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Here is a List of Literary Criticism I collected from various sources.
Aristotle
Aristotle is considered one of the two great philosophers of antiquity
along
with Plato, and many consider him to be the greatest philosopher of
all time.
Aristotle lived and taught in Athens for the majority of his career.
He started
as a pupil of Plato, and for some time was the tutor for Alexander
the
Great. He wrote on a great variety of subjects, varying from biology
and
astronomy to rhetoric and literary criticism, from political theory
to abstract
philosophy. He wrote two treatises on ethics, called Eudemian and
Nicomachean after their first editors, his pupil Eudemus and his son
Nicomachus. The Nicomachean Ethics was probably written later, in
Aristotle's fifties and sixties, when he was head of the Lyceum, the
school
he founded in Athens.
New Criticism
New Criticism is an approach to literature that was developed by a
group of American critics,
most of whom taught at southern universities during the years following
the first World War. The
New Critics wanted to avoid impressionistic criticism, which risked
being shallow and arbitrary,
and social/ historical approaches which might easily be subsumed by
other disciplines. Thus, they
attempted to systematize the study of literature, to develop an approach
which was centered on the
rigorous study of the text itself. They were given their name by John
Crowe Ransom, who describes
the new American formalists in _The New Criticism_ (1941).
New Humanism
Conservative philosophical-literary movement in the USA (around 1915-1933).
Reaction against the
excrescences of romance, realism and naturalism, stressed again the
ethical-ethisch-humanen
factories and represented humans not as part nature, but in the opposite
as a nature free in its will
decision, which should concern in accordance with its experiences and
the ethical yardsticks of large
models freely and responsible.
Impressionistic Criticism
A kind of criticism that tries to convey what the critic subjectively
feels and thinks about a work of
art.
Historical Criticism
If historical-criticism has at all the task to search out everything
as precisely as
possible with regard to
writings whose origin and character it investigates, it
cannot be satisfied with
merely their outward appearance, but must attempt
also to penetrate their
inner nature. It must inquire not merely about the
circumstances of the time
in general, but in particular about the writer's position
with regard to these things,
the interests and motives, the leading ideas of his
literary activity. The greater
the conceptual significance of a literary product,
the more it should be assumed
that it is based on an idea that determines the
whole, and that the deeper
consciousness of the time to which it belongs is
reflected in it. Even with
regard to the New Testament writings, therefore,
historical criticism would
not completely fulfill its task if it did not endeavor to
investigate more precisely
the conceptual character.
Textual Criticism
The application of critical methods in the editing of classical texts
was developed
principally by three German scholars. The
method of textual criticism which has been generally practised by editors
of classical Greek and Latin texts involves two main processes, recension
and
emendation. Recension is the selection, after
examination of all available material, of
the most trustworthy evidence on which to
base a text. Emendation is the attempt to
eliminate the errors which are found even
in the best manuscripts.
Formal Criticism
An approach to Literary Criticism which originated in Russia in the
1920's. To the formalist critic,
art is style, technique and craftsmanship, and the primary function
of criticism is the objective and
scientific analysis of literary style. The formalist critic attempts
to explain or evaluate the way in
which the text is structured but does not attempt to evaluate the content
of the work against any
standards of truth or morality. According to Viktor Schlovsky, a well
known formalist critic, "Art
is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is
not important," and "A work of
art is equal to the sum of processes used in it."
Analytical Criticism
Jungian term which takes into account not only the collective unconscious
and the personal unconscious as
motivators of behaviour, but also the conscious aspirations and goals
of the subject. A
hypothetical criticism so inspired would differ fundamentally from
Freudian-based
psychoanalytical criticism.
Mythic Criticism
Criticism which chooses to search for a text's formative influences
and constitutive elements in the realm of myth.
Archetype
A form of criticism which is based on the psychology of Carl Jung,
who argues that there are two
levels of the unconscious: the personal, which comprises repressed
memories that are part of an
individual's psyche, and the archetypal, which comprises the racial
memory of a collective
unconscious, a storehouse of images and patterns, vestigial traces
of which inhere in all humans
beings and which find symbolic expression in all human art. An archetype
is "a symbol, usually an image, which recurs often enough in literature
to be recognizable as an element of one's literary experience."
Jungian Criticism
Criticism influenced by Jungian ideas, principally the role of the
collective unconscious in the determination of cultural behavior. Every
individual participates in
two psychic streams, one personal and one supposedly sharing psychic
constants with everyone else. The emphasis in practical Jungian writing,
however, often ends up on the latter of these two streams, leading some
opponents to describe Jungian approaches as essentialist.
Karl Jung
Carl (Gustav) Jung (1875-1961)
Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist whose theories were the basis of
a form of literary criticism
known as "Archetypal" criticism (a branch of Psychoanalytic Criticism).
In Jung's terms,
Archetypes are instinctive patterns having a universal character expressed
in behavior and images. Jung proposed and developed the concepts
of the extroverted and introverted personality, archetypes, and the
collective
unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the
study of religion,
literature, and related fields.
Freudian Criticism
Criticism emphasizing orthodox Freudian ideas. There are other sorts
of psychological criticism, which make use of Freudian ideas but for reasons
that Freud had not foreseen.
Sigmund Freud
(1856-1939)
Austrian neurologist, founder of psychoanalysis.
