Literary Theory and Criticism: A Comprehensive Overview
Posted on May 1, 2024 in Physics
Chapter 2: Before and During New Criticism
Early Approaches to Literary Interpretation
- Impressionistic Criticism: Focused on personal responses to literature, moralizing, and reading aloud.
- Writer’s Milieu: Considered the writer’s circle of friends and influences from other writers and artists.
Key Concepts of New Criticism
- Close Reading: Emphasized detailed, careful attention to the text itself, focusing on the words on the page.
- Intrinsic Criticism: Advocated for focusing on the literary work itself, rather than extrinsic factors like history or biography.
- Organic Unity: Believed that a great literary work forms a complete and self-sufficient whole, with each part interconnected.
- Paradox, Ambiguity, Tension, and Irony: Explored these concepts as key features of literary language and meaning.
- Patterns and Symbols: Analyzed recurring patterns and symbols to reveal the unified artistic vision of a text.
Historicizing New Criticism
- Formalism: Shifted focus to the form of literary works, such as structure and language, while de-emphasizing historical and cultural context.
- The Fugitives and Agrarians: A group of Southern writers who influenced New Criticism with their conservative views and critique of modernism.
Intentional Fallacy and Affective Fallacy
- Intentional Fallacy: Argued against using the author’s intention as the basis for interpreting a text.
- Affective Fallacy: Cautioned against letting personal emotions determine the meaning of a literary work.
Chapter 3: Structuralism
Binary Oppositions and the Structure of Thought
- Structuralism analyzes how binary oppositions, such as hot/cold or light/dark, shape our understanding of the world.
- Ferdinand de Saussure’s work on linguistics laid the foundation for structuralist thought.
Key Figures and Concepts
- Claude Lévi-Strauss: Applied structuralism to anthropology, studying myths and kinship systems.
- Roland Barthes: Extended structuralist analysis to cultural phenomena.
- Langue and Parole: Saussure’s distinction between the overall system of language (langue) and individual utterances (parole).
- Semiotics: The study of signs and symbols, including their meaning and interpretation.
- Signifier and Signified: The relationship between the physical form of a sign (signifier) and the concept it represents (signified).
Chapter 4: Deconstruction
Jacques Derrida and the Challenge to Stable Meaning
- Deconstruction challenges the idea of fixed or stable meanings in texts.
- It builds upon structuralism but emphasizes the instability and multiplicity of meaning.
Key Concepts
- Free-Floating Signifiers: Words and symbols that do not have a fixed or stable meaning.
- Double Reading: A two-stage process of interpretation, first identifying a dominant meaning and then deconstructing it to reveal its instability.
- Undecidability: The recognition that texts often have multiple, conflicting interpretations.
- Differance: Derrida’s concept highlighting the constant deferral of meaning and the gap between signifier and signified.
Poststructuralism and Beyond
- Deconstruction is often categorized as poststructuralism, which emphasizes the multiplicity of meaning and the role of language in shaping our understanding of the world.
