One useful way to think about the different approaches or schools of literary criticism is to regard them as different methodologies. An earlier chapter in this textbook (Section 1.3: Fields of Inquiry) talked about the different methodologies employed by different academic disciplines. We defined a methodology there as a “a system of methods that an academic discipline uses to carry out its research and pursue the answers to its questions, combined with an overarching philosophical attitude and interpretive framework for applying those methods.” That’s a good guide to understanding the nature of the different literary critical theories/methodologies. There’s a whole host of different interpretive methodologies for approaching works of literature. You’ll learn more about these in the next section. Collectively, these individual methodologies or theories add up, more or less, to the larger realm of literary theory as a whole.

Schools of Literary Criticism

To put meat on these bones, here are brief descriptions of some of the most prominent schools of literary criticism. (Bear in mind that this is hardly a comprehensive list!) When you research the available scholarly writings on a given work of literature, you may come across essays and articles that use one or more of these approaches. We’ve grouped them into four categories—author-focused, text-focused, reader-focused, and context-focused—each with its own central approach and central question about literary works and effective ways to understand them.

Author-Focused: How can we understand literary works by understanding their authors?

Biographical criticism focuses on the author’s life. It tries to gain a better understanding of the literary work by understanding the person who wrote it. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following:

• What aspects of the author’s life are relevant to understanding the work?
• How are the author’s personal beliefs encoded into the work?
• Does the work reflect the writer’s personal experiences and concerns? How or how not?

Psychological criticism applies psychological theories, especially Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian archetypal depth psychology, to works of literature to explore the psychological issues embedded in them. It may analyze a story’s characters or plot, a poet’s use of language and imagery, the author’s motivations for writing, or any other aspect of a literary work from a psychological perspective. It can be classified as an author-focused approach because its emphasis is on reading the work as an expression of the author’s unconscious processes, such that one can analyze and interpret the work in the same way a psychoanalyst would do with a patient’s dream. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following:

• What psychological forces and factors are involved in the words, behaviors, thoughts, and motivations of the characters in a story?
• Do dreams or psychological disorders play a part in the work?
• How did the author’s life experiences affect his or her intellectual and emotional formation? How is this psychological impact evident in the text and/or the author’s act of writing it?
• What unintended meanings might the author have embedded or encoded in the work?

Text-Focused: How can we understand literary works in terms of themselves?

Formalism, along with one of its more conspicuous modern iterations, New Criticism, focuses on a literary text itself, aside from questions about its author or the historical and cultural contexts of its creation. Formalism takes a story, poem, or play “on its own terms,” so to speak, viewing it as a self-contained unit of meaning. The formalist critic therefore tries to understand that meaning by paying attention to the specific form of the text. New Criticism was a particular kind of Formalism that arose in the mid-twentieth century and enjoyed great influence for a time. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following:

• How does the structure of the work reveal its meaning?
• How do the form and content of the work illuminate each other? What recurring patterns are there in the form, and what is their effect?
• How does use of imagery, language, and various literary devices establish the work’s meaning?
• How do the characters (if any) evolve over the course of the narrative, and how does this interact with the other literary elements?

Reader-Focused: How can we understand literary works by understanding the subjective experience of reading them?

Reader-response criticism emphasizes the reader as much as the text. It seeks to understand how a given reader comes together with a given literary work to produce a unique reading. This school of criticism rests on the assumption that literary works don’t contain or embody a stable, fixed meaning but can have many meanings—in fact, as many meanings as there are readers, since each reader will engage with the text differently. In the words of literature scholar Lois Tyson, “reader-response theorists share two beliefs: (1) that the role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature and (2) that readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by an objective literary text; rather they actively make the meaning they find in literature.” Typical questions involved in this approach include the following:

• Who is the reader? Also, who is the implied reader (the one “posited” by the text)?
• What kinds of memories, knowledge, and thoughts does the text evoke from the reader?
• How exactly does the interaction between the reader and the text create meaning on both the text side and the reader side? How does this meaning change from person to person, or if the same person rereads it?

Context-Focused: How can we understand literary works by understanding the contextual circumstances—historical, societal, cultural, political, economic—out of which they emerged?

