Competency 8:
Explain the literary, biographical, linguistic, and sociocultural contexts and discuss how they enhance the text’s meaning and enrich the reader’s understanding.
Situate the text in the context of the region and the nation.
Explain the relationship of context with the text’s meaning.
It is the analysis of a literary text through various lenses that highlight authorial stance, purpose, and perspective.
A critical viewpoint is simply a lens through which we look at a literature piece, allowing this lens to shape our reaction to the work. These different schools are not exclusive – in fact, most critical essays use ideas from several types of criticism. But depending upon what work you are reading, what your ideas about what good literature should do, or your ideas about life and the world, some critical methods will work better than others or help your understanding of a work. Literary criticism aims to help us understand and appreciate a work more fully, no matter what approach(es) we use.
This approach sees a literary work as a reflection of the author’s life and times or the characters' life and times in the work. Critics using this school of thought investigate how plot details, settings, and characters of the work reflect or represent events, settings, and people in the author’s life or a direct outgrowth of — or reaction to– the culture in which the author lived.
This approach takes the position that the larger function of literature is to teach morality and probe philosophical issues, such as ethics, religion, or humanity's nature. Literature is interpreted within the philosophical thought of a period or group, such as Christianity, Existentialism, Buddhism, etc. Often critics will see the work allusions to other works, people, or events from this perspective or see the work as allegorical.
Using this type of criticism, a reader would see the work as an independent and self-sufficient artistic object. This approach is sometimes referred to as the “New Criticism,” since it came back in vogue in the 1960s-70s, but it was originally an outgrowth of the “Art for Art’s Sake” movement of the late 1800s. Formalistic critics assume that everything necessary for analyzing the work is present in work itself and disregard any connection to possible outside influences such as the author’s own life or historical times. This criticism considers what a work says and how it says it as inseparable issues. It focuses on close reading, with sensitivity to the words and their various meanings. It searches for structures, patterns, imagery and motifs, and figurative language along with the juxtaposition of scenes, tone, and other literary techniques to conclude the meaning of the work.
This approach deals with literature primarily as it is an expression – in fictional form – of the author’s personality, mindset, feelings, and desires. It also requires that we investigate the characters' psychology and their motives to figure out the work’s meanings. This school of criticism got its start with the work of Sigmund Freud, which incorporated the importance of the unconscious or sub-conscious in human behavior. Some typical “archetypal” Freudian interpretations include rebellion against a father, id versus superego, death-wish forces, or sexual repression. Dreams, visualizations, and fantasies of characters in modern works usually stem from Freudian concepts.
This approach asks us to use a wide variety of issues related to gender, concerning the author, the work itself, the reader, and the author and reader's societies to determine the stance of the work on the feminist continuum. These critics would argue that to achieve validity, a literary criticism that claims universality must include the feminine consciousness, since till very recently and in many instances yet today, works of literature and criticism have been male-dominated and therefore necessarily skewed in their perspective. Feminist critics look for the development of male and female characters and their motives to see how the author and his or her times affected the gender roles in the work.
This viewpoint considers particular aspects of the text's political content; the author; the historical and socio-cultural context of the work; and the reader's cultural, political, and personal situation about the text. These critics tend to focus on the overall themes of the work related to economic class, race, sex, and instances of oppression and/or liberation. Author, critic, and reader bias is explored.
7. Reader-Response Criticism
It considers readers' reactions to literature as vital to interpreting the meaning of the text. Tyson explains that "...reader-response theorists share two beliefs: 1) that the role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature and 2) that readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by an objective literary text; rather they actively make the meaning they find in literature" (154).
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