The Definition of Literary Criticism:

1. Literary refers to literature and criticism refers to an ability to analyze a work of art, from
an opinion, and substantiate it with evidence—in other words, to think critically.
2. Literary criticism is the practice of studying, evaluating, and interpreting works of
literature.
3. Literary criticism is the interpretation, analysis, and judgment of a text.

The importance of Literary Criticism:

It offers readers new ways to understand an author’s work.

The purposes of literary criticism:

1. Is to help a reader better engage with or challenge that writing.
2. It’s also a great place to pick up some writing techniques of your own.
3. Is to broaden a reader’s understanding of an author’s work by summarizing, interpreting,
and exploring its value.
4. Is to creates space for readers to better understand the beauty and complexity of the world
through literature.

A typical structure for literary criticism:

Begin with a summary of the text, examine its arguments, and end with an evaluation.
➢ Many major news publications run literary criticism in their weekend editions. Critics
writing for these publications are writing for a general audience, which makes their work an
approachable introduction to literary criticism.

The Example of Literary Criticism:

One of the examples of literary criticism is What is written in the newspaper for the general
audiences.

Benefits or Advantages of Literary Criticism:

1. Literary criticism expands your worldview: By examining works of literature through
different approaches to literary criticism, you expand your understanding of the world
around you.
2. Literary criticism helps you better understand literature: Literary criticism can give you
the tools to study, evaluate, and interpret literary works like novels, short stories, and
poems.
3. Literary criticism creates opportunities for new styles of writing: With a vast number of
approaches, the practice of literary criticism creates space and context for authors to create
works of literature that push boundaries and break new creative ground.

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  Good criticism deepens our understanding of literature and contributes to
literature’s development over time.

 Literary criticism is not just about being critical and the job of the critic is not to tear that
work down, but to analyze a work of art form an opinion, and substantiate it with
evidence.
 Literary criticism: Is the reasoned consideration of literary works and issues. It applies, as
a term, to any argumentation about literature, whether or not specific works are analyzed.

 Plato’s cautions against the risky consequences of poetic inspiration in

general in his Republic are thus often taken as the earliest important example of literary
criticism.

 The functions of literary criticism vary widely, ranging from the reviewing of books
as they are published to systematic theoretical discussion.

 Though reviews may sometimes determine whether a given book will be widely
sold, many works succeed commercially despite negative reviews, and many classic works,
including Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), have acquired appreciative publics long after
being unfavourably reviewed and at first neglected.

The Definition of Literary Theory:

Is a different framework used to evaluate and interpret a particular work.

The Purpose of literary theory:

It Provides a broader philosophical framework for how to analyze literature.

Examples of literary theories

It includes new historicism, queer theory, critical theory, and post-colonial theory.

Literary criticism vs. literary theory:

Literary criticism and literary theory are closely related fields, but they deal with literature on
different scales.
While literary criticism seeks to analyze specific works of literature, literary theory is
concerned with literature on a philosophical level.
Literary Criticism asks questions like “What did the author intend to do with this book?”
while literary theory asks questions like “What is the goal of literature?”
Literary Criticism deals with a specific book (or set of books), while literary theory deals with
broader concepts about books.
Literary theory is used to support literary criticism, and literary criticism can influence
literary theory.

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 Literary Criticism Literary Theory
Analyzes specific works of literature. Is concerned with literature on a
philosophical level
Asks questions like “What did the author Asks questions like “What is the goal of
intend to do with this book?” literature?”
Deals with a specific book (or set of Deals with broader concepts about books.
books)
Can influence literary theory. Used to support literary criticism

Traditional Critical Approaches:

1. Historical-biographical criticism: Historical-biographical criticism examines literature
through the perspective of the author’s historical context. (sometimes referred to as
traditional criticism) (Definition)
 This approach assumes that the significance of a particular piece of literature is
inextricably linked to its historical context. (Assumption)
For example: historical-biographical critics evaluate Shakespeare’s work within the context
of English literature, history, and culture during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries. (Example)
 It depends on an author’s biography to better understand and analyze a text.
 All matters of biography, including geography, race, class, gender, historical moment,
and so on, can provide relevant information to the critic engaging in this kind of criticism.
2. Moral-philosophical criticism: This approach examines literary works based on the moral
statements and judgments the characters and author express throughout the literary text. It
is based on its ethical merits. (Definition)
 Moral-philosophical criticism operates under the assumption that literature performs a
certain ethical or moral role in society. It analyzes texts based on their ethical merits and is
typically written within the framework of a prevailing school of thought. (Assumption)
3. Sociological criticism: This approach considers the political and social viewpoint of the
author or characters within the text. It examines the author’s status in his society as well as
the effect that the literary work had on its audience within society.
 Sociological criticism evaluates literature based on its relationship to society.
(Assumption)
 One form of sociological criticism is Marxist criticism, which examines how a specific
work of literature affirms or rejects oppression within class systems. (Example)
4. Psychoanalytic criticism: This form of literary criticism examines literature based on the
psychological desires and neuroses of the characters within a particular piece of literature.
(Definition)

