THEORETICAL APPROACHES OF LITERATURE

Literary interpretations always reflect a particular institutional, cultural, and historical

background. Historically speaking, the systematic analysis of texts developed in the magic or
religious realm, and in legal discourse. The interpretation of oracles and dreams forms the
starting point of textual analysis and survives as the basic structures in the study of the holy texts
of all major religions. An ecstatic person (called a medium) in a state of trance received encoded
information about future events from a divinity. An important aspect of this oral precursor of
written textual phenomena is that the wording of an utterance was seen as a fixed text that could
consequently be interpreted.
The interpretation of encoded information in a text is important to all religions; it usually
centers on the analysis or exegesis of canonical text such as the Bible, the Koran, or other holy
books. It is important to observe that the interpretation of these kinds of texts deals with encoded
information which can only be retrieved and made intelligible through exegetic practices. The
exegesis of religious and legal texts was based on the assumption that the meaning of a text
could only be retrieved through the act of interpretation. The approaches and methodologies
associated with both (the exegesis of the Bible and the interpretation of legal texts) have always
indirectly influenced literary studies.
Among the many diverse methods of interpretation it is possible to isolate four basic
approaches which provide a grid according to which most schools or trends can be classified.
Depending on the main focus of these major methodologies, one can distinguish between text-,
author-, reader-, and context-oriented approaches.
1. TEXT-ORIENTED APPROACHES
In text-oriented approaches, extra-textual factors concerning the author (his or her
biography, other works), audiences (race, class, gender, age, education) or larger contexts
(historical, social, or political conditions) are deliberately excluded from the analysis. Text-
oriented traditions, however, center on the text per se, primarily investigating its formal or
structural features. Traditional philology, for example, highlights “material” elements of
language; rhetoric and stylistics analyze larger structures of meaning or means of expression, and
the formalist-structuralist schools, including Russian formalism, the Prague school of
structuralism, new criticism, semiotics, and deconstruction, attempt to trace general patterns in
texts or illuminate the nature of “literariness.”
a) Philology
In literary criticism, the term philology generally denotes approaches which focus on
editorial problems and the reconstruction of texts. these philological approaches tried to
incorporate advanced empirical methodologies into the study of literature. These recent
manifestations of traditional philology, which sometimes focus on such arcane aspects as
typography, are often referred to as textual criticism.
b) Rhetoric and Stylistic
Rhetoric was mainly concerned with teaching effectively how to influence the masses. In
its attempt to classify systematically and investigate elements of human speech, rhetoric laid
the foundation for current linguistics and literary criticism. Rhetoric originally mediated
rules concerning eloquence and perfect speech and was hence primarily prescriptive.
Rhetoric analyzed concrete textual samples in order to delineate rules for the composition of
a “perfect” text. Stylistics focused on grammatical structures (lexis, syntax), acoustic
elements (melody, rhyme, meter, rhythm), and over-arching forms (rhetorical figures) in its
analyses of texts.
c) Formalism and Structuralism
The terms formalism and structuralism encompass a number of schools in the first half of
the twentieth century whose main goal lies in the explication of the formal and structural
patterns of literary texts. Questions concerning form and content, already discussed by
ancient philosophers, lie at the heart of this approach. According to this traditional point of
view, things in the world only exist because shapeless matter receives structure through
superimposed form. While a number of schools of literary criticism focus primarily on the
level of content (the “what?” of a text), formalists and structuralists emphasize the level of
form (the “how?” of a text).
d) New Critism
New criticism objects to evaluative critique, source studies, investigations of
sociohistorical back-ground, and the history of motifs. Its main concern is to free literary
criticism of extrinsic factors and thereby shift the center of attention to the literary text itself.
In order to maintain an objective stance, the critic must focus solely on textual
idiosyncrasies. New criticism, therefore, does not try to match certain aspects of a literary
work with biographical data or psychological conditions of the author; instead, its aim is the
analysis of a text—seen as a kind of message in a bottle without a sender, date, or address—
based solely on the text’s intrinsic dimensions. In its analyses, new criticism consequently
focuses on phenomena such as multiple meaning, paradox, irony, word-play, puns, or
rhetorical figures.
e) Semiotics and Deconstuction
Semiotics and deconstruction are the most recent trends in textoriented literary theory
which regards a text as a system of signs. The Swiss linguist starts from the assumption that
language functions through representation, in which a mental image is verbally manifested
or represented. Before a human being can, for example, use the word “tree,” he or she has to
envision a mental concept of a tree. (in this case the mental image of a tree) as the signified
and its verbal manifestation (the sequence of the letters or sounds T-R-E-E) as the signifier.
