NAME:

SECTION:

Republic of the Philippines

JOSE RIZAL MEMORIAL STATE UNIVERSITY
The Premier University in Zamboanga del Norte

Lit 1-Poetry
Learning Toolkit

UNIT 3: Literary Criticism

This course explores the philosophies, theories, and legal bases of special and
inclusive education, typical and atypical development of children, learning characteristics
of students with special educational needs and practices in the continuum of special
inclusive education.

Course Outcome:
• Write a critique of a poem read

Learning Outcomes:

At the end of this unit, you are expected to:

• identify various literary approaches used in literary criticism;

• differentiate the various literary approaches used in literary criticism; and
• apply literary approaches in own critique of a poem.

LITERARY THEORY AND SCHOOLS OF CRITICISM

INTRODUCTION

A very basic way of thinking about literary theory is that these ideas act as different
lenses critics use to view and talk about art, literature, and even culture. These different
lenses allow critics to consider works of art based on certain assumptions within that
school of theory. The different lenses also allow critics to focus on particular aspects of a
work they consider important.

For example, if a critic is working with certain Marxist theories, s/he might focus on
how the characters in a story interact based on their economic situation. If a critic is
working with post-colonial theories, s/he might consider the same story but look at how
characters from colonial powers (Britain, France, and even America) treat characters
from, say, Africa or the Caribbean.
APPROACHES TO LITERARY CRITICISM
The work itself (literary piece) is in the center of the map because all approaches
must deal, to some extent or another, with the text itself. To critique a piece of work, one
must read first the text. After which, one may utilize any of the following literary
approaches below:

1. Formalism
2. Psychoanalytic Criticism
3. Marxist Criticism
4. Reader-Response Criticism
5. Postmodern Criticism
6. Feminist Criticism
7. Gender Studies and Queer Theory

1. FORMALIST CRITICISM
Form Follows Function: Russian Formalism, New Criticism, Neo-Aristotelianism

Formalists disagreed about what specific elements make a literary work "good" or
"bad"; but generally, Formalism maintains that a literary work contains certain intrinsic
features, and the theory "...defined and addressed the specifically literary qualities in the
text" (Richter 699). Therefore, it's easy to see Formalism's relation to Aristotle's theories
of dramatic construction.
Formalism attempts to treat each work as its own distinct piece, free from its
environment, era, and even author. This point of view developed in reaction to "...forms
of 'extrinsic' criticism that viewed the text as either the product of social and historical
forces or a document making an ethical statement" (699). Formalists assume that the
keys to understanding a text exist within "the text itself" (a common saying among New
Critics), and thus focus a great deal on, you guessed it, form (Tyson 118).
For the most part, traditional Formalism is no longer used in the academy.
However, New Critical theories are still sometimes used in secondary- and post-
secondary-level instruction in literature and writing (Tyson 115). There has been a
renewed interest in form among groups like the New Formalists.

Typical questions:

• How does the work use imagery to develop its own symbols? (i.e. making a certain
road stand for death by constant association)
• What is the quality of the work's organic unity "...the working together of all the
parts to make an inseparable whole..." (Tyson 121)? In other words, does how the
work is put together reflect what it is?
• How are the various parts of the work interconnected?
• How do paradox, irony, ambiguity, and tension work in the text?
• How do these parts and their collective whole contribute to or not contribute to the
aesthetic quality of the work?
• How does the author resolve apparent contradictions within the work?
• What does the form of the work say about its content?
• Is there a central or focal passage that can be said to sum up the entirety of the
work?
• How do the rhythms and/or rhyme schemes of a poem contribute to the meaning
or effect of the piece?

Here is a list of scholars we encourage you to explore to further your understanding of

this theory:
Russian Formalism

• Victor Shklovsky
• Roman Jakobson
• Victor Erlich - Russian Formalism: History - Doctrine, 1955
• Yuri Tynyanov

New Criticism

• John Crowe Ransom - The New Criticism, 1938

• I.A. Richards
• William Empson
• T.S. Eliot
• Allen Tate
• Cleanth Brooks

Neo-Aristotelianism (Chicago School of Criticism)

• R.S. Crane - Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern, 1952

• Elder Olson
• Norman Maclean
• W.R. Keast
• Wayne C. Booth - The Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961

2. PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

Sigmund Freud

Psychoanalytic criticism builds on Freudian theories of psychology. While we don't

have the room here to discuss all of Freud's work, a general overview is necessary to
explain psychoanalytic literary criticism.

The Unconscious, the Desires, and the Defenses

Freud began his psychoanalytic work in the 1880s while attempting to treat
behavioral disorders in his Viennese patients. He dubbed the disorders 'hysteria' and
began treating them by listening to his patients talk through their problems. Based on this
work, Freud asserted that people's behavior is affected by their unconscious: "...the notion
that human beings are motivated, even driven, by desires, fears, needs, and conflicts of
which they are unaware..." (Tyson 14-15).

