Critical LensesCritical LensesFeminist, Marxist, Psychoanalytic, and Reader Response

Feminist TheoryFeminist TheoryAsserts that most of our literature presents a masculine-patriarchal view in which the role of women is negated or at best minimized.Feminist View

◦ Attempts to show that writers of traditional literature have ignored women and have transmitted misguided and prejudiced views of them

◦ Attempts to stimulate the creation of a critical environment that reflects a balanced view of the nature and value of women

◦ Attempts to recover the works of women writers of past times and to encourage the publication of present women writers so that the literary canon may be expanded to recognize women as thinkers and artists

◦ Urges transformations in the language to eliminate inequities and inequalities that result from linguistic distortions.

Feminist QuestionsFeminist Questions Is the author male or female? Is the text narrated by a male or female? What types of roles do women have in the text? Are the female characters the protagonists or secondary

and minor characters? Do any stereotypical characterizations of women appear? What are the attitudes toward women held by the male

characters? What is the author’s attitude toward women in society? How does the author’s culture influence his or her

attitude? Is feminine imagery used? If so, what is the significance

of such imagery? Do the female characters speak differently than do the

male characters? In your investigation, compare the frequency of speech for the male characters to the frequency of speech for the female characters.

How does the text reinforce the “traditional” gender roles?

How does the text make women seem less (or more) important/valued?

MarxismMarxism Karl Marx (1818-1883) was primarily a theorist and

historian. After examining social organization in a scientific way, he perceived human history to have consisted of a series of struggles between classes--between the oppressed and the oppressing. Marx thought that "historical materialism" was the ultimate driving force, a notion involving the distribution of resources, gain, production, and such matters.

The supposedly "natural" political evolution involved "feudalism" leading to "bourgeois capitalism" leading to "socialism" and finally to "utopian communism.“

In bourgeois capitalism, the privileged bourgeoisie rely on the proletariat--the labor force responsible for survival. Marx theorized that when profits are not reinvested in the workers but in creating more factories, the workers will grow poorer and poorer until no short-term patching is possible or successful. At a crisis point, revolt will lead to a restructuring of the system.  

Marxist CriticismMarxist CriticismAccording to Marxists, and to other scholars in

fact, literature reflects those social institutions out of which it emerges and is itself a social institution with a particular ideological function. Literature reflects class struggle and materialism: think how often the quest for wealth traditionally defines characters.

So Marxists generally view literature "not as works created in accordance with timeless artistic criteria, but as 'products' of the economic and ideological determinants specific to that era" (Abrams 149).

Literature reflects an author's own class or analysis of class relations, however piercing or shallow that analysis may be.

Marxist QuestionsMarxist QuestionsThe Marxist critic simply is a careful reader or viewer who keeps in mind issues of power and money, and any of the following kinds of questions: What social classes do the characters represent?What role does class play in the work; what is the author's analysis of class relations?How do characters overcome oppression?In what ways does the work serve as propaganda for the status quo; or does it try to undermine it?What does the work say about oppression; or are social conflicts ignored or blamed elsewhere?What is the social class of the author?Which class does the work claim to represent?What values does it reinforce?What values does it subvert?What conflict can be seen between the values the work champions and those it portrays?How do characters from different classes interact or conflict?

PsychoanalyticPsychoanalyticThe Unconscious, the Desires, and the Defenses Freud asserted that people's behavior is affected by

their unconscious: Freud believed that our unconscious was influenced

by childhood events. Freud organized these events into developmental stages involving relationships with parents and drives of desire and pleasure where children focus

These stages reflect base levels of desire, but they also involve fear of loss (loss of genitals, loss of affection from parents, loss of life) and repression

Repression doesn't eliminate our painful experiences and emotions...we unconsciously behave in ways that will allow us to 'play out'...our conflicted feelings about the painful experiences and emotions we repress

Freud argued that we develop defenses: selective perception, selective memory, denial, displacement, projection, regression, fear of intimacy, and fear of death, among others.

