Methods in the Humanities

Research in the humanities can be accomplished through a surprisingly diverse range of

methods, which apply equally well to the study of languages, literatures, the fine arts, applied
arts, and religion. Most of these methods fall into two basic categories: Extrinsic or
Contextualist approaches and Intrinsic or Isolationist approaches.

Extrinsic or Contextualist Approaches

Extrinsic or contextualist approaches are largely historical in orientation; that is, they seek to
examine the context, the milieu, the background that produced the literary text, artwork, idea, or
author/artist. Such approaches assume that there are causal connections between the nature of a
work of art (including its content and its form), or a linguistic or an ideological phenomenon, and
the historical moment in which it occurred. However, it should be understood from the outset
that no single such factor ever fully accounts for the complexity of a text, artwork, or idea, which
tends to be the product of many different causes. Although the term “historical” would seem to
suggest that such methods are applicable only to older works of art, texts, or ideas, they are in
fact equally useful in a discussion of contemporary works and ideas as well; however, they are
then more properly described as “extrinsic” or “contextualist” approaches. Under this general
rubric fall several more specialized methods:

(1) Texts, artworks, and ideas are born of individuals; thus many studies are specifically
biographical or psychological in orientation, focusing directly upon the life and mind of the
author/artist, seeking connections between life experience and the product(s) of his or her mind.
Also included under this rubric are so-called influence studies, which chart the impact of a
particular individual, work, idea, or movement of some kind upon another. Comparative studies
might likewise be made of two or more works by the same author or artist, as a way of arriving
at some conclusions about the author’s/artist’s intellectual, personal, aesthetic preoccupations
and development; or of works by different authors/artists working in the same medium or genre,
as a means of discovering the uniqueness of a particular person's body of work. These modes of
analysis presuppose substantial research into primary documents such as letters, journals, diaries,
first-person accounts of contemporaries, and so forth. Careful investigation of an author’s/artist’s
stated intentions with regard to his or her work should be considered as interpretations are
advanced.

(2) Works are likewise produced within an institutional context; thus it can be productive to
examine the social, economic, and political conditions that surrounded an author/artist, in order
to determine whether directly or indirectly they affected the artworks or the more widespread
movements of which specific works form only a part. Under this rubric an even narrower focus
can be achieved by using the following closely related methods:

Gender, race, ethnicity, identity, and sexuality studies focus upon the literary and artistic
representations of specific groups such as women, gays, lesbians, African Americans, Hispanics,
Asians, and Jews. These kinds of studies examine the lives, attitudes toward, and social
conditions of such groups as either the background against which a work or an idea was
conceived, or as phenomena reflected within a work or an idea—often, but not exclusively, in
works produced by members of that group. For example, feminist critics seek to understand
historical concepts of “the feminine” and their impact upon an author’s/artist’s representation of
or assumptions about women. Such studies often critique the masculine, authoritarian tradition of
misrepresenting or excluding the female. This tradition, operative in both literary and art history,
has been shown by feminist critics to be responsible for the suppression of countless works of art
by women; thus, much feminist criticism has devoted itself in recent years to locating and re-
establishing the primary texts by women authors/artists and securing for them a place in the
canon. Feminist scholarship in the field of religion has generated radical revisionist readings of
major theological texts, particularly of the Bible. Film criticism has likewise benefited from
feminist interpretations, prompting fascinating explorations of the masculine “gaze” of the
camera upon a variety of feminine stereotypes, real and imagined. All versions of gender, race,
ethnicity, identity, and sexuality studies share a common interest in the expression and
interrogation of such depictions, as well as their relationship to the prevailing power structures
within a society.

A Marxist approach is derived from a specific scientific theory of human societies—namely,

that history is the record of people engaged in struggles to free themselves from oppressive class
and economic systems; and that history can be properly understood only in terms of a society’s
modes of production and the material life they afford—for all attitudes, values, and expressions
of culture (e.g., its art) are necessarily linked to the economic conditions of daily life. Thus a
Marxist interpretation of art would address itself not only to the more obvious depictions of the
political and economic lives and struggles of individuals (as in, say, Delacroix’s painting Liberty
Leading the People, Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure, or Strindberg’s play Miss Julie), but to
subtler manifestations of these phenomena, such as the evolution of genres; the rise of new forms
of artistic expression; and the means by which works were actually produced, marketed, and
received by the public and by those in power. For instance, how does one explain the rise of the
novel in the 18th century? The appearance of Cubism in painting? The use of polyphonic voices
in Eliot’s The Waste Land? The rise of the International Style in architecture? The movement
from Naturalism to Expressionism in the European drama of the 1890s? How politics affected
the translation of certain passages in the King James version of the Bible? Why Wordsworth
chose to publish his poem The White Doe of Rylstone in the more expensive quarto format and
how this decision affected the sales, reviews, and subsequent literary reputation of the poem?
The Marxist critic would argue that all of the foregoing questions are answerable within a
political, social, or an economic context.

