Critical Theory
Critical theory -- the systematic analysis of literature through conceptual frameworks derived from philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and political theory -- is a central component of A-Level English Literature. AQA's Non-Examined Assessment requires explicit engagement with the AQA Critical Anthology; other boards assess contextual and critical knowledge within examined papers. This section provides comprehensive coverage of the major critical approaches, their key theorists and concepts, and their application to literary texts.
Overview of Critical Approaches
The following table summarises the major critical approaches, their key questions, and representative theorists:
| Approach | Central Question | Key Theorists |
|---|---|---|
| Formalism / New Criticism | How does the text create meaning through its formal features? | Wimsatt, Beardsley, Brooks, Empson |
| Structuralism | What underlying structures organise the text? | Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Propp |
| Post-structuralism | How does the text undermine its own apparent meanings? | Derrida, Barthes |
| Marxism | How does the text reflect or challenge class relations and ideology? | Marx, Althusser, Gramsci, Eagleton |
| Feminist criticism | How does the text represent gender, and how does it reinforce or challenge patriarchy? | Beauvoir, Showalter, Mulvey, Cixous |
| Psychoanalytic criticism | How does the text manifest unconscious desires and conflicts? | Freud, Lacan, Jung |
| Postcolonial criticism | How does the text engage with the legacy of colonialism? | Said, Fanon, Spivak, Bhabha |
| New Historicism | How is the text embedded in the power relations of its historical moment? | Greenblatt, Foucault |
| Ecocriticism | How does the text represent the relationship between humans and the environment? | Buell, Garrard, Glotfelty |
| Reader-response theory | How does the reader participate in constructing meaning? | Iser, Fish, Barthes |
| Queer theory | How does the text represent sexuality, and how does it reinforce or challenge heteronormativity? | Butler, Sedgwick, Foucault |
Formalism and New Criticism
Principles
Formalism and New Criticism emerged in the early twentieth century as a reaction against impressionistic and biographical approaches to literature. The central principle is that a literary text should be analysed as a self-sufficient, autonomous object, independent of the author's intentions or the reader's emotional response.
Key Concepts
Close reading: The meticulous, detailed analysis of a text's language, structure, and formal features. Close reading is the foundational skill of all literary criticism and remains essential regardless of the theoretical approach adopted.
Intentional fallacy: Coined by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in "The Intentional Fallacy" (1946), this is the error of interpreting a text by reference to the author's stated or inferred intentions. For the New Critics, the text is all that matters; the author's intention is neither recoverable nor relevant to interpretation.
Affective fallacy: Also from Wimsatt and Beardsley, this is the error of evaluating a text by its emotional effect on the reader. The New Critics insisted that the text's meaning resides in the text itself, not in the reader's subjective response.
The heresy of paraphrase: Cleanth Brooks's argument (in The Well Wrought Urn, 1947) that a poem's meaning cannot be separated from its form. Any attempt to paraphrase a poem -- to extract its "message" from its verbal embodiment -- necessarily distorts or loses the meaning that is constituted by the poem's specific formal choices.
Paradox, irony, ambiguity, and tension: The New Critics valued poems that generated complexity through the interplay of opposing elements. Brooks argued that the language of poetry is inherently paradoxical: it says two (or more) things at once, and its meaning is constituted by the tension between these opposing meanings.
Application
A formalist analysis focuses on the text's formal features (structure, metre, rhyme, diction, imagery, figurative language), the relationships between these features and meaning, patterns of repetition and contrast, and ambiguity, irony, and paradox as constitutive elements of meaning.
Limitations
Formalism neglects historical context, political dimension, and the reader's role in constructing meaning. It tends to treat all texts as equally amenable to close reading, regardless of their historical or cultural specificity.
Applying Formalism: Worked Example
Consider the opening of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land: "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain."
A formalist analysis would attend to the paradox of the opening statement (April, conventionally associated with renewal, is declared "the cruellest month"), the agricultural imagery that creates a sense of reluctant, painful revival, the juxtaposition of "memory and desire" as opposing orientations set in unresolved tension, the enjambment across lines that creates forward momentum, and the allusion to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales that creates ironic contrast between Chaucer's celebration of spring and Eliot's vision of its cruelty.
Structuralism
Principles
Structuralism, derived from the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, analyses cultural phenomena -- including literature -- as systems of signs governed by underlying structures and rules. The structuralist argues that meaning is produced not by individual elements but by the relationships between elements within a system.
