Critical approaches to literature reveal how or why a particular work is constructed and

what its social and cultural implications are. Understanding critical perspectives will help
you to see and appreciate a literary work as a multilayered construct of meaning.
Reading literary criticism will inspire you to reread, rethink, and respond. Soon you will
be a full participant in an endless and enriching conversation about literature.

POSTCOLONIAL CRITICISM
Adapted from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms by Ross Murfin and Supriya M. Ray. Copyright 1998 by Bedford
Books.

A type of cultural criticism, postcolonial criticism usually involves the analysis of literary
texts produced in countries and cultures that have come under the control of European colonial
powers at some point in their history. Alternatively, it can refer to the analysis of texts written
about colonized places by writers hailing from the colonizing culture. In Orientalism (1978),
Edward Said, a pioneer of postcolonial criticism and studies, focused on the way in which the
colonizing First World has invented false images and myths of the Third (postcolonial) World—
stereotypical images and myths that have conveniently justified Western exploitation and
domination of Eastern and Middle Eastern cultures and peoples. In the essay "Postcolonial
Criticism" (1992), Homi K. Bhabha has shown how certain cultures (mis)represent other
cultures, thereby extending their political and social domination in the modern world order.
Postcolonial studies, a type of cultural studies, refers more broadly to the study of cultural
groups, practices, and discourses—including but not limited to literary discourses—in the
colonized world. The term postcolonial is usually used broadly to refer to the study of works
written at any point after colonization first occurred in a given country, although it is sometimes
used more specifically to refer to the analysis of texts and other cultural discourses that emerged
after the end of the colonial period (after the success of the liberation and independence
movements). Among feminist critics, the postcolonial perspective has inspired an attempt to
recover whole cultures of women heretofore ignored or marginalized—women who speak not
only from colonized places but also from the colonizing places to which many of them fled.
Postcolonial criticism has been influenced by Marxist thought, by the work of Michel
Foucault (whose theories about the power of discourses have influenced the new historicism),
and by deconstruction, which has challenged not only hierarchical, binary oppositions such as
West/East and North/South but also the notions of superiority associated with the first term of
each opposition.

STRUCTURALISM
Adapted from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms by Ross Murfin and Supriya M. Ray. Copyright 1998 by Bedford
Books.

Structuralism is a theory of humankind in which all elements of human culture, including

literature, are thought to be parts of a system of signs. Critic Robert Scholes has described
structuralism as a reaction to "’modernist’ alienation and despair."
European structuralists such as Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland
Barthes (before his shift toward poststructuralism) attempted to develop a semiology, or
semiotics (science of signs). Barthes, among others, sought to recover literature and even
language from the isolation in which they had been studied and to show that the laws that govern
them govern all signs, from road signs to articles of clothing.
Structuralism was heavily influenced by linguistics, especially by the pioneering work of
Ferdinand de Saussure. Particularly useful to structuralists was Saussure’s concept of the
phoneme (the smallest basic speech sound or unit of pronunciation) and his idea that phonemes
exist in two kinds of relationships: diachronic and synchronic. A phoneme has a diachronic, or
"horizontal," relationship with those other phonemes that precede and follow it (as the words
appear, left to right, on this page) in a particular usage, utterance, or narrative—what Saussure, a
linguist, called parole (French for "word"). A phoneme has a synchronic, or "vertical,"
relationship with the entire system of language within which individual usages, utterances, or
narratives have meaning—what Saussure called langue (French for "tongue," as in "native
tongue," meaning language). An means what it means in English because those of us who speak
the language are plugged into the same system (think of it as a computer network where different
individuals can access the same information in the same way at a given time).
Following Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist, studied hundreds of myths, breaking
them into their smallest meaningful units, which he called "mythemes." Removing each from its
diachronic relations with other mythemes in a single myth (such as the myth of Oedipus and his
mother), he vertically aligned those mythemes that he found to be homologous (structurally
correspondent). He then studied the relationships within as well as between vertically aligned
columns, in an attempt to understand scientifically, through ratios and proportions, those
thoughts and processes that humankind has shared, both at one particular time and across time.
Whether Lévi-Strauss was studying the structure of myths or the structure of villages, he looked
for recurring, common elements that transcended the differences within and among cultures.
Structuralists followed Saussure in preferring to think about the overridinglangue, or
language of myth, in which each mytheme and mytheme-constituted myth fits meaningfully,
rather than about isolated individual paroles, or narratives. Structuralists also followed Saussure's
lead in believing that sign systems must be understood in terms of binary oppositions (a
proposition later disputed by poststructuralist Jacques Derrida). In analyzing myths and texts to
find basic structures, structuralists found that opposite terms modulate until they are finally
resolved or reconciled by some intermediary third term. Thus a structuralist reading of
Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) might show that the war between God and the rebellious angels
becomes a rift between God and sinful, fallen man, a rift that is healed by the Son of God, the
mediating third term.
Although structuralism was largely a European phenomenon in its origin and
development, it was influenced by American thinkers as well. Noam Chomsky, for instance, who
powerfully influenced structuralism through works such as Reflections on Language (1975),
identified and distinguished between "surface structures" and "deep structures" in language and
linguistic literatures, including texts.
MARXIST CRITICISM
 Adapted from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms by Ross Murfin and Supriya M. Ray. Copyright 1998
by Bedford Books.

