LYUDMILA V.

GUSHCHINA

MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE:

LITERARY CRITICISM

(study guide)

Rostov-on-Don
2009
FEDERAL STATE EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENT OF
HIGHER PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION
«SOUTHERN FEDERAL UNIVERSITY»

MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE:

LITERARY CRITICISM
(study guide)

Rostov-on-Don
2
2009

3
УДК
ББК 81.2 Англ-9
Г

Печатается по решению редакционно-издательского совета ПИ ЮФУ

Рецензент:
кандидат филологических наук, доцент
Черкасс И.А.

Научный редактор:
доктор филологических наук, профессор
Агапова С.Г.

Автор-составитель:
Гущина Л.В., кандидат филологических наук, доцент

Gushchina L.V.
Г Modern English Literature: Literary Criticism (A Study Guide).  Rostov-on-
Don: PI SFU, 2009.  58p.

Modern English Literature: Literary Criticism is a comprehensive guide for the 3rd
-4th years students that deals with literary criticism and a variety of critical
approaches, enlarging students’ knowledge in the sphere of modern English
literature on the whole, concerning some aspects of lingual and stylistic types of
interpretation. The overall goal of this study guide is to introduce basic literary
theory and criticism. This course helps students gain a basic understanding of some
literary criticism theories: Textual, Moral / Philosophical, Historical, Biographical
approaches, Formalism, New criticism, Russian Formalism, Structuralism, Marxist
Critical Approach. Practical approaches are provided to developing critical views
on literature, close reading and unseens, comparing different critical approaches,
studying texts in accordance to them, coursework assessment and tests.

УДК
ББК 81.2 Англ-9

© ПИ ЮФУ, 2009
© Гущина Л.В., 2009

4
 Contents

Introduction…………………………………………………………………..... 5

Module 1. Literary Criticism………………………………………………..... 6

1.1. Literature…………………………………………………………………… 6
1.2. Literary Criticism…………………………………………………………... 7

Module 2. Textual Criticism………………………………………………….. 10

2.1. Textual criticism………………………………………………………….... 10
2.2. Textual criticism: eclecticism, stemmatics and copy-text editing…………. 13
2.2.1. Eclecticism…………………………………………………………..... 13
2.2.2. Stemmatics…………………………………………………………..... 15
2.2.3. Copy-Text Editing…………………………………………………….. 16
2.2.4. Cladistics……………………………………………………………… 21

Module 3. Historical and Biographical Approaches………………………... 26

Module 4. Moral and Philosophical Approaches……………………………. 30

Module 5. The Formalist Approach………………………………………….. 34

5.1. The Formalist Approach…………………………………………………… 34
5.2. The New Criticism…………………………………………………………. 36
5.3. Constants of the Formalist Approach: Some Key Concepts, Terms, and 38
Devices…………………………………………………………………….

Module 6. Russian Formalism……………………………………………….. 43

6.1. Russian Formalism………………………………………………………… 44
6.2. Dialogism………………………………………………………………….. 46
6.3. Structuralism………………………………………………………………. 46
6.4. Post-structuralism………………………………………………………….. 48
6.5. Marxist Literary criticism………………………………………………….. 49

Module 7. Environmentalism and Ecocriticism……………………………... 53

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………… 57

5
 Introduction

So what is literary criticism? Literary criticism describes the study, discussion,

evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Literary criticism is made up of a
number of different types of critical approaches. Critical approaches are very much
like the lens through which we view and understand a piece of literature. Critical
literary theories can bring certain qualities of a work of literature into focus or call
our attention to particular issues.
This book presents itself a research project for learning. You will be asked to
explore and evaluate different sources (both literary and online ones) related to
your study of literary criticism. In particular, this book was designed to help you
become more familiar with the different types of literary criticism and
interpretation theories. In addition, you will learn the basic terminology associated
with literary criticism as well as have the opportunity to practice applying various
literary criticism theories to your study of different British and American books.
Of course, you can ask a question: ‘But why do I need to know about different
literary theories?’. There is a great definition of literary criticism found on the
Literatureclassics.com website which reads, ‘Literary criticism is an extension of
this social activity of interpreting’. As we read a text, we are constantly engaging
in the practice of interpretation as we attempt to understand a particular work’s
significance and meaning. The critics’ purpose may be to make value judgments
on a work, to explain his or her interpretation of the work, or to provide other
readers with relevant historical or biographical information. As readers we use
criticism as a way to communicate with other readers our ideas regarding a
particular text. Literary criticism helps readers to understand the intricacies of a
text and communicate with other readers about those intricacies. It is important to
understand how a particular form of literary criticism may help you understand a
text more clearly. However, criticism from other sources should never be a
substitute for your original ideas regarding a text. Instead, reading other critics may
help you clarify your own understand and ideas.

So, let’s get started!

Good luck!

6
 Module 1. Literary Criticism

The overall goal is to study some corresponding terms like literature, literary
criticism, etc.; aims and purposes of literary criticism; and to enumerate its main
schools and theories.

1.1. Literature

Literature is a body of written works related by subject-matter (e.g. the

literature of computing), by language or place of origin (e.g. Russian literature), or
by prevailing cultural standards of merit. In this last sense, ‘literature’ is taken to
include oral, dramatic, and broadcast compositions that may not have been
published in written form but which have been (or deserve to be) preserved.
Since the 19th century, the broader sense of literature as a totally written or
printed works has given way to more exclusive definitions based on criteria of
imaginative, creative, or artistic value, usually related to a work’s absence of
factual or practical reference – its autotelic. Autotelic stands for having, as a work
of art, no end or purpose beyond its own existence. The term was used by
T.S. Eliot in 1923 and adopted by New Criticism to distinguish the self-referential
nature of literary art from didactic, philosophical, critical, or biographical works
that involve practical reference to things outside themselves: in the words of the
American poet Archibald MacLeish, ‘A poem should not mean | But be’. A similar
idea is implied in the theory of the ‘poetic function’ put forward in Russian
Formalism.
Even more restrictive has been the academic concentration upon poetry, drama,
and fiction. Until the mid-20th century, many kinds of non-fictional writing – in
philosophy, history, biography, criticism, topography, science and politics – were
counted as literature; implicit in this broader usage is a definition of literature as
that body of works which – for whatever reason – deserves to be preserved as part
of the current reproduction of meanings within a given culture (unlike yesterday’s
newspaper, which belongs in the disposable category of ephemera). This sense
seems more tenable than the later attempts to divide literature – as creative,

7
imaginative, fictional, or non-practical – from factual writings or practically
effective works of propaganda1, rhetoric2, or didactic3 writing.
1.2. Literary Criticism

Literary criticism is the reasoned discussion of literary works, an activity which

may include some or all of the following procedures, in varying proportions: the
defence of literature against moralists and censors, classification of a work
according to its genre, interpretation of its meaning, analysis of its structure and
style, judgement of its worth by comparison with other works, estimation of its
likely effect on readers, and the establishment of general principles by which
literary works (both individually and in categories, or as a whole) can be evaluated
and understood.
Contrary to the everyday sense of criticism as ‘fault-finding’, much modern
criticism (particularly of the academic kind) assumes that the works it discusses are
valuable. The functions of judgement and analysis having to some extent become
divided between the market (where reviewers ask ‘Is this worth buying?’) and the
educational world (where academics ask ‘Why is this so good?’).
Literary criticism is a term applied since the seventeenth century to the
scientific investigation of literary documents in regard to such matters as origin,
text, composition, and/or history. This term refers to studies devoted to the
comparison, analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of works of literature. The
term ‘criticism’ is derived from the Greek word kritikos, meaning a ‘judge’.
Literary criticism may be positive or negative, or a mixture of both. The
different standards, or criteria, by which literary critics have judged works of
literature, have led to the development of various schools or varieties of literary
criticism.
Literary criticism attempts to serve the following purposes:
 explain a work and its underlying principles to an uncomprehending
audience;

1
propagandism – the tendency to compose literary works chiefly to serve the purpose of
propaganda, i.e. writing to persuade people to support a particular religious or political cause.
Propagandist writing is thus a kind of didactic literature directed toward changing or confirming
readers’ and audiences’ allegiances. In liberal criticism, the term is used disparagingly of left-
wing literary forms such as agitprop, social realism, or the epic theatre of Brecht, with the
suggestion that these are betrayals of true Art.
2
rhetoric – the deliberate exploitation of eloquence for the most persuasive effect in public
speaking or in writing. It was cultivated as an important art and science in antiquity, and was an
essential element of medieval university education, involving the elaborate categorizing of
figures of speech together with the arts of memory, arrangement, and oratorical delivery. The
emphasis on sincerity in the culture of Romanticism helped to discredit rhetoric, so that the usual
modern sense of the term implies empty and ineffectual grandness in public speech. Modern
critics sometimes refer to the rhetorical dimension of a literary work, meaning those aspects of
the work that persuade or otherwise guide the responses of readers. A practitioner or theorist of
rhetoric is called a rhetorician.
3
didactic – instructive; designed to impart information, advice, or home doctrine of morality or
philosophy.
8
  interpret works to readers who might otherwise fail to understand or
appreciate them;
 discover and apply principles which describe the foundations of ‘good
literature’;
 justify imaginative literature in a world that finds its value questionable;
 prescribe rules for readers and legislate taste for the audience;
 judge works by clearly defined standards of evaluation.
In addition, it also attempts to answer the following questions about literature:
 What is literature?
 What does literature do?
 What is literature worth?
The various kinds of criticism fall into several overlapping categories:
theoretical, practical, impressionistic, affective, prescriptive, or descriptive.
Criticism concerned with revealing the author’s true motive or intention
(sometimes called ‘expressive’ criticism) emerged from Romanticism to dominate
much 19th- and 20th-century critical writing, but has tended to give way to
‘objective’ criticism, focusing the work itself (as in New Criticism and
structuralism), and to a shift of attention to the reader in Reader-response criticism.
Particular schools of criticism also seek to understand literature in terms of its
relations to history, politics, gender, social class, mythology, linguistic theory, or
psychology, as with psychoanalytical criticism, Marxist criticism, feminist
criticism, myth criticism, erocriticism, and others.
Metacriticism is criticism of criticism; that is, the examination of the principles,
methods, and terms of criticism either in general (as in critical theory) or in the
study of particular critics or critical debates. The term usually implies a
consideration of the principles underlying critical interpretation and judgement.

Project Tasks

1. Explore in depth definitions of literature and literary criticism.

2. Answer the following questions:
 What is literature?
 What is literary criticism?
 What are the main purposes of literary criticism?
 What schools of criticism do you know?
3. Create a presentation (report) on Literary Criticism. Your presentation
should contain the following points:
 a title;
 a brief definition for your topic;
 basic background information regarding your topic;
 use textual evidence to support your commentary.

Test №1

9
 The test consists of 6 tasks. It requires 3 minutes to solve it. Choose the
right answer and tick it in the blank form.

1. What purpose does not belong to the purposes of literary criticism?

explain a work and its underlying interpret works to readers who
1 principles to an 2 might otherwise fail to
uncomprehending audience understand or appreciate them
unjustify imaginative literature discover and apply principles
3 in a world that finds its value 4 which describe the foundations
questionable of ‘good literature’
2. The term ‘criticism’ is derived from the ... word kritikos, meaning a ‘judge’.
1 Greek 2 German
3 Dutch 4 Roman
3. What literary criticism can be?
1 only positive 2 only negative
3 positive and negative 4 critical
4. Literary criticism is a term applied since the 17th century to the scientific
investigation of literary documents in regard to such matters as: origin, text,
composition, and ... .
1 biology 2 psychology
3 history 4 maths
5. The various kinds of criticism fall into several ... categories: theoretical,
practical, impressionistic, affective, prescriptive, or descriptive.
1 independent 2 overlapping
3 material 4 psychological
6. Which definition does not define the term literary criticism?
1 the reasoned discussion of 2 reveal of the author’s true motive
literary works or intention
the examination of the principles,
methods, and terms of criticism studies devoted to the
3 either in general (as in critical 4 comparison, analysis,
theory) or in the study of interpretation, and evaluation of
particular critics or critical works of literature
debates

Blank Form

№ 1 2 3 4 5 6
1
2
10
 3
4

Literature

1. Baldick C. Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2008.
2. Croft S., Cross H. Literature, Criticism, and Style. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004.
3. Richards J. Rhetoric. New York, 2007.
4. Russell D.A., Winterbottom M. Classical Literary Criticism. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2008. 
5. Waugh P. Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006.
6. http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva

Module 2. Textual Criticism

The overall goal is to study the theory of Textual Criticism, its three
fundamental approaches: eclecticism, stematics and copy-text editing.

