MAJORSHIP

Area: ENGLISH
Focus: Literary Criticism

LET Competencies:
1. show understanding of the ideas and principles of each literary
theory/approach
2. apply the ideas and principles of each literary theory/approach in reading,
interpreting, and analyzing selected works in prose and poetry

Literature and Literary Theory

 Traditionally, literature is regarded as a homogenous body of works with similar

characteristics which are read in similar ways by an undifferentiated audience.
 Today with the impact of literary theory to the study of literature, the latter is seen
as an area in a state of flux.
 Literature, as a body of writing together with its moral and aesthetic qualities, can
be seen as a site of struggle where meanings are contested rather than regarded as
something possessing timeless and universal values and truths.
 Literary theories can offer various ways of reading, interpreting, and analyzing
literature, but they do not offer any easy solutions as to what literature is, or what its
study should be.
 These theories aim to explain, or at times demystify, some of the assumptions or
beliefs implicit in literature and literary criticism.

Literary Criticism and Literary Theory

 Literary criticism involves the reading, interpretation and commentary of a specific

text or texts which have been designated as literature.
 Two conventions or assumptions which tend to be inherent in its practice are: a)
that criticism is secondary to literature itself and dependent on it and b) that critical
interpretations or judgments seem to assume that the literary text which they are
addressing is unquestionably literature.
 If literary criticism involves the reading, analysis, explication, and interpretation of
texts which are designated as literary, then literary theory should do two things: a) it
ought to provide the readers with a range of criteria for identifying literature in the
first place, and an awareness of these criteria should inform critical practice; and b) it
should make us aware of the methods and procedures which we employ in the
practice of literary criticism, so that we not only interrogate the text, but also the ways
in which we read and interpret the text.
 Literary criticism is best understood as the application of a literary theory to
specific texts.
 Literary criticism also involves the understanding and appreciation of literary texts.
 Two primary questions of literary criticism are: a) why does a piece of literature
have the precise characteristics that it has? (how does it work?) and b) what is the
value of literature?
 Any literary theory has to account for: a) the nature of representation in the text; b)
the nature of reality and its relation to representation; c) how the representation of
reality is accomplished or subverted and denied; and d) what conventions or codes
particular writers, literary schools or periods might employ to achieve representation.
 Literary theory also addresses questions of what makes literary language literary,
as well as the structures of literary language and literary texts, and how these work.
 Literary theory is also concerned with the study of the function of the literary text in
social and cultural terms, which in turn leads to a construction of its value.

Survey of Literary Theories/Approaches

a. Classical Literary Theory. This theory is premised on the idea that literature
is an imitation of life. It is interested in looking at literature based on:

 Mimesis (Plato). Mimesis is the Greek word for imitation. We try to see
whether a piece of literary work shows imitation of life or reality as we know it.
If it is, what is imitated? How is the imitation done? Is it a good or bad
imitation?
 Function (Horace). Function refers to whether a piece of literary work aims
to entertain (dulce) or to teach or to instruct (utile).
 Style (Longinus). Style refers to whether the literary work is written in a
low, middle, or high style. Longinus even suggested a fourth style which he
called the sublime.
 Catharsis (Aristotle). Catharsis refers to purgation, purification,
clarification, or structural kind of emotional cleansing. Aristotle’s view of
catharsis involves purging of negative emotions, like pity and fear.
 Censorship (Plato). Censorship is an issue for Plato for literary works that
show bad mimesis. Literary works that show bad mimesis should be censored
according to Plato.
b. Historical-Biographical and Moral-Philosophical Approaches.
 The Historical- Biographical approach sees a literary work chiefly, if not
exclusively, as a reflection of its author’s life and times or the life and times of
the characters in the work. A historical novel is likely to be more meaningful
when either its milieu or that of its author is understood. James Fenimore
Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, Charles Dickens’s
Tale of Two Cities, and John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath are certainly better
understood by readers familiar with, respectively, the French and Indian War
(and the American frontier experience), Anglo-Norman Britain, the French
Revolution, and the American Depression.
 On the other hand, the Moral-Philosophical approach emphasizes that
the larger function of literature is to teach morality and to probe philosophical
issues. Literature is interpreted within a context of the philosophical thought of
a period or group. Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus can be read profitably only
if one understands existentialism. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter is seen as a
study of the effects of sin on a human soul. Robert Frost’s “Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening” suggests that duty takes precedence over beauty
and pleasure.
 Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild
dream of a witch-meeting?