Marxist criticism is a type of criticism in which literary works are viewed as the product
of work and whose practitioners emphasize the role of class and ideology as they reflect,
propagate, and even challenge the prevailing social order. Rather than viewing texts as
repositories for hidden meanings, Marxist critics view texts as material products to be
understood in broadly historical terms. In short, literary works are viewed as a product of work
(and hence of the realm of production and consumption we call economics).
Marxism began with Karl Marx, the nineteenth-century German philosopher best known
for Das Kapital (1867; Capital), the seminal work of the communist movement. Marx was also
the first Marxist literary critic, writing critical essays in the 1830s on such writers as Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe and William Shakespeare. Even after Marx met Friedrich Engels in 1843
and began collaborating on overtly political works such as The German Ideology (1846) and The
Communist Manifesto (1848), he maintained a keen interest in literature. In The German
Ideology, Marx and Engels discuss the relationship between the arts, politics, and basic
economic reality in terms of a general social theory. Economics, they argue, provides
the base, or infrastructure, of society, from which a superstructure consisting of law, politics,
philosophy, religion, and art emerges.
The revolution anticipated by Marx and Engels did not occur in their century, let
alone in their lifetime. When it did occur, in 1917, it did so in a place unimagined by either
theorist: Russia, a country long ruled by despotic czars but also enlightened by the works of
powerful novelists and playwrights including Anton Chekhov, Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy,
and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Russia produced revolutionaries like Vladimir Lenin, who shared not
only Marx's interest in literature but also his belief in its ultimate importance. Leon Trotsky,
Lenin's comrade in revolution, took a strong interest in literary matters as well,
publishing Literature and Revolution (1924), which is still viewed as a classic of Marxist literary
criticism.
Of those critics active in the Soviet Union after the expulsion of Trotsky and the triumph of
Stalin, two stand out: Mikhail Bakhtin and Georg Lukács. Bakhtin viewed language—especially
literary texts—in terms of discourses and dialogues. A novel written in a society in flux, for
instance, might include an official, legitimate discourse, as well as one infiltrated by challenging
comments. Lukács, a Hungarian who converted to Marxism in 1919, appreciated pre
revolutionary realistic novels that broadly reflected cultural "totalities" and were populated with
characters representing human "types" of the author's place and time.
Perhaps because Lukács was the best of the Soviet communists writing Marxist criticism in
the 1930s and 1940s, non-Soviet Marxists tended to develop their ideas by publicly opposing
his. In Germany, dramatist and critic Bertolt Brecht criticized Lukács for his attempt to enshrine
realism at the expense not only of the other "isms" but also of poetry and drama, which Lukács
had largely ignored. Walter Benjamin praised new art forms ushered in by the age of mechanical
reproduction, and Theodor Adorno attacked Lukács for his dogmatic rejection of nonrealist
modern literature and for his elevation of content over form.
In addition to opposing Lukács and his overly constrictive canon, non-Soviet Marxists took
advantage of insights generated by non-Marxist critical theories being developed in post—World
War II Europe. Lucien Goldmann, a Romanian critic living in Paris, combined structuralist
principles with Marx’s base superstructure model in order to show how economics determines
the mental structures of social groups, which are reflected in literary texts. Goldmann rejected
the idea of individual human genius, choosing instead to see works as the "collective" products
of "trans-individual" mental structures. French Marxist Louis Althusser drew on the ideas of
psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan and the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who
discussed the relationship between ideology and hegemony, the pervasive system of assumptions
and values that shapes the perception of reality for people in a given culture. Althusser’s
followers included Pierre Macherey, who in A Theory of Literary Production (1966) developed
Althusser’s concept of the relationship between literature and ideology; Terry Eagleton, who
proposes an elaborate theory about how history enters texts, which in turn may alter history; and
Frederic Jameson, who has argued that form is "but the working out" of content "in the realm of
the superstructure."

FEMINIST CRITICISM
Adapted from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms by Ross
Murfin and Supriya M. Ray. Copyright 1998 by Bedford Books.
 Feminist criticism became a dominant force in Western literary studies in the late 1970s, when
feminist theory more broadly conceived was applied to linguistic and literary matters. Since the
early 1980s, feminist literary criticism has developed and diversified in a number of ways and is
now characterized by a global perspective.
French feminist criticism garnered much of its inspiration from Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal
book, Lé Deuxiéme Sexe (1949; The Second Sex). Beauvoir argued that associating men with
humanity more generally (as many cultures do) relegates women to an inferior position in
society. Subsequent French feminist critics writing during the 1970s acknowledged Beauvoir’s
critique but focused on language as a tool of male domination, analyzing the ways in which it
represents the world from the male point of view and arguing for the development of a feminine
language and writing.
Although interested in the subject of feminine language and writing, North American feminist
critics of the 1970s and early 1980s began by analyzing literary texts—not by abstractly
discussing language—via close textual reading and historical scholarship. One group practiced
"feminist critique," examining how women characters are portrayed, exposing the patriarchal
ideology implicit in the so-called classics, and demonstrating that attitudes and traditions
reinforcing systematic masculine dominance are inscribed in the literary canon. Another group
practiced what came to be called "gynocriticism," studying writings by women and examining
the female literary tradition to find out how women writers across the ages have perceived
themselves and imagined reality.
While it gradually became customary to refer to an Anglo-American tradition of feminist
criticism, British feminist critics of the 1970s and early 1980s objected to the tendency of some
North American critics to find universal or "essential" feminine attributes, arguing that
differences of race, class, and culture gave rise to crucial differences among women across space
and time. British feminist critics regarded their own critical practice as more political than that of
North American feminists, emphasizing an engagement with historical process in order to
promote social change.
By the early 1990s, the French, American, and British approaches had so thoroughly critiqued,
influenced, and assimilated one another that nationality no longer automatically signaled a
practitioner’s approach. Today’s critics seldom focus on "woman" as a relatively monolithic
category; rather, they view "women" as members of different societies with different concerns.
Feminists of color, Third World (preferably called postcolonial) feminists, and lesbian feminists
have stressed that women are not defined solely by the fact that they are female; other attributes
(such as religion, class, and sexual orientation) are also important, making the problems and
goals of one group of women different from those of another.
Many commentators have argued that feminist criticism is by definition gender criticism
because of its focus on the feminine gender. But the relationship between feminist and gender
criticism is, in fact, complex; the two approaches are certainly not polar opposites but, rather,
exist along a continuum of attitudes toward sex, sexuality, gender, and language.