More recent incarnations of this mode of analysis are the New Historicism, Cultural Criticism,
and Post-Colonialism, all heavily historical and sociological in orientation but manifesting a
postmodern skepticism about history and culture’s somewhat deceptive self-fashioning. These
modes of criticism seek to explore aspects of, and the relationship between, "high culture" and
"low culture" (as they have frequently been described), recognizing that the identity of a society
and its values are Influenced by both spheres. Since working-class voices and native voices (in
the case of societies colonized by outsiders) have often been ignored, suppressed, or co-opted by
the proponents of the hegemonic "high culture," the three critical approaches above focus their
attention on these uneasy relationships and on the significance and vehicles of expression that
emerge from mass culture.

Among the several institutional contexts, a technological or materials-based approach would

examine the impact of a particular technological innovation upon a specific work, movement,
medium, or discipline, such as the invention of color film or the ultra-high-speed lens upon
photography or filmmaking; of tempered glass upon contemporary architectural style; of acrylic
paint upon traditional easel-painting; or of digital technology on preserving glass-plate negatives.

(3) A history-of-ideas approach seeks to explain texts, artworks, and other intellectual
developments in terms of a larger context of ideas characteristic of an age. These leading ideas
can be philosophical, scientific, or religious in origin (e.g., positivism, evolution, evangelicalism)
but are nonetheless profoundly influential upon many other areas of knowledge. Some scholars
subscribe to the notion of a Zeitgeist, a “spirit of the age,” which simultaneously permeates all
intellectual disciplines; this method thus assumes a kinship of ideas among the several arts,
philosophy, religion, the sciences, and various other creations of the human mind that comprise
“culture” in a given age. Scholars have often traced the metamorphosis of a single idea through
several ages and its appearance in various media (e.g., the concept of the “great chain of being,”
the idea of skepticism, the psychological principle of the association of ideas, the neo-Platonic
concept of beauty). Under this same rubric we may place studies of the “taste” of an age; as well
as of movements, of which, according to intellectual history, individual writers or artists formed
a part (e.g., Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Dadaism, Russian Constructivism).

(4) A related approach concerns itself with the analysis of myth, archetypes, folklore,
iconography, iconology, and other patterns of visual or verbal imagery, which occur as
leitmotifs within individual works or groups of works. Extrinsic treatments of this subject often
focus upon the historical origins of such stories or emblems, their reappearance in various ages
and media, their evolution from one kind of representation to another, and the social, political, or
psychological causes that prompt their re-emergence (e.g., the creation story, Camelot, the
leprechaun, the Madonna, the fisher-king, the vampire).

(5) Furthermore, charting the development of a specific genre, medium, or category of objet
d’art (the sonnet, Victorian “moral art,” the improvisational drama, the Greek amphora) and its
attendant conventions or characteristics can prove a fruitful approach, particularly when
analyzing a work according to the “horizon of expectations” that the genre sets for the
reader/viewer, and the degree to which that work gratifies or thwarts those expectations (e.g., In
what ways do John Donne’s Holy Sonnets defy our expectations of the sonnet? On what generic
grounds was Beckett’s Waiting for Godot a shock to the typical theater-goer of the 1952 season?
How did Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 [“Eroica”] depart from the earlier conventions of
symphonic composition? How did Horne Tooke’s notion of “abbreviation” revolutionize
eighteenth-century concepts of grammar?).

(6) The methods known as hermeneutics and reception theory offer real challenges to the
researcher; for both demand that one recreate as accurately and completely as possible the exact
historical milieu in which a work was conceived in order to comprehend the intentions of the
artistic or authorial consciousness that created it, as well as the audience’s subsequent response
to it.

The hermeneutical critic charts the meaning of the work through time; believing, however, that
meaning itself is a historical—and therefore relative—construct, subject to changes from one
period to another. (What Shakespeare’s plays meant to the Renaissance audience is different
from their meaning to a twenty-first-century one.) The author may intend to invest his or her
text/artwork with certain meanings, but the audience will always endow it with additional ones;
or to put it another way, the text/artwork will—as it continues through time—accrue further
meanings, regardless of the author’s original intentions. Interpretation is, therefore, situational
and is necessarily a dialogue between past and present interpretations of a work. In this
interpretive history, the hermeneutical critic must be well versed.

