Literary Approaches

1. Criticism
Psychoanalytic, Cultural Criticism, and
Structuralism

2. Psychoanalytic
Criticism

3. •It adopts the methods of "reading"
employed by Freud and later theorists to
interpret texts. It argues that literary texts,
like dreams, express the secret unconscious
desires and anxieties of the author, that
a literary work is a manifestation of the
author's own neuroses. It approaches an
author’s work as a kind of textual “talk
therapy”.

4. •One may psychoanalyze a particular
character within a literary work, but
it is usually assumed that all such
characters are projections of the
author's psyche.

5. •Like psychoanalysis itself, this critical
endeavor seeks evidence of unresolved
emotions, psychological conflicts, guilt,
ambivalences, and so forth within the
author’s literary work. The author's own
childhood traumas, family life, sexual
conflicts, fixations, and such will be
traceable within the behavior of the
characters in the literary work.

6. •Despite the importance of the author here,
psychoanalytic criticism is similar to New
Criticism in not concerning itself with "what
the author intended." But what the author
never intended (that is, repressed) is
sought. The unconscious material has been
distorted by the censoring conscious mind.

7. •Psychoanalytic critics will ask such
questions as, "What is Hamlet's
problem?" or "Why can't Brontë seem to
portray any positive mother figures?"

8. Cultural Criticism

9. •A cultural critic is a critic of a
given culture, usually as a whole
and typically on a radical basis.
There is significant overlap with
social and cultural theory.

10. • One of the goals of cultural criticism is to
oppose Culture with a capital C, in other
words, that new of culture which always
and only equates it with what we
sometimes call "high culture." Cultural
critics want to make the term culture refer
to popular culture as well as to that culture
we associate with the so-called classics.

11. •Cultural critics are as likely to write about
"Star Trek" as they are to analyze James
Joyce's Ulysses. They want to break down
the boundary between high and low, and to
dismantle the hierarchy that the distinction
implies. They also want to discover the
(often political) reasons why a certain kind
of aesthetic product is more valued than
others.

12. Structuralism
Approach

13. •The structural critical analysis studies
symmetry, trends and patterns for a
particular society or for a societal
comparative analysis of various
societies, underlying patterns of
symmetry which are held to be common
to all societies.

14. •Corroboration is drawn from sociology
and anthropology, and the study
techniques categorize and evaluate the
work in larger context rather than
assessing its quality alone.

15. •Structuralists view literature as a system
of signs. They try to make plain the
organizational codes that they believe
regulate all literature.
•The most famous practitioner is Michael
Foucault.