Critical

Approaches in
Writing a
Critique
1. How did you find the picture?
2. By looking at the picture, are you
thinking about the beautiful nature?
3. What about the location?
4. Did it cross to your mind who is
responsible of taking care of the
nature?
5. What about the feeling of the lady
jumping onto the water?
6. Did you ask yourself if you would
want to do the same?
7. What about the reasons why God has
created this nature for us?
8. Have you not wondered how God
created the beautiful world?
Literary Analysis: A literary analysis
essay examines, evaluates, and
makes an argument about a literary
work. As its name suggests, a literary
analysis essay goes beyond mere
summarization. It requires careful close
reading of one or multiple texts and
often focuses on a specific
characteristic, theme, or motif.
What is critique?
A critique is a careful analysis of an argument to
determine what is said, how well the points are made,
what assumptions underlie the argument, what issues
are overlooked, and what implications are drawn from
such observations. It is a systematic, yet personal
response and evaluation of what you read.
It is a genre of academic writing that briefly
summarizes and critically evaluates a work or concept.
Critiques can be used to carefully
analyze a variety of works such as:
 Creative works – novels, exhibits, film,
images, poetry
 Research – monographs, journal
articles, systematic reviews, theories
 Media – news reports, feature articles
 Like an essay, a critique uses a
formal, academic writing style and has a
clear structure, that is, an introduction,
body and conclusion. However, the
body of a critique includes a summary
of the work and a detailed evaluation.
The purpose of an evaluation is to
gauge the usefulness or impact of a
work in a particular field.
Why do we write critiques?
Writing a critique on a work helps us to develop:
 A knowledge of the work’s subject area or
related works.
 An understanding of the work’s purpose,
intended audience, development of argument,
structure of evidence or creative style.
 A recognition of the strengths and
weaknesses of the work.
How to write a critique
Before you start writing, it is important to have a
thorough understanding of the work that will be
critiqued.
 Study the work under discussion.
 Make notes on key parts of the work.
 Develop an understanding of the main
argument or purpose being expressed in the
work.
 Consider how the work relates to a broader
issue or context.
 The following are the
different approaches in
writing a critique:
1. Formalist: This approach regards literature as “a
unique form of human knowledge that needs
to be examined on its own terms.” All the elements
necessary for understanding the work are
contained within the work itself. Of particular interest
to the formalist critic are the elements of form—style,
structure, tone, imagery, etc.—that are found within
the text. A primary goal for formalist critics is to
determine how such elements work together with the
text’s content to shape its effects upon readers.
•Character: How does the character evolve during the story? What
is unique or interesting about a character? Is the character a
stereotypical action hero, a patriarchal father figure, or Madonna?
How does a character interact with other characters?
•Setting: How does the setting enhance tension within the work?
Do any elements in the setting foreshadow the conclusion of the
piece?
•Plot: What is the conflict? How do scenes lead to a suspenseful
resolution? What scenes make the plot unusual, unexpected,
suspenseful?
•Point of View: Who is telling the story? Is the narrator omniscient
(all knowing) or does the narrator have limited understanding?
2. Gender Criticism: This approach “examines how
sexual identity influences the creation and reception of
literary works.” Originally an offshoot of feminist
movements, gender criticism today includes a number
of approaches, including the so-called “masculinist”
approach recently advocated by poet Robert Bly.
The bulk of gender criticism, however, is feminist
and takes as a central precept that the patriarchal
attitudes that have dominated western thought have
resulted, consciously or unconsciously, in literature “full
of unexamined ‘male-produced’ assumptions.”
3. Feminist criticism attempts to correct this
imbalance by analyzing and combatting such attitudes
—by questioning, for example, why none of the
characters in Shakespeare’s play Othello ever
challenge the right of a husband to murder a wife
accused of adultery. Other goals of feminist critics
include “analyzing how sexual identity influences the
reader of a text” and “examining how the images of
men and women in imaginative literature reflect or
reject the social forces that have historically kept the
sexes from achieving total equality.”
Feminist Criticism examines images of
women and concepts of the feminine in myth
and literature; uses the psychological,
archetypal, and sociological approaches; often
focuses on female characters who have been
neglected in previous criticism. Feminist critics
attempt to correct or supplement what they
regard as a predominantly male-dominated
critical perspective.
 How does the story re-inscribe or contradict
traditional gender roles? For example, are the
male characters in “power positions” while the
women are “dominated”? Are the men prone to
action, decisiveness, and leadership while the
female characters are passive, subordinate? Do
gender roles create tension within the story? Do
characters’ gender roles evolve over the course of
the narrative?
•How does the work portray the lives of women?
•How are female characters portrayed? How are
the relationships between men and women
portrayed? Does this reinforce sexual and gender
stereotypes or challenge them?
•How does the specific language of a literary
work reflect gender or sexual stereotypes?
4. Historical: This approach “seeks to
understand a literary work by
investigating the social, cultural, and
intellectual context that produced it—a
context that necessarily includes the
artist’s biography and milieu.” A key
goal for historical critics is to
understand the effect of a literary work
upon its original readers.
Historical criticism focuses on the historical and social
circumstances that surrounded the writing of a text. It may
examine biographical facts about the author’s life (which can
therefore connect this approach with biographical criticism) as
well as the influence of social, political, national, and
international events. It may also consider the influence of other
literary works. New Historicism, a particular type of historical
criticism, focuses not so much on the role of historical facts
and events as on the ways these things are remembered and
interpreted, and the way this interpreted historical memory
contributes to the interpretation of literature. Typical questions
involved in historical criticism include the following:
•How (and how accurately) does the work
reflect the historical period in which it was
written?
•What specific historical events influenced the
author?
•How important is the work’s historical context
to understanding it?
•How does the work represent an interpretation
of its time and culture? (New Historicism)
5. Reader-Response Criticism: This
approach takes as a fundamental tenet that
“literature” exists not as an artifact upon a
printed page but as a transaction between
the physical text and the mind of a reader. It
attempts “to describe what happens in the
reader’s mind while interpreting a text” and
reflects that reading, like writing, is a creative
process.
Reader-Focused: How can we understand literary works by
understanding the subjective experience of reading them?
Reader-response criticism emphasizes the reader as much as the text.
It seeks to understand how a given reader comes together with a given
literary work to produce a unique reading. This school of criticism
rests on the assumption that literary works don’t contain or embody a
stable, fixed meaning but can have many meanings—in fact, as many
meanings as there are readers, since each reader will engage with the
text differently. In the words of literature scholar Lois Tyson, “reader-
response theorists share two beliefs: (1) that the role of the reader
cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature and (2) that
readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by
an objective literary text; rather they actively make the meaning they
find in literature.” Typical questions involved in this approach include
the following:
•Who is the reader? Also, who is the implied
reader (the one “posited” by the text)?
•What kind of memories, knowledge, and
thoughts does the text evoke from the reader?
•How exactly does the interaction between the
reader and the text create meaning on both the
text side and the reader side? How does this
meaning change from person to person, or if
the same person rereads it?
6. Structuralism focused on how human
behavior is determined by social, cultural
and psychological structures. It tended to
offer a single unified approach to human life
that would embrace all disciplines. The
essence of structuralism is the belief that
“things cannot be understood in isolation,
they have to be seen in the context of larger
structures which contain them.
For example, the structuralist analysis
of Donne’s poem, Good Morrow,
demands more focus on the relevant genre,
the concept of courtly love, rather than on
the close reading of the formal elements of
the text.
7. Sociological focuses on
man’s relationship to others in
society, politics, religion, and
business.