All readers approach reading from
different theories or critical perspectives
 Awareness of critical theories helps
students read for multiple meanings and
interpretations
 Reasons people read:

› Pleasure
› High culture
› Moral improvement

Philology – study for language –
attention to historical context,
authoritative text, extensive footnotes,
and thorough glossaries
› Generally, classical texts like Greek and
Roman classics
› Medieval texts
Focus on the author
 Uses details from the author’s life to shed
a light on the works
 How does the author’s experiences and
literary influences in turn influence the
writing

› Frankenstein
› A Prayer for Owen Meany
Social
 Political
 Cultural
 Intellectual
 Authors to consider:
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Mary Shelley
Charles Dickens
Ernest Hemingway
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Class conflict
› Economic power and how it can be
distorted and manipulated

The effect of ideology
› “Ideology includes everything that shapes
the individual’s [perception] of life
experience”
› This lens focuses on exposing the attitudes,
values, and beliefs through which
characters/authors perceive reality
1940s & 1950s – Freudian concepts
 Conscious vs. Unconscious

› Conscious: the things we are aware of
› Preconscious: feelings and sensations we are
not presently aware of but can know
through reflection
› Subconscious: things we are unaware of but
that have great influence over us

Id, Ego, Superego (ultra-simplified)
› Id: biological impulses and drives; needs
instant gratification (hunger, heat/cold,
“relief,” etc)
› Ego: rational, controlled; concerned with
pleasure and self-preservation
› Superego: internalized rules/taboos imposed
by authority/society

Oedipus complex, Electra complex
› Part of normal emotional development is for a
child to wish to eliminate/replace the parent of
its gender in the affections of the parent of the
opposite gender
› Although this theory has been largely
discredited, it still has influence in literature and
critical theory

Repression
› Memories of painful, threatening or guilt-laden
situations are pushed into the unconscious
› May interfere with a person’s adult personality
Archetypes – symbols, character types,
and plot lines repeated in cultures across
time and distance
 Seasonal cycles: life, death, rebirth
 Monomyth

› Hero cycle
› Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a
Thousand Faces
› Foster’s How to Read…Like a Professor
Most influential in the 20th century
 Concentration on the formal elements of
a work
 Examines a work for its primacy & is
appreciated:

› As worthwhile for its own sake
› For its aesthetic beauty
› For its understanding of the human condition
in general

Explication means to explain in detail
(annotations help with this)!
› Explain interconnections and ambiguities
› Detailed close analysis
› Author’s intention isn’t relevant
› What matters is what the work actually says
and does
› New critics read the work multiple times.

Unity of form and meaning
› Meaning cannot be separated from form
› Focuses on
 The speaker
 Conflicts and tensions
 Arrangement of parts and details
 The relationships between all of the above
› Pays particular attention to
 Metaphors
 Irony
 Paradox
Looks especially for issues of significance
to all people, in all times
 Literature has its own kind of knowledge

› “experiential knowledge conveyed
imaginatively”
› This is superior to impersonal knowledge of
science
› Claims overreliance on scientific approach
leads to fragmentation within society and
individuals.

Literature offers a hope
› Of wholeness
› Of a “unified sensibility” combining intellect
and feeling
› Of redemption from the division,
specialization, and alienation that science
has sometimes inflicted on the modern world
Focuses primarily on the reader instead of
the text
 On individual effect rather than universal
meaning
 Assumes reading a transaction between an
author, a reader and a text in its cultural
context
 Does not describe the response but
explains the activity in reading

› How the work produces the effects and feelings
it does in the reader

Subjective view
› Cannot mean just anything the reader says
› Reader must
 Pay close attention to the text
 Notice and follow the cues in the text
 Be able to provide evidence from the text to
support the reader’s interpretation.

Interpretive communities: groups of
people with similar circumstances or
assumptions who agree on the
conventions, context and meaning

Collective judgments: role of interpretive
communities is not to find the “right” or
“best” answer but rather to support or
discourage interpretations
› Constraints exist: they grow out of the
strategies, assumptions and conventions of
the community

Prior to 1970 most critics and professors
were white, male academics
› The literary canon therefore favored works
by white male authors, poets and
playwrights
› Consequently, issues of importance to
“marginal groups” – women, people of
color, lower class – were overlooked

Feminism is a rethinking of the literary
canon
Feminist criticism reacted against the
power of male critics to choose the
canon
 1st: What happens to a work written by a
male author when it is read from a
consciously female perspective?
 Becoming a “resisting reader”

› Exposes masculine biases
› Pay attention to not only what is said, but
what is not said?

2nd: Moved on to study literature written
by women
› Not only reexamining the few accepted
female authors in the canon
› But also discovering or rediscovery
neglected/forgotten female authors past &
present

3rd: “something else”
› While women are female, they are also
something else (class, orientation, race, etc.)
› Must examine this also

4th: Marginalized groups
› Took the lead in same questions for ethnic
minorities
 How are the treated by the white patriarchy?
 Are they stereotyped in insensitive or
demeaning ways?, etc.

Orientation not method
› Looks at a set principles that can be fused
with a variety of other lenses
Beyond feminist criticism to focus “on the
idea that gender is socially constructed
on attitudes toward masculinity and
femininity”
 Sex vs. gender

› Sex: physical characteristics of male/female
› Gender: traits designated as
feminine/masculine
› Simone de Beauvoir: “One is not born a
woman, one becomes one.”

Binary oppositions
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Masculine/feminine
Father/mother
Son/daughter
Brother/sister
Active/passive
Reason/emotion
Intelligent/sensitive
“Covers all ‘the critical ramifications of
sexual oppression’”.
Most controversial and difficult
 Challenges the logical principles on which
Western thinking is based like binary
oppositions but includes other
contradictions:

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conscious/unconscious
Being/nonbeing
Reality/image
Right/wrong
Thing/sign
Speech/writing

Challenge the “impulse to divide and
stratify”
› Not always separate and opposed
› Can be interdependent and interactive

Questioning assumptions
› Propose that a text has no stable reference
› Question the ability of language to represent
reality
› Claims “language is not fixed and limited: It
always conveys meanings different from or
beyond what [is] intend[ed].”
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Focuses on gaps and ambiguities in the text
Looks for the “crack” in unity or coherence
“Meaning” not present but filled in by the
act of reading
Meaning is totally contextual
Works don’t reflect reality but create their
own reality
Text is “self-referential”: cannot go outside
the text to the author’s intentions to
determine its signification

Explores the relationship between the
author and his/her work and the cultural
context in which they exist.
› Specific time in a specific place
› Author inevitably influenced by
contemporary events and attitudes
› How people relate to all levels of art, music,
literature
› What the work conveys about social
attitudes and social relations
Different from “old historicism” which
emphasizes facts and events and focuses
on the kinds of events recorded in official
documents and textbooks
 New historics assume it is almost impossible
to recreate the past.
 New historicism attempts to demonstrate:

› how art is shaped by and shapes, social,
historical and economical conditions
› How art is affected by politics and has political
effects itself
Deals with cultural expression and
behavior relating the formerly/currently
colonized parts of the world
 Analysis of writers from colonized parts of
the world
 Themes:

› Identity
› Independence
› Clashes of culture

Deals with
› Struggles when one culture is subjugated by
another
› Creation of otherness (us/them, same/other,
white/colored, rational/irrational,
ordered/chaotic)
› Colonized people’s loss of past, history,
culture, loss of cultural beliefs and practices
› Confronts loss of language and the
cooperation with conquerors necessary to
be economically viable