Formalism: Typical questions:
How does the work use imagery to develop its own symbols? (i.e. making a certain road stand for death by constant association)
How do paradox, irony, ambiguity, and/or tension work in the text?
How does the author resolve (or not resolve) apparent contradictions within the work?
What does the form of the work say about its content?
Is there a central or focal passage that can be said to sum up the entirety of the work’s theme(s)?
Psychoanalytic Criticism: Typical questions:
How do the operations of repression structure or inform the work?
Are there any oedipal dynamics – or any other family dynamics – at work here?
How can characters’ behavior, narrative events, and/or images be explained in terms of psychoanalytic concepts of any kind (for example…fear or fascination with death, sexuality – which includes love and romance as well as sexual behavior – as a primary indicator of psychological identity or the operations of ego-id-superego)?
Marxist Criticism/Cultural Materialism: Typical questions:
What social class or group does it benefit if the work or effort is accepted/successful/believed, etc.?
Which class does the work claim to represent?
What social/cultural values does it reinforce?
What social/cultural values does it subvert?
What conflict can be seen between the values the work champions and those it
portrays?
What social classes do the characters represent?
How do characters from different classes interact or conflict?
New Historicism/Cultural Criticism: Typical questions:
How are events’ interpretation and presentation a product of the culture of the author?
Does the work’s presentation support or condemn the event?
Can it be seen to do both?
How does this portrayal criticize the leading political figures or movements of the day?
How does the literary text function as part of a continuum with other historical/cultural texts from the same period?
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?
How does the work consider traditionally marginalized populations?
Postcolonial Criticism/Race Theory: Typical questions:
How does the literary text, explicitly or allegorically, represent various aspects of colonial oppression?
What does the text reveal about the problematics of post-colonial identity, including the relationship between personal and cultural identity and such issues as double
consciousness and hybridity?
What person(s) or groups does the work identify as “other” or stranger? How are such persons/groups described and treated?
What does the text reveal about the politics and/or psychology of anti-colonialist
resistance?
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?
How does the text respond to or comment upon the characters, themes, or assumptions of a canonized (colonialist) work?
How does a literary text in the Western canon reinforce or undermine colonialist ideology through its representation of colonialization and/or its inappropriate silence about colonized peoples?
Feminist Criticism: Typical questions:
How is the relationship between men and women portrayed?
What are the power relationships between men and women (or characters assuming
male/female roles)?
How are male and female roles defined?
What constitutes masculinity and femininity?
How do characters embody these traits?
Do characters take on traits from opposite genders? How so? How does this change
others’ reactions to them?
What does the work imply about the possibilities of sisterhood as a mode of resisting patriarchy?
What does the work say about women’s creativity?
What does the history of the work’s reception by the public and by the critics tell us about the operation of patriarchy?
Queer Theory/Gender Studies: Typical questions:
What elements of the text can be perceived as being “masculine” (active, powerful) and “feminine” (passive, marginalized) and how do the characters support these traditional roles?
What sort of support (if any) is given to elements or characters who question the
masculine/feminine binary? What happens to those elements/characters?
What elements in the text exist in the middle, between the perceived masculine/feminine binary? In other words, what elements exhibit traits of both (bisexual)?
What are the politics (ideological positions) of specific gay, lesbian, or queer works, and how are those politics revealed in…the work’s thematic content or portrayals of its characters?
What are the poetics (literary devices and strategies) of a specific lesbian, gay, or queer work?
What does the work contribute to our knowledge of queer, gay, or lesbian experience and history, including literary history?
What does the work reveal about the operations (socially, politically, psychologically) of homophobia?
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?
