Literary criticism questions test your knowledge of theoretical lenses — formalist, Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, reader-response, and more. The LET often gives a literary excerpt and asks which critical approach a sample interpretation reflects.
Sample 1
Which school of literary criticism focuses exclusively on the text itself, disregarding the author's biography and the historical context of the work?
- A Marxist Criticism
- B Psychoanalytic Criticism
- C Formalism (New Criticism)✓
- D New Historicism
Answer: C
Formalism and New Criticism are closely related schools that focus exclusively on analyzing the text itself—what's written on the page. Imagine reading a poem without knowing anything about the poet's life or the country it was written in; you simply look at the words, images, and structure. This approach emphasizes 'close reading,' treating the poem like a self-contained object. The meaning lives entirely in the language and literary devices, not in the author's biography or historical events. This became a major approach in 20th-century literary education.
Why the other choices are wrong
- A. Marxist criticism focuses on power structures, economics, and class conflict in texts—it demands historical and social context.
- B. Psychoanalytic criticism uses the author's unconscious mind and childhood experiences to interpret texts—it requires biographical knowledge.
- D. New Historicism explicitly incorporates historical context and documents into literary analysis—the opposite of text-only focus.
Sample 2
In literary criticism, which approach focuses primarily on the text itself, examining its internal structure, imagery, and devices without regard for the author's biography or historical context?
- A New Criticism✓
- B Biographical Criticism
- C Marxist Criticism
- D Feminist Criticism
Answer: A
New Criticism (also called Formalism) treats a literary work as a self-contained object—a unified whole where meaning comes from the internal relationships between images, structure, and language. Close reading is the core method: you examine metaphors, irony, paradox, and form without asking 'Who wrote this?' or 'When was it written?' For example, analyzing a Shakespearean sonnet by looking at its rhyme scheme, volta, and imagery—but not researching Shakespeare's biography. This approach dominated Anglo-American literary education in the mid-20th century and is still taught because it makes students better readers of form and structure.
Why the other choices are wrong
- B. Biographical criticism does the opposite—it prioritizes the author's life and experiences as keys to interpreting the text.
- C. Marxist criticism explicitly demands historical and economic context; it's anti-formalist.
- D. Feminist criticism incorporates gender ideology and social history; it's not text-only.
Sample 3
Which of the following is a central concept in deconstructionist criticism?
- A The death of the author✓
- B The intentional fallacy
- C The sublime
- D The uncanny
Answer: A
Deconstruction is a way of reading literature most associated with Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes. Once a text is written, they argue, the author's intentions don't lock down its meaning anymore — readers find their own. Roland Barthes called this idea 'the death of the author': read the text on its own, free from what the writer claimed to mean. The result is that one work can carry many valid readings, and the reader's interpretation matters as much as the writer's plan.
Why the other choices are wrong
- B. The intentional fallacy is from New Criticism (Wimsatt and Beardsley), not deconstruction.
- C. The sublime belongs to Romantic aesthetics — awe and grandeur in nature and art.
- D. The uncanny is a Freudian/psychoanalytic concept about the strangely familiar.
