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MODULE 1 INTRODUCING LITERATURE:

DEFINITIONS AND FORMS

CONTENTS

1. Introduction
2. Objectives
3. Main Content
3.1 Literature: An Introduction
3.2 Definition of Literature
3.3 Forms of Literature
4. Conclusion
5. Summary

1. INTRODUCTION

In this unit you will be introduced to the world of literature. What

you are going to learn in the early part of this course may not be entirely
new. There is, therefore, a need to bring your previous knowledge to bear on
the new knowledge that you acquire in the previous course. In this unit, you
will learn about the definitions of literature and different literary forms.
Literature is a study that concerns a whole range of human life and
activities. Thus, literature concerns you and me.

2. OBJECTIVES

By the end of this unit, you should be able to:

 Define literature
 Evaluate the different definitions of literature
 Give different forms of literature.
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3. MAIN CONTENT
3.1 Literature: An Introduction
If there is such a thing as literary theory, then it would seem obvious
that there is something called literature which it is the theory of. We can
begin, then, by raising the question: what is literature?
There have been various attempts to define literature. You can define
it, for example, as 'imaginative' writing in the sense of fiction - writing
which is not literally true. But even the briefest reflection on what people
commonly include under the heading of literature suggests that this will not
do. Seventeenth-century English literature includes Shakespeare, Webster,
Marvell and Milton; but it also stretches to the essays of Francis Bacon, the
5sermons of John Donne, Bunyan's spiritual autobiography and whatever it
was that Sir Thomas Browne wrote.
A distinction between 'fact' and 'fiction', then, seems unlikely to get
us very far, not least because the distinction itself is often a questionable
one. It has been argued, for instance, that out own opposition between
'historical' and 'artistic' truth does not apply at all to the early Icelandic
sagas. In the English late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the word
'novel' seems to have been used about both true and fictional events, and
even news reports were hardly to be considered factual. Novels and news
reports were neither clearly factual nor clearly fictional: our own sharp
discriminations between these categories simply did not apply. Gibbon no
doubt thought that he was writing the historical truth, and so perhaps did the
authors of Genesis, but they are now read as 'fact' by some and 'fiction' by
others; Newman certainly thought his theological meditations were true but
they are now for many readers 'literature'. Moreover, if 'literature' includes
much 'factual' writing, it also excludes quite a lot of fiction. Superman
comic and Mills and Boon novels are fictional but not generally regarded as
literature, and certainly not as Literature. If literature is 'creative' or
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'imaginative' writing, does this imply that history, philosophy and natural
science are uncreative and unimaginative?
Perhaps one needs a different kind of approach altogether. Perhaps
literatures definable are not according to whether it is fictional or
'imaginative', but because it uses language in peculiar ways. On this theory,
literature is a kind of writing which, in the words of the Russian critic
Roman Jakobson, represents an 'organized violence committed on ordinary
speech'. Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates
systematically from everyday speech. If someone approaches you at a bus
stop and murmur 'Thou still unrevised bride of quietness,' then you are
instantly aware that you are in the presence of the literary. You may know
this because the texture, rhythm and resonance of his words are in excess of
their abstract able meaning - or, as the linguists might more technically put
it, there is a disproportion between the signifiers and the signified. His
language draws attention to itself, flaunts its material being, as statements
like 'Don't you know the drivers are on strike?' do not.
The Formalists started out by seeing the literary work as a more or
less arbitrary assemblage of 'devices', and only later came to see these
devices as interrelated elements or 'functions' within a total textual system.
'Devices' included sound, imagery, rhythm, syntax, metre, rhyme, narrative
techniques, in fact the whole stock of formal literary elements; and what all
of these elements had in common was their 'estranging' or 'defamiliarizing'
effect. What was specific to literary language, what distinguished it from
other forms of discourse, was that it 'deformed' ordinary language in various
ways. Under the pressure of literary devices, ordinary language was
intensified, condensed, twisted, telescoped, drawn out, and turned on its
head. It was language 'made strange'; and because of this estrangement, the
everyday world was also suddenly made unfamiliar. In the routines of
everyday speech, our perceptions of and responses to reality become stale,
blunted, or, as the Formalists would say, 'automatized'. Literature, by
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forcing us into a dramatic awareness of language, refreshes these habitual

responses and renders objects more 'perceptible'. By having to grapple with
language in a more strenuous, self-conscious way than usual, the world
which that language contains is vividly renewed. The poetry of Gerard
Manley Hopkins might provide a particularly graphic example of this.
Literary discourse estranges or alienates ordinary speech, but in doing so,
paradoxically, brings us into a fuller, more intimate possession of
experience. Most of the time we breathe in air without being conscious of it:
like language, it is the very medium in which we move. But if the air is
suddenly thickened or infected we are forced to attend to our breathing with
new vigilance, and the effect of this may be a heightened experience of our
bodily life. We read a scribbled note from a friend without paying much
attention to its narrative structure; but if a story breaks off and begins again,
switches constantly from one narrative level to another and delays its climax
to keep us in become freshly conscious of how it is constructed at the same
time as our engagement with it may be intensified. The Formalists, then,
saw literary language as a set of deviations from a norm, a kind of linguistic
violence: literature is a 'special' kind of language, in contrast to the 'ordinary'
language we commonly use. But to spot a deviation implies being able to
identify the norm from which it swerves.
It is true that many of the works studied as literature in academic
institutions were 'constructed' to be read as literature, but it is also true that
many of them were not. A piece of writing may start off life as history or
philosophy and then come to be ranked as literature; or it may start off as
literature and then come to be valued for its archaeological significance.
Some texts are born literary, some achieve literariness, and some have
literariness thrust upon them. Breeding in this respect may count for a good
deal more than birth. What matters may not be literature then it seems that
you are, irrespective of what you thought you were.
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In this sense, one can think of literature less as some inherent quality
or set of qualities displayed by certain kinds of writing all the way from
Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, than as a number of ways in which people relate
themselves to writing. It would not be easy to isolate, from all that has been
variously called 'literature', some constant set of inherent features. In fact it
would be as impossible as trying to identify the single distinguishing feature
which all games have in common. There is no 'essence' of literature
whatsoever. Any bit of writing may be read 'non-pragmatically', if that is
what reading a text as literature means, just as any writing may be read
'poetically'.
John M. Ellis has argued that the term 'literature' operates rather like
the word 'weed': weeds are not particular kinds of plant, but just any kind of
plant which for some reason or another a gardener does not what around.
Perhaps 'literature' means something like the opposite: any kind of writing
which for some reason or another somebody values highly. As the
philosophers might say, 'literature' and 'weed' are functional rather than
ontological terms: they tell us about what we do, not about the fixed being
of things. They tell us about the role of a text or a thistle in a social context,
its relations with and differences from its surroundings, the ways it behaves,
the purposes it may be put to and the human practices clustered around it.
'Literature' is in this sense a purely formal, empty sort of definition.
The fact that we always interpret literary works to some extent in the
light of our own concerns — indeed that in one sense of 'our own concerns'
we are incapable of doing anything else - might be one reason why certain
works of literature seem to retain their value across the centuries. All
literary works, in other words, are 'rewritten', if only unconsciously, by the
societies which read them; indeed there is no reading of a work which is not
also a 're-writing'. No work, and no current evaluation of it, can simply be
extended to new groups of people without being changed, perhaps almost
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unrecognizably, in the process; and this is one reason why what counts as
literature is a notably unstable affair.
In his famous study Practical Criticism (1929), the Cambridge critic
I. A. Richards sought to demonstrate just how whimsical and subjective
literary value-judgements could actually be by giving his undergraduates a
set of poems, withholding from them the titles and authors' names, and
asking them to evaluate them. The resulting judgements, notoriously, were
highly variable: time-honoured poets were marked down and obscure
authors celebrated. However, much the most interesting aspect of this
project, and one apparently quite invisible to Richards himself, is just how
tight a consensus of unconscious valuations underlies these particular
differences of opinion. Reading Richards' undergraduates' accounts of
literary works, one is struck by the habits of perception and interpretation
which they spontaneously share - what they expect literature to be, what
assumptions they bring to a poem and what fulfilments they anticipate they
will derive from it.
If it will not do to see literature as an 'objective', descriptive
category, neither will it do to say that literature is just what people
whimsically choose to call literature. For there is nothing at all whimsical
about such kinds of value-judgement: they have their roots in deeper
structures of belief which are as apparently unshakeable as the Empire State
building. What we have uncovered so far, then, is not only that literature
does not exist in the sense that insects do, and that the value-judgements by
which it is constituted are historically variable, but that these value-
judgements themselves have a close relation to social ideologies. They refer
in the end not simply to private taste, but to the assumptions by which
certain social groups exercise and maintain power over others. If this seems
a far-fetched assertion, a matter of private prejudice, we may test it out by
an account of the rise of 'literature' in England.
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3.2 Definitions of Literature

It should be made clear from the onset that there is no real consensus
or one all embracing definition of the term literature. One should also know
that some of the definitions of literature given by scholars are largely
according to their wealth of life experience within their locations. Before
going further, let us consider literature both on its broad and narrow planes.
Gyasi (1973) defines it in its broad sense as "anything that is written", while
Rees (1973) sees it in the narrow sense of "writing which expresses and
communicates thought, feelings and attitudes towards life".
The broad definition of literature appears to be vague and amorphous
in that it includes works that are not literature per se, like works in fields of
Education, Biology, History and a host of others, because they are written.
However, they cannot qualify as real literature. The narrow definition
delineates literature from its general purview to what can be called literature
as a subject of study.
For one who really knows what literature is, some more definitions
will have to be given to you. This will be followed by the evaluation of each
of the definitions to see which one can be said or taken to be most
appropriate in discussing literature.
Moody (1987) writes that literature springs from our in born love of
telling a story, of arranging words in pleasing patterns, of expressing in
words some special aspects of our human experience.
Boulton (1980) defines literature from a functional perspective as the
imaginative work that gives us R’s: recreation, recognition, revelation and
redemption.
Rees (1973), after describing what he regarded as literature, summed
up that literature is a permanent expression in words of some thoughts or
feelings in ideas about life and the world.
All the above definitions describe literature from different
perspectives. Still, there are certain things that are common to them. They
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all recognize the fact that: (1) Literature is imaginative, (2) Literature
expresses thoughts and feelings, (3) Literature deals with life experiences,
(4) Literature uses words in a powerful, effective and yet captivating
manner, and (5) Literature promotes recreation and revelation of hidden
facts.
Literature is thus summed up as permanent expressions in words
(written or spoken), specially arranged in pleasing accepted patterns or
forms. Literature expresses thoughts, feelings, ideas or other special aspects
of human experiences.

3.3 Forms of Literature

Forms are taken to mean the mode in which literature is expressed.
Usually, it is in either the spoken or written form. The spoken form predated
the written one. The spoken form is common to many in the Third World or
developing countries of Africa that are not literate. This is the form of
literature that is called Orature. It is orally rendered and transmitted from
generation to generation. Examples are the oral literature from your locality.
The written form of literature is that which has been reduced to
writing. It is common among literate cultures. It is no wondered therefore
that when the British Colonialists came to Africa, they did not recognize our
literature, which was mostly in the oral form.

