III. Standards for essay evaluation

An effective literary analysis…

· is written in the present tense;

· has a well-defined purpose;

· provides precise definitions of the terms used;

· identifies clearly the title and author of the literary text;

· uses author’s background to substantiate interpretation;

· provides a short summary of the important plot events (the whole story should not be told or irrelevant details repeated);

· gives a clear presentation of the theses (states the central problem of the text and establishes the author’s approach), consisted and coherent argumentation;

· ties the background information to the problem;

· clarifies the meaning of the text and reveals how the text operates;

· provides textual evidence for interpretation in advances and shows how the evidence supports the interpretation;

· cites supporting quotations;

· provides symbolic interpretation;

· concludes by tying the ideas in the essay together;

· takes into account any plausible alternative interpretations and any contradictory evidence;

· gives the precise bibliography.

 

IV. THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO LITERARY TEXTS

Modern literary theory has taken up many ideas from philosophy, psychology, sociology, linguistics, and cultural theory. It uses a number of general methods as well as special ones characteristic of a particular school / trend (neocritical method of close reading) or suggested by one school and then incorporated by the others (method of intertextual analysis).

The approaches to studying literature can be grouped in the following way:

· author-oriented (biographical, psychoanalytic, hermeneutic, cognitive) that consider the history of the literary work creation, the author’s biography, his/her conscious intention, and the unconscious;

· context-oriented (typological, cultural and historical approach, sociological approach, mythological criticism, Marxism, cultural materialism, New Historicism, Reconstructing Historicism, feminism, post-colonial studies, ecocriticism) that consider the interrelation of the text and the context(the system of cultural practices);

· text-oriented (New Criticism, formalism, structuralism, semiotics) that ignore extra-textual influences and focus on inter-textual processes;

· reader-oriented (reader response theory) that consider a work of literature as the result of the text-reader contact.

Author-oriented approaches

Psychological and psychoanalytic approaches (V. Woolf, H. Read, F. Lucas, D.H. Lawrence, I. Richards, J. Krutch, M. Bowie, B. Simon, Theodor Reik, Wilhelm Stekel, Ernest Jones, Marie Bonaparte) are based on the assumption that fiction shows human emotions and it is preconditioned by the psyche of its creator. The critics use Karl Jung, Jacques Lacan and Otto Rank’s ideas as well as I. Richards’s theory of emotive creation. Psychological criticism makes use of the achievements in experimental psychology (behaviorism, the theory of instincts, etc.).

Psychoanalysis emerges specifically from a therapeutic technique which the Viennese neurologist Sigmund Freud developed for the treatment of hysteria and neurosis at the end of the XIX century. It ventured into the study of literary works insisting that creative writings are the product of unconscious processes. Psychoanalytical method considers the work of literature to be derived from the author’s complexes and anxieties, sexual frustrations and repressions (attachment to the mother, penis envy, ambivalence towards the father, narcissism, anxiety of castration, Oedipus complex, Electra complex, etc.), it traces the erotic motif, relates the symbols and themes to the creator’s life. Freud’s model of the human psyche consists of three areas, the superego (consciousness ), which contains the social and cultural norms, the id (unconscious), which harbours the drives, and the rational ego (conscious), which tries to mediate between social norms and individual drives. While Freud did not ignore the conscious creation of art, he was more interested in the way unconscious reveals itself in complex images. The transposition of Freudian ideas into concepts in linguistics and philosophy underlies all of Lacan’s work exploring the link between unconscious mechanisms, language, and rhetoric. Post-structuralist Lacan described the processes of condensation and replacement as following the patterns of metaphor and metonymy. According to Lacan, the child’s development has two stages: a mirror one (identification with the mother’s image) and the one that gives the notion of the symbolic order and is associated with the father. Feminists reproach psychoanalysis of phallocentrism.

Psychological approach adopts primarily biographical method (Saint-Boeve) tracing the relation of the work with the wide spectrum of the writer’s personality. The method is based on recording facts about the author’s life and times, identifying the parallels between the author’s life and work, describing the ways imagination transforms experience.

