Literary Criticism
Meaning and Origin
Meaning
• It is a broad term which can really refer to any
discourse on the subject of literature.
• It is perhaps most widely used to refer to the
evaluative activity of literary critics or reviewers
who pass judgment on works of literature in
newspapers and magazines.
• It is this meaning of “literary criticism” which
predominates outside academic study, and is
one which is tied closely to its etymology.
Origin
• “Criticism” derives from the Greek word
”krinein” meaning “to judge”, and the idea
of evaluation has always been inherent in
the term.
• The noun “kritikos” meaning a “judge” of
literature has a very long history and was
in use as early as the 4th century B.C.
Literary Criticism
• The term “literary criticism”, however, tends to be
used rather differently within modern academic
circles and while its usage here retains an idea
of “judgment”, it is often judgment in the sense of
“analysis” rather than “evaluation”, e.g., a
descriptive work of literary history- perhaps an
account of how the genre of the novel emergedcould still be termed “criticism, even if it did not
seek to assess in any qualitative sense the
literary work under investigation.
Literary Criticism
• “Literary criticism”, in this sense, is another
way of saying “literary analysis’ and in this
sense, it of course remains a very wide
term encompassing an array of different
types of analysis.
• Criticism in this academic sense, can of
course involve qualitative evaluation, but it
is important to recognize that it need not
necessarily do so
• It is probably obvious, then, that the
academic use of criticism does not carry
the ideas of “negative assessment” or
“condemnation” which are associated with
the term in general discourse. Many nonacademics might assume that a book
called Wordsworth: A Critical Study was a
lengthy discussion of all that is wrong with
Wordsworth, but this is unlikely to be the
case.
Criticism and Theory
• “Literary theory” can also be seen as an aspect
of “literary criticism”, but there is a distinction
between these two terms- and not only as to
clarify the types of works we refer to as
“criticism” later. “Theory” an d criticism are
usually treated as separate categories in literary
degree courses.
• There are often separate courses on “Literary
Theory” and “The history of Criticism”
Criticism and Theory
• It is perhaps best to distinguish criticism from
theory by saying that they have different objects
of investigation. The object of investigation in
“literary criticism” is typically a particular literary
work or agroup of literary works.
• The object of investigation in “literary theory” can
vary, but to generalize we can say that it
involves the way in which we might think about a
literary work or group of literary works.
Criticism and Theory
• To use an analogy from industrial products
we might say that “Theory” is the tertiary
enterprise generating the tools used in the
business of criticism. The tools in this case
are conceptual- they are patterns of
thought that underlie the approach of
criticism
Criticism and Theory
• Although this distinction purifies the
categories any extended reading of works
of theory and criticism will show that there
are many overlaps between the two. A
theory can not emerge from a vacuum and
new directions can be sparked off through
critical analsis and will then be tested and
further explored through critical analysis.
• Primarily critical works may well involve
long passages of theoretical discussion
and refinement. Overlaps aside, as a
working definition of “literary criticism”, we
can say it refers to studies which aim to
analyze particular literary works or groups
of works.
• Note that is not to say that “literary
criticism” and “practical criticism” are the
same thing. Whereas “practical criticism”
refers to analysis based upon the close
reading of a text with minimal attention to
biographical, historical, or other “extrinsic’
details, concerning the text, ‘literary
criticism” is used in a broader sense and
can describe an array of approaches
which do draw on extrinsic information.
• Critics have been asking more or less the
same questions about works of literature
since the time of Plato and up till the
twentieth century:
• What is the nature of art?
• What is the function of art?
• What is the role of the artist?
• In the linguistic equation of the famous
literary theorist Roman Jacobson the act
of communication involves:
• sender______>message_____>receiver
• Literary criticism in such structural
approach studies the underlying code of
language
Different Approaches in Criticism
• The formal approach studies form or
structure without any consideration to
content (the intrinsic approach as opposed
to the extrinsic).
• The structural approach studies the under
lying code or rules of language.
• The ideological approach places the
literary work into its socio-political context.
