Having acquired a knowledge of how to read fiction, poetry, and drama closely, you could potentially strike out on your own and begin to develop written responses to stories, novels, poems, and plays, based solely on your own likes, dislikes, and interpretive judgments. However, if you did this, you’d miss out on the enhancement of your understanding and appreciation that comes from learning to engage with literary criticism. There’s a whole academic field devoted to discussing and evaluating works of literature. Just like literary works themselves, the articles and essays that make up the field of literary criticism need some explanation and mental preparation before you can read and use them effectively in an academic context.

Up front, the thing to bear in mind is that literary criticism has a habit of taking everyday words and using them in very specific and sometimes counterintuitive ways. Consider the following title of an article, published in an academic literary journal, about Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved: “‘To Be Loved and Cry Shame’: A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved.’” You’re already familiar with the word “reading,” of course, but you may be less familiar with the way it’s used here: as a noun. Instead of an act you perform, like reading a book, the word “reading” here refers to something the author of the article has created through her critical-interpretive work: a reading. And even more, it’s a psychological reading. Clearly, the word “reading” is being used in a highly specific way.

Or consider another everyday word: “unpack.” You can tell someone that you need to unpack your suitcase or your car, and they’ll instantly understand what you mean. But look at the following passage from another academic article, this one titled “Reading to Outmaneuver: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and African American Literacy in Cold War America,” and notice the word’s use in a different way:

In their texts, African American authors explore a range of positions on reading’s role in black communities. Some works, such as James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), depict reading as the route to transcending the limitations of one’s status—albeit one that comes at great cost. Others texts, in a variation on the Douglass theme, depict it as a radical awakening—for instance, Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945), The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1968). Still others represent literacy as a weapon wielded by dominant powers to control, exclude, or erase blackness; Toni Morrison takes this tack in her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), and again in a later work, Song of Solomon (1977). As they work to unpack the complex history and role of literacy in African American lives, these twentieth-century writers rely on books to construct themselves as individuals, community members, and citizens. (Matthews)

The author obviously isn’t talking about unpacking a physical object like a suitcase. From the context, you can probably tell that she’s using the word to refer to the interpretive act of explaining something—in this case, “the complex history and role of literacy in African American lives”—by drawing out implicit or unexamined meanings.

The upshot is that when you first begin to read literary criticism, you should be on the alert for regular words that seem odd in a sentence, as this may be a sign that they’re being used in a technical way. You’ll also encounter many words that are entirely new to you; the field has its own highly developed technical vocabulary. When you encounter such words, try to use context clues to understand their meaning, but also make good use of the many valuable resources that are available for this very purpose, such as this online glossary or the books that are recognized as standard reference works, such as The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory or Holman and Harmon’s renowned A Handbook to Literature.

Common Terms in Literary Criticism

With these things in mind, here’s a short glossary of some broadly common terms you’ll encounter in literary criticism.

Criticism

The first word to understand is “criticism” itself, which can be confusing if you take it in the wrong sense, which also happens to be its more customary, everyday sense. In everyday conversation, to criticize most often means to find fault with someone or something. The Oxford English Dictionary captures this sense when it defines criticism as “the expression of disapproval of someone or something based on perceived faults or mistakes.” However, the OED also provides a second definition, and this is the one we’re concerned with here: criticism is “the analysis and judgment of the merits and faults of a literary or artistic work.” The roles of “film critic” and “book critic” both draw on this definition, as they refer to people whose job is not so much to find fault with films and books as to offer informed evaluations of their quality.

Putting this all together, you can see that “literary criticism” means literary analysis and interpretation. It’s the act of interpreting and evaluating literature to understand and appreciate it more deeply. Note that this definition also applies to different forms of the word “criticism,” such as “critical.” Your “critical judgment” about a story or poem doesn’t mean your expression of dislike or disapproval but your overall evaluation and “take” on it as a work of literature. (On this last point, see the comments about “Reading” above, and also below.)

Theory

The OED defines a theory as “a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something.” You’re probably familiar with the word’s use in the natural sciences, where a theory—such as the theory of evolution, the the theory of relativity, or cell theory—is an explanatory framework, supported and verified by repeated scientific testing, that accounts for a set of observed facts or phenomena in the physical world.

The word’s use in connection with literature and literary criticism is related but distinct. Literary criticism proceeds by drawing on literary theory, defined as the set of methods, ideas, and assumptions that we bring to the reading of literature. There’s a highly developed realm of academic research and discourse devoted to literary theory. It gets really deep, really fast, and its many details sprawl well beyond the boundaries of this course. Just know that when you start reading literary criticism, you may come across references to theory. You can keep the two terms (criticism and theory) straight by remembering that literary criticism is the act of interpreting and evaluating literary texts, while literary theory deals with the assumptions and principles we bring to that practice. Sometimes the different approaches to literary criticism are referred to as discrete theories in their own right. That’s how we’ll refer to them in the next section on approaches to literary criticism.

School

Sometimes different literary critical theories are referred to as different “schools,” such as the “reader-response school” or the “feminist school of thought” (both of which you’ll learn about in the next section). This employs one of the basic definitions of the word “school”: as “a group of people, particularly writers, artists, or philosophers, sharing the same or similar ideas, methods, or style.”

Reading

As noted in the example above, in literary criticism and theory the word “reading” is often used not as a verb (“She was reading a book”) but as a noun (“What was her reading of that book?”) to refer to a particular interpretation, viewpoint, or understanding of a literary work. English professor Dr. Stephen Watt explains the difference: “‘Reading’ is one of the most provocative terms in literary theory, in part because it connotes both an activity and a product: on the one hand, an effort to comprehend a text or object of knowledge, and on the other, a more formal response.” Watts says the latter sense of the word refers to “an intellectual or scholarly product.” This second sense is important to understand when approaching the realm of literary criticism, because the act of literary criticism results in “a reading” of a literary work, that is, a particular “take” on it. When you set out to apply literary criticism to a story, novel, poem, or play, the end product is your personal reading of the work, your individual “intellectual or scholarly product,” which you produce by engaging with the work and attempting to articulate your interpretive understanding of it.

Canon

The word “canon” refers to a collection of literary works that are held to be of extremely high quality and permanent value for a culture or civilization. The now-unfashionable idea of “the classics” is roughly equivalent. Originally used to refer to an official collection of religious texts that are held by some to be authoritative and sacred, such as the canon of 27 books that make up the New Testament, the word also came to be applied to works of literature in general as a broad conceptual tool for identifying those that constitute a kind of core collection of literary value for a given civilization—something along the lines of what the 19th-century English poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold meant in his essay “Culture and Anarchy” when he famously referred to “the best that has been thought and said.”

The very idea of a literary canon invites controversy, as it automatically raises the question of who is qualified or authorized to identify the works that should be universally considered canonical. The great cultural upheavals in America, Great Britain, and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s involved accusations of racism and sexism being leveled against official institutional notions of the literary canon at schools, colleges, and universities, and in the early decades of the 21st century the idea of a universal or normative canon remained contentious. This is why you’re as likely as not to come across explicit mention of the literary canon, and of the controversies surrounding the idea, in works of criticism written at any time during the past several decades.