A Course Material To Introduction To Lit

Introduction to Literary Theories and Criticisms (Enla 422), 2011
DEBREMARKOS UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE AND HUMANITIES
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
A Course Material to:
INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY
THEORIES AND CRITICISMS
(Enla 422)
BY
MINASIE GESSESSE (MGZG)
2010G.C/2003E.C
Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………...1
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Chapter One: Literary Criticism and Literary Periods

1.1 The Period Concept ………………………………………………………………………3
1.2 Different Periods ……………………………………………………………………………...4
1.2.1 Renaissance (14th C to 16th C) …………………………………………………………5
1.2.2 Neoclassicism (1660–1798) ………………………………………………………………6
1.2.3 Romanticism (1798–1832) ……………………………………………………………….7
1.2.4 Realism (1830–1900) ……………………………………………………………………..8
Chapter Two: Theories of Literary Criticism

2.1 Definition of Literary Criticism ………………………………………………………………9
2.2 The Purpose of Criticism ……………………………………………………………………10
2.3
Approaches of Literary Criticism …………………………………………………………...11
2.3.1 Author/Character-oriented approaches (Biographical Approach) ………………………12
2.3.2 Context-Oriented Approaches ……………………………………………………..........13
2.3.1.1 New Criticism …………………………………………………………………..13
2.3.1.2 .Archetypal/Myth Criticism (Mythological) …………………………………..14
2.3.1.3 New Historicism ………………………………………………………..17
2.3.1.4 Feminism Literary Criticism ………………………………………….18
A. Historical Roots of Feminist Literary Criticism …………………………..................18
B. Feminist Movements ……………………………………………………….19
C. Goals of Feminist Literary Criticism ………………………………………20
D. Types of Feminism ………………………………………………………...21
2.4.1.5 Marxism ………………………………………………………………...27
2.4.1.6 Post-colonialism ………………………………………………………...28
2.3.3 Text-oriented Approaches ……………………………………………………..30
2.3.3.1 Russian Formalism/Prague Linguistic Circle/Linguistic
Criticism/Dialogic Theory
……………………………………………..30
2.3.3.2 Structuralism and Semiotics …………………………………………..33
2.3.3.3 Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction ………………………………35
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2.3.3.4 Postmodernism …………………………………………………………..38

2.3.4 Literary Criticism Approaches Related to the Reader ……………………...39
2.3.4.1 Reception and Reader-Response Theory ……………………………..39
2.3.4.2 Phenomenology and Hermeneutics ……………………………………...41
2.3.5 Neutral/undecided Critical Approaches: Psychoanalytic Criticism (Psychological
Approach)
………………………………………………………………………..43
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Introduction
This course is prepared to raise your awareness in literary criticisms, to enable you introduce
with literary criticism approaches through different periods and to empower you with the
methods, techniques and guidelines so as to analyze, evaluate and interpret a literary works
of art.
Literary texts offer us with much aesthetic, intellectual and emotional pleasure in that the
writers often seek to delineate their vision of human experience through a creative,
imaginative and emotive use of language. Consequently, it is only through a close interaction
with the text that reaction to the text, looking unique use of language and appreciation of
literary works can be achieved (Widdowson, 1975:75). In unraveling the possible meanings
of a literary work, one engages in an exercise to make inferences, formulate ideas, and
analyze a text closely for evidence and all these activities contribute to sharpening one's
critical faculty. The basic reason that compels us to give criticism is for universal human
values and the values of the culture from which they spring from literary materials contribute
to our understanding of ourselves and our relations with our fellow beings (Marckwardt,
1978:6). Besides, critics and readers will benefit from literary materials by exploiting the
"codes and preoccupations” of the society they represent (Collie and Slater, 1987:4) and see
as the mirror to untie problems and to argue on controversies and to forward new overviews.
Since critically analyzing literary works has immense uses, students of literature, language
teachers and advanced readers need to use literary theories and philosophies to give critics to
different kinds of oral and written works of arts. It is to this end that this course is given to
you. In this course we will see the dominant contemporary literary theories with practical
examples. Thus, we are going to see author oriented, text oriented, context oriented and
reader oriented approaches of literary criticisms.
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Chapter One: Literary Criticism and Literary Periods
General objective: having learned the contents of this chapter, you are expected to
conceptualize the definition of literary criticism and the contribution of each of the periods to
the emergence of new kinds of literary criticisms across different historical times. Thus, you
are expected to:
 Recognize the concept of different periods,
 Comprehend the different periods of human history and
 Familiarize with the essences of the periods and the proponents in each of the
periods.
Dear students: before you have information about the periods here you are requested to
respond to the following questions.
1. What periods do you know in your previous grades?
2. How do the periods influence the prevalent literary criticisms?
3. On what aspects may we possibly differentiate one period to another?
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1.1 The Period Concept

We are going to see some peculiar historical, philosophical and cultural movements which
change the views of different critics across the world. Seeing the literary movements across
different historical periods essentially helps critics to see that literary works can be grouped
according to what they share with each other within a given period, and that this grouping
can be differentiated from one another with fundamental issues that they have raised across
the periods. Literary periods share, in Rene Wellek's phrase, "systems of norms," which
include such things as conventions, styles, themes, and philosophies. The study of literary
periods and movements can be helpful in three ways. The first thing is the prevalence of
contemporary allusions that can only be cleared up by study of the age. More significantly,
such study may help one avoid the potential danger of misreading a work through ignorance
of its historical context. Finally great works of art are salient cultural instruments to capture
the reader's possession of certain broad kinds of information about the age in which they
were produced. For example, readers can possibly exploit information of different kinds
(whether it be religion, cultural, political, social, historical or any) against their immediate
contexts. For instance, before we criticize Plato’s attitude towards poetry (that says the artist
is three times further than the practical reality), we need to know that Athenians were
confused by the poets of the time and changed their attitude from time to time. Having seen
the power of poetry in changing the youths’ attitude, Plato said that Poetry is misleading.
Thus, the reader's experience of literature will necessarily be enriched by knowledge of the
prevailing attitudes toward education, history, money, arranged marriages, duty, ethics; by its
attitudes toward human nature, including the importance attached to various human faculties
(spirit, reason, feeling, imagination). And especially important to the student of literature is
the periodical representative attitudes toward art and the methods of its creation (Brooklyn
College, 2008). Since period has paramount influence upon the literary criticism of a certain
society in specific period of time, looking thorough different period before the theories of
literary criticism is crucially demanding.
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1.2 Different Periods
There were lots of periods in different historical periods of human kind. Here follows
dominant periods of human beings along with their literary, social, economic, technological
and cultural values they come up with. The literary periods and movements following the
classical period are usually labeled as follows:
 Classical period (ancient Greek criticism),

 Medieval (from the fall of Rome through the fourteenth or fifteenth century),
 Renaissance (from its earliest beginnings in Italy in the fourteenth century through the
sixteenth century elsewhere in Europe, with a shift in some countries to "Baroque" in its
last phase),
 The Neoclassical (starting in the mid-seventeenth century, with its subsequent eighteenth-
century development as the "Age of Enlightenment"),
 The Romantic period (beginning in the last decades of the eighteenth century and
continuing at least through the middle of the nineteenth),
 The Realist movement and its late nineteenth century extension into "naturalism", and
 And finally, the Modern Period, which has been given many names, all of them, so far,
provisional.
Each of these major periods and movements is international in scope and designates the
system of norms that dominated Western culture at a particular time of the historical process.
Historians of English literature employ period labels which emphasize, in some cases, local
variations of these international periods. For example, "Elizabethan" designates a period that
corresponds to the late Renaissance. "Victorian" designates the literature of the mid-
nineteenth through the turn of the twentieth century in England and its spheres of influence.
Nevertheless, the multiple labeling, while derived from varied sources, are ultimately
compatible (Brooklyn College, 2008).
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1.2.1 Classical period (ancient Greek criticism)
The ancient Greek and Roman philosophers have contributed much to the development of
Literary Theory and Literary criticisms. Especially Plato (428-347 BC) and Aristotle
(384–322 BC) have been cited in many disciplines since time memorial. Looking the
brief overview of these scholars’ works will help students of literature to know the basics
and to introduce themselves to the contemporary literary theories and criticisms of
literature quite easily. From this perspective, thus, here follows the positions and
arguments of Plato and Aristotle regarding literature and its criticisms based on Habib
(2005: 7-41).
According to Habib, the first recorded instances of criticism go back to dramatic festivals
organized as contests in ancient Athens requiring an official judgment as to which author
had produced the best drama. A particularly striking literary-critical discussion occurs in
Aristophanes’ play The Frogs, first performed in 405 BC, just before the ending of the
Peloponnesian War in 404 BC in the utter defeat of Athens at the hands of its rival,
Sparta. This is not merely a contest between two literary theories, representing older and
younger generations; it is rather a contest in poetic art. The judge of course will be
Dionysus, who they considered as the patron god of drama. During the then contest,
Aeschylus represents the more traditional virtues of olden generation, such as martial
expertise, heroism, and respect for social hierarchy – all embodied in patronizing,
modest, and sublime style of speech – while Euripides is the voice of a more recent,
democratic, secular, and plain-speaking generation.
Firstly, Aeschylus cautions that “we, the poets, are teachers of men” and that the “sacred
poet” should avoid depicting any kind of evil, especially the harlotry and incest that we
can find in Euripides (Frogs, l. 1055). Euripides agrees that in general the poet is valued
for his “ready wit” and wise counsels, and because he trains the citizens to be “better
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townsmen and worthier men” (Frogs, l. 1009). But he claims that, in contrast with
Aeschylus, he himself employs a “democratic” manner, allowing characters from all
classes to speak, showing “scenes of common life,” and teaching the public to reason
(Frogs, ll. 952, 959, 971–978). Thus, he insists that the poet should speak in “human
fashion,” and accuses Aeschylus of using language that is verbose, obscure, and
repetitious (Frogs, ll. 839, 1122, 1179). Aeschylus rejoins that a high style and lofty
speech is appropriate for “mighty thoughts and heroic aims” (Frogs, ll. 1058–1060); and
he upbraids Euripides for teaching the youth of the city to “prate, to harangue, to
debate . . . to challenge, discuss, and refute,” as well as bringing to the stage dishonesty
and “scandal” (Frogs, ll. 1070–1073). Finally, Dionysus pronounces as victor Aeschylus
in whom his “soul delights” (Frogs, ll. 1465–1467). It is clear that Aristophanes’ play
both embodies and enacts the civic duty of poetry and literary criticism.
There were three historical events that facilitate the development of literary criticism in
particular and literature in general. The first was the evolution of the polis or city-state.
Even the internal structure of drama was influenced by the ideal of the polis: the chorus
(whether comprised of a group of dancers and singers, or a single speaking character)
was the representative of the community or polis. Poetry had a primary role in education:
children were taught letters for the purpose of memorizing poetry and ultimately of
performing and interpreting it (CHLC, V.I, 74). In the ancient Greek world, poetry not
only had a public nature but also served several functions which have been displaced in
our world by news media, film, music, religious education, and the sciences. The second
was the war of Peloponnesian between the Athens (democratic) and the Sparta
(Oligarchy) which lasted for 27 years beginning in 431 BC. The name of the war recited
the other major power in the Greek world -Sparta, who counterbalanced Athens’
leadership of the Delian League with her own system of defensive alliances known as the
Peloponnesian League. The first twenty-four years of Plato’s life were lived during this
war, and the issues raised by the conflict affected many areas of his thought, including his
literary theory.
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A third factor that shaped the evolution of literature in archaic and classical Greece was
pan-Hellenism, or the development of certain literary ideals and standards among the
elites of the various city-states of Greece (CHLC, V.I, 22). Gregory Nagy, as cited in
Habib 2005, points out that pan-Hellenism was crucial in the process of the continuous
modification and diffusion of the Homeric poems and of poetry generally. According to
Nagy, then, pan-Hellenism had a number of important consequences. Firstly, it provided
a context in which poetry was no longer merely an expression or ritual reenactment of
local myths. A second consequence of pan-Hellenism, furthering the process of
standardization, was the evolution of a certain group or “canon” of texts into the status of
classics (CHLC, V.I, 44). The third, related, consequence was the development of the
concept of imitation or mimesis into a “concept of authority.” Mimesis designates “the re-
enactment, through ritual, of the events of myth” by the poet; it also designates “the
present re-enacting of previous re-enactments,” as in the performer’s subsequent
imitation of the poet. Mimesis becomes an authoritative concept inasmuch as the author
speaks with the authority of myth which is accepted as not local but universal, timeless,
and unchanging.
And then Plato and Aristotle, who are both obliged to consider literature as a public or
state concern, come. Plato’s most systematic comments on poetry occur in two texts,
separated by several years. The first is Ion, where Socrates cross-examines a rhapsode or
singer on the nature of his art and the second was the Republic. The Muse inspires the
poet, who in turn passes on this inspiration to the rhapsode, who produces an inspired
emotional effect on the spectators (Ion, 534c–e). To Socrates, the Muse is the magnet or
loadstone; the poet is the first ring, the rhapsode is the middle ring, and the audience the
last one (Ion, 533a, 536a–b). In this way, the poet conveys and interprets the utterances of
the gods, and the rhapsode interprets the poets. Hence, the rhapsodes are “interpreters of
interpreters” (Ion, 535a).
The poet, insists Socrates, is “a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to
compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in
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him” (Ion, 534b). Not only poetry, according to Socrates, but even criticism is irrational
and inspired. Hence, in this early dialogue, composed several years before the Republic,
Plato has already sharply separated the provinces of poetry and philosophy; the former
has its very basis in a divorce from reason, which is the realm of philosophy; poetry in its
very nature is steeped in emotional transport and lack of self-possession. Having said
this, Plato in this earlier dialogue accords poetry a certain reverence: he speaks of the
poet as “holy,” and as divinely inspired.
In the Republic, Socrates’ inquiry is finally arrived at through a complex strategy

