What is Literary Criticism?
Literary criticism is the crazy stuff we do when we read some literature and then tell people or write about what we we got out of it. Whenever we discuss what a work of literature means we are engaging in literary criticism.
Literary criticism isn't like most people think of criticism. It isn't simply finding faults with literature (well, sometimes it is, but not all the time). Nor is it telling people to read a book or let it pass by the wayside, like movie critics do. Nope, all we do when we engage in lit. crit. is to say "This is what this literature means, and here's why I think so." Unless of course you are a Deconstructionist. Then you say something like, "This is what this literature would like to mean, but here's why it fails. Everything is meaningless . . . Espresso?
"Yes, Please."
So anyway, It's not like some kind of academic free-for-all, where everybody just gets to assign meaning to literature all willy-nilly. It's worse than that. It's done under the guise of organized schools.
These schools of literary criticism have names like Marxism, Feminism, Formalism, Reader Response, Deconstructionism, and so on. They differ from each other mainly in what they choose to focus on. And they all think they are the most important, or the "right" school.
It might help to think of each school as a filter that brings out some aspects of the literature while letting other aspects stay in the background. For instance, Psychoanalytic criticism would look at the inner workings of a character's mind to find the meaning, but wouldn't concern itself with the interaction between different socioeconomic classes. Get it? If you don't, you will.
So everybody is seperated into these schools, right? But they don't necessarily agree on much of anything. They talk about the same stuff, and use a similar style of arguments, but they still can, and do, completely disagree with each other. So when you come up with something that you think a piece of literature means and have the stuff to back it up, your theory is probably going to be at odds with some of the other theories even in the same school that you are in. And of course you're going to be disagreed with by people who are in the other schools.
But it's OK. There's no need to worry. Rarely is blood shed because of differences of interpretation of literature.... Hold it. Nevermind. Blood is often shed because of differences of interpretation of literature. But that's mainly in northern Ireland and in the Middle East. Here in Academia you're relatively safe.
And you don't have to choose a school that you must write from forever. They're not like clubs with dues and all that. My advice to you is to shop around. Try on the different schools. See how they feel. You'll probably find a couple you like.
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3.15.2002