Id, Ego, and SuperegoId, Ego, and SuperegoFreud maintained that our desires and

our unconscious conflicts give rise to three areas of the mind that wrestle for dominance as we grow from infancy, to childhood, to adulthood:

id - "...the location of the drives" or libido

ego - "...one of the major defenses against the power of the drives..." and home of the defenses listed above

superego - the area of the unconscious that houses judgement (of self and others)

Oedipus ComplexOedipus Complex The Oedipus complex involves children's need for their

parents and the conflict that arises as children mature and realize they are not the absolute focus of their mother's attention

Freud argued that both boys and girls wish to possess their mothers, but as they grow older this changes

Children connect this conflict of attention to the intimate relations between mother and father, relations from which the children are excluded. Freud believed that "the result is a murderous rage against the father...and a desire to possess the mother“

The Oedipus complex differs in boys and girls◦ boys fantasized that punishment for their rage will take the form of

castration eventually the boy learns to identify with the father in the hope of someday possessing a woman like his mother.

◦ In girls, the castration complex does not take the form of anxiety...the result is a frustrated rage in which the girl shifts her sexual desire from the mother to the father

Freud believed that eventually, the girl's spurned advanced toward the father give way to a desire to possess a man like her father later in life. Freud believed that the impact of the unconscious, id, ego, superego, the defenses, and the Oedipus complexes was inescapable and that these elements of the mind influence all our behavior (and even our dreams) as adults - of course this behavior involves what we write.

Freud and LiteratureFreud and LiteratureSo what does all of this psychological

business have to do with literature and the study of literature?

Put simply, some critics believe that we can "...read psychoanalytically...to see which concepts are operating in the text in such a way as to enrich our understanding of the work and, if we plan to write a paper about it, to yield a meaningful, coherent psychoanalytic interpretation”

Psychoanalytic QuestionsPsychoanalytic Questions How do the operations of repression structure or

inform the work? Are there any oedipal dynamics - or any other family

dynamics - are work here? How can characters' behavior, narrative events, and/or

images be explained in terms of psychoanalytic concepts of any kind (for example...fear or fascination with death, sexuality - which includes love and romance as well as sexual behavior - as a primary indicator of psychological identity or the operations of ego-id-superego)?

What does the work suggest about the psychological being of its author?

What might a given interpretation of a literary work suggest about the psychological motives of the reader?

Are there prominent words in the piece that could have different or hidden meanings? Could there be a subconscious reason for the author using these "problem words"?

Reader ResponseReader Response Focuses on finding meaning in the act of reading

itself and examining the ways individual readers or communities of readers experience texts.

Raises theoretical questions regarding how the reader joins with the author "to help the text mean."

Determines what kind of reader or what community of readers the work implies and helps to create.

Examines the significance of the series of interpretations the reader undergoes in the reading process.

Focus on what texts do; what do texts do in the minds of the readers?

A text can exist only as activated by the mind of the reader. .

Interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not decode poems; they make them

Reader Response- Text Reader Response- Text ReaderReader What did the author intend for you to feel while reading this

work, and how did he or she make you feel it? What are you dependent on in this work to help you make

sense of what you read descriptive passages, the narrator’s voice, contrasting viewpoints of characters?

Do the events fall into a pattern you have met before? Are there opposites in the text that surprise you? Inform you?

Keep you from anticipating what is coming? How do your previous experiences with this genre set up your

expectations for how this text will operate? What images and events in the story are you already

conditioned to approve or disapprove? How does the point of view affect (or control) your

understanding? How does the text call upon what you know of the world to

produce your response to the work? Did the work cause you to make interpretations that you had to

revise later? What events or experiences were you led to anticipate? What

mysteries were you asked to solve? What judgments were you expected to make?

Reader Response- Reader Reader Response- Reader texttextWhat did you expect to feel while reading this

work?What was unsettling in what you read?How did you adapt to what made you

uncomfortable so that it more clearly fit what you desired?

With what or whom did you most closely identify in the work? What identification gave you the most pleasure? The most displeasure?

Did the work fit your picture of the way life is? What adjustments did you have to make so that

the work did not challenge the world as you know it?

What does the work fail to tell you about characters and/or events? What imaginary or personal material did you use to supply what was missing?

What memories does this work recall for you?

Reader Response- Text Reader Response- Text ReaderReader What kind of reader is implied by this text? For example, does it address you as if you are intelligent and well-informed, or as if you are inexperienced and innocent?

What aspects of the text invite you to respond as that implied reader?

How do you, as an actual reader, differ from the one that is implied?

What gaps and vague outlines did you find yourself filling in?

How did your perceptions and responses change as the work unfolded? What caused them to change?

What contradictions did you perceive in the text—for example, characters who represent differing viewpoints? How did you resolve them?

What do you know of the author’s intent? List the most vivid images you remember from the text.

How have you reconstructed them from your own experiences?

What experiences of your own have you used to visualize and understand those presented in the text?