A literary critic pays special attention to one of several aspects: its intended purpose, its effect on an audience, its language and structure, and the information and worldview it conveys. In studying the formal characteristics of a text, a critic usually recognizes the variability of performances of dramatic works and the variability of readers’ mental interpretation of the texts. In studying the purpose of the author, a critic acknowledges the forces beyond the conscious intentions of the writer that can affect what he actually communicates. In studying what a literary work is about, a critic explores the complex relationship between truth and fiction in various types of storytelling. In studying the impact of the literature on its audience, a critic has been increasingly aware of how cultural expectations shape experience.

Because works of literature can be studied after their first publication, awareness of historical and theoretical context contributes to our understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of them. Historical research relates a work to the life and times of its author. Attention to the nature, functions, and categories of literature provides a theoretical framework joining a past text to the experience of present readers.

The tradition and approaches of textual analysis and literary criticism includes the observation of philosophers and creative writers and literary, historical, and cultural studies scholars - from Aristophanes, The Frogs, 405 B. C.; Plato, The Republic, 380 B. C.; and Aristotle, Poetics, 330 B. C.; to Émile Zola, Le roman experimental, 1880; Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Living, 1889; and Anatole France, La vie littéraire, 1888-1893.

At the end of the Nineteenth Century, in England and in America, as academics began to push for university courses in English and American Literature, the question as to how could the study of literature be defined and carried out in a manner that was disciplined and objective enough to give it status as an academic pursuit. This debate led, not only to the development of the first English departments, but to the development of the first types of literary theory, i. e., theories about how literature worked, what it did, and how it ought to be read and studied.

The social, cultural, and technological development of the Twentieth Century have vastly expanded the Western critical tradition in textual analysis and literary criticism. Modern critics in the established cultural centers in Western Europe heed not only Central Europe and North America but also areas once considered remote, including Russia, Latin America, and most recently, the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa. At a growing number of universities, professors of literature and other related fields paid attention to long-neglected areas of study - for example post colonialism, African-American criticism, and gender studies - aside from the three highly influential paradigms - formalism, structuralism, and new criticism.

FORMALISM

Formalism, a text-based critical method, was developed by Victor Shlovsky, Vladinmir Propp, and other Russian literary critics in the early Twentieth Century. It involved a detailed inquiry about the plot structure, symbolic imagery, narrative perspective, and other literary techniques of literature. After the mid-1930s, leaders of the Union Soviet of Socialist Republics and its subsequent satellites in Eastern Europe demanded that literature and textual analysis and literary criticism must directly serve their political objectives. Political leaders in those countries suppressed formalist criticism, calling it reactionary. Even such internationally influential opponents of extreme formalism as the Russian Mikhail Bakhtin and the Hungrian Georg Lukács would often find themselves under attack.

Formalism insisted that the best, and indeed the only, way to study literature was to study the text itself in close detail, and to disregard anything outside the text itself, including the author’s biography, the historical context in which the work appeared, how it related to other works both before, during, and after its appearance, and how critics and readers responded to the text. In short, this textual analysis and literary criticism assumed that a text is an isolated object, something to be studied in and of itself alone. This is the criticism that says what literature students ought to do is read the words on the page, and nothing else.

STRUCTURALISM

In the early 1940s, literary critic Roland Barthes, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and other mid-century thinkers and scholars initiated French structuralism by applying linguistically inspired formal methods of literature and related phenomena. Structuralism attempted to investigate the “structure” of a culture as a whole by “decoding” or “interpreting” its interactive systems of signs. These systems included literary texts and genres as well as other cultural formations, such as fashion, advertising, and taboos on certain forms of behavior.

Structuralism looks at the text as a key to understanding ideas and questions beyond the text itself. Rather than centering on the text alone, structuralists ask “big picture” questions: How are literary texts structured? How are they different from non-literary texts? How do literary texts affect readers and audiences? Is there such a thing as a specifically “literary” language, and if so, what is it like? How does literature relate to other aspects of a culture, such as politics, economics, philosophy, or gender relations? Structuralists use the literary text as a kind of springboard to ask questions that are not solely concerned with “the words on the page.”

