Literary Criticism

Meaning and Origin

Meaning
It is a broad term which can really refer to any
discourse on the subject of literature.
It is perhaps most widely used to refer to the
evaluative activity of literary critics or reviewers
who pass judgment on works of literature in
newspapers and magazines.
It is this meaning of literary criticism which
predominates outside academic study, and is
one which is tied closely to its etymology.

Origin
Criticism derives from the Greek word
krinein meaning to judge, and the idea
of evaluation has always been inherent in
the term.
The noun kritikos meaning a judge of
literature has a very long history and was
in use as early as the 4th century B.C.

Literary Criticism
The term literary criticism, however, tends to be
used rather differently within modern academic
circles and while its usage here retains an idea
of judgment, it is often judgment in the sense
of analysis rather than evaluation, e.g., a
descriptive work of literary history- perhaps an
account of how the genre of the novel emergedcould still be termed criticism, even if it did not
seek to assess in any qualitative sense the
literary work under investigation.

Literary Criticism
Literary criticism, in this sense, is
another way of saying literary analysis
and in this sense, it of course remains a
very wide term encompassing an array of
different types of analysis.
Criticism in this academic sense, can of
course involve qualitative evaluation, but it
is important to recognize that it need not
necessarily do so

 It is probably obvious, then, that the

academic use of criticism does not carry
the ideas of negative assessment or
condemnation which are associated with
the term in general discourse. Many nonacademics might assume that a book
called Wordsworth: A Critical Study was a
lengthy discussion of all that is wrong with
Wordsworth, but this is unlikely to be the
case.

Criticism and Theory

Literary theory can also be seen as an aspect
of literary criticism, but there is a distinction
between these two terms- and not only as to
clarify the types of works we refer to as
criticism later. Theory an d criticism are
usually treated as separate categories in literary
degree courses.
There are often separate courses on Literary
Theory and The history of Criticism

Criticism and Theory

It is perhaps best to distinguish criticism from
theory by saying that they have different objects
of investigation. The object of investigation in
literary criticism is typically a particular literary
work or agroup of literary works.
The object of investigation in literary theory can
vary, but to generalize we can say that it
involves the way in which we might think about a
literary work or group of literary works.

Criticism and Theory

To use an analogy from industrial products
we might say that Theory is the tertiary
enterprise generating the tools used in the
business of criticism. The tools in this case
are conceptual- they are patterns of
thought that underlie the approach of
criticism

Criticism and Theory

Although this distinction purifies the
categories any extended reading of works
of theory and criticism will show that there
are many overlaps between the two. A
theory can not emerge from a vacuum and
new directions can be sparked off through
critical analsis and will then be tested and
further explored through critical analysis.

 Primarily critical works may well involve

long passages of theoretical discussion
and refinement. Overlaps aside, as a
working definition of literary criticism, we
can say it refers to studies which aim to
analyze particular literary works or groups
of works.

 Note that is not to say that literary

criticism and practical criticism are the
same thing. Whereas practical criticism
refers to analysis based upon the close
reading of a text with minimal attention to
biographical, historical, or other extrinsic
details, concerning the text, literary
criticism is used in a broader sense and
can describe an array of approaches which
do draw on extrinsic information.

 Critics have been asking more or less the

same questions about works of literature
since the time of Plato and up till the
twentieth century:
What is the nature of art?
What is the function of art?
What is the role of the artist?

 In the linguistic equation of the famous

literary theorist Roman Jacobson the act
of communication involves:
sender______>message_____>receiver
Literary criticism in such structural
approach studies the underlying code of
language

Different Approaches in Criticism

The formal approach studies form or
structure without any consideration to
content (the intrinsic approach as opposed
to the extrinsic).
The structural approach studies the under
lying code or rules of language.
The ideological approach places the
literary work into its socio-political context.

