Literary criticism is a very broad topic that can be looked at using various perspectives. There are many theories that can be used while reading a piece of literature because everyone reads texts differently. Some people concentrate more on the story while others are concerned with the realism of the characters. Others focus on the language and words found in the story, and even more focus on how readers would react to the work. History, the current culture, and literature as a whole can come into play as well for many readers. All these different perspectives make literary criticism a very diverse subject that allows each reader to read a piece the way they find best fit. This makes the subject of literary criticism and theory appealing for many who study it because they don’t have to follow theory by the book and agree with everything that has been said and written about the different perspectives. They can decide what they agree with and what they disagree with, and they can mesh different theories together to make their own literary approach.
Donald Keesey, author of Contexts for Criticism, has developed a graph of formal criticism that many place themselves on in order to understand how they read literature. Keesey states, “Because criticism usually involves the interpretation of a particular work, it is logical that the work in question should hold the central place in the diagram” (Keesey 3). Therefore the piece of literature remains in the middle and the various perspectives branch off to the sides for readers to apply to the work. The graph is made up of an x-axis and a y-axis. The top of the y-axis is concerned with the author and historic criticism, while the bottom is concerned with the audience and reader-response criticism. The x-axis is made up of reality and mimetic criticism on the left and literature and intertextual criticism on the right. When I first looked at the chart, I had difficulties trying to decide where I would place myself because one doesn’t always think about how they read until they are told to do so. First, I thought that I just fit at the top of the y-axis because before I read a piece of literature I have to always read a biographical piece about the author so that I can connect the literary story to their life and the time in which they wrote the piece. However, after some deeper thinking, I realized that I do more than that. I also connect the story to myself and how I react to it as well as how other readers would respond to it. Therefore, when looking at Keesey’s diagram, I fall on the entire y-axis. Sometimes I spend more time on the top of the axis and other times I spend more time on the bottom, but usually I spend my time right in the middle so that I can move freely between historical criticism and reader-response criticism.
I feel at home on the y-axis because through all my work with the different theories, the historical and reader-response perspectives make the most sense to me. I feel like I have gained the appropriate amount of knowledge of those theories, so I’m able to apply them to every work that I read and they work in helping me understand different pieces of literature.
The historical context of criticism looks at a piece of text from the background of the past. Those who concentrate on this theory mainly look at the author’s background, the author’s intention, and the mores and conventions that were in place in society at the time the piece was written or even at the time in which the story is based. People who study this will look into the story to find different aspects that they can do further research on to derive some deeper meaning about the story.
By looking at the author’s background they can see if the story is directly or partially based on something from his or her past or if something that occurred in his or her past caused the story to be written in that way. By looking at the author’s intention they will be able to figure out what the author has planned to do in writing the story. If they did some research and found out information about the author’s past then they would be able to connect that to the story and hypothesize why each aspect of the story was written a certain way. In looking at the history of the time the story was written historical critics look at different scenes and actions in the story to decide where it is taking place. They will also use what they know about what was going on in the life of the author and the society they were living in at the time that he or she wrote the piece. This information will help them decide if different aspects of the story were put there on purpose because that is how things worked back then or if they were just coincidental.
E. D. Hirsch spent a lot of time with this theory. He argued that coherence was not a quality that should be looked at fully to determine meaning, but that the context of the interpretation of the work should be evaluated. In his essay, Objective Interpretation, he states, “It is natural to speak not of what a text says, but of what an author means, and this more natural locution is the more accurate one” (Keesey 27). Therefore, he believes that doing research to decide what the author’s intention was is a more accurate way to understand a piece than just looking at it for its words in general.
After reading this quote by Hirsch, I knew that I agreed with his perspective of the historical context. I too believe that readers are able to understand a text better by figuring out what the author is trying to say instead of just looking at the words. This is why the formalist context doesn’t work for me because I’m more concerned with what the author is trying to get across in his work. I spend time studying the history of the time when the piece was written and the life of the author, so that I can figure out what the author means by the piece. A formalist critic is only going to look within the piece to find its true meaning, and this doesn’t always work. Many times the author has an external motivator that he brings in from the outside to form meaning in his work. I find this to be a positive aspect of historical criticism because it offers a different perspective in looking at a piece of literature. I’m all for cognitive learning, and I feel that it is far less cognitive to search within a piece for meaning than it is to search outside a piece. It takes some extra work and deeper thinking to find the meaning of a text outside of the text, but after all is said and done I feel like the reader is able to better understand the piece overall by using this literary context.
