JULIUS JAY JR B. DASKEO

In literary criticism, the term philology generally denotes approaches which focus on editorial problems and the reconstruction of texts. The materiality of texts, a major concern of traditional philology, is still relevant to today’s literary scholarship, as illustrated by the debate concerning the reliability of the generally accepted edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).  

 

Together with theology and grammar, rhetoric remained the dominant textual discipline for almost two thousand years. Since ancient Greco-Roman culture treasured public speech, rhetoric compiled a number of rules and techniques for efficient composition and powerful oratory. It offered guidelines for every phase of textual composition including inventio (selection of themes), dispositio (organization of material), elocutio (verbalization with the help of rhetorical figures), memoria (the technique of remembering the speech), and actio (delivery of the speech).

In the nineteenth century, rhetoric eventually lost its influence and partially developed into stylistics, a field whose methodology was adopted by literary criticism and art history as well. With the aim of describing stylistic idiosyncrasies of individual authors, entire nations, or whole periods, stylistics focused on grammatical structures (lexis, syntax), acoustic elements (melody, rhyme, meter, rhythm), and over-arching forms (rhetorical figures) in its analyses of texts. 

 

The terms formalism and structuralism encompass a number of schools in the first half of the twentieth century whose main goal lies in the explication of the formal and structural patterns of literary texts. This emphasis on the intrinsic and structural aspects of a literarywork deliberately distinguished itself from older traditions—above all the biographical literary criticism of the nineteenth century—which were primarily concerned with extrinsic or extra-textual features intheir analysis of literature. 

 

Largely independent of European formalism and structuralism, new criticism established itself as the dominant school of literary criticism in the English-speaking academic community during the 1930s and 1940s. New criticism objects toevaluative critique, source studies, investigations of sociohistoricalback-ground, and the history of motifs; it also counters authorcentered biographical or psychological approaches as well as thehistory of reception. Its main concern is to free literary criticism of extrinsic factors and thereby shift the center of attention to the literary text itself.

 

Semiotics and deconstruction are the most recent trends in textoriented literary theory of the 1970s and 1980s, which regards a text as a system of signs.

 

Semiotics and deconstruction use the verbal sign or signifier as the starting point of their analyses, arguing that nothing exists outside the text, i.e., that our perception of the world is of a textual nature. A new and unconventional aspect of semiotics and deconstruction is their attempt to extend the traditional notion of textuality to nonliterary or nonlinguistic sign systems.

Like semiotics, deconstruction also highlights the building-block character of texts whose elements consist of signs. This poststructuralist method of analysis starts with the assumption that a text can be analyzed (destructed) and put together (constructed).

2.      AUTHOR-ORIENTED APPROACHES

 

This author-oriented approach established a direct link between the literary text and the biography of the author. Dates, facts, and events in an author’s life are juxtaposed with literary elements of his or her works in order to find aspects which connect the biography of the author with the text.

Autobiographies are obviously suitable for this kind of approach, which compares the fictional portrayal with the facts and figures from the author’s life. In many cases, autobiographical material enters the fictional text in codes.

Author-centered approaches focus also on aspects which might have entered the text on a subconscious or involuntary level. The fact that Mary Shelley had a miscarriage during the period in which she wrote her novel Frankenstein (1818) can be related directly to the plot. According to the author-centered approaches, the central theme of the novel, the creation of an artificial human being, can be traced back to Mary Shelley’s intense psychological occupation with the issue of birth at the time. 

 

3.       READER-ORIENTED APPROACHES

 

A reader-oriented approach developed in the 1960s called reception theory, reader-response theory, or aesthetics of reception. All three terms are used almost synonymously to summarize those approaches which focus on the reader’s point of view. Some of these approaches do not postulate a single objective text, but rather assume that there are as many texts as readers. Reader-centered approaches examine the readership of a text and investigate why, where, and when it is read. They also examine certain reading practices of social, ethnic, or national groups. Many of these investigations also deal with and try to explain the physiological aspect of the actual reading process. They aim at revealing certain mechanisms which are employed in the transformation of the visual signs on paper into a coherent, meaningful text in the mind of the reader. These approaches assume that a text creates certain expectations in the reader in every phase of reading.

