Critical Lenses

Concerned with the way those with economic power exploit those without it.

• Critical Race Theory

• Psychoanalytic

• Marxist

• New Criticism

Tags

CCSS.RI.11-12.3

CCSS.RI.11-12.5

Attempts to understand how we are affected by cultural perceptions of race and how we are better able to represent ourselves to counter prejudice.

• Critical Race Theory

• Psychoanalytic

• Marxist

• New Criticism

Attempts to treat each work as its own distinct piece, free from its environment, era, and even author. Assumes that the keys to understanding a text exist within "the text itself", or its "form".

• Moral Criticism

• Formalism

• Psychoanalytic Criticism

• Marxist Criticism

Tags

CCSS.L.11-12.4

CCSS.L.11-12.5

CCSS.RI.11-12.4

CCSS.RL.11-12.4

Considers readers' reactions to literature as vital to interpreting the meaning of the text. They maintain "...that what a text is cannot be separated from what it does" to the reader.

• Formalism

• Moral Criticism

• New Historicism

• Reader-Response

Tags

CCSS.RL.11-12.7

Seeks to reconnect a work with the time period in which it was produced and identify it with the cultural and political movements of the time. Assumes every work is the product of the time it was written.

• New Historicism

• Postmodern Criticism

• Post-Colonial Criticism

• Formalism

Tags

CCSS.RI.11-12.9

CCSS.RL.11-12.9

Concerned with literature produced by colonial powers and works produced by those who were/are colonized.

• New Historicism

• Postmodern Criticism

• Post-Colonial Criticism

• Formalism

Tags

CCSS.RI.11-12.6

CCSS.RL.11-12.6

Concerned with "the ways in which literature (and other cultural productions) reinforce or undermine the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of women."

• Formalism

• Feminist Criticism

• Postmodern Criticism

• Gender Studies

Looks at a text through the ideas of the "father of modern psychology", Sigmund Freud. Particularly concerned with the repressed and subconscious messages a text sends, about either the author or characters.

• Formalism

• Gender Studies

• Postmodern Criticism

• Psychoanalytic Criticism