Literary criticism essay

Literary criticism essay

Literary Criticism In Poetry Words | 5 Pages. Formalist criticism is the literary theory that takes a look into works of literature for the message and meaning, but gives a special focus on the form and structure, as well as the literary devices it utilizes Literary criticism is the study, commentary, evaluation, and interpretation of the qualities of a source of literature and its significance in society’s context. Litierary criticism is more often than not, influenced by literary theory. In “Walking through Philippines theater Vol. I”, Criticism is said to Continue Reading Beauty in Literature: A Collection of Works. Ideas on beauty and what it means to be beautiful have changed over the years and this evolution has been documented throughout literature. This collection comprises a selection of high quality literary research from Essays in Criticism and our other literature journals exploring the concept of

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Psychoanalytic reading has been practiced since the early development of psychoanalysis itself, and has developed into a heterogeneous interpretive tradition. Critics may view the fictional characters as a psychological case study, attempting to identify such Freudian concepts as Oedipus complex, penis envy, literary criticism essay, Freudian slips, literary criticism essay, Id, ego and superego and so on, and demonstrate how they influenced the thoughts and behaviors of fictional characters. However, more complex variations of psychoanalytic criticism are possible.

Like all forms of literary criticism, psychoanalytic criticism can yield useful clues to the sometime baffling symbols, actions, and settings in a literary work; however, like all forms of literary criticism, literary criticism essay, it has its limits. As Guerin, et al. put it in A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. To see a great work of fiction or a great poem primarily as a psychological case study is often to miss its wider significance and perhaps even the essential aesthetic experience it should provide.

Psychoanalytic: Such criticism aims at uncovering the working of the human mind—especially the expression of the unconscious. Literary criticism essay include analyzing a text like a dream, looking for symbolism and repressed meaning, or developing a psychological analysis of a character. Three ideas found in the work of Sigmund Freud are particularly useful: the dominance of the unconscious mind over the conscious, literary criticism essay, the expression of the unconscious mind through symbols often in dreamsand sexuality as a powerful force for motivating human behavior, literary criticism essay. Early psychoanalytic literary criticism would often treat the literary criticism essay as if it were a ind of dream.

This means that the text represses its real or latent content behind obvious manifest content. The process of changing from latent to manifest content is known as the dream work, and involves operations of concentration and displacement. The critic analyzes the language and symbolism of a text to reverse the process of the dream literary criticism essay and arrive at the underlying latent thoughts. However, Lacanian scholars have noted that Lacan himself was not interested in literary criticism literary criticism essay se, literary criticism essay in how literature might illustrate a psychoanalytic method or concept. Charles Mauron: psychocriticism InCharles Mauron conceived a structured method to interpret literary works via psychoanalysis.

The study implied four different phases: 1. The creative process is akin to dreaming awake: as such, it is a mimetic, literary criticism essay, and cathartic, representation of an unconscious impulse or desire that is best expressed and revealed by metaphors and symbols. These metaphorical networks are significant of a latent inner reality. They point at an obsession just as dreams can do, literary criticism essay. A basically unconscious sexual impulse literary criticism essay symbolically fulfilled in a positive and socially gratifying way, a process known as Sublimation. Romance is a multiple orgasm.

Psychoanalysis in Literature In a nutshell, the key to understanding the history of psychoanalytic literary criticism is to recognize that literary criticism is about books and psychoanalysis is about minds. Therefore, the psychoanalytic critic can only talk about the minds associated with the book. And what are those? There are three, and curiously, Freud spelled them out in his very first remarks on literature in the letter to Fliess of October 15, in which he discussed Oedipus Rex. Those are the three people that the psychoanalytic critic can talk about: the author, the audience, and some character represented in or associated with a text.