Historical criticism focuses on the historical and social circumstances that surrounded the writing of a text. It may examine biographical facts about the author’s life (which can therefore connect this approach with biographical criticism) as well as the influence of social, political, national, and international events. It may also consider the influence of other literary works. New Historicism, a particular type of historical criticism, focuses not so much on the role of historical facts and events as on the ways these things are remembered and interpreted, and the way this interpreted historical memory contributes to the interpretation of literature. Typical questions involved in historical criticism include the following:

• How (and how accurately) does the work reflect the historical period in which it was written?
• What specific historical events influenced the author?
• How important is the work’s historical context to understanding it?
• How does the work represent an interpretation of its time and culture? (New Historicism)

Feminist criticism focuses on prevailing societal beliefs about women in an attempt to expose the oppression of women on various levels by patriarchal systems both contemporary and historical. It also explores the marginalization of women in the realm of literature itself. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following:

• How does the work portray the lives of women?
• How are female characters portrayed? How are the relationships between men and women portrayed? Does this reinforce sexual and gender stereotypes or challenge them?
• How does the specific language of a literary work reflect gender or sexual stereotypes?

Post-colonial criticism focuses on the impact of European colonial powers on literature. It seeks to understand how European hegemonic political, economic, religious, and other types of power have shaped the portrayals of the relationship and status differentials between Europeans and colonized peoples in literature written both by the colonizers and the colonized. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following:

• How does the text’s worldview, as evinced in plot, language, characterization, and so on, grow out of assumptions based on colonial oppression?
• Which groups of people are portrayed as strangers, outsiders, foreign, exotic, “others”? How are they treated in the narrative?
• How does the work portray the psychology and interiority of both colonizers and colonized?
• How does the text affirm (either actively or by silence) or challenge colonialist ideology?

Critical race theory focuses on systemic racism and interrogates the dynamics of race and race relationships. In origin, it is a specifically American school of critical theory that sees White racism as an everyday fact of life in America, visible throughout all aspects of culture and society. As such, it encompasses all aspects of life, including literature. Its purpose is to expose and overturn the factors that enable systemic racism to exist. As a literary critical approach, its typical questions include the following:

• What is the significance of race, either explicit or implicit, in the literary work being examined?
• Does the work include or exclude the voices and experiences of racism’s victims?
• How does the work either affirm/reinforce (whether actively or by silence) or challenge/subvert systemic racism?

The following video presents a helpful introduction to the different schools of literary theory and criticism as methodologies:

Useful Metaphors: Literary Critical Methods as Toolboxes and Lenses

Two useful metaphors for understanding what literary critical theories do and how they’re intended to work are the metaphor of the toolbox and the metaphor of the lens.

The toolbox is the older metaphor. It was more popular before the turn of the twenty-first century, and it says that each critical/theoretical approach provides a set of tools, in the form of specialized concepts and vocabulary, for thinking and talking meaningfully about literature. As this metaphor would have it, once you’ve learned the right concepts and terminology, you’re better equipped with the tools to think and talk about literature in a rich and deep way.

Beginning roughly around the turn of the century, the lens began to supplant the toolbox as the preferred metaphor. Tyson explains it well: “Think of each theory as a new pair of eyeglasses through which certain elements of our world are brought into focus while others . . . fade into the background.” In other words, the lens metaphor characterizes each critical/theoretical approach as a different way of seeing the text, with the different lenses rendering different aspects of the text more prominent or less prominent, more visible or less visible, resulting in the possibility of substantially and even fundamentally different overall readings of the same text depending on which lens is used.

For example, consider the case of Homer’s Iliad as it might appear through several of the different lenses described above.

