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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.