Freud believed that our unconscious was influenced by childhood events. Freud
organized these events into developmental stages involving relationships with parents
and drives of desire and pleasure where children focus "...on different parts of the
body...starting with the mouth...shifting to the oral, anal, and phallic phases..." (Richter
1015). These stages reflect base levels of desire, but they also involve fear of loss (loss
of genitals, loss of affection from parents, loss of life) and repression: "...the expunging
from consciousness of these unhappy psychological events" (Tyson 15).

Tyson reminds us, however, that "...repression doesn't eliminate our painful
experiences and emotions...we unconsciously behave in ways that will allow us to 'play
out'...our conflicted feelings about the painful experiences and emotions we repress" (15).
To keep all of this conflict buried in our unconscious, Freud argued that we develop
defenses: selective perception, selective memory, denial, displacement, projection,
regression, fear of intimacy, and fear of death, among others.
Id, Ego, and Superego

Freud maintained that our desires and our unconscious conflicts give rise to three
areas of the mind that wrestle for dominance as we grow from infancy, to childhood, to
adulthood:

• id - "...the location of the drives" or libido

• ego - "...one of the major defenses against the power of the drives..." and home of
the defenses listed above
• superego - the area of the unconscious that houses Judgment (of self and others)
and "...which begins to form during childhood as a result of the Oedipus complex"
(Richter 1015-1016)

Oedipus Complex

Freud believed that the Oedipus complex was "...one of the most powerfully
determinative elements in the growth of the child" (Richter 1016). Essentially, the Oedipus
complex involves children's need for their parents and the conflict that arises as children
mature and realize they are not the absolute focus of their mother's attention: "the
Oedipus complex begins in a late phase of infantile sexuality, between the child's third
and sixth year, and it takes a different form in males than it does in females" (Richter
1016).

Freud argued that both boys and girls wish to possess their mothers, but as they
grow older "...they begin to sense that their claim to exclusive attention is thwarted by the
mother's attention to the father..." (1016). Children, Freud maintained, connect this
conflict of attention to the intimate relations between mother and father, relations from
which the children are excluded. Freud believed that "the result is a murderous rage
against the father...and a desire to possess the mother" (1016).

Freud pointed out, however, that "...the Oedipus complex differs in boys and
girls...the functioning of the related castration complex" (1016). In short, Freud thought
that "...during the Oedipal rivalry [between boys and their fathers], boys fantasized that
punishment for their rage will take the form of..." castration (1016). When boys effectively
work through this anxiety, Freud argued, "...the boy learns to identify with the father in the
hope of someday possessing a woman like his mother. In girls, the castration complex
does not take the form of anxiety...the result is a frustrated rage in which the girl shifts her
sexual desire from the mother to the father" (1016).

Freud believed that eventually, the girl's spurned advances toward the father give
way to a desire to possess a man like her father later in life. Freud believed that the impact
of the unconscious, id, ego, superego, the defenses, and the Oedipus complex was
inescapable and that these elements of the mind influence all our behavior (and even our
dreams) as adults - of course this behavior involves what we write.

Freud and Literature

So what does all of this psychological business have to do with literature and the
study of literature? Put simply, some critics believe that we can "...read
psychoanalytically...to see which concepts are operating in the text in such a way as to
enrich our understanding of the work and, if we plan to write a paper about it, to yield a
meaningful, coherent psychoanalytic interpretation" (Tyson 29). Tyson provides some
insightful and applicable questions to help guide our understanding of psychoanalytic
criticism.
Typical questions:

• How do the operations of repression structure or inform the work?

• Are there any Oedipal dynamics - or any other family dynamics - at work here?
• How can characters' behavior, narrative events, and/or images be explained in
terms of psychoanalytic concepts of any kind (for example, fear or fascination with
death, sexuality - which includes love and romance as well as sexual behavior - as
a primary indicator of psychological identity or the operations of ego-id-superego)?
• What does the work suggest about the psychological being of its author?
• What might a given interpretation of a literary work suggest about the psychological
motives of the reader?
• Are there prominent words in the piece that could have different or hidden
meanings? Could there be a subconscious reason for the author using these
"problem words"?

Here is a list of scholars we encourage you to explore to further your understanding

of this theory:

• Harold Bloom - A Theory of Poetry, 1973; Poetry and Repression: Revisionism

from Blake to Stevens, 1976
• Peter Brooks
• Jacque Lacan - The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of
Psychoanalysis, 1988; "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason
Since Freud" (from Écrits: A Selection, 1957)
• Jane Gallop - Reading Lacan, 1985
• Julia Kristeva - Revolution in Poetic Language, 1984
• Marshall Alcorn - Changing the Subject in English Class: Discourse and the
Constructions of Desire, 2002

Carl Jung

Jungian criticism attempts to explore the connection between literature and what
Carl Jung (a student of Freud) called the “collective unconscious” of the human race:
"...racial memory, through which the spirit of the whole human species manifests itself"
(Richter 504). Jungian criticism, which is closely related to Freudian theory because of its
connection to psychoanalysis, assumes that all stories and symbols are based on mythic
models from mankind’s past.

