What the exam asks
The IB never tests critical theory by name. Instead, it rewards the analytical habits that lenses give you:
- Paper 1: Tools from sociolinguistics (the study of language and society) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) (how language shapes social power) help you read between the lines of unseen non-literary texts, unpacking subtle biases for Criterion A and precise grammatical choices for Criterion B.
- Paper 2: No question asks for a lens, and naming one earns nothing. The habits a lens trains (asking who holds the money, who controls the rooms, who speaks and who is silent) can still point you to the choices worth analysing in a question about a character, a place or a voice, as long as the essay’s reasons come from the works themselves (Criterion B1) and the comparison is explained through their forms and perspectives (Criterion B2).
- Individual oral (SL and HL) and HL essay (HL only): Lenses help you narrow a broad topic into a focused global issue (for the oral: a problem that matters on a wide scale, across countries and in everyday local life) or a sharp line of inquiry (for the HL essay: the question your essay explores) without losing sight of the text itself.
Core ideas
1. Literary lenses: one text, multiple interpretations
A critical lens is a set of questions you bring to a text. Because readers ask different questions, the same work can support more than one valid interpretation.
| Lens | Core question it asks of a text | Textual features and broader authorial choices to track |
|---|---|---|
| Feminist / Gender | How does the text construct, reinforce, or challenge gender roles and patriarchy? | Characterization, female agency, domestic vs. public settings, dialogue dominance, visual gaze. |
| Marxist | How do social class, wealth, and economic systems shape characters’ lives and values? | Setting contrasts, commodification of people (treating people as goods to buy and sell), labour imagery, plot outcomes tied to money. |
| Postcolonial | How does the text represent empire, colonized peoples, cultural hybridity, and resistance? | Voice, standard vs. non-standard dialect, untranslated words, framing of “the Other” (people shown as strange outsiders). |
| Psychoanalytic | How do unconscious desires, trauma, repression, or family dynamics drive behaviour? | Dreams, symbols, motifs, slips in dialogue, fractured narrative structure, doubles. |
| Reader-response | How does the text invite the reader to fill in gaps, and how do different audiences react? | Ambiguous endings, unreliable narration, direct address, shifts in perspective. |
| New historicist | How does the text reflect, circulate, or resist the power structures of its historical moment? | Period-specific allusions, censorship, institutional settings, alignment with dominant values. |
| Ecocritical | How is the natural world represented—as a resource to exploit or an active force? | Nature imagery, pathetic fallacy (weather or nature that mirrors human feelings), industrial vs. pastoral (countryside) settings, anthropomorphism (giving animals or nature human traits). |