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Literary Criticism

How We Read, Interpret, and Judge Texts. Slides: Literary Criticism · Classical and Renaissance Criticism · Romantic and Victorian Criticism · Formalism and New Criticism · Structuralism · Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction · Marxist Literary Criticism · Feminist Literary Criticism.

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How We Read, Interpret, and Judge Texts Key sections include: Literary Criticism; Classical and Renaissance Criticism; Romantic and Victorian Criticism; Formalism and New Criticism; Structuralism; Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction; Marxist Literary Criticism; Feminist Literary Criticism; Postcolonial Criticism; Reader-Response Theory.

Key sections

01Literary Criticism
02Classical and Renaissance Criticism
03Romantic and Victorian Criticism
04Formalism and New Criticism
05Structuralism
06Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction
07Marxist Literary Criticism
08Feminist Literary Criticism
09Postcolonial Criticism
10Reader-Response Theory
11New Historicism and Cultural Studies
12Psychoanalytic Criticism
13Ecocriticism
14Digital Humanities and Distant Reading
15Contemporary Debates
16The Value of Literary Criticism

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literature literary criticism

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Slide outline

01Literary Criticism
02Classical and Renaissance Criticism
03Romantic and Victorian Criticism
04Formalism and New Criticism
05Structuralism
06Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction
07Marxist Literary Criticism
08Feminist Literary Criticism
09Postcolonial Criticism
10Reader-Response Theory
11New Historicism and Cultural Studies
12Psychoanalytic Criticism
13Ecocriticism
14Digital Humanities and Distant Reading
15Contemporary Debates
16The Value of Literary Criticism

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Slide 01

Literary Criticism

How We Read, Interpret, and Judge Texts
Literary criticism is the systematic study of how literature works and what it means. It asks: What makes a text effective? How does meaning arise from language? What relationship exists between a text and its author, its readers, its historical moment, its cultural context? From Aristotle's "Poetics" to contemporary digital humanities, literary criticism has developed increasingly sophisticated frameworks for understanding the most complex artifacts human language produces. It is, at its best, thinking about thinking -- using reason and imagination to illuminate how texts generate meaning, pleasure, and power.

Slide 02

Classical and Renaissance Criticism

Aristotle's "Poetics" (c. 335 BCE)
The foundational text. Aristotle analyzed tragedy as a form: it imitates (mimesis) a complete action of appropriate magnitude, using language with rhythm and melody, arousing pity and fear to achieve catharsis (emotional purgation). He identified plot (mythos) as the "soul" of tragedy, prioritizing structure over character. His concepts -- unity of action, recognition (anagnorisis), reversal (peripeteia), the tragic flaw (hamartia) -- remain active in literary and dramatic analysis 2,400 years later.
Horace's "Ars Poetica" (c. 19 BCE)
Roman poet's pragmatic advice for writers. Literature should "teach and delight" (docere et delectare) -- combining moral instruction with aesthetic pleasure. Advocated decorum (matching style to subject), unity, and craftsmanship. Horace's approach is prescriptive (how literature should be written) versus Aristotle's descriptive (how literature works). The didactic tradition -- literature valued for its moral utility -- dominated Western criticism for centuries.
Sir Philip Sidney, "An Apology for Poetry" (1595)
The major English Renaissance defense of literature against Puritan attacks. Sidney argued poetry is superior to both philosophy (too abstract) and history (too particular): it combines the universal truths of philosophy with the concrete examples of history. The poet "nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth" -- fiction's acknowledged fictionality gives it unique access to truth. Literature creates "golden worlds" that inspire virtue more effectively than real-world examples.

