Literary criticism essay

Literary criticism essay

It is one of the most popular types of literary criticism essay, which is based on feminist literary criticism essay. Literary Criticism Novel Under The Feet of Jesus. Jamaica Kincaid Literary Criticism On Seeing England For The First Time. Today, I literary criticism essay the liveliest psychoanalytic criticism addresses questions of gender and personality in the personality of the author and, literary criticism essay, to me, most interestingly, in the mind of the reader Holland ; Flynn and Schweickart Though set in different times of American history, the revisionist novel Montana written by Larry Watson explores the corruption of justice and the nepotistic community of Bentrock. Not a very sophisticated view and not very pleasurable literature. But there is always an element of personality in what a critic says—otherwise, why would we sign our articles?

Literary Criticism Essay Example

Psychoanalytic reading has been practiced since the early development of psychoanalysis itself, and has developed into a heterogeneous interpretive tradition. Critics may view the fictional characters as a psychological case study, attempting to identify such Freudian concepts as Oedipus complex, penis envy, Freudian slips, Id, ego and superego and so on, and demonstrate how they influenced the thoughts and behaviors of fictional characters. However, more complex variations of psychoanalytic criticism are possible. Like all forms of literary criticism, psychoanalytic criticism can yield useful clues to the sometime baffling symbols, actions, and settings in a literary work; however, literary criticism essay, literary criticism essay all forms of literary criticism, literary criticism essay, it has its limits.

As Guerin, et al. put it in A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. To see a great work of fiction or a great poem primarily as a psychological case study is often to miss its wider significance and perhaps even the essential aesthetic experience it should provide. Psychoanalytic: Such criticism aims at literary criticism essay the working of the human mind—especially the expression of the unconscious. Possibilities include analyzing a text like a dream, looking for symbolism and repressed meaning, or developing a psychological analysis of a character. Three ideas found in the work of Sigmund Freud are particularly useful: the dominance of the unconscious mind over the conscious, the expression of the unconscious mind through symbols often in dreamsliterary criticism essay sexuality as a literary criticism essay force for motivating human behavior.

Early psychoanalytic literary criticism would often treat the text as if it were a ind of dream. This means that the text represses its real or latent content behind obvious manifest content. The process of changing from latent to manifest content is known as the dream work, and involves operations of concentration and displacement. The critic analyzes the language and symbolism of a text to reverse the process of the dream work and arrive at the underlying latent thoughts. However, Lacanian scholars have noted that Lacan himself was not interested in literary criticism per se, but in how literature might illustrate a psychoanalytic method or concept. Charles Mauron: psychocriticism InCharles Mauron conceived a structured method to interpret literary works via psychoanalysis.

The study implied four different phases: 1. The creative process is akin to dreaming awake: as such, it is a mimetic, and cathartic, representation of an unconscious impulse or desire that is best expressed and revealed by metaphors and symbols. These metaphorical networks are significant of a literary criticism essay inner reality. They point at an obsession just as dreams can do. A basically unconscious sexual impulse is symbolically fulfilled in a positive and socially gratifying way, literary criticism essay, a process known as Sublimation. Romance is a multiple orgasm, literary criticism essay.

Psychoanalysis in Literature In a nutshell, the key to understanding the history of psychoanalytic literary criticism is to recognize that literary criticism is about books and psychoanalysis is about minds. Therefore, the psychoanalytic critic can only talk about the minds associated with the book. And what are those? There are three, and curiously, Freud spelled them out in his very first remarks on literature in the letter to Fliess of October 15, literary criticism essay, in which he discussed Oedipus Rex. Those are the three people that the psychoanalytic critic can talk about: the author, the audience, and some character represented in or associated with a text.

From the beginning of this field to the present, that cast of characters has never changed: author, audience, or some person derived from the text. Those are the three minds that the psychoanalytic critic addresses. How the psychoanalytic critic addresses those minds depends on the orientation of the critic. Is he or she a classical psychoanalyst, an ego psychologist, a Lacanian, a Kleinian, a member of the object-relations school, a Kohutian, and so on? Each of the various schools in the development of psychoanalysis necessarily produces a different style of psychoanalytic literary criticism. In the earliest stage of psychoanalytic criticism, the critics did little more than identify oedipus complexes and the occasional symbol or parapraxis in one or another work of literature.

