Critical Approaches to Literature

1. FORMALIST CRITICISM

Formalist criticism regards literature as a unique form of human knowledge that needs to be examined on its own
terms. To a formalist, a poem or story is not primarily a social, historical, or biographical document; it is a literary work
that can be understood only by reference to its intrinsic literary features—those elements, that is, found in the text itself.
To analyze a poem or story, the formalist critic, therefore, focuses on the words of the text rather than facts about the
author’s life or the historical milieu in which it was written. The critic would pay special attention to the formal features
of the text—the style, structure (sentence structure: short, long, simple, complicated, loose sentence; repetition,
parallelism, climax, anti-climax, imagery, symbols, figure of speech, tone, and genre. These features, however, are usually
not examined in isolation, because formalist critics believe that what gives a literary text its special status as art is how all
of its elements work together to create the reader’s total experience. As Robert Penn Warren commented, “Poetry does not
inhere in any particular element but depends upon the set of relationships, the structure, which we call the poem.

A key method that formalists use to explore the intense relationships within a poem is close reading, a careful step-
by-step analysis and explication of a text. The purpose of close reading is to understand how various elements in a
literary text work together to shape its effects on the reader. Since formalists believe that the various stylistic and thematic
elements of literary work influence each other, these critics insist that form and content cannot be meaningfully separated.
The complete interdependence of form and content is what makes a text literary. When we extract a work’s theme or
paraphrase its meaning, we destroy the aesthetic

...But the formalist critic is concerned primarily with the work itself. Form and content can’t be separated....

The formalist critic knows as well as anyone that poems and plays and novels are written by men—that they do not
somehow happen—and that they are written as expressions of particular personalities and are written from all sorts of
motives—for money, from a desire to express oneself, for the sake of a cause, etc. Moreover, the formalist critic knows as
well as anyone that literary works are merely potential until they are read—that is, that they are recreated in the minds of
actual readers, who vary enormously in their capabilities, their interests, their prejudices, their ideas. Speculation on the
mental processes of the author takes the critic away from the work into biography and psychology. There is no reason, of
course, why he should not turn away into biography and psychology. Such explorations are very much worth making. But
they should not be confused with an account of the work. Such studies describe the process of composition, not the
structure of the thing composed, and they may be performed quite as validly for the poor work as for the good one. They
may be validly performed for any kind of expression—non-literary as well as literary.

2．BIOGRAPHICAL CRITICISM

Biographical criticism 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. Anyone who reads the biography
of a writer quickly sees how much an author’s experience shapes—both directly and indirectly—what he or she creates.
Reading that biography will also change (and usually deepen) our response to the work. Sometimes even knowing a single
important fact illuminates our reading of a poem or story. Learning, for example, that Josephine Miles was confined to a
wheelchair or that Weldon Kees committed suicide at forty-one will certainly make us pay attention to certain aspects of
their poems we might otherwise have missed or considered unimportant. A formalist critic might complain that we would
also have noticed those things through careful textual analysis, but biographical information provided the practical
assistance of underscoring subtle but important meanings in the poems. Though many literary theorists have assailed
biographical criticism on philosophical grounds, the biographical approach to literature has never disappeared because of
its obvious practical advantage in illuminating literary texts.

It may be helpful here to make a distinction between biography and biographical criticism. Biography is, strictly
speaking, a branch of history; it provides a written account of a person’s life. To establish and interpret the facts of a
poet’s life, for instance, a biographer would use all the available information—not just personal documents like letters and
diaries, but also the poems for the possible light they might shed on the subject’s life. A biographical critic, however, is
not concerned with recreating the record of an author’s life. Biographical criticism focuses on explicating the literary
work by using the insight provided by knowledge of the author’s life.

A reader, however, must use biographical interpretations cautiously. Writers are notorious for revising the facts of
their own lives; they often delete embarrassments and invent accomplishments while changing the details of real episodes
to improve their literary impact. A savvy biographical critic always remembers to base an interpretation on what is in the
text itself; biographical data should amplify the meaning of the text, not drown it out with irrelevant material.