Slide 03

Romantic and Victorian Criticism

Wordsworth and Coleridge
The "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" (1800) -- Wordsworth's manifesto declaring poetry should use "the real language of men" and describe "incidents and situations from common life" illuminated by imagination. Poetry is "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" recollected in tranquillity. This shifted criticism from neoclassical rules (decorum, genre conventions) to Romantic expressivism: the poem as authentic expression of individual feeling and perception.
Coleridge's "Biographia Literaria" (1817) introduced the distinction between Fancy (mere recombination of existing images) and Imagination (creative power that dissolves and recreates perceptions into new unities). Primary imagination: the basic human faculty of perception. Secondary imagination: the poetic power that "echoes" primary imagination, creating new realities from the raw material of experience.
Matthew Arnold
"The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (1865) -- criticism as "a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world." Arnold advocated "touchstones" -- great passages from Homer, Dante, Shakespeare -- against which to measure new work. His cultural criticism ("Culture and Anarchy," 1869) argued literature should replace religion as the source of moral and spiritual guidance in an increasingly secular age. Poetry as "criticism of life."
Arnold established the tradition of literature as moral education -- a tradition both celebrated (the "Great Books" movement) and attacked (as elitist canon-formation serving dominant class interests).

Slide 04

Formalism and New Criticism

Early 20th-century movements that insisted literary criticism should focus on the text itself -- its formal properties, structures, and techniques -- rather than biography, history, or reader responses.
Russian Formalism (1910s-1930s)
Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Boris Eichenbaum. Key concept: "defamiliarization" (ostranenie) -- literature makes the familiar strange, forcing readers to perceive anew rather than recognize automatically. Art's function is to resist the automatization of perception. Literature is defined not by what it says but by how it says it -- its "literariness" (literaturnost). The Formalists developed rigorous methods for analyzing poetic language, narrative structure, and genre evolution.
New Criticism (1930s-1960s)
Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, W.K. Wimsatt, Robert Penn Warren. Dominated Anglo-American literary studies for decades. Core principles: the poem is an autonomous verbal artifact. Its meaning is determined by close reading of its language, imagery, paradox, irony, and tension -- not by the author's biography or intention ("Intentional Fallacy") or by the reader's emotional response ("Affective Fallacy"). The text alone is the proper object of criticism.
Practical Impact
New Criticism's "close reading" method became the foundation of literature pedagogy in American universities and remains central today, even among critics who reject New Critical theory. The idea that a poem rewards careful attention to every word, image, and structural choice -- that meaning emerges from the interaction of formal elements -- is permanently valuable regardless of theoretical framework. Its limitation: treating texts as closed systems divorced from the worlds that produce and receive them.

Slide 05

Structuralism

Based on Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistics: meaning is produced not by the relationship between words and things but by differences within a system of signs.
Principles
Saussure demonstrated that linguistic signs are arbitrary (no natural connection between the word "tree" and the object) and differential (we understand "cat" by its difference from "bat," "cot," "cap" -- not by its connection to actual cats). Structuralism applied this insight to literature: meaning in a text arises from its position within systems of convention, genre, and cultural code rather than from transparent reference to reality.
Claude Levi-Strauss applied structural analysis to mythology: myths across cultures share underlying structures (binary oppositions -- nature/culture, raw/cooked, human/divine) even when their surface content differs radically. Roland Barthes analyzed cultural "myths" in everyday life (fashion, advertising, food) as sign systems constructing ideological meanings.
Narratology
Structural analysis of narrative. Gerard Genette ("Narrative Discourse," 1972) developed systematic terminology: story (events in chronological order) vs. narrative (how they're told); focalization (who perceives); duration, frequency, and order of narration. A.J. Greimas proposed that all narratives reduce to a limited set of "actants" (subject, object, sender, receiver, helper, opponent) in structural relationships. These tools remain essential for narrative analysis across media.

Slide 06

Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction

If structuralism found stable systems of meaning, post-structuralism showed those systems are unstable, contradictory, and ultimately undecidable.
Jacques Derrida
Deconstruction demonstrates that texts undermine their own claims to stable meaning. Language depends on differences that are never fully present -- each word's meaning defers to other words in an infinite chain ("differance"). Binary oppositions (speech/writing, nature/culture, presence/absence) that organize Western thought are not natural but constructed, and each text contains the resources to destabilize its own hierarchies. Deconstruction is not destruction but a demonstration of how meaning proliferates beyond any author's or reader's control.
Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author" (1967)
The most influential single essay in modern literary theory. Barthes argued that attributing a text's meaning to its author's intention is a limitation -- the "Author-God" who controls meaning. Once a text is written, it belongs to language and readers. "The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." This liberated interpretation from biographical constraint and opened texts to infinite readings -- but raised the problem of interpretive anarchy: if the author doesn't determine meaning, what constrains it?
Michel Foucault
"What Is an Author?" (1969) -- the "author function" is not a real person but a principle of textual organization that society constructs. Power/knowledge relationships determine which discourses are authorized, which texts become "literature," and whose voices are heard. Foucault's archaeology of knowledge systems reveals that the categories through which we understand literature (authorship, genius, originality) are historical inventions serving specific power structures, not timeless truths.