Relevant collections would be: Phillips ; Manheim and Manheim ;; Ruitenbeek In the French critic Charles Mauron made the important point that these different levels of fantasies were all transformations of one another, literary criticism essay, superimposed, so that one could imagine the human being as a series of geological levels with oral fantasies at the deepest level, literary criticism essay, then anal, phallic and so on forming and leaving traces of themselves at the higher. This is, of course, consistent with the continuities we see psychoanalytically in the development of any human being. Again, we often read both the defenses and the fantasies back to the authors, and the result has been distinguished biographies by Leon EdelJustin Kaplan, and Cynthia Griffin Wolff, to name but a few of the many good psychobiographers.

Even more helpfully, we became able to see that literary forms functioned psychologically like various types of defense mechanism. Form works as a defense, both at the level of particular wordings and in larger structures. Our identifications with characters serve in this way, to modulate and direct our feelings as identifications do in life. A shift of the sensory modality in a poem may serve as a kind of isolation. Symbolizing serves to disguise all kinds of content in literary works. And, literary criticism essay, of literary criticism essay, omission functions like repression or denial. See Holland ; Withim ; Rose The idea of form as defense meant that we could talk about literary works that had no characters at all, where one could only talk about form.

We were no longer limited to plays and stories. We could talk about lyric poems see, for example, Sullivan or Tennenhouse We could analyze non-fiction prose. Necessarily we related these to the mind of the author. Various collections of essays use one or another of these familiar approaches: object-relations Woodward, Schwartz ; Rudnytsky ; self-psychology Bouson ; Berman ; Lacan, Davis ; Stoltzfus In their various modes, literary criticism essay follow the general pattern of psychoanalytic criticism: applying object-relations, literary criticism essay, self-psychology, or Lacanian psychoanalysis to the reader, the author, or some person derived from the text.

To me, the most significant breakthrough was the recognition that our relationship to a literary work is to a transitional or transformational object, literary criticism essay. Literature exists in potential space Schwartz ; Bollas There have been many failures of psychoanalytic criticism, mostly as a result of crudity in applying psychoanalytic ideas: labeling, pathography, id analysis. And there have been some successes. Today, I think the liveliest psychoanalytic criticism addresses questions of gender and personality in the personality of the author and, literary criticism essay, to me, most interestingly, in the mind of the reader Holland ; Flynn and Schweickart Nowadays we have psychoanalytically-oriented courses in literature and classes oriented to analyzing reader-response Holland and Schwartz ; Hollandb; Berman In such teaching, a critic or teacher can help readers understand what they are bringing to a given work of literature.

How do you respond when you enter the obsessionl world of Charles Dickens? How do you respond when you enter the oral world of Christopher Marlowe with its overwhelming rage and desire? How do you shape and change those those worlds to fit your own characteristic patterns of fantasy and literary criticism essay In other words, what kind of person are you and how do you perceive the world of books and the world around you? But what about the future? Literary criticism essay seems to me that the direction psychoanalytic theory, including its theory of literature, needs to take in the twenty-first century is to integrate psychoanalytic insights with the new discoveries coming from brain research and literary criticism essay science.

These are very powerful and, as I read them, often quite in harmony with what psychoanalysis has been saying about people from an entirely different perspective and based on entirely different evidence. It seems to me literary criticism essay what psychoanalysis or psychology in general needs to do is put together the clinical knowledge derived from psychoanalysis with the new knowledge of how the mind works in perception, memory, learning, bilateralization, and, most important for a literary critic, in the way we use language.

I do not think this is an impossible task, or even, perhaps, a very difficult one. There have been several efforts so far: Reiser ; Winson ; Harris ;Modell ; Kandel What I think is rather more difficult is integrating with literary criticism the things we are finding out about the brain and how it acquires and uses language with literary criticism. MRI and PET scans enable us to get pictures of the blood and oxygen flow and other things in the brain as that person fears or perceives or reads or listens to languge. Scientists like Gerard Edelman or Hanna and Antonio Damasio are showing how we understand words in our brains.

