By Ryna May

Just to follow up on today's discussion about critical strategies and how we approach them — in 210, we review the types of strategies and then have a quiz on the main concerns raised by each philosophy. I then give them a "Critical Strategies Cheat Sheet" of sorts, which they can keep about them. We do this fairly early in the semester — right after we have read "The Story of an Hour" and looked at the various elements of fiction. So they're already doing a formalist type of discussion, and I've found that since almost all of the critical readings refer to this story, it provides them with some context to understand it.

From there, we variously apply different reading strategies. For example, we are completing our reading of Death of a Salesman today for 210, and in class, they will be separated into three groups in which they must come up with a short critical analysis: one "gender" reading, one "mythological" reading, and one "psychological" reading. There is a short freewriting assignment that asks leading questions, and they must then explain their particular reading to the rest of us. I like to do this varied approach with the same text, because it raises interesting questions for the assigned texts, and it shows how different "meaning" can arise.

I shy away from reader-response unless it is merged with another approach — which we often do.  But leaving them to reader-response alone often inspires lazy reading in my experience. Students begin to argue that any approach at all is valid, and I think it discourages critical thinking. But, for example, a hybrid of reader-response and mythological criticism is an opportunity to talk about the meaning of archetypes in our culture vs. past cultures, and that is usually much more critically involved.

In 203, I think I challenge them a bit more on the critical front. Using the Norton Anthology, I do give a lecture about the growth of literary theory and criticism out of philosophy — discussing Plato and Aristotle and how those ideas form a foundation; then I move on to the types of Medieval and Renaissance criticism, and then I ask them to take it on. After we read our first three major texts (Beowulf, A Knight's Tale, Morte Darthur), we delve into criticism to look back on those texts.  The assignment I gave them is to work in pairs to read an article by a critic, and then to explain the aims of the articles. The criticism is widespread: Judith Butler's "Gender Trouble," Edward Said's "Orientalism," Paul de Man's "Semiology and Rhetoric," Cleanth Brooks's "The Heresy of Paraphrase," Carl Jung's "The Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," Northrop Frye's "Archetypes of Literature," Stanley Fish's "Interpreting the Variorum," and Michel Foucault's "What Is an Author?"... finally, they have to apply one of these approaches to open up new ideas on one of the three things we've already read.  Again, because we've read these texts together already, they have context.

Throughout the semester in 203, I'll seek opportunities to expand our critical approaches. For example, we just read Faustus, and before they read it, I gave them a lecture on some of the historical circumstances surrounding the text and the tenets of New Historicism, and then asked them to read the text with the aims of New Historicism in mind. Then when we came into class, I gave them a short set of discussion questions to freewrite on for a few minutes which, again, were leading in the sense that they resonated with the ideas of our critical approach. So our discussion centered around that approach to the text, but since we have a wealth of critical approaches under our belts by this point, it was possible to let it wander to other areas of interpretation.

While history is an important part of this course, it is helpful to think about interpretive communities, marginalization, and archetypal images as they form paradigms that influence literature for centuries to follow. So there are useful ways to talk about all of these varied approaches. Finally, my syllabus is actually designed to culminate in a discussion of intertextuality as we finish with reading A Midsummer Night's Dream and look back on The Knight's Tale and other things that have influenced it as an illustration of the point of, as Bloom might say, the "anxiety of influence."