2.1. Textual criticism

Textual criticism or lower criticism is a branch of philology or bibliography

that is concerned with the identification and removal of errors from texts.
Normally, the product of textual criticism is an edited text that the editor believes
comes as close as possible to a lost original (called the archetype), or some other
version of a text as it existed – or was intended to exist – in the past. This term is
used in contrast with higher criticism, which is the endeavour to establish the
authorship, date and place of composition of the text.
Textual criticism has been practiced for over two thousand years. Early textual
critics were concerned with preserving the works of antiquity, and later with
medieval and early modern manuscript writings. Many ancient works, such as the
Bible and the Greek tragedies, survive in hundreds of copies, and the relationship
of each copy to the original may be unclear, though the question if the Bible has
ever had only one original has been discussed. Textual scholars have debated for
centuries which sources are most closely derived from the original, and which
readings in those sources are correct.
In the English language, the works of Shakespeare have been a particularly
fertile ground for textual criticism – both because the texts as transmitted contain a
considerable amount of error, and because the effort and expense to produce
superior editions of his works has always been widely viewed as worthwhile. The
principles of textual criticism, although originally developed and refined for works
of antiquity, the Bible, and Shakespeare, have been applied to the works of many
authors, representing periods from ancient times to the twentieth century.
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 When comparing different documents (or, ‘witnesses’) of a single text, it is not
always apparent which variant is original and which is an error. The textual critic's
task, therefore, is to sort through the variants and establish a ‘critical text’ that is
intended to best represent the original by explaining the state of all extant
witnesses.
So, the ideal of textual criticism is the establishment of an authentic text, or the
‘text which the author intended’.
This aim is not so easy to achieve as one might think, however, and it is a
problem not only with older works, were it night be more expected, but also in
contemporary literature. There are countless ways in which a literary text may be
corrupted from what the author intended. The author’s own manuscript may
contain omissions and errors in spelling and mechanics; these mistakes may be
preserved by the text copyists, be they scribes, or compositors, or scanners, who
may add a few of their own. Or, as has often happened, copyists or editors may
take it upon themselves to improve, censor, or correct what the author wrote. If the
author or someone who knows what the author intended does not catch these errors
during proofreading, they can be published, disseminated, and perpetuated.
Before the invention of printing, literary works had to be copied by hand, and
each time a manuscript was copied, errors might be introduced by the human
scribe. The age of printing reduced the need for handwritten copies, but printed
editions are subject to many of the same kinds of errors. Instead of a scribe
miscopying his source, it is a compositor or a printing shop.
Many additional mishaps can befall a manuscript in the course of producing
multiple copies for the public that the ‘ordinary history of the transmission of a
text, without the intervention of author or editor, is one of progressive
degeneration’.
So, in establishing the critical text it is important for the textual critic to deal
with both ‘external’ evidence (the age, provenance, and affiliation of each witness)
and ‘internal’ considerations (what the author and scribes, or printers, were likely
to have done).
Textual criticism plays an especially important role in studying the genesis and
development of a piece of literature. Thus it has enabled us to see how, for
example, Ezra Pound’s editorial surgery transformed T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
from a clumsy and diffuse poem to a modern classic (the poem still presents
textual problems, however, because Eliot himself authorized versions containing
substantive differences) or other famous textual cases include Dickens’s two
endings for Great Expectations (after seeing the first ‘unhappy’ ending in proof,
Dickens wrote another and authorized only it. Later editors have published the first
version as having more aesthetic integrity, but Dickens never authorized it);
another example is that Thomas Hardy made so many substantive character and
plot alterations in the four versions of The Return of the Native, all of which he
authorized for publication between 1878 and 1912, that J. Thorpe understandably
asks, ‘Which is the real Return of the Native’.
Moreover, textual criticism is anything but an essentially mechanical operation.
Although its practitioners are very much concerned with accidentals, i.e., spelling,
12
punctuation, capitalization, italicization, and paragraphing, in the establishment of
an authentic text, they deal with much more than close proofreading. They must be
highly skilled in linguistics, literary history, literary criticism, and bibliography, to
mention only the most obvious areas.
However, though textual critics must and do make aesthetic judgements, not
only in accidentals but also in substantives (actual verbal readings), they do so in
order to establish by means as scientific as possible an authentic text for the
literary critic, who may then proceed to interpret and evaluate. In this case textual
criticism can be treated not as a traditional interpretive approach to literature but as
an indispensable tool for further meaningful analysis. So textual critics are not and
should not be considered scientists. They have no predetermined or inviolable laws
that they can use to come out with an authentic text. Perhaps it would be more
accurate to concede that textual critics are scientists of sorts; they simply are not
exact scientists (i.e., ones dealing in an exact science). They are, more precisely, a
combination of scientist and artist. As A.E. Housman says, textual criticism is the
‘science of discovering error in texts and the art of removing it’.
On the whole, textual criticism deals with cutting losses, reducing the amount
of error, improving or clarifying the state of textual affairs and approaching the
ideal.
So, textual criticism can be defined as a branch of literary scholarship that
attempts to establish the most accurate version of a written work by comparing all
existing manuscript and / or printed versions so as to reconstruct from them the
author’s intention, eliminating copyists’ and printers’ errors and any corrupt
interpolations; the technique of restoring texts as nearly as possible to their original
form. Texts in this connection are defined as writings other than formal documents,
inscribed or printed on paper, parchment, papyrus, or similar materials. The study
of formal documents such as deeds and charters belongs to the science known as
“diplomatics”; the study of writings on stone is part of epigraphy; while
inscriptions on coins and seals are the province of numismatics and sigillography.
The textual critic's ultimate objective is the production of a ‘critical edition’.
This contains a text most closely approximating the original, which is accompanied
by an apparatus criticus (or critical apparatus) that presents: 1) the evidence that
the editor considered (names of manuscripts, or abbreviations called sigla); 2) the
editor's analysis of that evidence (sometimes a simple likelihood rating); 3) a
record of rejected variants (often in order of preference).
Before mechanical printing, literature was copied by hand, and many variations
were introduced by copyists. The age of printing made the scribal profession
effectively redundant. Printed editions, while less susceptible to the proliferation of
variations likely to arise during manual transmission, are nonetheless not immune
to introducing variations from an author's autograph. Instead of a scribe
miscopying his source, a compositor or a printing shop may read or typeset a work
in a way that differs from the autograph. Since each scribe or printer commits
different errors, reconstruction of the lost original is often aided by a selection of
readings taken from many sources. An edited text that draws from multiple sources
is said to be eclectic. In contrast to this approach, some textual critics prefer to
13
identify the single best surviving text, and not to combine readings from multiple
sources.
When comparing different documents, or ‘witnesses’, of a single, original text,
the observed differences are called variant readings, or simply variants or
readings. It is not always apparent which single variant represents the author's
original work. The process of textual criticism seeks to explain how each variant
may have entered the text, either by accident (duplication or omission) or intention
(harmonization or censorship), as scribes or supervisors transmitted the original
author's text by copying it. The textual critic’s task, therefore, is to sort through the
variants, eliminating those most likely to be un-original, hence establishing a
‘critical text’, or critical edition, that is intended to best approximate the original.
At the same time, the critical text should document variant readings, so the relation
of extant witnesses to the reconstructed original is apparent to a reader of the
critical edition. In establishing the critical text, the textual critic considers both
‘external’ evidence (the age, provenance, and affiliation of each witness) and
‘internal’ or ‘physical’ considerations (what the author and scribes, or printers,
were likely to have done).
The collation of all known variants of a text is referred to as a Variorum,
namely a work of textual criticism whereby all variations and emendations are set
side by side so that a reader can track how textual decisions have been made in the
preparation of a text for publication. The Bible and the works of William
Shakespeare have often been the subjects of variorum editions, although the same
techniques have been applied with less frequency to many other works, such as
Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and the prose writings of Edward Fitzgerald.

2.2. Textual criticism: eclecticism, stematics and copy-text editing

There are three fundamental approaches to textual criticism: eclecticism,

stematics and copy-text editing. Techniques from the biological discipline of
cladistics are now also being used to determine the relationship between
manuscripts.

2.2.1. Eclecticism

Eclecticism is the practice of examining a wide number of witnesses and

selecting the variant that seems best. The practice is based on the principle that the
more independent two transmission histories are, the less likely they will be to
reproduce the same errors. What one omits, the other may retain; what one adds,
the other is unlikely to add. Eclecticism allows inferences to be drawn regarding
the original text, based on the evidence of contrasts between witnesses.
Eclectic readings also normally give an impression of the number of witnesses
to each available reading. Although a reading supported by the majority of
witnesses is frequently preferred, this does not follow automatically. For example,
a second edition of a Shakespeare play may include an addition alluding to an
event known to have happened between the two editions. Although nearly all
14
subsequent manuscripts may have included the addition, textual critics may
reconstruct the original without the addition.
Since the mid-19th century, eclecticism, in which there is no a priori bias to a
single manuscript, has been the dominant method of editing the Greek text of the
New Testament. Even so, the oldest manuscripts, being of the Alexandrian text-
type, are the most favoured, and the critical text has an Alexandrian disposition.
The result of the process of eclectism is a text with readings drawn from many
witnesses. In a purely eclectic approach, no single witness is theoretically
favoured. Instead, the critic forms opinions about individual witnesses, relying on
both external and internal evidence.
External evidence is evidence of each physical witness, its date, source, and
relationship to other known witnesses. Critics will often prefer the readings
supported by the oldest witnesses, a majority of witnesses, the most
geographically diverse witnesses, or the best witnesses. Readings that depart from
the known practice of a scribe or a given period may be deemed more reliable,
since a scribe is unlikely on his own initiative to have departed from the usual
practice.
Internal evidence is evidence that comes from the text itself, independent of the
physical characteristics of the document. Various considerations can be used to
decide which reading is the most likely to be original. Sometimes these
considerations can be in conflict.
One of the techniques is Lectio difficilior potior (‘the harder reading is
stronger’), based on taking the more difficult reading as being more likely to be the
original. It is based on the idea that copyists are more likely to simplify and smooth
a text they do not fully understand. Some developing research, however, suggests
that this principle cannot be applied universally, as is the case with the Book of
Revelation.
Another scribal tendency is called homeoteleuton, meaning ‘same endings’.
Homeoteleuton occurs when two words/phrases/lines end with the same sequence
of letters. The scribe, having finished copying the first, skips to the second,
omitting all intervening words. Homeoarchy refers to eye-skip when the
beginnings of two lines are similar.
The critic may also examine the other writings of the author to decide what
words and grammatical constructions match his style. The evaluation of internal
evidence also provides the critic with information that helps him evaluate the
reliability of individual manuscripts. Thus, the consideration internal and external
evidence is related.
Canons of textual criticism. Various scholars have developed guidelines, or
canons of textual criticism, to guide the exercise of the critic's judgment in
determining the best readings of a text. One of the earliest was Johann Albrecht
Bengel (1687-1752), who in 1734 produced an edition of the Greek New
Testament. In his commentary, he established the rule Proclivi scriptioni praestat
ardua, ‘The difficult reading is to be preferred to that which is easy’.
Johann Jakob Griesbach (1745-1812) published several editions of the New
Testament. In his 1796 edition, he established fifteen critical rules. Among them
15
was a variant of Bengel's rule, Lectio difficilior potior, ‘the hardest reading is best’.
Another was Lectio brevior praeferenda, ‘the shorter reading is best, based on the
idea that scribes were more likely to add than to delete. This rule cannot be applied
uncritically, as scribes may omit material inadvertently’.
Brooke Foss Westcott (1825-1901) and Fenton J.A. Hort (1828-1892)
published an edition of the New Testament in 1881. They proposed nine critical
rules, including a version of Bengel's rule, ‘The reading is less likely to be original
that shows a disposition to smooth away difficulties’. They also argued that
‘Readings are approved or rejected by reason of the quality, and not the number, of
their supporting witnesses’, and that ‘The reading is to be preferred that most fitly
explains the existence of the others’.
Many of these rules, although originally developed for Biblical textual
criticism, have wide applicability to any text susceptible to errors of transmission.
Limitations of eclecticism. Since the canons of criticism are highly susceptible
to interpretation, and at times even contradict each other, they can often be
employed to justify any result that fits the text critic's aesthetic or theological
agenda. Starting in the nineteenth century, scholars sought more rigorous methods
to guide editorial judgment. Best-text editing (a complete rejection of eclecticism)
became one extreme. Stemmatics and copy-text editing – while both eclectic, in
that they permit the editor to select readings from multiple sources – sought to
reduce subjectivity by establishing one or a few witnesses presumably as being
favored by ‘objective’ criteria.

2.2.2. Stemmatics

Stemmatics or stemmatology is a rigorous approach to textual criticism

developed by Karl Lachmann (1793-1851) and others. Karl Lachmann himself
greatly contributed to making this method famous, even though he did not invent it
(see Timpanaro, The genesis of Lachmann's method). The method takes its name
from the stemma, ‘family tree’, which shows the relationships of the surviving
witnesses. The family tree is also referred to as a cladorama.
The method works from the principle that ‘community of error implies
community of origin’. That is, if two witnesses have a number of errors in
common, it may be presumed that they were derived from a common intermediate
source, called a hyparchetype. Relations between the lost intermediates are
determined by the same process, placing all extant manuscripts in a family tree or
stemma codicum descended from a single archetype. The process of constructing
the stemma is called recension, or the Latin recensio.
Having completed the stemma, the critic proceeds to the next step, called
selection or selectio, where the text of the archetype is determined by examining
variants from the closest hyparchetypes to the archetype and selecting the best
ones. If one reading occurs more often than another at the same level of the tree,
then the dominant reading is selected. If two competing readings occur equally
often, then the editor uses his judgment to select the correct reading.

16
 After selection, the text may still contain errors, since there may be passages
where no source preserves the correct reading. The step of examination, or
examinatio is applied to find corruptions. Where the editor concludes that the text
is corrupt, it is corrected by a process called ‘emendation’, or emendatio (also
sometimes called divinatio). Emendations not supported by any known source are
sometimes called conjectural emendations.
The process of selectio resembles eclectic textual criticism, but applied to a
restricted set of hypothetical hyparchetypes. The steps of examinatio and
emendatio resemble copy-text editing. In fact, the other techniques can be seen as
special cases of stemmatics, but in which a rigorous family history of the text
cannot be determined but only approximated. If it seems that one manuscript is by
far the best text, then copy text editing is appropriate, and if it seems that a group
of manuscripts are good, then eclecticism on that group would be proper.
The Hodges-Farstad edition of the Greek New Testament attempts to use
stemmatics for some portions.
Limitations and Criticism. The stemmatic method assumes that each witness
is derived from one, and only one, predecessor. If a scribe refers to more than one
source when creating his copy, then the new copy will not clearly fall into a single
branch of the family tree. In the stemmatic method, a manuscript that is derived
from more than one source is said to be contaminated.
The method also assumes that scribes only make new errors – they do not
attempt to correct the errors of their predecessors. When a text has been improved
by the scribe, it is said to be sophisticated, but ‘sophistication’ impairs the method
by obscuring a document's relationship to other witnesses, and making it more
difficult to place the manuscript correctly in the stemma.
The stemmatic method requires the textual critic to group manuscripts by
commonality of error. It is required, therefore, that the critic can distinguish
erroneous readings from correct ones. This assumption has often come under
attack. W.W. Greg noted, ‘That if a scribe makes a mistake he will inevitably
produce nonsense is the tacit and wholly unwarranted assumption’.
The critic Joseph Bédier (1864-1938) launched a particularly withering attack
on stemmatics in 1928. He surveyed editions of medieval French texts that were
produced with the stemmatic method, and found that textual critics tended
overwhelmingly to produce trees divided into just two branches. He concluded that
this outcome was unlikely to have occurred by chance, and that therefore, the
method was tending to produce bipartite stemmas regardless of the actual history
of the witnesses. He suspected that editors tended to favor trees with two branches,
as this would maximize the opportunities for editorial judgment (as there would be
no third branch to ‘break the tie’ whenever the witnesses disagreed). He also noted
that, for many works, more than one reasonable stemma could be postulated,
suggesting that the method was not as rigorous or as scientific as its proponents
had claimed.
The stemmatic method's final step is emendatio, also sometimes referred to as
‘conjectural emendation’. But in fact, the critic employs conjecture at every step of
the process. Some of the method's rules that are designed to reduce the exercise of
17
editorial judgment do not necessarily produce the correct result. For example,
where there are more than two witnesses at the same level of the tree, normally the
critic will select the dominant reading. However, it may be no more than fortuitous
that more witnesses have survived that present a particular reading. A plausible
reading that occurs less often may, nevertheless, be the correct one.
Lastly, the stemmatic method assumes that every extant witness is derived,
however remotely, from a single source. It does not account for the possibility that
the original author may have revised his work, and that the text could have existed
at different times in more than one authoritative version.

