What is the purpose to using critical approaches to literature?

Literary Criticism – The assay of a literary text though diverse lenses that highlight authorial stance, purpose, and perspective

Part of the fun of reading adept literature is looking for all its meanings and messages. Since people take written literature, critics have been interpreting it …. going all the way back to aboriginal Greece and Rome. For many centuries, literary criticism has been limited to some basic approaches involving historical, moral and biographical perspectives. Just during the 20th century, disquisitional approaches take go much more varied due to the huge increase of educated people and their widely various reactions to literature. As the significant of what literature is and can exist or should be has changed, so has the critics' responses to information technology.

Below are outlined for you half-dozen of the dozen-or-so "schools" of literary criticism currently deemed valid by the academic earth. A critical viewpoint is simply a lens through which we look at a piece of literature, allowing this lens to shape our reaction to the work. These different schools are not exclusive – in fact, most critical essays apply ideas from several types of criticism. But depending upon what piece of work y'all are reading, and what your own ideas about what good literature should do, or your own ideas about life and the globe, some critical methods will piece of work better than others or be more than helpful for your understanding of a piece of work. The goal of literary criticism is e'er to help the states understand and capeesh a work more fully, no matter what approach(es) we apply.

The following definitions are paraphrased from A Handbook of Disquisitional Approaches to Literature, fourth edition, Guerin, Labor, Morgan, Reesman & Willingham. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999

Traditional Critical Approaches

1. Historical-Biographical. This approach sees a literary work as a reflection of the author'south life and times or the life and times of the characters in the work. Critics using this school of thought investigate how plot details, settings, and characters of the work reflect or are representative of events, settings, and people in the author'south life or a direct outgrowth of — or reaction to– the civilisation in which the author lived.
2. Moral-Philosophical. This arroyo takes the position that the larger role of literature is to teach morality and probe philosophical issues, such as ethics, religion, or the nature of humanity. Literature is interpreted within the context of the philosophical thought of a period or group, such as Christianity, Existentialism, Buddhism, etc. Often critics will see in the work allusions to other works, people, or events from this perspective, or see the work equally allegorical.
3. Formalistic Criticism. Using this type of criticism, a reader would see the work as an independent and self-sufficient artistic object. This approach is also sometimes referred to equally the "New Criticism," since it came back in faddy in the 1960s-70s, merely it was originally an outgrowth of the "Art for Art'south Sake" movement of the late 1800s. Formalistic critics assume that everything necessary for analyzing the work is present in the work itself and condone whatever connection to possible exterior influences such every bit the author's ain life or historical times. This criticism considers what a work says and how it says information technology as inseparable issues. It focuses on shut reading, with sensitivity to the words and their various meanings. Information technology searches for structures, patterns, imagery and motifs, and figurative language along with the juxtaposition of scenes, tone, and other literary techniques in order to come to conclusions nigh the significant of the work.

Newer Approaches to Literary Criticism

1. Psychological Criticism. This approach deals with a piece of work of literature primarily as it is an expression – in fictional form – of the author's personality, mindset, feelings and desires. It likewise requires that we investigate the psychology of the characters and their motives in lodge to effigy out the work'southward meanings. This schoolhouse of criticism got its start with the work of Sigmund Freud, which incorporated the importance of the unconscious or sub-conscious in human behavior. Some typical "archetypal" Freudian interpretations include: rebellion against a father, id versus superego, expiry-wish forces, or sexual repression. Dreams, visualizations, and fantasies of characters in modern works usually stem from Freudian concepts.
2. Feminist / Gender Criticism. This arroyo asks us to apply a broad variety of bug related to gender, concerning the author, the work itself, the reader, and the societies of the author and reader, to determine the stance of the work on the feminist continuum. These critics would argue that in club to achieve validity, a literary criticism that claims universality must include the feminine consciousness, since till very recently and in many instances yet today, works of literature and criticism have been male person-dominated and therefore necessarily skewed in their perspective. Feminist critics await for the development of male and female characters and their motives to meet how the writer and his or her times affected the gender roles in the work.
3. Sociological / Marxist Criticism. This viewpoint considers detail aspects of the political content of the text; the author; the historical and socio-cultural context of the work; and the cultural, political, and personal situation of the reader in relationship to the text. These critics tend to focus on the overall themes of the piece of work as they relate to economic grade, race, sexual activity, and instances of oppression and/or liberation. Writer, critic and reader bias is explored.

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Source: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/englishcomp2kscopex92x2/chapter/what-is-literary-criticism/

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