Literary Terms: All Kinds of Criticism

           Name: Vaishali Hareshbhai Jasoliya

           Roll No. : 29

Enrollment no.: PG14101019

Topic: Literary Terms:

            All Kinds of Criticism

Paper No.: 3

Email-Id: jasoliyavaishali@gmail.com

Submitted to: MAHARAJA KRISHNAKUMARSINHJI            

                                     BHAVNAGAR UNIVERSITY

                                     DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

◘ Criticism:

                        The word ‘criticism’ is derived from the Greek word kritikos and it means ‘Judgement’.It concerned with defining, classifying, analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating works of literature.

“Literary criticism is the evaluation of literary works. This includes the classification by genre analysis of structure and judgment of value.”

It means.....the art of judging and defining the qualities or merits of things, especially of a literary or artistic work. Its use is to get best understanding of the value of literature and proper pleasure of literature.

“Criticism is the play of the mind on the aesthetic qualities of literature, having for its object an interpretation of literary values.”

-         Atkins

“To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.”

-         Aristotle

“Don’t criticize what you can’t understand.”

-         Bob Dylan

“Literary Criticism is the study, discussion, evaluation and interpretation of literature.”

            We search on piece of literature like the matter, the manner, the technique and language by the criticism.

◘Practical Criticism / Applied Criticism:

                        Practical criticism or applied criticism concerns itself with particular works and writers; in an applied critique, the theoretical principles controlling the analysis, interpretation, and evaluation are often left implicit, or brought in only as the occasion demands. Among the more influential works of applied criticism in England and America are the literary essays of Dryden in the Restoration; Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the English poets (1779-81); Coleridge’s chapters on the poetry of Wordsworth in Biographia Literaria (1817) and his lectures on Shakespeare; William Hazlitt’s lectures on Shakespeare and the English poets, in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century; Matthew Arnold’s Essays in Criticism (1865 and following); I.A.Richards’ Practical Criticism (1930);T.S.Eliot’s  Selected Essays(1932); and the many critical essays by Virginia Woolf,F.R.Leavis,and Lionel Trilling. Cleanth Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn (1947) exemplifies the “close reading” of single texts which was the typical mode of practical criticism in the American New Criticism. For an example of practical criticism applied to a single poetic text, see Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (2d ed., 1998).

                        In Practical criticism, a frequent distinction is made between impressionistic and judicial criticism:

◘ Impressionistic criticism:

                   Impressionistic criticism attempts to represent in words the felt qualities of a particular passage or work, and to express the responses (the “impression”) that the work directly evokes from the critic. As William Hazlitt put it in his essays “On Genius and Common Sense” (1824): “You decide from feeling, and not from reason; that is, from the impression of a number of things on the mind…though you may not be able to analyze or account for it in the several particulars.”And Walter Pater later said that in criticism “the first step toward seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realize it distinctly,” and posed as the basic question, “What is this song or picture…to me?.”At its extreme this mode of criticism becomes, in Anatole France’s phrase, “the adventures of a sensitive soul among masterpieces.”

◘ Mimetic criticism:

                   Mimetic criticism views the literary work as an imitation, or reflection, or representation of the world and human life, and the primary criterion applied to a work is the “truth” and “adequacy” of its representation to the matter that it represents, or should represent. This mode of criticism, which first appeared in Plato and (in a qualified way) in Aristotle, remains characteristic of modern theories of literary realism.

◘ Pragmatic criticism:

                   Pragmatic criticism views the work as something which is constructed in order to achieve certain effects on the audience (effects such as aesthetic pleasure, instruction, or kinds of emotion), and it tends to judge the value of the work according to its success in achieving that aim. This approach, which largely dominated literary discussion from the versified Art of poetry by the Roman Horace (first century BC) through the eighteenth century, has been revived in rhetorical criticism, which emphasizes the artistic strategies by which an author engages and influences the responses of readers to the matters represented in a literary work. The pragmatic approach has also been adopted by some structuralists who analyze a literary text as a systematic play of codes that produce the interpretative responses of a reader.

◘ Expressive criticism:

                   Expressive criticism treats a literary work primarily in relation to its author. It defines poetry as an expression, or overflow, or utterance of feelings, or as the product of the poet’s imagination operating on his or her perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; it tends to judge the work by its sincerity, or its adequacy to the poet’s individual vision or state of mind; and it often seeks in the work evidences of the particular temperament and experiences of the author who, deliberately or unconsciously, has revealed himself or herself in it. Such views were developed mainly by romantic critics in the early nineteenth century and remain current in our own time, especially in the writings of psychological and psychoanalytic critics and in critics of consciousness such as George Poulet and the Geneva School. For a reading of literary criticism itself as involving self expression, see Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Character of Criticism, 2006.

◘ Objective criticism:

                   Objective criticism deals with a work of literature as something which stands free from what is often called an “extrinsic” relationship to the poet, or to the audience, or to the environing world. Instead it describes the literary product as a self-sufficient and autonomous object, or else as a world-in-itself, which is to be contemplated as its own end, and to be analyzed and judged solely by “intrinsic” criteria such as its complexity, coherence, equilibrium, integrity, and the interrelations of its component elements, the conception of the self-sufficiency of an aesthetic object was proposed in Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (1790)-see distance and involvement- was taken up by proponents of art for art’s sake in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and has been elaborated in detailed modes of applied criticism by a number of important critics since the 1920s, including the New Critics Chicago School, and proponents of European formalism.

                   An essential critical enterprise that the ordinary reader takes for granted is to establish a valid text for a literary work; see the entry textual criticism. For a detailed discussion of the classification of traditional theories that is represented in this essay, see M.H.Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953).

Conclusion:

                   A good conclusion gives your literary criticism a sense of closure without boring your reader with a rehash of things you have already written. By using the concluding strategies below, you can wrap up your literary analysis in a way that is meaningful for both you and your reader. Because literary analysis is subject, you may find yourself arguing a point that other analysis may not agree with. If this is the case, you might want to qualify your perspective in the conclusion by including a statement about other known opinions and why your argument disproves the other. This will show that you have done your background research and have an answer for the critics of your own work.