LITERARY CRITICISM: FEMINISM,
HISTORICAL, AND READER-RESPONSE
FEMINISM
FEMINIST CRITICISM (1960S-PRESENT)
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" This school of
theory looks at how aspects of our culture are inherently
patriarchal (male dominated) and aims to expose
misogyny in writing about women, which can take
explicit and implicit forms.
COMMON APPROACHES IN
FEMINIST THEORIES
THOUGH A NUMBER OF DIFFERENT APPROACHES EXIST IN FEMINIST CRITICISM, THERE
EXIST SOME AREAS OF COMMONALITY.
1. Women are oppressed by patriarchy
economically, politically, socially, and
psychologically; patriarchal ideology is the
primary means by which women are oppressed.
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 and
death in the world.
While biology determines our sex (male
or female), culture determines our gender
(scales of masculine and feminine).
All feminist activity, including feminist
theory and literary criticism, has as its
ultimate goal to change the world by
prompting gender equality
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.
THREE WAVES OF FEMINISM:
FIRST WAVE FEMINISM
- late 1700s-early 1900's: writers like Mary Wollstonecraft
(A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792) highlight the
inequalities between the sexes. Activists like Susan B.
Anthony and Victoria Woodhull contribute to the women's
suffrage movement, which leads to National Universal
Suffrage in 1920 with the passing of the Nineteenth
Amendment.
SECOND WAVE FEMINISM
- early 1960s-late 1970s: building on more equal working
conditions necessary in America during World War II,
movements such as the National Organization for Women
(NOW), formed in 1966, cohere feminist political activism.
Writers like Simone de Beauvoir (Le Deuxième Sexe,
1949) and Elaine Showalter established the groundwork
for the dissemination of feminist theories dove-tailed with
the American Civil Rights movement.
THIRD WAVE FEMINISM
- early 1990s-present: resisting the perceived essentialist (over
generalized, over simplified) ideologies and a white, heterosexual,
middle class focus of second wave feminism, third wave feminism
borrows from post-structural and contemporary gender and race
theories (see below) to expand on marginalized populations'
experiences. Writers like Alice Walker work to "...reconcile it
[feminism] with the concerns of the black community...[and] the
survival and wholeness of her people, men and women both, and
for the promotion of dialog and community as well as for the
valorization of women and of all the varieties of work women
perform" (Tyson 107).
TYPICAL QUESTIONS:
How is the relationship between men and women portrayed?
What are the power relationships between men and women (or characters
assuming male/female roles)?
How are male and female roles defined?
What constitutes masculinity and femininity?
How do characters embody these traits?
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 work imply about the possibilities of sisterhood as a mode of
resisting patriarchy?
What does the work say about women's creativity?
What does the history of the work's reception by the public and by the critics
tell us about the operation of patriarchy?
HISTORICAL
CRITICISM
HISTORICAL CRITICISM
literary criticism in the light of historical evidence
or based on the context in which a work was
written, including facts about the author’s life and
the historical and social circumstances of the time.
WHY IS HISTORICAL CRITICISM IMPORTANT?
The primary goal of historical criticism is to discover the text's
primitive or original meaning in its original historical context
and its literal sense or sensus literalis historicus. The secondary
goal seeks to establish a reconstruction of the historical situation of
the author and recipients of the text
WHAT IS HISTORICAL APPROACH IN LITERARY
CRITICISM?
The historical approach involves understanding
the events and experiences surrounding the
composition of the work, especially the life of the
author, and using the findings to interpret that work of
literature
READER-RESPONSE
CRITICISM
reader-response criticism considers readers' reactions to
literature as vital to interpreting the meaning of the text
A critic deploying reader-response theory can use a
psychoanalytic lens, a feminist lens, or even a structuralist
lens. What these different lenses have in common when
using a reader-response approach is they maintain "...that
what a text is cannot be separated from what it does"
READER-RESPONSE THEORISTS SHARE TWO
BELIEFS
1) that the role of the reader cannot be omitted from our
understanding of literature
2) that readers do not passively consume the meaning
presented to them by an objective literary text; rather
they actively make the meaning they find in literature"
TYPICAL QUESTIONS:
How does the interaction of text and reader create meaning?
What does a phrase-by-phrase analysis of a short literary text, or a
key portion of a longer text, tell us about the reading experience
prestructured by (built into) that text?
Do the sounds/shapes of the words as they appear on the page or
how they are spoken by the reader enhance or change the meaning
of the word/work?
How might we interpret a literary text to show that the reader's
response is, or is analogous to, the topic of the story?
HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH CRITICISM?
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO DEAL
WITH CRITICISM POSITIVELY?
WHAT IGNACIAN VALUE DO YOU POSSESS IF YOU ARE
ACCEPTING CRITICISM POSITIVELY?