The reader-response context is made up of an umbrella of approaches to literature that focus on the responses that readers have about the text. Someone who looks at a piece of text using a reader-response context combines the text with how they feel about it from a reader’s perspective to create a shared reaction. By taking what they find in the text and combining it with what they know they are able to react to the text and understand it more deeply.
As I have already stated, this context is really made up of a series of different approaches that are interrelated, so to describe this context more clearly I will describe two perspectives that I agree with. When it comes to reader-response criticism, I tend to follow what Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish have each developed. I combine both of their theories together to make up my reader-response theory that I can use to apply to different pieces of literary work.
Wolfgang Iser came up with the concept of the implied reader. This was broken down into two roles that the reader would have: the role of a textual structure and the role of a structured act. In the role of a textual structure the reader will be able to look at the text and see things that he wouldn’t have been able to just based on what he was already aware of. In the role of a structured act the reader will find the meaning of a text based on how the perspectives of the text have guided him.
Stanley Fish believed that meaning was derived mostly from the experience of the reader. The same aspect of a piece of text could be viewed many different ways depending on the prior knowledge that each reader has of the material. In his article, Is There a Text in this Class, a girl asks her teacher if there is a text in the class that she is going to be in for the new semester. The teacher replies that there is a textbook because based on his prior knowledge from when students usually asked that question he assumed she was talking about the textbook when she said text. However, she wanted to know if the class was going to be one where the students believe in poems and other texts or if was just them and their own perspective. Therefore, based on this example different readers are going to view aspects of a piece of writing in different ways based on their own personal lives.
I know that this context relies more on looking at the text to develop a reaction and then a meaning, and I just got done saying that I’m not too fond of formalism because it looks solely at the text. However, I feel like the use of the text here is different. The reader-response criticism doesn’t just look at the text, but it makes a connection with what the reader knows and doesn’t know to help guide them in the meaning. I don’t like how formalists only use the text to find meaning, but here prior knowledge and experience, two outside sources, are used to help the reader develop meaning.
In regards to this perspective, it is hard for me to choose between the theories of Iser and Fish because I see the use in both of them. Some critics who follow this context of criticism will only agree with Iser or only agree with Fish, but I can’t really argue that one theory is stronger than the other. The implied reader idea is appealing to me because I like how a text can open doors and allow the reader to see ideas and perspectives that they haven’t been aware before through the textual structure. I also find it to work positively through the use of the structured act because the reader is able to find meaning from the text based on how the perspectives of the text have guided him, and this can relate to historical criticism in a way. The perspective that guides the reader can be that of the author’s, and their perspective can be related to their own history. Therefore, my two different approaches on the y-axis are able to find a connection here.
Fish’s theory also works well in my approach because it can connect the reader-response context with the historical one as well as work by itself. Fish believed that readers are able to understand different pieces of text based on the experiences that they have had. Therefore, if a reader has had much experience with the works of the writer they are reading then they will be able to understand the meaning of the piece better due to what they already know. This works well outside the author realm as well though. I find that when reading a piece of literature I begin to understand parts that I can relate to more. I believe this is true for all readers. No matter what piece of literature one is reading, they will always find a part of it that they can relate to. This part will stick out most in their mind and allow them to derive meaning from the story based on that relatable aspect that they connected with.
The reader-response context works well overall because it allows for the reader to not only relate the text to what they know in order to respond to it, but it allows them to think about how other readers are going to relate to it as well. I chose this theory as part of my approach based on this because I like the wide range of opportunity open for readers to use their cognitive minds. I also find that the umbrella of perspectives allows for this context to be used in a variety of ways, and although I chose to only include two of those perspectives in my approach, just having those two allows for quite an expansive range for readers to use and apply to different pieces of literature.
