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Criticism vs Literary Theory

Literary criticism and literary theory are two important terms that we encounter in literary studies. There
are varying views on the difference between literary criticism and literary theory; some scholars use
these two terms to describe the same concept whereas some other scholars consider literary criticism as
the practical application of the literary theories. In this article, we are considering the latter perspective.
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation and interpretation of literature whereas literary theory is the
different frameworks used to evaluate and interpret a particular work. This is the main difference
between literary criticism and literary theory.

What is Literary Criticism

Literary criticism is the study, analysis, evaluation and interpretation of literature. In other words, it
judges the value of a work. In literary criticism, a particular work or a body of work is evaluated
according to its aesthetic value, historical/cultural/social significance of the work, use of language, and
insights and insights of the work. These qualities are often mutually dependent or inflective.

Literary criticism has a long history and can be traced back to the times of Pluto. Literary criticisms are
often published in essay or book format.

How to Write a Literary Criticism

Difference Between Literary Criticism and Literary Theory

What is Literary Theory

Literary theory is understanding the nature, and function of literature and the relation of text to its
author, reader, and society. It can be described as the frame that supports literary criticism. Literary
theory consists of a variety of scholarly approaches to evaluate a study. In simple terms, they can be
described as the different perspectives or angles scholars use to evaluate literature.

Some of the major schools of literary theory include :

Formalism – focuses on the structural purposes of a text

Reader-Response Criticism – focuses on the response of the reader to a text

Structuralism – focuses on the universal underlying structures of a text

Gender/Queer Studies – focuses on the portrayal of gender and gender relations

Post-colonial Studies – focuses on the influence of colonialism on literature

Psychoanalytic Criticism – focuses on the role of consciousness and unconsciousness in literature

Marxist Criticism – focuses on the political, economic and social in the literature

Difference Between Literary Criticism and Literary Theory

Definition

Literary Criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature.

Literary Theory is the different frameworks used to evaluate and interpret a particular work.

Theoretical vs Practical

Literary Criticism is the practical application of literary theory.

Literary Theory is a combination of the nature and function of literature and the relation of text to its
author, reader, and society.

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Literary theory

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Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for
analyzing literature.[1] However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition
to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of intellectual history, moral
philosophy, social prophecy, and other interdisciplinary themes which are of relevance to the way
humans interpret meaning.[1] In the humanities in modern academia, the latter style of scholarship is an
outgrowth of critical theory and is often called[by whom?] simply "theory".[2] As a consequence, the
word "theory" has become an umbrella term for a variety of scholarly approaches to reading texts. Many
of these approaches are informed by various strands of Continental philosophy and of sociology.

History

Overview

Differences among schools

Schools Edit

Listed below are some of the most commonly identified schools of literary theory, along with their major
authors. In many cases, such as those of the historian and philosopher Michel Foucault and the
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the authors were not primarily literary critics, but their work has
been broadly influential in literary theory.

African-American literary theory

Associated with Romanticism, a philosophy defining aesthetic value as the primary goal in understanding
literature. This includes both literary critics who have tried to understand and/or identify aesthetic
values and those like Oscar Wilde who have stressed art for art's sake.

Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Harold Bloom

American pragmatism and other American approaches

Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty

Cognitive literary theory – applies research in cognitive neuroscience, cognitive evolutionary psychology
and anthropology, and philosophy of mind to the study of literature and culture.

Frederick Luis Aldama, Mary Thomas Crane, Nancy Easterlin, William Flesch, David Herman, Suzanne
Keen, Patrick Colm Hogan, Alan Richardson, Ellen Spolsky, Blakey Vermeule, Lisa Zunshine

Cambridge criticism – close examination of the literary text and the relation of literature to social issues

I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis, Q.D. Leavis, William Empson.

Critical race theory

Cultural studies – emphasizes the role of literature in everyday life

Raymond Williams, Dick Hebdige, and Stuart Hall (British Cultural Studies); Max Horkheimer and
Theodor Adorno; Michel de Certeau; also Paul Gilroy, John Guillory

Darwinian literary studies – situates literature in the context of evolution and natural selection

Deconstruction – a strategy of "close" reading that elicits the ways that key terms and concepts may be
paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning undecidable

Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Gayatri Spivak, Avital Ronell

Desciptive poetics

Brian McHale

Eco-criticism – explores cultural connections and human relationships to the natural world

Gender (see feminist literary criticism) – which emphasizes themes of gender relations

Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Elaine Showalter

Formalism – a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes
of a particular text

German hermeneutics and philology

Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Erich Auerbach, René Wellek

Marxism (see Marxist literary criticism) – which emphasizes themes of class conflict

Georg Lukács, Valentin Voloshinov, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Theodor Adorno,
Walter Benjamin

