Critical Approaches

 This excellent distillation (of libraries of critical discourse) is originally from Dr. Carl Runon.

If you would like another review of basically the same material with a different organization, see Purdue. 

I.	OBJECTIVISM: Literature is an independent object, free from the subjectivity of author and reader.
	A.	Formalism: The work is complete in itself, written for its own sake, and unified by its form--that which makes it a work of art.
		1.	New Criticism: The dominant literary criticism of the middle 20th century, New Criticism remains an important influence today. They attempt to demonstrate formal unity (or organic unity) by showing how every part of a work--every word, every image, every element--contributes to a central, unifying theme. (This is distinct from mechanical unity, the external, preconceived structure of rules that do not arise from the individuality of the work but from the type or genre.) New Critical analysis (or explication of the text) has become so universally accepted as the first step in understanding literature that it is almost everywhere the critical approach taught in introductory literature courses. New Critics' focus on theme or meaning as well as form means that for them literature is referential: it points to something outside itself, things in the real, external world, in human experience; thus, they do not question the reality of the phenomenal world or the ability of language to represent it.
	B.	Structuralism: Structuralists believe that literature is not referential, but rather the text is an independent aesthetic object that is detached from historical, social, or political implications.
	C.	Post-structuralism : The umbrella designation for any of several schools of criticism which, while depending crucially on the insights of science-based theory, attack the very idea that any kind of certitude can exist about the meaning, understandibility, or sharability of texts.
		1.	Deconstruction [Jacques Derrida]: takes the observations of structuralism to its logical conclusion--that semiotic differentiation in texts means they can ultimately have no stable, definite, or discoverable meaning.
II.	SUBJECTIVISM: any form of psychological and self-, subject-, or reader-centered criticism
	A.	Psychological Criticism: assumes that literature is the expression of the author's psyche, often his or her unconscious, and, like dreams, needs to be interpreted.
		1.	Freudian Criticism [Sigmund Freud]: asserts that the meaning of the literary work does not lie on its surface but in the psyche of the author.
		2.	Lacanian Criticism [Jacques Lacan]: language expresses an absence--words represent an absent object which cannot be made present.
		3.	Jungian Criticism [Carl Jung]: assumes humans share a collective unconscious which contains universal images, patterns, and forms of human experiences or archetypes, and that embedded in all literature is the central myth--the monomyth of the quest
	B.	Phenomenological Criticism: Critics of consciousness consider all the writings of an author as the expression of his or her mind-set.
	C.	Reader-response Criticism: the essence of the literary work does not exist on the page; it is only the text. The text becomes a work only when it is read, and no two readers receive exactly the same meaning from identical texts.
III	HISTORICAL CRITICISM
	A.	Dialogism [Mikhail Bakhtin]: Language (and literature) is a continuous dialogue, each utterance being a reply to what has gone before. The dialogic critic sees the work of literature as a part of the dialogue of the culture.
		1.	Sociological Criticism: Literature is one aspect of the larger processes of history, particularly those which involve people in social groups or as members of social institutions or movements. Sociological criticism attempts to relate what happens in texts to social events and patterns; the most important functions of literature involve the way that literature both portrays and influences human interactions.
		2.	Marxist Criticism [Karl Marx]: initially in the 19th century it was concerned with the way literary works would reveal the state of the struggle between classes in the historical place and moment. But in the 20th century, it shifted its focus to the role of perception and insisted that all use of language, including literary and critical language, is ideological.
		3.	Feminist Criticism: Strongly conscious that most of recorded history has given grossly disproportionate attention to the interests, thoughts, and actions of men, feminist thought endeavors both to extend contemporary attention to distinctly feminine concerns, ideas, and accomplishments and to recover the largely unrecorded and unknown history of women in earlier times.
	B.	New Historicism: Drawing on the insights of modern anthropology, it wishes to isolate the fundamental values in texts and cultures, and it regards texts both as evidence of basic cultural patterns and as forces in social and cultural change.
IV.	PLURALISM: Many of the critical perspectives seem to overlap and to approach literature from a combination of these perspectives is generally enriching
	A.	Pluralism (approaching literature from a mixture of perspectives) clearly will cause problems when the critic seems to be operating out of contradictory assumptions.
	B.	Yet pluralists contend that they make use of promising insights or methods wherever they find them and argue that putting together the values of different approaches leads to a more fair and balanced view of texts and their uses.
	C.	Opponents--those who insist on a consistency of ideological commitment--argue that pluralists are simply unwilling to state or admit their real commitments, and any mixing of methods leads to confusion, uncertainty, and inconsistency rather than fairness.