From the beginning of this field to the present, that cast of characters has never changed: author, audience, or some person derived from the text. Those are the three minds that the psychoanalytic critic addresses. How the psychoanalytic critic addresses those minds depends on the orientation of the critic. Is he or she a classical psychoanalyst, literary criticism essay ego psychologist, a Lacanian, literary criticism essay, a Kleinian, a member of the object-relations school, a Kohutian, literary criticism essay, and so on? Each of the various schools in the development of psychoanalysis necessarily produces a different style of psychoanalytic literary criticism.

In the earliest stage of psychoanalytic criticism, literary criticism essay critics did little more than identify oedipus complexes and the occasional symbol or parapraxis in one or another work of literature. Relevant collections would be: Phillips ; Manheim and Manheim ;; Ruitenbeek In the French critic Charles Mauron made the important point that these different literary criticism essay of fantasies were all transformations of one another, superimposed, so that one could imagine the human being as a series of geological levels with oral fantasies at the deepest level, then anal, phallic and so on forming and leaving traces of themselves at the literary criticism essay. This is, of course, consistent with the continuities we see psychoanalytically in the development of any human being.

Again, we often read both the defenses and the fantasies back to the authors, and the result has been distinguished biographies by Leon EdelJustin Kaplan, and Cynthia Griffin Wolff, literary criticism essay, to name but a few of the many good psychobiographers. Literary criticism essay more helpfully, we became able to see that literary forms functioned psychologically like various types of defense mechanism. Form works as a defense, both at the level of particular wordings and in larger structures. Our identifications with characters serve in this way, to modulate and direct our feelings as identifications do in life. A shift of the sensory modality in a poem may serve as a kind of isolation.

Symbolizing serves to disguise all kinds of content in literary works. And, of course, omission functions like repression or denial. See Holland ; Withim ; Rose The idea of form as defense meant that we could talk about literary works that had no characters at all, where one could only talk about form. We were no longer limited to plays and stories. We could talk about lyric poems see, for example, Sullivan or Tennenhouse We could analyze non-fiction prose. Necessarily we related these to the mind of the author. Various collections of essays use one or another of these familiar approaches: object-relations Woodward, Schwartz ; Rudnytsky ; self-psychology Bouson ; Berman ; Lacan, Davis ; Stoltzfus In their various modes, literary criticism essay, these follow the general pattern of psychoanalytic criticism: applying object-relations, self-psychology, literary criticism essay, or Lacanian psychoanalysis to the reader, the author, or some person derived from the text.

To me, the most significant breakthrough was the recognition that our relationship to a literary criticism essay work is to a transitional or transformational object. Literature exists in potential space Schwartz ; Bollas There have been many failures of psychoanalytic criticism, literary criticism essay, mostly as a result of crudity in applying psychoanalytic ideas: labeling, pathography, id analysis. And there have been some successes. Today, I think the liveliest psychoanalytic criticism addresses questions of gender and personality in the personality of the author and, literary criticism essay, to me, most interestingly, in the mind of the reader Holland ; Flynn and Schweickart Nowadays we have psychoanalytically-oriented literary criticism essay in literature and classes oriented to analyzing reader-response Holland and Schwartz ; Hollandb; Berman In such teaching, a critic or teacher can help readers understand what they are bringing to a given work of literature.

How do you respond when you enter the obsessionl world of Charles Dickens? How do you respond when you enter the oral world of Christopher Marlowe with its overwhelming rage and desire? How do you shape and change those those worlds to fit your own characteristic patterns of fantasy and defense? In other words, what kind of person are you and how do you perceive the world of books and the world around you? But what about the future? It seems to me that the direction psychoanalytic theory, including its theory of literature, needs to take in the twenty-first century is to integrate psychoanalytic insights with the new discoveries coming from brain research and cognitive science.

These are very powerful and, as I read them, literary criticism essay, often quite in harmony with what psychoanalysis has been saying about people from an entirely different perspective and based on entirely different evidence. It seems to me that what psychoanalysis or psychology in general needs to do is put together the clinical knowledge derived from psychoanalysis with the new knowledge of how the mind works in perception, memory, learning, bilateralization, and, most important for a literary critic, in the way we use language.