Russian Formalism
• Formalist approach emerged from ithe meetings
and discussions of the Opajaz group in
Petersburg and the Moscow Linguistic Circle.
• In 1914 Viktor Shklovsky wrote “The
Resurrection of the Word”:the manifesto of the
school
• They were dissatisfied with the existing positivist
forms of literary studies.
• Shklovsky, Eichenbaum,Roman Jakobson
• It has a connection with a variety of more
\recent theoretical movements
• Parisian Structuralism establishment of a
poetics distinct from other disciplines
• RF represents the earliest systematic
attempts to put literary studies on an
independent footing and to make the study
of literature an autonomous and specific
discipline
A rejection of 19th century genetic
approach
• Formalist theory rigorously excludes the non –
literary: Life and art are two mutual opposites.
• A rejection of 19th century genetic approach:
biography ,history, philosophy ,sociology ,
ethnography made the specificity of literature
swamped by adjacent disciplines
• A justification of the independent existence
of literary studies (not the how but what the
subject matter of literature really is).
Exclusion of the mimetic and
expressive definitions of literature.
• Exclusion of the mimetic and expressive
definitions of literature.
• Literature seen as an expression of
personality of the author leads to
biography
• Poetry as ”thinking in images” leads to
epistemology and psychology
• The solution for the problem of definition of
literature is a differential, oppositional one.
Defamiliarization
The set of differences were found in the
concept of defamiliarization or making
strange.
Art defamiliarizes things that have become
habitual or automatic
Walking is automatically performed and
perceived
A dance is awalk constructed to be felt
The Differential Principle
• Everyday language is made strange in poetry
• Poetic language differs from practical language
not because of strange vocabulary , but because
its formal devices ,e.g., rhyme and rhythm act on
ordinary words to renew our perception of them
and of their sound texture in particular
• The question of defamiliarization becomes
focused on the issue of language
• Later it is extended to cover non-linguistic issues
modeled on its original linguistic formulation
literature as "organized violence
committed on ordinary speech
• Roman Jakobson described literature as
"organized violence committed on ordinary
speech." Literature constitutes a deviation
from average speech that intensifies,
invigorates, and estranges the mundane
speech patterns. In other words, for the
Formalists, literature is set apart because
it is just that: set apart.
literature as "organized violence
committed on ordinary speech
• The use of devices such as imagery, rhythm,
and meter is what separates "Ladies and
gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is
what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple,
noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this
tangle of thorns (Nabokov Lolita 9)", from "the
assignment for next week is on page eighty
four."
• Literature by forcing us into a dramatic
awareness of language, refreshes these habitual
responses and renders objects more perceptible
The Business of Literary Studies
• The business of literary studies is to
analysze the differences implied in the
opposition between practical and poetic
language, relying on the concept of
defamiliarization to bring those differences
into focus.
• Literary studies would not operate on the
inherent qualities of literature (there are
inherently poetic themes)
Literariness as the object of
Literary Studies
• Therefore, it is the quality of literariness that
gives a scientific status to the study of literature
,and is the object of literary studies. (jakobson)
• Literariness made RF scientific and systematic
• As Tynianov puts it :”It is vital for us to turn our
back on academic eclecticism …and on the
tendency to turn the study of literature and
language from a systematic science back once
more into a miscellany of episodic and anecdotal
essays”.
literariness and form
• The synonym of literariness and form is a
feature of the first phase of RF
• “Art as technique” and the ‘device as sole hero”
are principles which the development of the
opposition between automatization and
defamiliarization altered
• The Habitual/made strange opposition became
located into literature and not between literature
and non-literature
Art as Technique
• In “Art as Technique” : form and order can
themselves become powerful automatizing
factors,e.g., literariness of poetic rhythm
will derive from poetic rhythm.
• If disordered rhythm becomes a
convention, it would be ineffective as a
device because it will lose the function of
defamiliarization.
