LITERARY CRITICISM

What is Literary Criticism?

Literary Criticism is the process of:

 analysing,
 evaluating,
 describing, or
 Interpreting literature.

Literary criticism can be based on:

 one work,
 one author's entire body of work, or
 The works of different authors.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS
The purpose for writing a critique is to evaluate somebody's work (a book, an essay, a movie, a
painting...) in order to increase the reader's understanding of it. A critical analysis is subjective writing
because it expresses the writer's opinion or evaluation of a text. Analysis means to break down and
study the parts. Writing a critical paper requires two steps: critical reading and critical writing.

Critical reading:
1. Identify the author's thesis and purpose
2. Analyse the structure of the passage by identifying all main ideas
3. Consult a dictionary or encyclopaedia to understand material that is unfamiliar to you
4. Make an outline of the work or write a description of it
5. Write a summary of the work
6. Determine the purpose which could be
o To inform with factual material
o To persuade with appeal to reason or emotions
o To entertain (to affect people's emotions)
7. Evaluate the means by which the author has accomplished his purpose

 If the purpose is to inform, has the material been presented clearly, accurately, with order and
coherence?
 If the purpose is to persuade, look for evidence, logical reasoning, contrary evidence
 If the purpose was to entertain, determine how emotions are affected: does it make you laugh,
cry, angry? Why did it affect you?

Consider the following questions: How is the material organized? Who is the intended audience?
What are the writer's assumptions about the audience? What kind of language and imagery does the
author use?
 SAMPLE OUTLINE FOR CRITICAL ESSAY
After the passage under analysis has been carefully studied, the critique can be drafted using this
sample outline.

 I. Background information to help your readers understand the nature of the work
o A. Information about the work
 1. Title
 2. Author
 3. Publication information
 4. Statement of topic and purpose
o B. Thesis statement indicating writer's main reaction to the work
 II. Summary or description of the work
 III. Interpretation and/or evaluation
o A. Discussion of the work's organization
o B. Discussion of the work's style
o C. Effectiveness
o D. Discussion of the topic's treatment
o E. Discussion of appeal to a particular audience

DIFINITION
Literary criticism is the comparison, analysis, interpretation, and/or evaluation of works of
literature. Literary criticism is essentially an opinion, supported by evidence, relating to theme, style,
setting or historical or political context.

It usually includes discussion of the work’s content and integrates your ideas with other insights
gained from research. Literary criticism may have a positive or a negative bias and may be a study of
an individual piece of literature or an author’s body of work.

This includes the classification by genre, analysis of structure, and judgement of value.

 Although criticism may include some of the following elements in order to support an idea,
literary criticism is NOT a plot summary, a biography of the author, or simply finding fault
with the literature.

 Researching, reading, and writing works of literary criticism will help you to make better
sense of the work, form judgments about literature, study ideas from different points of view,
and determine on an individual level whether a literary work is worth reading.

“Literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical

discussion of literature's goals and methods.”
* Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analysing
literature.

“Literary criticism” is the name given to works written by experts who critique—analyse—an
author’s work.
It does NOT mean “to criticize” as in complain or disapprove.
 All forms of art have their critics. We read film reviews in our daily newspapers,
television reviews in weekly blogs and, of course, book reviews in magazines.
Criticism is how we evaluate and interpret art. Critics let us know if a book is worth
spending our time and hard-earned money.

Literary criticism goes all the way back to the days of Plato. Through the years, it has
developed and grown, and ultimately provides us with parameters on how to study
literature. Because there are a million different ways to dissect written works, such as
novels or poems, literary criticism provides some general guidelines to help us
analyse, deconstruct, interpret and evaluate. We usually see literary criticism in a
book review or critical essay.

IMPORTANCE OF LITERARY CRITICISM

Literary criticism is an interpretive process used to weigh the social value of a written idea. Critics
have reviewed and debated the value of literary works since before the Italian Renaissance.

1) Function

Critical reviews can assist you personally by supporting points you may make in your own literary
interpretation. Referencing another legitimate literary review often enhances the quality of your
reading of a text.

2) Effects

Literary critics may sometimes challenge the ideas and values of literature. For example, some
feminist critics review and challenge what they believe to be sexist attitudes in widely accepted
literature written by men or from an exclusively male perspective.

3) Benefits

Empathy is a necessary tool when criticizing a text. When reading another critic's textual
interpretation that conflicts with your own values, you experience the reading through someone else's
perspective and hence have the opportunity to increase your own tolerance for differing ideas.

4) Career Enhancement

Published authors and poets work as literary critics. Some professors also publish extensively in the
field of literary criticism, typically focusing on one area of expertise.

