| Reader-Response | Structuralism | Deconstruction |
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Approach |
Literature is |
its purpose |
methodology |
implications |
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Formalism New Criticism
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autonomous object; unified in terms of form and meaning; features irony, paradox, and complexity has a single valid interpretation |
aesthetic appreciation of verbal art and technique. Literature valued as a high art whose meaning can transcend time. | bracket off outside contexts; focus on structure and elements of the work, especially how form and meaning are related. Identify and state central tension or paradox in the poem and relate elements of poem to it. Establish unity of the work through interrelation of all its parts. | revolutionized the study of literature; helped create literature as a serious object of inquiry; became official way to teach literature--anyone could learn to do a formalist explication--didn't need to research social, biographical, and historical contexts. |
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Genre Studies
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organized by categories and derives meaning through its relationship to other works with similar characteristics. Constitutes a "contract" between reader and writer based on generic expectations | Purpose and value depends on the genre. For Aristotle, the purpose of tragedy was catharsis, the purging of the emotions of fear and pity. Literature that improves on a genre is valued. | Identify characteristics of different genres of literature and categorize individual works. Look for patterns of thought and technique and ways a work plays upon generic expectations. | Literary work can't be read out of the context of other works similar to it. Authors write within certain traditions and conventions, even if they break with them. Part of work's meaning is in the relationship to its genre. |
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Rhetorical
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a means to an end, an instrument for getting something done; features strategies and techniques designed to govern the reader's response | moral instruction, inform and persuade the reader; literature not bound by methods of history and philosophy--can draw on both to get at the essence of things (Sydney) | Consider author's purpose and intention, how they want the audience to act; research how rhetoric taught at the time to find out what rhetorical conventions the audience would recognize. | "intentional fallacy" not a fallacy at all; literature is rhetorical since it is always about ideas, and often touches on ultimate questions about the nature of humankind etc. Author always writes to an audience and the author's conception of the audience alters the work of art. |
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Reader-Response (Fish) Phenomenology Psychology (Holland)
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is an experience; text is not separate from its realization by a reader; reader's deep psychological identity makes hypotheses about the work, gets answers, which alter the reader's identity and so on in a loop. meaning is transactional--the result of the transaction between the reader and a text |
to alter reader's assumptions and characteristic ways of viewing the world; results in reader's self-discovery to achieve a reading that feels right | Study the complex process of a reader constructing meaning from the words, what reader brings to the text and gets from the experience of it; study reception of the work in its time and over time; study the reader's "interpretive community" which largely defines how one reads, what a reader seeks in the text. | Reader is really an ideal or implied reader and often is fantastically talented, erudite (like Stanley Fish!); Reception approach notes that the meaning of a text changes over time and that readers get more sophisticated from learning to read new literary styles. RR diametrically opposed to formalism--no objective reality to the literature outside of the transaction with a reader. |
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Structuralism based on linguistic theories of Saussure--langue, parole, signifier, signified, sign
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an individual instance of a larger system of language and structure; literature is a special kind of language use that has its own rules and conventions which govern how individual works are formed. | a way to learn more about the system of language and structures that determine cultural production; can lead to a science of signs | Study sets or genres to determine the rules that govern them--ex is Propp's eight actions in the fairy tale. Divide the work up into lexie or divisible components based on functional codes to do with the plot, suspense, character development, social knowledge, and themes | works best with prose narratives and less well with poetry; very rationalistic--assumes that meaning is understood through difference as expressed through binary oppositions (light/dark; male rationality/female emotionalism; written vs. oral language etc.) Has not really fulfilled its intentions. Led to post-structuralism. |
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Deconstruction Post-structural- ism
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text whose meaning is known only through difference. Language is arbitrary; truth claims and intentions of a text are undermined by its own contradictions; meaning is finally indeterminate. | allows you to see through the alleged stability of textual meaning; textual meaning is not finite; close attention to the play of language yields pleasure | Identify binary oppositions in the text and look for moments that overturn the privileged term; doesn't just reverse the hierarchy but undermines the idea of the opposition as valid. Locate the point of contradiction, where the text "breaks free of the constraints imposed by its own realistic form" (Belsey 104) | can be used with many other approaches. Like Formalism, involves close reading of language, but denies unity of form and meaning; uses the discovery of rules in Structuralism to undermine idea of rational rules; recognizes author's intentions, as in rhetorical criticism, places power to make meaning of the text, as in reader response. |