Jul 26, · At first, the critical lens metaphor seems functionally equivalent to the critical toolbox metaphor. Both, for instance, can be used in isolation or combination with others of its kind. But whereas the tool serves a temporary usefulness, a lens suggests a permanent way of seeing, a way of seeing perhaps not otherwise blogger.com: Thomas L Martin Critical lenses Literary lenses (which are more formally called Schools of Criticism) focus on one basic principle: Different readers read the same text differently. Knowing how different groups of readers read a text can illuminate deeper meaning and new interpretations Literary Theories: A Sampling of Critical Lenses Literary theories were developed as a means to understand the various ways people read texts. The proponents of each theory believe their theory is the theory, but most of us interpret texts according to the "rules" of several different theories at a time. All literary theories are lensesFile Size: 35KB
What Does'critical Lens' Mean?
In any case, figuring literary theories as lenses appears to be the metaphor that embodies a widespread understanding of the role of theory today. Before this was the critical toolbox, critical lens meaning. For several decades leading up to the appearance of the first edition of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism incritics referred to the concepts and ideas in literary theory as tools.
The assortment of those tools taken together represented a toolbox the reader might carry from one text to another. That metaphor drops out of use around the turn of the century, critical lens meaning.
The MLA Index clearly demonstrates the shift in the metaphor when in the s the toolbox metaphor trends down to nearly nothing, while the lens metaphor begins and in the later s rises to a peak. If it is indeed an end in itself, where does that leave the literature? Or perhaps he was out front of a critical lens meaning shift in our thinking about the role of theory and its relationship to the arts.
New paradigms require new metaphors. Does the paradigm behind the lens metaphor assume that the literature is just another commentary on, or exemplification of, the theory?
Does that paradigm relegate the primary source to a secondary status? It is significant to note that the adjective Literary in the titles of competing anthologies is absent from the Norton volume. That is what the toolbox metaphor essentially suggested: meaning resides in the literary text, and some application of tools might be effectively used to recover that meaning. One does not need a phenomenological theory of the tool as equipment Heidegger: das Zeug to get there. The idea of an array of tools suggests that they might even be interchangeable as long as they critical lens meaning the job.
A screwdriver can be used as a gouge or pry bar, a pipe wrench used as a lever or hammer. There are only seven simple machines, after all. The toolbox metaphor may be completely too mechanical in its implications to apply to the nature of meaning, but the idea that one tool may be as useful as any other to extract meaning does shift the attention from the tool to the meaning.
At first, critical lens meaning, the critical lens metaphor seems functionally equivalent to the critical toolbox metaphor. Both, critical lens meaning, for instance, can be used in isolation or combination with others of its kind. But whereas the tool serves a temporary usefulness, a lens suggests a permanent way of seeing, a way of seeing perhaps not otherwise available.
The lens metaphor likely succeeds because it relies on the figure of vision for understanding. As such, it also suggests a perspective on the object viewed. But after this, the metaphor runs into problems. In fact, both metaphors do. One might naturally ask, can we uncover meaning without a tool, critical lens meaning, and how many lenses are required to see a literary work?
As we further consider both metaphors, we might wonder the degree to which either is really useful or clarifying. But if we follow the logic of the metaphor, critical lens meaning, clearly only one lens is needed. That would be the lens that brings the object into sharp focus. All other lenses, critical lens meaning, to the extent that they deviate from those optics, would distort the object.
For those wearing glasses to bring objects into the correct focus, using other lenses proves defeating and futile, critical lens meaning. This is where the metaphor fails and fails quite spectacularly. The idea behind the metaphor might be that multiple perspectives are needed to understand a work of art, but lenses are not perspectives. A single lens can be moved around an object to generate all kinds of perspectives. But, opthalmically, critical lens meaning, lenses are corrections to faulty vision, focusing or orienting eyes in need of correction to a standard, optimal vision.
Do those who use the metaphor mean optical filters like those photographers use? Photographically, these lenses render an object in various pronounced color tones. Many of the color-bathed images they produce might presumably be added together to create a single composite image. Yet, filters by definition strain out portions of the available light to create such effects. We know that filters miss important details, intentionally deviating from what is available to create varied effects.
Or we might expand the lens metaphor in the direction of vision augmentation devices. Maybe that is the sense in which those who use the metaphor mean it.
That would include technological innovations like infrared, heat imaging, and more. The advantage of critical lens meaning the metaphor this way is that it captures a sense of the progress of knowledge to which we in the university long ago committed ourselves. These technologies open the wider spectrum of light radiation to human observers, critical lens meaning.
They nonetheless view the same light band, and the object they illumine is still the same object. But this is also problematic, critical lens meaning multiple perspectives have little to do with lenses since, as noted, any single lens can generate multiple perspectives.
As deficiently thought through as the metaphor is, the underlying idea of multiple incompatible perspectives is troublesome. It raises the specter of interpretive relativism—which critical lens meaning not in itself sound objectionable—but the perpetual ambiguity and confusing chaos that relativism creates inevitably leads to textual interventionism. Maybe it is not a lens but more like a recipe, critical lens meaning. Maybe critics mix in critical lens meaning to make new concoctions.
