A literary critic pays special attention to one of several aspects: its intended purpose, its effect on an audience, its language and structure, and the information and worldview it conveys. In studying the formal characteristics of a text, a critic usually recognizes the variability of performances of dramatic works and the variability of readers' mental interpretation of the texts. In studying the purpose of the author, a critic acknowledges the forces beyond the conscious intentions of the writer that can affect what he actually communicates. In studying what a literary work is about, a critic explores the complex relationship between truth and fiction in various types of storytelling. In studying the impact of the literature on its audience, a critic has been increasingly aware of how cultural expectations shape experience.
Because works of literature can be studied after their first publication, awareness of historical and theoretical context contributes to our understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of them. Historical research relates a work to the life and times of its author. Attention to the nature, functions, and categories of literature provides a theoretical framework joining a past text to the experience of present readers.
The tradition and approaches of textual analysis and literary criticism includes the observation of philosophers and creative writers and literary, historical, and cultural studies scholars - from Aristophanes, The Frogs, 405 B. C.; Plato, The Republic, 380 B. C.; and Aristotle, Poetics, 330 B. C.; to Émile Zola, Le roman experimental, 1880; Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Living, 1889; and Anatole France, La vie littéraire, 1888-1893.
At the end of the Nineteenth Century, in England and in America, as academics began to push for university courses in English and American Literature, the question as to how could the study of literature be defined and carried out in a manner that was disciplined and objective enough to give it status as an academic pursuit. This debate led, not only to the development of the first English departments, but to the development of the first types of literary theory, i. e., theories about how literature worked, what it did, and how it ought to be read and studied.
The social, cultural, and technological development of the Twentieth Century have vastly expanded the Western critical tradition in textual analysis and literary criticism. Modern critics in the established cultural centers in Western Europe heed not only Central Europe and North America but also areas once considered remote, including Russia, Latin America, and most recently, the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa. At a growing number of universities, professors of literature and other related fields paid attention to long-neglected areas of study - for example post colonialism, African-American criticism, and gender studies - aside from the three highly influential paradigms - formalism, structuralism, and new criticism.
FORMALISM
Formalism, a text-based critical method, was developed by Victor Shlovsky, Vladinmir Propp, and other Russian literary critics in the early Twentieth Century. It involved a detailed inquiry about the plot structure, symbolic imagery, narrative perspective, and other literary techniques of literature. After the mid-1930s, leaders of the Union Soviet of Socialist Republics and its subsequent satellites in Eastern Europe demanded that literature and textual analysis and literary criticism must directly serve their political objectives. Political leaders in those countries suppressed formalist criticism, calling it reactionary. Even such internationally influential opponents of extreme formalism as the Russian Mikhail Bakhtin and the Hungrian Georg Lukács would often find themselves under attack.
Formalism insisted that the best, and indeed the only, way to study literature was to study the text itself in close detail, and to disregard anything outside the text itself, including the author's biography, the historical context in which the work appeared, how it related to other works both before, during, and after its appearance, and how critics and readers responded to the text. In short, this textual analysis and literary criticism assumed that a text is an isolated object, something to be studied in and of itself alone. This is the criticism that says what literature students ought to do is read the words on the page, and nothing else.
STRUCTURALISM
In the early 1940s, literary critic Roland Barthes, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and other mid-century thinkers and scholars initiated French structuralism by applying linguistically inspired formal methods of literature and related phenomena. Structuralism attempted to investigate the “structure” of a culture as a whole by “decoding” or “interpreting” its interactive systems of signs. These systems included literary texts and genres as well as other cultural formations, such as fashion, advertising, and taboos on certain forms of behavior.
Structuralism looks at the text as a key to understanding ideas and questions beyond the text itself. Rather than centering on the text alone, structuralists ask “big picture” questions: How are literary texts structured? How are they different from non-literary texts? How do literary texts affect readers and audiences? Is there such a thing as a specifically “literary” language, and if so, what is it like? How does literature relate to other aspects of a culture, such as politics, economics, philosophy, or gender relations? Structuralists use the literary text as a kind of springboard to ask questions that are not solely concerned with “the words on the page.”