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Psychoanalytic critics believe that an author’s unconscious thoughts are expressed through
their work.
5. Practical criticism: This study of literature encourages readers to examine the text without
regard to any outside context—like the author, the date and place of writing, or any other
contextual information that may enlighten the reader. (Definition)
6. Formalism: Formalism compels readers to judge the artistic merit of literature by
examining its formal elements, like language and technical skill. (Definition)
Formalism favors a literary canon of works that exemplify the highest standards of
literature, as determined by formalist critics.
7. Reader-response criticism: Reader-response criticism is rooted in the belief that a reader's
reaction to or interpretation of a text is as valuable a source of critical study as the text itself.
(Definition)
Reader-response criticism based on the reader’s response to the text.
 This approach asserts that a reader’s initial reaction is valuable information for evaluation.
While this approach is the most subjective, the critic is still required to substantiate their
reaction using the text itself.
 Criticism can also be anchored in broader fields of study, such as feminism, Marxism, and
postcolonialism.
8. New criticism: New critics focused on examining the formal and structural elements of
literature, as opposed to the emotional or moral elements. (Definition)
Poet T.S. Eliot and critics Cleanth Brooks and John Crowe Ransom pioneered the approach
in the mid-twentieth century. (The pioneers)
New criticism engages solely with what the author has put on a page. It disregards outside
context and emotional response and instead places an emphasis on form, structure, and the
words themselves.
9. Post-structuralism: Post-structuralist literary criticism abandoned ideas of formal and
structural cohesion, questioning any assumed universal truths as reliant on the social
structure that influenced them. (Definition)
One of the writers who shaped post-structuralist criticism is Roland Barthes—the father of
semiotics, or the study of signs and symbols in art. (The pioneers)
10. Deconstruction: Proposed by Jacques Derrida, deconstructionists pick apart a text’s ideas
or arguments, looking for contradictions that render any singular reading of a text impossible.
(Definition)
11. Feminist criticism understands a text through the lens of feminism and gender roles.
(Definition)

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Feminist criticism: As the feminist movement gained steam in the mid-twentieth century,
literary critics began looking to gender studies for new modes of literary criticism.
→ One of the earliest proponents of feminist criticism was Virginia Woolf in her seminal
essay, A Room of One's Own. (The pioneers)
➢ Queer theory: analyzes a text through the angle of gender and sexuality.
➢ Critical race theory: understands a text through the intersectional dimensions of race and
culture.
➢ Critical disability theory: understands a text through the lens of disability and analyzes
societal structures that uphold ableism.

Historical development
Antiquity
 Although literary criticism is a modern subject, it refers to the questions raised by Aristotle
and Plato and that was in the Middle Ages and every critic who has attempted to justify the
social value of literature has had to come to terms with the opposing argument made by Plato
in The Republic.
 According to Plato the poet as a man and poetry as a form of statement both seemed
untrustworthy and depicted the physical world as an imperfect copy of transcendent ideas
and poetry as a mere copy of the copy. So, Literature could only mislead the seeker of truth.
 Plato credited the poet with divine inspiration, but this, was cause for worry; a man
possessed by such madness would subvert the interests of a rational polity. So that Poets
were to be banished from the hypothetical republic.
Aristotle countered Plato’s indictment by stressing what is normal and useful about literary
art.
 The tragic poet is not so divinely inspired as he is motivated by a universal human need to
imitate, and what he imitates is not something like a bed (Plato’s example) but a noble action.
 Tragedy does arouse emotions of pity and terror in its audience, but these emotions are
purged in the process (katharsis).
 By using katharsis Aristotle succeeded in portraying literature as satisfying and regulating
human passions instead of inflaming them.
 Although Plato and Aristotle are regarded as antagonists, the narrowness of their
disagreement is noteworthy.
➢ Both maintain that poetry is mimetic, both treat the arousing of emotion in the perceiver,
and both feel that poetry takes its justification, if any, from its service to the state. It was
obvious to both men that poets wielded great power over others.

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 Modern critics have tried to show that poetry is more than a pastime, Aristotle had to offer
reassurance that it was not socially explosive.
 Aristotle’s practical contribution to criticism, as opposed to his ethical defense of literature,
lies in his inductive treatment of the elements and kinds of poetry.
 Poetic modes are identified according to their means of imitation, the actions they imitate,
the manner of imitation, and its effects. These distinctions assist the critic in judging each
mode according to its proper ends instead of regarding beauty as a fixed entity.
 The ends of tragedy, as Aristotle conceived them, are best served by the harmonious
disposition of six elements: plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song.
 Thanks to Aristotle’s insight into universal aspects of audience psychology, many of his
dicta have proved to be adaptable to genres developed long after his time.

Medieval period
 In the Christian Middle Ages criticism suffered from the loss of nearly all the ancient critical
texts and from an antipagan distrust of the literary imagination.
 Criticism was in fact inhibited by the very coherence of the theologically explained
universe.
 When nature is conceived as endlessly and purposefully symbolic of revealed truth,
specifically literary problems of form and meaning are bound to be neglected.
 Even such an original vernacular poet of the 14th century as Dante appears to have
expected his Divine Comedy to be interpreted according to the rules of scriptural exegesis.

The Renaissance:
 Renaissance criticism grew directly from the recovery of classic texts and notably from
Giorgio Valla’s translation of Aristotle’s Poetics into Latin in 1498.
 It is difficult today to appreciate that this obeisance to antique models had a liberating
effect; one must recall that imitation of the ancients entailed rejecting scriptural allegory and
asserting the individual author’s ambition to create works that would be unashamedly great
and beautiful. Classicism, individualism, and national pride joined forces against literary
asceticism. Thus, a group of 16th-century French writers known as the Pléiade—notably
Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay—were simultaneously classicists, poetic innovators,
and advocates of a purified vernacular tongue.
 The poet “doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way, as will
entice any man to enter into it.”
 While still honouring the traditional conception of poetry’s role as bestowing pleasure and
instruction, Sidney’s essay presages the Romantic claim that the poetic mind is a law unto
itself.