Hermeneutic approach (Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, F. Cermode, E.D. Hirsh, Andrés Ortíz-Osés, Bernard Lonegran, Karl-Otto Apel) is aimed at working out the hidden meaning of the text. Hermeneutics is the theory of interpretation. In XVIII-XIX centuries the context for such issues was predominantly religious (correct interpretation of the Bible). Hermeneutics deals with the influence of the new historical and social environment on the text reception, with the conventions of the time and the author’s free will. The text is considered the bearer of the meaning that can be traced by studying the author’s life and language. This approach is also context-oriented.

Cognitive literary criticism (Mark Turner, Roger Schank, Robert Abelson) represents a recent attempt on the part of scholars to bring literary studies into dialogue with the new sciences of mind and brain in order to understand subjectivity, agency, consciousness, language, and psychological development behind the work of literature.

 

Context-oriented approaches

Typological approach identifies the inner links between the works of one author or different authors; describes common trends of the literary works (typology of literary trends, typology of genres, typology of styles, etc.). The approach help identify some general principles forming a literary and aesthetic unity, to define to which type or genre the literary work belongs.

Cultural and historical as well as comparative approaches provide the tools for exploring the influences and interrelations among the literatures.

Humanistic, or ethical, approach (Matthew Arnold) claims human values to be important in the work of literature. Ethical criticism roots back to the ancient philosophers. American Neohumanists (Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More) develop the methodology based on the new conception of humanism and egalitarianism (literature should follow the moral standards synthesized from the world philosophic and literary tradition). Modern scholars (Eugene Goodheart) combine historic and ethical approaches.

Social and cultural approach (Frank Raymond Leavis, Herbert Richard Hoggart) claim that peculiarities of the certain literary epoch are shaped by social and cultural environment.

Sociological approach (Randolph Born, Van Wyck Brooks, F. Dell, S. Finkelstein, John Govard Lawson, Philip Bonosky) provides critical interpretation from some political point of view.

Mythological approach (archetypal literary criticism, comparative mythology) (J. Grimm, James George Frazer, Archer Taylor, E. Chambers, Friederich Max Müller, Joseph Campbell) is based on the theory that the myth originated from ritual and is the source of spiritual life. Myth generates literature. A number of books can be deciphered using mythological codes (mythological themes and motives), the transhistorical archetypes can be identified (K. Jung).

According to Marxism the material reality of economic circumstances forms the base that conditions the social, political, and cultural life of the superstructure. Marxism is a theory of determinancy and historical materiality. Literature is seen as a by-product of its historical and cultural milieu. It can be identified as a mere vehicle of ideology predetermined by the base or as a reflection of ideology.

Cultural materialism locates a text in its material contexts but greatly enhances the relevance of language, communication, and culture. So the critics try to find the cultural forces of the period and the author’s position to them, social and economic conflicts represented, implicit ideology.

New Historicism (Michel Foucault, Stephen Greenblatt) maintains that the problem of historiography lies in the contradiction between past events and their retrospective subjective representation. The past is not a stable, coherent entity, and therefore cannot serve as a firm background and reference point of literature. History exists in multiple texts, which do not add up to one version. Michel Foucault analyses the historical formation of thinking and knowledge in discourses. The literary text is embedded in a dynamic network of interdependent cultural discourses and social practices. The term discourse draws attention to the role of language as the vehicle of ideology. The New Historicists try to find out how the literary text describes, exposes, or takes part in negotiations of power, truth, and values. Reconstructing Historicism (Leo Strauss, Wolfgang Iser, Hans-Robert Jauss) claims that the pastness of the texts under interpretation demands accommodation of critical approach to negotiate historical differences; it studies relations between fact and fiction, history and aesthetics.

Feminism and gender theory (Simone de Beauvoir, Elaine Showalter, Erica Jong, Marge Piercy, Julia Kristeva, Irigaray) address literary texts raising questions about the women’s writing, concepts of femininity and gender, absence of women from literature, sexual identity. Feminists brought to literature a suspicion of established ideas. They were interested in literature as a powerful means of creating and perpetuating belief system. Feminism takes issue with real forms of discrimination and discriminating cultural gender constructions. There is a difference between the biological sex (biological constitution as female or male) and the cultural construction of gender roles (cultural programming as feminine or masculine, which are categories created by society rather than by nature). Gender studies tend to analyse cultural constructs, whereas lesbian and gay theorists shift the balance towards the body and sexuality. Feminist readings of literature have exposed masculine representations of women and retrieved neglected literature by women. Feminist theory constantly incorporates new ideas from other fields and can be seen as interdisciplinary.

