Formalism / New Criticism

involves a close reading of the text

all information essential to the interpretation of a

work must be found within the work itself

focuses on analyzing irony, paradox, imagery, and

metaphor

also interested in the work's setting, characters,

symbols, and point of view.

no need to bring in outside information about the

history, politics, or society of the time, or about the

author's life

Formalism / New Criticism

Advantages:

can be performed without much research

emphasizes the value of literature apart from its

context

virtually all critical approaches must begin here

Disadvantages:

text is seen in isolation

ignores the context of the work

cannot account for allusions

Formalism" is, as the name implies, an interpretive approach that emphasizes literary form and the
study of literary devices within the text. The work of the Formalists had a general impact on later
developments in "Structuralism" and other theories of narrative. "Formalism," like "Structuralism,"
sought to place the study of literature on a scientific basis through objective analysis of the motifs,
devices, techniques, and other "functions" that comprise the literary work. The Formalists placed great
importance on the literariness of texts, those qualities that distinguished the literary from other kinds of
writing. Neither author nor context was essential for the Formalists; it was the narrative that spoke, the
"hero-function," for example, that had meaning. Form was the content. A plot device or narrative
strategy was examined for how it functioned and compared to how it had functioned in other literary
works. Of the Russian Formalist critics, Roman Jakobson and Viktor Shklovsky are probably the most well
known.

The Formalist adage that the purpose of literature was "to make the stones stonier" nicely expresses
their notion of literariness. "Formalism" is perhaps best known is Shklovsky's concept of
"defamiliarization." The routine of ordinary experience, Shklovsky contended, rendered invisible the
uniqueness and particularity of the objects of existence. Literary language, partly by calling attention to
itself as language, estranged the reader from the familiar and made fresh the experience of daily life.

Formalist Criticism: This approach regards literature as “a unique form of human knowledge that needs
to be examined on its own terms.” All the elements necessary for understanding the work are contained
within the work itself. Of particular interest to the formalist critic are the elements of form—style,
structure, tone, imagery, etc.—that are found within the text. A primary goal for formalist critics is to
determine how such elements work together with the text’s content to shape its effects upon readers.

Psychological Criticism

views works through the lens of psychology

looks either at the psychological motivations of the

characters or of the authors themselves

most frequently applies Freudian psychology to works,

but other approaches also exist.

Freudian Approach to Personality

Three parts to an individual’s psyche:

the id: the instinctual, pleasure seeking part

of the mind

the ego: the part of the mind that controls

but does not repress the id's impulses,

releasing them in a healthy way

the superego: the part of the mind that

represses the id's impulses

Psychoanalytical Approach

Advantages:

can be a useful tool for understanding

character development and conflict

Disadvantages:

can turn a work into a psychological case

study

tends to see sex in everything, exaggerating

this aspect of literature

 some works do not lend themselves readily

to this approach.

5. Archetypal/Mythological Criticism

assumes that there is a collection of

symbols, images, characters, and motifs (i.e.

archetypes) that evokes basically the same

response in all people

identifies these patterns and discusses how

they function in the works

asserts that these archetypes are the source

of much of literature's power.

Archetypal Approach

based on the theories of

psychologist Carl Jung

he states that mankind

possesses a "collective

unconscious" that

contains these archetypes

and that is common to all

of humanity

Archetypal Approach

Advantages:

provides a universalistic approach to literature and

identifies a reason why certain literature may

survive the test of time

it works well with works that are highly symbolic

Disadvantages:

literature may become a vehicle for archetypes

can easily become a list of symbols without much

analysis
6. Feminist/Gender Criticism

...the ways in which literature (and other

cultural productions) reinforce or

undermine the economic, political, social,

and psychological oppression of women

Role of women in the literary work;

representations of women

Power structures between men and women

The female/feminine experience

Some common considerations

for feminist/gender critics

Patriarchal ideologies and its effects on women (and

men)

While biology determines our sex (male or female),

culture determines our gender (masculine or

feminine)

(Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today)

Sex and gender equality

Stereotypical representations of gender

Marginalization

Feminist gender theory is postmodern in that it challenges the paradigms and intellectual premises of
western thought, but also takes an activist stance by proposing frequent interventions and alternative
epistemological positions meant to change the social order. In the context of postmodernism, gender
theorists, led by the work of Judith Butler, initially viewed the category of "gender" as a human
construct enacted by a vast repetition of social performance. The biological distinction between man
and woman eventually came under the same scrutiny by theorists who reached a similar conclusion: the
sexual categories are products of culture and as such help create social reality rather than simply reflect
it. Gender theory achieved a wide readership and acquired much its initial theoretical rigor through the
work of a group of French feminist theorists that included Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Helene
Cixous, and Julia Kristeva, who while Bulgarian rather than French, made her mark writing in French.
French feminist thought is based on the assumption that the Western philosophical tradition represses
the experience of women in the structure of its ideas. As an important consequence of this systematic
intellectual repression and exclusion, women's lives and bodies in historical societies are subject to
repression as well. In the creative/critical work of Cixous, we find the history of Western thought
depicted as binary oppositions: "speech/writing; Nature/Art, Nature/History, Nature/Mind,
Passion/Action." For Cixous, and for Irigaray as well, these binaries are less a function of any objective
reality they describe than the male-dominated discourse of the Western tradition that produced them.
Their work beyond the descriptive stage becomes an intervention in the history of theoretical discourse,
an attempt to alter the existing categories and systems of thought that found Western rationality.
French feminism, and perhaps all feminism after Beauvoir, has been in conversation with the
psychoanalytic revision of Freud in the work of Jacques Lacan. Kristeva’s work draws heavily on Lacan.
Two concepts from Kristeva—the "semiotic" and "abjection"—have had a significant influence on
literary theory. Kristeva’s "semiotic" refers to the gaps, silences, spaces, and bodily presence within the
language/symbol system of a culture in which there might be a space for a women’s language, different
in kind as it would be from male-dominated discourse.
7. Marxist Criticism

Karl Marx perceived human history to have

consisted of a series of struggles between

classes--between the oppressed and the

oppressing (“the haves” and “the have-

nots”).

Marx thought that materialism was the

ultimate driving force in history

Marxist Approach

Focus on the ideological content of a work

Explicit and implicit assumptions and values

about race, culture, class, and power

Texts are political in nature, responding to

larger social and material constructs

Material, not psychological

Marxist Approach

Marxist criticism examines the nature of

power structures within a novel.

A Marxist critic asks questions like:

Who has power? Who lacks power?

What is the relationship between power and

wealth?

Who is exploited by whom and why?

How does power remain constant or shift

throughout a work of literature?

What makes certain characters powerful or

powerless?

Marxist literary theories tend to focus on the representation of class conflict as well as the
reinforcement of class distinctions through the medium of literature. Marxist theorists use traditional
techniques of literary analysis but subordinate aesthetic concerns to the final social and political
meanings of literature. Marxist theorist often champion authors sympathetic to the working classes and
authors whose work challenges economic equalities found in capitalist societies. In keeping with the
totalizing spirit of Marxism, literary theories arising from the Marxist paradigm have not only sought
new ways of understanding the relationship between economic production and literature, but all
cultural production as well. Marxist analyses of society and history have had a profound effect on
literary theory and practical criticism, most notably in the development of "New Historicism" and
"Cultural Materialism.

This approach “examines literature in the cultural, economic and political context in which it is written
or received,” exploring the relationships between the artist and society. Sometimes it examines the
artist’s society to better understand the author’s literary works; other times, it may examine the
representation of such societal elements within the literature itself. One influential type of sociological
criticism is Marxist criticism, which focuses on the economic and political elements of art, often
emphasizing the ideological content of literature; because Marxist criticism often argues that all art is
political, either challenging or endorsing (by silence) the status quo, it is frequently evaluative and
judgmental, a tendency that “can lead to reductive judgment, as when Soviet critics rated Jack London
better than William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Edith Wharton, and Henry James, because he
illustrated the principles of class struggle more clearly.” Nonetheless, Marxist criticism “can illuminate
political and economic dimensions of literature other approaches overlook.”

