Stereotypes depict them as eccentric individuals, hunched over a desk overflowing with papers and books, copious notes scribbled in the margins. But Maggie Berg contends that, to some degree, everyone’s a literary critic.
“What I want my students to come away with is that they’re always being literary critics when they read,” she said. “We are all literary critics when we discuss literature.” Literary criticism is the study, discussion, evaluation and interpretation of literature. Some critics consider literary criticism to be informed by literary theory, while others consider the two to be separate. The actual job of a literary critic is to look at a literary text and how it relates to society, Berg said. For this, literary critics look at a work’s relation to one or more of the schools of criticism, such as feminism, Marxism, formalism or post-structuralism.
“I think the idea is that literary criticism uses ideas that are circulating in society anyway,” Berg said. “It asks questions about how we live our lives, but in relation to literary texts.
“There are so many different ways of going about literary criticism. It depends on your value systems and beliefs.”
Berg, who teaches literary criticism at both graduate and undergraduate levels, said literary criticism is socially relevant because it offers us a different way to view the world.
“Why is literary criticism important? Because the way we read texts—which is what literary criticism is—is directly related to the way we live our lives,” she said.
English Professor Laura Murray said the different schools of literary criticism and theory give a reader the tools to analyze a text.
“If you’re carrying a bunch of tools with you, you’re not always going to use the same one, and you’re not always going to use all of them. … You kind of identify the problem, and then go to the appropriate tool,” she said.
“Knowledge of the different tools allows you to look at a novel through different lenses.” Murray said she tries to look at a text for the first time without a particular literary theory in her mind.
“Certain texts may seem to invite one approach or another. … Myself, I’m not a card-carrying Marxist or feminist or psychoanalytical critic, but I will start to follow those paths if the book seems to invite them,” she said.
In delving into literary criticism, Murray said students should trust their gut reactions.
“Students would do well to trust themselves more than I think they do. Sometimes I feel that students have been told in high school that when you read a book you need to do X, Y and Z, and look for A, B and C … and they suppress their own reactions,” she said.
Learning how to think critically about literature doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it anymore, Murray said.
“Some people think that once you get into the critical mode you can’t enjoy things, or you have to read as a critic. … For me, it doesn’t work that way because understanding how something works can actually increase the pleasure of it,” she said. “I mean, you wouldn’t say that you appreciate nature less if you know about ecology. I’ve always been an analytical kind of person … and I think a lot of us who are in this business are kind of that cast of mind. You have to like reading, and have to be willing to read something a second time, maybe a third or a 10th.”
—With files from Angela Hickman
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