Types Of Literary Criticism

Assignment Paper 3

Literary Theory & Criticism

Ajit A. Kaliya

M.A. Sem 1

Roll No. 3

Enrollment No. 206910820170013

Email: kaliyaajitbhai@gmail.com

Department Of English, MKBU

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Types Of Literary Criticism

Everybody is a critic. you, me, and all. Because all have the habit of see good and bad things in anything. In literary criticism we see literature in good or bad way. It is our perspective to see literary works. Since ancient time authors have been debating on literature. Greeks may believe that comedy and tragedy should be separated, while Dryden comes with the word tragicomedy and considers it better. It was their perspective to see towards literature. There are so many ways to look towards literature like feminist point of view, Marxism, psychoanalytic and so many others. They can be consider as varies types of literary criticism.

Meaning of literary criticism:

Ø Literary criticism is the study, evolution and interpretation of literature[Wikipedia]

Ø Literary criticism is the overall teem for studies concerned with defining, classifying, analysing, interpreting, and evaluating works of literature[H.M.Abrams, Glossary of literary terms]

That is enough for understanding the meaning of literary criticism. Now let us see several types of Criticism.

Ø  Traditional criticism

In traditional criticism you examine how the author's life, his or her biographical information is reflected in the work. You research all facets of his background and find Traces of his or her experiences shown in the text. Question how the work shows pieces of the author's past, his or her interests.

The adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a great example of traditional criticism.

Ø  Mythological/Archetypal Criticism

In literary criticism the term archetype denotes re-current narrative designs, patterns of action, character types, themes, and im-

ages which are identifiable in a wide variety of works of literature, as well as in myths, dreams, and even social rituals. An archetype is a motif or image which is found in myths of people widely separated by Time or place. Because of this, it has universal significance, situations, conflicts, and characters can be archetypal.

Ø Theoretical criticism

Theoretical criticism proposes an explicit theory of literature, in the sense of general principles, together with a set of terms, distinctions, and categories, to be applied to identifying and analyzing works of literature, as well as the criteria (the standards, or norms) by which these works and their writers are to be evaluated. The earliest, and enduringly important, treatise of theoretical criticism was Aristotle's Poetics (fourth century B.C.). Among the most influential theoretical critics in the following centuries were Longinus in Greece; Horace in Rome; Boileau and Sainte-Beuve in France; Baumgarten and Goethe in Germany; Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold in England; and Poe and Emerson in America. Landmarks of theoretical criticism in the first half of the twentieth century are I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924); Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941, rev. 1957); Eric Auerbach, Mimesis (1946); R. S. Crane, ed., Critics and Criticism (1952); and Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957).

Ø Practical or applied criticism

It concerns with particular works and writers. The theoretical principles controls the mode of analysis, interpretation, and evaluation are often left implicit, or brought in only as the occasion demands. Some influential works are the literary essays of Dryden in the Restoration; Dr. Johnson's Lives of the English Poets (1779-81); Coleridge's chapters on the poetry of Wordsworth in Biographia Literaria (1817) and his lectures on Shakespeare; William Hazlitt's lectures on Shakespeare and the English poets, in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century; Matthew Arnold's Essays in Criticism (1865 and following); I. A. Richards' Practical Criticism (1930); T. S. Eliot's Selected Essays (1932); and the many critical essays by Virginia Woolf, F. R. Leavis, and Lionel Trilling.

Practical criticism is sometimes distinguished into impressionistic and judicial criticism

Ø Impressionistic criticism

It attempts to represent in words the felt qualities of a particular passage or work, and to express the responses (the "impression") that the work directly evokes from the critic. As William Hazlitt put it in his essay "On Genius and Common Sense" (1824): "You decide from feeling, and not from reason; that is, from the impression of a number of things on the mind .. . though you may not be able to analyze or account for it in the several particulars." And Walter Pater later said that in criticism "the first step toward seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realize it distinctly," and posed as the basic question, "What is this song or picture .. . to me?'' (preface to Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 1873). At its extreme this mode of criticism becomes, in Anatole France's phrase, "the adventures of a sensitive soul among masterpieces."

Ø Judicial criticism

It analyses and explains the effect of the work by reference to its subject, organisation, techniques and style and to base the critic's individual judgement on specified criteria of literary excellence.

Ø Mimetic Criticism

Mimetic criticism views the literary work as an imitation, or reflection, or representation of the world and human life, and the primary criterion applied to a work is the "truth" of its representation to the subject matter that it represents, or should represent. This mode of criticism, which first appeared in Plato and (in a qualified way) in Aristotle, remains characteristic of modern theories of literary realism.

Ø Pragmatic criticism

It views the work as something which is constructed in order to achieve certain effects on the audience (effects such as aesthetic pleasure, instruction, or kinds of emotion), and it tends to judge the value of the work according to its success in achieving that aim. This approach, which largely dominated literary discussion from the versified Art of Poetry by the Roman Horace (first century B.C.) through the eighteenth century, has been revived in recent rhetorical criticism, which emphasizes the artistic strategies by which an author engages and influences the responses of readers to the matters represented in a literary work. The pragmatic approach has also been adopted by some structuralists who analyze a literary text as a systematic play of codes which effect the interpretative responses of the reader.