Key Concepts
Saussurean linguistics: Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1916, posthumous) distinguished between the signifier (the material form of the sign), the signified (the concept the signifier evokes), and the sign (their union). Crucially, Saussure argued that the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary -- there is no natural connection between the word "tree" and the concept of a tree. Meaning is produced by the differences between signs within a system.
Binary oppositions: Structuralist analysis identifies the underlying binary oppositions that organise a text or cultural system: nature / culture, raw / cooked, male / female, speech / writing. Claude Levi-Strauss applied this method to myth, arguing that myths are structured by binary oppositions that mediate fundamental cultural contradictions.
Narrative functions: Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928) identified thirty-one recurring "functions" (basic plot elements) in Russian folktales, arguing that all folktales are variations on a single underlying structure.
Application
A structuralist analysis would identify the underlying binary oppositions that organise the text, analyse how these oppositions are maintained, mediated, or subverted, and examine the narrative structure as a system of functions or roles.
Applying Structuralism: Worked Example
In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a structuralist analysis would identify binary oppositions: Creator / Created (Victor / the Creature), Human / Monster, Nature / Science, Reason / Emotion, Society / Isolation, Male / Female. The novel's thematic power derives from the way these oppositions are established and then destabilised: the Creature is more eloquent and morally sensitive than Victor; Victor's scientific ambition is itself a form of monstrosity; the boundary between human and monster proves permeable. The novel does not simply affirm these oppositions but dramatises their collapse.
Post-Structuralism
Principles
Post-structuralism, emerging in France in the 1960s, challenges the structuralist assumption that meaning is fixed and determinate. Post-structuralists argue that language is inherently unstable, that texts are sites of contradiction and undecidability, and that meaning is produced by the reader rather than discovered in the text.
Key Concepts
Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida's method of reading that identifies the internal contradictions and instabilities within a text. Derrida argued that Western philosophy is organised by a hierarchy of binary oppositions (speech / writing, presence / absence, male / female) in which one term is privileged over the other. Deconstruction reveals that these hierarchies are unstable: the privileged term depends on the suppressed term, and the boundary between them is porous.
Differance: Derrida's neologism (combining "difference" and "deferral") captures the idea that meaning is never fully present but is always deferred along an infinite chain of signification. No sign has a fixed, final meaning; meaning is always produced through the interplay of differences that can never be totalised.
Death of the Author: Roland Barthes's essay "The Death of the Author" (1967) argued that the author's intentions and biographical identity are irrelevant to the interpretation of a text. The "Author-God" is a product of bourgeois ideology; in reality, a text is "a tissue of quotations" drawn from innumerable cultural sources, and its meaning is produced by the reader, not determined by the author.
The readerly and the writerly: In S/Z (1970), Barthes distinguished between "readerly" texts (which encourage passive, consumption-oriented reading) and "writerly" texts (which invite the reader to become an active co-producer of meaning).
Application
A post-structuralist analysis would identify the binary oppositions that structure a text and demonstrate their instability, show how a text undermines or contradicts its own apparent arguments, emphasise the open-endedness and undecidability of meaning, and acknowledge the reader's role in constructing meaning.
Applying Post-Structuralism: Worked Example
In Shakespeare's The Tempest, a post-structuralist reading would identify the play's central binary opposition -- civilisation / savagery (Prospero / Caliban) -- and demonstrate its instability. Prospero's claim to legitimate authority is undermined by his own admission that he usurped Caliban's inheritance. Caliban's apparent savagery is undercut by his poetic language and his moral claim to the island. The play simultaneously establishes and deconstructs the colonial binary, revealing the instability of the categories it appears to affirm.
Marxism
Principles
Marxist literary criticism, derived from the writings of Karl Marx (1818--1883) and Friedrich Engels, analyses literature in relation to the economic structures and class relations of the society that produces it. The fundamental premise is that literature is not autonomous but is shaped by -- and participates in -- the ideological struggles of its historical moment.
Key Concepts
Base and superstructure: Marx argued that society consists of an economic base (the forces and relations of production) and a cultural and ideological superstructure (law, politics, religion, art, philosophy) that is determined by the base. Literature, as part of the superstructure, both reflects and reinforces the economic relations of the society that produces it.
Ideology: In Marxist theory, ideology is the system of beliefs, values, and representations that naturalises and legitimises the interests of the ruling class. Ideology functions by making the contingent appear necessary, the socially constructed appear natural. Louis Althusser (1970) argued that ideology operates through "Ideological State Apparatuses" (education, religion, the family, the media) that reproduce the conditions of capitalist production by shaping individuals' subjectivity.
