Gioia & Kennedy - Critical Approaches To Literature

5» Critical Approaches to Literature
The really competent critic must be an empiricist. He must conduct his

exploration with whatever means lie within the bounds of his personal limb
ration. He must produce the effects with whatever tools will work. If pills
fail, he gets out his saw. If the saw won’t cut, he seizes a club.
—H. L. Mencken
Literary criticism is not an abstract, intellectual exercise; it is a natural human

response to literature. If a friend informs you she is reading a book you have just
finished, it would be odd indeed if you did not begin swapping opinions. Literary
criticism is nothing more than discourse—spoken or written—about literature. A
student who sits quietly in a morning English class, intimidated by the notion of
literary criticism, will spend an hour that evening talking animatedly about the
meaning of R.E.M. lyrics or comparing the relative merits of the three Star Trek
T.V. series. It is inevitable that people will ponder, discuss, and analyze the works
of art that interest them.
The informal criticism of friends talking about literature tends to be casual,
unorganized, and subjective. Since Aristotle, however, philosophers, scholars,
and writers have tried to create more precise and disciplined ways of discussing
literature. Literary critics have borrowed concepts from other disciplines, like
linguistics, psychology, and anthropology, to analyze imaginative literature
more perceptively. Some critics have found it useful to work in the abstract area
of literary theory, criticism that tries to formulate general principles rather
than discuss specific texts. Mass media critics, such as newspaper reviewers, USU'
ally spend their time evaluating works—telling us which books are worth read'
ing, which plays not to bother seeing. But most serious literary criticism is not
1790 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

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primarily evaluative; it assumes we know that Othello or The Death of Ivan Ilych
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are worth reading. Instead, it is analytical; it tries to help us better understand a !
I literary work. !:
In the following pages you will find overviews of nine critical approaches to
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literature. While these nine methods do not exhaust the total possibilities of lit'
erary criticism, they represent the most widely used contemporary approaches.
Although presented separately, the approaches are not necessarily mutually
exclusive; many critics mix methods to suit their needs and interests. A historical
critic may use formalist techniques to analyze a poem; a biographical critic will
frequently use psychological theories to analyze an author. The summaries do not
try to provide a history of each approach; nor do they try to present the latest
trends in each school. Their purpose is to give you a practical introduction to
each critical method and then provide one or more representative examples of
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criticism. If one of these critical methods interest you, why not try to write a class
paper using the approach?
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Fo r m a l is t Cr it ic is m
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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 f
for work in literary scholarship,” Rene Wellek and Austin Warren wrote in their
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influential Theory of Literature, “is the interpretation and analysis of the works of K
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literature themselves.” To a formalist, a poem or story is not primarily a social,
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historical, or biographical document; it is a literary work that can be understood
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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, focus- •:
es on the words of the text rather than facts about the author’s life or the histori- &
cal milieu in which it was written. The critic would pay special attention to the
formal features of the text—the style, structure, imagery, tone, and genre. 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 ele-
ments work together to create the reader’s total experience. As Robert Penn ■ki
Warren commented. “Poetry does not inhere in any particular element but
depends upon the set of relationships, the structure, which we call the poem.”
A key method that formalists use to explore the intense relationships within
a poem is close reading, a careful step-by-step analysis and explication of a text.
(For further discussion of explication, see page 1762). The purpose of close reading
is to understand how various elements in a literary text work together to shape its
effects on the reader. Since formalists believe that the various stylistic and the-
matic elements of literary work influence each other, these critics insist that form
and content cannot be meaningfully separated. The complete interdependence of
form and content is what makes a text literary. When we extract a work’s theme i, i
or paraphrase its meaning, we destroy the aesthetic experience of the work.
When Robert Langbaum examines Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” li- I-
(the full poem is on page 594), he uses several techniques of formalist criticism.
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FORMALIST CRITICISM 1791
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First, he places the poem in relation to its literary form, the dramatic monologue
(see page 593 for a discussion of this genre). Second, he discusses the dramatic
structure of the poem—why the duke tells his story, whom he addresses, and the
physical circumstances in which he speaks. Third, Langbaum analyzes how the
duke tells his story—his tone, manner, even the order in which he makes his dis-
closures. Langbaum does not introduce facts about Browning’s life into his analy-
sis; nor does he try to relate the poem to the historical period or social conditions
that produced it. He focuses on the text itself to explain how it produces a com-
plex effect on the reader.
Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994)

Th e Fo r ma l is t Cr it ic 1951
! Here are some articles of faith I could subscribe to:
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That literary criticism is a description and an evaluation of its object.
1 That the primary concern of criticism is with the problem of unity—the kind of
whole which the literary work forms or fails to form, and the relation of the various parts
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to each other in building up this whole.
That the formal relations in a work of literature may include, but certainly exceed,
those of bgic.
. That in a successful work, form and content cannot be separated.
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That form is meaning.
I That literature is ultimately metaphorical and symbolic.
That the general and the universal are not seized upon by abstraction, but got at
through the concrete and the particular.
! That literature is not a surrogate for religion.
That, as AUen Tate says, “specific moral problems” are the subject matter of litera-
ture, but that the purpose of literature is not to point a moral.
That the principles of criticism define the area relevant to literary criticism; they do
not constitute a method for carrying out the criticism.
The formalist critic knows as well as anyone that poems and plays and novels
are written by men—that they do not somehow happen—and that they are writ-
ten as expressions of particular personalities and are written from all sorts of
motives—for money, from a desire to express oneself, for the sake of a cause, etc.
Moreover, the formalist critic knows as well as anyone that literary works are
merely potential until they are read—that is, that they are recreated in the minds
of actual readers, who vary enormously in their capabilities, their interests, their
prejudices, their ideas. But the formalist critic is concerned primarily with ie
work itself. Speculation on the mental processes of the author takes the critic
away from the work into biography and psychology. There is no reason, of course,

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why he should not turn away into biography and psychology. Such explorations
are very much worth making. But they should not be confused with an account of
the work. Such studies describe the process of composition, not the structure of
the thing composed, and they may be performed quite as validly for the poor
work as for the good one. They may be validly performed for any kind of expres-
sion—non-literary as well as literary.
“The Formalist Critic”
Robert Langbaum (b. 1924)

On Ro b e r t Br o w n in g ’s “My La s t Du c h e s s ” 1957
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When we have said all the objective things about Browning’s “My Last
Duchess,” we will not have arrived at the meaning until we point out what can
only be substantiated by an appeal to effect—that moral judgment does not fig-
ure importantly in our response to the duke, that we even identify ourselves
with him. But how is such an effect produced in a poem about a cruel Italian
duke of the Renaissance who out of unreasonable jealousy has had his last
duchess put to death, and is now about to contract a second marriage for the
sake of dowry? Certainly, no summary or paraphrase would indicate that con-
demnation is not our principal response. The difference must be laid to form, to
that extra quantity which makes the difference in artistic discourse between !
content and meaning.
The objective fact that the poem is made up entirely of the duke’s utterance i
has of course much to do with the final meaning, and it is important to say that
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the poem is in form a monologue. But much more remains to be said about the :
way in which the content is laid out, before we can come near accounting for the !
whole meaning. It is important that the duke tells the story of his kind and gener-
ous last duchess to, of all people, the envoy from his prospective duchess. It is i
important that he tells his story while showing off to the envoy the artistic merits
of a portrait of the last duchess. It is above all important that the duke carries off
his outrageous indiscretion, proceeding triumphantly in the end downstairs to :
conclude arrangements for the dowry. All this is important not only as content
but also as form, because it establishes a relation between the duke on the one
hand, and the portrait and the envoy on the other, which determines the reader’s
relation to the duke and therefore to the poem—which determines, in other I
words, the poem’s meaning. to :
The utter outrageousness of the duke’s behavior makes condemnation the
least interesting response, certainly not the response that can account for the
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poem’s success. What interests us more than the duke’s wickedness is his i
immense attractiveness. His conviction of matchless superiority, his intelligence ; i
and bland amorality, his poise, his taste for art, his manners—high-handed aristo- I
cratic manners that break the ordinary rules and assert the duke’s superiority
when he is being most solicitous of the envoy, waiving their difference of rank !l !
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FORMALIST CRITICISM 1793
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(‘Nay, we’ll go / Together down, sir’); these qualities overwhelm the envoy, caus-
ing him apparently to suspend judgment of the duke, for he raises no demur. The
reader is no less overwhelmed. We suspend moral judgment because we prefer to
participate in the duke’s power and freedom, in his hard core of character fiercely
loyal to itself. Moral judgment is in fact important as the thing to be suspended,
as a measure of the price we pay for the privilege of appreciating to the full this
extraordinary man.
It is because the duke determines the arrangement and relative subordina-
tion of the parts that the poem means what it does. The duchess’s goodness
shines through the duke’s utterance; he makes no attempt to conceal it, so preoc-
cupied is he with his own standard of judgment and so oblivious of the world’s.
Thus the duchess’s case is subordinated to the duke’s, the novelty and complexi-
ty of which engages our attention. We are busy trying to understand the man
who can combine the connoisseur’s pride in the lady’s beauty with a pride that
caused him to murder the lady rather than tell her in what way she displeased
him, for in that
would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. [lines 42-3]
The duke’s paradoxical nature is fully revealed when, having boasted how at his
command the duchess’s life was extinguished, he turns back to the portrait to
admire of all things its life-likeness:
There she stands
As if alive. [lines 46-7]
This occurs ten lines from the end, and we might suppose we have by now
taken the duke’s measure. But the next ten lines produce a series of shocks that
outstrip each time our understanding of the duke, and keep us panting after reve-
lation with no opportunity to consolidate our impression of him for moral judg-
ment. For it is at this point that we learn to whom he has been talking; and he
goes on to talk about dowry, even allowing himself to murmur the hypocritical
assurance that the new bride’s self and not the dowry is of course his object. It
seems to me that one side of the duke’s nature is here stretched as far as it will go;
the dazzling figure threatens to decline into paltriness admitting moral judgment,
when Browning retrieves it with two brilliant strokes. First, there is the lordly
waiving of rank’s privilege as the duke and the envoy are about to proceed down-
stairs, and then there is the perfect all-revealing gesture of the last two and a half
lines when the duke stops to show off yet another object in his collection:
Notice Neptune, though,

