Feminist criticism (1960s–present): An umbrella term for a number of different critical approaches that seek to distinguish the human experience from the male experience. Feminist critics draw attention to the ways in which patriarchal social structures have marginalized women and male authors have exploited women in their portrayal of them.
Feminist criticism is a type of literary criticism, which may study and advocate the rights of women. As Judith Fetterley says, "Feminist criticism is a political act whose aim is not simply to interpret the world but to change it by changing the consciousness of those who read and their relation to what they read." Using feminist criticism to analyze fiction may involve studying the repression of women in fiction. How do men and women differ? What is different about female heroines, and why are these characters important in literary history? In addition to many of the questions raised by a study of women in literature, feminist criticism may study stereotypes, creativity, ideology, racial issues, marginality, and more.
Feminist literary criticism, arising in conjunction with sociopolitical feminism, critiques patriarchal language and literature by exposing how these reflect masculine ideology. It examines gender politics in works and traces the subtle construction of masculinity and femininity, and their relative status, positionings, and marginalizations within works.
Beyond making us aware of the marginalizing uses of traditional language (the presumptuousness of the pronoun "he," or occupational words such as "mailman") feminists focused on language have noticed a stylistic difference in women's writing: women tend to use reflexive constructions more than men (e.g., "She found herself crying"). They have noticed that women and men tend to communicate differently: men directed towards solutions, women towards connecting.
Feminist criticism concern itself with stereotypical representations of genders. It also may trace the history of relatively unknown or undervalued women writers, potentially earning them their rightful place within the literary canon, and helps create a climate in which women's creativity may be fully realized and appreciated.
One will frequently hear the term "patriarchy" used among feminist critics, referring to traditional male-dominated society. "Marginalization" refers to being forced to the outskirts of what is considered socially and politically significant; the female voice was traditionally marginalized, or discounted altogether.
@@@@@feminist criticism A development and movement in critical theory and in the evaluation of literature which was well under way by the late 1960s and which has burgeoned steadily since. It is an attempt to describe and interpret (and reinterpret) women's experience as depicted in various kinds of literature — especially the novel (q.v.); and, to a lesser extent, poetry and drama.
It questions the long-standing, dominant, male, phallocentric ideologies (which add up to a kind of male conspiracy), patriarchal attitudes and male interpretations in literature (and critical evaluation of literature). It attacks male notions of value in literature - by offering critiques of male authors and representations of men in literature and also by privileging women writers. In addition it challenges traditional and accepted male ideas about the nature of women and about how women feel, act and think, or are supposed to feel, act and think, and how in general they respond to life and living. It thus questions numerous prejudices and assumptions about women made by male writers, not least any tendency to cast women in stock character (q.v.) roles.
The inquiry (or discourse, q.v.) has posed a number of questions. For example, the possibility or likelihood of ecriture feminine {q.v.): writing that is essentially, characteristically, feminine or female in language and style. And, if such a thing exists, whether or not it is a fruitful idea to make distinctions between male and female writing; whether or not the making of such distinctions would merely result in 'sexual polarization'.
There is debate in feminism itself about how productive are: (a) the notion of an essential difference expressed in writing — a kind of separatism; (b) a radical desire to recognize that male representations of women are as important as women's writing, and also to recognize that the notion of an ecriture feminine surrenders to a traditional marginalization of women's voices.
Here perhaps one may amplify to make a crude but serviceable distinction between the 'essentialists* and the 'relativists'. The essentialist position holds the view that there is a fundamental distinction (not based on biological determinism so much as social and economic factors and their psychological consequences) between the way women and men think and write - to such a degree that there is such a thing as ecriture feminine: that is, a way that women have of expressing themselves totally opposed to the representative aspects of male language and discourse. This position is associated with French feminists. The relativist position - broadly associated with Anglo-American critics - is that the analysis of the representation of men and women by male and female authors is important. No fundamental difference separates men and women's writing except the way male critics and authors have undervalued the latter.@@@@
Formalism (1915–1929): A school that attempted a scientific analysis of the formal literary devices used in a text.
