UNIT 1: GETTING STARTED: THE PRE-CRITICAL RESPONSE

When we begin to talk about setting, plot, character, structure, and so on, we move

towards more analytical commentary on questions such as: what, how, and why.

SETTING The where and when of a story or play; the locale. In drama the term may refer to

the scenery or props. The overall setting of a narrative or dramatic work is the general locale,

historical time, and social circumstances in which its action occurs; the setting of a single episode

or scene within the work is the particular physical location in which it takes place. The overall

setting of Macbeth, for example, is medieval Scotland, and the setting for the particular scene in

which Macbeth comes upon the witches is a blasted heath.

PLOT: The plot (which Aristotle termed the mythos) in a dramatic or narrative work is

constituted by its events and actions, as these are rendered and ordered toward achieving

particular artistic and emotional effects. This description is deceptively simple, because the actions

(including verbal discourse as well as physical actions) are performed by particular characters in a

work, and are the means by which they exhibit their moral and dispositional qualities. Plot and

character are therefore interdependent critical concepts.

CHARACTERS: are the persons represented in a dramatic or narrative work, who are

interpreted by the reader as possessing particular moral, intellectual, and emotional qualities by

inferences from what the persons say and their distinctive ways of saying it—the dialogue—and

from what they do—the action.

STRUCTURE: The students' awareness of the major complications and developments of a

film plot such as that of The Lord of the Rings and the importance of each to the outcome is akin

to the reader’s or viewer's unconscious sense of plot structure, the relatedness of actions, the
gradual build-up in suspense from a situation full of potential to a climax and a resolution.

Structure at its most obvious (plot, story, argument) is the skeleton of a work. Since structure is a

matter of arrangement, it includes the formal ordering of the content in time. It is the

arrangement and relationship of the various elements of a literary work.

STYLE: The characteristic manner of expression in Prose or verse; how a particular writer

says things. The analysis and assessment of style involves examination of a writer's choice of

words, his figures of speech, the devices (rhetorical and otherwise), the shape of his sentences

(whether they be loose or periodic), the shape of his paragraphs - indeed, of every conceivable

aspect of his language and the way in which he uses it.

ATMOSPHERE: Defined as the mood or feeling that permeates an environment.

Atmosphere is a further common ingredient in the two parts of our analogy. Several factors

combine to create it. It is the emotional tone pervading a section or the whole of a literary work,

which fosters in the reader expectations as to the course of events, whether happy or (more

commonly) terrifying or disastrous. For instance, the opening scene in Harnlet where the watch is

tense and apprehensive, even 'jumpy'.

THEME: The often rich and varied underlying idea of the action is the theme. Properly

speaking, the theme of a work is not its subject but rather its central idea, which may be stated

directly or indirectly. For example, the theme of Othello is jealousy.

TRADITIONAL APPROACHES

Well into the twentieth century, however, a new type of literary analysis emerged in which

the literary work per se became the dominant concern of scholars. The New Critics, as the

proponents of this position were called, insisted that scholars concentrate on the work itself, on
the text, examining it as art. This method revolutionized the study of literature. The rationale of

the New Criticism seems to have put into clearer focus what a poem or play or piece of fiction is

trying to do. The most astute critics have certainly insisted on treating literature as literature, but

they have not ruled out the possibility of further illumination from traditional quarters. While we

may grant the position that literature is primarily art, we may also say that it is a creation by

someone at some time in history, and it is intended to speak to other human beings about some

idea or issue that has human relevance. Any work of art for that matter will always be more

meaningful to knowledgeable people than to uninformed ones.

 SET 2: DEFININIG LITERATURE, THEORY AND CRITICISM

WHAT IS LITERARY CRITICISM?

Literary criticism is a disciplined activity that attempts to describe, study, analyze, justify,

interpret, and evaluate a work of art. This discipline attempts to formulate aesthetic and

methodological principles on which the critic can evaluate a text. Anyone who attempts to

evaluate texts in this fashion is a literary critic, a term derived from two Greek words, krino,

meaning "to judge" and krites, meaning "a judge or jury person." A literary critic, or kritikos, is,

therefore, a "judge of literature."

When we consider literary criticism and its relationship to texts, it is not usually considered

a discipline in and of itself, for it must be related to something else—that is, a work of art. Without

the work of art, the activity of criticism cannot exist. And it is through this activity of criticism that

we can knowingly and deliberately explore the questions that help define our humanity, critique

our culture, evaluate our actions and feelings, or simply increase our appreciation and enjoyment

of both a literary work and our fellow human beings.

HOW TO BECOME A LITERARY CRITIC?

What each reader should do is to read the story. The reading process itself produces within

the reader an array of responses, taking the form of questions, statements, opinions, and feelings

evoked by the text. It is these responses coupled with the text itself that are the concerns of

literary criticism and theory. Although readers may need to master the terminology, the many

philosophical approaches and the diverse methodologies of formal literary criticism to become

trained literary critics, they automatically become literary critics, as they read the text and think

about it. The do not need formal training in literary criticism, and if they did, then they would
become literary critics who are better able to understand and articulate their own reactions, and

analyse those of others given to any text.

WHAT IS LITERARY THEORY?

When someone reads a text, we necessarily interact with it, asking many specific, text-

related questions and maybe personal ones as well. Such questions involve us in practical

criticism.

What we tend to forget during the reading of O'Connor's short story or any other text is

that we have already read other literary works (intertextuality). Our response to any text—or the

principles of practical criticism we apply to it—is largely a conditioned or socially constructed one;

that is, how we arrive at meaning in fiction is, in part, determined by our experiences. Whatever

we think about what we have read depends on our personal philosophical framework. When we

can clearly articulate our personal philosophical framework when reading a text and explain how

this mind-set directly influences our values and aesthetic judgments about a text, we are well on

our way to developing a coherent, unified literary theory. Whereas literary criticism involves our

analysis of a text, literary theory concerns itself with our understanding of the ideas, concepts, and

intellectual assumptions upon which rests our actual literary critique. Because anyone who

responds to a text is already a practicing literary critic and because practical criticism is rooted in

the reader's preconditioned expectations (his or her mind-set) when actually reading a text, every

reader espouses some kind of literary theory. Each reader's theory may be conscious or

unconscious, whole or partial, informed or ill informed, eclectic or unified. An incomplete,

unconscious, and therefore, unclear literary theory more frequently than not leads to illogical,

unsound, and haphazard interpretations. On the other hand, a well-defined, logical, and clearly
articulated theory enables readers to develop a method by which to establish principles that

enable them to justify, order, and clarify their own appraisals of a text in a consistent manner.

A better understanding of literary theory can be gained by investigating the etymology of

the word theory itself. Derived from the Greek word theoria, the word theory means a "view or

perspective of the Greek stage.

Literary theory, then, offers to us a view of life, an understanding of why we interpret texts

the way we do. Literary theory asks: what exactly is influencing us during the reading process? This

question will be affecting our interpretation and enjoyment (or lack of) a text.

A well-articulated literary theory also assumes that an innocent reading of a text or a

sheerly emotional or spontaneous reaction to a work does not exist because literary theory

questions the assumptions, beliefs, and feelings of readers, asking why they respond to a text in a

certain way. In a very real sense, literary theory causes us to question our commonsense

interpretation of a text, asking us to probe beneath our initial responses. According to a consistent

literary theory, a simple emotional or intuitive response to a text does not explain the underlying

factors that caused such a reaction. What elicits that response, or how the reader constructs

meaning through or with the text, is what matters.

BEGINNING THE FORMAL STUDY OF LITERARY THEORY

The underlying premises of why a study of literary theory is essential are:

• Literary theory assumes that there is no such thing as an innocent reading of a

text. All our reactions, whatever they are, are based on underlying factors that make us respond to
that text in a particular way. What is the factor that elicits these responses, or how a reader makes

sense of a text is the core of literary theory.

• • Because our reactions to any text have theoretical bases, all readers must have a

literary theory. The methods we use to frame our personal interpretations of any text directly

involve us in the process of literary criticism and theory, automatically making us practicing literary

critics.

• Many readers have a literary theory that is more often than not unconscious,

incomplete, ill informed, and eclectic; therefore, readers' interpretations can easily be illogical,

unsound, and haphazard. A well-defined, logical, and clearly articulated literary theory consciously

and purposefully enables readers to develop their own methods of interpretation, permitting

them to order, clarify, and justify their appraisals of a text in a consistent and logical manner.