2.2.3. Copy-Text Editing

With copy-text editing, the textual critic selects a base text from a manuscript
thought to be reliable. Often, the base text is selected from the oldest manuscript of
the text, but in the early days of printing, the copy text was often a manuscript that
was at hand.
Using the copy-text method, the critic examines the base text and makes
corrections (called emendations) in places where the base text appears wrong to the
critic. This can be done by looking for places in the base text that do not make
sense or by looking at the text of other witnesses for a superior reading. Close-call
decisions are usually resolved in favor of the copy-text.
The first published, printed edition of the Greek New Testament was produced
by this method. Erasmus, the editor, selected a manuscript from the local
Dominican monastery in Basle and corrected its obvious errors by consulting other
local manuscripts. The Westcott and Hort text, which was the basis for the Revised
Version of the English bible, also used the copy-text method, using the Codex
Vaticanus as the base manuscript.
McKerrow's concept of copy-text. The bibliographer Ronald B. McKerrow
introduced the term copy-text in his 1904 edition of the works of Thomas Nashe,
defining it as ‘the text used in each particular case as the basis of mine’. McKerrow
was aware of the limitations of the stemmatic method, and believed it was more
prudent to choose one particular text that was thought to be particularly reliable,
and then to emend it only where the text was obviously corrupt. The French critic
Joseph Bédier likewise became disenchanted with the stemmatic method, and
concluded that the editor should choose the best available text, and emend it as
little as possible.
In McKerrow's method as originally introduced, the copy-text was not
necessarily the earliest text. In some cases, McKerrow would choose a later
witness, noting that ‘if an editor has reason to suppose that a certain text embodies
later corrections than any other, and at the same time has no ground for
disbelieving that these corrections, or some of them at least, are the work of the
author, he has no choice but to make that text the basis of his reprint’.
By 1939, in his Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare, McKerrow had
changed his mind about this approach, as he feared that a later edition – even if it
contained authorial corrections – would ‘deviate more widely than the earliest print
18
from the author's original manuscript.’ He therefore concluded that the correct
procedure would be ‘produced by using the earliest ‘good’ print as copy-text and
inserting into it, from the first edition which contains them, such corrections as
appear to us to be derived from the author’. But, fearing the arbitrary exercise of
editorial judgment, McKerrow stated that, having concluded that a later edition had
substantive revisions attributable to the author, ‘we must accept all the alterations
of that edition, saving any which seem obvious blunders or misprints’.
W.W. Greg's rationale of copy-text. Anglo-American textual criticism in the
last half of the twentieth century came to be dominated by a landmark essay by Sir
Walter W. Greg The Rationale of Copy-Text. Greg proposed, ‘a distinction
between the significant, or as I shall call them ‘substantive’, readings of the text,
those namely that affect the author's meaning or the essence of his expression, and
others, such in general as spelling, punctuation, word-division, and the like,
affecting mainly its formal presentation, which may be regarded as the accidents,
or as I shall call them ‘accidentals’, of the text.
Greg observed that compositors at printing shops tended to follow the
‘substantive’ readings of their copy faithfully, except when they deviated
unintentionally; but that ‘as regards accidentals they will normally follow their
own habits or inclination, though they may, for various reasons and to varying
degrees, be influenced by their copy’.
He concluded, ‘The true theory is, I contend, that the copy-text should govern
(generally) in the matter of accidentals, but that the choice between substantive
readings belongs to the general theory of textual criticism and lies altogether
beyond the narrow principle of the copy-text. Thus it may happen that in a critical
edition the text rightly chosen as copy may not by any means be the one that
supplies most substantive readings in cases of variation. The failure to make this
distinction and to apply this principle has naturally led to too close and too general
a reliance upon the text chosen as basis for an edition, and there has arisen what
may be called the tyranny of the copy-text, a tyranny that has, in my opinion,
vitiated much of the best editorial work of the past generation’.
Greg's view, in short, was that the ‘copy-text can be allowed no over-riding or
even preponderant authority so far as substantive readings are concerned.’ The
choice between reasonable competing readings, he said, ‘will be determined partly
by the opinion the editor may form respecting the nature of the copy from which
each substantive edition was printed, which is a matter of external authority; partly
by the intrinsic authority of the several texts as judged by the relative frequency of
manifest errors therein; and partly by the editor's judgement of the intrinsic claims
of individual readings to originality – in other words their intrinsic merit, so long
as by ‘merit’ we mean the likelihood of their being what the author wrote rather
than their appeal to the individual taste of the editor’.
Although Greg argued that an editor should be free to use his judgment to
choose between competing substantive readings, he suggested that an editor should
defer to the copy-text when ‘the claims of two readings...appear to be exactly
balanced.... In such a case, while there can be no logical reason for giving
preference to the copy-text, in practice, if there is no reason for altering its reading,
19
the obvious thing seems to be to let it stand’. The ‘exactly balanced’ variants are
said to be indifferent.
Editors who follow Greg's rationale produce eclectic editions, in that the
authority for the ‘accidentals’ is derived from one particular source (usually the
earliest one) that the editor considers to be authoritative, but the authority for the
‘substantives’ is determined in each individual case according to the editor's
judgment. The resulting text, except for the accidentals, is constructed without
relying predominantly on any one witness.
Greg – Bowers – Tanselle. W.W. Greg did not live long enough to apply his
rationale of copy-text to any actual editions of works. His rationale was adopted
and significantly expanded by Fredson Bowers (1905–1991). Starting in the
1970s, G. Thomas Tanselle vigorously took up the method's defense and added
significant contributions of his own. Greg's rationale as practiced by Bowers and
Tanselle has come to be known as the ‘Greg – Bowers’ or the ‘Greg – Bowers –
Tanselle’ method.
Application to works of all periods. In his 1964 essay, Some Principles for
Scholarly Editions of Nineteenth-Century American Authors, Bowers said that ‘the
theory of copy-text proposed by Sir Walter Greg rules supreme’. Bowers's
assertion of ‘supremacy’ was in contrast to Greg's more modest claim that ‘My
desire is rather to provoke discussion than to lay down the law’.
Whereas Greg had limited his illustrative examples to English Renaissance
drama, where his expertise lay, Bowers argued that the rationale was ‘the most
workable editorial principle yet contrived to produce a critical text that is
authoritative in the maximum of its details whether the author be Shakespeare,
Dryden, Fielding, Nathaniel Hawthorne, or Stephen Crane. The principle is sound
without regard for the literary period’.
For works where an author's manuscript survived – a case Greg had not
considered – Bowers concluded that the manuscript should generally serve as
copy-text. Citing the example of Nathaniel Hawthorne, he noted, ‘When an
author's manuscript is preserved, this has paramount authority, of course. Yet the
fallacy is still maintained that since the first edition was proofread by the author, it
must represent his final intentions and hence should be chosen as copy-text.
Practical experience shows the contrary. When one collates the manuscript of The
House of the Seven Gables against the first printed edition, one finds an average of
ten to fifteen differences per page between the manuscript and the print, many of
them consistent alterations from the manuscript system of punctuation,
capitalization, spelling, and word-division. It would be ridiculous to argue that
Hawthorne made approximately three to four thousand small changes in proof, and
then wrote the manuscript of The Blithedale Romance according to the same
system as the manuscript of the Seven Gables, a system that he had rejected in
proof’.
Following Greg, the editor would then replace any of the manuscript readings
with substantives from printed editions that could be reliably attributed to the
author: ‘Obviously, an editor cannot simply reprint the manuscript, and he must
substitute for its readings any words that he believes Hawthorne changed in proof’.
20
 Uninfluenced final authorial intention. McKerrow had articulated textual
criticism's goal in terms of ‘our ideal of an author's fair copy of his work in its final
state’. Bowers asserted that editions founded on Greg's method would ‘represent
the nearest approximation in every respect of the author's final intentions’. Bowers
stated similarly that the editor's task is to ‘approximate as nearly as possible an
inferential authorial fair copy’ (quoted in: Tanselle, 1976: 168). Tanselle notes
that, ‘Textual criticism...has generally been undertaken with a view to
reconstructing, as accurately as possible, the text finally intended by the author’.
Bowers and Tanselle argue for rejecting textual variants that an author inserted
at the suggestion of others. Bowers said that his edition of Stephen Crane's first
novel, Maggie, presented ‘the author's final and uninfluenced artistic intentions’. In
his writings, Tanselle refers to ‘unconstrained authorial intention’ or ‘an author's
uninfluenced intentions’. This marks a departure from Greg, who had merely
suggested that the editor inquire whether a later reading ‘is one that the author can
reasonably be supposed to have substituted for the former’, not implying any
further inquiry as to why the author had made the change.
Tanselle discusses the example of Herman Melville's Typee. After the novel's
initial publication, Melville's publisher asked him to soften the novel's criticisms of
missionaries in the South Seas. Although Melville pronounced the changes an
improvement, Tanselle rejected them in his edition, concluding that ‘there is no
evidence, internal or external, to suggest that they are the kinds of changes
Melville would have made without pressure from someone else’.
Bowers confronted a similar problem in his edition of Maggie. Crane originally
printed the novel privately in 1893. To secure commercial publication in 1896,
Crane agreed to remove profanity, but he also made stylistic revisions. Bowers's
approach was to preserve the stylistic and literary changes of 1896, but to revert to
the 1893 readings where he believed that Crane was fulfilling the publisher's
intention rather than his own. There were, however, intermediate cases that could
reasonably have been attributed to either intention, and some of Bowers's choices
came under fire – both as to his judgment, and as to the wisdom of conflating
readings from the two different versions of Maggie.
Hans Zeller argued that it is impossible to tease apart the changes Crane made
for literary reasons and those made at the publisher's insistence:
Firstly, in anticipation of the character of the expected censorship, Crane could
be led to undertake alterations which also had literary value in the context of the
new version. Secondly, because of the systematic character of the work, purely
censorial alterations sparked off further alterations, determined at this stage by
literary considerations. Again in consequence of the systemic character of the
work, the contamination of the two historical versions in the edited text gives rise
to a third version. Though the editor may indeed give a rational account of his
decision at each point on the basis of the documents, nevertheless to aim to
produce the ideal text which Crane would have produced in 1896 if the publisher
had left him complete freedom is to my mind just as unhistorical as the question of
how the first World War or the history of the United States would have developed
if Germany had not caused the USA to enter the war in 1917 by unlimited
21
submarine combat. The nonspecific form of censorship described above is one of
the historical conditions under which Crane wrote the second version of Maggie
and made it function. From the text which arose in this way it is not possible to
subtract these forces and influences, in order to obtain a text of the author's own.
Indeed I regard the ‘uninfluenced artistic intentions’ of the author as something
which exists only in terms of aesthetic abstraction. Between influences on the
author and influences on the text are all manner of transitions.
Bowers and Tanselle recognize that texts often exist in more than one
authoritative version. Tanselle argues that: ‘two types of revision must be
distinguished: that which aims at altering the purpose, direction, or character of a
work, thus attempting to make a different sort of work out of it; and that which
aims at intensifying, refining, or improving the work as then conceived (whether or
not it succeeds in doing so), thus altering the work in degree but not in kind. If one
may think of a work in terms of a spatial metaphor, the first might be labeled
‘vertical revision’, because it moves the work to a different plane, and the second
‘horizontal revision’, because it involves alterations within the same plane. Both
produce local changes in active intention; but revisions of the first type appear to
be in fulfillment of an altered programmatic intention or to reflect an altered active
intention in the work as a whole, whereas those of the second do not’.
He suggests that where a revision is ‘horizontal’ (i.e., aimed at improving the
work as originally conceived), then the editor should adopt the author's later
version. But where a revision is ‘vertical’ (i.e., fundamentally altering the work's
intention as a whole), then the revision should be treated as a new work, and edited
separately on its own terms.
Format for apparatus. Bowers was also influential in defining the form of
critical apparatus that should accompany a scholarly edition. In addition to the
content of the apparatus, Bowers led a movement to relegate editorial matter to
appendices, leaving the critically-established text ‘in the clear’, i.e. free of any
signs of editorial intervention. Tanselle explained the rationale for this approach,
‘In the first place, an editor's primary responsibility is to establish a text; whether
his goal is to reconstruct that form of the text which represents the author's final
intention or some other form of the text, his essential task is to produce a reliable
text according to some set of principles. Relegating all editorial matter to an
appendix and allowing the text to stand by itself serves to emphasize the primacy
of the text and permits the reader to confront the literary work without the
distraction of editorial comment and to read the work with ease. A second
advantage of a clear text is that it is easier to quote from or to reprint. Although no
device can insure accuracy of quotation, the insertion of symbols (or even footnote
numbers) into a text places additional difficulties in the way of the quoter.
Furthermore, most quotations appear in contexts where symbols are inappropriate;
thus when it is necessary to quote from a text which has not been kept clear of
apparatus, the burden of producing a clear text of the passage is placed on the
quoter. Even footnotes at the bottom of the text pages are open to the same
objection, when the question of a photographic reprint arises’.

22
 Some critics believe that a clear-text edition gives the edited text too great a
prominence, relegating textual variants to appendices that are difficult to use, and
suggesting a greater sense of certainty about the established text than it deserves.
As Shillingsburg notes, ‘English scholarly editions have tended to use notes at the
foot of the text page, indicating, tacitly, a greater modesty about the ‘established’
text and drawing attention more forcibly to at least some of the alternative forms of
the text’.

2.2.4. Cladistics

Cladistics is a technique borrowed from biology, where it is used to determine

the evolutionary relationships between different species. The text of a number of
different manuscripts is entered into a computer, which records all the differences
between them. The manuscripts are then grouped according to their shared
characteristics. The difference between cladistics and more traditional forms of
statistical analysis is that, rather than simply arranging the manuscripts into rough
groupings according to their overall similarity, cladistics assumes that they are part
of a branching family tree and uses that assumption to derive relationships between
them. This makes it more like an automated approach to stemmatics. However,
where there is a difference, the computer does not attempt to decide which reading
is closer to the original text, and so does not indicate which branch of the tree is the
‘root’ – which manuscript tradition is closest to the original. Other types of
evidence must be used for that purpose.
The major theoretical problem with applying cladistics to textual criticism is
that cladistics assumes that, once a branching has occurred in the family tree, the
two branches cannot rejoin; so all similarities can be taken as evidence of common
ancestry. While this assumption is applicable to the evolution of living creatures, it
is not always true of manuscript traditions, since a scribe can work from two
different manuscripts at once, producing a new copy with characteristics of both.
Nonetheless, software developed for use in biology has been applied with some
success to textual criticism; for example, it is being used by the Canterbury Tales
Project to determine the relationship between the 84 surviving manuscripts and
four early printed editions of the Canterbury Tales.

A Sample of the Textual Criticism in Practice:

To His Coy Mistress after Andrew Marvell

There are several textual problems in Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress.
One of these problems deals with the last word in the following couplet:
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew.
Instead of ‘dew’, the first edition of the poem had ‘glew’, which is regarded
now as a dialectical variant of ‘glow’, although it was earlier thought to be another
spelling of ‘glue’, a senseless reading in the context. ‘Lew’ (dialectical ‘warmth’)
was also suggested as a possibility. But when someone conjectured ‘dew’,
23
probably in the 18th century, it was apparently so happy an emendation that
virtually all textbooks have long printed it without any explanation. But several
modern texts restore the earliest reading. Both Louis Martz’s Anchor Anthology of
Seventeenth-Century Verse and George de F. Lord’s Andrew Marvell, Complete
Poetry print ‘glew’ (meaning ‘glow’) as making more sense in the context and
being quite sound linguistically. Two other words in the poem that must be
explained are ‘transpires’ and ‘instant’ in the following couplet:
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires.
In each case, the word is much nearer to its Latin original than to its 20 th-
century meaning. ‘Transpires’ thus means literally ‘breathes forth’, and ‘instant’
means ‘now present’ and ‘urgent’. Admittedly, this sort of linguistic information
borders on the technical, but an appreciation of the meaning of the words is
imperative for a full understanding of the poem.