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me! [lines 54—6]
The lines bring all the parts of the poem into final combination, with just
the relative values that constitute the poem’s meaning. The nobleman does not
hurry on his way to business, the connoisseur cannot resist showing off yet anot

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er precious object, the possessive egotist counts up his possessions even as he I
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moves toward the acquirement of a new possession, a well-dowered bride; and
most important, the last duchess is seen in final perspective. She takes her place
as one of a line of objects in an art collection; her sad story becomes the cicerone’s
anecdote0 lending piquancy to the portrait. The duke has taken from her what he
wants,.her beauty, and thrown the life away; and we watch with awe as he pro-
ceeds to take what he wants from the envoy and by implication from the new
duchess. He carries all before him by sheer force of will so undeflected by ordinary
compunctions as even, I think, to call into question—the question rushes into
place behind the startling illumination of the last lines, and lingers as the poem’s
haunting aftemote—the duke’s sanity.
The Poetry of Experience 1
On ROBERT BROWNING’S “My La s t DUCHESS.” Cicerone's anecdote: The Duke’s tale. (In Italian , a
cicerone is one who conducts guided tours for sightseers.)
Bio g r a ph ic a l Cr it ic is m
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
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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, ;
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that Josephine Miles (see “Reason” on page 637) was confined to a wheelchair or
that Weldon Kees (see “For My Daughter” on page 602) 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 t
underscoring subtle but important meanings in the poems. Though many literary
theorists have assailed biographical criticism on philosophical grounds, the bio-
graphical approach to literature has never disappeared because of its obvious
practical advantage in illuminating literary texts.
It may be helpful here to make a distinction between biography and bio-
graphical criticism. Biography is, strictly speaking, a branch of history; it pro-
vides a written account of a person’s life. To establish and interpret the facts of a
poet’s life, for instance, a biographer would use all the available information—not
just personal documents like letters and diaries, but also the poems for the possi- 1;
ble light they might shed on the subject’s life. A biographical critic, however, is
not concerned with recreating the record of an author’s life. Biographical criti-
cism focuses on explicating the literary work by using the insight provided by
knowledge of the author’s life. Quite often biographical critics, like Brett C.
Millier in her discussion of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” will examine the drafts IS
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BIOGRAPHICAL CRITICISM 1795
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of a poem or story to see both how the work came into being and how it might
have been changed from its autobiographical origins.
A reader, however, must use biographical interpretations cautiously. Writers
are notorious for revising the facts of their own lives; they often delete embarrass-
ments and invent accomplishments while changing the details of real episodes to
improve their literary impact. John Cheever, for example, frequently told
reporters about his sunny, privileged youth; after the author’s death, his biograph-
er Scott Donaldson discovered a childhood scarred by a distant mother, a failed,
alcoholic father, and nagging economic uncertainty. Likewise, Cheever’s out-
wardly successful adulthood was plagued by alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, and
family tension. The chilling facts of Cheever’s life significantly changed the way
critics read his stories. The danger in a famous writer’s case—Sylvia Plath and F.
Scott Fitzgerald are two modem examples—is that the life story can overwhelm
and eventually distort the work. A savvy biographical critic always remembers to
base an interpretation on what is in the text itself; biographical data should
amplify the meaning of the text, not drown it out with irrelevant material.
Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)

Th e Re l a t io n s h ip o f Po e t a n d Po e m 1960
A central dogma of much recent criticism asserts that biographical information is

irrelevant to the understanding and evaluation of poems, and that conversely,
poems cannot legitimately be used as material for biography. This double con-
tention is part of a larger position which holds that history is history and art is
art, and that to talk about one in terms of the other is to court disaster. Insofar as
this position rests upon the immortal platitude that it is good to know what one
is talking about, it is unexceptionable; insofar as it is a reaction based upon the
procedures of pre-Freudian critics, it is hopelessly outdated; and insofar as it
depends upon the extreme nominalist definition of a work of art, held by many
“formalists” quite unawares, it is metaphysically reprehensible. It has the further
inconvenience of being quite unusable in the practical sphere (all of its propo-
nents, in proportion as they are sensitive critics, immediately betray it when
speaking of specific works, and particularly of large bodies of work); and, as if that
were not enough, it is in blatant contradiction with the assumptions of most seri-
ous practicing writers.
That the antibiographical position was once “useful,” whatever its truth,
cannot be denied; it was even once, what is considerably rarer in the field of criti-
cism, amusing; but for a long time now it has been threatening to turn into one o
those annoying cliches of the intellectually middle-aged, profferred with all the
air of a stimulating heresy. The position was bom in dual protest against an
excess of Romantic criticism and one of “scientific scholarship.” Romantic aes-
thetics appeared bent on dissolving the formally realized “objective elements in
works of art into “expression of personality”; while the “scholars, in revo t

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against Romantic subjectivity, seemed set on casting out all the more shifty ques-
tions of value and gestalt as “subjective,” and concentrating on the kind of “facts” ii
amenable to scientific verification. Needless to say, it was not the newer psycho-
logical sciences that the “scholars” had in mind, but such purer disciplines as
physics and biology. It was at this point that it became fashionable to talk about
literary study as “research,” and graphs and tables began to appear in analyses of
works of art.
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The poet’s life is the focusing glass through which pass the determinants of
the shape of his work: the tradition available to him, his understanding of
“kinds,” the impact of special experiences (travel, love, etc.). But the poet’s life is
more than a burning glass; with his work, it makes up his total meaning. I do not !PI
intend to say, of course, that some meanings of works of art, satisfactory and as far
as they go sufficient, are not available in the single work itself (only a really bad
work depends for all substantial meaning on a knowledge of the life-style of its
author); but a whole body of work will contain larger meanings, and, where it is
available, a sense of the life of the writer will raise that meaning to a still higher
power. The latter two kinds of meaning fade into each other; for as soon as two
works by a single author are considered side by side, one has begun to deal with
biography—that is, with an interconnectedness fully explicable only in terms of a
personality, inferred or discovered.
One of the essential functions of the poet is the assertion and creation of a
personality, in a profounder sense than any nonartist can attain. We ask of the
poet a definition of man, at once particular and abstract, stated and acted out. It
is impossible to draw a line between the work the poet writes and the work he
lives, between the life he lives and the life he writes. And the agile critic, there-
fore, must be prepared to move constantly back and forth between life and
poem, not in a pointless circle, but in a meaningful spiraling toward the
absolute point.
No! in Thunder
Brett C. Millier (b. 1958)