Slide 07

Marxist Literary Criticism

Literature analyzed as a product of -- and participant in -- material economic conditions and class struggle.
Base and Superstructure
Marx's model: economic relations (base) determine cultural production (superstructure), including literature. Literature reflects, reproduces, or potentially challenges the dominant ideology of its era. A novel doesn't just "describe" society -- it participates in constructing the worldview that legitimizes existing power relations. The realist novel's focus on individual psychology, for instance, naturalizes bourgeois individualism.
Georg Lukacs argued for "critical realism" -- literature that reveals the totality of social relations beneath surface appearance. He championed Balzac and Tolstoy for showing how individual fates are determined by historical forces, versus modernism (Joyce, Kafka) which he saw as fragmented, apolitical retreat from reality.
Cultural Materialism
Raymond Williams ("Culture and Society," "Marxism and Literature") rejected crude base/superstructure determinism. Culture is not merely a reflection of economics but a material practice that actively shapes social reality. Literature participates in "structures of feeling" -- the lived experience of a particular historical moment as distinct from official ideology. His concept of "dominant," "residual," and "emergent" cultures explains how societies contain multiple, competing worldviews simultaneously.
Fredric Jameson ("The Political Unconscious," 1981): "Always historicize!" All literary interpretation must ultimately be political -- understanding texts as responses to specific historical contradictions that they cannot fully resolve. Even seemingly apolitical texts reveal political unconscious content through symptomatic reading.

Slide 08

Feminist Literary Criticism

First Wave: Recovering Women's Writing
Virginia Woolf ("A Room of One's Own," 1929) asked why women had produced so little literature and answered: material conditions (money and private space). Elaine Showalter ("A Literature of Their Own," 1977) mapped a female literary tradition invisible within the male-constructed canon. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar ("The Madwoman in the Attic," 1979) analyzed how 19th-century women writers navigated a literary tradition that offered only "angel" or "monster" as female roles.
Gender as Construction
Judith Butler ("Gender Trouble," 1990): gender is not natural but "performative" -- constituted through repeated acts that create the illusion of a stable identity. This insight transformed literary criticism: how do texts perform, reinforce, or destabilize gender? How does literary form itself encode gendered assumptions? Butler's work opened space for queer theory -- analyzing how texts construct, police, and occasionally subvert heteronormative assumptions about desire, identity, and relationship.
Intersectionality
Black feminist critics (Barbara Smith, bell hooks, Kimberle Crenshaw) demonstrated that gender cannot be analyzed in isolation from race, class, sexuality, and other axes of identity. hooks' "Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center" (1984) challenged white feminism's universalizing tendency. Intersectional criticism analyzes how texts represent -- or fail to represent -- subjects positioned at multiple axes of marginalization simultaneously.

Slide 09

Postcolonial Criticism

How does literature participate in colonialism -- and how can it resist? Postcolonial criticism examines the cultural dimensions of imperial power and the possibilities of decolonization.
Edward Said, "Orientalism" (1978)
Foundational text: Western literary and scholarly representations of "the East" constitute a discourse that constructs the Orient as exotic, irrational, and inferior -- justifying colonial domination. Orientalism is not error or prejudice but a systematic mode of knowledge-production that creates its object. Literature (Flaubert, Kipling, Conrad) participates in this construction. Said demonstrated that "culture" is never innocent -- it is always implicated in power.
Homi Bhabha
"The Location of Culture" (1994): colonial power is never as total as it appears. Colonized subjects engage in "mimicry" (imitating the colonizer in ways that subtly mock), "hybridity" (creating cultural forms that are neither purely colonial nor purely indigenous), and resistance within the "third space" between cultures. These concepts illuminate how postcolonial literature creates meaning from the productive instability of cultural identity after empire.
Gayatri Spivak
"Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988): even well-intentioned postcolonial criticism risks speaking for -- rather than creating space for -- the most marginalized voices. The "subaltern" (the truly dispossessed) cannot simply be "recovered" by Western-trained scholars without replicating the power structures that silenced them. Spivak's work challenges postcolonial critics to examine their own positioning within global academic power structures.

