TSL 3102LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

Introduction to Theories of Literary Criticism

Dr. Nil Farakh SulaimanLanguage Department

IPGMK Pendidikan TeknikKompleks Pendidikan Nilai

DrNil/ipgkpt/2013

Tasks

1. Discuss and analyse definitions of criticism, theory and literature.

2. Discuss the importance of literary theory for readers.

3. Analyse a selected short story making use of one of the literary theories discussed in the lecture.

4. Prepare a mind map on literary theories (ISL) – http://www.kristisiegel.com/theory.htm

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Literary Criticism (definition)

• The informed evaluation, analysis, description or interpretation of a piece of literature.

• May examine a particular literary work, or may look into an author’s writing as a whole.

• Some of the functions of a critic are to:– introduce authors we don’t know– encourage readers to re-evaluate a work– compare different works / ages / cultures– increase our understanding of a work– relate art to life / religion etc

• Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory – some critics consider literary criticism a practical application of literary theory.

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Literary Criticism (definition)

• Acts as different lenses that critics use to view and talk about art, literature and culture.

• These different lenses allow critics to:– consider works of art based on certain assumptions

within that school of theory– focus on particular aspects of a work they consider

important.• E.g.: If a critic is working with

1. Marxism, s/he might focus on how the characters in the story interact based on their economic situation

2. Post colonialism, s/he might consider the same story but look at how characters from colonial powers (Britain, France, Dutch etc) treat characters.

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Literary Theory (definition)

• The philosophical discussion of the body of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of literature.

• A description of the underlying principles/tools by which we attempt to understand literature.

• Refers not to the meaning of a work of literature but to the theories that reveal what literature can mean.

• Refers to any principles derived from internal analysis of literary texts or from knowledge external to the text that can be applied in multiple interpretive situations.

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Literary Theory (definition)

• Formulates the relationship between author and work – from the standpoint of the biography of the author and an analysis of their thematic presence within texts.

• Recently, literary theory has sought to explain the degree to which the text is more the product of culture than an individual author and in turn how those texts help to create the culture.

• The status of literary theory within the academic discipline of literary studies continues to evolve.

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Literature (definition)

• Latin – litterae (plural for letter) • Literally means “acquaintance with letters”• The art of written works – most commonly used to

refer to works of the creative imagination – especially poetry and prose

• Controversial issue:– Literature encompasses far more than just fiction, also

refers to non-fiction (memoirs, biography, and other works that are factual in scope)

– Exclude works on grounds of weak or faulty style, use of slang, poor characterization and shallow construction

– Genres such as romance, crime and mystery, science fiction, horror and fantasy are also excluded as being “literary”

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Theories of Literary Criticism

Historical

Cultural

Social Political

Gender

Post- modernism

HISTORICAL & BIOGRAPHICAL CRITICISM• The basic tenets of this criticism most clearly articulated

in the 19th century.• The basic premise is that literary meaning is grounded in

the author – the author is the context in which the work is studied and is the cause of the work’s meaning.

• The search for the author’s original intention.• To ask what a literary work means is to ask what the

author meant when he or she created it.• In order to study the author as context, it is necessary for

the historical critic to examine the work against its historical surroundings and determine how these surroundings worked with the individuality of the author and the individuality of the age to create and define the text.

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HISTORICAL & BIOGRAPHICAL CRITICISM• Assumes that by examining the facts and motives of

an author’s life, the meaning and intent of his/her literary work can be illuminated.

• Views a literary work chiefly as a reflection of its author’s life and times or the life and times of the characters in the work.– E.g. John Milton’s sonnet “On His Blindness” – best

understood when one realizes that the poet became totally blind when he was 44 and “On His Deceased Wife”, a tribute to his second wife, Katherine Woodcock

• Assumes that the relationship between art and society is organic; views a literary work in relation to the standards and social milieu of the period in which it was produced.

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HISTORICAL & BIOGRAPHICAL CRITICISM• A historical novel is likely to be more meaningful when

either its milieu or its author is understood, e.g.• J.F. Cooper’s “Last of the Mohicans” – the French and Indian War• W. Scott’s “Ivanhoe” – Anglo-Norman Britain• Charles Dickens’s “Tale of Two Cities” – the French Revolution • John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” – the American Depression

• Advantage:– This approach works well for some works which are obviously

political in nature• Disadvantage:– This approach tends to reduce art to the level of biography and

make it relative (to the times) rather than universal

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NEW HISTORICISM/ CULTURAL STUDIES• It seeks to reconnect a work with the time period in which it

was produced and identify it with the cultural and political movements of the time.

• Assumes that every work is a product of the historic moment that created it.

• Resists that history is a series of events that have a linear, causal relationship.

• Does not believe that we can look at history objectively, but rather we interpret events as products of our time and culture.

• Believes that “ we don’t have clear access to any but the most basic facts of history … our understanding of what such facts mean … is … strictly a matter of interpretation, not fact”.

