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Remember that the way we read is a choice; the interpretation of a text depends on active, conscious decisions on the part of the reader.

Here are some hints to remember when you are sorting through your critical lenses.

1. The lenses are not always mutually exclusive, but you should be aware which are incompatible by understanding the assumptions behind them.

2. No single lens gives the clearest view; all have limitations.

3. Applying different lenses to the same text can reveal new features of that text.

4. It is easier for novices to apply one lens at a time.

5. These descriptions are simplified; many lenses are based on years of scholarly research anddebate.

6. Turning these lenses on your experiences–your life–can help you understand and think critically about your own ideologies.

7. Writing about literature and art affords us the ability to discuss real ideas in the realm of imagination; in other words, we can play.

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Essential Question: What does analysis of the text’s form reveal about the meaning of its content?

Central Concerns: form, unity, ambiguity, resolution, pattern, literacy language

Critical Assumptions:
1.  A text will teach you how to read it; the work itself is the only locus of critical interest.

2.  The author’s intentions are unavailable and irrelevant.

3.  A text is valuable if it contains ambiguities, ironies, and complexities that can be resolved through careful analysis of its form.

4.  A complex work will reveal a unifying theme.

What to do:

1.  Determine oppositions, ambiguities, ironies, and complexities in the text.

2.  Read closely; assume there are no “mistakes” in a text, or that any aspect of text is “unintentional.” Study the interrelationship of literary elements.

3.  Explicate the text by showing how it resolves its ambiguities.

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Essential Question:
How does this text reinforce, critique, or challenge definitions of masculinity or femininity?

Central Concerns: gender roles, objectivity/objectification, representation, differences

Critical Assumptions:
1. Any text cannot exist outside of a gender frame of reference.

2. Historically, writing (and interpretation) has been dominated by men and masculine perceptions; it is important for women to create a feminine/feminist way of writing and reading.

3. Men and women are essentially different, and differences can be examined in social behavior, ideas, and values; these differences should be recognized.

4. Stereotyping is dangerous and can lead to destructive social norms.

What to do:
1. Consider the gender of the author, the reader, and the characters/voices in the text: how does the text reflect social gender codes?

2. Ask how the text reinforces or undermines gender stereotypes.

3. Imagine yourself as someone of the opposite gender reading this work.

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Essential Question: How does this text reflect the experience, beliefs, and understandings of its reader?

Central Concerns: effect, personal reflection, description, subjectivity

Critical Assumptions:

1. The text does not exist without a reader.

2. An author’s intentions are unavailable to a reader outside the text.

3. Reading is the active process of evaluating a personal response to a text.

4. A reader’s changing perceptions that result from reading are valuable.

What to do:

1. Move through the text carefully and slowly, describing the response of an informed reader at various points; note changes in response.

2. Describe your own responses to the text, using evidence and explanation.

3. React to the text as a whole, expressing the subjective and personal response it engenders.

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Essential Question:
How does this text comment on or represent class conflict?

Central Concerns: power, economics, class, differences, fairness, society

Critical Assumptions:
1.  The way people think and behave is determined by basic economic factors.

2.  Class conflict is the same as political conflict.

3.  The wealthy class exploits the working class by forcing their own values and beliefs upon them, usually through control of working conditions and money.

4.  These ideas can be applied to the study of literature, which is a product of culture and social conflict.

What to do:
1.  Explore the way different economic classes are represented in the text.

2.  Determine the ideological stance of the text. (Is it radical? Conservative?)

3.  Link the text to the social class of its author.

4.  Consider how the text itself is a commodity that reproduces certain beliefs and behaviors. What is the effect of the work as means of control?

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Essential Question: How does this text comment on, represent, or repress the marginalized voices?

Central Conerns: cultural markers, the Other, oppression, justice, society

Critical Assumptions:

1. Colonization—the exploitation of one national or ethnic group by another— is a powerful destructiveforce that disrupts the identities of both groups.

2. Colonized societies are forced to the margins by their colonizers (called “Othering”), despite having a historical claim to the land they inhabit.

3. Literature written by colonizers distorts the experiences and realities of the colonized; literature written by the colonized often attempts to redefine or preserve a sense of cultural identity.

What to do:

1. Explore how the text represents a colonized or colonized cultural group.

2. Ask how the text creates images of “others.” How does it demonstrate a colonial mindset?

3. Ask how conflicts in the text might be viewed as cultural conflicts.

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Essential Question: How does analysis of this text reveal privileged oppositions of meaning and arbitrary nature of language?

Central Concerns: privilege, hierarchies, indeterminacy, sign, signifier

Critical Assumptions:

1.  Meaning is not determinate: it is made by binary oppositions (yes/no, positive, negative, etc.), butone item in an opposition is unavoidably favored or privileged over the other.

2.  The hierarchy is arbitrary and can be exposed or reversed.

3.  Texts contain unavoidable gaps, spaces, absences, contradictions and irresolvable ambiguities that defeat complete interpretation.

What to do:

1.  Identify oppositions in the text.

2.  Determine which member in a given opposition appears favored, and demonstrate contradiction of that favoring.

3.  Expose a text’s inability to resolve its ambiguities.

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Essential Question:
How can we apply psychology and psychoanalytical criticism to gain insights into the behavior andmotivations of authors and characters?

Central Concerns: expression, personality, state of mind, designs of author

Critical Assumptions:
1. An author reveals repressed wishes or fears in a literary text.

2. Creative writing, like dreaming, can unlock the subconscious.

3. There are some patterns such as anxiety, repression, fear of death that can be applied both toindividual characters and authors as well as generally to human beings.

What to do:
1. Look for an underlying psychological subtext in the work.

2. Discover key biographical moments and relate them to the text.

3. Try to explain the behavior of the characters in psychological terms, such as projection, repression, fear (of abandonment, sexuality, etc.).

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Essential Questions: How does this text reinforce, critique, or challenge representations of race and racism?

Central Concerns: levels of racism (individual, systemic, ideological); colorblindness (naturalization, abstract liberalism, minimization); racial perspectives (stock stories; white savior narratives, counterstories)

Critical Assumptions:
1. Racism is pervasive in American society and literature plays a role in both reflecting race and racism in American and constructing it.

2. Literature is often complicit in constructing and reinforcing dominant racial ideologies such as colorblindness and abstract liberalism.

3. The views and experiences of people of color are missing from the typical literature curriculum; counterstories are necessary to challenge these dominant narratives.

4. Literature and literature instruction can be a powerful vehicle for developing racial literacy and promoting social action.

What to do:
1. Consider the racial profile of the author, then read the character/voices in the text; how does the text reinforce or challenge representations of race.

2. Ask how the text reinforces or undermines racial stereotypes.

3. Imagine yourself as someone of the racial group represented in this text, and describe how you might feel drawing on the text to illustrate your reaction to issues of race.