Literary criticism has multiple functions. It is used as a vehicle to interpret or analyze various types of literature, including poetry, novels, and plays. There are many different types, or schools, of literary criticism that can be applied to works of literature. Critical essays are the most common form of literary criticism, and they are generally found in scholarly journals or in books of collected essays or anthologies.
In effect, literary criticism explores different possible meanings that a text may have. Criticismmay look at an idea in a single text or may compare ideas found in multiple texts. These texts may be by the same author, or they may be from the same time period, or they may include similar themes. Often, literary critics use examples from the text or texts to emphasize or support the points they are making in their interpretations or analyses. In addition, ideas from other critical essays may be used to support or defend a point in an essay.
This type of criticism, which is also known as literary theory, has many different schools of thought. The type of criticism being used will influence the way that the critic views the text, and because of this, texts can be interpreted in many different ways. This is often referred to as looking at literature through different lenses, depending on which type of criticism is being used. For example, a psychoanalytic critic will view a text very differently than a critic using Marxist theory, which views the text from an economic standpoint.
Another school of literary criticism is postcolonial. A critic using this theory will often look at the way the colonized people were viewed and treated by the colonizers in a work of literature, for instance. New Historicism or cultural theory, is another school of criticism. This theory views a text in the cultural and social context in which it was written. For example, a critic who uses this theory to explore a work of literature may also look at letters the author wrote or newspaper accounts of what was happening at the time the work was written to try to understand the meaning of the text more completely.
Reader-response criticism is another theory used to study literature. This school of criticismlooks at how groups of readers respond to the same text and explores differences and similarities in their interpretations. Feminist criticism looks at works from a female perspective; for example, it may explore how the female characters in literature are treated by the male characters and draw conclusions based on that examination.
There are other schools of literary criticism as well, including formalism, deconstruction, and gender/queer criticism. The main purpose of any type of literary criticism is to form a judgment about the text and its meaning. It may also allow the reader to see things through a closer exploration of the text. In addition, if there are conflicts within the text, using literarycriticism may help to resolve them and offer a clearer understanding.
New Criticism is a form of literary criticism that triumphed as the predominant critical form in the 1940s through the 1960s. John Crowe Ransom is responsible for naming New Criticism in his book of the same name, published in 1941. New Criticism quickly became “the” way to read literature and poetry, and was taught in both college and high schools.
Literary criticism prior to New Criticism had dwelt on several ways to interpret literature, with no consensus as to the best method. Some critics evaluated literature in terms of the author’s history, showing how works were representative or differed from the time periods in which they were written. Others evaluated works in terms of the author’s life and background.
New Criticism differed greatly from previous forms as it dismissed authorial intent, and particularly ignored biographical and historical information about an author. Instead, literature was to be interpreted based solely on the cohesiveness of the work. To a New Critic, whatever the author intended was invalid, as the form of the work always transformed intent, producing new meanings.
The critic’s position, according to New Criticism, was to evaluate various aspect of a text that produce ambiguity. Critics analyzed metaphor, simile, and other rhetorical tropes that resulted in stress and counterstress, reconciling them to find the harmony in a work. Through analysis, the critic could then tell readers how to interpret a text and what value was to be gained from reading a text. In other words, the critic became the interpreter through which literature could be understood.
Additionally, in New Criticism, the text had to be considered as an object of literature, complete within itself. If the reader began to extrapolate to his or her interpretation outside of the text, he or she had strayed from New Criticism. The critic should be free from his or her own feelings or emotional response when reading the text. Only criticism that stuck to the text was of value. Later theorists argued that there can be no freedom from the self in textual analysis, and that this desire to analyze text as if one were a blank slate is quite impossible.
However, in their new elevated status as interpreter granted by New Criticism, critics legitimized their own profession. Publication of books and articles that clarified the meanings of poetry and other writings were cousins to literature, because they provided the layperson with a method for understanding what one read. Though much of New Criticism has been soundly refuted, this new status of the lofty critic remains.
New Criticism influenced the literary canon, the materials considered to be art, because critics could point to those works that achieved harmony through ambiguity. As such, certain works were considered more valuable than others, greatly influencing which works were assigned as reading material. Students writing about such material often had their interpretations scrapped because they had failed to find the “correct” interpretation of a text.
While New Criticism remains a useful tool for teaching students about the basic elements in poetry, most of New Criticism has been refuted and replaced. Newer forms of literary criticism, which posit that texts can produce multiple meanings that are directly opposed, have triumphed over New Criticism. Newer critical theories have reintroduced the consideration of the author’s intent from a psychological or historical point of view. Other critical schools, such as structuralism, evaluate the specific language of the text to derive multiple meanings.
The best refutations of New Criticism have led to inclusion of more works in the canon. New Critics tended to value Western work over any other forms of literature, and moreover, placed a higher value on works written by men. Feminist and New Historical Critics have restored many works to the canon that had been ousted by New Critics.
