critical approaches: types of literary criticism

Critical Approaches

Reported By:Reyes/StoDomingo/Chavez/Bela-ong

In everyday talk the most common meaning of criticism is something like “finding fault.” And to be critical is to be censorious. But a critic can see excellences as well as faults.

Functions of Critic

1. Introduce to authors or works of which was until now unaware.

2. Convince me that it have undervalued an author or a work because it had not read them carefully enough.

3. Show relations between works of different ages and cultures which it could never have seen because it do not know enough and never shall.

4. Give a “reading” of a work which increases understanding of it.

5. Throw light upon the process of artistic “Making.”6. Throw light upon the relation of art to life, science,

economics, ethics, religion, etc.

Formalist Criticism

Formalist Criticism

• Emphasizes the work as an independent creation, a selfcontained unit, something to be studied in itself, not as part of some larger context, such as the author’s life or a historical period.

• This kind of study is called formalist criticism because the emphasis is on the form of the work, the relationships between the parts—the construction of the plot, the contrasts between characters, the functions of rhymes, the point of view, and so on.

Formalist Criticism

• Formalist criticism is, in essence, intrinsic criticism, rather than extrinsic, for (at least in theory) it concentrates on the work itself, independent of its writer and the writer’s background—that is, independent of biography, psychology, sociology, and history.

Formalist Criticism

• In practice, formalist criticism usually takes one of two forms, explication (the unfolding of meaning, line by line or even word by word) or analysis (the examination of the relations of parts).

Formalist Criticism

• Formalist criticism begins with a personal response to the literary work, but it goes on to try to account for the response by closely examining the work. It assumes that the author shaped the poem, play, or story so fully that the work guides the reader’s responses.

Formalist Criticism

• Using formalism, a critic can show how the various parts of a work are welded together to make an organic whole. This approach examines a text as a self-contained object; it does not, therefore, concern itself with biographical information about the author, historical events outside of the story, or literary allusions, mythological patterns, or psychoanalytical traits of the characters (except those aspects described specifically in the text.)

Writing a Formalist Literary Analysis

• A formalist critic examines the form of the work as a whole, the form of each individual part of the text (the individual scenes and chapters), the characters, the settings, the tone, the point of view, the diction, and all other elements of the text which join to make it a single text. After analyzing each part, the critic then describes how they work together to make give meaning (theme) to the text.

Writing a Formalist Literary Analysis

Directions: Criticize the story “Scarlet Letter” by providing the given elements:

Point of View Setting

Characters Plot

Symbols Theme

Activity 1

Deconstruction

Deconstruction

• or deconstructive or poststructuralist criticism, can almost be characterized as the opposite of everything formalist criticism stands for. Deconstruction begins with the assumptions that the world is unknowable and that language is unstable, elusive, unfaithful.

• Language is all of these things because meaning is largely generated by opposition: “Hot” means something in opposition to “cold,” but a hot day may be 90 degrees whereas a hot oven is at least 400 degrees; and a “hot item” may be of any temperature.

Deconstruction

• Despite the emphasis on indeterminacy, one sometimes detects in deconstructionist interpretations a view associated with Marxism. This is the idea that authors are “socially constructed” from the “discourses of power” or “signifying practices” that surround them.

Deconstruction

• Deconstruction is valuable insofar as—like the New Criticism—it encourages close, rigorous attention to the text. Furthermore, in its rejection of the claim that a work has a single stable meaning, deconstruction has had a positive influence on the study of literature.

Deconstruction

• The problem with deconstruction, however, is that too often it is reductive, telling the same story about every text—that here, yet again, and again, we see how a text is incoherent and heterogeneous. There is, too, an irritating arrogance in some deconstructive criticism.

Deconstruction

Activity 2

Reader-Response

Reader-Response

• Probably all reading includes some sort of response—“This is terrific,” “This is a bore,” “I don’t know what’s going on here”—and probably almost all writing about literature begins with some such response, but specialists in literature disagree greatly about the role that response plays, or should play, in experiencing literature and in writing about it.

• Reader-response criticism, then, says that the “meaning” of a work is not merely something put into the work by the writer; rather, the “meaning” is an interpretation created or constructed or produced by the reader as well as the writer.

Reader-Response

Reader-Response

• Against the objective view one can argue thus: No author can fully control a reader’s response to every detail of the text. No matter how carefully constructed the text is, it leaves something—indeed, a great deal—to the reader’s imagination.

Reader-Response

• In an extreme form the subjective view denies that authors can make us perceive the meanings that they try to put into their works. This position suggests that every reader has a different idea of what a work means, an idea that reflects the reader’s own ideas.

• Many people who subscribe to one version or another of a reader-response theory would agree that they are concerned not with all readers but with what they call informed readers or competent readers. Thus, informed or competent readers are familiar with the conventions of literature.

Reader-Response

• A reader response asks the reader to examine, explain and defend her/his personal reaction to a reading. You will be asked to explore why you like or dislike the reading, explain whether you agree or disagree with the author, identify the reading's purpose, and critique the text. There is no right or wrong answer to a reader response. Nonetheless, it is important that you demonstrate an understanding of the reading and clearly explain and support your reactions. "

Reader-Response

Activity 3

Directions:

• Explore why you like or dislike the reading• Explain whether you agree or disagree with

the author• Identify the reading's purposes• Critique the text.