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Psychoanalytic | Marxist | Feminist | New Critic | Reader-Response | Structural Critic | Deconstructionist | Cultural Critic | Queer Theory | Post Colonial | African American

First of all, remember that the literature is, above all, meant to entertain and enlighten us.  And to be honest, the best interpretation is a private one, based upon your own experiences and philosophy.

That said, the methods/questions below offer different ways of examining literature, providing that all important “different point of view” that’s so crucial in developing broader perspectives on literature – and, of course, on life.  Consider these of ways of developing an informed “private” interpretation.

These questions are adapted from Lois Tyson’s Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide, a title held by our library (and well worth keeping on your bookshelf). 

• How do the operations of repression structure or inform the work?  That is, what unconscious motives are operating in the main character(s); what core issues are thereby illustrated; and how do these core issues structure or inform the piece? (Remember, the unconscious consists of repressed wounds, fears, unresolved conflicts, and guilty desires).
• Are there any oedipal dynamic – or any other family dynamics – at work here?  That is, is it possible to relate a character’s patterns of adult behavior to early experiences in the family as represented in the story?  How do these patterns of behavior and family dynamics operate and what do they reveal?
• How can characters’ behavior, narrative events, and/or images be explained in terms of psychoanalytic concepts of any kind (for example, regression, crisis, projection, fear of or fascination with death, sexuality – which includes love and romance as well as sexual behaviors – as a primary indicator of psychological identity or the operations of ego-id-superego)?
• In what ways can we view a literary work as analogous to a dream?  That is, how might recurrent or striking dream symbols reveal the ways in which the narrator or speaker is projecting his or her unconscious desires, fears, wounds, or unresolved conflicts onto other characters, onto the setting, or onto the events portrayed?  Symbols, relevant to death, sexuality, and the unconscious are especially helpful.
• What does this work suggest about the psychological being of its author?  Although this question is no longer the primary question asked by psychoanalytic critics, some critics still address it, especially those who write psychological biographies.  In these cases, the literary text is interpreted much as if it were the author’s dream.  Psychoanalyzing an author in this manner is a difficult undertaking, and our analysis must be carefully derived by examining the author’s entire corpus as well as letters, diaries, and any other biographical material available.  Certainly, a single literary work can provide but a very incomplete picture.
• What might a given interpretation of a literary work suggest about the psychological motives of the reader?  Or what might a critical trend suggest about the psychological motives of a group of readers (for example, the tendency of literary critics to see Willy Loman as a devoted family man and ignore or underplay his contribution to the family dysfunction)?

• Does the work reinforce (intentionally or not) capitalist, imperialist, or other classist values?  If so, then the work may be said to have a capitalist, imperialist, or classist agenda, and it is the critic’s job to expose and condemn this aspect of the work.
• How might the work be seen as a critique of capitalism, imperialism, or classism?  That is, in what ways does the text reveal, and invite us to condemn, oppressive socioeconomic forces (included repressive ideologies)?  If a work criticizes or invites us to criticize oppressive socioeconomic forces, then it may be said to have Marxist agenda.
• Does the work in some ways support a Marxist agenda but in other ways (perhaps unintentionally) support a capitalist, imperialist, or classist agenda?  In other words, is the work ideologically conflicted?
• How does the literary work reflect (intentionally or not) the socioeconomic conditions of the time in which it was written and/or the time in which it is set, and what do those conditions reveal about the history of class struggle?
• How might the work be seen as a critique of organized religion? That is, how does religion function, in the text, to keep a character or characters from realizing and resisting socioeconomic oppression?

• What does the work reveal about the operations (economically, politically, socially, or psychologically) of patriarchy?  How are women portrayed?  How do these portrayals relate to the gender issues of the period in which the novel was written or is set?  In other words, does the work reinforce or undermine patriarchal ideology? (In the first case, we might say that the text has a patriarchal agenda.  In the second case, we might say that the text has a feminist agenda. Texts that seem to both reinforce and undermine patriarchal ideology might be said to be ideologically conflicted)
• What does the work imply about the possibilities of sisterhood as a mode of resisting patriarchy and/or about the ways in which women’s situations in the world – economic, political, social, or psychological – might be improved?
• What does the work suggest about the ways in which race, class, and/or other cultural factors intersect with gender in producing women’s experience?
• What does the work suggest about women’s creativity?  In order to answer this question, biographical data about the author and historical data about the culture in which she lived will be required.
• What might an examination of the author’s style contribute to the ongoing efforts to delineate a specifically feminine form of writing?
• What does the history of the work’s reception by the public and by the critics tell us about the operations of patriarchy?  Has the literary work been ignored or neglected in the past?  Why?  Or, if recognized in the past, is the work ignored or neglected now? Why?
• What role does the work play in terms of women’s literary history and literary tradition?

• What single interpretation of the text best established its organic unity?  In other words, how do the text’s formal elements, and the multiple meanings those elements produce, all work together to support the theme, or overall meaning , of the work?  Remember, a great work will have a theme of universal human significance.

