Approaches to Reading and Interpretation

New Criticism/Formalism

Traditional Historicism

New Historicism

Reader-Response Criticism

Psychoanalytical Criticism

Feminist Literary Criticism

Structuralist Criticism

Marxist Literary Criticism

		New Historicism
		Old Historicism
		MIMETIC APPROACH
EXPRESSIVE APPROACH		TEXT OBJECTIVE APPROACH		PRAGMATIC APPROACH
Writer				Reader
Biographical Criticism		New Criticism		Reader-Response Criticism
				Aristotle
				Some Psych. critics

New Criticism/Formalism

• Examples of New Critical Approach
  • On Jarrell's "Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner"
  • ENG 220WE Student Interpretations using this approach
• Historical Background
  • New Criticism arose in opposition to biographical or vaguely impressionistic approaches
  • It sought to establish literary studies as an objective discipline
  • Its desire to reveal organic unity in complex texts may be historically determined, reflective of early 20th century critics seeking a lost order or in conflict with an increasingly fragmented society
• Assumptions
  • Texts possess meaning in and of themselves; therefore, analyses should emphasize intrinsic meaning over extrinsic meaning (verbal sense over significance in E.D. Hirsch's view)
  • The best readers are those who look most closely at the text and are familiar with literary conventions and have an ample command of the language
  • Meaning within the text is context-bound. This means that readers must be ready to show how the parts of the text relate to form a whole.
  • The test of excellence in literature: the extent to which the work manifests organic unity
  • The best interpretations are those which seek out ambiguities in the text and then resolve these ambiguities as a part of demonstrating the organic unity of the text
• Methods
  • Close reading of texts
  • This includes paying attention to semantic tensions that complicate meaning. At the end, though, these ambiguities must be resolved.
  • Learn and apply the appropriate literary conventions that apply in any discourse (e.g. imagery, motifs, metaphor, symbols, irony, paradox, structural patterns, choice of narrative perspective, oppositions, prosody, etc.)
• Criticisms of this approach:
  • Some critics of this approach have argued that a New Critic's commitment to revealing organic unity of a work blinds him or her to elements in the text that do not contribute to this unity.
  • Others have argued that in dismissing the importance of history, or the response of readers as irrelevant to an understanding of the work, New Critics have contradicted their own claims that meaning is context bound.
• What we can gain from applying a New Critical approach
  • Close reading skills, leading to . . .
  • A deeper appreciation of the multiple uses of language that a text uses

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Traditional Historicism

• Historical Background
  • Dates from the 19th century, the abuse of this approach in part led to New Criticism. Historical context used to explain and understand the literary text.
• Assumptions
  • To know a text, one needs to understand its insertion in a particular moment in time, as an expression of a writer influenced by his/her times.
  • History consists in part of consistent world views that are reflected in art
• Methods
  • Research an author's biographical data, as well as historical works from the time in order to show how the text reflects its time: ideology, social, political, economic beliefs and trends, etc.
• Criticisms of this approach:
  • Sometimes brings with it simplistic view of history. History is more complicated, involving a swirl of conflicting attititudes. No history is objective. We always understand history from a set of beliefs, values, etc., rooted in our time.
  • In the worst cases it can lead us away from close reading of the text, subordinating the text to a preconception of history. New Critics believed we should first and foremast read the text closely, on its own terms.
• What we can gain from applying this approach
  • When done by excellent historicists, a deeper understanding of the historical determinants of meaning in a text. Knowing the implied context that permeates a text helps us understand it more fully.

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  New Historicism

• Historical Background
  • Developed in late 1970's in response to perceived excesses of New Criticism, which tended to ignore importance of historical context of work of art
• Assumptions
  • As with traditional historicism, new historicists argue that we cannot know texts separate from their historical context
  • Unlike traditional historicists, new historicists insist that all interpretation is subjectively filtered through one's own set of historically conditioned viewpoints. There is no "objective" history.
  • From Foucault, history is an intersection of discourses that establish an episteme, a dominant ideology.
  • Texts sometimes reveal a resistance to the episteme, rather than reflect it.
  • The real center of inquiry is not the text, but history.
  • Each text is only one example of many types of discourses that reveal history
  • To best understand a text, one should look at all sorts of other texts of the time, including social practice (as a kind of text)
• Methods
  • Similar to traditional historicism, except that it looks to a greater variety of "discourses": social, political, religious, artistic to help explain the text
  • New Historicists investigate
    • the life of the author
    • social rules found within the text
    • the manner in which the text reveals an historical situation
    • the ways in which other historical texts can help us understand the texts
• Criticisms of this approach:
  • Since the true center of analysis is history, New Historical critics sometimes don't pay close attention to the actual text.
  • Some historians (as opposed to English professors, for example) criticize the limited sampling of texts used to explain/elucidate the text. Some New Historicists, for example, can be accused of hasty generalizations.
• What we can gain from applying this approach
  • See comments under traditional historicism
  • In addition to the above, we gain a better understanding of how historical viewpoints are complicated and how they are filtered through our own epistemes.

