Twentieth Century Literature

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Twentieth Century Literature

• Major Critical Approaches

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Questions to consider

• What is literature?
• What do we get out of literature?

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Critical Theory Definition

• Critical theory is what we bring to literature,
  and, in turn, what we get out of it.
• Two major types
• Historical/Biographical
• Expressive Realism

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Historicism

• Basically, we have been doing this all year
• Considers the literary work in the facts of the
  historical period.

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New Historicism

• Much the same as Historicism with one difference
• New Historicism finds meaning by looking at a
  text within the framework of the prevailing ideas
  and assumptions of its historical era.

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Psychoanalytic

• Freudian
• Looks at a text as the subconscious expressions
  of the author.

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Feminist

• Looks at literature by exposing how a work
  reflects masculine ideology.
• They have noticed that women and men tend to
  communicate differently men directed towards
  solutions, women towards connecting.

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Marxist

• Literature reflects a class struggle and
  materialism
• Questions to ask
• What role does class play in the work what is
  the author's analysis of class relations?
• How do characters overcome oppression?
• In what ways does the work serve as propaganda
  for the status quo or does it try to undermine
  it?
• What does the work say about oppression or are
  social conflicts ignored or blamed elsewhere?
• Does the work propose some form of utopian vision
  as a solution to the problems encountered in the
  work?

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Desirees Baby

• What lens(es) can we look at this story though?
• Historianism?
• New Historianism?
• Psychoanalytic?
• Feminist?
• Marxist?

• quadroon Person descended from one black
  grandparent and three white grandparents.
• Look for foreshadowing