Semiotics and deconstruction use the verbal sign or signifier as the starting point of their
analyses, arguing that nothing exists outside the text, i.e., that our perception of the world is
of a textual nature.
2. AUTHOR-ORIENTED APPROACHES
This author-oriented approach established a direct link between the literary text and the
biography of the author. Dates, facts, and events in an author’s life are juxtaposed with literary
elements of his or her works in order to find aspects which connect the biography of the author
with the text. Research into the milieu and education of the author is conducted and then related
to certain phenomena in the text.
Autobiographies are obviously suitable for this kind of approach, which compares the
fictional portrayal with the facts and figures from the author’s life. In many cases,
autobiographical material enters the fictional text in codes. Author-centered approaches focus
also on aspects which might have entered the text on a subconscious or involuntary level. The
fact that Mary Shelley had a miscarriage during the period in which she wrote her novel
Frankenstein (1818) can be related directly to the plot. According to the author-centered
approaches, the central theme of the novel, the creation of an artificial human being, can be
traced back to Mary Shelley’s intense psychological occupation with the issue of birth at the
time. This approaches assume that the author is present in his text in encoded form and that his
spirit can be revived by an intensive reading of his complete works.
3. READER-ORIENTED APPROACHES
Reader-oriented approach developed in the 1960s called reception theory, reader-
response theory, or aesthetic of reception. These approaches assume that a text creates certain
expectations in the reader in every phase or of reading. The reader’s expectation plays a role in
every sort of text, but it is most obvious in literary genres like detective fiction, which depend
very much on the interaction between text and recipient. Edgar Alan Poe’s The Murders in the
Rue Morgue is one of the example of this approach. It guides reader’s imagination and
expectation in different directions.
4. CONTEXT-ORIENTED APPROACHES
This term refers to heterogeneous group of schools and methodologies which do not
regard literary texts as self-contained, independent work of art but try to place them within a
larger context. It is divided into two parts, they are literary history and Marxist literary
theory. Literary history divided into many periods, describes the text with respect to its historical
background, dates, texts, and examines their mutual influences.
a) New historicism
New historicism arose in US in the 1980s. it builds on post-structuralism and
deconstruction, with their focus on text and discourse, but adds a historical dimension to the
discussion of literary texts. For example is Shakespeare’s works are viewed as a concern
with the historical document on the discovery of America.
 b) Feminist literary theory and gender theory
Feminist literary theory born on the movement of people especially woman which has
strongly establish academic discipline.  Feminist literary theory starts with the assumption
that “gender difference” is an aspect which has been neglected in traditional literary
criticism and, therefore, argues that traditional domain of literary criticism have to be re-
examined from a gender-oriented perspective.
5. LITERARY CRITIQUE OR EVALUATION
In the English-speaking world, the term literary criticism can refer to the literary
interpretation of texts as well as their evaluation. For that reason, “literary critique” is sometimes
used to differentiate between the interpretation of a text and the evaluative criticism that often
occurs in connection with literary awards and book reviews. In all philologies (disciplines
concerned with the literatures of different countries or ethnic groups) there are publications in
weekend editions of major newspapers which introduce the latest in primary or secondary
literature in the form of book reviews. Among the most distinguished papers in the English-
speaking world which review both primary and secondary texts are the New York Times Book
Review (since 1896), the New York Review of Books (since 1963), and the Times Literary
Supplement (since 1902). Scholarly (secondary) literature is most often reviewed in special
journals by literary critics who comment on new book publications in respective fields of
research. Related to book reviews are review articles, which discuss a broader theme (such as
“Latest publications in feminist literary theory in English” or “The phenomenon of new
historicism”) or a number of secondary sources on a particular text or author. This kind of
general survey offers a basic impression of the latest trends or publications in a certain field.