Modernism
Modernism
• A revolutionary movement in all creative
arts began at the end of the 19th century
as a result of the traumatic effect of World
War I on Europeans
• Modernism in art is characterized by
disorder, fragmentation, patterns of
allusion, symbol, and myth
• Examples: Futurism and Formalism
FUTURISM
• In the 1920's and 1930's the term Futurism was loosely
used to describe a wide variety of aggressively modern
styles in art and literature
• Futurism was the first deliberately organized, selfconscious art movement of the twentieth century. It
quickly spread to France, Germany, Russia and the
Americas, appealing to all who had tired of romanticism,
decadence and sentimentality, desirious of something
more vigorous and robust, something in keeping with the
Machine Age.
• Speed, noise, machines, transportation, communication,
information...and all the transient impressions of life in
the modern city intoxicated Marinetti and his followers.
They despised tame, bourgeois virtues and tastes, and
above everything else, loathed the cult of the past.
Avante-garde
• Avante-garde (French pronunciation: [avɑ̃ɡard]) means
"advance guard" or "vanguard".The adjective form is
used in English, to refer to people or works that are
experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to
art, culture, and politics.
• Avant-garde represents a pushing of the boundaries of
what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily
in the cultural realm. The notion of the existence of the
avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of
modernism, as distinct from postmodernism.
Excerpt from Marinetti's free
verse poem To a Racing Car[13]
• Vehement god from a race of steel,
Automobile drunk with space,
Trampling with anguish, bit between your strident teeth!
O formidable Japanese monster with forge,
Nourished with flame and mineral oils,
Hungry for horizons and sidereal prey,
I unleash your heart to the diabolical vroom-vroom
And your giant radials, for the dance
You lead on the white roads of the world.
Lastly I loosen your metal reins and you soar,
Drunkenly, into freedom-giving Infinity!...
New Criticism
• When in the 1920’s the New Criticism first
emerged in public it was limited to a small
group of professors and students at
Vanderbilt University (Nashville,
Tennessee). In only two decades its
principles, values and proceedings were to
become so pervasive and so much
embedded in the study of literature, that
they were almost equated with the very
nature and essence of the critical art.
• The term New Criticism became
established as the name of the School
after John Crowe Ransom, one of its
founders, published a collection of essays
bearing that title, in 1941. In one of them,
“Wanted: An Ontological Critic”, he
announced that it was time to identify a
powerful intellectual movement which
deserved to be called “a new criticism”.
• The intention implicit in this name is
obviously polemical: indeed the New
Critics felt it was time to do away with the
traditional approaches, which laid
emphasis only on the historical, social,
biographical or psychological contexts, on
the moral or philosophical implications, or
still on the textual-linguistic specific
factors.
• In other words the traditional critics took
into account extra-textual considerations
and/or separated the form of the art object
from its meaning, refusing to regard the
work as an integrated art-form.
• Some of these concerns are similar to
those of the Russian formalists, but
between the two critical schools there are
also important differences.
• The New Critics’ activity, their formalism
never severed all connections with what is
outside the form of the literary text.
• The New Critics were first the members of an
informal group of literary discussion, around the
poet-scholar J. C. Ransom and his students
Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth
Brooks.
• Ransom was editing The Fugitive, a poetry
magazine which published mostly traditionallypatterned verse, and championed a
conservative ideology, later on to be defined as
Southern Agrarianism.
• In the 1930s other critics associated with
them (such as T. S. Eliot,I. A. Richards, W.
Empson,R. P. Blackmur, and R. Wellek,
while the New Critical principles spread in
most universities, in literary circles and
journals.
• By 1955 the current had completely lost
its innovative image and was regarded by
many as a dying trend.
• The moderately revolutionary spirit of the
New Criticism is not a pure product of the
formalist 20th century. Some of its roots lie
in the aesthetics of Kant and Coleridge,
which was based on a theory of
imagination emphasizing the concepts of
harmony and poetic wholeness.
• Besides, in his Critique of Judgment, Kant insisted that
aesthetic pleasure is purely disinterested: as a “free
approval”, it is indifferent to the real existence of the
contemplated thing. The New Critics are also indebted to
the paradoxical Kantian notion of “purposeless finality”:
in the same treatise the German philosopher maintained
that those things which we like and consider beautiful
seem to have been meant for the satisfaction of our
needs and desires, although there is no rational
evidence that there has been a purposeful intelligence to
have produced them.