Based on these commonalities, Jung developed archetypal myths, the Syzygy:

"...a quaternion composing a whole, the unified self of which people are in search"
(Richter 505). These archetypes are the Shadow, the Anima, the Animus, and the Spirit:
"...beneath...[the Shadow] is the Anima, the feminine side of the male Self, and the
Animus, the corresponding masculine side of the female Self" (Richter 505).

In literary analysis, a Jungian critic would look for archetypes (also see the
discussion of Northrop Frye in the Structuralism section) in creative works: "Jungian
criticism is generally involved with a search for the embodiment of these symbols within
particular works of art." (Richter 505). When dealing with this sort of criticism, it is often
useful to keep a handbook of mythology and a dictionary of symbols on hand.

Typical questions:

• What connections can we make between elements of the text and the archetypes?
(Mask, Shadow, Anima, Animus)
• How do the characters in the text mirror the archetypal figures? (Great Mother or
nurturing Mother, Whore, destroying Crone, Lover, Destroying Angel)
 • How does the text mirror the archetypal narrative patterns? (Quest, Night-Sea-
Journey)
• How symbolic is the imagery in the work?
• How does the protagonist reflect the hero of myth?
• Does the “hero” embark on a journey in either a physical or spiritual sense?
• Is there a journey to an underworld or land of the dead?
• What trials or ordeals does the protagonist face? What is the reward for
overcoming them?

Here is a list of scholars we encourage you to explore to further your understanding

of this theory:

• Maud Bodkin - Archetypal Patterns in Poetry, 1934

• Carl Jung - The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Vol. 9, Part 1
of Collected Works. 2nd ed. Trans. R.F.C. Hull, 1968
• Bettina Knapp - Music, Archetype and the Writer: A Jungian View, 1988
• Richard Sugg - Jungian Literary Criticism, 1993

3. MARXIST CRITICISM

Whom Does It Benefit?

Based on the theories of Karl Marx (and so influenced by philosopher Georg

Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel), this school concerns itself with class differences, economic and
otherwise, as well as the implications and complications of the capitalist system: "Marxism
attempts to reveal the ways in which our socioeconomic system is the ultimate source of
our experience" (Tyson 277).

Theorists working in the Marxist tradition, therefore, are interested in answering

the overarching question, whom does it [the work, the effort, the policy, the road, etc.]
benefit? The elite? The middle class? Marxist critics are also interested in how the lower
or working classes are oppressed - in everyday life and in literature.

The Material Dialectic

The Marxist school follows a process of thinking called the material dialectic. This
belief system maintains that "...what drives historical change are the material realities of
the economic base of society, rather than the ideological superstructure of politics, law,
philosophy, religion, and art that is built upon that economic base" (Richter 1088).

Marx asserts that "...stable societies develop sites of resistance: contradictions

build into the social system that ultimately lead to social revolution and the development
of a new society upon the old" (1088). This cycle of contradiction, tension, and revolution
must continue: there will always be conflict between the upper, middle, and lower
(working) classes and this conflict will be reflected in literature and other forms of
expression - art, music, movies, etc.

The Revolution

The continuing conflict between the classes will lead to upheaval and revolution by
oppressed peoples and form the groundwork for a new order of society and economics
where capitalism is abolished. According to Marx, the revolution will be led by the working
class (others think peasants will lead the uprising) under the guidance of intellectuals.
Once the elite and middle class are overthrown, the intellectuals will compose an equal
society where everyone owns everything (socialism - not to be confused with Soviet or
Maoist Communism).
 Though a staggering number of different nuances exist within this school of literary
theory, Marxist critics generally work in areas covered by the following questions.

Typical questions:

• Whom does it benefit if the work or effort is accepted/successful/believed, etc.?

• What is the social class of the author?
• Which class does the work claim to represent?
• What values does it reinforce?
• What values does it subvert?
• What conflict can be seen between the values the work champions and those it
portrays?
• What social classes do the characters represent?
• How do characters from different classes interact or conflict?

Here is a list of scholars we encourage you to explore to further your understanding

of this theory:

• Karl Marx - (with Friedrich Engels) The Communist Manifesto, 1848; Das Kapital,
1867; "Consciousness Derived from Material Conditions" from The German
Ideology, 1932; "On Greek Art in Its Time" from A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy, 1859
• Leon Trotsky - "Literature and Revolution," 1923
• Georg Lukács - "The Ideology of Modernism," 1956
• Walter Benjamin - "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," 1936
• Theodor W. Adorno
• Louis Althusser - Reading Capital, 1965
• Terry Eagleton - Marxism and Literary Criticism, Criticism and Ideology, 1976
• Frederic Jameson - Marxism and Form, The Political Unconscious, 1971
• Jürgen Habermas - The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 1990

4. READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM

What Do You Think?