Russian Formalism
Formalist approach emerged from ithe meetings
and discussions of the Opajaz group in
Petersburg and the Moscow Linguistic Circle.
In 1914 Viktor Shklovsky wrote The
Resurrection of the Word:the manifesto of the
school
They were dissatisfied with the existing positivist
forms of literary studies.
Shklovsky, Eichenbaum,Roman Jakobson

 It has a connection with a variety of

more \recent theoretical movements
Parisian Structuralism establishment of a
poetics distinct from other disciplines
RF represents the earliest systematic
attempts to put literary studies on an
independent footing and to make the
study of literature an autonomous and
specific discipline

A rejection of 19th century genetic

approach
Formalist theory rigorously excludes the non
literary: Life and art are two mutual opposites.
A rejection of 19th century genetic approach:
biography ,history, philosophy ,sociology ,
ethnography made the specificity of literature
swamped by adjacent disciplines
A justification of the independent existence
of literary studies (not the how but what the
subject matter of literature really is).

Exclusion of the mimetic and

expressive definitions of literature.
Exclusion of the mimetic and expressive
definitions of literature.
Literature seen as an expression of
personality of the author leads to biography
Poetry as thinking in images leads to
epistemology and psychology
The solution for the problem of definition of
literature is a differential, oppositional one.

Defamiliarization
The set of differences were found in the
concept of defamiliarization or making
strange.
Art defamiliarizes things that have become
habitual or automatic
Walking is automatically performed and
perceived
A dance is awalk constructed to be felt

The Differential Principle

Everyday language is made strange in poetry
Poetic language differs from practical language
not because of strange vocabulary , but because
its formal devices ,e.g., rhyme and rhythm act on
ordinary words to renew our perception of them
and of their sound texture in particular
The question of defamiliarization becomes
focused on the issue of language
Later it is extended to cover non-linguistic issues
modeled on its original linguistic formulation

literature as "organized violence

committed on ordinary speech
Roman Jakobson described literature as
"organized violence committed on ordinary
speech." Literature constitutes a deviation
from average speech that intensifies,
invigorates, and estranges the mundane
speech patterns. In other words, for the
Formalists, literature is set apart because
it is just that: set apart.

literature as "organized violence

committed on ordinary speech
The use of devices such as imagery, rhythm,
and meter is what separates "Ladies and
gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is
what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple,
noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this
tangle of thorns (Nabokov Lolita 9)", from "the
assignment for next week is on page eighty
four."
Literature by forcing us into a dramatic
awareness of language, refreshes these habitual
responses and renders objects more perceptible

The Business of Literary Studies

The business of literary studies is to
analysze the differences implied in the
opposition between practical and poetic
language, relying on the concept of
defamiliarization to bring those differences
into focus.
Literary studies would not operate on the
inherent qualities of literature (there are
inherently poetic themes)

Literariness as the object of Literary

Studies
Therefore, it is the quality of literariness that
gives a scientific status to the study of
literature ,and is the object of literary studies.
(jakobson)
Literariness made RF scientific and systematic
As Tynianov puts it :It is vital for us to turn our
back on academic eclecticism and on the
tendency to turn the study of literature and
language from a systematic science back once
more into a miscellany of episodic and anecdotal
essays.

literariness and form

The synonym of literariness and form is a
feature of the first phase of RF
Art as technique and the device as sole hero
are principles which the development of the
opposition between automatization and
defamiliarization altered
The Habitual/made strange opposition became
located into literature and not between literature
and non-literature

Art as Technique
In Art as Technique : form and order can
themselves become powerful automatizing
factors,e.g., literariness of poetic rhythm
will derive from poetic rhythm.
If disordered rhythm becomes a
convention, it would be ineffective as a
device because it will lose the function of
defamiliarization.

