Week 4: Critical Approaches

A Summary of the 7 Critical Approaches to Media Texts

1. Rhetorical/Audience Analysis

This approach analyzes the ways in which media uses language, signs and images.

What is this media text asking the audience to accept, value or believe?

How (or can) exposure to media affect our attitudes and beliefs?

How do “…audiences become members of symbolic, imagined communities” (Beach, 2007) as consumers of media texts?

2. Semiotic/Narrative Analysis

The Semiotic approach analyzes how we make meaning of signs and codes based on our social and cultural associations with those signs and codes.

We look at images and create meaning from those images based on our social and cultural associations with those images (low lighting = scary/unknown).

The Narrative analysis looks at the typical patterns of narrative or archetypal structures in a variety of genres.

3. Poststructural Analysis

This approach “…examines how language categories in media texts themselves influence characters and audiences’ perceptions” (Beach, 2007).

With this approach, one can critically examine stereotypes and one-dimensional definitions of characters.

4. Critical Discourse Analysis

This approach goes outside studying the use of language in media texts; rather, CDA analyzes the larger ways in which we view the world and identify ourselves.

Discourses reflect “…hegemonic, dominant modes of thinking that permeate a world portrayed in a media text” (Beach, 2007).

This approach includes discourses of race and discourses of class, which deal with how race and class are portrayed in the media.

5. Feminist Criticism

This approach analyzes how men and women are portrayed (and often stereotyped) in the media.

This approach can also look at the way our culture continually redefines gender.

6. Postmodern Theory

This theory, as the name suggests, goes against modernist thinking and the modernist “…assumption that these narratives will lead humans to a greater sense of happiness and fulfillment” (Beach, 2007).

In media texts, postmodernists often challenge traditional narrative structures.

7. Postcolonial Theory

This approach looks at how “…colonial or imperialist conceptions of the world are portrayed in literature and media texts” (Beach, 2007).

We can use this approach to analyze how cultures and people from different parts of the world are shown in Western media texts.

Applying one critical approach in depth:

On our Wednesday discussion my group will be focusing on the commercial and how we can apply our focuses to the commercial. My chosen focus is the Semiotic/Narrative Analysis. I chose that focus because I use this approach a lot in my classroom. I spend an entire quarter on tragedies and the tragic hero with my 12th grade classes. I teach students the narrative structure of tragedies as well as the typical qualities of the tragic hero, as well as the other players in a tragedy (nemesis, choral figure, foil, confidant). I also base my women in literature unit on archetypes and archetypal patterns in short stories, poetry, novels, Disney movies, other films and advertising.