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| Reviewed: |
Apr 28, 2010 by English Editorial Board |
| Overview: |
Critical approaches to literature reveal how or why a particular work is constructed and what its social and cultural implications are. Understanding critical perspectives will help you to see and appreciate a literary work as a multilayered construct of meaning. The site has three tabs: Elements of Poetry, Cultural Contexts, and Critical Approaches.
Elements of Poetry. Covers the basic set of poetic terms from allegory and meter to alliteration and word order. Each element is then applied to a reading of three poems: Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish”, Andrew Marvel’s “To His Coy Mistress” and Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz”. The various elements are applied to the three poems the site focuses on. The text of each of the three poems is also provided. Cultural Contexts analyze the social, political and economic undercurrents of three poems
Approaches include: deconstruction, Feminist Criticism, The New Historicism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, Reader-Response Criticism, Structuralism, Marxist Criticism, The New Criticism, Formalism, and Postcolonial Criticism. Other features include: Each poem’s cultural analysis included key primary documents from the period of the poem’s composition. For example “To His Coy Mistress’ Includes documents relating to Female sexuality and political rebellion. |
| Learning Goals: |
1. To understand how various analytical approaches to literature influence the interpretation of the work.
2. To review selected poems as interpreted through the various critical approaches.
3. To gain an understand of how various critical approaches have developed and interrelated over time. |
| Target Student Population: |
High school, college, and graduate school, especially for English and humanities majors. Selected poems suitable for college age. |
| Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills: |
High school level English, but better if used in upper division literature courses |
| Type of Material: |
Reference material |
| Recommended Uses: |
High school, college, and graduate school, especially for English and humanities majors--as a reference source or as model of how various critical approaches might affect interpretation. |
| Technical Requirements: |
Flash reader, IE or Firefox |
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| Strengths: |
Excellent and concise summaries/explanations. Applies elements of poetry to a reading of three poems. This demonstrates how to read a poem line by line. The literacry criticism section provides an excellent in-depth look at key literary theories and will help students develop an informaed approach to literary analysis.Cultural contexts helps situate the poem in its historical time period and allows students to combine close reading with a more broad based cultural approach to a poem. |
| Concerns: |
The literary criticism is not applied, like the poetry, to specific texts. This lack of a context may prevent beginning students from understanding and appreciating the value of a particular theory. |
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Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool |
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| Strengths: |
Excellent for reading poetry; invaluable for a poetry class or an introduction to literature class. Helps students understand the formal quality of poetry and gives them a vocabulary for talking about poems. Definitions for literary criticsm provides a starting point for further research. Cultural contexts will help students appreciate the forces at work in a poem's production and some of the influences on the author.
This is a one-stop resources (definition and examples as well as historical context) for the major schools of criticism one would need to know for graduate level study in English or the humanities. |
| Concerns: |
Critical Approaches would benefit from more supplemental resources. As currently desgined this section of the website provides just a working definition of lietary schools of criticism.
There may be slight differences in how historians or other social scientists would define and exemplify these approaches. |
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Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty |
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| Strengths: |
This site is very simple to use. The site is divided into Poems in Depth and Approaches and Contexts. Vistors clickon the appropriate tab and he screen displays either a approacj to criticsm, a poem, or a cultural context. The use of frames makes for easy reading. The poem, for instance, is displayed in the left hand frame while elements of poetry related to the specific poem are displayed in the right hand frame. |
| Concerns: |
none |
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| Other Issues and Comments: |
The only issue is we would prefer to see the approaches to literature have a little more applied content as well as a list of supplemental websites people could go to for further information about a particular school of literary criticism.
This is a reference site and needs a teacher/instructor's frame for high school or lower-division college students. The material is presented without prejudice. |
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