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Neoclassicism and its decline:
The Renaissance in general could be regarded as a neoclassical period, in that ancient works
were considered the surest models for modern greatness.
Neoclassicism usually connotes narrower attitudes that are at once literary and social: a
worldly-wise tempering of enthusiasm, a fondness for proved ways, a gentlemanly sense of
propriety and balance.
The decline of Neoclassicism is hardly surprising; literary theory had developed very little
during two centuries of artistic, political, and scientific ferment. The 18th century’s important
new genre, the novel, drew most of its readers from a bourgeoisie that had little use for
aristocratic dicta.

Romanticism:
 Romanticism, an amorphous movement that began in Germany and England at the turn of
the 19th century, and somewhat later in France, Italy, and the United States, found
spokesmen as diverse as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England, and
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edgar Allan Poe in the United States.
➢ Most of those who were later called Romantics did share an emphasis on Individuality,
passion, inspiration, a taste for symbolism and historical awareness, and a conception of art
works as internally whole structures in which feelings are dialectically merged with their
contraries.
 Romantic criticism coincided with the emergence of aesthetics as a separate branch of
philosophy, and both signalled a weakening in ethical demands upon literature.
 The lasting achievement of Romantic theory is its recognition that artistic creations are
justified, not by their promotion of virtue, but by their own coherence and intensity.

The late 19th century

 The Romantic movement had been spurred not only by German philosophy but also by the
universalistic and utopian hopes that accompanied the French Revolution.
 Some of those hopes were thwarted by political reaction, while others were blunted by
industrial capitalism and the accession to power of the class that had demanded general
liberty.
 Advocates of the literary imagination now began to think of themselves as enemies or
gadflies of the newly entrenched bourgeoisie. In some hands the idea of creative freedom
dwindled to a bohemianism pitting “art for its own sake” against commerce and
respectability.
 Toward the end of the 19th century, especially in Germany, England, and the United States,
literary study became an academic discipline “at the doctoral level.”

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 Philology, linguistics, folklore study, and the textual principles that had been devised for
biblical criticism provided curricular guidelines.

The 20th century

 The ideal of objective research has continued to guide Anglo-American literary scholarship
and criticism and has prompted work of unprecedented accuracy.
 Bibliographic procedures have been revolutionized; historical scholars, biographers, and
historians of theory have placed criticism on a sounder basis of factuality. Important
contributions to literary understanding have meanwhile been drawn from anthropology,
linguistics, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.
→ Impressionistic method has given way to systematic inquiry from which gratuitous
assumptions are, if possible, excluded. Yet demands for a more ethically committed criticism
have repeatedly been made, from the New Humanism of Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt
in the United States in the 1920s, through the moralizing criticism of the Cambridge don F.R.
Leavis and of the American poet Yvor Winters, to the most recent demands for “relevance.”
No sharp line can be drawn between academic criticism and criticism produced by authors
and men of letters. Many of the latter are now associated with universities, and the main shift
of academic emphasis, from impressionism to formalism, originated outside the academy in
the writings of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot.
In certain respects the hegemony of New Criticism has been political as well as literary; and
anti-Romantic insistence on irony, convention, and aesthetic distance has been accompanied
by scorn for all revolutionary hopes. In Hulme conservatism and classicism were explicitly
linked. Romanticism struck him as “spilt religion,” a dangerous exaggeration of human
freedom.
In reality, however, New Criticism owed much to Romantic theory, especially to Coleridge’s
idea of organic form, and some of its notable practitioners have been left of centre in their
social thought.
 The totality of Western criticism in the 20th century defies summary except in terms of its
restless multiplicity and factionalism.
 Schools of literary practice, such as Imagism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism, have
found no want of defenders and explicators.
Ideological groupings, psychological dogmas, and philosophical trends have generated
polemics and analysis, and literary materials have been taken as primary data by sociologists
and historians.
 Literary creators themselves have continued to write illuminating commentary on their
own principles and aims.

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The influence of science
 What separates modern criticism from earlier work is its catholicity of scope and method,
its borrowing of procedures from the social sciences, and its unprecedented attention to
detail.
As literature’s place in society has become more problematic and peripheral, and as
humanistic education has grown into a virtual industry with a large group of professionals
serving as one another’s judges,
 Criticism has evolved into a complex discipline, increasingly refined in its procedures but
often lacking a sense of contact with the general social will.

Criticism and knowledge

The debate over poetic truth may illustrate how modern discussion is beholden to extra
literary knowledge. Critics have never ceased disputing whether literature depicts the world
correctly, incorrectly, or not at all, and the dispute has often had more to do with the support
or condemnation of specific authors than with ascertainable facts about mimesis. Today it
may be almost impossible to take a stand regarding poetic truth without also coming to terms
with positivism as a total epistemology.
➢ The pervasive influence of science is most apparent in modern criticism’s passion for total
explanation of the texts it brings under its microscope.
 Formalist schools, which take for granted an author’s freedom to shape his work according
to the demands of art, treat individual lines of verse with a dogged minuteness that was
previously unknown, hoping thereby to demonstrate the “organic” coherence of the poem.
The spirit of explanation is also apparent in those schools that argue from the circumstances
surrounding a work’s origin to the work itself, leaving an implication that the former have
caused the latter.
Most of the issues debated in 20th-century criticism appear to be strictly empirical, even
technical, in nature. By what means can the most precise and complete knowledge of a
literary work be arrived at? Should its social and biographical context be studied or only the
words themselves as an aesthetic structure? Should the author’s avowed intention be trusted,
or merely taken into account, or disregarded as irrelevant? How is conscious irony to be
distinguished from mere ambivalence, or allusiveness from allegory? Which among many
approaches—linguistic, generic, formal, sociological, psychoanalytic, and so forth—is best
adapted to making full sense of a text?