Be it so if you will; but, alas! It was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman
brown. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man
did he become from the night of that fearful dream. On the Sabbath day, when
the congregation were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen because an
anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear and drowned all the blessed strain.
When the minister spoke from the pulpit with power and fervid eloquence,
and, whit his hand on the open Bible, of the sacred truths of our religion, and
of saint-like lives and triumphant deaths, and of future bliss or misery
unutterable, then did Goodman Brown turn pale, dreading lest the roof should
thunder down upon the gray blasphemer and his hearers. …
from Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne
c. Romantic Theory. William Wordsworth explained his idea on romanticism in
his Preface to the Second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads.
He explained that poetry should:
• Have a subject matter that is ordinary and commonplace.
• Use simple language, even aspiring to the language of prose.
• Make use of the imagination.
• Convey a primal (simple, uncomplicated) feeling.
• Present similitude in dissimilitude (similarities in differences).
d. American New Criticism/New Criticism. This theory believes that literature
is an organic unity. It is independent of its author or the time when it was
written or the historical context. It is concerned solely with the ‘text in itself’,
with its language and organization. It does not primarily seek a text’s
meaning, but how it speaks itself. It encourages attentive close reading of
texts, a kind of democratization of literary study in the classroom, in which
nearly everyone is placed on an equal footing in the face of a ‘blind text.’ It
looks into how the parts relate to each other, achieve its order and harmony,
contain and resolve irony, paradox, tension, ambivalence, and ambiguity.
To use this theory, one proceeds by looking into the following:
• the persona
• the addressee
• the situation (where and when)
• what the persona says
• the central metaphor (tenor and vehicle)
• the central irony
• the multiple meanings of words
e. Psychoanalytical Theory. This theory applies the ideas of Freudian
psychology to literature. Freud sees the component parts of the psyche as
three groups of functions: the id, directly related to the instinctual drives; the
ego, an agency which regulates and opposes the drives; and the superego,
another part of the ego with a critical judging function.
f. It encourages the reader/critic to be creative in speculating about the
character’s or author’s motivations, drives, fears, or desires. The belief here is
that creative writing is like dreaming – it disguises what cannot be confronted
directly – the critic must decode what is disguised. A direct relation between
the text and the author is presupposed and made the center of inquiry.
g. Mythological/Archetypal Approach. This approach to literary study is based
on Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious. Repeated or dominant
images or patterns of human experience are identified in the text: the
changing of seasons, the cycle of birth, death and rebirth, the heroic quest, or
immortality. Myths are universal although every nation has its own distinctive
mythology. Similar motifs or themes may be found among many different
mythologies, and certain images that recur in the myths of people separated
in time and place tend to have a common meaning, elicit comparable
psychological responses, and serve similar cultural functions. Such motifs and
images are called archetypes.
This approach also uses Northrop Frye’s assertion that literature consists of
variations on a great mythic theme that contains the following:
• the creation and life in paradise: garden
• displacement or banishment from paradise: alienation
• a time of trial and tribulation, usually a wandering: journey
• a self-discovery as a result of struggle: epiphany
• a return to paradise: rebirth/resurrection
h. Structuralist Literary Theory. This theory draws from the linguistic theory of
Ferdinand de Saussure. Language is a system or structure. Our perception of
reality, and hence the ways we respond to it are dictated or constructed by the
structure of the language we speak.
This theory assumes that literature, as an artifact of culture, is modeled on the
structure of language. The emphasis is on ‘how’ a text means, instead of the
‘what’ of the American New Criticism. The structuralists argue that the
structure of language produces reality, and meaning is no longer determined
by the individual but by the system which governs the individual. Structuralism
aims to identify the general principles of literary structure and not to provide
interpretations of individual texts (Vladimir Propp and Tzvetan Todorov).
• The structuralist approach to literature assumes three dimensions in
the individual literary texts:
• the text as a particular system or structure in itself (naturalization of
a text)
• texts are unavoidably influenced by other texts, in terms of both their
formal and conceptual structures; part of the meaning of any text
depends on its intertextual relation to other texts
• the text is related to the culture as a whole (binary oppositions)
i. Deconstruction. This theory questions texts of all kinds and our common
practices in reading them. It exposes the gaps, the incoherences, the
contradictions in a discourse and how a text undermines itself. The
deconstructionist critic begins by discerning a flaw in the discourse and then
revealing the hidden articulations.
 Deconstructing a text calls for careful reading and a bit of creativity. The text
says something other than what it appears to say. The belief is that language
always betrays its speaker (especially when there is a metaphor).
A deconstructive critic deals with the obviously major features of a text, and
then he/she vigorously explores its oppositions, reversals, and ambiguities.
The most important figure in deconstruction is the Frenchman Jacques
Derrida.
How to do deconstruction:
• identify the oppositions in the text
• determine which member appears to be favored or privileged and look for
evidence that contradicts that favoring or privileging
• expose the text’s indeterminacy
j. Russian Formalism. This theory stresses that art is artificial and that a great
deal of acquired skill goes into it as opposed to the old classical maxim that
true art conceals its art. The Russian Formalists, led by Viktor Shklovsky,
aimed to establish a ‘science of literature’ – a complete knowledge of the
formal effects (devices, techniques, etc.) which together make up what is
called literature. The Formalists read literature to discover its literariness – to
highlight the devices and technical elements introduced by the writer in order
to make language literary.
The key ideas in this theory are:

