Literary Approaches

Literature

• Choose six of the following approaches and find one article for each approach.

• Writing:

 One page per article

 2 pgs summary

Critical approaches important in the study of literature:

MORAL/INTELLECTUAL

• Concerned with content and values

• Used not only to discover meaning, but also to determine whether works of literature are both true and significant.

• To study lit from this perspective is to determine whether a work conveys a lesson or a message and whether it can help readers lead better lives and improve their understanding of the world.

• Answer these questions:

 What ideas does the work contain?

 How strongly does the work bring forth its ideas?

 What application do the ideas have to the work’s characters and situations?

 How may the ideas be evaluated intellectually? Morally?

TOPICAL/HISTORICAL

• Stresses the relationship of lit to its historical period

• Investigates relationships of this sort, including the elucidation of words and concepts that today’s readers may not immediately understand.

• Common criticism is that in the extreme, it deals with background knowledge rather than with lit itself.

NEW CRITICAL/FORMALIST

• Focuses on literary texts as formal works of art, and for this reason it can be seen as a reaction against the topical/historical approach.

• Most brilliant in the formal analysis of smaller units such as poems and short passages.

• Discussions