1. Critical Approaches to Literature

2. Critical Approaches -used to analyze, question, interpret, synthesize and evaluate literary works, with a specific mindset or “lenses”

3. New Criticism -contend that literature needs little or no connection with the author’s intentions, life, or social/historical situation -everything needed to analyze the work is contained within the text -examines language and literary conventions; plot, rhyme, meter, dialect, setting, point of view, etc.

4. Reader-Response Criticism -studies the interaction of the reader with the text; holds the text incomplete until it is read -examines the readers reactions and thoughts to a piece of work

5. Biographical Criticism -relates the author’s life and thoughts to their work -allows one to better understand the elements within a work as well as relate works to authorial intention and audience

6. Narratological Criticism -concerns itself with the structure of narrative; how events are constructed and through what point of view -considers the narrator not necessarily as a person, but more as a window through which one sees a constructed reality

7. Historical Criticism -perspectives tend to reflect a concern with the period in which a text is produced and/or read

8. Social Criticism -recognizes literature as a reflection of the environment through analysis of social structure, power, politics, and agency

9. Gender/Feminist Criticism -addresses issues of masculinity and femininity as binaries, sexual orientation, heterosexism, and differences in sexes

10. Anthropological Criticism -focuses on aspects of everyday life in various cultures; using ideas of folklore, ritual, celebrations, traditions, etc.

11. Psychoanalytical Criticism -aims at uncovering the workings of the human mind especially that expression of the unconscious -analyzing a text like a dream, looking for symbolism and repressed meaning, the dominance of unconscious mine of the conscious -can be applied to either the author/text relationship or the reader/text relationship