Narratology

New Criticism – looks at literary works on the basis of what is written, and not at the goals of the author
or biographical issues

W. K. Wimsatt, F. R. Leavis, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, T.S. Eliot

New Historicism – which examines the work through its historical context and seeks to understand
cultural and intellectual history through literature

Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, Jonathan Goldberg, H. Aram Veeser

Postcolonialism – focuses on the influences of colonialism in literature, especially regarding the historical
conflict resulting from the exploitation of less developed countries and indigenous peoples by Western
nations

Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Declan Kiberd

Postmodernism – criticism of the conditions present in the twentieth century, often with concern for
those viewed as social deviants or the Other
Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Maurice Blanchot

Post-structuralism – a catch-all term for various theoretical approaches (such as deconstruction) that
criticize or go beyond Structuralism's aspirations to create a rational science of culture by extrapolating
the model of linguistics to other discursive and aesthetic formations

Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva

Psychoanalysis (see psychoanalytic literary criticism) – explores the role of consciousnesses and the
unconscious in literature including that of the author, reader, and characters in the text

Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Harold Bloom, Slavoj Žižek, Viktor Tausk

Queer theory – examines, questions, and criticizes the role of gender identity and sexuality in literature

Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michel Foucault

Reader-response criticism – focuses upon the active response of the reader to a text

Louise Rosenblatt, Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland, Hans-Robert Jauss, Stuart Hall

Realist

James Wood

Russian formalism

Victor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp

Structuralism and semiotics (see semiotic literary criticism) – examines the universal underlying
structures in a text, the linguistic units in a text and how the author conveys meaning through any
structures

Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Yurii
Lotman, Umberto Eco, Jacques Ehrmann, Northrop Frye and morphology of folklore

Other theorists: Robert Graves, Alamgir Hashmi, John Sutherland, Leslie Fiedler, Kenneth Burke, Paul
Bénichou, Barbara Johnson, Blanca de Lizaur

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Literary criticism (or literary studies) is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern
literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of literature's
goals and methods. Though the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have
not always been, theorists.

Whether or not literary criticism should be considered a separate field of inquiry from literary theory, or
conversely from book reviewing, is a matter of some controversy. For example, the Johns Hopkins Guide
to Literary Theory and Criticism[1] draws no distinction between literary theory and literary criticism,
and almost always uses the terms together to describe the same concept. Some critics consider literary
criticism a practical application of literary theory, because criticism always deals directly with particular
literary works, while theory may be more general or abstract.

Literary criticism is often published in essay or book form. Academic literary critics teach in literature
departments and publish in academic journals, and more popular critics publish their reviews in broadly
circulating periodicals such as the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times Book Review, the New
York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Dublin Review of Books, The Nation, and The
New Yorker.

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Critical theory is the reflective assessment and critique of society and culture by applying knowledge
from the social sciences and the humanities. As a term, critical theory has two meanings with different
origins and histories: the first originated in sociology and the second originated in literary criticism,
whereby it is used and applied as an umbrella term that can describe a theory founded upon critique;
thus, the theorist Max Horkheimer described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human
beings from the circumstances that enslave them."[1]

In sociology and political philosophy, the term "Critical Theory" describes the Western Marxist
philosophy of the Frankfurt School, which was developed in Germany in the 1930s. This use of the term
requires proper noun capitalization, whereas "a critical theory" or "a critical social theory" may have
similar elements of thought, but not stress its intellectual lineage specifically to the Frankfurt School.
Frankfurt School critical theorists drew on the critical methods of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Critical
theory maintains that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation.[2] Critical theory was
established as a school of thought primarily by the Frankfurt School theoreticians Herbert Marcuse,
Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Erich Fromm. Modern critical theory has
additionally been influenced by György Lukács and Antonio Gramsci, as well as the second generation
Frankfurt School scholars, notably Jürgen Habermas. In Habermas's work, critical theory transcended its
theoretical roots in German idealism and progressed closer to American pragmatism. Concern for social
"base and superstructure" is one of the remaining Marxist philosophical concepts in much of
contemporary critical theory.[3]

Postmodern critical theory politicizes social problems "by situating them in historical and cultural
contexts, to implicate themselves in the process of collecting and analyzing data, and to relativize their
findings."[4]

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Formalism (literature)

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Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural
purposes of a particular text. It is the study of a text without taking into account any outside influence.
Formalism rejects or sometimes simply "brackets" (i.e., ignores for the purpose of analysis) notions of
culture or societal influence, authorship, and content, and instead focuses on modes, genres, discourse,
and forms.

In literary theory Edit

In literary theory, formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent
features of a text. These features include not only grammar and syntax but also literary devices such as
meter and tropes. The formalistic approach reduces the importance of a text’s historical, biographical,
and cultural context.

