Literary interpretations always reflect a particular institutional, cultural, and historical background. Historically speaking, the systematic analysis of texts developed in the magic or religious realm, and in legal discourse. The interpretation of oracles and dreams forms the starting point of textual analysis and survives as the basic structures in the study of the holy texts of all major religions. An ecstatic person (called a medium) in a state of trance received encoded information about future events from a divinity. An important aspect of this oral precursor of written textual phenomena is that the wording of an utterance was seen as a fixed text that could consequently be interpreted.
The interpretation of encoded information in a text is important to all religions; it usually centers on the analysis or exegesis of canonical text such as the Bible, the Koran, or other holy books. It is important to observe that the interpretation of these kinds of texts deals with encoded information which can only be retrieved and made intelligible through exegetic practices. The exegesis of religious and legal texts was based on the assumption that the meaning of a text could only be retrieved through the act of interpretation. The approaches and methodologies associated with both (the exegesis of the Bible and the interpretation of legal texts) have always indirectly influenced literary studies.
Among the many diverse methods of interpretation, it is possible to isolate four basic approaches which provide a grid according to which most schools or trends can be classified. Depending on the main focus of these major methodologies, one can distinguish between text-, author-, reader-, and context-oriented approaches.
- Text-oriented Approach
- Reader-oriented Approach
- Author-oriented Approach
- Context-oriented Approach
Text-Oriented Approach
In text-oriented approaches, extra-textual factors concerning the author (his or her biography, other works), audiences (race, class, gender, age, education) or larger contexts (historical, social, or political conditions) are deliberately excluded from the analysis. Text oriented traditions, however, center on the text per se, primarily investigating its formal or structural features. Traditional philology, for example, highlights “material” elements of language; rhetoric and stylistics analyze larger structures of meaning or means of expression, and the formalist-structuralist schools, including Russian formalism, the Prague school of structuralism, new criticism, semiotics, and deconstruction, attempt to trace general patterns in texts or illuminate the nature of “literariness.”
Formalism and Structuralism
These linguistic movements began in the 1920s, were suppressed by the Soviets in the 1930s, moved to Czechoslovakia and were continued by members of the Prague Linguistic Circle (including Roman Jakobson. The Prague Linguistic Circle viewed literature as a special class of language and rested on the assumption that there is a fundamental opposition between literary (or poetical) language and ordinary language. Formalism views the primary function of ordinary language as communicating a message, or information, by references to the world existing outside of language.
In contrast, it views literary language as self-focused: its function is not to make extrinsic references, but to draw attention to its own “formal” features–that is, to interrelationships among the linguistic signs themselves. Literature is held to be subject to critical analysis by the sciences of linguistics but also by a type of linguistics different from that adapted to ordinary discourse, because its laws produce the distinctive features of literariness (Abrams, pp. 165 166).
Rhetoric
Rhetoric was mainly concerned with teaching effectively how to influence the masses. In its attempt to classify systematically and investigate elements of human speech, rhetoric laid the foundation for current linguistics and literary criticism. Rhetoric originally mediated rules concerning eloquence and perfect speech and was hence primarily prescriptive. Rhetoric analyzed concrete textual samples in order to delineate rules for the composition of a “perfect” text. Stylistics focused on grammatical structures (lexis, syntax), acoustic elements (melody, rhyme, meter, rhythm), and over-arching forms (rhetorical figures) in its analyses of texts.
New Criticism
A literary movement that started in the late 1920s and 1930s and originated in reaction to traditional criticism that new critics saw as largely concerned with matters extraneous to the text, e.g., with the biography or psychology of the author or the work’s relationship to literary history. New Criticism proposed that a work of literary art should be regarded as autonomous, and so should not be judged by reference to considerations beyond itself. A poem consists less of a series of referential and verifiable statements about the ‘real’ world beyond it, than of the presentation and sophisticated organization of a set of complex experiences in a verbal form (Hawkes, pp. 150-151).
Major figures of New Criticism include I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, David Daiches, William Empson, Murray Krieger, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, F. R. Leavis, Robert Penn Warren, W. K. Wimsatt, R. P. Blackmur, Rene Wellek, Ausin Warren, and Ivor Winters.
- Close Reading: a close and detailed analysis of the text itself to arrive at an interpretation without referring to historical, authorial, or cultural concerns.
- Intentional Fallacy: equating the meaning of a poem with the author’s intentions.
Deconstruction
“It is a shift from seeing the poem or novel as a closed entity, equipped with definite meanings which it is the critic’s task to decipher, to seeing literature as irreducibly plural, an endless play of signifiers which can never be finally nailed down to a single centre, essence, or meaning”
Reader-Oriented Approach
Reader-oriented approach developed in the 1960s called reception theory, reader response theory, or aesthetic of reception. These approaches assume that a text creates certain expectations in the reader in every phase or of reading. The reader’s expectation plays a role in every sort of text, but it is most obvious in literary genres like detective fiction, which depend very much on the interaction between text and recipient. Edgar Alan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue is one of the examples of this approach. It guides reader’s imagination and expectation in different directions.
