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| 4740765770 | Formalist or "New Criticism" | - "The text, the text, and nothing but the text." - close reading of literary texts - when analyzing a work, only evidence from the text (intrinsic) is worth considering nothing from the outside (extrinsic) - questions of technique are most important for meaning - seek to understand how author or poet uses figures of speech, symbolism, narrative frames, and the other literary tools at his disposal to achieve "unity of effect" - a work of literature must stand or fall on its own merits - How do the literary elements found in a particular text work together to achieve a unified artistic effect? | 0 | |
| 4740765771 | Biographical Criticism | - studies the events in the life of the author in order to determine how they may have influenced the author's life - What real life event or personality inspired the author to create a given plot twist or character? - Where does real life leave off and the imagination take over? | 1 | |
| 4740765943 | Historical Criticism | - examine the social and intellectual milieu (environment) in which the author wrote - consider the politics and social movements prevalent during the time period of the text's creation - do so in order to determine how the literature under examination is both the product and shaper of society - How did the text in question influence contemporary events and how did contemporary events influence the author's creative choices? | 2 | |
| 4740765944 | Feminist Criticism | - investigate how a literary work either tends to serve or to challenge a patriarchal (male dominated) view of society - literature should be analyzed with the goal of explaining how the text exemplifies or reveals important insights about sex roles and society's structure - traditional "canon" (books that are commonly read and are valued as sacred or genuine) tends to define women as "other", or an object, compared to the male's high statues - focuses on social relationships, including the patterns of thought, behavior, values, enfranchisement and power between the sexes - "a political act whose aim is not simply to interpret the world but to change it by changing the consciousness of those who read and their relation to what they read..." (Judith Fetterly) - How does the text mirror or question a male-dominated (phallocentric) view of reality? - How are feminine and masculine defined and/ or qualified within the text? - How are women represented in texts written by men? - How does the text display the power relationships between genders? | 3 | |
| 4740766156 | Marxist Criticism | - inspired by the historical, economic and sociological theory of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - focus on the connections between the content or form of a literary work and the economic, class, social or ideological factors that have shaped and determined it - perpetually oriented to investigating the social realities to condition works of art - worried about matters of class status, economic conditions, what is published and what is repressed in the literary marketplace, the preferences of the reading public, and so forth - Who has the power/ money in society? Who does not? What happens as a result? - How are the privileged and working classes conveyed? - How are class distinctions established? | 4 | |
| 4740766420 | Psychoanalytical/Psychological Criticism | - analyzes literature from the position that texts express the inner workings of the human mind - focuses on the choices of humans as moral agents - Leo Tolstoy, the accomplished Russian novelist, believed that the purpose of literature was "to make humans good by choice." - power of story has the ability to engage the individual imaginatively in other worlds and other times - invites the reader to put him or herself in the position of other human beings; to empathize - interested in every phase of human interaction and choice as developed in the text - constantly informs us about and leads us to question what it means to be a human being - closely follows these revelations and takes them as a central subject for analysis - What is the text telling us about what it means to be a human being? - Would you act like the main character in the same circumstances? - How is the repressed component of the human psyche represented? - What is behind a character's thoughts and actions? - What are the emotional conflicts within a character? - How was a character's deepest fears and desires presented? | 5 | |
| 4740766425 | Archetypal or Mythological Criticism | - stems from the notion that texts ultimately point out the universality of human experience - built largely on the psychology of Carl Jung - contends that there are certain shared memories that exist in the collective unconscious of the human species - a storehouse of images and patterns, vestigial traces of which inhere in all human beings and which find symbolic expression in all human art, including its literature - Practitioners such as Northrop Frye and Joseph Campbell have figured out a complex and comprehensive correspondence between the basic story patterns of humans comedy, romance, tragedy and irony and the myths and archetypal patterns associated with the seasonal cycle of spring, summer, fall and winter - the death/rebirth theme is said to be the archetype of archetypes - What universal patterns of human experience are evidenced and are being explored in the text? - What archetypes or tropes are present and how do they effect our understanding of the text? | 6 | |
| 4740766912 | Reader Response Theory | - a literary text is not separate and closed-off; rather, its meaning is completed when the individual reader comes in contact with it and while reading creates a new version of what the text is saying - notes that reading is ultimately a personal and idiosyncratic activity - this undoubtedly true "theory" does not qualify as a "critical lens" because it supports the obvious right of each individual to his or her own opinion about a piece of writing without the need to justify or defend himself/herself - in school, students are invited to respond to a text subjectively all the time - this happens, for example, when teachers ask them to "make connections" between the text and their own experience and knowledge of the world - how most people spontaneously react to literature - healthy, indispensable, and inherently subjective and, for that reason, not what we are trying to coach students to accomplish when writing a literary analysis paper - How did you like the book? - What are some connections with other texts? - What makes the text a "good" piece of literature? | 7 | |
| 4740768079 | Postcolonial Criticism | - a type of cultural criticism - involves the analysis of literary texts produced in countries and cultures that have come under the control of European colonial powers at some point in their history - it can refer to the analysis of texts written about colonized places by writers hailing from the colonizing culture - in Orientalism (1978), Edward Said, a pioneer of postcolonial criticism and studies, focused on the way in which the colonizing First World has invented false images and myths of the Third (postcolonial) World Stereotypical images and myths that have conveniently justified Western exploitation and domination of Eastern and Middle Eastern cultures and peoples - in the essay "Postcolonial Criticism" (1992), Homi K. Bhabha has shown how certain cultures (mis)represent other cultures, thereby extending their political and social domination in the modern world order - How does the text illustrate cultural groups marginalized as a result of colonization? - How does the text challenge Eurocentric attitudes? - How do post-colonial writers convey their experiences and identity? | 8 |