On El iz a b e t h Bis h o p ’s “On e Ar t ” 1993 :
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Elizabeth Bishop left seventeen drafts of the poem “One Art” among her papers. :
In the first draft, she lists all the things she’s lost in her life—keys, pens, glasses,
cities—and then she writes “One might think this would have prepared me / for ’ ,y
losing one average-sized not exceptionally / beautiful or dazzlingly intelligent per-

son . .. / But it doesn’t seem to have at all-----” By the seventeenth draft, nearly
every word has been transformed, but most importantly, Bishop discovered along
the way that there might be a way to master this loss.
One way to read Bishop’s modulation between the first and last drafts from
“the loss of you is impossible to master” to something like “I am still the master of
losing even though losing you looks like a disaster” is that in the writing of such a f
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BIOGRAPHICAL CRITICISM 1797
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disciplined, demanding poem as this villanelle (“[Write it/]”) lies the potential
mastery of the loss. Working through each of her losses—from the bold, painful
catalog of the first draft to the finely honed and privately meaningful final ver-
sion—is the way to overcome them or, if not to overcome them, then to see the
way in which she might possibly master herself in the face of loss. It is all, perhaps
“one art”—writing elegy, mastering loss, mastering grief, self-mastery. Bishop had
a precocious familiarity with loss. Her father died before her first birthday, and
four years later her mother disappeared into a sanitarium, never to be seen by her
daughter again. The losses in the poem are real: time in the form of the “hour
badly spent” and, more tellingly for the orphaned Bishop “my mothers watch”:
the lost houses, in Key West, Petrdpolis, and Ouro Preto, Brazil. The city of Rio
de Janeiro and the whole South American continent (where she had lived for
nearly two decades) were lost to her with the suicide of her Brazilian companion.
And currently, in the fall of 1975, she seemed to have lost her dearest friend and
lover, who was trying to end their relationship. But each version of the poem dis-
tanced the pain a little more, depersonalized it, moved it away from the tawdry
self-pity and “confession” that Bishop disliked in so many of her contemporaries.
Bishop’s friends remained for a long time protective of her personal reputa-
tion, and unwilling to have her grouped among lesbian poets or even among the
other great poets of her generation—Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Theodore
Roethke—as they seemed to self-destruct before their readers’ eyes. Bishop herself
taught them this reticence by keeping her private life to herself, and by investing
what “confession” there was in her poems deeply in objects and places, thus
deflecting biographical inquiry. In the development of this poem, discretion is
both a poetic method, and a part of a process of self-understanding, the seeing of
a pattern in her own life.
Adapted by the author from
Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It
His t o r ic a l Cr it ic is m
Historical criticism seeks to understand a literary work by investigating the
social, cultural, and intellectual context that produced it—a context that neces-
sarily includes the artist’s biography and milieu. Historical critics are less con-
cerned 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” (pages 652-654), 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.

Reading ancient literature, no one doubts the value of historical criticism.
There have been so many social, cultural, and linguistic changes that some older
texts are incomprehensible without scholarly assistance. But historical criticism
can even help us better understand modem texts. To return to Weldon Kees’s
“For My Daughter” (page 602), for example, we leam a great deal by considering {
two rudimentary historical facts—the year in which the poem was first published
(1940) and the nationality of its author (American)—and then asking ourselves
how this information has shaped the meaning of the poem. In 1940, war had
already broken out in Europe and most Americans realized that their country, still
recovering from the Depression, would soon be drawn into it; for a young man, like
Kees, the future seemed bleak, uncertain, and personally dangerous. Even this sim-
ple historical analysis helps explain at least part of the bitter pessimism of Kees’s
poem, though a psychological critic would rightly insist that Kees’s dark personali-
ty also played a crucial role. In writing a paper on a poem, you might explore how
the time and place of its creation affected its meaning. For a splendid example of
how to recreate the historical context of a poem’s genesis, read the following
account by Hugh Kenner of Ezra Pound’s imagistic “In a Station of the Metro.”
(This poem is also discussed more briefly on pages 660-661.)
Hugh Kenner (b. 1923)

Im a g is m 1971
For it was English post-Symbolist verse that Pound’s Imagism set out to reform,
by deleting its self-indulgences, intensifying its virtues, and elevating the glimpse
into the vision. The most famous of all Imagist poems commenced, like any poem
by Arthur Symons,0 with an accidental glimpse. Ezra Pound, on a visit to Paris in
1911, got out of the Metro at La Concorde, and “saw suddenly a beautiful face,
and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then anoth-
er beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what they had IT I
meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as
lovely as that sudden emotion.”
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The oft-told story is worth one more retelling. This was just such an experi-
ence as Arthur Symons cultivated, bright unexpected glimpses in a dark setting, I
instantly to melt into the crowd’s kaleidoscope. And a poem would not have f
given Symons any trouble. But Pound by 1911 was already unwilling to write a > •'
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Symons poem.
He tells us that he first satisfied his mind when he hit on a wholly abstract !■!*: ' H
vision of colors, splotches on darkness like some canvas of Kandinsky’s (whose :

work he had not then seen). This is a most important fact. Satisfaction lay not in ;
preserving the vision, but in devising with mental effort an abstract equivalent
for it, reduced, intensified. He next wrote a 30-line poem and destroyed it; after k-1-•
six months he wrote a shorter poem, also destroyed; and after another year, with,
as he tells us, the Japanese hokku in mind, he arrived at a poem which needs
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every one of its 20 words, including the six words of its title: !
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HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1799
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In a St a t io n of t he Me t r o
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.
We need the title so that we can savor that vegetal contrast with the
world of machines: this is not any crowd, moreover, but a crowd seen under'
ground, as Odysseus and Orpheus and Kore saw crowds in Hades. And carrying
forward the suggestion of wraiths, the word “apparition” detaches these faces
from all the crowded faces, and presides over the image that conveys the quali-
ty of their separation:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Flowers, underground; flowers, out of the sun; flowers seen as if against a natural
gleam, the bough’s wetness gleaming on its darkness, in this place where wheels
turn and nothing grows. The mind is touched, it may be, with a memory of
Persephone, as we read of her in the 106th Canto,
Dis’ bride, Queen over Phlegethon,

girls faint as mist about her.
—the faces of those girls likewise “apparitions.”

What is achieved, though it works by way of the visible, is no picture of the
thing glimpsed, in the manner of
The light of our cigarettes

Went and came in the gloom.
It is a simile with “like” suppressed: Pound called it an equation, meaning not a

redundancy, a equals a, but a generalization of unexpected exactness. The
statements of analytic geometry, he said, “are ‘lords’ over fact. They are the
thrones and dominations that rule over form and recurrence. And in like man-
ner are great works of art lords over fact, over race-long recurrent moods, and
over tomorrow.” So this tiny poem, drawing on Gauguin and on Japan, on
ghosts and on Persephone, on the Underworld and on the Underground, the
Metro of Mallarme’s capital and a phrase that names a station of the Metro as
it might a station of the Cross, concentrates far more than it need ever specify,
and indicates the means of delivering post-Symbolist poetry from its pictorial-
ist impasse. “An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional
complex in an instant of time”: that is the elusive Doctrine of the Image. And,
just 20 months later, “The image ... is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I
can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and
into which, ideas are constantly rushing.” And: “An image ... is real because
we know it directly.”
The Pound Era
IMAG1SM. Arthur Symons: Symons (1865-1945) was a British poet who helped introduce French sym-
bolist verse into English. His own verse was often florid and impressionistic.

