Chapter 12

Criticism = assessment Theory = lens of assessment

the context the text the reader a combination Meaning lies primarily in….

Historical criticism New historicism Biographical criticism The Context

 Places a text in its historical and cultural context  Views the text as a reflection of the attitudes and values of the people (including the author) living at that time

 Views literature as a part of history  Views history itself as a construct (as opposed to objective truth)  Studies history as a text  Tends to favor marginalized groups

 Assumes a relationship between the author’s own world and the world of the text  Attempts to show how some aspect of an author’s life and experience “show up” in his/her literary texts

Formalist (New) criticism Structuralist criticism Archetypal criticism The Text

 Concentrates on the literary text itself— particularly its literariness or artfulness  Pays attention to literary/artistic form  Views texts in isolation  John Crowe Ransom

 Focuses on the narrative strategies of the literary text  Attempts to discover underlying patterns and themes common to all narratives  Views characters according to features or patterns  Claude Levi-Strauss  Roland Barthes

 Studies repeated patterns (archetypes) in literature  Focuses on character types  Focuses on archetypal situations  Sees literature as emerging from the “collective unconscious”  Carl Jung

Reader-response criticism Deconstruction The Reader

 Emphasizes the importance of the reader’s role in determining meaning  Suggests that reality does not exist independently in the external world, but depends on the individual’s perception of it (phenomenology)  Posits that a literary work is not complete until it is read  Stanley Fish

 Concentrates on the relationship between language and meaning  Concludes that all language is unreliable and unstable  Therefore…..all interpretation is misinterpretation  Therefore…..all interpretations are vaild  Therefore…..meaning can only exist in a solitary sense with in readers  Jacques Derrida

Marxist criticism Psychoanalytic criticism Feminist and Gender criticism A Combination

 Views human life in terms of economics, particularly the confrontation between the working classes and the forces of capitalism  Emphasizes the influence of economic forces on characters, plot, conflict, etc.  Karl Marx

 Attempts to establish the unconscious motives of characters in literary texts  Attempts to explain how an author’s experiences are reflected in his/her work  Attempts to explain how/why readers respond in certain ways  Sigmund Freud

 Focuses on the depiction of women in literature  Analyzes women’s writing from a female perspective  Seeks to recognize specifically feminine types of writing  Establishes a difference between sex and gender  Simone de Beauvoir