Abrams’ Quaternity of
Critical Approaches to Literature
• UNIVERSE
• WORK
• ARTIST
• AUDIENCE
TCG, 2004-2012
• WORK
• i.e., the text itself, as artifact, and a
supposedly objective analysis of purely
aesthetic matters (think "textbook" literary
terms);
• supposedly, too, the sole intrinsic approach,
while all others are extrinsic;
• e.g., Formalism (including New Criticism),
various rhetorical & genre theories,
Structuralism, & (to a great extent, even)
Deconstruction
• ARTIST
• i.e., the author (and his/her inner, inspired,
self-expressive/emotive, soul-burning
"LAMP");
• e.g., expressive (expressionist) criticism,
biographical criticism, and much
psychoanalytic criticism (which ponders the
unconscious underpinnings of an author’s
creativity)
• AUDIENCE
• i.e., the reader(s); key terms here include
"affective" and "pragmatic" (that is, how does
the work move the reader, to emotional
response, or even action?);
• e.g., impressionistic criticism & various
brands of reader-response theory (the latter
usually a more concerted analysis of
how/why readers respond as they do)
• UNIVERSE
• i.e., the "world" (and culture) out there,
"outside" the author/text/reader;
• think the "real world" (as in art being a
realistic or Platonic "MIRROR" [mimesis] of
said world); or (more usually today):
• historical-political
worldviews/ideologies/values-systems
imposed on the text by the critic (e.g.,
feminism, Marxism, postcolonial & critical
race theory, queer theory, & ecocriticism)
• Historical Time-Line (I)
• Classical Greece—Plato: art as a reflection of his
idealistic World of Forms (UNIVERSE); Aristotle: art
as catharsis (AUDIENCE); Aristotle's genre
prescriptions (WORK)
• Medieval & Renaissance periods (heck, well into the
17th & 18th centuries)—not only various versions of
Platonic mimesis (UNIVERSE) and Aristotelian
catharsis (AUDIENCE), but a strong (Christian)
moral-didactic emphasis (UNIVERSE)
• Historical Time-Line (II)
• 19th-century Romanticism—both a new emphasis on
the individual’s creativity (expressionism: ARTIST)
and a comparable freedom for the critic to be
subjective & “impressionistic” (AUDIENCE)
• 19th-century Realism—Stendhal's mimetic notion of
the novel as "a mirror carried along the road"
(UNIVERSE)
• Historical Time-Line (III)
• 1st half of the 20th century:
• —highlighted, above all, by a new emphasis on the
(form of the) WORK of art per se (New Criticism,
Russian Formalism, structuralism)
• —however, the late 19th- and early 20th centuries
also included lots of (old-fashioned) biographical
criticism (ARTIST) and (old-fashioned) historical
criticism (UNIVERSE: that is, how does this author's
work reflect the "world," the "reality," of his/her sociocultural milieu?)
• Historical Time-Line (IV)
• 1st half of the 20th century (continued):
• —but also a new Freudian psychoanalysis of the
ARTIST
• —and also the rise of Marxist theory (UNIVERSE)
and of reader-response theories (AUDIENCE)
• Historical Time-Line (V)
• 2nd half of the 20th century:
• —the climax of structuralism, and its contradictory
spawn, poststructuralism (both WORK, at last)
• —the climax of reader-response theories
(AUDIENCE)
• —the climax of Marxism, and the advent of other
politically/culturally based agendas, like feminism,
race studies, and postcolonial theory (UNIVERSE)
• 1st half of the 21st century: the ultimate victory of Reality
TV, 12-year-old MTV divas, and Kill Abdul: the Video
Game!?
Coda/Notes
• Abrams' "quaternity" has been derived from—
– Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory
and the Critical Tradition. London: Oxford UP, 1953.
• (see especially pages 6-7)
• All misreadings thereof are the complete and utter fault of
Thomas C. Gannon, U of Nebraska-Lincoln, Aug. 2004.