Postcolonial criticism
 Draws attention to issues of cultural difference in literary texts. It is one of several critical
approaches which focus on specific issues, including issues of gender (feminist criticism), of
class (Marxist criticism), and of sexual orientation (lesbian/gay criticism). (definition)

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 This raises the possibility of a kind of 'super-reader' able to respond equally and adequately
to a text in all these ways.
 In practice, for most readers one of these issues tends to eclipse all the rest.
 Postcolonial criticism emerged as a distinct category only in the 1990s.

What postcolonial critics do:

1. They reject the claims to universalism made on behalf of canonical Western literature and
seek to show its limitations of outlook, especially its general inability to empathize across
boundaries of cultural and ethnic difference.
2. They examine the representation of other cultures in literature as a way of achieving this
end.
3. They show how such literature is often evasively and crucially silent on matters concerned
with colonization and imperialism (see, for instance, the discussion of Jane Austen's Mansfield
Park in the example described below).
4. They foreground questions of cultural difference and diversity and examine their treatment
in relevant literary works.
5. They celebrate hybridity and 'cultural poly valency', that is, the situation whereby
individuals and groups belong simultaneously to more than one culture (for instance, that of
the colonizer, through a colonial school system, and that of the colonized, through local and
oral traditions).
6. They develop a perspective, not just applicable to postcolonial literatures, whereby states
of marginality, plurality and perceived 'Otherness' are seen as sources of energy and potential
change.

Stylistics
 Stylistics is a critical approach which uses the methods and findings of the science of
linguistics in the analysis of literary texts. (definition)
 By 'linguistics' here is meant the scientific study of language and its structures, rather than
the learning of individual languages.
 Stylistics developed in the twentieth century and its aim is to show how the technical
linguistic features of a literary work, such as the grammatical structure of its sentences,
contribute to its overall meanings and effects.
→ Stylistics is not confined to the analysis of literature: it can be applied equally to expository
prose, political speeches, advertisements, and so on.
 It assumes that the language of literature is not a 'special case': on the contrary, literary
language can be analyzed just like any other kind to reveal precisely how effects are created.

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 Stylistics concedes no special mysterious qualities to literary language: it is not sacred or
revered; it is simply the data on which the method can be put to use.
It is true that very few literary critics would make semi-mystical claims that poetry is inspired,
or ineffable, or operates beyond reason in a realm which analysis can never fully penetrate.
But on the other hand, neither do many of them proclaim the contrary that literary language
never has any transcendent dimension which lifts it above the everyday.
 Stylistics is the modern version of the ancient discipline known as 'rhetoric', which taught
its students how to structure an argument, how to make effective use of figures of speech,
and generally how to pattern and vary a speech or a piece of writing to produce the maximum
impact.
 Rhetoric in medieval times played an important part in training people for the Church,
the legal profession, and political or diplomatic life, but once divorced from this vocational
purpose it degenerated into a rather arid and mechanical study of the mere surface features
of language which involved, for instance, identifying and classifying figures of speech.

How does stylistics differ from standard close reading?

 Stylistic analysis attempts to provide a commentary which is objective and scientific, based
on concrete quantifiable data, and applied in a systematic way.
 In contrast, conventional 'close reading' is often seen as impressionistic, intuitive, and
randomized.
 The differences between the two approaches might well seem superficial to a casual
observer.
The specific differences between conventional close reading and stylistics include the
following:
1. Close reading emphasizes differences between literary language and that of the general
speech community; it tends to isolate the literary text and sees it as a purely aesthetic art
object, or 'verbal icon', whose language operates according to rules of its own.
 In contrast, Stylistics emphasizes connections between literary language and everyday
language.
This difference of view about literary language is a continuation of a very old dispute.
2. Stylistics uses specialized technical terms and concepts which derive from the science of
linguistics, terms like 'transitivity', 'under-lexicalization', 'collocation', and 'cohesion'. Terms
like these are part of the technical vocabulary of a particular field of intellectual enquiry and
they do not have any currency outside this field.
In contrast, close reading uses layperson's terms and concepts which may have slightly
'bookish' air but are nevertheless part of ordinary everyday language; terms, for instance, like
'verbal nuance', 'irony', 'ambiguity', 'paradox', and 'ambivalence'.

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3. Stylistics makes greater claims to scientific objectivity than does close reading, stressing
that its methods and procedures can be learned and applied by all.

Close reading Stylistics

 emphasizes differences between literary  emphasizes connections between
language and that of the general speech literary language and everyday language.
community
 uses layperson's terms and concepts  uses specialized technical terms and
which may have slightly 'bookish' air. concepts which derive from the science of
linguistics.

 Terms like 'verbal nuance', 'irony',  Terms like 'transitivity', 'under-

'ambiguity', 'paradox', and 'ambivalence'. lexicalization', 'collocation', and 'cohesion'.

 Terms like these are part of ordinary  Terms like these are part of the technical
everyday language vocabulary of a particular field of
intellectual enquiry
 is often seen as impressionistic, intuitive,  provides a commentary which is
and randomized objective and scientific, based on concrete
quantifiable data, and applied in a
systematic way.
 Stylistics makes greater claims to scientific objectivity than does close reading

The ambitions of stylistics

1. Stylisticians try to provide 'hard' data to support existing 'intuitions' about a literary work.
 Stylistics is not always just about the interpreting of individual literary works, but when it
is engaged in straight textual interpretation it often tries to back up the (as they would see
them) impressionistic hunches of common readers with hard linguistic data.
2. Stylisticians suggest new interpretations of literary works based on linguistic evidence.
❑ Stylistics brings a special expertise to bear on the linguistic features of a text, and therefore
sees a dimension of the material which the ordinary reader would be unaware of. This
dimension may well contain material which could alter our interpretation of the work.

