Review Sheet

Why Criticism? Why Theory?

Listed here are some basic concepts that we have been covering in this introductory unit of the course.

Why do literary criticism at all?

While our writers haven’t answered this question in any detail, the presumption of many seems to be that criticism helps us escape from the vague impressionism that governs our everyday reading. It lets us look at the text as a work of art rather than as a vehicle with a message or simply an occasion for entertainment. For Burke, criticism at its best can aid literature’s usefulness as “equipment for living.”

What are the appropriate methods for doing literary criticism?

Formalism—Literary criticism should be rigorously “intrinsic,” focusing on the characteristics of the work itself. For New Critics and deconstructionists alike, this quasi-scientific rigor provides the only adequate basis for studying literature as literature because it focuses on the literary object itself. For Ransom, this laserlike focus on the text itself helps secure the place of literary studies in the academy where they must compete with the hard sciences and other older humanistic disciplines. For de Man, this focus on the text itself provides a more adequate intellectual foundation for the study of literature, over and against the vague aestheticism associated with traditional literary studies.

Extrinsic criticism—While we haven’t yet looked in detail at other forms of criticism, Kenneth Burke strongly implies that extrinsic approaches to criticism are perfectly appropriate, and in many cases necessary to the study of literature. While both Christian and Gates tend toward formalist analyses, their formalism also takes up extrinsic political and cultural concerns.

What is the difference between criticism and theory?

Criticism speaks about the nature and function of individual literary texts or collections of texts, attempting to analyze their properties, explicate their meanings, and/or establish their relationship to other texts or extrinsic areas such as history, culture, politics, biography, etcetera.

Theory speaks about the nature and function of criticism, as well as the nature and function of literature in general? It is concerned with the questions such as the following: What is the nature of literature (and, consequently, the nature of other things like authors, readers, literary language, and so forth)? What are its effects in culture? What kinds of things should one be concerned with in reading a work of literature? What are the consequences of reading in particular ways? Theory can be thought of as meta-critical, or, more simply, as the philosophy of literary studies. It is what Burke seems to be imagining when he discusses the “Criticism of Criticism?

Should we theorize about literature?

Conservatives cultural critics have argued that we shouldn’t theorize because it devalues the great works of the Western tradition or is otherwise faddish and insubstantial. By contrast, some supporters of theory argue that theory has no specific political agenda. Indeed, it can make the study of the Western canon more fruitful and relevant to students’ lives.

Pragmatists like Knapp and Michaels argue that we shouldn’t do theory (or, as Fish argues, that we can do theory if we want to, but it won’t help us do criticism). According to this argument, theory at its best is merely descriptive of what we do and cannot help us change what we do? Others argue that the study of theory frees us from entrapment within received norms of reading, thus enabling new fields of vision and study. This group argues that theory is not only relevant, it is crucial to the way we go about doing things in literature. We are “always already” working with a theory, even if we don’t realize it.

Some politically oriented critics have argued that theory is a trap because it distracts us from doing work that will actually change the world. At its worst, theory can devalue the voices and creativity of those who have only recently begun to be recognized in the literary world such as women, non-white ethnic/racial groups, postcolonial nations. Still others argue that theory has been crucial in opening a space that has enabled previously silenced writers to be engaged productively in the academy, transforming our ideas of literature and its scope and purposes.