Slide 1: Critical Worlds

Welcome! I’m Dr. Liza Long and in this presentation for English 211, I’m going to go over the critical theories we will cover in your textbook for this course, Critical Worlds: A Targeted Introduction to Literary Analysis. You should have already read the first part, “What Is Literature?” and the second part, “Historical/Biographical Criticism,” before viewing this presentation. In this presentation, we will look at a variety of critical methods that we’re going to explore in this course.

Slide 2: Biographical Criticism

I will use this target image throughout the course to indicate the central goal for each type of analysis. Let’s start with Historical/Biographical Criticism. With this critical lens, the Author is at the center of our target. I’m willing to bet that you’ve encountered this type of critical approach previously. Maybe you wrote a book report in middle school or high school, or you have written a college essay exploring a literary text by focusing on how the text shows the author’s intent. I asked you to attempt this lens in your first-week writing assessment.

For hundreds of years, when we talked about literary analysis, what we meant was biographical analysis. We looked at the text through the lens of author intent. What did the author mean when they wrote this text? What elements from their background and culture help us to identify that meaning? How does the author’s life illuminate the text? The key term for this type of criticism is author intent. But as any of you who have followed the lengthy debate about who wrote Shakespeare’s plays certainly knows, there can be some drawbacks to this kind of criticism. Can we ever truly know the author? And more importantly for literary analysis, does author intent even matter? Stop and think about that last question for a minute. It’s going to shape many of the approaches we take to texts in this course, starting with New Criticism.

Slide 3: New Criticism

New Criticism is the “business” of literature. In his 1937 essay “Criticism, Inc.,” which introduced the term New Criticism for the first time, literature professor John Crowe Ransom argues that “Criticism must become more scientific, or precise and systematic.”  New Criticism, then, emerged as a methodology for approaching literature with the TEXT as the center of our target. It no longer mattered what the author intended, or who the author was. Instead, the New Critic looks at the words themselves. We’re looking for complexity, first and foremost: richness, tension, paradox, beautiful language, or profound insights. Then we examine how that complexity leads to a unity of purpose in the work. How does all that richness and tension and paradox and language work to give us a central idea or a central meaning? We might consider things like metaphor, point of view, diction, repetition of language, or imagery as we do this type of criticism. If this feels somewhat familiar to you, I am not surprised, especially if you went to high school in the United States. This type of approach is what you may have used in English 190 or English 175 or a similar college level literature appreciation course.

You’ll take a very valuable tool from this type of criticism, one that you’ll use with every other method we study in the course. This is the technique of close reading. It’s an in-depth examination of the text that focuses on individual elements of style.

Slide 4: Reader Response

If the author doesn’t matter, what about the reader? The next type of criticism we’ll learn in this class is reader response theory. Again, this will likely feel familiar to you if you’ve ever been asked to write your response to a book or play or poem. I personally enjoy this approach to literature because the center of the target is me, the reader. Well, actually, there are two types of reader response theory. The reader might be me, which is called subjective reader response. How am I responding to the text, and why? Or the reader might be the expected reader or the implied reader, the so called “normal,” reader of the text. I think normal is a setting on a washing machine, but I think you all know what I mean.

I hope you’ll experiment with both methods. When we get to that section of the book, you’ll have a chance to try this out. Some of the questions you might ask for subjective reader response include:

How am I responding to this idea or language? What is this make me think and what am I expecting to happen next? We take close reading from New Criticism, and we take subjective reader response from this critical lens. Going forward, you should examine your own response to every text we study.

For receptive reader response, which is the more common type that we see in scholarship, you may consider how a specific audience would react to a text. For example, would men and women react differently to the Barbie movie? Why?

Slide 5: Deconstruction and Post-Structuralism

The next type of criticism will blow your mind. Deconstruction is my personal favorite type of literary analysis. We look briefly at structuralism before we get into deconstruction because it’s necessary to have at least a brief knowledge of structuralism to understand how deconstruction, also sometimes called poststructuralism, works. I spend a lot more time in my Survey of World Mythology class talking about structuralism because Levi-Strauss’s work in looking at binary structures as paths to meaning is really useful when we analyze the structure of myths.

But we don’t see many structuralist approaches to literature anymore. Deconstruction is a method that evolves from structuralism’s attempt to find universal meaning and blows it up. There can be no shared meaning. The center of the target for deconstruction thus becomes the gap in meaning between what the author might have intended to say, and what any reader takes from the text. Just as with New Criticism, the text is central to the idea of deconstruction, but we’ll take a different and expanded approach in our analysis. As with New Criticism, deconstruction starts with a close reading of the text but with a very different goal. Rather than looking for unity, we’re going to look for ways in which the text undermines its own meaning. The basic idea is that meaning is relative. With deconstruction, you’ll look for these kinds of gaps, exploring how the text undercuts its own stated meaning.

Slide 6: New Historicism and Cultural Studies

The next two types of literary criticism lens we will explore are New Historicism and Cultural Studies. Let’s look at New Historicism first. With this approach, we will be looking at the context to the work as the center of our analysis. How is this different from historical criticism? It differs in several ways. While we still don’t necessarily consider author intent, we will need to think about the author’s biography. Who wrote it? What was the time period like? How does that context illuminate the text? One important difference from historical criticism is the idea, taken from deconstruction, that there are no “stable” facts in history. You may have heard the phrase, “History is written by the victors.” That’s what we mean here—that history itself is a text, and that cultural context inevitably shapes the writing of that text.

