Doing Literary Criticism. Product Details Author: Tim GillespieISBN: 978-157110-842-5Year: 2010Media: 320 pp/paper + CDGrade Range: 7-12Item No: WEB-0842 One of the greatest challenges for English language arts teachers today is the call to engage students in more complex texts. Tim Gillespie, who has taught in public schools for almost four decades, has found the lenses of literary criticism a powerful tool for helping students tackle challenging literary texts. Tim breaks down the dense language of critical theory into clear, lively, and thorough explanations of many schools of critical thought -- reader response, biographical, historical, psychological, archetypal, genre based, moral, philosophical, feminist, political, formalist, and postmodern.
Doing Literary Criticism gives each theory its own chapter with a brief, teacher-friendly overview and a history of the approach, along with an in-depth discussion of its benefits and limitations. Table of Contents. DonaMajicShow • On Moral and Philosophical Criticism. 2 Literary Criticism. Types of literary criticism. Overview For all its shortcomings, literary criticism still provides the poet with the tools for self-evaluation and self-improvement. It introduces work of periods and cultures different in theme and treatment. Literary criticism comes in various shapes and aims. At best it poses searching questions of the writer, and insists that he understands how the arts, the sciences and philosophy have different but coexisting concepts of truth and meaning. Introduction Literary critics have many skills, {1} but those which the practising poet needs to acquire are close reading, explication and evaluation. But the critic's eye is a rare gift, rarer than sainthood, Housman thought, and matters have lately become more controversial.
Purposes of Theory What does literary criticism hope to achieve? But who is the reader? It is the original intention or purpose of writing, that much historical and sociological analysis attempts to understand. With conventions come the expectations of the audience. 1. Literary-criticism - Poetry Beyond Text. There is no single methodology that governs Literary Criticism as a whole, but generally critics tend to proceed by drawing together close readings of texts with historical sources and/or theoretical frameworks.
There are many schools of criticism, founded on different approaches and value systems. Here, we outline some of the historical and theoretical frameworks relevant to ‘Poetry Beyond Text’. Aesthetics Theories of aesthetics explore how we engage with and react to sensual objects and experiences, attempting to explain how we come to judgments such as ‘this is beautiful’ or ‘this is ugly’. Aesthetic experience, because it is sensory rather than conceptual, is difficult to put into language. We can agree that a painting or a sunset is beautiful for example, but we find it difficult to say what makes it so. Literature and visual art, the two modes upon which this project focuses, have been considered in relation to one another since antiquity.
Reader Response Cognitive Literary Theory. Introduction to Modern Literary Theory. Psychoanalytic Criticism The application of specific psychological principles (particularly those of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan [zhawk lawk-KAWN]) to the study of literature. Psychoanalytic criticism may focus on the writer's psyche, the study of the creative process, the study of psychological types and principles present within works of literature, or the effects of literature upon its readers (Wellek and Warren, p. 81).
In addition to Freud and Lacan, major figures include Shoshona Felman, Jane Gallop, Norman Holland, George Klein, Elizabeth Wright, Frederick Hoffman, and, Simon Lesser. Key Terms: Unconscious - the irrational part of the psyche unavailable to a person's consciousness except through dissociated acts or dreams. Freud's model of the psyche: Id - completely unconscious part of the psyche that serves as a storehouse of our desires, wishes, and fears. The id houses the libido, the source of psychosexual energy. Further references: Barrett, William.
Key Terms : Criticism. Literary Criticism.