Topic: Literary Approaches

English 10: Quarter 3

Objectives: At the end of the video lesson, you’ll be able to:

1. distinguish the different major points in each literary approach;
2. comprehend literary piece using the different literary approaches; and
3. evaluate a text using various literary approaches

1. Formalism
- is a literary criticism style that enables the readers to comprehend and appreciate a work
for its intrinsic merit.

- Formalism is an object-centered theory of critical approach to literature.

- It focuses only on the work itself and completely ignores the author of the work, time and
background information of the work, and the audiences’ feeling or perception about the
work.

Brief History:
- started as a reaction towards Marxism and USSR Ideology
1st proponent : Roman Jakobson (1915) - French Formalism / Prague Linguistic Circle
2nd proponent: Victor Shklovsk (1916) - Russian Formalism /OPOYAZ ( Society for the study
of Poetic Language) in Moscow
- Their ideas were based partly on the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure and partly
on symbolist notions

Major Points:
- Formalism holds that true meaning can be determined only by analyzing the literary
elements of the text and by understanding how these elements work together to form up a
cohesive whole.
- Examines text as a self-contained object
- Focused on the form/structure of a literary work
- Comprehend text as how various parts of a literary work together to make a whole
- Stresses the importance of a literary form.
- Applicable to poems and short stories
- The reader should analyze the parts of the text:
- POV
- Setting
- Characters
- Plot
- Symbols
- Theme
- Structure / style / tone / imagery

Formalism asserts that formal properties are the only things that matter about literature.

The formal properties of a literary work include:

 Words (meaning of the words)

 Shape/structure of the text
 Harmony of the words
 The rhythm of the sentences
 Rhyming of the words
 Meaning of the text as a whole
The formal properties of a literary work do NOT include: 

 Time of the work

 Background of the work
 Representation of the work
 The symbolism of the words
 Author’s moral, religious, or political values
 Author’s personal life

What is a Text?  

According to Formalism,
 A text is a literary work which is a finished product and nothing can change in
meaning and form.
 The form and contents of the text cannot be separated. It creates meaning as a
whole.
 A literary text has a fixed meaning.
 The greatest literary texts are ‘constant’, ‘coherent’, ‘timeless’, and ‘universal’.

A Checklist for Formalist Criticism:

A formalist critic analyzes:  
 How the work is structured or organized (formed)
 How it begins
 How it is advancing/transiting to the next lines
 How it ends
 How the plot is built
 How the plot relates to its structure
 How each part of the work relates to the work as a whole
 How all the parts relate to one another
 How the narrator/speaker narrates the story
 Point of view of the narrator
 The major and the minor characters
 How the characters are related to one another
 Actions of the characters
 The language of the literary work
 Style of the writing
 Literary devices such as imageries, similes, metaphors, ironies, paradox, etc.
 How the literary devices function to create meaning

Why did it come to an end?

- Generally, literature is bounded culturally. Since Formalism focuses on the structure only
believing that comprehending a text/literary piece is found within, this loses the cultural value of a
text.

2. Historical / Biographical Approach - see works as the reflection of an author’s life and times (or of
the characters’ life and times). H/B approach deems it necessary to know about the author and the
political, economical, and sociological context of his times in order to truly understand the work(s).
- It focuses on links between a work’s content and the writer’s life; often use the writer’s intentions,
experiences, motives, or beliefs to interpret his/her literary texts.

- It seeks to illuminate the deeper meaning of themes, conflicts, characters, settings and literary
allusions based on the author's own concerns and conflicts

- Facts from the author's life are used to help the reader better understand the work; the focus is
always on the literary work under investigation.

Proponents:

•Samuel Johnson : Lives of the Poets (1779–81) was the first thorough-going exercise in biographical
criticism, the attempt to relate a writer’s background and life to his works

•Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve : was a literary critic and one of the major figures of French
literary history. One of Sainte-Beuve's major critical contentions was that in order
understand an artist it was first necessary to understand that artist's biography

Advantages:

This approach works well for some works -like those of Alexander Pope, John Dryden, and Milton –
which are obviously political in nature. It also is necessary to take a historical approach in order to
place allusions in their proper classical, political, or biblical background.