Class struggle: Marx argued that history is the history of class struggle -- the conflict between the ruling class (bourgeoisie) and the working class (proletariat). Literature can either reinforce the ruling class's hegemony (by naturalising existing social relations) or challenge it (by exposing exploitation and advocating for change).
Alienation: Marx's concept of alienation describes the condition of workers under capitalism, who are estranged from the products of their labour, from the labour process, from their own human potential, and from other people.
Hegemony: Antonio Gramsci (1891--1937) developed the concept of cultural hegemony -- the process by which the ruling class maintains its dominance not through coercion but through consent, by establishing its worldview as "common sense."
Application
A Marxist analysis would examine the text's representation of class relations and economic structures, analyse how the text reinforces or challenges the dominant ideology, consider the material conditions of the text's production and reception, and explore the text's relationship to the historical moment of its composition.
Applying Marxism: Worked Example
In Dickens's Hard Times (1854), a Marxist analysis would examine the representation of Coketown as an industrial landscape shaped by capitalist exploitation, Mr Gradgrind's utilitarian philosophy as an ideology that reduces human beings to productive units, the conflict between the factory workers (the "Hands") and the mill owners (Bounderby) as a dramatisation of class struggle, and Sissy Jupe's resistance to Gradgrind's system as a representation of the human spirit's capacity to survive ideological indoctrination.
Feminist Criticism
Principles
Feminist literary criticism analyses the representation of women in literature and the ways in which literary texts reflect, reinforce, or challenge patriarchal ideologies. It emerged as a distinct critical approach in the 1960s and 1970s, informed by the second-wave feminist movement.
Key Concepts
Patriarchy: A social system in which men hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege, and control of property. Feminist criticism examines how literary texts reproduce or resist patriarchal assumptions about gender.
Gender representation: How are women and men represented in literature? What roles are available to female characters? Are women defined primarily in relation to men (as wives, mothers, lovers)? Does the text offer any representation of female agency, desire, or subjectivity?
The male gaze: Laura Mulvey's concept (1975), derived from film theory, describes the way visual arts and literature position the viewer/reader as male and objectify women as objects of desire.
Gynocriticism: Elaine Showalter's term (in "Toward a Feminist Poetics," 1979) for the study of women's writing as a distinct literary tradition. Showalter identified three phases in the history of women's writing: the Feminine phase (1840--1880), in which women writers imitated the dominant male tradition; the Feminist phase (1880--1920), in which women writers protested against male domination; and the Female phase (1920--present), in which women writers achieved self-discovery and a distinctive female voice.
Simone de Beauvoir: Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) -- "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" -- is a foundational text of feminist theory, arguing that femininity is a social construct imposed on women by patriarchal society, not a biological essence.
Application
A feminist analysis would examine the representation of women characters and their access to agency, voice, and desire; analyse the text's assumptions about gender roles and relations; consider the text's position within a historically male-dominated literary tradition; and explore how the text reinforces or challenges patriarchal ideology.
Applying Feminist Criticism: Worked Example
In Shakespeare's Othello, a feminist analysis would examine Desdemona's progressive silencing (from articulate Senate defence to her final overridden attempt to speak), Emilia's speech on gender equality (IV.iii: "Let husbands know / Their wives have sense like them"), the dynamics of male control (Othello's possessiveness, Iago's exploitation of gender norms), and the play's association of female speech with sexual infidelity and its ultimate silencing of female characters through death.
Psychoanalytic Criticism
Principles
Psychoanalytic literary criticism applies the theories of Sigmund Freud (1856--1939) and subsequent psychoanalysts to the interpretation of literary texts. It assumes that literature, like dreams, is a product of the unconscious mind and that literary characters, like real people, are driven by unconscious desires, anxieties, and conflicts.
Key Concepts
The unconscious: Freud's central discovery: the mind contains a vast realm of repressed thoughts, desires, and memories that are inaccessible to conscious awareness but exert a powerful influence on behaviour, thought, and creative expression.
Id, ego, superego: Freud's tripartite model of the psyche. The id is the instinctual, pleasure-seeking, unconscious part governed by the pleasure principle. The ego is the conscious, rational part that mediates between the id's demands and external reality, governed by the reality principle. The superego is the internalised moral authority that judges and regulates the ego's actions.