At its most basic level, reader-response criticism considers readers' reactions to

literature as vital to interpreting the meaning of the text. However, reader-response
criticism can take a number of different approaches. A critic deploying reader-response
theory can use a psychoanalytic lens, a feminist lens, or even a structuralist lens. What
these different lenses have in common when using a reader-response approach is they
maintain "...that what a text is cannot be separated from what it does" (Tyson 154).

Tyson explains that "...reader-response theorists share two beliefs: 1) that the role
of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature and 2) that readers
do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by an objective literary text;
rather they actively make the meaning they find in literature" (154). In this way, reader-
response theory shares common ground with some of the deconstructionists discussed
in the Post-structural area when they talk about "the death of the author," or her
displacement as the (author)itarian figure in the text.

Typical questions:

• How does the interaction of text and reader create meaning?

• What does a phrase-by-phrase analysis of a short literary text, or a key portion of
a longer text, tell us about the reading experience prestructured by (built into) that
text?
 • Do the sounds/shapes of the words as they appear on the page or how they are
spoken by the reader enhance or change the meaning of the word/work?
• How might we interpret a literary text to show that the reader's response is, or is
analogous to, the topic of the story?
• What does the body of criticism published about a literary text suggest about the
critics who interpreted that text and/or about the reading experience produced by
that text? (Tyson 191)

Here is a list of scholars we encourage you to explore to further your understanding of

this theory:

• Peter Rabinowitz - Before Reading, 1987

• Stanley Fish - Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive
Communities, 1980
• Elizabeth Freund - The Return of the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism, 1987
• David Bleich
• Norman Holland - The Dynamics of Literary Response, 1968
• Louise Rosenblatt
• Wolfgang Iser - The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction
from Bunyan to Beckett, 1974
• Hans Robert Jauss

5. Postmodern Criticism

The Center Cannot Hold

This approach concerns itself with the ways and places where systems,
frameworks, definitions, and certainties break down. Post-structuralism maintains that
frameworks and systems, for example the structuralist systems explained in the
structuralist area, are merely fictitious constructs and that they cannot be trusted to
develop meaning or to give order. In fact, the very act of seeking order or a singular Truth
(with a capital T) is absurd because there exists no unified truth.

Post-structuralism holds that there are many truths, that frameworks must bleed,
and that structures must become unstable or decentered. Moreover, post-structuralism is
also concerned with the power structures or hegemonies and power and how these
elements contribute to and/or maintain structures to enforce hierarchy. Therefore, post-
structural theory carries implications far beyond literary criticism.

What Does Your Meaning Mean?

By questioning the process of developing meaning, post-structural theory strikes

at the very heart of philosophy and reality and throws knowledge making into what
Jacques Derrida called "freeplay": "The concept of centered structure...is contradictorily
coherent...the concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a freeplay which is
constituted upon a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself
beyond the reach of the freeplay" (qtd. in Richter, 878-879).

Derrida first posited these ideas in 1966 at Johns Hopkins University when he
delivered “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”: "Perhaps
something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an
'event,' if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of
structural-or structuralist-thought to reduce or to suspect. But let me use the term 'event'
anyway, employing it with caution and as if in quotation marks. In this sense, this event
will have the exterior form of a rupture and a redoubling” (qtd. in Richter, 878). In his
presentation, Derrida challenged structuralism's most basic ideas.
Can Language Do That?

Post-structural theory can be tied to a move against Modernist/Enlightenment

ideas (philosophers: Immanuel Kant, Réne Descartes, John Locke, etc.) and Western
religious beliefs (neo-Platonism, Catholicism, etc.). An early pioneer of this resistance
was philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In his essay, “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral
Sense” (1873), Nietzsche rejects even the very basis of our knowledge making, language,
as a reliable system of communication: “The various languages, juxtaposed, show that
words are never concerned with truth, never with adequate expression...” (248).

Below is an example, adapted from the Tyson text, of some language freeplay
and a simple form of deconstruction:

Time (noun) flies (verb) like an arrow (adverb clause) = Time passes quickly.

Time (verb) flies (object) like an arrow (adverb clause) = Get out your stopwatch
and time the speed of flies as you would time an arrow's flight.

Time flies (noun) like (verb) an arrow (object) = Time flies are fond of arrows (or at
least of one particular arrow).

So, post-structuralists assert that if we cannot trust language systems to convey

truth, the very bases of truth are unreliable and the universe - or at least the universe we
have constructed - becomes unraveled or de-centered. Nietzsche uses language slip as
a base to move into the slip and shift of truth as a whole: “What is truth? …truths are an
illusion about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions...” ("On Truth and Lies"
250).

