LO: To understand how to apply critical perspectives to a text. What is a critic? What is a ‘critical perspective’? Ext: How many can you name? Critical Perspectives

Summer Homework 1.Buy and read The Great Gatsby 2.Buy and read (esp. pg ) American Prose and Poetry in the 20 th Century – Caroline Zilboorg – Task: Create a timeline of key events in American History (1776 – 1940) and important/ influential literary texts. Due for first day of the course in September!

Critical literacy includes: m -considering the purpose of the text and the writer's motives -understanding that texts are not neutral, that they represent particular views, silence other points of view and influence people's ideas -emphasising multiple readings of texts. (Because people interpret texts in the light of their own beliefs and values, texts will have different meanings to different people.) -providing students with opportunities to take social action

Using Theory Old model of criticism Author Literary Text Critic/ Academic Meaning Reader What is the issue with this system for understanding texts? Change? Literature became political (1960s) New critics applied theoretical principles from social studies and neuroscience

Read your picture book from the perspective summarised on your card. Do you gain any new insights into the book from reading it from this perspective? Does the picture book lose anything from being read from this perspective?

Feminism A feminist critique is one that is critical of the reinforcement of female gender stereotypes (virgin/madonna, whore, housewife, passive, victim etc) and the objectification of the female body as a result of second wave feminism’s endorsement of ‘body politics’ which implicates a rejection of practices that draw attention to differences between male and female bodies, refusing to shave the legs and underarms and rejecting cosmetics and revealing, form-fitting clothing as they are a creation of patriarchy and the ‘male gaze’

Post feminism The movement began in the early 1980s and arose out of a backlash against feminism. Second wave feminists stand for a pessimistic vision of sexuality. Post feminism rejects these rigid and pessimistic standpoints and instead promotes an empowered vision of women with a right to ‘personal choice’. In post feminist texts, women are portrayed as active, in control of their sexuality, bodies and life decisions

Psychoanalytical Criticism Psychoanalytic criticism: form of literary criticism using some of techniques of psychoanalysis (therapy with aim to cure mental disorders through investigation of the interaction between conscious and unconscious elements of the mind). Because of an interest in the unconscious, they pay most attention to what is glossed over or ‘repressed’. They want to look beyond the obvious surface meaning to what the text is ‘really’ about. They also look for representations of psychological states or phases in literature, and are more interested in the emotional conflicts between the characters or groups in a text than in its wider context. Unconscious: part of the mind Freud believed has a strong influence on our actions, without our ‘conscious’ knowledge Repression: forgetting or ignoring of unresolved conflicts, unadmitted desires or traumatic past events so that they are forced out of conscious awareness into the unconscious (e.g. in a text repressed sexual desire is represented by the presence of phallic or other sexual imagery and language)

Post-colonial literary criticism You believe a text is related to the historical context in which it was written. You are interested in the struggle against injustice and oppression, chiefly between black and white. You look at what a text reveals about attitudes to social class, race and gender. In particular you are critical of texts that present white voices as dominant or other ethnicities and races as inferior, absent or exoticized. You want to read about the experiences of writers outside of the White British tradition, or texts presenting a plurality of voices

Marxist literary criticism Marxist literary criticism is a loose term describing literary criticism based on socialist and dialectic theories. Marxist criticism views literary works as reflections of the social institutions from which they originate. According to Marxists, even literature itself is a social institution and has a specific ideological function, based on the background and ideology of the author. The simplest goals of Marxist literary criticism can include an assessment of the political 'tendency' of a literary work, determining whether its social content or its literary form are 'progressive'. It also includes analysing the class constructs demonstrated in the literature.

Moral literary criticism Literary critics who use the school of Moral Criticism (known in contemporary critical circles as Christian Humanism) as their "lens" from which to view and examine the worthiness or quality of literature do the following: 1. Judge the value of the literature on its moral lesson or ethical teaching. 2. Works that are moral (or literature that attempts to teach and instruct as well as entertain) are often seen in contemporary criticism as didactic. 3. Plato argues that literature (and art) is capable of corrupting or influencing people to act or behave in various ways. Sometimes these themes, subject matter, or the actions of literary characters undermine religion or ethics, he warns. The underlying principle then is whether or not the text can be seen as A) moral, and B) practical or useful. 4. Post Modern Moral Criticism asks how the work in question affects the reader.

Structuralist literary criticism Structuralists are not interested so much in when a text was written, or who it was written by, or even what it is about. They believe that we use language, not simply to describe the world, but to construct it. Therefore, in literature, they are most interested in how the text is constructed: its form, its overall structure and the patterns of language in it, especially pairs of opposites. Texts from popular culture, societies, belief systems are all structures which can be explored and analysed like a literary text. Some structuralist critics who were interested in patterns and structures became more interested in the gaps, silences and absences in texts. They became known as poststructuralists.

Little Red Riding Hood You will work in three groups today. You each have a critical position card. Your task is to read the story of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and to analyse the story from that position. 1.Feminist critique 2.Post-feminist interpretation 3.Freudian/ psychoanalytic interpretation How does it help to analyse a text from different critical positions? How will it help your essays to use a critical interpretation?

Final thoughts… Read ‘There was once…’ What is Atwood’s point here? Can you identify the different critical stances referenced in this story? What do you think?