Since the expansion from traditional critical theory to "This New Critical Approach," Average Joes (like me) are given the ability to say what an artist's work means...and whether or not the author would agree with this is irrelevant. In the beginning of this New Approach, critical theory basically threw out the rulebook and clung to the subjective truths of an individual reader’s perception. The power here lies in the reader’s mind; there is no absolute truthful way to interpret a given piece...?
Post-structuralism and postmodernism are both running away from all forms of known analysis yet breeched. By the time Frye and Campbell come around, the previous theories are being thrown aside for a newer acknowledgement of the past; archetypal theories relate current and more recent pieces to their ancient, mythical, yet identifiable ancestors.
Psychoanalytic, feministic, and Marxist theories all focus on a single aspect of analysis. And by their names they can be easily understood.
Reader-Response seems the best place to start in criticizing a piece. Like in class the other day, we easily started talking when the floor was left open to our open-ended reflections of Oedipus.\
New Historicist Theory also seems like a natural place to move into when analyzing literature. It involves simply looking at the times a piece was written in to better understand the piece. At this point, it’s interesting to note how critical theory has made a full-circle back to author-focused theory. The “New Approach” was running away from an author’s Point-of-View, however, this cannot be avoided when magnifying the setting which an author worked.
Deconstruction Theory makes as much sense as “There is absolutely no such thing as absolute truth!”
Out.
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