• Today many critics use the terms literary criticism and literary theory

interchangeably. Although the semantic boundaries between literary criticism and literary theory

(and sometimes Continental philosophy) are a bit blurred, literary criticism assumes that literary

theory exists and that literary criticism rests on literary theory's concepts, ideas, and ever-

developing principles
 UNIT 3: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH

Dreams cause us to question and explore that part of our minds over which we have

ostensibly little control. The foremost investigator of the unconscious and its activities is the

Viennese neurologist and psychologist Sigmund Freud. He became the pioneer of psychoanalysis,

His patients would talk freely in a patient-analyst setting; applying the same methods to our

understanding of literature means we are engaged in psychoanalytic criticism. Psychoanalysts can

exist side by side with any other critical method or interpretation; it actually is an approach to

literary interpretation rather than a particular school of criticism. Jung, Freud’s student, branched

out into new theories and concerns and established analytical psychology. By the mid-60s, Frye

symbolic or archetypical criticism, which helped change the direction of 20th century literary

analysis. Lacan revised and expanded Freud’s theories in light of newly developed linguistic and

literary principles, thereby revitalizing psychoanalytic criticism and ensuring its continued

influence on literary criticism today.

Sigmund Freud

 Models of the human Psyche: Dynamic Model

The dynamic model asserts that our minds are a dichotomy consisting of the conscious (the

rational) and the unconscious (the irrational). Freud is one of the first to suggest that it is the

unconscious, not the conscious, which governs large part of our actions.

Freud dramatically redefined the unconscious, believing it to be a dynamic system that not only

contains our biographical memory but also store our suppressed and unresolved conflicts. For

Freud, the unconscious is also the storehouse of disguised truths and desires that want to be

revealed in and through the conscious. These will appear inevitably (Freudian slips)
  Economic Model

In both models, the conscious and the unconscious battle for control of a person's actions, and in

both models, a person's unconscious desires will force their way to the consciousness. In the

economic model, Freud introduces two new concepts that both describe and help govern the

human psyche: the pleasure principle and the reality principle. The pleasure principle craves only

pleasures, and it desires instantaneous satisfaction. The reality principle is that part of the psyche

that recognizes the need for societal standards and regulations on pleasure. Freud believed that

both these principles are at war within the human psyche.

 Typographical models

The most famous model of the human psyche is Freud's revised version of the typographical

model, the tripartite model, sometimes referred to as the structural model. This model divides the

psyche into three parts: the id, the ego, and the superego. The irrational, instinctual, unknown,

and unconscious part of the psyche Freud calls the id; it urges the pleasure principle. The ego, the

rational, logical, waking part of the mind operates in harmony with the reality principle. the

superego, acts like an internal censor, causing us to make moral judgments in light of social

pressures. In contrast to the id, the superego operates according to the morality principle. It is left

to the ego to mediate between the instinctual (especially sexual) desires of the id and the

demands of social pressure issued by the superego. What the ego deems unacceptable, it

suppresses and deposits in the unconscious, and what it has most frequently repressed in all of us

is our sexual desires of early childhood.

  Freud's Pre-Oedipal Developmental Phase

According to Freud, in our early childhood, all of us go through three overlapping phases: the oral,

anal, and phallic stages. Oral phase: When we suck our mother's breast to be fed, our duality (or

libido) is activated. Anal stage: anus becomes pleasure when the kids know the delights of

defecating; they perceive themselves as separated from the mother. Phallic stage: sexual desire

directed to genitals. Freud asserts that pleasure principal basically controls the child.

 The Significance of Dreams

Every adult has stored many painful memories of repressed sexual desires, anger, rage, and guilt in

his or her unconscious. In his magnum opus, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud asserts

that the unconscious will express its suppressed wishes and desires. The conscious represses these

desires to the unconscious. Then the unconscious then redirects and reshapes these concealed

wishes into acceptable social activities, presenting them in the form of images or symbols in our

dreams and/or our writings. Through the process of displacement, for example, the unconscious

may switch a person's hatred for someone named Mr. Appleby onto a rotting apple in a dream.

When certain repressed feelings of ideas cannot be adequately released through dreams, jokes, or

other methods the ego must act and block any outward response. In so doing, the ego and id

become involved in an internal battle Freud calls neurosis. From a fear of heights to a pounding

headache, neurosis can assume many physical and psychological abnormalities.

 Literature and Psychoanalysis

For Freud, the unresolved conflicts that give rise to any neurosis constitute the stuff of literature.

A work of literature, he believes, is the external expression of the author's unconscious mind.
Accordingly, literary works must then be treated like a dream, applying psychoanalytic techniques

to texts to uncover the author's hidden motivations, repressed desires, and wishes.

Mythological and Archetypical Approaches

Definitions and misconceptions

In The Masks of God, Joseph Campbell recounts a curious phenomenon of animal behavior. Newly

hatched chickens, bits of eggshells still clinging to their tails, will dart for cover when a hawk flies

overhead; yet they remain unaffected by other birds. Furthermore, a wooden model of a hawk,

drawn forward along a wire above their coop, will send them scurrying (if the model is pulled

backward, however, there is no response). Campbell's hinted analory, though only roughly

approximate, will serve nonetheless as an instructive introduction to the mythological approach to

literature.

The myth critic is concerned to seek out those mysterious elements that inform certain literary

works and that elicit, with almost uncanny force, dramatic and universal human reactions.

Speaking figuratively, the myth critic studies in depth the "wooden hawks" of great literature: the

so-called archetypes or archetypal patterns that the writer has drawn forward along the tensed

structural wires of his or her masterpiece and that vibrate in such a way that a sympathetic

resonance set off deep within the reader.

Both the mythological and psychological approach are similar in the sense that they are concerned

with the motives that underlie human behavior. Psychology tends to be experimental and

diagnostic; it is closely related to biological science. Mythology tends to be speculative and

philosophical. Both Freud and Jung were mythologists too. Even so, the two approaches are

distinct, and mythology is wider in its scope than psychology.

It may be true that myths do not meet our current standards of factual reality, but then neither

does any great literature. Instead, they both reflect a more profound reality. Myths are by nature

collective and communal; they bind a tribe or a nation together in common psychological and

spiritual activities.

Some examples of archetypes

Although every people have its own distinctive mythology that may be reflected in legend,

folklore, and ideology myth is, in the general sense, universal. Such motifs and images are called

archetypes; those which carry the same or very similar meanings for a large portion, if not all, of

mankind.

Images:

 Water: the mystery of creation; birth-death-resurrection; purification and

redemption; fertility and growth. According to Jung, water is also the commonest

symbol for the unconscious.

 Sun (fire and sky are closely related): creative energy; law in nature; consciousness

(thinking, enlightenment, wisdom, spiritual vision); father principle (moon and

earth tend to be associatedw ith female or mother principle); passage of time and

life.

 Colors

Red: blood, sacrifice, violent passion; disorder.

Green: growth; sensation; hope; fertility; in negative context may be associatedw ith death and

decay.

 Circle (sphere): wholeness, unity.

  Serpent (snake, worm): symbol of energy and pure force (cf. libido); evil, corruption,

sensuality; destruction; mystery; wisdom; the unconscious.

 Numbers:

Three: light; spiritual awareness and unity (cf. the Holy Trinify); the male principle.

Four: associated with the circle, life cycle, four seasons; female principle, earth, nature; four

elements (earth, air, fire, water)

 The archetypal woman: (Great Mother-the mysteries of life, death, transformation); the

female principle associated with the moon

 Tree: "In its most general sense, the symbolism of the tree denotes life of the cosmos: its

consistence growth, proliferation, generative and regenerative processes. It stands for

inexhaustible life, and is therefore equivalent to a symbol of immortality"

Archetypal Motifs or Patterns

 Creation: perhaps the most fundamental of all archetypal motifs-virtually every mythology

is built on some account of how the cosmos, nature, and humankind were brought into

existence by some supernatural Being or beings.

 Immortality: another fundamental archetype, generally taking one of two basic narrative

forms: escape from time or mystical submersion into cyclical time

 Hero archetypes (archetypes of transformation and redemption):

The quest: the hero (savior, deliverer) undertakes some long journey during which he or she must

perform impossible tasks, battle with monsters, solve unanswerable riddles, and overcome

insurmountable obstacles in order to save the kingdom.