Reader Response Criticism

• Historical Background
  • Classical Roots
    • Both Plato and Aristotle were aware of the effects of works of literature. Plato, in fact, worried that poets would stir up the emotions of the audience. He also believed that art, as a copy of a copy, was at a furthest remove from "truth" and therefore misled people. In his Republic he excludes poets from his ideal society.
    • Aristotle, the first formalist (and first "Structuralist" in literary criticism, was also conscious of the significance of specific rhetorical effects of works of art. In his discussion of tragic form (found in the Poetics ), he tells us that tragic plays elicit from spectators the feelings of pity and fear. Furthermore, another portion of his descriptive analysis of tragic form refers to "proper magnitude" in plays. This probably meant that dramatists must not overload the audience with complicated plots or excess information.
    • As Bressler tells us, both of these ancient writers assumed that the audience is passive: the text works on the mind as if the mind were acted upon, much like a wax tablet or a mirror.
  • Reader-Response Criticism in the 20th Century:
    • As we have learned, New Criticism exerted a powerful influence upon the way critics read literature and teachers taught literature well into the 1960's. Especially in America and Britain, you were not taken seriously as a reader or critic if you did not espouse the tenets of New Criticism.
    • In the midst of this hegemony of New Criticism, Louis Rosenblatt proposed a different model for literary analysis. In Literature as Exploration (1937) she proposed her transactional theory, in which she saw reading as a transaction between reader and text. Meaning is as dependent upon the reader as it is dependent upon the text. There is no universal, absolute interpretation of a poem; rather, there can be several probable interpretations, depending in part upon what the reader brings to the text. For Rosenblatt, the reader is not passive.
    • Rosenblatt, by the way, agreed with New Critics' emphasis upon close reading. Reading is a transaction in which readers, while bringing their world of experience to activate the text, respect the text on its own terms. She acknowledged that some interpretations were better than others.
• Types of Reader-Response Critics
  • Rhetorical criticism
    • Analyzes texts in terms of rhetorical strategies embedded to influence readers. These critics, for example, might see plot as an arrangement of certain effects: moving us to first question events, giving us partial, teasing answers, deliberately delaying discovery of information, surprising us with new information or reversal of expectations, and so on. This approach assumes that the text exerts more control over the interpretive process than the reader.
  • Structuralist approaches to reader-response
    • Describes the codes readers acquire and use to ascertain meaning. Since codes change across time, interpretations vary.
  • Phenomenologists
    • Studies how the mind processes texts. Hans Robert Jauss, a reception theorist, studies how horizons of expectation change with time, thereby changing the way audiences interpret texts. Wolfgang Iser (pronounced "ee-zer") analyzes the text's effect on both the implied reader and the actual reader. Iser's implied reader is the reader implied by the text--the hypothetical reader predisposed to appreciate the effects of the text. In other words, what sort of reader does this text seem to address: how informed about the nuances of words, history, conventions, strategies of irony, etc. In experimental "modernist" texts (like Joyce's Ulysses or Woolf's To the Lighthouse , we might ask, "What kind of reader does this challenging text attempt to create?" (A question a rhetorical critic might ask as well, by the way)
    • Iser also discusses ways in which texts are concretized in the mind. He will discuss ways in which texts call upon and alter the reader's own horizons of expectations. How, in other words, does a novel set us up to expect something only to deliver something else. Iser also discusses gaps in the text: places in which the text expects us to fill in information or otherwise use our imagination.
    • From all of this it is clear that we have come a long way from Aristotle's view of the audience as passive. For Iser, readers create the text, filling in gaps, anticipating what is to come, all along using their own for-understanding (their world of beliefs/values) to process the work. Sometimes the text subverts that pre-understanding, creating disturbing effects; sometimes it confirms it.
  • Subjective Reader Response Criticism
    • Here the text is subordinated to the individual reader. The subject becomes the individual reader as he reveals himself in the act of reading. For example, imagine a reader outraged by a story in which a father ignores his child. The intensity of the reader's reaction may lie in his or her conflicted relationship with his or her father.
    • This kind of criticism has been attacked as too relativistic and of limited usefulness in the classroom. Defenders of this approach point out that literature must work on a personal, emotional level to move us powerfully. Steven Mailloux, urges that students be allowed their personal, powerful reaction, but then expect to make his responses relevant to an interpretive community.
• Assumptions
  • Meaning = text + reader
• Methodology
  • Varies with each of the types listed above. In general, the reader-response critic looks to ways in which a literary text affects the reader intellectually and affectively. Close reading is still an important activity; in this case the critic looks carefully at how the text stimulates the work of the reader.

