literary on criticism

[mini-eloise]

any one of you read literary on criticism kind enough to share your idea with me?

[chmpman]

I don't follow. Literary criticism?

[Anna G. Appel]

Literary criticism, I think, is a better way to the understanding of a book. Say you read a work by some author and you are amazed by the book but dont know exactly what all of it meant. Criticism helps for a better understanding of the book you are reading, and you are getting points and views from more than one side.
I am not fond of the critics who take a sentence like "This author did a bad job." to "The controlling author of this most foul book must have been a horrid mistake which I will complain about for as to why I was disgusted and disturbed with horrid imagery." Such critics who add about four, eight syllable words in each sentence.
I think that if the purpose of the criticism is to complain rather than inform, then it is not worth reading, but most criticism is at least good for comparison to your own thoughts and someone elses.

[LaraWood]

I agree with you... When you read something, a poem, a short story a novel.. it is really useful to know other's opinion about it, not only from a literary critic but also from a common person. It is so pleasant to talk about the possible meaning of a literaty work...and in the end you will catch what the writer meant to say when he or she wrote it.
So, enjoy your reading!!

Lara

[Dans deist]

I had gone through all the comments,as I had been a teacher of criticism; I felt it none understood the aim of a real critique.

A critic has to explore meanings which are not specified by the author, cut it and test and taste it and after he should distribute it to his fellow being .

[Bastet]

Criticism is my focus of work, so let me tell you in the most simple way what it is to me:




A critic has to explore meanings which are not specified by the author.

This is actually the true purpose of criticism. Critics find messages (normally expressed by some type of symbolism and therefore not so obvious) in the text. They formulate an hypothesis with this "message" and their goal is to PROVE it. In order to do that, they provide the necessary examples from the text that will support their theory. If they can't do this, then you can say their theory doesn't support itself and that THAT is a bad critic article.

It has NOTHING to do with personal opinion (i.e. "I like or I don't like this book"). That's a common misconception of what literary criticism means.

I hope this helps ;)

[Anna G. Appel]

I did previously understand the concept... I just wasnt quite sure how to explain it. So thank you for your clarity.

[mousemouse]

isn't all of this just one way of looking at the critics job. It seems to me that it is a rather psycological approach, by which I mean that what you then find is something "hidden" in the text which the author subconsciously has placed there??
How do you know that this is in fact not your own subconsciuosness playing trix on you and making you find things that are not really there??
There are a lot of ways you can go within the area of literary critiscism, but as far as I can see there is only one represented here. For a short introduction to some of the newer theories I would recomend that you read the book "Literary Theory, a very short introduction" by Jonathan Culler.

[subterranean]

I haven't read any from this type of genre, but I once had a glimpse of a book that talks about Bob Dylan's songs. At first I thought it's somekind of biography book about Dylan.

[mj_blazer]

Literary criticism in a narrow sense follows what has been already mentioned, although, through the years, the meaning and value of criticism has changed.

Here in the Philippines and elsewhere, criticism is taught and practiced everyday, even if the people concerned don't realize it. Edward Said, author of Orientalism and the inspiration behind the book Representations of the Intellectual, once pointed out that the students of literature are always required to write "what they think, what they feel" of literature that they are exposed to. This is what he calls "non-pragmatic discourse". And of course, this is already criticism. As members of the academe, we are exposed to criticism whether we know it or not.


I am a student of Comparative Literature, major concentration in European Literatures at the University of the Philippines-Diliman.