Marxist theory Karl Marx’s analysis of society as structured around economic factors and the way these determined social relations in society, has been central in offering a critique of capitalism focusing primarily on the inequality between those who owned the means of production, the factories, mills and machinery, and those who had no choice but to sell their labour and work in the factories for their bourgeois owners. The economic and cultural exploitation this often entailed is the concern of those taking a Marxist approach to the analysis of texts both literary and non-literary. Marx’s analysis of capitalism and its expression in society informs a critical approach that sees texts as encoding economic and social inequality in society and either naturalizing or challenging this inequality.

Given the pervasiveness of capitalist modes of economic organization and the political successes of Marxism, the theoretical position taken by the Marxist critic has been a powerful force certainly throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Characteristically it investigates the way texts legitimize exploitative practice by naturalizing or silencing it within the text. For example, texts like Mansfield Park might be seen through the lens of Marxist analysis as more than just a drama about character and relationships but also, and more sinisterly, as disguising the realities of wealth accumulated through the exploitation of slaves on the Caribbean plantations owned by Sir Thomas Bertram, the benefactor of the main character, Fanny Price —something explicitly brought out in the 1999 film by Patricia Rozema. Essentially, Marxism invites us to look closely at the relationships between different classes in texts, identifying the social and economic forces at work in these relationships and revealing the ideological biases at work in the representation of these relationships.

Marxist analysis of texts, then, seeks to reveal and problematise representations of society that present social and economy inequality as natural and unquestioned. In exploring this they look closely at the representations of character and social and economic relations in texts and the impact of the contexts of reception and production.

Applications to studies in language and literature

Marxist analyses of texts offer students many opportunities to see how texts might be considered as reflecting the realities of society and its economic and social inequalities, and in some cases reinforcing them. The later Marxist idea of the notion of hegemony associated with the Italian writer Antonio Gramsci has also been important highlighting the way dominant ideas and beliefs disguise the economic and military power that enforces their dominance and has been central in texts like Orientalism for instance that explored the Western cultural dominance over the East in the 19th and 20th centuries. This approach is strongly associated with cultural materialism and the work of British critics working in the 1970s led by Raymond Williams.

Guiding questions

• What examples can you select of texts that either support and legitimize inequality or challenge and attack it?
• How might a Marxist approach to literature challenge the traditional canon? How far are texts political entities as opposed to things in themselves?

Key theorists include Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, Theodor Adorno, Terry Eagleton

Feminist and queer theories Feminist theory focuses on the relationship between the sexes, and in particular, gender inequality and the role of women in society and culture. Like Marxist theory, feminist theory explores power structures in society, but through the lens of gender rather than class.

While early feminist ideas (sometimes referred to as proto-feminism) were in circulation in the late 18th century (for example, in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft), the term feminism was not used until the late 19th century. From this point, the feminist movement is often seen as developing in three waves. First wave feminism developed in the context of the fight for women’s legal and democratic rights in the late 19th and early 20th century. Second wave feminism, developing in the 1960s and 1970s, challenged discrimination against women in society and culture more broadly. Modern feminist theory originated at this time as a socio-cultural discourse, identifying issues of gender, power and identity as crucial within a patriarchal society. Third wave feminism, originating in the 1980s and 1990s, sought to diversify approaches to the rights of women, taking greater account of issues to do with class, race and sexuality, and challenging binary notions of gender. Some argue that there has been a recent fourth wave feminism which, fuelled by the rise of social media, has focused particularly on issues of sexual abuse and violence.

Third wave feminism, with its radical critique of gender binaries and its focus on gender performativity (as in the work of Judith Butler), is closely related with broader gender theory emerging from gender studies. Another theory to have emerged from gender theory is queer theory, which is concerned with the construction of sexual identity and the operation of normative and deviant categories of gender and sexuality in society.

Applications to studies in language and literature

Feminist critics are concerned both with the representation of women in texts and language, and with the ways in which culture and language more broadly might reflect gender inequalities and discrimination against women. By extension, critics in gender studies and queer theory are interested in the ways in which gender and sexuality are represented in texts and language, how they are shown as being constructed and performed, and how culture and language act to deprivilege those who deviate from recognized norms.

In studies in language and literature, ideas are frequently drawn from feminist theory both when exploring texts with an explicit feminist message—as seen in many contemporary works—and in exploring the representation of women, and gender more broadly, in texts across history and different cultures.

