Discussion of Critical Approaches: Introduction

        A number of critical theories or approaches for understanding and interpreting literature are available to critics and students alike. Many of these have been developed during the twentieth century to create a discipline of literary studies comparable with disciplines in the natural and social sciences. Literary critics have often borrowed liberally from other disciplines (e.g., history, psychology, anthropology) but have primarily aimed at developing literature as a course of study in its own right.

        At the heart of the various critical approaches have been many fundamental questions: What is literature? What does it do? Is its concern only to tell stories, or is it to express emotions? Is it private? Public? How does it get its ideas across? What more does it do than express ideas? How valuable was literature in the past and how valuable is it now? What can it contribute to intellectual, artistic, and social history? To what degree is literature an art, as opposed to an instrument for imparting knowledge? How is literature used, and how and why is it misused? What theoretic;' and technical expertise may be invoked to enhance literary studies?

        Questions such as these indicate that criticism is concerned not only with reading and interpreting stories, poems, and plays, but also with establishing theoretical understanding. Because of such  extensive aims, you will understand that a full explanation and illustration of the approaches would fill the pages of a long book. The following descriptions are therefore intended as no more than brief introductions. Bear in mind that in the hands of skilled critics, the approaches are so subtle, sophisticated, and complex that they are not only critical stances bur also philosophies.

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A. Discussion of Critical Approaches: Historical

This traditional approach stresses the relationship of literature to its historical period, and for its reason it has had a long life. Although much literature may be applicable to many places and times, much of it also directly reflects the intellectual and social words of the authors. When was the work written? What were the circumstances that produced it? What major issues does it deal with? How does it fit into the author’s career? Keats’s poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” for example, is his excited response to his reading of one of the major literary works of Western civilization. Hardy's "Chanel Firing" is an acerbic response to continued armament and preparation for war during the twentieth century.
The topical/historical approach investigates relationships of this sort including the elucidation of words and concepts that today's readers may not immediately understand. Obviously, the approach requires the assistance of footnotes, dictionaries, histories, and handbooks.
A common criticism of the topical/historical approach is that in the extreme it deals with background knowledge rather than with literature itself. tis possible, for example, for a topical/historical critic to describe a writer's life, the period of the writer's work, and the social and intellectual ideas of the time, all without ever considering the meaning, importance, and value of the work itself.

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B. Discussion of Critical Approaches: Biographical

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. Quite often biographical critics, like Brett C. Millier in her discussion of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” will examine the drafts of a poem or story to see both how the work came into being and how it might have been changed from its autobiographical origins.
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. John Cheever, for example, frequently told reporters about his sunny, privileged youth; after the author’s death, his biographer Scott Donaldson discovered a childhood scarred by a distant mother, a failed, alcoholic father, and nagging economic uncertainty. Likewise, Cheever’s outwardly successful adulthood was plagued by alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, and family tension. The chilling facts of Cheever’s life significantly changed the way critics read his stories. The danger in a famous writer s case—Sylvia Plath and F. Scott Fitzgerald are two modern examples—is that the life story can overwhelm and eventually distort the work. 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.

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C. Discussion of Critical Approaches: Psychoanalytic

The scientific study of the mind is a product of psychodynamic theory as established by Sigmund Freud 0856-1939) and of the psychoanalytic method practiced by his followers. Psychoanalysis provided a new key to the understanding of character by claiming that behavior was caused by hidden and unconscious motives and drives. It was greeted as a virtual revelation, and not surprisingly it had a profound effect on twentieth-century literature.
In addition, its popularity produced a psychological/psychoanalytic approach to criticism. Some critics use the approach to explain fictional characters, as in the landmark interpretation by Freud and Ernest Jones that Shakespeare's Hamlet suffers from the "Oedipus Complex." Still other critics use it as a way of analyzing authors and the artistic process. For example, John Livingston Lowes's The Road to Xanadu presents a detailed examination of the mind, reading, and neuroses of Coleridge, the author of "Kubla Khan,”
Critics using the psychoanalytic approach treat literature somewhat like information about patients in therapy. In the work itself, what are the obvious and hidden motives that cause a character's behavior and speech? How much background (childhood trauma, adolescent memories, etc.) does the author reveal about a character? How purposeful is this information with regard to the character's psychological condition? How much is important in analyzing and understanding the character?
In the consideration of authors, critics utilizing the psychoanalytic
i mode consider questions like these: What particular life experiences explain \ characteristic subjects or preoccupations? Was the author's life happy? Miserable? Upsetting? Solitary? Social? Can the death of someone in the author's \family be associated with melancholy situations in that author's work? (All eleven of the brothers and sisters of the English poet Thomas Gray, for example, died before reaching adulthood. Gray was the only one to survive. In his poetry, Gray often deals with death, and he is therefore considered as one of the "Graveyard School" of eighteenth-century poets. A psychoanalytical critic might make much of this connection.)

