Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Approaches:
The Tools of the Trade for Reading Texts
Intelligently
Read the following brief descriptions of five methods used by various schools of critical
theory to interpret and decipher literary texts. Please pick the one that appeals most to you
or the one you are most curious about. For our next seminar, you will have to be prepared to
approach Shakespeare’s The Tempest using your chosen method. Further guidance and
additional materials will be provided.
1) The Psychoanalytical Approach: Who are you when you’re not looking?
Which one of the voices fighting to get on air is ‘you’?
Freudian psychoanalytic criticism adopts the methods of reading dreams and employed by
Freud and later theorists to interpret texts. It argues that literary texts, like dreams, express
the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author, that a literary work is a
manifestation of the author's own neuroses. Like psychoanalysis itself, this critical endeavour
seeks evidence of unresolved emotions, psychological conflicts, guilts, ambivalences, and so
forth within what may well be a disunified literary work. Psychological material will be
expressed indirectly, disguised, or encoded (as in dreams) through principles such as
"symbolism" (the repressed object represented in disguise), "condensation" (several
thoughts or persons represented in a single image), and "displacement" (anxiety located
onto another image by means of association).
Jungian psychoanalytic criticism attempts to explore the connection between literature and
what Carl Jung (a student of Freud) called the “collective unconscious” of the human race:
"...racial memory, through which the spirit of the whole human species manifests itself".
Jungian criticism, closely related to Freudian theory because of its connection to
psychoanalysis, assumes that all stories and symbols are based on mythic models from
humankind’s past.
2) The Feminist Approach: Girl power! But you’ve got to fight for it.
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 approach looks at how aspects of our culture are inherently
patriarchal (male-dominated) and strives to expose the explicit and implicit misogyny in male
writing about women. It examines gender politics in works and traces the subtle construction
of masculinity and femininity, and their relative status, positionings, and marginalizations
within works. "Marginalization" refers to being forced to the outskirts of what is considered
ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND THE RENAISSANCE SEMINAR Cătălin Țăranu
socially and politically significant, since the female voice was traditionally marginalized, or
discounted altogether.
ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND THE RENAISSANCE SEMINAR Cătălin Țăranu
ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND THE RENAISSANCE SEMINAR Cătălin Țăranu