questions, interesting language, abrupt surprises, etc. Before we dive right into analysis strategies, it’s important to note that analysis is notasummary. Most students have read and studied stories, Perhaps the enduring legacy of “New Criticism” can be found in the college classroom, in which the verbal texture of the poem on the page remains a primary object of literary study. The major Marxist influences on literary theory since the Frankfurt School have been Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton in Great Britain and Frank Lentricchia and Fredric Jameson in the United States. Marxist, feminist, and postmodern thought have brought about the incorporation of all human discourses (that is, interlocking fields of language and knowledge) as a subject matter for analysis by the literary theorist. It involves the characters and events of the story being brought to life on a stage by actors and their interactions (verbal and non-verbal) through its events. You may notice that a narrator Plot is the pattern of events that make up a story. irony, symbolism, and point of view), main themes, and … complication Foucault played a critical role in the development of the postmodern perspective that knowledge is constructed in concrete historical situations in the form of discourse; knowledge is not communicated by discourse but is discourse itself, can only be encountered textually. Literary(Structure(of(the(Book(of(Jonah(Bible(7:((OldTestament(Survey,(Mr.(Farrelly((The(Following(is(onepossible(chiastic*(structure(of(the(book(of(Jonah. It is a figure of speech where the author uses a repeated sound of the first/second letter … Of various forms of drama, plays are the most popular. Creativity and cultural production in advanced capitalist societies were always already co-opted by the entertainment needs of an economic system that requires sensory stimulation and recognizable cliché and suppressed the tendency for sustained deliberation. back--please write your annotation in your notebook. Too much=sentimentality, resolution: the “falling action” When you analyze a literary text, you will deal with basic elements of literature, like plot, theme, character, point of view, and setting. For example, to speak of the “unity” of Oedipus the King explicitly invokes Aristotle’s theoretical statements on poetics. All critical practice regarding literature depends on an underlying structure of ideas in at least two ways: theory provides a rationale for what constitutes the subject matter of criticism—”the literary”—and the specific aims of critical practice—the act of interpretation itself. The Different Elements There are different ways in which literature can be portrayed – a novel, drama, poetry, biography, non-fictional prose, an essay, an epic, or short stories. “New Historicism,” a term coined by Stephen Greenblatt, designates a body of theoretical and interpretive practices that began largely with the study of early modern literature in the United States. Gender theory achieved a wide readership and acquired much its initial theoretical rigor through the work of a group of French feminist theorists that included Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and Julia Kristeva, who while Bulgarian rather than French, made her mark writing in French. In its period of ascendancy during the 1980s, “New Historicism” drew criticism from the political left for its depiction of counter-cultural expression as always co-opted by the dominant discourses. Marxist analyses of society and history have had a profound effect on literary theory and practical criticism, most notably in the development of “New Historicism” and “Cultural Materialism.”. An allegory is when an author uses characters or events that represent larger, more abstract ideas. All literary interpretation draws on a basis in theory but can serve as a justification for very different kinds of critical activity. My love is a Grand Canyon of longing. By learning these elements of narrative, such as plot, setting … Take a minute and imagine building a house. metaphor: metaphor: an image used to While literary theory has always implied or directly expressed a conception of the world outside the text, in the twentieth century three movements—”Marxist theory” of the Frankfurt School, “Feminism,” and “Postmodernism”—have opened the field of literary studies into a broader area of inquiry. perspective. But by looking at the parts of a story one at a In one of the earliest developments of literary theory, German “higher criticism” subjected biblical texts to a radical historicizing that broke with traditional scriptural interpretation.             *morality “Poststructuralism” in America was originally identified with a group of Yale academics, the Yale School of “Deconstruction:” J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartmann, and Paul de Man. time, we can learn what to look for in stories. Marxist theorists use traditional techniques of literary analysis but subordinate aesthetic concerns to the final social and political meanings of literature. telling a story in order of events as they take place in time, conflict: some form of opposition “Literary theory” is the body of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of literature. Any narrative, whether it is a novel, short story or film, shares the same elements. Eagleton is known both as a Marxist theorist and as a popularizer of theory by means of his widely read overview, Literary Theory. If you didn't have these elements, you wouldn't have a house.             *coming-of-age Within the way a particular society uses language and signs, meaning was constituted by a system of “differences” between units of the language. Willard R. Trask. Postmodern thought has led to the serious questioning of the so-called metanarratives of history, science, philosophy, and economic and sexual reproduction. but let’s review the list of various aspects that make up most stories. You may ask: why do we need literary essays if we've already written a book review? You’ve probably written book reports before, and you know that these are pretty simple because you basically retell a book’s major events to prove you’ve read it. For those who may not want to write in their Archetypal criticism is a critical approach to literature that seeks to find and understand the purpose of archetypeswithin literature. This is precisely what literary theory offers, though specific theories often claim to present a complete system for understanding literature. Typically, a literary analysis makes a point about a literary work, then supports that point by discussing the work’s literature elements (e.g. These causes converged with early literary feminist practice, characterized by Elaine Showalter as “gynocriticism,” which emphasized the study and canonical inclusion of works by female authors as well as the depiction of women in male-authored canonical texts. story’s parts to one central organizing principle that forms an organic whole, types of tales: Marxist approaches to literature require an understanding of the primary economic and social bases of culture since Marxist aesthetic theory sees the work of art as a product, directly or indirectly, of the base structure of society. You may want to focus on the events--plot. You may find that the description Using the various poststructuralist and postmodern theories that often draw on disciplines other than the literary—linguistic, anthropological, psychoanalytic, and philosophical—for their primary insights, literary theory has become an interdisciplinary body of cultural theory. Until the nineteenth century, Art, in Shakespeare’s phrase, held “a mirror up to nature” and faithfully recorded an objectively real world independent of the observer. progresses, pathos: quality of a work that evokes Lord of the Flies, for example, is filled to the brim with allegory. as it moves close to the story’s climax, distance: an author’s or Kristeva’s “semiotic” refers to the gaps, silences, spaces, and bodily presence within the language/symbol system of a culture in which there might be a space for a women’s language, different in kind as it would be from male-dominated discourse. “Formalism” is perhaps best known is Shklovsky’s concept of “defamiliarization.” The routine of ordinary experience, Shklovsky contended, rendered invisible the uniqueness and particularity of the objects of existence. lifelike details to give the semblance of reality. Jameson is a more diverse theorist, known both for his impact on Marxist theories of culture and for his position as one of the leading figures in theoretical postmodernism. conveyed by the author’s choice of language. Political feminism of the so-called “second wave” had as its emphasis practical concerns with the rights of women in contemporary societies, women’s identity, and the representation of women in media and culture. realism: use of magical elements to          mood: Literary Devices, Techniques, and Elements A literary device is any specific aspect of literature, or a particular work, which we can recognize, identify, interpret and/or analyze. *revenge Traditional separations of literary and non-literary texts, “great” literature and popular literature, are also fundamentally challenged. “Ethnic Studies” concerns itself generally with art and literature produced by identifiable ethnic groups either marginalized or in a subordinate position to a dominant culture. Literary theory refers to any principles derived from internal analysis of literary texts or from knowledge external to the text that can be applied in multiple interpretive situations. “Critical theory” sees in the structure of mass cultural forms—jazz, Hollywood film, advertising—a replication of the structure of the factory and the workplace. The biological distinction between man and woman eventually came under the same scrutiny by theorists who reached a similar conclusion: the sexual categories are products of culture and as such help create social reality rather than simply reflect it. This, in turn, enables us to better To “queer” becomes an act by which stable boundaries of sexual identity are transgressed, reversed, mimicked, or otherwise critiqued. But analysis requires more from you. symbol: a person, event, place, etc., T.S. when you’re forced to “analyze” a story and write about it as if you’re Attention to the etymology of the term “theory,” from the Greek “theoria,” alerts us to the partial nature of theoretical approaches to literature. The Hungarian theorist Georg Lukacs contributed to an understanding of the relationship between historical materialism and literary form, in particular with realism and the historical novel. These three or four sentences will make up the bulk of your introductory paragraph. In your literary analysis, you’ll want to focus on whether or not these events are significant to your claim. Literary biography was and still is an important interpretive method in and out of the academy; versions of moral criticism, not unlike the Leavis School in Britain, and aesthetic (e.g. and internal forces that cause characters to perform specific acts, narrator: (of plot): the introduction and development of a conflict between characters “Cultural Studies” became notorious in the 90s for its emphasis on pop music icons and music video in place of canonical literature, and extends the ideas of the Frankfurt School on the transition from a truly popular culture to mass culture in late capitalist societies, emphasizing the significance of the patterns of consumption of cultural artifacts. Like Plato, Saussure regarded the signifier (words, marks, symbols) as arbitrary and unrelated to the concept, the signified, to which it referred. Like much of the emergent European social history of the 1980s, “New Historicism” takes particular interest in representations of marginal/marginalized groups and non-normative behaviors—witchcraft, cross-dressing, peasant revolts, and exorcisms—as exemplary of the need for power to represent subversive alternatives, the Other, to legitimize itself. To complete a piece, a writer, dramatist, or a novelist needs to … “Formalism,” like “Structuralism,” sought to place the study of literature on a scientific basis through objective analysis of the motifs, devices, techniques, and other “functions” that comprise the literary work. More recently, scholars and writers such as Henry Louis Gates, Toni Morrison, and Kwame Anthony Appiah have brought attention to the problems inherent in applying theoretical models derived from Euro-centric paradigms (that is, structures of thought) to minority works of literature while at the same time exploring new interpretive strategies for understanding the vernacular (common speech) traditions of racial groups that have been historically marginalized by dominant cultures. Feminist gender theory is postmodern in that it challenges the paradigms and intellectual premises of western thought, but also takes an activist stance by proposing frequent interventions and alternative epistemological positions meant to change the social order. 