ABSTRACT
If you’ve read several of the preceding chapters, you may be feeling a bit overwhelmed both by the amount of information you’ve consumed and by the various ways in which many critical theories overlap with one another. The following questions are offered, not as a summary of the schools of criticism we’ve discussed but as ways to organize your thoughts as you reect on what you’ve learned and decide which theories you’d like to pursue further. Certainly, “Some Questions Critics Ask about Literary Texts” and “Questions for Further Practice” (which preceding chapters provide as specic guidelines for applying the critical theories they describe) are more thorough than the brief questions listed below. However, the questions that follow offer you a kind of bird’s-eye overview of the theories we’ve studied and, therefore, an opportunity to see more generally the ways in which critical theories both resemble and differ from one another.