The Oedipus complex: Freud's theory that all children experience a sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex and a rivalry with the parent of the same sex. The resolution of the Oedipus complex -- through identification with the same-sex parent and repression of the forbidden desire -- is the foundation of individual identity and social order. In literary criticism, the Oedipus complex has been applied to narratives of family conflict, paternal authority, and sexual desire.
Dream analysis: Freud argued that dreams are the "royal road to the unconscious" and that they operate through condensation (the compression of multiple thoughts into a single image) and displacement (the transfer of emotional intensity from a significant to an insignificant element). Literature, like dreaming, is a form of wish-fulfilment that operates through symbolic displacement.
Jacques Lacan (1901--1981): Lacan reinterpreted Freud through structural linguistics, arguing that the unconscious is structured like a language. His concept of the mirror stage -- the infant's recognition of its own image in a mirror, which produces the illusion of a coherent, unified self -- has been widely applied to literary representations of identity. Lacan's distinction between the Imaginary (images, identification, wholeness), the Symbolic (language, law, social structure), and the Real (that which resists symbolisation) provides a framework for analysing the relationship between language, desire, and identity in literary texts.
Carl Jung (1875--1961): Jung proposed a collective unconscious populated by archetypes -- universal, inherited patterns of thought and imagery that appear in myths, dreams, and literature across cultures. Key archetypes include the Hero, the Shadow, the Anima/Animus, the Wise Old Man, and the Great Mother.
Application
A psychoanalytic analysis would examine characters' unconscious desires, anxieties, and conflicts; analyse the text as a manifestation of psychological preoccupations; identify symbolic patterns corresponding to psychoanalytic concepts; and consider the text's representation of dreams, fantasies, and the irrational.
Applying Psychoanalytic Criticism: Worked Example
In Shakespeare's Hamlet, a Freudian analysis would examine Hamlet's relationship with Gertrude: Freud's suggestion that Hamlet's delay is caused by repressed Oedipal desire for Gertrude -- Claudius has done what Hamlet unconsciously wanted to do, and killing Claudius would mean confronting his own forbidden desire. The play's preoccupation with death, decay, and the body (the graveyard scene, Yorick's skull) can be read as expressions of the death drive (Thanatos). Hamlet's "antic disposition" operates as displacement, channelling unconscious desire and aggression into socially ambiguous behaviour.
Postcolonial Criticism
Principles
Postcolonial criticism analyses the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism, examining how literature both reflects and resists colonial ideologies. It is concerned with the representation of colonised peoples, the politics of language, the construction of cultural identity, and the relationship between power and knowledge.
Key Concepts
Orientalism: Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) is the foundational text of postcolonial criticism. Said argued that the "Orient" is not a geographical fact but a cultural construction produced by Western discourse. Orientalism functions as a mechanism of imperial power, constructing the Orient as exotic, irrational, and inferior, thereby justifying colonial domination.
Subaltern: Derived from Antonio Gramsci, the term was adopted by the Subaltern Studies Group (Gayatri Spivak, Ranajit Guha) to designate populations outside the hegemonic power structure. Spivak's essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988) argues that the subaltern cannot be represented within the dominant discourse without being distorted or silenced by it.
Hybridity: Homi Bhabha's concept (in The Location of Culture, 1994) describes the cultural mixing that occurs in colonial encounters. Hybridity challenges the colonial binary of coloniser / colonised, producing new, hybrid cultural forms that resist the purity and fixity of colonial categories.
Fanon and decolonisation: Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Black Skin, White Masks (1952) analyse the psychological effects of colonialism on the colonised, arguing that colonialism produces a damaged sense of self that can be healed only through radical decolonisation.
Appropriation and writing back: Postcolonial writers frequently appropriate and rewrite canonical Western texts from a colonised perspective. Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) rewrites Jane Eyre from Bertha Mason's perspective; Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958) challenges the colonial narratives about Africa that underlie works like Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
Application
A postcolonial analysis would examine how the text represents colonised peoples, cultures, and places; analyse the relationship between power, knowledge, and representation; consider the politics of language; and explore how the text engages with or resists colonial ideology.
Applying Postcolonial Criticism: Worked Example
In Shakespeare's The Tempest, a postcolonial analysis would examine Caliban as the colonised subject (his enslavement, his linguistic education: "You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is I know how to curse"), Prospero as the coloniser (his displacement of Caliban, his imposition of European language and culture), the island as a colonial space (positioned as empty, available for appropriation), and the play's resolution (Prospero's forgiveness and Caliban's promise to "seek for grace") as a narrative of reconciliation that may reproduce colonial power dynamics.
