Literature
The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines literature as “writings whose value lies in the beauty of form or emotional effect”. Walter Pater’s definition “the matter of imaginative or artistic literature as a transcript, not of mere fact, but of fact in its infinitively varied forms”, also stresses the written aspect attached to literature. The word comes from “littera”, in Latin “letter” which also underlines the fact of writing. Shklovsky (1917) defined literature as a certain organization of words which produces pleasure and through which our everyday experiences are transformed and elevated.
The following one is Virginia Woolf’s:
If a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he choose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street Tailors would have it. Life is not a series of giglamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?
Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction”(1919) in Collected Essays, II 1967:105-6.
Joyce expresses similar concerns:
"An aesthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time. What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space. But, temporal or spatial, the aesthetic image is first luminously apprehended as self-bounded and self-contained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it" (Joyce in A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man 1993:180).
The emphasis on technique and on the perceptual experience is a common denominator.
In Anatomy of Criticism, however, Northrop Frye had warned: "We have no real standards to distinguish a verbal structure that is literary from one that is not. We have no work to describe a work of literary art." (Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton, New Jersey, 1971).
Critical schools have tried to search precisely for those elements that make a literary text different from any other text. Most of the critical theories have been based upon the study of poetry, which is thought to be the simplest and purest literary expression. Narrative continued to be a source of controversy due to its largest extension and multiple forms. The Greek, for instance, believed history to be among the seven greatest forms of art. Philosophical works like Plato’s Dialogues are considered literature.Essays were elevated to the category of literature during the Roman Empire. Personal documents, such as autobiographies, diaries, memories and even letters can also be considered literature.
More recently literature has been defined in more general terms as a special type of communication, whose absent context creates a gap that the reader can fill in with his/her own expectations, thus acting as a source of aesthetic pleasure (see Robert Scholes and Paul de Man in our Guías de Lectura).
In the 21st-century we are surrounded by publicity, television , cinema, newspapers, journals, magazines, internet. They are all forms of communication. Some articles, films, even advertisements are so carefully constructed that can be a source of aesthetic pleasure. Are they literary? What is the quality of literature that Jakobson define as “literariness”? These are some of the questions we shall address in this course.
The differences between Literary Criticism, Literary Theory and theory itself.
I: 'Literary criticism
Literary criticism is fundamentally the estimation of the value of a particular work or body of work on such grounds as: the personal and/or cultural significance of the themes and the uses of language of a text; the insights and impact of a text; and the aesthetic production (or, performance) of the text; particularly as these areas are seen to be mutually dependent, supportive or inflective. The word 'criticism' has ordinary-use negative connotations, and to an extent that is right: for literary criticism is part of the disciplining of discourse generally and of what is considered literature in particular. One patrols the boundaries of good writing, admitting or excluding, determining what should be thought about a text, and why, what personal and cultural value should be placed on it.
Judgments of value are not simple, however. They require that one consider what constitutes value, what the personal and social value of literature is, what the value of 'the aesthetic' is. And they require that one interpret the text. As texts judged to be of high literary value tend to be marked by complexity and even ambiguity, and to yield diverse interpretations, judgment may ultimately require a theory of interpretation, or at least careful attention to the question of what constitutes, guides, and legitimates interpretation.
II: Literary Theory
Theory is the process of understanding what the nature of literature is, what functions it has, what the relation of text is to author, to reader, to language, to society, to history. It is not judgment but understanding of the frames of judgment. There have always been literary theories — about how literature works, what meaning is, what it is to be an author and so forth. The central interpretive practices in force and in power in the academy which are being challenged by Theory were themselves revolutionary, theory-based practices which became the norm. The two main critical practices in the first half of the 20th-century have been the formalist tradition, in America called 'New Criticism', which sees a text as a relatively self-enclosed meaning-production system which develops enormous signifying power through its formal properties and through its conflicts, ambiguities and complexities, and the Arnoldian humanist tradition exemplified most clearly in the work of F. R. Leavis and his followers, which concentrates evaluatively on the capacity of the author to represent moral experience concretely and compellingly.
III: Theory
Theory, however, particularly as "a theory of X," tends to operate within a frame of values and expectations itself. Full understanding requires one think as fully as possible about the sets of expectations, assumptions and values of theory and theorizing.
IV: Literary Studies
Roman Jakobson in his essay "Linguistics and Poetics" insists that literary studies must be differentiated from literary criticism. "Literary studies" refers to knowledge about the facts of the case as they illuminate the meaningfulness of texts -- facts of authorship, biography, influence, aesthetics, the pressures and modulations of contexts, rewriting and publication, historical interpretation, and so forth.
Literary Criticism and Interpretation: an introduction
What Is Interpretation?
