Jalandoni Memorial National High School

SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL

English for Academic Purposes Program

Reporters:
1. Gwen Myles Jover
2. Gina Mae Mesias
3. Ronel Bryan Casco
4. Kyla Marie Jaravilla
5. John Eliazer Lacaran

CRITICAL APPROACHES IN WRITING A CRITIQUE

CRITIQUE
Critique is a method of disciplined, systematic study of a written or oral discourse. Although critique is
commonly understood as fault finding and negative judgment,[1] it can also involve merit recognition,
and in the philosophical tradition it also means a methodical practice of doubt.[1] The contemporary
sense of critique has been largely influenced by the Enlightenment critique of prejudice and authority,
which championed the emancipation and autonomy from religious and political authorities.[1]
The term critique derives, via French, from Ancient Greek κριτική (kritikē), meaning "the faculty of
judgment", that is, discerning the value of persons or things.[2] Critique is also known as major logic, as
opposed to minor logic or dialectics.

What is meant by critical?

A critical review is not just a summary. It is an evaluation of what an author has said about a
topic. At college level, to be critical does not mean to criticize in a negative manner. Rather it
requires you to question the information and opinions in a text and present your evaluation or
judgement of the text. To do this well, you should attempt to understand the topic from
different perspectives (i.e. read related texts) and in relation to the theories, approaches and
frameworks in your course.

CRITIQUE VS CRITICISM
In French, German, or Italian, no distinction is drawn between 'critique' and 'criticism': the two words
both translate as critique, Kritik, and critica, respectively.[5] In the English language, according to
philosopher Gianni Vattimo, criticism is used more frequently to denote literary criticism or art criticism,
that is the interpretation and evaluation of literature and art; while critique may be used to refer to
more general and profound writing as Kant's Critique of pure reason.[5] Another proposed distinction is
that critique is never personalized nor ad hominem, but is instead the analyses of the structure of the
thought in the content of the item critiqued.[5] This analysis then offers by way of the critique method
either a rebuttal or a suggestion of further expansion upon the problems presented by the topic of that
specific written or oral argumentation. Even authors that believe there might be a distinction suggest
that there is some ambiguity that is still unresolved.[5]
 In everyday talk the most common meaning of criticism is something like “finding fault.” And to be
critical is to be censorious (having or showing tendency to criticize someone or something severely; very
critical). But a critic can see excellences as well as faults.

Functions of Critic
1. Introduce to authors or works of which was until now unaware.
2. Convince me that it have undervalued an author or a work because it had not read them carefully
enough.
3. Show relations between works of different ages and cultures which it could never have seen because
it do not know enough and never shall.
4. Give a “reading” of a work which increases understanding of it.
5. Throw light upon the process of artistic “Making.”
6. Throw light upon the relation of art to life, science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.

Formalist Criticism
• Emphasizes the work as an independent creation, a self-contained unit, something to be studied in
itself, not as part of some larger context, such as the author’s life or a historical period.
• This kind of study is called formalist criticism because the emphasis is on the form of the work, the
relationships between the parts—the construction of the plot, the contrasts between characters, the
functions of rhymes, the point of view, and so on.
• Formalist criticism is, in essence, intrinsic criticism, rather than extrinsic, for (at least in theory) it
concentrates on the work itself, independent of its writer and the writer’s background—that is,
independent of biography, psychology, sociology, and history.
• In practice, formalist criticism usually takes one of two forms, explication (the unfolding of meaning,
line by line or even word by word) or analysis (the examination of the relations of parts).
• Formalist criticism begins with a personal response to the literary work, but it goes on to try to
account for the response by closely examining the work. It assumes that the author shaped the poem,
play, or story so fully that the work guides the reader’s responses.

