In my last post, I expressed my surprise that by reading the fourth chapter of Interdisciplinarity, I was able to connect the books we are exploring in class to Marxist theory. A few days later, I found the entry “Marxist criticism” in The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms and must admit that I had missed something important in my last post – Marxist literary criticism has been pretty prevalent in the West since the 1940s (Murfin & Ray, 282). Had I known this, it wouldn’t have been a surprise to me at all when I was able to look at Cane and Meridian through the lens of Marxist criticism.
This realization made me wonder just how many approaches to literary criticism could possibly exist – in this semester alone, I’ve been exposed to several, some of which I had used in one way or another in the past. Little did I know, each has its own name and history attached to it. For instance, in the beginning of this semester we discussed New Criticism, the idea that texts are “self-contained and self-referential and thus [New Critics] based their interpretations on elements within the text rather than on external factors such as the effects of…historical materials” (Murfin & Ray, 335). On the very next page of the Bedford, an approach called “the new historicism” is explained, a type of criticism that nearly directly contradicts new critical formalism because “New historicist critics assume that literary works both influence and are influenced by historical reality…” (Murfin & Ray, 336). Based on the three approaches I’ve already mentioned in this post, there’s a range (and there are so many more forms of criticism I doubt I’ve even heard of yet) of ways to analyze a single text.
I’ve always heard people say that literary works mean different things to different people, and now it’s more clear to me how that can be. How one chooses to interpret a text depends on what perspectives, experiences, and ideas about the world you bring to the table. A Marxist critic isn’t going to see the same things as a New Critic, and both will differ from the ideas of a New Historicist. Furthermore, I question if literary critics even neatly line up into one track or another. Although I’m only a freshman English student, who hasn’t had nearly enough time or experience studying literature to be aligned in any way, it seems to me that most people approach literary works with components of all the theories I’ve talked about and more. For instance, in class we discussed how many of the tools we learned in high school stem from New Critical Formalism – I’ve done an endless amount of close readings, and have always been prompted to focus on imagery, rhyme, etc. But nobody adheres to this; we also look at the historical context of the books we read, the experiences of the authors, the messages works deliver about the nature of society and humanity. Interdisciplinarity and The Bedford help expose readers to an endless amount of ways to evaluate literature, something which helps reinforce the idea that a variety of perspectives and ideas is incredibly valuable when trying to discuss a work.