Literary Criticism

Overview

Begin by separating three activities that are often confused: description, interpretation, and evaluation. Description says what is in the text, its form, structure, imagery, and voice. Interpretation says what that description means, what pattern or significance it carries. Evaluation says whether that meaning and form are valuable, successful, or important, and on what grounds. A strong critical answer moves through all three, but keeps them distinct: it does not jump from a feature to a value judgement without an interpretation, and it does not present an interpretation as if it were mere description. A second separation is between intrinsic and extrinsic criticism. Intrinsic criticism focuses on the text itself, its language, structure, and internal relations. Extrinsic criticism brings in history, biography, society, or the reader, and uses those contexts to illuminate the text. Neither is automatically superior; the question is whether the context genuinely illuminates the text or merely replaces reading it. A biographical fact that explains an image is useful; a biography that substitutes for reading is not.

Literary Criticism: approaches, canon, and judgement

Formal criticism, in its classic modern form, treats the text as an autonomous object whose meaning is created by internal relations: paradox, irony, tension, ambiguity, and the reconciliation of opposites. It distrusts appeals to author intention and to reader emotion as tests of meaning, arguing that the poem itself, not what the poet meant or what a reader feels, should be the evidence. Its strength is close reading: it teaches attention to language and structure. Its limit is that it can bracket history, politics, and readership, treating a text as if it floated free of the world that produced and received it. Historical criticism restores that world: it reads a text in its period, its genre conventions, its publication conditions, and its contemporary debates. It asks what a text meant to its first readers, what it borrowed and changed, and how its language carried period assumptions. Its strength is contextual richness; its risk is reducing a text to a document of its age, losing what makes it literature rather than history. Biographical criticism relates a text to its author's life, letters, and development. Used carefully, it can illuminate recurring images, revisions, and choices. Used carelessly, it commits the intentional fallacy in reverse, assuming that knowing the life explains the work, or that a fictional speaker is the author speaking. The author's intention is evidence, not a verdict: a text can mean more, less, or other than its author intended, and criticism must argue from the text when intention and text diverge. Reader-based criticism shifts attention to the reader's role: meaning is not simply in the text waiting to be extracted, but is made in the act of reading, guided by textual gaps, expectations, and the reader's competence and situation. Different readers, and different reading communities, may legitimately produce different readings, because they bring different questions and fill gaps differently. Its strength is that it explains why readings change over time; its risk is relativism, the claim that any reading is as good as any other, which criticism must resist by requiring evidence and coherence. Social and ideological criticism reads literature in relation to power, class, gender, race, nation, and institutions. It asks whose voices are centred, whose are marginalised, what social arrangements a text naturalises or challenges, and how literary form itself carries ideology. Marxist criticism stresses material conditions, class, and the social function of literature. Feminist criticism stresses gender, patriarchy, and the representation and agency of women, and it has expanded to include questions of sexuality, body, and intersection with class and race. Postcolonial criticism stresses empire, cultural contact, hybridity, and the writing back of formerly colonised peoples. Each social approach gains a political dimension that formal criticism may miss, and each risks reducing a complex text to an illustration of a thesis if it stops listening to form. Genre criticism asks how a text uses and changes the conventions of its kind: a sonnet, a tragedy, a detective story, or a memoir each carry expectations, and meaning often lives in fulfilling, frustrating, or transforming those expectations. Canon formation is the process by which some texts are selected as central, taught, anthologised, and preserved, while others are neglected. Canon is not a natural list of the best; it is a historical selection shaped by institutions, taste, power, and accident, and criticism therefore asks both what is in the canon and what has been excluded, and on what grounds. Value judgement in criticism must be argued, not asserted. To say a poem is great because it is moving is not criticism; to show how its form creates that movement, how its images cohere, and how it repays re-reading is the beginning of a judgement. Practical criticism, the close reading of an unseen passage, is the test of all these approaches: it requires description of language and form, interpretation of pattern, and a tentative evaluation, without importing a theory that the passage cannot support. The best practical criticism lets the passage lead, uses a concept only when it illuminates a specific feature, and acknowledges where a reading remains uncertain.

Critical approaches: focus, strength, limit

Description, interpretation, evaluation