Literary Theory
Theory is a set of questions to ask a text, not a set of labels to attach to it. Used well it opens a reading; used badly it replaces one.
A warning before anything else
An essay that announces its theoretical position and then fits the text to it almost always scores worse than a careful close reading with no theory in it at all.
Use these approaches as questions. If the question opens something in the text, follow it. If it does not, ask a different one. Never write reading this text through a feminist lens as a substitute for evidence.
The approaches, and the questions each one asks
Close reading (formalist criticism)
Attends to the text itself — its language, structure, imagery and form — largely independently of the author's life or the historical moment.
Questions it asks: How is this made? What does this word do that a synonym would not? Where is the pattern, and where is it broken? What does the form contribute?
Its strength: it is the foundation of all the others, and the one skill no A/L candidate can do without.
Its limit: treated as the only approach, it can make a text seem to exist outside history and society.
Historical and contextual criticism
Reads a work in relation to the period that produced it, and to the conditions in which it was written and first received.
Questions it asks: What did this word, this idea or this behaviour mean at the time? What could and could not be said? What was the writer arguing against?
Its strength: it prevents anachronism — judging a past text by present assumptions without noticing that you are doing so.
Its limit: context can be used to excuse a text from criticism, or to swamp the text with information about its period.
Psychological criticism
Attends to motive, desire, memory and the unconscious, in characters and sometimes in the reader.
Questions it asks: What does this character want that they cannot admit to wanting? What is repeated, avoided or forgotten? What is the significance of what is not said?
Its strength: it is very productive on characters whose stated reasons do not match their behaviour.
Its limit: it slides easily into diagnosing invented people. Keep the analysis tied to the text's own evidence.
Feminist criticism
Attends to the representation of women and men, to gender as something constructed rather than given, and to whose experience a text treats as central.
Questions it asks: Who is allowed to speak, and at what length? Whose inner life is shown? What options are available to female and male characters, and who decides them? Does the text endorse the arrangement it depicts, or expose it?
Its strength: it frequently reveals structures so familiar that they had become invisible.
Its limit: a text that depicts inequality is not necessarily endorsing it. That distinction has to be argued from evidence, not assumed.
Marxist and materialist criticism
Attends to class, work, money and power, and to the economic conditions inside and behind a text.
Questions it asks: Who works and who does not? Where does the money come from? Whose labour is invisible? Does the text present its social arrangements as natural or as made?
Its strength: it is often startlingly productive on novels, which are full of unexamined money.
Its limit: reducing every text to economics flattens works whose interests genuinely lie elsewhere.
Postcolonial criticism
Attends to empire and its aftermath: to who is represented and by whom, to language and power, and to the position of the colonised in a text's assumptions.
Questions it asks: Who is given a voice and who is described? Whose land, whose language, whose history? What does the text take for granted about the centre and the margin?
Its strength: it is often directly relevant to texts studied in Sri Lanka, both to works written here and to works about places like it.
Its limit: as with all these approaches, the reading must come from the text, not be imposed upon it.
Reader-response criticism
Attends to the reader's part in making meaning: what the text withholds, what it makes us expect, and how it manages our sympathy.
Questions it asks: What am I made to expect here, and is the expectation met? When am I given information, and what difference does the timing make? Whose side does the text put me on, and how?
Its strength: it produces exactly the comments about effect that A/L answers most often lack.
Its limit: "what it means to me" is not criticism. The response must be shown to be produced by the text.
How to use theory in an examination answer
- Start from the text, not the theory. Notice something, then ask which set of questions explains it best.
- Do not name the school unless it helps. The novel makes the mother's labour invisible is a Marxist-feminist observation and does not need to announce itself.
- Use theory to complicate, not to conclude. Its best use in an essay is in the paragraph that meets the objection: It might be read as… but attending to who actually earns the money in this household suggests otherwise.
- Never invent a critic or a quotation. It has often been argued that… is honest, sufficient and safe.
- One approach, well used, beats four names dropped.