The organic principle
• In his Biographia Literaria, the English Romantic poet
Samuel T. Coleridge propounded the organic principle as
the constitutive definition of the poem: the whole is in
every part, and every part can be found in the whole.
The poem is that species of composition characterized,
unlike works of science, by the immediate purpose of
pleasure, and also by special metric and phonetic
arrangements; it produces delight as a whole and this
delight is compatible with the distinct gratification
generated by each component part, which harmonizes
with the other elements.
Coleridge’s concept of Organicism
• T. S. Hulme, a 20th century English thinker,
elucidated Coleridge’s concept quite graphically
in his Speculations: Essays on Humanism and
the Philosophy of Art: unlike mechanical
complexity, vital or organic is that kind of
complexity “in which the parts cannot be said to
be elements as each one is modified by the
other’s presence, and each one to a certain
extent is the whole. The leg of a chair by itself is
still a leg. My leg by itself wouldn’t be.”[
• Actually the idea of organicism had been
first highlighted in Aristotle’s Poetics, but
the Stagirite had focused on plot, which
acquired with him an almost immaterial,
transcendental quality, and not on poetic
language, not on figures and style.
Primary Imagination
• In Coleridge’s view, expounded in Biographia
Literaria, a great poem is the product of both the
primary imagination (a superior intuitive power,
similar to the Kantian Vernunft, which conceives
of the oneness of universals, like truth or beauty,
and characterizes the creative poetic genius),
and of the secondary imagination (the faculty,
similar to the Kantian Verstand, possessed by
every human being who intuitively realizes the
oneness of an object or concept).
Secondary Imagination
• The secondary imagination “dissolves,
disperses, scatters, in order to re-create”
[4] the material of the primary imagination;
it represents creation as against vision.
Contextualism
• Another important principle which the New
Critics borrowed from Coleridge’s poetic is
contextualism. The English poet viewed
the poem as a product of the form-creating
man; it had an independent existence,
within the organic system of mutual
relationships among the terms that made
up the context of the poem. Thus the
poem was regarded outside any and all
non-poetic contexts.
I. A. Richards
• If the New Critics overlooked the psychological
component in the critical doctrine of the English
critic I. A. Richards, they took over in various
forms his distinction between the symbolic and
the emotive language, as well as that one
between statements (conveyed by science), and
pseudo-statements (conveyed by poetry, which
impresses not through the “truth” it contains, but
through its structural coherence).
Metaphor and Irony
• Richards’s emphasis on metaphor as a
constitutive element of language, and on the
determining role of irony and tension in poetry
was also extremely influential with the New
Criticism. High poetry is characterized,
according to him, by a balanced poise - an
equilibrium of opposite factors always in a state
of tension; irony, for instance, brings them into
the poem as contending, complementary
impulses.
Impersonal Theory of Poetry
• Likewise T. S. Eliot’s “impersonal theory of
poetry’, as he himself called it in “Tradition and
the Individual Talent”,had an important impact on
the New Critical thought. In the writing of poetry,
Eliot contends, there is a great deal which must
be conscious and deliberate. “Poetry is not a
turning loose of emotion, but an escape from
emotion; it is not the expression of personality,
but an escape from personality.”
The Objective Correlative
• However, there is one way of expressing emotion in the
form of art: it is by finding an “objective correlative”, that
is, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which
will become the formula of that particular emotion. So,
when the “external facts, which must terminate in
sensory experience” are presented in the work of art, the
emotion is “immediately evoked” (145). The well-known
New Critical concept of “fallacy”, referring to the
traditional critics’ erroneous emphasis on what is
creation and interpretation and not on the text as such,
owes a great deal to Eliot’s views above.
Conservative Ideology.
• Eliot’s“Tory” social and religious views, his
emphasis on the decadent condition of the
current Western world, and his preaching
a return to myth, to a “unified sensibility”
and wholeness of being, made his doctrine
largely converge with the Southern
Agrarians’ conservative ideology.