Modernism
Modernism
A revolutionary movement in all creative
arts began at the end of the 19 th century
as a result of the traumatic effect of World
War I on Europeans
Modernism in art is characterized by
disorder, fragmentation, patterns of
allusion, symbol, and myth
Examples: Futurism and Formalism

FUTURISM
In the 1920's and 1930's the term Futurism was loosely
used to describe a wide variety of aggressively modern
styles in art and literature
Futurism was the first deliberately organized, selfconscious art movement of the twentieth century. It quickly
spread to France, Germany, Russia and the Americas,
appealing to all who had tired of romanticism, decadence
and sentimentality, desirious of something more vigorous
and robust, something in keeping with the Machine Age.
Speed, noise, machines, transportation, communication,
information...and all the transient impressions of life in the
modern city intoxicated Marinetti and his followers. They
despised tame, bourgeois virtues and tastes, and above
everything else, loathed the cult of the past.

Avante-garde
Avante-garde (French pronunciation: [av ard]) means
"advance guard" or "vanguard".The adjective form is
used in English, to refer to people or works that are
experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art
, culture, and politics.
Avant-garde represents a pushing of the boundaries of
what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily
in the cultural realm. The notion of the existence of the
avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of
modernism, as distinct from postmodernism.

Excerpt from Marinetti's free

verse poem To a Racing Car[13]
Vehement god from a race of steel,
Automobile drunk with space,
Trampling with anguish, bit between your strident teeth!
O formidable Japanese monster with forge,
Nourished with flame and mineral oils,
Hungry for horizons and sidereal prey,
I unleash your heart to the diabolical vroom-vroom
And your giant radials, for the dance
You lead on the white roads of the world.
Lastly I loosen your metal reins and you soar,
Drunkenly, into freedom-giving Infinity!...

New Criticism
When in the 1920s the New Criticism first
emerged in public it was limited to a small
group of professors and students at
Vanderbilt University (Nashville,
Tennessee). In only two decades its
principles, values and proceedings were to
become so pervasive and so much
embedded in the study of literature, that
they were almost equated with the very
nature and essence of the critical art.

 The term New Criticism became

established as the name of the School
after John Crowe Ransom, one of its
founders, published a collection of essays
bearing that title, in 1941. In one of them,
Wanted: An Ontological Critic, he
announced that it was time to identify a
powerful intellectual movement which
deserved to be called a new criticism.

 The intention implicit in this name is

obviously polemical: indeed the New
Critics felt it was time to do away with the
traditional approaches, which laid
emphasis only on the historical, social,
biographical or psychological contexts, on
the moral or philosophical implications, or
still on the textual-linguistic specific
factors.

 In other words the traditional critics took

into account extra-textual considerations
and/or separated the form of the art object
from its meaning, refusing to regard the
work as an integrated art-form.

 Some of these concerns are similar to

those of the Russian formalists, but
between the two critical schools there are
also important differences.
The New Critics activity, their formalism
never severed all connections with what is
outside the form of the literary text.

 The New Critics were first the members of an

informal group of literary discussion, around the
poet-scholar J. C. Ransom and his students
Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth
Brooks.
Ransom was editing The Fugitive, a poetry
magazine which published mostly traditionallypatterned verse, and championed a
conservative ideology, later on to be defined as
Southern Agrarianism.

 In the 1930s other critics associated with

them (such as T. S. Eliot,I. A. Richards, W.
Empson,R. P. Blackmur, and R. Wellek,
while the New Critical principles spread in
most universities, in literary circles and
journals.
By 1955 the current had completely lost
its innovative image and was regarded by
many as a dying trend.

 The moderately revolutionary spirit of the

New Criticism is not a pure product of the
formalist 20th century. Some of its roots lie
in the aesthetics of Kant and Coleridge,
which was based on a theory of
imagination emphasizing the concepts of
harmony and poetic wholeness.

 Besides, in his Critique of Judgment, Kant insisted that

aesthetic pleasure is purely disinterested: as a free
approval, it is indifferent to the real existence of the
contemplated thing. The New Critics are also indebted to
the paradoxical Kantian notion of purposeless finality:
in the same treatise the German philosopher maintained
that those things which we like and consider beautiful
seem to have been meant for the satisfaction of our
needs and desires, although there is no rational
evidence that there has been a purposeful intelligence to
have produced them.