4. CONCLUSION
The attempt in this first unit is to introduce you to the world of
literature. It is also to start to kindle your interest in reading and studying the
work of art. There is no better way words are used in a special and yet
powerful manner than in literature. Anyone who neglects literature neglects
the greatest part of life. Literature will invigorate the life in you.
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5. SUMMARY
In this unit you have learnt:
 what literature is;
 how to evaluate different definitions of literature,
 how to study literature, and
 the major forms or parts of literature.
This unit is intended to be purely introductory. It prepares you for
the serious literary analyses that will be done in subsequent units.
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MODULE 2 LITERARY THEORIES & LITERARY

CRITICISM

CONTENTS

1. Introduction
2. Objectives
3. Main Content
3.1 Definition of Literary Theory
3.2 Definition of Literary Criticism
4. Conclusion
5. Summary

1. INTRODUCTION

In this unit you will be introduced to the literary theories and

criticism. What you are going to learn in the early part of this course may
deal with defining of what is literary theory and literary criticism. Some of
the basic form of theories of literary and criticism will be presented in order
to create a basic understanding about the two concepts, knowing the
different of both concepts, and understanding some approaches found in
literary theory and literary criticism.

2. OBJECTIVES

By the end of this unit, you should be able to:

 define literary theories
 define literary criticism
 understand some forms of both theories
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3. MAIN CONTENT
3.1 Definition of Literary Theory

While literary criticism since the late 19th century has often made
use of different “theories” drawn from the social and natural sciences,
philosophy, and other scholarly fields, strictly defined “schools” of literary
theory began to appear throughout European and North American
intellectual circles, colleges, and universities in the middle part of the 20th
century. The rise of literary theory during this time—and its continued
popularity in European and American universities’ literature and humanities
departments—is owed to a number of social and cultural factors. In
particular, these factors include the development of post-structural
philosophy in American and European colleges and universities; the
popularity of psychoanalysis, Marxism, and other social and cultural
theories throughout the intellectual world; and the multi- and cross-
disciplinary academic ideology that began to pervade colleges and
universities during the last half of the 20th century.
“Literary theory” refers to a particular form of literary criticism in
which particular academic, scientific, or philosophical approaches are
followed in a systematic fashion while analysing literary texts. For
example, a psychoanalytic theorist might examine and interpret a literary
text strictly through the theoretical lens of psychoanalysis and psychology
and, in turn, offer an interpretation or reading of a text that focuses entirely
on the psychological dimensions of it. Traditional literary criticism tends
not to focus on a particular aspect of (or approach to) a literary text in quite
the same manner that literary theory usually does. Literary theory proposes
particular, systematic approaches to literary texts that impose a particular
line of intellectual reasoning to it. For example, a psychoanalytic literary
theorist might take the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud or Carl
Jung and seek to reach a critical understanding of a novel such as Ernest
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Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. A literary theorist applying,

perhaps, Sigmund Freud’s notions of trauma to Hemingway’s novel might
explore the protagonist’s psychology, using Freud’s theoretical “tools,” and
argue that the protagonist suffers from what Freud termed “shell shock” and
that the novel, then, can reasonably be argued to be a commentary upon the
effects of war on the psychology of individuals. Literary theorists often
adapt systems of knowledge developed largely outside the realm of literary
studies and impose them upon literary texts for the purpose of discovering
or developing new and unique understandings of those texts that a
traditional literary critic might not be intellectually equipped to recognize.
With that said some literary critics and theorists deny that there is a
distinct difference between literary criticism and literary theory and argue
that literary theory is simply a more advanced form of literary criticism.
Other critics argue that literary theory itself is far more systematic,
developed and scholarly than literary criticism, and hence of a far greater
intellectual and critical value than traditional literary criticism per se.
Rarely do different groups of literary theorists agree exactly as to how to
define what literary theory is and how it is similar to or different from
traditional literary criticism.
Today, literary theory is practiced by a vast majority of college
literature professors, research scholars, and students throughout English,
literature, and humanities departments in North America and Europe. While
some literary scholars debate the ultimate value of literary theory as a
method of interpretation (and some critics, in fact, object to the practicality
of literary theory entirely), it is nevertheless vital for students of literature to
understand the core principles of literary theory and be able to use those
same principles to interpret literary texts. Most students studying literature
at the college level are, to some degree or another, trained not simply to be
critics of literature but, moreover, to function as theorists of literature with
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the ability to offer interpretations of literary texts through several different

theoretical perspectives.
The study of literary theory is challenging, especially for students
who are relatively new to the field. It takes time, patience, and practice for
students to get used to the unique and sometimes highly specialized
language that literary theorists tend to use in their writings as well as the
often complicated and detailed arguments they make. As you are exposed
to literary theory, take the time to carefully consider the argument being
made, to re-read when you find yourself confused by a statement, and to
look up and acquaint yourself with any language or terminology you are
exposed to and not familiar with (the glossary of terms provided in this
course will prove helpful for that). Literary theory can be quite challenging
to master but such nevertheless can allow for incredibly insights into literary
texts that would otherwise be unreachable without making use of the
interpretive apparatus of literary theory.

3.2 Definition of Literary Criticism

Strictly defined, “literary criticism” refers to the act of interpreting
and studying literature. A literary critic is not someone who merely
evaluates the worth or quality of a piece of literature but, rather, is someone
who argues on behalf of an interpretation or understanding of the particular
meaning(s) of literary texts. The task of a literary critic is to explain and
attempt to reach a critical understanding of what literary texts mean in terms
of their aesthetic, as well as social, political, and cultural statements and
suggestions. A literary critic does more than simply discuss or evaluate the
importance of a literary text; rather, a literary critic seeks to reach a logical
and reasonable understanding of not only what a text’s author intends for it
to mean but, also, what different cultures and ideologies render it capable of
meaning. Criticism, or more specifically literary criticism, is the
overall term for studies concerned with defining, classifying, analysing,
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interpreting, and evaluating works of literature. Theoretical criticism

proposes an explicit theory of literature, in the sense of general principles,
together with a set of terms, distinctions, and categories, to be applied to
identifying and analysing works of literature, as well as the criteria (the
standards, or norms) by which these works and their writers are to be
evaluated. The earliest, and enduringly important, treatise of theoretical
criticism was Aristotle's Poetics (fourth century B.C.). Among the most
influential theoretical critics in the following centuries were Longinus in
Greece; Horace in Rome; Boileau and Sainte-Beuve in France; Baumgarten
and Goethe in Germany; Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold
in England; and Poe and Emerson in America. Landmarks of theoretical
criticism in the first half of the twentieth century are I. A. Richards,
Principles of Literary Criticism (1924); Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of
Literary Form (1941, rev. 1957); Eric Auerbach, Mimesis (1946); R. S.
Crane, ed., Critics and Criticism (1952); and Northrop Frye, Anatomy of
Criticism (1957).
4. CONCLUSION

Literary theory refers to a particular form of literary criticism in

which particular academic, scientific, or philosophical approaches are
followed in a systematic fashion while analysing literary texts, while
literary criticism is the overall term for studies concerned with defining,
classifying, analysing, interpreting, and evaluating works of literature.

5. SUMMARY
In this unit you have learnt:
 what literary theory is;
 how to evaluate different definitions of literary theory,
 what is literary criticism
 how to relate literary theory with literary criticism
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MODULE 3 APPROACHES ON LITERARY

CRITICISM

CONTENTS

1. Introduction
2. Objectives
3. Main Content
3.1 Formalist Criticism
3.2 Biographical Criticism
3.3 Historical Criticism
3.4 Gender Criticism
3.5 Psychological Criticism
3.6 Sociological Criticism
3.7 Mythological Criticism
3.8 Reader-Response Criticism
3.9 Deconstructionist Criticism
4. Conclusion
5. Summary

1. INTRODUCTION

By this unit, you will be introduced with some approaches to the

literature, since some critics have found it useful to work in the abstract area
of literary theory.Literary critics have borrowed concepts from other
disciplines, like linguistics, psychology, and anthropology, to analyze
imagi-native literature more perceptively. It tries to help us better
understand a literary work.

2. OBJECTIVES

By the end of this unit, you should be able to:

 define approaches in literary criticism
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 understand the difference point of view of every approaches of literary

criticism

3. Main Content

Literary criticism is not an abstract, intellectual exercise; it is a

natural human response to literature. If a friend informs you she is reading a
book you have just finished, it would be odd indeed if you did not begin
swapping opinions. Literary criticism is nothing more than discourse—
spoken or written—about literature. A student who sits quietly in a morning
English class, intimidated by the notion of literary criticism, will spend an
hour that evening talking animatedly about the meaning of R.E.M. lyrics or
comparing the relative merits of the three Star Trek T.V. series. It is
inevitable that people will ponder, discuss, and analyse the works of art that
interest them.

The informal criticism of friends talking about literature tends to be

casual, unorganized, and subjective. Since Aristotle, however, philosophers,
scholars, and writers have tried to create more precise and disciplined ways
of discussing literature. Literary critics have borrowed concepts from other
disciplines, like linguistics, psychology, and anthropology, to analyse
imagi-native literature more perceptively. Some critics have found it useful
to work in the abstract area of literary theory, criticism that tries to
formulate general principles rather than discuss specific texts. Mass media
critics, such as newspaper reviewers, usually spend their time evaluating
works—telling us which books are worth reading, which plays not to bother
seeing. But most serious literary criticism is not primarily evaluative; it
assumes we know that Othello or “The Death of Ivan Ilych” is worth
reading. Instead, it is analytical; it tries to help us better understand a literary
work.
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In the following, you will find overviews of nine critical approaches

to literature. While these nine methods do not exhaust the total possibilities
of literary criticism, they represent the most widely used contemporary
approaches. Although presented separately, the approaches are not
necessarily mutually exclusive; many critics mix methods to suit their needs
and interests. A historical critic may use formalist techniques to analyse a
poem; a biographical critic will frequently use psychological theories to
analyse an author. The summaries do not try to provide a history of each
approach; nor do they try to present the latest trends in each school. Their
purpose is to give you a practical introduction to each critical method and
then provide one or more representative examples of criticism.

The following pages will described the nine common critical

approaches to the literature quated from X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia’s
Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, Sixth Edition
(New York: Harper Collins, 1995),

3.1 Formalist Criticism

Formalist criticism regards literature as a unique form of human

knowledge that needs to be examined on its own terms. “The natural and
sensible starting point for work in literary scholarship,” René Wellek and
Austin Warren wrote in their influential Theory of Literature, “is the
interpretation and analysis of the works of literature themselves.” 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 analyse 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; Humor in Dickens’
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writing, simplicity in Sherwood Anderson or in Hemingway, etc., structure

(sentence structure: short, long, simple, complicated, loose sentence;
repetition, parallelism, climax anti-, climax; oxymoron; normal or deviation,
imagery, symbols, figure of speech, tone, and genre (poem: implied
meaning.). 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
experience of the work.
When Robert Langbaum examines Robert Browning’s “My Last
Duchess”, he uses several techniques of formalist criticism. First, he places
the poem in relation to its literary form, the dramatic monologue Second, he
discusses the dramatic structure of the poem—why the duke tells his story,
whom he addresses, and the physical circumstances in which he speaks.
Third, Langbaum analyzes how the duke tells his story—his tone, manner,
even the order in which he makes his disclosures. Langbaum does not
introduce facts about Browning’s life into his analysis; nor does he try to
relate the poem to the historical period or social conditions that produced it.
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He focuses on the text itself to explain how it produces a complex effect on

the reader.
But the formalist critic is concerned primarily with the work itself.
From and content can’t be separated....eg. Color Imagery in Tess; The Use
of Figure of Contrast in "The Solitary Reaper"; The Major Writing Skills
Washington Irving Used in His The Legend of Sleepy Hollow; Verbal Irony
and an Irony of Fate in The Cop and the Anthem.
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.