Guiding questions

• How are women and men represented in the text you are studying?
• To what extent do they conform to or challenge gender norms and stereotypes, and how are they treated as a result?
• How is sexuality represented in the text you are studying?
• To what extent do characters adhere to or deviate from social norms of sexual behaviour, and how are they treated as a result?
• How does the text you are studying reveal the operation of patriarchal power structures within society, through institutions, individuals or acceptance of social norms?
• To what extent does the text support or challenge such structures?
• How many female and male authors feature in your course of study?
• To what extent do male and female readers conform to gender norms in their reading habits?
• Do male writers and female writers have different concerns and approaches?

Key theorists include Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler.

Key reference: Butler, J. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York, USA. Routledge.

Post-colonialist theory focuses on the relationship between Western (European and European-origin) and non-Western cultures, and the development of historical imbalances in power between these areas of the world. In particular, it focuses on issues to do with the operation and effects of colonialism, both during and after periods of colonization. Originating in analyses of the history of colonialism, and emerging in the political aftermath of the final decline of European colonialism and against a backdrop of American cultural and economic expansionism in the 1970s, postcolonialism challenges traditional historical and cultural discourses about, and representations of, colonialism and colonized cultures, and highlights the ways that the injustices and imbalances of colonialism continue to operate in the post-colonial world. Inevitably, race and ethnicity are key concepts here. A central idea is that colonialism led to the marginalization of nonWestern people, cultures and voices, reinforcing unhelpful binary oppositions (such as, white/black and civilized/uncivilized), and encouraging the development of the prejudiced identification of non-Western cultures and people as different, or other, in relation to Western norms.

It must be noted that not all post-colonial discourses are related to the Western/non-Western or black/ white binary. In a small number of cases, post-colonial discourse has been used to discuss instances of political or cultural oppression and annexation by one European country against another—for instance between England, Northern Ireland and the other nations of the United Kingdom.

Postcolonial critics focus on a range of issues in relation to literature, language and media, exploring issues such as the representation of the colonizers and the colonized in culture, and related questions to do with the representation of slavery and suppression of human rights, of nationalism and political independence, and of emigration and immigration. They are also interested in the ways in which cultural processes and institutions (such as, publishing, broadcasting and the literary canon) have allowed or disallowed access to people from colonial/post-colonial countries. Parallel with the growth of post-colonial theory has been the rise of post-colonial literature, which seeks to celebrate and reclaim the language and cultural identity of previously colonized people and countries, and reveal their resistance to the forces of oppression. Postcolonial writers may also seek to emphasize cultural variety and difference as a universal social norm, as distinct from the unequal cultural binaries of colonialism which posited Western culture as the norm.

Applications to studies in language and literature

Postcolonialism can be related to both specific texts (canonical and non-canonical) and a range of texts that represent an international range of places and cultures, studied in the courses. In particular, it will be of interest in relation to aspects of the global issues which inform the individual oral.

Guiding questions

• Does this text present an unequal relationship between colonizer and colonized, and/or between one cultural or ethnic group and another?
• How does the text represent aspects of colonial or cultural repression?
• Does this text present the struggle of the colonized to reclaim social or cultural power or identity either during a period of colonialism or in the post-colonial period?
• What obstacles does the text suggest might stand in the way of this process?
• To what extent does this text—especially if a text from the Western canon—reinforce the colonialist perspective either through its representation of the colonized, or through the absence of any reference to colonization or slavery?

Key theorists include Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak

Psychoanalytical theory (or psychoanalytic criticism) builds on Sigmund Freud’s work on the mental life of human beings and in particular his analysis of the way the human mind develops and the means by which this development allows us to cope with the challenges of having to repress our desire for pleasure in order to undertake the work needed to guarantee our survival. Freud’s model of the mind saw the process of the child’s development as dominated by Oedipal urges for both the mother and the father and the emergence of three parts of the mind: the id that holds the instinctual drives that need to be controlled; the ego that is the persona we present to the world that exists only through the repression of the uncontrollable desires that now reside in the id and the unconscious and which emerge in dreams; and the superego, which develops what could be described as conscience.

In literary criticism a range of ideas from psychoanalysis have been influential. The description of the child’s development given by Freud, for example, is important in literary theory for the way it can be seen as primarily an account of how identity develops, an important focus for the way psychoanalytic criticism of literary texts has developed. In the first instance, however, the psychoanalytic critic will attempt to interpret the ideas in a literary text in terms of psychoanalytic understanding of character and motive, most famously perhaps in Freud’s own analysis of Hamlet. In addition, the psychoanalytic critic may adopt what has been labelled the psychobiographical approach looking at what the text reveals about the author’s beliefs, ideas and motives.

Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst who was one of Freud’s students but went on to develop his theories in a slightly different way, is also important in this area of theory because of his focus on archetypes, leading some critics to identify characters or situations as representing particular archetypes and the ways they are understood by particular cultures. More recently the work of Jacques Lacan has linked Freud’s theories to language and thus to literature. The experience of the individual unconscious is transformed by Lacan into an introduction that is external rather than internal and forms the unconscious symbolic systems held by the culture that receives the text—these symbols are seen by Lacan as language. In this way it has been used by feminist critics, for example, who see revealed in these unconscious symbolic systems a culture’s establishment of roles and identities that are linked to gender and potentially limit and demean women and their role in society.

Applications to studies in language and literature

This approach to texts helps to explore the role of personality in constructing the meaning of texts. It is also useful in developing understanding of one of the ways in which the role of identity and the self are a context of reception that contributes to the shaping of a text’s meaning. The concepts of identity, culture and perspective are also enriched by looking at them through the lens of psychoanalytical criticism, exploring, for example, the way culture and the symbols it shares affect how its members understand texts.

Guiding questions

• What does Lacan’s theory suggest about the way symbols reinforce ideas in society that might be challenged?
• How is the identity of a character in one of the texts you are studying formed and how can your understanding be enriched by looking at it in the light of psychoanalytic ideas?
• How might psychoanalytical thinking help us to understand the author’s intentions in writing a particular text?

Key theorists include Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Harold Bloom, Jacques Lacan

Key reference: Eagleton, T. 1996. Literary Theory. An Introduction. Minneapolis, USA. The University of Minnesota Press.

Reader response theory, also known as reception theory, the key reader response theorist was Wolfgang Iser who argued that the understanding of a text was a collaborative venture between reader and writer. It was influential on structuralism (a theory considered later in this section) in the way it saw meaning as dependent on the reader’s knowledge of other texts and the values and conventions of their culture and society including the reading practices with which they are familiar, and not centred solely in the text.

Reader response centres the role of the reader and their context in constructing the meaning of a text. At one level this explores the context of reception in relation to the values, assumptions and ideas the reader brings to and through which they interpret the text. At another it looks at the gaps, silences and omissions in the text, exploring how the reader’s role in filling these constructs meaning and how these silences and omissions might be seen as disguising and therefore naturalizing cultural values and assumptions that should perhaps be questioned.

Examples of reader response point the reader to a more self-conscious understanding of the assumptions they are making in a text and how they are filling in the gaps in the text or ignoring the omissions. What assumptions do we make about the gender of a narrator, for example, before that information is given to us and on what basis might they be made?

Applications to studies in language and literature

Reader response is central in the area of exploration “readers, writers and texts”, and looking at how students reconstitute the text and the potential significance of their interaction with the gaps and silences in the text that they might fill or respond to. It also addresses the ideas of context and intertextuality in the other areas of exploration, as these might determine the thinking that a reader uses in filling the gaps in the text to achieve a full understanding of its meaning; also to analyse the way the text creates tension and drama by exploiting and then challenging the reader’s assumption about a character, for example, Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Guiding questions

How does this approach relate to New Criticism approaches to texts?

How does this approach to texts highlight the constructed and external as opposed to intrinsic and fixed nature of meaning in a text?

How does this approach allow us to trace the changing ways in which texts are interpreted by readers over time? What does a reader bring to a text?

Key theorists include Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish, Louise Rosenblatt, Umberto Eco Key reference: Iser, W. 1978. The Act of Reading: a theory of aesthetic response. Baltimore, USA. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Introduction

Critical Race Theory, or CRT, is a theoretical and interpretive mode that examines the appearance of race and racism across dominant cultural modes of expression. In adopting this approach, CRT scholars attempt to understand how victims of systemic racism are affected by cultural perceptions of race and how they are able to represent themselves to counter prejudice.

Closely connected to such fields as philosophy, history, sociology, and law, CRT scholarship traces racism in America through the nation’s legacy of slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and recent events. In doing so, it draws from work by writers like Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others studying law, feminism, and post-structuralism. CRT developed into its current form during the mid-1970s with scholars like Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, and Richard Delgado, who responded to what they identified as dangerously slow progress following Civil Rights in the 1960s.

Prominent CRT scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia Williams share an interest in recognizing racism as a quotidian component of American life (manifested in textual sources like literature, film, law, etc). In doing so, they attempt to confront the beliefs and practices that enable racism to persist while also challenging these practices in order to seek liberation from systemic racism.

As such, CRT scholarship also emphasizes the importance of finding a way for diverse individuals to share their experiences. However, CRT scholars do not only locate an individual’s identity and experience of the world in his or her racial identifications, but also their membership to a specific class, gender, nation, sexual orientation, etc. They read these diverse cultural texts as proof of the institutionalized inequalities racialized groups and individuals experience every day.

As Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic explain in their introduction to the third edition of Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, “Our social world, with its rules, practices, and assignments of prestige and power, is not fixed; rather, we construct with it words, stories and silence. But we need not acquiesce in arrangements that are unfair and one-sided. By writing and speaking against them, we may hope to contribute to a better, fairer world” (3). In this sense, CRT scholars seek tangible, real-world ends through the intellectual work they perform. This contributes to many CRT scholars’ emphasis on social activism and transforming everyday notions of race, racism, and power.

More recently, CRT has contributed to splinter groups focused on Asian American, Latino, and Indian racial experiences.

Common Questions

• What is the significance of race in contemporary society?
• Where, in what ways, and to what ends does race appear in dominant culture and shape the ways we interact with one another?
• What types of texts and other cultural artifacts reflect dominant culture’s perceptions of race?
• How can scholars convey that racism is a concern that affects all members of society?
• How does racism continue to function as a persistent force in American society?
• How can we combat racism to ensure that all members of American society experience equal representation and access to fundamental rights?
• How can we accurately reflect the experiences of victims of racism?

Why Use This Approach?

As we can see, adopting a CRT approach to literature or other modes of cultural expression includes much more than simply identifying race, racism, and racialized characters in fictional works. Rather, it (broadly) emphasizes the importance of examining and attempting to understand the socio-cultural forces that shape how we and others perceive, experience, and respond to racism. These scholars treat literature, legal documents, and other cultural works as evidence of American culture’s collective values and beliefs. In doing so, they trace racism as a dually theoretical and historical experience that affects all members of a community regardless of their racial affiliations or identifications.

Most CRT scholarship attempts to demonstrate not only how racism continues to be a pervasive component throughout dominant society, but also why this persistent racism problematically denies individuals many of the constitutional freedoms they are otherwise promised in the United States’ governing documents. This enables scholars to locate how texts develop in and through the cultural contexts that produced them, further demonstrating how pervasive systemic racism truly is. CRT scholars typically focus on both the evidence and the origins of racism in American culture, seeking to eradicate it at its roots.

Additionally, because CRT advocates attending to the various components that shape individual identity, it offers a way for scholars to understand how race interacts with other identities like gender and class. As scholars like Crenshaw and Willams have shown, CRT scholarship can and should be amenable to adopting and adapting theories from related fields like women’s studies, feminism, and history. In doing so, CRT has evolved over the last decades to address the various concerns facing individuals affected by racism.

Interestingly, CRT scholarship does not only draw attention to and address the concerns of individual affected by racism, but also those who perpetrate and are seemingly unaffected by racial prejudice. Scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois, Peggy McIntosh, Cheryl Harris, and George Lipsitz discuss white privilege and notions of whiteness throughout history to better understand how American culture conceptualizes race (or the seeming absence of race).

Important Terms

• White privilege: Discussed by Lipsitz, Lee, Harris, McIntosh, and other CRT scholars, white privilege refers to the various social, political, and economic advantages white individuals experience in contrast to non-white citizens based on their racial membership. These advantages can include both obvious and subtle differences in access to power, social status, experiences of prejudice, educational opportunities, and much more. For CRT scholars, the notion of white privilege offers a way to discuss dominant culture’s tendency to normalize white individuals’ experiences and ignore the experiences of non-whites. Fields such as CRT and whiteness studies have focused explicitly on the concept of white privilege to understand how racism influences white people.
• Microaggressions: Microaggressions refer to the seemingly minute, often unconscious, quotidian instances of prejudice that collectively contribute to racism and the subordination of racialized individuals by dominant culture. Peggy Davis discusses how legal discourse participates in and can counteract the effects of microaggressions.
• Institutionalized Racism: This concept, discussed extensively by Camara Phyllis Jones, refers to the systemic ways dominant society restricts a racialized individual or group’s access to opportunities. These inequalities, which include an individual’s access to material conditions and power, are not only deeply imbedded in legal institutions, but have been absorbed into American culture to such a degree that they are often invisible or easily overlooked.
• Social construction: In the context of CRT, “social construction” refers to the notion that race is a product of social thought and relations. It suggests that race is a product of neither biology nor genetics, but is rather a social invention.
• Intersectionality and anti-essentialism: These terms refer to the notion that one aspect of an individual’s identity does not necessarily determine other categories of membership. As Delgado and Stefancic explain, “Everyone has potentially conflicting, overlapping identities, loyalties, and allegiances” (CRT: An Introduction 10). In other words, we cannot predict an individual’s identity, beliefs, or values based on categories like race, gender, sexuality, religion, nationality, etc; instead, we must recognize that individuals are capable of claiming membership to a variety of different (and oftentimes seemingly contradictory) categories and belief systems regardless of the identities outsiders attempt to impose upon them.

from OWL Purdue