Critical Strategies for Reading

1. Critical Strategies for Reading How many ways can you analyze a story?

2. Formalist Strategies • Focuses on language, structure, and tone. • Reflects only what is in the writing, not on what may be outside such as authors state of mind or a moment in history which is called intrinsic. • Formalists study the connection between the artistic elements. • For example formalist would look at the irony that Mr. Mallard was still alive. By: Steven and Brad

3. Biographical Strategies • Analyze how a work might follow actual events in an authors life. • Analyze how characters may be based on people known by the author. • Sometimes it can answer questions or further confuse the reader. • Can at the very least serve as a control on interpretation.

4. Psychological Strategies By L-Miles & L-Johnson

5. Sigmund Freud- The founder of psychoanalytic theories. • Dreams • Unconscious Desires • Sexual Repression • Aspects of Psyche • Id • Ego • Superego • Oedipus Complex- a boys unconscious rivalry with his father for his mothers love and his desire to eliminate his father in order to take his fathers place with his mother. • Electra complex- a daughters unconscious rivalry for her father.

6. “ The Story of an Hour” is not related to an Oedipus Complex but it is clear that the news of her husbands death has released powerful unconscious desires for freedom that she had previously suppressed As she grieved, “something” was “coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully.” What comes to her is what she senses about the life outside her window; that’s the stimulus, but the true source of what was to “posses her” which she strove to “beat…back with her [conscious] will” is her desperate desire for the autonomy and fulfillment she had been unable to admit did not exist in her marriage. A psychological approach to her story amounts to a case study in the destructive nature of self-repression. The story might reflect Chopin’s own views of her marriage- despite her conscious statements about her loving husband.

7. Historical Strategies By: Richard Gardner & Ashley Barr

8. The Historical Strategies • Historical critics use literature as a window into the past because literature often provides hints of the past that are not available in other sources. • This strategy uses history as a means of understanding a work of literature better. • Historical critics see literature as a product of their times, shedding light on historical situations and times.

9. Literary History Criticism • This category claims that literature may transcend time to the extent that it may concern readers over the years, even centuries. Followers of this category understand that it remains a part of the past in which it was made, a past that can reveal more fully a work’s language, purposes and ideas.

10. Marxist Criticisms: The Great Struggles of Class • Marxist readings hold the heightened interest in radical reform. These critics look at literature as a means of aiding the proletarian social and economic goals. • Marxist critics focus on the ideological content of a story or book. They focus upon what takes place within the book, implicit and explicit values and assumptions about matters such as culture, race, class, and power. • They stress that all criticism is political in some way, and that even if it attempts to ignore class struggles, it is politicized, because it supports that status quo.

11. New Historicist Criticism • New Historicism emphasizes the interaction between the historic context of literature and a modern reader’s understanding and interpretation of the literature. • They attempt to describe the culture of a period by reading many different kinds of texts that traditional historians might have previously left for other social scientists. • They attempt to read a period in all dimensions, including political, economic, social and aesthetic concerns. • By emphasizing that historical perceptions are governed by our own concerns and preoccupations, new historicists open our eyes to the fact that the history on which we choose to focus is built upon a reconstructed history, which affects our reading.

12. Cultural Criticism • These critics, like New Historicists, focus on the historical contexts of a literary work, but pay particular attention to popular ideas present within the work. • These critics focus upon what the literary works reveal about the culture; their values, their norms, and what they believed in. • They use eclectic strategies taken from New Historicism, Psychology, Gender Studies, and Deconstructionism, to name a few. • They analyze not only literature, but radio talk shows, comic strips, calendar art, commercials, travel guides, and baseball cards, just to name a few examples.

13. Postcolonial Criticism • Postcolonial Criticism is the study of cultural behavior and expression in relation to the formerly colonized world. • Refers to the analysis of literary works written by writers who lived in countries that were at one time controlled by a colonial power. • The term also refers to the analysis of literary works written about colonial cultures by writers from the colonizing power.

14. Gender Strategies • Gender critics ask what is masculine and what is feminine. Different types of criticism are… *Feminist- places literature in a social context like marxism. It explains how images of women in literature reflect patriarchal social forces that impede full equality.

15. Feminist Cont. • Example from “The Story of the Hour”: feminists look at the psychological stress created by the expectations that marriage imposes on Mrs. Mallard. These expectations break her heart.

16. Gay and Lesbian • Critics focus on how homosexuals are represented in literature, how they read literature, and whether sexuality and gender are culturally constructed. • Example from “The Story of the Hour”: Mrs. Mallard’s feelings of relief which are marriage over owing to presumed death of her husband could be seen as a rejection of her heterosexual identity.

17. Mythology • The mythological approach to interpreting literature involves identifying what creates universal responses in a work. Because human beings are confused about certain things in their lives (sexuality, birth, death), myths seek to account for these discrepancies symbolically. • Although the details of myths can vary, they often contain collective similarities. An example of a myth found in literature would be a body of water that would symbolize the unconscious or the eternity in an attempt to reconcile humans innate conflict with these issues.

18. Mythologycontinued • Because myths deal with issues of human nature, one commonly used myth deals with victory and defeat. In “The Story of an Hour” certain passages allude to a myth referred to as “the goddess of Victory.” For example, when Mrs. Mallard kept repeating, “Free! Body and soul free!” it signified her triumph over her “late” husband’s repression, which lead Kate Chopin to refer to Mrs. Mallard as a goddess of Victory. • Another slightly less creditable myth that can be found in “The Story of an Hour” is the coinciding of Mrs. Mallard’s husband’s death and thus the rebirth with the arrival of spring and new energy. For example, when she found out her husband had dies and she was finally free she observed “the new spring life,” as a sort of reenergizing force.

19. Reader Response Focuses attention of what goes on in the reader’s mind rather than the work itself. It does not assume that literary works have fixed formal properties but as an evolving creation of the way the characters, plots, images, and other elements are processed by the reader. It does not attempt to define what the work means but what it does to an informed reader. It does not attempt to define what the work means but what it does to an informed reader. This strategy helps one understand how a text can be shaped by the reader because the responses are influence by the impressions, memories, and experiences of the reader.

20. The Deconstructionist View *Insists that works don’t hold fixed meanings. *Language has meanings we don’t intend. *Disestablish meanings instead of establish. *Look for ways to expand text. *Focus on gaps, ambiguity, and look for patterns. *Rhetorical devices yield provisions.

21. …Continued… A deconstructionist would say, about the ending, that the narrator would share the doctor’s inability to imagine a life for Mrs. Mallard apart from her husband. They would also say that death represents more than lost personal freedoms. The Story of an Hour