In general, to interpret something is to make it personally meaningful. Our brain takes raw data from the senses and makes it meaningful by relating it to our previous experiences. When we read or hear a sentence, we put the words together into a meaningful whole, rather than just noting their separate dictionary definitions. Most everyday language is fairly straightforward and requires little interpretation. Because literature presents us with more than one possible meaning, interpreting literature requires more care and attention.
Why Should We Interpret Literature?
Authors of fiction, poetry, or drama choose literature for their expression because they believe that there are at least two valid sides to any major issue--not just a simple right and wrong. Reading and interpreting literature, then, nourishes us with a sense of the complexity of life's deepest mysteries-- love, hate, death, conflicts between the individual and society, and so on--so that when we approach these problems we do so with greater self-awareness and greater tolerance for the views of others.
When we interpret literature at this level, we are taking what we already know about human nature and adding in the experience and wisdom of the author (even if we don't share all of the author's convictions).
There is no unified cultural tradition but rather a set of cultural conflicts -including conflicts over what the cultural tradition is and has been thought to be. Eliot and Borges offered the idea that each new writer of importance alters the canon preceding him or her, shifting our perspective so that we see earlier work in a different way, and thus sometimes enormously enriching our appreciation of an earlier writer's prescience and modernity.
What Is Literary Criticism?
Literary criticism is an extension of this social activity of interpreting. One reader writes down his or her views on what a particular work of literature means so that others can respond to that interpretation. The critic's specific purpose may be to make value judgements on a work, to explain his or her interpretation of the work, or to provide other readers with relevant historical or biographical information. The critic's general purpose, in most cases, is to enrich the reader's understanding of the literary work. Critics typically engage in dialogue or debate with other critics, using the views of other critics to develop their own points. Unfortunately, when critics assume that their readers are already familiar with previous criticism, the argument may be difficult to follow.
Discovering the meaning of literary work, and the way that specific meaning is made, remains the first task of literary criticism, followed by evaluating that work in comparison to other literary works, so as to account for its appeal or lack of it to generations of readers.
Literary criticism is the reasoned consideration of literary works and issues. Plato's cautions against the risky consequences of poetic inspiration in general in his Republic are thus often taken as the earliest important example of literary criticism.
Why Is Criticism Important for Students?
The teaching of literature involves deciding what works to study and why, what questions to ask about them, what contexts to put them in. To teach the traditional canon assumes a theory of why it should be taught. By "theory" here we mean some technical concepts, and ideas that give point and value to literary study. To understand and appreciate the literature treated in their classrooms, students need to understand the theoretical ideas that determine why it is being taught as it is.
As a reader of literature, you may find the views of others very helpful in developing your own interpretations. When you write an essay about literature, you will also find criticism helpful for supporting your points. But criticism should never be a substitute for your own original views--only in very rare cases would an assignment require you to summarize a critical work without including your interpretation of the literature.
Is All Literary Criticism Valid?
Certainly if a critic has added to your appreciation of a literary work, then that person has been useful. But as you read a variety of criticism on a given author, you will discover that some criticism more useful than others, and you may find some completely useless, particularly if it only summarizes the plot, focuses on an issue you're not interested in, concentrates too much on other critics or theories and not on the literature itself, or uses an unnecessarily technical vocabulary.
Although some critics believe that literature should be discussed in isolation from other matters, criticism usually seems to be openly or covertly involved with social and political debate. Since literature itself is often partisan, is always rooted to some degree in local circumstances, and has a way of calling forth affirmations of ultimate values, it is not surprising that the finest critics have never paid much attention to the alleged boundaries between criticism and other types of discourse. Especially in modern Europe, literary criticism has occupied a central place in debates about cultural and political issues. Sartre's own What Is Literature? (1947) is typical in its wide-ranging attempt to prescribe the literary intellectual's ideal relation to the development of his society and to literature as a manifestation of human freedom. Similarly, some prominent American critics, including Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Kenneth Burke, Philip Rahv, and Irving Howe, began as political radicals in the 1930s and sharpened their concern for literature on the dilemmas and disillusionments of that era. Trilling's influential The Liberal Imagination (1950) is simultaneously a collection of literary essays and an attempt to reconcile the claims of politics and art.
How Do I Incorporate Literary Criticism into a Research Paper?
Just as it's usually best to read criticism after you've developed your own views, so do you normally refer to or quote criticism after you've expressed an idea of your own. A typical paragraph may consist of a topic sentence (expressing a portion or subtopic of your interpretation), followed by an elaboration of the idea, a reference to or brief quote from the work that you're analyzing, an explanation of how this passage illustrates your point, a quote or reference from a critic on this passage (or a similar one), and perhaps a brief discussion of the critic's comments.
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