Overview
For this project we first learned about the different Critical Lenses that could be viewed from reading books, your surrounds or any way someone views situations in their perspective. So in order to get familiar with the content before we used them for a classroom choice book we were assigned an assignment where we had to write words, phrases or drawings that represented a lense we choose that could be used when viewing ourselves as the subject. Of course, when you're asked to find qualities, characteristics or anything about yourself, you come to a blank. Or you take your time because you want to figure out what's the best about you. I took this a bit personally because knowing myself, my weakness and strengths, I wanted my peers to realize I had since I'm not one of those people who are considered an "open book". But we also had the choice to write down the way we thought others such as , peers saw us or thought about us,
Critical Lenses
Some of the many lenses we looked at were:
- Critical Race Theory- Focus on issues of identity and representation in texts and analyze the cultural traditions of marginalized populations. It attempts to expose assumptions held within dominant discourses and how these are represented in texts.
- Psychoanalysis- Most typically examines the internal mentl states, the desires, and the motivations of literry characters or of the author themselves, considering the possible unconscious urges that may have driven an author to write a particular text
- Marxism- Concerns itself with class diferences, economics, and the implications of the capitalist system. It attepmts to reveal the ways in which our socioeconomic system is the root of opur experience and show that economics drives everything
- Gender Theory- Explores issues of sexuality, power, and marginalized populations. It is heavily informed by feminist perspectives, but the believes that it is too liiting to talk about male s. female and instead view gender as fluid and not extreme
- Feminism- Concerned with the ways in which literature reinforces the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of women. It examines how aspects of our culture are inherently patriachal or male dominated and strive to expose the explicit and implicit misogyny in male writing about women
- Reader Response- Believe that a text is meaningless until a reader examines and responds to it. It is grounded in the belief that readers actively create, rather than passively discover, meaning in a text. This process is guided by personal or societal goals, norms, and rules