• Baring the device – this practice refers to the presentation of devices

without any realistic ‘motivation’ – they are presented purely as devices. For
example, fiction operates by distorting time in various ways – foreshortening,
skipping, expanding, transposing, reversing, flashback and flashforward, and
so on.
• Defamilairization – this means making strange. Everything must be dwelt
upon and described as if for the first time. Ordinary language encourages the
automatization of our perceptions and tends to diminish our awareness of
reality. It simply confirms things as we know them (e.g. the leaves are falling
from the trees; the leaves are green).
• Retardation of the narrative – the technique of delaying and protracting
actions. Shklovsky draws attention to the ways in which familiar actions are
defamiliarized by being slowed down, drawn out or interrupted. Digressions,
displacement of the parts of the book, and extended descriptions are all
devices to make us attend to form.
• Naturalization – refers to how we endlessly become inventive in finding
ways of making sense of the most random or chaotic utterances or discourse.
We refuse to allow a text to remain alien and stay outside our frames of
reference – we insist on ‘naturalizing’ it.
• Carnivalization – the term Mikhail Bakhtin uses to describe the shaping
effect of carnival on literary texts. The festivities associated with the Carnival
are collective and popular; hierarchies are turned on their heads (fools
become wise; kings become beggars); opposites are mingled (fact and
fantasy, heaven and hell); the sacred is profaned; the rigid or serious is
subverted, mocked or loosened.
k. Marxist Literary Theory. This theory aims to explain literature in relation to
society – that literature can only be properly understood within a larger
framework of social reality. Marxists believe that any theory that treats
literature in isolation (for instance, as pure structure or as a product of the
author’s individual mental processes) and keeps it in isolation, divorcing it
from history and society, will be deficient in its ability to explain what literature
is.
Marxist literary critics start by looking at the structure of history and society
and then see whether the literary work reflects or distorts this structure.
Literature must have a social dimension – it exists in time and space; in
history and society. A literary work must speak to concerns that readers
recognize as relevant to their lives.
Marxist literary criticism maintains that a writer’s social class and its prevailing
‘ideology’ (outlook, values, tacit assumptions, etc.) have a major bearing on
what is written by a member of that class. The writers are constantly formed
by their social contexts.
l. Feminist Criticism. This is a specific kind of political discourse; a critical and
theoretical practice committed to the struggle against patriarchy and sexism.
Broadly, there are two kinds of feminist criticism: one is concerned with
unearthing, rediscovering or re-evaluating women’s writing, and the other with
re-reading literature from the point of view of women.
Feminism asks why women have played a subordinate role to men in the
society. It is concerned with how women’s lives have changed throughout
history and what about women’s experience is different from men.
Feminist literary criticism studies literature by women for how it addresses or
expresses the particularity of women’s lives and experience. It also studies
the male-dominated canon in order to understand how men have used culture
to further their domination of women.
Critics like Simone de Beauvoir, Mary Ellman, and Kate Millett were among
the first to reveal that throughout literary history women have been conceived
of as ‘other,’ as somehow abnormal or deviant. As a result, female literary
characters have been stereotyped as bitches, sex goddesses, ols maids. For
the first time in history, criticism posited a female reader for whom stereotypes
of womanhood were offensive.

