Literary Criricism

Criticism
“kritikos” -to make judgement

Literary Criticism - according to Beckson & Ganz

‣ classification of genre
‣ analysis of structure
‣ judgement of values

To understand: - importance of literary criticism

‣ Context
‣ Structure
‣ Content
‣ Influence

Consistency - shows good grasp of literary criticism

‣ Guerin

Literary approaches - Different approaches used to discover diff. Meanings and

interpretations

Historical-Biography - how test is influenced by its _____

‣ milieu
- Period when text is written/environment of author
Moral-Philosophical - explains certain philosophies that shape literary work

Structuralism - how certain text follow a grand structure

- Reveal evident pattern
Formalism - nothing outside of text
- Meaning contained inside text
- Requires close reading
Psychoanalysis - deals with study of human mind and behavior

Marxism - representation of class struggle

- How text is influenced by history and society
Post-colonialism - Reveals representation of conflicts b/w colonizers and colonized

Gender-sensitive - representation of different genders

Pre-critical Response - initial appreciation based on basic ingredients of literature

Psychoanalysis Theory - states that most mental processes are unconscious

- Most human behaviour is motivated by sexuality
- Desires and memories are repressed
Sigmund Freud - Father of Psychoanalysis Theory
‣ “the conscious becoming aware of the unconscious”
- Describes it as “___”
Freudian slips - unawarely revealing unconscious intentions
3 Psychic Zones
‣ The Id - what we were born with
- Driven by biological instincts (Eros, Thanatos)
‣ The Ego
▫︎ age 3/5 - balances the wants of the Id with reality
- “I need to do some planning to get it.”
‣ Super Ego
- Driven by reality principle

- uses introjection; responsible for right/wrong

- “You can’t have it. It is not right.”
- Driven by morality principle
Eros - instinct for self and life preservation
- Reason for reproduction
Thanatos - death instinct

Ego Ideal - when you take pride in what you did right

Guilt - when you disobey your super ego

Defense Mechanisms - activated by the Ego

Repression - threatening thoughts pushed back to the unconscious

- Keeping threatening or disturbing thoughts from being
conscious

Reaction Formation - threatening impulses leading them to overemphasizing the

opposite
- person perceives their true feelings or desires to
be socially or, in some cases, legally unacceptable, and so they attempt to
convince themselves or others that the opposite is true

Denial - threatening stimuli is refused

- Involves blocking external events from awareness
Projection - threatening impulses are externalized by blaming it to others
- Involves individuals attributing their own acceptable thoughts,
feelings, and motives to another person

Displacement - target of unconscious fears/desires are shifted to a different outlet

- Satisfying an impulse with a substitute object

Regression - return to an earlier, safer stage of life

Rationalization - you try to logically explain unconscious motives

Sublimation - dangerous urges transformed into more socially acceptable ways

Erogeneuos zones - an area of the human body that has heightened sensitivity, which,
when stimulated, may create a sexual response such as relaxation,
thoughts of sexual fantasies, sexual arousal and orgasm
Oral stages - from birth to one year-old
- Personality wise: may become overly dependent upon
▸ oral receptive
- Preocuppied with eating/drinking and releases tension through
smoking, drinking, over eating, biting nails
▸ oral regressive
- may also fight these urges and develop pessimism and aggression
towards others

Anal Stage - child’s focus of pleasure is on eliminating and retaining feces

- Result of too much punishment while potty training
▸ anal retentive
- stingy, with a compulsive seeking of order and tidiness. The person is
generally stubborn and perfectionist.
▸ anal expulsive
- has a lack of self control, being generally messy and careless

Phallic Stage - age of 5 or 6

▸ Oedipus complex
‣ Fear of castration
- desire for the mother
- son believes his father knows about his desire for his mother and
hence fears his father will castrate him. He thus represses his desire
and defensively identifies with his father.
▸ Electra complex
‣ Penis envy - desire for the father
- Daughter hates mother for not having a penis
- initially attached to her mother, but then a shift of attachment occurs
when she realizes she lacks a penis. She desires her father whom she
sees as a means to obtain a penis substitute (a child). She then represses
her desire for her father and incorporates the values of her mother and
accepts her inherent 'inferiority' in society.