5) Considerations

An understanding of historical literary criticism may also provide insight on past cultures. Readers
often assume that what's true today was true in the past, but certain forms of literary criticism place
writings in their proper context.
 THE IMPORTANCE OF LITERARY CRITICISM IN LITERARY STUDIES

Literary criticism helps us to understand what is important about the text:

its structure
its context: social, economic, historical
what is written
how the text manipulates the reader

o Criticism can see the whole aspect of literary work, based on the critic used in seeing
the literary work. It is not only matter of how to read and understanding the work but
how to interpret the text within the work.

o Literary criticisms see the literary work from some point of views. For instance; social
aspect, economy, psychology, history, and philosophy. Those aspects can enrich our
knowledge as reader base on what aspect that become our focus because critics as
tool for the reader to understanding what literary work talk about, what message that
will be deliver to the reader.

o Literary criticism can improve our capability in reading comprehension in order to

understand broader about literary work.

o Applying criticism make our focus on certain aspect or element of literary work
sharper than reading as usual. The reader can focus on an aspect as his/her interest
toward the literary work. For instance; focus on structure, history, philosophy, or
may be psychology within the literary work.

o Criticism help the reader to understand the work through specific point of view to
know something that the others do not understand within the literary work.

TYPES OF LITERARY THEORY

1) Formalism
2) Marxism
3) Feminism
4) Psychoanalytic
5) Cultural Criticism
6) Structuralism
7) Post-structuralism
8) Archetypal

 Traditional
 Biological
 Cognitive scientific
 Moralist
 Socio-political
  Sociological and many others.
1) FORMALISM
Formalism or Formalist criticism:
Formalist critics look closely at the work itself, analysing the various elements of the work as
a way of explicating or interpreting a text.
Focuses on “objectively” evaluating the text, identifying its underlying form. For example, a
text’s use of imagery, diction, metaphor, or symbolism. Isn’t concerned with matters outside
the text, such as biographical or contextual information.

Formalist criticism approaches literature in itself

Is not concerned a lot with the historical, political, social, or biographical context
surrounding the work.

The critic pays special attention to the elements of the work.

o Fiction: Plot, point of view, characters, setting, tone and style, theme, symbol,
o Poetry: kind of poem (lyric, didactic, epic, etc.), tone, words, imagery, figures of
speech, sound, rhythm, form, symbol
o Drama: modes of drama, plot, characters, climax, theme, setting, symbol

A formalist reads literature as an independent work of art rather than as a reflection

of the author’s state of mind or as a representation of a moment in history.

Formalists offer intense examinations of the relationship between form and meaning
within a work, emphasizing the subtle complexity of how a work is arranged.

History, politics, etc. are considered extrinsic matters, which are relatively less
important than what goes on within the autonomous text.

Formalism has advantage of forcing writers to evaluate a work on its own terms
rather to relay on “accepted” notions of writer work.

The formalist perspective began in Russia in the early 1920s.

Formalist Critics Major Beliefs

 Literature is a form of knowledge with intrinsic elements--style, structure, imagery,
tone, and genre.
 What gives a literary work status as art, or as a great work of art, is how all of its
elements work together to create the reader's total experience (thought, feeling, gut
reactions, etc.)

 The appreciation of literature as an art requires close reading--a careful, step-by-step

analysis and explication of the text (the language of the work). An analysis may follow
 from questions like, how do various elements work together to shape the effect on the
reader?

 Style and theme influence each other and can't be separated if meaning is to be
retained. It's this interdependence in form and content that makes a text "literary."
"Extracting" elements in isolation (theme, character, ploy, setting, etc.) may destroy a
reader's aesthetic experience of the whole.

 Formalist critics don't deny the historical, political situation of a work, they just
believe works of art have the power to transcend by being "organic wholes"--akin to a
being with a life of its own.

 Formalist criticism is evaluative in that it differentiates great works of art from poor
works of art. Other kinds of criticism don't necessarily concern themselves with this
distinction.

 Formalist criticism is decidedly a "scientific" approach to literary analysis, focusing

on "facts amenable to "verification" (evidence in the text).

NEW CRITICISM
New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary
criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly
of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential
aesthetic object.
The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom’s 1941 book The New Criticism.
Also very influential were the critical essays of T. S. Eliot, such as “Tradition and the
Individual Talent” and “Hamlet and His Problems,” in which Eliot developed his notion of
the “objective correlative.” Eliot’s evaluative judgments, such as his condemnation of Milton
and Shelley, his liking for the so-called metaphysical poets and his insistence that poetry
must be impersonal, greatly influenced the formation of the New Critical canon.
*New Critics believed the structure and meaning of the text were intimately
connected and should not be analysed separately.

*In order to bring the focus of literary studies back to analysis of the texts, they aimed
to exclude the reader’s response, the author’s intention, historical and cultural
contexts, and moralistic bias from their analysis.

New criticism developed as a reaction to the older philological and literary history
schools of the US North, which, influenced by nineteenth-century German
scholarship, focused on the history and meaning of individual words and their
relation to foreign and ancient languages, comparative sources, and the biographical
circumstances of the authors. These approaches, it was felt, tended to distract from
the text and meaning of a poem and entirely neglect its aesthetic qualities in favour of
teaching about external factors.

Although the New Criticism is no longer a dominant theoretical model in American

universities, some of its methods (like close reading) are still fundamental tools of
literary criticism, underpinning a number of subsequent theoretic approaches to
literature including post structuralism, deconstruction theory, and reader-response
theory.