ENG102: Writing About Literature (Torregrossa)

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Literary criticism versus reference information

Examples of literary criticism:

• A scholarly journal article that examines the book Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain through the lens of Critical Race Theory. 
• An Book that analyzes the critical and theoretical approaches found in Toni Morrison’s writings. 
• A eBook that analyzes the novel Frankenstein.

Examples of reference works:

• An article in Credo Reference introducing the life and literary work of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. 
• A plot summary of the novella “The Yellow Wallpaper” from Gale Literature Resource Center.
• A description in an eBook of the different types of poetry stanzas.

There are many ways of approaching literary criticism. Here are examples of some "lenses" you can look at a work through for your criticism: 

Author-Focused: How can we understand literary works by understanding their authors?

Biographical criticism focuses on the author’s life. It tries to gain a better understanding of the literary work by understanding the person who wrote it. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following:

• What aspects of the author’s life are relevant to understanding the work?
• How are the author’s personal beliefs encoded into the work?
• Does the work reflect the writer’s personal experiences and concerns? How or how not?

Psychological criticism applies psychological theories, especially Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian archetypal depth psychology, to works of literature to explore the psychological issues embedded in them. It may analyze a story’s characters or plot, a poet’s use of language and imagery, the author’s motivations for writing, or any other aspect of a literary work from a psychological perspective. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following:

• What psychological forces and factors are involved in the words, behaviors, thoughts, and motivations of the characters in a story?
• Do dreams or psychological disorders play a part in the work?
• How did the author’s life experiences affect his or her intellectual and emotional formation? How is this psychological impact evident in the text and/or the author’s act of writing it?
• What unintended meanings might the author have embedded or encoded in the work?

Text-Focused: How can we understand literary works in terms of themselves?

Formalism, along with one of its more conspicuous modern iterations, New Criticism, focuses on a literary text itself, aside from questions about its author or the historical and cultural contexts of its creation. Formalism takes a story, poem, or play “on its own terms,” so to speak, viewing it as a self-contained unit of meaning. The formalist critic therefore tries to understand that meaning by paying attention to the specific form of the text. New Criticism was a particular kind of Formalism that arose in the mid-twentieth century and enjoyed great influence for a time. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following:

• How does the structure of the work reveal its meaning?
• How do the form and content of the work illuminate each other? What recurring patterns are there in the form, and what is their effect?
• How does use of imagery, language, and various literary devices establish the work’s meaning?
• How do the characters (if any) evolve over the course of the narrative, and how does this interact with the other literary elements?

Context-Focused: How can we understand literary works by understanding the contextual circumstances—historical, societal, cultural, political, economic—out of which they emerged?

Historical criticism focuses on the historical and social circumstances that surrounded the writing of a text. It may examine biographical facts about the author’s life (which can therefore connect this approach with biographical criticism) as well as the influence of social, political, national, and international events. It may also consider the influence of other literary works. New Historicism, a particular type of historical criticism, focuses not so much on the role of historical facts and events as on the ways these things are remembered and interpreted, and the way this interpreted historical memory contributes to the interpretation of literature. Typical questions involved in historical criticism include the following:

• How (and how accurately) does the work reflect the historical period in which it was written?
• What specific historical events influenced the author?
• How important is the work’s historical context to understanding it?
• How does the work represent an interpretation of its time and culture? (New Historicism)

Feminist criticism focuses on prevailing societal beliefs about women in an attempt to expose the oppression of women on various levels by patriarchal systems both contemporary and historical. It also explores the marginalization of women in the realm of literature itself. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following:

• How does the work portray the lives of women?
• How are female characters portrayed? How are the relationships between men and women portrayed? Does this reinforce sexual and gender stereotypes or challenge them?
• How does the specific language of a literary work reflect gender or sexual stereotypes?

Post-colonial criticism focuses on the impact of European colonial powers on literature. It seeks to understand how European hegemonic political, economic, religious, and other types of power have shaped the portrayals of the relationship and status differentials between Europeans and colonized peoples in literature written both by the colonizers and the colonized. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following:

• How does the text’s worldview, as evinced in plot, language, characterization, and so on, grow out of assumptions based on colonial oppression?
• Which groups of people are portrayed as strangers, outsiders, foreign, exotic, “others”? How are they treated in the narrative?
• How does the work portray the psychology and interiority of both colonizers and colonized?
• How does the text affirm (either actively or by silence) or challenge colonialist ideology?

Critical race theory focuses on systemic racism and interrogates the dynamics of race and race relationships. In origin, it is a specifically American school of critical theory that sees White racism as an everyday fact of life in America, visible throughout all aspects of culture and society. As such, it encompasses all aspects of life, including literature. Its purpose is to expose and overturn the factors that enable systemic racism to exist. As a literary critical approach, its typical questions include the following:

• What is the significance of race, either explicit or implicit, in the literary work being examined?
• Does the work include or exclude the voices and experiences of racism’s victims?
• How does the work either affirm/reinforce (whether actively or by silence) or challenge/subvert systemic racism?

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