Writing a Formalist Literary Analysis

• Using formalism, a critic can show how the various parts of a work are welded together to make an
organic whole. This approach examines a text as a self-contained object; it does not, therefore, concern
itself with biographical information about the author, historical events outside of the story, or literary
allusions, mythological patterns, or psychoanalytical traits of the characters (except those aspects
described specifically in the text.)
• A formalist critic examines the form of the work as a whole, the form of each individual part of the text
(the individual scenes and chapters), the characters, the settings, the tone, the point of view, the
diction, and all other elements of the text which join to make it a single text. After analyzing each part,
the critic then describes how they work together to make give meaning (theme) to the text.

Deconstruction
• or deconstructive or poststructuralist criticism, can almost be characterized as the opposite of
everything formalist criticism stands for. Deconstruction begins with the assumptions that the world is
unknowable and that language is unstable, elusive, unfaithful.
• Language is all of these things because meaning is largely generated by opposition: “Hot” means
something in opposition to “cold,” but a hot day may be 90 degrees whereas a hot oven is at least 400
degrees; and a “hot item” may be of any temperature.
• Despite the emphasis on indeterminacy, one sometimes detects in deconstructionist interpretations a
view associated with Marxism. This is the idea that authors are “socially constructed” from the
“discourses of power” or “signifying practices” that surround them.
• Deconstruction is valuable insofar as— like the New Criticism—it encourages close, rigorous attention
to the text. Furthermore, in its rejection of the claim that a work has a single stable meaning,
deconstruction has had a positive influence on the study of literature.
• The problem with deconstruction, however, is that too often it is reductive, telling the same story
about every text— that here, yet again, and again, we see how a text is incoherent and heterogeneous.
There is, too, an irritating arrogance in some deconstructive criticism.

Reader- Response
• Probably all reading includes some sort of response—“This is terrific,” “This is a bore,” “I don’t know
what’s going on here”—and probably almost all writing about literature begins with some such
response, but specialists in literature disagree greatly about the role that response plays, or should play,
in experiencing literature and in writing about it.
• Reader-response criticism, then, says that the “meaning” of a work is not merely something put into
the work by the writer; rather, the “meaning” is an interpretation created or constructed or produced
by the reader as well as the writer.
• Against the objective view one can argue thus: No author can fully control a reader’s response to every
detail of the text. No matter how carefully constructed the text is, it leaves something—indeed, a great
deal—to the reader’s imagination.
• In an extreme form the subjective view denies that authors can make us perceive the meanings that
they try to put into their works. This position suggests that every reader has a different idea of what a
work means, an idea that reflects the reader’s own ideas.
• Many people who subscribe to one version or another of a reader-response theory would agree that
they are concerned not with all readers but with what they call informed readers or competent readers.
Thus, informed or competent readers are familiar with the conventions of literature.
• A reader response asks the reader to examine, explain and defend her/his personal reaction to a
reading. You will be asked to explore why you like or dislike the reading, explain whether you agree or
disagree with the author, identify the reading's purpose, and critique the text. There is no right or wrong
answer to a reader response. Nonetheless, it is important that you demonstrate an understanding of the
reading and clearly explain and support your reactions.

FEMINISM - The women's movement in 1960s to struggle for the equality of rights as social class
- Related to the ways in understanding literary works, in both production and reception in literature.

- A belief that women universally face some form of oppression or exploitation

- A commitment to uncover and understand what causes and sustains oppression
- A commitment to work individually and collectively everyday life to end all forms of oppression

Feminist Criticism
Focuses on how literature presents women as subjects of socio-political, psychological, and economic
oppression.
A criticism advocating equal rights for women in a political, economic, social, psychological, personal,
and aesthetic sense.

Feminist Criticism: Feminist literary criticism helps us look at literature in a different light. It applies the
philosophies and perspectives of feminism to the literature we read.

