Richard Wright and Cultural Lit: Literary Meaning Derived from Collective Cultural Experience

Cultural criticism is a phrase that is hard to pin down an exact meaning to. There are different psychological, sociological, and literary definitions of the term, as well as the academic definition those two words might garner even without association to another field.

Perhaps this is part of what makes the phrase "cultural criticism" hard to precisely nail down in literary studies, nonetheless it is a method and a direction that should be fully explored and brought into full potential like Marxist and feminist critical theories before it, the two fields that could most easily be seen as the precursors to cultural criticism, a technique that is not so much something new, as it is the further evolution and melding of several of the particular fields that have come before it.

Although the issue of what exactly cultural criticism is, and what all it entails, for the purposes of clarity in order to allow a clear discussion, the definition of cultural criticism in this paper will refer to a field of literary theory in which the strongest meaning from a text results in when the reader of a text shares a cultural familiarity and experience with the author that allows that reader to view the work through eyes similar to those of the author's, resulting in a stronger reader-work connection.

This allows for the broadest definition of cultural criticism, which is necessary for a working definition. Cultural criticism is a study technique that demands an almost interdisciplinary approach. One critic discussed cultural criticism's most significant challenge to other fields of literary theory as its call for radical contextualization.[1] The call of cultural criticism is even more fully affirmed in this article, with the statement that: "Cultural studies voices the call to historicize and contextualize, invoking a still wider field of influences."[2] In cultural criticism the reaction of the reader, or the reader's subconscious, to the text is just as important as the author's influences, intentions, and motives. This is a place where the psychoanalytical and historic approaches can meet.