Structuralism

• Historical Background
  • Ferdinand de Saussure, "Course in General Linguistics" (1906-1911)
    • Rejects mimetic theory of language (in which discussion of language must include reference in real world) for structural view of language
      • Language a system (la langue) that is prior to any linguistic utterance (parole)
      • The sign is a composite of signifier (a written or spoken mark) and signified (mental concept) Saussure ignores the real world referent.
      • Contains rules
      • Meaning in any language is relational; "in language there are only differences"
    • Proposed general theory of signs: semiology to cover all kinds of sign systems (e.g. fashion, non verbal signs, etc)
  • Charles Sanders Peirce--19th Century American philosopher, logician. Proposed semiotics as study of how meaning occurs
• Assumptions
  • To know something you need to understand the underlying system (structure) that makes meaning possible. This is true for language as well as any other signifying system.
  • In applying structuralist thinking to literature, we would assume literature contains a structure from which individual texts emerge. Very often we would be less concerned with the individual text on its own terms and more interested in the ways in which it participates in a larger system. For example,
    • Vladimir Propp, a Russian formalist critic, isolated 31 actions, or functions in the fairy tale. Taken together these comprise the structure of the fairy tale. In looking at a particular fairy tale, he might note which on the functions this particular fairy tale employs.
    • His contemporary, Victor Shklovsky, was another Russian formalist critic. He defined literariness as a function of defamiliarization. In other words, we understand that a text is "literary" when we see how it departs from expectations. Our expectations are generated by our understanding of conventional form. Shklovsky also distinguished between story (the chronological sequence) and the plot (the actual arrangement of incidents in the telling of the story).
    • More recent studies in narratology look for an underlying grammar of narrative. Robert Scholes gives an example of the way a narratologist like Tzvetan Todorov would mark the narrative grammar of Joyce's "Eveline" ; XA + XB -> X-C + YaX + (X-A+X-B->XC) predX->(XbY)predX + XA! -> XnotbY -> (XB + X-C)! imp
      • Where X = Eveline, Y = Frank, A = a Dubliner, B = celibate, C = happy-respected, secure, a = to offer elopement, b = to accept elopement - = negative of attribute, not = negative of verb, pred = predicts or expects, imp = is implied by discourse (Scholes, In Search of James Joyce, 144-160.)
    • Todorov has also studied the function of symbolism in literature. He has also mapped out the structure of a given genre (the "fantastic") and fitted particular texts within that generic structure.
    • Gerard Genette has studied the way time is represented in narrative, the many possibilities of temporal marking within the structure of narrative. He then applies these findings in relation to particular texts.
    • the American Jonathan Culler adds a new twist: include reading conventions that form part of the system
  • Authorial intention not of interest, for he/she too is conditioned by a structure of meaning formulation
  • Structuralists are not concerned with producing a "correct" interpretation. They are more concerned with how meaning is generated or how a text fits in within a system of possible discursive strategies.
  • As with New Criticism, less concern with historical context
  • Treats literature almost as if it were an organized, scientific body of knowledge.
• Methodology
  • Focus on structure, showing how the text reifies that structure.
  • Look for rules that govern interpretive choices
  • Identify codes that operate in texts (this scene is coded for wealth, e.g.)
  • Identify and discuss significance of binary oppositions since difference generates meaning in any semiotic system
• Critique
  • In any theory that focusses on system rather than individual text, sometimes we lose sense of the uniqueness of a text (not a problem in New Criticism)
  • On the other hand, this approach forces us to think about how we make sense of things; it gives us a vocabulary that helps us describe the operations we make
  • Knowing the underlying rules to the game better helps us to find meaning in convincing manner.
  • Finally, gaining awareness of how codes operate to guide our reactions we are better able to resist them, if we choose.