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NEW HISTORICISM/ CULTURAL STUDIES• Holds that “we are subjective interpreters of

what we observe”.• The difference between traditional historians

and new historicists:– Traditional historians – What happened? What

does the event tell us about history?– New historicists – How has the event been

interpreted? What do the interpretations tell us about the interpreters?

• Major figures: Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz, Stephen Greenblatt, Pierre Bourdieu.

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NEW HISTORICISM/CULTURAL STUDIES• Differs from the historical criticism of the 1930s and 1940s

– It is informed by the poststructuralist, and reader-response theory of the 1970s, as well as by the thinking of feminist, cultural and Marxist critics.

– It is treacherous to reconstruct the past as it really was as we have been conditioned by our own place and time to believe that it was.

– Less fact- and event-oriented than historical critics – wonder whether the truth about what really happened can ever be purely or objectively known.

– Less likely to see history as linear and progressive.– Less likely to think of literature in terms of specific eras, each

with a definite, persistent and consistent spirit of the times. – Hence, literary texts have no single or easily identifiable

historical context.

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MARXISM• Based on the theories of Karl Marx.• Concerns itself with class differences, economic and otherwise,

and implications and complications of the capitalist system.• Marxism attempts to reveal the ways in which our

socioeconomic system is the ultimate source of our experience.• Marxism is interested in answering these questions:

– Whom does it (the work, the effort etc) benefit? The elite? The middle class?

– How the lower or working classes are oppressed?• Marxism follows a process of thinking called the material

dialectic:– …what drives historical change are the material realities of the

economic base of society, rather than the ideological superstructure of politics, law, philosophy, religion and art ….

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MARXISMWhat is social reality?• The working class people (the proletariat) have been

oppressed, suppressed and cajoled into believing that reality is simply the way things are.

• The working class people have been manipulated by the bourgeoisie to accept their values and beliefs whose only goal is to keep the working class in its place.

• This ideology unconsciously hinders the working class from progressing forward.

• The core principles of Marxist thought:– offers to humanity a social, political, economic and cultural

understanding of the nature of reality, of society and of the individual

– society shapes our consciousness– social and economic conditions directly influence how and what we

believe and value

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MARXISM• Tends to view literature in the light of modes of production,

and their property relations, and class struggles – focuses on power and money in works of literature.

• Pertinent tenets:– The evolving history of humanity and its ways of thinking are

determined by the changing mode of its “material production” – that is, of its basic economic organization.

– Human consciousness in any era is constituted by an ideology (a set of beliefs, values, and ways of thinking and feeling) through which human beings perceive, and by which they explain, what they take to be reality.

– A Marxist critic explains the literature in any era by revealing the economic, class and ideology determinants of the way an author writes, and examining the relation of the text to the social reality of that time and place.

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POLITICAL CRITICISM• A piece of literature is regarded as political when

it touches political, gender, racial and class issues• Simultaneously, a text which doesn’t discuss all

the above issues is also political. Why?• Because it doesn’t want to disturb the peaceful

order of the society and doesn’t want to disturb the ruling class’s power (Dr. Rodney Sharkey)

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GENDER CRITICISM• Signifies the socially constructed differences

between men and women which operate in most societies and which leads to forms of inequality, oppression and exploitation between the sexes.

• Sexuality and literature first became an issue within the feminist movement.

• Examines how sexual identity influences the creation and reception of literary works.

• Today includes a number of approaches:1. Masculinist approach – advocated by poet Robert

Bly2. Lesbian approach3. Gay approach

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FEMINISM• A feminist critic sees cultural and economic disabilities in a

“patriarchal” society that have hindered or prevented women from realizing their creative possibilities and women’s cultural identification as a merely negative object or “other”.

• Man is defined as a dominating “subject”.• Assumptions and concepts:

– Our civilization is pervasively patriarchal; economically, politically, socially and psychologically.

– This patriarchal ideology pervades many great literatures. Such works lack autonomous female role models.

– Examines the patterns of thought, behaviour, values, enfranchisement (freedom), and power in relations between the sexes.

– All feminist activities, have as their ultimate goal to change the world by prompting gender equality.

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LESBIAN & GAY CRITICISM• Views that feminism questions traditional views

of gender but fails to question similarly traditional views of same-sex relations.

• Practical problems in lesbianism:–What is a lesbian text? Is it one describing lesbian

relationship? Is it one written by a lesbian author? Is it one in which hidden kinds of pleasure are offered to an implied lesbian reader?

– Are texts lesbian if neither author nor content are explicitly lesbian?

– How much of a text has to be about lesbianism to be regarded as lesbian?

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LESBIAN & GAY CRITICISM• There are many parallels between lesbian and

gay criticism.• Scholars and critics have emphasized that lesbian

relationships need to be viewed as separate and distinct from either heterosexual or gay relationships due to the additional pressures on women living in a male-dominated world.

