Literary Terms

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Smt. S. B. Guardy Department of English

Written by: Poojaba G. Jadeja

Roll No.: 22

Year: 2014, semester 2 

Topic: Literary Terms: Psychoanalytical criticism, New criticism and Diaspora   

Psychoanalytical Criticism:

To understand psychoanalytical criticism, we have to understand, psychological criticism. Psychological criticism deals with a work of literature primarily as an expression, in an indirect and fictional form, of the state of the mind and the structure of personality of the individual author. In easy words, we can say that, psychological criticism studies psychology of author through their work.

Psychological approach emerged in the early decades of the 19^th century, as part of the Romantic replacement of earlier mimetic and pragmatic views by an expensive view of the nature of criticism.

There are three types of the critical procedures that are based on the assumption that the details and form of a work of literature are correlated with its author’s distinctive mental and emotional traits. These are...

1.       Reference to the author’s personality in order to explain and interpret a literary work.

2.       Reference to literary works in order to establish, biographically, the personality of the author. And

3.       The mode of reading a literary work specifically in order to experience the distinctive subjectivity of its author.

Since 1920s a widespread type of psychological literary criticism has come to be psychoanalytical criticism. Its premises and procedures were established by Sigmund Freud.

Freud had developed the dynamic form of psychology that he called “psychoanalysis” as procedure for the analysis and therapy of neuroses, but expanded it to account for many development and practices in the history of civilization, including warfare, mythology, and religion, as well as literature and other arts.

Freud gives many theories which are known as psychoanalytical criticism’s major theories and basic ideas for that criticism. Theories like, neuroses, sublimate, three stages of human mind and many other are very famous even today. 

Freud’s concepts and theories:

Freud’s brief comment on the workings of the artist’s imagination set forth the theoretical framework of “classical” psychoanalytic criticism. Freud proposes that literature and the other arts, like dreams and neurotic symptoms, consist of the imagined or fantasised, fulfilment of wishes that are either denied by reality or prohibited by the social standards of morality and propriety.

The forbidden wishes come into conflict with the ‘censor’ and are repressed by the censor into the unconscious realm of the artist’s mind, but are permitted to achieve a fantasised satisfaction in distorted forms that serve to disguise their real motives and objects from the conscious mind.

The chief mechanisms that affect these disguises of unconscious wishes are (1) condensation (2) displacement and (3) symbolism. The disguised fantasies that are available to consciousness are called by Freud the MANIFEST CONTENT of dream or work of literature; the unconscious wishes that find a semblance of satisfaction into the disguised expression he calls the LATENT CONTENT.

Freud also asserts that artists process special abilities that differentiate them radically from the patently neurotic type of personality. And so, arts make them capable of satisfying the unconscious desires that other people share with the individual artist; to meld an artistic medium into a faithful image of the creatures of his imagination, as well as satisfying artistic form.

This outline of Freud’s theory of art in 1920 was elaborated and refined, but not radically altered, by later developments in his theory of mental structures, dynamics and processes. Freud’s model of the mind is having three functional aspects:

(1) The Id: which incorporates libidinal and other innate desires.

(2) The Superego: the internalization of social standards of morality and propriety.

(3) The Ego: which tries as best it can to negotiate the conflict between the insatiable demands of the Id, the impossibly stringent requirements of the Superego, and the limited possibilities of gratification offered by reality.

Freudian critics, in a mode suggested by Freud’s later writings on the role of “ego psychology” in elaborating the manifest content and artistic form of the work of literature; that is on the way that the ego, in contriving the work, consciously  manages to mediate between the conflicting demands of Id, the superego and the limits imposed by reality.

Fredrick C. Crews (literature and psychology), James Thrope, and Norman Holland these and many other writers and critics try to explain and follow “psychoanalytic criticism” and Freudian concepts and theories about it. Psychoanalytic criticism tries to connect psychology and literary criticism. 

New Criticism:  

The term ‘New Criticism’ made current by the publication John Crowe Ransom’s ‘The New Criticism’ in 1941, came to be applied to a theory and practice that remained prominent in American literary criticism until late in the 1960s.

The movement derived in considerable part from elements in I. A. Richard’s ‘Principles of Literary Criticism’ (1924) and ‘Practical criticism’ (1929) and from the critical essays of T. S. Eliot.