Though New Criticism is no longer a dominant critical form, knowledge of New Criticism is essential to understanding the history of literary criticism. One outstanding text to review is Cleanth Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn . Other influential writers in New Criticism are William Empson and Allen Tate.
Russian formalism is a school of literary criticism formed in Russia that became highly influential in the early decades of the 1900s. Some of its concepts are still in use today in literary criticism. Its central tenant is that the text of the writer’s work should be the focus of any inquiry or criticism regarding the work. The Russian formalists believed that literature, including poetry, should not be interpreted based on ideology, historical interests, or psychological principles. Literary art is the total effect of literary devices and “strategies” the writer uses to achieve her aims.
Scholars point out that Russian formalism is not the precise term for the school of criticism. Many of its early adherents could not agree on what all of its principals and goals should be. They simply considered themselves “formalists.” By the 1930s, Russian authorities were using the term formalist as a pejorative to describe any “elitist” artist.
Formalists advocated an objective and what they considered a “scientific” method of studying literature and poetic language. Literary scholarship was thought to be a distinct field of study that was separate from the disciplines of psychology and sociology. Only those features that distinguish literature from all other kinds of thought and expression should be the object of critical study.
One key feature that formalists identified as distinguishing literature from other endeavors was its use of “defamiliarization.” This term refers to the way in which literature uses language in new, unfamiliar, and even strange ways. The writer is in control of a universe of her own making. She can explain the world in a whole new light through her choice of language and story construction. What the writer says cannot be separated from how she says it.
Formalists believed that literature has its own distinct history and innovations. It is left to the writers to find new approaches to defamiliarization. Two modern examples of the literary strategy of defamiliarization are James Joyce’s “stream of consciousness” writing, and the use of magical realism by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his novels.
Russian formalism influenced the literary theory of structuralism. Structuralism holds that relationships between concepts are dependent on the culture and language in which the concepts are created. These relationships can be discovered and studied.
The school of “new criticism” is comparable to Russian formalism, although it did not evolve from it. Both schools of thought believe that literature must be studied on its own terms. It cannot be evaluated in terms of cultural and historical “externalities.” The focus of study should be the literary strategies and craft of the writer.
is a philosophy applied to literary criticism, as well as to criticism of the other arts, which began to gain popularity in the 1980s. The field of deconstruction arose partially in reaction to the literary theories of structuralism. Structuralism posited that when words could be understood within the context of a society of readers, then one could point to the specific meaning of a text.
Deconstruction eschewed the concept of one possible meaning for a text, and instead suggested that meanings of a text are multiple and contradictory. Underlying a text is thesubtext, a set of values that must be evaluated to see if the text is really contrary in nature and hence somewhat without meaning. Deconstruction also evaluates the way in which texts in the traditional literary canon are taught to students, suggesting that traditional “readings” of a text often ignore underlying value structures in direct opposition to what is taught.
A simple example of this is analysis of the work Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. For many years, this novel was thought to be an important work on human rights and an examination of man’s inhumanity to man. Through the eyes of Huck, the reader could see the devastation of slavery and the degradation suffered by African Americans.
Critics who use deconstruction quite logically point to the last portion of the book, in which Huck and Tom realize that Jim is a free man and no longer a slave, yet go to great lengths to pretend he is a slave. They lock him up and nearly starve him. Huck is quite willing to degrade Jim in this way, showing few moral qualms about doing so.
For those practicing deconstruction, this bizarre chapter suggests that the so-called work about human rights is anything but. The underlying values in the text are not consistent with the way it is presented to students. In a sense, the deconstructionist has taken apart the novel and its critical tradition, displaying its inconsistencies.
Many literary critics abhor deconstruction, stating that deconstructing a text deprives the text of meaning and ultimately dismisses the value of anything it touches. To those who use deconstruction, the answer to this criticism might be: “How does one define value? What is meaning?” Though this answer may frustrate critics of deconstruction, it points to the way in which deconstructionists see the text as a source of multiple meanings, determined very much by each reader's own subtexts and definitions. To reduce and reduce the meaning of a work may ultimately make it purposeless, say some critics. At its best, though, deconstruction can be helpful in unmasking huge contradictions present in a text.
Critics of deconstruction have also accused the theory of being fascist in nature. This is largely due to one major proponent, Paul de Man, who may have written for a magazine that had some Nazi sympathies. Paul de Man has refuted these charges, yet deconstruction seems inexorably tied to fascism in the minds of many.
It is true that reading a deconstruction of a text can be similar to attempting to decode a secret message. Deconstructionists like Jack Derrida deliberately choose confusing and lengthy words to derive a multiplicity of meanings from their interpretation. In some ways, this makes deconstruction elitist and inaccessible to many readers. The deconstructionist cares not, however, for those who are confused. They believe that confusion should be the result of reading a deconstruction of a text.
