One useful way to think about the different approaches or schools of literary criticism is to regard them as different methodologies. An earlier chapter in this textbook (Section 1.3: Fields of Inquiry) talked about the different methodologies employed by different academic disciplines. We defined a methodology there as a “a system of methods that an academic discipline uses to carry out its research and pursue the answers to its questions, combined with an overarching philosophical attitude and interpretive framework for applying those methods.” That’s a good guide to understanding the nature of the different literary critical theories/methodologies. There’s a whole host of different interpretive methodologies for approaching works of literature. You’ll learn more about these in the next section. Collectively, these individual methodologies or theories add up, more or less, to the larger realm of literary theory as a whole.

Schools of Literary Criticism

To put meat on these bones, here are brief descriptions of some of the most prominent schools of literary criticism. (Bear in mind that this is hardly a comprehensive list!) When you research the available scholarly writings on a given work of literature, you may come across essays and articles that use one or more of these approaches. We’ve grouped them into four categories—author-focused, text-focused, reader-focused, and context-focused—each with its own central approach and central question about literary works and effective ways to understand them.

Author-Focused: How can we understand literary works by understanding their authors?

Biographical criticism focuses on the author’s life. It tries to gain a better understanding of the literary work by understanding the person who wrote it. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following:

• What aspects of the author’s life are relevant to understanding the work?
• How are the author’s personal beliefs encoded into the work?
• Does the work reflect the writer’s personal experiences and concerns? How or how not?

Psychological criticism applies psychological theories, especially Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian archetypal depth psychology, to works of literature to explore the psychological issues embedded in them. It may analyze a story’s characters or plot, a poet’s use of language and imagery, the author’s motivations for writing, or any other aspect of a literary work from a psychological perspective. It can be classified as an author-focused approach because its emphasis is on reading the work as an expression of the author’s unconscious processes, such that one can analyze and interpret the work in the same way a psychoanalyst would do with a patient’s dream. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following:

• What psychological forces and factors are involved in the words, behaviors, thoughts, and motivations of the characters in a story?
• Do dreams or psychological disorders play a part in the work?
• How did the author’s life experiences affect his or her intellectual and emotional formation? How is this psychological impact evident in the text and/or the author’s act of writing it?
• What unintended meanings might the author have embedded or encoded in the work?

Text-Focused: How can we understand literary works in terms of themselves?

Formalism, along with one of its more conspicuous modern iterations, New Criticism, focuses on a literary text itself, aside from questions about its author or the historical and cultural contexts of its creation. Formalism takes a story, poem, or play “on its own terms,” so to speak, viewing it as a self-contained unit of meaning. The formalist critic therefore tries to understand that meaning by paying attention to the specific form of the text. New Criticism was a particular kind of Formalism that arose in the mid-twentieth century and enjoyed great influence for a time. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following:

• How does the structure of the work reveal its meaning?
• How do the form and content of the work illuminate each other? What recurring patterns are there in the form, and what is their effect?
• How does use of imagery, language, and various literary devices establish the work’s meaning?
• How do the characters (if any) evolve over the course of the narrative, and how does this interact with the other literary elements?

Reader-Focused: How can we understand literary works by understanding the subjective experience of reading them?

Reader-response criticism emphasizes the reader as much as the text. It seeks to understand how a given reader comes together with a given literary work to produce a unique reading. This school of criticism rests on the assumption that literary works don’t contain or embody a stable, fixed meaning but can have many meanings—in fact, as many meanings as there are readers, since each reader will engage with the text differently. In the words of literature scholar Lois Tyson, “reader-response theorists share two beliefs: (1) that the role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature and (2) that readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by an objective literary text; rather they actively make the meaning they find in literature.” Typical questions involved in this approach include the following:

• Who is the reader? Also, who is the implied reader (the one “posited” by the text)?
• What kinds of memories, knowledge, and thoughts does the text evoke from the reader?
• How exactly does the interaction between the reader and the text create meaning on both the text side and the reader side? How does this meaning change from person to person, or if the same person rereads it?

Context-Focused: How can we understand literary works by understanding the contextual circumstances—historical, societal, cultural, political, economic—out of which they emerged?

