Literary Criticism

Nicolas Casadiego
Its not about who you are or what you wear.but it is about what you think and
how you think
Psychoanalytic
This theory relates to the psychological ideas of Sigmund Freud. These ideas focus on
how our psychological state of mind is growing up and how we interpret and express our
ideas, whether we decide to have them hindered or to express them loudly. He believed
that many of our experiences growing up, especially if they were traumatic, are not
forgotten but stored away in the unconscious part of our mind where it continues to
influence our adult influence. Freud also uses the concept of ID which is how we identify
as an individual and how we represent ourselves towards other people, what we hide and
what we do stop ourselves from exposing what were hiding using the mechanisms. The
Oedipus complex is used in psychoanalytic theory as a critical way to explain the growth
of a human, it contemplates the need kids have for their parents and what happens as
they grow up and realize that theyre not the centre of attention of their parents. Freud
combines these ideas to come up with questions to analyze literature like: What might a
given interpretation of a literary work suggest about the psychological motives of the
reader? and Are there any oedipal dynamics - or any other family dynamics - are work
here?
Feminism
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. This school of theory looks at how aspects of our culture are
naturally patriarchal (male dominated) and the woman feel as if they are being put
down. There are three waves of feminism as well that range from a moderate to extreme
case of criticism which a variety of woman are classified under. Feminism is a
perspective that advocates the rights of women in equality to men politically,
economically, and socially. The first known use of feminism was in the year 1895. In
literature, feminists focus more on the roles of females rather than males. Feminists give
more emphasis on their own gender. When it comes to societal problems, feminists focus
on how men are more engaged in causing chaos and how society lets men create it.
Literary criticism that takes form in the shape of Feminism tends to emphasize and
extract any sort of subject of interpretation of ones gender. The feminist would sit down,
and try to develop an analysis by trying to identify what a piece of media may hold, in
terms of a depiction of gender and its involvement in culture. A common question a
feminist would try and develop is how the male and female act out, which will further
emphasize their roles in the world they are living in.
Marxist
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 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.
Formalist
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," (..."the battle
cry of the New Critical effort..." and thus focus a great deal on, you guessed it, form
(Tyson 118).
Destruction
A method of reading and theory of language that seeks to sabotage, dismantle, and
destroy any idea that a text or signifying system has any boundaries, margins,
coherence, unity, determinate meaning, truth, or identity. Unlike structuralism, which
privileges structure over event, deconstruction insists on the paradox of structure and
event. "Theory," Jonathan Culler writes, "must shift back and forth between these
perspectives," and this shifting results in "an irresolvable alternation or aporia."
Associated with the writings of Jacques Derrida, deconstruction is, in Barbara Johnson's
phrase, "a careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text," and
because there is no outside the text, once one is inside the text one is everywhere and
nowhere at the same time. Divided by contradictions and indeterminacies, texts are
naturally diverse, and they inevitably undo the philosophical system to which they follow
by revealing its rhetorical nature. Because every term can be read in different manners,
the reader is unable to arrive at any ultimate decision and is left in the double bind of
trying to master a text that has no boundaries and cannot be totalized. As J. Hillis Miller
puts it, "deconstruction is not a dismantling of a text but a demonstration that it has
already dismantled itself." According to Culler, "a deconstruction involves the
demonstration that a hierarchical opposition, in which one term is said to be dependent
upon another conceived as prior, is in fact a rhetorical or metaphysical imposition and
that the hierarchy could well be reversed." In Culler's phrase, "toward an order of
meaning -- thought, truth, reason, logic, the Word -- conceived of as existing in itself, as
foundation." Because philosophy, like literature, is but a mode of discourse, it suffers
from the same un-decidability that infects discourse in general. Deconstruction's central
point is that total context is un-masterable. A double bind is thus produced, for meaning

is contextually determined, on the one hand, and context is infinitely extendable and
thereby indeterminate, on the other. Moreover, since any signifying system is but a
system of differences with no positive terms, meaning is disseminated rather than
conveyed. It disperses itself throughout the realm of what Derrida calls diffrance, the
realm of end-less differing and deferral, of limitless free play.

"Welcome to the Purdue OWL." Purdue OWL: Literary Theory and Schools of
Criticism. Web. 28 Apr. 2016.
"Literary Theory." UofT Library. Web. 30 Apr. 2016.