Latency Stage - 6- puberty

- Sexual urges remain repressed
- children interact and play mostly with same sex peers
- Sexual energy is channeled into everyday activities
- No erogenous zone

Genital Stage - puberty onwards

- Final stage
- Sexual urges are awakened
- Direct sexual urges to opposite sex
- Primary focus of pleasure is genitals

Interpretation of dreams

Dreams - royal road to the unconscious

- accdg. to Freud
Manifest content - what a person remembers & consciously considers
Latent content - the underlying hidden meaning

Dream Symbols
▸ Phallic symbols - long (resembles penis)
▸ Yonic symbols
- Anything concave (femininity)
Not all images in text symbolize sex/sexuality - danger of psychoanalysis

Mythical and archetypal approaches

▸ Joseph Campbell - deals with the relationship of literary art to some very deep chord in
human nature

▸ Carl Gustav Jung - explains how works of literature exhibit the collective unconscious of
human race

Mythology - symbolize projection of the way human race thought and felt untold
ages ago
- Primary awareness of man in the universe
- Tends to be speculative and philosophical
▸ Hamilton - fundamental, dramatic representative of our deepest instinctual life

▫︎ Religion ‣ involves:
▫︎ Anthropology
▫︎ Cultural history

Archetypes - original pattern which all other similar persons, objects or concepts are
‣ Carl Gustav Jung derived, copied/modeled from

‣ arhein - origin/old

‣ typos - pattern/model

Water - mystery of creation

- birth, death
- Resurrection
- Growth
- purification, redemption
- unconscious

‣ Ocean - Mother of all life

▸ River
- Death, Rebirth, Baptism
Sun - fire sky
- Creative energy
- Law of nature
- Consciousness
- enlightenment

▸ Rising Sun - Birth, Creation

▸ Setting Sun
- Death, hopelessness
Circle - Wholeness
- Unity
- origin
Colors

Green - growth, hope, fertility

- Deatt, decoy
Red - Blood
- Sacrifice
- Violent passion, disorder
Blue - positive, truth
- Security
- Spiritual purity
White - light, innocence
- death, terror
- Blinding truth
Black - Chaos, death
- mystery
- Unconscious
- melancholy

Numbers

3 - Spirituality
- Unity
4 - Nature
- Cycle
- elements
7 - completion of a cycle
- Perfect order
Archetypal hero - the quest
‣ separation
‣ transformation
- Initiation
‣ return
- sacrificial scapegoat

Archetypal Women
▸ Good mother - nourishment, growth, warmth
▸ Terrible mother
- witch, fear, danger
▸ soulmate

Demon lover - evil, satan, dracula

Wise old man - Knowledge

- Insight
- cleverness
Trickster - joker
- transformer
- Opposite of wise old man
- Brings chaos
Archetypal Settings
Garden - unspoiled beauty, paradise
Mountain
- inspiration; aspiration
- Spiritual elevation
Desert - Goal of pilgrimage

- death, hopelessness

Archetypal Motifs & Patterns

Creation - most fundamental motif

- How nature was brought into existence by some supernatural being

Immortality - escape from time

- Cyclical time
Archetype as a Genre
Spring - comedy
Summer
Fall - Romance
Winter - Tragedy
- Irony

Archetypes in Moana (galing sa internet)

▸ Quest, Initiation
▸ Mentor - grandma
▸ Water - Purity
▸ Black
▸ Boat - death, evil
- Safe passage

Feminisim - examine ways in which literature is shaped accdg to issues of gender

▸ Application
- Aims to reevaluate Western patriarchal canon
‣ images - Abolish misogyny & establish gynocriticism
‣ society - Cerda: examines subjugation of women in society and how they
‣ representation
were personified

Plato - woman as a slave

Aristotle - women is defective

St. Thomas de Aquinas - woman as an imperfect incidental man

Simoune de Beuvoir - woman as a constructed being

Kate Millet - woman as a distorted image

Tillie Olsen - silenced individual

‣ caused by society

Man - standard of perfection accdg. to.