Formalism rose to prominence in the early twentieth century as a reaction against Romanticist theories
of literature, which centered on the artist and individual creative genius, and instead placed the text
itself back into the spotlight to show how the text was indebted to forms and other works that had
preceded it. Two schools of formalist literary criticism developed, Russian formalism, and soon after
Anglo-American New Criticism. Formalism was the dominant mode of academic literary study in the US
at least from the end of the Second World War through the 1970s, especially as embodied in René
Wellek and Austin Warren's Theory of Literature (1948, 1955, 1962).

Beginning in the late 1970s, formalism was substantially displaced by various approaches (often with
political aims or assumptions) that were suspicious of the idea that a literary work could be separated
from its origins or uses.[citation needed] The term has often had a pejorative cast and has been used by
opponents to indicate either aridity or ideological deviance.[citation needed] Some recent trends in
academic literary criticism suggest that formalism may be making a comeback.[1]

Pedagogy

Research Edit

Formalism research involves studying the ways in which students present their writing.[3] Some ways
formalism research is conducted involves allowing the text to speak to the readers versus cutting out
unintended meaning in a written piece. Respectively, these two methods deal with language as the
“master” writer versus a teacher as the “master” writer.

Russian formalism Edit

Main article: Russian formalism

Learn moreThis section does not cite any sources.

Russian Formalism refers to the work of the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOYAZ) founded
in 1916 in St. Petersburg (then Petrograd) by Boris Eichenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky and Yury Tynyanov, and
secondarily to the Moscow Linguistic Circle founded in 1914 by Roman Jakobson. (The folklorist Vladimir
Propp is also often associated with the movement.) Eichenbaum's 1926 essay "The Theory of the 'Formal
Method'" (translated in Lemon and Reis) provides an economical overview of the approach the
Formalists advocated, which included the following basic ideas:

The aim is to produce "a science of literature that would be both independent and factual," which is
sometimes designated by the term poetics.[citation needed]

Since literature is made of language, linguistics will be a foundational element of the science of
literature.

Literature is autonomous from external conditions in the sense that literary language is distinct from
ordinary uses of language, not least because it is not (entirely) communicative.

Literature has its own history, a history of innovation in formal structures, and is not determined (as
some crude versions of Marxism have it) by external, material history.

What a work of literature says cannot be separated from how the literary work says it, and therefore the
form and of a work, far from being merely the decorative wrapping of an isolable content, is in fact part
of the content of the work.

According to Eichenbaum, Shklovsky was the lead critic of the group, and Shklovsky contributed two of
their most well-known concepts: defamiliarization (ostraneniye, more literally, 'estrangement') and the
plot/story distinction (syuzhet/fabula). "Defamiliarization" is one of the crucial ways in which literary
language distinguishes itself from ordinary, communicative language, and is a feature of how art in
general works, namely by presenting the world in a strange and new way that allows us to see things
differently. Innovation in literary history is, according to Shklovsky, partly a matter of finding new
techniques of defamiliarization. The plot/story distinction separates out the sequence of events the work
relates (the story) from the sequence in which those events are presented in the work (the plot). Both of
these concepts are attempts to describe the significance of the form of a literary work in order to define
its "literariness." For the Russian Formalists as a whole, form is what makes something art to begin with,
so in order to understand a work of art as a work of art (rather than as an ornamented communicative
act) one must focus on its form.

This emphasis on form, seemingly at the expense of thematic content, was not well-received after the
Russian Revolution of 1917. One of the most sophisticated critiques of the Formalist project was Leon
Trotsky's Literature and Revolution (1924).[citation needed] Trotsky does not wholly dismiss the
Formalist approach, but insists that "the methods of formal analysis are necessary, but insufficient"
because they neglect the social world with which the human beings who write and read literature are
bound up: "The form of art is, to a certain and very large degree, independent, but the artist who creates
this form, and the spectator who is enjoying it, are not empty machines, one for creating form and the
other for appreciating it. They are living people, with a crystallized psychology representing a certain
unity, even if not entirely harmonious. This psychology is the result of social conditions" (180, 171). The
Formalists were thus accused of being politically reactionary because of such unpatriotic remarks as
Shklovsky's (quoted by Trotsky) that "Art was always free of life, and its color never reflected the color of
the flag which waved over the fortress of the City"(source?)(164). The leaders of the movement suffered
political persecution beginning in the 1920s, when Joseph Stalin came to power, which largely put an end
to their inquiries. But their ideas continued to influence subsequent thinkers, partly due to Tzvetan
Todorov's translations of their works in the 1960s and 1970s, including Todorov himself, Barthes, Genette
and Jauss.

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New Criticism

New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in
the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover
how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. The movement
derived its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism.

