Introduction to Critical Perspectives

(b) Form

Formalism treats a literary work as a self-contained object and studies its form — its language, structure, imagery and literary devices — rather than its content, background or the author's life.

Gender Perspective (also called feminist criticism) is a critical approach that examines how literature reflects, reinforces or challenges the unequal power relations between men and women. It starts from the belief that most societies are patriarchal — male-dominated — and that this imbalance has shaped both the writing of literature and the way it has been read and judged.

A gender perspective looks at several things. First, it studies representation: how women are shown in texts — as angels, temptresses, weak dependents or mere background figures — and whether they are given voices and agency of their own. Second, it questions the canon: why so few women writers appear in lists of "great" literature, and how male experience came to be treated as universal human experience. Third, it examines language itself, arguing that inherited words and images often carry masculine assumptions. Fourth, it studies gender as a social construct, distinguishing biological sex from the roles society assigns to men and women.

Its main concerns include the oppression of women, the search for a female literary tradition, the recovery of lost women writers, and the demand for equality. Critics such as Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir and Elaine Showalter have shaped the approach. In practice, a gender reading of a text asks: Whose story is being told? Who is silent? What assumptions about men and women does the text take for granted? In this way, the gender perspective has widened literary study and made it more inclusive and self-aware.

OR

Marxist Criticism is a literary approach, based on the ideas of Karl Marx, that reads literature in relation to the economic and social conditions that produced it. It holds that a society's economic base (its mode of production) shapes its superstructure — its laws, religion, education and art. Literature, therefore, is not a free, timeless creation but a product of its historical moment, and it usually carries the ideology of the class that holds power.

Marxist critics examine several things. They study the class position of the author and the characters, and ask whose interests the text serves. They look for ideology — the hidden assumptions that make an unequal system seem natural — and for signs of class conflict between the ruling class and the working class. They also consider the material conditions of writing: who paid the writer, who published the book, who could afford to read it. Some critics, following Georg Lukács, praise realist works that expose social contradictions; others, following Bertolt Brecht, value works that make the audience think critically rather than feel comfortable.

Its strengths are that it connects literature to real social life and uncovers the political work that texts do. Its weaknesses are that it can reduce art to propaganda and ignore its aesthetic and emotional value. Still, Marxist criticism has given literary study powerful tools for asking who benefits from a story and whose voice is left out.

Marginality is the condition of being pushed to the edge (margin) of a society — economically, socially, politically or culturally — so that a person or group is denied full participation in the mainstream and has limited access to resources, rights, opportunities and decision-making power. A marginalised group therefore lives with less income, less voice, weaker social status and fewer chances of upward mobility than the dominant groups around it.

Certain groups become marginalised through the following processes:

1. Caste-based exclusion — In caste-ridden societies such as Nepal and India, Dalits are treated as "untouchable", barred from temples, wells and inter-caste marriage, and confined to low-paid, dirty work. This is marginalisation by birth, sanctioned by tradition.

2. Gender discrimination — Patriarchal norms keep women and girls in subordinate roles: unequal wages, limited property rights, heavy unpaid domestic work, early marriage and restricted mobility. Their contribution to the economy stays invisible, so they remain on the margin.

3. Economic inequality — Poverty, landlessness, illiteracy and lack of capital push poor peasants, labourers and slum dwellers out of the mainstream. The rich control resources and decision-making, while the poor remain dependent.

4. Ethnic and linguistic domination — Indigenous nationalities (Janajatis), tribal communities and linguistic minorities are often forced to abandon their mother tongue, dress and customs in the name of "national" culture. Their knowledge and identity are devalued, and they are under-represented in state bodies.

5. Geographical and political neglect — People of remote hills, mountains and border areas lack roads, schools, hospitals and markets. Distance from the centre of power means weak political representation and slow development.

6. Disability, age and health — Persons with disabilities, the elderly and the chronically ill face physical barriers, social stigma and lack of support services, which reduces their participation in education and employment.

7. Migration and refugee status — Refugees, displaced persons and undocumented migrant workers are often denied citizenship, legal protection and basic services, leaving them permanently marginal.

8. Caste–class–gender overlap (intersectionality) — A poor Dalit woman in a remote village suffers from several disadvantages at once, so her marginality is deeper than that of a rich urban man. This shows that marginalisation is not a single condition but a layered one.

