Introduction to Literary Criticism

1. Introduction to Literary Criticism Part One Goals: -define Literary Criticism -define and describe Reader Response Criticism -define and describe Formalism -contrast Reader Response Criticism to Formalism

2. What is Literary Criticism? • Literary criticism is an attempt to evaluate and understand the literature of an author. • Literary criticism is a description, analysis, evaluation, or interpretation of a particular literary work or an author's writings as a whole. • Literary criticism is usually expressed in the form of a critical essay. In-depth book reviews are also sometimes viewed as literary criticism.

3. In other words, • Literary criticism is a view or opinion on what a particular written work means. • It is about the meanings that a reader finds in an author's literature.

4. Types of Criticism • There is much debate about the “proper” way to critically study a work of literature. • Some of the types, or schools, of criticism we’ll be studying this year: • Reader Response vs. Formalism • Psychoanalytical (Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian) • Marxist Criticism • Feminist Criticism • Post-Colonialism • Eco-criticism? Historicism? Others?

5. Reader Response Criticism • “Literature is an incomplete work of sculpture.” • We have to bring our own imagination to see the work’s full potential • Seems to be the most common way students are asked to analyze literature

6. First Type: Reader Response • One of the oldest types of criticism based on Greek and Roman focus on rhetoric. They saw literature as a means of making an audience react in a certain way • In the reader-response critical approach, the primary focus falls on the reader and the process of reading rather than on the author or the text.

7. Theoretical Assumptions • Literature is a performative art and each reading is a performance • Literature exists only when it is read (“If a tree falls in the forest…”) • The literary text possesses no fixed and final meaning or value; there is no one "correct" meaning. • Literary meaning and value are "transactional," or "dialogic," meaning they are created by the interaction of the reader and the text.

8. Different Audiences in Reader Response Criticism • IDEAL READER: a hypothetical reader who possesses the competence to understand all parts of the text with absolute clarity. • INTENDED READER: the reader consciously or unconsciously envisioned by the author when the text was produced. • REAL READER: used to describe the overall meaning and effect of the text on an actual reader (including yourself!).

9. Figuring it out is the reader’s job • The reader is not passive! They have to work to find meaning in the text. • The text doesn’t have a meaning in and of itself- it has meaning in relation to the reader • Meaning may come from relating to personal experiences, or filling in “gaps” in the text with your own thinking/analysis • Meaning changes depending on who the reader is, and what their background is.

10. Questions to ask • How does the text “govern” the reader? Focus on how texts guide, constrain, control reading through stylistic or linguistic analysis • Basically, how/why do you feel the way you do about the book based on how it’s written? Think DIDLS/Intent-Action-Outcome • How “true” does this text feel? Reader evaluates the text by comparing events, characters, settings to his or her real world experience. • How do you react to the text?

11. The Anti-Reader Response: Formalism, or New Criticism • THE WORK STANDS ALONE • The approach to literary analysis known as Formalism or New Criticism is a way of determining the meaning of a literary text by using only the text itself. • Formalism says a book has meaning independent of the reader’s response • Idea that a book should be analyzed as a reflection of what’s IN the text, not what a reader interprets it to mean • More emphasis on ONE correct reading of a text, looking for ONE valid interpretation

12. This is similar to what you have already done • Think of Formalism as close reading. Really close reading, focusing on specific images or details and explaining how the text shows meaning through those details. • For example, “A comparison is made between the flow of human blood in human veins, to that of the flow of water in the river. The river represents the blood that has been shed. Both are encompassed by a larger element. Rivers are contained by the earth much like blood is contained by the body.”

13. Meaning comes from what’s there, not what we assign to what’s there • “Every piece of the text, like every cell in an organism or every brick in a building, contributes to the life or meaning of the text. Formalists ideally seek to explain and assess the function of all pieces of the text.” • Ways to do this: in the case of poetry, identify the speaker; the event that prompted the poem; the genre of poetry the text belongs to; the person(s) to whom the poem seems to be addressed; the literal meaning of the poem; figurative uses of language--metaphors and their implications, symbols, tone, structure, etc.

14. The job of a Formalist critic • Identify what the text is doing • Explain how the text does that • Explain why the text does that • For example: • “The text shows a man’s struggle to understand his father.” • “It shows this through the use of words like ‘difficult’, ‘dominating’, and ‘opaque.” • “These words explain that the relationship was unclear to the speaker and that it was not an overall positive experience.”

15. The "Intentional Fallacy" is the mistake of attempting to understand the author's intentions when interpreting a literary work. The "Affective Fallacy" is the mistake of equating a work with its emotional effects upon an audience. Umm…everything we did with TTTC?! Formalism’s diss to Reader Response Criticism

16. In conclusion, • Literary Criticism is the lens through which a reader makes meaning from a text. There are many different beliefs as to the real meaning of a text and how to get to that meaning. • Reader Response Criticism values the reader’s experience with literature, and says the meaning of a text comes from that interaction. The reader has a dialogue with the text, and that dialogue is the text’s meaning • Formalism says that the text stands on its own without influence from personal reader responses and it shows a careful analysis of the components that add up to the whole. The result of that analysis is the meaning of the text.