Biographical Approach
The Biographical Approach uses information about an author’s life and background to better understand and analyze his or her work. Why is this important? A writer’s life may shed light on his or her literature and the literature of the era. It may act to explain an author’s biases within the text. It may also help the reader understand elements the author uses in his work, such as words, allusions, themes, characters. The allegorical implications in the narrative often come to the fore with this information. Time, place, and persons take on value as the text is interrogated. Understanding the author’s political and religious leanings often adds clarity and significance to the written work while, at the same time, they help the reader discover the author’s audience and intention. Correlations are better understood using the author’s life but care must be taken.
For our purposes, authenticating the author’s biographical information is essential in forming strong connections to the text. Did the author’s personal experience act as an impetus in the formulation of the overall content of the story or even a part of it? What part of the story is purely imaginative? Does the author express social themes founded in his or her own situation? It is essential to avoid such mistakes as assuming that the author’s life is necessarily the same as the work’s contents.
Feminist/Gender Approach
Feminist/gender issues in literature raise several complex concerns. Broadly speaking, this approach examines how gender and sexual identity influences the creation and reception of literary works.
The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms
states that this approach looks at masculinity/femininity as binaries and the representation of women within the text. Feminist critics insist that man has been assumed to be representative of the essence of humanity while women are relegated or demoted to the role of subservience. The tradition of men’s writing, they claim, expresses the male point of view from the male point of view and symbolizes and enforces male dominance of the world. Patriarchy is highlighted as truth, while the value of women is often dismissed and marginalized.
Other feminists want to explore and interrogate the issues of race, class, religion, and culture and their effects on the women through time and place. How do these factors influence attitudes, ideas, and language in the narrative? What are the implications of “white” “woman” “pretty” “rich” “wealth” and their opposed terms? Have these changed with the passage of time? The essential questions raised above lie at the heart of the feminist approach for the purposes of this unit.
Formalistic Approach
The formalistic approach to an open text allows the reader to decide what is important about the words on the page as well as the reasons and actions of the characters themselves. It is more concerned with form rather than content. Literary devices are essential to this approach. The reader is able to derive reasonable explanations for the elements of plot, setting, characterization, and theme of the text. In Poe’s
Tell Tale Heart
formal questions of sound and patterns of language, pacing, and imagery are raised. Awareness of the use of these devices within the test is essential to the understanding of it. According to
The Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature
, “When all the words, phrases, metaphors, images, and symbols are examined in terms of each other and of the whole, any literary text worth our efforts will display its own internal logic” (Guerin 75). Formal analysis explores the significance of individual details, affects, or parts within the self-endorsed whole of a work of art rather than investigating the relationship of those parts to things outside the text. When practicing the formalistic approach, the reader must scrutinize the text for tools such as form, texture, literary conventions, style, symbolism, point of view, theme, and so on to expose the beauty of the novel. With this approach, readers must understand what is meant by such conventions as metaphor and allegory, where a deeper idea is represented using a more easily accessible one; satire and irony, where human folly and vice are held up to scorn, derision, or ridicule; and parody, where a piece of text is used to ridicule another subject or text.
Historical Approach
Simply put, this approach tries to understand how history impacts the written word. According to Kennedy and Gioia in
Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama,
this approach “seeks to understand a literary work by investigating the social, cultural, and intellectual context that produced it--a context that necessarily includes the artist’s biography and milieu” (Kennedy 23). A key goal for historical critics is to understand the effect of a literary work upon its original readers. Another focus may be how the times in which a writer lived influenced him or her. In other words, was he or she in step with or working against the popular culture of the day? The reader must be careful not to impose historical facts on a narrative if the connections are too vague or unclear. This approach actually helps a reader understand the text because without the historical background the deeper meaning of the text is lost. An example of this is in the story “Stop the Sun” where the reader, like the character, Terry, within the narrative, must develop an understanding of the Vietnam War to comprehend Terry’s father and the Vietnam War Syndrome.