Initiation: the hero undergoes a series of excruciating ordeals in passing from ignorance and

immaturity to social and spiritual adulthood, that is, in achieving maturity and becoming a full-

fledged member of his or her social group.

Archetypes as Genres

Archetypes may be found in even more complex combinations as genres or types of literature that

conform with the major phases of the seasonal cycle.

1. The mythos of spring: comedy

2. The mythos of summer: romance

3. The mythos of fall: tragedy

4. The mythos of winter: irony

With brilliant audacity Frye identifies myth with literature, asserting that myth is a "structural

organizing principle of literary form"

Jungian Psychology and its Archetypal Insights

The second major influence on mythological criticism is the work of C. G. Jung. fung's primary

contribution to myth criticism is his theory of racial memory and archetype. Just as certain

instincts are inherited by the lower animals (for example/ the instinct of the baby chicken to run

from a hawk's shadow), so more complex psychic predispositions are inherited by human beings.

Therefore what Jung called "myth forming" structural elements are ever present in the

unconscious psyche; he refers to the manifestations of these elements as "motifs," "primordial

images," or " archetypes."

In stressing that archetypes are actually "inherited forms," Jung also went further than most of the

anthropologists, who tended to see these forms as social phenomena passed down from one

generation to the next through various sacred rites rather than through the structure of the

psyche itself. Furthermore, in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, he theorized that

myths do not derive from external factors such as the seasonal or solar cycle but are, in truth, the

projections of innate psychic phenomenon. Myths are the means by which archetypes, essentially

unconscious forms, become manifest and articulate to the conscious mind.

Jung suggests it is only logical that the artist "will resort to mythology in order to give his

experience its most fitting expression." This is not to say that the artist gets materials secondhand:

"The primordial experience is the source of his creativeness; it cannot be fathomed, and therefore

requires mythological imagery to give it form"

Some Special Archetypes: Shadow, Persona, and Anima

One major contribution is Jung's theory of individuation as related to those archetypes designated

as the shadow, the persona, and the anima. Individuation is a psychological growing up, the

process of discovering those aspects of one's self that make one an individual different from other

members of the species. It is essentially a process of recognition which is absolutely essential if

one is to become a well-balanced individual. Jung theorizes that neuroses are the results of the

person's failure to confront and accept some archetypal component of the unconscious. Instead of

assimilating this unconscious element into their consciousness, neurotic individuals persist in

projecting it upon some other person or object.

The shadow, the persona, and the anima are structural components of the psyche that human

beings have inherited, just as the chicken has inherited his built-in response to the hawk. We

encounter the symbolic projections of these archetypes throughout the myths and the literatures
of humankind. In melodrama, such as the traditional television or film western or cop story, the

persona, the anima, and the shadow are projected, respectively, in the characters of the hero, the

heroine, and the villain. The shadow is the darker side of our unconscious self, the inferior and less

pleasing aspects of the personality, which we wish to suppress. The anima is perhaps the most

complex of Jung's archetypes. It is the "soul-image," the spirit of a man's vital impetus, his life

force or vital energy. In the sense of "soul," Jung gives the anima a feminine designation in the

male psyche, pointing out that the "anima-image is usually projected upon women" (in the female

psyche this archetype is called the animus).In this sense, anima is the contra sexual part of a man's

psyche, the image of the opposite sex that he carries in both his personal and his collective

unconscious. The phenomenon of love, especially love at first sight, may be explained at least in

part by |ung's theory of the anima: we tend to be attracted to members of the opposite sex who

mirror the characteristics of our own inner selves. The persona is the obverse of the anima in that

it mediates between our ego and the external world. Speaking metaphorically, let us say that the

ego is a coin. The image on one side is the anima; on the other side, the persona. The persona is

the actor's mask that we show to the world-it is our social personality, a personality that is

sometimes quite different from our true self. Jung, in discussing this social mask, explains that, to

achieve psychological maturity, the individual must have a flexible, viable persona that can be

brought into harmonious relationship with the other components of his or her psychic makeup.

He states, furthermore, that a persona that is too artificial or rigid results in such symptoms of

neurotic disturbance as irritability and melancholy.

 UNIT 4: FEMINISMS AND GENDER STUDIES

Are women and men equal in all respects? Feminist studies, feminist theorists, and

feminist critics all answer in one accord: No! Feminist literary criticism advocates equal rights for

all women (indeed, all peoples) in all areas of life. Emerging to prominence in the 1960s, feminist

criticism is one strand of feminist studies; it serves as an umbrella term for a variety of approaches

to culture and literature that are of particular interest to women. Central to the diverse aims and

methods of feminist criticism is its focus on patriarchy, the rule of society and culture by men.

Annette Kolodny articulates feminist criticism chief tenant: it is “an acute and impassioned

attentiveness to the ways in which primarily male structures of power are inscribed or (encoded)

within our literary inheritance [and] the consequences of that encoding for women— as

characters, as readers, and as writers.”

These male structures of power embrace phallocentrism, the belief that identifies the

phallus as the source of power in culture and literature, with its accompanying male-centered and

male-dominated patriarchal assumptions. According to Judith Fetterley the first act of a feminist

critic is to become a resisting rather than an assenting reader and, by this refusal to assent, to

begin the process of exorzising the male mind that has been implanted in us. The phallocentric

belief has been implanted in us in large part by the Western literary cannon whose authors are

mainly men; such famous names as Plato, Martin Luther, Shakespeare, Napoleon or Nietzsche

have had patriarchal statements, assigning women a lower status.

Historic Development

The first major work of feminist criticism challenging these male voices was that authored

by Christine de Pizan (1365-C.1434) in the fourteenth century; Pizan declares that God created

both man and woman as equal beings. Aphra Behn (1640-1689) is often accredited as the first
English professional female writer. Unlike writers of her time, Behn used her fiction to bring to the

forefront and analyze women's sexual desires directed toward both males a females-. Innovative

in the use of such narrative techniques as voice, visual cues and frankness of subject matter, Behn

published dramas, poetry and novels that helped pave the way for the British Romantic

Movement. Influenced by the French revolution and believing that women along with men should

have a voice in the public arena, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) authored A Vindication of the

Rights of Woman (1792), the first major published work that acknowledges an awareness of

women's struggles for equal rights. Women, she maintains, must define for themselves what it

means to be a woman. It was not until the Progressive Era of the early 1900s, however, that major

concerns of feminist criticism took root in literature and criticism. During this time, women gained

the right to vote and became prominent activists in the social issues of the day, such as health

care, education, politics, and literature, but equality with men in these arenas still remained

outside their grasp.

Prominent Figures

Virginia Woolf in her powerful work A Room of One’s Own (1929) declares that men have

treated and continue to treat women as inferiors. Males define what is to be a female and

determine who controls the political, economic, social, and literary structures. Here she

hypothesizes the existence of Shakespeare’s sister, who has the same abilities as him but she can’t

have “a room of her own” because of her sex. In her work the sister dies without acknowledging

her genious, even hwer grave por doesn0y bear a name. Such a loss of artistic talent and personal

worth, argues Woolf, is a result of society’s opinion of women: they are seen as intellectual

inferior to men. Women, Woolf declares, must reject the social construct of femaleness and

establish and define for themselves their own identity.

 Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex (1949) by the French writer Simone de Beauvoir

(1908-1986), is heralded as the foundational work of twentieth-century feminism, Beauvoir's text

asserts that French society (and Western societies in general) are patriarchal, controlled by males.

Since the female is not male, Beauvoir maintains, she becomes the Other, an object whose

existence is defined and interpreted by e dominant male. Being subordinate to the male, the

female discovers that she is a secondary or nonexistent player in the major social institutions of

her culture, such as the church, government, and educational systems. "What is a woman?”

Beauvoir insists that a woman’s answer must not be "mankind”, for such a term once again allows

males to define women. Beauvoir rejects this this generic label, believing that such labeling

assumes that "humanity is male and man defines women not as herself but as relative to him."

Women, she maintains, must reject the societal construct that men are the subject of the absolute

and women are the other.

