IN the previous installment I introduced the need for centredness in analysing literary works.
I made it clear that lack of centredness implies absence of identity or better still lack of self-knowledge.
If you know who you are then you can assess whatever comes your way in terms of its value to you.
Below is a cursory summary of some of the most common schools of critical lenses through which you can inspect art.
Archetypal Criticism
In criticism, ‘archetype’ signifies narrative designs, character types, or images that are said to be identifiable in a wide variety of works of literature, as well as in myths, dreams, and even ritualised modes of social behaviour.
The archetypal similarities within these diverse phenomena are held to reflect a set of universal, primitive, and elemental patterns, whose effective embodiment in a literary work evokes a profound response from the reader.
The death-rebirth theme is often said to be the archetype of archetypes.
Other archetypal themes are the journey motif, the heavenly ascent, the search for identity, the Promethean rebel-hero, the drought motif, the mother-earth motif, and the fatal woman.
Feminist Criticism
A feminist critic sees cultural and economic disabilities in a ‘patriarchal’ society that have hindered or prevented women from realising their creative possibilities and women’s cultural identification as a merely negative object, or ‘Other’, to man as the defining and dominating ‘Subject’.
There are several assumptions and concepts held in common by most feminist critics.
Our civilisation is pervasively patriarchal.
The concepts of ‘gender’ are largely, if not entirely, cultural constructs, effected by the omnipresent patriarchal biases of our civilisation.
This patriarchal ideology also pervades those writings that have been considered great literature. Such works lack autonomous female role models, are implicitly addressed to male readers, and leave the woman reader an alien outsider or else solicit her to identify against herself by assuming male values and ways of perceiving, feeling, and acting.
This is somewhat like Marxist criticism, but instead of focusing on the relationships between the classes, it focuses on the relationships between the genders.
Under this theory you would examine the patterns of thought, behavior, values, enfranchisement, and power in relations between the sexes.
Marxist Criticism
A Marxist critic grounds theory and practice on the economic and cultural theory of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, especially on the following claims:
The evolving history of humanity, its institutions and its ways of thinking are determined by the changing mode of its ‘material production’-that is, of its basic economic organisation.
Historical changes in the fundamental mode of production effect essential changes both in the constitution and power relations of social classes, which carry on a conflict for economic, political, and social advantage.
Human consciousness in any era is constituted by an ideology-that is, a set of concepts, beliefs, values, and ways of thinking and feeling through which human beings perceive, and by which they explain, what they take to be reality. A Marxist critic typically undertakes to ‘explain’ the literature in any era by revealing the economic, class, and ideological determinants of the way an author writes, and to examine the relation of the text to the social reality of that time and place.
This school of critical theory focuses on power and money in works of literature. Who has the money and therefore power?
Who does not?
What happens as a result?
New Criticism
New Criticism is directed against the prevailing concern of critics with the lives and psychology of authors, with social background, and with literary history.
There are several points of view and procedures that are held in common by most new critics.
Below are some of the central ideas:
A poem should be treated as primarily poetry and should be regarded as an independent and self-sufficient object. .
The distinctive procedure of the ‘New Critic’ is explication or close reading: The detailed and subtle analysis of the complex interrelations and ambiguities of the components within a work.
The principles of New Criticism are basically verbal. That is, literature is conceived to be a special kind of language whose attributes are defined by systematic opposition to the language of science and of practical and logical discourse. The key concepts of this criticism deal with the meanings and interactions of words, figures of speech, and symbols.
The distinction between literary genres is not essential.
Psychoanalytic Criticism
Psychoanalytic criticism deals with a work of literature primarily as an expression, in fictional form, of the personality, state of mind, feelings, and desires of its author.
The assumption of psychoanalytic critics is that a work of literature is correlated with its author’s mental traits.
This theory relies on the following points:
Reference to the author’s personality is used to explain and interpret a literary work.
Reference to literary works is made in order to establish, biographically, the personality of the author.
The mode of reading a literary work itself is a way of experiencing the distinctive subjectivity or consciousness of its author.
This theory requires that we investigate the psychology (state of mind) of a character or an author to figure out the meaning of a text.
Reader-Response Criticism
This type of criticism does not designate any one critical theory, but focuses on the activity of reading a work of literature.
Reader-response critics turn from the traditional conception of a work as an achieved structure of meanings to the responses of readers as their eyes follow a text.
By this shift of perspective a literary work is converted into an activity that goes on in a reader’s mind, and what had been features of the work itself-including narrator, plot, characters, style; and structure-are less important than the connection between a reader’s experience and the text.
It is through this interaction that meaning is made.
It insists that all literature is a structure of experience, not just a form or meaning, and therefore focuses on finding meaning in the act of reading itself and examines the ways individual readers or communities of readers experience texts.
This is the school of thought most students seem to adhere to.
Proponents believe that literature has no objective meaning or existence.
People bring their own thoughts, moods and experiences to whatever text they are reading and get out of it whatever they happen to based on their own expectations and ideas.
For example, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness may be viewed by some readers as pure adventure while others see it as a racist depiction of Africa depending on their psychological persuasions.