Hello and welcome. Today we are talking about literary criticism. Now literary criticism is a way of looking at literature. It's all about perspective really. Things look very different if you look at them from different angles.
For example, this is This is Rhiannon from one side. This is a close shot of Rhiannon's profile. This is Rhiannon's eye.
This is the underside of Rhiannon's face. These are Rhiannon's toes. This is Rhiannon's mismatched hand. This is a shot of Rhiannon's hair.
All these shots are technically of my mannequin, and yet they all look very different. They all focus on different aspects of her and from different perspectives. First of all, let's talk about what the words literary criticism mean.
Literary has to do with literature, but what is literature anyway? That's a complicated question and not one I have time to really fully address. People have used lots of synonyms, including text, but text can really mean almost anything you want it to mean. I could read a piece of poetry and that would be a text. I could read a novel and that would be a text.
But I could also go to a basketball game and read the basketball game in some ways and gain understanding about the team, about the culture, about really anything. And that would be a reading. The second word, criticism, has to do with the idea of critique. We sometimes associate the word criticism with something negative. If I'm criticizing you, then I'm probably pointing out your flaws.
But it's not necessarily being negative so much as it is paying close attention to detail. I might be paying attention to which details are flaws, but I might also be... also be paying attention to which details are successful and meaningful. So literary criticism can be very positive. I might be breaking apart a poem or a novel or a play, and in so doing, I discover all kinds of wonderful things about it, and I'm able to more richly enjoy it.
Now a lot of students, when they first discover literary criticism, may not like it because they feel like it takes the enjoyment, the fun, out of literature. But really, when you come to appreciate literary criticism, it helps to enrich the literature for you. It helps you to appreciate it more. Let's put it this way.
If you go into an art museum and you look around at all the paintings, and you don't know what any of them are, or what any of them are about, or anything like that, you'll probably get bored pretty quickly. They might look pretty, but you'll lose interest after a while. But if you know something about art, you know something about how these pieces of art were accomplished, there's a lot more to see. It's the same way with any piece of art or literature.
I can read a poem, and the poem can be meaningful to me in its content. I can read a novel, and the novel can be meaningful to me in its content. But when I can also understand the beauty of its craftsmanship, the historical context, and a lot of other issues, I can appreciate it much more richly and deeply. Stephen Lin, in his book Text and Context, gives a wonderful overview of literary criticism. In his introduction, he compares literature to travel, which isn't a very big stretch of a metaphor.
After all, when you read a book, it's like entering into a new world, experiencing something vicariously through the book. But he goes on to extend that metaphor to literary criticism. He says literary criticism is like hiring a tour guide.
Right. It shows you where to go and what to see in that new place that you've traveled to. And by further extension, different critical theories are like travel agencies. I don't know if you've ever traveled, but if you have, you might have had this experience.
You want a travel agency that is going to take you places and to see things that are interesting to you. I would not be very interested in going and tasting all of the fancy restaurants of Europe, but I would be very interested in the art and in the literature that I find in Europe. If I go see the art... opera houses and the theaters in Paris, and another person goes and visits the fashion district, we've both seen and experienced Paris.
However, we've experienced it from very different perspectives. The same is true with literary criticism. If I have a novel and I want to read it using one particular theory, I can get a very rich understanding out of it, whereas another person can pick it up and read it from a different theory and come to completely different appreciation of it.
This does, however, pose a little bit of a problem. A lot of students come to the study of literature looking for the right literature. right answer. And the thing is, there really isn't a right answer. There's more of a continuum of answers, to be fair.
And from certain perspectives, some answers are more valid and some answers are less valid. Let's say I wanted to study the play Hamlet, and I'm interested in the economic implications of the play, because I'm interested in how this vine for power in Denmark affects the economy. Well, obviously that's not the central aspect of the play, but it is an interesting reading, if that's my interest.
I might also take a read. reading that Hamlet is actually a symbol for a giant whale. That is very unlikely and actually not particularly helpful. Could I write such a piece of literary criticism? Yes, but who would read it?
On the other hand, just because I may not like a certain deconstructive theory and I prefer this particular feminist theory, that may not mean that the deconstructive theory is less valid. It's just not very interesting to me. For my own students, I accept all kinds of different answers. Really, the question boils down to, can you support your argument and is your argument useful?
for something as long as you come up with a good answer that you can support. Don't just wait around for me to tell you what the right answer is. Very likely I'm not going to. One more important point to make.
No matter how you read literature, you're going to have something of a theory when you approach it. Even if you say, I don't want a theory, I just want to read the book and enjoy it. Well, something causes you to either enjoy it or not. You make judgments about everything you read.
And your theory for what makes an enjoyable book could be very diverse. It could be this book bores me. or it doesn't. I had a student one time who said she knew a good book when it made her cry.
That was her criteria for judging books. If they make her cry, they're good. If they don't, they're not. And such a simple literary theory is perhaps okay, but you can get so much more out of a text if you know other ways of looking at it, even if you don't like them all.
One of my favorite things is when my students come to me and say, I can't watch movies anymore because all I see is the symbolism. And I laugh gleefully. So in the next several videos. I'm going to give a brief thumbnail sketch of these different types of theories.
If you'd like to see them, you can click on them now. And then you can at least get familiar with some of the theories out there. Click here to subscribe.
I'll see you next time. Ching!