Kate Millet. With Millett s publication of Sexual Politics in 1970, a new wave of feminism

begins. Millett is one of the first to challenge the ideological characteristics of both the male and

the female. She asserts that a female is born but a woman is created. In other words, one's sex is

determined at birth, but one's gender is a social construct created by cultural norms. Women,

Millett maintains, must disenfranchise the power center of their culture: male dominance. By so

doing, women will be able to establish female social conventions as defined by females, not males,

and in the process, they themselves will shape and articulate female discourse, literary studies,

and feminist theory.

Feminism and Psychoanalysis

Many essentialist feminists have been attracted to the psychoanalytic approach, to which

they have given their own stamp. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar examine female images in the
works of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Charlotte and Emily Bront€, and George Eliot, addressing such

topics as mothering, living within enclosures, doubling of characters and of aspects of the self,

women's diseases and their treatments, and feminized landscapes. They describe a feminine

utopia for which women authors yearn and where wholeness rather than "otherness" would

prevail as a means of identity.

In the 1980s, French feminism developed as one of the most exciting of new feminist

practices in the use of psychoanalytic tools for literary analysis. Freud has long been on Feminism's

Enemies List, the charge being that he totally misunderstood women and was interested only in

what they meant for male psychology. In Freud's defense, the narratives given by his female

patients represented radically new acceptance of their voices in their first-person accounts of

fantasies, fears, injuries, and diseases. Today such common (but often terrifying) complaints of

women including postpartum depression, major depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, and

fibromyalgia are responded to as real health crises with a combination of medical and

psychological help; but in Freud's day they were dismissed as ordinary "female trouble."

From the Freudian revisionist Jacques Lacan comes the notion of the Imaginary, a pre-

Oedipal stage in which the child has not yet differentiated her- or himself from the mother and as

a consequence has not learned language, which is the Symbolic Order to be taught by the father.

Lacan calls this the "phallogocentric" universe (phallus + logos) in which men are in control of "the

word." French feminists practice what they calll'1criture feminine as a psychically freeing form of

feminine discourse: the actual sex of the author, for them, is not always important (as it too is an

expression of binary Laws of the Father). French feminists speak of "exploding" rather than

interpreting a sign. H6ldne Cixous proposes a utopian place, a primeval female space free of

symbolic order, sex roles, otherness, and the Law of the Father. Here the self is still linked to the
voice of the mother, source of all feminine expression; to gain access to this place is to find an

immeasurable source of creativity. Irigaray would point out by way of example that when

confronted with ethical issues, men think in terms of rights, "while women think in terms of

responsibilities to others" Julia Kristeva furnishes a more specifically therapeutic sort of

psychoanalysis of women in works such as her Desire in Language, in which she presents a

mother-centered realm of the semiotic as opposed to the symbolic. Echoing Lacanian theory she

argues that the semiotic realm of the mother is present in symbolic discourse as absence or

contradiction, and that great writers are those who offer their readers the greatest amount of

disruption of the nameable. Feminist myth critics tend to center their discussions on such

archetypal figures as the Great Mother and other early female images and goddesses, viewing

such women as Medusa, Cassandra, Arachne, Isis, and others as radical "others" who were

worshipped by women and men as alternatives to the more often dominant male deities such as

Zeus or Apollo. Even the most negative images in mythology, such as Medusa from ancient

Greece, retain attraction for modern women, for anthropology teaches us that when many

formerly matriarchal societies in the "Western" tradition were supplanted by patriarchal societies

that venerated male gods instead of the older "Earth Mothers," many goddesses were

metamorphosed as witches, seductresses, or fools. Studying these ancient transformations alerts

us to the plasticity of all sexual categories and the ongoing revisions of "the feminine”.

Multicultural Feminisms

Among the most prominent of feminist minorities are women of color and lesbians. These

feminists practice what is sometimes called identity politics, based upon essential differences from

white, heterosexual, "mainstream" society, hence their inclusion here as essentialists.

 Like lesbian feminists, black feminists argue that they face additional layers of the

patriarchy that discourage their "comingout"; not only do they reject the traditional Western

literary canon as lopsided in favor of mery but they also specifically target its exclusion of black

women. Black feminists have accused their white sisters of wishing merely to become rewarded

members of the patriarchy at the expense of nonwhite women. To a greater extent than white

authors, black women writers have been elided from critical history or included merely as tokens.

Seeking out other autobiographical voices, black feminists have often turned to the slave narrative

and the captivity narrative, both old American forms of discourse, as of especial importance to

black women writers.

Marxist Feminism

As Karl Marx argued that all historical and social developments are determined by the

forms of economic, Marxist feminists have attacked the "classist" values of the prevailing capitalist

society of the West as the world also gradually becomes "globalized." Marxist feminists do not

separate "personal" identity from class identity, and they direct attention to the often nameless

underpinnings of cultural productions, including the conditions of production of texts, such as the

economics of the publishing industry. Lillian Robinson, a prominent Marxist feminist, has pointed

out that even a seemingly innocuous approach such as Formalism is encoded with class interests,

connecting it to the systematic exclusion of women, nonwhites, and the working class. Feminist

criticism, in contrast, should be "criticism with a cause, engaged criticism…It must be ideological

and moral criticism; it must be revolutionary"

Feminist Film Studies

Laura Mulvey's insight that films can compel the female viewer to participate in her own

humiliation by watching the film as a man is borne out in her analysis of the technical and
psychological organization of the classic Holl)-wood film, and her analysis has been eagerly

embraced by literary critics, who transfer her insights on film to the printed page. The "male gaze"

she describes (like the Lacanian Symbolic Order) is based upon voyeurism and fetishism, the only

available pleasure (usually) being the male one of looking at women's bodies for sexual cues.

According to Mulvey, women are the image, and man the bearer of the look, the voyeur: "In a

world ordered by sexual imbalance pleasure in looking has been split. . . . [and] the male

gazeprojects its phantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly"

Gender Studies

As a constructivist endeavor, gender studies examines how gender is less determined by

nature than it isby culture, In the past, descriptions of prose in masculine terms (a "virile" style or

"seminal" argument) were taken as the norm; today, a piece of writing might be criticized as

limited by its masculine point of view. For both feminists and gender critics, society portrays

binary oppositions like masculine and feminine or straight and gay as natural categories, but as

David Richter notes, "the rules have little to do with nature and everything to do with culture."

Homosexuality and heterosexuality may thus be seen as not two forms of identity but rather a

range of overlapping behaviors. In a similar way, masculinity and femininity are constantly

changing, so that today, as Richter notes, "women who wear baseball caps and fatigues, pump

iron, and smoke cigars (at the appropriate time and season) can be perceived as more piquantly

sexy by some heterosexual men than women who wear white frocks and gloves and look down

demurely"

Some lesbians define lesbianism as the "normal" relations of women to women, seeing

heterosexuality as "abnormal." This has led some heterosexual feminists to reject lesbian

perspectives, but on the whole, lesbian feminists have guided other feminists into new
appreciation of certain female traits in writing. They have also brought to the forefront the works

of lesbian authors.

Queer Theory

In the late 1 980s after the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, the work of Eve Kosofsky

Sedgwick, Michael Warner, and others in "Queer Theory" emerged as a way of providing gays and

lesbians with a common term around which to unite and a more radical way of critiquing

stigmatization, choosing the derogatory name queer and transforming it into a slogan with pride.

Queer Theory in particular has been involved in the so called culture wars in academia, as such

postmodern concepts as gender ambivalence, ambiguity, and multiplicity of identities have

replaced the more clearly defined sexual values of earlier generations.

Critics such as Alan Sinfield have offered startling new readings of Shakespeare , while others have

returned to such homosexual writers as Walt Whitman with better clues as to embedded sexual

meanings and the role of desire in reading the text. Increasingly in the last few years, gay

characters, themes, and programs now appear on all major television channels and are the

subjects of Hollywood films. Gay marriage remains in the headlines as a controversial issue, but it

seems clear that the queer or gay aesthetic has fully entered mainstream American culture.
 UNIT 5: CULTURAL STUDIES

Because the word "culture" itself is so difficult to pin down, "cultural studies" is hard to

define. Arising from the social turmoil of the 1960s, cultural studies is composed of elements of

Marxism, poststructuralism and postmodernism, feminism, gender studies, anthropology,

sociology, race and ethnic studies, film theory, urban studies, public policy, popular culture

studies, and postcolonial studies: those fields that concentrate on social and cultural forces that

either create community or cause division and alienation. The discipline of psychology has also

entered the field of cultural studies. For example, Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory of the

unconscious structured as a language promoted emphasis upon language and power as symbolic

systems. From Michel Foucault came the notion that power is a whole complex of forces; it is that

which produces what happens.

