Genre Criticism

Example:

God's Garden by Robert Frost (Poem)

God made a beatous garden
With lovely flowers strown,
But one straight, narrow pathway
That was not overgrown.
And to this beauteous garden
He brought mankind to live,
And said: "To you, my children,
These lovely flowers I give.
Prune ye my vines and fig trees,
With care my flowerets tend,
But keep the pathway open
Your home is at the end."

Then came another master,
Who did not love mankind,
And planted on the pathway
Gold flowers for them to find.
And mankind saw the bright flowers,
That, glitt'ring in the sun,
Quite hid the thorns of av'rice
That poison blood and bone;
And far off many wandered,
And when life's night came on,
They still were seeking gold flowers,
Lost, helpless and alone.


O, cease to heed the glamour
That blinds your foolish eyes,
Look upward to the glitter
Of stars in God's clear skies.
Their ways are pure and harmless
And will not lead astray,
Bid aid your erring footsteps
To keep the narrow way.
And when the sun shines brightly
Tend flowers that God has given
And keep the pathway open
That leads you on to heaven.

Analysis:

Genre Criticism focuses obviously to the genre of the literary work. God's garden fits to Genre Criticism because it is a poem which has the characteristics of a poem. It has rhyme, 36 lines and 3 stanzas.

Darwinism

Example:

Galapagos (Novel)

Synopsis:

Galápagos is the story of a small band of mismatched humans who are shipwrecked on the fictional island of Santa Rosalia in the Galápagos Islands after a global financial crisis cripples the world's economy. Shortly thereafter, a disease renders all humans on Earth infertile, with the exception of the people on Santa Rosalia, making them the last specimens of humankind. Over the next million years, their descendants, the only fertile humans left on the planet, eventually evolve into a furry species resembling seals: though possibly still able to walk upright (it is not explicitly mentioned, but it is stated that they occasionally catch land animals), they have a snout with teeth adapted for catching fish, a streamlined skull and flipper-like hands with rudimentary fingers (described as "nubbins").

The story's narrator is a spirit who has been watching over humans for the last million years. This particular ghost is the immortal spirit of Leon Trotsky Trout, son of Vonnegut's recurring character Kilgore Trout. Leon is a Vietnam War veteran who is affected by the massacres in Vietnam. He goes AWOL and settles in Sweden, where he works as a shipbuilder and dies during the construction of the ship, the Bahía de Darwin.This ship is used for the "Nature Cruise of the Century". Planned as a celebrity cruise, it was in limbo due to the economic downturn, and due to a chain of unconnected events the ship ended up in allowing humans to reach and survive in the Galápagos.

Kilgore Trout—deceased—makes four appearances in the novel, urging his son to enter the "blue tunnel" that leads to the afterlife. When Leon refuses for the fourth time, Kilgore pledges that he, and the blue tunnel, will not return for one million years, which leaves Leon to observe the slow process of evolution that transforms the humans into aquatic mammals. The process begins when a Japanese woman on the island, the granddaughter of a Hiroshima survivor, gives birth to a fur-covered daughter.

Trout maintains that all the sorrows of humankind were caused by "the only true villain in my story: the oversized human brain". Fortunately, natural selection eliminates this problem, since the humans best fitted to Santa Rosalia were those who could swim best, which required a streamlined head, which in turn required a smaller brain.

Analysis:

Darwinism is a branch of literary criticism that studies literature in the context of evolution by means of natural selection, including gene-culture coevolution. This novel fits to Darwinism because it talks about by which time humanity has evolved to become like seals.

Archetypal

Example:

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - Short Story

Synopsis:

A beautiful girl, Snow White, takes refuge in the forest in the house of seven dwarfs to hide from her stepmother, the wicked Queen. The Queen is jealous because she wants to be known as "the fairest in the land," and Snow White's beauty surpasses her own. The dwarfs grow to love their unexpected visitor, who cleans their house and cooks their meals. But one day while the dwarfs are at their diamond mine, the Queen arrives at the cottage disguised as an old peddler woman and persuades Snow White to bite into a poisoned apple. The dwarfs, warned by the forest animals, rush home to chase the witch away, but they are too late to save Snow White from the poisoned apple. They place her in a glass coffin in the woods and mourn for her. The Prince, who has fallen in love with Snow White, happens by and awakens her from the wicked Queen's deathlike spell with "love's first kiss."