This returns us to the discussion in the structuralist area regarding signs, signifiers,
and signified. Essentially, post-structuralism holds that we cannot trust the sign = signifier
+ signified formula, that there is a breakdown of certainty between sign/signifier, which
leaves language systems hopelessly inadequate for relaying meaning so that we are
(returning to Derrida) in eternal freeplay or instability.

What's Left?

Important to note, however, is that deconstruction is not just about tearing down -
this is a common misconception. Derrida, in "Signature Event Context," addressed this
limited view of post-structural theory: "Deconstruction cannot limit or proceed immediately
to a neutralization: it must…practice an overturning of the classical opposition and a
general displacement of the system. It is only on this condition that deconstruction will
provide itself the means with which to intervene in the field of oppositions that it criticizes,
which is also a field of nondiscursive forces" (328).

Derrida reminds us that through deconstruction we can identify the in-betweens

and the marginalized to begin interstitial knowledge building.

Modernism Vs Postmodernism

With the resistance to traditional forms of knowledge making (science, religion,

language), inquiry, communication, and building meaning take on different forms to the
post-structuralist. We can look at this difference as a split between Modernism and
Postmodernism. The table below, excerpted from theorist Ihab Hassan's The
Dismemberment of Orpheus (1998), offers us a way to make sense of some differences
between Modernism, dominated by Enlightenment ideas, and Postmodernism, a space
of freeplay and discourse.
 Keep in mind that even the author, Hassan, "...is quick to point out how the
dichotomies are themselves insecure, equivocal" (Harvey 42). Though post-structuralism
is uncomfortable with binaries, Hassan provides us with some interesting contrasts to
consider:

Modernism vs Postmodernism
Modernism Postmodernism
romanticism/symbolism paraphysics/Dadaism
form (conjunctive, closed) antiform (disjunctive, open)
purpose play
design chance
hierarchy anarchy
mastery/logos exhaustion/silence
art object/finished work/logos process/performance/antithesis
centering absence
genre/boundary text/intertext
semantics rhetoric
metaphor metonymy
root/depth rhizome/surface
signified signifier
narrative/grande histoire anti-narrative/petite histoire
genital/phallic polymorphous/androgynous
paranoia schizophrenia
origin/cause difference-difference/trace
God the Father The Holy Ghost
determinacy interdeterminacy
transcendence immanence

Post-Structuralism And Literature

If we are questioning/resisting the methods we use to build knowledge (science,

religion, language), then traditional literary notions are also thrown into freeplay. These
include the narrative and the author:

Narrative

The narrative is a fiction that locks readers into interpreting text in a single,
chronological manner that does not reflect our experiences. Postmodern texts may not
adhere to traditional notions of narrative. For example, in his seminal work, Naked Lunch,
William S. Burroughs explodes the traditional narrative structure and critiques almost
everything Modern: modern government, modern medicine, modern law-enforcement.
Other examples of authors playing with narrative include John Fowles; in the final sections
of The French Lieutenant's Woman, Fowles steps outside his narrative to speak with the
reader directly.

Moreover, grand narratives are resisted. For example, the belief that through
science the human race will improve is questioned. In addition, metaphysics is
questioned. Instead, postmodern knowledge building is local, situated, slippery, and self-
critical (i.e. it questions itself and its role). Because post-structural work is self-critical,
post-structural critics even look for ways texts contradict themselves (see typical
questions below).

Author

The author is displaced as absolute author(ity), and the reader plays a role in
interpreting the text and developing meaning (as best as possible) from the text. In “The
Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes argues that the idea of singular authorship is a
recent phenomenon. Barthes explains that the death of the author shatters Modernist
notions of authority and knowledge building (145).

Lastly, he states that once the author is dead and the Modernist idea of singular
narrative (and thus authority) is overturned, texts become plural, and the interpretation of
texts becomes a collaborative process between author and audience: “...a text is made
of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of
dialogue...but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the
reader” (148). Barthes ends his essay by empowering the reader: “Classical criticism has
never paid any attention to the reader...the writer is the only person in literature…it is
necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death
of the Author” (148).

Typical questions:

• How is language thrown into freeplay or questioned in the work? For example, note
how Anthony Burgess plays with language (Russian vs English) in A Clockwork
Orange, or how Burroughs plays with names and language in Naked Lunch.
• How does the work undermine or contradict generally accepted truths?
• How does the author (or a character) omit, change, or reconstruct memory and
identity?
• How does a work fulfill or move outside the established conventions of its genre?
• How does the work deal with the separation (or lack thereof) between writer, work,
and reader?
• What ideology does the text seem to promote?
• What is left out of the text that if included might undermine the goal of the work?
• If we changed the point of view of the text - say from one character to another, or
multiple characters - how would the story change? Whose story is not told in the
text? Who is left out and why might the author have omitted this character's tale?

