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Literary criticism is the systematic analysis and interpretation of literary texts using defined theoretical frameworks and methodologies. It moves beyond personal reaction to ask principled questions about how texts produce meaning, represent culture, and position readers. Different critical schools offer competing lenses—each illuminating certain aspects of a text while occluding others. Understanding criticism as a discipline means recognizing that interpretations are arguments, not facts, and must be supported with textual and theoretical evidence.
Read a single canonical poem or short story through three or four different critical lenses in sequence—notice how each framework reveals different features while rendering others invisible. Then read a brief manifesto or programmatic essay from each school (e.g., Wimsatt and Beardsley on intentional fallacy; Barthes on the death of the author) to understand the assumptions underlying each method.
Literary criticism can seem puzzling at first: you have already learned to read carefully and write about literature in close reading. What does a theoretical "framework" add? The answer is that every act of interpretation rests on assumptions — about where meaning comes from, whose perspective matters, what a text is "really" doing in its cultural moment — and those assumptions, when left implicit, go unexamined and uncontested. Literary criticism makes those assumptions explicit, turns them into debatable positions, and organizes them into schools of thought. The frameworks don't replace reading; they sharpen what you look for and why.
The most important threshold to cross is understanding that criticism is distinct from evaluation. When someone says a novel is "powerful" or "poorly written," they are evaluating — making an aesthetic judgment. When a critic says the same novel "constructs femininity as passivity by consistently depicting female characters in reactive rather than agentive roles," they are analyzing how the text produces meaning and what cultural work it does. Neither activity is superior to the other, but they answer different questions. Literary criticism is primarily in the analysis-and-interpretation business, not the quality-ranking business. Once this distinction is clear, the bewildering variety of critical schools starts to make sense: they are different principled approaches to the analysis question.
Different critical schools function as different lenses, each revealing certain textual features while de-emphasizing others. Formalist/New Critical approaches (which you will encounter next) focus narrowly on the internal structure of the text — imagery, irony, ambiguity, form — bracketing historical context and authorial biography entirely. Marxist criticism asks how a text represents, reflects, or critiques economic class relations. Feminist criticism examines how gender is constructed and what power relations are inscribed in the text. Psychoanalytic criticism explores unconscious drives and symbolic structures. Reader-response theory shifts focus from the text to the reader's constructive activity. None of these schools provides the "correct" interpretation because they are not answering the same question. A text can be read through multiple lenses, and the readings may complement, contradict, or enrich each other.
The term "theory" is often off-putting because it suggests abstraction divorced from the text. In practice, critical theory does something more specific: it supplies a vocabulary and a set of questions that make previously invisible features of texts visible and discussable. When Barthes announces "the death of the author," he is making a claim that the author's intended meaning should not constrain interpretation — that texts generate meanings beyond what their authors intended. That claim was not obvious before it was articulated; stating it explicitly allows critics to argue for or against it with precision. Theory, in this sense, is the set of contested assumptions that organized criticism into a discipline.
As you study individual critical schools — formalism, structuralism, feminist criticism, postcolonial criticism, and others — two questions are worth holding in mind throughout. First: what assumptions does this school make about where meaning comes from (the text itself, the author, the historical context, the reader, ideology)? Second: what kinds of questions does this school enable that other schools cannot easily ask? Answering those two questions for each school will give you a comparative map of the discipline and a principled basis for choosing which lens to apply to a given text and a given interpretive goal.
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