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 (linked to Derrida and Barthes) says that once a text is written, the author's intent does not control its meaning anymore. Roland Barthes called this idea "the death of the author" — meaning we should read the text on its own, free from what the writer claimed to mean. This frees the reader to find many meanings in a single work. The text always has more layers than the author planned.
Tip: Death of the author = author's intent doesn't lock the meaning.
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.