Daryl Pinckney (b. 1953)
On La n g s t o n Hu g h e s 1989
f.
; Fierce identification with the sorrows and pleasures of the poor black—“I myself
i belong to that class”—propelled Hughes toward the voice of the black Everyman.
He made a distinction between his lyric and his social poetry, the private and the
public. In the best of his social poetry he turned himself into a transmitter of mes-
sages and made the “I” a collective “I”:
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of
human blood in human veins. f:
My soul has grown deep like the rivers. i ■
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. J

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down
to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in
the sunset.
(“The Negro Speaks of Rivers”)
'The medium conveys a singleness of intention: to make the black known. The
straightforward, declarative style doesn’t call attention to itself. Nothing distracts
from forceful statement, as if the shadowy characters Sandburg wrote about in, :
say, “When Mammy Hums" had at last their chance to come forward and testify. :
Poems like “Aunt Sue’s Stories” reflect the folk ideal of black women as reposito-
ries of racial lore. The story told in dramatic monologues like “The Negro
Mother” or “Mother to Son” is one of survival life “ain’t been no crystal stair.”
The emphasis is on the capacity of black people to endure, which is why ;;
Hughes’s social poetry, though not strictly protest writing, indicts white ;.
America, even taunts it with the steady belief that blacks will overcome simply
by “keeping on”:
r
I, too, sing America. :
I am the darker brother

;■
They send me to the kitchen

When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well, - i
And grow strong.
(“Epilogue”)
Whites were not the only ones who could be made uneasy by Hughes’s »
attempts to boldly connect past and future. The use of “black” and the invocation
of Africa were defiant gestures back in the days when many blacks described
themselves as brown. When Hughes answered Sandburg’s “Nigger” (“I am the
nigger, / Singer of Songs ... ”) with “I am the Negro, / Black as the night is black,
:■ ;f
HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1801

k !
!- I
■
’IJ k
/ Black like the depths of my Africa” (“Proem”) he challenged the black middle
class with his absorption in slave heritage.
“Suitcase in Harlem”
Ge n d e r Cr it ic is m
Gender criticism examines how sexual identity influences the creation and recep-
tion 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 domi-
nated by men that literature is full of unexamined “male-produced” assumptions.
They see their criticism correcting this imbalance by analyzing and combatting
patriarchal attitudes. Feminist criticism has explored how an author’s gender
influences—consciously or unconsciously—his or her writing. While a formalist
critic like Allen Tate emphasized the universality of Emily Dickinson’s poetry by
demonstrating how powerfully the language, imagery, and myth-making of her
poems combine to affect a generalized reader, Sandra M. Gilbert, a leading femi-
nist critic, has identified attitudes and assumptions in Dickinson’s poetry that she
believes are essentially female. Another important theme in feminist criticism is
analyzing how sexual identity influences the reader of a text. If Tate’s hypotheti-
cal reader was deliberately sexless, Gilbert’s reader sees a text through the eyes of
his or her sex. Finally, feminist critics carefully examine how the images of men
and women in imaginative literature reflect or reject the social forces that have
historically kept the sexes from achieving total equality.
Recently, gender criticism has expanded beyond its original feminist perspec-
tive. Critics have explored the impact of different sexual orientations on literary
creation and reception. A men’s movement has also emerged in response to femi-
nism. The men’s movement does not seek to reject feminism but to rediscover
masculine identity in an authentic, contemporary way. Led by poet Robert Bly,
the men’s movement has paid special attention to interpreting poetry and fables
as myths of psychic growth and sexual identity.
Elaine Showalter (b. 1941)

To w a r d a Fe m in is t Po e t ic s 1979
Feminist criticism can be divided into two distinct varieties. The first type is con-
cerned with woman as reader—with woman as the consumer of male-produced lit-
erature, and with the way in which the hypothesis of a female reader changes our
apprehension of a given text, awakening us to the significance of its sexual c es.
I shall call this kind of analysis the feminist critique, and like other kinds o cri-
tique it is a historically grounded inquiry which probes the ideological assump-
tions of literary phenomena. Its subjects include the images and stereotypes o
women in literature, the omissions of and misconceptions about women in criti

cism, and the fissures in male-constructed literary history. It is also concerned
with the exploitation and manipulation of the female audience, especially in pop-
ular culture and film; and with the analysis of woman-as-sign in semiotic systems.
The second type of feminist criticism is concerned with woman as writer—with
woman as the producer of textual meaning, with the history, themes, genres, and
structures of literature by women. Its subjects include the psychodynamics of
female creativity; linguistics and the problem of a female language; the trajectory
of the individual or collective female literary career; literary history; and, of
course, studies of particular writers and works. No term exists in English for such
a specialized discourse, and so I have adapted the French term la gynocritique:
“gynocritics” (although the significance of the male pseudonym in the history of
women’s writing also suggested the term “georgics”).
The feminist critique is essentially political and polemical, with theoretical
affiliations to Marxist sociology and aesthetics; gynocritics is more self-contained
and experimental, with connections to other modes of new feminist research. In
a dialogue between these two positions. Carolyn Heilbrun, the writer, and
Catharine Stimpson, editor of the journal Signs: Women in Culture and Society,
compare the feminist critique to the Old Testament, “looking for the sins and
errors of the past,” and gynocritics to the New Testament, seeking “the grace of
imagination.” Both kinds are necessary, they explain, for only the Jeremiahs of
the feminist critique can lead us out of the “Egypt of female servitude” to the
promised land of the feminist vision. That the discussion makes use of these
Biblical metaphors points to the connections between feminist consciousness and
conversion narratives which often appear in women’s literature; Carolyn
Heilbrun comments on her own text, “When I talk about feminist criticism, I am
amazed at how high a moral tone I take.”
“Toward a Feminist Poetics”
!
Sandra M. Gilbert (b. 1936) and Susan Gubar (b. 1944)
!
Th e Fr e e d o m o f Em il y Dic k in s o n 1985
l
[Emily Dickinson] defined herself as a woman writer, reading the works of female
:
precursors with special care, attending to the implications of novels like
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and George
f
Eliot’s Middlemarch with the same absorbed delight that characterized her devo-
tion to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh. Finally, then, the key to her l!*:-
enigmatic identity as a “supposed person” who was called the “Myth of Amherst” 1:
may rest, not in investigations of her questionable romance, but in studies of her
unquestionably serious reading as well as in analyses of her disquietingly powerful
writing. Elliptically phrased, intensely compressed, her poems are more linguisti-
cally innovative than any other nineteenth-century verses, with the possible k
exception of some works by Walt Whitman and Gerard Manley Hopkins, her
's
1
two most radical male contemporaries. Throughout her largely secret but always
brilliant career, moreover, she confronted precisely the questions about the indi-
GENDER CRITICISM 1803
— • • ’"r-r TvT-7 ' \ t t : ; ^

vidual and society, time and death, flesh and spirit, that major precursors from
Milton to Keats had faced. Dreaming of “Amplitude and Awe,” she recorded
sometimes vengeful, sometimes mystical visions of social and personal transfor-
mation in poems as inventively phrased and imaginatively constructed as any in
the English language.
Clearly such accomplishments required not only extraordinary talent but
also some measure of freedom. Yet because she was the unmarried daughter of
conservative New Englanders, Dickinson was obliged to take on many household
tasks; as a nineteenth-century New England wife, she would have had the same
number of obligations, if not more. Some of these she performed with pleasure; in
1856, for instance, she was judge of a bread-baking contest, and in 1857 she won
a prize in that contest. But as Higginson’s “scholar,” as a voracious reader and an
ambitious writer, Dickinson had to win herself time for “Amplitude and Awe,”
and it is increasingly clear that she did so through a strategic withdrawal from her
ordinary world. A story related by her niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi reveals
that the poet herself knew from the first what both the price and the prize might
be: on one occasion, said Mrs. Bianchi, Dickinson took her up to the room in
which she regularly sequestered herself, and, mimicking locking herself in,
“thumb and forefinger closed on an imaginary key,” said “with a quick turn of her
wrist, ‘It’s just a turn—and freedom, Matty!’”
In the freedom of her solitary, but not lonely, room, Dickinson may have
become what her Amherst neighbors saw as a bewildering “myth.” Yet there, too,
she created myths of her own. Reading the Brontes and Barrett Browning, study-
ing Transcendentalism and the Bible, she contrived a theology which is power-
fully expressed in many of her poems. That it was at its most hopeful a female-
centered theology is revealed in verses like those she wrote about the women
artists she admired, as well as in more general works like her gravely pantheistic
address to the “Sweet Mountains” who “tell me no lie,” with its definition of the
hills around Amherst as “strong Madonnas” and its description of the writer her-
self as “The Wayward Nun—beneath the Hill—/ Whose service is to You—.” As
Dickinson’s admirer and descendant Adrienne Rich has accurately observed, this
passionate poet consistently chose to confront her society—to “have it out”—“on
her own premises.”
Introduction to Emily Dickinson,
The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women
Ps y c h o l o g ic a l Cr it ic is m
Modem psychology has had an immense effect on both literature and literary
criticism. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories changed our notions o
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 uncon-
scious fears or desires. Freud admitted that he himself had learned a great ea
about psychology from studying literature: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Goethe, an