Slide 10

Reader-Response Theory

Meaning does not reside in the text alone but emerges from the interaction between text and reader.
Key Theorists
Wolfgang Iser ("The Act of Reading," 1978): texts contain "gaps" (Leerstellen) that readers fill with their imagination. Reading is an active process of meaning-construction, not passive reception. The text provides a structure; the reader actualizes it. Different readers produce different but not unlimited actualizations.
Stanley Fish ("Is There a Text in This Class?" 1980): meaning is produced entirely by "interpretive communities" -- groups sharing interpretive conventions. There is no text independent of interpretation. This radical position implies that criticism cannot discover meaning in texts but only produces it according to institutional norms. Fish embraces this: the constraints come from professional communities, not textual properties.
Implications
Reader-response theory challenged the New Critical doctrine that meaning inheres in the text. If readers construct meaning, then different historical periods, cultures, and individuals will produce different valid readings. This opens literature to diversity of interpretation but raises the problem of evaluation: if all readings are constructions, how do we distinguish better from worse interpretations? Most practitioners reject total relativism in favor of the view that texts constrain (but do not determine) interpretation.

Slide 11

New Historicism and Cultural Studies

New Historicism
Stephen Greenblatt ("Renaissance Self-Fashioning," 1980) proposed reading literary texts alongside non-literary documents of the same period -- legal records, medical texts, travel narratives, sermons. Literature is not a "reflection" of its context but a participant in cultural negotiation. Texts and contexts circulate together in what Greenblatt calls "social energy." A Shakespeare play and an Elizabethan witchcraft trial illuminate each other -- both are performances of power within the same cultural system.
Cultural Studies
Emerged from Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Stuart Hall, 1960s-70s). Rejected the high/low culture distinction: popular culture (television, advertising, fashion, music) is as worthy of serious analysis as canonical literature. Culture is a site of struggle over meaning -- dominant groups encode "preferred readings" in texts, but subordinate groups can produce "oppositional readings." All cultural production is political; all analysis of culture is therefore political intervention.
The Canon Debates
Who decides what counts as "great literature"? New Historicism and Cultural Studies revealed that literary canons reflect power structures -- white, male, Western authors predominate not because of universal quality but because of institutional gatekeeping. The "canon wars" of the 1980s-90s expanded syllabi to include women, people of color, non-Western literatures. Critics disagree: is canon revision a correction of historical injustice or a dilution of quality? The debate continues, though most literature departments now teach far more diverse texts than in 1980.

Slide 12

Psychoanalytic Criticism

Freudian Approaches
Sigmund Freud read literature as a site where unconscious desires, repressions, and conflicts surface in disguised form -- just as in dreams. "Creative Writers and Daydreaming" (1908): fiction satisfies wishes that reality frustrates. The author's biography reveals unconscious motivations shaping the text. Characters embody psychic structures (id, ego, superego). Symbols encode repressed sexual content. Later critics applied Freud to texts without biographical reduction: examining how a text's formal contradictions reveal ideological repressions.
Lacanian Approaches
Jacques Lacan reread Freud through Saussurean linguistics: the unconscious is "structured like a language." Desire is produced by the gap between the signifier and what it signifies -- we never possess what we desire because language itself introduces absence into experience. Literary texts demonstrate how the Symbolic order (language, law, social structure) both enables and frustrates desire. Slavoj Zizek applied Lacan to popular culture, revealing how films, novels, and political discourse manage the impossible relationship between desire and satisfaction.

