) The second major area for psychological criticism is the psychological study of a particular artist. Most modern literary biographies employ psychology to understand their subject’s motivations and behavior. One recent book, Diane Middlebrook’s controversial Anne Sexton: A Biography, actually used tapes of the poet’s sessions with her psychiatrist as material for the study. The third common area of psychological criticism is the analysis of fictional characters. Freud’s study of Oedipus is the prototype for this approach that tries to bring modern insights about human behavior into the study of how fictional people act.

E.g.:

Sigmund Freud (1856—1939)

THE DESTINY OF OEDIPUS

Translated by James Strachey. The lines from Oedipus the King are given in the version of David Qrene.

If Oedipus the King moves a modern audience no less than it did the contemporary Greek one, the explanation can only be that its effect does not lie in the contrast between destiny and human will, but is to be looked for in the particular nature of the material on which that contrast is exemplified. There must be something which makes a voice within us ready to recognize the compelling force of destiny in the Oedipus, while we can dismiss as merely arbitrary such dispositions as are laid down in Die Ahnfrauor other modern tragedies of destiny. And a factor of this kind is in fact involved in the story of King Oedipus. His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours—because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that that is so. King Oedipus, who slew his father Laius and married his mother Jocasta, merely shows us the fulfillment of our own childhood wishes. But, more fortunate than he, we have meanwhile succeeded, insofar as we have not become psychoneurotics, in detaching our sexual impulses from our mothers and in forgetting our jealousy of our fathers. Here is one in whom these primeval wishes of our childhood have been fulfilled, and we shrink back from him with the whole..........

E. g. Hamlet’s Philosophical and Psychological Dilemma in His “To Be or Not to Be” Soliloquy;

MYTHOLOGICAL CRITICISM

1. Mythological criticism studies recurrent universal patterns underlying most literary works (for example, "the hero's journey").

2. It combines insights from a variety of academic disciplines--anthropology, psychology, history, comparative religion...it concerns itself with demonstrating how the individual imagination shares a common humanity by identifying common symbols, images, plots, etc.

3. Mythological critics identify "archetypes" (symbols, characters, situations, or images evoking a universal response).

MYTHOLOGICAL CRITICISM [source: here]

Mythological critics look for the recurrent universal patterns underlying most literary works. (“Myth and Narrative,” for a definition of myth and a discussion of its importance to the literary imagination.) Mythological criticism is an interdisciplinary approach that combines the insights of anthropology, psychology, history, and comparative religion. If psychological criticism examines the artist as an individual, mythological criticism explores the artist’s common humanity by tracing how the individual imagination uses myths and symbols common to different cultures and epochs.

A central concept in mythological criticism is the archetype, a symbol, character, situation, or image that evokes a deep universal response. The idea of the archetype came into literary criticism from the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, a lifetime student of myth and religion. Jung believed that all individuals share a “collective unconscious,” a set of primal memories common to the human race, existing below each person’s conscious mind.

Archetypal images (which often relate to experiencing primordial phenomena like the sun, moon, fire, night, and blood), Jung believed, trigger the collective unconscious. We do not need to accept the literal truth of the collective unconscious, however, to endorse the archetype as a helpful critical concept. The late Northrop Frye defined the archetype in considerably less occult terms as “a symbol, usually an image, which recurs often enough in literature to be recognizable as an element of one’s literary experience as a whole.”

Identifying archetypal symbols and situations in literary works, mythological critics almost inevitably link the individual text under discussion to a broader context of works that share an underlying pattern. In discussing Shakespeare’s Hamlet, for instance, a mythological critic might relate Shakespeare’s Danish prince to other mythic sons avenging their fathers’ deaths, like Orestes from Greek myth or Sigmund of Norse legend; or, in discussingOthello, relate the sinister figure of Iago to the devil in traditional Christian belief. Critic Joseph Campbell took such comparisons even further; his compendious study The Hero with a Thousand Faces demonstrates how similar mythic characters appear in virtually every culture on every continent.