whereby (1) Poetry is held to be the repository of received popular wisdom concerning
justice;
(2) As such, poetry is a codification of the rationale of individual self-interest and desire,
a rationale which makes necessary the imposition of laws to constrain selfishness;
(3) In consequence, such “wisdom” is morally incoherent, furnishing a divine and human
apparatus for the greater prosperity of the unjust man;
(4) Most fundamentally, the poets’ account is confined to the appearance of justice, not
real justice or justice “in itself.”
1.2.2 Renaissance (14th C to 16th C)
Renaissance particularly refers to the rebirth of learning that began in Italy in the
fourteenth century, broaden to the north, including England, by the sixteenth century, and
ended in the north in the mid-seventeenth century (earlier in Italy) (Abrams, 1999).
During this period, there was an enormous renewal of interest in and study of classical
antiquity. Yet the Renaissance was more than a rebirth. During this period, as Abrams
states, the European arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, and literature reached an eminence
not exceeded in any age. It was also an age of new discoveries, both geographical
(exploration of the New World) and intellectual movements. Both kinds of discovery
resulted in changes of tremendous import for Western civilization, in science for
example, Copernicus (1473-1543) attempted to prove that the sun rather than the earth
was at the center of the planetary system, thus radically altering the cosmic world view
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that had dominated antiquity and the Middle Ages. In religion, Martin Luther (1483-
1546) challenged and ultimately caused the division of one of the major institutions that
had united Europe throughout the Middle Ages--the Church. In fact, Renaissance thinkers
often thought of themselves as ushering in the modern age, as distinct from the ancient
and medieval eras (Abrams, 1999).
The adapted guide to the study of literature of Brooklyn College (2008) condensed
Renaissance to five interrelated issues. First, although Renaissance thinkers often tried to
relate themselves with classical relics and detach themselves from the Middle Ages,
important continuities with their recent past, such as belief in the Great Chain of Being, were
still much in evidence. Second, during this period, certain significant political changes were
taking place. Third, some of the noblest ideals of the period were best expressed by the
movement known as Humanism. Fourth, and connected to Humanist ideals, was the literary
doctrine of "imitation," important for its ideas about how literary works should be created.
Finally, what later probably became an even more far-reaching influence, both on literary
creation and on modern life in general, was the religious movement known as the
Reformation. A common oversimplification of Humanism suggests that it gave renewed
emphasis to life in this world instead of to the otherworldly, spiritual life associated with the
Middle Ages. Oversimplified as it is, there is nevertheless truth to the idea that Renaissance
Humanists placed great emphasis upon the dignity of man and upon the expanded
possibilities of human life in this world. For the most part, it regarded human beings as social
creatures who could create meaningful lives only in association with other social beings. In
the terms used in the Renaissance itself, Humanism represented a shift from the meditative
life to the active life. In the Middle Ages, great value had often been attached to the life of
contemplation and religious devotion, away from the world.
Though the traditional religious values coexisted with the new secular values of the
Renaissance, the latter one is highest associated with active involvement in public life
which demand morality, political, and military responsibilities, and giving service to the
state. Also, individual achievement, breadth of knowledge, and personal aspiration were
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valued. Thus, humanity during this time coerces the then people to participate actively in
the affairs of public and possess knowledge and skill in many subject areas like Leonardo
Da Vinci and John Milton and Francis Bacon. Bacon had declared that he had have taken
all knowledge to be his province. Nevertheless, individual ambition was undermined in
favor of participating in societal roles and to the nobility to rule the society. On the
whole, in consciously attempting to revive the thought and culture of classical antiquity,
perhaps the most important value the Humanists extracted from their studies of classical
literature, history, and moral philosophy was the social nature of humanity (Brooklyn
College, 2008; Abrams, 1999).
1.2.3 Neoclassicism (1660–1798)
After the Renaissance came a reaction in the direction of order and restraint. Generally
speaking, this reaction developed in France in the mid 17th century and in England thirty
years later; and it dominated European literature until the last part of the 18th century. Writers
turned from inventing new words to regularizing vocabulary and grammar. Complex, boldly
metaphorical language, such as Shakespeare used in his major tragedies, is clarified and
simplified--using fewer and more conventional figures of speech. Mystery and obscurity are
considered symptoms of incompetence rather than signs of grandeur. The ideal style is lucid,
polished, and precisely appropriate to the genre of a work and the social position of its
characters. Tragedy and high comedy, for example, use the language of cultivated people and
maintain a well-bred tone. The crude humor of the gravediggers in Hamlet or the pulling out
of Gloucester's eyes in King Lear would no longer be admitted in tragedy. Structure, like
tone, becomes more simple and unified. In contrast to Shakespeare's plays, those of
neoclassical playwrights such as Racine and Moliere develop a single plot line and are
strictly limited in time and place (often, like Moliere's The Misanthrope and Tartuffe, to a
single setting and a single day's time).
The period is called neoclassical because its writers looked back to the ideals and art forms
of classical times, emphasizing even more than their Renaissance predecessors the classical
ideals of order and rational control. Neoclassical thinkers could use the past as a guide for the
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present because they assumed that human nature was constant--essentially the same
regardless of time and place. Art, they believed, should express this essential nature:
"Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature"
(Samuel Johnson). An individual character was valuable for what he or she revealed of
universal human nature. Neoclassical writers saw themselves, as well as their readers and
characters, above all as members of society.
Reason had traditionally been assumed to be the highest mental faculty, but in this period
many thinkers considered it a sufficient guide in all areas. Both religious belief and morality
were grounded on reason: revelation and grace were de-emphasized, and morality consisted
of acting rightly to one's fellow beings on this earth. John Locke, the most influential
philosopher of the age, analyzed logically how our minds function (1690), argued for
religious toleration (1689), and maintained that government is justified not by divine right
but by a "social contract" that is broken if the people's natural rights are not respected.
According to Abrams (1999), the following list of ideas and characteristics that were shared,
between 1660 and the late 1700s, by authors such as John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph
Addison, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, and Edmund Burke, may serve as
an introductory sketch of some prominent features of neoclassic literature:
(1) These authors exhibited a strong traditionalism, which was often joined to a distrust of radical
innovation and was evidenced above all in their great respect for classical writers—that is, the
writers of ancient Greece and Rome—who were thought to have achieved excellence, and
established the enduring models, in all the major literary genres.
(2) Literature was conceived to be primarily an "art"; that is, a set of skills which, though it
requires innate talents, must be perfected by long study and practice and consists mainly in
the deliberate adaptation of known and tested means to the achievement of foreseen ends
upon the audience of readers.
(3) Human beings as an integral part of a social organization were regarded as the primary
subject matter of literature. Poetry was held to be an imitation of human life—in a common
phrase, "a mirror held up to nature."
(4) Both in the subject matter and the appeal of art, emphasis was placed on what human beings
possess in common—representative characteristics and widely shared experiences, thoughts,
feelings, and tastes.
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(5) Neoclassic writers like the major philosophers of the time, viewed human beings as limited
agents who ought to set themselves only accessible goals. Many of the great works of the
period, satiric and didactic, attack human "pride," or presumption beyond the natural limits of
the species, and enforce the lesson of the golden mean (the avoidance of extremes) and of
humanity's need to submit to its restricted position in the cosmic order—an order sometimes
envisioned as a natural hierarchy, or Great Chain of Being. In art, as in life, what were for the
most part praised were the law of measure and the acceptance of limits upon one's freedom.
1.2.4 Romanticism (1798–1832)
Romanticism (or the Romantic Era) was a complex artistic, literary and intellectual
movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained
strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution. In part, it was a revolt against
aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against
the scientific rationalization of nature. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts,
music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education and natural
history. One of Romanticism's key ideas and most enduring legacies is the assertion of
nationalism, which became a central theme of Romantic art and political philosophy.
From the earliest parts of the movement, with their focus on development of national
languages and folklore, and the importance of local customs and traditions, to the
movements which would redraw the map of Europe and lead to calls for self-
determination of nationalities, nationalism was one of the key vehicles of Romanticism,
its role, expression and meaning (Encyclopedia of Britannica, see also Spark.com literary
web site).The Romantics celebrated spontaneity, imagination, subjectivity, and the purity
of nature. Notable English Romantic writers include Jane Austen, William Blake, Lord
Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William
Wordsworth. Prominent figures in the American Romantic movement include Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, William Cullen Bryant, and John
Greenleaf Whittier (see also Spark.com literary web site).
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Here follows features in which romantic aims and achievements, in many outstanding and
pioneering writers during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, vary most evidently
from their neoclassic predecessors:
(1) The prevailing attitude favored innovation over traditionalism in the materials, forms, and style of
literature. Wordsworth's preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800 was written as a
poetic "manifesto," or statement of revolutionary aims, in which he denounced the upper-class
subjects and the poetic diction of the preceding century and proposed to deal with materials from
"common life" in "a selection of language really used by men." Other innovations in the period
were the exploitation by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and others of the realm of the
supernatural and of "the far away and the long ago"; the assumption by William Blake, William
Wordsworth, and Percy Bysshe Shelley of the persona of a poet prophet who writes a visionary
mode of poetry; and the use of poetic symbolism (especially by Blake and Shelley) deriving from a
worldview in which objects are charged with a significance beyond their physical qualities. "I
always seek in what I see," as Shelley said, "the likeness of something beyond the present and
tangible object."
(2) In his preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth repeatedly declared that good poetry is "the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." According to this view poetry is not primarily a
mirror of men in action; on the contrary, its essential component is the poet's own feelings, while
the process of composition, since it is "spontaneous," is the opposite of the artful manipulation of
means to foreseen ends stressed by the neoclassic critics.
(3) To a remarkable degree external nature—the landscape, together with its flora and fauna—
became a persistent subject of poetry, and was described with an accuracy and sensuous nuance
unprecedented in earlier writers. It is a mistake, however, to describe the romantic poets as simply
"nature poets." While many major poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge—and to a great extent by
Shelley and Keats—set out from and return to an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape, the
outer scene is not presented for its own sake but only as a stimulus for the poet to engage in the
most characteristic human activity, that of thinking. Representative romantic works are in fact
poems of feelingful meditation which, though often stimulated by a natural phenomenon, are
concerned with central human experiences and problems.
(4) Neoclassic poetry was about other people, but much of romantic poetry invited the reader to
identify the protagonists with the poets themselves in a number of romantic lyric poems.
(5) What seemed to a number of political liberals the infinite social promise of the French Revolution
in the early 1790s, fostered the sense in writers of the early Romantic Period that theirs was a great
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age of new beginnings and high possibilities. Many writers viewed a human being as endowed
with limitless aspiration toward the infinite good envisioned by the faculty of imagination
(Abrams, 1999).
1.2.5 Realism (1830–1900)
Technically, realism refers to a late-19th-century literary movement—primarily French,

English, and American—that aimed at accurate detailed portrayal of ordinary,
contemporary life. Realism is a loose term that can refer to any work that aims at honest
portrayal over sensationalism, exaggeration, or melodrama. Habib (2005) explains that
Realism was by no means a uniform or coherent movement; a tendency toward realism
arose in many parts of Europe and in America, beginning in the 1840s. He further
illustrates the major figures of the period by mentioning: Flaubert and Balzac in France,
Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in Russia, George Eliot and Charles Dickens in England, as well
as William Dean Howells and Henry James in America. The most general aim of realism
was to offer a truthful, accurate, and objective representation of the real world, both the
external world and the human self (See also Abrams 1999. To achieve this aim, realists
resorted to a number of strategies: the use of descriptive and evocative detail; avoidance
of what was fantastical, imaginary, and mythical; adhering to the requirements of
probability, and excluding events which were impossible or improbable; inclusion of
characters and incidents from all social strata, dealing not merely with rulers and nobility;
focusing on the present and choosing topics from contemporary life rather than longing
for some idealized past; emphasizing the social rather than the individual (or seeing the
individual as a social being); refraining from the use of elevated language, in favor of
more colloquial idioms and everyday speech, as well as directness and simplicity of
expression (Habib, 2005:471).Quoting the words of two scholars, Habib notes to us
realism historically can be viewed as a way of thinking that continues to this day – has
been not just a literary technique but a vast historical phenomenon with economic,
ideological, philosophic, and religious ramifications. This is neatly indicated in Fredric
Jameson’s statement that “the realistic mode . . . is one of the most complex and vital
realizations of Western culture, to which it is . . . well-nigh unique.” Lilian Furst
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describes realism as a product of “a pervasive rationalist epistemology that turned its

back on the fantasies of Romanticism” (Habib, 2005:474).
Realism can be seen as a reaction against romanticism, an interest in scientific method,

the systematizing of the study of documentary history, and the influence of rational
philosophy all affected the rise of realism. According to William Harmon and Hugh
Holman, "Where romanticists transcend the immediate to find the ideal, and naturalists
plumb the actual or superficial to find the scientific laws that control its actions, realists
center their attention to a remarkable degree on the immediate, the here and now, the
specific action, and the verifiable consequence" (A Handbook to Literature, p: 428).
Broadly defined as "the faithful representation of reality" or "verisimilitude," realism is a
literary technique practiced by many schools of writing. Though many critics have
suggested that there is no clear distinction between realism and its related late nineteenth-
century movement, naturalism, the latter one can be seen as an intensification of the
former.
Habib (2005:472) clearly explains naturalism and its resultant feature as follows.
Naturalism is the ancient term for the study of nature and it explicitly endeavors to
emulate the methods of the physical sciences, drawing heavily on the principles of
causality, determinism, explanation, and experimentation. He further says that some
naturalists also drew on the Darwinian conception of nature and attempted to express the
struggle for survival, as embodied in the connections between individuals and their
environments, often portraying the physiologically and psychically determined
dimensions of their characters as overwhelmed by accidental circumstances rather than
acting rationally, freely, and heroically upon the world. Hence, as Habib adds, naturalism
can be viewed as a more extreme form of realism, extending the latter’s scientific basis
still further to encompass extremely detailed methods of description, a deterministic
emphasis upon the contexts of actions and events, upon the hereditary psychological
components of their characters, and by refusing to accommodate any kind of
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metaphysical or spiritual perspective. The pioneers of naturalism include literary

historian Hippolyte Taine (1828– 1893) and Émile Zola.
Review Questions
1. What are the dominant periods that help the development and emergence of literary theories and
literary criticisms? What main differences have you seen across the periods?
2. Who were the main prominent figures of the classical period in relation to the theory of literary
criticisms? What were their basic arguments regarding the definition of literature, the importance
of poetry and the genres of literature? Whom do you support? Why?
3. List and define the five peculiar features of Renaissance.
4. How historians and scholars differ neoclassic period from other periods of human history?
What were the basics of literary genres of different type?
5. How you may distinctly define Romanticism? What were its basic features?
6. Compare and contrast Realism and Naturalism. How do you see these philosophic movements in
relation to the existing conditions of Ethiopia?
7. Name two reputed persons of each of the periods and their contributions.
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Chapter Two: Theories of Literary Criticism

Let us start with brainstorming questions:
 What are the salient purposes of literary criticism?
 What literary criticism approaches do you know?
 Which of the approaches dominantly used in giving literary criticism?
 What are the basic criteria that help to divide literary criticism approaches?
 What are the basic distinctions of author oriented, text oriented, context oriented and
reader oriented approaches of literary criticisms.
2.1 Definition of Literary Criticism
Scholars, critics and linguists define literary critics in different ways as other definitions of
different sciences. For controversies and differences urges educators to find solutions, to
respond to different views and to come up with new theories and to forward new methods of
criticism; a number of scholars have contributed their own for the development of literary
criticism theories, approaches and methods of literary criticisms. To most critics, the literary
work is a prerequisite for forwarding literary criticisms. Thus, the period, the literary work,
the approaches, the method of criticism and the priority that critics give to writers, texts,
context and reader differentiate one approach to another. With all their differences, however,
as Krishnaswamy and others (2001), and Jefferson and Robey (1986) note, literary criticism
is concerned with describing, interpreting and evaluating works of literature.
Of course, literary appreciation varies from place to place depending on socio-economic

background of the country; the educational and intellectual development of the individual
and the democratic rights that are cherished to the people. Since humanity is becoming more
sophisticated and challenging, by requesting solutions to different kinds of social,
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economical, political, religious and cultural inequalities, many literary criticism approaches
are being emerged since the second half the 20th century. But, right before we discuss the
different approaches of literature, let’s first glimpse the purposes of literary criticism
forwarded by Burris.
2.2 The Purpose of Criticism
As Burris (1999) notes, literary criticism has at least three primary purposes.
1. To help us resolve a difficulty in the reading
The historical approach, for instance, might be helpful in addressing a problem in Thomas
Otway's play Venice Preserv'd. Why are the conspirators, despite the horrible, bloody details
of their obviously violent plan, portrayed in a sympathetic light? If we look at the author and
his time, we see that he was a Tory whose play was performed in the wake of the Popish Plot
and the Exclusion Bill Crisis, and that there are obvious similarities between the Conspiracy
in the play and the Popish Plot in history. The Tories would never approve of the bloody
Popish Plot, but they nonetheless sympathized with the plotters for the way they were abused
by the Tory enemy, the Whigs. Thus it makes sense for Otway to condemn the conspiracy
itself in Vencie Preserv'd without condemning the conspirators themselves.
2. To help us choose the better of two conflicting readings
A formalist approach might enable us to choose between a reading which sees the dissolution
of society in Lord of the Flies as being caused by too strict a suppression of the "bestial" side
of man and one which sees it as resulting from too little suppression. We can look to the text
and ask: What textual evidence is there for the suppression or indulgence of the "bestial" side
of man? Does Ralph suppress Jack when he tries to indulge his bestial side in hunting? Does
it appear from the text that an imposition of stricter law and order would have prevented the
breakdown? Did it work in the "grownup" world of the novel?
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3. To enable us to form judgments about literature
One of the purposes of criticism is to judge if a work is any good or not. For instance, we
might use a formalist approach to argue that a John Donne poem is of high quality because it
contains numerous intricate conceits that are well sustained. Or, we might use the mimetic
approach to argue that The West Indian is a poor play because it fails to paint a realistic
picture of the world.
Having seen three fundamental functions of literary criticism, let’s turn to the discussions of
literary criticism approaches that come to exist and quest the presence of established
propositions.
2.3
Approaches of Literary Criticism
Many scholars have classified and discuss literary theories in different times. Among these
scholars, Eagleton (1983); Jefferson and Robey (1986) and Krishnaswamy et al (2001),
Barry, (2002) and Habib (2005) can be cited. Especially, the book entitled ‘Contemporary
Literary theory’ written by Krishnaswamy and others help me categorize different literary
criticism theories in four broad categories. These four literary criticism approaches explained
in the next section.
A. Author/character-oriented approaches: Historical / Biographical critics see works as

