As a means of effectively introducing critical approaches or layered understandings of literature, to allow my students to begin to see the “depths and expanses” of reading, it would be impractical to hand out a sheet of descriptions of each. It would provide little, if any, meaning, would bore my students to death, and would have them asking, “What does this mean?” Instead, my plan is to use a range of fictional and non fictional texts as a testing ground for the critical insights of narrative. It will be of the utmost importance to approach these forms of literary criticism in the appropriate way. As a guide, I will pose several essential questions that capture the essence of each of the approaches that I want my students to consider as they read the text. Rather than giving them a purely academic explanation, to help my students generate appropriate questions to ask of the text, I will ask them to think, instead as an historian, writing the world’s story; a psychiatrist, looking at the reasons for a person’s behavior so as to understand and perhaps empathize with him or her; or a feminist, looking at the text from a woman’s point of view. With the completion of each literary piece, I will ask my students what impact the selection had on their previously held perceptions. The approaches that I have chosen to highlight -- historical, biographical, feminist, formalistic, -- are ones that easily find their way into
Animal Farm
.