Russian Formalists advocated a "scientific" method for studying poetic language, to the exclusion of traditional psychological and cultural-historical approaches. The formalist theoreticians focused on the 'distinguishing features' of literature, on the artistic devices peculiar to imaginative writing".
There is one idea that united the Formalists: the autonomous nature of poetic language and its specificity as an object of study for literary criticism. The Formalists' main endeavour consisted in defining a set of properties specific to poetic language (be it poetry or prose) recognisable by their "artfulness" and consequently analysing them as such. Art is a sum of literary and artistic devices, that the artist manipulates to craft his work.
Broadly speaking, literature was considered, on the one hand, to be a social or political product, whereby it was then interpreted as an integral part of social and political history. On the other hand, literature was considered to be the personal expression of an author's world vision, expressed by means of images and symbols. The aim is therefore to isolate and define something specific to literature The central (and revolutionary) idea however is more general: poetic language possesses specific properties, which can be analysed as such.
@@@@ Formalism» Russian A literary theory which developed in Russia in the early 1920s. The Russian Formalists were primarily interested in the way that literary texts achieve their effects and in establishing a scientific basis for. the study of literature. In their early work, human content in literature (e.g. emotions, ideas, actions, 'reality' in general) did not possess, for them, any significance in defining what was specifically 'literary' about a text. Indeed, the Formalists collapse the distinction betwee'n form and content. And they, regard the . writer as a kind of cipher merely reworking available literary devices and conventions. The writer is of negligible importance. All the emphasis is on the 'literariness' (q.v.) of the formal devices of a text. OPOJAZ went so far as to suggest that there are not poets or literary .figures: there is just poetry and literature. Viktor Shklovsky (1893—?) summarizes the attitude in his definition of literature as 'the sum total of all the stylistic devices employed in it'.
The Formalists also developed a theory of narrative, making a distinction between plot and story. Syuzhet ('the plot') refers to-the order and manner in ,which events are actually presented in the narrative, while fabula: ('the story') refers to the chronological sequence of events.
Boris Tomashevsky, another of the Formalists, used the term 'motif' (q.v.) to denote the smallest unit of plot and distinguished between 'bound' and 'free' motifs. The 'bound* motif is one which the story absolutely requires, while the 'free' is inessential.
The concept of 'motif' is clearly linked to 'motive' and thus to 'motivation'. Formalists tended to regard a poem's content as subordinate to its formal devices. This dependence on external 'non-literary' assumptions was called 'motivation'. Shklovsky defined the motivation of a text as the extent to which it was dependent on 'non-literary' assumptions.@@@@
Marxist criticism: Marx maintained that material production, or economics, ultimately determines the course of history, and in turn influences social structures.These social structures, Marx argued, are held in place by the dominant ideology, which serves to reinforce the interests of the ruling class. Marxist criticism approaches literature as a struggle with social realities and ideologies.
According to Marxists, and to other scholars in fact, literature reflects those social institutions out of which it emerges and is itself a social institution with a particular ideological function. Literature reflects class struggle and materialism: think how often the quest for wealth traditionally defines characters. So Marxists generally view literature "not as works created in accordance with timeless artistic criteria, but as 'products' of the economic and ideological determinants specific to that era" (Abrams 149). Literature reflects an author's own class or analysis of class relations, however piercing or shallow that analysis may be.
The Marxist critic simply is a careful reader or viewer who keeps in mind issues of power and money, and any of the following kinds of questions:
- What role does class play in the work; what is the author's analysis of class relations?
- How do characters overcome oppression?
- In what ways does the work serve as propaganda for the status quo; or does it try to undermine it?
- What does the work say about oppression; or are social conflicts ignored or blamed elsewhere?
- Does the work propose some form of utopian vision as a solution to the problems encountered in the work?
Marxist criticism views literary works as reflections of the social institutions out of which they are born. According to Marxists, even literature itself is a social institution and has a specific ideological function, based on the background and ideology of the author. In essence, Marxists believe that a work of literature is not a result of divine inspiration or pure artistic endeavor, but that it arises out of the economic and ideological circumstances surrounding its creation. For Marxist critics, works of literature often mirror the creator's own place in society, and they interpret most texts in relation to their relevance regarding issues of class struggle as depicted in a work of fiction. Although Marx did not write extensively on literature and its place in society, he did detail the relationship between economic determinism and the social superstructure in various texts. Marx did view the relationship between literary activity and the economic center of society as an interactive process.
