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In short, New Critics believe that everything in a work of literature is carefully calculated to contribute to the unity of the work.

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New Criticism was a theoretical school that focused on interpreting and critically engaging with a self-sufficient text, independent of all outside factors.

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Psychoanalytic critics believe that there are core issues that define our beings in fundamental ways. 

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Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, came up with a theory of a tri-partite psyche. He believed that the human psyche was divided up between the Id, the Superego, and the Ego, which were constantly at war with one another.

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Marxism is a political, social, and economic theory, fathered by Karl Marx.

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Marxism claims that economics is the base on which the superstructure of social, political, and ideological realities are built.
Marxism believes that culture reproduces the class structure of society.

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Feminists in different countries respond to works from different perspectives, inspired by the influences of Marxism and Psychoanalysis.

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Because they are taking a psychoanalytic approach, they also study and attempt to define the difference between the male and female subconscious, especially when it comes to voice in a narrative.

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Queer Theory is an approach that rose out of the Feminist movement to focus the interest more on gender to include a discussion of sexuality.

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Queer Theorists approach literature and cultural productions, including sexual and gender identities, sexual practices, and types of masculinity and femininity that exist outside assumed norms.
Queer theory claims that sexuality is actually a set of diverse possibilities on a spectrum containing heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, and asexuality

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Structuralists are interested in structures that exist in our reality and how we can read meaning through them.

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When Structuralists speak of “language,” they aren’t talking about one specific language, but languages as a whole.
Languages are made up of words, and even parts of words, that can combine infinitely within the rules of language itself to create meaning.

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Post-Structuralism, or Deconstruction, came about as a reaction to an earlier movement, Structuralism.

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Where Structuralism claimed that the human mind creates structures to create meaning in life, Post-Structuralism claims that the world isn’t that simple. The two primary beliefs of critics within Post-Structuralism are that language is unstable and that language is non- referential.

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New Critics pay attention to formal elements in the work, such as narrative voice, setting, plot, and word choice.

New Critics also investigate the meaning behind word choices, including a word’s denotation, connotation, history, and any allusion the word is making.

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Psychoanalytic critics assume that psychoanalysis can interpret texts about human behavior.

They do this through character analysis, which comes out of the driving force behind psychoanalysis as a medical practice: to understand motives and relationships and to explain our growth and development on the level of humanity as a whole.

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Marxist critics apply theory to literature through the belief that ideology is at work in all cultural productions. Critics look for places where the text is ideologically conflicted.

Marxist theorists believe that a literary work can only be understood in its full context. Works are written within the context of the group ideology and the times in which they are written.
Another application of Marxism to literature is the belief that culture cannot be separated from the socioeconomic system that created it.
An alternative way to interpret texts in an analysis is to see literature as an active agent.

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•           Create Videos

Example: to help students understand the concepts, you can have them help teach them to the class by making a set of instructional videos.

•           Focus on Characters

Example: Internal Monologue: The use of creative drama is a fun way to show students how to read between the lines and discover hidden narratives and drives. With four student volunteers, two students will have a conversation while the other two give internal commentary that may or may not align with the situation in “real life.”

Subconscious Arguments

Example: with the use of creative drama, you can show students the way Freud perceives the subconscious. Students form two lines facing one another, one representing the Superego and one representing the Id (students should be aware of their roles). Each student will take a turn reading off a dilemma, and walking between the lines, each student member of the subconscious giving advice they believe is characteristic of their role.

Stream of Consciousness:

Example: in a writing activity, have students write constantly for five minutes without a prompt (this amount of time is supposedly long enough for their subconscious to take over). Then, have them go back through it and do a form of psychobiography, applying the criticism they are supposed to use as they read literature to their own writing.

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Structuralists also believe that we don’t speak language, but language speaks us. The source of meaning in language is a set of oppositions.
Structuralists believe that structure produces meaning. They not only look for the units of language, but the units of stories as well.
According to Barthes, we have to read the signified back through the signifier to see the signification. The myth has two functions: to notify readers and to make them understand something.

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Deconstructive critics work to reveal that a text has no traditional meaning, but rather a multiplicity of meanings. They look at the way a text is related to other texts to see how this contributes to multiplicity when investigating the meaning of a work.

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As a reader, you are looking at each and every detail presented to you within the story that you believe contributes to the overall meaning of the piece.

As you read, take notes on uses of imagery, metaphor, allusion, and other literary devices and word play that sticks out to you as being important.

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1. Underline important statements of the text.
2. Take notes to confirm or deny ideas of the text.
3. Analyze the characters and their behaviors.

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1. Take notes.
2. Look at instances where there are specific Marxist themes, such as conspicuous consumption or commodification of the working class.

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1. Pay close attention to the women in the story.
2. Look for any moments when the women appear to be responding to or going along with society’s ideas of femininity and what it means to be female.
3. Look at the way the male characters treat the women.
4. Looking for how the women use mimicry to get what they want from the men.

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1. Focus on the construction of gender identities, especially masculinity.
2. Take notes of the way the different male characters address one another and how they perform their gender identity.

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1. A Structuralist analysis of literature starts with determining the basic units of the text, which can be characters, recurring symbols, or anything else that seems to create a binary opposition or appears to be acting as a signifier in the work.
2. Pay attention to things that appear to be rules governing the behavior of each important character in the work, evidence of them imposing their rules on others, or fear and anxiety when they are breaking them.

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1. Carefully defined the primary binary opposition present in the text.
2. Flip the binary to analyze it.