Here is a list of scholars we encourage you to explore to further your understanding

of this theory:

Theorists

• Immanuel Kant - "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?", 1784 (as
a baseline to understand what Nietzsche was resisting)
• Friedrich Nietzsche - “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense," 1873; The Gay
Science, 1882; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, A Book for All and None, 1885
• Jacques Derrida - "Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences,"
1966; Of Grammatology, 1967; "Signature Event Context," 1972
• Roland Barthes - "The Death of the Author," 1967
• Deleuze and Guattari - "Rhizome," 1976
• Jean-François Lyotard - The Postmodern Condition, 1979
• Michele Foucault - The Foucault Reader, 1984
• Stephen Toulmin - Cosmopolis, 1990
• Martin Heidegger - Basic Writings, 1993
• Paul Cilliers - Complexity and Postmodernity, 1998
• Ihab Hassan - The Dismemberment of Orpheus, 1998; From Postmodernism to
Postmodernity: The Local/Global Context, 2001

Postmodern Literature

• William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch, 1959

• Angela Carter - Burning Your Boats, stories from 1962-1993 (first published as a
collection in 1995)
 • Kathy Acker - Blood and Guts in High School, 1978
• Paul Auster - City of Glass (volume one of the New York City Trilogy), 1985 (as a
graphic novel published by Neon Lit, a division of Avon Books, 1994)
• Lynne Tillman - Haunted Houses, 1987
• David Wojnarowicz - The Waterfront Journals, 1996

6. FEMINIST CRITICISM

Feminist criticism is concerned with "the ways in which literature (and other cultural
productions) reinforce or undermine the economic, political, social, and psychological
oppression of women" (Tyson 83). This school of theory looks at how aspects of our
culture are inherently patriarchal (male dominated) and aims to expose misogyny in
writing about women, which can take explicit and implicit forms. This misogyny, Tyson
reminds us, can extend into diverse areas of our culture: "Perhaps the most chilling
example...is found in the world of modern medicine, where drugs prescribed for both
sexes often have been tested on male subjects only" (85).

Feminist criticism is also concerned with less obvious forms of marginalization

such as the exclusion of women writers from the traditional literary canon: "...unless the
critical or historical point of view is feminist, there is a tendency to underrepresent the
contribution of women writers" (Tyson 84).

Common Space in Feminist Theories

Though a number of different approaches exist in feminist criticism, there exist

some areas of commonality. This list is excerpted from Tyson (92):

1. Women are oppressed by patriarchy economically, politically, socially, and

psychologically; patriarchal ideology is the primary means by which women are
oppressed.
2. In every domain where patriarchy reigns, woman is other: she is marginalized,
defined only by her difference from male norms and values.
3. All of Western (Anglo-European) civilization is deeply rooted in patriarchal
ideology, for example, in the Biblical portrayal of Eve as the origin of sin and death
in the world.
4. While biology determines our sex (male or female), culture determines our gender
(scales of masculine and feminine).
5. All feminist activity, including feminist theory and literary criticism, has as its
ultimate goal to change the world by prompting gender equality.
6. Gender issues play a part in every aspect of human production and experience,
including the production and experience of literature, whether we are consciously
aware of these issues or not.

Feminist criticism has, in many ways, followed what some theorists call the three
waves of feminism:

1. First Wave Feminism - late 1700s-early 1900's: writers like Mary Wollstonecraft
(A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792) highlight the inequalities between
the sexes. Activists like Susan B. Anthony and Victoria Woodhull contribute to the
women's suffrage movement, which leads to National Universal Suffrage in 1920
with the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment.
2. Second Wave Feminism - early 1960s-late 1970s: building on more equal
working conditions necessary in America during World War II, movements such as
the National Organization for Women (NOW), formed in 1966, cohere feminist
political activism. Writers like Simone de Beauvoir (Le Deuxième Sexe, 1949) and
Elaine Showalter established the groundwork for the dissemination of feminist
theories dove-tailed with the American Civil Rights movement.
 3. Third Wave Feminism - early 1990s-present: resisting the perceived essentialist
(over generalized, over simplified) ideologies and a white, heterosexual, middle
class focus of second wave feminism, third wave feminism borrows from post-
structural and contemporary gender and race theories (see below) to expand on
marginalized populations' experiences. Writers like Alice Walker work to
"...reconcile it [feminism] with the concerns of the black community...[and] the
survival and wholeness of her people, men and women both, and for the promotion
of dialog and community as well as for the valorization of women and of all the
varieties of work women perform" (Tyson 107).

Typical questions:

• How is the relationship between men and women portrayed?