Marxist criticism:
According to Marxism, the consciousness of a given class at a given historical moment derives from modes of material production. The set of beliefs, values, attitudes, and ideas that constitutes the consciousness of this class forms an ideological superstructure, and this ideological superstructure is shaped and determined by the material infrastructure or economic base. Hence the term "historical materialism."
Marxist Critics are often interested in social class. They see literature as a "product"--something produced by work, sold in a marketplace. They thus can see readers as consumers of these products.
Marxist Critics are very concerned about the structures of a society. They see a society's economic structures as its base--the foundation on which a society rests (think, "basement"). Societies are inherently conservative, so each society wants to perpetuate or continually reproduce its base--those foundational economic structures. Those foundational economic structures are often class interactions and power hierarchies. Literature can be out in the world doing social manipulation of its consumers. Marxist Critics see art as reproducing the economic and social foundations of their societies, or as criticizing and attempting to overthrow said economic and social foundations. Thus a typical Marxist Critic looks at a literary work as both a product of work and as something which itself goes out and does work--the work of reinforcing and perpetuating its culture's dominant value system (or ideology).
@@@@ Marxist criticism Karl Marx (1818-83) an(^ Friedrich Engels (1820-95) were primarily concerned with economic, political and philosophical issues and worked out explanations of the capitalist theory and mode of production.
Much earlier Marxist criticism has been devoted to a reconstruction of the past on the basis of historical evidence in order to find out to what extent a text (say, a novel) is a truthful and accurate representation of social reality at any. given time.
The concept of 'socialist realism' {q.v.) marked an important advance in the development of Marxist and, ipso facto. Communist views.on literature—.and art in general. Basically, socialist realism required a v/riter (or any artist) to be committed to the working-class cause of the Party. And it required that literature should be 'progressive* and should display a progressive outlook on society. This necessitated forms of optimism and realism. Moreover, ^-doctrine demanded that literature should be accessible to the masses. This was particularly true of the novel.
A key figure is the first major Marxist critic, namely the Hungarian Georg Lukacs (1885-1971). He developed the critical theory of 'reflection', seeing literary works as reflections of a kind of system that was gradually unfolding. In his.view, the novel, for instance (and he had much to say about this genre) revealed or ought to reveal underlying patterns in the social order and provide a sense of the wholeness of existence with all its inherent contradictions,. tensions and conflicts.
The principal theorist of Marxist criticism in Britain is Terry Eagleton, who has developed various views of Althusser and Macherey and suggests that a basic problem is to make clear the relationship between an ideology (e.g. Marxism) and literature. In his view texts do not reflect reality but influence an ideology to produce the effect or impression of reality. By ideology he does not necessarily mean political or Marxist ideology but all systems and theories of representation which help to make up a picture of a person's experience.@@@@
New Criticism this approach discourages the use of history and biography in interpreting a literary work. Instead, it encourages readers to discover the meaning of a work through a detailed analysis of the text itself.
New Criticism emphasizes explication, or "close reading," of "the work itself." It rejects old historicism's attention to biographical and sociological matters. Instead, the objective determination as to "how a piece works" can be found through close focus and analysis, rather than through extraneous and erudite special knowledge.
New Criticism, examines the relationships between a text's ideas and its form, between what a text says and the way it says it. New Criticism attempts to be a science of literature, with a technical vocabulary, some of which we all had to learn in junior high school English classes (third-person, denoument, etc.). Working with patterns of sound, imagery, narrative structure, point of view, and other techniques discernible on close reading of the text, they seek to determine the function and appropriateness of these to the self-contained work.
The goal then is not the pursuit of sincerity or authenticity, but subtlety, unity, and integrity--and these are properties of the text, not the author. The work is not the author's; it was detached at birth. The author's intentions are "neither available nor desirable". Meaning exists on the page. Thus, New Critics insist that the meaning of a text is intrinsic and should not be confused with the author's intentions nor the work's affective dimension (its impressionistic effects on the reader).