E.g. Northrop Frye (1912—1991)

MYTHIC ARCHETYPES

We begin our study of archetypes, then, with a world of myth, an abstract or purely literary world of fictional and thematic design, unaffected by canons of plausible adaptation to familiar experience. In terms of narrative, myth is the imitation of actions near or at the conceivable limits of desire. The gods enjoy beautiful women, fight one another with prodigious strength, comfort and assist man, or else watch his miseries from the height of their immortal freedom. The fact that myth operates at the top level of human desire does not mean that it necessarily presents its world as attained or attainable by human beings. . .

Eg. “Lucifer in Shakespeare’s Othello”；

MARXIST (SOCIOLOGICAL) CRITICISM

1. These critics examine literature in its cultural, economic, and political context; they explore the relation between the artist and the soceity--how might the profession of authorship have affected what's been written?

2. It is concerned with the social content of literary works, pursuing such questions as: What cultural, economic or political values does the text implicitly or explicitly promote? What is the role of the audience in shaping what's been written?

3. Marxist critics assume that all art is political.

4. Marxist critics judge a work's "ideology"--giving rise to such terms as "political correctness."

SOCILOLOGICAL CRITICISM [source: here]

Sociological criticism examines literature in the cultural, economic, and political context in which it is written or received. “Art is not created in a vacuum,” critic Wilbur Scott observed, “it is the work not simply of a person, but of an author fixed in time and space, answering a community of which he is an important, because articulate part.” Sociological criticism explores the relationships between the artist and society. Sometimes 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. Sociological criticism also analyzes the social content of literary works—what cultural, economic or political values a particular text implicitly or explicitly promotes. Finally, sociological criticism examines the role the audience has in shaping literature. A sociological view of Shakespeare, for example, might look at the economic position of Elizabethan playwrights and actors; it might also study the political ideas expressed in the plays or discuss how the nature of an Elizabethan theatrical audience (which was usually all male unless the play was produced at court) helped determine the subject, tone, and language of the plays.

An influential type of sociological criticism has been Marxist criticism, which focuses on the economic and political elements of art. Marxist criticism, like the work of the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs, often explores the ideological content of literature. Whereas a formalist critic would maintain that form and content are inextricably blended, Lukacs believed that content determines form and that therefore, all art is political. Even if a work of art ignores political issues, it makes a political statement, Marxist critics believe, because it endorses the economic and political status quo. Consequently, Marxist criticism is frequently evaluative and judges some literary work better than others on an ideological basis; this tendency can lead to reductive judgment, as when Soviet critics rated Jack London a novelist superior to William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Edith Wharton, and Henry James, because he illustrated the principles of class struggle more clearly. But, as an analytical tool, Marxist criticism, like other sociological methods, can illuminate political and economic dimensions of literature other approaches overlook.

E.g. Heathcliff: A Product of Social Environment; The American Dream in The Great Gatsby;

Collapse of the American Dream in Death of a Salesman; The Twisted Human Nature in Wuthering Heights

READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM

1. This type of criticism attempts to describe the internal workings of the reader's mental processes. it recognizes reading as a creative act, a creative process.

2. No text is self-contained, independent of a reader's interpretive design.

3. The plurality of readings possible are all explored. Critics study how different readers see the same text differently, and how religious, cultural, and social values affect readings.

4. Instead of focusing only on the values embedded in the text, this type of criticism studies the values embedded in the reader. Intersections between the two are explored.

READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM [source: here]

Reader-response criticism attempts to describe what happens in the reader’s mind while interpreting a text. If traditional criticism assumes that imaginative writing is a creative act, reader-response theory recognizes that reading is also a creative process. Reader-response critics believe that no text provides self-contained meaning; literary texts do not exist independently of readers’ interpretations. A text, according to this critical school, is not finished until it is read and interpreted. The practical problem then arises that no two individuals necessarily read a text in exactly the same way. Rather than declare one interpretation correct and the other mistaken, reader-response criticism recognizes the inevitable plurality of readings. Instead of trying to ignore or reconcile the contradictions inherent in this situation, it explores them.

