Using Critical Theory in Language A: Literature

[NotAProcrastinator]

Hello guys,

I am new both to this blog and to the IB. There is something that troubles me a lot these days on literary criticism exams that we will sit. Can we apply the principles of critical theory in our commentary, or is it not encouraged? In our class, there are not a lot of people who know critical theory and our teacher seems to encourage an in-depth examination of the literary text at hand in which we are simply building meaning from the text, as a critic with a New Critical approach would do, and as far as I know such an attitude is encouraged in normal US high schools as well. However, I do not wish to engage in such banal and aloof interpretation and wish to use and experiment with other theories, such as feminist critical theory, Marxist critical theory or even deconstruction. Daring to go further, I wish to postulate my own way of interpreting literary texts. I do not know if there is an official, IB-approved literature book discussing such matters- in fact, I know for certain that there is none for Turkish A1, which I am taking as my Language A1 course. What are your experiences concerning literary analysis? Were you allowed to engage in more complex sorts of criticism, or even tried to have the text play against itself in a deconstructionist sense? What did the examiners think? 

Edited June 16, 2017 by NotAProcrastinator