Literary Theory:

Using Critical Lenses to Examine Literature

What is Literary Theory?

• A system for analyzing and better understanding literature.

• Consists of numerous lenses through which we can respond to a piece of literature (or film, TV show, even video game).

• Eye glasses analogy

Little Miss MuffetBy Russell Baker

• One of the fascinating aspects of American English is its diversity, and one of the causes of this diversity is the specialized vocabularies of different occupations in America. Russell Baker’s report of a conference dealing with Little Miss Muffet illustrates several varieties of occupational jargon.

Little Miss MuffetBy Russell Baker

• One of the fascinating aspects of American English is its diversity, and one of the causes of this diversity is the specialized vocabularies of different occupations in America. Russell Baker’s report of a conference dealing with Little Miss Muffet illustrates several varieties of occupational jargon.

Little Miss MuffetBy Russell Baker

Little Miss Muffet, as everyone knows, sat on a tuffet eating her curds and whey when along came a spider who sat down beside her and frightened Miss Muffet away.

While everyone knows this, the significance of the event had never been analyzed until a conference of thinkers recently brought their special insights to bear upon it. Following are excerpts from the transcript of their discussion.

Sociologist:

Miss Muffet is nutritionally underprivileged, as evidenced by the subliminal diet of curds and whey upon which she is forced to subsist, while the spider’s cultural disadvantage is evidenced by such phenomena as legs exceeding standard norms, odd mating habits, and so forth.

In this instance, spider expectations lead the culturally disadvantaged to assert demands to share the tuffet with the nutritionally underprivileged. Due to a communications failure, Miss Muffet assumes without evidence that the spider will not be satisfied to share her tuffet, but will also insist on eating her curds and perhaps even her whey. Thus, the failure to preestablish selectively optimum norm structures diverts potentially optimal minimums from the expectation levels assumed to...

Militarist: Second-strike capability, sir! That’s what was lacking. If Miss Muffet had developed a second-strike capability instead of squandering her resources on curds and whey, no spider on earth would have dared launch a first strike capable of carrying him right to the heart of her tuffet. I am confident the Miss Muffet had adequate notice from experts that she could not afford both curds and whey and, at the same time, support an early-spider-warning system. Yet curds alone were not good enough for Miss Muffet. She had to have whey, too. Tuffet security must be the first responsibility of every diner...

Book Reviewer:Written on several levels, this searing and sensitive exploration of the arachnid heart illuminates the agony and splendor of Jewish family life with a candor that is at once breathtaking in its simplicity and soul-shattering in its implied ambiguity. Some will doubtless be shocked to see such subjects as tuffets and whey discussed without flinching, but hereafter writers too timid to call a curd a curd will no longer...

Psychiatrist:Little Miss Muffet is, course, neither little or a miss. These are obviously the self she has created in her own fantasies to escape the reality that she is a gross divorcee whose superego makes it impossible for her to sustain a normal relationship with any man, symbolized by the spider, who, of course, has no existence outside her fantasies. Little Miss Muffet may, in fact, be a man with deeply repressed Oedipal impulses, who sees in the spider the father he would like to kill, and very well may some day unless he admits that what he believes to be a tuffet is, in fact, probably the dining room chandelier, and that what he thinks he is eating is, in fact, probably...

Literary Theory:

Using Critical Lenses to Examine Literature

Questions Literary Theory Addresses

• What is literature?

• Why are there so many interpretations of one text?

• Why do certain individuals respond to a text in a certain way?

• How is literature written?

• What influences a society’s literary output?

LensesThese are a few of the numerous lenses

through which one can examine literature.

Reader-Response

• Meaning is made or created by the reader; it is not already embedded into the text by the author. (The author does not intentionally decide themes before writing.)

• The experiences of the reader shape the meaning of the text. For example, if you have an alcoholic or overbearing father you would interpret and experience Fences differently than someone who has a great relationship with his father.

• What is your personal opinion of Daisy? How do you explain her behaviors?

The Archetypal Perspective

• Archetype = Model or pattern that is repeated.• Often present in myths, fairy tales (Don’t a lot if fairy tales have

the same types of characters and storylines? The evil king or stepmom VS the young hero who overcomes evil and then lives happily ever after?).

• Crosses all world cultures through history.• The tragic hero for example: this is a recurrent character in a

book or play who is heroic, yet flawed and this flaw impedes his greatness (Odysseus and Troy).

• Examples of recurring or archetypal plots: the heroic journey (Odysseus), the search for a father figure or the residue of the absent father, the American Dream.

• How does Gatsby fulfill the role of a tragic hero? What traits and behaviors does he share with other tragic heroes?

The Character/Psychological Perspective

• Readers examine internal motivations of a character.

• Readers focus on character’s state of mind, feelings, desires to figure out the meaning of a text.

• Actors• A close examination of Troy from Fences and

his dreams and struggles would provide the meaning of the text.

• Why is Gatsby so stuck on Daisy? Why couldn’t he just let her go and find another perfectly acceptable woman?

The Biographical Perspective

• Readers examine author’s life and experiences and make conclusions about how the text is shaped by these.

• Can be helpful in understanding themes and historical references.

• The idea of fiction.• How did Fitzgerald’s experience with

Zelda and their courtship (rich girl/not so rich boy) impact The Great Gatsby?

The Historical Perspective

• Readers examine the book within its historically written context as well as the time in which the story actually occurs.

• Readers consider the social, political, economic, and cultural climate the time.

• Huck Finn• How did the climate of the early 20s in

which Fitzgerald live, shape the writing of Gatsby?

The Social Power Perspective • Social class (working class, middle-class, upper class…)

impacts a person’s beliefs, values, and way of thinking.• When we see characters of different classes thrown

together in a story, readers may use the allocation of power (who has it and who does not) to explain actions and plot.

• Gatsby and Fences, really all the books we have read, address the idea of who has power and who does not have power.

• Gatsby, Tom, Wilson, Wolfsheim• According to The Great Gatsby, how is power obtained

in society? How does power create social class, and how are interactions between members of different social classes shaped by this power?

The Gender Perspective

• Gender impacts the way a story is read and written.

• Women have historically been members of a “patriarchal” world.

• Women have not reached their fullest potentials as a result. When they do attempt to break through that glass ceiling, they are seen as subversive.

• Daisy, Jordan, Myrtle, Rose, Miss Watson• Although from different classes, what struggles

do Myrtle and Daisy share as a result of their gender?