Friedman - feminism: myth invented by man to confine women to their oppressed

state

The Male Gaze - Laura Mulvey

- devaluing, punishing, or saving a female, turning her into a pedestal
figure, a fetish, a possession
Elaine Showalter - Stages of Women’s Literature

1. The Feminine Phase - female writers tried to adhere to male values

- Employed male pseudonyms
2. The Feminist Phase - central theme of works by female writers was the criticism of the role
of women in society

3. The Female Phase - goal is to redefine and sexualize external and internal experience
- Works of women writers are authentic and valid

Marxism - Method of literary analysis based on the philosophy of Karl Marx

▸ “The history of all existing societies is
the history of class struggle”
- critics examine a work as the product of an
ideology (Marx’s)

Terry Eagleton - also explains the literary work more fully; and this means a sensitive
attention to its forms, styles, and meanings and grasping those as the
product of a particular history

Historical materialism - gain, production, economy

Idealism - theism

Materialism - atheism

Dialectical Materialism - Karl Marx’s belief

Types of societies in history

▸ slave societies - slave owners/slaves
- Unequal ownership of means of production
▸ feudal society
- feudal lords/ serf
▸ capitalist society - Agricultural
▸ socialist society
- bourgeoisie/proletariat
▸ communist society

- proletariat/others
- Means of production is owned by government

- equal distribution of ownership of means of production

Material interest of the dominant class - determine how people see human existence (Sedan, 1985)
‣ “People have been led to believe that their ideas, cultural life, legal
sysetms, and religions were creations of human and divine reason.”

Mode of production - determining force of history according to Marx

- We are economic beings
Silencing - Tillie Olsen
- Causes division
Revolution - overthrow bourgeoisie
- “Dictatorship of the proletariat”
- Aims to have common ownership
 - Planned economy to ensure matching supply and demand

Existentialism - best viewed as a movement

Soren Kierkegaard - meaning of life is up to how you live your life

Fyodor Dosteovsky - despair & loneliness

Friedrich Nietzeche - ni universal truth

Second World War -Europe was faced crisiss with death and destruction
- when existentialism was popularized in France
‣ Franz Kafka - 20th century existentialists
‣ Martin Heldegger
‣
‣
‣

Albert Camus - Unfree world results in act of rebellion

Jean-Paul Sartre - Man is condemned to be free because once thrown into the world, he
is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give life its
meaning.
- Existence precedes essence
Robert Solomon - Existential attitude begins with a disoriented individual facing a
confused world that he cannot accept.

The Human Condition - What does it mean to be human?

- Why am I here?
- How should I live my life?
‣ Philosophical - all-encompassing systems rejected by Existentialists
‣ Religious
‣ Scientific
- Have largely removed the massive burden that is encountered if one
tries to create meaning and purpose for their lives

Nothingness - our inherent lack of self accdg. to Sartre

- We are in constant pursuit of self. It is creative well-spring from
which all human possibilities can be realized.

Absolute Freedom - recognition that your existence is not founded upon any past objective
facts which removes your excuses and alibis

Anguish - result of human beings being absolutely free and absolutely

responsible

Absurd - refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent
value and meaning in life and the inability to find any

▸ Physical Suicide - accdg. to Camus, the only way to deal with the Absurd
▸ Philosophical Suicide
▸ Acceptance/Recognition
▸ Alienation - from all other humans, human institutions, past and future

Bad Faith - evil, satan, dracula

Campbell’s Monomyth - pattern of hero myths and stories from other world
- Human failure vs. Superhuman success
- Fulfills the promise of myth in inspiring humanity to better itself
1. Ordinary/Everyday World - where the Hero exists before his present story begins

2. Call to Adventure - presents the challenge

3. Refusal of the Call - hero gets second thoughts

4. Supernatural Aid/Meeting the Mentor - meeting of mentor figure

5. Crossing the Threshold/entering the unknown - world where he is not familiar with

6. Belly of the Whale - hero enters the zone of danger

7. The Road of Trials - hero faces many adventures along the way

8. Meeting with the goddess - represents the female figure of the hero
(his anima)
‣ if he can join, will make him whole

9. Woman as the Temptress - offers the hero short-term relief but giving in to this urge will ruin
quest

10. Atonement with Father figure - approval of father figure must be earned
11. Apotheosis - hero transcends, achieving a higher place

12. Ultimate Boon - through the many trials, the goal of the journey is achieved

13. Refusal of the Return - hero wants to say in the place where they have found bliss

14. Magic Flight - hero hurries home

15. Rescue from Without - hero is rescued from unexpected flight

16. Return to Threshold - return to home turf

17. Master of Two Worlds - hero has ability to go back and forth

18. Freedom to Live - Hero earns the right to choose the way he wants to live