9. Reader Response Criticism

analyzes the reader's role in the production of

meaning

lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from

formalism
 the text itself has no meaning until it is read by a

reader

The reader creates the meaning.

can take into account the strategies employed by

the author to elicit a certain response from readers

denies the possibility that works are universal (i.e.

that they will always mean more or less the same

thing to readers everywhere)

Reader Response Criticism

Advantages:

recognizes that different people view works

differently and that people's interpretations

change over time.

Disadvantages:

tends to make interpretation too subjective

 does not provide adequate criteria for evaluating

one reading in comparison to another

Reader-Response Criticism: This approach takes as a fundamental tenet that “literature” exists not as an
artifact upon a printed page but as a transaction between the physical text and the mind of a reader. It
attempts “to describe what happens in the reader’s mind while interpreting a text” and reflects that
reading, like writing, is a creative process. According to reader-response critics, literary texts do not
“contain” a meaning; meanings derive only from the act of individual readings. Hence, two different
readers may derive completely different interpretations of the same literary text; likewise, a reader who
re-reads a work years later may find the work shockingly different. Reader-response criticism, then,
emphasizes how “religious, cultural, and social values affect readings; it also overlaps with gender
criticism in exploring how men and women read the same text with different assumptions.” Though this
approach rejects the notion that a single “correct” reading exists for a literary work, it does not consider
all readings permissible: “Each text creates limits to its possible interpretations.”

10) Queer Theory

"Queer theory" is not synonymous with gender theory, nor even with the overlapping fields of gay and
lesbian studies, but does share many of their concerns with normative definitions of man, woman, and
sexuality. "Queer theory" questions the fixed categories of sexual identity and the cognitive paradigms
generated by normative (that is, what is considered "normal") sexual ideology. To "queer" becomes an
act by which stable boundaries of sexual identity are transgressed, reversed, mimicked, or otherwise
critiqued. "Queering" can be enacted on behalf of all non-normative sexualities and identities as well, all
that is considered by the dominant paradigms of culture to be alien, strange, unfamiliar, transgressive,
odd—in short, queer. Michel Foucault's work on sexuality anticipates and informs the Queer theoretical
movement in a role similar to the way his writing on power and discourse prepared the ground for "New
Historicism." Judith Butler contends that heterosexual identity long held to be a normative ground of
sexuality is actually produced by the suppression of homoerotic possibility. Eve Sedgwick is another
pioneering theorist of "Queer theory," and like Butler, Sedgwick maintains that the dominance of
heterosexual culture conceals the extensive presence of homosocial relations. For Sedgwick, the
standard histories of western societies are presented in exclusively in terms of heterosexual identity:
"Inheritance, Marriage, Dynasty, Family, Domesticity, Population," and thus conceiving of homosexual
identity within this framework is already problematic.
3) Historical Theory

Historical Criticism: This approach “seeks to understand a literary work by investigating the social,
cultural, and intellectual context that produced it—a context that necessarily includes the artist’s
biography and milieu.” A key goal for historical critics is to understand the effect of a literary work upon
its original readers.

2) Deconstructionist Criticism: This approach “rejects the traditional assumption that language can
accurately represent reality.” Deconstructionist critics regard language as a fundamentally unstable
medium—the words “tree” or “dog,” for instance, undoubtedly conjure up different mental images for
different people—and therefore, because literature is made up of words, literature possesses no fixed,
single meaning. According to critic Paul de Man, deconstructionists insist on “the impossibility of making
the actual expression coincide with what has to be expressed, of making the actual signs [i.e., words]
coincide with what is signified.” As a result, deconstructionist critics tend to emphasize not what is being
said but how language is used in a text. The methods of this approach tend to resemble those of
formalist criticism, but whereas formalists’ primary goal is to locate unity within a text, “how the diverse
elements of a text cohere into meaning,” deconstructionists try to show how the text “deconstructs,”
“how it can be broken down ... into mutually irreconcilable positions.” Other goals of deconstructionists
include (1) challenging the notion of authors’ “ownership” of texts they create (and their ability to
control the meaning of their texts) and (2) focusing on how language is used to achieve power, as when
they try to understand how a some interpretations of a literary work come to be regarded as “truth