I chose to mesh historical criticism with the reader-response context because I feel at home using both theories. I find the connection to the outside world in both contexts to work towards that advantage of finding the true meaning of different pieces of literature. I think that it can be difficult at times to use other theories that solely look at the text to find meaning because doing that uses more interpretation than my approach allows for, and in interpreting a piece of text it can be hard to know if what you are thinking is what you are supposed to be thinking. At least with my approach, interpretation has outside sources to fall back on. I value the fact that records can be looked at to see how the writer lived their life, and the fact that readers can take from their own experiences to react to a piece of literature and find its deeper meaning.
I will now take this time to show how my approach applies to a piece of literature using Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory”. I think this is a piece that I can really showcase my theory on because this piece was influential in helping me design my literary approach. I read this piece after I began to figure out how I read pieces of literature. Therefore, I feel like my approach shines brightly in this story. Capote used different aspects of his childhood in the South to write the story, and I was reminded of my relationship with my maternal grandmother throughout the story. Therefore, the historical and reader-response contexts show up strongly and can easily applied.
“A Christmas Memory” is a story about a little boy nicknamed Buddy and his elderly lady cousin who he refers to as his friend. They live in a house with many other family members, but the rest of the family is very strict so Buddy and his friend keep to themselves along with their dog Queenie. They are rather poor, but they save their money up over the year so they can use it around Christmastime. Starting in late November, they get their money out and go out and buy supplies to make fruitcakes. They make about thirty fruitcakes a year for people that they have met once or twice or even for those they haven’t met at all. They make one for a couple whose car broke down in front of their place a few years back, missionaries who lectured in their town the previous year, the bus driver, the reverend, and even President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Making the fruitcakes for those people allows Buddy and his friend to feel special because they’re doing something for people who are much more well-to-do than themselves.
They spend a good portion of the story gathering supplies for and then making the fruitcakes. They pick pecans from an orchard that isn’t theirs, gather different fruits from town, and purchase whiskey, the key ingredient, from an Indian bootlegger named Haha. After the cakes have been made and mailed out, Buddy and his cousin finish off the whiskey with their dog. The other family members in the house ridicule the elderly woman for allowing a child to get drunk. This brings her to tears, but Buddy cheers her up by reminding her that they will soon get a Christmas tree to decorate and have presents to make.
The next day Buddy and his friend go out and chop down a very large tree and bring it home. Then they spend many hours creating ornaments for the tree and making gifts for each other and the rest of the family. Buddy suspects that his cousin is making him a kite just like she did the previous year, so he does them same. On Christmas day, the two go out and fly the kites that they made each other and have a joyous time.
Sadly, Buddy says at the end of the story that this was the last Christmas that he got to spend with his cousin because he got sent to military school. They still wrote each other letters, but she started to get dementia so she wasn’t the same friend that he held all those fond Christmas memories with. He ends the story by telling the readers how he knew of her death before he was even told, and he looked to the sky expecting to see a lost pair of kites, like hearts, sailing to Heaven.
In regards to my literary approach, I always start with the historical aspect first. Therefore, readers of this piece would have to read a short biographical piece of Truman Capote first or even look into records of his childhood before actually reading the story. In doing this, they would be able to see that much of the story is taken from his childhood. He in fact had an elderly cousin that he was very fond of, and they spent a lot of time together because the rest of the family was very strict just like the family in the story is. However, after getting past this simple fact, the readers would have to explore the reason why Capote wrote this piece. Did he want his readers to get a glimpse of his childhood life even though it might be a little fabricated? Did he want to showcase the love between family members, showing that he had at least one person who cared for him? Did he write accurately about the South in the 1930’s? Did he actually make fruitcakes with his cousin, or is the fruitcake symbolic of another aspect of his childhood? Did he actually exchange kites with his cousin? These are all questions that could be asked dealing with this part of my approach. The readers are going to want to look at every aspect of Capote’s life including his childhood which he uses for this piece and his mindset around 1956 when the piece as written because it could be just as much about his past as it is about the current state he was in when he wrote the piece. Readers could look back at records to see where Capote was living while he wrote the piece, who he was living with, and how he was spending his days. They might also want to look farther back to see what life was like in the 1930’s for a boy in the South or if the other people in the story actually existed. They could find out if there was a Indian bootlegger at that time who resembled Haha, if a couple’s car had actually broken down in front of Capote’s house, or if missionaries had lectured in his town. Evaluating every piece of the story for its connection to the writer’s past is essential with the first part of my literary approach because using the outside material connected with the author can help the readers better understand the meaning of the piece overall.