• How does the interaction of text and reader create meaning?  How, exactly, does the text’s indeterminacy function as a stimulus to interpretation? (For example, what events are omitted or unexplained?  What descriptions are omitted or incomplete? What images might have multiple associations?) And how, exactly, does the text lead us to correct our interpretation as we read?
• What does a phrase-by-phrase analysis of a short literary text, or of key portions of a longer text, tell us about the reading experience prestructured by (built into) that text?  How does this analysis of what the text does to the reader differ from what the text “says” or “means”?  In other words, how might the omission of the temporal experience of reading this text result in an incomplete idea of the text’s meaning?
• How might we interpret a literary text to show that the reader’s response is, or is analogous to, the topic of the story? In other words, how is the text really about readers reading, and what, exactly, does it tell us about this topic?  To simplify further, how is a particular kind of reading experience and important theme in the text?  Of course, we must first establish what reading experience is created by the text (see question #2) in order to show that the topic of the story is analogous to it.  Then we must cite textual evidence – for example, reference to reading materials, to character reading texts, and to characters interpreting other characters or events – to show that what happens in the world of the narrative mirrors the reader’s situation decoding it.
• Drawing on a broad spectrum of thoroughly documented biographical data, what seems to be a given author’s identity theme, and how does that theme express itself in the sum of his or her literary output?
• What does the body of criticism published about a literary text suggest about the critics who interpreted that text and/or about the reading experience produced by that text? You might contrast critical camps writing during the same period, writing during different periods, or both.  What does your analysis suggest about the ways in which the text is created by readers’ interpretive strategies or by their psychological or ideological projections?
• If you have the resources to do it, what can you learn about the role of readers’ interpretative strategies or expectations, about the reading experience produced by a particular text, or about any other reading activity by conducting your own study using a group of real readers (for example, your students, classmates, or fellow book-club members)?

• Using a specific structuralist framework (Frye/Scholes), how should the text be classified in terms of its genre?
• Using a specific structuralist framework (such as that of Greimas, Todorov, or Genette), analyze the texts’ narrative operations.  Can you speculate about the relationship between the text’s “grammar” and that of similar texts?  Can you speculate about the relationship between the text’s grammar and the culture from which the text emerged?
• Using Culler’s theory of literary competence, what rules or codes of interpretation must be internalized in order to “make sense” of the text?  Depending on the text in question, it might be necessary to identify codes in addition to those specified by Culler. (In other words, what does a given text contribute to our knowledge of literary competence?)
• What are the semiotics of a given category of cultural phenomena, or “texts,” such as high-school football games, television and/or magazines ads for a particular brand of perfume (or any other consumer product), or even media coverage of an historical event, such as “Operation Desert Storm,” and important legal case, or presidential election campaign?  In other words, analyze the non-verbal messages sent by the “texts” in question, as well as the semiotic implications of such verbal “tags” as “Desert Storm” or “White Diamonds” (a brand of perfume).  What is being communicated, and how, exactly, is it being communicated?

• How can we use the various conflicting interpretations a text produces (the “play of meanings”), or find the various ways in which the text doesn’t answer the questions it seems to answer, to demonstrate the instability of language and the undecideability of meaning?
• What ideology does the text seem to promote – what is its main theme – and how does conflicting evidence in the text show the limitations of that ideology.  We can usually discover a text’s overt ideological project by finding the binary opposition(s) that structure the text’s main theme(s).

• What kinds of behavior, what models of practice, does this work seem to enforce?
• Why might readers at a particular time and place find this work compelling?
• Are there differences between my values and the values implicit in the work I am reading?
• Upon what social understandings does the work depend?
• Whose freedom of thought or movement might be constrained implicitly or explicitly by this work?
• What are the larger social structures with which these particular acts of praise or blame [that is, the text’s apparent ethical orientation] might be connected?
• How does the literary text function as part of a continuum with other historical/cultural texts from the same period, for example, penal codes, birthing practices, educational priorities, the treatment of children under the law, other art forms (including popular art forms), attitudes toward sexuality, and the like?  That is, taken as part of a “thick description” of a given culture at a given point in history, what does this literary work add to our tentative understanding of human experience in that particular time and place, including the ways in which individual identity shapes and is shaped by cultural institutions?
• How can we use a literary work to “map” the interplay of both traditional and subversive discourses circulating in the culture in which that work emerged and/or the cultures in which the work has been interpreted?  Put another way, how does the text promote ideologies that support and/or undermine the prevailing power structures of the time and place in which it was written and/or interpreted?
• Using rhetorical analysis (analysis of a text’s purpose and the stylistic means by which it tries to achieve that purpose), what does the literary text add to our understanding of the ways in which literary and non-literary discourses (such as political, scientific, economic, and educational theories) have influenced, overlapped with, and competed with one another at specific historical moments?
• What does the literary work suggest about the experience of groups of people who have been ignored, under-represented, or misrepresented by traditional history (for example, laborers, prisoners, women, people of color, lesbians and gay men, children, the insane, and so on)?  Keep in mind that new historical and cultural criticism usually include attention to the intersection of the literary work with non-literary discourse prevalent in the culture in which the work emerged and/or in the cultures in which it has been interpreted and often focus on such issues as the circulation of power and the dynamics of persona and group identity.
• How has the work’s reception by literary critics and the reading public – including the reception at its point of origin, changing responses to the work over time, and its possible future relationship with its audience – been shaped by and shaped the culture in which that reception occurred?