Disadvantages:

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.” Thus, art is reduced to the level
of biography rather than universal.

A Checklist of Historical Critical Questions:

- When was the work written?

- When was it published?
- How was it received by the critics and public and why?
- What does the work’s reception reveal about the standards of taste and value during the time it was
published and reviewed?
- What social attitudes and cultural practices related to the action of the word were prevalent during
the time the work was written and published?

- What kinds of power relationships does the word describe, reflect, or embody?

-How do the power relationships reflected in the literary work manifest themselves in the cultural
practices and social institutions prevalent during the time the work was written and published?

- To what extent can we understand the past as it is reflected in the literary work?

- To what extent does the work reflect differences from the ideas and values of its time?

Checklist of Biographical Critical Questions:

- What influences—people, ideas, movements, events—evident in the writer’s life does the work
reflect?

- To what extent are the events described in the word a direct transfer of what happened in the
writer’s actual life?
- What modifications of the actual events has the writer made in the literary work? For what possible
purposes?

- What are the effects of the differences between actual events and their literary transformation in
the poem, story, play, or essay?

- What has the author revealed in the work about his/her characteristic modes of thought,
perception, or emotion?

- What place does this work have in the artist’s literary development and career?

3. Marxism - it places a literary work within the context of class and assumptions about class. A
premise of Marxist criticism is that literature can be viewed as ideological, and that it can be analyzed
in terms of a Base/Superstructure model.

Brief History:

 Marxism began with Karl Marx, the nineteenth-century German philosopher

bestknown for Das Kapital (1867; Capital), the seminal work of the communist
movement.
 Marx was also the first Marxist literary critic, writing critical essays in the 1830s on
such writers as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and William Shakespeare.
 Even after Marx met Friedrich Engels in 1843 and began collaborating on overtly
political works such as The German Ideology (1846) and The Communist Manifesto
(1848), he maintained a keen interest in literature.
 In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels discuss the relationship between the arts,
politics, and basic economic reality in terms of a general social theory.

Economics, they argue, provides the base, or infrastructure, of society, from which a superstructure
consisting of law, politics, philosophy, religion, and art emerges. It is a social, political, and economic
philosophy named after Karl Marx. It examines the effect of capitalism on labor, productivity, and
economic development and argues for a worker revolution to overturn capitalism in favor of
communism. Marxism posits that the struggle between social classes—specifically between the
bourgeoisie, or capitalists, and the proletariat, or workers—defines economic relations in a capitalist
economy and will inevitably lead to revolutionary communism.

Marxism is a social, political, and economic theory originated by Karl Marx that focuses on the
struggle between capitalists and the working class.

Marx wrote that the power relationships between capitalists and workers were inherently
exploitative and would inevitably create class conflict.

He believed that this conflict would ultimately lead to a revolution in which the working class would
overthrow the capitalist class and seize control of the economy.

Typical questions:

Whom does it benefit if the work or effort is accepted/successful/believed, etc.?

What is the social class of the author?
Which class does the work claim to represent?
What values does it reinforce?
What values does it subvert?
What conflict can be seen between the values the work champions and those it portrays?
What social classes do the characters represent?
How do characters from different classes interact or conflict?
Marxist criticism places a literary work within the context of class and assumptions about class. A
premise of Marxist criticism is that literature can be viewed as ideological, and that it can be analyzed
in terms of a Base/Superstructure model. Karl Heinrich Marx argues that the economic means of
production within society account for the base. A base determines its superstructure. Human
institutions and ideologies—including those relevant to a patriarchy—that produce art and literary
texts comprise the superstructure. Marxist criticism thus emphasizes class, socioeconomic status,
power relations among various segments of society, and the representation of those segments.
Marxist literary criticism is valuable because it enables readers to see the role that class plays in the
plot of a text.