Part B
Excerpts from: SEDGWICK, Eve Kosofsky. Gender Criticism: what isn’t gender. In: Cultural theory
network. Available at: <http://dystopictimes.blogspot.com/2005/12/gender-criticism-what-isnt-gender.html>.
Access on: 22 July 2009.

Gender Criticism: What Isn't Gender

"Gender criticism" sounds like a euphemism for something. In practice it is a

euphemism for several things, and more than that. One of its subtexts is gay and
lesbian criticism. There can be no mystery about why that highly stigmatic label, though
increasingly common, should be self-applied with care--however proudly--by those of us
who do this scholarship. For instance, I almost never put "gay and lesbian" in the title of
undergraduate gay and lesbian studies courses, though I always use the words in the
catalog copy. To ask students to mark their transcripts permanently with so much as the
name of this subject of study would have unpredictably disabling consequences for
them in the future: the military, most churches, the CIA, and much of the psychoanalytic
establishment, to mention only a few plausible professions, are still unblinking about
wanting to exclude suspected lesbians and gay men, while in only a handful of places in
the U.S. does anyone have even nominal legal protection against the routine denial of
employment, housing, insurance, custody, or other rights on the basis of her or his
perceived or supposed sexual orientation. Within and around academic institutions, as
well, there can be similarly persuasive reasons for soft-selling the challenge to an
oppression whose legal, institutional, and extrajudicial sanctions extend, uniquely, quite
uninterruptedly up to the present.

Besides code-naming a range of gay and lesbian-centered theoretical inquiries, "gender

studies" also stands in a usably unmarked relation to another rubric, "feminist studies."
Feminist studies might be defined as the study of the dynamics of gender definition,
inequality, oppression, and change in human societies. To the extent that gender is thus
at the definitional center of feminist studies, "gender studies" can sometimes be used as
an alternative name for feminist studies, euphemistic only in not specifying, as the
"feminist" label more than implicitly does, how far inequality, oppression, and struggle
between genders may be seen as differentially constituting gender itself. Women's
studies today is commonly defined, at least in practice, by the gender of its object of
study (at my university, for instance, Women's Studies will not cross-list courses unless
a majority of the texts read are by women); by contrast to women's studies, feminist
studies, whose name specifies the angle of an inquiry rather than the sex of either its
subject or its object, can make (and indeed has needed to make) the claim of having as
privileged a view of male as of female cultural production.

What, then, can or does distinguish the project of gender studies from that of feminist
studies? In some cases, as I have suggested, "gender studies" is another, equally
appropriate way of designating "feminist studies"--the reasons for offering the emollient
name no more than tactical. In other cases, however, "gender studies" can mean
"feminist studies" minus feminism; or, in another version of the same deadening
equation, "women's studies" (in the most positivist meaning of the term) plus sonme
compensatory entity called "men's studies." Although they offer an illusion of enhanced
inclusiveness, these are the arithmetics that can give "gender studies" a sinister sound
to the very scholars most involved in active gender critique. The assumptions behind
these usages are intellectually as well as politically stultifying. To assume that the study
of gender can be definitionally detached from the analysis and critique of gender
inequality, oppression, and struggle (that is, from some form of feminism) ignores,
among other things, the telling fact that gender analysis per se became possible only
under the pressure of the most pointed and political feminist demand. It ignores, that is
to say, the degree to which the otherwise available analytic tools of Western culture had
already been structured by precisely the need to naturalize or to deny, and hence to
allow the continuance of, a gender inequality already assumed. To figure gender studies
as a mere sum of women's studies plus something called "men's studies," on the other
hand, reduces both women's studies and the supposedly symmetrical men's studies to
static denominations of subject matter, and reduces any understanding of relations
between genders to something equally static and additive. That genders are constituted
as such, not only in dialectical relation to one another, but in relation to the oppression
historically exercised by one over the other, is a knowledge repressed by this impulse
toward the separate-but-equal. Things get even worse when the rationale for an additive
gender-studies agenda involves, not a nominally depoliticized and positivist study of
women-as-women and men-as-men, but rather the conscious promotion of masculist
viewpoints (under the men's-studies rubric) as a remedial "balance" against feminist
ones. One can only summon up the foundational feminist assertion that colleges don't
need something called "men's studies" because so much of the rest of the curriculum
already fulfills that function: the function, that is, not only of studying the cultural
production of men, but of furthering the interest many of them have in rationalizing,
maintaining, or increasing their gender privilege over women.

