1. Othello & Critical Lenses

2. Intro to Othello: Home Shopping (trust me)
This is a competition! You must keep your groups identity secret or you will lose.

3. Intro to Othello: Home Shopping (trust me)
This is a competition! You must keep your groups identity secret or you will lose.
In your group of 5 you will be assigned a role
As a group you will move around the room and SILENTLY view the 7 houses for sale.
Your goal here is to find the house that will score you the MOST points. Keep your identity AND scorecard a secret.
Only one group visiting a for sale property at a time!!
After you have viewed all 7 homes rank them so you can pick the right house in the ‘draft’ even if you don’t get your first or second choice.

4. Intro to Othello: Home Shopping (trust me)
RANDOMIZED DRAFT ORDER: (KEEP YOUR SCORE A SECRET FOR NOW)
Group F
Group A
Group C
Group E
Group B
Group D
Group G

5. Intro to Othello: Home Shopping (trust me)
Calculate your score!
Who got 30 points?
Who got 20 points?
Why did we all score 20 points? How is it possible we all got what we wanted?

6. Othello: Reading with Critical Lenses

7. Critical Lens?!
A critical lens is when readers apply a specific literary theory to analyze a text from a set perspective like a Feminist or Marxist perspective.
Being able to apply different theories to a text expands a readers’ worldview and adds to understanding a text.
The world is full of ideologies, theories, and biases through which understanding of our and others’ experiences is filtered.
As we read or react to the world around us, competing perspectives change the way we interpret literature and life.
Allows readers to speak about a text from the same perspective.
Critical theory highlights the fact that there is no one simple vision of the truth. Truth is a complicated product of multiple perspectives.

8. Applying a Critical Lens to a text is like putting on a different pair of glasses that change the way you understand or judge what you see.

9. Marxist Literary Theory
Karl Marx was a philosopher, economist, political theorist, historian, and author whose work focused on how social classes struggle and how the accumulation of wealth and power enables an economic minority to dominate a working-class majority. He proposed that social conditions result from economic and political conditions. According to Marxist critics, economic conditions heavily influence a culture’s literature. "Marxism attempts to reveal the ways in which our socioeconomic system is the ultimate source of our experience" (Tyson 277).

10. Marxist Literary Critics aren’t communists, or speaking about social inequalities in capitalism (OR ECONOMIES) only

11. Marxist Literary Theory
The use of Marxist Criticism to analyze literature assumes the following:
All aspects of humanity are based on the struggle for economic power.
The basic struggle in human society is between the “haves” and the “have not’s.”
Social inequalities are represented by class dynamics and social hierarchies which are inherently.
Based on these assumptions, come up with 3 general questions a Marxist critic might apply to any text.

14. Whom does it benefit if the work or effort is accepted/successful/believed, etc.?
What is the social class of the author? The characters?
Which class does the work claim to represent?
What values does it reinforce?
What values does it subvert?
What conflict can be seen between the values the work champions and those it portrays?
What social classes do the characters represent?
How do characters from different classes interact or conflict?

15. Critical Race Theory

16. Critical Race Theorists
Examines the appearance of race and racism across dominant cultural modes of expression
Scholars attempt to understand how victims of systemic racism are affected by cultural perceptions of race and how they are able to represent themselves to counter prejudice
Closely related to fields like philosophy, history, sociology, and law
Developed into its current form in the mid-1970s

17. Critical Race Theorists Ask
What is the significance of race in contemporary American society?
Where, in what ways, and to what ends does race appear in dominant American culture and shape the ways we interact with one another?
What types of texts and other cultural artifacts reflect dominant culture’s perceptions of race?
How can scholars convey that racism is a concern that affects all members of society?
How does racism continue to function as a persistent force in American society?
How can we combat racism to ensure that all members of American society experience equal representation and access to fundamental rights?
How can we accurately reflect the experiences of victims of racism?

18. Why Critical Race Theory?
An attempt to emphasize the importance of examining and attempting to understand the socio- cultural forces that shape how we and others perceive, experience, and respond to racism
Offers scholars a way to examine how race interacts with other identities like class or gender

19. Key Terms
Social construction: In the context of CRT, “social construction” refers to the notion that race is a product of social thought and relations. It suggests that race is a product of neither biology nor genetics, but is rather a social invention.
Microaggressions: Microaggressions refer to the seemingly minute, often unconscious, quotidian instances of prejudice that collectively contribute to racism and the subordination of racialized individuals by dominant culture
Institutionalized Racism: This concept, discussed extensively by Camara Phyllis Jones, refers to the systemic ways dominant society restricts a racialized individual or group’s access to opportunities. 

20. Feminist Lens

21. Feminist Lens
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" (Tyson). 
Examines how society is set up in a way that is in inherently patriarchal
Tends to follow the arch of Feminism (1st wave, 2nd wave, 3rd wave) in terms of the focus of the lens

22. Common Ideas in Feminist Theory
Women are oppressed by patriarchy economically, politically, socially, and psychologically; patriarchal ideology is the primary means by which they are kept so
In every domain where patriarchy reigns, woman is other: she is marginalized, defined only by her difference from male norms and values
All of western (Anglo-European) civilization is deeply rooted in patriarchal ideology, for example, in the biblical portrayal of Eve as the origin of sin
While biology determines our sex (male or female), culture determines our gender (masculine or feminine)
Gender issues play a part in every aspect of human production and experience, including the production and experience of literature, whether we are consciously aware of these issues or not

23. Feminist Lens: Questions to Ask
How is the relationship between men and women portrayed? Power dynamic?
How are male and female roles defined?
What constitutes masculinity and femininity?
Do characters take on traits from opposite genders? How so? How does this change others’ reactions to them?
What does the work reveal about the operations (economically, politically, socially, or psychologically) of patriarchy?
What does the history of the work's reception by the public and by the critics tell us about the operation of patriarchy?
What role the work play in terms of women's literary history and literary tradition? (Tyson)

24. Choose one!
On a notecard, rank these three lens in terms of interest. You will be assigned to tracking one of these lenses as we read Othello, so be truthful with your ranking!