Introduction to Literary Criticism

Introduction to Literary Criticism by Dianna Muzaurieta taken from Purdue U’s excellent Owl resource at http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/722/1/

Timeline (most of these overlap)

 Moral Criticism, Dramatic Construction (~360 BC-present) o Plato: art should teach morality and ethics o Aristotle: dramatic (effective) construction is more important  Formalism, New Criticism, Neo-Aristotelian Criticism (1930s-present) o Analyze the text and its literary techniques o Work should be analyzed outside any cultural or authorial contexts  Psychoanalytic Criticism, Jungian Criticism(1930s-present) o Freudian: analyze what psychological theory tells about the character, author, and even the reader o Jung: archetypal analysis  Marxist Criticism (1930s-present) o Who benefits in this system? Who is oppressed? What is valued? o What classes are represented? How do they interact across class lines?  Reader-Response Criticism (1960s-present) o Analyze interaction between reader and text o Close reading of passages  Structuralism/Semiotics (1920s-present) o Analyze patterns of hidden symbols that permeate and create our experience and understanding of culture  Post-Structuralism/Deconstruction (1966-present) o Declares that there are no organizing patterns because no symbol is consistent, including and maybe especially language – so every system of organizing will break down o Analysis is therefore a somewhat complicated process of determining what is not shown, what is atypical, and how the work contradicts accepted beliefs to present its ideology  New Historicism/Cultural Studies (1980s-present) o Connect literature to its time period, including social and political issues; analyze how it interprets events and what we can learn about the writer’s point of view  Post-Colonial Criticism (1990s-present) o “Post-colonial theory looks at issues of power, economics, politics, religion, and culture and how these elements work in relation to colonial hegemony (western colonizers controlling the colonized)” (Brizee). Analyze how literary works represent the experience both of the colonizer and the colonized. o Work may be connected to specific racial or ethnic experiences  Feminist Criticism (1960s-present) o How do characters fit definitions of masculine and feminine roles? What are the power issues, for example, in their relationships? What limits are imposed by patriarchy, and how can those limits be overcome? How does the text illustrate the female experience?  Gender/Queer Studies (1970s-present) o What are the definitions of masculine and feminine behavior, and how do some characters move outside or between those roles? How does the text illustrate the GLBT experience?