Instead of thinking of history as a set of facts, we will start thinking about it in terms of the discourse, a word first used by French philosopher Michel Foucault. Discourse encompasses the idea that cultural norms shape texts. As an example, consider William Shakespeare. If we looked at Shakespeare’s historical reception and compared it to how Shakespeare is understood today, we would find several differences. How did the discourse during Shakespeare’s life affect the writing and performance of his plays? Today, women play the female roles, but during his time, these roles were played by men. The state of Florida just outlawed that. These are examples of differences in cultural norms. With New Historicism, we will be looking at texts as just one of many types of cultural artifacts.

Cultural studies is similar to New Historicism in that it focuses on the context of a work, but it also has us take an interdisciplinary approach to literary texts. We might consider a variety of factors such as class, ethnicity, race, gender, ideology, or nationality of an author or literary period. As with New Historicism, cultural studies approaches treat literary texts as artifacts of the culture in which they were produced and received.

Slide 7: Marxist/Materialist, Postcolonial, and Ethnic Studies

Marxist/Materialist, Postcolonial, and Ethnic Studies are similar to New Historicism and Cultural Studies, but here, instead of centering the context, we are specifically concerned with power structures in a society and how these influence texts. That’s why I’ve put “power” in the center of the target. Marxism is the term American scholars use for critical analysis that considers socioeconomic class in texts. Cultural Materialism is the same type of criticism, but this term is more widely used in the U.K. and has some overlaps with cultural studies. With a Marxist lens, we follow the money: who has it, and who doesn’t. How does wealth and capital (and access to these) shape literary texts, both in terms of what is written and in terms of what is distributed?

With postcolonial criticism, we will be looking at relationships between dominant and dominated cultures. For example, we might look at Indian authors during the British colonial occupation. Many cultural studies approaches fall under this type of analysis. This type of criticism expands on ideas about privileged voices that first emerged as part of deconstruction. Who gets to write texts? Who gets to read them?

Finally, ethnic studies are ways for us to consider a specific marginalized group’s literature. For example, we could study African American or Chicano/a writers.

Slide 8: Psychological Criticism

Psychological criticism: thank goodness it’s not just Freud! Full disclosure, Freud is not my favorite. But certainly we have to acknowledge Freud’s importance in this area of literary analysis. With psychological criticism, we’re looking at the text as a window to the human mind. What can that text illuminate about our minds? The author’s mind? Psychological criticism focuses on human behavior and what the text says about that. The most classic example of course, is the Oedipus complex, which comes from Freud and his interpretation of Oedipus Rex, the Greek tragic hero who married his mother and killed his father. Hamlet is another text that is often used to support this kind of criticism.

I do want to stress that it’s much more than Freud. You could really take any psychological theory and apply it to a text. We’ll have a chance to practice with a few. I really love Jung and his archetypes. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs might be familiar to you, or you may be interested in Eric Erickson’s theories of child development or Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief. Any psychological framework could be used with the text. The focus will always be the mind what reading the text through this framework illuminates about the mind.

Slide 9: Gender Criticisms

Our study of critical theories that focus on gender will introduce us to three types of criticism: feminist, post-feminist, and Queer Theory. Each of these will be looked at in detail later in the course. In feminist criticism, we’re looking at gender and power structures at the center of our target. For all three types of criticism, we’ll consider the significance of gender stereotypes. With feminist criticism, we’ll do this at a basic binary (male/female) level. Post-feminism is a deconstructive approach to feminist criticism, where we turn those gender stereotypes on their heads, we say that the text itself undercuts male/female stereotypes. Queer Theory takes it one step further, questioning the very existence of a gender binary and looking at how gender and sexuality and our cultural assumptions about these things impact both how texts are written and how they are read.

Slide 10: Ecocriticism

Our final exploration of critical lenses will look at ecocriticism, an increasingly popular approach to literary texts. Ecocriticism is an interdisciplinary approach to a text that considers the relationship of humans to the natural world. This type of criticism usually focuses on some aspect of the natural world and how this functions in a literary text. Ecocriticism approaches are often related to concerns about climate change. The text doesn’t have to be new: we could look at Moby Dick or even the Latin poet Vergil’s bucolic poetry through an ecocriticism lens.

Though the term “ecocriticism” was not coined until 1978 by William Rueckert, American authors and philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are both cited as influences in this type of approach to texts. Ecocriticism has taken on a special relevance and urgency in light of the undeniable effects of human-caused climate change, but it’s not all doom and gloom: scholars also focus on resilience in nature and how literary texts reflect this.

Slide 11: You Practice

This was a quick overview of the approaches to literary analysis that we will cover throughout this course. Now it’s time for you to practice! For your first essay, you’ll choose from one of these three poems. Start by doing a close reading of the poem, including numbering the lines. Use the New Criticism section of Critical Worlds as your guide. You’ll find more detailed information about your essay in Blackboard.

Here is a link to the PowerPoint: Critical Worlds Introduction.pptx