What stylistic critics do

1. They describe technical aspects of the language of a text -such as grammatical structures -
and then use this data in interpretation.
2. The purpose of doing this is sometimes simply to provide objective linguistic data to support
existing readings or intuitions about literary work.
3. At other times the purpose is to establish a new reading, which may be based only, or
mainly, on this linguistic data, and may challenge or counter existing readings.

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4. These technical accounts of how meanings are made in literature are part of an overall
project which involves showing that literature has no ineffable, mystical core which is beyond
analysis: rather, it is part of a common 'universe of discourse' and uses the same techniques
and resources as other kinds of language use.
5. To this end, stylistics does not confine itself to the analysis of literature and often juxtaposes
literary and other kinds of discourse, for instance, comparing the linguistic devices used in
poetry with those of advertising
6. Stylistics moves beyond 'sentence grammar' to 'text grammar', considering how the text
works as a whole to achieve (or not) its purposes (for instance, to amuse, to create suspense,
or to persuade) and examining the linguistic features which contribute to these ends.

Narratology (Telling stories)

Narratology: is the study of narrative structures. Narratology is a branch of structuralism, but
it has achieved a certain independence from its parent, and this justifies it being given a
chapter of its own. (Definition)
Narratology: is the study of how narratives make meaning, and what the basic mechanisms
and procedures are which are common to all acts of story-telling. (Definition)
 Narratology is not the reading and interpretation of individual stories, but the attempt to
study the nature of 'story' itself, as a concept and as a cultural practice.

The differences between 'story' and 'plot'

 The 'story' is the actual sequence of events as they happen. The 'story' has to begin at the
beginning, of course, and then move chronologically, with nothing left out.
 The 'plot' is those events as they are edited, ordered, packaged, and presented in what we
recognise as a narrative. The 'plot' may well begin somewhere in the middle of a chain of
events, and may then backtrack, providing us with a 'flashback' which fills us in on things that
happened earlier. The plot may also have elements which flash forward, hinting at events
which will happen later.
 So the 'plot' is a version of the story which should not be taken literally, just like those
menu descriptions.

story plot
 is the actual sequence of events as they  is those events as they are edited,
happen ordered, packaged, and presented in what
we recognise as a narrative
 has to begin at the beginning, of course,  may begin somewhere in the middle of a
and then move chronologically, with chain of events, and may then backtrack,
nothing left out providing us with a 'flashback' which fills us
in on things that happened earlier and may
also have elements which flash forward,
hinting at events which will happen later

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 Aristotle identifies 'character' and 'action' as the essential elements in a story, and says that
character must be revealed through action, which is to say through aspects of the plot.
 Aristotle identifies three key elements in a plot, these being (using Aristotle's Greek words):
 The hamartia means a 'sin' or 'fault' (which in tragic drama is often the product of the fatal
character defect which came to be known as the 'tragic flaw').
 The anagnorisis means 'recognition' or 'realisation', this being a moment in the narrative
when the truth of the situation is recognised by the protagonist – often it's a moment of self-
recognition.
 The peripeteia means a 'turn-round' or a 'reversal' of fortune. In classical tragedy this is
usually a fall from high to low estate, as the hero falls from greatness.

How is the narrative focalized?

Focalization means 'viewpoint' or 'perspective', which is to say the point-of-view from which
the story is told. (Definition)
 'External focalization': the viewpoint is outside the character depicted, so that we are told
only things which are external or observable - that is, what the characters say and do, these
being things you would hear and see for yourself if you were present at the scene depicted.
 'Internal focalization': the focus is on what the characters think and feel, these being things
which would be inaccessible to you even if you had been present.

Who is telling the story?

Of course, the author is, but not necessarily in his or her own voice or personal.
 One kind of narrator (the kind that often goes with a zero-focalized narrative) is not
identified at all as a distinct character with a name and a personal history, and remains just a
voice or a tone, which we may register simply as an intelligent, recording consciousness, a
mere 'telling medium' which strives for neutrality and transparency. Such narrators may be
called 'covert', 'effaced', 'non-intrusive', or 'non-dramatized'.
 We may impatiently insist that it is simply the author speaking to us directly, but it is worth
remembering that this is not in any sense the author's 'true' voice, since he or she only uses
this precise tone, pace, degree of detail, and so on, when narrating a work of fiction. If we
met the author at a party or in a bar we wouldn't be able to tolerate this narrative style for
more than a couple of minutes. Hence, it makes sense to think of this kind of disembodied
narrator as an 'authorial persona', rather than as the author in person.
The other kind of narrator is the kind who is identified as a distinct, named character, with
a personal history, gender, a social-class position, distinct likes and dislikes, and so on. These
narrators have witnessed, or learned about, or even participated in the events they tell. They
can be called 'overt' or 'dramatised' or 'intrusive' narrators.

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Examples being such tellers as Mr Lockwood in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Marlow in
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, andNick Carraway in Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
 The 'heterodiegetic' narrator is one who is not a character in the story he or she narrates,
but an outsider to it.