3． HISTORICAL CRITICISM

Historical criticism 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. Historical critics are less concerned
with explaining a work’s literary significance for today’s readers than with helping us understand the work by recreating,
as nearly as possible, the exact meaning and impact it had on its original audience. A historical reading of a literary work
begins by exploring the possible ways in which the meaning of the text has changed over time. The analysis of William
Blake’s poem “London”, for instance, carefully examines how certain words had different connotations for the poem’s
original readers than they do today. It also explores the probable associations an eighteenth— century English reader
would have made with certain images and characters, like the poem’s persona, the chimney-sweeper—a type of exploited
child laborer who, fortunately, no longer exists in our society.

4．GENDER CRITICISM

Gender criticism examines how sexual identity influences the creation and reception of literary works. Gender studies
began with the feminist movement and were influenced by such works as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949)
and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) as well as sociology, psychology, and anthropology. Feminist critics believe that
culture has been so completely dominated by men that literature is full of unexamined “male-produced” assumptions.
They see their criticism correcting this imbalance by analyzing and combating patriarchal attitudes.

Feminist criticism can be divided into two distinct varieties.

Feminist criticism has explored how an author’s gender influences—consciously or unconsciously—his or her
writing. It is concerned with woman as writer—with woman as the producer of textual meaning, with the history, themes,
genres, and structures of literature by women. Its subjects include the psychodynamics of female creativity; linguistics and
the problem of a female language; the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career; literary history; and,
of course, studies of particular writers and works.

Another important theme in feminist criticism is analyzing how sexual identity influences the reader of a text. It is
concerned with woman as reader—with woman as the consumer of male-produced literature, and with the way in which
the hypothesis of a female reader changes our apprehension of a given text, awakening us to the significance of its sexual
codes. It is a historically grounded inquiry which probes the ideological assumptions of literary phenomena. Its
subjects include the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions of and misconceptions about women in
criticism. It is also concerned with the exploitation and manipulation of the female audience, especially in popular culture
and film; and with the analysis of woman-as-sign in semiotic systems. The reader sees a text through the eyes of his or her
sex.

Finally, feminist critics carefully examine 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.

5．PSYCHOLOGICAL CRITICISM

Modern psychology has had an immense effect on both literature and literary criticism. Sigmund Freud’s
psychoanalytic theories changed our notions of human behavior by exploring new or controversial areas like wish-
fulfillment, sexuality, the unconscious, and repression. Freud also expanded our sense of how language and symbols
operate by demonstrating their ability to reflect unconscious fears or desires. Freud admitted that he himself had learned a
great deal about psychology from studying literature: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dostoevsky were as important
to the development of his ideas as were his clinical studies. Some of Freud’s most influential writing was, in a broad
sense, literary criticism, such as his psychoanalytic examination of Sophocles’ Oedipus.

This famous section of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) often raises an important question for students: was
Freud implying that Sophocles knew or shared Freud’s theories? (Variations of this question can be asked for most critical
approaches: does using a critical approach require that the author under scrutiny believed in it?) The answer is, of course,
no; in analyzing Sophocles’ Oedipus, Freud paid the classical Greek dramatist the considerable compliment that the
playwright had such profound insight into human nature that his characters display the depth and complexity of real
people. In focusing on literature, Freud and his disciples like Carl Jung, Ernest Jones, Marie Bonaparte, and Bruno
Bettelheim endorse the belief that great literature truthfully reflects life.

Psychological criticism is a diverse category, but it often employs three approaches. First, it investigates the creative
process of the artist: what is the nature of literary genius and how does it relate to normal mental functions? (Philosophers
and poets have also wrestled with this question, as you can see in selections from Plato and Wordsworth in the “Criticism:
On Poetry” ) The second major area for psychological criticism is the psychological study of a particular artist. Most
modern literary biographies employ psychology to understand their subject’s motivations and behavior. One recent book,
Diane Middlebrook’s controversial Anne Sexton: A Biography, actually used tapes of the poet’s sessions with her
psychiatrist as material for the study. The third common area of psychological criticism is the analysis of fictional
characters. Freud’s study of Oedipus is the prototype for this approach that tries to bring modern insights about human
behavior into the study of how fictional people act.

