Reading and Literature Studies · Reading Literary Texts

Literary Criticism and Critical Lenses: Reading One Text Many Ways

1.5 1.7 1.8About 75 minutes

Learning goals

I can explain what literary criticism is and how a critical lens differs from a personal opinion.
I can describe the main questions asked by formalist, historical, feminist, Marxist, postcolonial, Indigenous-centred and reader-response approaches.
I can apply two or more lenses to the same poem and support each reading with evidence.
I can read a short passage of published criticism and identify its claim, evidence and perspective.

Words to know

literary criticism
The study, interpretation and evaluation of literature, written as an argument with evidence. Criticism here means analysis, not complaining.

critical lens (critical theory)
A set of questions and assumptions used to read a text from one perspective, such as gender, class or colonialism.

formalism / New Criticism
An approach that focuses on the text itself (its images, structure, irony and tensions) rather than on the author or historical context.

the gaze
In feminist and film criticism, the act of looking, and the power that goes with being the one who looks rather than the one looked at.

postcolonial criticism
An approach that examines how texts represent empire, colonized peoples and resistance, and who gets to tell the story.

Indigenous literary criticism
Approaches developed by Indigenous scholars and communities that read texts in relation to land, kinship, sovereignty, oral tradition and community, often on a Nation's own terms.

reader-response
An approach that studies how meaning is made in the meeting between a text and its readers.

ideology
A system of beliefs and values, often taken for granted, that shapes how a society sees the world.

Hook: same painting, different galleries

Imagine one portrait hung in three galleries. In an art school, students discuss its brushwork. In a history museum, a label explains who paid for it and why. In a gallery about women in art, the label asks who the woman was, and why we know the painter's name but not hers.

Nothing about the painting changed. The questions changed. That is what a critical lens does to a text. In university English, you will be expected not only to interpret texts but to say which lens you are using and why.

Remember from Grade 11

In ENG3U you read The Great Gatsby through lenses of class, gender and race, and Hamlet through gender and power lenses, including a psychoanalytic reading (Freud and Ernest Jones) of Hamlet's delay. This lesson names the major schools of criticism behind those questions so you can choose and combine them on purpose.

What literary criticism is

Literary criticism is published argument about literature. A critic makes a claim about a text, supports it with evidence (quotations, history, other texts) and answers other readings. Criticism is not a list of likes and dislikes. I found it boring is an opinion; the poem's flat, repetitive rhythm mirrors the speaker's exhaustion is a critical claim.

A critical lens is a family of questions that grew out of a school of criticism. You do not have to believe a lens to use it. Think of lenses as tools: each one makes some features of a text sharper and blurs others.

Six widely used critical lenses. Each one points at the same text from a different side and asks different questions. Other lenses you will meet include psychoanalytic, archetypal and ecocritical.

Lens	Key questions	Thinkers you may meet at university
Formalist / New Criticism	How do imagery, structure, sound, irony and tension work together? Is the text unified?	Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (1947)
Historical / biographical	What was happening when it was written? How did first readers see it? Does the author's life matter?	E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (1943)
Feminist / gender	How are women and men represented? Who speaks, who is silent, who looks and who is looked at?	Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929)
Marxist / class	Who has money and power? Whose work is visible? Does the text support or question the social order?	Karl Marx's ideas, applied by later critics
Postcolonial	How are empire and colonized peoples shown? Who tells the story? What is missing?	Chinua Achebe's lecture on Heart of Darkness (1975)
Indigenous-centred	How does the text relate to land, kinship, community, oral tradition and sovereignty? Whose stories are these to tell?	Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation), Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (2018)
Reader-response	What does the reader bring? How do different readers, then and now, respond?	Louise Rosenblatt, Wolfgang Iser
Psychoanalytic	What hidden desires, fears or conflicts drive characters (or authors)?	Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones

A quick guide to the major lenses. You will use most of them in this unit; you are not expected to have read the thinkers listed.