Karl Marx
A German Philosopher who criticized the injustice inherent brought by the European class/capitalist
system of economics

MARXIST CRITICISM
Is concerned with the differences between economic classes and implication of a capitalist system

CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

Deconstruction is a school of literary criticism that suggests that language is not a stable entity,
and that we can never exactly say what we mean. Therefore, literature cannot give a reader any
one single meaning, because the language itself is simply too ambiguous. Deconstructionists
value the idea that literature cannot provide any outside meaning; texts cannot represent reality.
Thus, a deconstructionist critic will deliberately emphasize the ambiguities of the language that
produce a variety of meanings and possible readings of a text.

Feminist criticism tries to correct predominantly male-dominated critical perspective with a

feminist consciousness. This form of criticism places literature in a social context and employs a
broad range of disciplines, such as history, psychology, sociology, and linguistics, to create a
perspective that considers feminist issues. Feminist theories also attempt to understand
representation from a woman’s point of view and analyze women’s writing strategies in the
context of their social conditions.

MARXIST CRITICISM is a strongly politically-oriented criticism, deriving from the theories of the
social philosopher Karl Marx. Marxist critics insist that all use of language is influenced by social class
and economics. It directs attention to the idea that all language makes ideological
statements about things like class, economics, race, and power, and the function of literary output
is to either support or criticize the political and economic structures in place. Some Marxist
critics use literature to describe the competing socioeconomic interests that advance capitalistic
interests such as money and power over socialist interests such as morality and justice. Because
of this focus, Marxist criticism focuses on content and theme rather than form.

New criticism evolved out of the same root theoretical system as deconstructionism, called
formalist criticism. It was popular between the 1940’s and the 1960’s, but can still be found in
some mutated forms today. New criticism suggests that the text is a self-contained entity, and
that everything that the reader needs to know to understand it is already in the text. New critics
totally discount the importance of historical context, authorial intent, effects on the reader, and
social contexts, choosing to focus instead on the layers in the next. This school of criticism
works with the elements of a text only – irony, paradox, metaphor, symbol, plot, and so on – by
engaging in extremely close textual analysis.

New historicism focuses on the literary text as part of a larger social and historical context, and
the modern reader’s interaction with that work. New historicists attempt to describe the culture
of a period by reading many different types of texts and paying attention to many different
dimensions of a culture, including political, social, economic, and aesthetic concerns. They
regard texts as not simply a reflection of the culture that produced them but also as productive of
that culture by playing an active role in the social and political conflicts of an age. New
historicism acknowledges and then explores various versions of “history,” sensitizing us to the
fact that the history on which we choose to focus is colored by being reconstructed by our
present perspective.

Psychological criticism uses psychoanalytic theories, especially those of Freud and Jacques
Lacan, to understand more fully the text, the reader, and the writer. The basis of this approach is
the idea of the existence of a human consciousness – those impulses, desires, and feelings about
which a person is unaware but which influence emotions or behavior. Critics use psychological
approaches to explore the motivations of characters and the symbolic meanings of events, while
biographers speculate about a writer’s own motivations – conscious or unconscious – in a literary
work.

Queer theory, or gender studies, is a relatively recent and evolving school of criticism, which
questions and problematizes the issues of gender identity and sexual orientation in literary texts.
Queer theory overlaps in many respects with feminist theory in its aims and goals, being at once
political and practical. To many queer theorists, gender is not a fixed identity that shapes actions
and thoughts, but rather a “role” that is “performed.” It also challenges the notion that there is
such a thing as “normal,” because that assumes the existence of a category for “deviant.” Queer
theorists study and challenge the idea that these categories exist at all, but particularly in terms of
sexual activities and identities.

Reader-response criticism removes the focus from the text and places it on the reader instead,
by attempting to describe what goes on in the reader’s mind during the reading of a text. Reader-
response critics are not interested in a “correct” interpretation of a text or what the author
intended. They are interested in the reader’s individual experience with a text. Thus, there is no
single definitive reading of a text, because the reader is creating, as opposed to discovering,
absolute meanings in texts. This approach is not a rationale for bizarre meanings or mistaken
ones, but an exploration of the plurality of texts. This kind of strategy calls attention to how we
read and what influences our readings, and what that reveals about ourselves.