In this criticism critics opposed a prevailing interest of scholars, critics, and teachers of that era in the biographies of authors, in the social context of literature, and in literary history by insisting that the proper concern of literary criticism is not with the external circumstances or effects or historical position of a work, but with a detailed consideration of the work itself as an independent entity.

New Criticism differed from another in many ways. These are given below... 

According to new critics,

(1) A poem should be regarded as an independent and self-sufficient verbal object. The autonomy of the work itself as existing for its own sake New Critics warn the reader against critical practices which divert attention from the poem itself.

(2) The principles of the New Criticism are basically verbal. That is literature is conceived to be a special kind of language whose attributes are defined by systematic opposition to the language of science and of practical and logical discourse, and the explicative procedure is to analyse the meanings and interaction of words, figures of speech and symbols. The emphasis is on “organic unity” of its overall structure with its verbal meanings.

(3) The distinctive procedure for a New Critic is explication, or close reading, the detailed analysis of the complex interrelationships and ambiguities of the verbal and figurative components within a work.

(4) The distinction between literary genres does not play an essential role in the New Criticism. The essential components of any work of literature, whether lyric, narrative or dramatic, are conceived to be words images and symbols rather than character, thought and plot.

These linguistic elements are often said to be organized around a central humanly significant and to manifest high literary value to the degree that they manifest ‘tension’, ‘irony’ and ‘paradox’ in achieving ‘reconciliation of diverse impulses’ or an ‘equilibrium’ of opposed forces. The form of work, whether or not it has characters and plot, is said to be primarily a “structure of meanings” which evolve into an integral and freestanding unity mainly through a play and counter play of “thematic imagery” and “symbolic action”.

The basic orientation and modes of analysis in the New Criticism were adapted to the contextual criticism of Eliseo Vivas and Murray Krieger.       

Critics of New Criticism:

Notable critics of this criticism were the southerners Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, whose work ‘Understanding Poetry’ and ‘Understanding fiction’ did much to make the New Criticism the predominant method of teaching literature.

Other prominent writers of that time were Ransom, Brooks, Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur and William K. Wimsatt, F. R. Leavis, Anne Samson. These are some New Critics who introduce method of New Criticism. The works “The Well wrought Urn”, “The Verbal Icon” and many other are related to the New Criticism.

Thus, New Criticism introduces new method of criticism with only studding work as a whole. They opposed external background studies and study of author and his historical, social background.

Diaspora: 

In literature, this term is used differently. It is a Greek word which means a scattered population with common origin in a smaller geographic area. In literary sense the meaning is different. Today, Diaspora literature becomes important for world literature.

The definition of Diaspora can be found in 1993 edition of shorter Oxford. Now, Diaspora refers to ‘anybody of people living outside their traditional homeland’.

Diaspora literature involves an idea of a homeland, a place from where the displacement occurs and narrative of journeys undertaken on account of economic compulsions.

Basically Diaspora is a minority community living in exile. The dispersal signifies the location of a fluid human autonomous space involving a complex set of negotiation and exchange between the minority and majority, being spokes persons for minority rights and their people back to home and significantly transecting the contact zone a space changed with the possibility of multiple challenges.

The term ‘Diaspora’ or ‘Exile alienation’ are synonymous and possess an ambiguous status of being both a refugee and an ambassador. The two roles being different, the Diasporic writers attempt at doing justice to both. These people migrating to another country in exile home living peacefully immaterially but lost home forever.

Looking at the diasporic literature in a broader perspective it is seen that such helps in understanding various cultures, breaking the barriers between different countries, localizing the global and even spreading universal peace.

Diasporic writings occupy a place of great significance between countries and cultures. Theories are generated and positions defined in order to construct new identities, which further negotiate boundaries and confines that relate to different temporary and special metaphors. This movement causes the dislocation and location of cultures and individuals harp upon memories.

Diasporic writers are often pre-occupied with the elements of nostalgia as they seek to locate themselves in new culture.  They write in relation with the culture of their homeland and at the same time adopt and negotiate with the cultural space of the host land.

Diasporic writers live on the margins of two countries and create cultural theories. These writers attempt to doing justice with both his duty, as refugee, he seeks security and protection and as an ambassador projects his own culture and help enhance its comprehensibility.  

The chief characteristic features of the Diasporic writings are the quest for identity, uprooting, insider and outsider syndrome, nostalgia, nagging sense of guilt etc. That’s way; Diasporic writing has its own place in literatures. Diaspora, Diasporic writings give vast contribution in literature which is very important and famous today.