Project Tasks

1. Explore in depth the Textual Criticism.

2. Create your own piece of the Textual criticism on any modern literary work.
(see a sample of the Textual Criticism in Practice).
3. Answer the suggested questions:
 What is the Textual criticism?
 Why is the Textual criticism sometimes called lower criticism?
 What does the Textual Criticism deal with?
 What types of evidence does the textual critic deal with when he
establishes the critical text?
 What are the fundamental approaches of the Textual criticism? What are
their similarities and differences?
4. Choose the topic for your presentation (report); create it to explain your group's
assignment. Your presentation should contain the following points:
 a title to introduce your topic;
 a brief definition for your theory;
 basic background information regarding your theory, such as: what does
your theory focus on, why would someone be most likely use your
approach, what questions does your approach address;
 pros: Why would someone use your assigned approach?;
 cons: What are disadvantages to your approach?;
 use textual evidence to support your commentary.
5. Participate in the suggested discussion:
 Give the definition of the Textual criticism.
 Discuss the role of the Textual Criticism in studying the genesis and
development of a piece of literature.
 Define each fundamental approach of the Textual criticism.
 Speak on the different concepts of copy-text.
24
  Explain what cladistics is.

Test №2

The test consists of 6 tasks. It requires 4 minutes to solve it. Choose the
right answer and tick it in the blank form.

1. What definition doesn’t define the Textual criticism?

a branch of philology or the establishment of an authentic
1 bibliography that is concerned 2 text, or the text which the author
with the identification and intended
removal of errors from texts
a branch of literary scholarship
that attempts to establish the
most accurate version of a
written work by comparing all
the technique of restoring texts as
3 existing manuscript and / or 4 nearly as possible to their
printed versions so as to
original form
reconstruct from them the
author’s intention, eliminating
copyists’ and printers’ errors and
any corrupt interpolations
2. How are different documents called which are studied to re-create a single
text?
1 manuscripts 2 editorials
3 critical texts 4 witnesses
3. What judgements do textual critics make?
1 material 2 symbolic
3 aesthetic 4 classical
4. What point does not belong to ‘external’ evidence?
1 age 2 affiliation of each witness
3 provenance 4 physical consideration
5. What is ecclectism?
the practice of examining a wide
it works from the principle that
1 number of witnesses and 2 community of error implies
selecting the variant that seems
community of origin
best
Using it, the critic examines the a technique borrowed from
base text and makes corrections biology, where it is used to
3 (called emendations) in places 4 determine the evolutionary
where the base text appears relationships between different
wrong to the critic species
25
6. Who became the ‘father’ of stemmatics?
1 Johann Albrecht Bengel 2 Brooke Foss Westcott
3 Karl Lachmann 4 Johann Jakob Griesbach

Blank Form

№ 1 2 3 4 5 6
1
2
3
4

Literature

1. Aland K., Aland B. The Text of the New Testament. Brill, 1987.
2. Baldick C. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. NY: Oxford
University Press, 2008.
3. Bentham G., Gosse E. The Variorum and Definitive Edition of the Poetical
and Prose Writings of Edward Fitzgerald. Doubleday, Page and Co, 1902.
4. Bowers F. Some Principles for Scholarly Editions of Nineteenth-Century
American Authors // Studies in Bibliography 17. 1964. – Pp.223-228.
5. Bowers F. Multiple Authority: New Problems and Concepts of Copy-Text //
Library, Fifth Series XXVII (2). 1972. – Pp.81-115.
6. Bradley S. Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems. NY:
NYU Press, 1980.
7. Comfort Ph.W. Encountering the Manuscripts: An Introduction to New
Testament Paleography & Textural Criticism. B&H Publishing Group, 2005.
8. Davis T. The CEAA and Modern Textual Editing // Library, Fifth Series
XXXII (32). 1977. – Pp.61-74.
9. Gaskell Ph. From Writer to Reader: Studies in Editorial Method. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1978.
10. Greetham D.C. Theories of the text. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford
University Press, 1999.
11. Greg W.W. The Rationale of Copy-Text // Studies in Bibliography 3. 1950.
– Pp.19-36.
12. Guerin W.L., Labor E., Morgan L., Reesman J.C., Willingham J.R. A
Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 5 th ed. NY, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005.
13. Hartin P.J., Petzer J.H., Manning B. Text and Interpretation: New
Approaches in the Criticism of the New Testament. Brill, 2001.
14. Houseman A.E. The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism // Art and
Error: Modern Textual Editing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970.
15. Maas P. Textual Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958.

26
16. McCarter K. Textual criticism: recovering the text of the Hebrew Bible.
Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1986.
17. McGann J.J. A critique of modern textual criticism. Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1992.
18. McKerrow R.B. Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1939.
19. Mulken van M., Reenen van P. Studies in Stemmatology. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins Publishing Company, 1996.
20. Rosemann Ph. Understanding scholastic thought with Foucault. New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1999.
21. Schuh R.T. Biological systematics: principles and applications. Ithaca, N.Y:
Cornell University Press, 2000.
22. Shillingsburg P. An Inquiry into the Social Status of Texts and Modes of
Textual Criticism // Studies in Bibliography 42. 1989. – Pp.55-78.
23. Tanselle G.T. Some Principles for Editorial Apparatus // Studies in
Bibliography 25. 1972. – Pp.41-88.
24. Tanselle G.T. The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention // Studies
in Bibliography 29. 1976. – Pp.167-211.
25. Tanselle G.T. Historicism and Critical Editing // Studies in Bibliography 39.
1986. – Pp.1-46.
26. Tanselle G.T. A Rationale of Textual Criticism. 1989.
27. Tanselle, G.T., Greetham D.C. The Varieties of Scholarly Editing //
Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research. New York: The Modern Language
Association of America, 1995.
28. Thorpe J. Principles of Textual Criticism. San Marino, CA: The Huntington
Library, 1972.
29. Tov E. Textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001.
30. Wilson N.R., Reynolds L. Scribes and scholars: a guide to the transmission
of Greek and Latin literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.
31. Zeller H. A New Approach to the Critical Constitution of Literary Texts //
Studies in Bibliography 28, 1975. – Pp.231-264.
32. http://www.bible-researcher.com/rules.html#Bengel
33. http://www.bible-researcher.com/rules.html#Griesbach
34. http://www.bible-researcher.com/rules.html#Hort
35. http://www.britannica.com
36. http://www.omnipelagos.com/entry?n=textual_criticism

Module 3. Historical and Biographical Approaches

The overall goal is to study the Historical and Biographical Approaches; define
their similarity; study its context, main principles and the role in modern literature.

Although the historical and biographical approaches have been evolving over
many years, its basic tenants are perhaps most clearly articulated in the writings of
the 19th-century French critic Hippolyte A. Taine, whose phrase race, milieu, et
27
moment, elaborated in his History of English Literature, beaspeaks a hereditary
and environmental determinism.
The basic premise of Historical Criticism is that literary meaning is grounded in
the author. The author is the context in which the work is studied and is the cause
of the work's meaning. Historical criticism is the search for the author's original
intention. To ask what a literary work means, according to the historical critic, is to
ask what the author meant when he or she created it. In order to study the author as
context, it is necessary for the historical critic to examine the work against its
historical surroundings and determine how these surroundings worked with the
individuality of the author and the individuality of the age to create and define the
text.
On the whole, Historical Criticism assumes that the relationship between art
and society is organic; views a literary work in relation to the standards and social
milieu of the period in which it was produced. Biographical Criticism assumes that
by examining the facts and motives of an author's life, the meaning and intent of
his/her literary work can be illuminated.
In other words, this kind of criticism sees a literary work chiefly, if not
exclusively, as a reflection of its author’s life and times or the life and times of the
characters in the work.
For example, John Milton’s sonnet On the Late Massacre in Piedmont
illustrates the topical quality that great literature may and often does possess. This
poem commemorates the slaughter in 1655 of the Waldenses, members of a
Protestant sect living in the valleys of northern Italy. Knowledge of this
background clarifies at least one rather factual reference and two allusions in the
poem. Several of Milton’s other sonnets also reflect events in his life or times. Two
such are On His Blindness, best understood when one realizes that the poet became
totally blind when he was 44, and On His Deceased Wife, a tribute to his second
wife, Katherine Woodcock. Milton was already blind when he married her, a fact
that explains the line, ‘Her face was veiled’. In fact, Milton affords us an excellent
example of an author whose works reflect particular episodes in his life.
A historical novel is likely to be more meaningful when either its milieu or that
of its author is understood. J.F. Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, W. Scott’s
Ivanhoe, Ch. Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, and J. Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath are
certainly better understood by readers familiar with, respectively, the French and
Indian War (and the American frontier experience generally), Anglo-Norman
Britain, the French Revolution, and the American Depression. In addition, there is
a very real sense in which these books are about these great historical matters, so
that the author is interested in the characters only to the extent that they are molded
by these events.
The same thing can be said especially about ideological or propagandist novels.
For example, H.B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, F. Norris’s The Octopus,
U. Sinclair’s The Jungle ring truer (or falser as the case may be) to those who
know about the antebellum South, railroad expansion in the late 19 th century, and
scandals in the American meat-packing industry in the early 20th century.

28
 Advantages: This approach works well for some works – like those of
Alexander Pope, John Dryden, and Milton – which are obviously political in
nature. One must know Milton was blind, for instance, for ‘On His Blindness’ to
have any meaning. And one must know something about the Exclusion Bill Crisis
to appreciate John Dryden's ‘Absalom and Achitophel’. It also is necessary to take
a historical approach in order to place allusions in there proper classical, political,
or biblical background.
Disadvantages: New Critics refer to the historical / biographical critic's belief
that the meaning or value of a work may be determined by the author's intention as
‘the intentional fallacy’.  They believe that this approach tends to reduce art to the
level of biography and make it relative (to the times) rather than universal.

A Sample of the Historical / Biographical Approach in Practice:

‘Huckleberry Finn’ after M. Twain

We know from M. Twain’s autobiographical writings and from scholarly

studies of him, principally those of Bernard De Voto, A.B. Paine, and
Dixon Wecter, that the most sensational happenings and colourful characters in
Huckleberry Finn are based on actual events and persons Twain saw in Hannibal,
Missouri, where he grew up, and in other towns up and down the Mississippi. For
example, the shooting of Old Boggs by Colonel Sherburn is drawn from the killing
of one ‘Uncle Sam’ Smarr by William Owsley in the streets of Hannibal on
January 24, 1845. The attempted lynching of Sherburn is also an echo of
something that Mark Twain saw as a boy, for he declared in later life that he once
‘saw a brave gentleman deride and insult a [lunch] mob and drive it away’. During
the summer of 1847 Benson Blankenship, older brother of the prototype Huck,
secretly aided a runaway slave by taking food to him as his hideout on an island
across the river from Hannibal. Benson did this for several weeks and resolutely
refused to be enticed into betraying the man for the reward offered for his capture.
This is undoubtedly the historical source of Huck’s loyalty to Jim that finally
resulted in his electing to ‘go to Hell’ in defiance of law, society, and religion
rather than turn in his friend.

Project Tasks

1. Explore in depth the Historical and Biographical Approaches.

2. Answer the suggested questions:
 What is the Historical Criticism?
 What is the Biographical Criticism?
 What do they deal with?
 What is the context in which the work is studied and is the cause of the
work's meaning?
 What is the role of these approaches in modern literature?

29
3. Create a presentation (report) to explain your group's assigned literary theory
(Historical or Biographical Approaches). Your presentation should contain the
following:
 a title to introduce your literary theory;
 a brief definition for your theory;
 basic background information regarding your theory, such as: what does
your theory focus on, why would someone be most likely use your approach,
what questions does your approach address;
 pros: Why would someone use your assigned approach?;
 cons: What are disadvantages to your approach?;
 use textual evidence to support your commentary.
4. Write a short critical article according to historical and biographical approaches
on either H.B. Stowe’s ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, or J. London’s ‘Martin Eden’(see: A
Sample of the Historical and Biographical Approach in Practice).

30
 Test №3

The test consists of 6 tasks. It requires 3 minutes to solve it. Choose the
right answer and tick it in the blank form.
1. When were the basic tenants of the Historical / Biographical Approach most
clearly articulated?
th
1 19 century 2 17th century
3 20th century 4 16th century
2. Whose writings contain the basic tenants of the Historical / Biographical
Approach most clearly articulated?
1 John Milton 2 Hippolyte A. Taine
3 Alexander Pope 4 J.F. Cooper
3. What is the disadvantage of the Historical / Biographical Approach?
It places allusions in there proper A historical novel is likely to be
1 classical, political, or biblical 2 more meaningful when either its
background milieu or that of its author is
understood
This approach works well for New Critics refer to the historical
some works – like those of / biographical critic's belief that
3 Alexander Pope, John Dryden, 4 the meaning or value of a work
and Milton – which are obviously may be determined by the
political in nature author's intention as ‘the
intentional fallacy’
4. What is the definition of the Historical Criticism?
it assumes that the relationship
between art and society is
1 organic; views a literary work in 2 it seeks to establish the proper
relation to the standards and text for study of a literary work
social milieu of the period in
which it was produced
it views a literary work as an
it analyzes a literary work
imitation or reflection of the
3 according to a set of general 4 world and human life; applies the
principles
criterion of ‘truth’ to the subject
matter which the work represents
5. What is the context in which the work is studied in the
Historical / Biographical criticism and is the cause of the work's meaning?
1 the author 2 the audience
3 the work itself 4 historical events
6. It is necessary for the historical critic to examine the work against its ...
surroundings.
1 social 2 biographical
31
 3 historical 4 material

Blank Form

№ 1 2 3 4 5 6
1
2
3
4

Literature

1. Croft S., Cross H. Literature, Criticism, and Style. New York: Oxford

University Press, 2004.
2. Guerin W.L., Labor E., Morgan L., Reesman J.C., Willingham J.R. A
Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 5 th ed. NY, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005.
3. Waugh P. Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006.
4. http://www.literatureclassics.com/ancientpaths/litcrit.html#historical
5. http://www.literatureclassics.com/ancientpaths/litcrit.html#historical
6. http://home.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/200/litcrit.txt
7. http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~pasupathi/critical_tools/e314l_fall_2000/archi
ves/special/lib2/Biographical_Criticism.html
8. http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~pasupathi/critical_tools/e314l_fall_2000/archi
ves/special/lib1/Historical_Criticism.html

Module 4. Moral and Philosophical Approaches

The overall goal is to study the Moral and Philosophical Approaches; define
their origin, main principles, advantages and disadvantages.