3.2 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
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shapes—both directly and indirectly—what he or she creates. Reading

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
 21

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.
Eg. Isolation of Emily Dickinson as Revealed in Her Poems; Walt
Whitman: A Lover of Death;
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; A Biographical Study of
David Copperfield

3.3 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
 22

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 labourer who, fortunately, no longer
exists in our society.
Reading ancient literature, no one doubts the value of historical
criti-cism. There have been so many social, cultural, and linguistic changes
that some older texts are incomprehensible without scholarly assistance. But
historical criticism can even help us better understand modern texts. To
return to Weldon Kees’s “For My Daughter,” for example, we learn a great
deal by considering two rudimentary historical facts—the year in which the
poem was first published (1940) and the nationality of its author
(American)—and then asking ourselves how this information has shaped the
meaning of the poem. In 1940, war had already broken out in Europe and
most Americans realized that their country, still recovering from the
Depres-sion, would soon be drawn into it; for a young man, like Kees, the
future seemed bleak, uncertain, and personally dangerous. Even this simple
historical analysis helps explain at least part of the bitter pessimism of
Kees’s poem, though a psychological critic would rightly insist that Kees’s
dark personality also played a crucial role. In writing a paper on a poem,
you might explore how the time and place of its creation affected its
meaning. For a splendid example of how to recreate the historical context of
a poem’s genesis, read the following account by Hugh Kenner of Ezra
Pound’s imagistic “In a Station of the Metro.”

3.4 Gender Criticism

 23

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 uncon-sciously—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.
Eg. While a formalist critic emphasized the universality of Emily
Dickinson’s poetry by demonstrating how powerfully the language,
imagery, and myth-making of her poems combine to affect a generalized
reader, Sandra M. Gilbert, a leading feminist critic, has identified attitudes
and assumptions in Dickinson’s poetry that she believes are essentially
female.
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 signifi-cance of its sexual
codes. It is a historically grounded inquiry which probes the ideological
assumptions of literary phenomena. Its subjects include the images and
 24

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. Recently,
gender criticism has expanded beyond its original feminist perspective.
Critics have explored the impact of different sexual orientations on literary
creation and reception. A men’s movement has also emerged in response to
feminism. The men’s movement does not seek to reject feminism but to
rediscover masculine identity in an authentic, contemporary way. Led by
poet Robert Bly, the men s movement has paid special attention to
interpreting poetry and fables as myths of psychic growth and sexual
identity.
Eg. Female Characters in Lawrence’s Literary Works;
Character Analysis of Scarlett in Gone with the Wind;
Gender Influence in the Growth of Stephen

3.5 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 behaviour 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
 25

develop-ment 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 analysing 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 behaviour.
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
behaviour into the study of how fictional people act.
E.g.: Sigmund Freud (1856—1939)
THE DESTINY OF OEDIPUS
 26

Translated by James Strachey. The lines from Oedipus the King are
given in the version of David Qrene.

If Oedipus the King moves a modern audience no less than it did the
contemporary Greek one, the explanation can only be that its effect does not
lie in the contrast between destiny and human will, but is to be looked for in
the particular nature of the material on which that contrast is exemplified.
There must be something which makes a voice within us ready to recognize
the compelling force of destiny in the Oedipus, while we can dismiss as
merely arbitrary such dispositions as are laid down in Die Ahnfrau or other
modern tragedies of destiny. And a factor of this kind is in fact involved in
the story of King Oedipus. His destiny moves us only because it might have
been ours—because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth
as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual
impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous
wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that that is so. King
Oedipus, who slew his father Laius and married his mother Jocasta, merely
shows us the fulfilment of our own childhood wishes. But, more fortunate
than he, we have meanwhile succeeded, insofar as we have not become
psychoneurotic, in detaching our sexual impulses from our mothers and in
forgetting our jealousy of our fathers. Here is one in whom these primeval
wishes of our childhood have been fulfilled, and we shrink back from him
with the whole.
E. g. Hamlet’s Philosophical and Psychological Dilemma in His “To
Be or Not to Be” Soliloquy;

3.6 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
 27

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,
 28

Marxist criticism, like other sociological methods, can illuminate political

and economic dimensions of literature other approaches overlook.
E.g. Heathcliff: A Product of Social Environment; The American
Dream in The Great Gatsby; Collapse of the American Dream in Death
of a Salesman; The Twisted Human Nature in Wuthering
Heights

3.7 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
 29

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 simi-lar mythic characters appear in virtually every
culture on every continent.
E.g. Northrop Frye (1912—1991)
MYTHIC ARCHETYPES

We begin our study of archetypes, then, with a world of myth, an

abstract or purely literary world of fictional and thematic design, unaffected
by canons of plausible adaptation to familiar experience. In terms of
narrative, myth is the imitation of actions near or at the conceivable limits of
desire. The gods enjoy beautiful women, fight one another with prodigious
strength, comfort and assist man, or else watch his miseries from the height
of their immortal freedom. The fact that myth operates at the top level of
human desire does not mean that it necessarily presents its world as attained
or attainable by human beings. . .

Eg. “Lucifer in Shakespeare’s Othello”；

3.8 Reader-Response Criticism

 30

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 favourite 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
 31

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.

3.9 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 litera-ture 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
 32

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.

4. SUMMARY

In this unit you have learnt:

 the approaches on literary criticism
 to demonstrate the approaches to do critic on literary works
 to understand the concept of every approaches
 33

MODULE 4 STRUCTURALISM
AND POST-STRUCTURALISM

CONTENTS

1. Introduction
2. Objectives
3. Main Content
3.1 Structuralism
3.2 Post-structuralism
4. Conclusion
5. Summary

1. INTRODUCTION

In this part, students will be introduced with the model of literary

approach based on the structuralist and post-structuralist model. Almost all
literary theorists since Aristotle have emphasized the importance of
structure, conceived in diverse way, in analysing a work of literature. Post-
structuralism emerges as you replace this trend in analysing literature.

2. OBJECTIVES
By the end of this unit, you should be able to:
 comprehend the concept of structuralism
 comprehend the concept of post-structuralism
 differentiate the both forms of literary critic models

3. MAIN CONTENT

3.1 Structuralism
 34

Literary structuralism flourished in the 1960s as an attempt to apply

to literature the methods and insights of the founder of modern structural
linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure. Since many popularizing accounts of
Saussure's epoch-making Course in General Linguistics (1916) are now
available. Saussure viewed language as a system of signs, which was to be
studied 'synchronically' – that is to say, studied as a complete system at a
given point in time - rather than 'diachronically', in its historical
development. Each sign was to be seen as being made up of a 'signifier' (a
sound-image, or its graphic equivalent), and a 'signified' (the concept or
meaning). The three black marks c — a — t are a signifier which evoke the
signified 'cat' in an English mind. The relation between signifier and
signified is an arbitrary one: there is no inherent reason why these three
marks should mean 'cat', other than cultural and historical convention.
Contrast chat in French. The relation between the whole sign and what it
refers to (what Saussure calls the 'referent', the real furry four legged
creature) is therefore also arbitrary. Each sign in the system has meaning
only by virtue of its difference from the others. 'Cat' has meaning not 'in
itself, but because it is not 'cap' or 'cad' or 'bat'. It does not matter how the
signifier alters, as long as it preserves its difference from all the other
signifiers; you can pronounce it in many different accents as long as this
difference is maintained. 'In the linguistic system,' says Saussure, 'there are
only differences': meaning is not mysteriously immanent in a sign but is
functional, the result of its difference from other signs. Finally, Saussure
believed that linguistics would get into a hopeless mess if it concerned itself
with actual speech or parole as he called it. He was not interested in
investigating what people actually said; he was concerned with the objective
structure of signs which made their speech possible in the first place, and
this he called langue. Neither was Saussure concerned with the real objects
which people spoke about: in order to study language effectively, the
 35

referents of the signs, the things they actually denoted, had to be placed in
brackets.

Structuralism in general is an attempt to apply this linguistic theory

to objects and activities other than language itself. You can view a myth,
wrestling match, system of tribal kinship, restaurant menu or oil painting as
a system of signs, and a structuralist analysis will try to isolate the
underlying set of laws by which these signs are combined into meanings. It
will largely ignore what the signs actually 'say', and concentrate instead on
their internal relations to one another. Structuralism, as Fredric Jameson has
put it, is an attempt 'to rethink everything through once again in terms of
linguistics'. It is a symptom of the fact that language, with its problems,
mysteries and implications, has become both paradigm and obsession for
twentieth century intellectual life.

Almost all literary theorists since Aristotle have emphasized the

importance of structure, conceived in diverse ways, in analysing a work of
literature. "Structuralist criticism," however, now designates the practice of
critics who analyse literature on the explicit model of structuralist
linguistics. The class includes a number of Russian formalists, especially
Roman Jakobson, but consists most prominently of a group of writers, with
their headquarters in Paris, who applied to literature the concepts and
analytic distinctions developed by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in
General Linguistics (1915). This mode of criticism is part of a larger
movement, French structuralism, inaugurated in the 1950s by the cultural
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who analysed, on Saussure's linguistic
model, such cultural phenomena as mythology, kinship relations, and modes
of preparing food.

In its early form, as manifested by Lévi-Strauss and other writers in

the 1950s and 1960s, structuralism cuts across the traditional disciplinary
 36

areas of the humanities and social sciences by undertaking to provide an

objective account of all social and cultural practices, in a range that includes
mythical narratives, literary texts, advertisements, fashions in clothes, and
patterns of social decorum. It views these practices as combinations of signs
that have a set significance for the members of a particular culture, and
undertakes to make explicit the rules and procedures by which the practices
have achieved their cultural significance, and to specify what that
significance is, by reference to an underlying system (analogous to
Saussure's langue, the implicit system of a particular language) of the
relationships among signifying elements and their rules of combination. The
elementary cultural phenomena, like the linguistic elements in Saussure's
exposition, are not objective facts identifiable by their inherent properties,
but purely "relational" entities; that is, their identity as signs are given to
them by their relations of differences from, and binary oppositions to, other
elements within the cultural system.
Saussure's linguistic views influenced the Russian Formalists,
although Formalism is not itself exactly a structuralism. It views literary
texts 'structurally', and suspends attention to the referent to examine the sign
itself, but it is not particularly concerned with meaning as differential or, in
much of its work, with the 'deep' laws and structures underlying literary
texts. It was one of the Russian Formalists, however - the linguist Roman
Jakobson - who was to provide the major link between Formalism and
modern-day structuralism.
The modern structuralist analysis of narrative began with the
pioneering work on myth of the French structural anthropologist Claude
Levi-Strauss, who viewed apparently different myths as variations on a
number of basic themes. Beneath the immense heterogeneity of myths were
certain constant universal structures, to which any particular myth could be
reduced. Myths were a kind of language: they could be broken down into
individual units ('my themes') which like the basic sound units of language
 37

(phonemes) acquired meaning only when combined together in particular

ways. The rules which governed such combinations could then be seen as a
kind of grammar, a set of relations beneath the surface of the narrative
which constituted the myth's true 'meaning'. These relations, Levi-Strauss
considered, were inherent in the human mind itself, so that in studying a
body of myth we are looking less at its narrative contents than at the
universal mental operations which structure it. One result of structuralism,
then, is the 'decentring' of the individual subject, who is no longer to be
regarded as the source or end of meaning. Myths have a quasi-objective
collective existence, unfold their own 'concrete logic' with supreme
disregard for the vagaries of individual thought, and reduce any particular
consciousness to a mere function of themselves
What are the gains of structuralism? To begin with, it represents a
remorseless demystification of literature. It is less easy after Greimas and
Genette to hear the cut and thrust of the rapiers in line three, or feel that you
know just what it feels like to be a scarecrow after reading The Hollow
Men. Loosely subjective talk was chastised by a criticism which recognized
that the literary work, like any other product of language, is a construct,
whose mechanisms could be classified and analysed like the objects of any
other science. The Romantic prejudice that the poem, like a person,
harboured a vital essence, a soul which it was discourteous to tamper with,
was rudely unmasked as a bit of disguised theology, a superstitious fear of
reasoned enquiry which made a fetish of literature and reinforced the
authority of a 'naturally' sensitive critical elite. Moreover, the structuralist
method implicitly questioned literature's claim to be a unique form of
discourse: since deep structures could be dug out of Mickey Spillane as well
as Sir Philip Sidney, and no doubt the same ones at that, it was no longer
easy to assign literature an ontologically privileged status. With the advent
of structuralism, the world of the great aestheticians and humanist literary
scholars of twentiethcentury Europe - the world of Croce, Curtius,
 38

