Module 2 | Part 1 Flashcards
- It addresses ways of looking at literature beyond the typical plot-theme-character-setting studies.
- It is the study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of literature.
- It asks what literature is, what it does, and what it is worth. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
- It is the method used to interpret any given work of literature. The different schools of literary criticism provide us with lenses which ultimately reveal important aspects of the literary work.
LITERARY CRITICISM
Author’s Life Experience
- What aspects of the author’s personal life are relevant to this story?
- Which of the author’s stated beliefs are reflected in the work?
- Does the writer challenge or support the values of her contemporaries?
- What seem to be the author’s major concerns? Do they reflect any of the writer’s personal experiences?
- Do any of the events in the story correspond to events experienced by the author?
- Do any of the characters in the story correspond to real people?
Biographical
Historical Period’s Connection
- How does it reflect the time in which it was written?
- How accurately does the story depict the time in which it was set?
- What literary or historical influences helped to shape the form and content of the work?
- How does the story reflect the attitudes and beliefs of the time in which it was written or set?
(Consider beliefs and attitudes related to race, religion, politics, gender, society, philosophy, etc.) - What other historical literary works may have influenced the writer?
- What historical events or movements might have influenced this writer?
- Does it provide an opposing view of the period’s prevailing values?
- How important is it the historical context (the work’s and the reader’s) to interpreting the work?
Historical
Psychology/ Level of Sensibility & Consciousness
- What forces are motivating the characters?
Which behaviors of the characters are conscious ones? Which are unconscious?
What conscious or unconscious conflicts exist between the characters?
Given their backgrounds, how plausible is the characters’ behavior?
Are the theories of Freud or other psychologists applicable to this work? To what degree?
Do any of the characters correspond to the parts of the tripartite self? (Id, ego, superego)
What roles do psychological disorders and dreams play in this story?
How does the work reflect the writer’s personal psychology?
What do the characters’ emotions and behaviors reveal about their psychological states?
How does the work reflect the unconscious dimensions of the writer’s mind?
Psychological
Author’s Philosophy and Ideals
- What view of life does the story present? Which character best articulates this viewpoint?
- According to this work’s view of life, what is mankind’s relationship to God? To the universe?
- What moral statement, if any, does this story make? Is it explicit or implicit?
- What is the author’s attitude toward his world? Toward fate? Toward God?
- What is the author’s conception of good and evil?
- What does the work say about the nature of good or evil?
- What does the work say about human nature?
Philosophical
Women Empowerment; Equal Status
- How are women’s lives portrayed in the work?
- Is the form and content of the work influenced by the writer’s gender?
- How do male and female characters relate to one another? Are these relationships sources of conflict? Are these conflicts resolved?
- Does the work challenge or affirm traditional views of women?
- How do the images of women in the story reflect patriarchal social forces that have impeded women’s efforts to achieve full equality with men?
- What marital expectations are imposed on the characters? What effect do these expectations have?
- If a female character were male, how would the story be different (and vice versa)?
- How does the marital status of a character affect her decisions or happiness?
Feminist
Social Status and Ideologies
- Whom does it benefit if the work or effort is accepted/successful/believed, etc.?
- 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?
- What social classes do the characters represent?
- How do characters from different classes interact or conflict?
Marxist
criticism is concerned with the way cycles and reiterating patterns of tradition, culture, inborn images, and beliefs affect literary works.
Archetypes, Allusions, and Symbol
- What aspects of the work create deep universal responses to it?
- How does the work reflect the hopes, fears, and expectations of entire cultures (for example, the ancient Greeks)?
- How do myths attempt to explain the unexplainable:
origin of man?
Purpose and destiny of human beings? - What common human concerns are revealed in the story?
- How do stories from one culture correspond to those of another? (For example, creation myths, flood myths, etc.)
- How does the story reflect the experiences of death and rebirth?
- What archetypal events occur in the story?
(Quest? Initiation? Scapegoating? Descents into the underworld? Ascents into heaven?) - What archetypal images occur?
(Water, rising sun, setting sun, symbolic colors) - What archetypal characters appear in the story?
(Mother Earth? Femme Fatal? Wise old man? Wanderer?) - What archetypal settings appear?
(Garden? Desert?) - How and why are these archetypes embodied in the work?
Archetypal
Impacts of Colonial Domination
Guide Questions:
- How does the literary text, explicitly or allegorically, represent various aspects of colonial oppression?
- What does the text reveal about the problems of post-colonial identity, including the relationship between personal and cultural identity and such issues as double consciousness and hybridity?
- What person(s) or groups does the work identify as “other” or stranger? - - How are such persons/groups described and treated?
- What does the text reveal about the politics and/or psychology of anti-colonialist resistance?
- What does the text reveal about the operations of cultural difference -
the ways in which race, religion, class, gender, sexual orientation, cultural beliefs, and customs combine to form individual identity -
in shaping our perceptions of ourselves, others, and the world in which we live?
- Are there meaningful similarities among the literatures of different post-colonial populations?
- How does a literary text in the Western canon reinforce or undermine colonialist ideology through its representation of colonization and/or its inappropriate silence about colonized peoples?
Post-Colonialism
Green Analysis with emphasis on Natural World and Modern Environmental Concerns
Guide Questions:
- How is nature represented in this text?
- How has the concept of nature changed over time?
- How is the setting of the play/film/text related to the environment?
- What are the influences on metaphors and representations of the land and the environment on how we treat it?
- How do we see issues of environmental disaster and crises reflected in popular culture and literary works?
- How are animals represented in this text and what is their relationship to humans?
- How do the roles or representations of men and women towards the environment differ in this play/film/text/etc.
- Where is the environment placed in the power hierarchy?
- How is nature empowered or oppressed in this work?
- What parallels can be drawn between the sufferings and oppression of groups of people (women, minorities, immigrants, etc.) and treatment of the land?
- What rhetorical moves are used by environmentalists, and what can we learn from them about our cultural attitudes towards nature?
Ecocriticism
3 Approaches and tropes of literature
- Ecofeminism
- Pastoral
- Wilderness