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To teach New Criticism using reading strategies, start by teaching your class the concepts and tenets of New Criticism explicitly.

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•           Extended Reading Strategies
Refreshing students on some reading strategies will help make this fusion easier for students, as the two need to work together to provide structure and framework for conducting a New Critical reading.

Example: to teach close reading explicitly with reading strategies, you can create a worksheet with multiple columns for students to fill in as they read. In one column, students should write out the quote, symbol, or concept that drew their attention as well as the page or line number. In a second column, they should reword the quote, or explain the concept in more detail. In a third column, students should explain why this quote, concept, or symbol in significant.

o          Another way to teach New Criticism through critical thinking is to teach critical thinking skills with a focus on how New Critics read.

Example: Tell students that their job is to determine what the main point of the article is, and find support for it within the article; this is very similar to the New Critical concept of close reading. Have students make notes on the paper as they engage it on their own, then meet in groups based on what article they read. Inform students that they may not all have the same opinion.

•           Teach as ground work for other theories

Inform students that the techniques they apply in New Criticism are the foundation of the other theories to come, after briefly introducing the rest to them.

•           Use Essential Questions

To allow students to feel comfortable with inquiry and to engage them without limiting them, we as teachers can craft broad essential questions for each unit that students must answer, using the methods of New Criticism.

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Literature Circles

Example: while most works of literature can be analyzed using most lenses, you can make it easier for students by selecting works that are more applicable to Marxist criticism. One genre that fits this lens is utopia/dystopia. To differentiate for your students, you can choose different dystopia novels, including both modern ones and classics based on the ability level of your students.

•           Propaganda

Example: to get students to read closely to determine the ideology behind a work, you can have them analyze advertisements. This will help them learn to identify hegemony and interpellation in works, and begin to think about what the works want them to think about the status quo, how it is working to maintain society as it is.

Creating an unbiased understanding

It will be helpful to give students the pieces of Marxist theory gradually. This will help them to understand what they are actually doing, allowing them to keep an open mind about the theoretical school as it applies to literature.

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Complexity of Texts

For students to begin to grasp Feminist criticism, they need to be encouraged to embrace and interpret ambiguous, complex, and contradictory texts. By being forced to confront what they see as a natural order, students will be given the opportunity to renegotiate how they view texts and the world, opening up alternatives to what they previously thought.

Case Study

To facilitate the analysis of female experience in traditional literature, you may have students view a situation from the story or novel as a case study.

Example: students should choose a situation that involved or impacted a female character, then analyze the actions of all characters involved, propose alternative ways of acting in the situation, and the potential outcomes of these actions.

Acknowledge the Politics

Feminist literary criticism is inherently political.

Example: one way to engage this in the classroom is to have students read nonfiction works by Feminist writers: articles, blogs, etc. to help familiarize themselves with the issues they will be looking for in the works of fiction they are critiquing. Note: when choosing these texts, analyze them first yourself for credibility.

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•           Use Books Already in the Curriculum

Students can do queer readings of texts that do not have queer issues and characters at the forefront and are not written by queer authors by using a more general queer approach, deconstructing and disrupting presumed norms presented in the texts. Students should be taught to look for ways the structures that create identity categories are being complicated over the course of the text.

Example: include Works Containing Characters, Issues, and Authors from the Gender, Sexuality, and Romantic Minority.

•           Role Play

Have students portray an identity that is not their own while other members of the class try to guess their identity. Slips with identities should be handed out to the class before the activity begins.

Example: students will write a list of ways this identity is performed, according to the portrayal of people and characters with these identities in the media. During the performance, students will write what they believe the identity being performed is and why on sheets of paper. After each individual performance, the class should vote and list what factors contributed to their decision. Note: this activity is meant to play on stereotypes perpetrated by the media and culture; students should be aware of this beforehand.

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•           Create a Language

In this activity, groups of students will create their own language centered around three objects. It has to have governing rules that help make meaning for speakers and listeners. Student groups will then have to interact with other student groups, trying to barter items while dealing with their language barrier

This activity is meant to help students grasp the idea of the sign=signified+signifier creation of meaning and its arbitrary nature, as they’re coming up with new signifiers for a signified they already have the sign for.

•           What is it?

Example: students will be presented with a picture of a strange object, something that doesn’t look like anything they know or are familiar with. This may be an actual item. Students will then be asked to define what the item is. Inevitably, they will use differential relations to do this (ex: “Well, it doesn’t have a bottom, so it’s not a cup”).

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•           Discuss binaries

Example: practice with poetry.
Pick out poems for the class to analyze. Have them come up with a list of some binaries they see at work in the poem, such as sound/silence, warm/cold, white/black, nature/city, etc. Then have them practice deconstructing the text by reversing the binaries so the lesser-privileged term becomes the privileged one, going back through the poem with this reversal in mind, and seeing how the meaning changes.

•           Act it out

Example: deconstructive debate

For a Deconstructive debate, you first need to create a binary for your students to argue. For ease of topic, choose an issue that isn’t too controversial for your student population and that they are familiar with enough to argue on both sides. The topic should only have two positions (possibly something that garners a yes/no type of reaction).

1. In the first phase, give students a side for them to argue on. Tell them “your opinion” before they even start arguing (to mimic the privileging of one side of the binary).
2. In the second phase, tell the lesser-privileged group they have made a good case and you’re willing to look into their position. This should force the privileged group to actually define their position in an effort to regain their former privilege in the binary.

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