Auerbach, Spitzer and Wellek — seemed one whose hour had passed.6
These men, with their formidable erudition, imaginative insight and
cosmopolitan range of allusion, appeared suddenly in historical perspective,
as luminaries of a high European humanism which pre-dated the turmoil and
conflagration of the mid-twentieth century. It seemed clear that such a rich
culture could not be reinvented - that the choice was between learning from
it and passing on, or clinging with nostalgia to its remnants in our time,
denouncing a 'modern world' in which the paperback has spelt the death of
high culture, and where there are no longer domestic servants to protect
one's door while one reads in privacy.
The structuralist emphasis on the 'contractedness' of human meaning
represented a major advance. Meaning was neither a private experience nor
a divinely ordained occurrence: it was the product of certain shared systems
of signification. The confident bourgeois belief that the isolated individual
subject was the fount and origin of all meaning took a sharp knock:
language pre-dated the individual, and was much less his or her product than
he or she was the product of it. Meaning was not 'natural', a question of just
looking and seeing, or something eternally settled; the way you interpreted
your world was a function of the languages you had at your disposal, and
there was evidently nothing immutable about these. Meaning was not
something which all men and women everywhere intuitively shared, and
then articulated in their various tongues and scripts: what meaning you were
able to articulate depended on what script or speech you shared in the first
place. There were the seeds here of a social and historical theory of
meaning, whose implications were to run deep within contemporary
thought. It was impossible any longer to see reality simply as something 'out
there', a fixed order of things which language merely reflected. On that
assumption, there was a natural bond between word and thing, a given set of
correspondences between the two realms. Our language laid bare for us how
the world was, and this could not be questioned. This rationalist or
 39

empiricist view of language suffered severely at the hands of structuralism:

for if, as Saussure had argued, the relation between sign and referent was an
arbitrary one, how could any 'correspondence' theory of knowledge stand?
Reality was not reflected by language but produced by it: it was a particular
way of carving up the world which was deeply dependent on the sign-
systems we had at our command, or more precisely which had us at theirs.
The suspicion began to arise, then, that structuralism was only not an
empiricism because it was yet one more form of philosophical idealism —
that its view of reality as essentially a product of language was simply the
latest version of the classical idealist doctrine that the world was constituted
by human consciousness.
Structuralism scandalized the literary Establishment with its neglect
of the individual, its clinical approach to the mysteries of literature, and its
clear incompatibility with common sense. The fact that structuralism
offends common sense has always been a point in its favour. Common sense
holds that things generally have only one meaning and that this meaning is
usually obvious, inscribed on the faces of the objects we encounter. The
world is pretty much as we perceive it, and our way of perceiving it is the
natural, self-evident one.
Structuralism is a modern inheritor of this belief that reality, and our
experience of it, are discontinuous with each other; as such, it threatens the
ideological security of those who wish the world to be within their control,
to carry its singular meaning on its face and to yield it up to them in the
unblemished mirror of their language. It undermines the empiricism of the
literary humanists — the belief that what is most 'real' is what is
experienced, and that the home of this rich, subtle, complex experience is
literature itself. Like Freud, it exposes the shocking truth that even our most
intimate experience is the effect of a structure. For the 'hardest' forms of
structuralism they were universal, embedded in a collective mind which
 40

transcended any particular culture, and which Levi-Strauss suspected to be

rooted in the structures of the human brain itself.
Structuralism, in a word, was hair-raisingly unhistorical: the laws of
the mind it claimed to isolate - parallelisms, oppositions, inversions and the
rest — moved at a level of generality quite remote from the concrete
differences of human history. From this Olympian height, all minds looked
pretty much alike. Having characterized the underlying rule-systems of a
literary text, all the structuralist could do was sit back and wonder what to
do next. There was no question of relating the work to the realities of which
it treated, or to the conditions which produced it, or to the actual readers
who studied it, since the founding gesture of structuralism had been to
bracket off such realities. In order to reveal the nature of language,
Saussure, as we have seen, had first of all to repress or forget what it talked
about: the referent, or real object which the sign denoted, was put in
suspension so that the structure of the sign itself could be better examined.
Where it is more obviously detectable, perhaps, is in structuralism's
embarrassment with the problem of historical change. Saussure looked atthe
development of language in terms of one synchronic system
followinganother, rather like the Vatican official who remarked that whether
the Pope's imminent pronouncement on the question of birth control turned
out to uphold the previous teaching or not, the Church would nevertheless
have moved from one state of certainty to another state of certainty. For
Saussure, historical change was something which afflicted the individual
elements of a language, and could only in this indirect way affect the whole:
the language as a whole would reorganize itself to accommodate such
disturbances, like learning to live with a wooden leg or like Eliot's Tradition
welcoming a new masterpiece to the club. Behind this linguistic model lies a
definite view of human society: change is disturbance and disequilibrium in
an essentially conflict-free system, which will stagger for a moment, regain
its balance and take the change in its stride. Linguistic change for Saussure
 41

seems a matter of accident: it happens 'blindly', and it was left to the later
Formalists to explain how change itself might be grasped systematically.
Prague school developed a 'functionalist' view of the work in which
all the parts laboured inexorably together for the good of the whole.
Traditional criticism had sometimes reduced the literary work to little more
than a window on to the author's psyche; structuralism seemed to make it a
window on to the universal mind. The 'materiality' of the text itself, its
detailed linguistic processes, was in danger of being abolished: the 'surface'
of a piece of writing was little more than the obedient reflection of its
concealed depths. What Lenin once called the 'reality of appearances' was at
risk of being overlooked: all 'surface' features of the work could be reduced
to an 'essence', a single central meaning which informed all the work's
aspects, and this essence was no longer the writer's soul or the Holy Spirit
but the 'deep structure' itself. The text was really just a 'copy' of this deep
structure, and structuralist criticism was a copy of this copy. Finally, if
traditional critics composed spiritual elite, structuralists appeared to
constitute a scientific one, equipped with an esoteric knowledge far removed
from the 'ordinary' reader. At the same moment as structuralism bracketed
off the real object, it bracketed off the human subject. Indeed it is this
double movement which defines the structuralist project. The work neither
refers to an object, nor is the expression of an individual subject; both of
these are blocked out, and what is left hanging in the air between them is a
system of rules. This system has its own independent life, and will not stoop
to the beck and call of individual intentions. To say that structuralism has a
problem with the individual subject is to put it mildly: that subject was
effectively liquidated, reduced to the function of an impersonal structure. To
put it another way: the new subject was really the system itself, which
seemed equipped with all the attributes (autonomy, self-correction, unity
and so on) of the traditional individual.
 42

The shift away from structuralism has been in part, to use the terms
of the French linguist Emile Benveniste, a move from 'language' to
'discourse'. 'Language' is speech or writing viewed 'objectively', as a chain
of signs without a subject. 'Discourse' means language grasped as utterance,
as involving speaking and writing subjects and therefore also, at least
potentially, readers or listeners. This is not simply a return to the pre-
structuralist days when we thought that language belonged to us
individually as our eye brows did; it does not revert to the classical
'contractual' model of language, according to which language is just a sort of
instrument essentially isolated individuals use to exchange their pre-
linguistic experiences. This was really a 'market' view of language, closely
associated with the historical growth of bourgeois individualism: meaning
belonged to me like my commodity, and language was just a set of tokens
which like money allowed me to exchange my meaning-commodity with
another individual who was also a private proprietor of meaning.
There was no question for the critics of structuralism of returning to
this sorry state in which we viewed signs in terms of concepts, rather than
talking about having concepts as particular ways of handling signs. It was
just that a theory of meaning which seemed to squeeze out the human
subject was very curious. What had been narrow-minded about previous
theories of meaning was their dogmatic insistence that the intention of the
speaker or writer was always paramount for interpretation. In countering
this dogmatism, there was no need to pretend that intentions did not exist at
all; it was simply necessary to point out the arbitrariness of claiming that
they were always the ruling structure of discourse.
Structuralism has functioned as a kind of aid scheme for
intellectually underdeveloped nations, supplying them with the heavy plant
which might revive a failing domestic industry. It promises to put the whole
literary academic enterprise on a firmer footing, thus permitting it to
surmount the so-called 'crisis in the humanities'. It provides a new answer to
 43

the question: What is it that we are teaching/studying? The old answer -

Literature – is not, as we have seen, wholly satisfactory: roughly speaking, it
involves too much subjectivism. But if what we are teaching and studying is
not so much 'literary works' but the 'literary system' - the whole system of
codes, genres and conventions by which we identify and interpret literary
works in the first place - then we seem to have unearthed a rather more solid
object of investigation.
Some structuralist arguments would appear to assume that the critic
identifies the 'appropriate' codes for deciphering the text and then applies
them, so that the codes of the text and the codes of the reader gradually
converge into a unitary knowledge. But this is surely too simple-minded a
conception of what reading actually involves. In applying a code to the text,
we may find that it undergoes revision and transformation in the reading
process; continuing to read with this same code, we discover that it now
produces a 'different' text, which in turn modifies the code by which we are
reading it, and so on. This dialectical process is in principle infinite; and if
this is so then it undermines any assumption that once we have identified the
proper codes for the text our task is finished. Even at the technical level,
however, the concept of competence is a limited one. The competent reader
is one who can apply to the text certain rules; but what are the rules for
applying rules? The rule seems to indicate to us the way to go, like a
pointing finger; but your finger only 'points' within a certain interpretation I
make of what you are doing, one which leads me to look at the object
indicated rather than up your arm. Pointing is not an 'obvious' activity, and
neither do rules carry their applications on their faces: they would not be
'rules' at all if they inexorably determined the way we were to apply them.
Structuralism in more general sense, in its attempt to develop a
science of literature and in many of its salient concepts, the radical forms of
structuralism depart from the assumptions and ruling ideas of traditional
humanistic criticism. For example:
 44

1) In the structuralist view, what had been called a literary "work" becomes
a "text"; that is, a mode of writing constituted by a play of component
elements according to specifically literary conventions and codes. These
factors may generate an illusion of reality, but have no truth-value, nor
even any reference to a reality existing outside the literary system itself.
2) The individual author, or subject, is not assigned any initiative,
expressive intentions, or design as the "origin" or producer of a work.
Instead the conscious "self" is declared to be a construct that is itself the
product of the workings of the linguistic system, and the mind of an
author is described as an imputed "space" within which the impersonal,
"always-already" existing system of literary language, conventions,
codes, and rules of combination gets precipitated into a particular text.
Roland Barthes expressed, dramatically, this subversion of the
traditional humanistic view, "As institution, the author is dead" ("The
Death of the Author," in Image-Music-Text, trans. 1977).
3) Structuralism replaces the author by the reader as the central agency in
criticism; but the traditional reader, as a conscious, purposeful, and
feeling individual, is replaced by the impersonal activity of "reading,"
and what is read is not a work imbued with meanings, but écrìture,
writing. The focus of structuralist criticism, accordingly, is on the
impersonal process of reading which, by bringing into play the requisite
conventions, codes, and expectations, makes literary sense of the
sequence of words, phrases, and sentences that constitute a text. See text
and writing (écriture)
In the late 1960s, the general structuralist enterprise, in its rigorous
form and inclusive pretensions, ceded its central position to deconstruction
and other modes of post-structural theories, which subverted the scientific
claims of structuralism and its view that literary meanings are made
determinate by a system of invariant conventions and codes.This shift in the
prevailing point of view is exemplified by the changing emphases in the
 45

lively and influential writings of the French critic and man of letters, Roland
Barthes (1915-80). His early work developed and helped disseminate the
structuralist theory that was based on the linguistics of Saussure—a theory
that Barthes applied not only to literature but (in Mythologies, 1957) to
decoding, by reference to its underlying signifying system, many aspects of
popular culture. In his later writings, Barthes abandoned the scientific
aspiration of structuralism, and distinguished between the "readerly" text
such as the realistic novel that tries to "close" interpretation by insisting on
specific meanings, and the "writerly" text that aims at the ideal of "a galaxy
of signifiers," and so encourages the reader to be a producer of his or her
own meanings according not to one code but to a multiplicity of codes.
Structuralist premises and procedures, however, continue to manifest
themselves in a number of current enterprises, and especially in the semiotic
analysis of cultural phenomena, in stylistics, and in the investigation of the
formal structures that, in their combinations and variations, constitute the
plots in novels.

