Literary Terms

NAME                :      VORA HIRVA

ROLL NO.         :      12

SUB                    :      Literary Terms and Criticism

M.A.                   :      SEM – I

TOPIC               :      Literary Terms

               What is Criticism  :

Ê   Criticism is the practice of judging the merts and faults of something or someone in an intelligible way.

Ê   Criticism can be directed toward a person, at a group authority or organization, at a specific behavior, or at an object of some king can idea, a relationship, a condition, a process, or a thing.

Ê   Personal or impersonal.

Ê   Highly specific and detailed, or very abstract and general.

Ê   It can be expressed in language or expressed symbolically, or expressed through an action or a way of behaving.

               Literary Criticism  :

Ê   Literary criticism, the reasoned consideration of literary works and issues. It applies, as a term, to whether or not specific literary, analyzed. Ploto's cautions against the risky consequences of poetic inspiration in general in his republic earliest important example of literary criticism.

          More otrickly constructed the term covers only what her been called "Practical Criticism" the interpretation of meaning and the judgment of quality. Criticism is this narrow sense can be distinguished not only from aesthetic but also from other matters that may concern the questions, bibliography, historical knowledge, sources and infiueally in academic studies, a criticism is often considered to be separate from a scholarship. In practice, however this distinction often proves artificial, and even the most single minded concentration on a text may be informed by outside knowledge while many notable work's of criticism combine discussion of texts with broad arguments about the nature of literature and the principles of assessing it.

          Thus literary criticism is the term given to studies that define, classify, analyze, interpret and evaluate works of literature. There are many types of literary criticism some examples include historical criticism, textual criticism, feminist criticism, and formalist criticism. Literary criticism may examine a particular literary work or it may look at an author's writings as a whole.           

               Practical  Criticism or applied criticism :

          Practical criticism in the general sense, the kind of criticism that analysis specific literary works, either as a deliberate application of a previously elaborated theory or as a supposedly non theoretical investigation. More specifically the team is applied to an academic procedure devised by the critic.

          Practical criticism is sometimes distinguished into impressionistic and judicial criticism. Practical criticism   is like the formal study of English literature itself, a relatively young diseapline. It began in the 19205 with a series of experiments by the Cambridge critic. I.A. Richards. He gone Poems to students without any information about who wrote them or when they were written. The objective of his work was to encourage students to concentrate on 'The words on the page', rather than relying on preconceived or received beliefs about a text.

          Practical criticism  today is more usually treated as an ancillary skill rather than the foundation of a critical method. It is a part of many examinations in literature at almost all levels and is used to test students responsiveness to what they read, as well as their knowledge of verse forms and of the technical language for describing the way poems create their effects.

          Practical criticism in this form has no necessary connection with any particular theoretical approach and has shed the psychological theories which originally underpinned it. It might be seen as encouraging readings which concentrate on the form and meaning of particular works rather than on larger theoretical questions.

          Literary criticism can be divided into theoretical and practical applied criticism. Theoretical criticism is general and deals with the aesthetic principles and tenants of art. The practical criticism is by no means single in aim or approach.

               Impressionistic Criticism :

          Impressionistic criticism is the kind of criticism that restricts itself to describing the critic's own subjective response to a literary work, rather than ascribing intrinsic qualities to it in the light of general principles. Walter patel's defence of such criticism in the preface to his studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) was that in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, 95 to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realize it distinctly'

          It refers to the way a certain literary work makes the audience feel. Impressionist criticism is closely related to reader – response criticism where the reader describes what the meaning of the work is to them. Impressionistic criticism is the record of the personal responses ; it is a record of the critic's own appreciation of aesthetic beauty, any rules and regulations. The critic does not evaluate a work, he does not call it good or bad, rather he seeks to convey his own enjoyment of it to his readers.

          Impressionistic criticism is what happens when a critic is reading a piece of work and critiques it on how he or she is feeling instead of critiquing using principles. Impressionistic criticism is the difference between reality and what we think, the difference between objectively and subjectivity. The source of the subline lies in the capabilities of the speaker or writer. Three of these the use of figurative language, nobility of expression and elevated composition are matters of art that can be acquired by practice ; but two otherand more important, capabilities are largely innate;  "loftiness of thought" and "strong and inspired passion" the ability to achieve sublimity is in itself enough to prove the panseendent genius of a wrter, and expresses the nobility of the writer's character; "Submility is the ring of greatness in the soul". Longinus in poems range of  the voices of /homer through the tragedies of Aeschylus to a love lyric by sappose his examples in trose are taken from the writing of the philosopher plato, the orator Demosthenes, and the historian Herodotus. Especially notable is his quotation, as a prime instance of sublimity, of the passage in the Book of Genesis written by "the lawgiver of the Jews" : "And God said, 'Let there be light' and there was light, ':et there be land', and there was land".