\\
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.
This famous section of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) often raises an
important question for students: was Freud implying that Sophocles knew or
shared Freud’s theories? (Variations of this question can be asked for most critical
approaches: does using a critical approach require that the author under scrutiny
believed in it?) The answer is, of course, no; in analyzing Sophocles’ Oedipus,
Freud paid the classical Greek dramatist the considerable compliment that the
playwright had such profound insight into human nature that his characters dis-
play the depth and complexity of real people. In focusing on literature, Freud and Hi
his disciples like Carl Jung, Ernest Jones, Marie Bonaparte, and Bruno Bettelheim
endorse the belief that great literature truthfully reflects life.
Psychological criticism is a diverse category, but it often employs three
approaches. First, it investigates the creative process of the artist: what is the
nature of literary genius and how does it relate to normal mental functions?
(Philosophers and poets have also wrestled with this question, as you can see in
selections from Plato and Wordsworth in the “Criticism: On Poetry” section,
beginning on page 1025.) The second major area for psychological criticism is
the psychological study of a particular artist. Most modem literary biographies
employ psychology to understand their subject’s motivations and behavior. One
recent book, Diane Middlebrook’s controversial Anne Sexton: A Biography, actu-
ally used tapes of the poet’s sessions with her psychiatrist as material for the
study. The third common area of psychological criticism is the analysis of fiction-
al characters. Freud’s study of Oedipus is the prototype for this approach that
tries to bring modem insights about human behavior into the study of how fic-
tional people act.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) I

Th e De s t in y o f Oe d ipu s 1900 :
Transhted by James Strachey. The lines from Oedipus the King are given in the ver-
sion of David Grene.
:
If Oedipus the King moves a modem audience no less than it did the contemporary
Greek one, the explanation can only be that its effect does not lie in the contrast f
between destiny and human will, but is to be looked for in the particular nature
of the material on which that contrast is exemplified. There must be something ■
which makes a voice within us ready to recognize the compelling force of destiny !
in the Oedipus, while we can dismiss as merely arbitrary such dispositions as are i
laid down in Die Ahnfrau0 or other modem tragedies of destiny. And a factor of
this kind is in fact involved in the story of King Oedipus. His destiny moves us
f
only because it might have been ours—because the oracle laid the same curse
■
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i.
1
PSYCHOLOGICAL CRITICISM 1805
S
i
. I
upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct
our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first mur-
derous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that that is so. King
Oedipus, who slew his father Laius and married his mother Jocasta, merely shows
us the fulfillment of our own childhood wishes. But, more fortunate than he, we
have meanwhile succeeded, insofar as we have not become psychoneurotics, in
detaching our sexual impulses from our mothers and in forgetting our jealousy of
our fathers. Here is one in whom these primeval wishes of our childhood have
been fulfilled, and we shrink back from him with the whole force of the repres'
sion by which those wishes have since that time been held down within us.
While the poet, as he unravels the past, brings to light the guilt of Oedipus, he is
at the same time compelling us to recognize our own inner minds, in which those
same impulses, though suppressed, are still to be found. The contrast with which
the closing Chorus leaves us confronted—
behold this Oedipus,—
him who knew the famous riddles and was a man most masterful;
not a citizen who did not look with envy on his lot—
see him now and see the breakers of misfortune swallow him!
—strikes as a warning at ourselves and our pride, at us who since our childhood
have grown so wise and so mighty in our own eyes. Like Oedipus, we live in igno-
rance of these wishes, repugnant to morality, which have been forced upon us by
Nature, and after their revelation we may all of us well seek to close our eyes to
the scenes of our childhood.
The Interpretation of Dreams
Th e DESTINY o f Oe d ipu s . Die Ahnfrau: “The Foremother,” a verse play by Franz Grillparzer
(1791-1872), Austrian dramatist and poet.
Harold Bloom (b. 1930)

Po e t ic In f l u e n c e 1975
Let me reduce my argument to the hopelessly simplistic; poems, I am saying are

neither about “subjects” nor about “themselves.” They are necessarily about other
poems; a poem is a response to a poem, as a poet is a response to a poet, or a per-
son to his parent. Trying to write a poem takes the poet back to the origins of
what a poem first was for him, and so takes the poet back beyond the pleasure
principle to the decisive initial encounter and response that began him. We do
not think of W. C. Williams as a Keatsian poet, yet he began and ended as one, and
his late celebration of his Greeny Flower is anodier response to Keats’s odes. On y
a poet challenges a poet as poet, and so only a poet makes a poet. To the poet-in-a-
poet, a poem is always the other man, the precursor, and so a poem is always a per-
son, always the father of one’s Second Birth. To live, the poet must misinterpret
the father, by the crucial act of misprision, which is the rewriting of the father.

u
■
But who, what is the poetic father? The voice of the other, of the daimon, is {!
always speaking in one; the voice that cannot die because already it has sur-
vived death—the dead poet lives in one. In the last phase of strong poets, they
attempt to join the undying by living in the dead poets who are already alive in
them. This late Return of the Dead recalls us, as readers, to a recognition of the
original motive for the catastrophe of poetic incarnation. Vico, who identified
the origins of poetry with the impulse towards divination (to foretell, but also to
become a god by foretelling), implicitly understood (as did Emerson, and
Wordsworth) that a poem is written to escape dying. Literally, poems are
refusals of mortality. Every poem therefore has two makers: the precursor, and
the ephebe’s rejected mortality.
r:
A poet, I argue in consequence, is not so much a man speaking to men as a I!
man rebelling against being spoken to by a dead man (the precursor) outrageously
more alive than himself.
A Map of Misreading
So c io l o g ic a l Cr it ic is m
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, I
because articulate part.” Sociological criticism explores the relationships between r
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 r‘-
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
i 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.
An influential type of sociological criticism has been Marxist criticism,
r
: Sr
which focuses on the economic and political elements of art. Marxist criticism, as
like the work of the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs, often explores the ide-
ological content of literature. Whereas a formalist critic would maintain that
form and content are inextricably blended, Lukacs believed that content deter- k
mines form and that therefore, all art is political. Even if a work of art ignores
political issues, it makes a political statement, Marxist critics believe, because it
endorses the economic and political status quo. Consequently, Marxist criticism
is frequently evaluative and judges some literary work better than others on an U I
ideological basis; this tendency can lead to reductive judgment, as when Soviet E l
critics rated Jack London a novelist superior to William Faulkner, Ernest I. i
Hemingway, Edith Wharton, and Henry James, because he illustrated the princi-
i
SOCIOLOGICAL CRITICISM 1807
i
I IT—I v. ' .
pies of class struggle more clearly. But, as an analytical tool, Marxist criticism,
like other sociological methods, can illuminate political and economic dimen-
sions of literature other approaches overlook.
Georg Lukacs (1885-1971)

Co n t en t De t e r m in e s Fo r m 1962
What determines the style of a given work of art? How does the intention deter-
mine the form? (We are concerned here, of course, with the intention realized in
the work; it need not coincide with the writer’s conscious intention.) The dis-
tinctions that concern us are not those between stylistic “techniques” in the for-
malistic sense. It is the view of the world, the ideology or Weltanschauung3 under-
lying a writer’s work, that counts. And it is the writer’s attempt to reproduce this
view of the world which constitutes his “intention” and is the formative principle
underlying the style of a given piece of writing. Looked at in this way, style ceases
to be a formalistic category. Rather, it is rooted in content; it is the specific form
of a specific content.
Content determines form. But there is no content of which Man himself is
not the focal point. However various the donnees0 of literature (a particular expe-
rience, a didactic purpose), the basic question is, and will remain: what is Man?
Here is a point of division: if we put the question in abstract, philosophical
terms, leaving aside all formal considerations, we arrive—for the realist
school—at the traditional Aristotelian dictum (which was also reached by other
than purely aesthetic considerations): Man is zoon politikon,0 a social animal.
The Aristotelian dictum is applicable to all great realistic literature. Achilles
and Werther, Oedipus and Tom Jones, Antigone and Anna Karenina: their
individual existence—their Sein an sich,° in the Hegelian terminology; their
“ontological being,” as a more fashionable terminology has it—cannot be dis-
tinguished from their social and historical environment. Their human signifi-
cance; their specific individuality cannot be separated from the context in
which they were created.
Realism in Our Time
Co n t e n t De t e r min e s Fo r m . Weltanschauung: German for “worldview,” an outlook on life. don-

nies: French for “given”; it means the materials a writer uses to create his or her work or the subject or
purpose of a literary work. zoon politikon: Greek for “political animal.” Sein an sich. the
German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel’s term for “pure existence.”
Terry Eagleton (b. 1943)