3.2 Post-Structuralism
Saussure, as the reader will remember, argues that meaning in
language is just a matter of difference. 'Cat' is 'cat' because it is not 'cap' or
'bat'. Buthow far is one to press this process of difference? 'Cat' is also what
it is because it is not 'cad' or 'mat', and 'mat' is what it is because it is not
'map' or 'hat'. Where is one supposed to stop? It would seem that this
process of difference in language can be traced round infinitely: but if this is
so, what has become of Saussure's idea that language forms a closed, stable
system? If every sign is what it is because it is not all the other signs, every
sign would seem to be made up of a potentially infinite tissue of
differences? Defining a sign would therefore appear to be a more tricky
business than one might have thought. Saussure's langue suggests a
delimited structure of meaning; but where in language do you draw the line?
 46

Another way of putting Saussure's point about the differential nature

of meaning is to say that meaning is always the result of a division or
'articulation' of signs. The signifier 'boat' gives us the concept or signified
'boat' because it divides itself from the signifier 'moat'. The signified, that is
to say, is the product of the difference between two signifiers. But it is also
the product of the difference between a lot of other signifiers: 'coat', 'boar',
'bolt' and so on. This questions Saussure's view of the sign as a neat
symmetrical unity between one signifier and one signified, for the signified
'boat' is really the product of a complex interaction of signifiers, which has
no obvious endpoint. Meaning is the spin-off of a potentially endless play of
signifiers, rather than a concept tied firmly to the tail of a particular
signifier. The signifier does not yield us up a signified directly, as a mirror
yields up an image: there is no harmonious one-to-one set of
correspondences between the level of the signifiers and the level of the
signified in language. To complicate matters even further, there is no fixed
distinction between signifiers and signified either. If you want to know the
meaning (or signified) of a signifier, you can look it up in the dictionary; but
all you will find will be yet more signifiers, whose signified you can in turn
look up, and so on. The process we are discussing is not only in theory
infinite but somehow circular: signifiers keep transforming into signified
and vice versa, and you will never arrive at a final signified which is not a
signifier in itself. If structuralism divided the sign from the referent, this
kind of thinking -often known as 'post-structuralism' — goes a step further:
it divides the signifier from the signified. Another way of putting what
we have just said is that meaning is not immediately present in a sign. Since
the meaning of a sign is a matter of what the sign is not, its meaning is
always in some sense absent from it too. Meaning, if you like, is scattered or
dispersed along the whole chain of signifiers: it cannot be easily nailed
down, it is never fully present in any one sign alone, but is rather a kind of
constant flickering of presence and absence together. Reading a text is more
 47

like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the
beads on a necklace. There is also another sense in which we can never
quite close our fists over meaning, which arises from the fact that language
is a temporal process. When you read a sentence, the meaning of it is always
somehow suspended, something deferred or still to come: one signifier
relays me to another, and that to another, earlier meanings are modified by
later ones, and although the sentence may come to an end the process of
language itself does not. There is always more meaning where that came
from. You do not grasp the sense of the sentence just by mechanically piling
one word on the other: for the words to compose some relatively coherent
meaning at all, each one of them must, so to speak, contain the trace of the
ones which have gone before, and hold itself open to the trace of those
which are coming after. Each sign in the chain of meaning is somehow
scored over or traced through with all the others, to form a complex tissue
which is never exhaustible; and to this extent no sign is ever 'pure' or 'fully
meaningful'. At the same time as this is happening, you can detect in each
sign, even if only unconsciously, traces of the other words which it has
excluded in order to be itself. 'Cat' is what it is only by fending off 'cap' and
'bat', but these other possible signs; because they are actually constitutive of
its identity, still somehow inhere within it. Meaning, we might say, is thus
never identical with itself. It is the result of a process of division or
articulation, of signs being themselves only because they are not some other
sign. It is also something suspended, held over, still to come. Another
sense in which meaning is never identical with itself is that signs must
always be repeatable or reproducible. We would not call a 'sign' a mark
which only occurred once. The fact that a sign can be reproduced is
therefore part of its identity; but it is also what divides its identity, because it
can always be reproduced in a different context which changes its meaning.
It is difficult to know what a sign 'originally' means, what its 'original'
context was: we simply encounter it in many different situations, and
 48

although it must maintain a certain consistency across those situations in

order to be an identifiable sign at all, because its context is always different
it is never absolutely the same, never quite identical with itself. 'Cat' may
mean a furry four-legged creature, a malicious person, a knotted whip, an
American, a horizontal beam for raising a ship's anchor, a six-legged tripod,
a short tapered stick, and so on. But even when it just means a furry four-
legged animal, this meaning will never quite stay then same from context to
context: the signified will be altered by the various chains of signifiers in
which it is entangled.

The implication of all this is that language is a much less stable

affair than the classical structuralists had considered. Instead of being a
well-defined, clearly demarcated structure containing symmetrical units of
signifiers and signified, it now begins to look much more like a sprawling
limitless web where there is a constant interchange and circulation of
elements, where none of the elements is absolutely definable and where
everything is caught up and traced through by everything else. If this is so,
then it strikes a serious blow at certain traditional theories of meaning. For
such theories, it was the function of signs to reflect inward experiences or
objects in the real world, to 'make present' one's thoughts and feelings or to
describe how reality was. We have already seen some of the problems with
this idea of' representation' in our previous discussion of structuralism, but
now even more difficulties emerge.
Many socially oriented analysts of discourse share with other
poststructuralists the conviction (or at any rate the strong suspicion) that no
text means what it seems to say, or what its writer intended to say. But
whereas deconstructive critics attribute the subversion of the apparent
meaning to the unstable and self-conflicting nature of language itself, social
analysts of discourse—and also psychoanalytic critics—view the surface, or
"manifest" meanings of a text as a disguise, or substitution, for underlying
 49

meanings which cannot be overtly said, because they are suppressed by

psychic, or ideological, or discursive necessities. By some critics, the covert
meanings are regarded as having been suppressed by all three of these forces
together. Both the social and psychoanalytic critics of discourse therefore
interpret the manifest meanings of a text as a distortion, displacement, or
total "occlusion" of its real meanings; and these real meanings, in
accordance with the critic's theoretical orientation, turn out to be either the
writer's psychic and psycho-linguistic compulsions, or the material realities
of history, or the social power-structures of domination, subordination, and
marginalization that obtained when the text was written.

MODULE 5 LITERARY CRITICISM

ORIENTATION

CONTENTS

1. Introduction
2. Objectives
3. Main Content
3.1 Mimesis
3.2 Pragmatic
 50

3.3 Expressive
3.4 Objective
4. Conclusion
5. Summary

1. INTRODUCTION
M. H. Abrams, in his book, “Mirror of the Lamb”, classifies four
literary criticism orientations: mimesis, pragmatic, expressive, and objective
or formal. In this section, the students will be introduced with the four types
of literary criticism orientation by Abrams’ criticism orientation.

2. OBJECTIVES

By the end of this unit, students should be able to:

 comprehend the literary criticism orientation
 comprehend the four dimensions of literary criticism orientation by
M..H. Abrams
 comparing the different point of view of literary criticism orientation

3. MAIN CONTENT
3.1 Mimesis
Aristotle is the poetics also defines poetry as imitation. Epic poetry
and tragedy, as also comedy, dithyrambic poetry, and most flute – playing
and lyre-playing, are all, viewed as a whole, modes of imitation, and the
objects the imitator represents are actions.

But the difference between the way the term imitation functions in
Aristotle and in Plato distinguishes radically their consideration of art. In the
poetics, as in the Platonic dialogues, the term implies that a work of art is
constructed according to prior models in the nature of things, but since
Aristotle has shorn away the other world of criterion-ideas, there is no
longer anything invidious in that fact. Imitation is also made a term specific
 51

to the arts, distinguishing, these from everything else in the universe, and
thereby freeing them from rivalry with other human activities.
Furthermore, in his analysis of the fine art, Aristotle at once
introduces supplementary distinction according to the object imitated, the
medium of imitation, and the manner – dramatic, narrative, or mixed, for
example – in which the imitation is accomplished. By successive
exploitation of these distinctions in objects, means, and manner, he is able
first to distinguish poetry from other kinds of art, and then to differentiate
the various poetic genres, such as epic and drama, tragedy and comedy.
When he focuses on the genre of tragedy, the same analytic
instrument is applied to the discrimination of the parts constituting the
individual whole; plot, character, thought, and so on. Aristotle’s criticism,
therefore, is not only criticism of art as art, independent of statesmanship,
being, and morality, but also of poetry as poetry, and of each kind of poem
by the criteria appropriate to its particular nature. As a result of this
procedure, Aristotle bequeathed an arsenal of instruments for technical
analysis of poetic from and their elements which have proved indispensable
to critics ever since, however, diverse the uses to which these instruments
have been put.
A salient quality of the Poetics is the way it considers a work of art
in various of its external relations, affoding each its due function as one of
the causes of the work. This pricedure results in a scope and flexibility that
makes the treaties resist a ready classification into any one kind of
orientation. Tragedy can not be fully defined, for example, nor can the total
determinants of its construction be understood, without taking into account
its proper effect on the audience; the achievement of the specifically tragic
pleasure, which is that of pity and fear.
It is apparent, however, that the mimetic concept – the reference of a
work to the subject matter which it imitates – is primary in Aristotle’s
critical system, even if it is primus interpares. Their character as an imitation
 52

of human actions is what defines the arts in generals, and the kind of action
imitated serves as one important differentia of an artistic species.
The historical genesis of art is traced to the natural human instinct
for imitating, and to the natural tendency to find pleasure in seeing
imitations. Even the unity essential to any work of art is mimeticallt
grounded, since one imitation is always of ine things, and in poetry the
story, as an imitation of action, must represent one action, a complete
whole. And the form of a work, the presiding principle is derived from the
form of the object that is imitated. It is the fabel or plot that is the end and
purpose of tragedy, its life and soul, so to speak and this because tragedy is
essentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life. We maintain
that tragedy is primarily an imitation of action, and that it is mainly for the
sake of the action that it imitates the personal agents.
Imitation continue to be a prominent item in the critical vocabulary
for along time after Aristotle – all the way through the eighteenth century, in
fact. The systemic importance given to the term differed greatly from critic
to critic; those objects in the universe that art imitates, or should imitate,
were variuosly conceived as neither actual or in some sense ideal, and from
the first, there was a tendency to replace Aristotle’s action as the principal
object of imitation things. But particularly after the recovery of the Poetics
and the great burst of aesthetic theory in sixteenth – century Italy, whenever
a critic was moved to get down to fundamentals and frame a comprehensive.
Definition of art, the predicate usually included the word imitation or
else one of those parallel terms which, whatever differences they moght
imply, all faced in the same direction, reflection, representation,
counterfeiting, feigning, copy, or image.
Through most of the eighteenth century, the tenest that art is an
imitation seeemed almost too obvious to need iteration or proof.
 53

