¡Descarga Introduction to Literary Criticism, y más Ejercicios en PDF de Idioma Inglés solo en Docsity! Introduction to Literary Criticism of 1 2 1920s to 1940s – During this period of time, the text was studied on isolation from literary, cultural, historical context or biographical details about the author. The role of the critic was just to analyse how literary texts represent human experience. This was called practical criticism and it had an analytical approach. To understand the literariness, which has a linguistic approach, we have to focus on the structural relationship and the formal elements. The literariness of the text was back then a very linguistic approach. The aesthetic dimension of a text is related to its structure and its language. New Criticism, 1940s to 1970s – During this period we will see literature from a scientific point of view. According to Welles and Warren’s Theory of Literature: “a literary work is in the exact same position as a system of language”. We should be able to do a close reading of the text which will tell us how the formal elements of it works. They wanted to focus on the different literary works on isolation and how their structure and meaning worked in this way. Their interest was focused on meaning but not on how this one was conveyed. They worked with the text on isolation from the author, historical contexts and also from the reader. In this period, Literary Criticism was validated as a respectable profession. Rise of structuralism and post structuralism, 1960s – In these years we find different French intellectuals such as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and other French Feminists such as Hélèn Cixous and Julia Kristeva. We have a division between what is called high literature which tended to be more complex and popular literature which had everything else. Structuralism This movement focused on the surface structure to interpret and theorize deep surface and also those features shared universally which allow us to recognize a text as a story. Through the deep surface we could interpret the meaning of the text. We also have universal features shared by all types of literature. • In all stories we have a beginning, middle and end. • We will also find harmony, complication, a crisis and a resolution in all of them. • The characters will be heroes and villains. We can have main characters or foils. In contrast to New Criticism, they focus on conventions rather than on particular works. On his work Course in General Linguistics, Saussure introduced a Theoretical basis for structuralism and post-structuralism. He makes a distinction between signifier, signified, arbitrariness and signs. The Russian Formalist Movement inspired the creation of “narratology” in which general rules that characterize narrative structures were applied. A sign makes references to an object, a signifier to a physical existence such as a sound, word or an image and the signified refers to a mental concept. This is what we called binaries, a language based on a system of differentiation. The signifiers late their identity in their difference from other