A more accessible deconstructionist is Roland Barthes, who tragically died in his early 40s. His writing on deconstruction is somewhat more straightforward, and anyone studying literarycriticism would do well to read his work before forming an opinion of
New Historicism is a theory applied to literature that suggests literature must be studied and interpreted within the context of both the history of the author and the history of the critic. The theory arose in the 1980s, and with Stephen Greenblatt as its main proponent, became quite popular in the 1990s. Unlike previous historical criticism, which limited itself to simply demonstrating how a work was reflective of its time, New Historicism evaluates how the work is influenced by the time in which it was produced. It also examines the social sphere in which the author moved, the psychological background of the author, the books and theories that may have influenced the author, and any other factors which influenced the work of art. All work is biased.
In addition, New Historicism acknowledges that any criticism of a work is necessarily tinged with the critic’s beliefs, social structure, and so on. Most New Historicists may begin a critical reading of a novel by explaining themselves, their backgrounds, and their prejudices. Both the work and the reader are corrupted by everything that has influenced them. New Historicism thus represents a significant change from previous critical theories like New Criticism, because its main focus is to look at things outside of the work, instead of reading the text as a thing apart from the author.
Those practicing New Historicism draw from other forms of criticism, particularly the writings of Michel Foucault, who may be more properly termed a psychological critic. Marxist criticismis also a progenitor of New Historicism.
In regards to the relationship between Marxism and New Historicism, it can be said that the New Historicist often looks for ways in which populations are marginalized through a literary work. For example, a Jane Austen novel is a novel confined to a very limited sphere of society, namely the landed gentry. While the New Historicist may praise the novel, he or she will also duly note that the servant class is completely marginalized in Austen’s work. Austen asserts the pre-eminence of the landed gentry above any other class of society, and is quite critical of those who marry “beneath” their social status.
The critic might then evaluate why Austen would display this prejudice, giving information about her background, the books she had read, events in her life that may have influenced her, and her own choices in regards to marriage. Austen is, in a way, against her own work, which suggests power may be purchased through good marriages, since Austen never married. In fact, Austen’s life stands outside her own espoused theories in literature, because she was a female novelist, gaining power through her work rather than through marriage.
One practicing New Historicism would note such a dichotomy. The fact that Austen wrote about a society to which she only marginally belonged can enhance the reading of her work. It might also help make sense of her broad critiques of “civilized” society.
Criticisms of this literary theory are mostly levied by those who still practice New Criticism, as well as those who make up the Post-Modernist critics, such as Deconstructionists. The New Critic argues that literature should be read as a self contained work without considering influence. Deconstructionists seem largely annoyed that New Historicists claim to be the only ones who admit that all texts, including their own interpretations, are biased.
Structuralism is a broad-based rational theory that focuses on signs and organization in various aspects of human culture. While this approach can be applied to various areas of study ranging from anthropology to psychology, its primary use has occurred in language and literature studies. Structuralists focus on breaking down information into small elements for study. They are further interested in categorization and classification of these units of information.
The structuralism movement took hold in the early and mid-20th century, and it first gained prominence in France with notable figures like Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and Jaques Derrida. Scholars of this era became interested in how the world was defined by structures that could be categorized and studied. Anthropologists, for example, investigated developed systems like religious rituals and also researched epistemes, or the shared methods that cultures use to gain knowledge. Psychologists, on the other hand, determined how common experiences, symbols, and worldviews molded the human mind, while political researchers considered the rules of governments. In a sense, structuralism and its emphasis on the collective and the categorical became a response to existentialism and its reliance on unique and individual experiences.
Language studies became the field in which structuralism arguably took the strongest hold. Individuals like Ferdinand de Saussure applied the theory to language construction via structural linguistics. This approach centered on determining the common components of language systems. The relationship between the sounds and the meanings of words — or the signifier and the signified, respectively — were given particular attention. In modern linguistics, structural scholars study the smallest individual segments of words that produce sound or meaning, otherwise known as phonemes and morphemes.
Similar approaches have also found a stronghold in structuralistic literary criticism. In essence, literary scholars apply structural methods to works of fiction, and their only source of study is the actual works themselves. Such an approach could include finding common character types, settings, or story points among various novels, particularly categorical genre novels. The structural critic may look for patterns and associations within a single text as well. Water, for example, may play a prominent role at various progression points within a novel. In essence, comparison and cohesion are emphasized in structural criticism.
The foundation of structuralism has been both praised and criticized. Proponents believe the philosophy allows an objective and reliable method of researching and studying various principles and cultural components. Critics, however, argue that structuralistic study is too narrow and sterile. It does not consider factors like historical influences or human emotion, and it attempts to classify complex issues into convenient categories. In response, some opponents developed an opposing approach known as post-structuralism, which de-emphasized structure, order, and narrow interpretations.
