LITERARY THEORY IN TEACHING LITERATURE

1. Literary Criticism
Literary critics removing passages that displease them.
By Charles Joseph Travies de Villiers in 1830

2. Types of Literary Criticism
There are many different types of literary
criticism, but we’ll be studying these 5 closely:
•Formalist
•Feminist
•Reader Response
•Archetypal
•Marxist
Other types include structuralist,
psychoanalytic, mythological, sociological, etc.

3. Formalism
Background:
• Text as a complete isolated unit
• Study elements such as language, imagery, point of
view, plot structure, and/or character development and
motivation
• Pays no attention to either the authors or readers of
texts
• Readers should read neutrally or unemotionally
• No consideration to social and historical context
• New Criticism (a type of formalism) focuses on the
elements of fiction and emphasizes how they work
together to create, in a work of quality, a coherent
whole: a unity of plot, theme and character, through use
of tone, point of view, imagery, purposeful action,
dialogue, and description.
• Often analyzed and written as a “close reading.”

4. Strengths of this theory:
The reader does not need additional knowledge, other
than what’s in the text, for interpreting the literary
work.
Weaknesses of this theory:
• It ignores the author’s intentions.
• It assumes that “good” literature is “coherent” and
that a text that is not coherent by its standards is not
“good” literature. This means many works don’t get
read or considered to be of value.
• It divorces literature from its larger cultural context.
• It assumes that readers can refrain from investing
emotionally in their reading and can / should respond
objectively to texts.

5. Formalism – Questions to ask for literary criticism:
Who is the protagonist?
What conflicts does the protagonist experience?
What is the climax of the story?
What is the protagonist’s role in the climax
How is the setting relevant for this particular story?
What is the theme of the story?
How do character, plot and setting develop the story?

6. Reader Response
Background:
A reaction against the New Critics (or Formalists) gave birth
to Structuralism. In the 1970s a reaction against
Structuralism gave birth to Reader Response theory. While
Structuralists believed that a text was encoded with signifiers
that have set meanings, and that language itself was stable,
Reader Response theorists believed that words were dynamic:
No preset signifiers can exist since each reader’s thoughts,
feelings, and experiences are unique; therefore, each reader
responds uniquely to a text.

7. Some tenets of Reader Response Theory:
• Meaning is in act of reading not text itself.
• You can read in a literary manner or aesthetically. “In aesthetic
reading, the reader’s attention is centered directly on what he is living
through during his relation with that particular text.”
• Your interpretation changes each time your read the same text
because your experiences have changed.
• A community of readers (those with similar experiences and
backgrounds) are likely to read and interpret a text similarly, even if
they are not in complete agreement.
• The intended reader of a text is the general audience the author is
trying to reach—those who have the ability and perspective to
appreciate the author’s intentions.
• The resisting reader reads from a perspective that is directly
opposed to the author’s. He/She might read from the position of the
antagonist or marginal character.

8. Strengths of this theory:
• Recognizes the importance of the reader and reading as
an intellectual and active activity.
• Gives readers the freedom to provide meaning to a text,
allowing for multiple interpretations of a text.
Weaknesses of this theory:
• No one controls the meaning of a text. There is no
objective party to assist readers if they don’t agree with
one another. Also, there is no objective way for people,
such as teachers, to evaluate responses fairly because
how can one person say that another reader’s
interpretation is wrong even though that reader may not
really understand the text?

9. Reader Response – Questions to ask for Literary Criticism:
•How do you feel about this text? Why did you like/dislike
it?
• Explain how the text connects to an experience you have
had.
• Why do you think the characters acted as they did?
• In a similar situation, how would you have behaved?
• Who do you think is the intended reader for this selection?
• Create a poem, collage or letter to one of the characters in
the text with whom you most identify. Explain in your piece
why you identify with this character.

10. Archetypal Criticism
Background:
•Examines how texts rely on archaic patterns for their
meaning. The word archetype derives from Greek, with arche
meaning “first” and typos meaning “form” or “type”.
According to the Gage dictionary, archetype means “an
original model or pattern from which copies are made.”
•The original narrative models and patterns on which
western literary textual conventions depend come from
Judeo-Christian scripture and Greco-Roman mythology.
Archetypal literary critics identify how and to what effect
patterns from these ancient sources are used in folk tales,
epics, media texts, comics, and other texts.
•Unlike formalists, who view a text as an isolated unit,
archetypal critics focus on intertextual connections. A
leading proponent of archetypal criticism is Northrop Frye.

