Literary Criticism
What is Criticism?
Criticism, in the sense that we use it as students of literature, has nothing to do
with its everyday meaning, which is something like 'complaint'. Literary criticism is commentary on a text. The focus in literary criticism is on the reader's response to the text. Again, 'reader's response' means something more exact than it would to a non-specialist. Most people respond to literature in a highly personal way, relating it to their own experience or to their own philosophy of life. Literary criticism is something different. It aims to comment in a more objective way on the themes and techniques of the text. It explores such issues as why the writer chose certain words and not others, or why the writer included certain details and not others.
Impressionist(ic) Criticism
"Gut-level" response to a literary work; immediate & intuitive judgment of its worth, determined to a great extent by the reader's personality type and past experiences (including his/her past experiences with other works of literature). Also: the literary "critiques" of many pre-20th-century (especially 19th-century Romantic) critics, whose criticism was as much self-expression as anything else. Valuable--and perhaps inevitable--starting-point to any response of literature, but dangerously subjective ("oh, no!"), and best combined with one or more of the following, more "intellectually reputable," types of literary criticism.
Reader-Response Criticism
Reader-Response criticism attempts a psycho-philosophical analysis of how a reader encounters & interprets a text. Some of the more radical permutations lead to an almost complete reader subjectivism (the text is what the individual reader thinks it means, however absurd), while other versions analyze the means by which various readers arrive at a consensus regarding the "meaning"--which can then be assumed to be a pretty much "correct" interpretation by the "ideal reader."
Biographical Criticism
Fascinating and dangerous in its attempt to apply details from an author's life to his/her works--and then drawing conclusions, perhaps, about the author's "inner mental workings." In any case, the author's personal biography becomes the focus.
Psychoanalytical Criticism
Psychoanalytical critics interpret a literary work à la Freud, that is, in terms of unconscious fantasies & desires, fixations & complexes, displacement & repression. Early psychoanalytical critics assumed, with Freud, that even creative works of literature are at last products of the author's (sexual) libido.
Mythic/Archetypal (Jungian) Criticism
Another "both fascinating and dangerous" approach that assumes that all of humankind's creative works--including literature, myths, and religious rituals & symbols, and indeed, our very dreams--emanate from another inner psychic source, the collective unconscious, as formulated by Carl Jung. Therefore one may find in many works of literature archetypal (universal-to-our-species) symbols that represent the various emotions and aspirations of humankind's ancestral psychological heritage.
The archetypal method is also commonly called MYTH or MYTHIC criticism because archetypal figures & processes--such as the shadow, the anima/animus, the wise old man, the god-image (or "Self"), the journey, the "divine marriage," and rebirth--are profusely evident in humankind's myths and rituals.
The drawbacks of archetypal criticism are two-fold: 1) the Jungian critic is sometimes guilty of finding an "archetype" in every image, character, and twist of plot, thus weakening the impact of the critic's discoveries of the truly(?!) archetypal; 2) this approach is not able to judge the greatness of an artistic work solely on the presence of archetypal symbols, for, although Macbeth is replete with archetypal symbolism, so, too, is the graffiti on the bathroom walls in the bar downtown (but, of course, this latter limitation is really true of all "extrinsic" criticism); and 3) Jung's archetypes, as he presents them, are very much culturally and racially specific: e.g., to claim that dreaming of a "black man" is archetypally symbolic of the "shadow figure" applies, at best, to a quite white, Eurocentric psyche.
Formalism
For the formalist, the careful-thoughtful-and-well-informed reader judges the merits of the work as a finely-crafted aesthetic whole--considering, for instance, in a work of fiction, its use of plot, style, characterization, etc.; in a work of poetry, matters of prosody, diction, figurative language, et al. At last, attentiveness to the purely formal aspects of literature is an antidote to the reader's propensity for straying too far from the text. Indeed, formalist criticism is supposedly unique among critical methods in being completely "intrinsic," dealing only with aesthetic techniques evident within the work per se. All other critical approaches are extrinsic, bringing to bear considerations outside the text. For the formalist, such intrinsic analyses should at least be an integral part of any well-rounded critical discussion of literature, and the psychologically or politically based critic (for example) runs the danger of a distorted interpretation if formalistic matters are not also taken into consideration.