1976
Ar t As Pr o d u c t io n
I have spoken so far of literature in terms of form, politics, ideology, conscious

ness. But all this overlooks a simple fact which is obvious to everyone, an not
least to a Marxist. Literature may be an artefact, a product of social conscious

I.
ness, a world vision; but it is also an industry. Books are not just structures of
meaning, they are also commodities produced by publishers and sold on the mar-
ket at a profit. Drama is not just a collection of literary texts; it is a capitalist
:;
business which employs certain men (authors, directors, actors, stagehands) to !i
produce a commodity to be consumed by an audience at a profit. Critics are not 1

just analysts of texts; they are also (usually) academics hired by the state to pre-
pare students ideologically for their functions within capitalist society. Writers
are not just transposers of trans-individual mental structures, they are also work-
ers hired by publishing houses to produce commodities which will sell. “A
writer,” Marx comments in Theories of Surplus Value, “is a worker not in so far as
he produces ideas, but in so far as he enriches the publisher, in so far as he is Is
working for a wage.” s
It is a salutary reminder. Art may be, as Engels remarks, the most highly
“mediated” of social products in its relation to the economic base, but in another
sense it is also part of that economic base—one kind of economic practice, one :
!
r
type of commodity production, among many. It is easy enough for critics, even
Marxist critics, to forget this fact, since literature deals with human consciousness •:
and tempts those of us who are students of it to rest content within that realm. 1
;
The Marxist critics I shall discuss ... are those who have grasped the fact that art .
is a form of social production—grasped it not as an external fact about it to be del-
egated to the sociologist of literature, but as a fact which closely determines the
nature of art itself. For these critics—I have in mind mainly Walter Benjamin
f
and Bertolt Brecht—art is first of all a social practice rather than an object to be
academically dissected. We may see literature as a text, but we may also see it as a
social activity, a form of social and economic production which exists alongside,
and interrelates with, other such forms.
Marxism and Literary Criticism
My t h o l o g ic a l Cr it ic is m • u:
i
;
Mythological critics look for the recurrent universal patterns underlying most lit-
erary works. (See Chapter 25, “Myth and Narrative,” for a definition of myth and ; -
a discussion of its importance to the literary imagination.) Mythological criti- i
cism is an interdisciplinary approach that combines the insights of anthropology, !
psychology, history, and comparative religion. If psychological criticism exam- :
ines the artist as an individual, mythological criticism explores the artist’s corn- :
mon 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 i
“collective unconscious,” a set of primal memories common to the human race,
l
existing below each person’s conscious mind. Archetypal images (which often
relate to experiencing primordial phenomena like the sun, moon, fire, night, and
1
MYTHOLOGICAL CRITICISM 1809
*
i
blood), Jung believed, trigger the collective unconscious. We do not need to
accept the literal truth of the collective unconscious, however, to endorse the
archetype as a helpful critical concept. The late Northrop Frye defined the arche-
type in considerably less occult terms as “a symbol, usually an image, which recurs
often enough in literature to be recognizable as an element of one’s literary expe-
rience as a whole.”
Identifying archetypal symbols and situations in literary works, mythological
critics almost inevitably link the individual text under discussion to a broader
context of works that share an underlying pattern. In discussing Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, for instance, a mythological critic might relate Shakespeare’s Danish
prince to other mythic sons avenging their father’s deaths, like Orestes from
Greek myth or Sigmund of Norse legend; or, in discussing Othello, relate the sin-
ister figure of Iago to the devil in traditional Christian belief. Critic Joseph
Campbell took such comparisons even further; his compendious study The Hero
with a Thousand Faces demonstrates how similar mythic characters appear in vir-
tually every culture on every continent.
Northrop Frye (1912-1991)

My t h ic Ar c h e t y pe s 1957
We begin our study of archetypes, then, with a world of myth, an abstract or

purely literary world of fictional and thematic design, unaffected by canons of
plausible adaptation to familiar experience. In terms of narrative, myth is the imi-
tation of actions near or at the conceivable limits of desire. The gods enjoy beau-
tiful women, fight one another with prodigious strength, comfort and assist man,
or else watch his miseries from the height of their immortal freedom. The fact
that myth operates at the top level of human desire does not mean that it neces-
sarily presents its world as attained or attainable by human beings....
Realism, or the art of verisimilitude, evokes the response “How like that is to
what we know!” When what is written is like what is known, we have an art of
extended or implied simile. And as realism is an art of implicit simile, myth is an
art of implicit metaphorical identity. The word “sun-god,” with a hyphen used
instead of a predicate, is a pure ideogram, in Pound’s terminology, or literal
metaphor, in ours. In myth we see the structural principles of literature isolated;
in realism we see the same structural principles (not similar ones) fitting into a
context of plausibility. (Similarly in music, a piece by Purcell and a piece by
Benjamin Britten may not be in the least like each other, but if they are both in D
major their tonality will be the same.) The presence of a mythical structure in
realistic fiction, however, poses certain technical problems for making it plausi-
ble, and the devices used in solving these problems may be given the genera
name of displacement.
Myth, then, is one extreme of literary design; naturalism is the other, and in
between lies the whole area of romance, using that term to mean, not the histori

'P.
cal mode of the first essay, but the tendency, noted later in the same essay, to dis-
place myth in a human direction and yet, in contrast to “realism,” to convention-
alize content in an idealized direction. The central principle of displacement is
that what can be metaphorically identified in a myth can only be linked in :!
romance by some form of simile: analogy, significant association, incidental
accompanying imagery, and the like. In a myth we can have a sun-god or a tree-
god; in a romance we may have a person who is significantly associated with the
sun or trees.
Anatomy of Criticism
Maud Bodkin (1875-1967)

Lu c if e r in Sh a k e s pe a r e ’s Ot h e l l o 1934
If we attempt to define the devil in psychological terms, regarding him as an

archetype, a persistent or recurrent mode of apprehension, we may say that the
devil is our tendency to represent in personal form the forces within and without •.
us that threaten our supreme values. When Othello finds those values of confi- 1
dent love, of honor, and pride in soldiership, that made up his purposeful life,
falling into ruin, his sense of the devil in all around him becomes acute.
l
;
?
Desdemona has become “a fair devil”; he feels “a young and sweating devil” in
her hand. The cry “O devil” breaks out among his incoherent words of raving.
When lago’s falsehoods are disclosed, and Othello at last, too late, wrenches him-
self free from the spell of lago’s power over him, his sense of the devil incarnate
in lago’s shape before him becomes overwhelming. If those who tell of the devil
‘r
have failed to describe Iago, they have lied:
I look down towards his feet; but that’s a fable.
If that thou be’st a devil, I cannot kill thee.
t
We also, watching or reading the play, experience the archetype. Intellectually !
aware, as we reflect, of natural forces, within a man himself as well as in society !:
around, that betray or shatter his ideals, we yet feel these forces aptly symbolized
for the imagination by such a figure as Iago—a being though personal yet hardly
human, concentrated wholly on the hunting to destruction of its destined prey,
the proud figure of the hero. i
Archetypal Patterns in Poetry *
Re a d e r -Re s po n s e Cr it ic is m
Reader-response criticism attempts to describe what happens in the reader s mind I
while interpreting a text. If traditional criticism assumes that imaginative writing ,i
£i
is a creative act, reader-response theory recognizes that reading is also a creative
,r
K
process. Reader-response critics believe that no text provides self-contained
meaning; literary texts do not exist independently of readers’ interpretations. A
• i
■ i
l
READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM 1811 1
'• •• 1 I'-' ' . r ■■ t

text, according to this critical school, is not finished until it is read and interpret-
ed. 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.
The easiest way to explain reader-response criticism is to relate it to the
common experience of rereading a favorite book after many years. Rereading a
novel as an adult, for example, that “changed your life” as an adolescent, is often
a shocking experience. The book may seem substantially different. The character
you remembered liking most now seems less admirable, and another character
you disliked now seems more sympathetic. Has the book changed? Very unlikely,
but you certainly have in the intervening years. Reader-response criticism
explores how the different individuals (or classes of individuals) see the same text
differently. It emphasizes how religious, cultural, and social values affect readings;
it also overlaps with gender criticism in exploring how men and women read the
same text with different assumptions.
While reader-response criticism rejects the notion that there can be a single
correct reading for a literary text, it doesn’t consider all readings permissible.
Each text creates limits to its possible interpretations. As Stanley Fish admits in
the following critical selection, we cannot arbitrarily place an Eskimo in William
Faulkner’s story “A Rose for Emily” (though Professor Fish does ingeniously
imagine a hypothetical situation where this bizarre interpretation might actually
be possible).
Stanley Fish (b. 1938)