To do New Critical reading, ask yourself, "How does this piece work?" Look for complexities in the text: paradoxes, ironies, ambiguities. Find a unifying idea or theme which resolves these tensions.
New Criticism Tends to Emphasize:
- The text as an autotelic artifact, something complete with in itself, written for its own sake, unified in its form and not dependent on its relation to the author's life or intent, history, or anything else.
- The formal and technical properties of work of art.
The New Critics advocated 'close reading' and detailed textual analysis of poetry rather than an interest in the mind and personality of the poet, sources, the history of ideas and political and social implications. The application of semantics to this criticism was also important
Psychoanalytic criticism: Any form of criticism that draws on psychoanalysis, the practice of analyzing the role of unconscious psychological drives and impulses in shaping human behavior or artistic production. The three main schools of psychoanalysis are named for the three leading figures in developing psychoanalytic theory: Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Jacques Lacan. According to Freud, artists sublimate their desires and translate their imagined wishes into art. We, as an audience, respond to the sublimated wishes that we share with the artist. Working from this view, an artist’s biography becomes a useful tool in interpreting his or her work. “Freudian criticism” is also used as a term to describe the analysis of Freudian images within a work of art. Psychoanalytic criticism adopts the methods of "reading" employed by Freud and later theorists to interpret texts. It argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author, that a literary work is a manifestation of the author's own neuroses. One may psychoanalyze a particular character within a literary work, but it is usually assumed that all such characters are projections of the author's psyche. One interesting facet of this approach is that it validates the importance of literature, as it is built on a literary key for the decoding. Freud himself wrote, "The dream-thoughts which we first come across as we proceed with our analysis often strike us by the unusual form in which they are expressed; they are not clothed in the prosaic language usually employed by our thoughts, but are on the contrary represented symbolically by means of similes and metaphors, in images resembling those of poetic speech" (26). Like psychoanalysis itself, this critical endeavor seeks evidence of unresolved emotions, psychological conflicts, guilts, ambivalences, and so forth within what may well be a disunified literary work. The author's own childhood traumas, family life, sexual conflicts, fixations, and such will be traceable within the behavior of the characters in the literary work. But psychological material will be expressed indirectly, disguised, or encoded (as in dreams) through principles such as "symbolism" (the repressed object represented in disguise), "condensation" (several thoughts or persons represented in a single image), and "displacement" (anxiety located onto another image by means of association). Despite the importance of the author here, psychoanalytic criticism is similar to New Criticism in not concerning itself with "what the author intended." But what the author never intended (that is, repressed) is sought. The unconscious material has been distorted by the censoring conscious mind. Creativity and neurosis - thoughts and images in dreams may have more than one meaning, Freud says, and one thought or image may be transferred onto another one, possibly because the mind finds the second thought or image more acceptable than the first one. Freud labels the former process "condensation" and the latter one "displacement." Freud devised these terms for his work on the unconscious and the dream process, but the terms also enter into discussions of the artist and her work, since many critics agree with Freud's opinion that the unconscious is the main site of the creative process, as well as the dream process.
Elaborating on this opinion, some critics have wondered to what extent the creative process springs only from those thoughts in the unconscious which result from neurosis. Author psychology - the question of creativity can lead us to focus on the psychology of the author. Such a focus might suggest that a text helps to explain the life and concerns of an author and vice versa. Overdetermination - This term was used by Freud in his work on dream analysis and refers to the process by which one image takes on more than one meaning. A Freudian literary critic might say that this process was also involved when Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness. The critic Frederick Karl notes that Conrad utilizes the jungle as a symbol not only of what we fear, but also of what we destroy (130-2). Through this symbol, Conrad voices his concerns on both political policy and the irrationality of human behavior. Psychobiography - Some Freudian critics argue that a text also reflects the psychological make-up of the author. An author may write in order to "gratify secretly some forbidden wish" (118). This unconscious wish makes its way into the text by the process of displacement. By employing some of Freud's techniques, the critic may discover that a text, initially ambiguous in meaning, involves several different meanings.
