Nine Lit Crit Ways of Looking at The Great Gatsby

1
Nine Lit Crit Ways of Looking at The Great Gatsby

• . . .and the rest of the world
• Facilitated by a great many quotes from Donald E.
  Halls Literary and Cultural Theory
• Presented by Dr. Rita D. Jacobs at the MSU
  Institute for the Humanities sessions on The
  Great Gatsby, 4 February 2011

2
A New Critical Approach

• The task of the New Critic is to explore
  precisely how, through language and form,
  meanings are expressed and powerfully impressed
  upon readers.
• Discussions of
• Form and genre
• Close textual reading
• Narrative style and frame

3
A Reader-Response Analysis

• Reader-response analysis is a rigorous probing of
  the response process itself, and it has a wide
  variety of possible analytical focuses.
• The meaning of a text is not wholly intrinsic to
  the text.
• Emphasis is placed on the subjective nature of
  reading in that texts never exist in vacuums.

4
Marxist and Materialist Analysis

• This kind of analysis is rooted in historical
  research and changing social contexts for
  understanding literary and other cultural texts.
• Marxist critics are motivated by a sense of
  political and economic urgency and attempt to
  reveal how unwitting participation in class-based
  ideologies has concrete effects on the quality of
  human life.

5
Psychoanalytic Analysis

• An examination of the hidden forces, desires and
  fears that exert influence over characters in
  ways beyond their knowledge and control.
• Makes use of the frames of reference we use in
  discussing selfhood and identity, e.g. id, ego,
  super-ego.
• Essential tenets
• --Human activity is not reducible to conscious
  intent
• --Characters in texts may also have a complex
  psychology
• --Texts may have a psychological impact on
  readers

6
Structuralism and Semiotics

• The signified is the concept to which a word
  refers
• The signifier is that word, image or
  representation that is used to designate the
  signified
• The sign is the combination of the signifier and
  the signified
• Example a box of chocolates on Valentines Day
  represents the affection one feels for another
  person. The box of chocolates is the signifier,
  the affection is that which is signified and the
  box of chocolates as affection is commonly
  recognized as a complex cultural sign.
• Meaning can be made through a juxtaposition of
  opposites or binaries

7
Feminist Analysis

• The key to all feminist analysis is a recognition
  of the different degrees of social power that are
  granted to and exercised by women and men.
• Language, institutions and social power
  structures have reflected patriarchal interests
  throughout much of history this has had a
  profound impact on women yet, at the same time,
  women have resisted and subverted patriarchal
  oppression in a variety of ways.

8
Gay/Lesbian/Queer Analysis

• All gay/lesbian/queer analysis focuses on
  sexuality as a particulary important component of
  human identity, social organization and textual
  representation.
• All notions of normality sexual, gender related,
  and otherwiseare appropriate subjects for
  critique and historical representation.

9
Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Analysis

• Categories of race and ethnicity have been used
  in ways that have empowered and oppressed
• The differentiation of peoples is reflected in
  and reinforced by language and metaphor
• The differentiation of peoples and its political
  consequences are reflected not only in literary
  and other forms of representation but also in our
  very notion of literature

10
The New Historicism and Pluralistic Cultural
Analysis

• An examination of the work by analyzing the
  interplay between text and context.
• There are numerous possible stories and histories
  that offer different insights into the ways
  peoples lives reflect their time, place, race,
  gender, sexuality and economic situation.
• Literary and other cultural texts are connected
  in complex ways to the time periods in which they
  were created.
• No reading of a literary or cultural text is
  definitive.