There is no simple correspondence between signifier and signified as Lacan claimed. Rather, just to understand one word, the brain must bring together a variety of separate features, the sound of the word, its grammatical role, and other words that it is like and unlike. Then, to arrive at a meaning for a word, the brain assembles or coordinates these different kinds of information from different places in the brain. Furthermore, and most important for the psychoanalyst, what information there is, where it literary criticism essay located, and what emotions accompany it are all highly personal. If so, then a fortiori each of us will interpret a literary text consisting of a lot of words in an individual way. These new researches confirm what literary criticism essay reader-response critics have been saying for a long time.

But more to the point, they confirm what every psychoanalyst has seen from behind the couch. That is, a word, an event—take, for example, a national catastrophe like the Kennedy assassination or the Challenger crash or the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. Each patient will respond to that event out of his or her personal history and character. Neither is there a fixed meaning in a literary text. In a general way, then, I think the discoveries of brain science literary criticism essay confirming the theory behind psychoanalytic literary criticism, particularly reader-response psychoanalytic literary criticism.

But how, if at all, can we apply this to individual works of literature? This may be a question best left to neuroscientists and scientifically oriented psychoanalysts. What I am sure of is that the best future I can imagine for psychoanalytic literary criticism is a fusion of insights derived from psychoanalysis with insights derived from neuroscience. What is the purpose of all this mental energy that people have put into psychoanalytic literary criticism over the past century? What was it all for? What should it be for? What is the purpose of psychoanalytic literary literary criticism essay What, for that matter, is the purpose of any kind of literary criticism?

In the s, literary critics vastly expanded their subject matter to include just about anything that involves language. Nowadays, in literature classes literary criticism essay scholarly journals, you find discussions, not just of this or that poem or story or play or writer, but of gender, race, politics, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, all kinds of sciences, literary criticism essay, and, of course, of psychoanalysis. Needless to say, few English teachers can qualify as the universal geniuses that such discussions require. Perhaps for that reason we might do well to focus on that part of this larger literary criticism that does talk about literature, particularly this or that particular poem or story or play or film, as psychoanalytic literary critics tend to do.

What is the purpose, what is the use, of saying Hamlet has an oedipus complex and maybe Shakespeare does too? What is the use of saying that Othello and Iago have a homosexual marriage? What is the purpose of literary criticism? Literary criticism, any kind of criticism, rests on the purpose of literature itself, for, after all, criticism is, as the old saying has it, only the handmaiden to the muse. We come, literary criticism essay, then, to a much larger question.

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There have been several efforts so far: Reiser ; Winson ; Harris ;Modell ; Kandel What I think is rather more difficult is integrating with literary criticism the things we are finding out about the brain and how it acquires and uses language with literary criticism. MRI and PET scans enable us to get pictures of the blood and oxygen flow and other things in the brain as that person fears or perceives or reads or listens to languge. Scientists like Gerard Edelman or Hanna and Antonio Damasio are showing how we understand words in our brains. There is no simple correspondence between signifier and signified as Lacan claimed. Rather, just to understand one word, the brain must bring together a variety of separate features, the sound of the word, its grammatical role, and other words that it is like and unlike.

Then, to arrive at a meaning for a word, the brain assembles or coordinates these different kinds of information from different places in the brain. Furthermore, and most important for the psychoanalyst, what information there is, where it is located, and what emotions accompany it are all highly personal. If so, then a fortiori each of us will interpret a literary text consisting of a lot of words in an individual way. These new researches confirm what we reader-response critics have been saying for a long time. But more to the point, they confirm what every psychoanalyst has seen from behind the couch. That is, a word, an event—take, for example, a national catastrophe like the Kennedy assassination or the Challenger crash or the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam.