11. Strengths of this theory:
This theory encourages a close and careful reading and
subsequent analysis of the text. It is also an exciting and
interesting theory because it can link a text or idea from
500 years ago with a text written today.
Weaknesses of this theory:
One concern some people have with this theory is that it
limits personal interpretation. However, some personal
interpretation is needed in determining which archetypal
patterns the literature reflects. This theory can also be
limiting because it only analyzes one aspect (archetypes)
of literature.

12. Archetypal – Questions to ask for Literary Criticism:
• What is the protagonist’s starting point and end point
for the journey that he/she takes?
• How does this remind you of journeys taken by other
characters in literature?
• What greater significance do the settings or situations
convey? (Eg. Spring = rebirth)
• How does the protagonist link to other protagonists
from other texts or real life people?
• What symbols or archetypes remind you of other texts
you have read or other experiences you have had? (Eg.
does a man with a black hat in a mystery novel make
you think about how the “bad guys” in Westerns always
wear black?)

13. Feminist Criticism
Feminist literary criticism was launched in the twentieth century with
Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), in which the
author examines why there was no female Shakespeare by
highlighting the social and political conditions that made writing
for women difficult or impossible. In 1969, Kate Millett
examined, in Sexual Politics, how men represent women in
famous texts. Since then, in conjunction with Feminist theory
itself, Feminist literary critics have also examined
1. how women write their own experiences and representations
2. how women read about themselves
3. how to make feminist readings visible to readers
4. how women writers fared in given eras
5. how traditional texts by women are subversive of the social order

14. Strengths of this theory:
• For centuries, women in literature, the roles of both
men and women and how they were represented were
not a focus of literary criticism. This theory finally
examines how women and men are represented and
deals with the importance of women in literature.
Weaknesses of this theory:
• If this theory is the only one applied to a text, it can be
rather limiting. It only examines one element of the
text.

15. Feminist – Questions to ask for Literary Criticism:
· What is the protagonist’s attitude to male and female characters?
How is this evident? How does this affect your response to the
characters?
· How are women represented in the text?
· What roles do men and women play within family, work situations,
etc. (hero, breadwinner, helper, cook, sex object)?
· What were the social and historical conditions for women in this
period that might help us understand their roles in the text?
· How do women exercise their power in the text?
· If you were to rewrite the text’s ending, what would happen to the
female protagonist? The male protagonist?
· How and to what degree are the women’s lives limited or restricted
in this text?

16. Marxist Criticism
Background:
Marxism, which emerged in the nineteenth century as a result
of the theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, concerns
itself with the economic struggles for power between the
working class and the ruling class. These two men believed in
an eventual classless society with communal ownership of all
natural and industrial resources.
When Marxist theories are applied to literature, they provide a
means for assessing the social significance of a text. Marxist
criticism believes that literature is one form of cultural
production of a complex society and, as such, reflects the
forces shaping the society’s culture. This is to say that
literature is not only a mirror which reflects society. But it is
also a dynamic participant in the shaping of a culture.

17. Here are some points that a Marxist literary critic
considers when analyzing a text:
• Literature expresses the ideas, beliefs, and values of a
culture.
• Literature of any significance actively engages in
controversy or argument.
• Literature reveals power struggles (sexual power,
economic power, social power, and so on) and how this
operates and with what consequences.
• Literature reveals how the author, reader, and
characters demonstrate an awareness or lack or
awareness of their economic and social situations and
what oppresses them.
• Literature and authors can manipulate readers into
sympathizing with rather than critiquing the dominant
(and oppressive) social order.

18. Strengths of this theory:
Like archetypal criticism, this theory encourages a careful
reading of a text. It also does not limit a reader to view the
text in isolation, but allows the reader to think about the text
in its social, historical, and current contexts.
Weaknesses of this theory:
The main concern some readers may have about this theory
is that it only examines a limited aspect of the text. Some
people feel threatened by the focus on “ideology.” It
dismisses the beauty of writing and does not allow the
reader to simply enjoy the text.

19. Marxist – questions to ask for Literary Criticism:
• What or whose ideological values structure the text?
How are these evident?
• Who has power (and of what sorts) in the texts? How
does this power operate and change as the text
progresses?
• What “master” or dominant social narratives are
perpetuated or critiqued and disrupted in the text? (eg.
the American Dream, whereby, with hard work and
individual effort, a poor person can achieve success)

20. • To what degree does the protagonist or other
characters believe in and live by the prevailing social
order?
• At what point do characters recognize the
oppressiveness of the prevailing social order?
• How do they respond? What affects their options for
changing things?
• How is social objectification evident and how does it
operate in the text?
• What are the social forces that affect the author’s
writing or the text’s marketing and reception?