Cultural studies approaches, generally, share four goals. First, cultural studies transcend

the confines of a particular discipline such as literary criticism or history. It involves scrutinizing the

cultural phenomenon of a text - for example, Italian opera, or Latino telenovela - and drawing

conclusions about the changes in textual phenomena over time. Cultural studies practitioners are

"resisting intellectuals" who see what they do as "an emancipatory project" because it erodes the

traditional disciplinary divisions in most institutions of higher education.

Second, cultural studies are politically engaged. Cultural critics question inequalities within

power structures and seek to discover models for restructuring relationships among dominant and

"minority" or "subaltern" discourse. Because meaning and individual subjectivity are culturally

constructed, they can thus be reconstructed.

Third, cultural studies deny the separation of "high' and "low" or elite and popular culture.

Cultural crifics today work to transfer the term culture to include mass culture, whether popular,
folk, or urban. Cultural critics examine "the practice of everyday life," studying literature as an

anthropologist would, as a phenomenon of culture, including a culture's economy. They aim to

reveal the political, economic reasons why a certain cultural product is more valued at certain

times than others.

Finally, cultural studies analyze not only the cultural work, but also the means of

production. A well-known analysis of literary production is Janice Radway's, which demonstrates

the textual effects of the publishing industry's decisions about books that will minimize its financial

risks. L literature does not occur in a space separate from other concerns of our lives. Though

cultural studies practitioners deny "humanism" or "the humanities" as universal categories, they

strive for what they might call "social reason," which often (closely) resembles the goals and

values of humanistic and democratic ideals.

American Multiculturalism

In the 1960s, the segregation in schools and discrimination in industries was common, but

with the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the first African American student to enroll

Mississippi University this began to change slowly. Now, nearly a half century later, evolving

identities of racial and ethnic groups have not only claimed a place in the mainstream of American

life, but have challenged the very notion of "race," more and more seen by social scientists as a

construct invented by whites to assign social status and privilege, without scientific relevance.

Questions of ethnicity and race pervade the current interest in multicultural literary studies:

Which cultures should be canonized? Who decides? What constitutes a culture? These questions

are debated in American Studies, particularly which books should be taught in colleges and

universities.
 African American Writers

African American studies is widely pursued in American literary criticism. Ralph Ellison

argued that any "viable theory of Negro American culture obligates us to fashion a more adequate

theory of American culture as a whole" (253). This seems too obvious even to mention today,

when American arts, fashion, music, and so much besides is based uponAfricanAmerican culture,

from Oprah to Usher. But in Ellison's day, the 1950s, such an argument was considered radical.

African American writing often displays a folkloric conception of humankind; a "double

consciousness," as W. E. B. DuBois called it, arising from bicultural identity; irony, parody, tragedy,

and bitter comedy in negotiating this ambivalence; attacks upon presumed white cultural

superiority; a naturalistic focus on survival; and inventive reframing of language itself.

Ellison upheld folklore as a source of creativity; it was what "black people had before they

knew there was such a thing as art". This elevation of black folk culture to art is important, and it

led to divisions among black artists: the ones who pursued their roots and the ones who preferred

not to rely on them. It is ironic that black people adopted the Hebrew metaphor of the people

being guided to the Promised Land, the same one that puritans used when coming to America.

Their descendants ended up being having the worst experiences: kidnapping, slavery, ongoing

racism. Out of such painful cultural origins evolved African American literature.

African American writing continued to enter the mainstream with the protest novels of the

1940s. Spurred by the Depression and the failures of Jim Crow in the South, Naturalist author

Richard Wright furiously attacked white American society at the start of the Civil Rights movement

in works such as Natiae Son (1938) and Black Boy. The 1960s brought Black Power and the Black

Arts Movement, proposing a separate identification and symbology; in related arts, for example,
music, the big names were Chuck Berry, B. B. King, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, and ]imi

Hendrix. "Black" culture had "crossed over."

Latina/o Writers

Latina / o. Hispanic. Mexican American. Puerto Rican. Nuyorican. Chicano. Or maybe

Huichol or Maya. Which names to use? The choice often has political implications. Though there is

of course no one culture that can accurately be described as Latina /o, the diversity of Spanish-

speaking peoples-with different origins, nationalities, religions, skin colors, class identifications,

politics, and varying names for themselves-has had an enormous impact upon American, culture

since its beginnings.

What would become Mexican American literatures developed through combinations of

Spanish with indigenous forms to create new folk cultures and literatures? Not surprisingly, one of

the primary tropes in Latina/ o studies has to do with the entire concept of borders - borders

between nations, between cultures, and within cultures. In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New

Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldria demonstrates how Latinas live between - between two countries,

between two languages, between two cultures.

The Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s meant renewed Mexican American

political awareness and artistic production. World War II had greatly accelerated the process of

Mexican American acculturation. Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima (1973), perhaps the best-

known Latino novel, focuses on the impact of World War II on a small community in New Mexico.

On the other hand Latinas have the task of redefining not only ethnicity but also gender roles and

histories different from their men. They provide insight into the machismo of Mexican culture, call

for liberation of women from abusive and exploitative relationships, and celebrate the newly

heard voices of Mexican American women writers. Three cultural archetypes have been central to
Latina identity: La Malinche, La Virgen de Guadalupe, and La Llorona, but these are being newly

interrogated today. Together they offer a range of Latina themes and concerns.

American Indian Literatures

In predominantly oral cultures, storytelling passes on religious beliefs, moral values,

political codes, and practical lessons of everyday life. For American Indians, stories are a source of

strength in the face of centuries of silencing by Euro-Americans. "American Indian" is often

preferred by Indians over "Native American," The best names to use would be those of the

hundreds of tribes, with an awareness of their differing languages, beliefs, and customs,

confusingly lumped together as "Indian."

Two types of Indian literature have evolved as fields of study. Traditional Indian literature

includes tales, songs, and oratory that have existed on the North American continent for centuries,

composed in tribal languages and performed for tribal audience. Traditional literature was and is

oral. Far from the stereotype of the mute Indian, American Indians created the first American

literatures. Traditional Indian literature is not especially accessible for the average reader, and it is

not easy to translate from Cherokee into English. Mainstream Indian literature refers to works

written by Indians in English in the traditional genres of fiction, poetry, and autobiography. Earliest

mainstream Indian authors dealt with anthologies while later writers of the nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries dealt with native rights, the duplicities of U.S. government and military

leaders, racial ambivalence, creation myths, trickster humor, and tribal constancy in the face of

repeated assaults.
 Asian American Writers

Asian American literature is written by people of Asian descent in the United States,

addressing the experience of living in a society that views them as alien. Asian American literature

can be said to have begun around the turn of the twentieth century, primarily with

autobiographical "paper son" stories and "confessions." Paper son stories were carefully

fabricated for Chinese immigrant men to make the authorities believe that their New World

sponsors were really their fathers. Each tale had to provide consistent information on details of

their fictitious village life together. Confessions were elicited from Chinese women rescued by

missionaries from prostitution in California's booming mining towns and migrant labor camps.

Chinese women make up the largest and most influential group of Asian American writers.

Ironically, given the frequent cultural silencing of Asian women, they have produced an

astonishing array of literary works, far outdistancing Asian men.

Postmodernism

Postmodernism, like poststructuralism and deconstruction, is a critique of the aesthetics of

the preceding age, but besides mere critique, postmodernism celebrates the very act of

dismembering tradition.

Modernism typically displayed an emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity, on how

subjectivity takes place, rather than on what is perceived. Modernist novels sought to be

metafictive, or self-referential about their status as texts, their production as art, and their

reception. Postmodernism borrows from modernism disillusionment with the givens of society; a

penchant for irony; the self- conscious "play" within the work of art; fragmentation and ambiguity;

and a destructured, decentered, dehumanized subject. Whereas modernism still seeks a rational

meaning in a work of art, postmodernism explores the provisionality and irrationality of art.
 Postmodernism, Lyotard adds, is characterized by "incredulity toward metanarratives" that

serve to mask the contradictions and instabilities inherent in any social organization.

