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
What is the main purpose of incorporating literary criticism in language and literature teaching?
- A To teach students how to write literary works
- B To encourage students to become literary critics
- C To teach students how to analyze, interpret, and evaluate literary works✓
- D To introduce students to different literary genres
Answer: C
When teachers bring criticism into class, the goal isn't to make every student a future critic or novelist. The goal is to give them thinking tools so they can break a text down, figure out what it means, and decide if it's any good. These three skills — analyze, interpret, evaluate — are exactly what literary criticism trains.
Tip: 'Main purpose' = broadest skill goal. Avoid options that turn students into specialists (writers, professional critics) — these are too narrow.
Why the other choices are wrong
- A. Teaching writing is creative writing class, not literary criticism.
- B. Producing professional critics is too narrow a goal for general literature teaching.
- D. Genre introduction is one small part of literature class, not the main purpose of criticism.
Sample 2
"To be, or not to be: that is the question" is a famous soliloquy spoken by Hamlet in William Shakespeare's play, Hamlet. Which literary approach would be most useful in analyzing this soliloquy?
- A Psychoanalytical Criticism✓
- B Reader-Response Criticism
- C Formalist Criticism
- D New Historicism
Answer: A
Psychoanalytic criticism (rooted in Freud) digs into a character's inner mind: fears, desires, conflicts, and unconscious thoughts. Hamlet's 'To be, or not to be' is a soliloquy where he wrestles with whether to live or die, exposing his deepest anxieties and inner battle. That makes it a textbook scene for a psychoanalytic reading. The approach reads characters like patients, looking at hidden drives and emotional conflicts.
Tip: Soliloquy + inner conflict + unconscious thoughts = psychoanalytic criticism.
Why the other choices are wrong
- B. Reader-response focuses on how readers react, not on the character's inner mind.
- C. Formalism studies the form and language of the text, but the famous power of this scene is its psychological depth.
- D. New Historicism connects the text to its historical context; useful but not the best fit for a personal mental struggle.
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.
