Critical Questions

From W100Wiki

A continually updated list of questions that we can ask about a text in order to analyze its meanings.

Questions Related to the Author and the Author’s Biography

• What can we learn about the author's life that might prove relevant to an interpretation of this text?
• Where and when did the author write the text, and how might those conditions have affected the composition of the text itself?
• What kinds of works did this author produce? What thematic concerns did they share? How is this text related to the author's larger oeuvre?
• Did the author comment on this text in interviews, essays, memoirs, diaries, or letters?
• Who has influenced this author? To what extent can those influences be seen in the text?
• Was the author part of a literary movement? What are the similarities and differences between the work of this author and similar members of that movement?
• What were the political concerns of the author?

Questions Related to the Formal Properties of the Text

• To what genre(s) does the text belong? How does it play with the conventions of that genre?

• Poetry:
  • What is the tone of the poem? Does the tone shift during the poem?
  • Who is the speaker (if the poem is a dramatic monologue)? Who is being spoken to (as far as we can tell)?
  • Does the poem have a regular meter and rhythm? At what points, if any, does that meter break?
  • What kinds of images, figures, metaphors, similes, and allusions does the poem contain?
  • Does the poem have a rhyme scheme? Does the poet employ slant rhyme?
  • Does the poet use alliteration, assonance, or onomonotopoeia?
  • Does the poem follow a prescribed form, such as the Petrarchan sonnet, the Shakesperian sonnet, the villanelle, the sestina, or the haiku? Does it follow the form perfectly? How does it differ from other examples of poems in that form?
  • Is the poem a response to another poem? What are the similarities and differences between the two poems?
  • Does the poem have a narrative? What is it? At what points in the poem does the narrative shift? How is that shift signaled?
  • What characters appear in the poem? How might we describe them?
  • Does the poem have an argument? What is it? How is it stated? What is the logic of that argument?

• Drama:

• Short Stories:

• Novels:

Questions Related to the Popular Reception of the Text

• What kinds of readers encountered this text during the author's lifetime? In what social circumstances did they encounter the text?
• To what extent was the text popular during the author's own lifetime? How popular has it been since then? How is popularity to be measured?
• Has the text appealed to similar or different audiences since then?
• What did the text look like (as a physical object) when the text was produced? Can we find any images of early editions of the book on the web or in library archives? How might the visible appearance of the text have influenced the ways in which readers understood the work?
• How have various editions of the work presented it in different ways?

Questions Related to the Critical Reception of the Text

• What did critics write about the work during the author's own lifetime? How have critical opinions shifted since then?
• What are the major critical debates surrounding this text?
• What are some important or representative critical responses to this text?
  • How can we tell when a critical response is important or representative?
    • Did the essay appear in a well-known, peer-reviewed journal? Has the critical essay or book been reprinted or excerpted in anthologies or essay volumes on this author? How often is this critical essay cited by other scholars?

Questions Related to the Literary Reception of the Text

• How have later authors responded to this text in their own work?
• Has the text been parodied or criticized in subsequent literary productions?

Questions Related to the Historical Contexts of the Text

• Where and when was the text written and published?
• What were the historical circumstances, both large and small, of that particular culture?
• If the work deals with social issues, how might a deeper understanding of those issues affect our interpretation of the text?
• Did the author use historical sources to write the text? What were they, and how were they understood at the time that the author used them?