• Biographical criticism would highlight the influence of Homer himself—his biographical facts and major life experiences—on the text.
• Psychological criticism would highlight the inner psychological lives of the characters and the psychological meanings and significance of the Iliad’s language, settings, gods, heroes, themes, and so on, reading Homer’s epic poem in psychoanalytic terms as a kind of symbolic dreamworld.
• Reader-response criticism would consider the relationship between the individual reader and the text. Since the Iliad is more than two thousand years old, one possible reader-response approach (but only one among any) might be to consider how the modern reader’s experience and understanding of this work harmonizes or clashes with the implied/intended reader of a poem that was written down in vastly different cultural circumstances some 2,800 years ago, and that was composed even earlier than that.
• Historical criticism would try to understand the Iliad by understanding the historical, cultural, and literary contexts out of which it emerged in ancient Greece, and of which it is at least partly a reflection.
• Feminist criticism would highlight the roles and portrayals of women in a work largely dominated by men—such as Brisies, the Trojan priestess of Apollo, who becomes a contested “possession” in a conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon—and perhaps seek to recover these feminine perspectives from beneath their subjugation under the overriding masculine one.

It’s also important to recognize that not all literary works are equally amenable to being examined through all critical/theoretical lenses. When it comes to the Iliad, for example, post-colonial critics have found relatively little to “work with” and respond to. However, it’s a different story with Homer’s Odyssey, where the post-colonial lens has produced readings of the text that highlight Odysseus’ role as a colonizer, even as the same lens has also produced readings that highlight  Odysseus’ role as a wretched refugee. (Greenwood)

Terms and Concepts in Literary Criticism

Having acquired a knowledge of how to read fiction, poetry, and drama closely, you could potentially strike out on your own and begin to develop written responses to stories, novels, poems, and plays, based solely on your own likes, dislikes, and interpretive judgments. However, if you did this, you’d miss out on the enhancement of your understanding and appreciation that comes from learning to engage with literary criticism. There’s a whole academic field devoted to discussing and evaluating works of literature. Just like literary works themselves, the articles and essays that make up the field of literary criticism need some explanation and mental preparation before you can read and use them effectively in an academic context.

Up front, the thing to bear in mind is that literary criticism has a habit of taking everyday words and using them in very specific and sometimes counterintuitive ways. Consider the following title of an article, published in an academic literary journal, about Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved: “‘To Be Loved and Cry Shame’: A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved.’” You’re already familiar with the word “reading,” of course, but you may be less familiar with the way it’s used here: as a noun. Instead of an act you perform, like reading a book, the word “reading” here refers to something the author of the article has created through her critical-interpretive work: a reading. And even more, it’s a psychological reading. Clearly, the word “reading” is being used in a highly specific way.

Or consider another everyday word: “unpack.” You can tell someone that you need to unpack your suitcase or your car, and they’ll instantly understand what you mean. But look at the following passage from another academic article, this one titled “Reading to Outmaneuver: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and African American Literacy in Cold War America,” and notice the word’s use in a different way:

In their texts, African American authors explore a range of positions on reading’s role in black communities. Some works, such as James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), depict reading as the route to transcending the limitations of one’s status—albeit one that comes at great cost. Others texts, in a variation on the Douglass theme, depict it as a radical awakening—for instance, Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945), The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1968). Still others represent literacy as a weapon wielded by dominant powers to control, exclude, or erase blackness; Toni Morrison takes this tack in her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), and again in a later work, Song of Solomon (1977). As they work to unpack the complex history and role of literacy in African American lives, these twentieth-century writers rely on books to construct themselves as individuals, community members, and citizens. (Matthews)

The author obviously isn’t talking about unpacking a physical object like a suitcase. From the context, you can probably tell that she’s using the word to refer to the interpretive act of explaining something—in this case, “the complex history and role of literacy in African American lives”—by drawing out implicit or unexamined meanings.

The upshot is that when you first begin to read literary criticism, you should be on the alert for regular words that seem odd in a sentence, as this may be a sign that they’re being used in a technical way. You’ll also encounter many words that are entirely new to you; the field has its own highly developed technical vocabulary. When you encounter such words, try to use context clues to understand their meaning, but also make good use of the many valuable resources that are available for this very purpose, such as this online glossary or the books that are recognized as standard reference works, such as The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory or Holman and Harmon’s renowned A Handbook to Literature.

Common Terms in Literary Criticism

With these things in mind, here’s a short glossary of some broadly common terms you’ll encounter in literary criticism.