Interpretation:
Snow White can be viewed under Achetypal because this theory focuses on some figments of imaginations which the story of Snow White has. This theory also focuses on symbols, narratives and images. The best archetypal pattern is any symbol with deep roots in a culture's mythology, such as the forbidden fruit in Genesis or even the poison apple in Snow White.

Cultural Studies

Example:

A Thousand Splendid Suns (Novel)

Synopsis:

Mariam lives in a kolba on the outskirts of Herat with her embittered mother. Jalil, her father, is a wealthy man who lives in town with three wives and nine children. Because Mariam is his illegitimate daughter, she cannot live with them, but Jalil visits her every Thursday. On her fifteenth birthday, Mariam wants her father to take her to see Pinocchio at his movie theater. When he does not show up, she hikes into town and goes to his house. He refuses to see her, and she ends up sleeping on the porch. In the morning, Mariam returns home to find that her mother has committed suicide out of fear that her daughter has deserted her. Mariam is then taken to live in her father's house. Jalil arranges for her to be married to Rasheed, a shoemaker from Kabul who is thirty years her senior. In Kabul, Mariam becomes pregnant seven successive times, but is never able to carry a child to term, and Rasheed gradually becomes more abusive.

A girl named Laila and a boy named Tariq, who are close friends and aware of social boundaries, live in the same neighborhood. War comes to Afghanistan, and Kabul is bombarded by rocket attacks. Tariq's family decides to leave the city, and the emotional farewell between Laila and Tariq ends with them making love. Laila's family also decides to leave Kabul, but as they are packing a rocket destroys the house, kills her parents, and severely injures Laila. Laila is taken in by Rasheed and Mariam.

After recovering from her injuries, Laila discovers that she is pregnant with Tariq's child. After learning that Tariq is dead, she agrees to marry Rasheed, who is eager to have a young and attractive second wife, and hopes to have a child with her. When Laila gives birth to a daughter, Aziza, Rasheed is displeased and suspicious, and he soon becomes abusive toward Laila. Mariam and Laila eventually become confidantes and best friends. They plan to run away from Rasheed and leave Kabul, but they are caught at the bus station. Rasheed beats them and deprives them of water for several days, almost killing Aziza.

A few years later, Laila gives birth to Zalmai, Rasheed's son. The Taliban has risen to power, and there is a drought, and living conditions in Kabul become poor. Rasheed's workshop burns down, and he is forced to take jobs for which he is ill-suited. Rasheed sends Aziza to an orphanage. Then one day, Tariq appears outside the house. He and Laila are reunited, and their passions flare anew. When Rasheed returns home from work, Zalmai tells his father about the visitor. Rasheed starts to savagely beat Laila. He nearly strangles her, but Mariam intervenes and kills Rasheed with a shovel. Afterwards, Mariam confesses to killing Rasheed, in order to draw attention away from Laila and Tariq, and is executed, while Laila and Tariq leave for Pakistan with Aziza and Zalmai.

After the fall of the Taliban, Laila and Tariq return to Afghanistan. They stop in the village where Mariam was raised, and discover a package that Mariam's father left behind for her: a videotape ofPinocchio, a small pile of money and a letter. Laila reads the letter and discovers that Jalil regretted sending Mariam away. Laila and Tariq return to Kabul and fix up the orphanage, where Laila starts working as a teacher. Laila is pregnant with her third child, and if it is a girl, she will be named Mariam.

Analysis:
The novel centers around the friendship between Mariam and Laila. It is split into four parts, with a focus on Mariam in the first part, continuing Laila in the second and fourth, and the relationship between the two women in the third part. The book focuses on the tumultuous lives of two Afghan women and how their lives cross each other. It can be classified under Cultural Studies because it shows here the culture of Afghanistan an d how two friends never forget each other.