6．SOCIOLOGICAL CRITICISM

Sociological criticism examines literature in the cultural, economic, and political context in which it is written or
received. “Art is not created in a vacuum,” critic Wilbur Scott observed, “it is the work not simply of a person, but of an
author fixed in time and space, answering a community of which he is an important, because articulate part.” Sociological
criticism explores the relationships between the artist and society. Sometimes it looks at the sociological status of the
author to evaluate how the profession of the writer in a particular milieu affected what was written. Sociological criticism
also analyzes the social content of literary works—what cultural, economic or political values a particular text implicitly
or explicitly promotes. Finally, sociological criticism examines the role the audience has in shaping literature. A
sociological view of Shakespeare, for example, might look at the economic position of Elizabethan playwrights and
actors; it might also study the political ideas expressed in the plays or discuss how the nature of an Elizabethan theatrical
audience (which was usually all male unless the play was produced at court) helped determine the subject, tone, and
language of the plays.

An influential type of sociological criticism has been Marxist criticism, which focuses on the economic and political
elements of art. Marxist criticism, like the work of the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs, often explores the
ideological content of literature. Whereas a formalist critic would maintain that form and content are inextricably blended,
Lukacs believed that content determines form and that therefore, all art is political. Even if a work of art ignores political
issues, it makes a political statement, Marxist critics believe, because it endorses the economic and political status quo.
Consequently, Marxist criticism is frequently evaluative and judges some literary work better than others on an
ideological basis; this tendency can lead to reductive judgment, as when Soviet critics rated Jack London a novelist
superior to William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Edith Wharton, and Henry James, because he illustrated the principles
of class struggle more clearly. But, as an analytical tool, Marxist criticism, like other sociological methods, can illuminate
political and economic dimensions of literature other approaches overlook.

7．MYTHOLOGICAL CRITICISM

Mythological critics look for the recurrent universal patterns underlying most literary works. (“Myth and Narrative,”
for a definition of myth and a discussion of its importance to the literary imagination.) Mythological criticism is an
interdisciplinary approach that combines the insights of anthropology, psychology, history, and comparative religion. If
psychological criticism examines the artist as an individual, mythological criticism explores the artist’s common humanity
by tracing how the individual imagination uses myths and symbols common to different cultures and epochs.

A central concept in mythological criticism is the archetype, a symbol, character, situation, or image that evokes a
deep universal response. The idea of the archetype came into literary criticism from the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, a
lifetime student of myth and religion. Jung believed that all individuals share a “collective unconscious,” a set of primal
memories common to the human race, existing below each person’s conscious mind.

Archetypal images (which often relate to experiencing primordial phenomena like the sun, moon, fire, night, and
blood), Jung believed, trigger the collective unconscious. We do not need to accept the literal truth of the collective
unconscious, however, to endorse the archetype as a helpful critical concept. The late Northrop Frye defined the archetype
in considerably less occult terms 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.”

Identifying archetypal symbols and situations in literary works, mythological critics almost inevitably link the
individual text under discussion to a broader context of works that share an underlying pattern. In discussing
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, for instance, a mythological critic might relate Shakespeare’s Danish prince to other mythic sons
avenging their fathers’ deaths, like Orestes from Greek myth or Sigmund of Norse legend; or, in discussing Othello, relate
the sinister figure of Iago to the devil in traditional Christian belief. Critic Joseph Campbell took such comparisons even
further; his compendious study The Hero with a Thousand Faces demonstrates how similar mythic characters appear in
virtually every culture on every continent.

8．DECONSTRUCTIONIST CRITICISM

Deconstructionist criticism rejects the traditional assumption that language can accurately represent reality.
Language, according to deconstructionists, is a fundamentally unstable medium; consequently, literary texts, which are
made up of words, have no fixed, single meaning. Deconstructionists insist, according to critic Paul de Man, on “the
impossibility of making the actual expression coincide with what has to be expressed, of making the actual signs coincide
with what is signified.” Since they believe that literature cannot definitively express its subject matter, deconstructionists
tend to shift their attention away from what is being said to how language is being used in a text.

