Critical approaches for your essays, and their associated questions
I. Formalist-thematic questions (repetition-amidst-variation, moral of the story)
1. What is the
meaning?
2. How do the
details (especially repeated motifs) reinforce the meaning?
3. How does irony
work?
4. What is the
engine for the plot, the trigger that gets everything going?
5. How do
characters change in the course of the work?
6. Is there any
character doubling? Are there characters who seem quite different who are put
by the author into the same situations, the same predicaments? Are there any
characters that might embody just one component of an identity rather than a
whole? Is the complementary component then filled in by a different character?
II. Sociocultural questions, emphasizing identity politics and aggressive
readings
Questions of this
kind might be decided on before you even open the text, but in order to sustain
a good essay, eventually you must ground your answers to these questions in the
text. Mostly, this line of questioning asks you to say what norms the work
sponsors, particularly if it were read as the document that characterizes a
culture. Generalizing from particulars, thus, is permissible from this
viewpoint.
1. In what ways are
common stereotypes (choose a group) reinforced? In what ways are they
challenged?
2. How are women
treated by men? How are men treated by women? (These are not symmetrical
questions.)
3. How are blacks
treated by whites? How are whites treated by blacks? (These are not symmetrical
questions.)
4. How does the
work treat questions of class?
5. Other group
sensibilities?
6. What is the
place of ritual in the work? –religion? –technology?
7. What cultural
values does the work ascribe to, perhaps unwittingly?
III. Linguistic and self-referential questions (deconstructive readings)
1. What is the
author’s attitude toward his or her own art?
2. How might this
artwork be said to attempt to describe the conditions of its own production?
How does it fail? (It always must fail.)
3. Is there any
hint of the idea that life (as rendered by art, of course) imitates art?
4. Are there
indications that words and language are failing in their capacity as references
to a stable meaning?
5. Is there any
indication that a search for origins would be futile?
6. In what way does
framing an event alter the content of what is inside the frame?
If you are moved to ask all of these
questions (or all from a particular subheading) when reading, you will arrive
at many interesting insights, but you will probably have too much for an essay.
Just choose a few. Strive for a focused essay.
See also: Worksheet for a Literary Essay Fiction worksheet, especially for final assignment
and (especially for Sociocultural Readings, above): Reading Against the Grain of the Text link not yet enabled