Texts and Contexts : Writing about Literature with Critical Theory

This book is deeply rooted in the views, responses, and history of contemporary critical theories. This popular book presents a user-friendly introduction to contemporary critical theories-from new criticism to cultural studies-as part of the practice of analyzing and writing about literature. The new edition has more coverage of film and other genres reflecting the growing interest in film as an academic field. There is more on current approaches to literature, including the relationship between rhetoric and reader-response criticism, Marxism, postcolonialism, queer theory, feminist theory, and African-American studies. For anyone interested in applying critical theory to writing about literature.

Practices Questions 1. Read closely. You can assume that everything 1. What formal elements does this work is carefully calculated to contribute to the have? (Structure, imagery, diction, etc.) work¿s unity¿figures of speech, point of view, 2. How can these formal elements be diction, recurrent ideas or events, etc. arranged in opposing pairs or groups? 2. Find oppositions, tensions, ambiguities, and 3. What unifying idea holds these ironies in the work. opposing elements together? 3. Indicate how all these various elements are (Think in terms of an ¿Although X, Y¿ unified¿what idea holds them together? thesis sentence.) 1. Move through the text in slow motion, 1. What is your response to the text? describing the responses of an ideal reader¿ 2. If the text were changed in some specific what is anticipated, what is experienced. way (a word, a phrase, a sentence, etc.), 2. Or, move through the text describing your how would your response change? own personal response. 3. Is your response personal and 3. Focus on how particular details shape idiosyncratic, or is it shaped by the text readers¿ expectations and responses. and shared norms of interpretation? 1. Identify the oppositions in the text, and 1. What does the text most obviously determine which items are favored. seem to say? 2. Identify what appears to be central to the text, 2. How can the text be turned against and what appears to be marginal and excluded. itself, making it say also the opposite of 3. Reverse the text¿s hierarchy (the system of what it most obviously seems to say? favoring), opening up another (or an other) 3. How can something apparently reading; and/or argue that what appears to be marginal or trivial in the text be marginal is actually central. brought to the center of attention? 1. Research the author¿s life and relate that infor- 1. How can you connect the author¿s life to mation, cautiously, to the work. his or her writing? Are there common 2. Research the author¿s time (the political issues, events, concerns? history, economic history, intellectual history, 2. How can you connect the literary work etc.) and relate that information, to its historical context, including its cautiously, to the work. literary context? 3. Research how people reasoned during the 3. Is the author part of a dominant culture, author¿s lifetime, the patterns and limits in- or a colonial culture, or a postcolonial volved in making sense. Relate those logical culture, and how does that status affect strategies to the work. the work? 1. Apply a developmental concept to the work¿ 1. What appears to be motivating the for example, the Oedipal complex, anal reten- author, or character, or even reader? tiveness, castration anxiety, gender confusion. 2. What other motivations, repressed or 2. Relate the work to psychologically significant disguised, might be at work? events in the author¿s life. 3. What developmental concepts might 3. Consider how repressed material may be help to explain this behavior? expressed in the work¿s pattern of imagery or symbols. 1. Identify the qualities of gender, class, race, 1. How does this work advance or question sexual preference, religion, etc. of the author a particular political agenda? and/or characters: that is, say how individ 2. How would readers of different political uals are portrayed as members of some group. stances read this work differently? 2. Consider whether the text promotes or 3. How are the individuals in this work undermines stereotypes. portrayed as part of a group or class? 3. Imagine how the text might be read by a cer- tain type of reader; or how a text might have been neglected by a certain type of reader. Texts and Contexts Writing About Literature with Critical Theory Sixth Edition Steven Lynn University of South Carolina New York San Francisco Boston London Toronto Sydney Tokyo Singapore Madrid Mexico City Munich Paris Capetown Hong Kong Montreal For Annette and Anna Vice President and Editor-in-Chief: J