It seems, then, that insofar as "gender studies" actually is the study of gender, its most
substantive and intellectually respectable meanings make it coextensive with "feminist
studies," and gender criticism coextensive with feminist criticism. Where, in that case, to
look for the distinctive projects of gender criticism beyond its overlap with feminist
criticism? In the context of this volume, where feminist criticism has its own topical
assignment, distinct from this chapter as it is from that devoted to women's literature, it
seems particularly possible to insist on the question. And where, for that matter, to look
for the already fecund connection of gender criticism with the agendas of gay and
lesbian-centered critique to which I began by alluding? Homosexual is not, after all,
today understood as the name of a gender, though it alludes to gender and is defined
by reference to it. Nor has the feminist analysis of mutually-constitutive relations and
oppressions between genders proven to have an adequate purchase on how relations,
identities, and oppressions are constituted, as in the exemplary gay instance, within
them. Yet so far the greatest success--institutionally as well as intellectually--of gender
criticism per se has been specifically in gay and lesbian criticism.

Let me suggest that the most distinctive task of gender criticism-not-coextensive-with-

feminist criticism may be, not to do gender analysis, but to explore what resists it: to
ask, with respect to certain categories that can't be a priori disentangled from gender,
nonetheless what isn't gender. "Gender criticism" might here be taken to mean, then,
not criticism through the categories of gender analysis, but criticism of them, mapping of
the fractal borderlines between gender and its others. And if gay and lesbian criticism is
so far the typifying site of such interrogations of gender analysis, then the first other of
gender would seem to be, in this defining instance, sexuality.

Part C
Excerpts from: ESCH, Stacy Tartar. Critical approaches to literature. West Chester University.
Available here. Access on: 08 Aug. 2008.

"It's inevitable that people will ponder, discuss, and analyze the works of art that interest them."
X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama

Standard critical thinking tools, so useful elsewhere, are readily adaptable to the study
of literature. It's possible to analyze, question, interpret, synthesize, and evaluate the
literary works you read in the course of pondering, analyzing and discussing them.
Literary criticism is the field of study which systematizes this sort of activity, and several
critical approaches to literature are possible. Some of the more popular ones, along with
their basic tenants, are listed below:

FORMALIST CRITICISM
1. Literature is a form of knowledge with intrinsic elements--style, structure, imagery,
tone, and genre.
2. What gives a literary work status as art, or as a great work of art, is how all of its
elements work together to create the reader's total experience (thought, feeling, gut
reactions, etc.)
3. The appreciation of literature as an art requires close reading--a careful, step-by-
step analysis and explication of the text (the language of the work). An analysis may
follow from questions like, how do various elements work together to shape the effect
on the reader?
4. Style and theme influence each other and can't be separated if meaning is to be
retained. It's this interdependence in form and content that makes a text "literary."
"Extracting" elements in isolation (theme, character, ploy, setting, etc.) may destroy a
reader's aesthetic experience of the whole.
5. Formalist critics don't deny the historical, political situation of a work; they just
believe works of art have the power to transcend by being "organic wholes"--akin to a
being with a life of its own.
6. Formalist criticism is evaluative in that it differentiates great works of art from poor
works of art. Other kinds of criticism don't necessarily concern themselves with this
distinction.
7. Formalist criticism is decidedly a "scientific" approach to literary analysis, focusing
on "facts amenable to "verification" (evidence in the text).

BIOGRAPHICAL CRITICISM
1. Real life experience can help shape (either directly or indirectly) an author's work.
2. Understanding an author's life can help us better understand the work.
3. Facts from the author's life are used to help the reader better understand the work;
the focus is always on the literary work under investigation.
BIOGRAPHICAL CRITICISM [source: here]
Biographical criticism begins with the simple but central insight that literature is written by actual people
and that understanding an author’s life can help readers more thoroughly comprehend the work. Anyone who
reads the biography of a writer quickly sees how much an author’s experience shapes—both directly and
indirectly—what he or she creates. Reading that biography will also change (and usually deepen) our response
to the work. Sometimes even knowing a single important fact illuminates our reading of a poem or story.
Learning, for example, that Josephine Miles was confined to a wheelchair or that Weldon Kees committed
suicide at forty-one will certainly make us pay attention to certain aspects of their poems we might otherwise
have missed or considered unimportant. A formalist critic might complain that we would also have noticed
those things through careful textual analysis, but biographical information provided the practical assistance of
underscoring subtle but important meanings in the poems. Though many literary theorists have assailed
biographical criticism on philosophical grounds, the biographical approach to literature has never disappeared
because of its obvious practical advantage in illuminating literary texts.
It may be helpful here to make a distinction between biography and biographical criticism. Biography is,
strictly speaking, a branch of history; it provides a written account of a person’s life. To establish and interpret
the facts of a poet’s life, for instance, a biographer would use all the available information—not just personal
documents like letters and diaries, but also the poems for the possible light they might shed on the subject’s
life. A biographical critic,however, is not concerned with recreating the record of an author’s life. Biographical
criticism focuses on explicating the literary work by using the insight provided by knowledge of the author’s
life. Quite often biographical critics, like Brett C. Millier in her discussion of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,”
will examine the drafts of a poem or story to see both how the work came into being and how it might have
been changed from its autobiographical origins.
A reader, however, must use biographical interpretations cautiously. Writers are notorious for revising the
facts of their own lives; they often delete embarrassments and invent accomplishments while changing the
details of real episodes to improve their literary impact. John Cheever, for example, frequently told reporters
about his sunny, privileged youth; after the author’s death, his biographer Scott Donaldson discovered a
childhood scarred by a distant mother, a failed, alcoholic father, and nagging economic uncertainty. Likewise,
Cheever’s outwardly successful adulthood was plagued by alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, and family tension.
The chilling facts of Cheever’s life significantly changed the way critics read his stories. The danger in a
famous writer s case—Sylvia Plath and F. Scott Fitzgerald are two modern examples—is that the life story can
overwhelm and eventually distort the work. A savvy biographical critic always remembers to base an
interpretation on what is in the text itself; biographical data should amplify the meaning of the text, not drown
it out with irrelevant material.