An Es k im o “A Ro s e f o r Em il y ” 1980
The fact that it remains easy to think of a reading that most of us would dismiss
out of hand does not mean that the text excludes it but that there is as yet no
elaborated interpretive procedure for producing that text.... Norman Holland s
analysis of Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is a case in point. Holland is arguing for
a kind of psychoanalytic pluralism. The text, he declares, is “at most a matrix of
psychological possibilities for its readers,” but, he insists, “only some possibilities
.. . truly fit the matrix”: “One would not say, for example, that a reader of.. ■ ‘A
Rose for Emily’ who thought the ‘tableau’ [of Emily and her father in the door-
way] described an Eskimo was really responding to the story at all only pursuing
some mysterious inner exploration.”
Holland is making two arguments: first, that anyone who proposes an Es imo
reading of “A Rose for Emily” will not find a hearing in the literary community.
And that, I think, is right. (“We are right to rule out at least some readings. ) is
second argument is that the unacceptability of the Eskimo reading is a function
of the text, of what he calls its “sharable promptuary,” the public store o struc-

:
tured language” that sets limits to the interpretations the words can accommo-
date. And that, I think, is wrong. The Eskimo reading is unacceptable because
;
there is at present no interpretive strategy for producing it, no way of “looking” or i'
reading (and remember, all acts of looking or reading are “ways”) that would
result in the emergence of obviously Eskimo meanings. This does not mean, how-
ever, that no such strategy could ever come into play, and it is not difficult to
imagine the circumstances under which it would establish itself. One such cir-
cumstance would be the discovery of a letter in which Faulkner confides that he
has always believed himself to be an Eskimo changeling. (The example is absurd
only if one forgets Yeats’s Vision or Blake’s Swedenborgianism® or James Miller’s
recent elaboration of a homosexual reading of The Waste Land0.) Immediately
the workers in the Faulkner industry would begin to reinterpret the canon in the
light of this newly revealed “belief’ and the work of reinterpretation would
involve the elaboration of a symbolic or allusive system (not unlike mythological
or typological criticism) whose application would immediately transform the text
into one informed everywhere by Eskimo meanings. It might seem that I am
admitting that there is a text to be transformed, but the object of transformation
would be the text (or texts) given by whatever interpretive strategies the Eskimo
strategy was in the process of dislodging or expanding. The result would be that
whereas we now have a Freudian “A Rose for Emily,” a mythological “A Rose for
Emily,” a Christologicai “A Rose for Emily,” a regional “A Rose for Emily,” a
sociological “A Rose for Emily,” a linguistic "A Rose for Emily,” we would in
addition have an Eskimo “A Rose for Emily,” existing in some relation of com-
patibility or incompatibility with the others.
I-
Again the point is that while there are always mechanisms for ruling out
readings, their source is not the text but the presently recognized interpretive
i
strategies for producing the text. It follows, then, that no reading, however out- ■
landish it might appear, is inherently an impossible one.

I
t
Is There a Text in This Class?
An ESKIMO “A Ro s e Fo r Emil y .” Yeats’s Vision or Blake's Swedenborgianism: Irish poet William Butler
Yeats and Swedish mystical writer Emanuel Swedenborg both claimed to have received revelations ■i
I; !I
from the spirit world; some of Swedenborg’s ideas are embodied in the long poems of William Blake.
The Waste Land: influential poem by T. S. Eliot. ;
Robert Scholes (b. 1929)

“How Do We Ma k e A Po e m ?” 1982
Let us begin with one of the shortest poetic texts in the English language, “Elegy”
by W. S. Merwin:
f;
i
;
Who would I show it to
One line, one sentence, unpunctuated, but proclaimed an interrogative by its
t r
c
grammar and syntax—what makes it a poem? Certainly without its title it would f
not be a poem; but neither would the title alone constitute a poetic text. Nor do t
!
: •- r
READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM 1813 i!
. hi
the two together simply make a poem by themselves. Given the title and the
text, the reader is encouraged to make a poem. He is not forced to do so, but there
is not much else he can do with this material, and certainly nothing el:se so
rewarding. (I will use the masculine pronoun here to refer to the reader, not
because all readers are male but because I am, and my hypothetical reader is rnot a
pure construct but an idealized version of myself.)
How do we make a poem out of this text? There are only two things to work
on, the title and the question posed by the single, colloquial line. The line is not
simply colloquial, it is prosaic; with no words of more than one syllable, conclud-
ed by a preposition, it is within the utterance range of every speaker of English. It
is, in a sense, completely intelligible. But in another sense it is opaque, mysteri-
ous. Its three pronouns—who, I, it—pose problems of reference. Its conditional
verb phrase—would ... show to—poses a problem of situation. The context that
would supply the information required to make that simple sentence meaningful
as well as intelligible is not there. It must be supplied by the reader.
To make a poem of this text the reader must not only know English, he must
know a poetic code as well: the code of the funeral elegy, as practiced in English
from the Renaissance to the present time. The “words on the page” do not con-
stitute a poetic “work,” complete and self-sufficient, but a “text,” a sketch or out-
line that must be completed by the active participation of a reader equipped with
the right sort of information. In this case part of that information consists of an
acquaintance with the elegiac tradition: its procedures, assumptions, devices, and
values. One needs to know works like Milton’s “Lycidas,” Shelley’s “Adonais,”
Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloomed,” Thomas’s “Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London,”
and so on, in order to “read” this simple poem properly. In fact, it could be argued
that the more elegies one can bring to bear on a reading of this one, the better,
richer poem this one becomes. I would go even further, suggesting that a knowl-
edge of the critical tradition—of Dr. Johnson’s objections to “Lycidas,” for
instance, or Wordsworth’s critique of poetic diction—will also enhance one’s
reading of this poem. For the poem is, of course, an anti-elegy, a refusal not sim-
ply to mourn, but to write a sonorous, eloquent, mournful, but finally acquies-
cent, accepting—in a word, “elegiac”—poem at all.
Reading the poem involves, then, a special knowledge of its tradition. It also
involves a special interpretive skill. The forms of the short, written poem as they
have developed in English over the past few centuries can be usefully seen as
compressed, truncated, or fragmented imitations of other verbal forms, especially
the play, story, public oration, and personal essay. The reasons for this are too
complicated for consideration here, but the fact will be apparent to all who
reflect upon the matter. Our short poems are almost always elliptical versions of
what can easily be conceived of as dramatic, narrative, oratorical, or meditative
texts. Often, they are combinations of these and other modes of address. To take
an obvious example, the dramatic monologue in the hands of Robert Browning is
like a speech from a play (though usually more elongated than most such speec
es). But to “read” such a monologue we must imagine the setting, the situation,

hif
N
the context, and so on. The dramatic monologue is “like” a play but gives us less
1
information of certain sorts than a play would, requiring us to provide that infor-
mation by decoding the clues in the monologue itself in the light of our under- ;: ;• .
standing of the generic model. Most short poems work this way. They require \
both special knowledge and special skills to be “read.”
» f
To understand “Elegy” we must construct a situation out of the clues provid-
ed. The “it” in “Who would I show it to” is of course the elegy itself. The “I” is
the potential writer of the elegy. The “Who” is the audience for the poem. But !I I
the verb phrase “would ... show to” indicates a condition contrary to fact. Who
would I show it to if I were to write it? This implies in turn that for the potential
elegiac poet there is one person whose appreciation means more than that of all ll
!■ ?
the rest of the potential audience for the poem he might write, and it further l -
implies that the death of this particular person is the one imagined in the poem. : '
!
If this person were dead, the poet suggests, so would his inspiration be dead.
With no one to write for, no poem would be forthcoming. This poem is not only t:
i ■:
a “refusal to mourn,” like that of Dylan Thomas, it is a refusal to elegize. The
whole elegiac tradition, like its cousin the funeral oration, turns finally away
from mourning toward acceptance, revival, renewal, a return to the concerns of ! .
1
life, symbolized by the very writing of the poem. Life goes on; there is an audi-
ence; and the mourned person will live through accomplishments, influence,
if
descendants, and also (not least) in the elegiac poem itself. Merwin rejects all '■ t
:*
that. If I wrote an elegy for X, the person for whom I have always written, X
would not be alive to read it; therefore, there is no reason to write an elegy for r:
the one person in my life who most deserves one; therefore, there is no reason to
l
write any elegy, anymore, ever. Finally, and of course, this poem called “Elegy” is ! .
not an elegy. i ‘
r :
Semiotics and Interpretation
De c o n s t r u c t io n is t Cr it ic is m r •
! ■
Deconstructionist criticism rejects the traditional assumption that language can i -

accurately represent reality. Language, according to deconstructionists, is a funda-
mentally unstable medium; consequently, literary texts, which are made up of
words, have no fixed, single meaning. Deconstructionists insist, according to crit-
ic 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 decon- £
structionist approach attempts to show how the text deconstructs, that is, how *
it can be broken down—by a skeptical critic—into mutually irreconcilable posi-
tions. A biographical or historical critic might seek to establish the author’s
DECONSTRUCTIONIST CRITICISM 1815 i *

