Critical Strategies for Reading

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Critical Strategies for Reading

• How many ways can you analyze a story?

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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

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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.

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Psychological Strategies

• By
• L-Miles L-Johnson

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• 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.

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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 thats the
stimulus, but the true source of what was to
posses her which she strove to beatback 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
Chopins own views of her marriage- despite her
conscious statements about her loving husband.
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Historical Strategies

• By Richard Gardner Ashley Barr

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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.

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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 works language,
  purposes and ideas.

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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.

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New Historicist Criticism

• New Historicism emphasizes the interaction
  between the historic context of literature and a
  modern readers 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.
  Mallards feelings of relief which are marriage
  over owing to presumed death of her husband could
  be seen as a rejection of her heterosexual
  identity.

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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.

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Mythology continued

• 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
  husbands 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. Mallards husbands 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.

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Reader Response

• Focuses attention of what goes on in the readers
  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.

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The Deconstructionist View

• Insists that works dont hold fixed meanings.
• Language has meanings we dont intend.
• Disestablish meanings instead of establish.
• Look for ways to expand text.
• Focus on gaps, ambiguity, and look for patterns.
• Rhetorical devices yield provisions.

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Continued
A deconstructionist would say, about the ending,
that the narrator would share the doctors
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
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