Literary Criticism Overview

Essentialist Criticism

Before the world of today’s competing schools of theory, people practiced literary criticism to help the reader understand the text as presented on the page. This kind of criticism is today referred to as essentialist.To handle literature this way required a set of fixed notions always assumed when interpreting literature. One primary fixed notion that the essentialistassumed was human nature. A fixed human nature was what made the idea of “great” books possible. The assumption at work was that great books speak timelessly to an unchanging human nature. Another essentialist assumption was that the text contained meaning without the need to frame literature in theoretical contexts.

Anti-Essentialist Criticism

Questioning essentialist assumptions, literary theory is essentially anti-essentialist. Literary theory challenges assumptions and is suspicious of anything that portrays itself as fixed. Another simple way of stating it is that literary theory distrusts all categorical classifications. For instance, you should distrust the notion of “great” books as an absolute and self-sustaining category (Barry, 35). What separates different schools is how they approach their distrust of generally accepted notions.

Prominent Schools of Literary Criticism

Psychoanalysis

Based on Sigmund Freud’s various theories of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic criticism looks for hidden, unapparent meanings in literary texts. Psychoanalysis aims to uncover what is not as obvious about motivations of characters in literary works and also their authors. Frequently, Freudian concepts such as repression, consciousness and the unconscious, parapraxis (the Freudian slip), and the concept of an Oedipus complex, come up in literary analysis conduced under the theoretical framework of psychoanalysis.

Structuralism/Post-structuralism

Structuralism seeks to understand literature in the context of linguistic and cultural structures. Language and culture are seen as a system that is constantly reinforced as words are spoken and units of culture are exchanged. Words are signs that consist of two faces: the signifier and the signified. The signifier communicates the idea of the signified. Literature is an assemblage of signifiers reinforcing the implied order linguistically and culturally. Structuralism attempts to understand the “structures” being reinforced by literature and other forms of cultural exchange.

Post-structuralism, or deconstruction, is a reaction to any notion of certainty implied in structuralism. Where structuralism sees language and culture as framing and shaping the structures of reality thereby giving an aim of understanding reality as its relationship with language is understood, post-structuralism takes structuralism’snotion of reality being framed by language and questions the implied order. Post-structuralism questions the notion of language, rather than attempting to understand reality with language.

New Historicism

Taking cues from structuralism’s notion of language shaping reality and reinforcing an implied order, new historicism attempts to examine literature and history in terms of what Michel Foucault calls discursive practices. Discursive practices are various sets of conversations being conducted in all areas of society at given time and place. The new historicist examines history and literature by considering the language of the time and how that language shapes what is approved to be in circulations of discussion. Rather than seeing historical accounts as portraying a static account of actual events, new historicismfocuses on seeing these accounts as representations of events. In this process history is formed, formed through an assemblage of terms that makeup various discourses. Literature is analyzed with attention paid to the terms of discussion used. A hypothetical question for the critic would be: what part of what discourse is this literature legitimizing and reinforcing?

Political Criticism

Once again drawing from aspects of structuralism and also Marxist economic theory, political criticism has most prominently taken the form of Marxist criticism. Political critics pay attention to the author’s social class and that class’s prevailing “ideology” (outlook, values, assumptions, allegiances, etc.), attempting to decipher how those social structures influence the author’s work. This form of criticism tends to disallow the notion that authors can be autonomous “inspired” individuals able to create original timeless works of art (Barry, 158). Political critics look at narrative structures to discover the reinforcing or subverting of the power structure. In narrative structures, political critics see conflict in the prevailing social order that, once resolved, leaves the dominant social order intact or subverts the resolution by implying an artificial contingent resolution that leaves questions.

Other ‘isms’ and Subject-Specific Criticism

There are still yet many more schools of literary criticism in existence and on the rise. These schools blend elements from psychoanalysis, structuralism/post-structuralism, new historicism, and Marxism. Some of these schools are feminist criticism (taking into account a discourse of gender-biased terms that serve to reinforce patriarchy), ecocriticism (studying the relationship between the environment and literature), postcolonial criticism (challenges innate assumptions held by Western nations and their standards for “great literature”). These and other schools have drawn extensively from the forbearers of anti-essentialist critical traditions and have continued the reaction to the fixed notions of essentialism.

Works Cited

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.

Rivkin, Julie; Ryan, Michael. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.