Psychoanalytic criticism
 is a form of literary criticism which uses some of the techniques of psychoanalysis in the
interpretation of literature.
 Psychoanalysis itself is a form of therapy which aims to cure mental disorders 'by
investigating the interaction of conscious and unconscious elements in the mind'
⚫ The classic method of doing this is to get the patient to talk freely, in such a way that the
repressed fears and conflicts which are causing the problems are brought into the conscious
mind and openly faced, rather than remaining 'buried' in the unconscious.
 This practice is based upon specific theories of how the mind, the instincts, and sexuality
work. These theories were developed by the Austrian Sigmund Freud.
 There is a growing consensus today that the therapeutic value of the method is limited,
and that Freud's life-work is seriously flawed by methodological irregularities. All the same,
Freud remains a major cultural force, and his impact on how we think about ourselves has
been incalculable.
 Many of Freud's ideas concern aspects of sexuality.
 Infantile sexuality: is the notion that sexuality begins not at puberty, with physical
maturing, but in infancy, especially through the infant's relationship with the mother.
Connected with this is the Oedipus complex.
 Says Freud, the male infant conceives the desire to eliminate the father and become the
sexual partner of the mother.
 Many forms of inter-generational conflict are seen by Freudians as having Oedipal
overtones, such as professional rivalries, often viewed in Freudian terms as reproducing the
competition between siblings for parental favour.
 There are several key terms concerning what might be called psychic processes, such as
transference, projection, screen memory, dream work (displacement, condensation),
parapraxis,
 Transference: is the phenomenon whereby the patient under analysis redirects the
emotions recalled in analysis towards the psychoanalyst: thus, the antagonism or resentment
felt towards a parental figure in the past might be reactivated, but directed against the
analyst.

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 Projection: when aspects of ourselves (usually negative ones) are not recognised as part
of ourselves but are perceived in or attributed to another; our own desires or antagonisms,
for instance, may be 'disowned' in this way.
 Both Transference and Projection might be seen as defence mechanisms, that is, as psychic
procedures for avoiding painful admissions or recognitions.
 Screen Memory: which is a trivial or inconsequential memory whose function is to
obliterate a more significant one.
 A well-known example of these mechanisms is the Freudian slip, which Freud himself called
the 'parapraxis'.
 Parapraxis: is repressed material in the unconscious finds an outlet through such everyday
phenomena as slips of the tongue, slips of the pen, or unintended actions.
 Dream Work: is the process by which real events or desires are transformed into dream
images.
 These include: Displacement, and Condensation.
 Displacement: whereby one person or event is represented by another which is in some
way linked or associated with it, perhaps because of a similar-sounding word, or by some form
of symbolic substitution.
➢ Condensation: whereby a number of people, events, or meanings are combined and
represented by a single image in the dream.
Thus, characters, motivation, and events are represented in dreams in a very 'literary' way,
involving the translation, by the dream work, of abstract ideas or feelings into concrete
images.
 Dreams, just like literature, do not usually make explicit statements. Both tend to
communicate obliquely or indirectly, avoiding direct or open statement, and representing
meanings through concrete embodiments of time, place, or person.
 Should we say 'unconscious' or 'subconscious' when discussing Freudian ideas?
The adjectives 'unconscious' and 'subconscious' often seem to be interchangeable in popular
usage, as if they were synonyms, but this an error in the context of Freudian discussion.
→ Freud used the term 'subconscious' only in his early writings, and quickly abandoned it
because it seemed wrongly 'calculated to stress the equivalence of what is psychical to what
is conscious'.
→ The unconscious: is described as designating a specific area and process in the
'topography' of the mind as first formulated by Freud.

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What Freudian psychoanalytic critics do
1. They give central importance, in literary interpretation, to the distinction between the
conscious and the unconscious mind. They associate the literary work's 'overt' content with
the former, and the 'covert' content with the latter, privileging the latter as being what the
work is 'really' about, and aiming to disentangle the two.
2. They pay close attention to unconscious motives and feelings, whether these be (a) those
of the author, or (b) those of the characters depicted in the work.
3. They demonstrate the presence in the literary work of classic psychoanalytic symptoms,
conditions, or phases.
4. They make large-scale applications of psychoanalytic concepts to literary history in general.
5. They identify a 'psychic' context for the literary work, at the expense of social or historical
context, privileging the individual 'psycho-drama' above the 'social drama' of class conflict.
The conflict between generations or siblings, or between competing desires within the same
individual, looms much larger than conflict between social classes, for instance.

Feminist criticism
→ The 'women's movement' of the 1960s was not the start of feminism. Rather, it was a
renewal of an old tradition of thought and action already possessing its classic books which
had diagnosed the problem of women's inequality in society.
 The feminist literary criticism of today is the direct product of the 'women's movement' of
the 1960s.
 This movement was literary from the start, in the sense that it realised the significance of
the images of women promulgated by literature, and saw it as vital to combat them and
question their authority and their coherence.
 In this sense the women's movement has always been crucially concerned with books and
literature, so that feminist criticism should not be seen as an off-shoot or a spin-off from
feminism which is remote from the ultimate aims of the movement, but as one of its most
practical ways of influencing everyday conduct and attitudes.
 The concern with 'conditioning' and 'socialisation' underpins a crucial set of distinctions -
that between the terms 'feminist', 'female', and 'feminine'.
Feminist: is 'a political position'.
Female: is 'a matter of biology'.
Feminine: is 'a set of culturally defined characteristics'.
Particularly in the distinction between the second and third of these lies much of the force of
feminism.