• What are the power relationships between men and women (or characters
assuming male/female roles)?
• How are male and female roles defined?
• What constitutes masculinity and femininity?
• How do characters embody these traits?
• Do characters take on traits from opposite genders? How so? How does this
change others’ reactions to them?
• What does the work reveal about the operations (economically, politically, socially,
or psychologically) of patriarchy?
• What does the work imply about the possibilities of sisterhood as a mode of
resisting patriarchy?
• What does the work say about women's creativity?
• What does the history of the work's reception by the public and by the critics tell
us about the operation of patriarchy?
• What role does the work play in terms of women's literary history and literary
tradition? (Tyson)

Here is a list of scholars we encourage you to explore to further your understanding

of this theory:

• Mary Wollstonecraft - A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792

• Simone de Beauvoir - Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex), 1949
• Julia Kristeva - About Chinese Women, 1977
• Elaine Showalter - A Literature of Their Own, 1977; "Toward a Feminist Poetics,"
1979
• Deborah E. McDowell - "New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism," 1980
• Alice Walker - In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, 1983
• Lillian S. Robinson - "Treason out Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary
Canon," 1983
• Camille Paglia - Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art, 1990

Here is the Tyson source referenced above:

• Lois Tyson - Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide, 2nd ed., 2006.

7. GENDER STUDIES AND QUEER STUDIES

Gender(s), Power, And Marginalization

Gender studies and queer theory explore issues of sexuality, power, and
marginalized populations (woman as other) in literature and culture. Much of the work in
gender studies and queer theory, while influenced by feminist criticism, emerges from
post-structural interest in fragmented, de-centered knowledge building (Nietzsche,
Derrida, Foucault), language (the breakdown of sign-signifier), and psychoanalysis
(Lacan).

A primary concern in gender studies and queer theory is the manner in which
gender and sexuality is discussed: "Effective as this work [feminism] was in changing
what teachers taught and what the students read, there was a sense on the part of some
feminist critics that...it was still the old game that was being played, when what it needed
was a new game entirely. The argument posed was that in order to counter patriarchy, it
was necessary not merely to think about new texts, but to think about them in radically
new ways" (Richter 1432).

Therefore, a critic working in gender studies and queer theory might even be
uncomfortable with the binary established by many feminist scholars between masculine
and feminine: "Cixous (following Derrida in Of Grammatology) sets up a series of binary
oppositions (active/passive, sun/moon...father/mother, logos/pathos). Each pair can be
analyzed as a hierarchy in which the former term represents the positive and masculine
and the latter the negative and feminine principle" (Richter 1433-1434).

In-Betweens

Many critics working with gender and queer theory are interested in the breakdown
of binaries such as male and female, the in-betweens (also following Derrida's interstitial
knowledge building). For example, gender studies and queer theory maintains that
cultural definitions of sexuality and what it means to be male and female are in flux: "...the
distinction between "masculine" and "feminine" activities and behavior is constantly
changing, so that women who wear baseball caps and fatigues...can be perceived as
more piquantly sexy by some heterosexual men than those women who wear white frocks
and gloves and look down demurely" (Richter 1437).

Moreover, Richter reminds us that as we learn more about our genetic structure,
the biology of male/female becomes increasingly complex and murky: "even the physical
dualism of sexual genetic structures and bodily parts breaks down when one considers
those instances - XXY syndromes, natural sexual bimorphisms, as well as surgical
transsexuals - that defy attempts at binary classification" (1437).

Typical questions:

• What elements of the text can be perceived as being masculine (active, powerful)
and feminine (passive, marginalized) and how do the characters support these
traditional roles?
• What sort of support (if any) is given to elements or characters who question the
masculine/feminine binary? What happens to those elements/characters?
• What elements in the text exist in the middle, between the perceived
masculine/feminine binary? In other words, what elements exhibit traits of both
(bisexual)?
• How does the author present the text? Is it a traditional narrative? Is it secure and
forceful? Or is it more hesitant or even collaborative?
• What are the politics (ideological agendas) of specific gay, lesbian, or queer works,
and how are those politics revealed in...the work's thematic content or portrayals
of its characters?
• What are the poetics (literary devices and strategies) of a specific lesbian, gay, or
queer works?
• What does the work contribute to our knowledge of queer, gay, or lesbian
experience and history, including literary history?
• How is queer, gay, or lesbian experience coded in texts that are by writers who are
apparently homosexual?
 • What does the work reveal about the operations (socially, politically,
psychologically) homophobic?
• How does the literary text illustrate the problematics of sexuality and sexual
"identity," that is the ways in which human sexuality does not fall neatly into the
separate categories defined by the words homosexual and heterosexual?

Here is a list of scholars we encourage you to explore to further your understanding

of this theory:

• Luce Irigaray - Speculum of the Other Woman, 1974

• Hélène Cixous - "The Laugh of the Medusa," 1976
• Laura Mulvey - "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," 1975; "Afterthoughts on
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," 1981
• Michel Foucault - The History of Sexuality, Volume I, 1980
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - Epistemology of the Closet, 1994
• Lee Edelman - "Homographesis," 1989
• Michael Warner
• Judith Butler - "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," 1991

PERFORMANCE TASK 1

Read the following poem and do an initial literary critique by answering the guide
questions for each approach.