the reflection of an author's life and times (or of the characters' life and times). They
believe it is necessary to know about the author and the political, economical, and
sociological context of his times in order to truly understand his works. However, the New
Critics refer to the historical / biographical critic's belief that the meaning or value of a
work may be determined by the author's intention as "the intentional fallacy." They
believe that this approach tends to reduce art to the level of biography and make it relative
(to the times) rather than universal. These are classic and humanistic theories which mainly
focus on explicating authors intensions from literary materials. This approach works well
for some works--like those of Alexander Pope, John Dryden, and Milton--which are
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obviously political in nature. However, one must know that Milton was blind to give the
expression of "On His Blindness" ‘tangible’ meaning. And one must know something
about the Exclusion Bill Crisis to appreciate John Dryden's "Absalom and Achitophel." It
also is necessary to take a historical approach in order to place allusions in there proper
classical, political, or biblical background.
B. Context-Oriented Approaches
When scholars identify themselves that a literary work is a product of a society with a
defined context (notion, philosophy, socio-economic background, technology and human
advancement), critics began to depend on various contexts of psychology, gender, history,
colonialism, socio-economy, socio-cultural backgrounds. These contexts give rise to:
Feminist/Gay/Lesbian; New Historicism/Cultural Materialism; Post-colonial/ neo-colonial
criticism; Marxist Criticism and Myth Criticism/Dialogism respectively.
C. Text/Language Oriented Approaches: Formalism, Practical, New Criticism,
Structuralism, Stylistics, Post-Structuralism, and Deconstruction belong to this category.
The salient emphasis given to the text and its elements (be it organizational or linguistic
elements).
D. Reader-Oriented Approaches: other critics switch their attention to readers of literary
materials from the assumption that readers themselves are critics of literature. Reader-
response/Receptionist Theory focuses on how the readers of works of arts see, explain,
analyze and evaluate literary materials.
Having seen the four categories in general, we are now going to see each of these approaches
along with their historical time, proponents and its fundamentals which help critics analyze
literary works.
2.3.1 Author/Character-oriented approaches (Biographical Approach))
Most traditional approaches are, somehow, author oriented. They focus on the writer’s mind
though other factors that contribute to the study of the authorial intentions were not neglected
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(Krishnaswamy and others, 2001). As these scholars further argue, during the ancient time,
Aristotle’s considered drama as an imitation of life by looking at: how the drama affects the
audience and how they identify themselves with the main actor (Pragmatic Criticism). In the
later times, using the author’s biographical facts to the analysis of a certain literary work
began to be considered to arrive at the author’s intention_ intuitively (spontaneously) or
subjectively (Glossary of Literary Terms, 1993: 40-42). Projecting universal values of the
then time was the aim of literature and the author was considered as the creator of the text (to
mean that the writer was the only all knowing person about his text). Example: In Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the insanity that the narrator
descends into parallels that of Gilman herself. Since Gilman felt trapped by her own husband
after giving birth to her first child, Gilman through writing a short story where the same thing
happened to her protagonist wished to show the devastation caused by male superiority.
2.3.2 Context-Oriented Approaches
2.3.1.1 Archetypal/Myth Criticism (Mythological)
Burris (1999) notes that a mythological / archetypal approach to literature assumes that there
is a collection of symbols, images, characters, and motifs (i.e. archetypes) that evokes
basically the same response in all people. According to the psychologist Carl Jung,
mankind possesses a "collective unconscious" that contains these archetypes and that is
common to all of humanity. Myth critics identify these archetypal patterns and discuss how
they function in the works. They believe that these archetypes are the source of much of
literature's power (Burris). Siegel on his behalf explains this approach as a form of criticism
based largely on the works of C. G. Jung and Joseph Campbell (and myth itself). Some of
the school's major figures include Robert Graves, Francis Fergusson, Philip Wheelwright,
Leslie Fiedler, Northrop Frye, Maud Bodkin, and G. Wilson Knight. These critics view the
genres and individual plot patterns of literature, including highly sophisticated and realistic
works, as recurrences of certain archetypes and essential mythic formulae. Archetypes,
according to Jung, are "primordial images"; the "psychic residue" of repeated types of
experience in the lives of very ancient ancestors which are inherited in the "collective
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unconscious" of the human race and are expressed in myths, religion, dreams, and private
fantasies, as well as in the works of literature (Abrams, p. 10, 112). Some common examples
of archetypes include water, sun, moon, colors, circles, the Great Mother, Wise Old Man, etc.
In terms of archetypal criticism, the color white might be associated with innocence or could
signify death or the supernatural.
Some Archetypes are taken from Burris (1999) and the rest are found from Siegel’s home
page.
 archetypal women - the Good Mother, the Terrible Mother, and the Soul Mate (such as
the Virgin Mary)
 water - creation, birth-death-resurrection, purification, redemption, fertility, growth
 garden - paradise (Eden), innocence, fertility
 desert - spiritual emptiness, death, hopelessness
 red - blood, sacrifice, passion, disorder
 green - growth, fertility
 black - chaos, death, evil
 serpent - evil, sensuality, mystery, wisdom, destruction
 seven - perfection
 shadow, persona, and anima (see psychological criticism)
 hero archetype - The hero is involved in a quest (in which he overcomes obstacles). He
experiences initiation (involving a separation, transformation, and return), and finally he
serves as a scapegoat, that is, he dies to atone.
Though this approach provides a universalistic approach to literature and identifies a reason
why certain literature may survive the test of time and works well with works that are highly
symbolic, it makes Literature not little more than a vehicle for archetypes, and this approach
may ignore the "art" of literature.
Examples:
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(1) In Arrow of God, by Chenua Achebe, for example, the "rain" (p. 182) and the “rock”
(p. 48) represent the disastrous end of the traditional government and the upcoming
age long exploitation of the whites on the land of Umuaro. It was a wave of thick
rain which went on until Ezeulu's fingers held on to his staff. The rain showered
Ezeulu and the one with him heavenly. The rain is there to symbolize the limitless
disaster that comes to the traditional government'. The damage came to Umuaro was
all against the dripping values, as did the rain that met Ezeulu across his journey. At
large, his souff in his goatskin bag is spoiled by the rain to foreshadow the fate of
Obika who by then symbolized the strength of the old tradition. Similarly, it is Mr
Goodcountry who is symbolized by a rock. He preaches the converters to kill the sacred
python by their own. It is his influence that forces oduche to attempt to kill the python. Rock
is the hardest mineral having occupied a wide area in a place. The rock represents the white
man who inflected a huge loss at Umuaro. It lucidly reflects, then, the year’s long existence
of the white man who replaced the old tradition by its own values.
(2) In Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Fedallah can be seen as Ahab's shadow, his defiant
pagan side wholly unrestrained. Numerous archetypes appear in Moby Dick. The sea is
associated both with spiritual mystery (Ahab is ultimately on a spiritual quest to defy God
because evil exists) and with death and rebirth (all but Ishmael die at sea, but Ahab's
death as if crucified is suggestive of rebirth). Three is symbolic of spiritual awareness;
thus we see numerous triads in Moby Dick, including Ahab's three mysterious crew
members and the three harpooners.
(3) In Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner, for example, we might view Isaac McCaslin's
repudiation of the land as an attempt to deny the existence of his archetypal shadow--that
dark part of him that maintains some degree of complicity in slavery. When he sees the
granddaughter of Jim, and can barely tell she is black, his horrified reaction to the
miscegenation of the races may be indicative of his shadow's (his deeply racist dark
side's) emergence.
Key Terms:
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Anima - feminine aspect - the inner feminine part of the male personality or a man's image
of a woman.
Animus - male aspect - an inner masculine part of the female personality or a woman's image
of a man.
Archetype - (from Makaryk, 1993: 508): “a typical or recurring image, character, narrative
design, theme, or other literary phenomenon that has been in literature from the beginning
and regularly reappears". Note - Frye sees archetypes as recurring patterns in literature; in
contrast, Jung views archetypes as primal, ancient images/experience that we have inherited.
Collective Unconscious - "a set of primal memories common to the human race, existing
below each person's conscious mind" (Jung)
Persona - the image we present to the world
Shadow - darker, sometimes hidden (deliberately or unconsciously), elements of a person's
psyche.
2.3.1.2 New Historicism
Barry (2002: 115-121) explains the term New Historicism and adherent scholars of it. He
begins by saying that the term 'new historicism' was coined by the American critic
Stephen Greenblatt whose book Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from Moore to
Shakespeare (1980) is usually regarded as its beginning. However, similar tendencies can
be identified in work by various critics published during the 1970s; a good example being
J. W. Lever's The Tragedy of State: A Study of Jacobean Drama (published by Methuen
in 1971, and reissued in 1987 with an introduction by Jonathan Dollimore). This brief and
epoch-making book challenged conservative critical views about Jacobean theatre, and
linked the plays much more closely with the political events of their era than previous
critics had done.
Barry also defines New Historicism as it is a method based on the parallel reading of
literary and non-literary texts which are usually written at same historical period. That is
to say, new historicism culminated giving priority to the literary texts and gave equal
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weight to literary and non-literary texts and interrogates each other. To Barry (2002), this
'equal weighting' is firstly suggested by the American critic Louis Montrose when he
defines the term saying, “it as a combined interest in 'the textuality of history, the
historicity of texts”. Greenblatt's, as cited in Barry (2002), new historicism involves, “an
intensified willingness to read all of the textual traces of the past with the attention
traditionally conferred only on literary texts.”
What new historicists do?

1. They juxtapose literary and non-literary texts, reading the former in the light of the
latter.
2. They try thereby to 'defamiliarise' the canonical literary text, detaching it from the
accumulated weight of previous literary scholarship and seeing it as if new.
3. They focus attention (within both text and co-text) on issues of State power and how it
is maintained, on patriarchal structures and their perpetuation, and on the process of
colonization, with its accompanying 'mind-set'.
4. They make use, in doing so, of aspects of the post-structuralist outlook, especially
Derrida's notion that every facet of reality is textualised, and Foucault's idea of social
structures as determined by dominant 'discursive practices'.
Example:
For example, critics may see the relationship between Haddis Alemayehu’s fiction ‘Fikir
Eske-Mekabir’ with Professor Bahiru Zewdie’s historical book to see the socio-economic,
cultural and political conditions of the then time. By doing so, critics can easily see the
dominance of the bourgeoisie, the resistance of the peasantry and the inequality of sexes.
Having mirrored the discourse time with the historical story time, the critic can easily
scrutinize linguistic evidences from the fiction which testify the central tenets of the literary
work.
Exercise Three
Analyze the following extract taken from ‘Arrow of God’ from New Criticism
perspective.
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Things were so bad for the six villages that their leaders came together to save
themselves. They hired a strong team of medicine-men to install a common deity for
them. This deity which the fathers of the six villages made was called Ulu. Half of the
medicine was buried at a place which became Nkwo market and the other half thrown
into the stream which became Mili Ulu. The six villages then took the name of Umuaro,
and the priest of Ulu became their Chief Priest. From that day they were never again
beaten by an enemy. How could such a people disregard the god who founded their town
and protected it? Ezeulu saw it as the ruin of the world.
On the day, five years ago, when the leaders of Umuaro decided to send an emissary to
Okperi with white clay for peace or new palm frond for war, Ezeulu spoke in vain. He
told the men of Umuaro that Ulu would not fight an unjust war.
'I know,' he told them, 'my father said this to me that when our village first came here to
live the land belonged to Okperi. It was Okperi who gave us a piece of their land to live
in. They also gave us their deities---their Udo and their Ogwugwu. But they said to our
ancestors---mark my words---the people of Okperi said to our fathers: We give you our
Udo and our Ogwugwu; but you must call the deity we give you not Udo but the son of
Udo, and not Ogwugwu but the son of Ogwugwu. This is the story as I heard it from my
father. If you choose to fight a man for a piece of farmland that belongs to him I shall
have no hand in it.'
But Nwaka had carried the day. He was one of the three people in all the six villages who
had taken the highest title in the land, Eru, which was called after the lord of wealth
himself. Nwaka came from a long line of prosperous men and from a village which called
itself first in Umuaro. They said that when the six villages first came together they
offered the priesthood of Ulu to the weakest among them to ensure that none in the
alliance became too powerful.
'Umuaro kwenu!' Nwaka roared.
'Hem!' replied the men of Umuaro.
'Kwenu!'
'Hem!'
'Kwezuenu!'
'Hem!'
He began to speak almost softly in the silence he had created with his salutation.
'Wisdom is like a goatskin bag; every man carries his own. Knowledge of the land is also
like that. Ezeulu has told us what his father told him about the olden days. We know that
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a father does not speak falsely to his son. But we also know that the lore of the land is
beyond the knowledge of many fathers. If Ezeulu had spoken about the great deity of
Umuaro which he carries and which his fathers carried before him I would have paid
attention to his voice. But he speaks about events which are older than Umuaro itself. I
shall not be afraid to say that neither Ezeulu nor any other in this village can tell us about
these events.' There were murmurs of approval and of disapproval but more of approval
from the assembly of elders and men of title. Nwaka walked forward and back as he
spoke; the eagle feather in his red cap and bronze band on his ankle marked him out as
one of the lords of the land---a man favoured by Eru, the god of riches.
'My father told me a different story. He told me that Okperi people were wanderers. He
told me three or four different places where they sojourned for a while and moved on
again. They were driven away by Umuofia, then by Abame and Aninta. Would they go
today and claim all those sites? Would they have laid claim on our farmland in the days
before the white man turned us upside down? Elders and Ndichie of Umuaro, let
everyone return to his house if we have no heart in the fight. We shall not be the first
people who abandoned their farmland or even their homestead to avoid war. But let us
not tell ourselves or our children that we did it because the land belonged to other people.
Let us rather tell them that their fathers did not choose to fight. Let us tell them also that
we marry the daughters of Okperi and their men marry our daughters, and that where
there is this mingling men often lose the heart to fight. Umuaro Kwenu!'(Page 15--16).
2.3.1.3 Psychoanalytic Criticism (Psychological Approach)
Murfin and Ray (1998) Psychoanalytic criticism originated in the work of Austrian
psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who pioneered the technique of psychoanalysis. Freud
developed a language that described, a model that explained, and a theory that encompassed
human psychology. His theories are directly and indirectly concerned with the nature of the
unconscious mind.
The psychoanalytic approach to literature not only rests on the theories of Freud; it may even
be said to have begun with Freud, who wrote literary criticism as well as psychoanalytic
theory. Probably because of Freud’s characterization of the artist’s mind as “one urged on by
instincts that are too clamorous,” psychoanalytic criticism written before 1950 tended to
psychoanalyze the individual author. Literary works were read—sometimes unconvincingly
—as fantasies that allowed authors to indulge repressed wishes, to protect themselves from
deep-seated anxieties, or both. After 1950, psychoanalytic critics began to emphasize the
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ways in which authors create works that appeal to readers’ repressed wishes and fantasies.
Consequently, they shifted their focus away from the author’s psyche toward the psychology
of the reader and the text. Norman Holland’s theories, concerned more with the reader than
with the text, helped to establish reader-response criticism. Critics influenced by D.W.
Winnicott, an object-relations theorist, have questioned the tendency to see the reader/text as
an either/or construct; instead, they have seen reader and text (or audience and play) in terms
of a relationship taking place in what Winnicott calls a “transitional” or “potential space”—
space in which binary oppositions like real/illusory and objective/subjective have little or no
meaning.
Jacques Lacan, another post-Freudian psychoanalytic theorist, focused on language and

language-related issues. Lacan treats the unconscious as a language; consequently, he views
the dream not as Freud did (that is, as a form and symptom of repression) but rather as a form
of discourse. Thus we may study dreams psychoanalytically in order to learn about literature,
even as we may study literature in order to learn more about the unconscious. Lacan also
revised Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex—the childhood wish to displace the parent
of one’s own sex and take his or her place in the affections of the parent of the opposite sex
—by relating it to the issue of language. He argues that the pre-oedipal stage is also a
preverbal or “mirror stage,” a stage he associates with the imaginary order. He associates the
subsequent oedipal stage—which roughly coincides with the child’s entry into language—
with what he calls the symbolic order, in which words are not the things they stand for but
substitutes for those things. The imaginary order and the symbolic order are two of Lacan’s
three orders of subjectivity, the third being the real, which involves intractable and
substantial things or states that cannot be imagined, symbolized, or known directly (such as
death).
This criticism refers to the application of specific psychological principles (particularly those
of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan) to the study of literature. Psychoanalytic criticism
may focus on the writer's psyche, the study of the creative process, the study of psychological
types and principles as presented within works of literature, or the effects of literature upon
its readers (Wellek and Warren, p. 81). Though Krishnaswamy and others (2001) classify this
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approach as context based, as you may see from the above explanation, however, it may be
of biographical (when it refers to the author), reader response (when it tries to see the
psychological traits depicted characters in a certain literary material) or context oriented
(when we literally see that the text eminently focus on the text can be interpreted against
psychological method or feminist literary criticism). In addition to Freud and Lacan, major
figures include Shoshona Felman, Jane Gallop, Norman Holland, George Klein, Elizabeth
Wright, Frederick Hoffman, and, Simon Lesser (Siegel, n.d). Though this approach uses
psychology as a context, its main emphasis is on the author or characters behavior.
Psychological critics view works through the lens of psychology. They look either at the
psychological motivations of the characters or of the authors themselves, although the former
is generally considered a more respectable approach. Most frequently, psychological critics
apply Freudian psychology to works, but other approaches (such as a Jungian approach) also
exist (Burris 1999). Burris illustrates this approach with two specific methods: Freudian and
Jungian.
Freudian Method:
A Freudian approach often includes pinpointing the influences of a character's id (the

instinctual, pleasure seeking part of the mind), superego (the part of the mind that represses
the id's impulses) and the ego (the part of the mind that controls but does not repress the id's
impulses, releasing them in a healthy way). Freudian critics like to point out the sexual
implications of symbols and imagery, since Freud's believed that all human behavior is
motivated by sexuality. They tend to see concave images, such as ponds, flowers, cups, and
caves as female symbols; whereas objects that are longer than they are wide are usually seen
as phallic symbols. Dancing, riding, and flying are associated with sexual pleasure. Water is
usually associated with birth, the female principle, the maternal, the womb, and the death
wish. Freudian critics occasionally discern the presence of an Oedipus complex (a boy's
unconscious rivalry with his father for the love of his mother) in the male characters of
certain works, such as Hamlet. They may also refer to Freud's psychology of child
development, which includes the oral stage, the anal stage, and the genital stage.
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Jungian Method:
Jung is also an influential force in myth (archetypal) criticism. Psychological critics are
generally concerned with his concept of the process of individuation (the process of
discovering what makes one different from everyone else). Jung labeled three parts of the
self: the shadow, or the darker, unconscious self (usually the villain in literature); the
persona, or a man's social personality (usually the hero); and the anima, or a man's "soul
image" (usually the heroine). A neurosis occurs when someone fails to assimilate one of
these unconscious components into his conscious and projects it on someone else. The
persona must be flexible and be able to balance the components of the psyche.
As Burris further notes, this approach can be a useful tool for understanding some works,
such as Henry James The Turning of the Screw, in which characters obviously have
psychological issues. Like the biographical approach, knowing something about a writer's
psychological makeup can give us insight into his work. However, this approach has also its
own limitation. For example, Psychological criticism can turn a work into little more than a
psychological case study, neglecting to view it as a piece of art. Critics sometimes attempt to
diagnose long dead authors based on their works, which is perhaps not the best evidence of
their psychology. Critics tend to see sex in everything, exaggerating this aspect of literature.
Finally, some works do not lend themselves readily to this approach.
Examples:
(1) A psychological approach to John Milton's Samson Agonisties might suggest that the
shorning of Samson's locks is symbolic of his castration at the hands of Dalila and that the
fighting words he exchanges with Harapha constitute a reassertion of his manhood.
Psychological critics might see Samson's bondage as a symbol of his sexual impotency, and
his destruction of the Philistine temple and the killing of himself and many others as a final
orgasmic event (since death and sex are often closely associated in Freudian psychology).
The total absence of Samson's mother in Samson Agonisties would make it difficult to argue
anything regarding the Oedipus complex, but Samson refusal to be cared for by his father and
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his remorse over failing to rule Dalila may be seen as indicative of his own fears regarding
his sexuality.
(2) A psychological approach to "The Silence of the Llano" would allow us to look into the
motivations of Rafael--it would allow us to examine the effects of isolation and loneliness on
his character and provide some reasoning for why he might chose to establish an incestuous
relationship with his daughter. A specifically Freudian approach will tune us in to the
relevant symbolism which will enable us to better understand the conclusion. For instance,
with such a mind frame, we can immediately recognize that Rafael's statement to his
daughter "I will turn the earth for you. The seeds will grow" is the establishment of a sexual
relationship that will result in children. We can see the water in which she bathes as symbolic
of that birth that is to come.
Key Terms:
Unconscious - the irrational part of the psyche unavailable to a person's consciousness
except through dissociated acts or dreams.
Freud's model of the psyche:

 Id - completely unconscious part of the psyche that serves as a storehouse of our desires,
wishes, and fears. The id houses the libido, the source of psychosexual energy.
 Ego - mostly to partially (<--a point of debate) conscious part of the psyche that
processes experiences and operates as a referee or mediator between the id and superego.
 Superego - often thought of as one's "conscience"; the superego operates "like an internal
censor [encouraging] moral judgments in light of social pressures" (123, Bressler - see
General Resources below).
Lacan's model of the psyche:
 Imaginary - a preverbal/verbal stage in which a child (around 6-18 months of age)
begins to develop a sense of separateness from her mother as well as other people and
objects; however, the child's sense of sense is still incomplete.
 Symbolic - the stage marking a child's entrance into language (the ability to understand
and generate symbols); in contrast to the imaginary stage, largely focused on the mother, the
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symbolic stage shifts attention to the father who, in Lacanian theory, represents cultural
norms, laws, language, and power (the symbol of power is the phallus--an arguably "gender-
neutral" term).
 Real - an unattainable stage representing all that a person is not and does not have. Both
Lacan and his critics argue whether the real order represents the period before the imaginary
order when a child is completely fulfilled--without need or lack, or if the real order follows
the symbolic order and represents our "perennial lack" (because we cannot return to the state
of wholeness that existed before language).
2.3.1.4 Feminism Literary Criticism
A. Historical Roots of Feminist Literary Criticism