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→ The representation of women in literature, then, was felt to be one of the most important
forms of 'socialisation', since it provided the role models which indicated to women, and men,
what constituted acceptable versions of the 'feminine' and legitimate feminine goals and
aspirations.
→ Feminists pointed out, for example, that in nineteenth-century fiction very few women
work for a living, unless they are driven to it by dire necessity. Instead, the focus of interest is
on the heroine's choice of marriage partner, which will decide her ultimate social position and
exclusively determine her happiness and fulfilment in life, or her lack of these.
 Thus, in feminist criticism in the 1970s the major effort went into exposing what might be
called the mechanisms of patriarchy, that is, the cultural 'mind-set' in men and women which
perpetuated sexual inequality.
→ Critical attention was given to books by male writers in which influential or typical images
of women were constructed.
Then, in the 1980s, in feminism as in other critical approaches, the mood changed:
 Firstly, feminist criticism became much more eclectic, meaning that it began to draw upon
the findings and approaches of other kinds of criticism (Marxism, structuralism, linguistics,
and so on).
 Secondly, it switched its focus from attacking male versions of the world to exploring the
nature of the female world and outlook, and reconstructing the lost or suppressed records of
female experience.
➢ Thirdly, attention was switched to the need to construct a new canon of women's writing
by rewriting the history of the novel and of poetry in such a way that neglected women writers
were given new prominence.
 Such distinct phases of interest and activity seem characteristic of feminist criticism.
But feminist criticism since the 1970s has been remarkable for the wide range of positions
that exist within it. Debates and disagreements have centred on three particular areas, these
being:
1. the role of theory.
2. the nature of language.
3. the value or otherwise of psychoanalysis.

Feminist criticism and language

Another fundamental issue, on which opinion is just as polarised, is the question of whether
or not there exists a form of language which is inherently feminine.
 There is a long-standing tradition of debate on this issue within feminism. For instance,
Virginia Woolf suggests that language use is gendered, so that when a woman turns to novel
writing she finds that there is 'no common sentence ready for her use'.

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 The great male novelists have written 'a natural prose, swift but not slovenly, expressive
but not precious, taking their own tint without ceasing to be common property'.
 She quotes an example and says 'That is a man's sentence'. She doesn't make its qualities
explicit, but the example seems to be characterised by carefully balanced and patterned
rhetorical sequences.
 Generally, then, the female writer is seen as suffering the handicap of having to use a
medium (prose writing) which is essentially a male instrument fashioned for male purposes.
→ The thesis that the language is 'masculine' in this sense is developed by Dale Spender in
the early 1980s in her book Man Made Language which also argues that language is not a
neutral medium but one which contains many features which reflect its role as the instrument
through which patriarchy finds expression.

Feminist criticism and psychoanalysis

The story so far of feminism's relationship with psychoanalysis is simple in outline but complex
in nuance.

What feminist critics do

1. Rethink the canon, aiming at the rediscovery of texts written by women.
2. Revalue women's experience.
3. Examine representations of women in literature by men and women.
4. Challenge representations of women as 'Other', as 'lack', as part of 'nature'.
5. Examine power relations which obtain in texts and in life, with a view to breaking them
down, seeing reading as a political act, and showing the extent of patriarchy.
6. Recognise the role of language in making what is social and constructed seem transparent
and 'natural'.
7. Raise the question of whether men and women are 'essentially' different because of biology
or are socially constructed as different.
8. Explore the question of whether there is a female language, an ecriture feminine, and
whether this is also available to men.
9. 'Re-read' psychoanalysis to further explore the issue of female and male identity.
10. Make clear the ideological base of supposedly 'neutral' or 'mainstream' literary
interpretations.

New historicism and cultural materialism

 It is a method based on the parallel reading of literary and non-literary texts, usually of the
same historical period. (Definition)

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 New historicism refuses to 'privilege' the literary text: instead of a literary 'foreground'
and a historical 'background', it envisages and practises a mode of study in which literary and
non-literary texts are given equal weight and constantly inform or interrogate each other.
 This 'equal weighting' is suggested in the definition of new historicism offered by the
American critic Louis Montrose: he defines it as: a combined interest in 'the textuality of
history, the historicity of texts'. (Definition)

The differences between new and old historicisms

➢ When we say that new historicism involves the parallel study of literary and nonliterary
texts, the word 'parallel' encapsulates the essential difference between this and earlier
approaches to literature which had made some use of historical data.
➢ These earlier approaches made a hierarchical separation between the literary text, which
was the object of value, the jewel, as it were, and the historical 'background', which was
merely the setting, and by definition of lesser worth.
 The practice of giving 'equal weighting' to literary and non-literary material is the first and
major difference between the 'new' and the 'old' historicism.
→ As representative of the 'old' historicism we could cite Tillyard's The Elizabethan World
Picture and Shakespeare's History Plays, books against which new historicism frequently
defines itself.
 A second important difference between old and new historicisms is encapsulated in the
word 'archival' in the phrase 'the archival continuum' quoted earlier, for that word indicates
that new historicism is indeed a historicist rather than a historical movement.

Advantages and disadvantages of new historicism

 Firstly, although it is founded upon post-structuralist thinking, it is written in a far more
accessible way, for the most part avoiding post-structuralism's characteristically dense style
and vocabulary. (Advantages)
 Secondly, the material itself is often fascinating and is wholly distinctive in the context of
literary studies. These essays look and feel different from those produced by any other critical
approach and immediately give the literary student the feeling that new territory is being
entered.
 Thirdly, the political edge of new historicist writing is always sharp, but at the same time it
avoids the problems frequently encountered in 'straight' Marxist criticism: it seems less
overtly polemical and more willing to allow the historical evidence its own voice.

What new historicists do

1. They juxtapose literary and non-literary texts, reading the former in the light of the latter.
2. They try thereby to 'defamiliarise' the canonical literary text, detaching it from the
accumulated weight of previous literary scholarship and seeing it as if new.

