Commission on Higher Education

Region V (Bicol)
LIBON COMMUNITY COLLEGE
Libon, Albay

MC LIT 6: LITERARY CRITICISM Course/Block: BSED English III-

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TRADITIONAL LITERARY CRITICISM

Traditional Literary Criticism

 Traditional literary criticism is an approach to the analysis and interpretation of literature

that has been practiced for centuries.
 It evaluates an author ’s biographical information; their culture, background, and history.

Purpose:

 Understand and appreciate Literature

 Preserve literary tradition
 Uncover author intentions
 Explore universal themes

Traditional Approaches in Literary Criticism

 Historical-Biographical - critics see works as the reflection of an author’ s life and times. It is
believed that it is necessary to know about the author and political, economical, and
sociological context of his/her times in order to understand his/her works.
 Moral-Philosophical - critics believed that the larger purpose of literature is to teach
morality and to probe philosophical issues.
 Sociological criticism - evaluates literature based on it’ s relationship to society. examines
the author ’s status in their society as well as the effect that the literary work had on its
audience within the society.
 Psychoanalytic criticism - examines literature based on psychological desires and neuroses
of the characters within a particular piece of literature.
 Practical criticism - this study literature encourages reader’s to examine the text without
regard to any outside context-like the author, the date and place of writing, or any other
contextual information that may enlighten the reader.
 Formalism - compels reader’s to judge the artistic merit of literature by examining formal
elements, like language and technical skills.
 Reader-response - criticism is rooted in the belief that the reader’s reaction to or
interpretation of a text is a valuable source of critical study as the text itself.
 New criticism - focused on examining the formal and structural elements of literature, as
opposed to the emotional or moral elements.
 Post-Structuralism - abandoned ideas of formal and structural cohesion, questioning any
assumed universal truths as reliant on the social structure that influenced them. Roland
Barthes- one of the writer who shaped post-structuralism, the father of semiotics.
 Feminist criticism - in the mid-twentieth century, literary critics began looking to gender
studies for new modes of literary criticism.

Famous Critics

Plato

 was a philosopher in Classical Greece and the founder of the Academy of Athens.
 was born in 428-7 B.C.E and died at the age of eighty or eighty one at 338-7 B.C.E.
 “believed that a great work of literature occurs when a writer is hit with divine inspiration”

 Mimesis - Plato’s concept of mimesis, which means imitation or representation, played a

significant role in literary criticism.
  Idea or Ideal Forms – Plato’s theory of ideal forms, which suggests that there are perfect,
unchanging forms of concepts such as justice, beauty, and truth influenced his literary criticism.
 Censorship and Ethical Concerns – Plato believed that literature should promote various
behavior and that certain types of literature, particularly those that depicted immorality or
falsehoods, should controlled or banned.

Aristotle

 an Ancient Greek philosopher and student of Plato

 lived from 384 to 322 BCE in ancient Greece and was born in Stagira
 Aristotle’s views in literary criticism as presented in his work “Poetics” are highly influential and
have shaped the way literature understand and analyzed.

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