Et alia

Slănic Salt Mine, Prahova, Romania. June 2023. #my photos

Here we can see 5 different types of criticism (according to Kesey's model).

Each is marked for their relation to the WORK or text itself being responded to. Formal criticism differs from the other modes of criticism in that it is primarily concerned with the form of the work itself, responding to and analyzing elements purely with the work. (In common tumblr parlance, Watsonian analysis falls predominantly in this realm).

Each other mode of criticism engages with the work in the context of some other pole - the author, the literary field, the audience, or reality. These other modes can fall anywhere on the axis between being focused on the other pole and being focused on the work itself. Someone could, for example, do an author focused critique of Stephen King (doing historical criticism, or what's also often referred to as "genetic criticism") and use anywhere from one story of his to the entire body of his work to make claims about how he writes, what subject matter he writes, or other such analysis. (What tumblr calls "Doylist analysis" most often falls into this mode of critique.) Conversely, the analysis might be much more focused on the work, only dipping into minor facts about the author to back up claims that are primarily focused on the text itself.

An analysis could move between multiple modes. It could look at audience responses to a particular work, as well as audience responses to other works from that year, that genre, or other such engagement with other works (intertextual analysis), to analyze why audience response to that work might be different. (If a critic looked at how audiences responded to a work in the superhero genre with a woman protagonist and compared their responses to very similar works featuring a non-woman protagonist, for example, the critic would be deploying both work formal & intertextual techniques to ultimately make an audience-focused analysis.)