Oppermann (1994) explains that literary history of women images traced back to Aristotle
assertion which says “the female is female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities” and St.
Thomas Aquinas’s biased representation of women as they are an imperfect man (1399).
Plato was a feminist, given his view that women should be trained to rule (Republic, Book
V), even though he was an exception in his historical context. In contrast, Mary
Wollstonecraft’s ‘A Vindication of the Right of Women’ (1792) was the first milestone
which advocated the equality of both sexes. In 1929, Virginia Wolf’s ‘A Room of Ones
Own’ enhanced the female responsiveness and criticism. She insisted women to demolish the
false cultural constructs to live the world of reality than the world of men. Likewise, Simon
de Beauvior in her “Second Sex” (1949) activated women to break the bonds of Patriarchal
society. Kate Millet, in her ‘Sexual Politics’ (1970) asserted that gender is a social construct
by saying “A female is born but a woman is created.”
B. Feminist Movements
The first wave feminist literary movement began in the United States of America from the
mid-19th century until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. It principally
aimed at gaining the right of women suffrage. In United Kingdom, forexample, Mary
Wollstonecraft published a book entitled ‘A Vindication of the Rights of women’ (1792) in
which she advocated the social and moral equality of the sexes. While the second wave
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feminist literary movement vigorously concerned with the issue of economic, the ability to
have careers and the right not to have children. In similar manner, the third wave literary
movement began in the early 1990s by challenging and expanding common definitions of
sexuality. In the third movement queer theory, women- of- color-consciousness, post
colonialism, critical theory, trans-nationalism and new feminist theory become central issues.
This movement is different from the two predecessors for it echoing on equality than
addressing perceived oppressions by patriarchy.
Showalter (1977) classified the feminist movements in to three. The first one was the
feminine phase (1840_1880), the second phase was also called feminist phase (1880_1920)
and the last one was categorized as female phase (from 1970 to the present). Elaine
Showalter, in A Literature of Their Own, argues that literary subcultures all go through three
major phases of development. For literature by or about women, she labels these stages the
Feminine, Feminist, and Female:
(1) Feminine Stage - involves "imitation of the prevailing modes of the dominant tradition"
and "internalization of its standards."
(2) Feminist Stage - involves "protest against these standards and values and advocacy of
minority rights...."
(3) Female Stage - this is the "phase of self-discovery, a turning inwards freed from some of
the dependency of opposition, a search for identity."
Showalter has stated that in the first and second phases writers have accepted their gender
role in writing literary texts. However, she also has expressed that there were some writers,
such as Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and George Sand who were writing under masculine
pseudonyms to get into males literary canon. As she further explained, females’ critics in the
third phase were concerned with understanding female experiences in arts; including a
feminine analysis of literary forms and techniques by uncovering misogamy in male texts. In
the Second Wave feminism female authors dramatized the plight of the undermined women
by depicting the harsh representations of female characters. Though there were 100 writers of
females before Jane Austen (possibly more), as Showalter has explained, critics had focused
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on the distinguished giant figures such as, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and
Virginia Wolf. Though she was not sounded as the preceding giant figures in England,
Schreiner, as cited in Showalter (1977), has coined the term gynocritics or gynocriticism,
which focused on the history, style, themes, genres, and structures of women writings based
on the four models. The models were stated as biological, linguistic, psychoanalytic and
cultural. Amazingly, feminist critics still focus on these four models in one way or the other.
Thus, we need to examine these four models briefly as follows.
C. Goals of Feminist Literary Criticism

Whatever women know about they opt to do, the end is justified by men (Ethiopians also say
‘Set Biyawk Bewond Yalk’). The goal of feminism therefore is changing these devaluating
views so as women realize they are not the “significant other” and understand that they have
given privileges and rights as every man. Based on this general umbrella there are also
specific goals of feminists which can be summarized in the following six points:
 Developing and uncovering a female tradition of writing;

 Interpreting symbolism of women’s writings so that it will not be lost or ignored by male
perspectives;
 Rediscovering old texts of female writers;
 Analyzing women writers and their writings from female perspective;
 Resisting gender stereotyping in literature; and
 Increasing awareness of the sexual politics of language and style (Shildrick, 1997).
Having these goals in mind, critics may need to ask the following questions to analyze
females’ representations in a certain text. However, the criticism may not only limit to these
questions, for the approach and the techniques employ in the analysis matters. This term
paper taken into accounts most of this questions inline with the Post Modernism and
Deconstruction perspective.
Here follows the questions:
 Is the author male or female?

 Is the text narrated by male or female?
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 What types of roles do women have in the text?

 Are the female characters the protagonists or secondary and minor characters?
 Do any stereotypical characterizations of women appear?
 What are the attitudes towards women held by the male characters?
 What is the author’s attitude toward women in the society?
 Is feminine imagery used? If so, what is the significance of such imagery?
 Do the female characters speak differently than the male characters?
D. Types of Feminism
Though Feminists struggle to liberate from the masculine oriented societal orientations, they
are not devaluating this canon in one umbrella; their inherent perspectives do vary. Currently,
there are five kinds of feminism that follows with their brief summary.
i. Liberal Feminism
This is the variety of feminism that works within the structure of mainstream society to
integrate women into that structure. Its roots stretch back to the social contract theory of
government instituted by the American Revolution, under the motto of proposing equality for
women.
ii. Radical Feminism

This term refers to the feminist movement that sprung out of the civil rights and peace
movements in 1967-1968. The reason this group gets the "radical" label is that they view the
oppression of women as the most fundamental form of oppression, one that cuts across
boundaries of race, culture, and economic class. This is a movement intent on social change,
change of rather revolutionary proportions, in fact. Radical feminism was the cutting edge of
feminist theory from approximately 1967-1975.
iii. Marxist and Socialist Feminism
Marxism recognizes that women are oppressed, and attributes the oppression to the
capitalist/private property system. Thus they insist that the only way to end the oppression of
women is to overthrow the capitalist system. Socialist feminism is the result of Marxism
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meeting radical feminism. Marxists and socialists often call themselves "radical," but they
use the term to refer to a completely different "root" of society: the economic system.
iv. Cultural Feminism

As radical feminism died out as a movement, cultural feminism got rollingThese alternative-
building efforts were accompanied with reasons explaining (perhaps justifying) the
abandonment of working for social change. Notions that women are "inherently kinder and
gentler" are one of the foundations of cultural feminism, and remain a major part of it. A
similar concept held by some cultural feminists is that while various sex differences might
not be biologically determined, they are still so thoroughly embedded as to be pig-headed.
v. Eco-Feminism
This branch of feminism is much more spiritual than political or theoretical in nature. Its
basic tenet is that a patriarchal society will exploit its resources without regard to long term
consequences as a direct result of the attitudes fostered in a patriarchal/hierarchical society.
Parallels are often drawn between society's treatment of the environment, animals, or
resources and its treatment of women. In resisting patriarchal culture, eco-feminists feel that
they are also resisting plundering and destroying the Earth. Feminist criticism is concerned
with the impact of gender on writing and reading. It usually begins with a critique of
patriarchal culture. It is concerned with the place of female writers in the cannon. Finally, it
includes a search for a feminine theory or approach to texts. Feminist criticism is political
and often revisionist. Feminists often argue that male fears are portrayed through female
characters. They may argue that gender determines everything, or just the opposite: that all
gender differences are imposed by society, and gender determines nothing. To speak of
"Feminism" as a theory is already a reduction. However, in terms of its theory (rather than as
its reality as a historical movement in effect for some centuries) feminism might be
categorized into three general groups:
1. Theories having an essentialist focus (including psychoanalytic and French feminism);

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2. Theories aimed at defining or establishing a feminist literary canon or theories seeking to

re-interpret and re-vision literature (and culture and history and so forth) from a less
patriarchal slant (including gynocriticism, liberal feminism); and
3. Theories focusing on sexual difference and sexual politics (including gender studies,
lesbian studies, cultural feminism, radical feminism, and socialist/materialist feminism).
Though this approach has vividly exposed that Women have been somewhat
underrepresented in the traditional cannon, and a feminist approach to literature redresses this
problem, Feminist turn literary criticism into a political battlefield and overlook the merits of
works they consider "patriarchal." When arguing for a distinct feminine writing style, they
tend to relegate women's literature to a ghetto status; this in turn prevents female literature
from being naturally included in the literary cannon. The feminist approach is often too
theoretical (Burris 1999).
Example One:
Showalter's three stages of feminine, feminist, and female are identifiable in the life of
Cleófilas in Sandra Cisneros's "Woman Hollering Creek."
Cleófilas begins to internalize the paternalistic values of the society in which she lives at
least as early as the ice house scene. She "accompanies her husband," as is expected of her
(48). Since women should be seen and not heard in a paternalistic society, she "sits mute
beside their conversation" (48). She goes through all of the motions that are expected of her,
laughing "at the appropriate moments" (48). She submits, if unhappily, to the rule of her
husband, "this man, this father, this rival, this keeper, this lord, this master, this husband till
kingdom come" (49).
Yet Cleófilas gradually begins to emerge from the feminine stage into the feminist stage,
where she begins to revolt and advocate for her own rights. It begins with "[a] doubt. Slender
as a hair" (50). When she returns from the hospital with her new son, something seems
different. "No. Her imagination. The house was the same as always. Nothing" (50). This is
true because the house is not different; it is Cleófilas who has begun to change. Perhaps
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giving birth to a child has made her aware of the power and importance women possess. She
begins to think of returning home, but is not ready for the possibility yet. It would be "a
disgrace" (50). She begins to internally protest against the society, thinking about the town
"with its silly pride for a bronze pecan" and the fact that there is "nothing, nothing, nothing of
interest" (50). The patriarchal society, with its ice house, city hall, liquor stores, and bail
bonds is of no interest to her. She is upset that the town is built so that "you have to depend
on husbands" (51). Though her husband says she is "exaggerating," she seems to be
becoming convinced that her society is a bad one, where men kill their wives with impunity.
"It seemed the newspapers were full of such stories. This woman found on the side of the
interstate. This one pushed from a moving car . . ." (52). Although she does nothing when he
throws a book at her, Cleófilas does (if only meekly) insist that he take her to the doctor. And
there she solidifies her internal rebellion with actions: she leaves her husband with Felice to
return to Mexico.
Felice is actually more representative of the third, female, stage than Cleófilas, but the fact
that Cleófilas enjoys her company suggests that when she returns to Mexico, she may seek to
enter that third stage herself. Felice is not phalocentric--she is not interested in revolting
against men, she simply does not need them. She doesn't have a husband and she owns her
own car. "The pickup was hers. She herself had chosen it. She herself was paying for it" (55).
Felice is most likely a part of a community of women; she is certainly friends with the nurse
Graciela. Cleófilas is attracted to Felice, who "was like no woman she'd ever met" (55). At
home, in Mexico, Cleófilas recounts the story of Felice's yelling when they crossed the creek.
"Just like that. Who would've thought?" (56). Cleófilas seems to have enjoyed her company
and has kept the experience in her mind. Felice's laughter, "gurgling out of her own throat, a
long ribbon of laughter, like water" suggests that Felice had completed the self-discovery
stage. (Water is often symbolic of rebirth.) Cleófilas has witnessed the third stage in Felice,
and it is up to her whether she will enter it or regress to the feminine stage and internalize the
paternalistic values of her father and brothers with whom she is now living.
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Example Two:
The Women Burden and Source of Conflict among Them
Freedom is a right not a privilege given from men a little share to women, but in Igbo
society, women have limited rights of attending meetings; sharing ideas and household
activities; forwarding, compromising and discussing on issues that are fundamental in
living. If they were doing so, they would gain social, psychological, and spiritual
satisfactions in the society. Rather women are undertaking pieces of works that they are
told by their husbands. Husbands in Umuaro (see on page 66 and 111) tend to be served
by their younger wives and send the senior wife to the field. Belittling women is not
limited only to black natives; it is a phenomenon to the white women Doctor Savage
Mary. She is belittled as unfeminine in the text.
Though Ngoye gets a little room of addressing issues by herself, she is not give a
convincing right for discussion. For instance, when Oduche goes to the white new
orthodoxy, his mother Ngoye was unhappy. She tries to discuss the issue with her
husband, however, he is inpatient with her and says, “How does it concern you what I do
with my son (p.45)? Is there something demanding to a mother other than discussing on
the wellbeing of her child? Whose share is substantial in the cultivation of Oduche,
Ezelu’s or Ngoye’s? We can just give automatic reply to the above, questions in favor of
Ngoye, though Ezulu’s two-facedness let him say so. Moreover, when Matefi came to her
husband while her son Obika is beaten by the Whiteman, Ezelu commanded her saying,
“Go back to your hut women (p.88)?” this must not be the way a wife is treated.
Nevertheless, this is right to Ezelu to solve problems and to rehearse thoughts regarding
‘his son’ by himself with men colleague. Though Nwafo is assigned to clean Ezelu’s
house everyday, we see daughters are doing household activities more than sons do.
Obiageli takes care of children (p. 123; 125) and Ojiugo serves a bowl of foofoo and a
bowl of soup by saluting her father and setting before him (p. 9).
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Exercise One
Analyze the following extract that is taken from Jane Austen ‘Emma’ from Feminist
Criticism perspective like the examples given above
She [Emma] was the youngest of the two daughters of a most affectionate, indulgent
father, and had, in consequence of her sister's marriage, been mistress of his house
from a very early period. Her mother had died too long ago for her to have more than
an indistinct remembrance of her caresses, and her place had been supplied by an
excellent woman as governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in affection.
Sixteen years had Miss Taylor been in Mr Woodhouse's family less as a governess
than a friend, very fond of both daughters, but particularly of Emma. Between them it
was more the intimacy of sisters. Even before Miss Taylor had ceased to hold the
nominal office of governess, the mildness of her temper had hardly allowed her to
impose any restraint; and the shadow of authority being now long passed away, they
had been living together as friend and friend very mutually attached, and Emma doing
just what she liked; highly esteeming Miss Taylor's judgment, but directed chiefly by
her own.
Sorrow came -- a gentle sorrow -- but not at all in the shape of any disagreeable
consciousness -- Miss Taylor married. It was Miss Taylor's loss which first brought
grief. It was on the wedding-day of this beloved friend that Emma first sat in
mournful thought of any continuance. The wedding over and the bride-people gone,
her father and herself were left to dine together, with no prospect of a third to cheer a
long evening. Her father composed himself to sleep after dinner, as usual, and she had
then only to sit and think of what she had lost.
The event had every promise of happiness for her friend. Mr Weston was a man of
unexceptionable character, easy fortune, suitable age and pleasant manners; and there
was some satisfaction in considering with what self-denying, generous friendship she
had always wished and promoted the match; but it was a black morning's work for
her. The want of Miss Taylor would be felt every hour of every day. She recalled her
past kindness -- the kindness, the affection of sixteen years -- how she had taught and
how she had played with her from five years old -- how she had devoted all her
powers to attach and amuse her in health -- and how nursed her through the various
illnesses of childhood. A large debt of gratitude was owing here; but the intercourse
of the last seven years, the equal footing and perfect unreserve which had soon
followed Isabella's marriage on their being left to each other, was yet a dearer,
tenderer recollection. It had been a friend and companion such as few possessed,
intelligent, well-informed, useful, gentle, knowing all the ways of the family,
interested in all its concerns, and peculiarly interested in herself, in every pleasure,
every scheme of her's; - one to whom she could speak every thought as it arose, and
who had such an affection for her as could never find fault.
How was she to bear the change? - It was true that her friend was going only half a
mile from them; but Emma was aware that great must be the difference between a
Mrs Weston only half a mile from them, and a Miss Taylor in the house; and with all
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her advantages, natural and domestic, she was now in great danger of suffering from
intellectual solitude. She dearly loved her father, but he was no companion for her.
He could not meet her in conversation, rational or playful. (Jane Austen, Emma 37-
38)
2.4.1.5 Marxism
Siegel explains that a sociological approach to literature views works of literature or art as
the products of historical forces that can be analyzed by looking at the material conditions in
which they were formed. In Marxist ideology, what we often classify as a world view (such
as the Victorian age) is actually the articulations of the dominant class. Marxism generally
focuses on the clash between the dominant and repressed classes in any given age and also
may encourage art to imitate what is often termed an "objective" reality. Contemporary
Marxism is much broader in its focus and views art as simultaneously reflective and
autonomous to the age in which it was produced.
Marxism according to Terry Eagleton (1977) is “a scientific theory of human society and
of the practices of transforming them; and what that means, rather more concretely, is
that the narrative Marxism has to deliver is the story of the struggles of men and women
to free themselves from certain forms of exploitation and oppression. The proverbial
nutshell “don’t let the man keep you down.” is what Marxism is all about. The Marxist
critic believes that the only importance in a piece of literature lies in how it supports or
attacks the socio economic structure. According to David Fourgasc, Marxism is
essentially a theory of economics, history and revolution before it has anything to do with
literary theory (Ann Jefferson and David Robey, 1993:166).
The Frankfurt School is also associated with Marxism (Abrams, p. 178, Childers and Hentzi,
pp. 175-179). Major figures include Karl Marx, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Raymond
Williams, Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs, and Friedrich
Engels, Theordor Adorno, Edward Ahern, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
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Key Terms (note: definitions below taken from Ann B. Dobie's text (2002: 92), Theory into
Practice: An Introduction to Literary Criticism):
Commodificaion - "the attitude of valuing things not for their utility but for their power to
impress others or for their resale possibilities".
Conspicuous consumption - "the obvious acquisition of things only for their sign value
and/or exchange value".
Dialectical materialism - "the theory that history develops neither in a random fashion nor
in a linear one but instead as struggle between contradictions that ultimately find resolution
in a synthesis of the two sides. For example, class conflicts lead to new social systems".
Material circumstances - "the economic conditions underlying the society. To understand
social events, one must have a grasp of the material circumstances and the historical situation
in which they occur" (92).
Reflectionism - associated with Vulgar Marxism - "a theory that the superstructure of a
society mirrors its economic base and, by extension, that a text reflects the society that
produced it".
Superstructure - "The social, political, and ideological systems and institutions--for
example, the values, art, and legal processes of a society--that are generated by the base".
Reification - another Marxist insight into human behavior that involves damaging effects of
capitalism on human psychology and related to alienation. Reification describes the practice
of equating human relationships in terms of relations among things.
Alienation- according to David Forgasc, alienation is the process by which a worker sells
his or her labor power to the capitalist for wages and becomes appendage of a machine
(Ann Jefferson and David Robey, 1993:170).
Religion-religion, which Marx called “the opiate of masses,” is an ideology that helps to
keep the faithful poor satisfied with their lot in life, or at least tolerant of it, much as a
tranquilizer might do. In this regard, the premise of Marxist analysis is not on the
question of the existence of god, but in what human beings do in God’s name-the
organized religion
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Individualism and collectivism
According to Tyson (1999), individualism is an ideology that keeps the focus on “me” instead of
on “us” thus working against class action and giving us the illusion that we make one own
decisions and are not significantly influenced by ideology. Individualism hold’s that the
individual is the primary unit of reality and the ultimate standard of value. This view does not
deny that societies exist or that people benefit from living in them, but it sees society as a
collection of individuals, not something over and above them. Collectivism holds that the group--
the nation, the community, the proletariat, the race, etc… is the primary unit of reality and the
ultimate standard of value. But ultimately, collectivism holds that one’s identity is determined by
the groups one interest with that one’s identity is constituted essentially of relationships with
others.
Example:
Classism and alienation in ‘Xala’
Xala (1974) is a satirical comedy about the misadventures of one of the new African elite
whose post independence fortunes are marred and then wrecked by the curse of Xala –
impotence. From the very beginning of the novel, Sembene’s assessment of the neo-
colonial bourgeoisie in to shocking metaphor; no sooner is the French ruling order over
turned then it is replaced by the African equivalent – a conclave of business – suited men.
The protagonist, El-Hadji, is a man in his fifties living in Dakar with his two wives. El-
Hadji who has become the beneficiary of the neo-colonial order is a wealthy French
speaking importer of European luxury – good, who not only rides a white Mercedes, but
has his chauffeur wash the car in imported mineral water.
In Xala, there are observable classes which reflect different social relationships
(struggles). Throughout the novel, there is a game of opposition between the nouveous
riche and the people. But sembene does not waste time in making a dialectical logic of
the two classes’ intersection. Despite this, firstly, there are the new middle class who are
the inheritors of the role of the colonialists. In the novel, the people who belong to this
class are featured by distinctive roles. For instance, the bourgeoisie, who are the rich,
privileged, or the fortunate, constitute the neo-colonial African leaders. These are new
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African elite (Senegalese elite) a concave of business suited Africans and their white
“advisors” who bring them suite cases stuffed with money. Under this category are found
the “business men” who had come together from different sectors of the business
community to form the “business men’s Group”. The less fortunate are victims of the
bourgeoisie, who deprive them of basic needs and view them with their utter contempt.
They are dominated by the bourgeoisie class nature in the novel which marks that they
are unheard, muted, and rejected constituting the lower – class or the poor urban people
of Senegal. They are alienated from their inheritance, their names falsified and thrown
into prison, being considered as aliens. El-Hadji once, in the novel, called them ‘human
rubbish’ but later they had managed to submit him to them by debasement and revenge,
after arranging his xala. This is one of the symbolic class implications of the novel.
The Socioeconomic status of El Hadji’s family and the business men (the upper class) is
presented in comparison with that of the masses of crippled beggars (the lower class).
After managing to take control of the heart of the country’s economy, El-Hadji and the
business men conquered all branches of the economy which they felt were theirs by right
(p-1). The whole sale trade, public works contracts, the pharmacies, the private clinics,
the bakeries, the manufacturing industry, the bookshops and cinemas. They selfishly
monopolized the whole economy. This marks how the transition from colonialism to neo
colonialism went about in Senegal. Soon, the French ruling order overturned, it is
replaced by the African equivalent business suited Senegalese people. These people who
appeared to be neocolonial bourgeoisie, are the ones who managed to control the post
colonial fortunes. One is, El-Hadji, who is a wealthy French speaking importer of
European luxury good, who not only rides a white Mercedes, but has his chauffeur wash
his car in imported mineral water.
2.4.1.6 Post-colonialism
Literally, post-colonialism refers to the period following the decline of colonialism, e.g., the
end or lessening of domination by European empires. Although the term post-colonialism
generally refers to the period after colonialism, the distinction is not always made. In its use
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as a critical approach, post-colonialism refers to "a collection of theoretical and critical

