English paper
Length: minimum 2,500 words
Format: MLA, Calibri (or equivalent sans serif font)
Directions: Develop an interesting, focused thesis on Othello in a paper employing one critical perspective, using at least four relevant scholarly sources, including both journal articles and books: a minimum of five sources, including the play.
What do we mean by critical theory? Critical theory, or literary theory, is a set of concepts and intellectual assumptions that form the basis of explanations and interpretations of literary texts. In the humanities, a theory is a framework or set of ideas that transcends the individual example, but that cannot be proven. It isn’t about coming up with the “right answer” but about exploring how any given theory helps provide insights and new ways of understanding. Theories are in dialogue with each other, and often contradict. Consider them part of an ongoing dialogue between theorists. Ultimately, theories are tools meant to be put into practice.
Literary criticism has two main functions:
1. To analyze, study, and evaluate works of literature
2. To form general principles for the examination of works of literature
New Criticism:
o 1930s (when literature was establishing itself as an academic discipline)
o Focuses on the text itself (usually poem)
o Uses "close reading"—analyze language, the text
o Ignores what is outside the text (author’s intentions, social or historical contexts, biography
of author, etc.)
o Avoid "intentional fallacy"—confusing meaning of a work with the author's intention
o Avoid "affective fallacy"—interpreting texts according to emotional responses of readers,
confusing what the text is with what it does
o Pays attention to elements of the genre (irony, coherence, metaphor, point of view, etc.) and how
all elements contribute to overall meaning
Feminist Criticism: 1970s (second-wave women’s movement)
o Calls attention to and challenges "the patriarchal point of view as the standard for all moral,
aesthetic, political, and intellectual judgments" (1096)
o Argues that gender roles are learned as part of culture, not fixed as part of nature
o Focuses on issues of identity
o Examines how characters are portrayed
Psychoanalytic Criticism:
Began with Sigmund Freud’s theories of how unconscious affects behavior: how what happens in
childhood can unconsciously shape adult behavior
o Literature shows symbolic elements of such behavior, influenced by author’s experiences
o Literary text can express unconscious desires and anxieties of its author
Marxist Criticism:
Based on Karl Marx’s political and economic theories
o Focuses on specific issues of race and class within a text
o Economy drives society, class system drives economy, and proletariat (labor) do not understand
these economic and social forces on them
o Believes that social values are constructed in ways that benefit the wealthy and hold back the laborers
Deconstruction:
o 1950s (France)
o A philosophical movement particularly popular with feminist and Marxist critics to uncover concepts in
literature
o Follows philosophy of Jacques Derrida:
o Western thought divided into binaries, with one preferenced (good/evil, male/female, freedom/slavery, etc.)
o However, this binary opposition is artificial, a social construct that reflects social norms
o Argues instead of being opposites, binaries are interconnected, defined only in relation to each other (différance)
o Our language reflects our biases, altering our perception; language is not stable or reliable as words
can be understood from a variety of perspectives
Reader Response Criticism:
o 1960s
o Literary texts gain meaning from readers, from their act of reading and bringing to the text their own
assumptions and personal experience; reader is not passive recipient of objective text
o But this is not an entirely subjective, free-for-all on a text
o Examine how communities influence readers’ responses
o Stanley Fish: "Interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not
decode poems; they make them"
o Opposite of New Criticism, which would argue that all meaning resides only inside the text itself, that
nothing outside the text matters
Postcolonial Criticism:
o 1990s
o Focuses on literature produced by those in formerly colonized areas, particularly on the colonizer-
colonized experience
o Examines the effects of 19th -century European political domination, both on colonizers and colonized
o Examines how dominant culture's values become normative, displacing those of the less politically
powerful cultures
o Looks for us-vs-them mentality, seen as artificial boundaries, challenging the vision of the Other
New Historicism:
o 1980s
o Relates a literary text to its cultural and historical moment, relating it to power, society, or ideology of
its time
o Sees history as selective, biased, and only one possible perspective, too often told from a top down
view; we subjectively interpret what we observe
o Writers and readers (everyone) cannot escape influence of their culture, and examining this culture
beyond the text is useful to shed light on the literary text
o Therefore, other artifacts of cultural moment (stories, speeches, newspapers, etc.) are all relevant in
the study of a literary text