What a critical theory actually is

A critical theory is not a set of opinions about books. It is a set of questions — a position from which certain features of a text become visible that were invisible from elsewhere.

Test for using theory well: a lens must let you see something in the text you could not otherwise see. If your feminist paragraph and your Marxist paragraph could be swapped without either becoming false, you have not used either lens — you have merely named them.

• Theory is a tool, not an authority. You are not obliged to agree with a theory to use it, and the strongest essays put two lenses into conflict with each other over the same passage.
• Theory must land on evidence. Every theoretical claim ends in a quotation, a structural fact, or a silence.
• Beware the summary trap. Two paragraphs explaining what Marxism is will earn you nothing. Explain nothing; do it.

Using a lens

Reading the telling, not the tale

Narrative theory asks not what is told but how, and therefore who controls what you are allowed to know.

• Story vs discourse (or fabula vs syuzhet) — the events as they happened, versus the order and manner in which they are presented. The gap between the two is where meaning is manufactured.
• Narrator and focalisation — who speaks is not the same as who sees. A third-person narrator may see the world through one character's eyes, which quietly makes that character's assumptions the reader's own.
• Unreliability — a narrator whose account the text invites us to doubt. Ask what the text lets us see over the narrator's shoulder.
• Gaps and closure — what is withheld, and whether the ending resolves it. Structuralists (Todorov, Propp, Genette) describe recurring narrative shapes; the interesting question is always what a text does with the shape it inherits.
• Time — analepsis (flashback), prolepsis (flashforward), duration, frequency. A text that keeps returning to one event is making an argument about trauma or obsession without ever stating it.

Narrative theory is the lens that combines with all the others. Feminist, Marxist and post-colonial readings all end up asking a narrative question: who is granted a point of view, and who is only ever looked at?

Narrative theory in action

Reading gender

Feminist criticism is not one thing. Know at least the range:

• Images-of-women criticism — how are women represented? The angel, the monster, the madwoman, the muse, the corpse. Useful, but the weakest and most easily exhausted version.
• The gaze — who looks, and who is looked at? Laura Mulvey's account of the male gaze (developed for cinema, transferable with care) describes a structure in which the man acts and the woman is displayed.
• Gynocriticism — Elaine Showalter's term for the study of women's writing as a tradition in its own right, rather than women as objects in men's writing.
• The construction of gender — Simone de Beauvoir's claim that one is not born but rather becomes a woman; later, Judith Butler's argument that gender is performative, produced through repeated acts rather than expressing an inner essence.
• Intersection — class and race cut across gender. A reading that treats all women in a text as occupying one position will usually be wrong.

The most productive feminist question at A-level is a narrative one: who is granted interiority? Count the soliloquies, the free indirect passages, the moments of private thought. A text may adore its heroine and still never let her think.

Feminist reading, done well

Sort the critical question

Tap a question, then tap the theory that asks it.

Reading class and economy

Marxist criticism reads literature as produced by, and participating in, an economic order.

• Base and superstructure — the claim that a society's economic arrangements shape its culture. In its crude form this is determinism; in its useful form it is a question: what economic arrangement does this text need to be true in order to work?
• Ideology — Louis Althusser's argument that ideology is not a set of lies but the frame within which reality is experienced as natural. The most ideological thing in a text is what it does not think worth mentioning.
• Hegemony — Antonio Gramsci's term for rule maintained by consent rather than force: the ruled accept the order as common sense. Comedy and romance are extraordinarily good at manufacturing it.
• Commodity and labour — who works in this text, and is their work visible? Wealth in fiction very often appears as a property of persons rather than a product of anyone's hands.
• Literature as a commodity — books are also produced, priced, sold and reviewed. A Marxist reading includes the marketplace the text was made for.

The killer Marxist question: who does the work in this book, and where does the prose put them? Count the pages. The answer is almost always an argument.

Ideology

Match the concept to its theorist or theory

Tap a concept on the left, then where it comes from.

Reading empire

• Orientalism — Edward Said's argument that the West produced the East as an object of knowledge: exotic, irrational, feminised, in need of governing. Once you have the idea, you find its grammar everywhere in nineteenth-century writing.
• Othering — the construction of a group as fundamentally different, so that the observing culture can define itself as the norm.
• The subaltern — Gayatri Spivak's question, can the subaltern speak?, presses whether the most powerless can be heard at all, or whether even sympathetic representation talks over them.
• Hybridity and mimicry — Homi Bhabha's account of the colonised subject who imitates the coloniser: almost the same, but not quite — an imitation that unsettles the original by revealing it to be a performance.
• Writing back — texts from formerly colonised nations that rewrite the canon from the other side, turning a silent figure into a narrator.

Post-colonial reading is not confined to texts set in colonies. A country-house novel whose income comes from a plantation nobody visits is doing colonial work precisely by not mentioning it. The absence is the evidence.

Post-colonial reading

Reading the non-human

Eco-criticism asks how a text represents the natural world and the human relation to it — and it is the youngest lens in the Anthology, which makes it a demonstration of the point that new contexts of reception create new readings.

• Nature as setting vs nature as agent — is the landscape a backdrop for human feeling, or does it have its own life the text must reckon with?
• The pathetic fallacy — weather that agrees with the hero. Eco-criticism treats this suspiciously: it makes the non-human world a mirror for human emotion, which is a subtle form of erasure.
• Pastoral and anti-pastoral — the idealised countryside is very often a landowner's countryside: no labour, no mud, no wages. Raymond Williams's The Country and the City exposed exactly this, and it is where eco-criticism meets Marxism.
• Anthropocentrism — the assumption that the human is the centre and everything else is resource, scenery or symbol.
• The Anthropocene and climate — reading older texts in the light of ecological crisis: not to condemn them, but to notice what they could take for granted.

Best eco-critical question at A-level: does the land in this text belong to anybody, and does the text notice? That one question turns a nature-description paragraph into an argument.

Eco-critical reading

Building the theory essay

The task: two essays of 1250–1500 words, each on a different text (one poetry, one prose) and each linked to a different aspect of the Critical Anthology. One may be re-creative, with a commentary.

What a good theory essay does:

1. States a reading, not a theory. Your title should promise a claim about the text, not a summary of a school of criticism.
2. Applies the lens to specific, close evidence — and stays close. 1500 words is short; there is no room for a page of Marxism-in-general.
3. Tests the lens. The best essays find the place where the theory struggles with the text — a woman who is both objectified and given the last word; a labourer the novel both pities and cannot imagine. That resistance is your argument.
4. Uses critics sparingly and accurately. One well-understood idea, applied twice, beats six name-drops. Never attribute a quotation you cannot verify.
5. Bibliography and citation. Referencing is part of the assessment of academic practice — record everything you consult as you go, not the night before.

The re-creative option: the creative piece is only as good as its commentary. The commentary must show the critical thinking — what you changed, which theoretical claim the change tests, and what it reveals about the original.

NEA quality

The big ideas to take into the exam

Theory is not a hat you put on. It is a place you stand, and it changes what is visible. Press Finish to see your score.