Chapter 9: Writing About Literature: An

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What if I told you that the author of your absolute favorite book might actually have no idea what it means?

I mean, that sounds like total academic anarchy, honestly.

Right.

But better yet, what if your college literature professor actually thinks your personal interpretation of that book is like just as valid as the one the author intended?

Yeah, it really does sound chaotic, but it is actually the total foundation of modern literary analysis.

Really?

Yeah.

When you walk into a college literature class, the expectation just isn't that you're, you know, digging up some singular buried treasure chest of meaning that the author hid on page 42.

Which is such a huge relief.

Yeah.

Because, I mean, when you sit down to write an academic essay about a poem or a play,

staring at that blank document can feel incredibly daunting.

Oh, absolutely.

It's terrifying.

So today's deep dive is basically a personalized one -on -one tutoring session.

We really want to clear up those academic muddy waters for you.

We are walking through chapter nine of a short guide to writing about literature, and we're focusing entirely on the nature of critical writing and the specific critical approaches detailed in the text.

Because writing about literature isn't just, you know, summarizing the plot.

Right.

We've all done that in high school.

Exactly.

And despite how the word is used in everyday conversation, criticism doesn't actually mean finding fault with a text.

Like leaving a bad Yelp review.

Right.

Exactly.

The poet and critic, W .H.

Auden, reframed this beautifully.

He suggested that a critic's real job is simply to call attention to interesting things going on in a work of art.

I love that.

It's about illuminating the making of the art.

Like showing the relations between different cultures or revealing why a work actually matters to life or ethics.

It's a creative act of showing.

Yeah.

So to you, the student listening right now, consider this deep dive your new toolkit.

We are going to give you a set of different analytical lenses.

And you can put any one of these lenses on to examine the exact same text in completely different ways.

You don't have to find the one true meaning.

You just have to pick a lens and, you know, argue your case.

Exactly.

And the most foundational lens you can possibly pick up before you try to apply sweeping historical or psychological theories to a book is to simply look at the words on the page.

Just the text itself.

Just the text.

This brings us to formalist criticism, which is sometimes called new criticism.

Okay.

I like to think of formalist criticism like examining a mechanical watch.

Oh, that's a good way to put it.

Yeah.

Like if you want to understand how a watch works, you look purely at how perfectly its inner gears and springs fit together.

You admire the internal construction.

Right.

And to do that, you don't really need to know anything about the watchmaker who built it.

And you don't need to know what century the watch was built in.

You treat the object as this independent, self -contained unit.

Yes.

The formalist critic, Cleanth Brooks, laid out his articles of faith for this approach back in 1951.

And that watch analogy captures his primary concern perfectly, which is unity.

Unity.

Okay.

How so?

Well, it asks, how do the individual parts of a story relate to the whole?

He argued that form is meaning.

Form is meaning.

Yeah.

The way a plot is constructed, the specific rhyming meter used in a poem or the choice of a first -person point of view,

those aren't just decorative containers that hold the meaning.

They're not just packaging.

Right.

Those structural choices are the meaning.

The textbook calls this intrinsic criticism.

Right.

Because you are looking strictly inside the text.

Exactly.

Intrinsic.

And that is positioned against extrinsic criticism, which brings in outside elements like sociology or the author's biography.

Right, which we'll get to later.

Yeah.

And when you are working intrinsically, the book says you have two main strategies.

You can do an explication, which means literally unfolding the meaning line by line.

Or you can do an analysis, which examines the relationship of the parts to each other.

To put that into practice for your essay, an explication means you might take a single sentence, say, the leaves fell like dead men.

And you spend a whole paragraph unpacking the specific connotations of the word dead versus fallen.

Wow.

A whole paragraph on one sentence.

Oh, yeah.

And then an analysis, on the other hand, would take that observation and connect it to the broader structure of the poem, showing how that imagery supports the climax.

I feel like for a student,

formalist criticism is incredibly empowering.

It really is.

Because you don't need to spend three weeks in the library reading 18th century philosophy to write a stellar essay.

You just need the text right in front of you, trusting that the author shaped the work so fully that all the meaning you need is contained in those pages.

Absolutely.

But if formalism argues that a text is a perfectly coherent, self -contained watch, the next two

were born as rebellious reactions to those rigid rules.

Oh, here comes the drama.

Yeah, they essentially argued that the watch is actually broken or that it only ticks because the reader happens to be wearing it.

OK, let's start with the broken watch,

which is deconstruction.

This is like the direct opposite of formalism.

Totally.

Where formalism sees stability and unity, deconstruction begins with the assumption that language itself is unstable, elusive, and unfaithful.

Right.

Deconstructionists argue that meaning is only generated by opposition.

Meaning what, exactly?

Well, the word hot only means something because it is the opposite of cold.

