FINAL EXAMINATION

LITERARY CRITICISM

Vanessa S. Benet

Answer the questions that follow by highlighting important concepts to strengthen your
discussion. Each question will be rated 25 points.

1. Trace the history of literary criticism from Plato to the present.

Literary criticism, the reasoned consideration of literary works and issues. It applies, as a
term, to any argumentation about literature, whether or not specific works are analyzed. This
kind of scrutinization that has a negative bite to it starts many years ago with Plato in around
428 ca. It is an undeniable fact that Plato has a theory in all aspect of things in life. As the
generation pass by the people that are involve in literary criticism goes on and on. Those people
created, offered, and utilize different theories to shred each literature that they can read.

2. What makes aesthetic judgment valid according to Kant. Justify by citing the elements
of what is beautiful according to him.

Kant argues that such aesthetic judgments must have four key distinguishing features.
First, they are disinterested, meaning that we take pleasure in something because we judge it
beautiful, rather than judging it beautiful because we find it pleasurable. The latter type of
judgment would be more like a judgment of the ‘agreeable’. Second and third, such judgments
are both universal and necessary. This means roughly that it is an intrinsic part of the activity of
such a judgment to expect others to agree with us. Although we may say ‘beauty is in the eye of
the beholder’, that is not how we act. Instead, we debate and argue about our aesthetic judgments
– and especially about works of art -and we tend to believe that such debates and arguments can
actually achieve something. Indeed, for many purposes, ‘beauty’ behaves as if it were a real
property of an object, like its weight or chemical composition. But Kant insists that universality
and necessity are in fact a product of features of the human mind, and that there is no objective
property of a thing that makes it beautiful. Fourth, through aesthetic judgments, beautiful objects
appear to be ‘purposive without purpose’ An object’s purpose is the concept according to which
it was made; an object is purposive if it appears to have such a purpose; if, in other words, it
appears to have been made or designed. But it is part of the experience of beautiful objects, Kant
argues, that they should affect us as if they had a purpose, although no particular purpose can be
found.

3. Compare and contrast realism and naturalism. Be able to cite literary works that would
clarify your point of emphasis.
Realism, as the name suggests, was an attempt to describe situations as they might
actually occur, as opposed to romanticism which told stories that conformed to particular
narrative conventions, appealed to emotions, and sometimes invoked the supernatural. Realism
can be seen as a response to romanticism, which had previously been the dominant literary
aesthetic. While realism offered supposedly objective descriptions of real conditions with the
hope of improving society, naturalism often focused on determinism, or the inability of human
beings to resist the biological, social, and economic forces that dictated their behavior and their
fate. Naturalism is usually considered to be an outgrowth of realism in its pursuit of realistic
depictions, but naturalist fiction was more likely to depict base human impulses and violence and
veered away from middle-class concerns. Instead, it often depicted more marginal members of
society, particularly those of low-wage factory labor that was creating a more urban, regimented,
unhealthy, and bleak existence for great masses of people. An example of both theories that is in
a literary work is The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, it discussed the life of a teenage woman
who has cancer, mostly it revolves around her love interest that she knew in a support group.
Realism can be shown in the context by portraying how a cancer patient got treated in her day to
day basis. The character being in middle class have shown that her illness is treated more than
those people in lower class. The Naturalism that is stated in the context can be when the boy who
the woman is in loved with died because if cancer.

4. Discuss substantially the following literary criticism of; The Later Twentieth Century:
New Historicism, ReaderResponse Theory, Postcolonial Criticism, and Cultural Studies
New Historicism is a literary theory based on the idea that literature should be studied
and interpreted within the context of both the history of the author and the history of the critic.
Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts "real existence"
to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation reader-response theorists share two
beliefs: 1) that the role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature and
2) that readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by an objective literary
text; rather they actively make the meaning they find in literature. Postcolonial critics reinterpret
and examine the values of literary texts, by focussing on the contexts in which they were
produced, and reveal the colonial ideologies that are concealed within.  Cultural Studies might
be characterized by its broad definition of literature as including all aspects of popular culture, its
situation of literature as a set of semiotic codes among broader social codes, its view of culture as
an instrument of subordination or subversion, as a site of ideological struggle, its commitment to
broadly left-wing political aims, and its generally empirical, interdisciplinary, and collaborative
methodology.