Criticism

The first word to understand is “criticism” itself, which can be confusing if you take it in the wrong sense, which also happens to be its more customary, everyday sense. In everyday conversation, to criticize most often means to find fault with someone or something. The Oxford English Dictionary captures this sense when it defines criticism as “the expression of disapproval of someone or something based on perceived faults or mistakes.” However, the OED also provides a second definition, and this is the one we’re concerned with here: criticism is “the analysis and judgment of the merits and faults of a literary or artistic work.” The roles of “film critic” and “book critic” both draw on this definition, as they refer to people whose job is not so much to find fault with films and books as to offer informed evaluations of their quality.

Putting this all together, you can see that “literary criticism” means literary analysis and interpretation. It’s the act of interpreting and evaluating literature to understand and appreciate it more deeply. Note that this definition also applies to different forms of the word “criticism,” such as “critical.” Your “critical judgment” about a story or poem doesn’t mean your expression of dislike or disapproval but your overall evaluation and “take” on it as a work of literature. (On this last point, see the comments about “Reading” above, and also below.)

Theory

The OED defines a theory as “a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something.” You’re probably familiar with the word’s use in the natural sciences, where a theory—such as the theory of evolution, the the theory of relativity, or cell theory—is an explanatory framework, supported and verified by repeated scientific testing, that accounts for a set of observed facts or phenomena in the physical world.

The word’s use in connection with literature and literary criticism is related but distinct. Literary criticism proceeds by drawing on literary theory, defined as the set of methods, ideas, and assumptions that we bring to the reading of literature. There’s a highly developed realm of academic research and discourse devoted to literary theory. It gets really deep, really fast, and its many details sprawl well beyond the boundaries of this course. Just know that when you start reading literary criticism, you may come across references to theory. You can keep the two terms (criticism and theory) straight by remembering that literary criticism is the act of interpreting and evaluating literary texts, while literary theory deals with the assumptions and principles we bring to that practice. Sometimes the different approaches to literary criticism are referred to as discrete theories in their own right. That’s how we’ll refer to them in the next section on approaches to literary criticism.

School

Sometimes different literary critical theories are referred to as different “schools,” such as the “reader-response school” or the “feminist school of thought” (both of which you’ll learn about in the next section). This employs one of the basic definitions of the word “school”: as “a group of people, particularly writers, artists, or philosophers, sharing the same or similar ideas, methods, or style.”

Reading

As noted in the example above, in literary criticism and theory the word “reading” is often used not as a verb (“She was reading a book”) but as a noun (“What was her reading of that book?”) to refer to a particular interpretation, viewpoint, or understanding of a literary work. English professor Dr. Stephen Watt explains the difference: “‘Reading’ is one of the most provocative terms in literary theory, in part because it connotes both an activity and a product: on the one hand, an effort to comprehend a text or object of knowledge, and on the other, a more formal response.” Watts says the latter sense of the word refers to “an intellectual or scholarly product.” This second sense is important to understand when approaching the realm of literary criticism, because the act of literary criticism results in “a reading” of a literary work, that is, a particular “take” on it. When you set out to apply literary criticism to a story, novel, poem, or play, the end product is your personal reading of the work, your individual “intellectual or scholarly product,” which you produce by engaging with the work and attempting to articulate your interpretive understanding of it.

Canon

The word “canon” refers to a collection of literary works that are held to be of extremely high quality and permanent value for a culture or civilization. The now-unfashionable idea of “the classics” is roughly equivalent. Originally used to refer to an official collection of religious texts that are held by some to be authoritative and sacred, such as the canon of 27 books that make up the New Testament, the word also came to be applied to works of literature in general as a broad conceptual tool for identifying those that constitute a kind of core collection of literary value for a given civilization—something along the lines of what the 19th-century English poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold meant in his essay “Culture and Anarchy” when he famously referred to “the best that has been thought and said.”

The very idea of a literary canon invites controversy, as it automatically raises the question of who is qualified or authorized to identify the works that should be universally considered canonical. The great cultural upheavals in America, Great Britain, and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s involved accusations of racism and sexism being leveled against official institutional notions of the literary canon at schools, colleges, and universities, and in the early decades of the 21st century the idea of a universal or normative canon remained contentious. This is why you’re as likely as not to come across explicit mention of the literary canon, and of the controversies surrounding the idea, in works of criticism written at any time during the past several decades.