When analyzing literature (or poetry or film (as many of you like to do with the latter outside of academic settings)), using critical approaches can help you set up your arguments while also giving proper context to whatever it is you are analyzing.
This list is not exhaustive.
When you use the historical approach, you look at the society of the time period that surrounds the characters, the author, or the time of creation. I highly suggest using this approach (and the biographical approach, as they are related) when you are talking about social issues within a piece of literature.
You can look at how the society of the author impacted the creation of the character or the behavior of the character (how they interact with others, how they behave in general, how they interact with the environment, their opinions, etc.).
This approach can be used in small bits throughout your analysis to give the proper context for certain words that have changed meaning or time or that we no longer use. This provides a better understanding of the prose.
A sub-type of the historical approach is the sociological approach. By using this, you look at the relationship between society and the author. this is related to the biographical approach, but can also include looking at how the artist reflects or criticizes their own society through their work.
The historical approach puts a piece of work in its proper context. I’ll use the phenomenon of queer baiting for an example. If a person were to analyze Star Trek: The Original Series for queer baiting without considering the historical context, they might say that the relationship between Kirk and Spock is queer baiting. This is not true. During this time, the only representation available to the gay community was subtext. The relationship between Kirk and Spock was not even subtext, as it was not supposed to be. The concept of queer baiting did not exist during the show’s run. Therefore, the historical context does not support queer baiting. This is true for many works of the past.
Furthermore, you must consider how progressive Star Trek’s cast was for its time. If the original series was written in the late seventies or early eighties instead of the sixties, Roddenberry probably would have included gay characters.
The biographical approach is limited to the author. This approach examines the author’s life in relation to how it has affected or changed their work. For the latter, one might look at an author’s work prior to a traumatic event and after the event to compare how this event has impacted their writing.
When using this approach, look for a good biography of the author. You have to use critical thinking here and make your own conclusions of cause-and-effect based on the evidence you find. However, interviews in which the author speaks of how their life has affected their work can give you a more direct answer. When using direct evidence like that, you should still expand on it. Find specific examples of their work that reflects this evidence.
You can also look at the author’s own morals and values to examine how they have impacted their work and their characters.
It’s well known that the death of JK Rowling’s mother caused Harry Potter to take a different direction. One of the major themes became death and Rowling was able to personify her depression in the form of dementors. This part of her life had an impact on her writing and therefore is applicable to using a biographical approach.
Using the gender approach, also called the feminist approach, refers to examining the gender and sexuality of a work. This does not mean gender and sexuality as in lgbt+, but rather gender roles, expectations, and relations. The gender approach often examines how patriarchal societies in fiction impact the characters in those stories (usually female characters, but sometimes male characters). The historical approach goes well with this one, especially if you are analyzing something written in the past.
I know I said this doesn’t refer to sexual orientation, but that is not ruled out when talking about a character’s sexuality. It’s just that whether they are heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual, pansexual, etc. is not a focus of the analysis.
This approach answers questions like: “Why are all the female characters in X written like Y when the male characters are not?” or it may look at symbolism and how it relates to gender and sexuality (as in, fertility, sexual liberation, etc.).
I could talk about this short story forever so I’m going to try to keep it as short as possible. In Story of an Hour, the protagonist is a woman in the late nineteenth century who learns that her husband has died. To understand the situation, you have to understand the historical context (women do not have financial control, are always under the control of fathers or husbands, etc.). When the character’s husband dies, she finds new freedom. The story itself is full of symbolism of womanhood and freedom. It is important to note that the character is not happy that her husband died (but it was an arranged marriage and she didn’t truly love him), but relieved and joyful in her own freedom. It’s all about her growth. The gender approach here looks at how being a woman has affected the protagonist’s life, thoughts, feelings, ambitions, and outlook on life.
The short story Bliss is full of symbolism for female sexuality. Everything, from the protagonist’s name, to the use of fruit, to the colors is all about fertility and sexuality. However, there are also hints that the protagonist might be sexually attracted to a female character. When analyzing her sexuality in this way, an emphasis is not put on the gender she is attracted to, but how she is attracted to that person and how this attraction can contribute to the analysis of her sexuality.
Story of an Hour (I also talked about irony in this story here)
This approach examines the psyche of the characters through their thoughts, behaviors, actions, and background. Some analyses include a psychoanalysis of characters. For those of you who are studying psychology or for those of you who want to study psychology, this might be good practice for you.
You still need to find examples from the text to support your psychological analysis. Use dialogue, behaviors, actions, reactions, and thoughts to support your claim and don’t take them out of context. You have to provide context.
During my inevitable high school read of The Catcher in the Rye, my teacher (who was both a psychology and an English teacher) had us psychoanalyze Holden in three different ways.
We first had to using Freudian psychology to assess him, then the psychology that was present during Holden’s time (historical approach), and finally we had to diagnose Holden with a mental illness by using the DSM that was current at the time of the assignment. By using his behaviors, actions, thoughts, and feelings, I diagnosed him with bipolar disorder (I don’t remember which type (I was probably wrong, anyway)). This is an example of the psychological approach.
However, you don’t have to diagnose your characters with anything. You can use text evidence to say that your character is anxious or that their fear is the cause for their irrational decisions. This is the more common approach.
This is the most common approach and many of you are probably familiar with it. With the formalist approach, you analyze style, metaphors, imagery, symbolism, structure, tone, subtext, and literary devices to analyze a character, scene, chapter, overall story, etc.
Using this approach can get quite intensive. With certain works, almost every word and every punctuation mark can be taken into considering when analyzing.
If you are analyzing poetry, this approach can be useful. You can analyze how pauses, structure, rhythm, and rhyme all contribute to a certain emotion.
I’m not going to give an example for this one because it would be too long, because there are just too many examples to choose from, and because most of you have been using this approach for your whole life anyway.
Writing a Formalist Literary Analysis
An Overview and Extended Definition of Formalism in Literature and Theory
Mythological/Archetypal/Symbolic Approach
Psychological Approaches to Literature
Psychoanalytic Approaches
Key Terms in Post-colonial Theory
Post-Colonialism Critical Lens
Marxist Literary Criticism: Brief Guide
Marxist Literary Theory Made Easy
