Literary Theories

1. Literary Theories viewing literature through multiple lenses

2. Reader Response • Critics turn from the traditional conception of a work as an achieved structure of meanings to the responses of readers to the text. • What had been features of the work itself - narrator, plot, characters, style, and structure - is less important than the connection b/w a reader’s experience and the text. Here, meaning is made.

3. Reader Response EXAMPLE “Sonny’s Blues” James Baldwin The unnamed narrator of the story discovers from a newspaper that his younger brother, Sonny, has been arrested for selling and using heroin. As he prepares to teach his algebra class, the narrator remembers Sonny as a young boy. His students, he realizes, could someday end up like Sonny, given the obstacles and hardships they face growing up in Harlem. (Those with siblings might recall a tension or problem in the relationship.)

4. Gender/Feminist • Sees cultural and economic disabilities in a “patriarchal” society that have hindered or prevented women from realizing their true potential. • Feminists consider works as lacking a strong, female role model, implicitly addressed to male readers, or shut out the female reader as an outsider or solicit her to identify against herself by assuming male ways and values.

5. Gender/Feminist EXAMPLE “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Joyce Carol Oates Connie is the female victim of the role in society that she perceives herself playing - the coy, young lady whose life depends on her looks. She is consistently compared to her older, more “perfect” sister.

6. Social-Class/Marxist • an economic and cultural theory • developed by Karl Marx • The evolving history of humanity is determined by its basic economic organization. • Historical changes in production effect changes in the constitution and relations of social classes. • Focuses on power and money

7. Social-Class/Marxist EXAMPLE The Hunger Games Suzanne Collins The upper class (the Capitol) attempts to maintain its power and influence over the lower class (working members of each district).

8. Postcolonial • A type of cultural criticism, postcolonial criticism usually involves the analysis of literary texts produced in countries and cultures that have come under the control of European colonial powers at some point in their history. • Alternatively, it can refer to the analysis of texts written about colonized places by writers hailing from the colonizing culture. • [from Bedford/St. Martin’s virtuaLit: Critical Approaches website]

9. Postcolonial EXAMPLE Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe details the strife and devastation that occurred when British colonists began moving inland from the Nigerian coast

10. Deconstructionist • **most difficult to understand • Literature means nothing b/c language means nothing. • We cannot say we know the “meaning” of a story b/c there is no way of knowing.

11. Deconstructionist EXAMPLE The Stranger Albert Camus Try as we might, readers cannot rationalize the reasons for Meursault’s actions. In addition, we do not know whether or not Meursault got his wish: for his execution to be witnessed by a “large crowd of spectators.”

12. Psychological/Psychoanalytic • expressive of the personality, state of mind, feelings, and desires of its author • looks at unconscious mind, dreams, etc. • can provide many clues for solving symbolic mysteries • AKA Freudian (Sigmund Freud) ….

13. Freudian Psychoanalytic • Id = primary source of psychic energy. Source of aggression/desire. If unchecked leads to self destruction. • Ego = regulates, rational governing agent. Largely unconscious, yet would be considered the conscious mind. Mediates within and without. • Superego = moral censor, place of conscience and pride.

14. Psychological/Psychoanalytic EXAMPLE Lord of the Flies William Golding

15. Sources Definitions and components of each theory from Critical Encounters in High School English, 2nd Edition by Deborah Appleman Story/Novel summaries from sparknotes