Conclusion: Marginalisation is thus produced and sustained by unequal power structures — caste, patriarchy, class, ethnicity and geography — which deny some groups fair access to wealth, education, dignity and political voice. It can be reduced only through inclusive policies such as reservation, affirmative action, legal protection and equal opportunity.

(ii) The bourgeoisie impose their value on proletariat.

The Marxist approach reads literature as a reflection of class struggle, holding that the ruling class (the bourgeoisie) controls the means of production and imposes its ideology and values on the working class (the proletariat). The other options reflect religious, patriarchal or romantic views, not Marxist criticism.

Gender Perspective

Gender perspective is a way of looking at society, culture and literature by asking how gender shapes the experiences, roles and opportunities of men and women. It starts from the idea that most of the differences between men and women are not natural or biological but are socially and culturally constructed. These constructions are called gender roles, and they are passed on through family, education, religion, media and tradition.

A gender perspective examines how these roles create inequality. In most societies, men have been given the public sphere of power, work and decision-making, while women have been confined to the private sphere of home and care-giving. This unequal division gives men more freedom, wealth and authority, and keeps women dependent and subordinate. A gender-sensitive reading therefore looks at who speaks and who is silenced, who owns property and who is denied it, who is valued and who is treated as secondary.

In literature, the gender perspective is used to study how male and female characters are represented. It questions stereotypes such as the weak, sacrificing woman or the strong, aggressive man, and it recovers the voices of women writers who were ignored by a male-dominated literary tradition. It also studies how language itself can carry gender bias.

The gender perspective is not only about women. It also studies masculinity and the pressure on men to be tough, unemotional and dominant. Its final aim is equality: to free both men and women from rigid roles so that each person can develop fully as an individual. Thus, the gender perspective is both an analytical tool and a demand for social justice.

Queer Theory

Queer theory is a field of critical and cultural theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of gay and lesbian studies, feminist theory, and post-structuralist thought. The term was popularised by Teresa de Lauretis in 1991 and developed by scholars such as Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michael Warner. It takes the word "queer" — once a slur — and reappropriates it as a positive, fluid, and politically charged identity label. Queer theory challenges the idea that sexual orientation and gender identity are fixed, natural, or binary categories. Instead, it treats them as social and cultural constructions that are performed, unstable, and open to change. It is less a single doctrine than a critical lens for questioning the way desire, identity, and normality are produced and policed in society.

Key features of queer theory:

1. Critique of fixed identity: It rejects the notion of a stable, essential self. Identities such as "man," "woman," "gay," or "straight" are seen as provisional and historically produced, not innate.

2. Opposition to binary thinking: It dismantles the rigid binaries of male/female, masculine/feminine, and heterosexual/homosexual, arguing that such divisions oversimplify human experience.

3. Gender as performance: Following Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990), it holds that gender is not what one is but what one does — a repeated set of acts and behaviours that create the illusion of a natural core.

4. Heteronormativity as a target: It exposes and questions the assumption that heterosexuality is the normal, default, and superior orientation, showing how this assumption shapes law, language, literature, and everyday life.

5. Fluidity and intersectionality: It recognises that sexuality and gender intersect with race, class, caste, and nation, and that desire can shift across time and context.

6. Deconstruction of language and texts: It reads literary and cultural texts against the grain to expose hidden queer subtexts, silences, and anxieties, and it questions the very categories (such as "author" or "character") that texts rely on.

7. Political and activist edge: It aims not only to interpret the world but to unsettle oppressive norms, giving voice to marginalised sexual and gender minorities.

In short, queer theory is a critical practice that interrogates the categories of sex, gender, and desire, insisting that identity is plural, fluid, and constructed rather than given.

(iv) the culture that subordinate groups exercise.

Cultural critics (following Gramsci and later Fiske) treat popular culture as the culture of the ordinary people, the subordinate groups, through which they make their own meanings and sometimes resist the dominant class. It is not simply what "everyone" likes or accepts.

Cultural Perspective

The cultural perspective is an approach to reading literature by examining how a text reflects, shapes, or is shaped by the culture in which it was produced. Culture here includes the beliefs, customs, rituals, values, language, social norms, religion, and everyday practices of a community. The perspective assumes that literature is not created in a vacuum: a writer writes from within a cultural context, and readers interpret the text through their own cultural background as well.

