AP English Literature & Composition Literary Criticism

Literary Criticism

• What is Literary Criticism?
• Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature.
• Essentially, it asks a few major questions:
• What is the work about?
• What is the author trying to say?
• What does [something] mean?
• How do these works relate to one another?
• Is this work any good (by any given definition of “good”)?
• Why Does Literary Criticism Matter?
• A lot of people would tell you it doesn’t, BUT …
• It helps you get through high-school and college literature classes.
• It helps you understand what a lot of very smart people are talking about (and sound smart yourself).
• It helps you understand the operating system of human beings—stories.
• Where to Find Literary Criticism
• Critical anthologies
• Literary journals
• Book reviews
• Popular “literary” magazines (The New Yorker, The Nation, etc.)
• Major Critical Movements
• Moral Criticism, Dramatic Construction (~360 BC-present)
• Formalism, New Criticism, Neo-Aristotelian Criticism (1930s-present)
• Psychoanalytic Criticism, Jungian Criticism(1930s-present)
• Marxist Criticism (1930s-present)
• Reader-Response Criticism (1960s-present)
• Structuralism/Semiotics (1920s-present)
• Post-Structuralism/Deconstruction (1966-present)
• New Historicism/Cultural Studies (1980s-present)
• Post-Colonial Criticism (1990s-present)
• Feminist Criticism (1960s-present)
• Gender/Queer Studies (1970s-present)
• How to Write Your Own Literary Criticism
• Essentially, literary criticism is all about observation and interpretation. You observe what is present in or around the work, and you interpret what it means and how it connects to other works.
• This might be your sincere opinion about whatever you’re reading, or it might not.
• At least on the AP English Literature and Composition exam, you don’t have to believe a word you say. You just have to back it up.
• Things to look at:
• Context:When and where was the work written? Is it part of a larger literary movement? Does it follow the rules of that movement, or deviate from them in some important way?
• Biography:What do you know about the author? Is this work autobiographical? Is some element of it drawn from the author’s life, or written in response to some key historical event?
• Content:On a basic level, what’s in the work? What happens in the story or poem? What is predictable? What is surprising? What do you remember most about this work when you’ve finished reading it?
• Undercurrents:What is the theme of the work? Are there allusions to other works of literature? How does the author’s tone affect your perception of the work?
• Language:What kind of language does the author use? What kind of vocabulary does he or she display? Are sentences, lines, and paragraphs long or short? Does anything rhyme? What kinds of word origins are in play? What kind of sound would this work have when read aloud?
• Critical Perspectives:How would members of the various critical schools approach this work? What would they say about it?
• The Quick and Dirty Secret of Lit-Crit
• Write about whatever the author didn’t have to include.
• Scenes, actions, and characters
• Language and imagery
• Allusions
• Digressions and tangents
• Style deviations
• The “weird stuff”
• Three Great Books on Lit-Crit
• The Critical Tradition: Classical Texts and Contemporary Trends (1998), edited by David H. Richter
• Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide(1999), by Lois Tyson
• Beginning Theory(2002), by Peter Barry