m. Postcolonial Criticism. Postcolonialism refers to a historical phase

undergone by Third World countries after the decline of colonialism: for
example, when countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean
separated from the European empires and were left to rebuild themselves.
Many Third World writers focus on both colonialism and the changes created
in a postcolonial culture. Among the many challenges facing postcolonial
writers are the attempts both to resurrect their culture and to combat the
preconceptions about their culture.
Postcolonial literatures emerged in their present form out of the experience of
colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the
imperial power and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of
the imperial center. Language became a site of struggle for postcolonial
 literatures since one of the main features of imperial oppression is control
over language.
There is a need to escape from the implicit body of assumptions to which
English, the language of the colonizing power, was attached: its aesthetic and
social values, the formal and historically limited constraints of genre, and the
oppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominance – of
center over margin.
Postcolonial critics also study diasporic texts outside the usual Western
genres, especially productions by aboriginal authors, marginalized ethnicities,
immigrants, and refugees.
Homi K. Bhabha’s postcolonial theory involves analysis of nationality,
ethnicity, and politics with poststructuralist ideas of identity and indeterminacy,
defining postcolonial identities as shifting, hybrid constructions.
n. Postmodern Literary Theory. Postmodern is a term used to refer to the
culture of advanced capitalist societies. This culture has undergone a
profound shift in the ‘structure of feeling.’ A whole new way of thinking and
being in the world emerged – a paradigm shift in the cultural, social, and
economic orders.
Following World War II a new kind of society began to emerge, variously
called post-industrial society, multinational capitalism, consumer society,
media society. This society is characterized by:
• a new type of consumption
• planned obsolescence
• ever more rapid rhythm of fashion and styling changes
• the penetration of advertising, television, and the media
• the replacement of the old tension between city and country, center and
province, by the suburb and by universal standardization
• the growth of the great networks of superhighways and the arrival of
the automobile culture
The term postmodern has been applied to a style or a sensibility manifesting
itself in any creative endeavor which exhibits some element of self-
consciousness and reflexivity.
The common features of postmodern texts are:
fragmentation intertextuality
discontinuity decentring
indeterminacy dislocation
plurality ludism
metafictionality parody
heterogeneity pastiche
Perhaps the greatest liberating feature of postmodern writing has been the
mixing of writings and intertextual referencing. The borders between genres
have become more fluid. Artists and writers no longer quote texts; they
incorporate them, to the point where the line between high art and commercial
forms seems increasingly difficult to draw.
Examples:
The works of Andy Warhol
 The poetry of Allen Ginsberg, Haryette Mullen, Susan Howe
The novels of Don de Lillo, Jasper Fforde, Thomas Pynchon, William Gibson
Movies like Moulin Rouge, Matrix, Vanilla Sky, Inception, Adjustment Bureau,
Stranger than Fiction, Mamma Mia
The works of Michel Foucault
o. Reader Response Criticism can be seen as a reaction in part to some
problems and limitations perceived in New Criticism. New Criticism did not
suddenly fail to function: it remains an effective critical strategy for illuminating
the complex unity of certain literary works. But some works do not seem to
respond well to New Criticism’s ‘close reading.’ New ideas about the
conceptual nature of knowledge, even scientific knowledge, questioned a
fundamental assumption of New Criticism. New Criticism was arguably
emulating the sciences; but in the wake of Einstein’s theory of relativity,
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, or Gӧdel’s mathematics, and much else, it
seems clear that the perceiver plays an active role in the making of any
meaning, and that literary works in particular have a subjective status (as
opposed to New Criticism’s objective reality of the literary work).
For the believers of reader-response theories (Rosenblatt, Bleich, Fish), the
object of observation appears changed by the act of observation. ‘Knowledge
is made by people, not found,’ according to David Bleich (1978). Writing about
literature should not involve suppressing readers’ individual concerns,
anxieties, passions, enthusiasms. A response to a literary work always helps
us find out something about ourselves. Every act of response, he continues,
reflects the shifting motivations and perceptions of the reader at the moment.
Readers undergo a process of ‘negotiation’ with a community of readers to
seek a common ground.
Louise Rosenblatt (1978) called for criticism that involved a ‘personal sense of
literature, an unself-conscious, spontaneous, and honest reaction,’ but this
should be checked against the text and modified in a continuing process.
While multiple interpretations are accepted, some readings are considered
incorrect or inappropriate because they are unsupportable by the text. The
focus is on the ‘transaction’ between the text and the reader, i.e. a poem is
made by the text and the reader interacting.
Stanley Fish (1980, 1989) moves away from the idea of an ideal reader who
finds his/her activity marked out, implied, in the text, and he moves toward the
idea of a reader who creates a reading of the text using certain interpretive
strategies.
Three (3) important questions need to be asked by the reader:
a. How do I respond to this work?
b. How does the text shape my response?
c. How might other readers respond?
Fire and Ice
Robert Frost
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
 But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.