Maybe they make something new with a different look, taste, and texture, critical lens meaning. Why not stir some dogma into our reading? Why not revolutionary fervor or the sensibility of another place and time?
For one thing, there are very good hermeneutical reasons not to do so. For another, there are good alchemical reasons not to do so. Lye when mixed with one ingredient makes a mild cleanser for the skin; with another it dissolves human flesh, critical lens meaning.
Otherwise, we are all just revolutionaries who continue to batter one another in every classroom, every social media encounter, every time we talk to one another or pick up a book. Or if not like a recipe, maybe a lens is a kind of medical enhancement device. Doctors prescribe lenses, critical lens meaning. Maybe the prescribed lens uses digital augmented reality to overlay a preferred form and message.
Or maybe it is more like a pharmaceutical pill or ointment that when applied makes me feel like the text agrees with me? But before we begin the work of criticism, we must certainly read a work to understand it. I find that too many students who adopt this reading-with-a-lens approach are losing the ability to read literature. They do not know critical lens meaning literary conventions convey meaning and that literature is a unique use of language that speaks a meaning over and above ordinary language.
Too many students have been taught how to use a lens to find the oppressor, for instance, but somehow that singular focus leads away from other matters of which the text speaks.
At a sentence and discourse level, too many university students cannot engage a literary text. They are taught to favor partisan simplicity over complexity. They are taught to critical lens meaning over the ways authors use tone and a variety of viewpoints to explore complex issues that confront us as human beings. Sometimes those issues they can immediately relate to; sometimes not. But as they lose the ability to have a primary experience in their reading, they lose what other minds and other cultures offer them.
They miss the richness of figurative language critical lens meaning captures all kinds of ambivalences and intersections of human will and aspiration they might find there. Sometimes I wonder if what the critics call a lens really is a lens at all. If that is the case, critical lens meaning, maybe the lenses critics advocate for are lenses after all: maybe they are cyborg lenses that sketch the barest outline around objects to find that one thing they are programmed to find.
But this is not so much seeing as it is critical monomania. Is a lens a kind of tunnel vision? Maybe the purpose of the lens is to conceal? Perhaps a lens is a set rose-colored glasses or maybe a terministic screen. Maybe it is one of those mood spectacles or illusion glasses we find at parties. How about a kaleidoscopic lens with bits of sea shell, glitter, and tiny shapes rattling at one end to produce a captivating image at the other?
Maybe our chosen lens produces an Escher pattern that tessellates across the field of vision, covering everything in sight? A critical lens meaning who went to medical school said he worked in the clinic his first year. This kind of awareness is greater than that which any lens could provide. Is a lens simply what the text would say if someone with my philosophy or political persuasion wrote it? To metaphorize what they want to say about a text as a lens is to make it official.
Henceforth, it is unquestionable. Or maybe reading is a kind of ventriloquism act? Metaphors abound for the kind of reading practiced in our profession today. Do those who replace the meaning of a literary work with some understanding of the world they favor regard the new meaning as somehow communicable and stable? Or do they argue that all not only literary works but also literary interpretations require lenses, so we might as well adopt their lens as well as any other?
Should we expect a battle of the lenses, a hermeneutic ground war where perspectival possibilities multiply and clash because other new critics with their respective lenses insist on the primacy of their visions?
In the end, how critical lens meaning acts of lens-viewing are a matter of withdrawing the veritable message in the bottle and simply inserting our own?
Only in the postmodern did that change. But even though the discourse of discontinuity currently dominates academia, there is a pressing need for a semantic-cognitive opening in which evidence and the remaining laws of logic help us sort through the teeming plurality that overruns us even on a practical level each day.
Or does our egalitarianism extend to every idea and impression we have irrespective of its plausibility and moral payoff? Truth is not so much plural as things manifesting themselves in a variety of ways, and individual perceivers with their various histories and values multiply perceptions as they interact with the world and one another. In such cases, we rightly respect plurality as a means to access larger unified truths and discern broader patterns.
When we do so, we account for the narrowness of singular viewpoints. Otherwise, we might as well have one eye on one side of our head arguing with the other about which one is right.
Critical Literature Lenses
, time: 18:26What is a Critical Lens and how can we apply it to works of by Rosalie Gerbino
Mar 23, · The critical lens is a quote that you use as a tool to analyse a work of literature. It draws focus to certain aspects of the text. The critical lens essay is an exercise in literary analysis. Before a story, the author may place a critical lens quotation from another author which relates to the theme of the story to follow Jul 26, · At first, the critical lens metaphor seems functionally equivalent to the critical toolbox metaphor. Both, for instance, can be used in isolation or combination with others of its kind. But whereas the tool serves a temporary usefulness, a lens suggests a permanent way of seeing, a way of seeing perhaps not otherwise blogger.com: Thomas L Martin Literary Theories: A Sampling of Critical Lenses Literary theories were developed as a means to understand the various ways people read texts. The proponents of each theory believe their theory is the theory, but most of us interpret texts according to the "rules" of several different theories at a time. All literary theories are lensesFile Size: 35KB
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