I do not think this is an impossible task, or even, perhaps, a very difficult one. There have been several efforts so far: Reiser ; Winson ; Harris ;Modell ; Kandel What I think is rather more difficult is integrating with literary criticism the things we are finding out about the brain and how it acquires and uses language with literary criticism. MRI and PET scans enable us to get pictures of the blood and oxygen flow literary criticism essay other things in the brain as that person fears or perceives or reads or listens to languge. Scientists like Gerard Edelman or Hanna and Antonio Damasio are showing how we literary criticism essay words in our brains.

There is no simple correspondence between signifier and signified as Lacan claimed. Rather, just to understand one word, the brain must bring together a variety of separate features, the sound of the word, its grammatical role, and other words that it is like and unlike. Then, to arrive at a meaning for a word, the brain assembles or coordinates these different kinds of information from different places in the brain. Furthermore, and most important for the psychoanalyst, what information there is, where it is located, and what emotions accompany it are all highly personal. If so, then a fortiori each of us will interpret a literary text consisting of a lot of words in an individual way. These new researches confirm what we reader-response critics have been saying for a long time, literary criticism essay.

But more to the point, they confirm what every psychoanalyst has seen from behind the couch. That is, a word, an event—take, literary criticism essay, for example, a national catastrophe like the Kennedy assassination or the Challenger crash or the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. Each patient will respond to that event out of his or her personal history and character. Neither is there literary criticism essay fixed meaning in a literary text. In a general way, then, I think the discoveries of brain science are confirming the theory behind psychoanalytic literary criticism, particularly reader-response psychoanalytic literary criticism.

But how, if at all, literary criticism essay, can we apply this to individual works of literature? This may be a question best left to neuroscientists and scientifically oriented psychoanalysts. What I am sure of is that the best future I can imagine for psychoanalytic literary criticism is a fusion of insights derived from psychoanalysis with insights derived from neuroscience. What is the purpose of all this mental energy that people have put into psychoanalytic literary criticism over the past century? What was it all for?

What should it be for? What is the purpose of psychoanalytic literary criticism? What, for that matter, is the purpose of any kind of literary criticism? In the s, literary critics vastly expanded their subject matter to include just about anything that involves literary criticism essay. Nowadays, in literary criticism essay classes or scholarly journals, you find literary criticism essay, not just of this or that poem or story or play or writer, but of gender, race, politics, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, all kinds of sciences, and, of course, of psychoanalysis.

Needless to say, few English teachers can qualify as the universal geniuses that such discussions require. Perhaps for that reason we might do well to focus on that part of this larger literary criticism that does talk about literature, particularly this or that particular poem or story or play or film, as psychoanalytic literary critics tend to do. What is the purpose, what is the use, of saying Hamlet has an oedipus complex and literary criticism essay Shakespeare does too? What literary criticism essay the use of saying that Othello and Iago have a homosexual marriage? What is the purpose of literary criticism? Literary criticism, any kind of criticism, rests on the purpose of literature itself, for, literary criticism essay, after all, criticism is, as the old saying has it, only the handmaiden to the muse.

We come, then, to a much larger question.

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Literary criticism is the study, commentary, evaluation, and interpretation of the qualities of a source of literature and its significance in society’s context. Litierary criticism is more often than not, influenced by literary theory. In “Walking through Philippines theater Vol. I”, Criticism is said to Continue Reading Writing a Critical Essay about Literature (AKA: Your professor told you to stop summarizing and start analyzing) So you have been given an assignment to write an essay about a piece of literature. This assignment may have been called a "critical literature essay," an "analysis," a "critical analysis" or by one of many other frustrating terms Beauty in Literature: A Collection of Works. Ideas on beauty and what it means to be beautiful have changed over the years and this evolution has been documented throughout literature. This collection comprises a selection of high quality literary research from Essays in Criticism and our other literature journals exploring the concept of