Click on the tab for the critical lens that fits your needs.
Source: Eight Critical Lenses through Which Readers Can View Texts
Gender Lens
Definition: Reading [viewing] a text [film] for its gender related issues or attitudes towards gender. The assumption here is that men and women are different: they write differently, read differently, and write about their reading differently. These differences should be valued.
Questions and Strategies:
1. Consider the gender of the author, [the director], and the characters: what role does gender play in the text [film]?
2. Observe how gender stereotypes might be reinforced or undermined. Try to see how the text [film] reflects
or distorts the place men or women have in society.
3. Imagine reading [viewing] the text [film] from the point of view of someone from the opposite gender.
Source: Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism
Typical questions:
How is the relationship between men and women portrayed?
What are the power relationships between men and women (or characters assuming male/female roles)?
How are male and female roles defined?
What constitutes masculinity and femininity?
How do characters embody these traits?
Do characters take on traits from opposite genders? How so? How does this change others’ reactions to them?
What does the work reveal about the operations (economically, politically, socially, or psychologically) of patriarchy?
What does the work imply about the possibilities of sisterhood as a mode of resisting patriarchy?
What does the work say about women's creativity?
What does the history of the work's reception by the public and by the critics tell us about the operation of patriarchy?
What role the work play in terms of women's literary history and literary tradition?
(Tyson)
Source: Feminist Literary Criticism
How are female perspectives and experience represented in literary works [films] by writers [and directors] of either gender? How is the "feminine" component of traditional binary systems regarded in any given work?
How does a given work [film] critique the dominant culture and its institutions? How does [the film] comment upon the dominant culture and its institutions?
How has a given work been read or misread [viewed] by male critics?
How does the gender of the [viewer or director] reader or writer affect how a work means? How is the writing [ or direction] itself gendered?
What does it mean, in a given [film] to be a man or a woman? How is gender in a work constructed? Are gender roles in the work equal? traditional? nontraditional? How do the characters in the work match or not match common gender stereotypes?
1. What are the politics (ideological agendas) of specific gay, lesbian, or queer works, and how are those politics revealed in, for example, the work's thematic content or portrayals of its characters?
2. What are the poetics (literary devices and strategies) of specific lesbian, gay, or queer work? What does the work contribute to the ongoing attempt to define a uniquely lesbian, gay, or queer poetics, literary tradition, or canon?
3. What does the work contribute to our knowledge of queer, gay or lesbian experience and history, including literary history?
4. How is queer, gay, or lesbian experience coded in texts that are apparently heterosexual? (This analysis is usually done for works by writers who lived at a time when openly queer, gay, or lesbian texts would have been considered unacceptable, or it is done in order to help reformulate the sexual orientation of a writer formerly presumed heterosexual.)
5. How might the works of heterosexual writers be re-read to reveal an unspoken or unconscious lesbian, gay, or queer presence? That is, does the work have an unconscious lesbian, gay, or queer desire or conflict that it submerges (or that heterosexual readers have submerged)?
6. What does the work reveal about the operations (socially, politically, psychologically) of heterosexism? Is the work (consciously or unconsciously) homophobic? Does the work critique, celebrate, or blindly accept heterosexist values?
7. How does the literary text illustrate the problematics of sexuality and sexual identity, that is, the ways in which human sexuality does not fall neatly into the separate categories defined by the words homosexual and heterosexual?
Does the work reinforce (intentionally or not) capitalist, imperialist, or other classist values? If so, then the work may be said to have a capitalist, imperialist, or classist agenda, and it is the critic's job to expose and condemn this aspect of the work.
How might the work be seen as a critique of capitalism, imperialism, or classism? That is, in what ways does the text reveal, and invite us to condemn, oppressive socioeconomic forces (included repressive ideologies)? If a work criticizes or invites us to criticize oppressive socioeconomic forces, then it may be said to have Marxist agenda.
Does the work in some ways support a Marxist agenda but in other ways (perhaps unintentionally) support a capitalist, imperialist, or classist agenda? In other words, is the work ideologically conflicted?
How does the literary work reflect (intentionally or not) the socioeconomic conditions of the time in which it was written and/or the time in which it is set, and what do those conditions reveal about the history of class struggle?
How might the work be seen as a critique of organized religion? That is, how does religion function, in the text, to keep a character or characters from realizing and resisting socioeconomic oppression?
Source: Marxist Literary Theory
This lens suggests viewing or reading a 'text' for the ways in which it addresses issues of race, heritage, and ethnicity.
Analyze how the text discusses race, heritage, and ethnicity. Or consider what images of "others" are presented in the text. How are "others" portrayed?
Are there unfair stereotypes? Are there any generalities that hold truth?
Analyze the text for how it deals with cultural conflicts, particularly between majority and minority groups.