Expectations are at the basis of text interpretation on every level of the reading process, from the deciphering of a single word or sentence to the analysis of thematic structures of texts. Reception theory, therefore, shifts the focus from the text to the interaction between reader and text. It argues that the interpretation of texts cannot and must not be detached from the reading individual. A further aspect which is closely connected with this movement is the investigation of the reception of texts by a particular readership.

In reception history sales figures are examined together with reviews in newspapers and magazines. These analyses can either look at the reception of texts in one particular period (synchronic analysis) or trace changes and developments in the reception of texts in literary history (diachronic analysis). The reader-centered approaches of reception theory and reception history, particularly influential in the 1970s as reactions to the THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE 93 dogmas of new criticism, were pushed into the background in the 1980s by text-oriented semiotics and deconstruction as well as by a variety of context-centered schools.

 

4.       CONTEXT-ORIENTED APPROACHES

 

The term context-oriented approaches refers here to a heterogeneous group of schools and methodologies which do not regard literary texts as self-contained, independent works of art but try to place them within a larger context. Depending on the movement, this context can be history, social and political background, literary genre, nationality, or gender. The most influential movement to this day is literary history, which divides literary phenomena into periods, describes the text with respect to its historical background, dates texts and examines their mutual influence. This movement is associated with the discipline of history and is guided by historical methodology. The entire notion of literary history has become so familiar to us that it is difficult to distinguish it as an approach at all. This historically informed methodology which organizes literary works in a variety of categories is, of course, as arbitrary and dependent on conventions as any other approach. An important school which places literary works in the context of larger sociopolitical mechanisms is Marxist literary theory. Conditions of production in certain literary periods and their influence on the literary texts of the time are examined. A Marxist literary interpretation, for example, might see the development of the novel in the eighteenth century as a consequence both of new economic conditions for writers and readers and of new modes in the material production of printed books. Since the mechanisms of class, on which Marxist theory focuses, often parallel the structural processes at work in “race” and “gender,” the theoretical framework provided by Marxist criticism has been adapted by younger schools that focus on marginalized groups, including feminist, African American, gay and lesbian literary criticism or colonial literary studies. Text-oriented theoretical approaches such as deconstruction and new historicism are also indebted to Marxist thought, both for their terminology and philosophical foundations.

One of the latest developments in the field of contextual approaches has been new historicism, which arose in the US in the 1980s. It builds on post-structuralism and deconstruction, with their focus on text and discourse, but adds a historical dimension to the discussion of literary texts. Certain works by Shakespeare, for instance, are viewed together with historical documents on the discovery of America, and the discovery itself is treated as a text. History, therefore, is not regarded as isolated from the literary text in the sense of a “historical background” but rather as a textual phenomenon.

 

The most productive and, at the same time, most revolutionary movement of the younger theories of literary criticism in general and the contextual approaches in particular is feminist literary theory. This complex critical approach is part of a movement which has established itself in almost all academic disciplines and has become particularly strong in the various branches of modern literary criticism. Although gender is always at the center of attention in this school, this particular movement may be used to demonstrate how different approaches in literary studies tend to overlap. Feminist literary theory starts with the assumption that “gender difference” is an aspect which has been neglected in traditional literary criticism and, therefore, that traditional domains of literary criticism have to be reexamined from a gender-oriented perspective. At the beginning of this movement in the late 1960s, thematic issues such as the portrayal of women in literary texts by male authors stood in the foreground.

The most recent trends in gender theory incorporate concepts of deconstruction, thus questioning the entire notion of a stable gender identity. This discussion which was initiated by the American literary theorist Judith Butler (1956–) approaches gender identity in a manner reminiscent of deconstruction explaining meaning in language. Gender is thus “constructed” through a number of interacting elements within a societal fsystem. The key term is “gender construction” according to which “man” and “woman” adopt the role of signifiers whose meaning or identity is construed through an interdependent network of other signifiers.

 

 

In the English-speaking world, the term literary criticism can refer to the literary interpretation of texts as well as their evaluation. For that reason, “literary critique” is sometimes used to differentiate between the interpretation of a text and the evaluative criticism that often occurs in connection with literary awards and book reviews. In all philologies (disciplines concerned with the literatures of different countries or ethnic groups) there are publications in weekend editions of major newspapers which introduce the latest in primary or secondary literature in the form of book reviews.