Critical Lenses
Reader Response Criticism
• Focuses on the activity of reading a work of literature.
• Reader response critics shift the meaning of a work from the
traditional view of the work as an achieved structure of
meanings and focus more on the responses of readers to the
text.
• By this shift of perspective, a literary work is converted into an
activity that goes on in a reader’s mind, and what had been
features of the work itself – narrator, plot, characters, style, and
structure – is less important than the connection between a
reader’s experience and the text.
• Reader response critics believe that literature has no objective
meaning or existence.
• This is a more individualized lens as each reader has his or her
own life experiences that influence their critique of a literary
work.
Questions a Reader Response Critic
might ask:
• What factors surrounding my reading of the
text are influencing my response?
• What personal qualities or events relevant to
this particular text might influence my
response?
• What textual factors might influence my
response?
Historical Criticism
• Historicists aim simultaneously to understand
the work through its historical context and to
understand cultural and intellectual history
through literature.
• Two main ideas of historical criticism are:
1. The social, political, and cultural context
(historical influences) affect the creation of
works of literature.
2. The meaning of literature changes over time as
these same contexts change.
Questions a Historical Critic might ask:
• What were the responses of the original
audience?
• What are the meanings and implications of
specific words, symbols, images, and
characters throughout time?
• How do contemporary events influence the
writing of the author?
Socialist/Marxist Theory
• Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist,
sociologist, journalist in mid-19th c.
• Marx believed that history moved in stages which
were mainly shaped by economic systems:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Feudalism: the power of the ruling class comes from
their control over fruitful land, leading to the
control and exploitation of the peasants who farmed
that land
Capitalism: economic and political system defined
by a country’s trade being controlled by private
owners for profit, rather than by the state.
Socialism: social organization that requires
production, distribution, and exchange to be
controlled by the community as a whole.
Communism: society in which all property is
publicly owned and each person works and is paid
according to their abilities and needs.
Marx continued…
• The key to understanding Marx’s economic systems was to focus
on the “mode of production.”
• Example:
– Feudalism = agricultural production
– Capitalism = industrial production
• An understanding of who owned the means of production is also
necessary.
• Example:
– Capitalism = a small upper class owned factories
– Socialism = larger working class owned factories
• Each system, up to and including capitalism, was characterized
by the exploitation of one class by another
• Each system also perpetuated itself as a social norm (no one
during the Middle Ages really questioned feudalism because that
was the understood norm of society).
An investigation into the validity of
Marx’s theories
• Marx argued that great historical changes followed
a three-step pattern called thesis-antithesissynthesis.
• Any idea or condition (thesis) brings into being its
opposite (antithesis). The two opposites then conflict
until they produced a new, higher stage (synthesis).
• Therefore, each class system contained the seeds of
its own destruction.
– Example: Marx saw capitalism as the cruelest, most
efficient system yet evolved for the exploitation of the
working majority by a small class of owners. It was the
nature of capitalism for wealth and ownership to be
concentrated in an ever-shrinking mega-rich class.
Questions a Marxist might ask:
Who is in the upper class?
How is the upper class ruling the lower class?
How close is a particular society to communism?
Whom does it benefit?
What is the social class of the author?
What values does it reinforce?
What values does it subvert?
What conflict can be seen between the values the
work champions and those it portrays?
• What social classes do the characters represent?
• How do characters from different classes interact or
conflict?
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Feminist Theory
• Feminism is a philosophy in which women and their
contributions are valued. It is based on social,
political and economical equality for women.
• Feminists can be anyone in the population: men,
women, girls or boys.
• Most societies are structured upon a patriarchy (an
ideology in which men are superior to women and
have the right to rule women).
• Feminism can also be described as a movement or a
revolution that includes women and men who want
the world to be equal without discrimination.
Feminists view the world as being unequal.
Lois Tyson
Lois Tyson is a professor of English at
Grand Valley State University. She is an
active Feminist and we will be using her
interpretation of Feminist theory to
understand this critical lens.
Feminist Critique of Literature
• Feminist criticism of literature is concerned with
the ways that literature reinforces the oppression
of women socially, economically, politically and
psychologically.
• This critical theory looks at how aspects of our
culture are inherently patriarchal (male
dominated) and tries to expose misogyny (hate of
women) in male writing about women.
(Tyson, 83) (Richter, 1346)
Feminist critical theory argues that…
1. Women are oppressed by patriarchy economically, politically,
socially, and psychologically
2. In every domain where patriarchy reigns, woman is the other:
she is marginalized, defined only by her difference from male
norms and values
3. All of western civilization is deeply rooted in patriarchal
ideology, (ex: the biblical portrayal of Eve as the origin of sin and
death in the world )
4. Biology determines our sex (male or female), culture determines
our gender (masculine or feminine)
5. Gender issues play a part in every aspect of human production
and experience whether we are consciously aware of these issues
or not.
Questions a Feminism Theorist might ask:
• How is the relationship between men and women
portrayed?
• What are the power relationships between men and
women?
• How are male and female roles defined?
• What constitutes masculinity and femininity?
• How do characters embody these traits?
• Do characters take on traits from the opposite gender?
How? How does this change others’ reactions to them?
• What does the history of the work’s reception by the public
and by the critics tell us about the operation of patriarchy?
• What role does this work play in terms of women’s literary
history and literary tradition?
Post-colonial Theory
• Post-colonial critics are concerned with literature
produced by colonial powers and literature
produced by those who were/are colonized.
• Post-colonial theory looks at issues of power,
economics, politics, religion, and culture and how
these elements work in relation to colonial
hegemony (leadership or dominance).
– For example, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness vs.
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
• Post-colonial critics also question the role of
western academia as the dominant form of
knowledge making.
Questions a post-colonial theorist might ask:
• How does the literary text represent various aspects of
colonial oppression?
• What does the text reveal about the challenges of postcolonial identity, including the relationship between
personal and cultural identity and such issues as double
consciousness and hybridity?
• What person(s) or groups does the work identify as “other”
or stranger? How are such people/groups described and
treated?
• Are there meaningful similarities among the literatures of
different post-colonial populations?
• How does a western text reinforce or undermine colonialist
ideology through its representation of colonization and/or
its inappropriate silence about colonized peoples?