examination of critical theories

The idea of teaching students how to think critically, and more specifically, how to view the media critically, is important to me. This also applies to teaching literature, as almost always think, discuss, and write about literature from the perspective of different critical lenses. But actually understanding the different critical theories and lenses and be difficult and somewhat confusing. Thinking “critically” is such a broad concept—we have to learn how to think more specifically from a feminist perspective, or Marxist, or postmodern. And all of these theories both have things in common and conflict. In my K-12 education I was never taught the different theories, never given the histories or context or vocabulary. It wasn’t until college when I embarked on an independent study in critical theory that I was able to finally get at what all this meant, and then I realized how much I had missed out on.

It’s important that we as teachers give our students access to these different theories, from Rhetorical/Audience to Postcolonial, because they all affect how we understand text (by which I include both books and media). One point from Beach that I thought was really important, yet seems almost absent in school, is a move from theory to practice: “It is important to go beyond critique to engage students in some proactive challenging status-quo practices. If they discover biased reporting in their local television news, they could then write a letter to the television news director…” (p. 33).

I think that audience analysis is a theory that will seem pretty intuitive or obvious to most students. It isn’t too much of a jump for us to think, Who is this person writing for? What is the intended audience? Who are they trying to reach with this message? This is a very good theory to begin with when talking about critical theories and discourse, as it applies to almost all literature and other media.

Semiotic analysis brings in the cultural perspective, examining the meaning of different codes and signs within texts. I think the most important thing for students to understand here is that these meanings are indeed culturally and socially derived.

Narrative analysis takes a closer look at the texts themselves and examines them in terms of how they function as stories. The structure itself is important, and students can think about how different genres affect text as well. I think this critical approach lends itself well to television and movies, as these often fall into archetypical patterns that are easy for students to examine and analyze.

Poststructuralist theory looks at language through binary classification, and asks the question, How do language categories affect perception? When we say that something is male or female, what does that mean? Black or White? Right or Wrong? I think this particular theory is perfect for adolescents, who are trying to discover their unique identities in a binary world. They are wondering who they are in the middle of categorical language, and can discuss the implications of being neither Good nor Evil, but somewhere in between.

The umbrella of critical discourse analysis includes discourses of class, race, and gender, although that most often is studied under the banner of Feminist theory. This theory takes a very realist approach to looking at social order, taking into account questions of power and identity. In my experience, this is one of the most fundamental of all the critical theories, and is important to introduce to students as they begin to think about worlds outside of their own lived experiences.

Psycholanalytic theory is relatively new to me, but is the idea that meaning is shaped by our own desires. I can see this theory as being relevant when working with adolescents, who have strong desires concerning what they want and who they want to be. How do these desires affect the meaning they derive from texts? How to advertisers, movie-makers, writers, etc., use these desires to provide adolescents with the characters, images, stories, that they know will be consumed?

Feminist analysis has moved beyond the binary idea of females vs. males to consider the broader question of society’s treatment of gender. Judith Butler, as explained by Beach, suggests that “we should think of gender as free-floating and fluid rather than fixed, but also constrained and limited by discourses of desire that position people to adopt different versions of the self” (p. 41). In this way she draws on psychoanalytic theory.

Postmodernism is probably the most confusing of all the critical theories. In fact, ask someone to define postmodernism, and most of time they won’t be able to tell you what exactly it is. Even the experts that study the theory disagree on its exact definition. What it is, for sure, is a reaction to modernism, the idea that master narratives are associated with progress, truth, human improvement, high art, science, and technology—the assumption that these narratives will all lead to happiness and fulfillment (Beach, p. 41). Postmodernism challenges all of that, undermining modernist notions of reality and truth, creating new ideas for what is meaningful.

The chart below, from Postmodernism and its Critics, is a good way of contrasting the two schools of thoughts, as well as the chart on the Po-Mo Page.

Contrast of Modern and Postmodern Thinking


I took a postmodern literature class in college, and we read books with disjointed narratives or alternative story styles, like Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novels Maus and Maus II, and William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition.

A teaching idea for postmodernism would be to have students compare and contrast modern and postmodern works, to make their own charts, similar to the ones above. They might read a modern novel, by Henry James or Virginia Wolf, and compare it to a postmodern text. Another activity might be examining the narrative structures of a postmodern book and a postmodern film, such as Memento. If time allows, students can even create their own postmodern narrative, through storyboard or film, based on the themes they've charted.

Postcolonial theory takes a look at the broader world and examines how colonialism affects media texts and understanding. A good definition of this theory is found on the website Political Discourse:

Historians, literary critics, and social scientists use the idea of postcolonialism to examine the ways, both subtle and obvious, in which colonization affects the colonized society. Notwithstanding different time periods, different events and different effects that they consider, all postcolonial theorists and theory admit that colonialism continues to affect the former colonies after political independence. By exposing a culture's colonial history, postcolonial theory empowers a society with the ability to value itself.

This theory would be especially important when studying multicultural literature, or American literature of a certain time period or subject. It is similar in a sense to the critical discourses of race and class, which ask readers to examine how a certain perspective or worldview affects perception.

Students in a multicultural literature course might use the postcolonial theory to examine different texts and uncover hidden meanings. Any class reading a work from the canon, most often written by white males, can analyze the text for its postcolonial meanings. Exercises like these allow students to expand their worldview. In a media class, students can analyze popular TV shows or movies for themes and assumptions about colonized cultures. Even a show like Lost provides tons of food for thought and discussion.

In conclusions, while all of these cultural theories may seem daunting, each is a useful tool for inquiry into texts, both literature and broader media texts.