Select a creative or artistic work that you want to apply your chosen theory to.Briefly explain some of the key concepts, questions, or ideas of your chosen literary theory, including an in-text citation for your source(s).

Literary Criticism Discussion

Purpose:

Hone your ability to choose and use a theoretical lens in meaningful ways. Practice synthesizing the information found in scholarly sources and thinking critically about cultural and literary texts.

Tasks: After reading through the task list, take a look at the Example Lit Crit Assignment for reference.

Connect one of the theories of literary criticism that you were introduced to on the Introducing Literary Criticism page to some form of creative/artistic media – whether it be film, music, literature, etc. – that you enjoy or are otherwise drawn to.

Explore and explain how you think the theoretical perspective is either expressed in or can be applied to your chosen work. Make sure that your included scholarly materials are directly relevant and applicable to your argument; take time reading over the materials to ensure a good match of theory to your selected creative work.

Part 1.

Choose one of the Schools of Literary Criticism from Unit 1, besides Reader Response (i.e. ethnic and cultural studies, feminist theory, queer theory, psychoanalytic theory, or structuralism and semiotics).

Part 2.

Learn more about your chosen literary theory using the credible, scholarly sources included in this unit:

Feminist Theory: Gregory Castle and Robert C. Evans
Queer Theory: Gregory Castle and David Carter
Psychoanalytic Theory: Gregory Castle and Robert C. Evans
Structuralism and Semiotics: Gregory Castle and Robert C. Evans
Ethnic and Cultural Studies: Gregory Castle and Robert C. Evans

Part 3.

Select a creative or artistic work that you want to apply your chosen theory to. Choose something that is interesting or exciting to you that you will enjoy thinking critically about.

Part 4.

Briefly explain some of the key concepts, questions, or ideas of your chosen literary theory, including an in-text citation for your source(s). Remember that any time you use words or ideas from a source, you want to clearly indicate this in your submission by enclosing exact words in quotation marks and including a parenthetical citation. Your in-text parenthetical citation would include the author’s surname, a space, and the page number (this is usually found at the bottom of each page of the PDF) in parentheses.

A sample quote would look like this:

Anthropological concepts such as “Lévi-Strauss’s study of kinship systems and mythology [can] illuminate[] the specific ways that Structuralism can be applied to symbolic social systems” (Castle 187).

Part 5.

Introduce your chosen media work, and provide a link to it.Discuss how and why your chosen literary theory applies to your chosen artistic/creative media. How does viewing your artifact through the lens of a specific literary theory color the way that we respond to it? How does it change what aspects of the artifact we pay attention to?

Part 6.

Include an MLA Works Cited-style citation for the source(s) that you used. This will allow you to practice citation for future papers. The sources linked above are from 3 different academic texts. Consult this bibliographic list of these sources.

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