1) The elements 2) Focus on literary 3) Essay Organization 4) MLA Format 1) The Elements The elements are the plot, conflict, characters and the setting. TERMS FOR DISCUSSING & ANALYZING STORIES, atmosphere: mood or feeling The Antigone (Anouilh) Community Note includes chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quizzes written by community members like you. Masculine gender theory as a separate enterprise has focused largely on social, literary, and historical accounts of the construction of male gender identities. may be a character Literary criticism refers to a “Literary theory,” sometimes designated “critical theory,” or “theory,” and now undergoing a transformation into “cultural theory” within the discipline of literary studies, can be understood as the set of concepts and intellectual assumptions on which rests the work of explaining or interpreting literary texts. Additionally, unlike literature or poetry, visual documents are often more ingrained in our daily lives and encountered instead of sought. According to Lacan, the fixed, stable self is a Romantic fiction; like the text in “Deconstruction,” the self is a decentered mass of traces left by our encounter with signs, visual symbols, language, etc. Academic literary criticism prior to the rise of “New Criticism” in the United States tended to practice traditional literary history: tracking influence, establishing the canon of major writers in the literary periods, and clarifying historical context and allusions within the text. As an important consequence of this systematic intellectual repression and exclusion, women’s lives and bodies in historical societies are subject to repression as well. Anal… Feminist thought and practice analyzes the production of literature and literary representation within the framework that includes all social and cultural formations as they pertain to the role of women in history. Of the Russian Formalist critics, Roman Jakobson and Viktor Shklovsky are probably the most well known. For Lacan, the self is constituted by language, a language that is never one’s own, always another’s, always already in use. A literary analysis essay explains the significance of a specific aspect of a literary work. “Theoria” indicates a view or perspective of the Greek stage. unity: the relation of all the narrator’s spatial, temporal, or emotional removal from plot events, flashback: breaks up chronological “Critical theory” held to a distinction between the high cultural heritage of Europe and the mass culture produced by capitalist societies as an instrument of domination. Wimsatt placed a similar focus on the metaphysical poets and poetry in general, a genre well suited to New Critical practice. complication (of plot): the introduction and development of a conflict between characters or characters and a situation. The Formalists placed great importance on the literariness of texts, those qualities that distinguished the literary from other kinds of writing. “Postcolonial Criticism” investigates the relationships between colonizers and colonized in the period post-colonization. All these entities have elements. Narrative Story Components. Make notes and mark important places as you read. Other tendencies in the moment after “Deconstruction” that share some of the intellectual tendencies of “Poststructuralism” would included the “Reader response” theories of Stanley Fish, Jane Tompkins, and Wolfgang Iser. By literary theory we refer not to the meaning of a work of literature but to the theories that reveal what literature can mean. simply read an assigned story. A plot device or narrative strategy was examined for how it functioned and compared to how it had functioned in other literary works. Literary language, partly by calling attention to itself as language, estranged the reader from the familiar and made fresh the experience of daily life. The work of the “Formalist” Roman Jakobson contributed to “Structuralist” thought, and the more prominent Structuralists included Claude Levi-Strauss in anthropology, Tzvetan Todorov, A.J. This article looks at Aristotle's analysis of the Greek tragedy and on Gustav Freytag's analysis of ancient Greek and Shakespearean drama. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953. New Critics like Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and W.K. Heck, you might not even have a building! Authors typically use allegory to teach a lesson of some sort. The Formalist adage that the purpose of literature was “to make the stones stonier” nicely expresses their notion of literariness. author seems to be saying about human nature–its theme. In this respect, “Postcolonial Criticism” is activist and adversarial in its basic aims. Having long served as the de facto “subject” of Western thought, male identity and masculine gender theory awaits serious investigation as a particular, and no longer universally representative, field of inquiry. Author admin Posted on May 5, ... Appraisal with a critical perspective: the skill to apply the principles of effective analysis of study so as to be able to distinguish between valid and invalid studies with an unbiased perspective. Throughout this sample literary analysis, footnotes are used to highlight the key components of a