• Schools of Literary Criticism

• New Criticism: Focuses on “objectively” evaluating the text, identifying its underlying form.
May study, for example, a text’s use of imagery, metaphor, or symbolism. Isn’t concerned with
matters outside the text, such as biographical or contextual information. Online Examples: A
Formalist Reading of Sandra Cisneros’s “Woman Hollering Creek” , Sound in William Shakespeare’s
The Tempest by Skylar Hamilton Burris

• Reader-Respons: Criticism Focuses on each reader’s personal reactions to a text, assuming

meaning is created by a reader’s or interpretive community’s personal interaction with a text.
Assumes no single, correct, universal meaning exists because meaning resides in the minds of
readers. Online Examples:Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz”: A Reader’s Response (PDF)

• Feminism: Criticism Focuses on understanding ways gender roles are reflected or

contradicted by texts, how dominance and submission play out in texts, and how gender roles evolve
in texts. Online Example: “The Yellow Wall-Paper”: A Twist on Conventional Symbols, Subverting the
French Androcentric Influence by Jane Le Marquand

• New Historicism Focuses on understanding texts by viewing texts in the context of other
texts. Seeks to understand economic, social, and political influences on texts. Tend to broadly define
the term “text,” so, for example, the Catholic Church could be defined as a “text.” May adopt the
perspectives of other interpretive communities–particularly reader-response criticism, feminist
criticism, and Marxist approaches–to interpret texts. Online Example Monstrous Acts by Jonathan
Lethem

• Media Criticism Focuses on writers’ use of multimedia and hypertexts. Online Examples The
Electronic Labyrinth by Christopher Keep, Tim McLaughlin, and Robin Parmar

• Psychoanalytical Criticism Focuses on psychological dimensions of the work. Online

Examples: A Freudian Approach to Erin McGraw’s “A Thief” by Skylar Hamilton Burris

• Marxist Criticism Focuses on ways texts reflect, reinforce, or challenge the effects of class,
power relations, and social roles. Online Example: A Reading of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” by
Peter Kosenko

• Archetypal Criticism Focuses on identifying the underlying myths in stories and archetypes,
which reflect what the psychologist Carl Jung called the “collective unconsciousness.” Online
Example: A Catalogue of Symbols in The Awakening by Kate Chopin by Skylar Hamilton Burris

• Postcolonial Criticism Focuses on how Western culture’s (mis)representation of third-world

countries and peoples in stories, myths, and stereotypical images encourages repression and
domination. Online Example: Other Voices

• Structuralism/Semiotics Focuses on literature as a system of signs where meaning is

constructed in a context, where words are inscribed with meaning by being compared to other words
and structures. Online Example: Applied Semiotics [Online journal with many samples]

• Post-Structuralism/Deconstruction Focuses, along with Structuralism, on viewing literature as

a system of signs, yet rejects the Structuralist view that a critic can identify the inherent meaning of a
text, suggesting, instead that literature has no center, no single interpretation, that literary language
is inherently ambiguou