The Purpose of Literary Criticism

Reading literary criticism can be overwhelming.

If you understand that different articles are written from different perspectives, and that the purpose of each is to enhance your understanding of the literary work by discussing only a particular element of it, then you can see that the articles’ varying strategies represent potentially interesting ways of opening up the text that might otherwise never have occurred to you.

There are many ways to approach a text, and a useful first step is to develop a sense of direction, an understanding of how a perspective– your own or a critic’s– shapes a discussion of a text.

Each of the perspectives described in Chapter 46 is sensitive to point of view, symbol, tone, irony, and other literary elements that you have been studying, but each perspective also casts those elements in a special and specific light.

Any given strategy raises its own types of questions and issues while seeking particular kinds of evidence to support itself.

An awareness of the assumptions and methods that inform an approach can help you to understand better the validity and value of a given critic’s strategy for making sense of a work.

Critical reading presupposes choices in the kinds of materials that are discussed.

Specific critical approaches to works are often more appropriate than others.