Postmodernism prefers "mini-narratives" of local events. Virtual reality games add another

dimension to the artificiality of postmodern life. Perhaps postmodernism is best compared to the

emergence of computer technology. Postmodernism thus reflects both the energy and diversity of

contemporary life as well as its frequent lack of coherence and depth. The lines between reality

and artifice can become so blurred that reality TV is now hard to distinguish from reality-and from

television entertainment.

Popular Culture

Within American Studies programs at first and then later in many disciplines, including

semiotics, rhetoric, literary criticism, film studies, anthropology, history, women's studies, ethnic

studies, and psychoanalytic approaches, critics examine such cultural media as pulp fiction, comic

books, television, film, advertising, popular music, and computer cyberculture. They assess how

such factors as ethnicity, race, gender, class, age, region, and sexuality are shaped by and

reshaped in popular culture.

There are four main types of popular culture analyses: production analysis (Who owns the

media? Who creates texts and why?), textual analysis (how specific works of popular culture

create meanings), audience analysis (how different groups of popular culture consumers, or users,

make similar or different sense of the same texts), and historical analysis (how these other three

dimensions change over time). Sometimes popular culture can so overtake and repackage a

literary work that it is impossible to read the original text without reference to the many layers of

popular culture that have developed around it. (E.g. Frankenstein)

 UNIT 6: POST COLONIAL STUDIES

What happens for example, when the dominant culture consists of white, Anglo-Saxon

males and one is a black female? Or how does one respond to a culture dominated by white males

if one is a Native American? For people of color living in Africa or in the Americas, for Native

Americans, for females, and for gays and lesbians, and a host of others, the traditional answer

already has been articulated by the dominant class and its accompanying hegemony: silence. But

many have not been quiet. Writers and thinkers, such as Toni Morrison Alice Walker, Gabriel

Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Judith Butler, to name a few, have dared to speak out an

challenge the dominant cultures and the dictates these cultures decree. They continue to refuse

silence and choose defiance, if necessary. The believe that an individual view of life, of values and

ethics really matters.

Postcolonialism refers to a historical phase undergone by Third World countries after the

decline of colonialism: for example, when countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the

Caribbean separated from the European empires and were left to rebuild themselves.

At first glance postcolonial studies would seem to be a matter of history and political

science, rather than literary criticism. However, we must remember that English, as in "English

Department" or "English Literature," has been since the age of the British Empire a global language

(it is today, for example, almost exclusively the language of the internet). Postcolonialism consists

of a set of theories in philosophy and various approaches to literary analysis that are concerned

with literature written in English in countries that were or still are colonies of other countries.

Postcolonial literary theorists study the English language within this politicized context. Earlier

figures such as Shakespeare's Caliban are re-read today in their New World contexts.
 Rooted in colonial power and prejudice, postcolonialism develops from 4000 years of

colony relationships between Africa, Asia, and the Western World. During the 19th century Great

Britain had such a big empire that it was though that they would rule the world. Because of this,

their superiority –physical and cultural- remained unquestioned; the colonizers exploded the

colonized. But by the earlier 20th century the process of decolonization had begun. By 1950, along

with India’s independence, the publication of texts that articulated the social, political and

economic conditions of various subgroups was a reality.

Many of poscolonialism’s adherents suggest there are two branches. The first views

poscolonialism as a set of diverse methodologies the possess no unitary quality (Bhabha) and the

second views postcolonialism as a set of cultural strategies “centered in history” (Said, Spivak)

Edward Said's concept of orientalism was an important touchstone to postcolonial studies,

as he described the stereotypical discourse about the East as constructed by the West. He

critiques the Western image of the Oriental as "irrational, depraved (fallen), child-like,' different,"'

which has allowed the West to define itself as "rational, virtuous, mature, normal”

Homi K. Bhabha's postcolonial theory involves analysis of nationality, ethnicity, and politics

with poststructuralist ideas of identity and indeterminacy, defining postcolonial identities as

shifting, hybrid construction. Bhabha critiques the presumed dichotomies between center and

periphery, colonized and colonizer, self and other, borrowing from deconstruction the argument

that these are false binaries. Perhaps his most important contribution has been to stress that

colonialism is not a one-way street, that because it involves an interaction between colonizer and

colonized, the colonizer is as much affected by its systems as the colonized.

Postcolonial critics accordingly study diasporic texts outside the usual Western genres,

especially productions by aboriginal authors, marginalized ethnicities, immigrants, and refugees.

Among the most important figures in postcolonial feminism is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who

examines the effects of political independence upon "subaltern" or subproletarian women in the

Third World. Spivak's subaltern studies reveal how female subjects are silenced by the dialogue

between the male-dominated West and the male-dominated East, offering little hope for the

subaltern woman's voice to rise up amidst the global social institutions that oppress her.

We can highlight postcolonialist’s major concerns:

• European colonialism did occur

• The British Empire was at the center of colonialism

• The conquerors dominated not only the physical land but also the hegemony or

the ideology of the colonized peoples.

• The social, political, and economic effects of such colonization are still being felt

today.

Methodology:

Critics identify two major approaches or strains of postcolonial criticism: postcolonial

criticism and postcolonial theory. Those who engage in the first investigate the ways in which texts

bear the traces of colonialism ideology and interpret those texts as challenging or promoting the

colonizer’s purposes and hegemony. The second approach investigates social, politic and

economic concerns of the colonized and the colonizer.

The person living and writing in a colonized culture poses three significant questions: “Who

am I?” – to connect with its historical roots –, “How did I develop in the person I am?” – to admit

the tensions between the roots and the new hegemony imposed on the writer by the conquerors -
, and “To what country or countries o to what cultures am I forever linked?” - to acknowledge

itself as an individual and social construct created and shaped mainly by the dominant culture.

Postcolonialists are quick to point out that they do indeed make value judgments about

cultures, people, and texts. In turn, they as us, their readers and critics, to examine carefully the

standards against which we are making our value judgments.

 UNIT 7: MATERIALISMS

Definitions

The core principles of Marxist thought are: reality itself can be defined and understood;

society shapes our culture; social and economic conditions directly influence how and what we

believe and value; the world as we know it can be changed from a place of bigotry, hatred, and

conflict due to struggle into classes society in which wealth, opportunity and education are

accessible for everyone. Marxism declares that it offers a comprehensive, positive view of human

life and history that demonstrates how humanity can save itself from a meaningless life of

aliniation and despair.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche Marxism did no begin as an alternative, theoretical

approach to literary analysis but as a pragmatic view of history that offered the working classes an

opportunity to change their world and their individual lives. It offered a philosophical system and a

plan for action which settled the basis of what we know today as socialism or communism. Marx

himself said little about the relationships of his ideas to literary theory but the collected works of

Engels comments on literature fill almost two volumes but none of them articulates a literary

theory or methodology of criticism.

Dialectical materialism, a core belief of Marxism, asserts that consciousness dos not

determine life: life determines consciousness. In their materialistic view of humanity, economic

means of production within a society engenders and controls all human institutions and ideologies

including all political and educational systems, all religion, and all art. The more market based

economy, the actual process of production, distributing, and consuming goods become more

complex. The differences this system creates divides people into different social classes.
 These authors maintain that capitalists have successfully enslaved the working class

through economic policies and production of goods. Marx borrows the term “ideology” to

pejoratively refer to the bourgeoisie ruling ideas, customs and practices. Consciously or

unconsciously, the ruling class will force its ideology on the proletariat. The working classes fail to

see who they are in such society: an exploited, oppressed class of people.

The link between the Marxism of its founder and literary theory resides in Marx’s concept

of history and the sociological leanings of Marxism itself; our place in society and our social

interaction determine our consciousness or who we really are. The traditional historical approach

(contemporary and resembling to Marx’s writings) declares that critics should place a work in its

historical setting, paying attention to the author’s life, the time period in which the work was

written and the cultural milieu of both the text and the author. Marx adds the economic means of

production that is to say who decides which texts will by published, or how these will be

distributed; these adds sociological issues which concerns both the character in a work of fiction as

well as the authors and the readers.

Russia and Marxism Russian Marxism and the Russian leadership at the beginning of the

20th century insisted that writers should also play a political role. Communist Party leaders insisted

that literature promote the standards set forth by the party. Lenin defended all kinds of literature,

arguing that something can be gleaned for any kind of literature; after the Bolshevik Revolution he

said that literature which blatantly defied established policies could not be accepted.

