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What
follows are descriptions of six prominent approaches to literary
analysis. These are taken from the
text Texts and Contexts: Writing About Literature with Critical Theory
by Steven Lynn.
New
Criticism:
Assumptions:
- The critic’s interest
ultimately should be focused on the work itself (not the author’s
intention, nor the reader’s response).
- The purpose of this
attention is to expose the work’s unity; every element should support
its unifying theme.
- The work should also
have some sort of complexity; great literature unifies ambiguities,
ironies, tensions.
Strategies:
- Determine what
oppositions or tensions or ambiguities are present.
- Read closely. You can
assume that every aspect is carefully calculated to contribute to the
works unity--figures of speech, point of view, diction, recurrent ideas
or events, everything.
- Say how the work is
unified, how the various elements work to unify it.
Reader-Response
Criticism:
Assumptions:
- An author’s
intentions are not reliably available to readers; all they have is the
text.
- Out of the text,
readers actively and personally make meaning.
- Responding to a text
is a process, and descriptions of that process are valuable.
Strategies:
- Move through the
text in super slow motion, describing the response of an informed reader
at various points.
- Or describe your own
response moving through the text.
- React to the text as
a whole, embracing and expressing the subjective and personal response
it engenders.
Deconstruction:
Assumptions:
- Meaning is made by
binary oppositions, but one item is unavoidably favored (or
“privileged”) over the other.
- This hierarchy is
arbitrary and can be exposed and reversed.
- Further, the text’s
oppositions and hierarchy can be called into question because texts
contain within themselves unavoidable contradictions, gaps, spaces,
absences that defeat closure and determinate meaning. All reading is
misreading.
Strategies:
- Identify the
oppositions in the text.
- Determine which
member appears to be favored and look for evidence that contradicts that
favoring.
- Expose the text’s
indeterminacy. Whereas New Criticism assumes that you should read a poem
closely as if it made sense, deconstruction assumes the opposite: that
if you read closely enough, the text will fail to make sense--or at
least will contradict itself.
New
Historical Criticism:
Assumptions:
- Meaning is
contextual.
- The context for a
literary work includes information about the author; his or her
historical moment; the systems of meaning available at the time of
writing.
- Interpretation of the
work should be based on an understanding of its context.
Strategies:
- Research the author’s
life, and relate that information to the work.
- Research the author’s
time (the political history, intellectual history, economic history,
etc.), and relate that information to the work.
- Research the systems
of meaning available to the author, and relate those systems to the
work.
Psychological
Criticism:
Assumptions:
- Creative writing
(like dreaming) represents the (disguised) fulfillment of a (repressed)
wish or fear.
- Everyone’s formative
history is different in particulars, but there are basic recurrent
patterns of development for most people. These patterns and particulars
have lasting effects.
- In reading
literature, we can make educated guesses about what has been repressed
and transformed.
Strategies:
- Attempt to apply a
developmental concept to the work (or the author or the characters). For
example: the Oedipal complex, anal retentiveness, castration anxiety,
gender confusion.
- Relate the work to
psychologically significant events in the author’s (character’s) life.
- Consider how
repressed material may be expressed in the work’s pattern of imagery or
symbols.
Feminist
Criticism:
Assumptions:
- The work doesn’t
have an objective status, an autonomy; instead, any reading of it is
influenced by the reader’s own status, which includes gender, or
attitudes toward gender.
- Historically the
production and reception of literature has been controlled largely by
men; it is important now to insert a feminist viewpoint in order to
bring to our attention neglected works as well as new approaches to old
works.
- Men and women are
different: they write differently, read differently, and write about
their reading differently. These differences should be valued.
Strategies:
- Consider the gender
of the author, the characters: what role does gender or sexuality play
in this work?
- Specifically,
observe how sexual stereotypes might be reinforced or undermined. Try to
see how the work reflects, or distorts, or recuperates the place of
women (and men) in society.
- Imagine yourself a
woman reading the work.
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