Reader-Response and Reception Theory
Reader-response theory may be traced initially to theorists such as I. A. Richards. the idea of a “correct” reading–though difficult to attain–was always the goal of the “educated” reader. To simplify, a reader brings certain assumptions to a text based on the interpretive strategies he/she has learned in a particular interpretive community. For Fish, the interpretive community serves somewhat to “police” readings and thus prohibit outlandish interpretations.
Author-Oriented Approach
This author-oriented approach established a direct link between the literary text and the biography of the author. Dates, facts, and events in an author’s life are juxtaposed with literary elements of his or her works in order to find aspects which connect the biography of the author with the text. Research into the milieu and education of the author is conducted and then related to certain phenomena in the text.
Autobiographies are obviously suitable for this kind of approach, which compares the fictional portrayal with the facts and figures from the author’s life. In many cases, autobiographical material enters the fictional text in codes. Author-centered approaches focus also on aspects which might have entered the text on a subconscious or involuntary level. The fact that Mary Shelley had a miscarriage during the period in which she wrote her novel Frankenstein (1818) can be related directly to the plot. According to the author-centered approaches, the central theme of the novel, the creation of an artificial human being, can be traced back to Mary Shelley’s intense psychological occupation with the issue of birth at the time. These approaches assume that the author is present in his text in encoded form and that his spirit can be revived by an intensive reading of his complete works.
Biographical Criticism
As the critical attention to biography waned in the mid-twentieth century, interest in autobiography increased. Autobiography paired well with theories such as structuralism and poststructuralism because autobiography was fertile ground for considering the divide between fact and fiction, challenging the possibility of presenting a life objectively, and examining how the shaping force of language prohibited any simple attempts at truth and reference. Classical autobiographies focused on public figures, were, largely, written by men, and works theorizing autobiography primarily treated men’s life writing. Until the mid-1970s, little work was done on theorizing women’s autobiographies.
Psychoanalytical Criticism
The application of specific psychological principles (particularly those of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan 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.
Also Read: Feminist and Psychoanalytic Approaches to Sons and Lovers
Freud’s model of the psyche:
Id – completely unconscious part of the psyche that serves as a storehouse of our desires, wishes, and fears.
Ego – mostly to partially (<–a point of debate) conscious part of the psyche that processes experiences and operates as a referee or mediator between the id and superego.
Superego – often thought of as one’s “conscience”; the superego operates “like an internal censor [encouraging] moral judgments in light of social pressures”
Lacan’s model of the psyche:
Imaginary – a preverbal/verbal stage in which a child (around 6-18 months of age) begins to develop a sense of separateness from her mother as well as other people and objects; however, the child’s sense of sense is still incomplete.
Symbolic – the stage marking a child’s entrance into language (the ability to understand and generate symbols); in contrast to the imaginary stage, largely focused on the mother, the symbolic stage shifts attention to the father who, in Lacanian theory, represents cultural norms, laws, language, and power (the symbol of power is the phallus–an arguably “gender-neutral” term).
Real – an unattainable stage representing all that a person is not and does not have. Both Lacan and his critics argue whether the real order represents the period before the imaginary order when a child is completely fulfilled–without need or lack, or if the real order follows the symbolic order and represents our “perennial lack”.
Context-Oriented Approach
This term refers to heterogeneous group of schools and methodologies which do not regard literary texts as self-contained, independent work of art but try to place them within a larger context. It is divided into two parts, they are literary history and Marxist literary theory. Literary history divided into many periods, describes the text with respect to its historical background, dates, texts, and examines their mutual influences.
Feminist Theory
Feminist literary theory born on the movement of people especially woman which has strongly establish academic discipline. Feminist literary theory starts with the assumption that “gender difference” is an aspect which has been neglected in traditional literary criticism and, therefore, argues that traditional domain of literary criticism has to be re-examined from a gender-oriented perspective.
Feminism might be categorized into three general groups:
- theories having an essentialist focus (including psychoanalytic and French feminism)
- theories aimed at defining or establishing a feminist literary canon or theories seeking to re-interpret and re-vision literature
- theories focusing on sexual difference and sexual politics
New Historicism
New historicism arose in US in the 1980s. it builds on post-structuralism and deconstruction, with their focus on text and discourse, but adds a historical dimension to the discussion of literary texts. For example is Shakespeare’s works are viewed as a concern with the historical document on the discovery of America.
New Historicism views history skeptically (historical narrative is inherently subjective), but also more broadly; history includes all of the cultural, social, political, anthropological discourses at work in any given age, and these various “texts” are unranked – any text may yield information valuable in understanding a particular milieu. Stephen Greenblatt was an early important figure, and Michel Foucault’s (fou-KOH) intertextual methods focusing especially on issues such as power and knowledge proved very influential.
Postcolonial Theory
Postcolonialism refers to the period following the decline of colonialism, e.g., the end or lessening of domination by European empires. Although the term postcolonialism generally refers to the period after colonialism, the distinction is not always made. In its use as a critical approach, postcolonialism refers to “a collection of theoretical and critical strategies used to examine the culture (literature, politics, history, and so forth) of former colonies of the European empires, and their relation to the rest of the world” (Makaryk 155).
Among the many challenges facing postcolonial writers are the attempt both to resurrect their culture and to combat preconceptions about their culture. Edward Said, for example, uses the word Orientalism to describe the discourse about the East constructed by the West.
Also Read: Writing Back to Power: An Introduction to Postcolonial Literature
