Schools of Literary Criticism

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Schools of Literary Criticism ‘The Sick Rose’ 1. Definitions of Literary Criticism  It is the understanding and appreciation of literary texts.  It is the art of interpretation and judgment of quality.  It is an attempt to evaluate, to understand and to interpret creative writings; it is the description and analysis of pieces of writing – plays, novels, poems and short stories. Thus, literary criticism sheds the light on the good and bad points of branches of literature. 2. Schools of literary Criticism A. Reader-Response Criticism: This context shifts the focus of criticism to the reader of the text and considers how a text affects us, that is why it is sometimes called affective criticism. Thus, it ignores the author and what he might have meant. The premise of this context is ‘a poem is recreated every time it is read.’ Reading a text differs from one person to another according to age, nationality, sex and the like. In fact, there are as many Hamlets as there are readers of Hamlet. The main argument of the affective critics runs as follows: the literary work exists only when it is read; when it is apprehended by some consciousness. This only possible real existence of a text involves a process interaction between the reader and the text. Moreover, the analysis of this process of interaction should be the business of literary criticism. Obviously, this approach drives us inevitably to the realm of psychology, since we have to consider how the human mind comprehends things (phenomenology).Thus, many schools of psychology found echo to their theories in this approach especially Freudianism. Literary critics can, on surface level, give a rhetorical analysis of a text whereas psychological critics can, on a sub-conscious level, give us a deeper account of what a text can mean(like in the famous Freudian interpretation of Hamlet
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