As Richard Hurd said in his Discourse on Poetical Imitation

published in 1751, All Poetry to speak with Aristotle and the Greek critics
(if for so plain authorities be thought waiting) is, properly, imitation. It is,
indeed, the noblest and most extensive of the mimetic arts; having all
creation for its object, and ranging the entire circuit of universal being. Even
the reputedly radical proponents of original genius in the second half of the
century commonly found that a work of genius was no less an imitation for
being an original.
Imitation are of two kinds: one of nature, and one of authors. The
first is called origins. The original genius in fact turns out to be a kind of
scientific investigator. The wide field of nature lies oepn before it, where it
may range unconfined, make what discoveries it can. Later the Reverend J.
Moir, an extremist in his demand for originally in poetry, concieved genius
to lie in the ability to discover a thousand new variations, distinctions, and
resemblances in the familiar phenomena of nature, and declared that original
genius always gives the identical impressiions it receives. In this
identification of the poets task as novelty of discovery and particularity of
description we have moved a long way from Aristotle’s conception of
mimesis, expect in this respect, that criticism still looks to one or another
aspect of the given world for the essential source and subject matter of
poetry.
As the century drew on, various English critics began to scrutinize
the concept of imitation very closely, and the ended by finding (Aristotle to
the contrary) that differences in medium between the arts were such as to
disqualify all but a limited number from being classed as mimetic, in any
strict sense. The trend may be indicated by a few examples. In 1744, James
Harris still maintained, in A Discourse of Music, Painting, and Poetry that
imitation was common to all three arts. They agree, by being all mimetic or
imitative. The differ, as they imitate by different media. In 1762, Kames
declared that of all the fine arts, painting only and sculpture are in their
 54

nature imitative. Music, like architecture,, is productive of originals, and

copies not from nature, while language copies from nature only in those
instance in which it is imitative of sound or motion. And by 1789, in two
closely reasoned dissertations prefixed to his translation of the Poetics.
Thomas Twinign confirmed this distinction between arts whose
media are iconic (in the later terminology of the Chicago semiotician,
Charles Morris), in that they resemble what they denote, and those which
are significant only by convention. Only works in which the resemblance
between copy and object is both immediate and obvious. Twining says, can
be described as imitative in a strict sense. Dramatic poetry, therefore, in
which we mimic speech by speech, is the only kind of poetry which is
properly imitation, music must be struck from the list of imitative arts, and
he concludes by saying that painting, sculpture, and the arts of design in
general are the only arts that are obviously and essentially imitative.
The concept that art is imitation, then, played an important part in
neoclassic aesthetics, but closer inspection shows that it did not, in most
theories, play the dominant part. Art, it was commonly said, is an imitation
– but an imitation which is only instrumental toward producing effects upon
an audience. In fact, the near – unanimity with which post – Renaissance
critics lauded and achoed Aristotle’s Poetics is deceptive. The focus of
interest had shifted, and on our diagram, this later criticism is primarily
oriented, not from work to universe, but from work to audience. The nature
and consequences of this change of direction is clearly indicated by the first
classic of English criticism, written sometimes in the early 1580’s, Sir Philip
Sidney’s The Apologie for Poetry.

3.2 Pragmatic Theories

Pragmatic orientation deals with the effects of poetics for listeners
and readers. Poesy therefore (said Sidney) is an art of imitation, to speak
metaphorically, a speaking picturem with this end, to teach and delight. It
 55

has a purpose – to achieve certain effects in an audience. It imitates only as

a means to the proximate and of pleasing and pleases, it turns out, only as a
means to the ultimate end of teaching, for right poets are those who imitate
both to delight and teach, and delight to move men to take that goodness in
handle, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger.
As a result, it needs of the audience become the fertile grounds for
critical distinctions and standards. In order to teach and delight poets imitate
not what is, has been, or shall be, but only what may be, and should be, so
that the very objects of imitation become such as to guarantee the moral
purpose. The poet is distinguished from, and elevated above, the moral
philosopher and the historian by his capacity to move his auditors more
forcefully to virtue, since he couples the general notion, of the philosopher
with the particular example of the historian, while by distinguishing his
doctrine in a tale, he entices, even hard hatd evil men, unaware, into the love
of goodness, as if they took a medicine of Cherries.The genres of poetry are
discussed and ranked from the point of views of the moral and social effect
each is suited to achieve, the epic poem thus demonstrated itself to be the
king of poetry because it most inflaeth the mind with desire to be worthy,
and even the lowly love lyric is conceived as an instrument for persuading a
mistress of the genuineness of her love’s passion.
A history of criticism could be written solely on the basis of
successive interpretations of salient passages from Aristotle’s Poetics. In
this instance, with ni sense of strain, Sidney follows of Horace, Cicero, and
the Church fathers, in bending one after another of the key statements of the
Poetics to fit his own theoretical frame.
For convenience, we may name criticism that, like Sidney’s is
ordered toward the audienced a pragmatic theory, since it looks at the work
of art chiefly as a means to an end, an instrument for getting something
done, and tends to judge its value according to its success in achieving that
aim. There is, of course, the greatest variance in emphasis and detail, but the
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central tendency of the pragmatic critics is to conceive a poem as something

made in order to effect requisite responses in its readers, to consider the
author from the point of view of the powers and training he must have in
order to achieve this end, to ground the classification and anatomy of poems
in large part on the special effects each kind and component is most
competent to achieve, and to derive the norms of the poetics art and canons
of critical appraisal from the needs and legitimate demands of the audience
to whom the poetry is addressed.
The perspective, much of the basic vocabulary, and many of the
characteristic topics of pragmatic criticism originated in the classical theory
of rhetorics. For rhetorics had been universally regarded as an instrument for
achieving persuasion in an audience, and most theoritists agreed with Cicero
that in order to persuade, the orator must conciliate, inform, and move the
minds of his auditors. The great classical exemplar of the application of the
rhetorical point of view to poetry was, of course, the Ars Poetica of Horace.
As Richard McKeon points out, Horace’s criticism is directed in the main to
instruct the poet how to keep his audience in their seats until the same token,
how to please all audiences and win immortality.
Looking upon a poem as a making a contrivance for affecting an
audience, the typical pragmatic critics is angrossed with formulating the
methods – the skills, or Crafte of making as Ben Jonson called it – for
achieving the effects desired. These methods, traditionally comprehended
under the term poesis, or art (in phrases such as the art of poetry) are
formulated as precepts and rules whose warrant consists either in their being
derived from the qualities of works whose success and long survival have
proved their adaptation to human nature, or else in their being grounded
directly on the psychological laws governing the response of men in
general. The rules, therefore, are inherent in the qualities of each excellent
work or art, and when excepted and codified these rules serve equally to
guide the artis in making and the critics in judging any future product.
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Dryden, said Dr. Johnson, may be properly considered as the father of

English criticism, as the writer who first taught us to determine upon
principles the merit of composition. Dryden method of establishing those
principles was to point out that poetry, like painting, has an end, which is to
please, that imitation of nature is the general means for attaining this end,
and that rules serve to specify the means for accomplishing this end in
detail.
Having thus shown that imitation pleases, and why it pleases in both
these arts, it follows that some rules of imitation are necessary to obtain the
end, for without rules there can be no art, any more there can be a house
without a door to conduct you into it.
Emphasis on the rules and maxims of an art is native to all criticism
that grounds itself in the demants of an audience, and it survives today in the
magazines and manuals devoted to teaching fledgling authors hoe to write
stories that sell. But rulesbook based on the lowest common denominator of
the modern buying public are only gross caricatures of the comples and
subtly rationalized neo-classic ideals of literary craftmanship.
At about mid-century, it became popular to demonstrate and
expound all the major rules for poetry, or even for art in general, in a single
inclusive critical system. The pattern of the pragmatic reasoning usually
employed may cenveniently be studied in such a compendious treatment as
James Beattie’s essay on Poetry and Music as they affect the mind (1762) or
more succiently still, in Richard Hurd’s Dissertation of the Idea of universal
poetry (1766).
Universal poetry, no matter what the genre, Hurd says, is an art
whose end is the maximum possible pleasure. When we speak of poetry, as
an art, we mean such a way or method of treating a subject, as is found most
pleasing and delighful to us. And this idea if kept steadily in view, will
unfold to us all the mysteries of the poetic art. These needs but to evolve the
philosopher’s idea, and to apply it, as occasion serves. From this major
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premises Hurd involves three properties, essential to all poetry if it is to

affect the greatest possible delight: figurative language, fiction (that is to
say, a departure from what is actual, or empirically possible) and
versification. The mode in any one species of poetry, however, will depend
on its peculiar end, because each poetic kind must exploit that special
pleasure which it is generically adapted to achieve. For the art of every kind
of poetry in only this general art so modified as the nature of each, that is,
its more immediate and subordinate end, may repsectively require.
For the name of poem will belong to every composition whose
primary end is to please, provided it be so constructed as to afford all the
pleasure, which its kind or sort will permit.

On the basis of isolated passages from his letter to chivalry and

romance, Hurd is commonly treated as a pre-romantic critic. But in the
assumption of his poetic creed in the idea of univesal poetry, the rigidly
deductive logic which Hurd employs to unfold the rules of poetry from a
primitive definition, permitting the reason of the thing, to override the
evidence of the actual practice of poets, brings him as close as anyone in
English to the geometric method of Charles Batteux, though without that
critic’s Cartesian apparatus. The difference is that Batteux evolves his rules
from the definition of poetry as the imitation of la belle nature, and Hurd,
from its definition as the art of treating a subject so as to afford the reader a
maximum pleasure, and this involves his assumsing that he possesses an
empirical knowledge of the psychology of the reader. For if the end of
poetry is to gratify the mind of the reader, Hurd says, knowledge of the laws
of mind is necessary to establish its rules, which are but so many means,
which experience finds most conductive to that end. Since Batteux and
Hurd, however, are both intent to rationalizing what is mainly a common
body of poetic lore, it need not surprise us that, though they set out from
different points of the compass, their paths often coincide.
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The pragmatic orintation, ordering the aim of the artist and the
character of the work to the nature of the needs, and the springs of pleasure
in the audience, charaterized by far the greatest part of criticism from the
time of Horace through the eighteenth century. Measure either by its
duration or the number of its adherents, therefore, the pragmatic view,
broadly concieve, has been the principal aesthetic attitude of the Western
world. But inherent in this system were the elements of its dissolution.
Ancient rhetoric had bequeathed to criticism not only its stress on affecting
the audience but also (since its main concern was with education the orator)
its detailed attention to the powers and activities of the speaker himself – his
nature, or innate powers and genius, as distinguished from his culture and
art, and also the process of invention, disposition, and expression involved
in his discourse. In the course of time, and particular after the psychological
contribution og Hobbes and Locke in the seventeenth century, increasing
attention was given to the mental contribution of the poet, the quality and
degree of his genius, and the play of his faculties in the act of composition.
Through most of the eighteenth century, the poet’s invention and
imagination were made thoroughly dependent for their materials – their
ideas and images on the external universe and the literary models the poet
had to imitate; while the persistent stress laid on his need for judgement and
art – the mental surrogates in effect, of the requirements of a cultivated
audience – held the poet strictly responsible to the audience for whose
pleasure he exertedd his creative ability. Gradually, however, the stress was
shifted more and more to the poet’s natural genius, creative imagination,
and emotional spontaneity, at the expense of the opposing attributes of
judgement, learning, and artful restraint. As a result, the audience gradually
render into the background, giving place to the poet himself. And his own
mental powers and emotional needs, as the predominant cause and even the
end and test of art. By this time other developments which shall have
occasion to talk about later, were also helping to shift the focus of critical
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interest from audience to artist and thus to introduce a new orientation in the
theory of art.