1
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 lan-
guage. 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
I 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.
Deconstruction, as you may have inferred, calls for intellectual subtlety and
skill, and isn’t for a novice to leap into. If you pursue your literary studies beyond
i
the introductory stage, you will want to become more familiar with its assump-
tions. Deconstruction may strike you as a negative, even destructive, critical
approach, and yet its best practitioners are adept at exposing the inadequacy of
much conventional criticism. By patient analysis, they can sometimes open up
the most familiar text and find in it fresh and unexpected significance.
I Roland Barthes (1915-1980)

Th e De a t h of t he Au t h o r 1968
Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions,
humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he
draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the
book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infi-
nitely deferred.
Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite
futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it
with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very
well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author
■
(or its hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work: when the
Author has been found, the text is “explained”—victory to the critic. Hence
there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the Author has also
been that of the Critic, nor again in the fact that criticism (be it new) is today
undermined along with the Author. In the multiplicity of writing, everything is
to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, “run (like
the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing
beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaseless y

:
posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of ;j
meaning. In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say !
writing), by refusing to assign a “secret”, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to
‘i
the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an .
activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to
refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law.
“The Death of the Author”
Translated by Stephen Heath
i
r \
Geoffrey Hartman (b. 1929) L
i; :
On Wo r d s w o r t h ’s “A Sl u m b e r Did My Spir it Se a l ” 1987
Take Wordsworth’s well-known lyric of eight lines, one of the “Lucy” poems,
which has been explicated so many times without its meaning being fully deter-
mined: /
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears: l
jj
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
nH .
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, i
With rocks, and stones, and trees. • i
ru
It does not matter whether you interpret the second stanza (especially its last
line) as tending toward affirmation, or resignation, or a grief verging on bitter-
ness. The tonal assignment of one rather than another possible meaning, to
repeat Susanne Langer0 on musical form, is curiously open or beside the point. ! 8
Yet the lyric does not quite support Langer’s general position, that “Articulation '
is its life, but not assertion,” because the poem is composed of a series of short and
definitive statements, very like assertions. You could still claim that the poem’s
life is not in the assertions but somewhere else: but where then? What would
articulation mean in that case? Articulation is not anti-assertive here; indeed the / t
sense of closure is so strong that it thematizes itself in the very first line.
Nevertheless, is not the harmony or aesthetic effect of the poem greater than
this local conciseness; is not the sense of closure broader and deeper than our E
admiration for a perfect technical construct? The poem is surely something else
than a fine box, a well-wrought coffin.
That it is a kind of epitaph is relevant, of course. We recognize, even if genre
P
is not insisted on, that Wordsworth’s style is laconic, even lapidary. There may be f • I
a mimetic or formal motive related to the ideal of epitaphic poetry. But the ■ : &
motive may also be, in a precise way, meta-epitaphic. The poem, first of all, .v
marks the closure of a life that has never opened up: Lucy is likened in other I
1.
DECONSTRUCTIONIST CRITICISM 1817
|
“—
poems to a hidden flower or the evening star. Setting overshadows rising, and her
mode of existence is inherently inward, westering. I will suppose then, that
Wordsworth was at some level giving expression to the traditional epitaphic
wish: Let the earth rest lightly on the deceased. If so, his conversion of this epi-
taphic formula is so complete that to trace the process of conversion might seem
gratuitous. The formula, a trite if deeply grounded figure of speech, has been cat-
alyzed out of existence. Here it is formula itself, or better, the adjusted words of
the mourner that lie lightly on the girl and everyone who is a mourner.
I come back, then, to the “aesthetic” sense of a burden lifted, rather than
denied. A heavy element is made lighter. One may still feel that the term “ela-
tion” is inappropriate in this context; yet elation is, as a mood, the very subject
of the first stanza. For the mood described is love or desire when it eternizes the
loved person, when it makes her a star-like being that “could not feel / The
touch of earthly years.” This naive elation, this spontaneous movement of the
spirit upward, is reversed in the downturn or cata-strophe of the second stanza.
Yet this stanza does not close out the illusion; it preserves it within the elegaic
form. The illusion is elated, in our use of the word: aufgehoben0 seems the proper
term. For the girl is still, and all the more, what she seemed to be: beyond
touch, like a star, if the earth in its daily motion is a planetary and erring rather
than a fixed star, and if all on this star of earth must partake of its sublunar,
: mortal, temporal nature.
:
To sum up: In Wordsworth’s lyric the specific gravity of words is weighed in

the balance of each stanza; and this balance is as much a judgment on speech in
the context of our mortality as it is a meaningful response to the individual death.
At the limit of the medium of words, and close to silence, what has been purged
is not concreteness, or the empirical sphere of the emotions—shock, disillusion,
trauma, recognition, grief, atonement—what has been purged is a series of flashy
schematisms and false or partial mediations: artificial plot, inflated consolatory
rhetoric, the coercive absolutes of logic or faith.
“Elation in Hegel and Wordsworth
On Wo r d s w o r t h ’s “A Sl u mb e r Did My Spir it Se a l .” Susanne hanger: Langer (1895-1985) was an
American philosopher who discussed the relationship between aesthetics and artistic form.
Aufgehoben: German for “taken up” or “lifted up,” but this term can also mean “canceled" or nulli-
fied.” Hartman uses the term for its double meaning.

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5» Critical Approaches to Literature

The really competent critic must be an empiricist. He must conduct his

Literary criticism is not an abstract, intellectual exercise; it is a natural human

1790 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

Formalist criticism regards literature as a unique form of human knowledge that

Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994)

1792 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

Robert Langbaum (b. 1924)

Notice Neptune, though,

1794 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

BIOGRAPHICAL CRITICISM 1795

Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)

A central dogma of much recent criticism asserts that biographical information is

1796 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

Brett C. Millier (b. 1958)

losing one average-sized not exceptionally / beautiful or dazzlingly intelligent per-

1798 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

Hugh Kenner (b. 1923)

vision of colors, splotches on darkness like some canvas of Kandinsky’s (whose :

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Dis’ bride, Queen over Phlegethon,

—the faces of those girls likewise “apparitions.”

The light of our cigarettes

It is a simile with “like” suppressed: Pound called it an equation, meaning not a

1800 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. J

I am the darker brother

They send me to the kitchen

HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1801

Elaine Showalter (b. 1941)

1802 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

GENDER CRITICISM 1803

— • • ’"r-r TvT-7 ' \ t t : ; ^

1804 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) I

Harold Bloom (b. 1930)

Let me reduce my argument to the hopelessly simplistic; poems, I am saying are

1806 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

SOCIOLOGICAL CRITICISM 1807

Georg Lukacs (1885-1971)

Co n t e n t De t e r min e s Fo r m . Weltanschauung: German for “worldview,” an outlook on life. don-

Terry Eagleton (b. 1943)

I have spoken so far of literature in terms of form, politics, ideology, conscious

1808 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

produce a commodity to be consumed by an audience at a profit. Critics are not 1

Northrop Frye (1912-1991)

We begin our study of archetypes, then, with a world of myth, an abstract or

1810 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

Maud Bodkin (1875-1967)

If we attempt to define the devil in psychological terms, regarding him as an

'• •• 1 I'-' ' . r ■■ t

Stanley Fish (b. 1938)

1812 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

landish it might appear, is inherently an impossible one.

Robert Scholes (b. 1929)

1814 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

Deconstructionist criticism rejects the traditional assumption that language can i -