List of Guide Questions For Literary Theory and Criticism

LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM
LIST OF GUIDE QUESTIONS
A. BIOGRAPHICAL CRITICISM
1. What verifiable aspects of the author’s biography show up in his or her work?
2. Do places where the author grew up appear in his or her work?
3. How does the author weave aspects of his or her familial life into the world of the
literary text? Does the author address relationships with parents, siblings, or
significant others? If so, how do these relationships create meaning in the text?
4. What distinguishes the author from his or her persona in the text? Is there a
distinction? How can you tell?
B. MARXIST CRITICISM
1. Whom does it benefit if the work or effort is accepted/successful/believed, etc.?

2. What is the social class of the author?
3. Which class does the work claim to represent?
4. What values does it reinforce?
5. What values does it subvert?
6. What conflict can be seen between the values the work champions and those it
portrays?
7. What social classes do the characters represent?
8. How do characters from different classes interact or conflict?
C. GENDER CRITICISM (SEXISM, FEMINISM, AND QUEER THEORY)
1. How is the relationship between men and women portrayed?

2. What are the power relationships between men and women (or characters assuming
male/female roles)?
3. How are male and female roles defined?
4. What constitutes masculinity and femininity?
5. How do characters embody these traits?
6. Do characters take on traits from opposite genders? How so? How does this change
others’ reactions to them?
7. What does the work reveal about the operations (economically, politically, socially, or
psychologically) of patriarchy?
8. What does the work imply about the possibilities of sisterhood as a mode of resisting
patriarchy?
9. What does the work say about women's creativity?
10. What does the history of the work's reception by the public and by the critics tell us
about the operation of patriarchy?
11. What role does the work play in terms of women's literary history and literary
tradition? (Tyson)
12. What elements of the text can be perceived as being masculine (active, powerful)
and feminine (passive, marginalized) and how do the characters support these
traditional roles?
13. What sort of support (if any) is given to elements or characters who question the
masculine/feminine binary? What happens to those elements/characters?
14. What elements in the text exist in the middle, between the perceived
masculine/feminine binary? In other words, what elements exhibit traits of both
(bisexual)?
15. How does the author present the text? Is it a traditional narrative? Is it secure and
forceful? Or is it more hesitant or even collaborative?
16. What are the politics (ideological agendas) of specific gay, lesbian, or queer works,
and how are those politics revealed in...the work's thematic content or portrayals of
its characters?
17. What are the poetics (literary devices and strategies) of a specific lesbian, gay, or
queer works?
18. What does the work contribute to our knowledge of queer, gay, or lesbian experience
and history, including literary history?
19. How is queer, gay, or lesbian experience coded in texts that are by writers who are
apparently homosexual?
20. What does the work reveal about the operations (socially, politically, psychologically)
homophobic?
21. How does the literary text illustrate the problematics of sexuality and sexual
"identity," that is the ways in which human sexuality does not fall neatly into the
separate categories defined by the words “homosexual” and “heterosexual?”
D. NEW HISTORICISM AND CULTURAL CRITICISM
1. What language/characters/events present in the work reflect the current events of

the author’s day?
2. Are there words in the text that have changed their meaning from the time of the
writing?
3. How are such events interpreted and presented?
4. How are events' interpretation and presentation a product of the culture of the
author?
5. Does the work's presentation support or condemn the event?
6. Can it be seen to do both?
7. How does this portrayal criticize the leading political figures or movements of the
day?
8. How does the literary text function as part of a continuum with other historical/cultural
texts from the same period?
9. How can we use a literary work to "map" the interplay of both traditional and
subversive discourses circulating in the culture in which that work emerged and/or
the cultures in which the work has been interpreted?
10. How does the work consider traditionally marginalized populations?
E. PSYCHOLOGICAL CRITICISM
1. How do the operations of repression structure or inform the work?

2. Are there any Oedipal dynamics - or any other family dynamics - at work here?
3. How can characters' behavior, narrative events, and/or images be explained in terms
of psychoanalytic concepts of any kind (for example, fear or fascination with death,
sexuality - which includes love and romance as well as sexual behavior - as a
primary indicator of psychological identity or the operations of ego-id-superego)?
4. What does the work suggest about the psychological being of its author?
5. What might a given interpretation of a literary work suggest about the psychological
motives of the reader?
6. Are there prominent words in the piece that could have different or hidden
meanings? Could there be a subconscious reason for the author using these
"problem words"?
F. STRUCTURALIST CRITICISM
1. Using a specific structuralist framework (like Frye's mythoi)...how should the text be
classified in terms of its genre? In other words, what patterns exist within the text that
make it a part of other works like it?
2. Using a specific structuralist framework...analyze the text's narrative operations...can
you speculate about the relationship between the...[text]... and the culture from which
the text emerged? In other words, what patterns exist within the text that make it a
product of a larger culture?
3. What patterns exist within the text that connect it to the larger "human" experience?
In other words, can we connect patterns and elements within the text to other texts
from other cultures to map similarities that tell us more about the common human
experience? This is a liberal humanist move that assumes that since we are all
human, we all share basic human commonalities.
4. What rules or codes of interpretation must be internalized in order to 'make sense' of
the text?
5. What are the semiotics of a given category of cultural phenomena, or 'text,' such as
high-school football games, television and/or magazine ads for a particular brand of
perfume...or even media coverage of an historical event? (Tyson 225)
G. FORMALIST CRITICISM
1. How does the work use imagery to develop its own symbols? (i.e. making a certain
road stand for death by constant association)
2. What is the quality of the work's organic unity "...the working together of all the parts
to make an inseparable whole..." (Tyson 121)? In other words, does how the work is
put together reflect what it is?
3. How are the various parts of the work interconnected?
4. How do paradox, irony, ambiguity, and tension work in the text?
5. How do these parts and their collective whole contribute to or not contribute to the
aesthetic quality of the work?
6. How does the author resolve apparent contradictions within the work?
7. What does the form of the work say about its content?
8. Is there a central or focal passage that can be said to sum up the entirety of the
work?
9. How do the rhythms and/or rhyme schemes of a poem contribute to the meaning or
effect of the piece?
H. POSTSTRUCTURALIST CRITICISM
1. How is language thrown into freeplay or questioned in the work? For example, note
how Anthony Burgess plays with language (Russian vs English) in A Clockwork
Orange, or how Burroughs plays with names and language in Naked Lunch.
2. How does the work undermine or contradict generally accepted truths?
3. How does the author (or a character) omit, change, or reconstruct memory and
identity?
4. How does a work fulfill or move outside the established conventions of its genre?
5. How does the work deal with the separation (or lack thereof) between writer, work,
and reader?
6. What ideology does the text seem to promote?
7. What is left out of the text that if included might undermine the goal of the work?
8. If we changed the point of view of the text - say from one character to another, or
multiple characters - how would the story change? Whose story is not told in the
text? Who is left out and why might the author have omitted this character's tale?

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LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM

LIST OF GUIDE QUESTIONS

1. Whom does it benefit if the work or effort is accepted/successful/believed, etc.?

C. GENDER CRITICISM (SEXISM, FEMINISM, AND QUEER THEORY)

1. How is the relationship between men and women portrayed?

D. NEW HISTORICISM AND CULTURAL CRITICISM

1. What language/characters/events present in the work reflect the current events of

1. How do the operations of repression structure or inform the work?

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