Trotsky is considered the founder of Marxist literary criticism. He advocates for tolerance

for open, critical dialogue; the content of a literary work need not to be revolutionary. The party’s

leadership in art must be indirect, helping to protect but not dominating it. Stalin, on the other

hand established the Russian Association of Proletariat Writers in order to guard against liberal
cultural tendencies, abolished all artists’ unions and associations and established that all literature

must glorify the party actions and decisions.

George Lukács believed that a detailed analysis of symbols, images and other literary

devices within a text would reveal class conflict and expose the direct relationship between the

economic base and the superstructure. Known as the reflection theory, this approach declares

that a text directly reflects society’s consciousness, literature is part of the superstructure and

directly reflect the economic base. By a close reading it is possible to reveal the text and author’s

worldview.

The Frankfurt School critics assert that a text is like any other commodity produced by

capitalism. The market determines which texts are published and when. A text reveals

fragmentation, not wholeness. For example, in theatre, dramatists must seize models of

production, abolish the audience normal expectations, hoping to create an alienation effect; the

audience must be forced into action and into making decisions.

Antonio Gramsci declares that a complex relationship exists between the base and the

superstructure. The bourgeois establishes and maintains what he calls hegemony- that is, the

assumptions, values and meanings that shape meaning and define realitu for the majority of

people in a given culture. Consequently, the majority of people forget or abandon their own

interests and desires and accept the dominant values and beliefs as their own.

Louis Althusser reject the assumtions of reflection theory. In his production theory he

asserts that literature should not be restricted to relegated to superstructure; the superstructure

can and does influence the base, art can and does inspire revolution. The dominant class

hegemony is never complete, thus alternative hegemonies exist and are cometing with the
domingn hegemony. Revolution can begin if working classes write their own literature, in this way

establishing an alternate hegemony which challenges the bourgeois one.

British Cultural Materialism

Cultural Materialisms, the British Branch of Cultural Poetics, is Marxist in its theories and political

and cultural in its aims. The cultural hegemony is unstable. For literature to produce change, a

critic must read the works of the established cannon “against the grain”, becoming “resisting

readers”. Claude Levi-Strauss's influence moved British thinkers to assign "culture" to primitive

peoples, and they with the work of British scholars like Raymond Williams, to attribute culture to

the working class as well as the elite. Inspired by Karl Marx, British theorists were also influenced

by Gyorgy Lukacs, Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Max Horkheimer, Mikhail Bakhtin, and

Antonio Gramsci. They were especially interested in problems of cultural hegemony and in the

many systems of domination related to literature. Cultural materialists also turned to the more

humanistic and even spiritual insights of the great student of Rabelais and Dostoevsky, Russian

Formalist Bakhtin, especially his amplification of the dialogic form of meaning within narrative and

class struggle, at once conflictual and communal, individual and social. Feminism was also

important for cultural materialists in recognizing how seemingly "disinterested" thought is shaped

by power structures such as patriarchy.

Ecocriticism

Ecocriticism is the latest emerging field in literary studies that directly relates who we are as

human beings to the environment. It emphasizes place, nature, and the physical world, attesting

to the interconnectedness between humans (their culture) and nature. It’s the study of the

relationship between literature and the physical environment; it takes an earth centered approach
to literary study. Ecocriticism calls us to activism, to participate in actually doing something about

our environment, not simply contemplating change or involvement.

Historical development

Greeks and Romans along with many authored texts that concerned pastoral scenes that highlight

setting and the natural world while generating responses to environmental concerns, such as

animal rights, pollution and excessive waste.

Ecocriticism can be divided into first and second wave environmental criticism. (Lawrence Bluell)

The first wave concerns itself with “nature reading” which is simply rereading Emerson and

Thoreau works and passively enjoy and contemplate nature. The second wave pays attention to

more recent works and focuses on current environmental concerns (poisons from insecticides,

dangerous chemicals in food, etc.).

First wave can be divided geographically into American and British. The American writers during

the mid-nineteenth century set the standard for nature writing (Fuller, Emerson, Thoreau). These

works highlight natural settings, nature, and a type of spirituality that connects both humanity and

nature itself, a like force in and through nature that humanity can and should embrace. In Britain,

Raymond Williams articulates some of the chief ecocritical ceoncerns including the key distinction

between rural and urban and nature and civilization.

From the 1900s second wave ecocritisism focuses less on romantic writers and more on present-

day environmental concerns. Proponents of this movement necessarily highlight questions of

gender, class, race, and colonialism, challenging first wave ecocritics who who seem more

interested in preserving “wild” and untamed nature than protecting the environment. Because 2nd
wave critics do not abandon 1st wave’s interests it is difficult to tell one critic is solely from 1st or

2nd wave.

Even though there is no unified sets of assumptions it can be said that Ecocriticism :

 Emphasizes interconnectedness of all things, including nature and culture.

 Is interdisciplinary (sciences and humanities dialogue)

 Believes human culture is connected to the physical world

 Assumes that nature, the world and humans exist and cannot be contained and described

fully and encoded by humanity language, concepts, or beliefs.

 Assumes that all texts develop a concept of place or setting that allows an ecocritical

reading.

 Advocates a literal saving of the world

 Believes in being inclusive in its theories and practices.

Methodology

Ecocriticism approaches texts with an intense concept of place and profound interest and

understanding of nature. It seeks to demonstrate humanity’s connectedness to nature and

to all living organisms and their physical environment. An ecocritic can approach a text

according to its interests; for example first wave interests focus on the beauty of nature,

thus the critic will demonstrate through textual analysis the hows and whys of protecting

place or setting or nature as evidenced in the text. Another critic may focus on urban

nature and post-apocalyptic themes while another can focus on how characters develop

ecosensitive human relationships. Such diverse possibilities allow ecocritisism to concern

about an ever expanding area of study.

UNIT 8: Literature and Linguistics

Definitions

The enlightment is synonymous with modernity. Here it is possible to observe two features:

reason is human kind bes guide to life, and science can lead humanity to a new promised land. The

rational essence freed from superstition, allowing humankind to discover the truth about the

physical world. Bacon’s scientific method and Newton’s understanding of physical world as a

mechanism are features of this period. Some characteristics of modernity are: self as conscious,

rational; reality can be studied; scientific methodology can lead to objective truth; progress is

thanks to rationality; language is referential, representing of the perceivable world.

Writers and literary theoreticians believed that texts possessed some kind of objective existence

and could, therefore, be studied and analyzed, with appropriate conclusions to follow from some

analysis. These assumptions will be challenged by postmodernism.

Until the late 1960s the primary form of discourse was represented in the form of a map.

(Franklin) The map itself is a representation of reality as known, discovered and detailed by

humanity. By the middle of 1960s this was challenged by Derrida’s deconstructionism. For him and

other postmodernists all definitions of truth are subjective; many truths exist, not the truth. Then,

the map idea is not useful anymore; a collage is a better representation of reality as it offers many

possible understandings instead of a fixed picture.

Even though postmodernism was present in American literary scene in the 30s (term already used

by Nietzsche) is was not until the 60s that authors such as Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Rorty

declared the death of objective truth. While modernity searched for an external point of
reference, an unifying element (God, science, reason, etc) postmodernism rejected this unity idea

- reality becomes a human construction shaped by each individual’s dominant social group.

Applied to literary interpretation, postmodernis realizes that there’s no such thing as “The

meaning” or the “correct” meaning. Meaning comes from interaction between reader and text.

Structuralism

In the 19th century, philology, not linguistics, was in charge or language. It had a diachronic

approach to language. In the first decade of 1900s Saussure triggered a reformation in language

study, setting the bases modern linguistics, structuralism literary theory and practical criticism.

While he affirmed the validity of the diachronic approach, he also introduced the synchronic

approach. He drew the attention to the nature of composition of language and its constituent

parts. Language is primarily determined by its own internally structured and highly systematized

rules.

Structuralists find meaning in the realationship of the various components of a system. When

applied to literature this principle becomes revolutionary. For structuralists, the proper study of

literature now involves an inquiry into the conditions surrounding the act of interpretation itself.

