How to do a Critical Reading

1. Read the text carefully, write down marginal notes

(questions raised by the text, insights, points you need to
research on about cultural or historical context).
2. Look through your notes and find which method of critical
analysis your notes are leaning toward.
3. Try to answer the questions or guidelines for the type of
critical analysis you have chosen:
New Criticism:
1. What complexities (or tensions, ironies, paradoxes,
oppositions, ambiguities) can you find in the text?
2. What idea unifies the work, and therefore resolves
these ambiguities?
3. What details or images support this resolution (that
is, connect the parts/elements to the whole?)
Reader-Response Criticism
1. How do I respond to the work?
2. How does the text aid in shaping my response?
3. How might other readers respond to the text? Will
theirs differ from mine? What are the possible
reasons for these differing responses?
Deconstructive Criticism A
1. Identify the oppositions in the text (X vs. Y).
2. Determine which member of the opposition (X or Y)
appears to be favored.
3. Look for evidence that contradicts that favoring.
4. Expose the texts indeterminacy.

Deconstructive Criticism B
1. What is the most obvious statement the text is
trying to make? What effect is it trying to create?
2. How might the text tend also to create the very
attitude, feeling, or assumptions it is trying to
remove? How does the text do or say contradictory
things? How does this contradiction influence the
texts effectiveness?
Biographical, Historical, or New Historical Criticism
1. Determine the historical setting of the work.
Investigate the authors biography.
2. Consider how the historical or biographical
background helps us understand the work. Or,
consider how the work contradicts or stands apart
from the usual historical or biographical
background of its milieu.
3. Consider what other texts of the same time might
be related to the text. Identify the ideology that is
shaping this system of texts.
Psychological Criticism
! Upon closer examination of the text, what
underlying meanings and significance can be found?
Feminist Criticism
! How does the piece try to move away from or
expose the dominant discourse (patriarchal texts or
ideologies)?
4. Try to come up with a thesis statement to focus your ideas
and then draft an outline to organize your thoughts.
5. Now, write your papermake sure to include textual
evidence and use the MLA Documentation Format.

Based on handout prepared by M.A. Villaceran, UP Diliman