literary analysis paper, including: • a strong thesis statement. Components of a Literature Review The works that make up the literature review fall into three categories: General theoretical literature. “Ethnic Studies” has had a considerable impact on literary studies in the United States and Britain. U. S. A. Much of what theoretical energy of masculine gender theory currently possesses comes from its ambiguous relationship with the field of “Queer theory.” “Queer theory” is not synonymous with gender theory, nor even with the overlapping fields of gay and lesbian studies, but does share many of their concerns with normative definitions of man, woman, and sexuality. Components of an effective Literature Review By . reality on purpose It is literary theory that formulates the relationship between author and work; literary theory develops the significance of race, class, and gender for literary study, both from the standpoint of the biography of the author and an analysis of their thematic presence within texts. Under postmodernity, all knowledge comes to be seen as “constructed” within historical self-contained systems of understanding. verisimilitude: use of certain “Cultural Studies” has been interdisciplinary, even antidisciplinary, from its inception; indeed, “Cultural Studies” can be understood as a set of sometimes conflicting methods and approaches applied to a questioning of current cultural categories. Williams is associated with the New Left political movement in Great Britain and the development of “Cultural Materialism” and the Cultural Studies Movement, originating in the 1960s at Birmingham University’s Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. \"Literary theory,\" sometimes designated \"critical theory,\" or \"theory,\" and now undergoing a transformation into \"cultural theory\" within the discipline of literary studies, can be understood as the set of concepts and intellectual assumptions on which rests the work of explaining or interpreting literary texts. “Postcolonial” theory reverses the historical center/margin direction of cultural inquiry: critiques of the metropolis and capital now emanate from the former colonies. Jameson’s work on consumer culture, architecture, film, literature and other areas, typifies the collapse of disciplinary boundaries taking place in the realm of Marxist and postmodern cultural theory. “Higher,” or “source criticism,” analyzed biblical tales in light of comparable narratives from other cultures, an approach that anticipated some of the method and spirit of twentieth century theory, particularly “Structuralism” and “New Historicism.” In France, the eminent literary critic Charles Augustin Saint Beuve maintained that a work of literature could be explained entirely in terms of biography, while novelist Marcel Proust devoted his life to refuting Saint Beuve in a massive narrative in which he contended that the details of the life of the artist are utterly transformed in the work of art. presented to the main character, crises: turning point in a narrative (This dispute was taken up anew by the French theorist Roland Barthes in his famous declaration of the “Death of the Author.” See “Structuralism” and “Poststructuralism.”) Perhaps the greatest nineteenth century influence on literary theory came from the deep epistemological suspicion of Friedrich Nietzsche: that facts are not facts until they have been interpreted. Vince Brewton Neither author nor context was essential for the Formalists; it was the narrative that spoke, the “hero-function,” for example, that had meaning. Their work beyond the descriptive stage becomes an intervention in the history of theoretical discourse, an attempt to alter the existing categories and systems of thought that found Western rationality. What literature was, and why we read literature, and what we read, were questions that subsequent movements in literary theory were to raise. Afro-Caribbean and African writers—Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe—have made significant early contributions to the theory and practice of ethnic criticism that explores the traditions, sometimes suppressed or underground, of ethnic literary activity while providing a critique of representations of ethnic identity as found within the majority culture. Greimas, Gerard Genette, and Barthes. Much of the intellectual legacy of “New Historicism” and “Cultural Materialism” can now be felt in the “Cultural Studies” movement in departments of literature, a movement not identifiable in terms of a single theoretical school, but one that embraces a wide array of perspectives—media studies, social criticism, anthropology, and literary theory—as they apply to the general study of culture. LITERARY or character’s thinking is curious, contradictory, etc.–point-of-view. Literary theorists trace the history and evolution of the different genres—narrative, dramatic, lyric—in addition to the more recent emergence of the novel and the short story, while also investigating the importance of formal elements of literary structure. Marxist literary theories tend to focus on the representation of class conflict as well as the reinforcement of class distinctions through the medium of literature. the thought of reading and writing about fiction, remembering traumatic episodes fortunes of a character, simile: Or, you focus on what the chronological/linear plot flow: telling a story in order of events as they take place in time The so-called “Men’s Movement,” inspired by the work of Robert Bly among others, was more practical than theoretical and has had only limited impact on gender discourse. This may require a huge amount of time and effort to compile, but the literature analysis is a first step toward solving the problem or carrying out the task described in the proposal. The translation of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin on carnival coincided with the rise of the “New Historicism” and “Cultural Materialism” and left a legacy in work of other theorists of influence like Peter Stallybrass and Jonathan Dollimore.
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