The moral-philosophical approach is as old as classical Greek and Roman

critics. Its main practitioners are Plato, Horace, Matthew Arnold, etc. Plato, for
example, emphasized moralism and utilitarianism; Horace stressed that literature
should be delightful and instructive. Among its most famous exemplars are the
commentators of the age of neoclassicism in English literature (1660-1800),
particularly Samuel Johnson. The basic position of such critics is that the larger
function of literature is to teach morality and to probe philosophical issues. They
would interpret literature within a context of the philosophical thought of a period
or group. From their point of view Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus can be read
profitable only if one understands existentialism. Similarly, Pope’s Essay on Man
may be grasped only if one understands the meaning and the role of reason in the
32
eighteenth-century thought. Such teaching may also be religiously oriented. Henry
Fielding’s Tom Jones, for example, illustrates the moral superiority of a hot-
blooded young man like Tom, whose sexual indulgences are decidedly atoned for
by his humanitarianism, tenderheartedness, and instinctive honor (innate as
opposed to acquired through training). Serving as foils to Tom are the real sinners
in the novel – the vicious and the hypocritical. Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter is
likewise seen essentially as a study of the effects of secret sin on a human soul –
that is, sin unconfessed before both God and man, as the sin of Arthur Dimmesdale
with Hester Prynne, or, even more, the sin of Roger Chillingworth. Robert Frost’s
‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ suggests that duty and responsibility
take precedence over beauty and pleasure.
A related attitude is that of Matthew Arnold, the victorian critic, who insisted
that a great literary work must possess ‘high seriousness’. In each instance critics
working from a moral bent are not unaware of form, figurative language, and other
purely aesthetic considerations, but they consider them to be secondary. The
important thing is the moral or philosophical teaching. On its highest plane this is
not superficially didactic, though it may at first seem so. In the larger sense, all
great literature teaches. The critic who employs the moral-philosophical approach
insists on ascertaining and stating what is taught. If the work is in any degree
significant or intelligible, this meaning will be there.
On the whole, Moral and philosophical critics believe that the larger purpose of
literature is to teach morality and to probe philosophical issues.
Advantages: This approach is useful for such works as Alexander Pope's ‘An
Essay on Man’, which does present an obvious moral philosophy. It is also useful
when considering the themes of works (for example, man's inhumanity to man in
Mark Twain's ‘Huckleberry Finn’). Finally, it does not view literature merely as
‘art’ isolated from all moral implications; it recognizes that literature can affect
readers, whether subtly or directly, and that the message of a work – and not just
the decorous vehicle for that message – is important.
Disadvantages: Detractors argue that such an approach can be too
‘judgemental’.  Some believe literature should be judged primarily (if not solely)
on its artistic merits, not its moral or philosophical content.

A Sample of the Moral and Philosophical Approaches in Practice:

‘Hamlet’ by W. Shakespeare

This play is valuable primarily for its moral and philosophical insights.
Sometimes Hamlet is explained as an idealist temperamentally unsuited for life in
a world peopled by fallible creatures. He is therefore shattered when he discovers
that some humans are so ambitious for a crown that they are willing to murder for
it and that others are so highly sexed that they will violate not only the laws of
decorum (e.g., by remarrying within a month of a spouse’s death) but also the civil
and ecclesiastical laws against incest. He is further crushed when he thinks that his
fiancée and his former schoolfellows are tools of his murderous uncle.

33
 One can see Hamlet’s plight as that of the essentially moral and virtuous
intellectual man, certainly aware of the gentlemanly code that demands satisfaction
for a wrong, but too much the student of philosophy and the Christian religion to
believe in the morality or the logic of revenge. Related to this is the view of
Hamlet as a kind of transitional figure, torn between the demands and the values of
the middle Ages and those of the modern world. We can also regard Hamlet as a
man of action, thwarted by such practical obstacles as how to kill a king
surrounded by a bodyguard.
On the whole, Hamlet fulfills the technical requirements of the revenge play as
well as the salient requirements of a classical tragedy; i.e., it shows a person of
heroic proportions going down to defeat under circumstances too powerful for him
to cope with. For most readers and audiences the question of Hamlet’s tragic flaw
will remain a moot one. But this will not keep them from recognizing the play as
one of the most searching artistic treatments of the problems and conflicts that
form so large a part of the human condition (Guerin, Labor, Morgan, Reesman,
Willingham, 2005: 80-81).

Project Tasks

1. Study in depth the Moral and Philosophical approaches.

2. Answer the suggested questions:
 What is the Moral approach?
 What is the Philosophical approach?
 What are the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches?
3. Create a presentation (report) to explain your group's assigned literary theory
(the Moral or Philosophical Approaches). Your presentation should contain the
following:
 a title to introduce your literary theory;
 a brief definition for your theory;
 basic background information regarding your theory, such as: what does
your theory focus on, why would someone be most likely use your
approach, what questions does your approach address;
 pros: Why would someone use your assigned approach?;
 cons: What are disadvantages to your approach?;
 use textual evidence to support your commentary.

Test №4

The test consists of 4 tasks. It requires 3 minutes to solve it. Choose the
right answer and tick it in the blank form.

1. Who is not considered to be the main practitioner of the Philosophical /

Moral approaches?

34
 1 Plato 2 Matthew Arnold
3 Horace 4 Aristotle
2. What is the primary thing for philosophical critics?
1 a moral bent 2 figurative language
3 form 4 aesthetic consideration
3. What is the purpose of literature according to Philosophical and Moral
approaches?
1 to study morality 2 to train philosophy
3 to teach morality and to probe 4 to gain some morality and
philosophical issues philosophical issues
4. What is the disadvantage of the Philosophical and Moral approach?
it recognizes that literature can
it is useful when considering the affect readers, whether subtly or
1 themes of works (for example, 2 directly, and that the message of
man's inhumanity to man in Mark a work – and not just the
Twain's ‘Huckleberry Finn’) decorous vehicle for that message
– is important
it does not view literature merely
3 as ‘art’ isolated from all moral 4 such an approach can be too
‘judgemental’
implications

Blank Form

№ 1 2 3 4
1
2
3
4
Literature

1. Croft S., Cross H. Literature, Criticism, and Style. New York: Oxford

University Press, 2004.
2. Guerin W.L., Labor E., Morgan L., Reesman J.C., Willingham J.R. A
Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 5 th ed. NY, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005.
3. Waugh P. Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006.

35
 4. http://wwww.ksu.edu.sa/colleges/art/eng/461Eng/Literary%20Criticism
%20Map.htm.
5. http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/humanism.html.
6. http://www.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/crit.intro.html.
7. http://www.msward.org/credits.html

Module 5. The Formalist Approach

The overall aim is to explore the Formalist Approach, its essence, history; to
study corresponding critical approaches focusing on the term ‘form’.

5.1. The Formalist Approach

Formalism, in the most general sense, is the cultivation of artistic technique at

the expense of subject-matter, either in literary practice or in criticism. The term
has been applied, often in a derogatory sense, to several kinds of approach to
literature in which form is emphasized in isolation from a work’s meanings or is
taken as the chief criterion of aesthetic value.

A Brief History of the Formalist Approach

The formalist approach emphasizes the manner of reading literature that was
given its special dimensions and emphases by English and American critics in the
first two-thirds of the 20th century. It should be mentioned, that to many students of
literature during that era, this approach came to be called the New Criticism.
In the last third of the century, the New Criticism came to be called by other
names, and at least it has come to be called by many of the old New Criticism, for
even ‘newer’ approaches have gained popularity and have had little or nothing in
common with the old New Criticism.
The New Critics helped us to read well, they taught us to look at the individual
work of literary art as an organic form. They articulated the concept that in an
organic form there is a consistency and an internal vitality that we should look for
and appreciate. In doing so, we would appropriate the work to ourselves and make
it part of our consciousness in the same way that we might when we study
Mahler’s Ninth Symphony or Michelangelo’s David.
One of the most salient considerations of the New Critics was emphasis on
form, on the work of art as an object. Art entails form; form takes many forms.

Backgrounds of the Formalist Theory

Classical art and aesthetics amply testify to a preoccupation with form. Plato
exploits dialectic and shapes movement toward Socratic wisdom by his imagery,
metaphor, dramatic scenes, characterization, setting, and tone. Aristotle’s Poetics
recommends as ‘orderly arrangement of parts’ that form a beautiful whole or
‘organism’. Horace admonishes the would-be poet: ‘In short, be your subject what
36
it will, let it be simple and unified’. And some awareness of formalism is at least
implicit in many other classical, medieval, and Renaissance treatises on art or
poetics.
But the Romantic movement in Europe in the late 18th -19th centuries intensifies
speculations about form in literature. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
brought to England (and thus to America) the conception of a dynamic
imagination as the shaping power and unifier of vision – a conception he had
acquired from his studies of the German philosophical idealists: Kant, Hegel,
Fichte, and Schelling. Such a conception encouraged discrimination between a
poem and other forms of discourse by stressing the poem’s power to elicit delight
as a ‘whole’ and ‘distinctive gratification from each component part’. In a
‘legitimate poem’, Coleridge declared, the parts ‘mutually support and explain
each other; all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose
and known influences of metrical arrangement’.
This interrelationship between the whole and the parts was manifested in a
consistently recurring image among the Romantics – the image of growth,
particularly of vegetation. Perhaps because of the Romantics’ infatuation with
nature, the analogy usually likened the internal life of a painting or poem to the
quintessential unity of parts within a tree, flower, or plant: as the seed determines,
so the organism develops and lives. Here are some quotations concerning
viewpoint: 1) ‘If Poetry comes not as naturally as Leaves to a tree it had better not
come at all’ (Keats, 1818); 2) ‘it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that
you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as to seek to
transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must
spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower’ (about relationship of sounds
in poetry in translation) (Shelley).
In America, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), extending Coleridge’s theory,
asserted the excellence of short lyric poems and short tales because they can
maintain and transmit a single, unitary effect more successfully than can long
works like ‘Paradise Lost’.
The number of Poe’s collected writings contributed to the theory of literary
criticism on the whole. As far as we know, his own most abiding ambition was to
become a powerful critic. Just as he had modeled his poems and first tales on
British examples (or British imitations of the German), he took his critical
concepts from treatises by late-18th century Scottish Common Sense philosophers
(later modified by his borrowings from A.W. Schlegel and Coleridge) and took his
stance as a reviewer from the slashing critics of the British quarterlies. According
to Poe’s basic critical principles, poetry should appeal only to the sense of beauty,
not truth; informational poetry, poetry of ideas, or any sort of didactic poetry was
illegitimate. Holding that the true poetic emotion was a vague sensory state, he set
himself against realistic details in poetry, although the prose tale, with truth as one
object, could profit from the discreet use of specifics. Both poems and tales should
be short enough to be read in one sitting; otherwise the unity of effect would be
dissipated. In Poe’s view, good writers should calculate their effects precisely.

37
 In ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ Poe demonstrated how the parts of his ‘The
Raven’ allegedly developed from the single effect he desired. Poe also
reprimanded certain contemporary poets like H.W. Longfellow for committing
what he called the ‘heresy of the didactic’ be taking on obtrusive (thus inorganic)
moral lessons and accordingly violating the lyric effects of their poems.
It would be appropriate to mention here his famous essay (1842), in which
E.A. Poe wrote what may be considered the manifesto of the short story. He
maintained that a short story has two fundamental traits: ‘unity of impression’ and
‘single effect’. As opposed to the novel, which due to its length, cannot be read at
one sitting, the short story, Poe argued, should not be interrupted by ‘worldly
interests’, otherwise the reader misses its immense force, its totality. Poe also
underlined that the short story need to be based on ‘a certain unique or single
effect’ which is ‘preconceived’ with deliberate care and should constantly be kept
in mind throughout the narration. Therefore, control over the narrative structure as
well as accuracy in the use of language become characteristic features of this
literary genre.
Later in the 19th century and on into the 20th, Henry James (1843-1916), in ‘The
Art of Fiction’ and the prefaces to his tales and novels, argued for fiction as a ‘fine
art’ and for the intricate, necessary interrelationship of parts ad the whole. James
implies the same interdependence and kinship for all other aspects of a work of
fiction – setting, theme, scene and narrative, image and symbol. When the artist is
attending to his or her craft, nothing that goes into the work will be wasted, and
form will be present: ‘Form alone takes, and holds and preserves, substance –
saves it from the welter of helpless verbiage that we swim in as in a sea of tasteless
tepid pudding’. When the work achieves its ‘organic form’, everything will count.

5.2. The New Criticism

Although there were antecedents from Plato through James, a systematic and
methodological formalist approach to literary criticism appeared only with the rise
in the 1930s of what came to be called the New Criticism. Coming together
originally at Vanderbilt University in the years following World War I, the New
Critics included a teacher-scholar-poet, John Crowe Ransom, and several bright
students – Allan Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks. Associated at
first in an informal group that discussed literature, they in time adopted the name
of Figutives and published an elegant literary magazine called The Figutive in
Nashville from 1922 to 1925.
The New Criticism can be characterized as a movement in American literary
criticism from the 1930s to the 1960s, concentrating on the verbal complexities
and ambiguities of short poems considered as self-sufficient objects without
attention to their origins or effects. The name comes from John Crowe Ransom’s
book The New Criticism (1941), in which he surveyed the theories developed in
England by T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, and William Empson, together with the work
of the American critic Yvor Winters.

38
 As for T.S. Eliot’s views, they dealt with organic tradition, the importance of
strict attention to form, conservatism related to classical values, the ideal of a
society that encourages order and tradition, a preference for ritual, and the rigorous
and analytical reading of literary texts. Eliot was particularly influential in his
formulation of the objective correlative (‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of
events which shall be the formula of [a] particular emotion; such that when the
external facts are given, the emotion is immediately invoked’). Eliot was also
influential in his endorsement of the English Metaphysical poets of the 17th century
for their success in blending ‘states of mind and feeling’ in a single ‘verbal
equivalent’. Such developments strengthened the emergent New Criticism, which
by the 1950s had become the dominant critical system in such influential journals
as Sewanee Review, The Kenyon Review, and The Hudson Review and in college
and university English departments.
The New Critics sought precision and structural tightness in the literary work;
they favoured a style and tone that tended toward irony; they insisted on the
presence within the work of everything necessary for its analysis; and they called
for an end to a concern by critics and teachers of English with matters outside the
work itself – the life of the author, the history of his or her times, or the social and
economic implications of the literary work. In short, they turned the attention of
teachers, students, critics, and readers to the essential matter: what the work says
and how it says it as inseparable issues.
So, J. Ransom called for a more ‘objective’ criticism focusing on the intrinsic
qualities of a work rather than on its biographical or historical context; and his
students Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren with Robert B. Heilman had
already advanced their critical theory and techniques through a series of brilliant
college textbooks on literary analysis: Understanding Poetry (1938),
Understanding Fiction (1943) by Brooks and Warren, Understanding Drama
(1945) by Brooks and Robert B. Heilman, which helped to make New Criticism
the academic orthodoxy for the next twenty years. Other critics grouped under this
heading, despite their differences, include Allen Tate (The House of Fiction, 1950,
co-ed. Caroline Gordon), Ray B. West, Jr. and Robert W. Stallman (The Art of
Modern Fiction), R.P. Blackmur, W.K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Kenneth Burke.
Influenced by T.S. Eliot’s view of poetry’s autotelic status, and by the detailed
semantic analyses of I.A. Richards in Practical Criticism (1929) and Empson in
Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), the American New Critics repudiated ‘extrinsic’
criteria for understanding poems, dismissing them under such names as the
affective fallacy and the intentional fallacy. Moreover, they sought to overcome the
traditional distinction between form and content: for them, a poem was ideally an
‘organic unity’ in which tensions were brought to equilibrium. Their favoured
terms of analysis – irony, paradox, imagery, metaphor, and symbol – tended to
neglect questions of genre, and were not successfully transferred to the study of
dramatic and narrative works. Many later critics – often unsympathetic to the New
Critics’ Southern religious conservatism – accused them of cutting literature off
from history, but their impact has in some ways been irreversible, especially in
replacing biographical source-study with text-centered approaches. The
39
outstanding works of New Criticism are Brook’s The Well-Wrought Urn (1947)
and Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon (1954).