The easiest way to explain reader-response criticism is to relate it to the common experience of rereading a favorite book after many years. Rereading a novel as an adult, for example, that “changed your life” as an adolescent, is often a shocking experience. The book may seem substantially different. The character you remembered liking most now seems less admirable, and another character you disliked now seems more sympathetic. Has the book changed? Very unlikely, but you certainly have in the intervening years. Reader-response criticism explores how the different individuals (or classes of individuals) see the same text differently. It 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.

While reader-response criticism rejects the notion that there can be a single correct reading for a literary text, it doesn’t consider all readings permissible. Each text creates limits to its possible interpretations. As Stanley Fish admits in the following critical selection, we cannot arbitrarily place an Eskimo in William Faulkner’s story “A Rose for Emily” (though Professor Fish does ingeniously imagine a hypothetical situation where this bizarre interpretation might actually be possible) poem would be forthcoming. This poem is not only a “refusal to mourn,” like that of Dylan Thomas, it is a refusal to elegize. The whole elegiac tradition, like its cousin the funeral oration, turns finally away from mourning toward acceptance, revival, renewal, a return to the concerns of life, symbolized by the very writing of the poem. Life goes on; there is an audience; and the mourned person will live through accomplishments, influence, descendants, and also (not least) in the elegiac poem itself. Merwin rejects all that. If I wrote an elegy for X, the person for whom I have always written, X would not be alive to read it; therefore, there is no reason to write an elegy for the one person in my life who most deserves one; therefore, there is no reason to write any elegy, anymore, ever.

Reference:

1. X. J. Kennedy, An Introduction to Poetry, New York: HarperCollins College Publishers, 1994
2. Gloria Henderson, William Day & Sandra Waller, Literature and Ourselves, New York: HarperCollins College Publishers, 1994

DECONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM (deconstruction)

1. Deconstructive critics believe that language doesn't accurately reflect reality because it's an unstable medium; literary texts therefore have no stable meaning.

2. Deconstructive criticism resembles formalist criticism in its close attention to the text, its close analysis of individual words and images. There the similarity ends, because their aims are in fact opposite. Whereas formalist criticism is interested in "aesthetic wholes" or constructs, deconstructionists aim to demonstrate irreconcilable positions--they destruct (or deconstruct)--by proving the instability of language, its inability to express anything definite.

DECONSTRUCTIONIST CRITICISM [source: here]

Deconstructionist criticism rejects the traditional assumption that language can accurately represent reality. Language, according to deconstructionists, is a fundamentally unstable medium; consequently, literary texts, which are made up of words, have no fixed, single meaning. Deconstructionists insist, according to critic Paul de Man, on “the impossibility of making the actual expression coincide with what has to be expressed, of making the actual signs coincide with what is signified.” Since they believe that literature cannot definitively express its subject matter, deconstructionists tend to shift their attention away from what is being said to how language is being used in a text.

Paradoxically, deconstructionist criticism often resembles formalist criticism; both methods usually involve close reading. But while a formalist usually tries to demonstrate how the diverse elements of a text cohere into meaning, the deconstructionist approach attempts to show how the text “deconstructs,” that is, how it can be broken down—by a skeptical critic— into mutually irreconcilable positions. A biographical or historical critic might seek to establish the author’s intention as a means to interpreting a literary work, but deconstructionists reject the notion that the critic should endorse the myth of authorial control over language. Deconstructionist critics like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault have therefore called for “the death of the author,” that is, the rejection of the assumption that the author, no matter how ingenious, can fully control the meaning of a text. They have also announced the death of literature as a special category of writing. In their view, poems and novels are merely words on a page that deserve no privileged status as art; all texts are created equal—equally untrustworthy, that is.

Deconstructionists focus on how language is used to achieve power. Since they believe, in the words of critic David Lehman, that “there are no truths, only rival interpretations,” deconstructionists try to understand how some “interpretations come to be regarded as truth. A major goal of deconstruction is to demonstrate how those supposed truths are at best provisional and at worst contradictory.