Critics applying this perspective ask: Whose culture is represented in the text? Whose voice is silenced or marginalised? How do the characters' actions reflect the values of their society? What do the rituals, festivals, food, dress, and speech reveal about that society? For example, reading Laxmi Prasad Devkota's narrative poem Muna Madan through this lens reveals Nepali cultural values of family duty and loyalty, and the hardships of trade and migration to Lhasa. Similarly, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is best understood culturally because it portrays Igbo customs and the disruption caused by colonialism.

The cultural perspective is closely related to cultural studies and postcolonial criticism. It resists a single universal standard of value and treats every culture as worthy of serious study. It also makes readers aware of their own cultural assumptions, making them more tolerant and open-minded. In short, it treats literature as a mirror and record of cultural life, and enriches our understanding of both the text and the society that produced it.

Yes, a class perspective does reveal literature as social reality, though only partially. Class is one of the most powerful lenses for showing how literature is rooted in the material conditions of the society that produces it. When we read a text through class, we see that characters do not live in a vacuum: their choices, conflicts, language and even their sense of self are shaped by their position in the economic order. In this sense, literature stops being mere private imagination and becomes a record of how a society is organised, who holds power, and who is made to suffer.

Reasons in support:

1. Literature reflects material conditions. Every text is written within a mode of production. The feudal world of Wuthering Heights, the colonial plantation economy in Things Fall Apart, or the industrial slums in Dickens's novels are not decorative backdrops; they are the very conditions that generate the plot. Class perspective uncovers this base-superstructure relationship, showing literature as a social product.

2. It exposes inequality and ideology. A class reading reveals how texts either expose or conceal exploitation. Gorky's Mother, Premchand's Godan, or the stories of Hridayesh show peasants and workers struggling against landlords and moneylenders. Even texts that seem apolitical carry class ideology — the "deserving rich" and "deserving poor" of Victorian fiction, for instance.

3. It explains character and conflict. Pip's shame in Great Expectations, or the humiliation of a servant in a Nepali story, cannot be understood without class. Motives such as ambition, resentment, deference and revolt are socially produced, not merely psychological.

4. It gives voice to the silenced. Class perspective recovers the experience of labourers, peasants and the poor, whom dominant literature often ignores or stereotypes. In this way literature becomes a form of social testimony.

Why it is not the whole truth:

Class is not the only social reality. Literature also embodies gender, caste, race, religion, region and individual psychology. A purely class reading can be reductionist — it may flatten a text's aesthetic complexity, ignore the autonomy of art, and miss how the same economic condition produces different responses in different people. A wealthy character may still be tragic; a poor one may be cruel. Moreover, literature does not simply mirror society; it shapes it, criticises it, and imagines alternatives.

Conclusion:

Class perspective therefore reveals literature as social reality in a strong but not exclusive way. It shows that literature is rooted in the economic life of its time and often serves as a critique of it. But the fullest understanding comes from combining class with other perspectives — feminist, postcolonial, psychological — so that literature is seen as both a product of society and a creative force upon it.

Meaning of a text in literature

A text, in literature, means the actual body of words — written or spoken — that a writer produces and a reader receives. It may be a poem, a story, a play, an essay or even a speech. In literary study the word "text" is used in a wider sense than "book": it refers to any organised piece of language that carries meaning and can be read, interpreted and analysed. A text is not merely ink on paper; it is a structure of signs, images, symbols and sounds that produces meaning when it is read.

The meaning of a text is neither fixed nor single. It is produced at several levels:

• the literal or surface meaning — what the words actually say;
• the implied or deeper meaning — theme, message, moral, symbolism;
• the reader's meaning — what each reader brings to the text from his own experience;
• the contextual meaning — the social, cultural and historical situation in which it is written and read.

So a text means what its language says, what its author intended, and what its readers make of it. That is why the same text can mean different things to different readers and in different ages.

Relevance between text and literature

Yes, there is a close and inseparable relevance between the two.

1. Text is the raw material of literature. Literature exists only in the form of texts. A novel, a poem or a drama becomes literature because it is a text. Without text there would be no literature at all.

2. Literature is the study of texts. The work of criticism, appreciation and interpretation is done on texts. We read, analyse, compare and evaluate texts, and this very activity is what we call literary study.

