LITERARY CRITICISM

Psychoanalytic Theory – Sigmund Freud

- A word is just a metaphor. Everything is a representation.
- The limits of your language is the limits of your world.
- You will be able to interpret a poem when you know how to draw the dramatic situation.
- The persona in the poem is not relevant.
- Meaning is in the hands of the author.
Hermeneutics- try to elicit interpretations of a single term; a method or principle of interpretation
- Meaning is conveyed only if it is established.
Literature – Horace and Aristotle
Dulce (sweetness) et utele (light) enlightenment
Every piece of literature must offer you these two things.
Literary Criticism – is the discussion, understanding, and evaluation of a literary text.
3 Major Purposes of Literary Criticism:
1. Literary criticism helps us resolve a difficulty in reading.
2. Literary criticism helps us choose the better of two conflict readings.
3. Literary criticism enables us to form judgment about literature.
- Text can grow and develop; formulates its own view.
Approaches to Teaching Literature
1. Moral-Philosophical Approach
Socrates, Plato – Morality/Utilitarianism Aristotle Alexander the Great
- Something is significant when it is moral.
- We celebrate what is moral and we condemn what is not.
- Literature is having high seriousness.
- Literature is there to instruct, to teach, and to correct people. (Matthew Arnolds)
- The job of the readers is to highlight these two opposing sides in literature.
- A text is worthy if it is used as a tool for correction.
1. judge the values of literature on its moral lesson or ethical teaching
2. to see the attributes of didactic literature

A piece of literature is capable of corrupting or influencing human behavior. – Plato

What is important is the moral lesson of the text.

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2. Structuralist – studies the systems of relationships that are embedded in words and items, and shows us
the ways in which we think. (Guerin)
Structuralism – parts components elements
--- structure ---relationship --binary oppositions
Structuralism is the basis of formalism
Fathers of Structuralism
- Ferdinand de Saussure – attempts to study literature from an objective perspective
- Claude Levi-Strauss – studying opposites
Binary oppositions – examined paired opposites that creep into works – sometimes intentionally and
sometimes unintentionally
Structuralist analyze other structures
- Sequence of events from beginning to end
- The rearrangement of narrative
- Flashbacks
- Unequal treatment of time
- Shifts in viewpoints or speakers
Proarctic Code – conflicts/tension
Hermeneutic Code – code of puzzles/questions
Referential Code – cultural code of systems of knowledge and values
Semantic Code – connotative code that expresses themes developed around the character
Symbolic Code – refers to the theme and meaning of the work

Poeticity – language and reality do not coincide

- Sign and referent do not coincide

3. Deconstructivism
1. typhology – language is unique
2. markedness – specific grammatical features of a language that are optimized than the others
3. linguistic universals – all languages in the world share some feature
- all languages in the world have grammatical categories
Deconstruction – looks at what is said and what’s left unsaid.

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4. Feminism - defends the political, economic, personal, and social rights of women.
- aims to achieve and establish equality between women and men.
- Feminism is not the belief that women are superior
- Feminism is not hating men
Waves of Feminism
First Wave 19th Century – early 20th Century
- Right to vote - marriage and poverty laws
- Right to education - better working conditions - reproductive rights
Adeline Virginia Woolf
A Room of One’s Own (1929)
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
Second Wave Feminism 1960-1980
 raising consciousness about sexism and patriarchy
 raising consciousness about gender based violence, domestic abuse and marital rape
 inequalities in the workplace
 legalizing abortion and birth control
 sexual liberation of women
Three Phases of Second Wave Feminism
 Feminist – male values (critiquing the works of men)
 Feminine – women’s role (women imitating men)
 Female – women’s work (self-awareness in the part of women’s writers)
Third Wave Feminism 1990-2007
 Intersectionality
 The diversity of "women" is recognized and emphasis is placed on identity, gender, race, nation, social
order and sexual preference
 Changes on stereotypes, media portrayals and language used to define women
 Sexual identities
Feminist face two categories:
1. women as writers
2. women as readers
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Generic Questions
A. How are women’s lives portrayed in the work?
B. Is the form and content of the work influenced by the writer’s gender?
C. How do male and female characters relate to one another? Are these relationships sources of conflict?
Are these conflicts resolved?
D. Does the work challenge or affirm traditional views of women?
E. How do the images of women in the story reflect patriarchal social forces that have impeded women’s
efforts to achieve full equality with men?
F. What marital expectations are imposed on the characters? What effect do these expectations have?

5. Cultural Criticism – trying to connect culture s

Cultures all over the world are one, they are interrelated

6. Psychoanalytic Theory
What is psychoanalysis?
- To bring the unconscious to the consciousness level
- Talk therapy that brings problems out of the unconscious into the conscious
Models of the Mind
Ego (conscious) – current thoughts, feelings
Super ego (preconscious) – the home of everything we can recall or retrieve from our memory
Id (unconscious) – deepest level resides a repository of the process that drive our behavior including primitive
and instinctual desires
- Storehouse of all painful experiences dealing with reality; adding morals
Common Core Issues
1. Fear of betrayal 2. Fear of Abandonment 3. Fear of Intimacy
4. Low Self-esteem 5. Insecure or unstable sense of seld 6. Oedipal fixation/Oedipal complex

7. Archetypal Criticism – increase both the knowledge of a literary piece and the satisfaction in reading the
work
- a pattern in literature, the meaning of which is understood by any reader
Archetype – original form
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8. Existentialism – examine what is not
A person’s life is good because he is happy.
Life is good when it is authentic.
Finding meaning in one’s existence
9. Existentialism – What gives your life meaning?
- is the view that every entity has a set of attributes