Postcolonialism and multiculturalism in criticism (Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Franz Fanon, Neil Lazarus, Homi Bhabha, Henry Louis Gates) are concerned with the impact of colonialism and postcolonialism on both British cultures and identities and those of the peoples under the British Empire. They address themselves to the historical, political, cultural, and textual ramifications of the colonial encounter between the West and the non-West, dating from the XVI century to the present day. There are two traditions of postcolonial thinking – the theoretical post-structuralist and the practical political. Postcolonial and multicultural theories are concerned with the multiple relationships between dominant and subordinate cultures. Both postcolonial and multicultural critics research the ethnic re-reading and rewriting of canonised literary and historical texts, the recuperation of indigenous cultures, and the construction of multicultural identities and literatures. They introduced the concepts of orientalism, subalternity, hybridity.

Ecocriticism (William Rueckert, Raymond Williams, Annette Kolodny) is a literary and cultural criticism from an environmentalist viewpoint. Texts are evaluated in terms of their environmental harmful or helpful effects. Ecocriticism analyses the history of concepts such as “nature”, in an attempt to understand the cultural developments that have led to the present global ecological crises.

 

Text-oriented approaches

The formal method (V. Shklovsky, R. Jakobson, V. Zhirmunsky, V. Vinogradov, B. Tomashevsky) is based on the assumption that literature is a set of devices, its development lies in their renewing regardless to the personality and biography of its creator. Formalists consider literature as a deviation from the conventional language rules: stylistic devices help defamiliarise our perception of common things. Y. Tynyanov and J. Propp contributed to the method development by introducing the notion of literary function; they proved that elements of a literary work should not be summed up, but relate. Formalists comment on the functional roles of agents in stories and the function of the plot, which rearranges the temporal sequence of a story. R. Jakobson developed an influential model of communication, according to which language has six functions which are of various importance in different utterances and texts: the emotive (expressive), referential (conveying information), conative (convincing the addressee), phatic (maintaining the contact with the adressee), aesthetic (reflecting on the structure and diction), and metalingual function (referring to the codes). Yury Lotman defined literature as a secondary modelling system, which uses elements from the primary modelling system, that is the way ordinary language and culture construct reality.

Among the weaknesses of such approach is its descriptive statistical method that neglects broad contexts. Russian formalism and structuralist linguistics caused a shift from content to form, from meaning to text arrangement.

The aesthetic approach (T.S. Eliot, Alfred Alvarez, Northrop Frye) is based on the conception of “the meaningful form”. A work of literature is considered as an autonomous aesthetic object.

Neocriticism is based on a wide range of literary analysis methods. Being influential from the end of the 1930s on into the 1950s it revolutionized the teaching of literature. The New Critics (J.C. Ransom, I. Richards, R. Brooks, A. Tate, Kenneth Burke, R.P. Blackmoore, Y. Winters, W.K. Wimsatt) focus on the inner structures of the text, special features of literary language. Each literary text is considered as a timeless, unique and autonomous artifact, self-sufficient verbal object. Literature was regarded as an autonomous aesthetic object independent of authorial intention, historical circumstances, and its emotional effect upon the reader. Rhetoric, poetics, and metrics serve the close reading of a text (the term is introduced by I. Richards), which is scrutinised for the aesthetic arrangement of its elements into an organic whole. While the text is closely read, all the formal evidence provided by the language is taken into account – the images, symbols, metaphors, rhyme, meter, point of view, setting, characterization, plot, etc. For Neocriticism, the complexity of a text is created by the multiple and often conflicting meanings woven through it. And these meanings are a product primarily of four kinds of linguistic devices: paradox, irony, ambiguity, and tension. The limitations of neocritical approach are its formalism and dehistorisation of the text.

The method of semantic analysis (A. Richardson, W. Empson, J.C. Ransom) puts perception of a literary work in connection with analytical brain work, taking into account polysemy and semantic associations, tension between the semantic elements of the text (A. Tate), “poetic paradox” (C. Brooks), “texture” (J. Ransom), etc.