Post-Modernism

Example:

The Lime Twig - John Hawkes

Synposis:

This highly elliptical novel, set in England after World War II, deals with a sedate, bored lower-class couple—Michael and Margaret Banks—who are lured into fronting a racehorse scheme. Michael Banks is befriended by William Hencher, a well-meaning but lost soul who fell into association with a ruthless gang during the war. After his mother's death, Hencher wants to repay the Bankses for their allowing him to rent a room in their home, where he lived with his mother twenty years prior. Knowing Michael likes horses, Hencher invites him to the heist of the racehorse Rock Castle—which goes awry, leading to Hencher's death. The gang members then keep Michael under wraps. Realizing that Margaret is becoming suspicious of Michael's absence, they force Michael to call and tell her to meet him at a party. In order to ensure that Michael will front as the owner of the stolen stallion, they kidnap Margaret while distracting Michael with two women, both sexual predators. The heavy of the gang, Thick, beats Margaret mercilessly with a truncheon after she attempts to escape; then, Larry, the seemingly invincible kingpin of the gang who orchestrates the novel's events, slashes and rapes her. Meanwhile, in a brutally ironic contrast, Michael finds delirious pleasure in a femme fatale, Sybilline, the mistress of Larry—and two other women, as well. Having been badly beaten in a street fight with a constable, Michael attempts to redeem himself from both criminal activity and infidelity by thwarting the race, which has been set up in order to allow Larry to retire to America in comfort.

Plot, though, is decidedly subordinate in Hawkes' fiction to intense imagery and a nightmarish, hallucinatory atmosphere. Many details of the plot can only be inferred, and many narrative questions cannot easily be answered. The narrative parodies detective thrillers, particularly through the final presentation of two baffled detectives in bowler hats who, having discovered Hencher's corpse during a heavy rain, set out "separately on vacant streets to uncover the particulars of this crime." In some sense, these figures may be taken as representatives of the reader, who is left to make coherent sense out of the novel's fragments. Some readers have found the novel's events highly disturbing, but the ultimate meaning and value of the work are irreducible to incident; instead, they inhere in the vividly impressionistic style through which these sordid events are both presented and transfigured.

Analysis:

 The Lime Twig is a narration of Hencher which concerns his recollections of life with his mother during World War II. The other chapters are all presented in a third-person limited style with a focus on the banal inner lives of Michael and Margaret Banks. The style is one of broken, dreamlike sequences, which suspend time in a quintessentially postmodernfashion. It falls under post modernism because this theory is defined as a style or trend which emerged in the post–World War II era.

Eco-criticism

Example:

Horton Hears a Who!

Synopsis:

An imaginative elephant named Horton hears a faint cry for help coming from a tiny speck of dust floating through the air. Although Horton doesn't know it yet, that speck houses an entire city named Who-ville, inhabited by the microscopic Whos, led by the Mayor. Despite being ridiculed and threatened by his neighbors, who think he has lost his mind, Horton is determined to save the particle--because "a person's a person, no matter how small." Horton's eight-word explanation for his actions embodies an idea both simple and profound, and which means so much, to so many. Horton explains to his skeptical friends: "If you were way out in space, and you looked down at where we live, we would look like a speck." Then there's Horton's code--his motto--that, "an elephant's faithful 100 percent"--pointing to his honesty and determination to never abandon his mission to find a new home for the speck that houses the incredible world of Who-ville. 

Intepretation:

Ecocriticism is an intentionally broad approach that is known by a number of other designations, including "green (cultural) studies", "ecopoetics", and "environmental literary criticism".The Horton hears a who can be viewed under eco-criticism because it's all about an elephant named Horton the Elephant who struggles to protect a microscopic community from his neighbors who refuse to believe it exists.

Moral Criticism

Example:

The Tortoise and the Hare (Short Story)

Summary:

In The Tortoise and the Hare, there is a Hare (kind of rabbit) and a tortoise (a large turtle). The hare and tortoise race, and the hare believes that since he is much faster than the tortoise, he can slow down and relax and take a nap and still win the race. However, he sleeps for too long and the tortoise eventually passes him, winning the race. The moral (lesson) of the story is that Slow and Steady Wins The Race.

Interpretation:

The Tortoise and the Hare is a children story and we can get moral lessons from it. And the lesson for this story is "Slow and steady wins the race." Though it's a children story, it still imparted lesson and that's what moral criticism criticize, it looks for the lesson in the literary works.