But a hot day is 90 degrees, while a hot oven is 400 degrees.

Language is just inherently slippery.

Oh, I see.

It changes based on the context.

Exactly.

So instead of looking for perfect unity, a deconstructionist interrogates a text to reveal what the author was unaware of.

They look for how a text inevitably contradicts itself.

Kind of pulling on a loose thread until the whole sweater unravels.

Yes.

Showing that there actually is no single coherent meaning at the center.

The chapter does warn about a danger here, though.

Deconstruction can be highly reductive.

It really can.

Like, if a critic uses it too bluntly,

they end up telling the exact same story about every single book.

The language is meaningless and the text is self -contradictory.

It just flattens the nuance of the actual art.

Which naturally leads to the next lens.

If the text itself is unstable and contradictory, who actually decides what it means?

Enter the reader.

Yes, reader response criticism.

This argues that meaning isn't just deposited into the book by the writer, like money into a bank account.

Meaning is actively constructed by the reader.

I love the Stanley Fish quote in the chapter about this.

He says, interpreters do not decode poems.

They make them.

They make them.

Exactly.

So the reader's aesthetic response, whether they are fascinated, horrified or moved,

becomes part of the text's meaning.

We don't read Shakespeare's Macbeth and respond the way we would to a real -life murder plot by, you know, calling the police.

Hopefully not.

Right.

We connect with the states of consciousness being portrayed, but wait, let me push back on this for a second.

Okay, go for it.

If the reader completely makes the meaning, what stops me from writing an essay claiming is a hilarious slapstick comedy, just because I personally thought the giant pile of corpses at the end was funny.

That is the most common pitfall when students first discover reader response theory.

You can't just project whatever you want onto the page.

Okay, so there are rules.

Yes.

Reader response relies heavily on the concept of the competent or informed reader.

Meaning I have to actually know the rules of the game being played.

Exactly.

Competent readers share a background of rules and conventions with the author.

For example, a competent reader of Shakespeare knows that aristocrat characters in his plays normally speak in poetic verse.

Right, they don't incorrectly assume that Hamlet is a professional poet just because he happens to be speaking metrically and using rhyme.

Spot on.

The text still guides that competent reader to a shared aesthetic experience of sadness and astonishment, what Shakespeare called woe or wonder.

Okay, so individual interpretations of Hamlet's guilt might vary, but the emotional guardrails are still there.

Exactly.

The guardrails keep you on the track.

Okay, so we've looked closely at the text itself and we've looked at the reader's brain.

Now let's grab a different lens and zoom way out from the individual.

Let's look at the broader scope of humanity and the flow of time.

Moving into archetypal and historical criticism.

Yes.

So archetypal criticism, which is sometimes called myth criticism,

draws heavily on the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung.

A huge figure in psychology.

Jung postulated the idea of a collective unconscious.

He argued that human beings inherit memories of countless typical human experiences from our ancestors, like we all experience the cycle of sleep and waking, we all watch the changing of the seasons, and we all face the reality of death.

And these shared massive human experiences sort of bubble up into our dreams, our myths and our literature.

Right.

So archetypal critics look for these recurring units, which they call archetypes.

A great example from the chapter is the archetypal plot of death and rebirth in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Oh yeah.

The ship goes through that terrifying death -like calm and then the mariner undergoes a profound spiritual rebirth.

Exactly.

And it applies to characters too.

We constantly see the scapegoat, the hero, the terrible mother, think of the wicked witch or the wolf grandmother in Little Red Riding Hood,

and the wise old man.

But let me ask you this.

How is finding an archetype like the wise old man?

Any different from just pointing out a lazy cliche?

Isn't that just a trope?

It's a really fine line, and critics of this approach definitely point that out.

It becomes reductive if a student crudely imposes a mythological pattern on everything.

Like claiming a character is on an epic quest just because they walk down the street to buy groceries.

Exactly.

But at its best, especially in the hands of critics like Northrop Frye, archetypal criticism uses comparison to highlight deep psychological resonances.

It asks why a certain type of story has moved human beings to tears across centuries, linking vastly different cultures together through shared subconscious patterns.

That is so fascinating.

That's the mythical zoom out.

But then there's the factual timeline zoom out, which is historical criticism.

Right.

Getting back to the real world.

Yeah.

This approach assumes that writers, no matter how individualistic they are, are shaped by their specific social context.

To understand the work, you have to understand how people in the past thought and felt.

The textbook gives a highly practical example of this.

If you're studying Hamlet or Julius Caesar, it is incredibly useful to research Elizabethan attitudes toward ghosts.

Did the original audience take them seriously?

Exactly.

Were ghosts seen as mere figments of a guilty imagination, or were they considered literal dangerous demons in disguise?

Or researching Elizabethan attitudes toward Moors to better understand Othello?

It's about recovering the lost historical context so you can see the text the way its original audience might have seen it.

