Critical Lenses

African American Studies

an interdisciplinary academic field that explores the history, culture, and experiences of African Americans and people of African descent, often analyzing social, political, and economic structures critically.

Biographical Criticism

a method of critical analysis that examines the relationship between an author’s works and their life experiences.

Cultural Studies

Examines a wide range of topics, including music, art, and film, as well as social, political, and economic issues.  It focuses on their contexts socially, as well as how they have been seen and handled throughout history.

Deconstruction

A critical practice that attempts to subvert the usual assumptions made about language, meaning, and structure in a text, and usually finds contradictions and complexities.

Ethnic Studies

A multidisciplinary academic field of study that examines the histories, cultures, and experiences of suppressed racial and ethnic groups, often focusing on matters of identity, power, and resistance.

Feminist Criticism

Beginning in the 1920s with Virginia Woolf, it is a mode of literary and cultural discussion inspired by modern feminist thought. Since the 1970s, it has developed as an arena of debate about the relationship between literature and the cultural subordination of women as writers, readers, or characters within the patriarchy. In the late 1970s, attention was redirected from the "sins" of male authors and towards the virtues of women's writings instead. Since the 1980s, works of this criticism have come under scrutiny for their exclusion of ethnic or sexual minorities, causing it to become much more focused on intersectionality.

Freudian Criticism

A literary lens that looks at a piece of work using psychoanalytic theories created by Sigmund Freud. Focuses on the unconscious desires and the motivations of the characters to find the latent meaning of their actions.

Gender Studies

Studies different aspects of gender: social, cultural and how gender is represented within those aspects.

Historical Criticism

analyzes a text by the historical context of when it was written, the context of the author’s life, and the cultural/social norms of the period. 

Jungian (Myth) Criticism

a type of literary criticism based on the theories of Carl Jung, a psychiatrist who developed his own theory of analytical psychology. Jungian criticism focuses on the analysis of archetypes in literature and mythology, which are shared images that express the universal unconscious. It also explores the goal of individuation, which is the integration of the unconscious and conscious mind. 

Lacaninan Criticism

analyzes literature and culture by focusing on the unconscious, language, and the symbolic order, exploring how these elements shape our understanding of identity, desire, and the human psyche 

Marxist Criticism

A critical approach that interprets literature based on the socio-economic theories of Karl Marx, focusing on class struggle, materialism, and the ways in which literature reflects, reinforces, or challenges societal power structures.

Narrative Theory

The study of narrative structures and how they affect our perception and interpretation of stories, encompassing the analysis of narrative techniques, genres, and the role of the narrator.

New Criticism

An approach to literary analysis that emphasizes close reading and examines the text as independent of the intentions of the author, historical background, or response from the reader. It focuses on elements such as imagery, symbolism, structure, and paradox to reveal meaning. It argues that the value of a work lies in its coherence and complexity. This approach helped shape modern literary studies by encouraging objective and detailed textual analysis. 

New Historicism

A literary theory that emphasizes the relationship between a work of literature and the historical period/context in which it was produced. It views literary works as not isolated works but instead products of their time. It argues that a piece is shaped by the social, political, and ideological forces that surrounded them. The theories of Michel Foucault are drawn on, especially his ideas about power and knowledge.

Postcolonial Criticism

considers vexed culture-political questions of national and ethnic identity, otherness, race, imperialism and language, during and after the colonial periods. It draws upon post-structuralist such as those of deconstruction in order to unravel the complex relations between colonial centre and colonial periphery, often in ways that have been criticized for being excessively abstruse. 

Poststructuralism

reacts against structuralist pretensions to scientific objectivity and comprehensiveness. Thoughts emphasize the instability of meanings and of intellectual categories and sought to undermine any theoretical system that claimed to have universal validity. They set out to dissolve the fixed binary oppositions of structuralist thought that between language and metalanguage-and thus between literary and criticism. These thinkers disregard certainties. 

Psychoanalytic Criticism

the style of criticism that applies psychoanalytic theories to the analysis of literature. However, this style of analysis does not focus on the text as much as it does on the author (or, occasionally, the reader.) It seeks to explore and explain some of the unfulfilled desires of a person that can be seen through descriptive symbolism with an emphasis on emotional logic over rational logic. It is a theory of the mind.

Queer Theory

the style of criticism that interprets the text regardless of the sex or intention of the author. It seeks to remove the stigma surrounding discussions of gender, sex, and sexuality. Theorists of queer theory argue that gender and sexuality are malleable and do not fit into a strict binary or system in general. This style of criticism also often parallels feminist theory. It questions themes of equality and difference and seeks to understand questions of difference and to look for the subtle things in literature that a reader can pick up on regarding the emotional relationships between characters regardless of the author’s original intent.

Reader-Response Criticism

A literary theory that focuses on the responses of the reader to its literary work rather than the work itself. It gives the reader more of an active role within the text. Therefore, it relies on the reader's response to what they interpret as the meaning of the text.

Structuralism

A movement of thought in the humanities, widespread in anthropology, linguistics, and literary theory, and influential in the 1950s and ’60s. Primarily considers language as a system of signs and signification, the elements of which are understandable only in relation to each other and to the system. This examines the underlying systems and structures within a text, rather than focusing on individual meanings or the author’s intent.