• What are the politics (ideological agendas) of specific gay, lesbian, or queer works, and how are those politics revealed in, for example, the work’s thematic content or portrayals of its characters?
• What are the poetics (literary devices and strategies) of specific lesbian, gay, or queer work?  What does the work contribute to the ongoing attempt to define a uniquely lesbian, gay, or queer poetics, literary tradition, or canon?
• What does the work contribute to our knowledge of queer, gay or lesbian experience and history, including literary history?
• How is queer, gay, or lesbian experience coded in texts that are apparently heterosexual? (This analysis is usually done for works by writers who lived at a time when openly queer, gay, or lesbian texts would have been considered unacceptable, or it is done in order to help reformulate the sexual orientation of a writer formerly presumed heterosexual.)
• How might the works of heterosexual writers be re-read to reveal an unspoken or unconscious lesbian, gay, or queer presence?  That is, does the work have an unconscious lesbian, gay, or queer desire or conflict that it submerges (or that heterosexual readers have submerged)?
• What does the work reveal about the operations (socially, politically, psychologically) of heterosexism?  Is the work (consciously or unconsciously) homophobic?  Does the work critique, celebrate, or blindly accept heterosexist values?
• How does the literary text illustrate the problematics of sexuality and sexual “identity,” that is, the ways in which human sexuality does not fall neatly into the separate categories defined by the words homosexual and heterosexual?

• How does the literary text, explicitly or allegorically, represent various aspects of colonial oppression? Special attention is often given to those areas where political and cultural oppression overlap, as it does, for example, in the colonizers’ control of language, communication, and knowledge in colonized countries.
• What does the text reveal about the problematics of postcolonial identity, including the relationship between personal and cultural identity and such issues as double consciousness and hybridity?
• What does the text reveal about the politics and/or psychology of anti-colonialist resistance?  For example, what does the text suggest about the ideological, political, social, economic, or psychological forces that promote or inhibit resistance?  How does the text suggest that resistance can be achieved and sustained by an individual or a group?
• What does the text reveal about the operations of cultural difference – the ways in which race, religion, class, gender, sexual orientation, cultural beliefs, and customs combine to form individual identity – in shaping our perceptions of ourselves, others, and the world in which we live?  “Othering” might be one area of analysis here.
• How does the text respond to or comment upon the characters, themes, or assumptions of a canonized (colonialist) work?  Following Helen Tiffin’s lead, examine how the postcolonial text reshapes our previous interpretations of a canonical text.
• Are there meaningful similarities among the literatures of different postcolonial populations?  One might compare, for example, the literatures of native peoples from different countries whose land was invaded by colonizers, the literatures of white settler colonies in different countries, or the literatures of different populations in the African diaspora.  Or one might compare literary works from all three of these categories in order to investigate, for example, if the experience of colonization creates some common elements of cultural identity that outweigh differences in race and nationality.
• How does a literary text in the Western canon reinforce or undermine colonialist ideology through its representation of colonization and/or its inappropriate silence about colonized peoples?  Does the text teach us anything about colonialist or anticolonialist ideology through its illustration of any of the post colonial concepts we’ve discussed?  (A text does not have to treat the subject of colonization in order to do this).

• What can the work teach us about the specifics of African heritage, African American culture and experience, and/or African American history (including but not limited to the history of marginalization)?
• What are the politics (ideological agendas related to political, social, and economic power) of specific African American works?  For example, does the work correct stereotypes of African Americans; correct historical misrepresentations of African Americans; celebrate Afro-American culture, experience, and achievement; or explore racial issues, including, among others, the psychological effects of racism?
• What are the poetics (literary devices and strategies) of specific African American works?  For example, does the work use black vernacular or standard white English?  Does the work draw on African myths or African American folk tales or folk motifs?  Does the work provide imagery that resonates with African American women’s domestic space, African American cultural practices, history, or heritage?  What are the effects of these literary devices and how do they relate to the theme, or meaning, of the work?
• How does the work participate in the African American literary tradition?  To what group of African American texts might we say it belongs in terms of its politics and poetics?  How does it conform to those texts?  How does it break with them, perhaps seeking to redefine literary aesthetics by experimenting with new norms?  In short, what place does it occupy in African American literary history or in African American women’s literary history?
• How does the text compare with texts from other parts of the African diaspora (peoples of African descent who do not live in Africa), for example texts by Afro-Cuban or other black Caribbean writers, or with other (non-black) American works?  Do we find a common thread of themes, character types, or literary strategies?  What are the areas of greatest contrast and how might we account for them?

© 2010 David Bordelon