Eg. Isolation of Emily Dickinson as Revealed in Her Poems; Walt Whitman: A Lover of Death;
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; A Biographical Study of David Copperfield

HISTORICAL CRITICISM
1. Historical criticism investigates the social, cultural, and intellectual context that
produced it. This investigation includes the author's biography and the social milieu.
2. Historical criticism often seeks to understand the impact of a work in its day, and it
may also explore how meanings change over time.
3. Historical criticism explores how time and place of creation affect meaning in the
work.
HISTORICAL CRITICISM [source: here]
 Historical criticism seeks to understand a literary work by investigating the social, cultural, and
intellectual context that produced it—a context that necessarily includes the artist’s biography and milieu.
Historical critics are less concerned with explaining a work’s literary significance for today’s readers than with
helping us understand the work by recreating, as nearly as possible, the exact meaning and impact it had on its
original audience. A historical reading of a literary work begins by exploring the possible ways in which the
meaning of the text has changed over time. The analysis of William Blake’s poem “London”, for instance,
carefully examines how certain words had different connotations for the poem’s original readers than they do
today. It also explores the probable associations an eighteenth— century English reader would have made with
certain images and characters, like the poem’s persona, the chimney-sweeper—a type of exploited child
laborer who, fortunately, no longer exists in our society.
Reading ancient literature, no one doubts the value of historical criticism. There have been so many social,
cultural, and linguistic changes that some older texts are incomprehensible without scholarly assistance. But
historical criticism can even help us better understand modern texts. To return to Weldon Kees’s “For My
Daughter,” for example, we learn a great deal by considering two rudimentary historical facts—the year in
which the poem was first published (1940) and the nationality of its author (American)—and then asking
ourselves how this information has shaped the meaning of the poem. In 1940, war had already broken out in
Europe and most Americans realized that their country, still recovering from the Depression, would soon be
drawn into it; for a young man, like Kees, the future seemed bleak, uncertain, and personally dangerous. Even
this simple historical analysis helps explain at least part of the bitter pessimism of Kees’s poem, though a
psychological critic would rightly insist that Kees’s dark personality also played a crucial role. In writing a
paper on a poem, you might explore how the time and place of its creation affected its meaning. For a splendid
example of how to recreate the historical context of a poem’s genesis, read the following account by Hugh
Kenner of Ezra Pound’s imagistic “In a Station of the Metro.”

PSYCHOLOGICAL CRITICISM
1. These critics hold the belief that great literature truthfully reflects life and is a
realistic representation of human motivation and behavior.
2. Psychological critics may choose to focus on the creative process of the artist, the
artist's motivation or behavior, or analyze fictional characters' motivations and
behaviors.
PSYCHOLOGICAL CRITICISM [source: here]
Modern psychology has had an immense effect on both literature and literary criticism. Sigmund Freud’s
psychoanalytic theories changed our notions of human behavior by exploring new or controversial areas like
wish-fulfillment, sexuality, the unconscious, and repression. Freud also expanded our sense of how language
and symbols operate by demonstrating their ability to reflect unconscious fears or desires. Freud admitted that
he himself had learned a great deal about psychology from studying literature: Sophocles, Shakespeare,
Goethe, and Dostoevsky were as important to the development of his ideas as were his clinical studies. Some
of Freud’s most influential writing was, in a broad sense, literary criticism, such as his psychoanalytic
examination of Sophocles’ Oedipus.
This famous section of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) often raises an important question for
students: was Freud implying that Sophocles knew or shared Freud’s theories? (Variations of this question can
be asked for most critical approaches: does using a critical approach require that the author under scrutiny
believed in it?) The answer is, of course, no; in analyzing Sophocles’ Oedipus, Freud paid the classical Greek
dramatist the considerable compliment that the playwright had such profound insight into human nature that
his characters display the depth and complexity of real people. In focusing on literature, Freud and his disciples
like Carl Jung, Ernest Jones, Marie Bonaparte, and Bruno Bettelheim endorse the belief that great literature
truthfully reflects life.
Psychological criticism is a diverse category, but it often employs three approaches. First, it investigates
the creative process of the artist: what is the nature of literary genius and how does it relate to normal mental
functions? (Philosophers and poets have also wrestled with this question, as you can see in selections from
Plato and Wordsworth in the “Criticism: On Poetry” ) The second major area for psychological criticism is the
psychological study of a particular artist. Most modern literary biographies employ psychology to understand
their subject’s motivations and behavior. One recent book, Diane Middlebrook’s controversial Anne Sexton: A
Biography, actually used tapes of the poet’s sessions with her psychiatrist as material for the study. The third
common area of psychological criticism is the analysis of fictional characters. Freud’s study of Oedipus is the
prototype for this approach that tries to bring modern insights about human behavior into the study of how
fictional people act.
E.g.:
Sigmund Freud (1856—1939)
THE DESTINY OF OEDIPUS

Translated by James Strachey. The lines from Oedipus the King are given in the version of David Qrene.