The work of Cambridge scholar I. A. Richards, especially his Practical Criticism and The Meaning of
Meaning, which offered what was claimed to be an empirical scientific approach, were important to the
development of New Critical methodology.[1] Also very influential were the critical essays of T. S. Eliot,
such as "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "Hamlet and His Problems", in which Eliot developed
his notion of the "objective correlative". Eliot's evaluative judgments, such as his condemnation of
Milton and Dryden, his liking for the so-called metaphysical poets and his insistence that poetry must be
impersonal, greatly influenced the formation of the New Critical canon.

Formalism theory Edit

New Criticism developed as a reaction to the older philological and literary history schools of the US
North, which, influenced by nineteenth-century German scholarship, focused on the history and
meaning of individual words and their relation to foreign and ancient languages, comparative sources,
and the biographical circumstances of the authors. These approaches, it was felt, tended to distract from
the text and meaning of a poem and entirely neglect its aesthetic qualities in favor of teaching about
external factors. On the other hand, the literary appreciation school, which limited itself to pointing out
the "beauties" and morally elevating qualities of the text, was disparaged by the New Critics as too
subjective and emotional. Condemning this as a version of Romanticism, they aimed for newer,
systematic and objective method.[2]

It was felt, especially by creative writers and by literary critics outside the academy, that the special
aesthetic experience of poetry and literary language was lost in the welter of extraneous erudition and
emotional effusions. Heather Dubrow notes that the prevailing focus of literary scholarship was on "the
study of ethical values and philosophical issues through literature, the tracing of literary history, and ...
political criticism". Literature was approached and literary scholarship did not focus on analysis of texts.
[3]

New Critics believed the structure and meaning of the text were intimately connected and should not be
analyzed separately. In order to bring the focus of literary studies back to analysis of the texts, they
aimed to exclude the reader's response, the author's intention, historical and cultural contexts, and
moralistic bias from their analysis. These goals were articulated in Ransom's "Criticism, Inc." and Allen
Tate's "Miss Emily and the Bibliographers".

Close reading (or explication de texte) was a staple of French literary studies, but in the United States,
aesthetic concerns, and the study of modern poets was the province of non-academic essayists and book
reviewers rather than serious scholars. The New Criticism changed this. Though their interest in textual
study initially met with resistance from older scholars, the methods of the New Critics rapidly
predominated in American universities until challenged by Feminism and structuralism in the 1970s.
Other schools of critical theory, including, post-structuralism, and deconstructionist theory, the New
Historicism, and Receptions studies followed.

Although the New Critics were never a formal group, an important inspiration was the teaching of John
Crowe Ransom of Vanderbilt University, whose students (all Southerners), Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks,
and Robert Penn Warren would go on to develop the aesthetics that came to be known as the New
Criticism. Indeed, for Paul Lauter, a Professor of American Studies at Trinity College, New Criticism is a
reemergence of the Southern Agrarians.[4] In his essay, "The New Criticism", Cleanth Brooks notes that
"The New Critic, like the Snark, is a very elusive beast", meaning that there was no clearly defined "New
Critical" manifesto, school, or stance.[5] Nevertheless, a number of writings outline inter-related New
Critical ideas.

In 1946, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published a classic and controversial New Critical
essay entitled "The Intentional Fallacy", in which they argued strongly against the relevance of an
author's intention, or "intended meaning" in the analysis of a literary work. For Wimsatt and Beardsley,
the words on the page were all that mattered; importation of meanings from outside the text was
considered irrelevant, and potentially distracting.

In another essay, "The Affective Fallacy", which served as a kind of sister essay to "The Intentional
Fallacy" Wimsatt and Beardsley also discounted the reader's personal/emotional reaction to a literary
work as a valid means of analyzing a text. This fallacy would later be repudiated by theorists from the
reader-response school of literary theory. One of the leading theorists from this school, Stanley Fish, was
himself trained by New Critics. Fish criticizes Wimsatt and Beardsley in his essay "Literature in the
Reader" (1970).[6]

The hey-day of the New Criticism in American high schools and colleges was the Cold War decades
between 1950 and the mid-seventies. Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry and Understanding
Fiction both became staples during this era.

Studying a passage of prose or poetry in New Critical style required careful, exacting scrutiny of the
passage itself. Formal elements such as rhyme, meter, setting, characterization, and plot were used to
identify the theme of the text. In addition to the theme, the New Critics also looked for paradox,
ambiguity, irony, and tension to help establish the single best and most unified interpretation of the text.

Although the New Criticism is no longer a dominant theoretical model in American universities, some of
its methods (like close reading) are still fundamental tools of literary criticism, underpinning a number of
subsequent theoretic approaches to literature including poststructuralism, deconstruction theory, and
reader-response theory.