1. FORMALIST CRITICISM
Formalist criticism regards literature as a unique form of human knowledge that needs to be examined on its own terms. “The natural and sensible starting point for work in literary scholarship,” René Wellek and Austin Warren wrote in their influential Theory of Literature, “is the interpretation and analysis of the works of literature themselves.” To a formalist, a poem or story is not primarily a social, historical, or biographical document; it is a literary work that can be understood only by reference to its intrinsic literary features—those elements, that is, found in the text itself. To analyze a poem or story, the formalist critic, therefore, focuses on the words of the text rather than facts about the author’s life or the historical milieu in which it was written. The critic would pay special attention to the formal features of the text—the style. These features, however, are usually not examined in isolation, because formalist critics believe that what gives a literary text its special status as art is how all of its elements work together to create the reader’s total experience. As Robert Penn Warren commented, “Poetry does not inhere in any particular element but depends upon the set of relationships, the structure, which we call the poem.
2．BIOGRAPHICAL CRITICISM
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.
3． HISTORICAL CRITICISM
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.
4．GENDER CRITICISM
Gender criticism examines how sexual identity influences the creation and reception of literary works. Gender studies began with the feminist movement and were influenced by such works as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) as well as sociology, psychology, and anthropology. Feminist critics believe that culture has been so completely dominated by men that literature is full of unexamined “male-produced” assumptions. They see their criticism correcting this imbalance by analyzing and combating patriarchal attitudes.
5．PSYCHOLOGICAL CRITICISM
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.
6．SOCIOLOGICAL CRITICISM
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.
7．MYTHOLOGICAL CRITICISM
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.
8．DECONSTRUCTIONIST CRITICISM
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.
9．READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM
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.
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