Post-structuralism is a modern philosophical school of thought. It grew out of, and in response to, the philosophy of structuralism, which many of the pivotal thinkers of post-structuralism were extremely critical of. Post-structuralism is one of the major driving forces in philosophy today, and is intricately connected with postmodernist thought.
Structuralism as a school of thought hit its stride during the radical movements of the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in France, although it had its roots back at the beginning of the 20th century. Structuralists look at the foundational structures implicit in all productions of a culture, and undertake an analysis of the many parts that create something, to get a better understanding of the creation. Linguistics was one of the first fields to use structuralism to its advantage, and its application quickly spread to other fields. The basic premise of structuralism is that all things have a structure below the level of meaning, and that this structure constitutes the reality of that thing.
Post-structuralism grew as a response to structuralism’s perceived assumption that its own system of analysis was somehow essentialist. Post-structuralists hold that in fact even in an examination of underlying structures, a slew of biases introduce themselves, based on the conditioning of the examiner. At the root of post-structuralism is the rejection of the idea that there is any truly essential form to a cultural product, as all cultural products are by their very nature formed, and therefore artificial.
This concept of non-essentialism was famously expanded upon by Foucault in his History of Sexuality, in which he argues that even gender and sexual orientation are contrived formations, and that our concept of essentialist notions of gender or sexuality is flawed. For example, he argues that the entire class of homosexuality is in fact quite recent, built up by cultural norms and an interplay between different groups in society, but with no more essential a quality than, for example, the idea of beauty.
One of the pivotal moments in the history of post-structuralism occurred in 1966, when Derrida delivered a talk at John Hopkins University. Derrida was respected as one of the great thinkers of structuralism, and so was invited to speak on the subject at length, as it was just beginning to receive a great deal of attention in the American intellectual community. Derrida’s lecture, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences,” was a sharp critique of structuralism, pointing out its inherent limitations, and laying out some basic principles for a new language of discourse.
Post-structuralism is importantly different from postmodernism, although the two are often considered one and the same by the general subject. Although there are certain areas of overlap, thinkers from one school almost never identify themselves with the other school of thought. Postmodernism importantly seeks to identify a contemporary state of the world, the period that is following the modernist period. Postmodernism seeks to identify a certain juncture, and to work within the new period. Post-structuralism, on the other hand, can be seen as a more explicitly critical view, aiming to deconstruct ideas of essentialism in various disciplines to allow for a more accurate discourse.
Within the area of language and humanities, Marxist criticism is an approach to literary criticism that grew out of the economic, social and political ideologies originally developed byKarl Marx during the 19th century and, as a result, concentrates on the ideological content of a work of literature. Marxist criticism examines a literary effort from the standpoint of the assumptions that it makes and the values that it displays regarding such issues as power, class, race and culture rather than elements of artistic style, form, quality of writing, plot or other yardsticks more commonly used in literary criticism. Although Marxist literary criticism makes use of more traditional literary analysis techniques, concerns about the aesthetics of a piece of literature are secondary to exploring the ultimate political and social meanings that it contains.
In addition to the more traditional techniques of literary criticism, Marxist criticism looks at how the characters relate to each other. Of special interest is the interactions that show the social hierarchy and individual mannerisms of the characters that can be related to different social classes. Marxist criticism is especially interested in what kinds of jobs the characters have in order to place them within the class or economic system. How much they have to work and the level of luxury they live in will often be part of the analysis.
The use of free time by the characters is of interest. Free time reflects the individual’s free choice and degree of conformity to society. The role that the government plays in the literary work is analyzed to identify how it played a role, what tools it used and how successful it was with the public.
For Marxist criticism, analyzing literature from a political or social point of view is a natural outgrowth of Marx’s theories. Viewed by a Marxist, the foundation of literature is the ideologyand background of the writer. Literature is considered to be a social institution with an identifiable ideological function.
Marxist criticism looks at a work of literature and sees it not the result of either divine or human inspiration or as the purely artistic effort by a writer. Instead, literature is considered to come from the ideological and economic circumstances in which the writer was immersed. ForMarxist criticism, the final and most important source of a person's experience is the socioeconomic system of which he or she is a member. The Marxist critic sees literature as just another product of work. Writers produce, the work is sold in the marketplace, and readers consume — it’s all economics.
Feminist criticism defines a literary theory showing how women were portrayed as less valuable than men in literature throughout history. Usually called feminist literary criticism, it studies how early writings condoned the oppression of women because men dominated society. Feminist criticism also explores how women writers were taken less seriously than male authors from a historical perspective.
Going back hundreds of years, women were shown in literature as imperfect when compared to men, according to feminist criticism. Female stereotypes abound in early literary works, andfeminist criticism scholars contend these views kept women from reaching equality socially, politically, and economically. In some instances, women were simply viewed as being different from men but not recognized for any contributions to society.