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3. They focus attention (within both text and co-text) on issues of state power and how it is
maintained, on patriarchal structures and their perpetuation, and on the process of
colonisation, with its accompanying 'mind-set'.

Cultural materialism
The two words in the term 'cultural materialism' are further defined:
 'Culture' will include all forms of culture (forms like television and popular music and
fiction). That is, this approach does not limit itself to 'high' cultural forms like the Shakespeare
play.
 'Materialism' signifies the opposite of 'idealism'. (Definition)
 An 'idealist' belief would be that high culture represents the free and independent play of
the talented individual mind; the contrary 'materialist' belief is that culture cannot
'transcend' the material forces and relations of production. Culture is not simply a reflection
of the economic and political system, but nor can it be independent of it.
 Cultural materialism particularly involves using the past to 'read' the present, revealing
the politics of our own society by what we choose to emphasise or suppress of the past.

The differences between cultural materialism and new historicism?

 Firstly, cultural materialists tend to concentrate on the interventions whereby men and
women make their own history, whereas new historicists tend to focus on the less than ideal
circumstances in which they do so, that is, on the 'power of social and ideological structures'.
 Secondly, cultural materialists see new historicists as cutting themselves off from effective
political positions by their acceptance of a particular version of post-structuralism, with its
radical scepticism about the possibility of attaining secure knowledge.
 Thirdly, where the former's co-texts are documents contemporary with Shakespeare, the
latter's may be programme notes for a current Royal Shakespeare Company production.

What cultural materialist critics do

1. They read the literary text (very often a Renaissance play) in such a way as to enable us to
'recover its histories', that is, the context of exploitation from which it emerged.
2. At the same time, they foreground those elements in the work's present transmission and
contextualising which caused those histories to be lost in the first place.
3. They use a combination of Marxist and feminist approaches to the text, especially in order
to do the first of these (above), and in order to fracture the previous dominance of
conservative social, political, and religious assumptions in Shakespeare criticism in particular.
4. They use the technique of close textual analysis, but often employ structuralist and post-
structuralist techniques, especially to mark a break with the inherited tradition of close
textual analysis within the framework of conservative cultural and social assumptions.

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5. At the same time, they work mainly within traditional notions of the canon, on the grounds
that writing about more obscure texts hardly ever constitutes an effective political
intervention (for instance, in debates about the school curriculum or national identity).

Ecocriticism
 The study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment. (Definition)
But should we call it 'ecocriticism' or 'green studies'?
 Both terms are used to denote a critical approach which began in the USA in the late 1980s,
and in the UK in the early 1990s, and it is worth briefly setting out its institutional history to
date.
 Ecocriticism, as it now exists in the USA, takes its literary bearings from three major
nineteenth-century American writers whose work celebrates nature, the life force, and the
wilderness as manifested in America, these being Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller,
and Henry David Thoreau.
 Emerson and Thoreau are founders of transcendentalism.
 By contrast, the UK version of ecocriticism, or green studies, takes its bearings from the
British Romanticism of the 1790s rather than the American transcendentalism of the 1840s.
 The founding figure on the British side is the critic Jonathan Bate and Wordsworth.

What ecocritics do
1. They re-read major literary works from an ecocentric perspective, with particular attention
to the representation of the natural world.
2. They extend the applicability of a range of ecocentric concepts, using things other than the
natural world - concepts such as growth and energy, balance and imbalance, symbiosis and
mutuality, and sustainable or unsustainable uses of energy and resources.
3. They give special canonical emphasis to writers who foreground nature as a major part of
their subject matter, such as the American transcendentalists, the British Romantics, the
poetry of John Clare, the work of Thomas Hardy and the Georgian poets of the early twentieth
century.
4. They extend the range of literary-critical practice by placing a new emphasis on relevant
'factual' writing, especially reflective topographical material such as essays, travel writing,
memoirs, and regional literature.
5. They turn away from the 'social constructivism' and 'linguistic determinism' of dominant
literary theories and instead emphasise ecocentric values of meticulous observation,
collective ethical responsibility, and the claims of the world beyond ourselves.

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Transcendentalism
 Is a philosophical, spiritual, and literary movement that developed in the late 1820s and
1830s in the New England region of the United States. (Definition)
 A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature, and while society and its
institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly
"self-reliant" and independent.
 Transcendentalists saw divine experience inherent in the everyday, rather than believing
in a distant heaven.
 Transcendentalists saw physical and spiritual phenomena as part of dynamic processes
rather than discrete entities.
 Transcendentalism is one of the first philosophical currents that emerged in the United
States; it is therefore a key early point in the history of American philosophy.
 Emphasizing subjective intuition over objective empiricism, its adherents believe that
individuals are capable of generating completely original insights with little attention and
deference to past masters.
➢ It arose as a reaction, to protest against the general state of intellectualism and spirituality
at the time.

Transcendental knowledge
 Transcendentalists desire to ground their religion and philosophy in principles based upon
the German Romanticism of Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher.

Individualism
 Transcendentalists believe that society and its institutions (particularly organized religion
and political parties) corrupt the purity of the individual.
 They have faith that people are at their best when truly self-reliant and independent. It is
only from such real individuals that true community can form.

Idealism
 Transcendentalists differ in their interpretations of the practical aims of will. Some
adherents link it with utopian social change.

Importance of nature
 Transcendentalists have a deep gratitude and appreciation for nature, not only for
aesthetic purposes, but also as a tool to observe and understand the structured inner
workings of the natural world.
 Emerson emphasizes the Transcendental beliefs in the holistic power of the natural
landscape in Nature.

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