Reception theory focuses specifically upon the reader’s role in actually helping to create the
meanings of a text. The psychodynamics of the act of reading itself are explored, the means by
which the reader actualizes or “concretizes” the literary work. Similar studies occur in the visual
arts, such as Rudolf Arnheim’s landmark work Visual Thinking, which explores the union
between visual perception and the rational process of constructing meanings from the act of
looking at a work of art. While these methods might seem to imply an anarchical “anything-
goes” mode of interpretation, in reality both presuppose a substantial knowledge of history,
psychology, and the various conventions of artistic forms, which serve as shorthand “codes” or
“signals” utilized by the author/artist in the creation of a work, and which, if recognized, enable
the reader or viewer to arrive at reasonable interpretations.

(7) In the fine arts, another important approach is referred to as Connoisseurship, which
involves acquiring extensive knowledge of works of art chiefly for the purpose of attributing
them to artists or schools, identifying sources, styles, and influences, and judging their quality in
relation to the existing canon.

Intrinsic or Isolationist Approaches

Intrinsic or isolationist approaches concern themselves solely with the structure and materials
that constitute the text, painting, sculpture, vase, photograph, film, building, play (or any other
artifact). By “structure” and “materials” we mean not only the diverse elements that comprise
form and content but the innate and unique relationship—indeed, the complex interaction—
that those various elements have with each other, and that collectively produce and unify the
aesthetic qualities of the artifact. Factors outside the text or artwork itself are banned from
consideration (the author or artist, the facts of his or her life, the historical period in which the
work occurred and all events and persons associated with it, the history of the genre or medium
of the work under scrutiny, and so on). These methods are also referred to as “textual” (in the
case of literary works) or “formal” (in the case of both art and literary works). The proliferation
of intrinsic approaches in the 20th-century reflects a backlash against the more traditional
extrinsic ones, which seemed to subordinate the artwork to the artist and his or her times.
Intrinsic approaches treat the work of art as an autonomous, unified system of structures or
interdependent “signs,” either linguistic or pre-iconographic (to use Erwin Panofsky’s term),
depending on the medium under consideration.

For the intrinsic study of literature, several general categories of inquiry—all language-based—
can be used to analyze the many strata of a work. As suggested by René Wellek and Austin
Warren in Theory of Literature, such analyses focus on the following: the individual units of
meaning—from words and phrases to sentences and stanzas—that determine the formal
linguistic structure of the work and its style (including its diction and its syntax); sound-
effects—euphony, cacophony, rhythm, meter, alliteration, assonance, consonance,
onomatopoeia, rhyme—and their role in creating the totality of a literary work; literary devices,
such as image and metaphor, symbols and symbolic systems (myths), and the wide range of
related figurative devices that contribute to a work’s structure and meaning; the “world” or
“consciousness” within the text, the interplay of “voices” (especially important to narrative
fiction) and the tone they create (which, it can be argued, is the sum total of all the stylistic
elements previously described—diction, imagery, syntax, sound, and rhythm). Literature is thus
seen to be an artful arrangement of language, its content and form inseparable, realized through a
variety of techniques—the detailed investigation of which leads the reader to a total experience
of the work, without any need for extraliterary considerations. All of the foregoing are really
modes of linguistic criticism. More specialized versions are described below:

(1) A structuralist approach concentrates upon the “structures” that comprise literary language
and their complex relationship to each other; these structures are both grammatical and mythic in
nature (the former with its roots in linguistics, the latter in anthropology). All entities (whether in
a text or in a society) are seen to be comprehensible only in terms of the larger structure of which
they form a part. Individual words (the “signifiers”) are used arbitrarily to denote particular
objects or abstractions (the “signified”). Together these “signs” constitute language, which is
used to express ideas. Words or signs have syntagmatic or “horizontal” relations, that is, a linear
relationship with the words that precede and succeed them in sentences, the positioning of which
affects “meaning”; and associative or “vertical” relations, namely, a relationship with all the
other words that might have been chosen to express an idea but were not and thus sharpen the
meaning of those that were. Literary language, by virtue of its poetic nature and the devices it
employs (metaphor, rhyme, and so on), self-consciously courts unique modes of expression,
calling attention to its medium over its message, subverting the more “ordinary” linguistic
system by extending and modifying it. The text consequently presents many levels of
relationship and thus many levels of meaning. This is the aim of a structuralist approach to
literature: to discover these relationships as well as these various levels of meaning (although
with little of the conventional critic’s concern for the implications of those various meanings).

(2) Similar to this method are formalism and semiotics, both of which—like structuralism—are
described as “sciences” of literary or textual analysis.