NEW CRITICISM

The text-based critical method of the formalist critics was accepted in the United States because they are parallel with the concerns of so called New Critics who focused on the overall structure and verbal texture of literary works, such as imagery, metaphor, and other qualities of a literary language apart from both historical setting and biographical information about the author. In the 1940s, when Russian linguist Roman Jakobson and Czech literary theorist René Wellek settled at the Harvard University and the Yale University, respectively, the study of literature in North America had been greatly influenced by the work of Cleanth Brooks and other New Critics. Like his British contemporary, Sir William Empson, Brooks applied the skill of close reading chiefly to the analysis of ironies, paradoxes, and ambiguities in individual texts.

New critics acknowledge that “the words on the page” are the basis for any analysis of any piece of literature - the raw material from which any ideas or argument must necessarily come. But, the analysis rarely stops with close reading; that close reading shows us something, not only about the construction of the text, but about the author, the reader, the social context of the author, the social context of the reader, and about the methods of interpretation available to authors and readers.

POST STRUCTURALISM

The 1960s saw a revolution in literary theory. During this decade, New Criticism dominated the literary world with the assumption that one interpretation of a text could be discovered. Believing that a text contained its meaning within itself, New Critics paid little attention to its historical context. For the New Critics, the meaning of a text was bound to the ironies, paradoxes, and ambiguities found within the structure of the text. By analyzing the text alone, New Critics believe that an intelligent critic could identify the central ironies, paradoxes, and ambiguities of the text and could explain how the text ultimately resolved these without sacrificing its general theme. Unlike the New Critics, Jacques Derrida, the founding father of deconstruction, denied the objective existence of a text. Disavowing the basic assumption of New Criticism, Derrida and other post structural critics challenged the definitions and assumptions of reading and writing, and from a philosophical perspective, asked what it means to read and to write.

Unlike the New Critics who believed that the language of literature was somehow different from the language of science and everyday conversation, post structural critics assumed that the language of the text is not distinct from the language used to analyze it. In other words, the language used in textual analysis and literary criticism helps form and shape the text being analyzed and criticized. The text and the language cannot be separated, and the language helps create objective reality.

Believing that objective reality can be created by language, post structural critics assumed that all reality is a social construction, and from this point of view, they assumed that there is no objective reality. According to post structural critics, each culture has a dominant group who determines an ideology or hegemony. All people in a given culture are consciously and unconsciously asked to conform to the prescribed ideology or hegemony.

What happens when one’s ideas, one’s thinking, and one’s personal background do not conform? For the blacks living in Africa and the Americas, the traditional answer has been silence. Live quietly, work quietly, and think quietly. The message sent has been clear: conform and be quiet, deny yourself and everything will be well.

But, many have not been quiet. Alice Walker, Edward Said, Franz Fanon, Toni Morrison, Gayatri Spivak, Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez had continued to challenge the dominant cultures. Defying the dominant culture, they believe that the ethics, values, and view of life of an individual do not matter. They did not believe with one culture, one perspective, and one interpretation of life.

Post structuralism has three approaches: post colonialism, African-American criticism, and gender studies. Although each group has its own concern, all seek after the same thing: to be heard and to be understood as valuable members of society. Because, post structuralists believe that their past and future are intricately interwoven, they also believe that by suppressing their past, their future is also suppressed. Often called subaltern writers, a term, used by Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist critic, which refers to the classes who are not in control of a culture’s ideology or hegemony, they provide new ways to see and understand cultural forces at work in literature.

POSTCOLONIALISM

Postcolonialism concerns itself with literature or literatures written in colonized countries like Asia, Africa, Australia, and South America. Often called third-world literature, postcolonialism investigates what happens when two cultures clash and when one of them with its accompanying ideology deems itself superior than the other.

Postcolonialism started in the 1950s, the decade when France ended its long involvement in Indochina, when Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre parted ways about Algeria, when Fidel Castro delivered “History Shall Absolve Me”, his most famous speech, and when Alfred Sauvy coined the term Third World that represents countries that are not culturally, politically, and philosophically defined by Western metaphysics. In the 1960s, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, George Lamming, and other critics, authors, and philosophers published text that became the foundation of postcolonial writings.