3. Not every text is literature. A text becomes literature when it uses language in an imaginative, artistic and meaningful way — when it goes beyond mere information and appeals to feeling, imagination and thought. A railway timetable or a legal notice is a text but not literature; a sonnet or a short story is both.

4. Meaning links them. The meaning of a text — its theme, tone, style and total effect — is exactly what makes it literature. Hence the question of what a text means is at the same time the question of what literature is and how it works.

Conclusion

Thus a text in literature means an organised piece of language carrying multiple layers of meaning, and literature is nothing but the collection and study of such meaningful texts. The two are related as body and soul: the text gives existence to literature, and literature gives value to the text.

(c) Bourgeoisie

In the Marxist approach the bourgeoisie own factories, land and capital, the means of production. The proletariat do not own them and sell their labour for wages.

Class perspectives refer to the way society is understood through the divisions of social class. They are strongly associated with Marxist criticism.

Basic idea. Society is divided into groups according to their relation to wealth and the means of production, such as land, factories and capital. In Marx's view, there are mainly two classes: the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, and the proletariat, who own only their labour and work for wages.

Class conflict. The interests of the two classes are opposed. The owners seek profit by paying low wages, while workers are exploited. History is therefore described as a struggle between classes.

Base and superstructure. The economic system (the base) shapes law, politics, religion, education and culture (the superstructure). The ruling class's ideas often appear as common sense and justify its power.

In literature. Class-based criticism asks whose interests a text serves, how it shows rich and poor, work, money and power, and whether it supports or challenges inequality. For example, in a play like All My Sons one can examine how profit-seeking business harms ordinary people.

Class perspectives thus help us read literature as a reflection of economic power and inequality.

Femininity means the qualities, behaviours and roles that a society regards as appropriate for women and girls. It is mostly a social and cultural construct rather than a natural fact. Feminist thinkers argue that, as Simone de Beauvoir said, "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."

Dimensions of femininity.

1. Biological. It is connected with female sex characteristics, but feminists argue that biology does not decide behaviour.

2. Social. Society assigns women roles such as caregiver, mother and homemaker, and expects them to be gentle, obedient and nurturing.

3. Cultural. Dress, manners, language, beauty ideals and family traditions differ by culture and time, and they shape what counts as feminine.

4. Psychological. Girls are taught from childhood to take on traits such as emotional sensitivity and modesty, and they come to see these as part of their identity.

5. Performative. Judith Butler argues that gender is performed through repeated acts such as speech and appearance, not an inborn essence.

6. Intersectional. Class, caste, race and ethnicity change how femininity is experienced.

Feminist criticism therefore questions rigid ideas of femininity that restrict women's freedom.

Textual perspective vs. contextual perspective

A textual perspective treats a literary text as a self-contained artefact. Meaning is located inside the text — in its language, structure, imagery, symbols, narrative technique, and internal patterns. The reader's job is close reading: to show how the parts work together to produce meaning. Biographical, historical, or social facts about the author are treated as irrelevant or secondary. This approach belongs to formalism, New Criticism, and structuralism. For example, a textual reading of a poem would analyse its rhyme, metaphor, and tone without asking who wrote it or when.

A contextual perspective treats a text as a product of, and a response to, the world around it. Meaning is located outside the text — in the author's life, the historical period, the political and economic conditions, the culture, and the reader's own situation. The text is read against its context. This approach belongs to biographical criticism, historical criticism, Marxist criticism, feminist criticism, postcolonial criticism, and reader-response theory. For example, a contextual reading of the same poem might explain its images as reflections of colonial rule or of the poet's personal loss.

Key differences:

In short, the textual perspective looks inward at the text as an independent verbal object, while the contextual perspective looks outward at the text as a document shaped by and shaping its world. The two are not mutually exclusive; a balanced reading often combines both.

I largely agree with Freud's view that literary creation emerges from the unconscious mind, though I would add that the unconscious alone is not sufficient: conscious craft and social reality also play a part.

Freud's psychoanalytic theory holds that the mind has three levels: the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious. The unconscious is the storehouse of repressed wishes, fears and desires, especially those formed in childhood. In his essay Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming (1908), Freud argues that a writer is like a child at play: he creates a fantasy world and invests it with strong emotion. The writer disguises these private wishes through artistic technique, symbolism and aesthetic form (the "fore-pleasure"), so that the reader can enjoy the writer's fantasy without shame or guilt. Literary creation is thus, in essence, the sublimation of unsatisfied desire.

