LITERARY APPROACHES/THEORIES

Formalist--Focusing on the formal elements of a work—looking at literature as works of art. Focusing on elements such as diction, irony, metaphor, paradox, symbol. This approach examines how these elements work together to give a coherent shape to a work while contributing to its meaning.

Biographical--Focusing on key elements of an author’s life—looking at how specific events in the author’s life might parallel or explain events in the work—may look at the writer’s motivations.

Psychological--This approach tends to draw on Freud’s theories. Critics use this approach to explore the motivations of characters and the symbolic meanings of events. This strategy is based on the idea of a human unconscious—those impulse, desires, and feelings that a person is unaware of but that influence emotions and behavior.

Historical--This approach focuses on how literature reflects the period—how it frequently provides the nuances of a historic period that cannot be readily perceived through other sources. The characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin display, for example, a complex set of white attitudes toward blacks in mid-nineteenth century America that is absent from more traditional historic documents, such as census statistics or state laws. This approach looks at how history helps to shape a work—Such readings treat a literary text as a document reflecting, producing, or being produced by the social conditions of its time, giving equal focus to the social milieu and the work itself.

--Literary historians: Look at the past to more fully reveal a work’s language, ideas, and purposes. These critics place the work in the context of its time—they seek to illuminate the historic background in order to shed light on some aspect of the work itself.

--Marxist critics: Focus on the ideological content of a work—its explicit and implicit assumptions and values about matters such as culture, race, class, and power. Marxist studies typically aim at revealing and clarifying ideological issues and also correcting social injustices. Some Marxist critics have used literature to describe the competing socioeconomic interests that too often advance capitalist money and power rather than socialist morality and justice. They argue that criticism, like literature, is essentially political because it either challenges or supports economic oppression. They tend to focus more on content and them rather than form.

--New historicists: Emphasizes the interaction between the historic context of a work and a modern reader’s undretsanding and interpretation of the work. They look at many different kinds of texts that traditional literary historians might have previously left for economists, sociologists, and anthropologists.

--Cultural critics, esp. postcolonial theorists: Study cultural behavior and expression in relationship to the formerly colonized world—colonizers and colonized alike.

Gender: Explore how ideas about men and women—what is masculine and feminine—can be regarded as socially constructed by particular cultures.

--Feminist critics: These critics seek to correct or supplement what they regard as a predominantly male-dominated critical perspective with a feminist consciousness—They place literature in a social context—how images of women in literature reflect the patriarchal social forces that have impeded women’s efforts to achieve full equality with men.

Reader-response: Focuses attention on the reader and his/her interaction with a text. These critics aim to describe the reader’s experience of a work; we get a reading of the reader—who comes to the work with certain expectations and assumptions, which are either met or not met.

Deconstructionist: insist that literary works do not yield fixed, single meanings. They argue thatthere cannot be absolute knowledge about anything b/c language can never say what we intend it to mean. Language is NOT a precise instrument but a power whose meanings are caught in an endless web of possibilities that cannot be untangled. Thus, any idea or statement thatinsists on being understood separately can ultimately be “deconstructed” to reveal its relations and connections to contradictory and opposite meanings. They seek to destabilize meanings rather than establishing them. They focus on gaps and ambiguities--

  • "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Women's Discourse

Karen Ford

Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 309-314

  • Environment as Psychopathological Symbolism in "The Yellow Wallpaper"

LoraleeMacPike

American Literary Realism, 1870-1910, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Summer, 1975), pp. 286-288

  • The Sacramental Irony of Flannery O'Connor

Judith F. Wynne

The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Spring, 1975), pp. 33-49

  • Emily's Rose of Love: Thematic Implications of Point of View in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"

Helen E. Nebeker

The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Mar., 1970), pp. 3-13

  • Father and Daughter: Edward and Emily Dickinson

Owen Thomas

American Literature, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Jan., 1969), pp. 510-523

  • The Structure of "A Rose for Emily"

Floyd C. Watkins

Modern Language Notes, Vol. 69, No. 7 (Nov., 1954), pp. 508-510