After reading the opening chapters in Texts and Contexts, I feel like I'm even more confused now about literary criticism. Maybe confused isn't the best way to describe my sense of overwhelmed. I never questioned how I process literature before. The different schools of thought on literary criticism make sense in the literal definition, its just difficult for me to classify such a cerebral process. This difficulty possibly arises from me critiquing literature with multiple schools of thought. Additionally, it seems to me like one wouldn't get the whole picture or a complete concept of a literary work without analyzing it using all the schools of thought.
Despite which school of thought is applied, the function of writing about literature is to attain this greater understanding of the observed piece of literature. To perform a literary criticism, a person will carefully analyze the piece of literature and find the areas that "speak to them" through self reflection.A literary work can be dissected into subjects that may attract different people. If someone is more attuned to cultural relativism, then they might be able to grasp this deeper concept pertaining to culture. Another person reading the same literature could explore the historical context of the book due to their love of the source's time period. While the function of writing about literature is to expound the reviewers outlook on the literature, the literary criticism's primary goal is to broaden the perspective of others.
We have already discussed how hard it is to define a work as popular fiction or a literary work. This difficulty is also translated into the function of literature since there is a broad range of literature. The only goal of literature that satisfies such a diverse range is to engage a targeted audience.
I agree, thinking about all of the different schools of literary criticism can be a bit perplexing because one would think that it would be necessary to use a combination of schools to effectively criticize a work. I think that one way to think about the differing schools is to apply these different techniques to different types of literature and to assess a work based on what the author's intentions were.
ReplyDeleteI agree that different people will see different things and that it is important who you are when you make your critique.
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