Introduction to Literary Theories and Criticisms (Enla 422), 2011
Text/Language Oriented Approaches
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- Author/Character-oriented approaches (Biographical Approach))
| Text/Language Oriented Approaches: Formalism, Practical, New Criticism, Structuralism, Stylistics, Post-Structuralism, and Deconstruction belong to this category. The salient emphasis given to the text and its elements (be it organizational or linguistic elements).
Reader-Oriented Approaches: other critics switch their attention to readers of literary materials from the assumption that readers themselves are critics of literature. Reader-response/Receptionist Theory focuses on how the readers of works of arts see, explain, analyze and evaluate literary materials. Having seen the four categories in general, we are now going to see each of these approaches along with their historical time, proponents and its fundamentals which help critics analyze literary works. Author/Character-oriented approaches (Biographical Approach)) Most traditional approaches are, somehow, author oriented. They focus on the writer’s mind though other factors that contribute to the study of the authorial intentions were not neglected (Krishnaswamy and others, 2001). As these scholars further argue, during the ancient time, Aristotle’s considered drama as an imitation of life by looking at: how the drama affects the audience and how they identify themselves with the main actor (Pragmatic Criticism). In the later times, using the author’s biographical facts to the analysis of a certain literary work began to be considered to arrive at the author’s intention_ intuitively (spontaneously) or subjectively (Glossary of Literary Terms, 1993: 40-42). Projecting universal values of the then time was the aim of literature and the author was considered as the creator of the text (to mean that the writer was the only all knowing person about his text). Example: In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the insanity that the narrator descends into parallels that of Gilman herself. Since Gilman felt trapped by her own husband after giving birth to her first child, Gilman through writing a short story where the same thing happened to her protagonist wished to show the devastation caused by male superiority. Download 333 Kb. Share with your friends:
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