Yes.

But once you start examining the history surrounding a text, you inevitably have to ask, who held the power and the wealth during that history?

Yeah.

Which brings us to our next set of lenses,

Marxist criticism and new historicism.

And it's important to note for the listener here, when academia uses terms like Marxist or queer theory in this context, they aren't trying to recruit you to a political party.

Yes, absolutely.

Just a quick disclaimer for our listeners.

We are simply reporting on these critical approaches as analytical tools found in the textbook.

We aren't endorsing any political ideology.

We're just outlining the toolkit.

Exactly.

These are just established analytical frameworks used to dissect a text.

So with that in mind, Marx's criticism, stemming from Karl Marx, views history primarily as a class struggle driven by economic forces.

Right.

Using this analytical tool, society is basically divided into two parts.

Economics is the base or the infrastructure.

The foundation.

Right.

And resting on top of that economic base is the superstructure, which includes law, politics, philosophy, and the arts, including literature.

This framework argues that the superstructure always reflects the interests of the dominant wealthy class.

Which means literature isn't some magical, ethereal inspiration passed down from the heavens.

It is a material product.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

It's produced to be consumed by a society, just like bread or cloves.

A Marxist critic analyzing Shakespeare isn't just looking at the beautiful poetry.

They're looking at the harsh economics of the Elizabethan theater.

Who paid for the tickets?

Who funded the acting companies?

Because if a playwright writes a scene that deeply insults the king who funds the theater, they might literally lose their head.

Exactly.

The economics dictate what the text's ideology absolutely will not permit it to say.

This lens is also deeply skeptical of the concept of the individual genius, isn't it?

Oh, entirely.

They see the label of genius as a bourgeois myth designed to detach art from its harsh capitalist realities, sort of pretending that great art transcends money.

Wow.

Okay.

So that's Marxist criticism.

New Historicism also looks at history and power, but takes a slightly different angle.

This school believes that there is actually no such thing as objective history.

Right.

There isn't a single narrative of indisputable past events waiting to be found.

There are only our subjective representations of the past.

It's like looking at the past through a funhouse mirror.

You're always partly seeing the reflection of your own era's biases and preconceptions mixed in with the historical facts.

The textbook uses Christopher Columbus to demonstrate this, actually.

Oh, right.

If you read history written in 1900, during an era that held highly pro -colonial views,

historians projected those views backward.

They used the funhouse mirror to represent Columbus as a heroic, flawless discoverer.

But then by 1992, leading up to the 500th anniversary of his voyage,

historians were projecting contemporary anti -colonial views onto the exact same historical events.

Right.

They argued Columbus didn't discover anything, the indigenous people already knew exactly where they were, and Columbus was the one who was lost.

So the historical facts didn't actually change.

The mirror changed based on who was holding it.

Every age projects its own preconceptions onto the past.

Exactly.

Okay.

So if history is a funhouse mirror shaped by massive societal forces, let's zoom all the way back into the specific individual looking into that mirror.

Let's dive into biographical and psychological criticism.

Oh, this is where it gets really personal.

Biographical criticism is a specific kind of historical research.

It involves digging into autobiographies, diaries, journals, and letters to see how the author's actual lived experiences illuminate the text.

For instance, a student might ask if the sensational, violent parts of Mark Twain's adventures of Huckleberry Finn were based on events he actually experienced, which would make him a realist writer, or if he was just writing in the tradition of the exaggerated American tall tale.

Right.

You're looking for the real -life connection.

You might look at Emily Dickinson's intense religious upbringing to unlock the themes of her poetry, or read Adrienne Rich's essays about her family life to understand her creative choices.

And then there's a very specific, fascinating subset of this, psychological or psychoanalytic criticism.

This examines the author and their writings through the framework of Freudian psychology.

Yes.

Specifically, it utilizes Freud's concept of the Oedipus complex, which theorizes that unconsciously harbored desires to displace their fathers.

Under this lens, works of art, much like our dreams, are actually disguised versions of our deep, repressed wishes.

The textbook highlights a wild example of this, with Ernest Jones's analysis of Hamlet.

Oh, I love this one.

It's wild.

The central question of that play is why Hamlet delays killing his uncle Claudius for so long.

Jones argues it's because Claudius has actually done exactly what Hamlet unconsciously wanted to do all along.

Kill his father and marry his mother.

Yes.

So for Hamlet to kill Claudius would be to essentially kill a hidden part of himself.

It completely changes how you view the protagonist's hesitation.

It really does.

But, I mean, Freud never met Shakespeare.

We certainly don't have Shakespeare sitting on a therapist's couch.

So isn't psychoanalyzing the subconscious of a dead author a bit of a stretch?

It is a highly debated approach for exactly that reason.

