CRITICAL APPROACHES TO READING

Literary Theory

Reader Response

•What you’ve already read.•What you’ve already experienced.•This school of criticism focuses on the reader instead of the author.•The reader is a producer rather than a consumer of meanings.

Psychoanalytic Criticism

•Applies the principles of Freud to the study of literature.

•A way of decoding the author’s use (conscious or subconscious) of symbolism.

•A way of understanding the creation of identity in a text.

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Deconstructionist Criticism

•A method of reading and theory of language that seeks to subvert, dismantle, and destroy any notion that a text has any boundaries, margins, coherence, unity, determinate meaning, truth, or identity.

•Deconstructionism argues that a text has multiple and often contradictory meanings.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

(Pride and Prejudice)

Marxist Criticism

•A sociological approach to literature that views works of literature as the products of historical forces that can be analyzed by looking at the material conditions in which they were formed.

•Marxism generally focuses on the clash between the dominant and repressed classes.

•Read to explore economic and cultural factors.

•Who has the money? Who has the power?

Mythological/Archetypal Criticism

•Based largely on the work of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell.

•The idea that our “collective unconscious” allows archetypal symbols and formulas.

•Expressed in our myths, dreams, religions, and literature.

•These archetypes, when used in literature, are understood on the unconscious level.

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Feminist Criticism

•On the thematic level, the feminist reader should identify with female characters and their concerns.

•The object is to provide a critique of phallocentric assumptions and an analysis of patriarchal visions or ideologies inscribed in a literature that is male-centered and male-dominated.

Formalism and New Criticism

•Looks at the text only. Does not consider biography, historical circumstances.

•Proposes that a work of literary art should be regarded as autonomous, and so should not be judged by reference to considerations beyond itself.