Feminist criticism gender studies typically divide history into three distinct periods. The first era looks at literature from the 1700s through the early 1900s. This is considered the first time women began examining female characters in literature, which were created from a male viewpoint. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, published in 1929, is studied for its impact on feminist criticism and the obstacles female writers overcame to express their views.
At that time, most women were confined to a house, which became a re-occurring theme in books by female authors of the era. Over time, these writers began developing strong female characters that went against society’s expectations. These early heroines sought independence and followed a quest for knowledge, with literature showing women bucking the system and using their intellect to make personal decisions.
The second wave of feminist criticism arose between the 1960s and late 1970s. The women’s rights movement drew attention to political, economic, and social injustices to the female sex. This era coincided with the civil rights movement that demanded equality for people of color.
During the 1990s, scholars studying feminist criticism actively wrote about the contributions of women to society. Literature included studies of text throughout history that illustrated the debasement of women, especially in works considered classics. The way women were featured in historical works influenced female characters in modern text internationally during this time.
A Broad and Ambiguous View of Reality
Postmodern theory is a broad and somewhat ambiguous belief system tied to the philosophical and cultural reaction to the convictions of Modernism (sometimes equated with Humanism). Postmodernism is the philosophical proposal that reality is ultimately inaccessible by human investigation, that knowledge is a social construction, that truth-claims are political power plays, and that the meaning of words is to be determined by readers not authors. In brief, Postmodern theory sees reality as what individuals or social groups make it to be.
is a critical concept within contemporary cultural studies characterized by attempts to explain the development, conditions, and consequences of the experience of modern colonialism. Postcolonial theorists generally focus on the empires of European nation-states that were consolidated in the nineteenth century and were largely dismantled in the mid-twentieth century. America's growing empire during the same period has also increasingly been subject to postcolonial cultural analysis.
As a field of inquiry, postcolonialism asks both how unequal relationships of political power are represented in cultural institutions such as literature, art, popular media, and the academy and how these representations work to create, destabilize, or understand the differences between individuals and among social groups. Its critical theories endeavor to come to terms with the legacy of the modern era's racism, primitivism, territorial conquest, sexual exploitation, slavery, and mass violence, as well as the influence of that legacy on the contemporary world.
Origins, Development, and Major Terms.
The work of Francophone writers published in the 1950s, including Albert Memmi, Aimé Césaire, and particularly Frantz Fanon, provided a foundation for much of the postcolonial theory that proliferated in the following decades. Their works describe the racism, violence, and sexualized power struggles inherent in colonial hegemony. Writing during the height of colonial independence movements, these theorists provided psychoanalytic critiques of the problems involved in negotiating demands for political power in the face of culturally constructed ideas of racial identity.
Edward Said built on these arguments and applied Marxist scholarship on dialectics and hegemony to the study of the cultural documents of European empires in his foundational book, Orientalism (1978). In this and later works Said drew on literary, philosophic, and social science texts to show how the West created an intellectual apparatus that fetishized the otherness of colonized peoples, and he argued that these institutionalized cultural conceptions directly facilitated territorial conquest. Said defined “Orientalism” as a “distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts,” and he set out to study the “dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires—British, French, American—in whose intellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced.”
Critics following Said opened up canonical Western intellectual, literary, and art history to analyses of how ideas of cultural and racial difference are created and how they legitimate violence and systematized oppression. Thus postcolonial theorists, critics, and writers engage with Western texts from the colonial period, focusing on how colonized subjects are depicted, while they also work toward discarding these kinds of intellectual blinders in order to initiate new cross-cultural dialogues.
In the early 1980s, Ranajit Guha and other Marxist historians founded Subaltern Studies, a collective project whose aim was to write histories from the perspective of peasants and other exploited activist groups. By using the term “subaltern,” these historians used the postcolonial experience of India to depart from a Marxist historical tradition and assert that large groups of people subordinated by the elite acted together politically without necessarily sharing a class consciousness.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak placed Subaltern Studies in dialogue with feminism, poststructural literary theory, and Said-influenced works on Orientalism in her writings over the following decades. Spivak showed early on how postcolonial studies could represent a confluence of late-twentieth-century intellectual theories. By drawing upon Immanuel Kant's and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophies of how the subject and the other are created and by applying Jacques Derrida's and Paul de Man's methods of deconstruction to the language of colonialism—all while remaining grounded in Marxism— Spivak's essays on literature and cultural studies show how language works to silence colonized subjects. Spivak uses feminist theory to argue that gender difference exacerbates the marginalization of the colonized both within the European literary tradition and in contemporary culture; she articulated this concern when she critiqued the approach of Subaltern Studies historians: “If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow.”
