English 8 Literature
Unit 1 Critical Lens
Critical readers understand that writers and readers approach literature from a variety of perspectives,
and these backgrounds/perspectives effective the purpose of a text and way in which an audience
responds.
Critical Lenses
1. Archetypal perspectives
2. Feminist/Gender perspective
3. Marxist/Social class perspective
4. Psychoanalytical perspective
5. Historical/Biographical perspective
As you work through this unit, consider the following questions:
Factual — What is critical theory? What is a critical lens? What are four types of critical lenses? How
were they established? How are they defined?
Conceptual — What archetypes exist in this text, and how do they work to create a broader purpose?
How would a feminist/gender critic approach and respond to this text? How would a Marxist/social class
critic approach and respond to this text? How would a psychoanalytical critic approach and respond to
this text? How would a historical/biographical critic approach this text?
Debatable — What are the advantages and disadvantages to using a particular lens? How fair or biased
is this view? Is it still reasonable in today’s world? Is literary criticism based on scepticism or something
else?
Part 1 Short Stories & Poetry
Approx. 5 weeks
“Young Goodman Brown” – Hawthorne
“The Story of an Hour” – Chopin
“The Necklace” – Maupassant
“Paul’s Case” – Willa Cather
“The Cask of Amontillado” – Edgar Allan Poe
“Little Things” – Raymond Carver
“Cat in the Rain” – Ernest Hemingway
“A Rose for Emily” – Faulkner
“The Lottery” - Shirley Jackson
“Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” –
Hemingway
“On the Subway” – Sharon Olds
“Barbie Doll” –Margie Percy
“We Wear the Mask” – Paul Lawrence Dunbar
“Let America Be America Again” & Harlem, “A Dream
Deferred”– Hughes
“Phenomenal Woman” - Angelou
“Siren Song” – Margret Atwood
“Richard Cory” Edwin Arlington Robson
“To Helen” – Poe
“My First Duchess” – Robert Browning
“To His Coy Mistress” - Marvel
Summative Assessment: Socratic Seminar/Fishbowl Discussion
Part 2 Novel or Drama/play
Approx. 5 weeks
Drama: Death of a Salesman
Summative Assessment: Literary Analysis Essay
Select 1 to 3 critical lenses and write a multi-paragraph analysis of the play/novel studied in class using
this lens/these lenses.
Unit 1 Critical Lenses
Literary Perspectives Tool Kit
Literary perspectives help us explain why people might interpret the same text in different ways.
Perspectives help us understand what is important to individual readers, and they show us why those readers
end up seeing what they see. One way to imagine a literary perspective is to think of it as a lens through which
we can examine a text. No single lens gives us the clearest view, but it is sometimes fun to read a text with a
particular perspective in mind because you often end up discovering something intriguing and unexpected.
While readers typically apply more than one perspective at a time, the best way to understand these
perspectives is to employ them one at a time. What follows is a summary of some of the best-known literary
perspectives. These descriptions are extremely brief, and none fully explains everything you might want to
know about the perspective in question, but there is enough here for you to get an idea about how readers use
them.
The Archetypal Perspective: In literary criticism, the word archetype signifies a recognizable pattern or
model. It can be used to describe story designs, character types, or images that can be found in a wide variety
of works of literature. It can also be applied to myths, dreams, and social rituals. The archetypal similarities
between texts and behaviors are thought to reflect a set of universal, even primitive, ways of seeing the world.
When we find them in literary works, they evoke strong responses from readers. Archetypal themes include the
heroic journey and the search for a father figure. Archetypal images include the opposition of heaven and hell,
the river as a sign of life and movement, and mountains or other high places as sources of enlightenment.
Characters can be archetypal as well; some examples are the rebel-hero, the scapegoat, the villain, and the
goddess.
Archetypal Criticism Essential Questions:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
What archetypal characters do you see, if any, in the text?
What archetypal situations do you see, if any, in the text?
What archetypal symbols do you see, if any, in the text?
What recurring images do you see, if any, in the text?
What recurring themes do you see, if any, in the text?
How do recurring patterns and our understanding of these patterns affect our understanding of
the text?
Upon Seeing an Orange
Archetypal Perspective asks: What reoccurring ideas, patterns, or aspects do we see from one orange to the
next? How do those patterns help us understand this orange?
Understanding Literary Perspectives/Theory & Archetypal Perspective
Based on the information above, respond to the following:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
What does understanding different literary perspectives help us explain?
What is a metaphor for literary perspectives? In other words, how can we think of it?
Archetypal perspective is one of the best-known lenses. What does the word archetype mean?
What are 4 questions an archetypal critic might ask when reading?
What would an archetypal critic ask themselves upon viewing an orange?