strategies used to examine the culture (literature, politics, history, and so forth) of former
colonies of the European empires, and their relation to the rest of the world" (Makaryk 155 -
see General Resources below). Among the many challenges facing postcolonial writers are
the attempts both to resurrect their culture and to combat preconceptions about their culture.
Edward Said, for example, uses the word Orientalism to describe the discourse about the East
constructed by the West. Major figures include Edward Said Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon,
Gayatri Spivak, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Salman Rushdie, Jamaica Kincaid, and
Buchi Emecheta.
Key Terms:
Alterity - "lack of identification with some part of one's personality or one's community,
differentness, otherness"
Diaspora (dI-ASP-er-ah- "is used (without capitalization) to refer to any people or ethnic
population forced or induced to leave their traditional ethnic homelands, being dispersed
throughout other parts of the world, and the ensuing developments in their dispersal and
culture" (Wikipedia).
Eurocentrism - "the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing emphasis on European
(and, generally, Western) concerns, culture and values at the expense of those of other
cultures. It is an instance of ethnocentrism, perhaps especially relevant because of its
alignment with current and past real power structures in the world"
(Dictionary.LaborLawTalk.com)
Hybridity - "an important concept in post-colonial theory, referring to the integration (or,
mingling) of cultural signs and practices from the colonizing and the colonized cultures
("integration" may be too orderly a word to represent the variety of stratagems, desperate or
cunning or good-willed, by which people adapt themselves to the necessities and the
opportunities of more or less oppressive or invasive cultural impositions, live into alien
cultural patterns through their own structures of understanding, thus producing something
familiar but new). The assimilation and adaptation of cultural practices, the cross-fertilization
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of cultures, can be seen as positive, enriching, and dynamic, as well as as oppressive" (from
Dr. John Lye - see General Literary Theory Websites).
Imperialism - "the policy of extending the control or authority over foreign entities as a
means of acquisition and/or maintenance of empires, either through direct territorial control
or through indirect methods of exerting control on the politics and/or economy of other
countries. The term is used by some to describe the policy of a country in maintaining
colonies and dominance over distant lands, regardless of whether the country calls itself an
empire" (Dictionary.LaborLawTalk.com).
2.3.3 Text-oriented Approaches
2.3.3.1 New/Practical Criticism
Although Siegel notes that the foundations of the New Criticism were laid in books and
essays written during the 1920s and 1930s by I. A. Richards (Practical Criticism [1929]),
William Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity [1930]), and T. S. Eliot ("The Function of
Criticism" [1933]), as Murfin and Ray describe the approach was significantly developed
later, however, by a group of American poets and critics, including R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth
Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and William K. Wimsatt. A
literary movement that started in the late 1920s and 1930s and originated in reaction to
traditional criticism that new critics saw as largely concerned with matters extraneous to the
text, e.g., with the biography or psychology of the author or the work's relationship to literary
history. To the later scholars, The New Criticism is a type of formalist literary criticism that
reached its height during the 1940s and 1950s and that received its name from John Crowe
Ransom’s 1941 book The New Criticism. New Critics treat a work of literature as if it were a
self-contained and self-referential object. New Criticism proposed that a work of literary art
should be regarded as autonomous, and so should not be judged by reference to
considerations beyond itself. A poem consists less of a series of referential and verifiable
statements about the 'real' world beyond it, than of the presentation and sophisticated
organization of a set of complex experiences in a verbal form (Hawkes, pp. 150-151). Rather
than basing their interpretations of a text on the reader’s response, the author’s stated
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intentions, or parallels between the text and historical contexts (such as author’s life), New
Critics perform a close reading, concentrating on the relationships within the text that give it
its own distinctive character or form.
New Critics emphasize that the structure of a work should not be divorced from
meaning, viewing the two as constituting a quasi-organic unity. Special attention is paid
to repetition, particularly of images or symbols, but also of sound effects and rhythms in
poetry. New Critics especially appreciate the use of literary devices, such as irony, to
achieve a balance or reconciliation between dissimilar, even conflicting, elements in a
text. Since it stresses close textual analysis and viewing the text as a carefully crafted,
orderly object containing formal, observable patterns, the New Criticism has sometimes
been called an "objective" approach to literature. New Critics are more likely than
certain other critics to believe and say that the meaning of a text can be known
objectively. For instance, reader-response critics see meaning as a function either of
each reader’s experience or of the norms that govern a particular interpretive
community, and deconstructors argue that texts mean opposite things at the same time.
Although we associate the New Criticism with certain principles and terms—such as
affective fallacy (the notion that the reader’s response is relevant to the meaning of a
work) and intentional fallacy (the notion that the author’s intention determines the
work’s meaning)—the New Critics were trying to make a cultural statement rather than
to establish a critical dogma. Generally southern, religious, and culturally conservative,
they advocated the inherent value of literary works (particularly of literary works
regarded as beautiful art objects) because they were sick of the growing ugliness of
modern life and contemporary events. Some recent theorists even link the rising
popularity after World War II of the New Criticism (and other types of formalist literary
criticism such as the Chicago School) to American isolationism. These critics tend to
view the formalist tendency to isolate literature from biography and history as
symptomatic of American fatigue with wider involvements. Whatever the source of the
New Criticism’s popularity (or the reason for its eventual decline), its practitioners and
the textbooks they wrote were so influential in American academia that the approach
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became standard in college and even high school curricula through the 1960s and well
into the 1970s.
Key Terms:
Intentional Fallacy - equating the meaning of a poem with the author's intentions.
Affective Fallacy - confusing the meaning of a text with how it makes the reader feel. A
reader's emotional response to a text generally does not produce a reliable interpretation.
Heresy of Paraphrase - assuming that an interpretation of a literary work could consist of a
detailed summary or paraphrase.
Close reading (from Bressler, 2003) - "a close and detailed analysis of the text itself to arrive
at an interpretation without referring to historical, authorial, or cultural concerns" (263).
2.3.3.2 Russian Formalism
According to Eagleton (1983), Krishnaswamy (2001), and Siegel (n.d), the above linguistic
movements began in the 1920s, were suppressed by the Soviets in the 1930s, moved to
Czechoslovakia and were continued by members of the Prague Linguistic Circle (including
Roman Jakobson, Jan Mukarovsky, and René Wellek). The Prague Linguistic Circle viewed
literature as a special class of language, and rested on the assumption that there is a
fundamental opposition between literary (or poetical) language and ordinary language.
Formalism views the primary function of ordinary language as communicating a message, or
information, by references to the world existing outside of language. In contrast, it views
literary language as self-focused: its function is not to make extrinsic references, but to draw
attention to its own "formal" features--that is, to interrelationships among the linguistic signs
themselves. Literature is held to be subject to critical analysis by the sciences of linguistics
but also by a type of linguistics different from that adapted to ordinary discourse, because its
laws produce the distinctive features of literariness (Abrams, pp. 165-166). An important
contribution made by Victor Schklovsky (of the Leningrad group) was to explain how
language--through a period of time--tends to become "smooth, unconscious or transparent."
In contrast, the work of literature is to defamiliarize language by a process of "making
strange." Dialogism refers to a theory, initiated by Mikhail Bakhtin, arguing that in a dialogic
work of literature--such as in the writings of Dostoevsky--there is a "polyphonic interplay of
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various characters' voices ... where no worldview is given superiority over others; neither is
that voice which may be identified with the author's necessarily the most engaging or
persuasive of all those in the text" (Childers & Hentzi, p. 81).
Saussure's ideas caught on most rapidly in Russia, where of course the Revolution had
overthrown bourgeois lifestyles and conceptions. Many of the Russian critics had already
been moving in a similar direction, encouraged by the acute consciousness of craft which
Symbolist poets exhibited, and by technical studies of Pushkin's art. Very obliquely, the
Formalists also drew sustenance from the Art for Art's Sake movement that swept Europe in
the second half of the nineteenth century. Both movements were anti-realist, denying that
morality, philosophy or subject should be the concern of a poem. What did matter were
verbal qualities: the evocative power of words for the Symbolists, their strident novelty for
the Futurists. But whereas the Italian Futurists strove for a new diction to express the new
age, the Russian Futurists believed that poetic speech should be an end in itself, not a
medium for conveying ideas and emotions. Many schools of poetry would be extinguished
by such a conception, but the Russian Futurists were iconoclastic and lived dangerously.
Many poets experimented wildly, arbitrarily using words for their form and texture rather
than any communicative value. Mayakovsky wrote: "Art is not a copy of nature, but the
determination to distort nature in accordance with its reflections in the individual
consciousness".
Much that the Russian Futurists bequeathed was very valuable. They made countless studies
of rhyme, metre, consonantal clusters, etc. of the Russian classics and of poems by
contemporaries. They claimed, contrary to Symbolist assertions, that words and their
connotations are not the most important ingredient of poetry. They replaced loose talk about
inspiration and verbal magic by "study of the laws of literary production". In regarding
literary history as successive revolts against prevailing canons, the young Futurists embraced
a rather crude relativism, however, with results apparent even to them: Pushkin, Dostoevsky
and Tolstoy continued to be read for all that Mayakovsky called them period pieces.
Shklovsky was not consistent in asserting that the poet's art lies in deforming reality to make
it fresh. Nor did Brik really believe that the author is immaterial, that Eugene Onegin would
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have been written anyway had Pushkin not lived. Much of the writing was cavalierly
provocative, originating in café talk, sharpened by youthful high spirits into polemic.
The Russian Formalists were materialists and anti-traditionalists, who tried to reach some
rapprochement with social and political concerns. At first their approach was somewhat
mechanical, treating literature simply as an assembly of literary devices. Subsequently they
investigated the interrelated of parts, an "organic" approach. Finally, in 1928, Tynyanov and
Jakobson recast literature as a system where every component had a constructive function,
just as the social fabric was a "system of systems." But the short period of comparative
tolerance of the early twenties changed as Stalinism tightened its grip, and the Formalists
were obliged to recant, turn to novel writing, or flee abroad. That literature should not be
subordinated to narrow Marxist concerns is a theme to which Russian authors occasionally
returned in the succeeding thirty years, but an aesthetic divorced from socialism remained a
heresy in the Soviet Union.
The Russian Formalists tried to explain how aesthetic effects were produced by literary
devices, and how literary writing differed from nonliterary. Literature, as they saw it, was an
autonomous product, and should be studied by appropriate methods, preferably scientific.
The literary was not distinguished from the non-literary by subject matter, poetic inspiration,
philosophic vision, or sensory quality of the poetic image, but by its verbal art. Tropes,
particularly metaphor, were the key, as they shifted objects to a new sphere of perception,
making the familiar strange, novel and exciting. Of course Aristotle had accepted unusual
words as necessary to poetic diction, and the Romantics saw novelty and freshness as one of
the hallmarks of true poetry. Surrealists made poems as a renascence of wonder, an act of
renewal. But Jakobson deepened the interest. "The distinctive feature of poetry lies in the
fact that a word is perceived as a word and not merely a proxy for the denoted object or an
outburst of emotion, that words and their arrangement, their meaning, their outward and
inward form acquire weight and value of their own". Now if rhythm, euphony and startling
word order should converge on a word so as to throw into relief its complex texture, its
density of meanings and associations that was nothing unusual. Few conscientious writers
would disagree. Words, and the meanings and emotions they carry, are the material
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assembled into a poem by the usual devices of this art form. Exactly in the same manner, a
painter takes the outside world as his raw materials rather than the given "content" which he
must faithfully reproduce. But Jakobson and Zirmunsky equated this "material" with the
verbal. That was the crucial difference. Words for them drew their meaning from their
arrangements within the poem, not their outside referents, an attitude analogous to Saussure's
closed system of arbitrary signs.
Burris (1999) says that New Critics refer to the historical / biographical critic's belief that the
meaning or value of a work may be determined by the author's intention as "the intentional
fallacy." They believe that this approach tends to reduce art to the level of biography and
make it relative (to the times) rather than universal. A formalistic approach to literature, once
called New Criticism, involves a close reading of the text. Formalistic critics believe that all
information essential to the interpretation of a work must be found within the work itself;
there is no need to bring in outside information about the history, politics, or society of the
time, or about the author's life. Formalistic critics (presumably) do not view works through
the lens of feminism, psychology, mythology, or any other such standpoint, and they are not
interested in the work's affect on the reader. Formalistic critics spend much time analyzing
irony, paradox, imagery, and metaphor. They are also interested in the work's setting,
characters, symbols, and point of view. This approach can be performed without much
research, and it emphasizes the value of literature apart from its context (in effect makes
literature timeless). Virtually all critical approaches must begin here. However, the text is
seen in isolation. Formalism ignores the context of the work. It cannot account for allusions.
It tends to reduce literature to little more than a collection of rhetorical devices.
Key Terms:
Terms Used in New Criticism: Burris (1999) and Siegel (n.d) have pointed out the terms
and salient features of these linguistic movements as follows. The first five concepts are
Burris’s while the rest four belong to Siegel’s.
 tension - the integral unity of the poem which results from the resolution of opposites,
often in irony of paradox
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 intentional fallacy - the belief that the meaning or value of a work may be determined by
the author's intention
 affective fallacy - the belief that the meaning or value of a work may be determined by
its affect on the reader
 external form - rhyme scheme, meter, stanza form, etc.
 objective correlative - originated by T.S. Eliot, this term refers to a collection of objects,
situations, or events that instantly evoke a particular emotion.
 Carnival - "For Bakhtin, carnival reflected the 'lived life' of medieval and early modern
peoples. In carnival, official authority and high culture were jostled 'from below' by elements
of satire, parody, irony, mimicry, bodily humor, and grotesque display. This jostling from
below served to keep society open, to liberate it from deadening..." (Bressler 276 - see
 Heteroglossia - "refers, first, to the way in which every instance of language use - every
utterance - is embedded in a specific set of social circumstances, and second, to the way the
meaning of each particular utterance is shaped and influenced by the many-layered context in
which it occurs" (Sarah Willen, "Dialogism and Heteroglossia")
 Monologism - "having one single voice, or representing one single ideological stance or
perspective, often used in opposition to the Bakhtinian dialogical. In a monological form, all
the characters' voices are subordinated to the voice of the author" (Malcolm Hayward).
 Polyphony - "a term used by Mikhail Bakhtin to describe a dialogical text which, unlike
a monological text, does not depend on the centrality of a single authoritative voice. Such a
text incorporates a rich plurality and multiplicity of voices, styles, and points of view. It
comprises, in Bakhtin's phrase, "a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and
consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices" (Henderson and Brown -
Glossary of Literary Theory).
Examples:
(1) A formalistic approach to John Milton's Paradise Lost would take into account the
physical description of the Garden of Eden and its prescribed location, the symbols of hands,
seed, and flower, the characters of Adam, Eve, Satan, and God, the epic similes and
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metaphors, and the point of view from which the tale is being told (whether it be the
narrator's, God's, or Satan's). But such an approach would not discuss the work in terms of
Milton's own blindness, or in terms of his Puritan beliefs. Therefore when the narrator says
"what in me is dark / Illumine," a formalistic critic could not interpret that in light of Milton's
blindness. He would have to find its meaning in the text itself, and therefore would have to
overlook the potential double-meaning.
(2) A formalistic approach to the short story "Silence of the Llano" by Rudolfo Anaya might
force us to see the incestuous relationship that is established at the end of the story as a
positive alternative to loneliness. If we were to take into account external things, such as
morality, we could not help but be horrified at such a conclusion. But in studying the
symbols, setting, and structure of "The Silence of the Llano," we get an opposite picture. The
setting of the llano, its isolation and desolation, make its loneliness the primary evil of the
story, in contrast to the town where people can escape the loneliness, where Rafael can find
love, and where men can talk. The only way to survive the llano is to make it more like the
town--to fill it with love and words and anything to escape the loneliness. "Words" are
positively contrasted to "silence," as is "winter" to "spring" and "growth" to "death." The
silence of the llano is constantly referred to, and Rafael's parents die in winter. But when
Rafael marries, his wife makes a garden to grow in the desolate llano, and he can hear her
voice. When Rafael establishes the incestuous relationship at the close of the story, he finally
speaks to his daughter, and words break the long silence. He tells her that the "spring is the
time for the garden. I will turn the earth for you. The seeds will grow." (182). Growth, spring,
and words--the primary symbols which are positively contrasted to death, winter, and
silence--are all combined in the close. The disadvantage of this formalistic approach is that it
does not allow us to account for most readers' natural (and appropriate) response of disgust to
the incestuous relationship or to examine how that affects the ability of the author to
communicate his story. Some would argue that an understanding of the text is where
criticism should begin, and not where it ends. We should also relate the text to life, ideas, and
morality.
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2.3.3.3 Structuralism and Semiotics
A. Structuralism
Barry (2002) notes that structuralism is an intellectual movement which began in France
in the 1950s and is first seen in the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1908
—) and the literary critic Roland Barthes (1915-1980).To Klages (2001), structuralism is
appealing to some critics because it adds certain objectivity, a scientific objectivity, to the
realm of literary studies (which have often been criticized as pure
subjective/impressionistic). This scientific objectivity is achieved by subordinating
"parole" to "langue;" actual usage is abandoned in favor of studying the structure of a
system in the abstract. Thus structuralist readings ignore the specificity of actual texts and
treat them as if they were like the patterns produced by iron filings moved by magnetic
force--the result of some impersonal force or power, not the result of human effort. In
structuralism, the individuality of the text disappears in favor of looking at patterns,
systems, and structures. Some structuralists (and a related school of critics, called the
Russian Formalists) propose that ALL narratives can be charted as variations on certain
basic universal narrative patterns.
In this way of looking at narratives, the author is canceled out, since the text is a function
of a system, not of an individual. The Romantic humanist model holds that the author is
the origin of the text, its creator, and hence is the starting point or progenitor of the text.
Structuralism argues that any piece of writing, or any signifying system, has no origin,
and that authors merely inhabit pre-existing structures (langue) that enable them to make
any particular sentence (or story)--any parole. Hence the idea that language speaks us
rather than that we speak language. We don't originate language; we inhabit a structure
that enables us to speak; what we misperceive as our originality is simply our
recombination of some of the elements in the pre-existing system. Hence every text, and
every sentence we speak or write, is made up of the "already written."
By focusing on the system itself, in a synchronic analysis, structuralists cancel out

