Coming into Contact with Lenses

In my English class at the moment, we are reading Shakespeare’s masterpiece Hamlet. The book is interesting and thought provoking, and I’ve been challenged and inspired reading it. I wouldn’t expect anything less from a piece of literature that’s been regarded as one of the best ever for thousands of years. What was more unexpected, for me, is how much time we’ve spent in class taking talking about different ways critics can read the same text.

Obviously, I knew before that there are many different lenses that a critic can use when viewing a piece of art. The lens a critic uses largely depends on their area of expertise. What I didn’t know, however, was how well-defined and specialized these lenses are. We learned about ways of looking at literature that I had never considered before, and some that I had considered but never really valued that much. Also, it came as a revelation that the author’s intent really doesn’t matter when choosing a lens to look at a text through. Shakespeare clearly didn’t want Hamlet to have Marxist or feminist themes, but that doesn’t mean it can be analyzed along those lines. Thought I never really understood all of the critical approaches (psychoanalysis isn’t really my thing), there are many that I will incorporate into the way I view literature in the future. While my reading of a text will never be only new historical or reader response, I will use these lenses as tools to gain a deeper understanding of whatever it is that I’m reading.