Historical criticism focuses on the historical and social circumstances that surrounded the writing of a text. It may examine biographical facts about the author’s life (which can therefore connect this approach with biographical criticism) as well as the influence of social, political, national, and international events. It may also consider the influence of other literary works. New Historicism, a particular type of historical criticism, focuses not so much on the role of historical facts and events as on the ways these things are remembered and interpreted, and the way this interpreted historical memory contributes to the interpretation of literature. Typical questions involved in historical criticism include the following:

• How (and how accurately) does the work reflect the historical period in which it was written?
• What specific historical events influenced the author?
• How important is the work’s historical context to understanding it?
• How does the work represent an interpretation of its time and culture? (New Historicism)

Feminist criticism focuses on prevailing societal beliefs about women in an attempt to expose the oppression of women on various levels by patriarchal systems both contemporary and historical. It also explores the marginalization of women in the realm of literature itself. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following:

• How does the work portray the lives of women?
• How are female characters portrayed? How are the relationships between men and women portrayed? Does this reinforce sexual and gender stereotypes or challenge them?
• How does the specific language of a literary work reflect gender or sexual stereotypes?

Post-colonial criticism focuses on the impact of European colonial powers on literature. It seeks to understand how European hegemonic political, economic, religious, and other types of power have shaped the portrayals of the relationship and status differentials between Europeans and colonized peoples in literature written both by the colonizers and the colonized. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following:

• How does the text’s worldview, as evinced in plot, language, characterization, and so on, grow out of assumptions based on colonial oppression?
• Which groups of people are portrayed as strangers, outsiders, foreign, exotic, “others”? How are they treated in the narrative?
• How does the work portray the psychology and interiority of both colonizers and colonized?
• How does the text affirm (either actively or by silence) or challenge colonialist ideology?

Critical race theory focuses on systemic racism and interrogates the dynamics of race and race relationships. In origin, it is a specifically American school of critical theory that sees White racism as an everyday fact of life in America, visible throughout all aspects of culture and society. As such, it encompasses all aspects of life, including literature. Its purpose is to expose and overturn the factors that enable systemic racism to exist. As a literary critical approach, its typical questions include the following:

• What is the significance of race, either explicit or implicit, in the literary work being examined?
• Does the work include or exclude the voices and experiences of racism’s victims?
• How does the work either affirm/reinforce (whether actively or by silence) or challenge/subvert systemic racism?

The following video presents a helpful introduction to the different schools of literary theory and criticism as methodologies:

Useful Metaphors: Literary Critical Methods as Toolboxes and Lenses

Two useful metaphors for understanding what literary critical theories do and how they’re intended to work are the metaphor of the toolbox and the metaphor of the lens.

The toolbox is the older metaphor. It was more popular before the turn of the twenty-first century, and it says that each critical/theoretical approach provides a set of tools, in the form of specialized concepts and vocabulary, for thinking and talking meaningfully about literature. As this metaphor would have it, once you’ve learned the right concepts and terminology, you’re better equipped with the tools to think and talk about literature in a rich and deep way.

Beginning roughly around the turn of the century, the lens began to supplant the toolbox as the preferred metaphor. Tyson explains it well: “Think of each theory as a new pair of eyeglasses through which certain elements of our world are brought into focus while others . . . fade into the background.” In other words, the lens metaphor characterizes each critical/theoretical approach as a different way of seeing the text, with the different lenses rendering different aspects of the text more prominent or less prominent, more visible or less visible, resulting in the possibility of substantially and even fundamentally different overall readings of the same text depending on which lens is used.

For example, consider the case of Homer’s Iliad as it might appear through several of the different lenses described above.

• Biographical criticism would highlight the influence of Homer himself—his biographical facts and major life experiences—on the text.
• Psychological criticism would highlight the inner psychological lives of the characters and the psychological meanings and significance of the Iliad’s language, settings, gods, heroes, themes, and so on, reading Homer’s epic poem in psychoanalytic terms as a kind of symbolic dreamworld.
• Reader-response criticism would consider the relationship between the individual reader and the text. Since the Iliad is more than two thousand years old, one possible reader-response approach (but only one among any) might be to consider how the modern reader’s experience and understanding of this work harmonizes or clashes with the implied/intended reader of a poem that was written down in vastly different cultural circumstances some 2,800 years ago, and that was composed even earlier than that.
• Historical criticism would try to understand the Iliad by understanding the historical, cultural, and literary contexts out of which it emerged in ancient Greece, and of which it is at least partly a reflection.
• Feminist criticism would highlight the roles and portrayals of women in a work largely dominated by men—such as Brisies, the Trojan priestess of Apollo, who becomes a contested “possession” in a conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon—and perhaps seek to recover these feminine perspectives from beneath their subjugation under the overriding masculine one.

It’s also important to recognize that not all literary works are equally amenable to being examined through all critical/theoretical lenses. When it comes to the Iliad, for example, post-colonial critics have found relatively little to “work with” and respond to. However, it’s a different story with Homer’s Odyssey, where the post-colonial lens has produced readings of the text that highlight Odysseus’ role as a colonizer, even as the same lens has also produced readings that highlight  Odysseus’ role as a wretched refugee. (Greenwood)