New Historicism
Principles
New Historicism, emerging in the 1980s through the work of Stephen Greenblatt, analyses literary texts in relation to the cultural and political practices of their historical moment. It challenges the formalist separation of "literature" from "history," arguing that texts are embedded in and participate in the power relations of their time.
Key Concepts
Power/knowledge: Derived from Michel Foucault (1926--1984), this concept holds that power and knowledge are inextricably linked: what counts as "knowledge" in any given society is determined by power relations, and knowledge functions as an instrument of power.
Historicising texts: New Historicism insists that texts must be read in relation to the specific historical circumstances of their production -- the political, religious, economic, and cultural contexts that shaped the text and to which the text responds.
Cultural poetics: Greenblatt's term for the practice of reading literary texts alongside non-literary documents (legal records, political tracts, medical treatises, religious sermons) to reconstruct the cultural world that produced the text.
Circulation of social energy: Greenblatt argues that literary texts participate in the exchange of cultural meanings, values, and anxieties between texts, institutions, and social practices. Literature both reflects and contributes to the negotiation of social power.
Application
A New Historicist analysis would situate the text within its specific historical moment, examine the relationship between the text and non-literary cultural documents, analyse how the text participates in the power relations of its time, and consider how the text negotiates, reinforces, or subverts dominant ideologies.
Applying New Historicism: Worked Example
In Shakespeare's Macbeth, a New Historicist analysis would examine the play's engagement with the politics of the Jacobean court (James I's interest in witchcraft, his belief in the divine right of kings, his claimed descent from Banquo), the Gunpowder Plot (1605) and anxieties about treason and regicide, the play's representation of Scottish history in relation to the Union of the Crowns (1603), and the witches as a nexus of contemporary anxieties about gender, power, and the supernatural.
Ecocriticism
Principles
Ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment. It emerged as a distinct critical approach in the 1990s, informed by the environmental movement, and analyses how literature represents the natural world, engages with ecological issues, and shapes (or challenges) human attitudes toward the environment.
Key Concepts
Anthropocentrism: The assumption that human beings are the central or most significant entities in the world. Ecocriticism challenges anthropocentrism, arguing for the intrinsic value of the non-human natural world and for the ethical responsibilities that arise from this recognition.
Pastoral: The literary tradition that idealises rural life and nature, often as a contrast to the corruption of urban civilisation. Ecocritics examine how pastoral literature constructs the relationship between human beings and the natural world, and how it may conceal the material realities of agricultural labour and environmental exploitation.
Nature writing: A genre of non-fiction prose that engages directly with the natural world, from Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selborne (1789) to Robert Macfarlane's Underland (2019). Ecocriticism analyses nature writing for its representations of ecological consciousness and environmental responsibility.
The ecological crisis: Contemporary ecocriticism is often explicitly concerned with climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and other manifestations of environmental degradation. "Eco-criticism" has evolved into "environmental humanities," an interdisciplinary field that brings literary and cultural analysis to bear on ecological questions.
Application
An ecocritical analysis would examine how the text represents the natural world, analyse the relationship between human and non-human characters and environments, consider the text's engagement with environmental issues, and explore how the text reinforces or challenges anthropocentric assumptions.
Applying Ecocriticism: Worked Example
In Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" (1798), an ecocritical analysis would examine the poem's representation of the Wye Valley landscape as a source of moral and spiritual renewal, the relationship between the speaker and the natural world as one of reciprocal influence ("Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her"), the poem's implicit environmental ethic (the natural world has intrinsic value independent of human use), and the tension between the poem's idealisation of nature and the historical realities of the Industrial Revolution that were transforming the English landscape.
Reader-Response Theory
Principles
Reader-response theory argues that meaning is not fixed in the text but is produced collaboratively by the text and the reader. It emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s as a reaction against formalism's neglect of the reader's role in interpretation.
Key Concepts
Implied reader: Wolfgang Iser's concept (in The Implied Reader, 1972) of the hypothetical reader that the text constructs and addresses. The implied reader is not an actual person but a role that the text requires the reader to occupy. The text contains "gaps" or "blanks" that the reader must fill in order to construct meaning.
Interpretive communities: Stanley Fish's concept (in Is There a Text in This Class?, 1980) that readers' interpretations are shaped by the interpretive strategies and assumptions of the communities to which they belong. There is no "objective" meaning of a text; meaning is always produced by the interpretive strategies that the reader brings to it.