In the following years, Homi Bhabha also brought together various schools of literary theory in order to critique ideas of cultural authenticity, building on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Lacan, and others. While responding directly the problems of postcoloniality, Bhabha's works such as The Location of Culture (1994) develop ideas of dialogism in narrative in an attempt to focus on the role of liminal voices or positions. Bhabha argues for a shift in analytical perspective to create an ability to understand other cultures that might be free from the sociological categorization and hierarchies that the colonial period propagated. By focusing on hybrid characters—those that combine aspects of opposing cultures—postcolonial analysis can threaten the radical divisions imposed by colonialist discourse: “This interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.” Postcolonialism became associated with studies of marginalized or cross-cultural figures and the history of attempts to represent alterity, or the state of being other, along with attempts to reconfigure ideas of what is meant by home and belonging in light of global diasporas initiated by colonialism.
The term “postcolonial” in reference to a literary genre as opposed to a cultural theory came into wider use after the appearance in 1989 of The Empire Writes Back by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Surveying the scholarship on the subject to that point, these authors defined postcolonial literatures as work written by people from the former British colonies, though today the term in reference to literature is much more broadly applied. Shortly thereafter, Robert Young traced the theoretical genealogy of postcolonial readings of history from Fanon through Said, Spivak, and Bhaba in White Mythologies (1990), and he argued that their analyses of colonialist discourse called for a reexamination of what constitutes ideas of Englishness within England: “Crucial… has been the demonstration of the extent to which colonialism, in the British example, was not simply a marginal activity on the edges of English civilization, but fundamental in its own cultural self-representation.” Young later called Said, Spivak, and Bhabha the “Holy Trinity” of postcolonial criticism, helping to consolidate further the idea of postcolonialism as a theoretical field, at the same time that the term was gaining recognition in reference to artistic work produced outside of the former empires' centers.
Critical Debates.
Postcolonialism has often been understood in comparison with postmodernism, an aesthetic movement gaining prominence at roughly the same time and characterized by skepticism of the possibilities of art and creative innovation. Kwame Anthony Appiah linked postmodernism and postcolonialism together by their attempts to make an intellectual “space-clearing gesture” beyond imperial and modern modes of thinking, rather than simply attempting a reactive or corrective gesture. According to Appiah, both concepts “challenge earlier legitimating narratives,” while they also introduce new possibilities for understanding the resulting indeterminacy. The comparison with postmodern artistic movements also helps postcolonialism to be understood as a way of thinking applicable to many analytical situations, not just to specific geographic locations.
Ato Quayson outlined the project of postcolonialism as bringing cultural critical practice to bear on the ongoing social consequences of imperialism in the present. The process of “postcolonializing” is, then, a new way of looking at cultural production that can be broadly applied, even though it is more directly focused on material concerns than postmodernism is: “The point is that postcolonialism must be seen as a project to correct imbalances in the world, and not merely to do with specific ‘postcolonial’ constituencies.”
Although postcolonialism has always been constituted by an overtly political reading of culture, its intersection with the kind of Western theoretical discourse mostly restricted to academia and embraced by Spivak and Bhabha sparked criticism. Benita Parry, for instance, argued that using the intellectual tools descended from the same cultural apparatus that carried out colonialism is itself imperialist. The term “postcolonial” itself, when applied to literary texts, also can be seen as a category that is meaningful only when presenting work from formerly colonized groups to Western audiences. Whereas novels by, for example, Naguib Mahfouz might be marketed in English-speaking countries as “postcolonial” along with novels by Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie, readers within the author's native Egypt would not necessarily consider his works in the same category as those written by authors originally from Africa or South Asia.
Scholars often ask if postcolonialism is a particular field of study or a methodology of practicing literary and cultural studies. Postcolonialism as a field might be thought to consist of art, literature, or film from former colonies, works that depict the experience of colonialism, or texts dating from the colonial era that describe interactions within empires. However, postcolonialism has also grown into a theoretical tool of analysis concerned with relationships of cultural difference and territorial conquest whose methods can be applied to texts from any period, from Shakespearean plays to modern films. As a method of inquiry, postcolonial studies is thus free from being confined temporally to the specific historical era of colonialism and can include analyses of the ongoing development of capitalism and the process of globalization. Postcolonialism has been able to engage with research on issues of migration, cosmopolitanism, and global economics previously beyond the scope of postcolonial studies. With this approach, postcolonialism has expanded the conversation on the relationship of culture and conquest to include a much wider circle of scholars concerned with neo-imperial realities.
Literary theory and literary criticism are interpretive tools that help us think more deeply and insightfully about the literature that we read. Over time, different schools of literary criticism have developed, each with its own approaches to the act of reading.
Schools of Interpretation
Cambridge School (1920s–1930s): A group of scholars at Cambridge University who rejected historical and biographical analysis of texts in favor of close readings of the texts themselves.
Chicago School (1950s): A group, formed at the University of Chicago in the 1950s, that drew on Aristotle’s distinctions between the various elements within a narrative to analyze the relation between form and structure. Critics and Criticisms: Ancient and Modern (1952) is the major work of the Chicago School.