Deconstruction, as you may have inferred, calls for intellectual subtlety and skill, and isn’t for a novice to leap into. If you pursue your literary studies beyond the introductory stage, you will want to become more familiar with its assumptions. Deconstruction may strike you as a negative, even destructive, critical approach, and yet its best practitioners are adept at exposing the inadequacy of much conventional criticism. By patient analysis, they can sometimes open up the most familiar text and find in it fresh and unexpected significance.

Part D

Cultural Studies [source: Cultural Studies UNC]

Cultural studies is an innovative interdisciplinary field of research and teaching that investigates the ways in which “culture” creates and transforms individual experiences, everyday life, social relations and power. Research and teaching in the field explores the relations between culture understood as human expressive and symbolic activities, and cultures understood as distinctive ways of life. Combining the strengths of the social sciences and the humanities, cultural studies draws on methods and theories from literary studies, sociology, communications studies, history, cultural anthropology, and economics. By working across the boundaries among these fields, cultural studies addresses new questions and problems of todays world. Rather than seeking answers that will hold for all time, cultural studies develops flexible tools that adapt to this rapidly changing world.

Cultural life is not only concerned with symbolic communication, it is also the domain in which we set collective tasks for ourselves and begin to grapple with them as changing communities. Cultural studies is devoted to understanding the processes through which societies and the diverse groups within them come to terms with history, community life, and the challenges of the future.

For a more nuanced understanding of the histories of cultural sudies read:Bennett, Tony, Lawrence Grossberg, Meaghan Morris, and Raymond Williams. New Keywords : A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2005.

Grossberg, Lawrence. Bringing it all Back Home : Essays on Cultural Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
Grossberg, Lawrence. Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler. Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Storey, John. What is Cultural Studies?: A Reader. London; New York: Arnold, 1996.

Cultural Studies

Source: New Dictionary of the History of Ideas | 2005 | Grossberg, Lawrence

Cultural studies is one of the more controversial intellectual formations of the 1990s and the first decade of the third millennium. It has experienced a period of rapid growth in the academy, appearing at many universities in a variety of forms and locations (although rarely as degree-granting departments). At the same time, it has been broadly attacked both from inside the university and outside academia.

Definitions

There are at least five distinct uses of cultural studies, making it difficult to know exactly what people are attacking or defending. It has been used to describe, alone or in various combinations:

1. Any progressive cultural criticism and theory (replacing "critical theory," which served as the umbrella term of the 1980s);
2. The study of popular culture, especially in conjunction with the political problematic of identity and difference;
3. So-called "postmodern" theories that advocate a cultural or discursive constructionism (and, thus, supposedly embrace relativism);
4. Research on the politics of textuality applied broadly to include social life, especially based in poststructuralist theories of ideology, discourse, and subjectivity;
5. A particular intellectual formation that is directly or indirectly linked to the project of British cultural studies, as embodied in the work of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS).

Second, the New Left emerged as a small but influential discussion group, and included many immigrants from the "colonies." It was sympathetic to (but not aligned with) the growing Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The New Left had a specific and ambivalent relation toMarxism, engaging Marxist theory and politics even as it criticized it for its failure (and inability?) to account for and respond to the challenges posed by the importance of ideology, colonialism and imperialism, race, and the failures of existing socialism. This work was enabled by the translation and publication of the early writings of Marx and a wide range of European Marxist thinkers.

Third, the British university system was, to put it mildly, elitist and classist, in terms of its student population and in its isolation, aestheticization, and limitation of culture to the field of the arts. Many of the influential early figures in cultural studies were working-class or immigrant students attending university on scholarship, who were driven to look for other accounts of culture that both expanded its referent and took it more seriously.

Finally, many of these figures were deeply influenced by their experience as teachers in various institutions of adult education outside the university. If nothing else, this experience played a role in convincing them, first, of the importance of culture (and intellectual work on culture) to both political struggle and people's everyday lives, and second, of the fact that the important questions do not usually respect the disciplinary boundaries of academic competence and expertise.

Continue reading at: New Dictionary of the History of Ideas

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