Like deconstruction and other post structural approaches to textual analysis and literary criticism, postcolonialism is a heterogeneous field of study where even its spelling provides an alternative. Some argue that it should be spelled with no hyphen - postcolonialism; while others argue that it should be spelled with hyphen - post-colonialism. Some suggests that it has two branches - those who view postcolonialism as a set of cultural strategies centered in history and those who view postcolonialism as a set of diverse methodologies that possess no unitary quality. Even the former group can be subdivided into two branches - those who believe that postcolonialism refers to the period after the colonized countries have become independent and those who believe that postcolonialism refers to the characteristics of a country from the time of its colonization to the present.

However, postcolonialism concerns itself with the diverse and the numerous issues that becomes evident when a literary critic examines various subjects such as place, history, ethnicity, language, feminism, education, resistance, difference, production, universality, nationalism, representation, and postmodernism. In its interaction with the colonizing culture, the colonized culture is forced to be obliterated or to go underground.

It is only after the colonization that the colonized people have time to think and to write about their oppression and loss of cultural identity. Born out of the colonized people’s frustrations, fears, hopes, and dreams about the future; and direct and personal cultural clashes with the colonizing culture, postcolonialism comes into existence.

Although a number of postcolonial critics such as Frantz Fanon, Homi K Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have contributed to postcolonialism’s ever growing body of practical methodology, the key figure in its establishment is Edward W Said’s Orientalism in 1978. In this text, Said reprimanded the literary world for not investigating and for not taking seriously the study of colonization, also known as imperialism.

According to Said, Nineteenth Century Europeans justified their territorial conquests by propagating Orientalism - a creation of non-European stereotypes that “Orientals” were crazy, indolent, unreliable, thoughtless, and sexually immoral. However, Said argued that all human knowledge can be viewed only through one’s cultural, political, and ideological framework. For him, a theory, either literary or political, can never be totally objective.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN CRITICISM

The growing interest of postcolonialism in the late 1970s to the present provided a renewed interest among African-American writers and their works. For the first seven decades of the Twentieth Century, African-American criticism was alive and enthusiastic; its chief concern being the developing understanding of the nature of African-American culture. African-American critics exposed the treatment of African-Americans, a repressed, suppressed, and colonized subculture, at the hands of their “white conquerors”. Presenting a variety of themes in their prose and poetry, such as the search for personal identity, the mild and the militant pictures of hatred and protests, the bitterness of the struggle of black men and women in America to achieve social, political, and economic success, African-American critics gave America numerous personal portraits of what it meant to be a black writer struggling with personal, cultural, and national identity.

Perhaps the most important African-American critic is Henry Louis Gates Jr. Unlike many African-American critics, Gates directed his attention to the other African-American critics refusing the premise that theory is something that the white people do and declaring that they must redefine theory itself from within their own black culture. Gates also attempted to provide a theoretical framework for developing an African-American literary canon.

Today, African-American critics and African-American feminist critics believe that they must develop a literary criticism devoted to African-American literature considering the language of blackness, because they believe that their literature is a significant discourse that has been ignored. According to them, this body of literature must be reformed, and its beginnings have brought another body of literature that has also been neglected or relegated to second-class citizenship: the writings of females with its accompanying approach to textual analysis and literary criticism - gender studies.

GENDER STUDIES

Alice Walker, Toni Morison, and Gloria Naylor are African-American women writers who have successfully bridged the gap between subaltern authors and the dominant culture. As models for other African-American women writers, they have found their voice in a society dominated by males and Western metaphysics, and their works have become influential texts in gender studies.

Concerned primarily with feminist criticism, gender studies broaden traditional feminist criticism to include an investigation not only of femaleness but also maleness. Like the traditional feminist theory, gender studies continues to investigate how women and men view such terms as ethics, society, personal identity, and definition of truth.

Striving to develop a philosophical basis of feminist criticism, gender studies re-examines the literary canon and questions the traditional definition of family, sexuality, and female reproduction. In addition, it continues to articulate and to investigate the nature of feminine writing, and joins feminist scholarship with postcolonial discourses noting that postcolonialism and feminism share many characteristics - the chief having oppressed peoples.

As with feminist criticism, the goal of gender studies is to analyze and to challenge the established literary canon. Women themselves must challenge the hegemony and free themselves from prejudices and false assumption that have prevented them from defining themselves. By involving themselves in textual analysis and literary criticism and its accompanying approaches, gender scholars believe that women and men alike can redefine who they are, what they want to be, and where they want to go.