The document provides an overview of various literary theories and criticism, detailing concepts such as practical criticism, theoretical criticism, and different modes of criticism including mimetic, pragmatic, expressive, and objective. It discusses significant critics and texts throughout history, including Aristotle's Poetics and the development of dramatic unities. Additionally, it explains the roles of plot, character, diction, and other elements in literary analysis.

1. Sem 1
Course 3: Literary Theory & Criticism
Unit 5

2.  Criticism,
 Practical
Criticism /
applied
criticism,
 Impressionistic,
 Mimetic
Criticism,
 Pragmatic
Criticism,
 Expressive
Criticism,
 Objective
Criticism,
 Deus Ex
Machina,
 Plot,
 Character,
 Diction,
 Thought,
 Song/Melody,
 Spectacle,
 Chorus,
 Tragedy,
 Three Unities,
 Tragic Hero,
 Hamartia,
 Catharsis

3. Criticism
Theoretical
Criticism
Mimetic
Criticism
Pragmatic
Criticism
Practical /
Applied
Criticism
Expressionism
Criticism
Objective
Criticism

4. • to the outer world
• Mimetic Criticism
• to the reader
• Pragmatic Criticism
• To the author
• Expressionism Criticism
• Treat the work as an entity itself
• Objective Criticism
. . . inexplainingand judgingawork of literature, theyreferthework
primarily . . .

5.  Assessment of creative work: considered judgment of or
discussion about the qualities of something, especially a
creative work
 More specifically literary criticism, is the overall term
for studies concerned with defining, classifying, analyzing,
interpreting, and evaluating works of literature.
 Presentation on Criticism
 Presentation on Critical Theory vs Criticism

6.  Theoretical criticism proposes an explicit theory of
literature, in the sense of general principles, together with a set
of terms, distinctions, and categories, to be applied to
identifying and analyzing works of literature, as well as the
criteria (the standards, or norms) by which these works and
their writers are to be evaluated.
 The earliest, and enduringly important, treatise of theoretical
criticism was Aristotle's Poetics (fourth century B.C.). Among
the most influential theoretical critics in the following centuries
were Longinus in Greece; Horace in Rome; Boileau and Sainte-
Beuve in France; Baumgarten and Goethe in Germany; Samuel
Johnson, Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold in England; and Poe
and Emerson in America. Landmarks of theoretical criticism in
the first half of the twentieth century are I. A. Richards,
Principles of Literary Criticism (1924); Kenneth Burke, The
Philosophy of Literary Form (1941, rev. 1957); Eric Auerbach,
Mimesis (1946); R. S. Crane, ed., Critics and Criticism (1952); and
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957).

7.  Practical criticism, or applied criticism, concerns itself with
the discussion of particular works and writers; in an applied
critique, the theoretical principles controlling the mode of the
analysis, interpretation, and evaluation are often left implicit, or
brought in only as the occasion demands.
 Among the more influential works of applied criticism in England
and America are the literary essays of Dryden in the Restoration;
Dr. Johnson's Lives of the English Poets (1779-81); Coleridge's
chapters on the poetry of Wordsworth in Biographia Literaria
(1817) and his lectures on Shakespeare; William Hazlitt‘s lectures
on Shakespeare and the English poets, in the second and third
decades of the nineteenth century; Matthew Arnold's Essays in
Criticism (1865 and following); I. A. Richards' Practical Criticism
(1930); T. S. Eliot's Selected Essays (1932); and the many critical
essays by Virginia Woolf, F. R. Leavis, and Lionel Trilling. Cleanth
Brooks' The Well Wrought Urn (1947) exemplifies the "close
reading" of single texts which was the typical mode of practical
criticism in the American New Criticism.
 Practical criticism is sometimes distinguished into
impressionistic and judicial criticism:

8.  Impressionistic criticism attempts to represent in words the
felt qualities of a particular passage or work, and to express the
responses (the "impression“) that the work directly evokes from the
critic.
 As William Hazlitt put it in his essay "On Genius and Common
Sense" (1824): "You decide from feeling, and not from reason; that is,
from the impression of a number of things on the mind . . . though
you may not be able to analyze or account for it in the several
particulars."
 And Walter Pater later said that in criticism "the first step toward
seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it
really is, to discriminate it, to realize it distinctly," and posed as the
basic question, "What is this song or picture . . . to me'' (preface to
Studies in the History of the renaissance, 1873).
 At its extreme this mode of criticism becomes, in Anatole France's
phrase, "the adventures of a sensitive soul among masterpieces."

9.  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 of literary excellence.
 Rarely are these two modes of criticism sharply distinct in
practice, but good examples of primarily impressionistic
commentary can be found in the Greek Longinus (see the
characterization of the Odyssey in his treatise On the
Sublime), Hazlitt, Walter Pater (the locus classicus of
impressionism is his description of Leonardo‘s Mona Lisa
in The Renaissance, 1873), and some of the twentieth-
century critical essays of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf.

10.  Types of traditional critical theories and of applied
criticism can be usefully distinguished according to
whether, in explaining and judging a work of
literature, they refer the work primarily to the outer
world (Mimetic), or to the reader (Pragmatic), or to
the author (Expressionist), or else treat the work as an
entity in itself (Objective):

11.  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" of its representation to
the subject matter that it represents, or should
represent.
 This mode of criticism, which first appeared in Plato
and (in a qualified way) in Aristotle, remains
characteristic of modern theories of literary realism.

