Literary Criticism Essay

Biographical review begins with the simple but central penetration that literature is written by true(a) people and that understanding an informants vitality can help readers more thoroughly comprehend the work. Anyone who reads the biography of a writer quickly sees how much an authors experience shapes both(prenominal) instantly and indirectlywhat he or she creates. assureation that biography will also form (and usually deepen) our response to the work. Sometimes until now knowing a single consequential fact illuminates our reading of a poetry or story.Learning, for example, that Josephine Miles was confined to a wheelchair or that Weldon Kees committed suicide at forty-one will certainly make us pay attention to certain aspects of their poems we king otherwise build missed or considered unimportant. A formalist critic might murmur that we would also have noniced those things by dint of careful textual analysis, but biographic information provided the practical a ssistance of underscoring penetrating but important meanings in the poems.though many literary theorists have assailed biographic criticism on philosophical grounds, the biographical approach to literature has never disappeared beca subroutine of its intelligible practical advantage in glistenen literary texts. It may be accommodative here to make a singularity between biography and biographical criticism. tarradiddle is, strictly speaking, a branch of history it provides a written account of a persons life.To establish and interpret the facts of a poets life, for instance, a biographer would put on all the available informationnot just personal documents standardised earn and diaries, but also the poems for the possible light they might shed on the force fields life. A biographical critic, however, is not concerned with recreating the record of an authors life. Biographical criticism focuses on explicating the literary work by using the perceptiveness provided by kno wledge of the authors life. Quite often biographical critics, like Brett C.Millier in her discussion of Elizabeth Bishops genius Art, will examine the drafts of a poem or story to see both how the work came into being and how it might have been changed from its autobiographical origins. A reader, however, must use biographical interpretings cautiously. Writers are notorious for rewrite the facts of their own lives they often delete embarrassments and comprise accomplishments while changing the details of real(a) episodes to improve their literary impact.John Cheever, for example, much told reporters about his sunny, privileged youth later the authors death, his biographer Scott Donaldson discovered a childhood scarred by a distant mother, a failed, alcoholic father, and shrewish economic uncertainty. Likewise, Cheevers outwardly winning adulthood was plagued by alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, and family tension.The cooling facts of Cheevers life significantly changed the mien critics read his stories. The danger in a famous writer s exampleSylvia Plath and F. Scott Fitzgerald are two modern examplesis that the life story can overwhelm and at long last distort the work. A savvy biographical critic always remembers to base an interpretation on what is in the text itself biographical data should amplify the meaning of the text, not drown it out with irrelevant material.