Literary Criticism: Literary criticism is an attempt to evaluate and understand the creative writing, the literature of an author. Literature includes plays, essays, novels, poetry, and short stories. Literary criticism is a description, analysis, evaluation, or interpretation of a particular literary work or an author's writings as a whole. Literary criticism is usually expressed in the form of a critical essay. In-depth book reviews are also sometimes viewed as literary criticism. is
Literary Theory: a set a principles or assumptions on which our interpretation of a text is based. It is the assumptions (conscious or subconscious) that undergird one’s understanding and interpretation of language, the construction of meaning, art, culture, aesthetics, and ideological positions.
Whereas literary criticism involves our analysis of a text, literary theory is concerned with our understanding of the ideas, concepts, and intellectual assumptions upon which our actual literary critique rests.
Structuralism
A theory of human kind whose proponents attempted to show systematically, even scientifically, that all elements of human culture, including literature, may be understood as parts of a system of sighs. Critic Robert Scholes has described structuralism as a reaction to “‘modernist’ alienation and despair.” Structuralism, which rose in France in the 1950s, proved to be just a system. European structuralists such as Roman Jakobson, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Roland Barhtes attempted to develop a semiology, or semiotics (science of signs).
According to structuralists, the signs that govern all human communication are arbitrary. In other words there is no inherent reason why a handshake should be used as a means of meeting or greeting. No inherent meaning why a green light should mean “go.” Furthermore, since these signs have no inherent or “natural” meaning, signification derives from the differences among signs.
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New Criticism:A literary movement that started in the late 1920s and 1930s and originated in reaction to traditional criticism that new critics saw as largely concerned with matters extraneous to the text, e.g., with the biography or psychology of the author or the work's relationship to literary history. New Criticism proposed that a work of literary art should be regarded as autonomous, and so should not be judged by reference to considerations beyond itself. A poem consists less of a series of referential and verifiable statements about the 'real' world beyond it, than of the presentation and sophisticated organization of a set of complex experiences in a verbal form (Hawkes, pp. 150-151). Major figures of New Criticism include I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, David Daiches, William Empson, Murray Krieger, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, F. R. Leavis, Robert Penn Warren, W. K. Wimsatt, R. P. Blackmur, Rene Wellek, Ausin Warren, and Ivor Winters.
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