Each patient will respond to that event out of his or her personal history and character. Neither is there a fixed meaning in a literary text. In a general way, then, I think the discoveries of brain science are confirming the theory behind psychoanalytic literary criticism, particularly reader-response psychoanalytic literary criticism. But how, if at all, can we apply this to individual works of literature? This may be a question best left to neuroscientists and scientifically oriented psychoanalysts. What I am sure of is that the best future I can imagine for psychoanalytic literary criticism is a fusion of insights derived from psychoanalysis with insights derived from neuroscience.

What is the purpose of all this mental energy that people have put into psychoanalytic literary criticism over the past century? What was it all for? What should it be for? What is the purpose of psychoanalytic literary criticism? What, for that matter, is the purpose of any kind of literary criticism? In the s, literary critics vastly expanded their subject matter to include just about anything that involves language. Nowadays, in literature classes or scholarly journals, you find discussions, not just of this or that poem or story or play or writer, but of gender, race, politics, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, all kinds of sciences, and, of course, of psychoanalysis.

Needless to say, few English teachers can qualify as the universal geniuses that such discussions require. Perhaps for that reason we might do well to focus on that part of this larger literary criticism that does talk about literature, particularly this or that particular poem or story or play or film, as psychoanalytic literary critics tend to do. What is the purpose, what is the use, of saying Hamlet has an oedipus complex and maybe Shakespeare does too? What is the use of saying that Othello and Iago have a homosexual marriage? What is the purpose of literary criticism? Literary criticism, any kind of criticism, rests on the purpose of literature itself, for, after all, criticism is, as the old saying has it, only the handmaiden to the muse.

We come, then, to a much larger question. What is the purpose of literature? Most, perhaps even all, theories of literature seem to me to agree in a general way on two purposes. They are most simply expressed by Horace in his Ars Poetica: aut prodesse aut delectare. We turn to literature for a pleasurable experience. In the duller periods of literary history, people said that prodesse means teaching better morals. Not a very sophisticated view and not very pleasurable literature. But then, in our rather phallic society, politicians rarely show interest in the arts Apple Another idea of prodesse would be that of a middlebrow book reviewer.

This novel tells us what life is like in an advertising agency. But we do not prize Ulysses for its picture of Dublin, nor The Great Gatsby for its geography of Long Island. I can enjoy the intensely interpersonal mind of Mrs. In other words, I can take pleasure in the great human themes, both the good ones and the bad ones, by means of what I read. Not judging them morally, not downloading information from them, but understanding them as fully as we can so that they can become part of our total experience of living. What is the purpose of literary criticism, then?

I would suggest that the role of the critic parallels that of the writer: the critic is also prodesse aut delectare, to delight or to instruct, but more narrowly than the writer. The critic delights or instructs in relation to literature. That is, the critic should give you ideas that enable you to add to your delight. If you observe these aspects of the work, you will have a better experience of it. You will be able to enter the world of the book in a more imaginative, more empathic, more satisfying way.

Criticism should help us to understand both our experience of literary pleasure and to understand ourselves as the experiencers. Criticism finally should enable both critic and ordinary reader to obey the primary command above the temple of the Delphic Oracle: Know Thyself. The art gives us the experience. Criticism should give us some understanding of the experience. That is how literary criticism serves as the handmaiden of the muse. It helps literature achieve both its pleasure and instruction. Very occasionally, literary criticism is an aesthetic experience in itself—more often it is not.

In other words instruction helps delight and delight helps instruction. In that sense, all literary criticism would benefit from psychological wisdom. The better the psychology, the better the criticism. I started by saying that literary criticism is about books and psychoanalysis is about minds. The reader-response critics and the brain scientists would add an important corollary to that. The only way you can know a book is through a mind. Inevitably then, there is a psychological component to any talk at all about books. They leave it unspoken or even denied.

But there is always an element of personality in what a critic says—otherwise, why would we sign our articles? Now how does this ideal for criticism translate into psychoanalytic literary criticism in particular? Suppose I say that Dickens is an obsessional writer. I give you a term. You can name the quality you are experiencing. I give you a way of thinking about it. I am giving you the opportunity of finding out what obsession is, what it feels like, what kind of imagination, what kind of world, such a person inhabits.