Deconstruction (1967–present): A philosophical approach to reading, first advanced by Jacques Derrida that attacks the assumption that a text has a single, stable meaning. Derrida suggests that all interpretation of a text simply constitutes further texts, which means there is no “outside the text” at all. Therefore, it is impossible for a text to have stable meaning. The practice of deconstruction involves identifying the contradictions within a text’s claim to have a single, stable meaning, and showing that a text can be taken to mean a variety of things that differ significantly from what it purports to mean.
Feminist criticism (1960s–present): An umbrella term for a number of different critical approaches that seek to distinguish the human experience from the male experience. Feminist critics draw attention to the ways in which patriarchal social structures have marginalized women and male authors have exploited women in their portrayal of them. Although feminist criticism dates as far back as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and had some significant advocates in the early 20th century, such as Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, it did not gain widespread recognition as a theoretical and political movement until the 1960s and 1970s.
Psychoanalytic criticism: Any form of criticism that draws on psychoanalysis,the practice of analyzing the role of unconscious psychological drives and impulses in shaping human behavior or artistic production. The three main schools of psychoanalysis are named for the three leading figures in developing psychoanalytic theory: Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Jacques Lacan.
Freudian criticism (c. 1900–present): The view of art as the imagined fulfillment of wishes that reality denies. According to Freud, artists sublimate their desires and translate their imagined wishes into art. We, as an audience, respond to the sublimated wishes that we share with the artist. Working from this view, an artist’s biography becomes a useful tool in interpreting his or her work. “Freudian criticism” is also used as a term to describe the analysis of Freudian images within a work of art.
Jungian criticism (1920s–present): A school of criticism that draws on Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, a reservoir of common thoughts and experiences that all cultures share. Jung holds that literature is an expression of the main themes of the collective unconscious, and critics often invoke his work in discussions of literary archetypes.
Lacanian criticism (c. 1977–present): Criticism based on Jacques Lacan’s view that the unconscious, and our perception of ourselves, is shaped in the “symbolic” order of language rather than in the “imaginary” order of prelinguistic thought. Lacan is famous in literary circles for his influential reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.”
Marxist criticism: An umbrella term for a number of critical approaches to literature that draw inspiration from the social and economic theories of Karl Marx. Marx maintained that material production, or economics, ultimately determines the course of history, and in turn influences social structures.These social structures, Marx argued, are held in place by the dominant ideology, which serves to reinforce the interests of the ruling class. Marxist criticism approaches literature as a struggle with social realities and ideologies.
Frankfurt School (c. 1923–1970): A group of German Marxist thinkers associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. These thinkers applied the principles of Marxism to a wide range of social phenomena, including literature. Major members of the Frankfurt School include Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas.
New Criticism (1930s–1960s): Coined in John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism (1941), this approach discourages the use of history and biography in interpreting a literary work. Instead, it encourages readers to discover the meaning of a work through a detailed analysis of the text itself. This approach was popular in the middle of the 20th century, especially in the United States, but has since fallen out of favor.
New Historicism (1980s–present): An approach that breaks down distinctions between “literature” and “historical context” by examining the contemporary production and reception of literary texts, including the dominant social, political, and moral movements of the time. Stephen Greenblatt is a leader in this field, which joins the careful textual analysis of New Criticism with a dynamic model of historical research.
New Humanism (c. 1910–1933): An American movement, led by Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, that embraced conservative literary and moral values and advocated a return to humanistic education.
Post-structuralism (1960s–1970s): A movement that comprised, among other things, Deconstruction, Lacanian criticism, and the later works of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. It criticized structuralism for its claims to scientific objectivity, including its assumption that the system of signs in which language operates was stable.
Queer theory (1980s–present): A “constructivist” (as opposed to “essentialist”) approach to gender and sexuality that asserts that gender roles and sexual identity are social constructions rather than an essential, inescapable part of our nature. Queer theory consequently studies literary texts with an eye to the ways in which different authors in different eras construct sexual and gender identity. Queer theory draws on certain branches of feminist criticism and traces its roots to the first volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976).
Russian Formalism (1915–1929): A school that attempted a scientific analysis of the formal literary devices used in a text. The Stalinist authorities criticized and silenced the Formalists, but Western critics rediscovered their work in the 1960s. Ultimately, the Russian Formalists had significant influence on structuralism and Marxist criticism.
Structuralism (1950s–1960s): An intellectual movement that made significant contributions not only to literary criticism but also to philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and history. Structuralist literary critics, such as Roland Barthes, read texts as an interrelated system of signs that refer to one another rather than to an external “meaning” that is fixed either by author or reader. Structuralist literary theory draws on the work of the Russian Formalists, as well as the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure and C. S. Peirce.
Literary Terms and Theories
Literary theory is notorious for its complex and somewhat inaccessible jargon. The following list defines some of the more commonly encountered terms in the field.