Slide 13

Ecocriticism

The study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment -- and the urgency of ecological crisis.
First Wave
Lawrence Buell ("The Environmental Imagination," 1995): how does literature represent the non-human world? Early ecocriticism focused on nature writing (Thoreau, Leopold, Dillard) and pastoral traditions, examining how texts construct "nature" as separate from "culture" -- and how this separation enables environmental destruction. If nature is merely backdrop or resource, it can be exploited without moral cost.
Second Wave: Environmental Justice
Expanded beyond wilderness aesthetics to address urban environments, environmental racism, toxic landscapes, and the unequal distribution of ecological harm. Rob Nixon ("Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor," 2011): how do we represent environmental damage that occurs gradually and invisibly -- chemical contamination, climate change, species loss? Literature can make visible what occurs too slowly for news media to capture.
The Anthropocene
Timothy Morton ("Hyperobjects"): climate change, nuclear radiation, and microplastics are "hyperobjects" -- entities so vast in temporal and spatial scale that they exceed human comprehension. How can literature represent the unrepresentable? Amitav Ghosh ("The Great Derangement," 2016) argues that realist fiction's focus on individual human experience is constitutively incapable of representing climate change. New forms are needed -- and ecocriticism must help imagine them.

Slide 14

Digital Humanities and Distant Reading

Franco Moretti's "Distant Reading"
Instead of close-reading individual texts (a tiny fraction of all literature ever written), use computational methods to analyze thousands or millions of texts simultaneously. Moretti mapped the rise and fall of novel genres, tracked the evolution of titles, and analyzed literary networks -- revealing patterns invisible at the level of individual works. "Distant reading" complements rather than replaces close reading: it identifies macro-patterns that specific readings can then investigate.
Computational Methods
Topic modeling identifies thematic clusters across large corpora. Stylometry attributes anonymous texts to authors via statistical analysis of style. Network analysis maps character relationships and social structures within and across novels. Sentiment analysis tracks emotional trajectories. These methods can process thousands of texts -- but require interpretive judgment to produce meaningful literary insights rather than mere data. The challenge: making quantitative methods serve humanistic questions.

Slide 15

Contemporary Debates

Surface Reading vs. Symptomatic Reading
Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus ("Surface Reading," 2009) challenged the post-structuralist assumption that criticism must read "against the grain" -- uncovering hidden meanings texts repress. Surface reading: what if we took texts at face value, attending to their explicit statements and formal surfaces rather than always assuming hidden depths? This provoked intense debate: is surface reading intellectually lazy or a necessary corrective to interpretive paranoia?
The "Hermeneutics of Suspicion"
Paul Ricoeur's term for criticism that assumes texts conceal more than they reveal (Marx: ideology; Freud: the unconscious; Nietzsche: the will to power). Rita Felski ("The Limits of Critique," 2015) argues this suspicious mode has become automatic and limiting -- criticism as revelation of hidden complicity. She advocates "postcritical" reading: attending to how texts enchant, inspire, and create meaning rather than only exposing their failures and complicities.
World Literature
How should criticism engage with literature produced across the entire globe rather than just the Western canon? David Damrosch, Pascale Casanova, Emily Apter, and others debate: Is "world literature" a genuine opening to diverse traditions or a flattening that subjects all literatures to Western theoretical frameworks and market conditions? How do texts travel across linguistic and cultural boundaries? What is lost and gained in translation?

Slide 16

The Value of Literary Criticism

Literary criticism at its best is not an academic exercise but a form of thinking essential to democratic culture. It teaches us to read carefully, question assumptions, recognize how language constructs reality, and imagine alternatives. In an era of disinformation, algorithmic manipulation, and narrative warfare, the critical reading skills literature departments teach -- attention to rhetoric, sensitivity to ambiguity, resistance to premature certainty -- are survival skills, not luxuries.
Every theory offers a partial but genuine illumination. Formalism teaches attention to craft. Marxism reveals how texts serve power. Feminism exposes gender construction. Postcolonialism decenters Western perspectives. Deconstruction demonstrates language's instability. Ecocriticism reconnects literature to the material world. No single approach captures the full complexity of how literature works -- and the proliferation of methods enriches rather than fragments the field.
The perennial question -- "Is literary criticism itself a form of literature or a form of knowledge?" -- may be false. The best criticism (Samuel Johnson, Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison's essays) is both: writing of beauty and precision that also advances understanding. Literary criticism reminds us that meaning is never settled, that texts contain more than any single reading can exhaust, and that the conversation between readers across centuries is itself one of humanity's most remarkable intellectual achievements.

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