If Oedipus the King moves a modern audience no less than it did the contemporary Greek one, the explanation
can only be that its effect does not lie in the contrast between destiny and human will, but is to be looked for in
the particular nature of the material on which that contrast is exemplified. There must be something which
makes a voice within us ready to recognize the compelling force of destiny in the Oedipus, while we can
dismiss as merely arbitrary such dispositions as are laid down in Die Ahnfrau or other modern tragedies of
destiny. And a factor of this kind is in fact involved in the story of King Oedipus. His destiny moves us only
because it might have been ours—because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him.
It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and
our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that that is so. King Oedipus, who slew
his father Laius and married his mother Jocasta, merely shows us the fulfillment of our own childhood wishes.
But, more fortunate than he, we have meanwhile succeeded, insofar as we have not become psychoneurotics,
in detaching our sexual impulses from our mothers and in forgetting our jealousy of our fathers. Here is one in
whom these primeval wishes of our childhood have been fulfilled, and we shrink back from him with the
whole..........
E. g. Hamlet’s Philosophical and Psychological Dilemma in His “To Be or Not to Be” Soliloquy;

MYTHOLOGICAL CRITICISM
1. Mythological criticism studies recurrent universal patterns underlying most literary
works (for example, "the hero's journey").
2. It combines insights from a variety of academic disciplines--anthropology,
psychology, history, comparative religion...it concerns itself with demonstrating how the
individual imagination shares a common humanity by identifying common symbols,
images, plots, etc.
3. Mythological critics identify "archetypes" (symbols, characters, situations, or
images evoking a universal response).
MYTHOLOGICAL CRITICISM [source: here]
Mythological critics look for the recurrent universal patterns underlying most literary works. (“Myth and
Narrative,” for a definition of myth and a discussion of its importance to the literary imagination.)
Mythological criticism is an interdisciplinary approach that combines the insights of anthropology,
psychology, history, and comparative religion. If psychological criticism examines the artist as an individual,
mythological criticism explores the artist’s common humanity by tracing how the individual imagination uses
myths and symbols common to different cultures and epochs.
A central concept in mythological criticism is the archetype, a symbol, character, situation, or image that
evokes a deep universal response. The idea of the archetype came into literary criticism from the Swiss
psychologist Carl Jung, a lifetime student of myth and religion. Jung believed that all individuals share a
“collective unconscious,” a set of primal memories common to the human race, existing below each person’s
conscious mind.
Archetypal images (which often relate to experiencing primordial phenomena like the sun, moon, fire,
night, and blood), Jung believed, trigger the collective unconscious. We do not need to accept the literal truth
of the collective unconscious, however, to endorse the archetype as a helpful critical concept. The late
Northrop Frye defined the archetype in considerably less occult terms as “a symbol, usually an image, which
recurs often enough in literature to be recognizable as an element of one’s literary experience as a whole.”
Identifying archetypal symbols and situations in literary works, mythological critics almost inevitably link
the individual text under discussion to a broader context of works that share an underlying pattern. In
discussing Shakespeare’s Hamlet, for instance, a mythological critic might relate Shakespeare’s Danish prince
to other mythic sons avenging their fathers’ deaths, like Orestes from Greek myth or Sigmund of Norse legend;
or, in discussingOthello, relate the sinister figure of Iago to the devil in traditional Christian belief. Critic
Joseph Campbell took such comparisons even further; his compendious study The Hero with a Thousand
Faces demonstrates how similar mythic characters appear in virtually every culture on every continent.
E.g. Northrop Frye (1912—1991)
MYTHIC ARCHETYPES
We begin our study of archetypes, then, with a world of myth, an abstract or purely literary world of fictional
and thematic design, unaffected by canons of plausible adaptation to familiar experience. In terms of narrative,
myth is the imitation of actions near or at the conceivable limits of desire. The gods enjoy beautiful women,
fight one another with prodigious strength, comfort and assist man, or else watch his miseries from the height
of their immortal freedom. The fact that myth operates at the top level of human desire does not mean that it
necessarily presents its world as attained or attainable by human beings. . .
Eg. “Lucifer in Shakespeare’s Othello”；

MARXIST (SOCIOLOGICAL) CRITICISM

1. These critics examine literature in its cultural, economic, and political context; they
explore the relation between the artist and the soceity--how might the profession of
authorship have affected what's been written?
2. It is concerned with the social content of literary works, pursuing such questions
as: What cultural, economic or political values does the text implicitly or explicitly
promote? What is the role of the audience in shaping what's been written?
3. Marxist critics assume that all art is political.
4. Marxist critics judge a work's "ideology"--giving rise to such terms as "political
correctness."
SOCILOLOGICAL CRITICISM [source: here]
Sociological criticism examines literature in the cultural, economic, and political context in which it is
written or received. “Art is not created in a vacuum,” critic Wilbur Scott observed, “it is the work not simply of
a person, but of an author fixed in time and space, answering a community of which he is an important,
because articulate part.” Sociological criticism explores the relationships between the artist and society.
Sometimes it looks at the sociological status of the author to evaluate how the profession of the writer in a
particular milieu affected what was written. Sociological criticism also analyzes the social content of literary
works—what cultural, economic or political values a particular text implicitly or explicitly promotes. Finally,
sociological criticism examines the role the audience has in shaping literature. A sociological view of
Shakespeare, for example, might look at the economic position of Elizabethan playwrights and actors; it might
also study the political ideas expressed in the plays or discuss how the nature of an Elizabethan theatrical
audience (which was usually all male unless the play was produced at court) helped determine the subject,
tone, and language of the plays.
 An influential type of sociological criticism has been Marxist criticism, which focuses on the economic
and political elements of art. Marxist criticism, like the work of the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs,
often explores the ideological content of literature. Whereas a formalist critic would maintain that form and
content are inextricably blended, Lukacs believed that content determines form and that therefore, all art is
political. Even if a work of art ignores political issues, it makes a political statement, Marxist critics believe,
because it endorses the economic and political status quo. Consequently, Marxist criticism is frequently
evaluative and judges some literary work better than others on an ideological basis; this tendency can lead to
reductive judgment, as when Soviet critics rated Jack London a novelist superior to William Faulkner, Ernest
Hemingway, Edith Wharton, and Henry James, because he illustrated the principles of class struggle more
clearly. But, as an analytical tool, Marxist criticism, like other sociological methods, can illuminate political
and economic dimensions of literature other approaches overlook.