The paragraph above presents formalism in its best light. On the negative side, in dealing with specific literary "devices" in isolation (irony, point of view, etc.), this approach may actually tend to destroy a work's "organic unity": as Wordsworth says, "We murder to dissect." Also, the claim to non-political "objectivity" has been severely called into question by politically-oriented critics, for whom all critical statements are ideological, even--and especially--those that claim not to be so. In sum, a "retreat" to formalism might well be said to be an implicit support of the political status quo.
Historical Criticism
Next to formalist criticism, traditionally considered the most "objective" critical approach. The historical critic may be concerned with 1) the historical context per se, and thus be concerned about the effects of the writer's historical milieu (race, place, & time [cf. Taine]) upon the literary work at hand--e.g., the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the work of a particular English Romantic poet; or 2) the cultural/philosophical--"HISTORY OF IDEAS"--background of the writer's milieu--e.g., the impact of Einstein's theory of relativity on, say, the novels of James Joyce--or 3) the effects of previous works of literature (literary history) on the writer & his/her work--e.g., the influence of Whitman'sfree verse and mystical worldview on American Beat poetry of the 1950's & 60's.
Genre Criticism
From Aristotle on, many scholars have emphasized the readers' expectations about what such-and-such type of literature should be and do. (Thus Aristotle thought that a good tragedy has a noble hero with a tragic flaw, creates some emotional catharsis in the audience, etc.) And so the genre critic considers the conventions that make up a particular literary type (e.g., the gothic romance, the pastoral poem), often analyzing how a particular example of that genre follows--or flaunts--those conventions, and to what effect. (Thus this approach can best be deemed a type of formalist criticism with rhetorical/reader-response considerations factored in.) The most famous "genre" school of the 20th century is the neo-Aristotelian Chicago School, of R.S. Crane, Wayne Booth, etc. However, Mikhail Bakhtin's DIALOGIC theory--with its emphasis on the novel genre and its sociological implications--has been more influential recently, in part because such notions as polyphony and heteroglossia allow for a quite politically "against-the-grain" reading of the text.
Humanist/Moral Criticism
Here, the critic brings the cultural/religious assumptions of his or her own time to bear upon a literary work, judging the text according to how well it fits the critic's own ethical values system. At its best, this approach heaps praise on works of literature for their superlative expression of humankind's highest ideals & aspirations. (Thus are the writings of Homer, Shakespeare, and Goethe often lauded.) However, the critic's subjective bias often leads to abuse; this method can easily evolve into dogmatic condemnation and censorship, and indeed, many works otherwise deemed as "aesthetically" great have been blacklisted, banned, or burned throughout the history of humankind by well-meaning "moral" critics.
Post structuralism
"Post structuralism" describes the various theories of social and linguistic constructivism that critique the project of the "whole"--finding instead a "hole," that leaves the truth and meaning of the text in flux, doubt, and relativity. Above all, poststructuralism is a de-centering of all the dominant stances of Western Civilization, including philosophy and socio-politics, class, racegender, sexuality, and culture.
Marxist Criticism
Marxist criticism (very simply put) champions the downtrodden of socio-economic class, critiquing texts that assume a classist society of economic elitism, and championing texts that support the "common man." Finally, "Cultural Studies" and postcolonial theories (among other approaches below) commonly adopt a Marxist methodology in their critiques of the dominant culture.
Feminist Criticism
Feminist criticism (very simply put) champions the downtrodden of the "war of the sexes," critiquing patriarchal texts and championing neglected (and recent) "pro-woman" literary works. Like Marxism, feminism quite often teams up with post-structuralism in its critique of the dominant male culture. One might conveniently divide feminism into two "camps": 1) those who posit an innate (and culturally repressed) "female" way of writing, reading, even thinking (essentialist); and 2) those who see sex or gender as socially conditioned and linguistically constructed (constructivist). Either way, patriarchal dominance/oppression has been--and continues to be, the focus of such criticism.
Race/Minority Studies/Criticism
With class and gender, race may be said to complete the main triad of oppressed social groups "writing back" against dominant Western culture. But with such demeaning labels as "African-American Studies" and "Native American Studies," much of the scholarship here may also be said to be truly on the "outside lookin' in."