A poem to test the lenses

Christina Rossetti wrote In an Artist's Studio in 1856; it was published after her death, in 1896. Rossetti's brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was a famous painter. The poem is a sonnet. It begins (public domain):

One face looks out from all his canvases, One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:

What happens in the poem (paraphrase): the speaker finds the same woman in every painting in an artist's studio, hidden behind screens and reflected in a mirror. He paints her as a queen in jewels, a nameless girl in summer green, a saint, an angel, but every canvas says the same thing. He feeds upon her face by day and night, and in the paintings she looks back at him kindly, bright and joyful, never pale with waiting or dim with sorrow. The last two lines turn:

Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright; Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

The repeated Not as she is tells us that the real woman has changed, perhaps grown sad and tired of waiting, while the paintings keep her frozen in the painter's fantasy.

Rossetti's sonnet works like a frame around a frame. The painter keeps one woman inside his idealized canvases; the poem steps back and shows him doing it. A feminist lens notices that she never speaks.

Worked example

Let's read one poem through three lenses

Apply a formalist, a feminist and a historical/biographical lens to In an Artist's Studio. State a claim for each.

Formalist: look at form and pattern. The poem repeats One... One at the start and Not as she is... Not as she is at the end: sameness at both ends, like the painter's endless copies. The octave describes the paintings; the sestet turns to the painter's hunger (feeds upon her face) and then to the truth. Claim: repetition enacts the painter's obsession, and the final repeated negative breaks the illusion.
Feminist: ask who looks and who is looked at. The painter is active (feeds, paints, dreams); the woman is only an image, nameless in one canvas, and never speaks. Even her kindness is something he paints. Claim: the poem exposes the male gaze that turns a living woman into a fixed ideal and silences her real experience.
Historical / biographical: add context. Rossetti's brother and his circle of painters (the Pre-Raphaelites) painted the same few models again and again; many readers link the poem to Dante Gabriel's paintings of Elizabeth Siddal, whom he married in 1860 after a long engagement. Claim: the poem may be a sister's sharp comment on the art world around her, though a careful reader notes the poem itself names no one.
Compare: the lenses do not cancel each other. The formal pattern (repetition, the turn) is the evidence that makes the feminist reading convincing, and the history explains why the subject mattered to Rossetti.

Three lenses, three claims. Best essay move: combine them, e.g. Through obsessive repetition and a final double negative, Rossetti's sonnet exposes the artist's gaze that preserves a woman's image while erasing the woman.

Most strong essays combine the two sides: close reading of the words (text-centred) used as evidence for a claim about history, gender, class or culture (context-centred).

Reading real criticism: Virginia Woolf

Criticism is itself a kind of text you read. In 1928 the novelist Virginia Woolf gave two talks to students at women's colleges at Cambridge; she expanded them into the book A Room of One's Own (1929). Her central claim fits in one line:

a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

To support it, Woolf invents a thought experiment. She imagines that Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, and follows her life: equally talented, but denied schooling, pushed toward marriage, laughed at when she tries to join the theatre, and finally destroyed by a world that gave her no room to work. (Judith is fictional: Woolf is clear that she is imagining.)

How to read criticism critically:

Claim: creative genius needs material conditions (money, privacy, education), which women were historically denied.
Evidence: history, imagined cases, the near-absence of women writers before the 1700s.
Perspective: an educated, financially independent white Englishwoman of 1928. Later critics, including Black feminist writers such as Alice Walker, have asked what Woolf's argument leaves out: women who wrote and created without money or rooms, for example enslaved women and working-class women.

Notice that last step: you can apply critical literacy to the critics.

A note on Indigenous-centred reading

Indigenous literary scholars stress that First Nations, Métis and Inuit literatures come from distinct Nations, each with its own languages, laws and storytelling traditions, not from one single "Indigenous culture." Questions to ask: Which Nation or community does this text come from? How does it relate to land, kinship and oral tradition? Who has the right to tell this story? Is this a story I am being invited to read, and how should I read it respectfully? Avoid reading Indigenous texts only as stories of loss: many centre survival, humour, continuity and resurgence.

