Psychoanalytic criticism

The unconscious is the storehouse of those painful experiences and emotions,

those wounds, fears, guilty desires, and unresolved conflicts we do not want to
know about because we feel we will be overwhelmed by them.

Marxism
Marxist praxis, or methodology, dictates that theoretical ideas can be judged to
have value only in terms of their concrete applications, that is, only in terms of their
applicability to the real world.
For Marxism, an ideology is a belief system, and all belief systems are products of
cultural conditioning.
Classism, for example, is an ideology that equates ones value as a human being
with the social class to which one belongs
Patriotism is an ideology that keeps poor people fighting wars against poor people from other countries (one way or another, sufficient money can generally keep
one out of the armed forces during war time or, at least, out of the combat units)
while the rich on both sides rake in the profits of war-time economy.
Religion, which Karl Marx called the opiate of the masses, is an ideology that
helps to keep the faithful poor satisfied with their lot in life, or at least tolerant of it,
much as a tranquilizer might do
Rugged individualism, which, as we have seen, is a cornerstone of the American
dream, is an ideology that romanticizes the individual who strikes out alone in
pursuit of a goal not easily achieved, a goal that often involves risk and one that
most people would not readily undertake.
Rugged individualism, which, as we have seen, is a cornerstone of the American
dream, is an ideology that romanticizes the individual who strikes out alone in
pursuit of a goal not easily achieved, a goal that often involves risk and one that
most people would not readily undertake.
Consumerism, or shop-till-you-drop-ism, is another cornerstone of the Ameri- can
dream. Consumerism is an ideology that says Im only as good as what I buy.
the word capital means money
Commodification is the act of relating to objects or persons in terms of their
exchange value or sign-exchange value
Feminism

Broadly defined, feminist criticism examines the ways in which literature (and
other cultural productions) reinforces or undermines the economic, political, social,
and psychological oppression of women. However, just as the practitioners of all
critical theories do, feminist critics hold many different opinions on all of the issues
their discipline examines.
Traditional gender roles cast men as rational, strong, protective, and decisive;
they cast women as emotional (irrational), weak, nur- turing, and submissive. These
gender roles have been used very successfully to justify inequities, which still occur
today, such as excluding women from equal access to leadership and
decision-making positions (in the family as well as in politics, academia, and the
corporate world), paying men higher wages than women for doing the same job (if
women are even able to obtain the job), and convincing women that they are not fit
for careers in such areas as mathemat- ics and engineering.
Patriarchy is thus, by definition, sexist, which means it promotes the belief that
women are innately inferior to men. This belief in the inborn inferiority of women is
a form of what is called biological essentialism because it is based on biological
differences between the sexes that are considered part of our unchang- ing essence
as men and women. A striking illustration is the word hysteria, which derives from
the Greek word for womb (hystera) and refers to psychological disor- ders deemed
peculiar to women and characterized by overemotional, extremely irrational
behavior.
Feminism therefore distinguishes between the word sex, which refers to our
biological constitution as female or male, and the word gender, which refers to our
cultural programming as feminine or masculine.
Generally speaking, the focus of French feminism has taken two different forms:
materialist feminism and psychoanalytic feminism. The first form is interested
in the social and economic oppression of women while the second form, as you
might expect, concentrates on womens psychological experience.
Semiotics, which is the analysis of cultural sign systems
Liberal Feminism-aims to achieve equal legal, political, and social right for women
Radical Feminism- arose with in the second wave in the 1960s.
New Criticism(Formalism)
Some of its most important con- cepts concerning the nature and importance of
textual evidencethe use of concrete, specific examples from the text itself to
validate our interpretations have been incorporated into the way most literary
critics today, regardless of their theoretical persuasion, support their readings of
literature.

Although the authors intention or the readers response is sometimes mentioned in

New Critical readings of literary texts, neither one is the focus of analysis. For the
only way we can know if a given authors intention or a given readers interpretation
actually represents the texts meaning is to carefully examine, or closely read,
all the evidence provided by the language of the text itself: its images, symbols,
metaphors, rhyme, meter, point of view, setting, characteriza- tion, plot, and so
forth, which, because they form, or shape, the literary work are called its formal
elements
For New Criticism, a literary work is a timeless, autonomous
(self-sufficient)
verbal object. Readers and readings may change, but the literary text stays the
same.
For New Criticism, the complexity of a text is created by the multiple and often
conflicting meanings woven through it. And these meanings are a product primarily of four kinds of linguistic devices: paradox, irony, ambiguity, and
tension.
Briefly, paradox ( a statement that seems to stay two opposite things but that
maybe true)is a statement that seems self-contradictory but represents the actual
way things are.
Irony,( a situation that is strange or funny because things happen in a way that
seems to be the opposite of what you expected) in its simple form, means a
statement or event undermined by the context in which it occurs.
Ambiguity occurs when a word, image, or event generates two or more different
meanings.
Finally, the complexity of a literary text is created by its tension,( a feeling of
nervousness, excitement, or fear) which, broadly defined, means the linking
together of opposites. In its simplest form, tension is created by the integration of
the abstract and the concrete, of general ideas embodied in specific images.
Close reading, the scrupulous examination of the complex relationship between a
texts formal elements and its theme, is how the texts organic unity was established by the New Critic. Because of New Criticisms belief that the literary text can
be understood primarily by understanding its form (which is why youll some- times
hear it referred to as a type of formalism), a clear understanding of the defini- tions
of specific formal elements is important.
Figurative language is language that has more than, or other than, a strictly
literal meaning.
If an image occurs repeatedly in a text, it probably has symbolic significance. A
symbol is an image that has both literal and figurative meaning, a concrete
universal

In contrast with the double dimension of the symbolits inclusion of both lit- eral
and figurative meaninga metaphor has only figurative meaning. A metaphor is a
comparison of two dissimilar objects in which the properties of one are ascribed to
the other.
Reader-response
Determinate meaning refers to what might be called the facts of the text, certain
events in the plot or physical descriptions clearly provided by the words on the
page. In contrast, indeterminate meaning, or indeterminacy, refers to gaps in
the textsuch as actions that are not clearly explained or that seem to have
multiple explana- tionswhich allow or even invite readers to create their own
interpretations.
Therefore, when we interpret the mean- ing of the text, we are actually interpreting
the meaning of our own symbolization: we are interpreting the meaning of the
conceptual experience we created in response to the text. He thus calls the act of
interpretation resymbolization. Resymbolization occurs when our experience of
the text produces in us a desire for explanation. Our evaluation of the texts quality
is also an act of resymbolization: we dont like or dislike a text; we like or dislike
our symbolization of it.