2. The License Plate (an introduction to critical theory) NO TYPOZ

4. Literary Criticism Literary criticism seeks to answer these questions: 1. What is literature? 2. Why is it so important? Criticism must identify the overall significance of a work in order to make a judgment

5. Think as each type of criticism as a frame through which you can view your subject.

6. Types of Criticism PoeticsHermeneutics

7. Starts with attested meanings or attested effects Asks how those meanings or effects are achieved Poetics Starts with the text itself Looks at language, the use of literary tools Asks what meanings or effects the language and literary tools create Hermeneutics

8. Poetics New Criticism Hermeneutics Formalism Structuralism Post- Structuralism Deconstruction Biographical Cultural And many more…

11. The tension between poetics and hermeneutics is represented here:

13. Types of Criticism According to… The text is… New Criticism A system of literary structures that create a unified, aesthetically pleasing whole.

14. Types of Criticism According to… The text is… Biographical Criticism The result of the author’s life experiences.

15. Types of Criticism According to… The text is… Formalist Criticism A system of literary structures; meaning is secondary

16. According to… The text is… Historical Criticism The result of the world around the writer at the time it was written

17. According to… The text is… Psychological Criticism A sign of the author’s or a character’s unconscious mind

18. According to… The text is… Sociological Criticism A sign of how humans interact within groups and how those groups interact with each other

19. According to… The text is… Gender Criticism A sign of the larger gender order

20. According to… The text is… Reader-Response Criticism The result of the reader’s life experiences

21. According to… The text is… Reader-Response Criticism The result of the reader’s life experiences

22. According to… The text is… Cultural Studies A result of the codes and practices in society that tend to alienate groups of people

23. According to… The text is… Archetypal Criticism A display of symbols from the universal human unconscious that are innate to all

24. According to… The text is… Queer Theory A sign of the heterosexual matrix

25. According to… The text is… Marxism A sign of the capitalistic matrix

26. According to… The text is… Structuralism A system of cultural signs and symbols that make meaning possible.

27. According to… The text is… Post Structuralism A system of cultural signs and symbols that make meaning possible, but ultimately is unreadable.

28. According to… The text is… Deconstructionist Theory Nothing, and you are silly for trying!

29. According to… The text is… Deconstructionist Theory Nothing, and you are silly for trying!

31. Green Eggs and Ham Green Eggs and Ham tells the story of a man who avoids eating green eggs and ham all his life until, one day, he tries it. Once he tries green eggs, he finds he likes it.

32. New Critics would argue that the repetition and rhyme scheme are critical to creating the story’s ultimate meaning. The constant repetition breaks down even the strongest feelings of revulsion, so that the reader is left with the message all that is new ( not just green eggs) has the potential to be good.

33. According to Marxist theorists, the narrator’s refusal of so many choices, such as “not in a car, not in a tree, not in a box” suggests the natural state of man: a life without need of the trappings of capitalism. Of course, in the end, the character accepts green eggs, and thus accepts everything capitalism offers. It is no accident that the American Dr. Suess gives us eggs that are green like American dollars.

34. Queer Theorists would argue that the absence of female characters in the story is tacitly meant to undermine the assumption that all characters must interact with members of the opposite sex. In a sense, this is an early example of undermining the heterosexual matrix by undermining children’s expectations about gender.

35. Freudian Theorists would argue Green Eggs and Ham is about the resistance of authority, and that ultimately, authority always wins. This is the same struggle we see at the heart of every Oedipal complex. The Oedipal complex is the son’s struggle for power over the father. Here, the father figure is Sam-I-Am himself. Thus, our main character is experiencing the same struggle that everyone experiences. Happily, losing to the father figure isn’t traumatic here, but rewarding. The green eggs prove to be pleasurable.

36. Archetypal theorists would argue that the eggs in the story are symbols of the captive souls of humanity bound by the physical realm. When the narrator accepts the green eggs and eats them he is releasing human souls into the spiritual beyond.

37. Feminist critics would argue that the text Green Eggs and Ham deliberately omits the female. There are no female characters or symbols of the feminine such as flowers. Thus, in a book about refusal and acquiescence, the tendency of the wider culture to deny females the right of refusal is tacitly expressed here. Ultimately, this serves to enforce cultural messages that though males have the right to refuse green eggs (at least for a time), here, females do not have the voice to refuse because they don’t have the presence to refuse.

38. Post-Structuralists would argue that the color green here has so many definitions and contexts in our culture…from representing nature to representing the animal drive to reproduce that to say the book is simply about trying new things would be a mistake.

39. Deconstructuralists would argue that the tendency of the author to omit the object repeatedly in places in the text (like “would you, could you in the rain” rather than “would you eat green eggs and ham in the rain”) suggests at minimum that the author expects readers to understand the object of the verb not as “green eggs and ham” but as any number of items. Essentially, the text tells us that if the main character refuses green eggs and ham, he will be left in a world doing nothing, nowhere. The impossibility of such an existence is plain. If in the world at all, the character is “a priori” doing “something.”