The Dynamics of Literary Criticism

The Dynamics of Literary Criticism by Norman N. Holland. Oxford University Press, $8.00.

Psychoanalytic criticism is either diagnostic or per allegoriam. It treats literary texts as symptoms of authors or as illustrations of a doctrine. It either eats through the text to a man or holds it up as a reflection of its own images, forms, and pressures. In the second instance, it allegorizes: it takes a work of literature as a system of referents to a body of doctrine put together before, after, or aside from the work—in any case, not by it.