[2026] PTE Academic Reading - Multiple Choice, Single Answer

For centuries, the interpretation of literature was tethered to the biography of the creator, based on the assumption that a poem or novel was merely a coded diary of the author’s private life. This traditional approach, known as biographical criticism, seeks to anchor every metaphor in a specific historical trauma or personal triumph. However, the mid-twentieth century saw a radical shift with the emergence of New Criticism, which advocated for the autonomy of the text. Proponents of this view argue that once a work is published, the author’s intentions become irrelevant, and the meaning is generated solely through the internal relationship of words on the page. While this detachment allows for a more democratic range of interpretations, it can also lead to a sterile, ahistorical analysis that ignores the social context in which the art was forged. Nevertheless, the greatest danger lies in the opposite extreme: the modern tendency to reduce art to a mere symptomology of the artist’s identity. When we treat a masterpiece as nothing more than a historical artifact of a specific life, we rob it of its transcendent power to speak to the universal human condition. True literary engagement requires us to acknowledge the hand that wrote the words without letting it strangle our own imaginative response to the work.