          Longinus' treatise exerted a strong and persistent effect on literary criticism after it became widely known by way of a French translation by Boileay in 1674; eventually, it halped theory of poetry and the critical method of impressionism. In the 18th century an important tendency in critical theory was to shift the application of the term, "The subhme" from a quality of linguistic discourse that originates in the powers of writer's mind, to a quality inherent in external objects, and above all in the scenes and occurrences of the natural worlds. Thus Edmund  Burke's highly in fluential philosophical Enquiry into the origin of our Ideas of the subline and Beautiful the source of the subline to those things which are "in any sort terrible" – that is, to whatever is "fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger" – provided that the observer is in a situation of safety from danger, and so is able to experience what would otherwise be a painful terror as a "delightful horror".

               Judicial Criticism   :

          On the other hand, attempts not merely to communicate, but to analyze and explain the effects of a work by reference to its subject organization, techniques, and style, and to base the critic's individual judgments on specified criteria or literary excellence. Rerely are there two modes of criticism sharply distrinct in practice, but good examples of primarily impressionistic commentary can be found in the greek Longinus, Hazlitt, Walter pater and some of the 20th century critical essays of E.M.Forster and virginic woolf.

          Types of traditional critical theries and of applied criticism can be usefully distinguished according to whether in defining, explaining and judging of work of literature. They refer the work primarily to the outer world, or to the reader or to the author, or else treat the work as an entity in itself.

1.      Mimetic Criticism   :

          Views the literary work as an imitation, or reflection, or representation of the world and human life, and the primary criterion applied to a work is the "Truth" and "adequacy" of its representation to the matter that it represents, or should represent. This mode of criticism which first appleared in plato and in Aristotle, remains characteristic of modern theories of literary realism.

          Structuralism is in explicit opposition to mimetic criticism, to expressive criticism. Mimetic criticism the view that literature is mimarily on imitation of reality and expressive criticism the view that literature primarily expresses the feelings or temperament or creative imagination of its author and to any form of the view that literature is a mode of communication between author and readers. More generally, in its attempt to develop a sequence of literature and in many of its salient concepts, the radical forms of structuralism depart from the assumptions and ruling ideas of traditional humanistic criticism.

2.      Pragmatic Criticism   :

          It views the work as something which is constructed in order to achieve certain effects on the audience, effects such as aesthetic pleasure, instruction, or kinds of emotion and it tends to judge the value of the work according to its success in achieving that aim. This approach, which largely dominated literary discussion from the versified Artof poetry by the Roman Horefe (First centry B.C.) through 18th century has been revived in recent rhetorical criticism, which emphasizes the artistic strategies by which an author engages and influences the responses of readers to the matters represented in a literary work.

          The Roman Horace in his versified Art of Poetry – First century B.C. declared that the aim of a poet is either to instruct or delight a reader, and preferably to do both. This view, by making poetry a calculated means to achieve effects on its audience, breaks down Aristotle's distinction between imitative poetry and persuasive rhetoric. Such pragmatic criticism became the dominant form of literary theory from late classical times through the 18th century. Discussion of poetry in that long span of time absorbed and expanded upon the analytic terms that had been developed in traditional rhetoric, and represented a poem mainly as a deployment of established artistic means for achieving foreseen effects upon its readers.

3.      Expressive Criticism   :

          Expressive criticism treats a literary work primarily in realtion to its author. It defines poetry as an expression or overflaw of feelings, poet's imagination, thoughts, Feelings, it tends to judge the work by its sincerity or state of minds and it often seeks in the work evidences of the particular temperament of the author.

4.      Objective Criticism   :

          Objective Criticism deals with a work of literature as something which stands free from what is often called "extrinsic" relations to the poet, or to the audience. Instead it describes the literary product as a self-sufficient and autonomous object or else as a world – in – atself, which is to be contemplated as its own end, and to be analyzed and judged solely by "intrinsic" criteria such as its complexity, wherence, integrity, and the interrelations of its component elements. The two critics work in direct reaction to the view of I.A. Richards, in his influential principles of Literary criticism that the value of a poem can be measured by the psychological responses it incites in its readers. Beardsley later modified the earlier claim by the admission that "it does not appear that critical evaluation can be done at all except in relation to certain types of effect that aesthetic objects have upon their perceivers". So altered, the doctrine be comes a claim for objective criticism, in which the critic, instead of describing the effects of a work, focuses on the features, devices, and form of the work by which such effects are achieved. An author's intended aims and meanings in writing a literature work whether these are asserted by the author or merely inferred from our knowledge of the author's life and opinions are irrelevant to the literary critic, because the meaning, structure and value of a text are inherent within the finished, freestanding, and public work of literature itself. Reference to the author's supposed purposes, or else to the author's personal situation and state of mind in writing a text, is held to be a harmful mistake, because it diverts our attention to such "External" matters as the author's biography, or psychological condition, or creative process, which we substitute for the proper critical concern with the "internal" constitution and interent value of the literary product. John Crowe  Ransom said, "is that it shall be objective, shall cite the nature of the object" and shall recognize "the autonomy of the work itself as existing for its own sake".