Critical Approaches and Interpretation
This domain tests whether you can read through a named critical lens and still stay anchored to the text. Examiners reward application and awareness of limits, not lists of theorists.
Start with close reading
New Criticism treats the text as a verbal object and warns against the intentional fallacy, the affective fallacy and the heresy of paraphrase. Even when you use another lens, quote the words.
Lenses and their keywords
- Historical and New Historicism: power, circulation, the text in its moment.
- Marxist: class, ideology, commodity, labour.
- Psychoanalytic: unconscious, repression, desire, symptom.
- Feminist: patriarchy, gender construction, the woman writer; Gilbert and Gubar on the anxiety of authorship.
- Postcolonial: Said's Orientalism, Spivak's subaltern, the empire writing back.
- Reader-response: horizons of expectation; meaning as an event.
- Deconstruction: binary hierarchy, undecidability, the trace.
Worked example
Analyse Caliban's teaching of language in The Tempest through a postcolonial lens. Evidence: Prospero's gift is also a tool of control, and Caliban turns that language into a curse. Reading: language as an instrument of colonial power and of resistance. Add a limit: the play was performed around 1611, before modern colonialism, so the reading is retrospective. That caveat earns marks rather than losing them.
Traps that cost marks
- Dropping a theorist's name with no application.
- Presenting one interpretation as the only correct meaning.
- Ignoring the lens the question named.
- Making claims with no quotation behind them.