struction In Literary Studies

Deconstruction’s reception was coloured by its intellectual predecessors, most notably structuralism
and New Criticism. Beginning in France in the 1950s, the structuralist movement in anthropology
analyzed various cultural phenomena as general systems of “signs” and attempted to develop
“metalanguages” of terms and concepts in which the different sign systems could be described.
Structuralist methods were soon applied to other areas of the social sciences and humanities, including
literary studies. Deconstruction offered a powerful critique of the possibility of creating detached,
scientific metalanguages and was thus categorized (along with kindred efforts) as “post-structuralist.”
Anglo-American New Criticism sought to understand verbal works of art (especially poetry) as complex
constructions made up of different and contrasting levels of literal and nonliteral meanings, and it
emphasized the role of paradox and irony in these artifacts. Deconstructive readings, in contrast,
treated works of art not as the harmonious fusion of literal and figurative meanings but as instances of
the intractable conflicts between meanings of different types. They generally examined the individual
work not as a self-contained artifact but as a product of relations with other texts or discourses, literary
and nonliterary. Finally, these readings placed special emphasis on the ways in which the works
themselves offered implicit critiques of the categories that critics used to analyze them. In the United
States in the 1970s and ’80s, deconstruction played a major role in the animation and transformation of
literary studies by literary theory (often referred to simply as “theory”), which was concerned with
questions about the nature of language, the production of meaning, and the relationship between
literature and the numerous discourses that structure human experience and its histories.

However, ‘structuralism’ now designates the practice of critics who analyze literature on the explicit
model of the modern linguistic theory. It is a term of literary criticism related to language though it
influenced a number of modes of knowledge and movements like Philosophy, Anthropology, Social
Science, literature in Europe. Actually, “structuralism”, became a major post-war intellectual movement
in Europe and the United States.

But the fact is that ‘structuralism’ includes all kinds of communicative methods both verbal and non-
verbal as well as sign and signification. As a result, it relates all the forms of signs like smoke, fire, traffic-
light, fly beacon, body language, art facts, status symbol etc. Even the study of the animal behavior is
also equally related with ‘structuralism (Rashid Ashkari, Uttaradhunik Shahitya O Shamalachana Tatta,
Kashbon Prokashon, Dhaka, P–43).

Though structuralism was marked and bloomed in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the salient of it was the Swiss
Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure(1857-1913). He instead of highlighting the historical development of
language chose to consider it in ‘a temporal term’ as a system of differentiated signs which could have
to mean within the system of which they were part (Bijoy Kumar Das, Twentieth Century Literary
Criticism, Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, P-26 ).
Queer literary criticism denotes a range of approaches to textual scholarship that analyze and contest
heteronormative structures and relations of meaning. It emerged from a combination of post‐
structuralist deconstruction of essentialist understandings of gendered and sexual identities and gay,
lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex political activism in the 1980s. It is closely aligned with queer
theory and is often cross‐ or multidisciplinary

Queer theory as an academic tool came about in part from gender and sexuality studies that in turn had
their origins from lesbians and gay studies and feminist theory. It is a much newer theory, in that it was
established in the 1990s, and contests many of the set ideas of the more established fields it comes
from by challenging the notion of defined and finite identity categories, as well as the norms that create
a binary of good versus bad sexualities. Queer theorists contention is that there is no set normal, only
changing norms that people may or may not fit into, making queer theorists’ main challenge to disrupt
binaries in hopes that this will destroy difference as well as inequality.