40
 5.3. Constants of the Formalist Approach:
Some Key Concepts, Terms, and Devices

1. Form and Organic Form. In systems of the past, the word form usually
meant what we would call external form. Thus, when we identify a poem with
fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, a conventional pattern of rhymes, and a
conventional division into two parts as a sonnet, we are defining its external form.
The same kind of description takes place when we talk about couplets, tersest,
ottava rima, quatrains, Spenserian stanzas, blank verse, or even free verse. But the
formalist critic is only moderately interested in external forms (in fact, only when
external form is related to the work’s total form, when stanzaic or metrical pattern
is integral to internal relationship, reverberations, patterns, and systems). The
process of formalist analysis is complete only when everything in the work has
been accounted for in terms of its overall form.
Organic form is a particular concept important to the New Critics, inherited
from the English Romantics. In the Romantics, we find the emphasis on
organicism not just in literary forms but in a broader, philosophical context, where
the world itself is organic; objects within it are organisms that interact with each
other in a larger organic universe.
In the formalist approach, the assumption is that a given literary experience
takes a shape proper to itself or at the least that the shape and the experience are
functions of each other. This may mean at a minimum that a precise metrical form
couples with a complex of sounds in a line of verse to present one small bit of the
experience. Or it may mean that a generic form, like that of the sonnet, is used
repeatedly in a sonnet cycle to show the interrelationship of thoughts to images, or
a problem to a comment or solution.
Statements that follow discovery of form must embrace what Ransom called
local texture and logical structure. The logical structure refers to the argument or
the concept within the work; local texture comprises the particular details and
devices of the work (e.g., specific metaphors, images). The emphasis is upon
counting for all aspects of the work are seeking to name or define its form and
effect. Mark Schorer pressed the distinction further between the critic’s proper
concentration on form and an improper total concern with content only: ‘Modern
[i.e., formalist] criticism has shown that to speak of content as such is not to speak
of the achieved content, the form, the work of art as a work of art, that we speak as
critics. The difference between content, or experience, and achieved content, or art,
is technique’. He goes on to say that ‘technique is the only means [an author] has
of discovering, exploring, developing his subject, of conveying its meaning, and,
finally, of evaluating it’.
2. Texture, Image, Symbol. Imagery and metaphor are an integral part of the
work as well as its form and potential to embody meaning, especially in the poem.
Of course, the formalist critics did not invent metaphor: Aristotle, very much a
formalist, discussed metaphor in his Poetics. But the New Critics delighted in close
analysis of imagery and metaphor, and they laid stress on a careful working out of
imagery. The consistency of imagery in a lyric, whether it is a single dominant
41
image throughout the poem or a pattern of multiple but related images, became for
some index to the quality of a given poem. Such consistency of imagery helped to
create what J.C. Ransom among others called texture.
When an image (or an incident or other discrete item) takes on meaning beyond
its objective self, it moves into the realm of symbol. Symbols may sometimes
remain within the works, as it were; but it is the nature of symbols to have
extensional possibilities, to open out to the world beyond the art object itself.
When meaning and value outside the work of literature are the real purposes of the
symbol, some formalist critics may find fault with the work. On the other hand,
such a restriction may well be one of the more limiting concerns of the New
Critics, and even in a formalist reading we must sometimes go beyond the pure
aestheticism of the work in itself to the extended meaning of the work as suggested
by its symbols. So, symbol is a way of using something integral to the work to
reach beyond the work and engage the world of value outside the work. It might be
an incident that takes on meaning. It might be the conventional object or device – a
crucifix, a colour, a tree – that becomes symbolic of meanings within and without
the poem, story, or play. When that happens, the formalist approach must study
such symbols as aspects of form, as exponents of meaning both within and without
the work.
3. Fallacies. Another formalist term that has brought mixed responses is the
intentional fallacy, along with its corollary the affective fallacy. The work must
give us from within itself any intention that might be gardened, and we must not go
to the author for his or her intention.
At the very least the author is not a reliable witness. No work of literary art can
be divorced from the reader and therefore from the reader’s response.
4. Point of View. Another device that a formalist approach must heed is the
point of view, which, like consistency of imagery, is generally considered a virtue
in the work of literary art, for it preserves the internal form, the organic quality of
the work. Conversely, a nonexistent point of view (i.e., one in which several points
of view is not clearly demarcated from each other) flaws the work, for the work
then may go in several directions and therefore have no integrity: the centre does
not hold. Such a fragmentation may be avoided if we grant the narrator the
privilege of knowing all, seeing all, from a perspective that in theological terms
would have to be called divine. In the great epics and in most traditional novels of
an earlier day, the omniscient narrator possessed that godlike quality and narrated
from a third-person perspective.
But in more restricted points of view, the very form of the work is conditioned
by the pint of view to which the author limits the narrator.
Narrators may be either reliable (if they support the explicit or implicit normal
norms of the author) or unreliable (if they do not). Thus Jake Barnes in The Sun
Also Rises is a completely reliable narrator, for he is the very embodiment of what
is often called the ‘Hemingway code’; on the other hand, the lawyer in Melville’s
Bartleby the Scrivener is unreliable in his early evaluations of himself because he
is not involved with humanity.

42
 In a first-person narration the author may condition the form even more. Thus a
young boy named Huckleberry Finn, who narrates his own story, must not be
allowed to know more than a young boy such as he would know. His view is
limited to what he sees and reports. Nor does he understand all that he reports, not
– at least – as a mature person devoid of cultural bias and prejudice might
understand. In this first-person point of view, the narration is limited to that
person’s telling. If the author wishes to communicate anything beyond that to the
reader that wish becomes a challenge in technique, for the information must be
reported naively by Huck Finn and interpreted maturely by the reader on the basis
of what the author has Huck Finn say. In this sense Huck Finn is honest on the one
hand, but an unreliable narrator on the other.
Still another point of view that would claim total objectivity – the scenic or
dramatic: we read only the dialogue of characters, with no hints of narrator to
intrude any perspective other than what we get from the dialogue itself. All these
points of view condition the form of literature, and a formalist approach must study
them for the reader to appreciate the fullness of the work, as failure to note point of
view as an aspect of form will result in a misreading or in an inadequate reading of
the work.
5. Tension, irony, paradox. This aspect of formalist criticism – tension – is the
resolution of opposites often found in irony and paradox. The New Critics laid
great stress on the terminology, sometimes almost to the exclusion of other
elements. The basic terms – tension, irony, and paradox – are often nearly
indistinguishable, so closely do they work together. C. Hugh Holman and William
Harmon summarize tension as ‘a term introduced by Allen Tate, meaning the
integral unity that results from the successful resolution of the conflicts of
abstraction and concreteness, of general and particular, of denotation and
connotation... Good poetry, Tate asserts, is the ‘full, organized body of all the
extension and intension that we can find in it’. Further they note that ‘This concept
has been widely used by the New Critics, particularly of poetry as a pattern of
paradox or as a form of irony’.

A Sample of the Formalist Approach in Practice:

Romance and Reality in Huckleberry Finn after M. Twain

The form of Huckleberry Finn at one level can be simplistically diagrammed as

a capital letter ‘I’ lying on its side. At each end there is a block of chapters set on
the land and in a world where Tom Sawyer can exist and even dominate. In the
middle are chapters largely related to the river as Huck and Jim travel down that
river; here realism, not a Tom Sawyer romanticism, dominates. Further, in the
central portion there is a pattern of alternations between land and river. Taking the
novel as a whole, then, there is a pattern of departures and returns.
But Twain was not limited to a pattern that can be charted, as it were, on graph
paper. In a master stroke of the creative art, he chose Huck Finn himself as the
point-of-view character. He allowed the central character to relate his adventures in
his own way – the point of view called first-person narrator. We can say that Huck
43
is an objective narrator. He is objective about himself, even when that objectivity
tens to reflect negatively upon himself. He is objective about the society he
repeatedly confronts, even when, as he often fears, that society possesses virtues
and sanctions to which he must ever remain a stranger. He is an outcast and he
knows it himself. He does not blame the society that has made and will keep him
an outcast. He always assumes in his characteristic modesty that he must somehow
be to blame for the estrangement. His lack f subtly is a measure of his reliability as
narrator: he has mastered neither the genteel speech of ‘respectable’ folks nor their
deceit, evasions of truth, and penchant for pious platitudes. He is always
refreshingly himself, even when he is telling a tall tale or engaging in one of his
ambitious masquerades to get out of a jam.
Thus the point of view Twain carefully establishes from the first words of the
narrative offers a position from which the reader must consider the events of the
narrative.

Project Tasks

1. Explore in depth the Formalist approach and the New Criticism.

2. Answer the suggested questions:
 What is the Formalist approach?
 What is the background of the Formalist approach?
 What is the New Criticism?
 What are the constants of the Formalist Approach (some key
concepts, terms, and devices)?
3. Create a presentation (report) to explain your group's assigned literary theory
(the Formalist approach or the New Criticisms). Your presentation should
contain the following:
 a title to introduce your literary theory;
 a brief definition for your theory;
 basic background information regarding your theory, such as: what does
your theory focus on, why would someone be most likely use your
approach, what questions does your approach address;
 pros: Why would someone use your assigned approach?;
 cons: What are disadvantages to your approach?;
 use textual evidence to support your commentary.
4. Write a critical article according to the principles of the Formalist approach.
5. Participate in the suggested discussion:
 discuss the background of the Formalist approach, define three main
periods of its establishment;
 give the definition of the Formalist approach, speak on its aims and its
role in modern literature;
 define the similarity and differences between the Formalist approach and
the New Criticism;
 Describe the essential concepts of the Formalist approach.
44
 Test №5

The test consists of 5 tasks. It requires 3 minutes to solve it. Choose the
right answer and tick it in the blank form.

1. What does the Formalist approach do?

It assumes that by examining the

facts and motives of an author's It seeks to establish the proper
1 life, the meaning and intent of 2
text for study of a literary work
his/her literary work can be
illuminated
It assumes that the relationship
between art and society is It deals with the theory of
3 organic; views a literary work in 4 criticism that sees the work as the
relation to the standards and central object that unites authors
social milieu of the period in and readers
which it was produced
2. Who does not belong to the classical background of the Formalist approach?
1 Plato 2 Aristotle
3 Horace 4 Coleridge
3. What American writer contributed much to the critical theory on the whole?
1 Samuel Taylor Coleridge 2 Henry James
3 Edgar Allan Poe 4 H.W. Longfellow
4. What does the New Criticism do?
It assumes that the relationship
It attempts by all scholarly means
1 to reconstruct the original 2 between art and society is
organic
manuscript of a work
It concentrates on the verbal
complexities and ambiguities of
3 It proposes a ‘theory of literature’ 4 short poems considered as self-
sufficient objects without
attention to their origins or
effects
5. What points are not considered key concepts of the Formal approach?

1 form and organic form 2 formats for apparatus

3 texture, image, symbol 4 tension, irony, paradox

45
 Blank Form

№ 1 2 3 4 5
1
2
3
4
Literature

1. Baldick C. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: Oxford

University Press, 2008.
2. Booth W. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1961.
3. Brooks C., Warren R.P. Understanding Poetry. 3rd ed. New York: Holt,
1960.
4. Corradin F., Parrino M. Widening Horizons. Genoa, 1996.
5. Guerin W.L., Labor E., Morgan L., Reesman J.C., Willingham J.R. A
Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 5 th ed. New York, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005.
6. Holman C.H., Harmon W. A Handbook to Literature. 6th ed. New York:
Macmillan, 1992.
7. Poe E.A. Twice-Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne. A Review (1842) //
Selected Writings. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.
8. Pottle F.A. The Case of Shelley. New York, 1952.
9. Ransom J. Crowe. The World’s Body. New York: Scribner’s, 1938.
10.Ransom J. Crowe. The New Criticism. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1941.
11.Schorer M. Technique as Discovery // The Hudson Review 1. Spring, 1948.
– Pp.67-87.
12.Wimsatt W.K., Beardsley M. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of
Poetry. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954.
13.http://www.literatureclassics.com/ancientpaths/litcrit.html#formalism
14.http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/fiction/critical.asp?e=8
15.http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/fiction/critical.asp?e=9
16.http://home.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/200/litcrit.txt
17.http://mesastate.edu/~blaga/formalism/formx.html

Module 6. Russian Formalism

46
 The overall goal is to study Russian Formalism, its background, its aims and
concepts and different critical branches.

It should be mentioned that the old New Criticism is not directly concerned
with the Russian formalists, thought the methodologies share some principles.

6.1. Russian Formalism

Russian Formalism is a school of literary theory and analysis that emerged in

Russia around 1915, devoting itself to the study of literariness. In general terms
literariness is a sum of special linguistic and formal properties (‘devices’) that
distinguish literary language / texts from ordinary language / non-literary texts.
The leading Formalist Roman Jakobson declared in 1919 that ‘the object of literary
science is not literature but literariness, that is, what makes a given work a literary
work’. Thus, the Russian Formalists in reaction against the vagueness of previous
literary theories, attempted a scientific description of literature (and especially
poetry but has not addressed the more difficult problem of the non-fictional prose
forms) to define literariness in terms of linguistic deviations, as a special use of
language with observable features. This meant deliberately disregarding the
contents of literary works, and thus inviting strong disapproval from Marxist
critics, for whom formalism was a term of reproach.
In modern critical discussion, however, the term frequently refers more
specifically to the principles of certain Russian and Czech theorists. In the context
of modern American poetry, the term has the specific sense of adherence to
traditional meters and verse forms, as with the work of Howard Nemerov, Richard
Wilbur, and the later poets of the New Formalism, in contrast with the more widely
adopted use of free verse.
With the consolidation of Stalin’s dictatorship around 1929, Formalism was
silenced as a heresy in the Soviet Union, and its centre of research migrated to the
Prague School4 in the 1930s.
The Prague School is the name that commonly is given to the Prague
Linguistic Circle, a group of linguistic and literary theorists based at Charles
University, Prague, from 1926 to 1948, of which the most influential was Roman
Jakobson, who had arrived from Moscow bringing the principles of Russian
Formalism, which were to be further developed in Prague. Other important figures
were Jan Mukařovský, who developed the theory of foregrounding, René Wellek,
later a leading New Critic in America, and the literary historian Felix Vodička. The
Prague School was a major influence on the development of structuralism.