Evidence from literature supports this. Frankenstein can be read as Mary Shelley's working out of deep anxieties about birth, creation and abandonment. Poe's tales of terror clearly spring from obsessive inner fears. Wordsworth's claim that poetry is "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" also points to a source beneath rational control. The sudden "inspiration" a writer feels suggests material rising from below the threshold of awareness.

However, I would not agree completely. If creation were purely unconscious, revision, metre, structure and genre would be meaningless, yet writers labour over these consciously. A writer's language, audience and historical situation also shape the work. The unconscious supplies the raw material and the driving wish; conscious artistry shapes it into a communicable form. Freud's insight is therefore valuable but partial: literary creation is a dialogue between the unconscious and the conscious mind.

Postmodernism and Plurality

Meaning of plurality. In the postmodern sense, plurality does not mean merely "many things existing together"; it means that there is no single centre, no single truth, no single standard by which all cultures, texts, identities or values can be judged. Reality is many, not one.

How the postmodern perspective addresses plurality.

1. Rejection of grand narratives. Lyotard defines postmodernism as "incredulity towards metanarratives" — the Enlightenment story of reason, progress, science and universal liberation. Once these overarching stories lose authority, the space they occupied is filled by many small, local, competing narratives. Plurality thus becomes the normal condition of knowledge, not a problem to be solved.

2. Difference over unity. Derrida's deconstruction shows that meaning is produced by différance — endless deferral and difference — so no final, fixed meaning is possible. Every centre is provisional; every hierarchy can be inverted. This legitimises the marginal, the excluded and the "other".

3. Decentred, plural identity. The postmodern subject is not a unified, autonomous self but a site where race, gender, class, sexuality, language and history intersect. Identity is fluid, constructed and multiple — hence the politics of difference, hybridity and multiculturalism.

4. Language games and plural truths. Following Wittgenstein, postmodernists hold that truth is relative to a language game or community. Science, myth, religion and art are different games with their own rules; none is inherently superior.

5. Aesthetic plurality. Pastiche, parody, intertextuality, mixed genres and the blurring of high and popular culture in postmodern art and fiction enact plurality formally, not merely thematically.

Evaluation.

Strengths: It dismantles hierarchies, gives voice to marginalised groups, resists totalitarianism and dogmatism, and makes room for genuinely democratic, multicultural coexistence. It is a powerful corrective to the violence done in the name of a single truth.

Weaknesses: Pushed to the extreme, plurality slides into relativism — if all views are equally valid, moral judgement and political resistance become impossible. Critics such as Habermas and Eagleton argue that it produces fragmentation, cynicism and a consumerist "anything goes" attitude that serves late capitalism rather than liberating anyone. It also risks reducing real social injustice to mere "difference" without a ground for action.

Conclusion. Postmodernism addresses plurality not by harmonising differences into one system but by insisting that differences be allowed to stand. Its value lies in this critique of uniformity; its danger lies in the loss of any shared ground on which to judge, choose or act.

No — abstract reasoning is not predominantly a male field of thought.

The belief that abstract reasoning belongs mainly to men is a cultural stereotype, not a scientific fact. My reasons are as follows:

1. No consistent biological evidence. Studies comparing the brains of men and women have found no structure or region that gives one sex a monopoly over abstract thought. Differences in average test scores, where they appear at all, are very small and overlap almost completely.

2. Social conditioning, not nature. From childhood, boys are often pushed toward mathematics, science and competitive problem-solving, while girls are steered toward care-giving and language. This unequal training, not innate ability, explains most of the gap in performance.

3. History supports this view. For centuries women were denied education, yet whenever they were given the chance, they excelled. Hypatia, Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, Ada Yonath and many others have made first-rate contributions to mathematics, physics and logic — fields that demand abstract reasoning.

4. Changing trends prove the point. In countries where girls now receive equal schooling, the gender gap in mathematics and reasoning scores has almost disappeared. This shows that opportunity, not gender, decides achievement.

5. Individual variation is greater than group difference. Differences within each sex are far larger than the average difference between the two sexes. Many women reason more abstractly than many men, and vice versa.

Conclusion: Abstract reasoning is a human capacity, not a male one. The idea that it is a male field is a myth created by patriarchy and unequal opportunity. Given equal encouragement and education, women can reason as abstractly and as brilliantly as men.