Just for fun

Funny-but-true: New Criticism is about 85 years old. The name comes from a 1941 book by the American poet and critic John Crowe Ransom called The New Criticism. In literary studies, new apparently never expires.

Hands-on activity

One object, four lenses

You need: one ordinary object or image from home that carries meaning (a family photo, a cereal box, a toy, a hockey jersey, a fridge magnet), paper and a pen.

Describe the object formally: shapes, colours, words, layout. What stands out, and what patterns repeat?
Read it through a historical lens: when and where was it made, and what does it show about that time?
Read it through a class / economic lens: who made it, who paid for it, who profits?
Read it through a gender lens: who is shown or addressed, and who is missing?
Write one sentence per lens beginning Through a ___ lens, this object...
Finally, write which lens taught you the most, and why.

What to look for: four genuinely different claims, each based on something specific in the object. For example, a cereal box: Formally, bright primary colours and a cartoon mascot target children; through a class lens, the "family size" label and price per 100 g sell value to budget-conscious buyers.

Your turn

What is the difference between a critical claim and a personal opinion? Give an example of each about any poem.

What does a formalist reader focus on?

What questions does a feminist / gender lens ask?

Paraphrase the last two lines of In an Artist's Studio.

What is Woolf's central claim in A Room of One's Own?

Why does Woolf invent Judith Shakespeare?

Name two questions an Indigenous-centred reading might ask.

More practice: warm-up

In literary studies, what does criticism mean?

Which lens asks who has money and power?

When did Rossetti write In an Artist's Studio, and when was it published?

What is the gaze?

Which lens focuses on what the reader brings to a text?

More practice: on your own

Why do the repetitions at the start (One... One) and end (Not as she is... Not as she is) of Rossetti's sonnet matter?

A classmate says: Lenses are biased, so it is better to read with no lens. Respond.

Apply a Marxist lens to the painter in Rossetti's poem in two or three sentences.

Identify the perspective and one limitation of Woolf's argument.

How can formalist and feminist readings support each other?

Challenge

Write a thesis on In an Artist's Studio that combines two lenses.

Explain why a reader should be careful about using the biographical lens on this poem.

Choose any novel or film you know well and show how a postcolonial or Indigenous-centred question changes your reading of it.

Check your understanding

Quiz

A critical lens is best described as...

Which lens focuses mainly on imagery, structure, sound and irony?

In In an Artist's Studio, Not as she is is repeated to show...

Woolf's Judith Shakespeare is...

Applying critical literacy to a critic means...

A respectful Indigenous-centred reading begins by asking...

For parents and teachers

What this lesson teaches: ENG4U Reading 1.5 (extending understanding by connecting texts to other texts, ideas and perspectives), 1.7 (evaluating texts and interpretations) and 1.8 (critical literacy: identifying and analysing perspectives and biases, including in literary criticism).

How to help at home:

Pick a familiar film or advertisement and ask your teen to read it through two lenses (for example, class and gender). Do the claims differ?
Ask them to explain Woolf's room of one's own argument in their own words, and whether it still applies today.

Common difficulties:

Treating lenses as opinions. A lens reading still needs evidence from the text.
Listing lenses without a claim. Through a feminist lens, the woman is silent is an observation; ask so what does that show?
Over-reading biography. Encourage phrases like many readers connect this to... rather than stating guesses as facts.

Facts used: Rossetti wrote the poem in 1856; it was published in 1896 in New Poems. Dante Gabriel Rossetti married Elizabeth Siddal in 1860. Woolf's book grew from talks given at Newnham and Girton colleges in October 1928 and was published in 1929. Ransom's The New Criticism appeared in 1941; Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn in 1947; Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture in 1943; Achebe's lecture on Heart of Darkness was given in 1975; Justice's book was published in 2018. Quotations are short; the rest is paraphrased.