Paradoxically, deconstructionist criticism often resembles formalist criticism; both methods usually involve close
reading. But while a formalist usually tries to demonstrate how the diverse elements of a text cohere into meaning, the
deconstructionist approach attempts to show how the text “deconstructs,” that is, how it can be broken down—by a
skeptical critic— into mutually irreconcilable positions. A biographical or historical critic might seek to establish the
author’s intention as a means to interpreting a literary work, but deconstructionists reject the notion that the critic should
endorse the myth of authorial control over language. Deconstructionist critics like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault
have therefore called for “the death of the author,” that is, the rejection of the assumption that the author, no matter how
ingenious, can fully control the meaning of a text. They have also announced the death of literature as a special category
of writing. In their view, poems and novels are merely words on a page that deserve no privileged status as art; all texts
are created equal—equally untrustworthy, that is.

Deconstructionists focus on how language is used to achieve power. Since they believe, in the words of critic David
Lehman, that “there are no truths, only rival interpretations,” deconstructionists try to understand how some
“interpretations come to be regarded as truth. A major goal of deconstruction is to demonstrate how those supposed truths
are at best provisional and at worst contradictory.
 Deconstruction, as you may have inferred, calls for intellectual subtlety and skill, and isn’t for a novice to leap into. If
you pursue your literary studies beyond the introductory stage, you will want to become more familiar with its
assumptions. Deconstruction may strike you as a negative, even destructive, critical approach, and yet its best
practitioners are adept at exposing the inadequacy of much conventional criticism. By patient analysis, they can
sometimes open up the most familiar text and find in it fresh and unexpected significance.

9．READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM

Reader-response criticism attempts to describe what happens in the reader’s mind while interpreting a text. If
traditional criticism assumes that imaginative writing is a creative act, reader-response theory recognizes that reading is
also a creative process. Reader-response critics believe that no text provides self-contained meaning; literary texts do not
exist independently of readers’ interpretations. A text, according to this critical school, is not finished until it is read and
interpreted. The practical problem then arises that no two individuals necessarily read a text in exactly the same way.
Rather than declare one interpretation correct and the other mistaken, reader-response criticism recognizes the inevitable
plurality of readings. Instead of trying to ignore or reconcile the contradictions inherent in this situation, it explores them.

The easiest way to explain reader-response criticism is to relate it to the common experience of rereading a favorite
book after many years. Rereading a novel as an adult, for example, that “changed your life” as an adolescent, is often a
shocking experience. The book may seem substantially different. The character you remembered liking most now seems
less admirable, and another character you disliked now seems more sympathetic. Has the book changed? Very unlikely,
but you certainly have in the intervening years. Reader-response criticism explores how the different individuals (or
classes of individuals) see the same text differently. It 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.

While reader-response criticism rejects the notion that there can be a single correct reading for a literary text, it
doesn’t consider all readings permissible. Each text creates limits to its possible interpretations. As Stanley Fish admits in
the following critical selection, we cannot arbitrarily place an Eskimo in William Faulkner’s story “A Rose for Emily”
(though Professor Fish does ingeniously imagine a hypothetical situation where this bizarre interpretation might actually
be possible) poem would be forthcoming. This poem is not only a “refusal to mourn,” like that of Dylan Thomas, it is a
refusal to elegize. The whole elegiac tradition, like its cousin the funeral oration, turns finally away from mourning toward
acceptance, revival, renewal, a return to the concerns of life, symbolized by the very writing of the poem. Life goes on;
there is an audience; and the mourned person will live through accomplishments, influence, descendants, and also (not
least) in the elegiac poem itself. Merwin rejects all that. If I wrote an elegy for X, the person for whom I have always
written, X would not be alive to read it; therefore, there is no reason to write an elegy for the one person in my life who
most deserves one; therefore, there is no reason to write any elegy, anymore, ever.