E.g. Heathcliff: A Product of Social Environment; The American Dream in The Great Gatsby;
Collapse of the American Dream in Death of a Salesman; The Twisted Human Nature in Wuthering Heights

READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM
1. This type of criticism attempts to describe the internal workings of the reader's
mental processes. it recognizes reading as a creative act, a creative process.
2. No text is self-contained, independent of a reader's interpretive design.
3. The plurality of readings possible are all explored. Critics study how different
readers see the same text differently, and how religious, cultural, and social values
affect readings.
4. Instead of focusing only on the values embedded in the text, this type of criticism
studies the values embedded in the reader. Intersections between the two are explored.
READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM [source: here]
Reader-response criticism attempts to describe what happens in the reader’s mind while interpreting a
text. If traditional criticism assumes that imaginative writing is a creative act, reader-response theory
recognizes that reading is also a creative process. Reader-response critics believe that no text provides self-
contained meaning; literary texts do not exist independently of readers’ interpretations. A text, according to
this critical school, is not finished until it is read and interpreted. The practical problem then arises that no two
individuals necessarily read a text in exactly the same way. Rather than declare one interpretation correct and
the other mistaken, reader-response criticism recognizes the inevitable plurality of readings. Instead of trying
to ignore or reconcile the contradictions inherent in this situation, it explores them.
The easiest way to explain reader-response criticism is to relate it to the common experience of rereading
a favorite book after many years. Rereading a novel as an adult, for example, that “changed your life” as an
adolescent, is often a shocking experience. The book may seem substantially different. The character you
remembered liking most now seems less admirable, and another character you disliked now seems more
sympathetic. Has the book changed? Very unlikely, but you certainly have in the intervening years. Reader-
response criticism explores how the different individuals (or classes of individuals) see the same text
differently. It emphasizes how religious, cultural, and social values affect readings; it also overlaps with gender
criticism in exploring how men and women read the same text with different assumptions.
While reader-response criticism rejects the notion that there can be a single correct reading for a literary
text, it doesn’t consider all readings permissible. Each text creates limits to its possible interpretations. As
Stanley Fish admits in the following critical selection, we cannot arbitrarily place an Eskimo in William
Faulkner’s story “A Rose for Emily” (though Professor Fish does ingeniously imagine a hypothetical situation
where this bizarre interpretation might actually be possible) poem would be forthcoming. This poem is not
only a “refusal to mourn,” like that of Dylan Thomas, it is a refusal to elegize. The whole elegiac tradition, like
its cousin the funeral oration, turns finally away from mourning toward acceptance, revival, renewal, a return
to the concerns of life, symbolized by the very writing of the poem. Life goes on; there is an audience; and the
mourned person will live through accomplishments, influence, descendants, and also (not least) in the elegiac
poem itself. Merwin rejects all that. If I wrote an elegy for X, the person for whom I have always written, X
would not be alive to read it; therefore, there is no reason to write an elegy for the one person in my life who
most deserves one; therefore, there is no reason to write any elegy, anymore, ever.
Reference:
1. X. J. Kennedy, An Introduction to Poetry, New York: HarperCollins College
Publishers, 1994
2. Gloria Henderson, William Day & Sandra Waller, Literature and Ourselves, New
York: HarperCollins College Publishers, 1994

DECONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM (deconstruction)

