Critical Approaches to Literature

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Described below are nine common critical approaches to the literature. Quotations are from X.J.
Kennedy and Dana Gioia’s Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, Sixth Edition (New
York: HarperCollins, 1995), pages 1790-1818.

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.

Biographical Criticism: This approach “begins with the simple but central insight that literature is written
by actual people and that understanding an author’s life can help readers more thoroughly comprehend
the work.” Hence, it often affords a practical method by which readers can better understand a text.
However, a biographical critic must be careful not to take the biographical facts of a writer’s life too far
in criticizing the works of that writer: the biographical critic “focuses on explicating the literary work by
using the insight provided by knowledge of the author’s life.... [B]iographical data should amplify the
meaning of the text, not drown it out with irrelevant material.”

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.

Gender Criticism: This approach “examines how sexual identity influences the creation and reception of
literary works.” Originally an offshoot of feminist movements, gender criticism today includes a number
of approaches, including the so-called “masculinist” approach recently advocated by poet Robert Bly.
The bulk of gender criticism, however, is feminist and takes as a central precept that the patriarchal
attitudes that have dominated western thought have resulted, consciously or unconsciously, in
literature “full of unexamined ‘male-produced’ assumptions.” Feminist criticism attempts to correct this
imbalance by analyzing and combatting such attitudes—by questioning, for example, why none of the
characters in Shakespeare’s play Othello ever challenge the right of a husband to murder a wife accused
of adultery. Other goals of feminist critics include “analyzing how sexual identity influences the reader of
a text” and “examin[ing] how the images of men and women in imaginative literature reflect or reject
the social forces that have historically kept the sexes from achieving total equality.”

Psychological Criticism: This approach reflects the effect that modern psychology has had upon both
literature and literary criticism. Fundamental figures in psychological criticism include Sigmund Freud,
whose “psychoanalytic theories changed our notions of human behavior by exploring new or
controversial areas like wish-fulfillment, sexuality, the unconscious, and repression” as well as
expanding our understanding of how “language and symbols operate by demonstrating their ability to
reflect unconscious fears or desires”; and Carl Jung, whose theories about the unconscious are also a
key foundation of Mythological Criticism. Psychological criticism has a number of approaches, but in
general, it usually employs one (or more) of three approaches:

An investigation of “the creative process of the artist: what is the nature of literary genius and how does
it relate to normal mental functions?”

The psychological study of a particular artist, usually noting how an author’s biographical circumstances
affect or influence their motivations and/or behavior.

The analysis of fictional characters using the language and methods of psychology.

Sociological Criticism: 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.”

Mythological Criticism: This approach emphasizes “the recurrent universal patterns underlying most
literary works.” Combining the insights from anthropology, psychology, history, and comparative
religion, mythological criticism “explores the artist’s common humanity by tracing how the individual
imagination uses myths and symbols common to different cultures and epochs.” One key concept in
mythlogical criticism is the archetype, “a symbol, character, situation, or image that evokes a deep
universal response,” which entered literary criticism from Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. According to
Jung, all individuals share a “‘collective unconscious,’ a set of primal memories common to the human
race, existing below each person’s conscious mind”—often deriving from primordial phenomena such as
the sun, moon, fire, night, and blood, archetypes according to Jung “trigger the collective unconscious.”
Another critic, Northrop Frye, defined archetypes in a more limited way as “a symbol, usually an image,
which recurs often enough in literature to be recognizable as an element of one’s literary experience as
a whole.” Regardless of the definition of archetype they use, mythological critics tend to view literary
works in the broader context of works sharing a similar pattern.

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.”

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.”

Feminist literary criticism, arising in conjunction with sociopolitical feminism, critiques patriarchal
language and literature by exposing how these reflect masculine ideology. It examines gender politics in
works and traces the subtle construction of masculinity and femininity, and their relative status,
positionings, and marginalizations within works.

Beyond making us aware of the marginalizing uses of traditional language (the presumptuousness of the
pronoun "he," or occupational words such as "mailman") feminists focused on language have noticed a
stylistic difference in women's writing: women tend to use reflexive constructions more than men (e.g.,
"She found herself crying"). They have noticed that women and men tend to communicate differently:
men directed towards solutions, women towards connecting.