In effect, I offer you another way of entering the imaginative world of, say, Bleak House or Our Mutual Friend. In other words, I think psychoanalytic critics should be interpreting their own, if you will, countertransference to the text or whatever else they are describing. I think most of us would agree that, mixed in with all the delightful comedy, is a great deal of dreadful sentimentality. We could simply call it mush or treacle and dismiss it. But suppose I offer you a bit of psychoanalytic criticism. Suppose I say to you that Charlie Chaplin, as Stephen Weissman has recently written is dealing in his films with the problem of a promiscuous mother.

At first, she had been a glamorous dancer onstage where the boy often admired her. At the end she was an impoverished seamstress, who perhaps prostituted herself, and who certainly suffered and eventually died from syphilis. We can understand why so often in his films his hero rescues and repairs damaged and fallen women. We can understand the ineptitude, the childishness of his tramp-hero as he tries to attract these women, like a child playing up to an elusive mother. Most people find these episodes repellingly sentimental. We could simply write them off. But I think psychoanalytic insight offers us a chance to do better. We can enter into these episodes more fully, with better understanding and more empathy.

We can rescue them by using our imagination as Chaplin rescued his mother in imagination. We can understand the little tramp as a recreation of the boy Chaplin. Literary Criticism. In Willstead town, in North Carolina strange things are happening. Do you want to know more? Well in A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine LEngle a wonderful writer tells all the weird things that are happening. Madeleine LEngle was born in and she is A Wrinkle in Time Literary Criticism. Its content is fundamentally drawn upon many references to the Bible. Many scholars are used Literary Criticism Literary Devices Modern Society.

He utilizes his little experiences to clarify a Tradition promulgates the deepest spaces and the smallest cracks of the human life, filling in and influencing as it lingers above and below the surface. It can be used to express, share, remember, stabilize. Traditions can remind us of our identity and our place in During King Philips War of , a wave of violence between British colonists and Native Americans crashed over New England. Literary Criticism Why Nations Fail. Both stories share the same topic about home, family, and childhood Literary Criticism Volar.

Creative work is merely an echo of life. Many forms of art are inspired by the events that take place in the real world. The experimental novel, Pale Fire, written by Vladimir Nabokov, describes the many ambiguities of John Shades life viewed in perspective from Literary Criticism Vladimir Nabokov. The published novel Under The Feet of Jesus by Helena Viramontes depicts the protagonist Estrella and her family moving to America for better opportunities to survive. The vividly brutal descriptions of the poor living conditions of immigrants raises awareness for the lack of immigrant rights Literary Criticism Novel Under The Feet of Jesus.

In the novel Uglies by Scott Westerfield, the author skillfully utilizes characterization to make his characters believable. Characterization is when the writer reveals the personality of a character. Direct characterization is when the author directly states the character trait. The protagonist or main character in Literary Criticism Novel Uglies. Published in , The Right Stuff was a great success as it Literary Criticism Tom Wolfe. The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom is the tale about the life of a lady in Holland during the German Nazi attack and holocaust.

Ten Boom tells about her adolescence, helping individuals escape through the counter Nazi underground, her capture and detainment, and Literary Criticism The Hiding Place. The three main characters of the novel, The Help, are the white journalist Miss Skeeter and the two black maids Aibileen and Minny. Miss Skeeter wants to write a book about the relationship between the black maids and their employers from the point of view Literary Criticism Novel The Help. Marx defended this idea in chapter 2 of his Communist Manifesto, which is a criticism of bourgeois society, Literary Criticism The Death of Ivan Ilyich Tolstoy.

Unfortunately death is inevitable, and each and every one of us is bound to die at some point in our life. In The Death of Ivan Introduction Most literature authors involve different literary styles in their works, in a bid to leave a mark to the readers. Different literary methods are applicable. One of these literary styles is Rhetoric. In the New York Times Bestseller novel, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a tragic story of the World War II Holocaust is described. The boy is never told about his Literary Criticism The Boy in The Striped Pajamas. In Ragtime , Doctorow blurs the line between reality and fiction in order to emphasise the validity of historical accounts.