history. Most insist, as Levi-Strauss does, that structures are universal, therefore timeless.
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Structuralists can't account for change or development; they are uninterested, for
example, in how literary forms may have changed over time. They are not interested in a
text's production or reception/consumption, but only in the structures that shape it. In
erasing the author, the individual text, the reader, and history, structuralism represented a
major challenge to what we now call the "liberal humanist" tradition in literary criticism.
The humanist model presupposed:

1. That there is a real world out there that we can understand with our rational minds.
2. That language is capable of (more or less) accurately depicting that real world..
3. That language is a product of the individual writer's mind or free will, meaning that we
determine what we say, and what we mean when we say it; that language thus
expresses the essence of our individual beings (and that there is such a thing as an
essential unique individual "self").
4. the self--also known as the "subject," since that's how we represent the idea of a self in
language, by saying I, which is the subject of a sentence--or the individual (or the mind
or the free will) is the center of all meaning and truth; words mean what I say they
mean, and truth is what I perceive as truth. I create my own sentences out of my own
individual experiences and need for individual expression.
The structuralist model argues:
1. That the structure of language itself produces "reality"--that we can think only through
language, and therefore our perceptions of reality are all framed by and determined by
the structure of language.
2. That language speaks us; that the source of meaning is not an individual's experience
or being, but the sets of oppositions and operations, the signs and grammars that govern
language. Meaning doesn't come from individuals, but from the system that governs
what any individual can do within it.
3. Rather than seeing the individual as the center of meaning, structuralism places THE
structure at the center--it's the structure that originates or produces meaning, not the
individual self. Language in particular is the center of self and meaning; I can only say
"I" because I inhabit a system of language in which the position of subject is marked by
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the first personal pronoun, hence my identity is the product of the linguistic system I
occupy.
Structuralism is a way of thinking about the world which is predominantly concerned with
the perceptions and description of structures. At its simplest, structuralism claims that the
nature of every element in any given situation has no significance by itself, and in fact is
determined by all the other elements involved in that situation. The full significance of any
entity cannot be perceived unless and until it is integrated into the structure of which it forms
a part (Hawkes, p. 11). Structuralists believe that all human activity is constructed, not
natural or "essential." Consequently, it is the systems of organization that are important (what
we do is always a matter of selection within a given construct). By this formulation, "any
activity, from the actions of a narrative to not eating one's peas with a knife, takes place
within a system of differences and has meaning only in its relation to other possible activities
within that system, not to some meaning that emanates from nature or the divine" (Childers
& Hentzi, p. 286.). Major figures include Claude Lévi-Strauss , A. J. Greimas, Jonathan
Culler, Roland Barthes (bart), Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Vladimir Propp, and
Terence Hawkes.
B. Semiotics
Semiotics, simply put, is the science of signs. Semiotics proposes that a great diversity of our
human action and productions--our bodily postures and gestures, the social rituals we
perform, the clothes we wear, the meals we serve, the buildings we inhabit--all convey
"shared" meanings to members of a particular culture, and so can be analyzed as signs which
function in diverse kinds of signifying systems. Linguistics (the study of verbal signs and
structures) is only one branch of semiotics but supplies the basic methods and terms which
are used in the study of all other social sign systems (Abrams, p. 170). Major figures include
Charles Peirce, Ferdinand de Saussure, Michel Foucault, Umberto Eco, Gérard Genette, and
Roland Barthes (bart).
Key Terms (much of this is adapted from Charles Bressler's Literary Criticism: An
Introduction to Theory and Practice - see General Resources below):
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Binary Opposition - "pairs of mutually-exclusive signifiers in a paradigm set representing

categories which are logically opposed and which together define a complete universe of
discourse (relevant ontological domain), e.g. alive/not-alive. In such oppositions each term
necessarily implies its opposite and there is no middle term" (Daniel Chandler).
Mythemes - a term developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss--mythemes are the smallest

component parts of a myth. By breaking up myths into mythemes, those structures
(mythemes) may be studied chronologically (~ diacrhonically) or synchronically/relationally.
Sign vs. Symbol - According to Saussure, "words are not symbols which correspond to
referents, but rather are 'signs' which are made up of two parts (like two sides of a sheet of
paper): a mark,either written or spoken, called a 'signifier,' and a concept (what is 'thought'
when the mark is made), called a 'signified'" (Selden and Widdowson 104 - see General
Resources below). The distinction is important because Saussure contended that the
relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary; the only way we can distinguish
meaning is by difference (one sign or word differs from another).
The relational nature of language implied by Saussure's system rejects the concept that a
word/symbol corresponds to an outside object/referent. Instead, meaning--the interpretation
of a sign--can exist only in relationship with other signs. Selden and Widdowson use the sign
system of traffic lights as an example. The color red, in that system, signifies "stop," even
though "there is no natural bond between red and stop" (105). Meaning is derived entirely
through difference, "a system of opposites and contrasts," e.g., referring back to the traffic
lights' example, red's meaning depends on the fact that it is not green and not amber (105).
Structuralist narratology - "a form of structuralism espoused by Vladimir Propp, Tzvetan

Todorov, Roland Barthes, and Gerard Genette that illustrates how a story's meaning develops
from its overall structure (its langue) rather than from each individual story's isolated theme.
To ascertain a text's meaning, narratologists emphasize grammatical elements such as verb
tenses and the relationships and configurations of figures of speech within the story"
(Bressler 275).
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2.3.3.4 Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction
Structuralism is an intellectual movement which began in France in the 1950s and is

first seen in the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1908—) and the
literary critic Roland Barthes (1915-1980).Klages (2001). The leading figure in
deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, looks at philosophy (Western metaphysics) to see that
any system necessarily posits a CENTER, a point from which everything comes, and to
which everything refers or returns. Sometimes it's God, sometimes it's the human self, the
mind, sometimes it's the unconscious, depending on what philosophical system (or set of
beliefs) one is talking about.
There are two key points to the idea of deconstruction. First is that we're still going to
look at systems or structures, rather than at individual concrete practices, and that all
systems or structures have a center, the point of origin, the thing that created the system
in the first place. Second is that all systems or structures are created of binary pairs or
oppositions, of two terms placed in some sort of relation to each.
Derrida says that such systems are always built of the basic units of structural analysis--
the binary opposition or pair--and that within these systems one part of that binary pair is
always more important than the other, that one term is "marked" as positive and the other
as negative. Hence, in the binary pair good/evil, good is what Western philosophy values
and evil is subordinated to good. Derrida argues that all binary pairs work this way--
light/dark, masculine/feminine, right/left; in Western culture, the first term is always
valued over the second.
In his most famous work, Of Grammatology, Derrida looks particularly at the opposition
speech/writing, saying that speech is always seen as more important than writing. This
may not be as self-evident as the example of good/evil, but it's true in terms of linguistic
theories, where speech is posited as the first or primary form of language, and writing is
just the transcription of speech. Derrida says speech gets privileged because speech is
associated with presence--for there to be spoken language, somebody has to be there to
be speaking.
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The idea is that the spoken word guarantees the existence of somebody doing the
speaking--thus it reinforces all those great humanist ideas, like that there's a real self that
is the origin of what's being said. Derrida calls this idea of the self that has to be there to
speak part of the metaphysics of presence; the idea of being, or presence, is central to all
systems of Western philosophy, from Plato through Descartes (up to Derrida himself).
Presence is part of a binary opposition presence/absence, in which presence is always
favored over absence. Speech gets associated with presence, and both are favored over
writing and absence; this privileging of speech and presence is what Derrida calls
logocentrism.
You might think here about the Biblical phrase "Let there be light" as an example. The
statement insures that there is a God (the thing doing the speaking), and that God is
present (because speech=presence); the present God is the origin of all things (because
God creates the world by speaking), and what God creates is binary oppositions (starting
with light/dark). You might also think about other binary oppositions or pairs, including
being/nothingness, reason/madness, word/silence, culture/nature, mind/body. Each term
has meaning only in reference to the other (light is what is not dark, and vice-versa), just
as, in Saussure's view, signifiers only have meaning--or negative value--in relation to
other signifiers. These binary pairs are the "structures," or fundamental opposing ideas,
that Derrida is concerned with in Western philosophy.
Because of the favoring of presence over absence, speech is favored over writing (and, as
we'll see with Freud, masculine is favored over feminine because the penis is defined as a
presence, whereas the female genitals are defined as absence). It's because of this
favoring of presence over absence that every system (I'm referring here mostly to
philosophical systems, but the idea works for signifying systems as well) posits a center,
a place from which the whole system comes, and which guarantees its meaning--this
center guarantees being as presence. Think of your entire self as a kind of system--
everything you do, think, feel, etc. is part of that system. At the core or center of your
mental and physical life is a notion of self, of an "I", of an identity that is stable and
unified and coherent, the part of you that knows who you mean when you say "I". This
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core self or "I" is thus the center of the "system", the "langue" of your being, and every
other part of you (each individual act) is part of the "parole". The "I" is the origin of all
you say and do, and it guarantees the idea of your presence, your being.
Western thought has a whole bunch of terms that serve as centers to systems --being,
essence, substance, truth, form, consciousness, man, god, etc. What Derrida tells us is
that each of these terms designating the center of a system serves two purposes: it's the
thing that created the system, that originated it and guarantees that all the parts of the
system interrelate, and it's also something beyond the system, not governed by the rules
of the system. This is what he talks about as a "scandal" discovered by Levi-Strauss in
Levi-Strauss's thoughts about kinship systems. (This will be covered in detail in the next
lecture).
What Derrida does is to look at how a binary opposition--the fundamental unit of the
structures or systems we've been looking at, and of the philosophical systems he refers
to--functions within a system. He points out that a binary opposition is algebraic (a=~b, a
equals not-b), and that two terms can't exist without reference to the other--light (as
presence) is defined as the absence of darkness, goodness the absence of evil, etc. He
doesn't seek to reverse the hierarchies implied in binary pairs--to make evil favored over
good, unconscious over consciousness, feminine over masculine. Rather, deconstruction
wants to erase the boundaries (the slash) between oppositions, hence to show that the
values and order implied by the opposition are also not rigid. Here's the basic method of
deconstruction: find a binary opposition. Show how each term, rather than being polar
opposite of its paired term, is actually part of it. Then the structure or opposition which
kept them apart collapses, as we see with the terms nature and culture in Derrida's essay.
Ultimately, you can't tell which is which, and the idea of binary opposites loses meaning,
or is put into "play" (more on this in the next lecture). This method is called
"Deconstruction" because it is a combination of construction/destruction--the idea is that
you don't simply construct new system of binaries, with the previously subordinated term
on top, nor do you destroy the old system--rather, you deconstruct the old system by
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showing how its basic units of structuration (binary pairs and the rules for their
combination) contradict their own logic.
Post-Structuralism (which is often used synonymously with Deconstruction or

Postmodernism) is a reaction to structuralism and works against seeing language as a stable,
closed system. "It is a shift from seeing the poem or novel as a closed entity, equipped with
definite meanings which it is the critic's task to decipher, to seeing literature as irreducibly
plural, an endless play of signifiers which can never be finally nailed down to a single center,
essence, or meaning" (Eagleton, 1883: 120). Jacques Derrida's paper on "Structure, Sign,
and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (delivered in 1966) proved particularly
influential in the creation of post-structuralism. Derrida argued against, in essence, the notion
of a knowable center (the Western ideal of logocentrism), a structure that could organize the
differential play of language or thought but somehow remain immune to the same "play" it
depicts (Abrams, 258-9). Derrida's critique of structuralism also heralded the advent of
deconstruction that--like post-structuralism--critiques the notion of "origin" built into
structuralism. In negative terms, deconstruction--particularly as articulated by Derrida--has
often come to be interpreted as "anything goes" since nothing has any real meaning or truth.
More positively, it may posited that Derrida, like Paul de Man and other post-structuralists,
really asks for rigor, that is, a type of interpretation that is constantly and ruthlessly self-
conscious and on guard. Similarly, Christopher Norris (in "What's Wrong with
Postmodernism?") launches a cogent argument against simplistic attacks of Derrida's
theories:
On this question [the tendency of critics to read deconstruction "as a species of all-licensing
sophistical 'freeplay'"), as on so many others, the issue has been obscured by a failure to
grasp Derrida's point when he identifies those problematic factors in language (catachreses,
slippages between 'literal' and 'figural' sense, subliminal metaphors mistaken for determinate
concepts) whose effect--as in Husserl--is to complicate the passage from what the text
manifestly means to say to what it actually says when read with an eye to its latent or covert
signifying structures. This 'free-play' has nothing whatsoever to do with that notion of an out-
and-out hermeneutic license which would finally come down to a series of slogans like "all
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reading is misreading," "all interpretation is misinterpretation," etc. If Derrida's texts have

been read that way--most often by literary critics in quest of more adventurous hermeneutic
models--this is just one sign of the widespread deformation professionelle that has attended
the advent of deconstruction as a new arrival on the US academic scene. In addition to
Jacques Derrida, key poststructuralist and deconstructive figures include Michel Foucault,
Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Helene Cixous, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Jacques
Lacan, and Barbara Johnson.
Key Terms :
Aporia (ah-por-EE-ah)- a moment of undecidability; the inherent contradictions found in any

text. Derrida, for example, cites the inherent contradictions at work in Jean-Jacques
Rousseau's use of the words culture and nature by demonstrating that Rousseau's sense of the
self's innocence (in nature) is already corrupted by the concept of culture (and existence) and
vice-versa.
Différance - a combination of the meanings in the word différance. The concept means 1)
différer or to differ, 2) différance which means to delay or postpone (defer), and 3) the idea
of difference itself. To oversimplify, words are always at a distance from what they signify
and, to make matters worse, must be described by using other words.
Erasure - to highlight suspect ideologies, notions linked to the metaphysics of presence,
Derrida put them under "erasure," metaphorically pointing out the absence of any definitive
meaning. By using erasure, however, Derrida realized that a "trace" will always remain but
that these traces do not indicate the marks themselves but rather the absence of the marks
(which emphasize the absence of "univocal meaning, truth, or origin"). In contrast, when
Heidegger similarly "crossed out" words, he assumed that meaning would be (eventually)
recoverable.
Logocentrism - term associated with Derrida that "refers to the nature of western thought,
language and culture since Plato's era. The Greek signifier for "word," "speech," and
"reason," logos possesses connotations in western culture for law and truth. Hence,
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logocentrism refers to a culture that revolves around a central set of supposedly universal
principles or beliefs" (Wolfreys 302 - see General Resources below).
Metaphysics of Presence - "beliefs including binary oppositions, logocentrism, and

phonocentrism that have been the basis of Western philosophy since Plato" (Dobie 155, see
Supplement - "According to Derrida, Western thinking is characterized by the 'logic of

