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Structuralist
Theory:
This requires complete focus
on only the text itself. We consider the patters that are built up
and broken down within a text in order to use them to get at an interpretation
of that same text.
Essential premises include:
1. A text is severed
from the author and reader. It exists solely on its own.
2. The reader's connections
are irrelevant.
What matters here is the art
form, it's shape and technique. A close reading of language and
elements of the text searches
for a harmony of those parts.
GUIDING QUESTION: What
is the unifying patterns (central axis?) on which the story turns?
Deconstruction:
Deconstruction is by far the
most difficult critical lens to understand. Deconstruction calls
the following theories into question:
1. Language is stable
and has meaning that we all can agree upon.
2. The author is in
control of the text that s/he writes.
3. Works of literature
have an internal consistency.
4. Works of literature
have an external relevance.
5. You can take the
author's or poet's word for what s/he writes.
6. There is a set of
interpretive tools that you can reliably use to interpret a text.
Deconstruction asks you to
read resistantly, to question all assumptions that the work or the
author asks you to make. To deconstruct, we don't take it apart.
We peel away at layers of a constructed meaning and realize
that there is something wrong in how in was constructed in the first place.
GUIDING QUESTION: Is
the story able to carry any meaning through symbols, structure or words?
Truth requires connotative stability.
Psychoanalysis:
This looks at the text as
an expression, in its fictional form, of the writer's state of mind, personality,
feelings, and desires. The assumption made by the critic is that
the text is correlated with the author's mental traits.
1. Reference to the
author's personality is used to explain and interpret the literary work.
2. Reference to the
literary work is made in order to establish the personality of the
author.
3. The mode of reading
a literary work itself is a way of experiencing the direct
subjectivity or consciousness
of its author.
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