GENERAL STRUCTURE FOR A CRITIQUE

1. Introduction
2. Plot Summary/Description
 3. Analysis/Interpretation
4. Conclusion/Evaluation

‘A critique analyses, interprets and evaluates a text, answering the questions how? Why? And how
well?’ (Jeffrey Cahan, 2004)

WHAT IS A CRITIQUE
‘What the reader of a critique is really interested in is hearing your assessment’ (Jones, 2001)

A critique is a specific style of essay which identifies the author’s ideas and evaluates the m based on
current theory and research. ƒ In order t o do a meaningful critique y o u need to understand where the
author is co ming from and why they are writing this particular article ƒ In a critique y ou need to
respond to the article not simply summarise it ƒ You need to explain why you respond t o the text in a
certain way and to support your argument with y our readings ƒ Begin by regarding the article as a
whole and building up a background picture.

BACKGROUND
 Who is the author (s) and what is the author’s background (discipline, researc h history,
political history if relevant)? - This will give you insight into their personal perspective, for
example, an article on the use of technology in schools written by an IT specialist will have a
different perspective from that of an educationalist.

 When was t he article written? - Is it based on current issues or not and is the article relevant to
today’s research? ƒ
 Who is the intended audience? - This can also lead us to some understanding of the purpose of
the article.
 What sources does the author use? - This can lead us to understand the theoretical basis of the
article.
 Has the author focused on a particular area of research or on a specific point of view? ƒ
 What general assumptions does the author make? Assumptions can be cultural, social or
theoretical.

INTRODUCTION
The length of an introduction is usually one paragraph for a journal article review and two or
three paragraphs for a longer book review. Include a few opening sentences that announce
the author(s) and the title, and briefly explain the topic of the text. Present the aim of the text
and summarize the main finding or key argument. Conclude the introduction with a brief
statement of your evaluation of the text. This can be a positive or negative evaluation or, as is
usually the case, a mixed response.

ANALYSIS/INTERPRETATION
‘What is the author’s particular concern?’ (Metcalfe, 2002)

Analysis of the article is necessary y in order to establish the general purpose, evidence, limitations, and
the structure of an article. ƒ Your analysis of the article deter mines exactly what it is the author is
saying and how they are saying it ƒ Your analysis needs to be thorough, as this is the information on
which you will base y our evaluation ƒ It is important to refer to your analysis during your critique,
although describing t he article should comprise no more than a third of your critique.

What is meant by analysis?

Analysing requires separating the content and concepts of a text into their main components
and then understanding how these interrelate, connect and possibly influence each other.
Commenting critically on an article involves analysis and evaluation. Analysis of the article
involves dissecting the information presented in order to identify the purpose, the main points,
the methodology and the findings or conclusions of the article (This is done in the initial
summarizing step). In addition, analysis for critical comment involves identifying:
1. unstated assumptions
2. steps in the argument that are not logical
3. any additional purposes of the article that are not explicitly stated.

Purpose
You can usually ascertain t he author’s purpose within the introduction e.g. their thesis statement, what
is it they are trying to prove? ƒ
 What is the purpose of the article? ƒ
 What arguments are being used to persuade the intended audience to believe?

Evidence ƒ
 You have identified the sources; now identify what each source is saying in support of your
author’s argument.
 What evidence is being used to support the argument? ƒ
 Section headings will give a good insight into supporting points given for an argument.
 Does the author present the evidence to back up a point made, to illustrate a point, or t o
engender sympathy towards an argument? e.g. startling statistics ƒ
 Is there any experiential or experimental analysis given (statistical evidence), and is it qualitative
or quantitative?

Limitations ƒ
 What limitations has the author identified? e.g. time limit, sample size, information base,
the degree of further research required, and the degree to which the article can be applied.
 Are both sides of the argument presented and supported wit h references?