But modern psychological criticism is less about perfectly diagnosing a historical figure from centuries ago and more about using psychology as a framework.

To unlock things in the text itself.

Yeah.

To unlock deeper, shared human fantasies within the characters.

It asks why we, as modern readers, respond so strongly to these conflicts.

If Hamlet appeals to us today, it might be because the character taps into universal, unresolved psychological tensions that we all carry.

That makes a lot of sense.

So psychology looks at our hidden inner desires.

But gender criticism asks how society publicly categorizes those desires and how those societal categories shape both the writer and the reader.

This encompasses gender, feminist and lesbian and gay criticism.

And again, just to neutrally remind our listeners, we are simply outlining the academic lenses provided in the source chapter here without taking any political sides.

Of course.

So feminist criticism traces its roots back to writers like Virginia Woolf and grew significantly out of the 1960s women's movement.

It really starts by pointing out a stark historical reality.

Which is?

That men have largely established the conventions of literature and men have established the canon, the official list of books deemed worth reading in academia.

And in that male -dominated canon, the values are often noticeably skewed.

Men are valued for being strong, active protagonists.

Think of the energetic hero like Jack the Giant Killer.

Right.

Meanwhile, women are often expected to be weak, passive prizes.

Think of Sleeping Beauty.

Or if a female character is active and powerful, she is usually portrayed as villainous, like the wicked stepmother or the witch.

Feminist criticism explores how men and women might read these exact same texts differently.

A male reader might look at Sleeping Beauty and perceive a beautiful romantic story about rescue.

But a woman reading the same story might recognize that this passive ideal comes at a great cost to her own societal autonomy and mental well -being.

Yes.

The critic Judith Federle coined a powerful term for this.

The resisting reader.

The resisting reader.

I like that.

Yeah.

This is the female reader who actively refuses to accept these oppressive, romanticized stories.

She pushes back against the patriarchal assumptions embedded in the text.

And it's not just about how we read, it's about what we value as art.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Adrienne Rich talked about writing as revision.

She argued, we have to look at traditionally female forms of writing like private diaries and journals that the male canon historically ignored and elevate them to their proper status.

That concept of revisioning the canon naturally paved the way for lesbian and gay criticism and what is broadly known as queer theory.

Yes.

And the book notes they aren't perfectly symmetrical.

Historically, lesbian literary theory has aligned more closely with feminist theory, focusing heavily on gender dynamics and patriarchal power.

Gay theory, on the other hand, has focused more specifically on sexuality and societal marginalization.

These lenses ask crucial analytical questions, like how did gay writers throughout history use coded strategies to make their work acceptable to a public that wouldn't tolerate open discussion of their lives?

Do straight writers portray gay characters using specific tropes?

It often involves looking at a text with an activist lens, seeking to uncover the reality of the author's expression that history has tried to hide.

The chapter brings up Michael Moon's work on Walt Whitman, right?

Yes, that's a great example.

For decades, traditional critics tried to whitewash Whitman's intense,

passionate celebrations of the male body, brushing them off as just sexless, brotherly love in a democratic society.

But Moon argues that we must stop ignoring reality and take Whitman's actual views on sexuality seriously if we are going to truly understand the mechanics of his poems.

It's all about opening your eyes to what has been deliberately overlooked by previous generations.

So we've covered a massive amount of ground today.

What does this all mean for you, the student listening, sitting down to finally write your literature essay?

It means you have a massive toolkit.

Think about the journey we just took.

We started with the formalist lens, looking closely at just the text and the mechanical gears on the page.

Then we moved to the reader's brain with reader response.

Right.

We zoomed out to ancient myths and then looked at historical economies.

Finally, we looked at the author's deepest psychology and their social identity.

And the best part is, you don't have to use all of these at once in your essay.

You just have to pick up the tool that best helps you illuminate the specific text you are reading.

You are no longer staring at a blank treasure map hoping to find the one right answer.

Exactly.

You are standing in an observatory and you get to choose which telescope to look through to build your argument.

And you actually use these tools every single day, don't you?

Oh, all the time.

When you walk out of a movie theater and immediately complain to your friends about the plot holes and how the ending didn't make structural sense, you are being a formalist critic.

Or when you groan at a movie, because it's using the same tired trope of the chosen one hero, you are acting as an archetypal critic.

Exactly.

This chapter hasn't given you alien concepts.

It has simply given you the academic vocabulary to refine the critical thinking you already do naturally.

So trust your instincts, pick up a lens, and start exploring.

So before you write your essay, I want to leave you with a final thought.

Ask yourself,

when you watch your favorite show tonight, which lens are you unconsciously wearing?

Are you examining the gears of the watch, or are you looking at who paid for it?

Something to think about.

Well, on behalf of the Last Minute Lecture Team, thank you so much for joining us for this tutoring session.

Good luck with your essay, and keep reading closely.