Notes on Article "Critical Approaches"
This is a good overview of the way literary criticism works, and the different approaches to it. It's also very well organized. The article is selective, instead of comprehensive, focusing on exemplary or typical theories and theoretical points, not on every kind of theory. I don't know who wrote it or where it comes from; it was a handout from my theory professor. Any quotes from the article are surely copyrighted by the author or publisher, whoever they are. Please don't treat them as public domain ideas. Many of the other comments here are paraphrases of the article, and I can take no credit for those ideas, either. The insights on the article--if any-- are mine, (c) 2002 Christopher J. O'Brien. Have a nice day.
I. Objectivism. The author describes certain stances as "objectivist" because they think of literature as "a fixed and freestanding object made up of words on a page. It is 'freestanding' in that it has no connection on the one hand with the author or his or her intention or life, . . ." nor with culture, etc. These critical theories treat a book as an "independent object, free from the subjectivity of author and reader."
A. Formalism--one kind of "objective" theory. Term: autotelic. This means that a work is complete in itself, written for its own sake, and unified by its form: that which makes it a work of art. "Content is less important than form. Literature involves a special kind of language that sets it apart from merely utilitarian writing; the formal strategies that organize and animate that language valorize literature and give it a special, almost religious character."
1. NEW CRITICISM. (the writer's example of a formalist theory) The New critics dominated literary criticism in the middle of the 20th century, and is still an important influence. "Their critical practice is to demonstrate formal unity by showing how every part of the work. . .contributes to a central unifying theme." In other words, they try to demonstrate that a work has organic unity. This seems a bit like a debater having to prove that a debate resolution has prima facie truth and justification. This kind of unity is contrasted with the (relatively scorned) mechanical unity, which is the "external, preconceived structure or rules that do not arise from the individuality of the work, but from the type or genre." The work that New Critics do is called "explication of the text." Also, I've heard professors calling this kind of work close reading. Much of this New Criticism is done on lyrical poetry, since it seems that this approach is especially effective for such poems. This seems to suggest that the inverse may also be true: it may be less successful at proving the "organic unity" of a novel, etc. Maybe this approach is not a universally useful tool for understanding all literature. This writer indicates that the Norton Introduction to Literature uses essentially this approach for its passages about "Understanding the Text." The writer also says that, to New Critics, literature is "referential" because it refers to something other than itself, such as a tree, or love. It's a little hard for me to grasp how literature, to New Critics, can be at once "referential" and also "autotelic." That is, I can't do it. I think that the "freestandingness" of literature and the "referentiality" of literature are to be taken at two different levels.
Somewhat tardily, the article's writer mentions that "for many formalists, literature is not referential. The words in a story, poem, or play no longer point outward to the things, people, or word they are supposed to denote, as they might do in ordinary, 'nonliterary' discouse, but point inward to each other and to the formal system they create." These formalists are still interested in interrelatedness, but are less concerned with "meaning."
B. Structuralism. This is another kind of "objectivism" (remember that "objectivism" appears to be a term coined by the article's writer). Structuralism also disengages the text from its author, reader, and culture, but emhasizes systematic analysis more than New Criticism does.