CRITICAL APPROACHES IN

WRITING A CRITIQUE SUCH AS

FORMALISM, FEMINISM, ETC.
At the end of the lesson the student will
be able to:
■ identify the appropriate approaches in writing
a critique
■ distinguish the different approaches from
one another
■ appreciate the importance of these
approaches in academic writing
Activity 1

Short Film Showing.

Activity 2
Questions:
■ 1. What was the film about? Use only 3
sentences to explain your answer.
■ 2. Did you like the film? Why or why not?
■ 3. Which part of the film did you like best?
Why? Which part you did not like? Why?
Critical Approaches in Writing a Critique
Paper.
■ Formalist criticism is defined as a
literary criticism approach which provides
readers with a way to understand and enjoy a
work for its own inherent value as a piece of
literary art. Formalist critics spend a great
deal of time analyzing irony, paradox,
imagery, and metaphor.
 Deconstructionism, as applied to
literary criticism, is a paradox about a
paradox: It assumes that all discourse, even
all historical narrative, is essentially
disguised self-revelatory messages. Being
subjective, the text has no fixed meaning, so
when we read, we are prone to misread.
 Historical criticism, also known as
the historical-critical method or
higher criticism, is a branch
of criticism that investigates the origins of
ancient texts in order to understand "the
world behind the text". ... That may be
accomplished by reconstructing the true
nature of the events that the text
describes.
 Reader-response criticism is a school
of literary theory that focuses on
the reader (or "audience") and their
experience of a literary work, in contrast
to other schools and theories that focus
attention primarily on the author or the
content and form of the work.
Mimetic criticism
Mimetic critics asks how well the work of literature accords with the real
world.
Is it accurate?
Is it correct?
Is it moral?
Does it show how people really act?

Mimetic approach includes:

Moral criticism
Psychological criticism
Feminist criticism
 Archetypal literary criticism is a type of
critical theory that interprets a text by
focusing on recurring myths
and archetypes (from the Greek archē,
"beginning", and typos, "imprint") in the
narrative, symbols, images, and character
types in literary works.
 Psychological Criticism, also known as
Psychoanalytical Criticism, is the analysis of
an author's unintended message. The
analysis focuses on the biographical
circumstances of an author. The main goal
is to analyze the unconscious elements
within a literary text based on the
background of the author.