Ø Expressive criticism

It treats a literary work primarily in relation to its author. It defines poetry as an expression, or overflow, or utterance of feelings, or as the product of the poet's imagination operating on his or her perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; it tends to judge the work by its sincerity, or its adequacy to the poet's individual vision or state of mind; and it often seeks in the work evidences of the particular temperament and experiences of the author who, consciously or unconsciously, has revealed himself or herself in it. Such views were developed mainly by romantic critics in the early nineteenth century and remain current in our own time, especially in the writings of psychological and psychoanalytic critics and in critics of consciousness such as George Poulet and the Geneva School.

Ø Objective criticism

It deals with a work of literature as something which stands free from what is often called "extrinsic" relations to the poet, or to the audience, or to the environing world. Instead it describes the literary product as a self-sufficient and autonomous object, or else as a world-in-itself, which is to be contemplated as its own end, and to be analyzed and judged solely by "intrinsic" criteria such as its complexity, coherence, equilibrium, integrity, and the interrelations of its component elements. The general viewpoint of the self-sufficiency of an aesthetic object was proposed in Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (1790)—see distance and involvement—-was taken up by proponents of art for art's sake in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and has been elaborated in detailed modes of applied criticism by a number of important critics since the 1920s, including the New Critics, the Chicago School, and proponents of European formalism.

Ø Feminist Criticism

feminist criticism was not inaugurated until late in the 1960s. Behind it, however, lie two centuries of struggle for the recognition of women's cultural roles and achievements, and for women's social and political rights. 5). Much of feminist literary criticism continues in our time to be interrelated with the movement by political feminists for social, legal, and cultural freedom and equality.

An important precursor in feminist criticism was Virginia Woolf, who, in addition to her fiction, wrote A Room of One's Own (1929) and numerous other essays on women authors and on the cultural, economic, and educational disabilities within what she called a "patriarchal" society that have hindered or prevented women from realizing their productive and creative possibilities.

Ø Marxist Criticism

Marxist literary criticismis a loose term describingliterary criticismbased on socialist and dialectic theories. Marxist criticism views literary works as reflections of the social institutions from which they originate.

According to Marxists, even literature itself is a social institution and has a specific ideological function, based on the background and ideologyof the author.The English literary critic and cultural theorist,Terry Eagleton, defines Marxist criticism this way:

"Marxist criticism is not merely a 'sociology of literature', concerned with how novels get published and whether they mention the working class. Its aim is to explain the literary work more fully; and this means a sensitive attention to its forms, styles and, meanings. But it also means grasping those forms, styles and meanings as the product of a particular history."

The simplest goals of Marxist literary criticism can include an assessment of the political 'tendency' of a literary work, determining whether its social content or its literary form are 'progressive'. It also includes analyzing the class constructs demonstrated in the literature.

Ø Psychological Criticism

Psychoanalytic literary criticism is literary criticism or literary theory which, in method, concept, or form, is influenced by the tradition of psycho analysis begun by Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalytic reading has been practiced since the early development of psychoanalysis itself, and has developed into a heterogeneous interpretive tradition. As Celine Surprenant writes, 'Psychoanalytic literary criticism does not constitute a unified field. However, all variants endorse, at least to a certain degree, the idea that literature is fundamentally entwined with the psyche'.

The object of psychoanalytic literary criticism, atits very simplest, can be the psychoanalysis of the author or of a particularly interesting character in a given work. The criticism is similar to psychoanalysis itself, closely following the analytic interpretive process discussed in Freud'sThe Interpretation of Dreamsand other works. Critics may view the fictional characters as psychologicalcase studies, attempting to identify such Freudian concepts as the Oedipus complex, ,Freudian slips, Id, ego and superego and so on, and demonstrate how they influence the thoughts and behaviors of fictional characters.

Ø TextualCriticism

Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants in either manuscripts or printed books. Ancient scribes made alterations when copying manuscripts by hand. Given a manuscript copy, several or many copies, but not the original document, the textual critic might seek to reconstruct the original text (the archetype or autograph) as closely as possible. The same processes can be used to attempt to reconstruct intermediate versions, or recensions, of a document's transcription history. The ultimate objective of the textual critic's work is the production of a "critical edition" containing a scholarly curated text.

Ø New Criticism

New Criticism developed as a reaction to the older philological and literary history schools of the US North, which, influenced by nineteenth-century German scholarship, focused on the history and meaning of individual words and their relation to foreign and ancient languages, comparative sources, and the biographical circumstances of the authors. These approaches, it was felt, tended to distract from the text and meaning of a poem and entirely neglect its aesthetic qualities in favor of teaching about external factors. On the other hand, the literary appreciation school, which limited itself to pointing out the "beauties" and morally elevating qualities of the text, was disparaged by the New Critics as too subjective and emotional. Condemning this as a version of Romanticism, they aimed for newer, systematic and objective method.

These are various types of literary criticism. Of course these are not all and there is also no certainty. Literature is evolutionary, tomorrow will other term be existed. But these are some terms of Criticism which can help you to see literature in deeper way.

References:

Glossary of literary terms - H.M.Abrams

Wikipedia

Scribd.com

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