4
Prague School is the name that commonly is given to the Prague Linguistic Circle, a group of
linguistic and literary theorists based at Charles University, Prague, from 1926 to 1948, of which
the most influential was Roman Jakobson, who had arrived from Moscow bringing the principles
of Russian Formalism, which were to be further developed in Prague. Other important figures
were Jan Mukařovský, who developed the theory of foregrounding, René Wellek, later a leading
New Critic in America, and the literary historian Felix Vodička. The Prague School was a major
influence on the development of structuralism.
47
 Rather than seek abstract qualities like imagination as the basis of literariness,
the Formalists (Russian and Prague) set out to define the observable ‘devices’ by
which literary texts – especially poems – foreground their own
language / linguistic status, thus drawing attention to how they say something
rather than to what they say, in meter, rhyme, surprising metaphors, alliteration,
and other patterns of sound and repetition by which its language draws attention to
itself.
Thus, literariness was understood in terms of defamiliarization 5, as a series of
deviations from ‘ordinary’ language. It this appears as a relation between different
uses of language, in which the contrasted uses are liable to shift according to
changed contexts. So, along with literariness the most important concept of the
school was that of defamiliarization: instead of seeing literature as a ‘reflection’ of
the world, Victor Shklovsky and his Formalist followers saw it as a linguistic
dislocation, or a ‘making strange’. In modern usage, the term corresponds to Viktor
Shklovsky’s use of the Russian word отстранение in his influential essay ‘Poetry
as Technique’ (1917). Shklovsky argued that art exists in order to recover for us
the sensation of life which is diminished in the ‘automatized’ routine of everyday
experience. He and the other Formalists set out to define the devices by which
literary works achieve this effect, usually in terms of the ‘foregrounding’ of the
linguistic medium. Brecht’s theory of alienation effect in drama starts from similar
grounds.
In the period of Czech Formalism Jan Mukařovský further refined this notion in
terms of foregrounding that stands for giving unusual prominence to one element
or property of a text, relative to other less noticeable aspects. In their studies of
narrative, the Formalists also clarified the distinction between plot (сюжет) and
story (фабула). Apart from Shklovsky and his associate Boris Eikhenbaum, the
most prominent of the Russian Formalists was Roman Jakobson, who was active
both in Moscow and in Prague before introducing Formalist theories to the United
States.
A somewhat distinct Russian group is the ‘Bakhtin school’ comprising Mikhail
Bakhtin, Pavel Medvedev, and Valentin Voloshinov; these theorists combined

5
defamiliarization is defined as a distinctive effect achieved by literary works in disrupting our
habitual perception of the world, enabling us to ‘see’ things afresh, according to the theories of
some English Romantic poets and of Russian Formalism. Samuel Taylor Coleridge in
Biographia Literaria (1817) wrote of the ‘film of familiarity’ that blinds us to the wonders of the
world, and that Wordsworth’s poetry aimed to remove. P.B. Shelley in his essay ‘The Defence of
Poetry’ (1821) also claims that poetry ‘makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar’ by
stripping ‘the veil of familiarity from the world’.
48
elements of Formalism and Marxism in their accounts of verbal multi-accentuality 6
and of the dialogic text.
Rediscovered in the West in the 1960s, the work of the Russian Formalists has
had an important influence on structuralist theories of literature, and on some of
the more recent varieties of Marxist literary criticism.

6.2. Dialogism

Dialogic (dialogical) is characterized or constituted by the interactive,

responsive nature of dialogue rather than by the single-mindedness of monologue.
The term is important in the writings of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin,
whose book Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929) contrasts the dialogic or
polyphonic interplay of various characters’ voices in Dostoevsky’s novels with the
‘monological’ subordination of characters to the single viewpoint of the author in
Tolstoy’s. In the same year, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (probably
by Bakhtin, although published under the name of V.N. Voloshinov) argued,
against Saussure’s theory of la langue, that actual utterances are ‘dialogic’ in that
they are embedded in a context of dialogue and thus respond to an interlocutor’s
previous utterances and / or try to draw a particular response from a specific
auditor.

6.3. Structuralism

Structuralism is a modern intellectual movement that analyses cultural

phenomena according to principles derived from linguistics, emphasizing the
systematic interrelationships among the elements of any human activity, and thus
the abstract codes and conventions governing the social production of meanings.
Building on the linguistic concept of the phoneme – a minimal unit of potentially
meaningful sound within a given language’s system of recognized sound
distinctions defined purely by its differences from other phonemes rather than by
any inherent features – structuralism argues that the elements composing any
cultural phenomenon (from cooking to drama) are similarly ‘relational’: i.e., they
have meaning only by virtue of their contrasts with other elements of the system,
especially in binary oppositions7 of paired opposites. Their meanings can be
6
Multi-accentuality – the ability of words and other linguistic signs to carry more than one
meaning according to the contexts in which they are used. The concept was introduced in an
important Russian critique of Saussure’s abstract theory of la langue: Valentin Voloshinov’s
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929) (sometimes alleged to have been written by
Mikhail Bakhtin) accused Saussure of attributing fixed meanings to sings, when in actual
practice the meaning of words is open to continual redefinition within the struggles between
social classes and groups. In central historical circumstances, particular words become objects of
struggle between groups for whom they have different meanings: the meaning of freedom is
constantly contested, while recent examples would include terrorist, among many others.
7
binary opposition – the principle of contrast between two mutually exclusive terms: on / off,
up / down, left / right, etc.; an important concept of structuralism which sees such distinctions as
fundamental to all language and thought.
49
established not by referring each element to any supposed equivalent in natural
reality, but only by analyzing its function within a self-contained cultural code.
Accordingly, structuralist analysis seeks the underlying system or langue8 that
governs individual utterances or instances. In formulating the laws by which
elements of such a system are combined, it distinguishes between sets of
interchangeable units (paradigms9) and sequences of such units in combination
(syntagms), thereby outlining a basic syntax of human culture.
Structuralism and its ‘science of signs’ (semiotics 10) are derived chiefly from
the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), and partly from
Russian Formalism and the related narratology11 of Vladimir Propp’s Morphology
8
langue – the French word for language or tongue, which has had a special sense in linguistics
since the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, in his Cours de linguistique générale (1915),
distinguished langue from parole. In this sense, langue refers to the rules and conventions of a
given language – its phonological distinctions, its permitted grammatical combinations of
elements, etc. – whereas parole (speech) refers to the sphere of actual linguistic events, i.e.
utterances. Saussure proposed that because langue emphasizes and makes possible the infinitely
varied forms of parole, it should be the primary object of linguistic science. The langue / parole
distinction is one of the theoretical bases of structuralism, although some structuralist writings
have encouraged a confusion between langue (the rules of a specific language) and Saussure’s
distinct third term langage (the concept language as such): the power attributed to language in
this tradition has little to do with Saussure’s notion of langue, and owes more to abstract
conceptions of langage as a universal system.
9
paradigm – in the general sense, a pattern or model in which some quality or relation is
illustrated in its purest form; but in the terminology of structuralism, a set of linguistic or other
units that can be substituted for each other in the same position within a sequence or structure. A
paradigm in this sense may be constituted by all words sharing the same grammatical function,
since the substitution of one for another does not disturb the syntax of a sentence. Linguists often
refer to the paradigmatic dimension of language as the ‘vertical axis’ of selection, whereas the
syntagmatic dimension governing the combination of linguistic units is the ‘horizontal axis’.
Thus any sign has two kinds of relation to other signs: a paradigmatic relation to signs of the
same class (which are absent in any given utterance), and a syntagmatic relation to sings present
in the same sequence.
10
semiotics (semiology) – the systematic study of signs, or , more precisely, of the production of
meanings from sign-systems, linguistic or non-linguistic. As a distinct tradition of inquiry into
human communications, semiotics was founded by the American philosopher C.S. Peirce (1839-
1914) and separately by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), who proposed
that linguistics would form one part of a more general science of sings: ‘semiology’. Peirce’s
term ‘semiotics’ is usually preferred in English, although Saussure’s principles and concepts –
especially the distinctions between signifier and signified and between langue and parole – have
been more influential as the basis of structuralism and its approach to literature. Semiotics is
concerned not with the relations between signs and things but with the interrelationships between
signs themselves, within their structured systems or codes of signification. The semiotic
approach to literary works stresses the production of literary meanings from shared conventions
and codes; but the scope of semiotics goes beyond spoken or written language to other kinds of
communicative systems such as cinema, advertising, clothing, gesture, and cuisine. A
practitioner of semiotics is a semiotician. The term semiosis is sometimes used to refer to the
process of signifying (Hawkes, 1977; Baldick, 2008: 303-304).
11
narratology – a term used since 1969 to denote the branch of literary study devoted to the
analysis of narratives, and more specifically of forms of narration and varieties of narrator.
Narratology as a modern theory is associated chiefly with European structuralism, although older
50
of the Folktale (1928). It flourished in France in the 1960s, following the widely
discussed applications of structural analysis to mythology by the anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss. In the study of literary works, structuralism is distinguished
by its rejection of those traditional notions according to which literature
‘expresses’ an author’s meaning or ‘reflects’ reality. Instead, the ‘text’ is seen as an
objective structure activating various codes and conventions which are independent
of author, reader, and external reality. Structuralist criticism is less interested in
interpreting what literary works mean than in explaining how they can mean; i.e. in
showing what implicit rules and conventions are operating in a given work.
The structuralist tradition has been particularly strong in narratology, from
Propp’s analysis of narrative functions to Greima’s theory of actants.
The concept function is employed in structuralist literary theory in two senses:
either as a kind of use to which language can be directed, or as an action
contributing towards the development of a narrative. The first sense is employed in
the influential model of communication outlined in Roman Jakobson’s Closing
statement: linguistics and poetics (1960). Here Jakobson defines six linguistic
functions according to the element of the communicative act that each function
makes predominant: 1) the emotive function orients the communication towards
the addresser (speaker or writer), expressing an attitude or mood; 2) the conative
(or connotative) function orients a communication towards its addressee or
recipient, as in commands; 3) the most commonly used function, the referential,
orients a message towards a context beyond itself, conveying some information;
4) the phatic function is oriented to the ‘contact’ between addresser and addressee,
maintaining or confirming their link; 5) the metalingual function is oriented
towards the code, usually to establish that it is shared by both parties; 6) the poetic
function is oriented towards the ‘message’ itself, i.e. to the communication’s
linguistic features of sound, syntax, and diction (foregrounding). The second sense
of ‘function’ is used in narratology, denoting a fundamental component of a tale:
an action performed by a character that is significant in the unfolding of the story.
Vladimir Propp, in his Morphology of the Folktale (1928), described 31 such
narrative functions in Russian fairy tales, claiming that their order of appearance is
invariable, although not every function will appear in one tale. Thus the 11 th
function (‘the hero leaves home’) necessarily precedes the 18th (‘the villain is
defeated’) and the 20th (‘the hero returns’).
In the narratology of A.J. Greimas, the term ‘actant’ is introduced as one of six
basic categories of fictional role common to all stories. The actants are paired in
binary opposition: subject / object, sender / receiver, helper / opponent. A character
(or acteur) is an individualized manifestation of one or more actants; but an actant
may be realized in a non-human creature (a dragon as Opponent), or inanimate
object (a magic sword as Helper, Holy Grail as Object), or more than one acteur.
The French critic Roland Barthes was an outstanding practitioner of
structuralist literary analysis notably in his book A/Z (1970) – and is famed for his
studies of narrative forms and devices, as far back as Aristotle’s Poetics (4th century BC) can also
be regarded as narratological works. Modern narratology may be dated from Vladimir Propp’s
Morphology of the Folktale (1928) with its theory of narrative functions.
51
witty analyses of wrestling, striptease, and other phenomena in Mythologies
(1957): some of his later writings, however, show s shift to post-structuralism, in
which the over-confident ‘scientific’ pretensions of structuralism are abandoned.

6.4. Post-structuralism

Post-structuralism is a school of thought that emerged partly from within

French structuralism in the 1960s, reacting against structuralist pretensions to
scientific objectivity and comprehensiveness. The term covers the philosophical
deconstruction practised by Jacques Derrida and his followers, along with the later
works of the critic Roland Barthes, the psychoanalytical theories of Jacques Lacan
and Julia Kristeva, the historical critiques of Michel Foucault, and the cultural-
political writings of Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze. These thinkers
emphasized the instability of meanings and of intellectual categories (including
that of the human ‘subject’), and sought to undermine any theoretical system that
claimed to have universal validity – such claims being denounced as ‘totalitarian’.
They set out to dissolve the fixed binary oppositions of structuralist thought,
including that between language and metalanguage – and thus between literature
and criticism.
It should be noticed that metalanguage is regarded as any use of language about
language, for example in glosses, definitions, or arguments about the usage or
meaning of words. Linguistics sometimes describes itself as a metalanguage
because it is a ‘language’ about language; and so on the same assumption criticism
is a metalanguage about literature. Some theorists of structuralism have spoken of
metalanguages as if they were clearly separate from or standing above the ‘object-
languages’ they describe, but this claim is denied by post-structuralism, which
points out that linguistics, criticism, etc. Are still within the same general language,
albeit as specialized uses with their own terminologies. Thus there is in principle
no absolute distinction between criticism and literature. It is also possible to have a
meta-metalanguage, i.e. a ‘third-level’ discourse such as an analysis of linguistics,
or a work of metacriticism.
Metacriticism is criticism of criticism; i.e. the examination of the principles,
methods, and terms of criticism either in general (as in critical theory) or in the
study of particular critics or critical debates. The term usually implies a
consideration of the principles underlying critical interpretation and judgement.
Instead they favoured a non-hierarchical plurality of ‘free play’ of meanings,
stressing the indeterminacy of texts. Although waning in French intellectual life by
the end of the 1970s, post-structuralism’s delayed influence upon literary and
cultural theory in the English-speaking world has persisted.

