Final Project: Literary Critique

Final Project Overview

AP English 12

Ms. Barrett

What’s the Point?

1. Add another novel to your repertoire

2. Practice college level literary analysis

3. Show all you have learned

4. Learn more about something that interests you

Requirements

• 7+ pages

• Thesis + outline

• Annotated bibliography

• 2 primary sources

• 5 secondary sources

• MLA citation

• Optional 5 min. presentation

What’s the Focus?

• Theme• Idea about some

aspect of life

• Technique• Devices• Archetypes• Innovations

• Theory• Methods of

examining literature

What is Literary Theory?

• "Literary theory" is the body of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of literature. By literary theory we refer not to the meaning of a work of literature but to the theories that reveal what literature can mean. Literary theory is a description of the underlying principles, one might say the tools, by which we attempt to understand literature.

(Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Lots of Literary Theories!

• Formalism and New Criticism• Marxist Political Theory• Structuralism and Poststructuralism

• Also Postmodernism• New Historicism• Ethnic Studies and Postcolonialism• Gender Studies and Queer Theory• Cyborg Theory• Digital Humanities…it gets crazy

Formalism/New Criticism

• “Formalism” is, as the name implies, an interpretive approach that emphasizes literary form and the study of literary devices within the text.

• Formalism = New Criticism; each theory views “the work of literature as an aesthetic object independent of historical context and as a unified whole that reflected the unified sensibility of the artist.”

Marxist Theory

• “Marxist literary theories tend to focus on the representation of class conflict as well as the reinforcement of class distinctions through the medium of literature.”

• Fun Note: Marxist analyses of society and history have had a profound effect on literary theory and practical criticism, most notably in the development of ‘New Historicism’ and ‘Cultural Materialism.’”

Structuralism and Poststructuralism

• Super Confusing and Super Fun!

• Signifiers (words, marks, symbols) are arbitrary

• Within the way a particular society uses language and signs, meaning was constituted by a system of ‘differences’ between units of the language.

• underlying structures of signification > particular meaning

Structuralism and Poststructuralism

• Still Super Confusing and Super Fun!

• Advocates of ‘Deconstruction’ calls into question the possibility of the coherence of discourse, or the capacity for language to communicate.

New Historicism

• No Neutral Inquiry!

• Literature is embedded

• Context is key!

Gender Studies and Queer Theory

• Feminist gender theory is postmodern in that it challenges the paradigms and intellectual premises of western thought• but also takes an activist stance by proposing

frequent interventions and alternative epistemological positions meant to change the social order.

• "Queer theory" questions the fixed categories of sexual identity and the cognitive paradigms generated by normative definitions of man, woman, and sexuality.

Pursue Your Thematic Interests!

Ms. B’s Favorites!• The Unkown• Eternity/Infinity• Illusion• Fulfilment• Dystopia• Evolution• Intellectualism

How about You?• Alienation• Family• Love• Dystopia• Contribution to

society• Art• Nature• God

Literary Movements of Interest

• Romanticism

• Realism

• Victorian

• Modernists

• Postmodernism

Romanticism

• Individual’s relationship with nature

• “hidden significance in common things” (Downes)

• Notable authors:• Coleridge, Blake,

Keats• Hawthorne• Melville• Poe• Dumas and Hugo

Realism

• Everyday things, everyday life

• Working class characters

• Poverty, hardship, and crime

• Notable authors:• Dostoevsky• Steinbeck• Joyce• Conrad

Victorian

• Rise of the middle class in the time of Queen Victoria

• Class-conflict• Concerned with

“self-image,” technology, and hypocrisy

• Notable authors:• Dickens• Oscar Wilde• George Eliot• H.G. Wells

Modernism

• “search for technical excellence” & “purity”

• “exotic imagery, musicality and pessimism” (Downes)

• Nature’s indifference• Notable authors:

• Hemmingway• Fitzgerald• D.H. Lawrence• Virginia Woolf• Ralph Ellison

Postmodernism

• “Superficial and random in choice of subject”

• Magic realism• Mix of “high” and

“low” humor• Notable Authors:

• Vonnegut• Heller• Nabakov• Pynchon