What Is Literary Criticism?
The different approaches subsumed under the label of literary criticism can be considered as an attempt to read the Bible “as literature,” with a sensitivity to the literary features of the biblical text. Literary criticism can thus be defined as “a discipline of literary critics which seeks, by literary analysis, to explain a text as a vehicle of communication between an author and an audience.”[1] Literary criticism is not a unified approach but is comprised of a vast spectrum of diverse systems derived from varied methodological and philosophical bases. In studying Scripture, “biblical” literary critics are using different tools borrowed from “secular” approaches to literature.[2] It must be noted, indeed, that all literary critics do not share a concern for truth. In fact, among the different approaches within literary criticism, only a limited segment of scholars who have not adopted the premises of relativism in language and meaning use the tools of literary criticism to come to
