The feminist approach

The feminist approach

                                     According to Sharon Spencer “feminine as applied to literature now a days customarily indicates the author’s  preoccupation with intimate human relationships concern with emotional aspect of life and with the dynamics of the psychic realm of  experience.

                                                    Feminist also implied a position stressing the beliefs that women are inadequate. Feminist literature written by men or women is depicting a search for identity, quest for self and lost prestige and position of women. Feminist literature highlights the basic difference between a man and a woman in the changed context of contemporary life. The growth of women’s self – awareness is a major motif in the feminist literature.

                                                The projection of female psyche reaches at height in the works of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and’ To the light house’. The women writer allies herself intimately with her female reader through this identification.

                                         Feminist in Indian writing

                                                                       Feminism in Indian writing involves two questions the creative writing and the critical approach. It has become common place of literary interpretation to topic as ‘women characters of Mulkraj Anand’, The Feminine principles of Raja Rao’s novels, Female protagonist in Anita Desai,

               Earlier generation of Indian novelist in English Couched extra- marital or illicit relationships, the more recent ones go to the extreme in their enthusiasm.

                History of feminist writing

                       In the first phase of Feminist t writing, writer imitating the norms and traditions cultivated by the more writers. The second phase expresses a strong protest against the patriarchal standard of society. The third phase is a period of self- discovery and self- assertion for women in the west.

                    Feminism is not today view as something limited to a women’s world but something that concern both woman and men together constitute a human family. The cast factor plays dominant role is determination of the status of Indian women.

v Formalist approach

            The Formalist approach regards a work of art in isolation from all the external point of reference. It analyses the work of art as a self- sufficient entity constituted by its parts in their internal relations. And sets out to judge it solely by criteria intrinsic to its own mode of being

v Aristotle’s study of the formal characteristics of a work of Art

                            The analysis of an art from occurs in the central portion of Aristotle’s poetics. Aristotle isolates the species ‘tragedy’ and established its relation to the universal as imitation of a certain action and effected in purging pity and fear. The tragic  work  itself can be  analyzed  formally as a self determining whole made up  of parts, the tragic plot are integrated by the internal relations of ‘ necessity or probability’. Aristotle’s poetics, classical rhetoric and Renaissance theories are earlier examples of systematic approaches to literary discourses.

v Art for art’s sake

                           Certain critics of early 19^th century particularly in Germany expanded upon Kant’s formula that a work of art exhibits ‘purposiveness without purpose’. As Poe expressed it ‘the aim of a poem for poem’s sake’. And it constitutes eloctrin ‘Art for artist sake’. In its extreme form, this doctrine changes into the moral ‘life for art’s sake’. It has been important in the later development in the systematic studies. T.S. Eliot’s dictum’ when we are considering poetry we must consider it primarily as poetry and not another thing’ gained wide approval.

v New criticism As a Healthy Reaction

             New criticism was a healthy reaction against the older philological, historical and biographical approach to the literature. It compelled the reader to be close text instead of read its author. Coleridge traced the formalistic method.

           Modern critics given a linguistic turn to criticism. But the formalist approach has its drawback also because it only stresses on text and neglect the author and milieu of text.

o   Marxist Approach / sociological Approach

                         Sociological criticism begins with the understanding that all literature is an expression of society, social forces, form and conditions. A Marxist critic typically explained literature in any historical era. Usually the Marxist critics examine the relation of a literary product to the actual economic and social reality of its time and place.

                                     The Hungarian thinker George Lukas the most widely influential of Marxist Critics, represents such a flexible view of the role of ideology.  Raymond Williams also adopted Marxist concepts. Most historian and critics believes that literature is related to the era in which author lived society which is addressed.

v Literature as a social institution

                  Literature is a social institution. Language and literary devices are a social creation. Literature imitates life and life is a social reality. In Marxist view of the economic basis of social organization, class ideologies and class conflict have influences the works of many critic.

                   Study of social background of an author’s work and the influence of that background on that work present in ‘The Dickens World’ by Humphy House which gives the readers sociological criticism. We also find the social scene in Dickens’s novels, Social convention in Jane Austen’s, the relation between social issues and morality in Thackeray.

                          Sociological criticism has a deeper insight into the works of the writers and given understanding of the time and condition of the writer. So the feminist approach is related with the solving the problems of women or the mindset of people for the wemen.