Born in Freiberg, Moravia, Austrian Empire, Freud received his degree
from the University of
Vienna in 1881. Freud studied in Paris for a time before returning
to Vienna to begin publishing his
works on psychoanalysis
Myth
A narrative in which some characters are superhuman beings who do things
that "happen
only in stories"; hence, a conventionalized
or stylized narrative not fully adapted to
plausibility or "realism."
Deconstruction
Deconstruction is a method of reading that is based on the assumption
that language is
unreliable. The goal of a deconstructionist reading is to seek out
the contradictions in the text to
prove that the text lacks unity and coherence. The point isn't really
to show that the text means the
opposite of what it is supposed to mean, but that there can be no actual
interpretation of the text.
Although deconstruction is primarily applied to the written word, some
practitioners use
deconstructive techniques to analyze concepts, systems and institutions.
Jacques Derrida
(1930-)
Jaques Derrida is a French philosopher whose critique of western philosophy
encompasses
literature, linguistics and psychoanalysis. Derrida's thought is based
on his disapproval of the
search for some ultimate metaphysical certainty or source of meaning,
which has characterized
most western philosophy. In his works he offers a way of reading texts,
called Deconstruction
which enables the reader to make explicit the metaphysical and a priori
assumptions used even by
those philosophers which are most deeply critical of metaphysics. Derrida
eschewed the holding
of any philosophical doctrine and sought to analyze language in an
attempt to provide a radically
alternative perspective in which the basic notion of a philosophical
thesis is called into question.
Feminism
Feminism in general is a position, not necessarily confined to women,
having to do with the
advocacy and encouragement of equal rights and opportunities for women
-- Politically, socially
psychologically, personally and aesthetically. The modern flourishing
of this movement has been
traced by some to a publication of Simone de Beauvoir's, The Second
Sex (1949). In literary
criticism feminism is a mode of discourse that emphasizes and analyzes
the gender relationships in
text. The general thrust of feminist critics has been to condemn male
attitudes toward women,
charging that men have historically imposed their will on women in
order to convince them of their
inherent inferiority. Such a male view of the world has been called
"phallocentrism".
Reader Response Criticism
This technique examines the reader's role and often his/her mental
process in interpreting the
literature. It often asks the question, "How do readers make
meaning?" Reader-Response Criticism is really a collective term used to
describe a number of critical theories that have emerged since the 1960's,
all of which focus on the response of the reader to the text rather than
the text itself as the source of meaning in a literary work. In Reader-Response
criticism a text is viewed as a process that goes on in the mind of the
reader rather than as a stable entity with a single "correct meaning".
In this sense the reader actually participates in creating the text.
Mimetic Criticism
High Mimetic:
A mode of literature in which, as in most
epics and tragedies, the central characters are
above our own level of power and authority,
though within the order of nature and subject
to social criticism.
Low Mimetic:
A mode of literature in which the characters
exhibit a power of action which is roughly on
our own level, as in most comedy and realistic
fiction.
Objective Correlative
A term used by T. S. Eliot in the 1919 essay "Hamlet and His Problems."
According to Eliot, "the
only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an
'objective correlative'; in other
words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall
be the formula of that particular
emotion."
Sir James Frazer
FRAZER, Sir James George (1854-1941), British anthropologist, born
in
Glasgow, Scotland, and educated at the universities of Glasgow and
Cambridge.
He was elected a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1879, and
was made a
professor of social anthropology at the University of Liverpool in
1907. He is
best known for his book The Golden Bough (1890), a study of ancient
cults,
rites, and myths and their parallels with early Christianity, expanded
to 13
volumes in 1915. Frazer was knighted in 1914. He wrote many other works,
including Totemism and Exogamy (1910), Man, God, and Immortality (1927),
and Creation and Evolution in Primitive Cosmogonies (1935).
T.S. Elliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
American-English poet, playwright, and literary critic, a leader of
the modernist movement in
poetry. In 1948 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Eliot's
work as a critic is
probably best represented by his first critical volume The Sacred Wood
(1920) The essays
introduced two concepts that became important in later critical theory:
the Objective Correlative
(the use of an external object, event, or situation to evoke emotion
in the reader) and dissociation
of sensibility (a phrase he invented to explain the change that came
over English poetry after John
Donne and Andrew Marvell). Later critical works broadened his interests
into theology and
sociology.
Revisionist
Literature that has transmuted itself into images for the times in
the works they are told in.
The first modern "revisionists" were, in France, the partisans of a
"revision" or judicial review of the trial of Alfred Dreyfus (1894)
Aristotelian Criticism
Aristotle analyzes rhetoric in terms of its end, or final, cause, which
is persuasion. Like dialectic it is not a science, and therefore it has
no specific subject matter, no single method, and no proper set of principles.
It is simply the faculty, or power, of observing in any given case.
Canon
An authorized or accepted list of books. In modem parlance, the literary
canon comprehends the
privileged texts, classics, or great books which are thought to belong
permanently on university
reading lists. Recent theory -- especially feminist, Marxist, and poststructuralist
-- critically
examines the process of canon formation and questions the hegemony
of white male writers. Such
theory sees canon formation as the ideological act of a dominant institution
and seeks to
undermine the notion of canonicity itself, thereby preventing the exclusion
of works by women,
minorities, and oppressed peoples.
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