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The response should indicate an awareness that a formal interpretation would focus on the structure, literary elements, and devices in a poem, while an ethical interpretation would focus on morals, ethics, symbols, and/or archetypes that are universal over cultural boundaries.
Having considered the principles of the school of formalism and the types of theories proposed by M.H. Abrams, the theory which explains the focus of the school of formalism best would be the ‘formal’ theory.
Why do you think some critics agree with Plato when it comes to children’s literature? The literary theory that Plato’s opinion apply to is moral criticism due to the fact that he believed that art was a weak reflection of the real world, which the real world in turn tries to imitate.
Five literary theories are still in use today.
Psychoanalytic criticism believes that art reflects the artist’s unconscious desires and fears.
A formal interpretation would focus on the relationships between the texts and analyze the themes and motifs of the text. A sociological interpretation would be how society interprets the piece and if the piece has a positive influence or not.
A widespread problem that Ishmael Beah attempts to reveal in his memoir A Long Way Gone is the use of children and teenagers as soldiers in armed conflict.
How would a formal interpretation differ from a biographical interpretation of this poem? … The response should indicate an awareness that a formal interpretation would focus on the structure, literary elements, and devices in the poem, while a biographical interpretation would focus on the author’s life and movitations.
Moral criticism is an example of a mimetic literary theory.
Literary theory is a school of thought or style of literary analysis that gives readers a means to critique the ideas and principles of literature. Another term for literary theory is hermeneutics, which applies to the interpretation of a piece of literature.
While the expressive, rhetoric and descriptive theories denote some form of literature in them, the Mimetic theory doesn’t. … The four types of literary theories are emosional, persuasive, reflective, structural.
Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader (or “audience”) and their experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work.
Structuralism is a mode of knowledge of nature and human life that is interested in relationships rather than individual objects or, alternatively, where objects are defined by the set of relationships of which they are part and not by the qualities possessed by them taken in isolation.
Glossary of Poetic Terms
Structuralist critics analyzed material by examining underlying structures, such as characterization or plot, and attempted to show how these patterns were universal and could thus be used to develop general conclusions about both individual works and the systems from which they emerged.
First, he wanted to expose how children are subjected to indoctrination as they are recruited to fight in conflicts around the world. The act of brainwashing a child who is looking for a place to belong is a powerful draw. He said he also wrote the book to educate people about Sierra Leone and its struggles.
A Long Way Gone takes place in Sierra Leone between 1993 and 1997. The memoir is the story of a twelve year old boy’s forced experience as a child soldier during the country’s civil war, where he was forced to fight for the military.
When Beah is at the rehabilitation center, Esther helps him discuss what had happened. At the end of every discussion, she always sternly tells him that “none of these things are your fault.” Why does she say this to him?
Interpretation is an explicit argument about a text’s deeper meanings—its implied themes, values, and assumptions. It pays special attention to the text’s contradictions, tensions, and ambiguities.
Literary criticism refers to a genre of writing whereby an author critiques a literary text, either a work of fiction, a play, or poetry. Alternatively, some works of literary criticism address how a particular theory of interpretation informs a reading of a work or refutes some other critics’ reading of a work.
The critique should identify aspects of the poem that could be improved. Get specific. The critique should consider four crucial aspects of the poem: imagery, sound, language, & figuration. visual (they can also be aural, tactile, olfactory, or gustatory), & there are poems that work well without a lot of imagery.
Psychoanalytic criticism adopts the methods of “reading” employed by Freud and later theorists to interpret texts. It argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author, that a literary work is a manifestation of the author’s own neuroses.
Psychoanalytic criticism builds on Freudian theories of psychology. While we don’t have the room here to discuss all of Freud’s work, a general overview is necessary to explain psychoanalytic literary criticism.
For example, if a critic is working with certain Marxist theories, s/he might focus on how the characters in a story interact based on their economic situation.
Researching, reading, and writing works of literary criticism will help you to make better sense of the work, form judgments about literature, study ideas from different points of view, and determine on an individual level whether a literary work is worth reading.
A language based approach to using literature includes techniques and procedures which are concerned more directly with the study of the literary text itself. The aim is to provide the students with the tools they need to interpret a text and to make competent critical judgements of it.
The critic’s specific purpose may be to make value judgements on a work, to explain his or her interpretation of the work, or to provide other readers with relevant historical or biographical information. The critic’s general purpose, in most cases, is to enrich the reader’s understanding of the literary work.
FORMALIST CRITICISM
Literature is a form of knowledge with intrinsic elements–style, structure, imagery, tone, and genre.
Gender criticism is an extension of feminist literary criticism, focusing not just on women but on the construction of gender and sexuality, especially LGBTQ issues, which gives rise to queer theory. … Thus identity is complicated and rich, involving much more than gender alone.
Poststructuralism encourages a way of looking at the world that challenges what comes to be accepted as ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’. Poststructuralists always call into question how certain accepted ‘facts’ and ‘beliefs’ actually work to reinforce the dominance and power of particular actors within international relations.
In the book Abrams speaks about the two ways in which literature or literary theories try to interpret the human mind – first the mind as a mirror that reflects the external objects and second as a lamp that throws light at the objects it sees.
A formal interpretation would focus on the relationships between the texts and analyze the themes and motifs of the text. A sociological interpretation would be how society interprets the piece and if the piece has a positive influence or not.
Having considered the principles of the school of formalism and the types of theories proposed by M.H. Abrams, the theory which explains the focus of the school of formalism best would be the ‘formal’ theory.