Quick questions on Applying critical approaches: SQA Advanced Higher English literary theory

Each critical approach is, at root, a set of questions. Rather than announcing a reading as "feminist", ask the questions a feminist critic would ask of this passage: who has power here, how is gender constructed, whose voice is heard or silenced? Then analyse the text to answer them. The approach earns its place by what those questions reveal, not by its name.

A critical approach must always return to the text. Bring the lens in to ask a question, then analyse a specific passage to answer it, so the approach deepens a close reading rather than floating above it. The moment a reading becomes about the theory, with the text reduced to an example, it has lost its grounding and its value.

Critical approaches are most at home in the dissertation, where engaging with wider criticism and perspectives is expected. They may inform the Literary Study essay where they stay text-based and serve the argument. They are least appropriate in Textual Analysis, which is primarily about close reading of an unseen text, though a critical awareness can still sharpen an interpretation. Match the depth of theory to the component.

What does it mean to use a critical approach as a tool rather than a label? [2 marks]

Where in the course is engagement with critical approaches most expected? [2 marks]

What is the test that an approach is a tool, not decoration? [1 mark]