After the historical context has been dealt with then my approach requires readers to travel down the y-axis of Keesey’s chart to reader-response criticism. Being that this is my approach, first off I would concentrate on the concept of the implied reader, looking at the textual structure and the structured act. The textual structure would allow the reader to be able to look at the text and see things that he wouldn’t have been able to see before just based on what he was already aware of. For instance the reader might not have been aware of the fact that Franklin D. Roosevelt and the other patrons who received the fruitcakes were higher up on the social ladder than Buddy and his cousin, so this part of the story would allow the reader to see that Buddy and his cousin feel like they are important because they get to make the desserts for those people. Likewise, this story introduces a diverse family connection that many readers might not be aware of. I remember after reading this that I thought for the longest time that his friend was his grandmother, not his cousin. Therefore, this story introduces readers to the fact that different family members can have strong emotional connections with one another, and they can take this knowledge and run with it in order to find a deeper meaning in the relationship between Buddy and his elderly friend. The structured act would have the reader find the meaning of a text based on how the perspectives of the text have guided him. This means that the reader is going to take what they know in life and bring that to the story. Based on what they bring, the text is going to mean different things to different people because their perspectives are going to be different. A young boy might connect with Buddy in the story and see the friend as his grandmother while an elderly woman is more apt to connect to the cousin in the story and view Buddy has her grandson or possibly her neighbor boy. Also, one has to take in to account that various people are going to be educated differently and be at different maturity levels. The young boy who reads the story is going to find more meaning in the fact that Buddy and his cousin are playing together and spending time with one another. While the elderly lady who reads the piece is going to be more apt to see the deeper meaning and connection that Buddy has with his cousin. They are both lost souls who are found when they are with each other, so when the cousin dies at the end Buddy feels like he has died as well. That is why he looks up to the sky as if he is going to see two kites sailing to Heaven. It all depends on what type of perspective a person brings to the story as to what type of perspective they get out of the story. I think that it is also important to know what each type of reader will bring to the story as I have demonstrated here. Readers not only have to show how they will react to a piece, but they should also know how other people will as well.
Stanley Fish’s context falls in closely with this as well. It all depends on what the reader brings to the text as to how much they understand it and what they get out of it. If someone has a close relationship with an elderly family member like Buddy does, then they might be able to see the connection that the two characters have. Likewise, anyone who has experienced the hustle, bustle, and excitement of Christmas time would be able to connect with that aspect of the story and find some meaning in the fact that Buddy and his cousin are participating in the festivities together. There has to be a least one aspect of the story that each reader has some experience in, and that way they are able to connect themselves to that part of the story and find some meaning from the piece overall.
Using historical criticism and reader-response criticism together on a piece literature has a very positive effect in my eyes. I believe that bringing in outside sources connected to the life and times of the writer as well as having readers bring in their own experiences to connect to the piece allows for a better understanding overall, and when readers understand a piece of literature they are able to get to its deeper meaning. Using my literary approach, I have found that I can connect parts of the writer’s life with parts of my life in order to find true meaning in pieces of literature. Therefore, I believe that my approach works because it brings forth two literary theories that involve cognitive thinking and bringing in aspects of the outside world. The y-axis on Keesey’s chart is the right place to be because readers are able to make connections and reactions that will help them in discovering the true meaning of every literary piece that they read.
Works Cited
- Capote, Truman. A Christmas Memory. New York: Random House, 1956.
- Fish, Stanley. “Is There a Text in This Class?”. Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communties. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. 678-693.
- Hirsch, Jr., E. D. “Objective Interpretation”. Contexts for Criticism: Fourth Edition. Ed. Donald Keesey. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2003. 17-33.
- Iser, Wolfgang. “Readers and the Concept of the Implied Reader”. Contexts for Criticism: Fourth Edition. Ed. Donald Keesey. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2003. 140-147.
- Keesey, Donald. Contexts for Criticism: Fourth Edition. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2003.
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