The organic principle

In his Biographia Literaria, the English Romantic poet
Samuel T. Coleridge propounded the organic principle as
the constitutive definition of the poem: the whole is in
every part, and every part can be found in the whole.
The poem is that species of composition characterized,
unlike works of science, by the immediate purpose of
pleasure, and also by special metric and phonetic
arrangements; it produces delight as a whole and this
delight is compatible with the distinct gratification
generated by each component part, which harmonizes
with the other elements.

Coleridges concept of Organicism

T. S. Hulme, a 20th century English thinker,
elucidated Coleridges concept quite graphically
in his Speculations: Essays on Humanism and
the Philosophy of Art: unlike mechanical
complexity, vital or organic is that kind of
complexity in which the parts cannot be said to
be elements as each one is modified by the
others presence, and each one to a certain
extent is the whole. The leg of a chair by itself is
still a leg. My leg by itself wouldnt be.[

Actually the idea of organicism had been

first highlighted in Aristotles Poetics, but
the Stagirite had focused on plot, which
acquired with him an almost immaterial,
transcendental quality, and not on poetic
language, not on figures and style.

Primary Imagination
In Coleridges view, expounded in Biographia
Literaria, a great poem is the product of both the
primary imagination (a superior intuitive power,
similar to the Kantian Vernunft, which conceives
of the oneness of universals, like truth or beauty,
and characterizes the creative poetic genius),
and of the secondary imagination (the faculty,
similar to the Kantian Verstand, possessed by
every human being who intuitively realizes the
oneness of an object or concept).

Secondary Imagination
The secondary imagination dissolves,
disperses, scatters, in order to re-create
[4] the material of the primary imagination;
it represents creation as against vision.

Contextualism
Another important principle which the New
Critics borrowed from Coleridges poetic is
contextualism. The English poet viewed
the poem as a product of the form-creating
man; it had an independent existence,
within the organic system of mutual
relationships among the terms that made
up the context of the poem. Thus the poem
was regarded outside any and all nonpoetic contexts.

I. A. Richards
If the New Critics overlooked the psychological
component in the critical doctrine of the English
critic I. A. Richards, they took over in various
forms his distinction between the symbolic and
the emotive language, as well as that one
between statements (conveyed by science), and
pseudo-statements (conveyed by poetry, which
impresses not through the truth it contains, but
through its structural coherence).

Metaphor and Irony

Richardss emphasis on metaphor as a
constitutive element of language, and on the
determining role of irony and tension in poetry
was also extremely influential with the New
Criticism. High poetry is characterized,
according to him, by a balanced poise - an
equilibrium of opposite factors always in a state
of tension; irony, for instance, brings them into
the poem as contending, complementary
impulses.

Impersonal Theory of Poetry

Likewise T. S. Eliots impersonal theory of
poetry, as he himself called it in Tradition and
the Individual Talent,had an important impact on
the New Critical thought. In the writing of poetry,
Eliot contends, there is a great deal which must
be conscious and deliberate. Poetry is not a
turning loose of emotion, but an escape from
emotion; it is not the expression of personality,
but an escape from personality.

The Objective Correlative

However, there is one way of expressing emotion in the
form of art: it is by finding an objective correlative, that
is, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which
will become the formula of that particular emotion. So,
when the external facts, which must terminate in
sensory experience are presented in the work of art, the
emotion is immediately evoked (145). The well-known
New Critical concept of fallacy, referring to the
traditional critics erroneous emphasis on what is
creation and interpretation and not on the text as such,
owes a great deal to Eliots views above.

Conservative Ideology.
EliotsTory social and religious views, his
emphasis on the decadent condition of the
current Western world, and his preaching
a return to myth, to a unified sensibility
and wholeness of being, made his
doctrine largely converge with the
Southern Agrarians conservative ideology.