21st

• Creativity is the ability to generate new ideas, solutions, or products through original thought processes.
• Critical thinking, problem solving, communication skills, collaboration, creativity, digital literacy, global awareness, and adaptability are all important 21st-century skills.
• Literary Criticism


  The study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of literature
• Schools of Criticism


  • Formalist Criticism
  • New Criticism
  • Biographical Criticism
  • Historical Criticism
  • Gender Criticism
  • Psychological Criticism
  • Sociological Criticism
  • Mythological Criticism
  • Readers-Response
  • Structuralism
  • Deconstructionism
  • Cultural Criticism
  • New Historicism
  • Postcolonial Criticism
• Formalist Criticism


  • Examines the elements of form-style, structure, tone, imagery, etc.-that are found within the text
  • Focuses on the text only
• New Criticism


  • Detailed analysis of the language of a literary text can uncover important layers of meaning in that work
  • Tended to consider texts as autonomous and "closed," meaning that everything that is needed to understand a work is present within it
• Formalism vs. New Criticism


  Formalism mainly focused on the form or structure of a literary work, instead of its content, but New Criticism believed that both form and content are closely connected and equally important.
• Biographical Criticism


  • Focuses on explicating the literary work by using the insight provided by knowledge of the author's life
  • Biographical data should amplify the meaning of the text, not drown it out with irrelevant material
• Historical Criticism


  • Seeks to understand a literary work by investigating the social, cultural, and intellectual context that produced it-a context that necessarily includes the artist's biography and milieu
• Gender Criticism


  • Examines how sexual identity influences the creation and reception of literary works
• Psychological Criticism


  The psychological study of a particular artist, usually noting how an author's biographical circumstances affect or influence their motivations and/or behavior.
• Sociological Criticism


  • Examines literature in the cultural, economic and political context in which it is written or received
  • Exploring the relationships between the artist and society.
• Mythological Criticism


  • Emphasizes the recurrent universal patters underlying most literary works
  • Explores the artist's common humanity by cultures and epochs
• Readers-Response Criticism


  A Criticism that takes as a fundamental tenet that "literature" exists not as an artifact upon a printed page but as a transaction between the physical text and the mind of the reader
• Structuralism


  • Examines how literary texts arrive at their meanings, rather than the meanings themselves
  • There are two major types of structuralist analysis: one examines the way patterns of linguistic structures unify a specific text and emphasize certain elements of that text, and the other interprets the way literary forms and conventions affect the meaning of language itself.
• Deconstructionism


  • Rejects the traditional assumption that language can accurately represent reality
  • Focuses how the language is used
• Cultural Criticism


  • Focuses on the historical as well as social, political, and economic contexts of a work
• New Historicism


  • Emphasizes the interaction between the historic context of the work and a modern reader's understanding and interpretation of the work
• Postcolonial Criticism


  The analysis of literary works written by writers from countries and cultures that at one time have been controlled by colonizing powers-such as Indian writers during or after British colonial rule.
• Albus Dumbledore (J. K. Rowling): '"Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic."'