Formalist approaches are likewise concerned with literary structure, with the recognition and
objective description of their uniquely literary nature and use of phonemic devices. To
underscore the “scientific” orientation of their analysis, the (Russian) formalist critics of the
1920s described the literary text using three relatively clinical metaphors: as a machine, as an
organism, and as a system. Subsequent formalists have concentrated upon literary language’s
self-reflexive quality—its tendency to call attention not to the speaker, the addressee, or the
meaning and purpose of their discourse; but to the words themselves and their complex patterns
of opposition, similarity, and parallelism. Formalist analyses thus focus upon the processes and
devices through which literary language “defamiliarizes” or estranges itself from ordinary
language, foregrounding its own “literariness.”

Semiotics, which means the systematic study of signs, is really a field of study, rather than a
method (like structuralism and formalism). Terry Eagleton (in Literary Theory: An Introduction)
has succinctly summarized its background and its complicated agenda:
 The American founder of semiotics, the philosopher C.S. Peirce, distinguished
between three basic kinds of sign. There was the ‘iconic,’ where the sign
somehow resembled what it stood for (a photograph of a person, for example); the
‘indexical,’ in which the sign is somehow associated with what it is a sign of
(smoke with fire, spots with measles), and the ‘symbolic.’ Semiotics takes up this
and many other classifications: it distinguishes between ‘denotation’ (what the
sign stands for ) and ‘connotation’ (other signs associated with it); between codes
(the rule-governed structures which produce meanings) and the messages
transmitted by them; between the ‘paradigmatic’ (a whole class of signs which
may stand in for one another) and the ‘syntagmatic’ (where signs are coupled
together with each other in a ‘chain’). It speaks of ‘metalanguages,’ where one
sign-system denotes another sign-system (the relation between literary criticism
and literature, for instance), ‘polysemic’ signs which have more than one
meaning, and a great many other technical concepts.
(pp. 100-101)

A literary text is thus seen as the most complex form of discourse, an amalgamation of numerous
systems—each containing its own inherent tensions and harmonies, which interact with those of
all the other systems. A text’s meaning is, furthermore, not simply an internal matter; rather, the
text is related to larger systems of meaning in society, in readers, and in the entire history of
literature, all of which amplify its meaning. A semiotic approach to a work seeks to discover this
network of relations, which the text holds within it.

(3) Deconstruction or poststructuralism is a complex fusion of structuralism’s emphasis upon

the patterns and structures inherent in literary language—as well as its tendency to view
linguistic and ideological phenomena in terms of binary oppositions or contraries (high/low,
light/dark, masculine/feminine, truth/falsehood); assumptions from the field of psychoanalysis,
which regards writing as the simultaneous expression and repression of desire; and the post-
Enlightenment skeptical tradition in Western philosophy, which ultimately views indeterminacy,
alogicality, and self-division as inevitable consequences of human existence and all human
endeavor (including language and writing). Language is regarded as consistently subverting or
contradicting its own assertions, evading its own apparent inner logic, and all attempts at
generalization or systemization. Like the human mind itself, with its conscious and unconscious
levels of mental activity (what Freud referred to as the “manifest” and “latent” contents of the
mind), a literary work seems to posit certain ideas and relations on the surface (the “text”),
which, when examined more carefully, reveals numerous “symptomatic” points—places where
impasses of meaning occur because inherent in them are contradictory ideas left unresolved (the
“subtext”). Deconstructionist criticism seeks out such oppositions within a text and charts their
various configurations.

(4) A phenomenological approach (derived from the philosophy of Edmund Husserl known as
“phenomenology”) seeks a totally immanent reading of a literary text. Nothing but the authorial
“consciousness” that the text embodies is considered—from its mode of stylistic expression to its
ontological and epistemological assumptions. The purpose is to experience as fully as possible
the world of this mind—how it perceives time and space, relations with others, and material
objects. Critical judgments are suspended in this mode of criticism, its object being a pure,
largely passive experience of the work.
In the fine arts, applied arts, and dramatic arts, the foregoing approaches are removed from a
linguistic context and transferred to a pre-iconographical or staging context. In the fine and
applied arts, the emphasis would be on pure forms, line and color, shapes, materials, techniques,
poses, gestures, atmosphere, composition, and other such artistic motifs and categories. In
dramatic arts [where both the written text of the play and its stage production(s) might be
considered], set and costume designs, lighting, blocking, characterization, and other aspects of
staging are examined in terms of their role in implementing the total aesthetic conception of the
play.

With all of the approaches previously described, extrinsic and intrinsic, candidates should realize
that many of the methods require substantial background research before it will be possible to
employ them successfully. Methods can be combined as well (e.g., a feminist-Marxist approach),
if there is a logical reason—associated with the nature of a particular research problem—for
doing so. Some of these methods are clearly more appropriate than others for certain types of
research problems. It is therefore important for students to consider fully the implications of
their topic, the issues they wish to prove or elucidate, and the approach(es) that will yield
the most fruitful results.