Critical approaches, and using a theory as a lens
What a critical approach is
- A critical approach is a set of questions you agree to ask. It is not a verdict or a political position.
- The standard names theory as a kind of critical text, and its own example of synthesis is using feminist theory to interpret advertising language. A lens is legitimate material, not a shortcut.
- A lens frames the investigation the way a hypothesis does. It tells you what to look at and what to leave out.
- Naming the approach is honest, not showy. Saying which questions you asked lets a reader judge your reading.
The approaches you are most likely to meet
| Approach | The question it asks |
|---|---|
| Formalist or close reading | What does this text do that a paraphrase would lose? |
| Structuralism | Which pairs does the text set against each other, and which side wins? |
| Reader-response | Where does the text withhold information, and what does the reader supply? |
| Feminist criticism | Who acts, who is described, and whose work is invisible? |
| Marxist or class-based criticism | Where does money enter, and what is presented as natural? |
| Postcolonial reading | Who is present, who is absent, and whose name is used for the land? |
| Ecocriticism | Is the environment a setting, a resource, an agent, or a victim? |
| Historicist criticism | What argument was going on around this text when it was made? |
| Discourse analysis | What is repeated, what is nominalised, and who is given agency? |
A lens supplies questions, not answers
- The lens gives the questions; the primary source must give the answers. If your conclusion could have been written from the theory alone, you have illustrated the theory rather than investigated the text.
- A good lens produces findings that surprise you. If every question yields exactly what the theory predicts, check whether you are still reading the text.
- The evidence is still details from the primary source, which the standard requires and theory does not supply.
- You may push back on the lens. Finding a place where the approach does not fit is a critique, which the standard's definition of an informed understanding includes.
Applying a theory to language
- Language investigations often suit theory better than literary ones do, because published criticism about a specific campaign or broadcast rarely exists, while theory about how such language works does. Choose the text set first — four or five short items of the same kind — then the lens, and work from the language up.
- Keep the claim about the language. The campaign is offensive is a judgement about the world; the campaign describes the place with adjectives that require no inhabitants is a judgement about the language, and it can be evidenced.
Two misuses, and choosing between lenses
- Labelling. Announcing that a text is patriarchal or colonial and stopping there. A label is a conclusion with the investigation removed, and it is the commonest way this standard is failed.
- Forcing. Bending the text to fit the lens by using only the passages that cooperate. The tell is that no passage resists your reading.
- The repair for both is the same: quote the passage that fits your lens worst, and account for it.
- Try two lenses briefly before committing, and prefer the one that finds something you had not noticed. A lens you can only half apply is not a failure — saying which of its questions your text answers is a judgement.
What the grades look like here
- Achieved — a named approach, applied to the primary source, producing a reading supported by details.
- Merit — discernment shows in which questions of the lens you asked, the ones this text can actually answer, and in dropping the rest.
- Excellence — perceptive work reports where the lens stops working, and treats that boundary as a finding rather than an embarrassment.
Worked Example
Worked Example
Whitebait Season is an advertising set written for these pages. Four lines from a fictional tourism campaign:
WHITEBAIT SEASON. Four hours from the city, the river has not heard of you. Bring the family. Bring nothing else. Still empty. Still waiting.
A student tries two lenses on it and must choose one.
Answer:
Step 1 — ask the ecocritical questions. Is the environment a setting, a resource, an agent or a victim?
The river is given a verb of awareness — it has not heard of you — so it is briefly an agent. But the season is named for what can be taken out of the river, and the final line makes the place a thing that waits. The environment is granted personality and then assigned a service role. A real finding, resting on two details.
Step 2 — ask the postcolonial questions. Who is present, who is absent, and whose name is used for the land?
Nobody lives here. Still empty asserts it, and has not heard of you requires it, since a place with residents would have heard of visitors. The place is named only by an activity and a distance from the city, so it exists in relation to somewhere else. Nothing in four lines admits a local person.
Step 3 — compare what each produced. The ecocritical reading reached one image. The postcolonial reading claims something about every line, and it explains the campaign's strangest move — telling visitors to bring nothing, which only makes sense if there is nobody there to sell them anything.
Step 4 — test the choice against the worst line. Bring the family fits least, because it puts people in the frame. But those people are the arriving family, which is the reading's own point.
Step 5 — say where the lens stops. It cannot explain the rhythm of the four lines, which a formalist reading handles better. State that limit rather than hide it.