6.5. Marxist Literary criticism

A tradition of literary and aesthetic interpretation and commentary derived from

the principles of Marxism (‘historical materialism’), and thus tending to view
literature in the light of modes of production (feudal, capitalist) and their property
52
relations and class struggles. Little in this tradition derives directly from the
writings of Karl Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels, who provided no
developed aesthetic theory, although they expressed doubts about the value of
propagandist fiction and thus discouraged the simple judgement of literary works
according to the degree of socialist sentiment they express. In general, the claims
of Marxist literary analysis have been more compatible with literary history (in
which the formative importance of economic factors in literary evolution has
commonly been accepted) than with evaluative criticism itself. Critical positions
claiming to be Marxist arouse later in the two divergent currents of official
Communist doctrine in the Soviet Union and its satellite parties (1917-1995) on the
one hand, and of ‘Western Marxism’ on the other. Russian Communist literary
policy generated a short-lived ambition for the proletarianization of literature and
the rejection of the bourgeois inheritance, under the name of proletcult (memorably
derided by Leon Trotsky in his Literature and Revolution, 1924), and then a more
conservative doctrine of socialist realism, which tended to impose a bland official
optimism upon writers while suppressing ‘decadent’ alternatives along with
independent critical positions such as those of the Russian Formalists and of the
Bakhtin group.
The more creative and ultimately more influential trends in Marxist criticism
emerged from various Western Marxist thinkers, who tended to disagree on a range
of questions including the requirement upon writers to be ‘committed’ to the
socialist cause and the progressive or reactionary tendencies of realism and
modernism. Notable figures here include the Hungarian writer Georg Lukács, who
in Studies in European Realism (1950) and other works upheld the value of
‘bourgeois’ realism as a basis for socialist literature while attacking the allegedly
apolitical pessimism of modernist writing; the German poet-playwright Bertolt
Brecht, who argued to the contrary in defending modernist experiments as
potentially radical; and some writers associated with the Frankfurt School, notably
Walter Benjamin, who interpreted the significance of Brecht’s epic theater and
whose essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935) is a
widely admire classic of Marxist reflection upon modern culture.
Western Marxist criticism underwent renewal and diversification in the 1960s
and 1970s, becoming more visible within academic literary studies and interacting
with a range of other critical schools from structuralism, psychoanalytic criticism,
feminist criticism, and postcolonial theory to deconstruction and new historicism.
In this ‘neo-Marxist’ phase, the traditional Marxist metaphor of economic causality
in which a ‘superstructure’ of political and cultural forms grew up from a ‘base’ of
economic forces and relations was either openly challenged (as it was by the
British socialist critic Raymond Williams, who inspired the school of cultural
materialism) or quietly set aside in favour of explorations of literature’s relations
with ideology and with the specific cultural contradictions of modern capitalist
society. In English, the leading figures in this phase have been the American
theorist Fredric Jameson (in Marxism and Form (1971), and later works) and the
prolific British essayist Terry Eagleton (in Criticism and Ideology (1976), The
ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), and numerous other works).
53
 Project Tasks

1. Explore in depth particular forms of literary criticism:

Russian Formalism
Structuralism
Post-structuralism
Dialogism
Marxist criticism
2. Create a presentation (report) to explain your group's assigned literary theory
(see above). Your presentation should contain the following:
 a title to introduce your literary theory;
 a brief definition for your theory;
 basic background information regarding your theory, such as: what does
your theory focus on, why would someone be most likely use your
approach, what questions does your approach address;
 pros: Why would someone use your assigned approach?;
 cons: What are disadvantages to your approach?;
 use textual evidence to support your commentary.
3. Participate in the suggested discussion.

Test №6

The test consists of 5 tasks. It requires 3 minutes to solve it. Choose the
right answer and tick it in the blank form.

1. When did the Russian Formalism emerge?

1 1905 2 1925
3 1915 4 1950
2. What is the name of the group of linguistic and literary theorists based at
Charles University from 1926 to 1948?
1 The Czech School 2 The Paris School
3 The Prague School 4 The Moscow School
3. Who had arrived from Moscow bringing the principles of Russian Formalism,
which were to be further developed in Prague?
1 Roman Jakobson 2 René Wellek
3 Jan Mukařovský 4 Felix Vodička
4. What is literariness?
1 the ability of words and other 2 a distinctive effect achieved by
linguistic signs to carry more literary works in disrupting our
than one meaning according to habitual perception of the world,

54
 enabling us to ‘see’ things afresh,
the contexts in which they are according to the theories of some
used English Romantic poets and of
Russian Formalism
the French word for language or
tongue, which has had a special
in terms of defamiliarization it is
sense in linguistics since the
3 Swiss linguist Ferdinand de 4 understood as a series of
deviations from ‘ordinary’
Saussure, in his Cours de
language
linguistique générale (1915),
distinguished langue from parole
5. What is Structuralism?
a modern intellectual movement
that analyses cultural phenomena
according to principles derived
from linguistics, emphasizing the the systematic study of signs, or ,
1 systematic interrelationships 2 more precisely, of the production
among the elements of any of meanings from sign-systems,
human activity, and thus the linguistic or non-linguistic
abstract codes and conventions
governing the social production
of meanings
a pattern or model in which some
quality or relation is illustrated in
its purest form; but in the the theory of criticism that sees
3 terminology of structuralism, a 4 the work as the central object that
set of linguistic or other units that unites authors and readers
can be substituted for each other
in the same position within a
sequence or structure

Blank Form

№ 1 2 3 4 5
1
2
3
4
Literature

55
 1. Culler J. Structuralist Poetics. 1975.
2. Eagleton T., Milne D. Marxist Literary Theory. 1996.
3. Galan F.W. Historic Structures: The Prague School Project, 1928-1946.
1985. Hawkes T. Structuralism and Semiotics. 1977.
4. Holquist M. Dialogism. 1990.
5. Sarup M. An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism.
1988.
6. Scholes R. Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction. 1974.
7. Steiner P. Russian Formalism. 1984.
8. Widdowson P. Literature. 1998.
9. http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/lit_crit/
10.http://www.shef.ac.uk/bakhtin/
11.http://mesastate.edu/~blaga/marxism/marxismx.html
12.http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/fiction/critical.asp?e=7
13.http://www.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/marxist.crit.html

Module 7. Environmentalism and Ecocriticism

The overall goal is to study Environmentalism and Ecocriticism, their

background, aims, concepts and interconnection.

Ecocriticism is literary and cultural criticism from an environmentalist’s point

of view. Texts are evaluated in terms of their environmentally harmful or helpful
effects. Beliefs and ideologies are assessed for their environmental implications.
Ecocritics analyze the history of concepts such as ‘nature’, in an attempt to
understand the cultural developments that have led to the present global ecological
crisis. Direct representations of environmental damage or political struggle are of
obvious interest to ecocritics, but so is the whole array of cultural and daily life, for
what it reveals about implicit attitudes that have environmental consequences.
Of the radical movements that came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s,
environmentalism has been the slowest to develop a school of criticism in the
academic humanities. The first use of the term ‘ecocriticism’ seems to have been
by US critic William Rueckert in 1978. A few works of literary criticism may be
said to have been ecocriticism before the term was invented, including in Britain
Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1973) and in the USA Annette
Kolodny’s The Lady of the Land (1975), a feminist study of the literary metaphor
of landscape as female. These were informed by environmentalist ideas and asked
some of the questions that were to become important in ecocriticism, but it was not
until the beginning of the 1990s that ecocriticism became a recognized movement.
So far, ecocriticism has grown most rapidly in the United States. The
Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), now the major
organization for ecocritics world-wide, was founded in 1992 at a meeting of the
US Western Literature Association. Ecocriticism’s early bias towards the study of
US nature writing in the tradition of Thoreau, Muir, Abbey, and Dillard, and
Native American writing, reflects its origin. Other points of emergence were
56
feminist theory and the study of Romantic literature. The first British critic to use
the term, tentatively, was Jonathan Bate in Romantic Ecology (1991).
Searching for alternatives to the most destructive forms of industrial
development, many ecocritics have looked to indigenous non-industrial cultures,
exploring the possibility of alliance between these cultures and the wider
environmental movement. Texts such as Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977)
and Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms (1995), two novels in which the environmental
values of Native American cultures are set against those of white industrial
capitalism, are important presences in the new ecocritical canon. This is part of a
broader attempt to bring together the different environmentalism of rich and poor.
‘The environmental justice movement’ is a collective term for the efforts of poor
communities to defend themselves against the dumping of toxic waste, the harmful
contamination of their air, food, and water, the loss of their lands and livelihoods,
and the indifference of governments and corporations. Ecocritics responsive to
environmental justice will bring questions of class, race, gender, and colonialism
into the ecocritical evaluation of texts and ideas, challenging versions of
environmentalism that seem exclusively preoccupied with preservation of wild
nature and ignore the aspiration of the poor.
Environmentalism began to take shape in the 2nd half of the 20th century, in
response to perceptions of how dangerous environmental damage had become.
This movement grew partly out of traditions of enthusiasm for wild nature, but is
distinct from those traditions. The treats that preoccupy environmentalists are not
only to wildlife and wilderness but also to human health, food, and shelter, and
they are global as well as local. For example, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
(1962), widely credited, because of the international response it received, with the
first rallying of environmentalism as a public movement, was a study of the toxic
effects of residues of industrial and agricultural chemicals in animal and human
bodies.
Industrial pollution is the main threat, along with destructive ways of
consuming natural resources, such as excessive fishing and the ‘clear cut’ logging
of forests. These are modern phenomena, products of industry and the application
of industrial methods to traditional harvest and husbandry. Environmentalism is
both a critique of industrial modernity and another product of it, a distinctively
modern movement in which an indispensable role is played by science: by the
methods and technologies, for example, that can identify chemical traces or
analyze atmospheric data. Essential, too, are modern forms of communication,
especially television, with its power of sending iconic images across the world to
mass audiences.
In the late 1980s, reports began to appear of concern among scientists about
climate changes thought to be occurring because of increasing levels of carbon
dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere. Among the possible consequences are flooding,
desertification, famine, eco-wars over diminishing resources, and millions of
environmental refugees. Many features of global warming defy political response
and cultural representation.

57
 Environmental themes feature abundantly in culture: in thrillers, adverts,
literary novels, poems, tourism from country weekends to safaris, television
wildlife documentaries, food scares, horror movies, dreams of rural retreat, books
and films for children.
There are some main concepts that give the ‘eco’ to ecocriticism: 1) ecology –
is the scientific study of natural interdependencies: of life forms as they relate to
each other and their shared environment. Creatures produce and shape their
environment, as their environment produces and shapes them. Ecology developed
in reaction against the practice of isolating creatures for study in laboratories, is
based in field-work, and draws on a range of specialist disciplines including
zoology, botany, geology, and climate studies; 2) ecosystem – a local set of
conditions that support life. Ecosystems are full of variables, often in flux, and
subject to forces outside their boundaries. New species arriving in an ecosystem
will change it. Each local ecosystem is, in this way, part of a larger one, and all
together constitute the global ecosystem, called the ‘ecosphere’ or ‘biosphere’;
3) ecological niche within the ecosystem is the ‘space’ the species occupies: the
combination of factors that makes a population viable, including food, shelter,
temperature, and number of predators and competitors; 4) food chain describes
one of the sets of relationships that make an ecosystem: the way in which energy
circulates. One creature eats another, and is in turn eaten or rots down into
nutrients. Food chain is an important concept for ecologists investigating pollution,
because of effects such as biomagnification, in which some poisons become more
concentrated as they pass up the food chain to the few top predators.
The word ‘ecology’ is frequently used in connection with the ‘green’
movement. Deep Ecology, for example, is a radical version of environmentalism,
conceived in the early 1970s by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess and
developed in the 1980s by US environmentalists Bill Devall and George Sessions.
Deep Ecologists reject merely technological and managerial solutions, because
these constitute yet another form of human dominance. Deep Ecology proposes
drastic changes in our habits of consumption, not only to avert catastrophe but as
spiritual and moral awakening.

Project Tasks

1. Explore in depth Ecocriticism.

2. Answer the suggested questions:
 What is Ecocriticism?
 What is the background of Ecocriticism?
 What are the main concepts of Environmentalism?
3. Create a presentation (report) to explain Ecocriticism. Your presentation
should contain the following:
 a title to introduce your literary theory;
 a brief definition for your theory;

58
  basic background information regarding your theory, such as: what does
your theory focus on, why would someone be most likely use your
approach, what questions does your approach address;
 pros: Why would someone use your assigned approach?;
 cons: What are disadvantages to your approach?;
 use textual evidence to support your commentary.
4. Participate in the suggested discussion.

Test №7

The test consists of 5 tasks. It requires 3 minutes to solve it. Choose the
right answer and tick it in the blank form.

1. When did Environmentalism emerge?

1 the 1st part of the 19th century
3 the 2nd part of the 20th century
2. What concept does not illustrate the work of ecology?
1 ecosystem
3 ecological niche
3. ASLE stands for:
1 The Association for the Study of
Literature and Environment
3 The Association for the Study of
Linguistics and Ecology
4. What is ecology?
1 a local set of conditions that
support life
3 the ‘space’ the species occupies
5. What is Ecocriticism?
1 a modern intellectual movement
that analyses cultural phenomena
according to principles derived
from linguistics, emphasizing the
systematic interrelationships
among the elements of any
human activity, and thus the
abstract codes and conventions
governing the social production
59
2 the 1st part of the 18th century
4 the 2nd part of the 19th century
2 food chain
4 ecocriticism
2 The Association for the Study of
Language and Ecology
4 The Association for the Study of
Logic and Ecocriticism
the scientific study of natural
2 interdependencies: of life forms
as they relate to each other and
their shared environment
one of the sets of relationships
4 that make an ecosystem: the way
in which energy circulates
2 the systematic study of signs, or,
more precisely, of the production
of meanings from sign-systems,
linguistic or non-linguistic
 of meanings
literary and cultural criticism
from an environmentalist’s point
of view. Texts are evaluated in the theory of criticism that sees
3 terms of their environmentally 4 the work as the central object that
harmful or helpful effects. unites authors and readers
Beliefs and ideologies are
assessed for their environmental
implications.

Blank Form

№ 1 2 3 4 5
1
2
3
4

60
 Literature

1. Kerridge R. Environmentalism and ecocriticism // Literary Theory and

Criticism: An Oxford Guide. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. –
Pp.530-543.
2. Adamson J.E., Mei Mei, Stein R. The Environmental Justice Reader.
Tuscon, Ariz.: University of Arizona Press, 2002.
3. Armbruster K., Wallace K. Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the
Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Charlottesville, Va., and London: University
Press of Virginia, 2001.
4. Garrard G. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2000.
5. Hochman J. Green Cultural Studies. Moscow, Ida.: University of Idaho
Press, 1998.

Bibliography

1. Baldick C. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. NY: Oxford

University Press, 2008. – 374p.
2. Coupe L. Myth. 1997.
3. Croft S., Cross H. Literature, Criticism, and Style. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004.
4. Culler J. Structuralist Poetics. 1975.
5. Eagleton M. Feminist Literary Theory. 2nd. Ed. 1995.
6. Eagleton T., Milne D. Marxist Literary Theory. 1996.
7. Freund E. The Return of the Reader. 1987.
8. Galan F.W. Historic Structures: The Prague School Project, 1928-1946.
1985.
9. Garrard G. Ecocriticism. 2004.
10. Glotfely Ch., Fromm H. The Ecocriticism Reader. 1996.
11. Guerin W.L., Labor E., Morgan L., Reesman J.C., Willingham J.R. A
Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 5 th ed. New York, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005.
12. Hawkes T. Structuralism and Semiotics. 1977.
13. Holquist M. Dialogism. 1990.
14. Richards J. Rhetoric. 2007.
15. Robbins R. Literary Feminisms. 2000.
16. Rooney E. The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory. 2006.
17. Russell D.A., Winterbottom M. Classical Literary Criticism. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2008.
18. Sarup M. An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism.
1988.
19. Scholes R. Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction. 1974.
20. Steiner P. Russian Formalism. 1984.
21. Szondi P. Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics. 1995.

61
22. Waugh P. Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006.
23. Widdowson P. Literature. 1998.
24. Wright E. Psychoanalytic Criticism. 2nd ed. 1998.
25. http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/
26. http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/
27. http://www.asle.org/site/resources/ecocritical-library/
28. http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/lit_crit/
29. http://www.shef.ac.uk/bakhtin/
30. http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva

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