Horizon of expectations: Hans Robert Jauss's concept (derived from Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics) of the set of cultural expectations, assumptions, and conventions that a reader brings to a text at a given historical moment. A text's meaning changes as the horizon of expectations of its readers changes.
Application
A reader-response analysis would examine how the text positions and guides the reader, identify the gaps and ambiguities that require the reader's active interpretation, consider how different readers (or different interpretive communities) might produce different readings, and explore the historical variability of interpretation.
Queer Theory
Principles
Queer theory, emerging in the early 1990s from the intersection of feminist theory, gay and lesbian studies, and post-structuralism, analyses the construction and regulation of sexuality and gender identity. It challenges the assumption that sexuality and gender are natural, fixed categories, arguing instead that they are culturally constructed and historically variable.
Key Concepts
Performativity: Judith Butler's central concept (in Gender Trouble, 1990) that gender is not a stable identity but a performance -- a set of repeated acts, gestures, and behaviours that produce the appearance of a natural, essential gender identity. Gender is "the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance."
Heteronormativity: The assumption that heterosexuality is the natural, normal, and superior form of sexuality, and that all other sexualities are deviant. Queer theory challenges heteronormativity and examines how literary texts reinforce or subvert it.
The closet and coming out: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet (1990) argues that the modern understanding of sexuality is organised by the binary of "closeted" and "out," and that this binary structures not only individual experience but also literary texts, cultural institutions, and systems of knowledge.
Queer reading practices: Queer theory advocates reading "against the grain" -- identifying homoerotic undertones, gender nonconformity, and the subversion of sexual norms in texts that may not explicitly address queer themes.
Application
A queer theory analysis would examine how the text constructs and regulates gender and sexuality, identify moments of gender nonconformity or homoerotic desire, analyse how the text reinforces or subverts heteronormative assumptions, and explore the relationship between sexuality and power.
Applying Queer Theory: Worked Example
In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, a queer reading would examine the play's exploration of gender performativity (Viola's disguise as Cesario creates a fluid network of desires that destabilises fixed categories of gender and sexuality), the homoerotic dimension of Orsino's attraction to Cesario (and Antonio's devotion to Sebastian), the play's resistance to heterosexual closure (the marriages at the end do not fully resolve the play's destabilisation of gender categories), and Feste's songs as expressions of desire and loss that exceed the play's comic framework.
Applying Critical Theory: Methodology
Choosing a Critical Approach
The choice of critical approach should be guided by the text and the question:
- What does the text emphasise? A text preoccupied with social class may invite a Marxist reading; a text preoccupied with gender may invite a feminist reading; a text preoccupied with colonial encounter may invite a postcolonial reading.
- What does the question ask? Exam questions often specify or imply a critical approach. "Explore the presentation of female characters" invites feminist criticism; "Consider the significance of the play's historical context" invites New Historicism.
- Can you combine approaches? The strongest answers often draw on multiple critical perspectives. A feminist-postcolonial reading of The Tempest, or a psychoanalytic-formalist reading of Hamlet, can produce richer analysis than a single approach alone.
Essay Structure for Critical Theory
- Introduction: State your thesis, identifying the critical approach or approaches you will use and explaining why they are appropriate to the text and question.
- Contextualisation: Briefly outline the key concepts of the critical approach, citing relevant theorists.
- Analysis: Apply the critical framework to specific textual evidence. Each paragraph should advance a clear analytical point, supported by close reading and quotation.
- Evaluation: Consider the limitations of the critical approach. What does it reveal? What does it overlook? How might a different approach produce a different reading?
- Conclusion: Summarise your argument, emphasise the significance of your findings, and, where appropriate, suggest connections to other texts or approaches.
Common Pitfalls
- Name-dropping without application: Mentioning theorists without demonstrating how their concepts illuminate the text.
- Theory over text: Allowing the critical framework to dominate at the expense of close reading. The text must always be central.
- Deterministic readings: Reducing the text to a mere illustration of a pre-existing theoretical position. The best criticism allows the text to challenge and complicate the theoretical framework.
- Neglecting alternative readings: Strong answers acknowledge the limitations of their chosen approach and consider how other perspectives might produce different interpretations.
- AQA NEA: failing to integrate theory: For AQA coursework, the critical theory must be integrated into your argument, not confined to a single paragraph or bolted on at the end.