We all have a range of hereditary responses, and the circumstances in which they are elicited depend on our particular learning history. When an adult human is happy, angry, or scared, this reaction consists of several factors. Altogether, responses or emotion is not hereditary but to a great degree is shaped by the experience of the particular individual (Ramnero & Torneke, 2008). 4. Ideological Criticism Some people believe that the ability of a literary critic to stand outside the boundary of values which are entirely culturally conditioned is his best quality.
This is because those according to Carruthers, Goldies, & Renfrew (2004) who are purely inside a culture cannot know that culture properly because they are totally shaped by it (p.249). It is therefore necessary to note that a person must be independent of the influence of their culture to become a good critic. Ideological criticism locates the meaning of the text not in the author of the text, not in the world behind the text, and not in the text per se, but in the encounter between the text and the reader (Wimbush & Rodman, 2001).
These are the readers, who contrary to the enlightenment ideals of neutrality and fairness, are always fascinated and always historically and culturally conditioned. Their interpretive strategies are circumscribed by their particular social locations, as influenced by factors such as race and ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, socio-political stance, and religious background (Wimbush & Rodman, 2001). 5. The Social Context of the Literary Text or Essay The social context of the literary text is both acknowledge and at the same time reinserted into the framework of literary activity.
Hall and Hobson (1992) explain that the critical act of reading, interpretation, and judgement is “fundamentally a social act” (p.221). For instance, although an aesthetic response is culturally conditioned as taste differs even among those within a single culture, the phenomenon of aesthetic response always remains selective since “nobody finds everything beautiful” (Eeckhout 2002, p.21). Criticism according to Kilcup & Edwards (1999) is propelled by the need to get things right rather than the desire to connect with readers.
This adversarial method excludes the use of emotional response as part of its process of understanding. This is because emotions are culturally conditioned acts of communication that differ from group to group (Wilcox 2000). Emotions are transitory social roles and socially prescribed set of responses to be followed by a person in a given situation. The rules governing the response consist of social norms or shared expectation regarding appropriate behavior (Goodwin & Jasper 2009). Language and culture have a distinctive interrelationship and with the inception of culture, human behaviours responds to artificial, external patterns, social behavior becomes “culturally modified and variable” (Hinkle 1994, p.179). The recognition that the author does not control the whole meaning of his or her text prepared the way for ‘reader-response criticism’, with its emphasis on the reader as a source of meaning-giving, a source conditioned by cultural experience, conscious or unconscious, by social and sexual roles, by ideological assumptions, and so forth (Makaryk, 1993).
For instance, art criticism is informed by an understanding of one’s own cultural and socio-political role in relation to the object of one’s criticism. An art critic does not have to make art in order to criticise since he or she has only to recognize her own creative process of criticism as a response to a socially and culturally conditioned object or situation. This kind of behavior is therefore in contrast with the belief that a critic may impersonally obliterate himself and his subjectivity in order to accurately deliver his criticism objectively (Piper 1999).
People who read or view an object, for instance a film, are conditioned by the time, place, society, or institutions, which they inhabit.
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