Although formalism as a school of criticism has lost its rank as the primary method of interpretation, it still has a place in the wider world of literary criticism today. Formalism provided other critical theories with the nomenclature and tools of analysis those theories use. Thus, when a reader-response critic (see page 13) or feminist critic (see page 12) discusses a passage, he or she will speak about theme, tone, or figurative language. In addition, formalism still provides students with the analytical tools they need to read and interpret written texts.
While literary critics’ primary interpretive method was formalism, by the middle of the 20th century, things had begun to change (Crews, n.d.). A series of interpretive methods that brought other points of view to the reading and interpreting of texts began to emerge. Many of the critical schools rejected the formalist notion that a text is a thing in isolation (Richter, 1998). These methods include Marxist, feminist, and deconstructionist theories. Most of these schools viewed a written text as a product, not just of an author, but also of a culture that strongly influenced the creation of the text, which might adhere to cultural norms or reject them (Richter, 1998). One way to think about these methods is to consider them as lenses one applies when reading and interpreting texts. Each lens will clarify a particular perspective on the passage in question. In approaching the interpretation of texts from a variety of viewpoints, these methods signal a moment when regularity and agreement on meaning were less valued than before, reflecting the shift in Western cultural values more broadly (Crews, n.d.). At this point, many literary critics also began to look for diversity of perspectives, not just in their criticism, but also in the texts themselves, and pushed back against the notion of the Western canon, which predominantly consisted of dead, white, male, Judeo-Christian, straight writers (Richter, 1998).
Marxist Criticism
The ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—particularly of the struggle between socioeconomic classes of the proletariat (workers) and bourgeoisie (owners of the means of production)—have had an enormous effect on the study of history, politics, and economics (Magee, 2001; Popkin, 2000). Literary critics have not missed the opportunity to apply the Marxist notion of economics and social structure to literature, providing a lens that can be productive in interpretation (Richter, 1998). Foundational to a Marxist approach to literature is the idea that history is economic. From a Marxist perspective, history can be reinterpreted not as a series of actions by great men (kings, generals, politicians) or great countries but as the working out of class struggles, with economics driving historical decisions. Marx owed a great deal to philosopher Georg Hegel, who saw the world in terms of conflict, with opposing powers constantly in a struggle to allow a world spirit to reveal and fulfill itself (Magee, 2001). Marx saw the struggle as primarily one of class. He also advocated using history as a political weapon in promoting the emergence and triumph of the proletariat in its struggle against the bourgeoisie (Magee, 2001). Marxist literary critics are often unafraid of taking Marx’s advice in this matter and reread literature as a weapon against Western capitalism.
Critic Warren Montag (1992) provided one example of how the Marxist lens can yield a very different reading of a text. In his article “The ‘Workshop of Filthy Creation’: A Marxist Reading of Frankenstein,” Montag (1992) rewrote the traditional reading of Mary W. Shelley’s (1818/1992) famous novel. Readers often interpret Frankenstein as a comment on the limitations of science, suggesting there are actions that scientists—even if they could—should not take. Death is meant to be final, and the reanimation of dead flesh means that a scientist at some point is playing God. Readers often take the ending of the novel, tragic for both creation and creator, to mean that some things are better left unknown.
Montag (1992), on the other hand, approached the novel from the perspective of class. Victor Frankenstein, brought up in a wealthy home, provided with a first-class education, and clearly a part of the ruling class, is the perfect example of the bourgeoisie. In animating his creature, he is in fact, through his horrible actions, giving birth to a symbol of proletariat man. In the conflict between these two characters, Shelley captured the fundamental conflict of Western capitalism—the need of the bourgeoisie to create, use, and control the proletariat, and the desire of the proletariat to rise beyond that control and be totally independent. This is a very different reading of the novel, but a legitimate one nevertheless.
Placing the presuppositions of Marxist criticism on the reading of any text, particularly a nonfiction one, can help students quickly see the results of changes in perspective and help them understand that different readers can experience the same text very differently.
Feminist Criticism
Equally surprising are the changes that emerge when looking at a work through a feminist lens. As feminism became more and more a force in Western culture through the mid and late 20th century, literary critics sought to apply some of the basic presuppositions of feminism to the interpretation of literature (Richter, 2007). There are many feminisms, approaches all sharing the basic ideas of feminism but approaching literary interpretation with different agendas (Richter, 1998). Still, there are a few common traits nearly all feminisms share, and they are often focused on the politics of gender.
First, feminism focuses on the fact that men designed and benefit from patriarchy, a system of government, culture, and civilization. Although it may appear to be normal, patriarchy is not inherent or natural to human society. Patriarchy only appears normal because it has been in operation for so long and because men have kept themselves in decision-making positions that allow them to perpetuate the system. An important effect of patriarchy is that it robs women of their identity through objectification. Because patriarchy encourages males to act on their propensity to see women as objects of sexual desire, it places women only in that role, and therefore removes the possibility of women having identities beyond that objectification. Therefore, patriarchy is the problem, and feminism seeks to overturn it as a system (Richter, 1998).
In applying these ideas to literature, approaching a traditional story by focusing on gender and the problems of patriarchy will yield yet another (and quite legitimate) reading. As feminist critics examined the Western canon, they criticized the fact that male authors wrote a disproportionate number of these works (Richter, 1997; Woolf & Gordon, 2005). Some women-authored works relegated to secondary status (or worse) at the time of their publication were rediscovered as feminism gained acceptance. One such work is Kate Chopin’s novella The Awakening, written in 1899, which literary critics virtually ignored until the middle of the 20th century. Today, The Awakening is one of the most studied texts in college classrooms and some high schools (Chopin, 1899/1994), but it took a shift in the way society views gender roles and the objectification of women for that change to occur.
Applying a feminist perspective to major events and character interactions in a text can yield some fascinating authorial moves that a formalist reading might not.
Postmodernism
The ideas of postmodernism (for example, skepticism, the rejection of objective truth, knowledge as socially constructed, and so on) also found their way into the interpretation of writing in the late 1960s and the years following. One example of this is poststructuralism. Poststructuralist critics desired to remove the structures traditional culture had placed on the reader’s view of the written text. A traditional view focuses on binaries—good versus evil, black versus white, United States versus the world, and a whole variety of dichotomous approaches to understanding ideas. Poststructuralism sought to identify the complexities of the world, to show that difficult ideas resist the reduction to simplistic two-sided discussions. While there is an appeal in identifying the complexities of human life and applying this to the reading of a text, poststructuralism was also seen as an attack on a more traditional or conservative worldview.
Perhaps the deepest and most challenging form of poststructuralism is deconstructionism. Emerging out of language theory, deconstructionism identified the disconnect that can occur between the written word on the page and the thing it refers to—between the signifier and the signified (Richter, 1998). Deconstructionists point out that writing itself perpetuates the distance between signifier and signified because the gap between the two continually grows