PLOT SUMMARY/DESCRIPTION
Present a summary of the key points along with a limited number of examples. You can also
briefly explain the author’s purpose/intentions throughout the text and you may briefly
describe how the text is organized. The summary should NOT be more than a third of the
critical review.

SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND & ANALYSIS

In summary, the information you need before you begin your critique includes:
1. The background and discipline of the author
2. The main issue being discussed
3. The point the author is arguing on that issue
4. The sources used to support this argument
5. The specific evidence used to support the argument
6. Any experiential or experimental analysis given (statistical evidence)
7. Any limitations identified.

CONCLUSION/EVALUATION

Conclusion
This is usually a very short paragraph.
Restate your overall opinion of the text.
Briefly present recommendations.
If necessary some further qualification or explanation of your judgment can be included.
This can help your critique sound fair and reasonable.
The analysis breaks down the information provided in the article. The evaluation of this information, the
way it is presented, its validity and application. This is the main focus of your critique.

What is meant by Evaluation or Judgment?

Here you decide the strengths and weaknesses of a text. This is usually based on specific
criteria. Evaluating requires an understanding of not just the content of the text, but also an
understanding of a text’s purpose, the intended audience and why it is structured the way it is.

Evaluation of the article involves making judgments about the value (both positive and
negative) of the article against specific criteria.

EVALUATION OF TOPIC
Yes No
Is the topic of the article clearly defined or whether it is ambiguous?
Is there an implicit argument to the paper? (That being implied or suggested but
not actually expressed)?
Are all the key words well defined?
Is the argument logical?
Is the text well clearly written in an orderly way?

Evaluation of the evidence ƒ

 Is the evidence convincing or perceptive? ƒ
 If there isn’t any experiential or experimental evidence given, why not? If there is, why? ƒ
 Is the evidence accurate and is it sufficient to back up t he points being argued?
 Is the text and evidence presented appropriate for the intended audience? E.g. If teachers are
the intended audience, then it would be inappropriate, in most cases, for a computer specialist
to present an article from a highly technical perspective.

Evaluation of the argument ƒ

 How does this article relate to other reading which you have done i n this subject area? ƒ
  Was the counter argument fully considered? What was it? ƒ
 What assumptions have been made and how do these assumptions weaken or impact the
argument? ƒ
 Were the implications of accepting the argument of the article fully explained? ƒ
 Are there aspects to the paper which raise a strong response? If so why? ƒ
 Where the argument of the article leads to possible applications of the theory, were these
practical or meaningful?

STRUCTURE OF CRITIQUE

Jeffrey Cahan, (2004) suggests that you can structure your critique in two ways:

First method: ƒ
 Itemize the argument into main point, reasons for argument, support offered ƒ
 Discuss t he strength a n d weakness of the articles assumptions ƒ
 Identify the article’s audience ƒ
 Assess the value of the overall argument.

Second method: ƒ
 Identify and explain the author’s ideas and perspective and the audience. Include direct quotes
from the article to illustrate your points (background) ƒ
 Explain what you think about the article, based on the evaluation as listed above. Focus on
specific weaknesses and strengths in the article (One per paragraph) ƒ
 For each point you mention, include sections from the article (quote or paraphrase) to illustrate
your point and bring in references to provide evidence i n support of your critique.

REFERENCES:

http://www.massey.ac.nz/massey/fms/Student%20services/Student%20Learning%20Development%20
Service/Documents/Albany/Brochures/Study%20skills/Critique%20of%20an%20academic%20article.pdf

https://1.cdn.edl.io/iNO2hsoBObE7ErZI4vRv3fHtpqHhNay113p0RZDYQwsnUoy8.pdf

https://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/feminist-criticism.pdf

http://www.athenscsd.org/userfiles/37/Classes/970/feminist_criticism.pdf?id=2194