Current Critical Approaches

Forming your perspective on a poem, story, or play might be easier if you understand some of the approaches commonly taken toward interpreting literature’s meaning. Literary studies have been around long enough that likeminded readers and scholars have gravitated toward basic common positions as they engage in dialogue with each other. As a result, there are a number of widely-recognized critical approaches to literature, from formalists (who focus on how an author employs strategies and devices for a particular effect) to psychoanalytical critics (who explore texts to better understand humans’ psychological structure and their typical responses to particular experiences). As you consider a poem or story, you might choose one of these approaches as the general lens through which to examine that work. What follows is a list of some of the most common critical perspectives. Consider them and make a note of any that strikes you as particularly interesting. You may find that one or several of these reflect your own way of looking at the world. You may also combine methods from more than one of these approaches.

In finding a perspective that interests you, consider these common ways of approaching literary study and interpretation and how those approaches might intersect with your own passions and values. Scholarly study should be objective, in that academic arguments should be supported by credible and substantial evidence, but scholarly argument is valuable when it aids us in better understanding our world and realizing our goals as humans, communities, and societies. Connecting to these objectives as a writer will help you find your reason for writing and the most effective rhetorical methods for reaching your goals.

Formalism (also referred to as “New Criticism”)

This approach considers a literary work as an entity separate from its author and its historical context. The formalist explores a poem as a mechanic would explore an engine. The mechanic would assume that the engine’s parts and function can be studied without any understanding of the maker’s life and/or the history of the period in which the engine exists. Similarly, to assess a poem’s impact and understand its meaning, a scholar might “take it apart,” considering its separate elements—the form, line length, rhythm, rhyme scheme, figurative language, and diction—and how those pieces make up the effect of and shape the meaning of the whole.

Formal analysis involves a close reading of the literary elements of a text. A formal analysis examines elements such as setting, imagery, characters, tone, form/structure, and language. The goal of a formal analysis is to create meaning by exploring how these elements work together in any given text. You can compare parts of a text or you can analyze how parts of a text relate to the whole text.

Cultural Analysis

A cultural analysis relates the literary work to broader historical, social, cultural, and political situations. By placing a work in its literary historical context, one can trace the influences a historical period had on an author and/or the creation of his/her work(s). In doing this, a literary historical critic gains insights about the nature of a particular historical period. Using the historical context as a lens through which to read literature allows one to gain an understanding of both larger social issues, as well as the personal struggles that everyday people endured. Your analysis might explain how events or prevailing attitudes influence the writing of a work or the way readers understand it. Following are some areas of focus for a cultural analysis. Ask yourself how the work examines these factors and how they influence characters’ actions and perspectives.

• Gender
• Class
• Race
• Ethnicity
• History
• Genre

Note that cultural analysis is a broad term that encompasses other critical perspectives discussed below, including feminist, gender, historical, and new historical analysis.

Biographical Criticism

This approach examines the life and attitudes of an author as the key to understanding the writer’s work. It analyzes how their experiences and culture have influenced the work.

Psychoanalytic Criticism

This approach explores the role of consciousnesses and the unconscious in literature including that of the author, reader, and characters in the text. Based on the theories of Freud and others, this approach examines a text for signs and symbols of the subconscious processes, both of the characters and of humans in general.

Archetypal Criticism

Springing from psychoanalytical criticism, this approach focuses on common figures and story-lines that reveal patterns in human behavior and psychology. Well-known archetypal characters are the hero, the scapegoat, the Earth mother, the temptress, the mentor, and the devil figure. Some common archetypal storylines are the journey, the quest, the fall, and death and rebirth. Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, key figures in the development of this approach, found that in the many stories they collected from cultures all over the world, these figures and storylines emerged over and over again. Their conclusion was that these figures and storylines are etched into the human psyche (or subconscious), and as we recreate them in our stories, our audiences recognize them as symbolic of their own experience.

Feminist Criticism

Using this approach, one examines a literary work for insight into why and how women are subjected to oppression and, sometimes, how they subvert the forces that oppress them.

Gender Theory

Expanding on feminist criticism, gender studies explore literature for increased understanding of socially defined gender identity and behavior and its impact on the individual and on society. It includes study of sexual orientation and how non-heterosexual identities are treated by mainstream ideology, a dynamic sometimes reflected in, sometimes critiqued by, literary works.

Reader-response Criticism

This is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader (or “audience”) and their experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work.

Structuralism and semiotics

Structuralism examines the universal underlying structures in a text, the linguistic units in a text and how the author conveys meaning through any structures.

Historical Criticism

This approach seeks to illuminate a text’s original meaning by uncovering details of the text’s historical context.

New Historicism

Modifying the historical approach described above, the new historicist assumes that material factors interact with each other; thus while this approach seeks to understand a text through its cultural context, it also attempts to discover through the literary work insight into intellectual history. For example, a new historicist might consider Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass as a product shaped not only by Douglass’s experience as a U.S. slave, but also by Douglass’s challenge of finding a publisher (most of whom were white), and by his primarily Christian readership. These factors, according to the new historicist, would interact to shape the text and its meanings.

Post-structuralism

This is  a catch-all term for various theoretical approaches such as deconstruction (see below) that criticize or go beyond Structuralism’s aspirations to create a rational science of culture by extrapolating the model of linguistics to other discursive and aesthetic formations.

Deconstruction

Deconstruction is a strategy of “close” reading that elicits the ways that key terms and concepts may be paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning undecidable.

Marxist Criticism

This approach to literature examines how class and economic forces shape human dynamics. It is important to note that Marxist criticism is not a promotion of socialist government, but rather a close study of how invisible economic forces underpin, and often undermine, authentic human relationships.

Postcolonialism

This approach focuses on the influences of colonialism in literature, especially regarding the historical conflict resulting from the exploitation of less developed countries and indigenous peoples by Western nations.

Eco-criticism

This approach explores cultural connections and human relationships to the natural world.

Other Critical Approaches

Comparison/Contrast Analysis

A comparison/contrast analysis looks at works sharing similarities, either written by the same author, different authors, and/or in different literary periods. A comparison/contrast essay uses the points of comparison and contrast between the works in order to make a claim about how one text illuminates the other or how they illuminate each other. Rather than a simple delineation of differences and similarities, this type of analysis uses those differences and similarities to make a larger argument about how comparing the two texts reveals some unexpected or non-obvious element in the works.

Often the best structure for this kind of argument is to detail enough similarities between the works (especially works written by vastly different authors and/or in different literary periods) to justify the comparison and to narrow the scope of the discussion. In other words, first show how the different texts are attempting similar things. Then, focus on the nuanced differences between each text’s approach to those similar things and the way in which juxtaposing them illuminates our understanding of one or both.

Continue Reading: 23.9 Applying Literary Theory and Critical Perspectives