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D. Discussion of Critical Approaches: Formalist

The New Criticism began in the 1930s and 1940s and has since been a dominant force in twentieth-century literary studies. To the degree that New Criticism focuses upon literary texts as formal works of art, it departs from the tropical approach. The objection raised by the New Critics is that as topical/historical critics consider literary history, they avoid close contact with actual texts.
The inspiration for the formalist or New Critical approach was the French practice of explication de texte, a method that emphasizes detailed examination and explanation. The New Criticism is therefore at its most brilliant in the analysis of smaller units such as entire poems and short passages. The New Criticism also utilizes a number of techniques for the analysis of larger structures, many of which form the basis for the chapters in this book. Discussions of "point of view," "tone," "plot," "character," and "structure," for example, are ways of looking at literature derived from the New Criticism.
The aim of the formalist study of literature is to provide readers not only with the means of explaining the content of works ("What, specifically, does this say?"), but also with the critical tools needed for evaluating the artistic quality of individual works and writers ("How well is it said?"). A major aspect of New Critical thought is the content and form including all ideas, ambiguities, subtleties, and even apparent contradictions were originally within the conscious or subconscious control of the author. There is no accident. It does not necessarily follow, however, that today's critic is able to define the author's intentions exactly, for such intentions require knowledge of biographical details that are irretrievably lost. Each literary work therefore takes on its own existence and identity, and the critic's work is to discover a reading or readings that explain the facts of the text. Note that the New Critic does not claim infallible interpretations and does not exclude the validity of multiple readings of identical works.
Dissenters from the New Criticism have noted a tendency by New Critics to ignore relevant knowledge that history and biography may bring to literary studies. In addition, the approach has been subject to the charge that stressing the examination of texts alone fails to deal with the value and appreciation of literature.

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E. Discussion of Critical Approaches: Structuralist

The principle of structuralism stems from the attempt to find the relationship and connection among elements that appear to be separate and discrete. lust ~s physical science reveals unifying universal principles of matter such as gravity and the forces of electromagnetism (and is constantly searching for a "unified field theory"), structuralism attempts to discover the forms unifying all literature's. Thus a structural description of Maupassant's "The Necklace" would stress that the main character, Mathilde, is an active protagonist who undergoes a test (or series of tests) and emerges with a victory, though not the kind she had originally hoped for. The same might be said of Phoenix in Welty's "A Worn Path." If this same kind of structural view is applied to Bierce's” An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," the protagonist would emerge in defeat. Generally, the structural approach applies such patterns to other works of literature to determine that some protagonists are active or submissive, that they pass or fail their tests, or that they succeed or fail at other encounters. The key is that many apparently unrelated works reveal many common patterns or contain similar structures with important variations.
The structural approach has become important because it enables critics to discuss works from widely separate cultures and historical periods. In this respect, critics have followed the leads of modem anthropologists most notably Claude Levi-Strauss (b. 1908). Along such lines, critics have undertaken the serious examination of folk tales and fairy tales. Some of the groundbreaking structuralist criticism, for example, was devoted to the structural principles underlying Russian folk tales. The method also bridges popular and serious literature, making little distinction between the two insofar as the description of the structures is concerned. Indeed, structuralism furnishes an ideal approach for comparative literature, and the method also enables critics to consolidate genres such as modem romances, detective tales, soap operas, and films.

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F. Discussion of Critical Approaches: Feminist

The feminist approach hold that most of our literature presents a masculine-patriarchal view in which the role of women is negated or at best minimized. As an adjunct of the feminist movement in politics, the feminist critique of literature seeks to raise consciousness about the importance and unique nature of women in literature.
Specifically, feminist view attempts (1) to show that writers of traditional literature have ignored women and have also transmitted misguided and prejudiced views of them, (2) to stimulate the creation of a critical milieu that reflects a balanced view of the nature and value of women, (3) to recover the works of women writers of past times and to encourage the publication of present women writers so that the literary canon may be expanded to recognize women as thinkers and artists, and (4) to urge transformations in the language to eliminate inequities and inequalities that result from linguistic distortions.
In form, the feminist perspective seeks to evaluate various literary works from the standpoint of the presentation of women. For works such as '''The Necklace" (story), "A Work of Artifice" (poem), and The Bear (play), a feminist critique would focus on how such works treat women and also on either the short comings or enlightenment of the author as a result of this treatment: How important are the female characters, how individual in their own right? Are they credited with their own existence and their own character? In their relationships with men, how are they treated? Are they given equal status? Ignored? Patronized? Demeaned? Pedestalized? How much concern do the male characters exhibit about women's concerns?

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G. Discussion of Critical Approaches: Marxist

The concept of cultural and economic determinism is one of the major political ideas of the last century. Karl Marx (1818-1883) emphasized that the primary influence on life was economic, and he saw society as an opposition between the capitalist and working classes. The literature that emerged from this kind of analysis features individuals in the grips of the class struggle. Often called "proletarian literature," it emphasizes persons of the lower class-the poor and oppressed who spend their lives in endless drudgery and misery, and whose attempts to rise above their disadvantages usually result in renewed suppression.
Marx's political ideas were never widely accepted in the United States and have faded still more after the political breakup of the Soviet Union, but the idea of economic determinism (and the related term "Social Darwinism") is still credible. As a result, much literature can be judged from an economic perspective: What is the economic status of the characters? What happens to them as a result of this status? How do they fare against economic and political odds? What other conditions stemming from their class does-tile-writer emphasize (e.g., poor education, poor nutrition, poor health care, inadequate opportunity)? To what extent does the work fail by overlooking the economic, social, and political implications of its material? In what other ways does economic determinism affect the work? How should readers consider the story in today's developed or underdeveloped world?

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