the influence a writer might have over the reader (or in the case of tragedy, the audience) and much more interested in how a playwright accomplishes the effects he creates on the stage (Richter, 1998). In this, Aristotle might be considered the first close reader, aiming at a solid analysis of what the writer is doing in the text. Aristotle introduced the concepts of catharsis, the release of the emotions of pity and fear that occurs, in Aristotle’s opinion, most effectively when timed at the crisis of the play; peripeteia, an unexpected turn of events; and anagnorisis, the protagonist’s discovery of new knowledge. Aristotle analyzed Sophocles’s play Oedipus Tyrannus as an example of the best of Greek tragedy. In focusing on an example he considered the height of the genre, Aristotle (335 BCE/1997) described what the perfect tragedy ought to do and thus moved criticism from an analytical to a prescriptive perspective.
Such a structural view of the function of tragedy represents the first unpacking of a creative text known in Western literature and thus serves as the beginning of literary criticism. In taking such an analytical approach, Aristotle suggested that many texts hide more substantial interpretations beneath seemingly innocuous statements and events. By properly approaching a text, you can unpack these interpretations and thus see more than a surface reading of the text. Of course, such an approach does suggest questions about limits and extents: How many interpretations should there be? Are all interpretations valid? Does every text yield multiple interpretations, or even one additional interpretation, beyond the narrative story? When should you stop analyzing? Literary critics struggle with these issues to this very day, and as teachers share close reading and the interpretation of written text with their students, they will struggle with many of the same questions.
Following Aristotle, little substantial change in interpretive reading of texts occurred until the 19th century. It was not until the emergence of the modern era, with a wider range of philosophical and scientific approaches to understanding the world, that new approaches to literary criticism emerged, including formalism, Marxist criticism, feminist criticism, reader-response criticism, and deconstructionism. These important critical approaches provide different “lenses” through which a text may be interpreted. While we wish our students to approach texts from the lens of formalism, each of these approaches has had an important impact on our interpretation of literary texts, and students may use one or more of these approaches in their own personal reaction to a text, so a familiarity with each is important to teachers as they guide student analysis of texts.
Modern Criticism
Political, philosophical, and theological concerns supplanted much new thinking in the West until the Renaissance. Although there were literary critics and writers, such as Dante, Sir Philip Sidney, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope, who added to the literature interpretation discussion, there were no enormous revisions in the way people read and interpreted texts until the emergence of many schools of literary criticism in the 19th century (Richter, 1998).
During the 18th and early 19th centuries, critics were mainly concerned with whether texts conformed to classical models and often viewed the value of texts by the degree to which they conformed or didn’t (Richter, 1998). Classical models were something to be admired and seen as a route to some underlying truth behind culture, a truth tied to an adoration of a lost ideal in the classical world. Scholars developed a key idea during this period: that the reading of important literary works would improve one’s ethical standing. George Eliot (1856) perhaps most elegantly stated this in her essay “The Natural History of German Life.” Reading good books made you a better person. As of the early 20th century, scholars were still justifying the teaching of literature that way, and, indeed, the entry of literary study into public schools was grounded in this idea.
Organized systems of interpreting literature emerged as literature made its way into colleges and secondary schools. These schools of literary criticism each focused on a set of agreed-on philosophical presuppositions that affected, to a large extent, the interpretation that resulted. Initially, there were two important schools of literary criticism: (1) biographical and (2) historical.
Biographical criticism has been around since at least the 18th century, and Samuel Johnson (1779–1781) used it in his important work The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, which was enormously popular right into the 20th century. Biographical criticism is intuitively attractive, particularly to those who place great authors on high pedestals. It suggests that, as every reader suspects, much of what happens in the author’s life impacts his or her writing. Thus, biographical criticism strove to analyze the biographies of writers and find connections to their works to read those works more deeply.
For example, biographical critics would point to profound moments in the life of American novelist Edith Wharton that arguably influenced events in her novel Ethan Frome (1911/1992). Wharton, who grew up in 19th century New York City, was raised in a family that shared all the Victorian taboos about women’s sexual feelings. Taught to ignore emerging desires as an adolescent, her emotions escaped in a frequent and terrifying anxiety every time she returned to her parents’ house. Her fear and anxiety were often so profound she was unable to walk inside the house and had to wait at the threshold for the symptoms to pass (Wharton, 1911/1992). Knowing that episode of Wharton’s biography can be telling when reading Ethan Frome. This novel describes a Massachusetts farmer, a former engineering student, who finds himself locked in a loveless marriage and a career he adopted out of necessity rather than interest. Into this barren life comes his wife’s beautiful cousin Mattie Silver. Ethan resists his growing desire for the beautiful girl but cannot deny it. Throughout the novel, the reader is placed in the position of observing important events from beyond a threshold, often a closed door beyond which things are clearly occurring (but which the reader is not privy to). Perhaps more important is the thematic implication of the threshold, where Ethan wishes to express his desire for Mattie but repeatedly stops before doing so—on the threshold of action, so to speak.
While a biographical reading like this may be correct and inform our understanding of the novel, it is certainly not the only way to read Ethan Frome. One of the limitations of biographical criticism is the way it implies that nonbiographical interpretations of a text are somehow less valid than biographical ones. Further, biographical criticism has an inherent flaw: one must know the author’s biography. The fact is, the biographies of the vast majority of writers are unknown. Even in the case of William Shakespeare, regarded as the greatest playwright in the English language, words like may, might, and could signal the uncertainty and speculation of his biographies. The facts known about Shakespeare are few, and the documents from his life even fewer. Sparse data limit the biographical criticism available on our most important writers. Indeed, biographical criticism would have nothing at all to say about the most prolific author in the English language—anonymous.
Simultaneously with biographical criticism, literary critics also favored a historical view of the analysis of written texts. The basic presupposition of historical criticism is that understanding the historical moment of the text creation—particularly the political, theological, cultural, and social contexts—provides insights into interpretive meanings of texts (Historical criticism, 2014). While history is more readily accessible than an author’s biography, fundamental flaws also exist in this approach to interpreting texts. First, not all historical periods are equally knowable. We know a great deal more, for example, about the French Revolution in the late 18th century than we do about the historical events surrounding the Trojan War. Indeed, some are not even sure the Trojan War was a real historical event. Also, while history is more knowable, the question arises as to whose history is the accepted version. There is an adage that history is written by the winners. There is truth to this, and history students will report that any important historical event viewed from the perspective of the losers looks very different from the commonly accepted version. Further, historical criticism starts from the assumption of the strong effect of the historical moment on the author as he or she composes a text. But surely there have been authors who have not succumbed to that influence or who have, like the French philosopher Montaigne, withdrawn from their own society. There are important examples of this throughout