Lionel Trilling explains that the purpose of this approach is not to expose the "shame" of the author, but to encourage the reader to regard a text as "no less alive and contradictory than the man who created it" (39). Critics see the text as if it were a kind of dream. This means that the text hides, represses its real content behind manifest content. Dream work involves (Freud) condensation, displacement. The interpreter must make his or her way through the literal level to the symbolic import, the meaning the writer cannot say overtly because it would be too painful. As one critic puts it, "a psychological criticism notices patterns of language beneath the surface and understands the verbal play as if the text were a patient recalling more than she/he realizes." (Schwarz 116). When the psychoanalytical critic looks closely at the text s/he usually treats the text like a dream, looking carefully at images to uncover latent content, expressions of repressed fears or desires either on the part of the author or character(s).
Psychoanalytic criticism is a form of applied psychoanalysis, a science concerned with the interaction between conscious and unconscious processes and with the laws of mental functioning. We are not aware of everything that is going on in our minds. Not only that, we are aware of only a little that is going on in our minds—only a small portion of our mental lives is accessible to us.
Structuralism (1950s–1960s): Structuralist literary critics read texts as an interrelated system of signs that refer to one another rather than to an external “meaning” that is fixed either by author or reader. Structures and their structuralist models exist only in human minds, and not in nature as e.g. a Marxist would claim.
1. Structuralism enables both the reading of texts and the reading of cultures: through semiotics, structuralism leads us to see everything as 'textual', that is, composed of signs, governed by conventions of meaning, ordered according to a pattern of relationships.
The thesis that what seems real to us is coded and conventional leads to a consideration of how 'reality' is represented in art -- what we get is a 'reality effect'; the signs which represent reality are 'naturalized', that is, made to seem as if we could see reality through them
Structuralism is the name that is given to a wide range of discourses that study underlying structures of signification. Signification occurs wherever there is a meaningful event or in the practise of some meaningful action. From the point of view of structuralism all texts, all meaningful events and all signifying practices can be analysed for their underlying structures. Such an analysis would reveal the patterns that characterise the system that makes such texts and practices possible. We cannot see a structure or a system per se. In fact it would be very awkward for us if we were aware at all times of the structures that make our signifying practices possible. Rather they remain unconscious but necessary aspects of our whole way of being what we are. Structuralism therefore promises to offer insights into what makes us the way we are.
@@@@structuralism
Broadly speaking it is concerned with 'language' in a most general sense: not just the language of utterance in speech and writing. It is concerned with signs and thus with signification. Structuralist theory considers all conventions and codes of communication; for example, all forms of signal (smoke, fire, traffic lights, Morse, flags, gesture), body language, clothes, artefacts, status symbols and so on. In theory, at any rate, it is to do with any or all of the means by which human beings convey information to each other: from a railway timetable to a thumbs-up sign; from a PR brochure to a siren.
The biologist's and zoologist's study of animal, insect, fish and bird behaviour, for instance, is equally concerned with 'language'1 signs and signification (zoosemiotics). In the non-human order communication- is astonishingly refined and complex, not least through scent. For example, the female silk moth (Bombyx mori) secretes a chemical substance (a pheromone) into the air whose scent is so alluring that it can attract a male moth over a distance of half a mile; and the secretion weighs but the thousandth part of a gram. Indeed, even the antennae of a disembodied male, monitored by electrodes, will respond to a mere molecule of Bombykol.
Everything, then, in the theory of structuralism, is the product of a system of signification or code (q.v.). The relationships between the elements of the code give it signification. Codes are arbitrary (all signs are arbitrary) and without them we cannot apprehend reality.
As far as literature and literary criticism are concerned, structuralism challenges the long-standing belief that a work of literature (or any kind of literary text) reflects a given reality; a literary text is, rather, constituted of other conventions and texts.@@@@
four levels of meaning The origins of the four levels of meaning are not certain, but an awareness of them is manifest in the Middle Ages. It was Dante who explained most clearly (in the Epistle to his patron Can Grande della Scala) what they consisted of. He was introducing the matter of the Divina Commedia and he distinguished: (a) the literal or historical meaning; (b) the moral meaning; (c) the allegorical meaning; (d) the anagogical. Orwell's Animal Farm (1945)
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