supplementation', which is actually two apparently contradictory ideas. From one
perspective, a supplement serves to enhance the presence of something which is already
complete and self-sufficient. Thus, writing is the supplement of speech, Eve was the
supplement of Adam, and masturbation is the supplement of 'natural sex'....But
simultaneously, according to Derrida, the Western idea of the supplement has within it the
idea that a thing that has a supplement cannot be truly 'complete in itself'. If it were complete
without the supplement, it shouldn't need, or long-for, the supplement. The fact that a thing
can be added-to to make it even more 'present' or 'whole' means that there is a hole (which
Derrida called an originary lack) and the supplement can fill that hole. The metaphorical
opening of this "hole" Derrida called invagination. From this perspective, the supplement
does not enhance something's presence, but rather underscores its absence" (from Wikipedia
- definition of supplement).
Trace - from Lois Tyson (see General Resources below): "Meaning seems to reside in words
(or in things) only when we distinguish their difference from other words (or things). For
example, if we believed that all objects were the same color, we wouldn't need the word red
(or blue or green) at all. Red is red only because we believe it to be different from blue and
green (and because we believe color to be different from shape). So the word red carries with
it the trace of all the signifiers it is not (for it is in contrast to other signifiers that we define
it)" (245). Tyson's explanation helps explain what Derrida means when he states "the trace
itself does not exist."
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Transcendental Signifier - from Charles Bressler (see General Resources below): a term
introduced by Derrida who "asserts that from the time of Plato to the present, Western culture
has been founded on a classic, fundamental error: the searching for a transcendental
signified, an external point of reference on which one may build a concept or philosophy.
Once found, this transcendental signified would provide ultimate meaning. It would
guarantee a 'center' of meaning...." (287).
2.3.3.5 Modernism and Postmodernism
As Klages (2003) puts forward, the main characteristics of modernism include:
1. An emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity in writing (and in visual arts as well);

an emphasis on HOW seeing (or reading or perception itself) takes place, rather than on
WHAT is perceived. An example of this would be stream-of-consciousness writing.
2. a movement away from the apparent objectivity provided by omniscient third-person
narrators, fixed narrative points of view, and clear-cut moral positions. Faulkner's
multiply-narrated stories are an example of this aspect of modernism.
3. A blurring of distinctions between genres, so that poetry seems more documentary (as
in T.S. Eliot or ee cummings) and prose seems more poetic (as in Woolf or Joyce).
4. An emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and random-seeming
collages of different materials.
5. A tendency toward reflexivity, or self-consciousness, about the production of the work
of art, so that each piece calls attention to its own status as a production, as something
constructed and consumed in particular ways.
6. A rejection of elaborate formal aesthetics in favor of minimalist designs (as in the
poetry of William Carlos Williams) and a rejection, in large part, of formal aesthetic
theories, in favor of spontaneity and discovery in creation.
7. A rejection of the distinction between "high" and "low" or popular culture, both in
choice of materials used to produce art and in methods of displaying, distributing, and
consuming art.
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Postmodernism, like modernism, follows most of these same ideas, rejecting boundaries
between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing
pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony, and playfulness. Postmodern art (and thought) favors
reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity (especially in
narrative structures), ambiguity, simultaneity, and an emphasis on the destructured,
decentered, dehumanized subject.
But--while postmodernism seems very much like modernism in these ways, it differs
from modernism in its attitude toward a lot of these trends. Modernism, for example,
tends to present a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history (think of The
Wasteland, for instance, or of Woolf's To the Lighthouse), but presents that
fragmentation as something tragic, something to be lamented and mourned as a loss.
Many modernist works try to uphold the idea that works of art can provide the unity,
coherence, and meaning which has been lost in most of modern life; art will do what
other human institutions fail to do. Postmodernism, in contrast, doesn't lament the idea of
fragmentation, provisionality, or incoherence, but rather celebrates that. The world is
meaningless? Let's not pretend that art can make meaning then, let's just play with
nonsense.
Another way of looking at the relation between modernism and postmodernism helps to
clarify some of these distinctions. According to Frederic Jameson, modernism and
postmodernism are cultural formations which accompany particular stages of capitalism.
Jameson outlines three primary phases of capitalism which dictate particular cultural
practices (including what kind of art and literature is produced). The first is market
capitalism, which occurred in the eighteenth through the late nineteenth centuries in
Western Europe, England, and the United States (and all their spheres of influence). This
first phase is associated with particular technological developments, namely, the steam-
driven motor, and with a particular kind of aesthetics, namely, realism. The second phase
occurred from the late nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century (about WWII);
this phase, monopoly capitalism, is associated with electric and internal combustion
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motors, and with modernism. The third, the phase we're in now, is multinational or
consumer capitalism (with the emphasis placed on marketing, selling, and consuming
commodities, not on producing them), associated with nuclear and electronic
technologies, and correlated with postmodernism.
Like Jameson's characterization of postmodernism in terms of modes of production and

technologies, the second facet, or definition, of postmodernism comes more from history
and sociology than from literature or art history. This approach defines postmodernism as
the name of an entire social formation, or set of social/historical attitudes; more
precisely,this approach contrasts "postmodernity" with "modernity," rather than
"postmodernism" with "modernism."
What's the difference? "Modernism" generally refers to the broad aesthetic movements of
the twentieth century; "modernity" refers to a set of philosophical, political, and ethical
ideas which provide the basis for the aesthetic aspect of modernism. "Modernity" is older
than "modernism;" the label "modern," first articulated in nineteenth-century sociology,
was meant to distinguish the present era from the previous one, which was labeled
"antiquity." Scholars are always debating when exactly the "modern" period began, and
how to distinguish between what is modern and what is not modern; it seems like the
modern period starts earlier and earlier every time historians look at it. But generally, the
"modern" era is associated with the European Enlightenment, which begins roughly in
the middle of the eighteenth century. (Other historians trace elements of enlightenment
thought back to the Renaissance or earlier, and one could argue that Enlightenment
thinking begins with the eighteenth century. I usually date "modern" from 1750, if only
because I got my Ph.D. from a program at Stanford called "Modern Thought and
Literature," and that program focused on works written after 1750).
The basic ideas of the Enlightenment are roughly the same as the basic ideas of
humanism. Jane Flax's article gives a good summary of these ideas or premises (on p.
41). I'll add a few things to her list.
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1. There is a stable, coherent, knowable self. This self is conscious, rational, autonomous,
and universal--no physical conditions or differences substantially affect how this self
operates.
2. This self knows itself and the world through reason, or rationality, posited as the
highest form of mental functioning, and the only objective form.
3. The mode of knowing produced by the objective rational self is "science," which can
provide universal truths about the world, regardless of the individual status of the
knower.
4. The knowledge produced by science is "truth," and is eternal.
5. The knowledge/truth produced by science (by the rational objective knowing self) will
always lead toward progress and perfection. All human institutions and practices can be
analyzed by science (reason/objectivity) and improved.
6. Reason is the ultimate judge of what is true, and therefore of what is right, and what is
good (what is legal and what is ethical). Freedom consists of obedience to the laws that
conform to the knowledge discovered by reason.
7. In a world governed by reason, the true will always be the same as the good and the
right (and the beautiful); there can be no conflict between what is true and what is right
(etc.).
8. Science thus stands as the paradigm for any and all socially useful forms of
knowledge. Science is neutral and objective; scientists, those who produce scientific
knowledge through their unbiased rational capacities, must be free to follow the laws of
reason, and not be motivated by other concerns (such as money or power).
9. Language, or the mode of expression used in producing and disseminating knowledge,
must be rational also. To be rational, language must be transparent; it must function
only to represent the real/perceivable world which the rational mind observes. There
must be a firm and objective connection between the objects of perception and the
words used to name them (between signifier and signified).
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These are some of the fundamental premises of humanism, or of modernism. They

serve--as you can probably tell--to justify and explain virtually all of our social structures
and institutions, including democracy, law, science, ethics, and aesthetics.
Modernity is fundamentally about order: about rationality and rationalization, creating

order out of chaos. The assumption is that creating more rationality is conducive to
creating more order, and that the more ordered a society is, the better it will function (the
more rationally it will function). Because modernity is about the pursuit of ever-
increasing levels of order, modern societies constantly are on guard against anything and
everything labeled as "disorder," which might disrupt order. Thus modern societies rely
on continually establishing a binary opposition between "order" and "disorder," so that
they can assert the superiority of "order." But to do this, they have to have things that
represent "disorder"--modern societies thus continually have to create/construct
"disorder." In western culture, this disorder becomes "the other"--defined in relation to
other binary oppositions. Thus anything non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, non-
hygienic, non-rational, (etc.) becomes part of "disorder," and has to be eliminated from
the ordered, rational modern society.
The ways that modern societies go about creating categories labeled as "order" or
"disorder" have to do with the effort to achieve stability. Francois Lyotard (the theorist
whose works Sarup describes in his article on postmodernism) equates that stability with
the idea of "totality," or a totalized system (think here of Derrida's idea of "totality" as the
wholeness or completeness of a system). Totality, and stability, and order, Lyotard
argues, are maintained in modern societies through the means of "grand narratives" or
"master narratives," which are stories a culture tells itself about its practices and beliefs.
A "grand narrative" in American culture might be the story that democracy is the most
enlightened (rational) form of government, and that democracy can and will lead to
universal human happiness. Every belief system or ideology has its grand narratives,
according to Lyotard; for Marxism, for instance, the "grand narrative" is the idea that
capitalism will collapse in on itself and a utopian socialist world will evolve. You might
think of grand narratives as a kind of meta-theory, or meta-ideology, that is, an ideology
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that explains an ideology (as with Marxism); a story that is told to explain the belief
systems that exist.
Lyotard argues that all aspects of modern societies, including science as the primary form
of knowledge, depend on these grand narratives. Postmodernism then is the critique of
grand narratives, the awareness that such narratives serve to mask the contradictions and
instabilities that are inherent in any social organization or practice. In other words, every
attempt to create "order" always demands the creation of an equal amount of "disorder,"
but a "grand narrative" masks the constructedness of these categories by explaining that
"disorder" really is chaotic and bad, and that "order" really is rational and good.
Postmodernism, in rejecting grand narratives, favors "mini-narratives," stories that
explain small practices, local events, rather than large-scale universal or global concepts.
Postmodern "mini-narratives" are always situational, provisional, contingent, and
temporary, making no claim to universality, truth, reason, or stability.
Another aspect of Enlightenment thought--the final of my 9 points--is the idea that

language is transparent, that words serve only as representations of thoughts or things,
and don't have any function beyond that. Modern societies depend on the idea that
signifiers always point to signifieds, and that reality resides in signifieds. In
postmodernism, however, there are only signifiers. The idea of any stable or permanent
reality disappears, and with it the idea of signifieds that signifiers point to. Rather, for
postmodern societies, there are only surfaces, without depth; only signifiers, with no
signifieds.
Another way of saying this, according to Jean Baudrillard, is that in postmodern society
there are no originals, only copies--or what he calls "simulacra." You might think, for
example, about painting or sculpture, where there is an original work (by Van Gogh, for
instance), and there might also be thousands of copies, but the original is the one with the
highest value (particularly monetary value). Contrast that with cds or music recordings,
where there is no "original," as in painting--no recording that is hung on a wall, or kept in
a vault; rather, there are only copies, by the millions, that are all the same, and all sold for
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(approximately) the same amount of money. Another version of Baudrillard's

"simulacrum" would be the concept of virtual reality, a reality created by simulation, for
which there is no original. This is particularly evident in computer games/simulations--
think of Sim City, Sim Ant, etc.
Finally, postmodernism is concerned with questions of the organization of knowledge. In

modern societies, knowledge was equated with science, and was contrasted to narrative;
science was good knowledge, and narrative was bad, primitive, irrational (and thus
associated with women, children, primitives, and insane people). Knowledge, however,
was good for its own sake; one gained knowledge, via education, in order to be
knowledgeable in general, to become an educated person. This is the ideal of the liberal
arts education. In a postmodern society, however, knowledge becomes functional--you
learn things, not to know them, but to use that knowledge. As Sarup points out (p. 138),
educational policy today puts emphasis on skills and training, rather than on a vague
humanist ideal of education in general. This is particularly acute for English majors.
"What will you DO with your degree?"
Not only is knowledge in postmodern societies characterized by its utility, but knowledge
is also distributed, stored, and arranged differently in postmodern societies than in
modern ones. Specifically, the advent of electronic computer technologies has
revolutionized the modes of knowledge production, distribution, and consumption in our
society (indeed, some might argue that postmodernism is best described by, and
correlated with, the emergence of computer technology, starting in the 1960s, as the
dominant force in all aspects of social life). In postmodern societies, anything which is
not able to be translated into a form recognizable and storable by a computer--i.e.
anything that's not digitizable--will cease to be knowledge. In this paradigm, the opposite
of "knowledge" is not "ignorance," as it is the modern/humanist paradigm, but rather
"noise." Anything that doesn't qualify as a kind of knowledge is "noise," is something
that is not recognizable as anything within this system.
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Lyotard says (and this is what Sarup spends a lot of time explaining) that the important
question for postmodern societies is who decides what knowledge is (and what "noise"
is), and who knows what needs to be decided. Such decisions about knowledge don't
involve the old modern/humanist qualifications: for example, to assess knowledge as
truth (its technical quality), or as goodness or justice (its ethical quality) or as beauty (its
aesthetic quality). Rather, Lyotard argues, knowledge follows the paradigm of a language
game, as laid out by Wittgenstein. I won't go into the details of Wittgenstein's ideas of
language games; Sarup gives a pretty good explanation of this concept in his article, for
those who are interested.
There are lots of questions to be asked about postmodernism, and one of the most
important is about the politics involved--or, more simply, is this movement toward
fragmentation, provisionality, performance, and instability something good or something
bad? There are various answers to that; in our contemporary society, however, the desire
to return to the pre-postmodern era (modern/humanist/Enlightenment thinking) tends to
get associated with conservative political, religious, and philosophical groups. In fact,
one of the consequences of postmodernism seems to be the rise of religious
fundamentalism, as a form of resistance to the questioning of the "grand narratives" of
religious truth. This is perhaps most obvious (to us in the US, anyway) in muslim
fundamentalism in the Middle East, which ban postmodern books--like Salman Rushdie's
‘The Satanic Verses’ --because they deconstruct such grand narratives.
This association between the rejection of postmodernism and conservatism or

fundamentalism may explain in part why the postmodern avowal of fragmentation and
multiplicity tends to attract liberals and radicals. This is why, in part, feminist theorists
have found postmodernism so attractive, as Sarup, Flax, and Butler all point out.
On another level, however, postmodernism seems to offer some alternatives to joining the
global culture of consumption, where commodities and forms of knowledge are offered
by forces far beyond any individual's control. These alternatives focus on thinking of any
and all action (or social struggle) as necessarily local, limited, and partial--but
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nonetheless effective. By discarding "grand narratives" (like the liberation of the entire
working class) and focusing on specific local goals (such as improved day care centers
for working mothers in your own community), postmodernist politics offers a way to
theorize local situations as fluid and unpredictable, though influenced by global trends.
Hence the motto for postmodern politics might well be "think globally, act locally"--and
don't worry about any grand scheme or master plan.
Though often used interchangeably with post-structuralism, postmodernism is a much

broader term and encompasses theories of art, literature, culture, architecture, and so forth. In
relation to literary study, the term postmodernism has been articulately defined by Ihab
Hassan. In Hassan's formulation postmodernism differs from modernism in several ways:
Modernism Post-Modernism
Purpose Play
Design Chance
Hierarchy Anarchy
Hypotactic Paratactic
Tantalization Deconstruction
Presence Absence
Root/Depth Rhizome/Surface
Synthesis Antithesis
Anarchy and
Urbanism
fragmentation
Elitism Anti-authoritarianism
In its simplest terms, postmodernism consists of the period following high modernism and
includes the many theories that date from that time, e.g., structuralism, semiotics, post-
structuralism, deconstruction, and so forth. For Jean Baudrillard, postmodernism marks a
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culture composed "of disparate fragmentary experiences and images that constantly bombard
the individual in music, video, television, advertising and other forms of electronic media.
The speed and ease of reproduction of these images mean that they exist only as image,
devoid of depth, coherence, or originality" (Childers and Hentzi 235).
2.3.4 Literary Criticism Approaches Related to the Reader
2.3.4.1 Reception and Reader-Response Theory
Murfin and Ray (1998) Reader-response criticism encompasses various approaches to

literature that explore and seek to explain the diversity (and often divergence) of readers'
responses to literary works.
Louise Rosenblatt is often credited with pioneering the approaches in Literature as

Exploration (1938). In her 1969 essay "Towards a Transactional Theory of Reading," she
summed up her position as follows: "A poem is what the reader lives through under the
guidance of the text and experiences as relevant to the text." Recognizing that many
critics would reject this definition, Rosenblatt wrote, "The idea that a poem presupposes a
reader actively involved with a text is particularly shocking to those seeking to
emphasize the objectivity of their interpretations." Rosenblatt implicitly and generally
refers to formalists (the most influential of whom are the New Critics) when she speaks
of supposedly objective interpreters shocked by the notion that a "poem" is cooperatively
produced by a "reader" and a "text." Formalists spoke of "the poem itself," the "concrete
work of art," the "real poem." They had no interest in what a work of literature makes a
reader "live through." In fact, in The Verbal Icon (1954), William K. Wimsatt and
Monroe C. Beardsley used the term affective fallacy to define as erroneous the very idea
that a reader’s response is relevant to the meaning of a literary work.
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Stanley Fish, whose early work is seen by some as marking the true beginning of
contemporary reader-response criticism, also took issue with the tenets of formalism. In
"Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics" (1970), he argued that any school of
criticism that sees a literary work as an object, claiming to describe what it is and never
what it does, misconstrues the very essence of literature and reading. Literature exists and
signifies when it is read, Fish suggests, and its force is an affective one. Furthermore,
reading is a temporal process, not a spatial one as formalists assume when they step back
and survey the literary work as if it were an object spread out before them. The German
critic Wolfgang Iser has described that process in The Implied Reader: Patterns of
Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (1974) and The Act of Reading:
A Theory of Aesthetic Response (1976). Iser argues that texts contain gaps (or blanks) that
powerfully affect the reader, who must explain them, connect what they separate, and
create in his or her mind aspects of a work that aren’t in the text but are incited by the
text.
With the redefinition of literature as something that only exists meaningfully in the mind
of the reader, and with the redefinition of the literary work as a catalyst of mental events,
comes a redefinition of the reader. No longer is the reader the passive recipient of those
ideas that an author has planted in a text. "The reader is active," Rosenblatt had insisted.
Fish makes the same point in "Literature in the Reader": "Reading is . . . something you
do." Iser, in focusing critical interest on the gaps in texts, on the blanks that readers have
to fill in, similarly redefines the reader as an active maker of meaning. Other reader-
response critics define the reader differently. Wayne Booth uses the phrase the implied
reader to mean the reader "created by the work." Iser also uses the term the implied
reader but substitutes the educated reader for what Fish calls the intended reader.
Since the mid-1970s, reader-response criticism has evolved into a variety of new forms.
Subjectivists like David Bleich, Norman Holland, and Robert Crosman have viewed the
reader’s response not as one "guided" by the text but rather as one motivated by deep-
seated, personal, psychological needs. Holland has suggested that, when we read, we find
our own "identity theme" in the text by using "the literary work to symbolize and finally
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replicate ourselves. We work out through the text our own characteristic patterns of
desire." Even Fish has moved away from reader-response criticism as he had initially
helped define it, focusing on "interpretive strategies" held in common by "interpretive
communities"—such as the one comprised by American college students reading a novel
as a class assignment.
Fish’s shift in focus is in many ways typical of changes that have taken place within the
field of reader-response criticism—a field that, because of those changes, is increasingly
being referred to as reader-oriented criticism. Recent reader-oriented critics, responding
to Fish’s emphasis on interpretive communities and also to the historically oriented
perception theory of Hans Robert Jauss, have studied the way a given reading public’s
"horizons of expectations" change over time. Many of these contemporary critics view
themselves as reader-oriented critics and as practitioners of some other critical approach
as well. Certain feminist and gender critics with an interest in reader response have asked
whether there is such a thing as "reading like a woman." Reading-oriented new
historicists have looked at the way in which racism affects and is affected by reading and,
more generally, at the way in which politics can affect reading practices and outcomes.
Gay and lesbian critics, such as Wayne Koestenbaum, have argued that sexualities have
been similarly constructed within and by social discourses and that there may even be a
homosexual way of reading.
Siegel explains Reader response criticism analyzes the reader's role in the production of
meaning. It lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from formalistic criticism. In reader
response criticism, the text itself has no meaning until it is read by a reader. The reader
creates the meaning. This criticism can take into account the strategies employed by the
author to elicit a certain response from readers. It denies the possibility that works are
universal (i.e. that they will always mean more or less the same thing to readers everywhere).
Norman Holland argues that "each reader will impose his or her 'identity theme' on the text,
to a large extent recreating that text in the reader's image." Therefore, we can understand
someone's reading as a function of personal identity (Burris 1999).
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As Siegel explains, Reader-response theory may be traced initially to theorists such as I. A.