3.3 Expressive Theories

Expresive theories concern to the poets’ creation. Poetry,
Wordsworth announced in his preface to the lyricall ballads of 1800, is the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. He thought well enough of this
formulation to use it twice in the same essay, and on this, as the ground
idea, he founded his theory of the proper subjects, language, effects, and
value of poetry.
Almost all the major critics of the English romantic generation
phrased definitons or key statements showing a parallel alignment from
work to poet. Poetry is the overflow, utterance, or projection of the thought
and feelings of the poet, or else (in the chief variant formulatio) poety is
defined in terms of the imaginative process which modifies and synthesizes
the images, thoughts, and feelings of the poet.
This way of thinking, in which the artist himself becomes the major
element generation both the artistic product and the criteria by which it is to
be judged. Setting the date at which this point of view became predominant
in critical theory, like marking the point which orangem becomes yellow in
the color spectrum, must be a somewhat arbitrary procedure. As we shall
see, an approach to the expressive orientation, thoug isolated in history and
partial in scope, is to be found as early as Longiunus discussion of the
sublime style as having its main source in the thought and emotions of the
speaker, and it recurs in a variant from in Bacon’s brief analysis of poetry as
pertaining to the imagination and accommodating the shows of things to the
desire of the mind. Even Wordsworth theory, it will appear, is much more
embedded in traditional matrix of interest and emphases, and is, therefore,
less radical than are the theories of his followers of the 1830’s. The year
1800 is a good round number, however, and Wordsworth’s preface a
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convenient document, by which to signalize the displacement of the mimetic

and pragmatic by the expressive view of art in English criticism.
In general terms, the central tendency of the expressive theory may
be summarized in this way: A work of art is essentially the internal made
external, resulting from a creative process operating under the impulse of
feeling, and embodying the combined product of the poet’s perception,
thoughts, and feelings. The primary source and subject matter of a poem,
therefore, are the attributes and actions of the poet’s own mind, or if aspects
of the external world, then these only as they are converted from fact to
poetry by the feelings and operations of the poet’s mind (thus the
poetry.....Wordsworth wrote, proceeds whence it ought to do, from the soul
of man, communicating its creative energies to the images of the external
world).
The paramount cause of poetry is not, as in Aritotle, a formal cause,
determined primarily by the human actions and qualities imitated, nor, as in
neo-classical criticism, a final cause, the effect intended upon the audience,
but instead an efficient cause – the impulse within the poet of feelings and
desires seeking expression, or the compulsion of the creative imagination
which has its internal source of emotion. The propensity is to grade the arts
by the extent to which their media are amendable to the undistorted
expression of the feelings or mental powers of the artist, and to classify the
species of an art and evaluate their instance, by the qualities or states of
mind of which they are a sign.
Of the elements constituting a poem, the element of
diction,especially figures of speech, becomes primary, and the burning
question is, whether these are the natural utterances of emotion and
imagination or the deliberate aping of poetic conventions. The first test any
poem must pass is no longer, is it true to nature? Or is it appropriate to the
requirements either of the best judge or the generality of mankind? But a
criterion looking in a different direction, namely is it sincere? Is it genuine?
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Does it match the intention, the feeling, and the actual state of mind of the
poet while composing? The work causes then to be regarded as primarily a
reflection of nature, actual or improved, the mirror held up to nature become
transparent and yield the reader insights into the mind anf heart of the poet
himself. The exploitations of literature as an index to personality first
manifest itself in the early nineteenth century; it is the inevitable
consequence of the expressive point of view.
Then, what happened to salient elements of traditional criticsm in the
essays abou what is poetry and the two kinds of poetry written by John
Stuart Mill in 1833. Mill relied in large part on Wordsworth’s preface to the
lyrical ballads, but in the intervening thirty years the expressive theory had
emerged from the network of qualification in which Wordsworth had
carefully placed it, and had worked out its own destiny unhindered. Mill’s
logic in answering the question, what is poetry is not more geometrico, like
that of Batteux, nor stiffy formal, like Richard Hurd’s nonetheless, his
theory turns out to be just as tightly dependent upon a central principle as
theirs. For whatever Mill’s empirical pretentions, his initial assumption
aboutnthe essential nature of poetry remains continuously though silently
effective in selecting, interpreting, and ordering the facts to be explained.
The primitive proposition of Mill’s theory is poetry is the expression
or uttering forth of feeling. Exploration of the data of aesthetics from this
starting point leads, among other things, to the following drastic alternations
in the great common places of the critical tradition.
a. The poetic kinds. Mill reinterprets and inverts the neo-classic ranking of
the poetic kinds. As the purest expression of feeling, lyric poetry is more
eminently and peculiarly poetry than any other forms are all alloyed by
non-poetic elements, whether descriptive, didactic or narrative, which
serve merely as convenient occasions for the poetic utterances of feeling
either by the or by one of his invented characters. To Aristotle tragedy
had been the highest form of poetry, and the plot, representing the action
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being imitated, had been its soul, while most neo-classic critics had
agreed that, whether judged by greatness of subject matter of effect, epic
and tragedy are the king and queen of poetic forms. It serves as an index
to the revolution in critical norms to notice that to Mill, plot becomes a
kind of necessary evil. An epic poem in so far as it is epic (i.e. narrative)
is not poetry at all, but only a suitable frame for the greatest diversity of
genuinely poetic passagers, while the interest in plot and story merely as
a story characterizes rude stages of society, children, and the shallowest
and emptiest of civilized adults. Similarly with the other arts, in music,
painting, sculpture, and architecture, Mill distinguishes between that
which is simple imitation or description and that which expresses human
feeling and is therefore, poetry.
b. Spontaneity as criterion. Mill accepts the venerable assumption that a
man’s emotional susceptibility is innate, but his knowledge and skill –
his art – are acquired. On this basis, he distinguishes poets into two
classes: poets who are born and poets who are made, or those who are
poets by nature, and those who are poets by culture. Natural poetry is
identifiable because it is feeling itself, employing thought only as the
medium of its utterance, on the other hand, the poetry of a cultivated but
not naturally poetic mind, is written with a distinct aim and in it the
thought remains the conspicous obejct, however, surrounded by a halo
of feeling. Naturally poetry it turns out, is poetry in a far higher sense,
than any other since that which constitutes poetry, human feeling, enters
far more largely into this than into the poetry of culture. Among the
modern, Shelly represents the poet born and Wordsworth the poet made,
and with unconscious irony Mill turns Wordsworth own criterion, the
spontaneous overflow of feeling, agsaints its sponsor. Wordsworth’s
poetry has little even of the appearance of spontaneousness: the well is
never so full that it overflows.
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c. The external world. In so far as a literary product simply imitates object,

it is not poetry at all. As a result, refernce of poetry to the external
universe dissapears from Mills theory, except to the extent that sensible
objects may serve as a stimulus or occasionfor the generation of poetry,
and then the poetry is not in the object itself, but in the state of mind, in
which it is contemplated. When a poet describe a lion he is describing
the lion professedly, but the state of excitement of the spectator really,
and the poetry must be true not to the object, but to the human emotion.
Thus severed from the external world, the obejcts signified by a poem
tend to be regarded as no more than a projected equivalent – an extended
and articulated symbol – for the poet’s inner state of mind. Poetry, said
Mill, in phrasing which anticipates T. E. Hulme and lays the theoretical
ground work for the practice of symbolist from Baudelaire throught T.S.
Elliot, embodies itself in symbols, which are the nearest possible
representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which in the poet’s
mind. Tennyson, Mill wrote in a review of that poet’s early poems,
excels in scene painting, in the higher sense of the term, and this is not
the mere power of producing that rather species of composition usually
termed descriptive poetry, but the power of creating scenery, in keeping
with some state of human feeling, so fifted to ti as to be the embodies
symbol of it, and to summon up the state of feeling itself, with a force
not to be surpassed by anything but reality. And as an indication of the
degree to which the innovations of the romantics persist as the common
place of modern critics – even of those who purpot to found their theory
an anti – romantic principles – notice how striking is the paralled
between the passage above and a famous comment by T.S. Elliot. The
only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an
objective correlative in other words, a set of objects, asituation, a chain
of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion, such that
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when the extenal facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are
given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
d. The audience. No less drastic is the fate of the audience. According to
Mill, Poetry is feeling, confessing itself to itself in moment of solitude.
The poet’s audience is reduced to a single member, consisting of the
poet himself. All poetry as Mill puts it, is of the nature of soliloquy. The
purpose of producing effects upon other men, which for centuries had
been the defining character of the art of poetry, new serve precisely the
opposite function it disqualifies a poem by proving it to be rhetoric
instead. When the poet’s act of utterance is no itself the end, but a means
to an end – viz, by the feelings he himself expresses, to works upon the
feelings or upon the belief, or the will, of another, when the expression
of his emotions is tinged also by that purpose, by that desire of making
an impression another mind, then it ceases to be poetry, and becomes
eloquence.
There is, in fact, something, singularly fatal to the audience in the
romantic point of view. Or, in terms of historical causes, it might be
conjectured that the disappearance of a homogenous and discriminating
reading public fostered a criticism which on principle dismished the
importance of the audience as a determinant f poetic value. Wordsworth still
insisted that poets do not writer for poets alone, but for men, and that each
of his poems has a worthy purposes, even though it turns out that the
pleasure and profit of the audience is an automatic consequence of the
poet’s spontaneous overflow of feeling, provided that the appropriate
associations between thoughts and feelings have been established by the
poet in advance.
The evolution is complete, from the mimetic poet, assigned the
minimal role of holding a mirror up to nature, through the pragmatic poet
who, whatever his natural gifts, is ultimately measured by his capacity to
satisfy the publisc taste, to Caryle’s Poet as Hero, the chosen one who,
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because he is a force of nature, writes as he must, and throuh the degree of

homage he evokes, serves as the measure of his reader’s and taste.

3.4 Objective Theories

Objective theories are related to the autonomy of literary works as an
art. All types of theort described so far, in their practical applications, get
down to dealing with the work of art itself, in its part and their mutual
relations, whether the premises on which these elements are descriminated
and evaluated relate them primarily to the spectator, the artist, or the world
without.
The objective orientation, which on principle regards the work of art
in isolation from all these external points of reference, analyzes it as a self –
sufficient entity constituent by its parts in their internal relation, and sets out
to judge it solely by criteria intrinsic to its own mode of being.
This point of view has been comparatively rare in literary criticism.
The one early attempt at the analysis of an art from which is both objective
and comprehensive occurs in the central of Aristotle’s Poetic. To discuss
Aristotle’s theory of art under the heading of mimetic theories, because it
sets out from, and makes frequent reference back to the concept of imitation.
Such as the flexibility of Aristotle procedure, however, that after he has
isolated the species tragedy and established its relation to the universe as an
imitation of a certain kind of action, and to the audience through its
observed effect of purging pity and fear, his method becomes centerpetal,
and assimilates these external elements into attributes of the works proper.
In this second consideration of tragedy as an object in itself, the action and
agents that are imitated re-enter the discussion as the plot, character, and
thought which, together with diction, melody, and spectacle, make up the
six elements of a tragedy, and even pity and fear are reconsidered as that
pleasurable quality proper to tragedy, to be distinguished work itself can
now be analyzed formally as a self deternining whole made up of parts, all
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organized around the controlling part, the tragic plot – itself a unity in which
the component incidents are intergrated by the internal relations of necessity
or probability.
As an all inclusive approach to poetry, the objective orientation was
just beginning to emerge in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century
critics were undertaking to explore the concept of the poem as a hetero-
cosmic, a world of its own, independent of the world into which we are
born, whose end is not to instruct or please but simply to exist. Certain
entries, particularly in Germany, were expanding upon Kant’s formula that a
work of art exhibits together with the concept the the contemplation of
beauty is disinterested and without regard to utility, while neglecting Kant’s
characteristic reference of an aesthetic product to the mental faculties of its
creator and receptor. The aim to consider a poem, as Poem expressed it, as a
poem written solely for the poem’s sake. In isolation from external causes
and ulterior ends, came to constiture on element of the diverse doctrines
usually huddled together by historians under the heading Art for Art’sSake.
And with differing emphases and adequacy, and in a great variety of
theoretical context, the objective approach to poetry has become one of the
most prominent elements in the innovative criticism of the last two or three
decades.
T. S. Elliot dictum of 1928’s that when we are considering poetry we
must consider it primarily as poetry and not another thing is widely
approved, however, far Elliot’s own criticism sometimes departs from this
ideal, a poem should not mean but the subtle and incisive criticism of
criticism by the Neo-Aristotelians and their advocacy of an instrument
adapted to dealing with poetry as such have been largely effective toward a
similar end. In his ontological criticism, John Crowne Ransom has been
calling for recognition of the autonomy of the work itself as existing for its
own sake. The theoryof literature written by Rene Wellek and Austin
Warren, proposes that criticism deal with a poem qua poem, independently
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of extrinsic factors, and similar views are being expressed, with increasing
frequency, not only in our literary but in our scholarly journals. In America,
at least, some form of the objective point of view has already gone far to
displace its rivals as the reigning mode of literary criticism.