Susanne Katherine Langer, K. Burke and some others use the ideas of psychoanalysis and Neocriticism as well as the method of symbolic interpretation. The method involves consideration of the key words, metaphors, symbols, images. Literary symbol is considered not only as verbal but as constructed by the rhythm and structure of the text.

The existential and phenomenological approaches (E. Husserl, M. Heidegger, K. Jaspers, J. Poule, J.-P. Richar) deny the necessity of typological generalisations, emphasise transcendental and human character of literature. A work of literature is regarded as closed in itself, outside its context.

Structuralism and narrative poetics (Roman Jacobson, Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Algirdas J. Greimas, Tzvetan Todorov, Gerard Genette) draw an analogy between language systems and social systems, focus on the abstract system of signs and the status of words in society. Structuralist approaches to literature have tended to focus on three specific areas of literary studies: the classification of literary genres, the description of narrative operations, and the analysis of literary interpretation. Structuralists identify the fundamental semantic, syntactic, rhetorical, and poetic binary oppositions and the way they are interrelated; how these elements and their functions relate to the conventions of the genre. Structures are not physical entities; they are conceptual frameworks that we use to organize and understand physical entities. Structuralism shows that a work of literature possesses wholeness (the system functions as a unit), transformation (the system is not static), and self-regulation (the elements belong to the system and obey its laws). Structuralists devised all-encompassing theory of narrative discourse.

Post-structuralists and deconstructivists (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Julia Kristeva) question all philosophical assumptions, hierarchical thinking in which one term is privileged over another (for instance, culture vs nature, men vs women), consider life phenomena through the prism of the text. Deconstruction is a controversial mode of textual analysis that can reveal hidden ideological assumptions. Deconstruction draws on thought of French theorist Jacques Derrida, who elaborated on linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s vision of language as a system of differences. Jacques Derrida claims that there is nothing outside the text. Roland Barthes claimed that texts can hardly be reduced to binary oppositions but reveal multiple and indeterminate meanings. The reader employs codes to unfold the meaning of the text, which are potentially endless because each text is intertextual in a wide sense. Deconstructivistslook for ambiguities and contradictions, shifts in perspective and judgement, subversive information in the text, self-referential statements and intertextual links that undermine the basic assumptions. The main purpose in deconstructing a literary text is to reveal the complex operations of the ideologies of which the text is constructed.

Intertextual approach originated from understanding literary development as constant interaction of the texts and outlooks – as the result each new text incorporates and processes the previous literary and cultural material. The approach is based on M.M. Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism and was further developed by J. Kristeva, R. Barthes, C. Levi-Strauss, M. Foucault, U. Eko, A. Zholkovsky, I. Arnold, B.M. Kasparova, Z. Turaeva. The intertextual method presupposes scrutinising the text for borrowings, quotations, reminiscences, allusions, parallel structures and images, comparing and contrasting typologically similar phenomena.

Reader-oriented approaches

Impressionistic approach (H. Menken) emphasises immediate emotional perception of literary works.

Modern reader-oriented approaches hold on to consciousness as the central instance of reading, they are influenced by phenomenology, which maintains that the self and the world are only given in consciousness, and Gadamer’s hermeneutics, which argues that meaning is generated in a dialogue between the reader and the text, which is always a process situated in historical circumstances.

The reader-response theory (Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland, Hans Robert Jauss) aims at studying the reader’s psychological and intellectual response; it questions the stability of the textual meaning. The representative of the reader-response theory W. Iser states that a literary work is the combination of the actual text and the response of the reader to it. The unsaid, specific information and gaps of indeterminacy are filled by each reader differently. Norman Holland realised that a reader’s personal identity theme conditions their typical reaction to the text. H.R. Jauss included historical circumstances (horizon of expectations, values, models of reality and of art) in his version of reception theory. R. Ingarden introduced the notion of actualization mechanism, meaning the way a small detail turns into a long chain of associations.

Narratology (M. Riffater, G. Gennett, Wolf Schmid) combines studying the text as well as the reader’s response. A literary work is treated as aesthetic communication between the narrator and the recipient.

At present we can observe the process of integration of different critical methodologies.

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Appendix 1.