12.  Pragmatic criticism 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 Art of Poetry by the Roman Horace (first
century B.C.) through the eighteenth 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 pragmatic approach has
also been adopted by some structuralists who analyze a
literary text as a systematic play of codes which effect the
interpretative responses of the reader.

13.  Expressive criticism treats a literary work primarily in
relation to its author.
 It defines poetry as an expression, or overflow, or utterance
of feelings, or as the product of the poet's imagination
operating on his or her perceptions, thoughts, and feelings;
it tends to judge the work by its sincerity, or its adequacy to
the poet's individual vision or state of mind; and it often
seeks in the work evidences of the particular temperament
and experiences of the author who, consciously or
unconsciously, has revealed himself or herself in it.
 Such views were developed mainly by romantic critics in
the early nineteenth century and remain current in our
own time, especially in the writings of psychological and
psychoanalytic critics and in critics of consciousness
as George Poulet and the Geneva School.

14.  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, or to the environing world.
 Instead it describes the literary product as a self-sufficient and
autonomous object, or else as a world-in-itself, which is to be
contemplated as its own end, and to be analyzed and judged solely by
"intrinsic" criteria such as its complexity, coherence, equilibrium,
integrity, and the interrelations of its component elements.
 The general viewpoint of the self-sufficiency of an aesthetic object was
proposed in Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (1790)—see
distance and involvement—-was up by proponents of art for art's
sake in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and has been
elaborated in detailed modes of applied criticism by a number of
important critics since the 1920s, including the New Critics, the
Chicago School, and proponents of European formalism

15.  Deus ex Machina is Latin for "a god from a
machine." It describes the practice of some Greek
playwrights (especially Euripides) to end a drama with
a god, lowered to the stage by a mechanical apparatus,
who by his judgment and commands resolved the
dilemmas of the human characters. The phrase is now
used for any forced and improbable device—a telltale
birthmark, an unexpected inheritance, the discovery
of a lost will or letter—by which a hard pressed author
resolves a plot. Conspicuous examples occur even in
major novels like Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist (1837-
38) and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles
(1891).

16.  Among the ancient Greeks the chorus was a group of people, wearing masks,
who sang or chanted verses while performing dancelike maneuvers at religious
festivals.
 A similar chorus played a part in Greek tragedies, where (in the plays of
Aeschylus and Sophocles) they served mainly as commentators on the
dramatic actions and events who expressed traditional moral, religious, and
social attitudes; beginning with Euripides, however, the chorus assumed
primarily a lyrical function.
 During the Elizabethan Age the term "chorus" was applied also to a single
person who spoke the prologue and epilogue to a play, and sometimes
introduced each act as well. This character served as the author's vehicle for
commentary on the play, as well as for exposition of its subject, time, and
setting, and the description of events happening offstage.
 Modern scholars use the term choral character to refer to a person within
the play itself who stands apart from the action and by his comments provides
the audience with a special perspective (often an ironic perspective) through
which to view the other characters and events

17.  The term is broadly applied to literary, and especially to dramatic,
representations of serious actions which eventuate in a disastrous
conclusion for the protagonist (the chief character).
 More precise and detailed discussions of the tragic form properly
begin—although they should not end—with Aristotle‘s classic analysis
in the Poetics (fourth century B.C.).
 Aristotle based his theory on induction from the only examples
available to him, the tragedies of Greek dramatists such as Aeschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides.
 In the subsequent two thousand years and more, many new and
artistically effective types of serious plots ending in a catastrophe have
been developed—types that Aristotle had no way of foreseeing. The
many attempts to stretch Aristotle's analysis to apply to later tragic
forms serve merely to blur his critical categories and to obscure
important differences among diverse types of plays, all of which have
proved to be dramatically effective.
 When flexibly managed, however, Aristotle's discussions apply in some
part to many tragic plots, and his analytic concepts serve as a suggestive
starting point for identifying the differentiae of various non-
Aristotelian modes of tragic construction.

18.  In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, critics of the drama in Italy and
France added to Aristotle's unity of action, which he describes in his Poetics,
two other unities, to constitute one of the rules of drama known as "the
three unities."
 On the assumption that verisimilitude—the achievement of an illusion of
reality in the audience of a stage play—requires that the action represented
by a play approximate the actual conditions of the staging of the play, they
imposed the requirement of the "unity of place” (that the action
represented be limited to a single location) and the requirement of the
"unity of time" (that the time represented be limited to the two or three
hours it takes to act the play, or at most to a single day of either twelve or
twenty-four hours).
 In large part because of the potent example of Shakespeare, many of whose
plays represent frequent changes of place and the passage of many years,
the unities of place and time never dominated English neoclassicism as
they did criticism in Italy and France. A final blow was the famous attack
against them, and against the principle of dramatic verisimilitude on which
they were based, in Samuel Johnson's "Preface to Shakespeare" (1765). Since
then in England, the unities of place and time (as distinguished from the
unity of action) have been regarded as entirely optional devices, available to
the playwright to achieve special effects of dramatic concentration.

19.  Plot,
 Character,
 Diction,
 Thought,
 Song/Melody,
 Spectacle,
 Tragic Hero,
 Hamartia,
 Catharsis

20.  Abram, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms
 Microsoft Encarta.