Lesson 1: Approaches in Literary Criticism

When you express your views, it is also important to use appropriate

language for a specific discipline. There are terms that you should prefer to put in
your writing depending on the field or context you are in.

For example, if you are to convince people who are experts in the field of
Science and Mathematics, you need to use their language. Here are examples of
terms that you can use in the following disciplines.
Science Mathematics General Terms

Experiments Equation Test

Lab equipment Statistical tool Materials

Invention Solution Action

Laboratory test Result Pregnancy Test

Hormones and Genes Equivalent Values Family

You should be formal and use technical terms that are familiar to them.
However, if your audience is the general public, you also need to use the language
they know. Do not use those that are not common to them. Avoid jargons or
technical words and slang or invented words. You can be informal when necessary.
However, you must never forget to be POLITE to avoid having future problems.
Learning appropriate language and manner is not enough in expressing your
views. There are critical approaches that you can use to make it more convincing
and appropriate.

Read about the critical approaches. You can highlight some important ideas.
You can use these in expressing your views.

1. Formalist Criticism
- This approach regards literature as “a unique form of human knowledge that needs
to be examined on its own terms.” All the elements necessary for understanding
the work are contained within the work itself. Of particular interest to the formalist
critic are the elements of form—style, structure, tone, imagery, etc.— that are
found within the text. A primary goal for formalist critics is to determine how such
elements work together with the text’s content to shape its effects upon readers.

2. Gender Criticism

- This approach “examines how sexual identity influences the creation and reception
of literary works.” Originally an offshoot of feminist movements, gender criticism
today includes a number of approaches, including the so-called “masculinist”
approach recently advocated by poet Robert Bly. The bulk of gender criticism,
 however, is feminist and takes as a central precept that the patriarchal attitudes
that have dominated western thought have resulted, consciously or
unconsciously, in literature “full of unexamined ‘male-produced’ assumptions.”
Feminist criticism attempts to correct this imbalance by analyzing and combatting
such attitudes—by questioning, for example, why none of the characters in
Shakespeare’s play Othello ever challenge the right of a husband to murder a
wife accused of adultery. Other goals of feminist critics include “analyzing how
sexual identity influences the reader of a text” and “examining 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.”

3. Historical Criticism

- This approach “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.” A key goal for historical critics is to
understand the effect of a literary work upon its original readers.

4. Reader-Response Criticism

- This approach takes as a fundamental tenet that “literature” exists not as an artifact
upon a printed page but as a transaction between the physical text and the mind
of a reader. It attempts “to describe what happens in the reader’s mind while
interpreting a text” and reflects that reading, like writing, is a creative process.

5. Media Criticism

- It is the act of closely examining and judging the media. When we examine the
media and various media stories, we often find instances of media bias. Media
bias is the perception that the media is reporting the news in a partial or
prejudiced manner. Media bias occurs when the media seems to push a specific
viewpoint, rather than reporting the news objectively. Keep in mind that media
bias also occurs when the media seems to ignore an important aspect of the
story. This is the case in the news story about the puppies.

6. Marxist Criticism

- It focuses on the economic and political elements of art, often emphasizing the
ideological content of literature; because Marxist criticism often argues that all art
is political, either challenging or endorsing (by silence) the status quo, it is
frequently evaluative and judgmental, a tendency that “can lead to reductive
judgment, as when Soviet critics rated Jack London better than William Faulkner,
Ernest Hemingway, Edith Wharton, and Henry James, because he illustrated the
principles of class struggle more clearly.” Nonetheless, Marxist criticism “can
illuminate political and economic dimensions of literature other approaches
overlook.”
7. Structuralism

- It focused on how human behavior is determined by social, cultural and

psychological structures. It tended to offer a single unified approach to human life
that would embrace all disciplines. The essence of structuralism is the belief that
“things cannot be understood in isolation, they have to be seen in the context of
larger structures which contain them. For example, the structuralist analysis of
Donne’s poem, Good Morrow, demands more focus on the relevant genre, the
concept of courtly love, rather than on the close reading of the formal elements of
the text.