• Overall, there is strong political component within both gay and lesbian literature, as the worlds they depict are routinely filled with characters who suffer violence, discrimination, marginalization and ridicule.

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POSTMODERNISM/POST-STRUCTURALISM• This approach concerns itself with the ways and places

where systems, frameworks, definitions, and certainties break down – the centre cannot hold.

• Maintains that frameworks and systems are merely fictitious constructs and that they cannot be trusted to develop meaning or to give order.

• Every act of seeking order or a singular Truth is absurd because there exists no unified truth.

• Holds that there are many truths, that frameworks must bleed, and that structures must become unstable or decentred.

• Concerns with the power structures or hegemonies and power and how these elements contribute to and/or maintain structures to enforce hierarchy.

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POSTMODERNISM/POST-STRUCTURALISM• Resistance to traditional forms of knowledge making

– science, religion and language.– Language, the basis of our knowledge making is an

unreliable system of communication.• Since language system cannot be trusted to convey

truth, the very bases of truth are unreliable.• What is truth – truths are an illusion about which it

has been forgotten that they are illusions.• Tagline; we cannot trust the sign/language for there

is a breakdown of certainty between the sign and the signifier, which leaves language systems hopelessly inadequate for relying meaning so that we are in eternal freeplay (indeterminacy) or instability.

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POSTMODERNISM & LITERATURE• Narrative

– Grand narratives are resisted – e.g. the believe that through science, the human race will improve is questioned.

– Look at how events, characters, plots contradict themselves; self-critical.• Author

– The death of the author; the birth of the reader.– The reader plays a role in interpreting the text and developing meaning

from the text• Typical questions:1. How does the work undermine or contradict generally accepted

truths?2. If we change the point of view of the text, how would the story

change?3. Whose story if not told in the text?• Theorists: Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzche, Rolant Bathes

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POST-COLONIALISM• Similar to cultural studies – concerned with literature

produced by colonial powers and works produced by those who were/are colonised.

• Post-colonial theory looks at issues of power, economics, politics, religion, and culture and how these elements work in relation to colonial hegemony (western colonizers controlling the colonized).

• E.g. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe– Colonial ideology is manifested in Crusoe’s colonialist

attitude toward the land upon which he shipwrecked and toward the black man he “colonizes”.

• Questions the role of the western literary canon and western history as dominant forms of knowledge making.

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POST-COLONIALISM• The terms “first world”, “second-world” and “third world”

nations are critiqued by post-colonial critics because they reinforce the dominant positions of western cultures populating first world status.

• Typical questions:1. How does the literary text, explicitly or allegorically, represent

various aspects of colonial oppression?2. What does the text reveal about the problematic of post-colonial

identity, including the relationship between personal and cultural identity?

3. What does the text reveal about the politics and/or psychology of anti-colonialist resistance?

4. How does the text reveal about the operations of cultural difference – the ways in which race, religion, class, gender, sexual orientation, cultural beliefs, and customs combine to form individual identity?

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PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM• Builds on Freudian theories of psychology• People’s behaviour is greatly affected by their:

Unconscious – influenced by childhood events Desires – sexuality Defenses – develop because people try to keep all of the

conflict buried in the unconscious (selective perception, selective memory, denial, regression etc)

• Freud believed that the impact of the above elements of mind was inescapable and influence not only our behaviour but also dreams.

• Psychological criticism deals with a work of literature primarily as an expression, in fictional form, of the personality, state of mind, feelings, and desires of its author.

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PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM• The assumption of psychoanalytic critics is that a work

of literature is correlated with its author’s mental traits.– Reference to the author’s personality is used to explain

and interpret a literary work.– Reference to literary works is made in order to establish,

biographically, the personality of the author.– The mode of reading a literary work itself is a way of

experiencing the distinctive subjectivity or consciousness of its author.

• This theory requires that readers investigate the psychology of a character or an author to figure out the meaning of a text (although to apply an author’s psychology to a text can also be considered biographical criticism).

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TIMELINE• Moral Criticism, Dramatic Construction (~ 360 BC – present)• Structuralism/Semiotics (1920s – present)• Formalism, New Criticism, Neo-Aristotelian Criticism (1930s

– present)• Psychoanalitic Criticism, Jungian Criticism (1930s – present)• Marxist Criticism (1930s – present)• Feminist Criticism (1960s – present)• Reader-Response Criticism (1960s – present)• Post-Structuralism/Deconstruction (1966 – present)• Gender/Queer Studies (1970s – present)• New Historicism/Cultural Studies (1980s – present)• Post-Colonial Criticism (1990s – present)

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DISCUSSION• Why does literary theory importance for

readers? 1. Guide for an informed evaluation, analysis,

description or interpretation of a piece of literature

2. Evaluate the influence of author’s cultural background with the piece written

3. Compare different works / ages / cultures4. Increase understanding of a work under

study5. Relate a piece of literature with personal life