Anxiety of influence: A theory that the critic Harold Bloom put forth in The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973). Bloom uses Freud’s idea of the Oedipus complex (see below) to suggest that poets, plagued by anxiety that they have nothing new to say, struggle against the influence of earlier generations of poets. Bloom suggests that poets find their distinctive voices in an act of misprision, or misreading, of earlier influences, thus refiguring the poetic tradition. Although Bloom presents his thesis as a theory of poetry, it can be applied to other arts as well.
Canon: A group of literary works commonly regarded as central or authoritative to the literary tradition. For example, many critics concur that the Western canon—the central literary works of Western civilization—includes the writings of Homer, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and the like. A canon is an evolving entity, as works are added or subtracted as their perceived value shifts over time. For example, the fiction of W. Somerset Maugham was central to the canon during the middle of the 20th century but is read less frequently today. In recent decades, the idea of an authoritative canon has come under attack, especially from feminist and postcolonial critics, who see the canon as a tyranny of dead white males that marginalizes less mainstream voices.
Death of the author: A post-structuralist theory, first advanced by Roland Barthes, that suggests that the reader, not the author, creates the meaning of a text. Ultimately, the very idea of an author is a fiction invented by the reader.
Diachronic/synchronic: Terms that Ferdinand de Saussure used to describe two different approaches to language. The diachronic approach looks at language as a historical process and examines the ways in which it has changed over time. Thesynchronic approach looks at language at a particular moment in time, without reference to history. Saussure’s structuralist approach is synchronic, for it studies language as a system of interrelated signs that have no reference to anything (such as history) outside of the system.
Dialogic/monologic: Terms that the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin used to distinguish works that are controlled by a single, authorial voice (monologic) from works in which no single voice predominates (dialogic or polyphonic). Bakhtin takes Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky as examples of monologic and dialogic writing, respectively.
Diegesis/Mimesis: Terms that Aristotle first used to distinguish “telling”(diegesis) from “showing” (mimesis). In a play, for instance, most of the action is mimetic, but moments in which a character recounts what has happened offstage are diegetic.
Discourse: A post-structuralist term for the wider social and intellectual context in which communication takes place. The implication is that the meaning of works is as dependent on their surrounding context as it is on the content of the works themselves.
Exegesis: An explanation of a text that clarifies difficult passages and analyzes its contemporary relevance or application.
Explication: A close reading of a text that identifies and explains the figurative language and forms within the work.
Hermeneutics: The study of textual interpretation and of the way in which a text communicates meaning.
Intertextuality: The various relationships a text may have with other texts, through allusions, borrowing of formal or thematic elements, or simply by reference to traditional literary forms. The term is important to structuralist and poststructuralist critics, who argue that texts relate primarily to one another and not to an external reality.
Linguistics: The scientific study of language, encompassing, among other things, the study of syntax, semantics, and the evolution of language.
Logocentrism: The desire for an ultimate guarantee of meaning, whether God, Truth, Reason, or something else. Jacques Derrida criticizes the bulk of Western philosophy as being based on a logocentric “metaphysics of presence,” which insists on the presence of some such ultimate guarantee. The main goal of deconstruction is to undermine this belief.
Metalanguage: A technical language that explains and interprets the properties of ordinary language. For example, the vocabulary of literary criticism is a metalanguage that explains the ordinary language of literature. Post-structuralist critics argue that there is no such thing as a metalanguage; rather, they assert, all language is on an even plane and therefore there is no essential difference between literature and criticism.
Metanarrative: A larger framework within which we understand historical processes. For instance, a Marxist metanarrative sees history primarily as a history of changing material circumstances and class struggle. Post-structuralist critics draw our attention to the ways in which assumed met narratives can be used as tools of political domination.
Mimesis:Seediegesis/mimesis,above.
Monologic:Seedialogic/monologic,above.
Narratology: The study of narrative, encompassing the different kinds of narrative voices, forms of narrative, and possibilities of narrative analysis.
Oedipus complex: Sigmund Freud’s theory that a male child feels unconscious jealousy toward his father and lust for his mother. The name comes from Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex, in which the main character unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother. Freud applies this theory in an influential reading of Hamlet, in which he sees Hamlet as struggling with his admiration of Claudius, who fulfilled Hamlet’s own desire of murdering Hamlet’s father and marrying his mother.
Semantics: The branch of linguistics that studies the meanings of words.
Semiotics or semiology: Terms for the study of sign systems and the ways in which communication functions through conventions in sign systems. Semiotics is central to structuralist linguistics.
Sign/signifier/signified: Terms fundamental to Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralism linguistics. A sign is a basic unit of meaning—a word, picture, or hand gesture, for instance, that conveys some meaning. A signifier is the perceptible aspect of a sign (e.g., the word “car”) while the signified is the conceptual aspect of a sign (e.g., the concept of a car). A referent is a physical object to which a sign system refers (e.g., the physical car itself).
Synchronic:Seediachronic/synchronicabove.