MODULE 6 APPRECIATING LITERARY

WORKS

CONTENTS

1. Introduction
2. Objectives
3. Main Content
3.1 Appreciating Poem
3.2 Appreciating Fiction
3.3 Appreciating Drama
4. Conclusion
5. Summary

1. INTRODUCTION
Theoritically, there are some ways that can be used as guidances in
aprreciating literary works. Based on the characteristic of each literary work,
the way how we appreciate them also in some way different between one
and another. The following section will help students to have a brief
overview in appreciating any literary works.

2. OBJECTIVES
By the end of this section, students are expected to:
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 understand the different ways in appreciating any literary works

 be able to appreciate a particular literary works, like poem, fiction, or
drama
 have better understanding in appreciating literary works

3. Main Content
3.1 Appreciating Poem
The appreciation of poetry may be more demanding than the
appreciation of drama or prose narrative just because poetry tends to be
more imaginative, suggestive and often difficult. What this implies is that, it
is easier to misinterpret a poem. The right approach to the reading of poetry,
therefore, is to be more patient and more discerning.
The first step in the reading of a poem is to discover its subject
matter. This is generally easier to discover than the theme (s). A careful
reading of a poem may give an idea of what the poem is about in a general
sense, depending on how difficult the poem is. But it is not proper to depend
on just one reading of the poem. There is always a temptation to feel that
one has gained enough insight into the poem to be able to read it. While
some poems can be understood the first time you read them, others need to
be read over and over again. The risk one stands if one depends on just a
reading of a poem to form one opinion about it is that of misreading poems
that are deceptively simple. The fact that a poem does not use difficult
words may not suggest that it is simple. It may just be a convenient way for
the poet to hide its meaning.
In fact, we often make a distinction between the denotative and
connotative meanings in poetry. The denotative meaning of a poem will
reflect the meaning of a poem that emerges you from the dictionary meaning
of the words in it, While the connotative meaning comes from what the
entire poem suggests. This may not be just apparent and demands some
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careful exploration. Repeated readings of a poem will always help you to

guard against hasty and often wrong judgment about what a poem is about.
A second reading should lead you to a better understanding of the poem.
You will normally feel more confident to answer questions on the poem
after the second reading. You may, however, need to read it again to
confirm that your understanding of a poem is correct. Repeated readings
may still be necessary to answer specific questions.
In sum, what you do when you are answering questions on what a
poem is all about, is to see if you can paraphrase the poem as a whole. This
normally helps you to answer questions that have to do with what the poem
is about, that is, its subject matter. A summary may not be exactly the same
as the paraphrase since it may not be as detailed as a paraphrase. Hence a
summary may be too short to make any meaning.
It is not possible to analyse samples of all types of poems. We shall,
however, try to attempt literary appreciation of someof them. For literary
criticism or appreciation of poetic works, you should follow the outline
presented below:
a. The Subject matter of the poem: (or theme of the poem) - Why isthe
poem written? What message is the poem trying to pass to thereaders?
What is the poem addressing?
b. The background setting of the poem: What is the setting of thepoem?
What type of life is the poem trying to portray? On whichbackground is
the poem based?
c. The form or structure of the poem: What verse form? What typeof lines?
Any rhyming or rhythmic pattern? What kind ofstanzas? etc.
d. The Language and style:What are the interesting language or stylistic
features such as the use ofsymbolism, compare, contrast, repetition,
parallelism (parallelstructures), metaphor, similes, appropriateness of
diction (or tone moodof the poet as exhibited in the poem), alliteration,
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personification(making inanimate objects behave like or possess the

characteristics ofthe animate), onomatopoeia, and so on?
Going by the outline of things to look for in a poem given above,
let's try a critical and literary appreciation of the poem titled Rainbow.

RAINBOW
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky;
So was it when my life began;
So it is now I am a man;
So be it when I grow old,
Or let me die!
The child is the father of the man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
William Wordsworth

i. Theme: the permanence of a rainbow with all its beautifulattributes.

The poem is written to appreciate the wonders of arainbow.
ii. Background/Setting: The setting is in a natural area where thepoet
can take a glimpse at the sky uninterrupted. It is areminiscence of the
way the rainbow was when the poet wasyoung and even when he
was old. The poem is trying to portraythe life of a man who is in
love with natural things like therainbow.
iii. Form and Structure: The poem is a nine-line lyrical poem,
short,vivid, well compacted and meaning-effective. There are
somerhyming patterns: abode abbd sort of pattern. The
rhythmicpattern of lines 1 -2 can be illustrated thus:My heart leaps
up when I beholdA rainbow in the sky:
iv. Language and style:
a. The poet maintains a definitive style: uses words and expressionsthat
make the rainbow in the sky so beautiful, important,admirable and
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stable. These words include: my heart leaps up, soit was, so it is, so
be it.
b. The images are sharp: rainbow, Sky, man, natural piety, etc
c. Symbolism: the rainbow is made to symbolize a thing ofpermanence
and a thing of beauty which makes the heart leap forjoy.
d. Assonance: “hearts” / “leap”, “when” / “began”, “I am” /
“Man”,“grow” / “old”, “let” / “die” “father” / “man”
e. Alliteration: "am" / "man"
f. Repetition:
so it was
so is it
so be it
this is also an example of parallel construction
We have already observed that it is easier to discover the subject
matterof a poem than its theme. This should just tell you that, there is
adifference between the two. You must however note that once you have
been able to discover the subject matter, you are not far fromdiscovering the
theme.Theme is the central argument or idea in a poem. It may not
beexplicitly stated and may even not be present in some poems. Somepoems
simply state their themes in the first line. In some others, itemerges as a
repeated statement which sums up the note of the poem.
We must also note that it is easier to discover the themes of some
poems
than those of others. What is always needed is to ensure that you properly
read a poem before attempting to comment on its central argument. Do not
forget that it is possible to have more than a theme ina poem. While there is
a main theme, you can also have sub-themes.

3.2 Appreciating Fiction

To analyze a prose fiction:
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a. Read the text very carefully and be sure you understand the story.Re-
read the story if understanding is not achieved.
b. Identify the common trends of the events in a logical order asthey occur
in the story i.e. the story line.
c. Use the storyline to determine the theme or themes of the prosefiction.
d. Relate all other issues, facts, events and activities in the story tothe
major theme.
e. Formulate impressions about the characters (minor and
majorcharacters), through what they say themselves, what they do,
andwhat other people say about them. 'Relate the characters to thetheme
of the novel'.
f. Draw conclusions, inferences and implications regarding
life,experiences, conflicting issues and the world at large through allthe
presentations in prose fiction.
g. Relate the use of words, expressions and the language of prosefiction to
the themes, characterization and the storyline. Identifythe powerful and
effective use of language to bring out theauthor's intentions.

3.3 Appreciaitng Drama

Dramatic literature, you will soon discover, is very rich. Your
enjoyment of it will be determined by your ability to recognize some of its
components. In this section of the unit, we shall endeavour to take a look at
some of them. If a few of the concepts examined are discussed once again, it
is because they are so important that we must keep on referring to them.

a. Plot
The plot refers to the story that a play tells. Normally, the events
arearranged sequentially. This does not happen all the time. Some of
theplays distort the sequence of events. What you do is to reconstruct
theplay. The fact that the plot of a play is not sequential or
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chronologicaldoes not necessarily suggest that you will have any

difficultyunderstanding it.
b. Setting
Setting generally refers to the location of a literary work. The setting is
areference to the placement of a work in both time and place. The
localeor environment in which a play is set will determine a lot about it.
Thesetting is often related to the focus or concern of the play.
c. Theme
Each play makes a statement about the social world. This may
emergefrom an exploration of the entire play. The theme is the central
messageof a play. It is however possible to have sub-themes along with
majordramatists who seek to make statements that have universal
validity intheir works. Generally, plays that treat common human
problems makestatements that have timeless relevance and consequently
have moreappeal as they speak to people of all ages and at all places.
d. Characterization
You have learnt that a play cannot be successful withoutpeople. This is
not all that you need to know. Characters do not justoccur in a play.
Playwrights take care to create the right kind ofcharacters to serve their
purpose.In the first place a playwright creates characters in line with his
purpose. Most of the time the characters are types. Typical characters
are meant to represent certain categories of people in society. A
character may represent people or members of the ruling elite, and
another may represent the poor and the oppressed that are often at the
mercy of therich and powerful.
Dramatists always try to delineate characters, that is, establish the
individual identities of characters, through the particular traits that the
characters depict. In most cases, language is used. For instance, you
must have observed that many of the uneducated characters that feature
in plays on the television are often made to speak pidgin English, while
 75

their bosses speak standard English. Language thus becomes a

yardstickwill be made to wear dresses that will reflect their social status
on stage.
In almost every play, there are characters that act prominent roles.
These are called major characters. The others are called minor
characters. The most prominent characters in a play is called the
protagonist. It is possible to further describe characters in a play by
finding out whether they are flat. Flat characters are those that embody
certain qualities. They are not capable of growing (i.e. changing). They
simply personify some values e.g. faithfulness, goodness etc. The
individual identities of these characters are not established. They are
found in didactic plays, a good example of which is Everyman. Round
characters, on the other hand, are those that have individual identities.
They can change in the course of a play. From all that we have said
about characterization, it should be easy for you to guess what
characterization is all about. It means the pattern adapted in the creation
of characters in a work. This includes roles and tendencies assigned to
particular characters.

4. CONCLUSION

In this unit you have learnt:

 the appropriate ways in appreciating literary works
 to demonstrate those ways in appreciating poem, fiction, and drama
 how to find a better way in appreciating literary works
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REFERENCE

Ahmed, M. M. and Odiwo, K. 1999. Understanding Literature: and

Criticism. Zaria: Al Azeem Supreme Printers.

Henderson, Gloria. dkk. 1994. Literature and Ourselves. New York:

HarperCollins College Publishers.

Kennedy, X. J. 1994.An Introduction to Poetry. New York: HarperCollins

College Publishers.

Kennedy, X. J. andDana Gioia, 1995. Literature: An Introduction to Fiction,

Poetry, and Drama. Sixth Edition. New York: HarperCollins

Moody, H. 1972. The Study of Literature. London: George Allen andUnwin.

Rees, R. J. 1973. English Literature: An Introduction for ForeignReaders.

Basinstoke and London: Macmillan Education Ltd.