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04 January, 2013

Defining critism, theory and literature

Say you happen to be present when an argument broke. As you watch all this happen, you would ..

  • wonder how the  people involved are feeling
  • evaluate their social positions
  • conjecture about the social structure of the people involved 
  • have your feelings temporarily affected 
  • become an observer of this conflict
  • 'read' not only what was said, but what was left unsaid
  • imagine their feelings, desires and results of their interactions
  • fill in the 'gaps' about their characters
  • simultaneously develop them not as they really were, but as you imagined them to be
  • become a participant in the actions of their tale
  • ask questions about the nature of the characters
  • ask the events of their story 
  • ask their and your emotional responses to the story line

These are all the same kinds of questions that a literary critic asks when reading a work of fiction. They become :
  • an evaluator
  • an interpretor
  • a participant in the story itself

Names of elements that literary critics use in order to help them articulate and analyze their literary works.
  • author
  • reader
  • narrator
  • narratee
  • etc.

One critic, the Russian writer, essayist, and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) coined the term *dialogic heteroglossia ("many voices in multiple conversations") to explain the various conversations occurring in one literary genre, the novel. 

Technical vocabulary

  • explain constituent elements
  • avenues to discovering their meanings



~Thanks for reading~

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