ENG140Y1/Unit 8

Unit 8 · Literature for our Time

Critical Approaches

A critical approach is a set of questions to bring to a text. Each makes some things visible and other things invisible, which is why they are tools rather than truths — and why choosing one is already an argument.

By the end you can

• Say what question each main approach asks.
• Apply one deliberately rather than by default.
• Recognise the approach a piece of criticism is using.
• Avoid using a lens as a template.

Why it matters & where it comes from

Why it exists

You already read with assumptions about what matters in a text. Naming them makes them arguable, and shows that other questions were available.

In the real world

Every discipline has framings that decide what counts as evidence. Seeing that a framing is a choice, and that it excludes as well as reveals, is a general habit worth having.

Story & open questions

The proliferation of theory from the 1960s produced a long argument about whether criticism should interpret texts or use them as evidence for something else. Most working critics now borrow across approaches rather than committing to one.

The main approaches

Definition

Formalist. How is the text made? Attends to form, structure and language, and treats the work as self-contained. This is Unit 1's close reading as a doctrine.

Historicist. What did this text do in its moment? Reads it alongside other documents of its time. Unit 7's material.

Marxist. Whose interests does the text serve? Asks about class, labour and who owns what — including whose work goes unmentioned.

Feminist and gender. How does the text construct gender? Who is allowed to speak, act and desire, and who is described.

Postcolonial. How does the text handle empire, race and cultural authority? Whose language is being written in.

Psychoanalytic. What is repressed or displaced? Reads gaps and slips as meaningful.

Ecocritical. How is the non-human world represented? Whether landscape is setting, resource or agent.

Reader-response. What does the text ask the reader to do? Where meaning is made in the encounter, not the object.

Rule Each has a characteristic question

If you can state an approach's question in one sentence, you can use it. Learning the vocabulary matters less than knowing what to ask with it.

Applying one

Example One scene, three approaches

An invented scene: a wealthy family's dinner, with servants present but never named or spoken to.

Formalist: notices that the servants appear only in passive constructions — dishes "were brought" — so the grammar removes their agency. The evidence is syntactic.

Marxist: notices that the labour producing the dinner is systematically unmentioned, and asks what the text has to conceal for the scene to read as leisure.

Feminist: notices who speaks and who serves, and whether the women at the table have more in common with the servants than the arrangement admits.

All three are supported by the same passage. None is the correct one, and a good essay might use the formalist observation as the evidence for the Marxist claim.

A lens is not a template

The failure mode is deciding the conclusion first and hunting for quotations. If every text you read turns out to say the same thing, you are applying a template, not reading. The approach supplies the question; the text supplies the answer, and the answer should sometimes surprise you.

Rule Approaches combine

Most good criticism uses more than one without announcing it. Close reading gathers the evidence; a historical or political framing explains why the evidence matters.

In a first-year essay, this usually means: notice something formally, then argue what it implies.

You rarely need to name the approach at all. Doing the work is better than labelling it.

Reading criticism

Rule What to extract from a secondary source

What is the critic's claim? Usually one sentence.

What evidence do they use, and from where?

What question are they asking — which approach is this?

What would count as a counter-argument?

Use criticism, do not defer to it

A published critic is a participant in an argument, not an authority who settles it. Quoting one to support your point is fine; quoting one instead of making a point is not. An essay that summarises three critics and adds nothing has no thesis.

Better: state your claim, then use a critic who disagrees as the counter-argument you answer. Unit 9 develops this.

Example Engaging rather than citing

Weak: "As Smith argues, the novel is concerned with memory." The essay has borrowed a claim and done nothing.

Better: "Smith reads the novel's repetitions as signs of traumatic memory. But the repetitions cluster in the sections the narrator did not witness, which suggests they are a feature of the telling rather than the remembering."

The second uses the critic as something to push against, and the essay now has a position of its own.

Common pitfalls

• Applying a lens as a template and reaching the same conclusion every time.
• Naming the approach instead of doing the analysis.
• Treating published critics as authorities rather than interlocutors.
• Using theoretical vocabulary you cannot define in plain words.
• Forgetting that every approach excludes something. Say what yours does not see.

Practice

Work each fully before opening the answer. These test whether the approaches are usable, not memorised.

Practice 1 · The question

State the formalist question in one sentence.

Answer

How is this text made, and what do its formal choices produce?

Practice 2 · Match the approach

An essay argues a novel's landscape is treated purely as resource. Which approach?

Answer

Ecocritical, though it would likely draw on Marxist framing too — resource extraction is a question about labour and ownership as much as nature.

Practice 3 · Same passage, two lenses

A servant is described only by her uniform. What would a formalist and a Marxist each say?

Answer

Formalist: the metonymy substitutes a garment for a person, and the technique itself performs the erasure. Marxist: the description reduces her to her function, which is what the household requires of her. The observation is shared; the significance differs.

Practice 4 · Template test

How do you know you are applying a lens mechanically?

Answer

Every text yields the same conclusion. If the approach never surprises you, you are not letting the text answer.

Practice 5 · Using a critic

Rewrite "As Jones notes, the ending is ambiguous" into something that does work.

Solution

"Jones reads the ending as ambiguous, but the ambiguity is confined to the narrator's account — the final stage direction settles what happens, if not what it means." The critic is now a position to refine rather than a source to lean on.

Practice 6 · Blind spots

What does a strictly formalist reading miss?

Answer

Everything outside the text: the conditions it was written in, who it was for, what it takes for granted. That was the objection that produced the historicist turn.

Practice 7 · Psychoanalytic caution

What goes wrong when this approach is applied to characters?

Answer

Characters have no unconscious to analyse — they have only what the text supplies. The usable version reads the text's patterns and silences, not a fictional person's psychology. This is the Unit 5 rule again.

Practice 8 · In a first-year essay

Do you need to name your approach?

Answer

Usually not. Do the analysis; the framing will be evident. Announcing "I will apply a postcolonial reading" spends a sentence on labelling that could have been spent arguing.

Expanded topic checklist

Course coverage. This unit is part of the complete ENG140Y1 topic map. It should cover the following before you move on:

• The approaches. The characteristic question each asks.
• Application. Using one deliberately, and letting the text answer.
• Combination. Close reading supplying evidence for a wider claim.
• Secondary sources. Engaging with criticism rather than deferring to it.

Textbook/source alignment

Introductory courses vary in how much theory they require. Check Quercus for whether secondary criticism is expected in essays, and whether particular approaches are taught.

Core idea map

An approach is a question. Different questions make different features visible, and none is complete. Unit 9 turns whichever question you chose into an argument.

Study routine. When you read criticism, write the critic's claim in one sentence of your own words. If you cannot, you have not finished reading it.

Deep practice extensions

Use these after the main practice set. They test whether the distinctions have actually landed.

Extension 1 · What an approach is

Is a critical approach a truth about literature?

Guide

No, a set of questions. It reveals some things and conceals others, which is why several can be valid at once.

Extension 2 · Template failure

What is the sign of mechanical application?

Guide

The conclusion is fixed before the reading. The text is being searched for confirmation.

Extension 3 · Critics

How should a published critic be used?

Guide

As a participant to agree with, refine or answer — not as an authority whose word settles it.

Extension 4 · Naming

Should an essay announce its approach?

Guide

Rarely. The analysis makes it clear, and the sentence is better spent on the argument.

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