Feminist criticism concern itself with stereotypical representations of genders. It also may trace the
history of relatively unknown or undervalued women writers, potentially earning them their rightful
place within the literary canon, and helps create a climate in which women's creativity may be fully
realized and appreciated.

One will frequently hear the term "patriarchy" used among feminist critics, referring to traditional male-
dominated society. "Marginalization" refers to being forced to the outskirts of what is considered
socially and politically significant; the female voice was traditionally marginalized, or discounted
altogether.

Historical Criticism insisted that to understand a literary piece, we need to understand the author's
biography and social background, ideas circulating at the time, and the cultural milieu. This school of
criticism fell into disfavor as the New Critics emerged.
New Historicism seeks to find meaning in a text by considering the work within the framework of the
prevailing ideas and assumptions of its historical era. New Historicists concern themselves with the
political function of literature and with the concept of power, the intricate means by which cultures
produce and reproduce themselves. These critics focus on revealing the historically specific model of
truth and authority (not a "truth" but a "cultural construct") reflected in a given work.

In other words, history here is not a mere chronicle of facts and events, but rather a complex description
of human reality and evolution of preconceived notions. Literary works may or may not tell us about
various factual aspects of the world from which they emerge, but they will tell us about prevailing ways
of thinking at the time: ideas of social organization, prejudices, taboos, etc. They raise questions of
interest to anthropologists and sociologists.

New Historicism is more "sociohistorical" than it is a delving into factoids: concerned with ideological
products or cultural constructs which are formations of any era. (It's not just where would Keats have
seen a Grecian urn in England, but from where he may have absorbed the definitions of art and beauty.)

So, New Historicists, insisting that ideology manifests itself in literary productions and discourse, interest
themselves in the interpretive constructions which the members of a society or culture apply to their
experience.

Structuralism is concerned not so much with what things mean, but how they mean; it is a science
designed to show that all elements of human culture, including literature, are understandable as parts
of a system of signs. This science of signs is called "semiotics" or "semiology." The goal is to discover the
codes, structures, and processes involved in the production of meaning. "Structuralism claims that
human culture itself is fundamentally a language, a complex system of signifieds (concepts) and
signifiers. These signifiers can be verbal (like language itself or literature) or nonverbal (like face
painting, advertising, or fashion)" (Biddle 80). Thus, linguistics is to language as structuralism is to
literature.

Structuralists often would break myths into their smallest units, and realign corresponding ones.
Opposite terms modulate until resolved or reconciled by an intermediary third term.

Structuralism was a reaction to modern alienation and despair; it sought to recover literature from the
isolation in which it had been studied, since laws governing it govern all sign systems -- clothing, food,
body 'language,' etc.
What quickly became apparent, though, was that signs and words don't have meaning in and of
themselves, only in relations to other signs and entire systems. Hence, post-structuralism.

POST-STRUCTURALISM

Post-structuralism contests and subverts structuralism and formalism. Structuralists are convinced that
systematic knowledge is possible; post-structuralists claim to know only the impossibility of this
knowledge. They counter the possibility of knowing systematically a text by revealing the "grammar"
behind its form and meaning. Texts contradict not only the structuralist accounts of them, but also
themselves. All signifieds are also signifiers (a car symbolizes achievement).

DECONSTRUCTION

Deconstructive criticism posits an undecidability of meaning for all texts. The text has intertwined and
contradictory discourses, gaps, and incoherencies, since language itself is unstable and arbitrary. The
critic doesn't undermine the text; the text already dismantles itself. Its rhetoric subverts or undermines
its ostensible meaning.

Jacques Derrida opposed the "metaphysics of presence, . . . the claim in literature or philosophy that we
can find some full, rich meaning outside of or prior to language itself." The hierarchy of binaries on
which this assertion rests is untenable. Privileging speech over writing = logocentrism; spoken or written
words have meaning only by "differance" from other words. Deconstructive critics focus on the text like
the formalists, but direct attention to the opposite of the New Critical "unities." Instead, they view the
"decentering" of texts and point out incompatabilities, rhetorical grain-against-grain contradictions,
undecidability within texts. There is often a playfulness to deconstruction, but it can be daunting to read
too.