Source:Eight Critical Lenses through Which Readers Can View Texts
• How does the race, ethnicity, religion, or culture of the author influence his or her perspective on society?
• How does the text convey the identities of people of different races, ethnicities, religions, or cultures?
• How does the text comment on issues of race, ethnicity, religion, culture, or other identities? • How does the text affirm or reject racism, discrimination, bias, and/or stereotypes?
Source: Reading with Critical Theories
Source: Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism
How do the operations of repression structure or inform the work?
Are there any oedipal dynamics - or any other family dynamics - are work here?
How can characters' behavior, narrative events, and/or images be explained in terms of psychoanalytic concepts of any kind (for example...fear or fascination with death, sexuality - which includes love and romance as well as sexual behavior - as a primary indicator of psychological identity or the operations of ego-id-superego)?
What does the work suggest about the psychological being of its author? What might a given interpretation of a literary work suggest about the psychological motives of the reader?
Are there prominent words in the piece that could have different or hidden meanings? Could there be a subconscious reason for the author using these "problem words"?
Source: Eight Critical Lenses Through Which Readers Can View Texts
Definition: Reading a text for patterns in human behavior. While everyone’s formative history is different in particulars, there are basic recurrent patterns of development for most people.
Questions and Strategies:
Source: Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism (Purdue OWL)
How does the literary text, explicitly or allegorically, represent various aspects of colonial oppression?
What does the text reveal about the problematics of post-colonial identity, including the relationship between personal and cultural identity and such issues as double consciousness and hybridity?
What person(s) or groups does the work identify as "other" or stranger? How are such persons/groups described and treated?
What does the text reveal about the politics and/or psychology of anti-colonialist resistance?
What does the text reveal about the operations of cultural difference - the ways in which race, religion, class, gender, sexual orientation, cultural beliefs, and customs combine to form individual identity - in shaping our perceptions of ourselves, others, and the world in which we live?
How does the text respond to or comment upon the characters, themes, or assumptions of a canonized (colonialist) work?
Are there meaningful similarities among the literatures of different post-colonial populations?
How does a literary text in the Western canon reinforce or undermine colonialist ideology through its representation of colonialization and/or its inappropriate silence about colonized peoples? (Tyson 378-379)
Source: Lois Tyson's Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. Found on https://media.ocean.edu/files/OCC_VIDEO/upload/Faculty_Resources/dbordelon/251%20Am%20lit%20I/Questions_Literary_Critics_Ask.htm
How does the literary text, explicitly or allegorically, represent various aspects of colonial oppression? Special attention is often given to those areas where political and cultural oppression overlap, as it does, for example, in the colonizers' control of language, communication, and knowledge in colonized countries.
What does the text reveal about the problematics of postcolonial identity, including the relationship between personal and cultural identity and such issues as double consciousness and hybridity?
What does the text reveal about the politics and/or psychology of anti-colonialist resistance? For example, what does the text suggest about the ideological, political, social, economic, or psychological forces that promote or inhibit resistance? How does the text suggest that resistance can be achieved and sustained by an individual or a group?
What does the text reveal about the operations of cultural difference: the ways in which race, religion, class, gender, sexual orientation, cultural beliefs, and customs combine to form individual identity "in shaping our perceptions of ourselves, others, and the world in which we live?" "Othering" might be one area of analysis here.
How does the text respond to or comment upon the characters, themes, or assumptions of a canonized (colonialist) work? Following Helen Tiffin's lead, examine how the postcolonial text reshapes our previous interpretations of a canonical text.
Are there meaningful similarities among the literatures of different postcolonial populations? One might compare, for example, the literatures of native peoples from different countries whose land was invaded by colonizers, the literatures of white settler colonies in different countries, or the literatures of different populations in the African diaspora. Or one might compare literary works from all three of these categories in order to investigate, for example, if the experience of colonization creates some common elements of cultural identity that outweigh differences in race and nationality.
How does a literary text in the Western canon reinforce or undermine colonialist ideology through its representation of colonization and/or its inappropriate silence about colonized peoples? Does the text teach us anything about colonialist or anticolonialist ideology through its illustration of any of the post colonial concepts we've discussed? (A text does not have to treat the subject of colonization in order to do this.)
Source: Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism (Purdue OWL)
What language/characters/events present in the work reflect the current events of the author’s day?
Are there words in the text that have changed their meaning from the time of the writing?
How are such events interpreted and presented? How are events' interpretation and presentation a product of the culture of the author?
Does the work's presentation support or condemn the event? Can it be seen to do both?
How does this portrayal criticize the leading political figures or movements of the day?
How does the literary text function as part of a continuum with other historical/cultural texts from the same period...?
How can we use a literary work to "map" the interplay of both traditional and subversive discourses circulating in the culture in which that work emerged and/or the cultures in which the work has been interpreted?
How does the work consider traditionally marginalized populations?
