Critical Filters

Objective Criticism:
Also known as Formalism, Structuralism, or NEW Criticism
Views any given literary work as freestanding, independent of
external references to its author, audience, or the environment in
which it is written or read. That is, the work is viewed as
authoritative and sufficient in and of itself, or even as a world-in-itself.
Objective critics, therefore, evaluate and analyze works based on
internal criteria rather than my external standards of judgment. They
consider, for instance, whether a work is coherent or unified and how
its various components relate to one another rather than how the
work is or was received by the public. Objective criticism has its
roots in Immanuel Kants Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.
Focuses exclusively on text and denies author and audience.
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Gender Criticism:
Also known as Feminist Criticism
Gender criticism encompasses a variety of issues: male/female roles in
society, sexuality, patriarchy/matriarcy, gay and lesbian criticism, new
historicism, and ecofeminism. Gender criticism can look at all
aspects of the transaction author, text, audience.
Significant text is Nancy Rule Goldbergers Womens Ways of Knowing.
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Psychological Criticism:
Also known as Psychoanalytic Criticism or Jungian (archetypal)
Analyzes texts in terms of mental processes. Focuses mainly on the
author and investigates the text as a mode of consciousness.
Psychoanalytic criticism is based on Freuds notion that the human
mind is of a dual nature, operating both consciously and
unconsciously. The predominately passionate, irrational, unknown
and unconscious portion of the brain he called the ID. The ID is
insatiable and pleasure driven and is motivated solely by desire.
Opposed to the ID is the SUPEREGO or the element that has
internalized the mores and standards of society. Moral judgements
are made as sacrifices and may not seem to be in our personal self-
interest. The EGO is Freuds I which is rational, conscious, logical
and orderly. It must regulate the demands of the SUPEREGO and
the ID.
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Psychological Criticism:
Jungian (archetypal)
Archetypal criticism comes from the work of psychologist Carl Jung.
Jungs theory focuses on patterns of myths, images, figures, symbols,
and stories that are common in humanitys collective unconscious.
Archetypes are persistent images, figures, and story patterns across
cultures and generations.
Critics who take an archetypal approach to literature may use genre
to help us understand different types of stories: COMEDY=spring,
ROMANCE=summer, TRAGEDY=fall, SATIRE=winter. There is
association with the seasons and allows us to understand our human
condition through stories.
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Existential Criticism:
Jean-Paul Sartre
EXISTENCE PRECEDES ESSENCE
The fundamental existential tenet sets the stage for humanitys
struggle against anguished existence. Existentialism seeks to
empower humans through RADICAL FREEDOM as an answer to
deterministic influences. Free will always means that the
RESPONSIBILITY is on the individual and not on fate, destiny, a
deity etc.
Schools of existentialists are divided by theism. Theistic existentialists
like Soren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich are countered by Atheistic
existentialists like Martin Heidegger and Sartre. Existentialist literary
criticism focuses on how well a work of literature represents the
existential condition of humanity.
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Deconstruction:
Jacques Derrida
Close Reading of Texts to Show Irreconcilable Contradictions!
Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a
demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. It is apparently on
solid ground, but is not rock but thin air. J. Hillis Miller
Deconstruction is based on the principle that Western Thought
revolves around a binary system that holds things in opposition to
one another. For example: something is masculine OR feminine, but
not both.
Language is mired in connotations that often confuse the meaning of
a text for the audience.
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Poststructuralism:
Julia Kristeva
Intertextuality = the text is a mosaic of preexisting texts whose
meanings it reworks and refines
Poststructuralism challenges the assumptions of structuralist thought,
rejecting the binary; cause/effect; sign, symbol, signifier mode of
understanding language. Derrida claimed that a text cannot be
rendered reliably determinable.
Modes of poststructuralist criticism include: deconstruction,
psychoanalytic, Marxist, cultural, feminist, and gender criticism.

Source: The Bedford Guide to Literary Terms