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Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide

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When we watch a movie, listen to a song, or read a book, we try to determine their principal meaning. Therefore; we make our own assumptions as to what they mean. We place ourselves in the literary text and interpret it in our own way. In her book, Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide, Tyson calls this, “reading against the grain.” Meaning we see something that the author did not intend (Tyson 7). This concept is part of Critical Theory, a type of social theory toward critiquing and changing society as a whole. As Tyson puts it, “Change the lens and you change both the view and the viewer” (9). In contrast, we ask the questions of literary arts of work, "Why they would say that line in a song?” or “Why are the characters in the book or movie behaving that way?” When we ask these questions we are performing psychoanalytic criticism. We are …show more content…
We have, in one way or another, been exposed to this concept in our everyday lives. As the world is looked upon through a psychoanalytic lens, it is comprised of individual human beings, with psychological problems that began in childhood. These past experiences are a pattern of behavior that are destructive and influence our behavior as an adult without our knowing it. Freud’s main insight into psychoanalysis is understanding the unconscious, the notion that human beings are motivated, even driven by desires, fears, needs, and conflicts of which they are unaware (Tyson 12). Freud maintains that our unconscious is formed of three parts: the Id, “...the location of the drives” or libido, our impulses; the Superego- the area of the unconscious that houses judgment (of self and others) and represents the conscience, the moral part of us; and the Ego-…”one of the major defenses against the power of the drives and maintains the balance between our Id and Superego (OWL

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