Download Historical/biographical lens

LENSES OVERVIEW
Historical/biographical lens
- Historical- Social/cultural/political influence of author's time period
- Biographical- Author's life & effect on text
- In what ways does the book reflect the experiences or feelings of the author and the time that he
or she lived in?
- Biographical and Historical theories believe that the author and his/her history are important to
the meaning of a text. These critics look at when and where the text was written, and try to
understand the social, political or cultural influence of the time period and its effect on the author.
They research the author’s life and times and relate that information to the work. Biographical
theory suggests that the work is a reflection of the author’s experience or feelings.
Marxist / Socio-political lens
- Class relationships? Power/control/conflict? Effect on text & interpretation? Power and social
class: in what ways do the characters focus on money, social class, economic oppression, and issues
of power and authority?
- Marxist theory looks at a text and considers the institutions of power at the time it was written.
The Marxist critic pays attention to the author’s view of the world and how his or her political views
are represented in the text. Marxist criticism is interested in what determines power and status; it
looks at the power struggles in the text and how the power structures are established and whether
they succeed or fail. Some Marxist critics consider the reader’s socio-economic status and how it
affects the way the reader reads and interprets texts. Focus is on class struggle, power, relations of
social classes, and the conflicts involved with economic, political, and social advantage.
Psychoanalytic lens
- How do characters represent id, ego, superego? Hidden desires/fears/motivation? Internal and
emotional conflict: what makes the characters feel the way they do? Do they have any “hidden”
desires? Are there characters that symbolize the Id, ego or superego?
- The Psychoanalytic lens focuses on the “hidden desires” that characters have. The terms id, ego,
and superego refer to parts of our conscious and subconscious mind (activity in our brain that we
are not aware of) that either make us act on our desires or control them. According to Sigmund
Freud, an Austrian psychiatrist, the Id represents the part of our brain that is unconscious—
hidden—to us; it is the passionate, irrational and impulsive part of our mind. The ego represents
the logical and orderly part of our brain that is in our conscious (the part we are aware of). The
superego—the opposite of the Id—is the part of our brain that makes moral judgments and tells us
to make sacrifices for good causes even if the sacrifice isn’t logical. A Psychoanalytic critic would
look at how different characters symbolize the Id, ego, and superego, or consider how each of the
characters represents a piece of something in all of us.
Feminist lens
- How is gender represented? Power? Attitudes? M/F interpretations? Stereotypes? Effect on
text? What lines suggest certain stereotypes about the ways women and men should act? Are there
lines that suggest the way women and men should treat each other?
- Feminist critics are interested in the author, the text itself, the reader, and when and where the text
was written and read. Feminist critics look at how men write about women and how male (and
female) authors depict gender roles (traditional and contemporary). It highlights the gender
relations within a text, and looks at the ways in which women may experience texts differently than
men. While looking at gender differences, Feminist critics also may observe how sexual
stereotypes might be reinforced; they look at which gender holds power, and notice how the text
reflects, distorts, or improves the place of women (or men) in society.
Postcolonial Lens
- The postcolonial lens is a special historical perspective that asks critics to consider the politics of
imperialism. Postcolonial theory focuses “the interactions between European nations and the
societies they colonized.”1 Postcolonial theory is an attempt to establish a way of thinking about
literature from former European colonies that takes a position “against imperialism and
Eurocentrism.”
- In particular, postcolonial theory is a reaction against the temptation to look for “universal”
meanings in all literature (including literature from former European colonies). Postcolonial theory
states that we must look for “the differences within the various [indigenous] cultural traditions as
well as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features shared across those traditions.” 2
- Finally, postcolonial theory asks us to think about how imperialism and expansion can have a
destabilizing effect on the colonial power.
Deepak Bahiri. “Introduction to Postcolonial Studies.” Postcolonial Studies at Emory.
http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Intro.html
2Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial
Literatures (London and New York: Routledge, 1989).
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