Still I Rise
BY MAYA ANGELOU

You may write me down in history You may shoot me with your words,
With your bitter, twisted lies, You may cut me with your eyes,
You may trod me in the very dirt You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like dust, I'll rise. But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you? Does my sexiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom? Does it come as a surprise
’Cause I walk like I've got oil wells That I dance like I've got diamonds
Pumping in my living room. At the meeting of my thighs?

Just like moons and like suns, Out of the huts of history’s shame
With the certainty of tides, I rise
Just like hopes springing high, Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
Still I'll rise. I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Did you want to see me broken? Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops, Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
Weakened by my soulful cries? I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
Does my haughtiness offend you? I rise
Don't you take it awful hard Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
’Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
Diggin’ in my own backyard. I rise
I rise
I rise.

Maya Angelou, "Still I Rise" from And Still I Rise: A Book of Poems. Copyright © 1978 by
Maya Angelou. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin
Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Literary Approach Guide Question Your Response
1. Formalism Is there a central or
focal passage that can
be said to sum up the
entirety of the work?

2. Psychoanalytic What does the work

Criticism suggest about the
psychological being of
its author?

3. Marxist What values does the

Criticism work reinforce?
4. Reader- Do the sounds/shapes
Response of the words as they
Criticism appear on the page or
how they are spoken
by the reader enhance
or change the meaning
of the word/work?
How?

5. Postmodern What ideology does the

Criticism text seem to promote?

6. Feminist What does the work

Criticism imply about the
possibilities of
sisterhood as a mode
of resisting patriarchy?

7. Gender Studies What elements of the

and Queer text can be perceived
Theory as being masculine
(active, powerful) and
feminine (passive,
marginalized) and how
do the persona support
these traditional roles?
Written Response Rubric
3 2 1
Claim Precise, Reasonable claim Missing claim or
thoughtful claim inaccurate claim
Evidence Uses well-chosen Uses some Missing textual
textual evidence relevant textual evidence, or
consistently evidence to relies solely on
throughout the piece support ideas irrelevant textual
evidence
Analysis Details are thoroughly There is some analysis Missing analysis
analyzed; evidence of of details and some
reflection; student evidence of reflection
makes insights
Conventions Few errors in writing Errors in writing may Response is
that do not disrupt disrupt readability; may illegible
readability contain bullet points or
incomplete sentences

PERFORMANCE TASK 2

For your final task, you will write your own poem following the principles you have
learned from this course. You are free to choose the form, length, and type of poem you
will write. Write your poem on a long bond paper (8.5”x13”). Please be guided with the
rubric below.

POETRY RUBRIC

A. Message

Points Description
15-20 Excellent
Message is compelling, engaging, and very clear. Message achieves
purpose of encouraging one to vote.
10-14 Good
Message is engaging and clear. Message achieves purpose of encouraging one to
5-9 Fair vote.
Message is somewhat engaging, but lacks focus. Message somewhat achieves
purpose of encouraging one to vote.
0-4 poor
Message does not capture nor maintain the reader's attention and does not maintain a
focus. Message does not encourage one to vote.

B. Use of Convention

Points Description
15-20 Excellent
Free of spelling and punctuation errors. Grammar usage is controlled and error free.
10-14 Good
Some spelling and punctuation errors; meaning is not interrupted by these errors.
Grammar is somewhat controlled; minimal errors.
5-9 Fair
Problems with spelling and punctuation causes some interruption in reading. Several
grammatical problems are evident.
0-4 poor
Spelling and punctuation errors are frequent and interrupt reading of story. Incorrect
use of grammar and punctuation interferes with understanding the writing.
C. Form

Points Description
15-20 Excellent
The structure is intentional and elements flow seamlessly together to enhance
meaning of message. Poem is complete.
10-14 Good
The structure is intentional and elements flow together to enhance meaning of message.
Poem is complete.
5-9 Fair
Structure somewhat contributes to meaning. Poem is not fully developed.
0-4 poor
Overall poem lacks coherence and message is unclear. Poem is not complete.

D. Technique

Points Description
15-20 Excellent
Effectively uses vivid vocabulary, unique details, figurative language, and sensory details
to create tone and meaning. Evokes a strong response from the reader.
10-14 Good
Uses vocabulary, figurative language, and sensory details to create tone and meaning.
Evokes a moderate response from the reader.
5-9 Fair
Weak use of vocabulary, figurative language, and sensory details to create tone and
meaning. Evokes a minimal response from reader.
0-4 poor
Lack of vocabulary, figurative language, and sensory details create an overgeneralized
or vague poem. Reader is unmoved by work.

Notes: