Critical Approaches

Ways of approaching popular fiction. As with more conventional forms of literary criticism, Popular Fiction raises issues about how you go about discussing, analysing and interpreting texts. Major approaches to Popular Fiction have included the sociological, the literary, the ideological, the formalist and structuralist approaches, in addition to various psychological, gender-based, reader-response, and deconstructionist approaches. Here is a brief summary of each of these approaches. Take one example of popular fiction and see how well that approach applies to the study of that text. What would this critical approach concentrate on when applied to that example?

1. sociological. The sociological approach is concerned less with the innards of the texts than with their place, role and function in society as a whole, looking perhaps at the publishing industry, the social impact of popular fiction, and the economic and political role of works of popular fiction.

1. literary. In the same way that critics "read" a classic text like Mansfield Park or Middlemarch literary approaches to Popular fiction concentrate on the style, narrative form, use of imagery and symbolism, characterisation and literary value of the text, in relation to other texts, and its social and historical contexts.

1. ideological. Ideological approaches to popular fiction explore the inner workings of texts in relation to the wider patterns and competing forms of socially functional patterns of meaning or ideas. In recent years, with the impact of Marxist criticism, works of Popular Fiction have been seen to provide fertile ground for ideological critics. For example, in relation to The Day of the Jackal, an ideological approach would look at the ways in which the text encodes, dramatises or otherwise deals with ideas (or ideologies) of bureaucracy, power and law and order, in relation to the wider operation of these ideas within society.

1. formalist. As the name suggests, formalist approaches look at the ways in which works of popular fiction follow the rules, codes and conventions of story-telling, "story grammar", in other words, questions of the form of such texts. The key figure behind Formalist approaches is often seen to be the Russian critic Vladimar Propp, most notably for his work on the logic or conventions of the folk tale. Popular Fiction is sometimes seen to be formulaic, ie., it follows set patterns of narrative order/disorder/resolution, with characters as "agents" of this narrative working-out of patterns (Hero, Heroine, Helper, Villain, etc.).

1. structuralist approaches. Structuralism attempts to identify the ways in which texts become meaningful, whether through their reliance on certain oppositions of terms (nature/culture; active/passive; good/bad; male/female, etc.) which are either generated within each text, or are social in origin, or through their relationship to the "structure" of which they are a part (structures of narrative order and the "rules" of story-telling; structures of the wider literary system (other books!); structures of social meaning. In the Approaches course taken in semester 1 you will already have come across these ideas, but you will find it helpful to recall the work of Roland Barthes (in Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives) or Umberto Eco (most accessibly in his essays on James Bond novels in The Role of the Reader).

1. Gender-based approaches. These are often viewed as derivatives of the ideological approach, and place particular emphasis on looking at texts from a gender-based approach, ie., how are men/women represented or constructed in a particular text? Is the text addressed to a recognisably gendered audience?

1. reader-response criticism. This approach emphasizes what readers do, or are led to do, when reading a particular text, whether in terms of cognitive strategies (thinking or working out), affective involvement (feeling and empathy), or ideological or social involvement (engagement, desire and recognition).

1. What is the relationship between popular fiction and society, or ideologies? Do works of popular fiction have a cultural function (in terms of expressing or symbolically enacting social attitudes, values and ideas)? Do they reproduce, reflect, legitimate, direct or challenge ideas and attitudes within society?

1. How relevant are issues of authorship and authorial intention when analysing or discussing works of popular fiction?

1. Do individual readers (or groups of readers) respond to particular texts in particular ways?

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