FORMALISTS AND NEW CRITICS
Believe that literature is no more than “words on a page.”
PSYCHOANALYTICS
Concerned with the psychology of the artist and the audience. This is closely related to Freudian ideology.
· Pleasure vs. aggression
· Id: wants pleasure now
· Ego: realistic and under control
· Superego: society’s norms and values, how we’ve been taught to behave idealistically
· Oedipus complex
POST-COLONIAL CRITICISM
Focuses on the relationship between the colonizers and the colonized. This includes response, adaptation, a new combined culture, and hegemony.
· Subaltern: one without any access to any cultural or political power in a given social situation (like a slave)
· Exoticism: process of assigning distance and mystique to the “other” where they differ from the norm of the colonizer
· Demonization: process of assigning to the “other” all undesirable characteristics one does not wish to recognize in their own group
· Alienation
· Hegemony
· Mimicry: adaptive survival strategy
· Appropriation: use of cultural property (language, customs, etc) of a colonized group by the colonizer, or a conquered group by the conqueror
· Representation: how a group is portrayed
· Hybridity: new transcultural forms that arise from cross-cultural exchange
READER RESPONSE
The “meaning” is the interaction between the reader and the text
LITERARY DARWINISM
Texts are artifacts of a culture
NEW HISTORICISM
Text should be analyzed in the context of historical and cultural events
MYTHOLOGICAL AND ARCHETYPAL CRITICS
Texts should be analyzed according to their symbolic values
MARXIST
Importance of the movement of economic power, and the power of the masses
STRUCTURALISM
Texts should be analyzed according to cultural structures
POST-STRUCTURALISTS
Similar to reader-response, French philosophers
FEMINISM
Concerned with sex and gender roles, especially the roles of women. Also the relationship between men and women and women’s place in society.
Again, not much to comment on. You have great organization, everything is related to the topic of your post. I think some criticisms work better for different texts. "Hamlet" would probably be psychological, feminist, and new historicist. I find formalist to be the least useful for most writing, but to each her own.
ReplyDeleteYou do an excellent job out clearly outlining each of the critical lenses and briefly explaining them. I think I understand all the lenses a little bit better now after reading you post to be honest. Great work, I will probably use it to study before the AP exam.
ReplyDelete