How a text conveys meaning rather than what meaning is conveyed is at the centre of their

interpretative methodology. To structuralists, how a symbol or any other literary device functions

is of chief importance (darkness=evil YGB)

If literature is a system of signs encased in a cultural frame, there is no mystified relationship

between reader and author. All texts, declare structuralists, are part of the shared system of

meaning that is intertextual, not text specific.

Claude Levi Strauss spent years studying myths from around the world, he assumed they

possessed a structure like language. He identified recurring themes; he called the basic structure

mythemes, which are the similar to primary building blocks of language. The rules that govern how

those mythemes may be combined constitute myth’s structure or grammar. The meaning of any

individual myth, then, depends on the interaction and order of the mythemes within the story.

Because mythemes occur in countless texts they immediately ignite emotions within the reader

when reading and individual text.

Roland Barthes declares that all language is its own self enclosed system based on binary

operations. Meaning develops through difference to all social contexts. When applied to

literature, an individual text is simply a message – an example of parole – that must be interpreted

by using appropriate codes or signs or binary operations that form the basis of the entire system,

the langue (light=good, dark=evil) . Rather than discovering any element of truth in a text, this

methodology the process of decoding a text in relationship to the codes provided by the structure

of language itself.

Vladimir Propp investigates Russian fairy tales to discover their langue. He discovered that all tales

are based on fixed elements that occur in a given sequence E.g accepting the call for adventure,

recognizing the hero, etc. Each element occurs in its logical and proper sequence. These logical

sequences can be found in any text.

Tzvetan Todorov By applying a rather intricate grammatical model to narrative—dividing the text

into semantic, syntactic, and verbal aspects—Todorov believes he can discover the narrative's

langue and establish a grammar of narrative. Genette believes that figures of speech require a

reader’s special attention. Although these narratologists provide us with various approaches to
texts, all furnish us with a metalanguage—words used to describe language— so we can

understand how a text means, not what it means.

Jonathan Culler took structuralism in another direction, a return to an investigation of langue. He

insists on analyzing the act of interpretation itself, shifting the focus from text to reader. In his

theory of reading he asserts that every reader holds three assumptions when reading and

interpreting texts: a text will be unified, thematically significant, and that significance can take a

form of reflection. He tries to establish the system that undergirds the reading process.

A core of structuralists believe the primary signifying system is best found as a series of binary

oppositions that the reader organizes, values and uses to interpret a text. Structuralism

emphasizes form and structure, not the actual content of a text.

Post structuralism

Throughout much of the 1950s and 1960s, structuralism dominated European and American

literary theory and criticism. Language is the primary means of signification and that language

comprises its own rule-governed system to achieve such meaning. Expectations highlight that all

social and cultural practices are governed by rules or codes. (E.g. sports fans lang and behavior)

The act of reading is also cultural and a social practice that contains its own codes. Thus, meaning

in a text resides in these codes that the reader has mastered before he or she even picks up an

actual text. In the mid-60s these assumptions were challenged by the maxim of undecidability: a

text has many meanings and, therefore, no definitive interpretation. For postmodern critics, by

contrast, undecidability radically undermines the very principle of unity: these critics celebrate

multiplicity, heterogeneity, difference. Undecidability splits the text, disorders it. Undecidability

dislodges the principle of a single final meaning in a literary text. Deconstruction theory, asks a

different set of questions, endeavoring to show that what a text claims it says and what it actually
says are discernibly different. By casting doubt on most previously held theories, deconstruction

declares that a text has an almost infinite number of possible interpretations. A paradigmatic shift

occurs in literary theory and criticism.

Deconstruction

Derrida questions and disputes the metaphysical assumptions held to be true by Western

philosophy and innaugurates a challenging method of textual analysis. He claims that his approach

to reading and literary analysis is more a "strategic device" than a methodology, more a strategy

or approach to literature than a school or theory of criticism. The assumptions can be divided into

three workable areas of study

1- What Derrida borrows and amends from structuralism

Derrida accepts Saussure's primary belief that language is a system of rules and that these rules

govern every aspect of language. In addition, Derrida affirms Saussure s assumption that the

linguistic sign (Saussure's linguistic replacement for the word word) is both arbitrary and

conventional. Saussure is insistent about the arbitrary relationship he- tween the signifier and the

signified. Derridean deconstruction begins with and empathetically affirms Saussure’s decree that

language is a system based on differences. We and know the meaning of signifiers through and

because of their relationships among themselves. The signified can be known only through its

relationships and differences among other signifiers.

Transcendental Signified is an external point of reference upon which one may build a concept or

philosophy. Once found, this transcendental signified would provide ultimate meaning since it

would be the origin of origins. It functions as centre of meaning, originates within itself, it’s not
comparable. A center of meaning could not subject itself to structural analysis because by so doing

it would lose its place to as a transcendental signified.

Logocentrism is the belief that there’s an ultimate reality or centre of truth. Western metaphysics

has invented a variety of terms that can function as centers: God, reason, origin, etc. we can never

totally free ourselves from our logocentric habit of thinking and our inherited concept of the

universe. By decentering and questioning the self (centre), I cause the unconscious self to become

the new center. By questioning the old center, I establish a new one. The process of logocentric

thinking, asserts Derrida, is natural but problematic for Western readers.

Binary Oppositions For each centre, there’s and opposing centre (God / humankind) one concept is

superior and defines itself by its opposite or inferior centre.

Phonocentrism Derrida wishes to dismantle or deconstruct the structure such binary oppositions

have created. Western thought has long privileged speech over writing. This privileging of speech

over writing Derrida calls phonocentrism. In placing speech in the privileged position,

phonocentrism treats writing as inferior. Phonocentrism assumes a logocentric way of thinking,

that the self is the center of meaning and can best ascertain ideas directly from other selves

through spoken words.

Metaphysics of Presence by deconstructing the basic premises, Derrida gives us a strategy that

opens up a variety of new interpretations heretofore unseen by those who are bound to the

restraints of western thought.

2- The proposed radical changes Derrida makes in Western philosophy

Once we have acknowledged the binary oppositions in our thinking we can readily reverse its

elements. Reversing the hierarchies will allow us to examine the values that gave rise to coth the

original hierarchy and the new one.

Derrida argues for a redefinition of the term writing will allow him to assert that writing is actually

a precondition for and prior to speech. Both writing and language are means of signification, and

each can be considered a signifying system. By equating writing with freeplay or the element of

undecidability at the center of all systems of communication, Derrida declares that writing actu-

ajly governs language, thereby negating the speech/writing hierarchy of Western metaphysics.

The relationship between any binary hierarchy is always unstable and problematic. Derrida asserts

that this relation is actually supplementary, for example in speech/writing; writing supplements

speaking and also takes its place.

The concept Derrida creates to deal with logo centrism is diffèrance (it’s a pun, the word only

exists in writing). The concept of diffèrance is basically the question “What if?” if the

transcendental signified didn’t exist, if there’s no essence, no unifying element. If we reverse the

hierarchy presence/ absence of TS there is no point of comparison to an absolute knowledge but

difference between bits of knowledge. When reading a text, we can say that the text lacks

prescense, in isolation it has no meaning, the text then, becomes intertextual. Never can we state

a text’s definitive meaning because it has no “one” correct or definitive interpretation. The search

for the text’s correct meaning or the authors intentions becomes meaningless; meaning evolves as

we, the readers, interact with the text, with both the readers and the text providing social an

cultural context.

3- The new terminology and methodology for textual analysis

A deconstructionist begins a textual analysis by assuming the text has multiple meanings, the joy is

in discovering new meanings; in a continuous seek to override the self logocentric and inherited

ways of viewing a text. Reversing hierarchies helps challenging fixed views and rigid beliefs.

A new reading strategy Deconstructionists believe that even the author does not control a text’s

interpretation. What he or she says or means may not be what it’s written. The author may

misspeak in questions, figurative languge and strong declarations; this demonstrates the

undecidability of a text’s meaning.

To this strategy we have to:

• Discover the binary operations that govern a text.

• Comment on the values, concepts, and ideas beyond these operations.

• Reverse these present binary operations.

• Dismantle previously held worldviews.

• Accept the possibility of various perspectives or levels of meaning in a text base(j on the new

binary inversions.

• Allow meaning of the text to be undecidable.

All in all deconstruction solicits an ongoing relationship between the interpreter (the critic) and

the text.