1. Deconstructive critics believe that language doesn't accurately reflect reality
because it's an unstable medium; literary texts therefore have no stable meaning.
2. Deconstructive criticism resembles formalist criticism in its close attention to the
text, its close analysis of individual words and images. There the similarity ends,
because their aims are in fact opposite. Whereas formalist criticism is interested in
"aesthetic wholes" or constructs, deconstructionists aim to demonstrate irreconcilable
positions--they destruct (or deconstruct)--by proving the instability of language, its
inability to express anything definite.
DECONSTRUCTIONIST CRITICISM [source: here]
Deconstructionist criticism rejects the traditional assumption that language can accurately represent
reality. Language, according to deconstructionists, is a fundamentally unstable medium; consequently, literary
texts, which are made up of words, have no fixed, single meaning. Deconstructionists insist, according to critic
Paul de Man, on “the impossibility of making the actual expression coincide with what has to be expressed, of
making the actual signs coincide with what is signified.” Since they believe that literature cannot definitively
express its subject matter, deconstructionists tend to shift their attention away from what is being said
to how language is being used in a text.
Paradoxically, deconstructionist criticism often resembles formalist criticism; both methods usually
involve close reading. But while a formalist usually tries to demonstrate how the diverse elements of a text
cohere into meaning, the deconstructionist approach attempts to show how the text “deconstructs,” that is, how
it can be broken down—by a skeptical critic— into mutually irreconcilable positions. A biographical or
historical critic might seek to establish the author’s intention as a means to interpreting a literary work, but
deconstructionists reject the notion that the critic should endorse the myth of authorial control over language.
Deconstructionist critics like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault have therefore called for “the death of the
author,” that is, the rejection of the assumption that the author, no matter how ingenious, can fully control the
meaning of a text. They have also announced the death of literature as a special category of writing. In their
view, poems and novels are merely words on a page that deserve no privileged status as art; all texts are
created equal—equally untrustworthy, that is.
Deconstructionists focus on how language is used to achieve power. Since they believe, in the words of
critic David Lehman, that “there are no truths, only rival interpretations,” deconstructionists try to understand
how some “interpretations come to be regarded as truth. A major goal of deconstruction is to demonstrate how
those supposed truths are at best provisional and at worst contradictory.
Deconstruction, as you may have inferred, calls for intellectual subtlety and skill, and isn’t for a novice to
leap into. If you pursue your literary studies beyond the introductory stage, you will want to become more
familiar with its assumptions. Deconstruction may strike you as a negative, even destructive, critical approach,
and yet its best practitioners are adept at exposing the inadequacy of much conventional criticism. By patient
analysis, they can sometimes open up the most familiar text and find in it fresh and unexpected significance.
Part D

Cultural Studies [source: Cultural Studies UNC]

Cultural studies is an innovative interdisciplinary field of research and teaching that investigates the ways in which
“culture” creates and transforms individual experiences, everyday life, social relations and power. Research and
teaching in the field explores the relations between culture understood as human expressive and symbolic activities,
and cultures understood as distinctive ways of life. Combining the strengths of the social sciences and the
humanities, cultural studies draws on methods and theories from literary studies, sociology, communications studies,
history, cultural anthropology, and economics. By working across the boundaries among these fields, cultural
studies addresses new questions and problems of today’ s world. Rather than seeking answers that will hold for all
time, cultural studies develops flexible tools that adapt to this rapidly changing world.

Cultural life is not only concerned with symbolic communication, it is also the domain in which we set collective
tasks for ourselves and begin to grapple with them as changing communities. Cultural studies is devoted to
understanding the processes through which societies and the diverse groups within them come to terms with history,
community life, and the challenges of the future.

For a more nuanced understanding of the histories of cultural sudies read: Bennett,
Tony, Lawrence
Grossberg, Meaghan Morris, and Raymond Williams. New Keywords : A Revised Vocabulary of
Culture and Society. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2005.
 Grossberg, Lawrence. Bringing it all Back Home : Essays on Cultural Studies. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1997.
 Grossberg, Lawrence. Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
 Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler. Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge,
1992.
 Storey, John. What is Cultural Studies?: A Reader. London; New York: Arnold, 1996.

Cultural Studies
Source: New Dictionary of the History of Ideas | 2005 | Grossberg, Lawrence
COPYRIGHT 2005 The Gale Group, Inc.

Cultural studies is one of the more controversial intellectual formations of the 1990s and the
first decade of the third millennium. It has experienced a period of rapid growth in the
academy, appearing at many universities in a variety of forms and locations (although rarely
as degree-granting departments). At the same time, it has been broadly attacked both from
inside the university and outside academia.

Definitions
There are at least five distinct uses of cultural studies, making it difficult to know exactly
what people are attacking or defending. It has been used to describe, alone or in various
combinations:

1. Any progressive cultural criticism and theory (replacing "critical theory," which
served as the umbrella term of the 1980s);
2. The study of popular culture, especially in conjunction with the political
problematic of identity and difference;
3. So-called "postmodern" theories that advocate a cultural or discursive
constructionism (and, thus, supposedly embrace relativism);
4. Research on the politics of textuality applied broadly to include social life,
especially based in poststructuralist theories of ideology, discourse, and
subjectivity;
5. A particular intellectual formation that is directly or indirectly linked to the project
of British cultural studies, as embodied in the work of Raymond Williams, Stuart
Hall, and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS).

Second, the New Left emerged as a small but influential discussion group, and included
many immigrants from the "colonies." It was sympathetic to (but not aligned with) the
growing Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The New Left had a specific and ambivalent
relation toMarxism, engaging Marxist theory and politics even as it criticized it for its failure
(and inability?) to account for and respond to the challenges posed by the importance of
ideology, colonialism and imperialism, race, and the failures of existing socialism. This work
was enabled by the translation and publication of the early writings of Marx and a wide range
of European Marxist thinkers.

Third, the British university system was, to put it mildly, elitist and classist, in terms of its
student population and in its isolation, aestheticization, and limitation of culture to the field
of the arts. Many of the influential early figures in cultural studies were working-class or
immigrant students attending university on scholarship, who were driven to look for other
accounts of culture that both expanded its referent and took it more seriously.

Finally, many of these figures were deeply influenced by their experience as teachers in
various institutions of adult education outside the university. If nothing else, this experience
played a role in convincing them, first, of the importance of culture (and intellectual work on
culture) to both political struggle and people's everyday lives, and second, of the fact that the
important questions do not usually respect the disciplinary boundaries of academic
competence and expertise.