Richards (The Principles of Literary Criticism, Practical Criticism and How to Read a
Page) or Louise Rosenblatt (Literature as Exploration or The Reader, the Text, the Poem).
For Rosenblatt and Richards the idea of a "correct" reading--though difficult to attain--was
always the goal of the "educated" reader (armed, of course, with appropriate aesthetic
apparatus). For Stanley Fish (Is There a Text in this Class?, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in
"Paradise Lost" and Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of the Seventeenth-Century
Reader), the reader's ability to understand a text is also subject a reader's particular
"interpretive community." To simplify, a reader brings certain assumptions to a text based on
the interpretive strategies he/she has learned in a particular interpretive community. For Fish,
the interpretive community serves somewhat to “police” readings and thus prohibits
outlandish interpretations. In contrast Wolfgang Iser argued that the reading process is
always subjective. In The Implied Reader, Iser sees reading as a dialectical process between
the reader and text. For Hans-Robert Jauss, however (Toward an Aesthetic of Reception,
and Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics), a reader's aesthetic experience is
always bound by time and historical determinants.
Though this approach helps us recognize that different people view works literature
differently, and that people's interpretations change over time, it to make interpretation too
subjective. It does not provide adequate criteria for evaluating one reading in comparison to
another.
Example:
For instance, in reading the parable of the prodigal son in the New Testament, different
readers are likely to have different responses. Someone who has lived a fairly straight and
narrow life and who does not feel like he has been rewarded for it is likely to associate with
the older brother of the parable and sympathize with his opposition to the celebration over
the prodigal son's return. Someone with a more checkered past would probably approach the
parable with more sympathy for the younger brother. A parent who had had difficulties with
a rebellious child would probably focus on the father, and, depending on his or her
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experience, might see the father's unconditional acceptance of the prodigal as either good and
merciful or as unwise and overindulgent. While the parable might disturb some, it could elicit
a feeling of relief from others, which, presumably, is what Christ intended it to do, and a
more skillful critic might be able to analyze the strategies Christ employed to elicit those
responses.
Key Terms:
Horizons of expectations - a term developed by Hans Robert Jauss to explain how a reader's
"expectations" or frame of reference is based on the reader's past experience of literature and
what preconceived notions about literature the reader possesses (i.e., a reader's aesthetic
experience is bound by time and historical determinants). Jauss also contended that for a
work to be considered a classic it needed to exceed a reader's horizons of expectations.
Implied reader - a term developed by Wolfgang Iser; the implied reader [somewhat akin to
an "ideal reader"] is "a hypothetical reader of a text. The implied reader [according to Iser]
"embodies all those predispositions necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect --
predispositions laid down, not by an empirical outside reality, but by the text itself.
Consequently, the implied reader as a concept has his roots firmly planted in the structure of
the text; he is a construct and in no way to be identified with any real reader" (Greig E.
Henderson and Christopher Brown - Glossary of Literary Theory).
Interpretive communities - a concept, articulated by Stanley Fish, that readers within an

"interpretive community" share reading strategies, values and interpretive assumptions
(Barbara McManus).
Transactional analysis - a concept developed by Louise Rosenblatt asserting that meaning is

produced in a transaction of a reader with a text. As an approach, then, the critic would
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consider "how the reader interprets the text as well as how the text produces a response in
her" (Dobie 132 - see General Resources below).
2.3.4.2 Phenomenology and Hermeneutics
A. Phenomenology
Phenomenology is a philosophical method, first developed by Edmund Husserl (HUHSS-
erel) that proposed "phenomenological reduction" so that everything not "immanent" to
consciousness must be excluded; all realities must be treated as pure "phenomena" and this is
the only absolute data from which we can begin. Husserl viewed consciousness always as
intentional and that the act of consciousness, the thinking subject and the object it "intends,"
are inseparable. Art is not a means of securing pleasure, but a revelation of being. The work
is the phenomenon by which we come to know the world (Eagleton, p. 54; Abrams, p. 133,
Guerin, p. 263, as cited in Burris 1999).
B. Hermeneutics
Burris sees Hermeneutics as an interpretation in a circular process whereby valid
interpretation can be achieved by a sustained, mutually qualifying interplay between our
progressive sense of the whole and our retrospective understanding of its component parts.
Two dominant theories that emerged from Wilhelm Dilthey's original premise were that of E.
D. Hirsch who, in accord with Dilthey, felt a valid interpretation was possible by uncovering
the work's authorial intent (though informed by historical and cultural determinants), and in
contrast, that of Martin Heidegger who argued that a reader must experience the "inner life"
of a text in order to understand it at all. The reader's "being-in-the-world" or dasein is fraught
with difficulties since both the reader and the text exist in a temporal and fluid state. For
Heidegger or Hans Georg Gadamer then, a valid interpretation may become irrecoverable
and will always be relative. Lye (1996) on his behalf explains the characteristics of these
literary criticisms movements as follows:
1. We live in the world: in history, in concretion: we do not live anywhere else, and all
meaning is only meaning in relation to particular, concrete, historical existence.
81
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2. Our existence as beings includes: our situation; our tools-to-hand with and through
which we manipulate and articulate the world; and our fore-understandings of the
world.
3. We share reality through common signs. We cannot share anyone else's reality except
through the mediation of our symbolic world -- that is, through a 'text' of some sort,
which text has a context -- in fact, many contexts. On the other hand, as Gadamer says
in Truth and Method, "Thanks to the linguistic nature of all interpretation every
interpretation includes the possibility of a relationship with others. There can be no
speech that does not bind the speaker and the person spoken to." When one
"understands" another, one assimilates what is said to the point that is becomes one's
own, lives as much as possible in the person's contexts and symbols.
4. Our symbolic world is not separate from our beings, especially in regard to language:
we 'are' language, in that what distinguishes us as persons is that we are beings who are
conscious of themselves, that is, can know themselves symbolically and self-
reflexively. As Heidegger remarked, "language speaks man." We are not beings who
'use' symbols, but beings who are constituted by their use. It follows that all experience
is articulable in principle; although it is not reducible to its articulation, it is brought
into being for us through its symbolic representation. As Paul Ricoeur remarks in
"Phenomenology and Hermeneutics", "To bring [experience] into language is not to
change it into something else, but, in articulating and developing it, to make it become
itself." It also follows that being and meaning are taken, by humans, to be as good as
the same, although signification does not exhaust experience (see the next point).
5. While experience is present to us through signification, experience is not just language,
or signifying systems generally; experience pre-exists signification at the same time as
signification brings it into meaning. While signification makes experience become
itself, there is an excess meaning to being, what phenomenology calls the noema, which
excess escapes articulation even as it is shaped by it, and so there is always an almost-
said, a demand for metaphor, image, narrative, nuance, polysemy. We are "being-in-
the-world" as Heidegger said; this is a complex and many-faceted phenomenon, but the
world is always 'left over', not exhausted by its symbolization. This surplus of meaning
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may remind one of the surplus of meaning one finds in deconstruction, but
phenomenological hermeneutics tends to locate more richness of surplus meaning in
self-presence or being-in-the-world than in signs, although the division is not wholly
comprehensible in itself.
6. In phenomenology, it might be said that speech (the particular signifying act) precedes
writing (the field of signifying possibility): there is always a self-presence before there
is signification, and there is always something of our being-in-the world beyond its
signification. This is opposed to structural and deconstructionist senses that writing (the
system of meaning, which is also the operation of differance), precedes speech, or self-
presence. In the structuralist/deconstruction tradition, the surplus of meaning is in the
play of signs, not in the surplus of being.
7. Intentionality is at the heart of knowing. We live in meaning, and we live "towards,"
oriented to experience. Consequently there is an intentional structure in textuality and
expression, in self-knowledge and in knowledge of others. This intentionality is also a
distance: consciousness is not identical with its objects, but is intended consciousness.
8. As self-consciousness as well as other consciousness is intentional, this means that at
the heart of being there is distance: this distance might be said to be signification, the
making of experience.
9. Self-understanding is a cultural act, and culture is a personal act. Paul Ricoeur puts it
this way: On the one hand, self-understanding passes through the detour of
understanding the cultural signs in which the self documents and forms itself. On the
other hand, understanding the text is not an end in itself; it mediates the relation to
himself of a subject who, in the short-circuit of immediate reflection, does not find the
meaning of his own life. Thus it must be said, with equal force, that reflection is
nothing without the mediation of signs and works, and that explanation is nothing if it
is not incorporated as an intermediary state in the process of self-understanding. In
short, in hermeneutical reflection -- or in reflective hermeneutics -- the constitution of
the self is contemporaneous with the constitution of meaning. On the relation of
culture to self Gadamer says, long before we understand ourselves through the process
of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family,
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society and state in which we live. The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The
self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical
life. That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments,
constitute the historical reality of his being.
10. In order to 'understand' one must 'foreunderstand', have a stance, an anticipation and a
contextualization. This is what is known as the "hermeneutic circle": one can only
know what one is prepared to know, in the terms that one is prepared to know. The
hermeneutic circle can be taken to be an innately limiting, self-blinding process in
which one only knows what one is prepared to know. According to phenomenological
hermeneutic theory the hermeneutic circle does not close off, however, but opens up,
because of the symbolic and self-reflective nature of our being.
Gadamer, in explaining Heidegger in Truth and Method, puts the issue of

foreknowledge in the encounter with texts this way: we can only read a text with
particular expectations, that is, with a fore-project; we must, however, constantly revise
our fore-projects in terms of what is there before us. Every revision of the fore-project
is capable of setting before itself a new project of meaning. Rival projects can emerge
side by side until it becomes clearer what the unity of meaning is, how symbols and the
world can cohere. This constant process of new projection is the movement of
understanding and interpretation. The interpreter must, to achieve understanding as
fully as possible.
Key Terms:
Dasein - simply, "being there," or "being-in-the world" - Heidegger argued that "what is
distinctive about human existence is its Dasein ('givenness'): our consciousness both
projects the things of the world and at the same time is subjected to the world by the very
nature of existence in the world" (Selden and Widdowson 52 ).
Intentionality - "is at the heart of knowing. We live in meaning, and we live 'towards,'
oriented to experience. Consequently there is an intentional structure in textuality and
expression, in self-knowledge and in knowledge of others. This intentionality is also a
84
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distance: consciousness is not identical with its objects, but is intended consciousness"
(quoted from Dr. John Lye's website - see suggested resources below).
Phenomenological Reduction - a concept most frequently associated with Edmund
Husserl; as explained by Terry Eagleton (1983: 55) "To establish certainty, then, we must
first of all ignore, or 'put in brackets,' anything which is beyond our immediate experience:
we must reduce the external world to the contents of our consciousness alone....Everything
not 'immanent' to consciousness must be rigorously excluded: all realities must be treated
as pure 'phenomena,' in terms of their appearances in our mind, and this is the only absolute
data from which we can begin".
References
Abrams, M. H. (1999). A Glossary of Literary Terms. Fifth ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart,
and Winston.
Barry, P. (2002). Beginning theory: An introduction to literary and cultural theory.

(Second Edition). ISBN: 0719062683. UK: Manchester University Press
Bressler, C. E. (2003). Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. 3rd

Ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Brooklyn College (2008). Adapted from ‘A Guide to the Study of Literature: A Companion
Text for Core Studies 6, Landmarks of Literature’, Retieved from the web
http://academic. brooklyn. Cuny.edu/en.
Culler, J. (1982). On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. USA:
Cornell University Press.
Dobie, A, B. (2002).Theory into Practice: An Introduction to Literary Criticism.

Thomson.
Eagleton, T. (1983). Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Encyclopædia Britannica. "''Romanticism''. Retrieved 30 January 2008, from Encyclopædia
Britannica Online". Britannica.com. http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9083836.
Retrieved 2010-08-24.
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Fishman, P. (1998). Conversation Insecurity, in Dborah, C. ed, The Feminist Critics of

Language. London: Routledge.
Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton.
Fonchingong, C.C. (n.d). Unbending GenderNarratives in African Literature. Retrieved
from the Web, http://209.85.129.132/search?
q=cache:0r9YL2tkMp0J:www.bridgew.edu/SoAS/J
IWS/Nov06/GenderNarratives.pdf+arrow+of+god+and+gender+representation&h
l=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=et, on 29/10/2008.
Gold,B.K; Miller, P.A, and Platter, C. (1997). Sex and Gender in Medieval and
Renaissance Texts. USA: State University of New York Press, Albany.
Jefersson, A. and Robey, D. (1986). Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative
Introduction. London: B.T. Batsford Ltd.
Klages, M. (April 21, 2003). Postmodernism Last revision. Retrieved from

Mary.Klages@colorado.edu on 10/09/2010.
Makaryk, I. R. (1993). ed. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory:

Approaches,Scholars, Terms. Toronto: U of Toronto P.
Mary, K. (n.d). (University of Colorado at Boulder). Jacques Lacan.
http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/2004lacan.html
Mascia_Lees, F.E. and Black, N.J. (2000). Gender and Anthropology. Illinos, USA:
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<http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/19971feminism.html>
Montrose, L. (1992). New Historicisms. /Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of
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Oppermann, S.T. (1994). Feminist Literary Criticism: Expanding the Canon as Regards the
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Introduction to Literary Theories and Criticisms (Enla 422), 2011

A Course Material to:

MINASIE GESSESSE (MGZG)

Chapter One: Literary Criticism and Literary Periods

Chapter Two: Theories of Literary Criticism

2.3.3.4 Postmodernism …………………………………………………………..38

Chapter One: Literary Criticism and Literary Periods

1.1 The Period Concept

1.2 Different Periods

 Classical period (ancient Greek criticism),

1.2.1 Classical period (ancient Greek criticism)

In the Republic, Socrates’ inquiry is finally arrived at through a complex strategy

1.2.2 Renaissance (14th C to 16th C)

1.2.3 Neoclassicism (1660–1798)

1.2.4 Romanticism (1798–1832)

Technically, realism refers to a late-19th-century literary movement—primarily French,

describes realism as a product of “a pervasive rationalist epistemology that turned its

Realism can be seen as a reaction against romanticism, an interest in scientific method,

metaphysical or spiritual perspective. The pioneers of naturalism include literary

Chapter Two: Theories of Literary Criticism

Of course, literary appreciation varies from place to place depending on socio-economic

2.2 The Purpose of Criticism

1. To help us resolve a difficulty in the reading

2. To help us choose the better of two conflicting readings

3. To enable us to form judgments about literature

A. Author/character-oriented approaches: Historical / Biographical critics see works as

2.3.1 Author/Character-oriented approaches (Biographical Approach))

2.3.2 Context-Oriented Approaches

2.3.1.1 Archetypal/Myth Criticism (Mythological)

2.3.1.2 New Historicism

What new historicists do?

'Umuaro kwenu!' Nwaka roared.

'Hem!' replied the men of Umuaro.

2.3.1.3 Psychoanalytic Criticism (Psychological Approach)

Jacques Lacan, another post-Freudian psychoanalytic theorist, focused on language and

A Freudian approach often includes pinpointing the influences of a character's id (the

Freud's model of the psyche:

2.3.1.4 Feminism Literary Criticism

A. Historical Roots of Feminist Literary Criticism

C. Goals of Feminist Literary Criticism

 Developing and uncovering a female tradition of writing;

Here follows the questions:

 Is the author male or female?

 What types of roles do women have in the text?

ii. Radical Feminism

iii. Marxist and Socialist Feminism

iv. Cultural Feminism

1. Theories having an essentialist focus (including psychoanalytic and French feminism);

2. Theories aimed at defining or establishing a feminist literary canon or theories seeking to

The Women Burden and Source of Conflict among Them

Individualism and collectivism

Classism and alienation in ‘Xala’

as a critical approach, post-colonialism refers to "a collection of theoretical and critical

2.3.3 Text-oriented Approaches

2.3.3.1 New/Practical Criticism

2.3.3.3 Structuralism and Semiotics

By focusing on the system itself, in a synchronic analysis, structuralists cancel out

The humanist model presupposed:

Binary Opposition - "pairs of mutually-exclusive signifiers in a paradigm set representing

Mythemes - a term developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss--mythemes are the smallest

Structuralist narratology - "a form of structuralism espoused by Vladimir Propp, Tzvetan

2.3.3.4 Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction

Structuralism is an intellectual movement which began in France in the 1950s and is