Critical Frameworks for Literary Analysis
There are numerous approaches for developing your engagement with any literary text.
Looking Inside the Text
In the past, literary critics would often focus mainly on evaluating a text’s principle elements and execution. Perhaps you had a class in the past that focused on how an author used literary elements to generate an effect for readers. And, perhaps, your class evaluated whether the messaging of the text was successful or convincing. Such evaluations of the artistry of a work of literature—its use of language, turns of phrases, or poesy; its patterning, imagery, themes, plotting—took on more formal assessments of organizing principles, such as a work’s structure (see, new criticism, semiotics, structuralism, or deconstructive criticism). If you’ve ever had a class assignment ask you to think about how the parts of a literary text made you arrive at an inference or made you generate an emotional or rational reaction, you’ve probably been asked to look inside the text for a cause that created the effect on you, the reader. Yet, even when considering literature as you would any writing using rhetorical moves (ethos, logos, pathos), the stress on readerly responses (see, reader response criticism) or the messaging’s credibility and authority requires an awareness of factors outside the text.
Looking Outside the Text
If you’ve compared an author’s life events to the contents of their literary work, you’ve been thinking about contexts and looking outside the text. There is, however, far more than simply biographical readings of literature. Interdisciplinary approaches from cultural studies, economics, history, philosophy, psychology, political science, and other sciences (see eco-criticism) produce distinct critical frameworks for analyzing literature differently than only considering the person’s name that is attached to text. An author, not unlike the texts they produce, belongs to particular historical and cultural circumstances—not just their own personal experiences—and might reflect, affirm or challenge the prevailing assumptions of their time. Similarly, the original readership may have participated in a common community as the author or bring their own intersectionality to a text. If you’ve ever thought about an historical event or movement that might have influenced a text, you were historicizing that text by being aware of its historical moment of production. If you’ve ever had a class assignment ask you to try to imagine (or research) the reaction of a past audience, you’ve taken into account that texts elicit different responses as they find new audiences. Furthermore, if you’ve ever compared a director’s cut of a film to its theatrical release, you’ll realize the production of any text involves often unrecognized or uncredited agents influencing a text’s composition or distribution perhaps more directly than, say, the political climate. To effectively perform a critical reading of a text in relation to its contexts requires looking both outside and inside the text.
Critical Frameworks
Critical approaches to a text usually deploy a particular concept or set of concepts derived from literary theory or an interdisciplinary critical approach. Depending on the critical approach(es) or an analysis’s methodology, different aspects of any text become the focus. By using a critical approach readers can ask new questions of what is inside the text by thinking about factors outside the text. The framework of ideas, important literary elements, and how you then synthesize your inquiry will guide you to ask particular questions of the text—and, if researching further, will guide you to locate distinct source material, primary and secondary.
Also see Posing Questions of Literature and Literary Theory.
