January 2018
January 2017
CRITICAL THEORY CARDS
Reader-Response Lens
Assumptions (Mindset; what you assume coming into a text based on your prior knowledge)
Strategies: How to Read with a Reader Response Lens
Gender Lens: Feminist Lens & LGBTQ Theory
Assumptions (Mindset: what you assume coming into a text based on your prior knowledge)
Marxists / Social Power Lens
Assumptions (Mindset; what you assume coming into a text based on your prior knowledge)
Strategies: How to Read with a Marxist Lens
Assumptions (Mindset; what you assume coming into a text based on your prior knowledge)
- An author’s intentions are not reliably available to readers; all they have is the text.
- We don’t know why an author wrote something or what they wanted us to get out of it.
- Out of the text, readers actively and personally make meaning.
- Responding to a text is a process, and descriptions of that process are valuable.
- Writing and talking about the text is important, but writing and talking about the way you’re coming to your ideas is important too.
Strategies: How to Read with a Reader Response Lens
- Describe your own response when moving through a text.
- React to the text as a whole, embracing and expressing the subjective and personal response that comes about.
- Step away from details and look at the text in a broad way.
- How does your personal lens (perspective? identity?) affect your reading of this text?
Gender Lens: Feminist Lens & LGBTQ Theory
Assumptions (Mindset: what you assume coming into a text based on your prior knowledge)
- The work / text itself does not have an autonomy. It cannot stand alone. Instead, any reading is influenced by the reader’s own status, which includes what gender he/she, and his/her attitudes towards gender.
- Your gender and your attitudes about gender affect the way you read a story.
- In the production of literature and within stories themselves, men and women have not had equal access.
- Men have been the focus of books more than women. Men have been published as writers more than women have.
- Men and women are different: they read differently, write differently, and write about reading differently. These differences should be valued.
- Consider the gender of the author or the character: what role does gender or sexuality play in this work?
- Specifically, observe how sexual stereotypes might reinforce or undermine. Try to see how the work reflects or distorts the place of women (men, straight, lgbt) in society.
- Sexual stereotypes are what we think “men and women are supposed to do”. Do the characters do those things? Or do they go against those things? Consider men, women, straight people, gay people…
- LGBT means lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, and/or transgender people.
- How are women, men, lgbt, treated in the text? Who has the power over whom?
Marxists / Social Power Lens
Assumptions (Mindset; what you assume coming into a text based on your prior knowledge)
- Karl Marx argued that the way people think and behave in any society is determined by basic economic factors.
- In his view, those groups of people who owned and controlled major industries could exploit the rest of the population through conditions of employment and by forcing their own values and beliefs on to other social groups.
- Marx thought that the people who control businesses have power over the people who don’t own them (the workers). They have power over them by controlling working conditions and forcing them to share the beliefs and values of the group in power.
Strategies: How to Read with a Marxist Lens
- Explore the way different groups of people ( or individuals) are represented in the text.
- What “groups” exist in the text? Who has power? Who doesn’t? What role does economic/social class play in the distribution of power in the text?
- Evaluate the level of social realism in the text and how society is portrayed.
- Is this a realistic depiction of the relationships shared by the different groups? How are the different groups portrayed?
- Does this seem realistic? Is this really how these groups would interact?
- Consider how the text itself is a commodity that reproduces certain social beliefs and practices. Analyze the social effect of the literary work.
- What did the work make you understand/believe as a result of reading it?
- What ideas/beliefs is this piece “pushing” on the reader?
- Look at the effects of power drawn from economic or social class.
- How do the “powerful” impact the “powerless”?