Summary
Highlights
Influenced by Sigmund Freud, this criticism examines characters' motives, hidden desires, fears, and behaviors to understand their personalities, which may also reflect the author's psyche. Symbolisms also play a vital role in this analysis.
The session introduces the importance of understanding different approaches to literature, specifically literary criticisms, which serve as 'lenses' for analyzing texts. The learning targets include distinguishing various approaches, performing close analysis, and identifying texts and authors from Asia and Africa.
Critical approaches are defined as perspectives used to analyze and interpret texts. They help answer key questions like 'what do we read' (content/context), 'why do we read' (motives/intentions), and 'how do we read' (interpretation methods).
The video lists several important literary criticism types: Formalist, Biographical, New Historicist, Psychological/Psychoanalytic, Deconstructionist, Reader's Response, Sociological (Marxist and Feminist), Gender, and Post-Colonial criticism.
Formalist criticism posits that a text's meaning is derived solely from its internal elements and devices, such as literary elements, devices, structure, and language. It emphasizes how these components interact to form a coherent whole.
Biographical criticism analyzes a text by considering the author's life and background, exploring how their personal principles, beliefs, and experiences influenced the creation of the work.
This modern approach considers the historical context, time period, events, ideologies, power struggles, and beliefs prevalent when the literary text was created, exploring their contribution to the work.
This approach highlights the reader's role in creating meaning. It views reading as an experience rather than just interpreting an object, acknowledging that readers' personal experiences and situations influence their interpretation and create a living meaning in their imagination.
Sociological criticism focuses on how societal beliefs, values, economic, political, and cultural issues are reflected in and influenced by literary texts. It views literature as a reflection of the society that produced it.
A sub-category of sociological criticism, Marxist criticism examines power struggles, class conflicts, and the roles of power, politics, and money within the text, particularly the dynamics between the rich and the poor, or superior and inferior classes.
Another sub-category of sociological criticism, feminist criticism analyzes the roles, positions, and influences of women in literary texts, often challenging patriarchal structures and stereotypes. It questions gender relationships, power dynamics, and the definitions of masculinity and femininity within a work.
An extension of feminist criticism, this approach emphasizes the struggles of the LGBTQ+ community and explores the multifaceted and flexible nature of gender and sexuality. It questions traditional gender roles, supports characters challenging binaries, and examines the political and ideological agendas in queer literature, focusing on fluidity and how texts contribute to understanding LGBTQ+ experiences.
This approach analyzes literature produced by both colonial powers and colonized regions, focusing on themes of colonization, oppression, double identity, and hybridity. It explores how colonization affects the identity and culture of a country and its people, such as the blending of cultures in former colonies.
The video concludes by emphasizing that these critical approaches can be integrated, as one criticism may overlap with others (e.g., Marxist with Sociological or Historical). Analyzing a text from multiple angles using varied approaches leads to a more comprehensive understanding and appreciation.
Introduced by Jacques Derrida, deconstructionist criticism believes texts have multiple valid meanings because readers interpret them differently than the writer intended. It focuses on binary oppositions (e.g., black/white, good/evil) and the connotations of words to uncover themes.