Download A Summary of Certain Theoretical Perspectives New Criticism: the

A Summary of Certain Theoretical Perspectives
New Criticism: the focus is on the written work itself. Knowledge about the reader or author is
unnecessary.
Reader Response: meaning occurs when the reader transacts with the text. The reader is an integral
part of the meaning making process.
Context
Reader -------------- Meaning --------------------Text
Deconstruction is a mirror image of New Criticism in that while New Criticism aims to reveal the
coherence and unity in the work, deconstruction aims to expose the gaps, incoherencies, and
contradictions in the text. There is never an immediate correlation between signifier (what we label)
and signified (the thing).
Example:
Let’s take a very simple text, one appearing beside an elevator:
“Seeing Eye Dogs Only.”
Although it appears to extend assistance to the visually impaired, it literally would ban them from
entering, since it appears to say that this elevator is reserved for Seeing Eye dogs—no other animals
or persons can ride it.
Although the text is put to help blind persons, it shifts attention and power to a certain kind of dog.
Suppose a person had a Seeing Eye monkey. He or she presumably could not ride the elevator.
Plus, blind people obviously cannot read the sign—which subverts the whole reason why the sign is
there in the first place.
Perhaps the sign is meant for someone who can see and has a retired Seeing Eye dog as a pet. Can
he or she take the dog on the elevator? Isn’t that what the sign says?
The point is not that deconstruction aims at destroying a text, but that it mainly shows how the text
unravels itself in self-contradiction.
Biographical, historical, and New Historical Criticism: knowledge of the author and the historical
context in which he or she wrote is crucial to understanding a piece of work. New Historical Criticism
goes further in saying that history is a text where meaning is constructed and interpreted. You can’t
separate the writer from his or her context. Literature is shaped by history, shapes history, and is also
distorted by history.
Psychological criticism is basically interested in one’s motives. Freudian theory is an important
element in psychological criticism. The basic ideas are that people are driven by the unconscious.
Submerging unacceptable desires—repression, especially sexual desires—is a major theme in
Freudian theory. The Oedipal complex is the most widely known, whereby a boy unconsciously
sexually desires his mother and desires to kill his father.
Feminist Criticism is concerned with how women have been portrayed in texts and how women
writers have written. Feminist criticism deals with the patriarchal society that women have had to live
under and the second class citizenship that they have had to endure.
Marxist Criticism is another sociological lens that concerns itself with the unequal distribution of
wealth in society, with class, capitalism, and class consciousness.