Criticism

Criticism is the analysis and judgment of works of art. It tries to interpret and to evaluate such works and to examine the principles by which they may be understood. Criticism attempts to promote high standards among artists and to encourage the appreciation of art. It also helps society remain aware of the value of both past and present works of art.

Criticism plays an important part in every art form. This article emphasizes literary criticism.

Kinds of literary criticism.

Criticism can be divided into four basic types. They differ according to which aspect of art the critic chooses to emphasize. Formal criticism examines the forms or structures of works of art. It may also compare a work with others of its genre (kind), such as other tragic plays or other sonnets. Formal criticism is sometimes intrinsic—that is, it may seek to treat each work of art as complete in itself. Rhetorical criticism analyzes the means by which a work of art affects an audience. It focuses on style and on general principles of psychology. Expressive criticism regards works as expressing the ideas or feelings of the artist. It examines the artist’s background and conscious or unconscious motives. Mimetic criticism views art as an imitation of the world. It analyzes the ways that artists show reality, and their thoughts about it.

The four types of criticism can also be combined. For example, a critic who looks at the form of a work might also study the way this form affects an audience.

History of literary criticism.

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato was the first known literary critic. He accused poetry of imitating the mere appearance of things. Aristotle, his pupil, defended epic poetry and tragic drama. In his Poetics, Aristotle said that poetry is an instructive imitation, not of things but of actions. Other essays on criticism tended to be rhetorical handbooks that taught writers how to achieve certain effects. They included Art of Poetry by the Roman poet Horace and On the Sublime by the Greek writer Longinus.

During the late 1500’s, such critics as the English poet Sir Philip Sidney praised literature as the image of an ideal world. During the 1600’s and 1700’s, critics turned their attention to defining the rules by which they thought works should be written and judged. The three most important English critics during this period were John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, and Alexander Pope.

At the end of the 1700’s, critics in Germany and England began to regard literature as an expression of the author’s imagination. These critics, called romantics, compared the forms of poems to those of living creatures, each with its own organic unity. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and the brothers August and Friedrich Schlegel were important German romantic critics. The greatest of the English romantic critics were Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt.

In the mid-1800’s, critics stressed the relation between art and society. The English writer Matthew Arnold thought poetry should be “a criticism of life,” which could help people attain a more accurate spiritual vision of the world, and correct the illusions of political propaganda. The American critics of the 1800’s also related art to society. But they insisted that American experience was different from that of Europe and therefore required a different sort of art. Ralph Waldo Emerson, an influential American writer, called for a new, democratic breed of author who would look to the future rather than the past.

In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, the novelist Henry James attempted a balance between American and European ideas of culture. James also wrote many essays on the craft of fiction. Later, such American critics as Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling continued the effort to relate American culture to its art.

In the early 1900’s, the poet T. S. Eliot argued for a criticism that would be the servant of poetry, not of society. I. A. Richards, an English critic, developed methods of close reading. He asked readers to pay attention to the exact meaning of the text, not to impose their own ideas on it. In the mid-1900’s, a movement called the New Criticism was popular in the United States. Such New Critics as Cleanth Brooks and John Crowe Ransom analyzed a work of literature as a self-contained whole, without reference to its historical period, the author’s life, or other external influences.

Beginning in the 1950’s, many critics turned from interpretative criticism to issues of theory. Semiotics approaches literature as a system of symbols that can be broken down like a language into parts for analysis. It is derived from the language theories of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Deconstructionism is a theory based on the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida. It states that every text dissolves into contradictions under close examination.

In the reader-response theory, critics attempt to understand how the audience plays a part in shaping the experience of literature. Some reader-response theorists stress how the psychological makeup of people causes them to read a work in different ways. Feminist literary criticism looks at the way the gender of the writer or the reader affects the writing or reading experience. Some feminist critics suggest that women’s imagination and approach to language differ from men’s. New historicism, based on the theories of French philosopher Michel Foucault and American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, emphasizes the historical analysis of literature. It insists that history, like literature, is not a matter of “hard facts,” but of texts that need to be interpreted to be understood.