Literary Theory?

"Literary theory," sometimes designated "critical theory," or "theory," and now undergoing a
transformation into "cultural theory" within the discipline of literary studies, can be understood
as the set of concepts and intellectual assumptions on which rests the work of explaining or
interpreting literary texts. Literary theory refers to any principles derived from internal analysis
of literary texts or from knowledge external to the text that can be applied in multiple interpretive
situations. All critical practice regarding literature depends on an underlying structure of ideas in
at least two ways: theory provides a rationale for what constitutes the subject matter of
criticism—"the literary"—and the specific aims of critical practice—the act of interpretation
itself. For example, to speak of the "unity" of Oedipus the King explicitly invokes Aristotle's
theoretical statements on poetics. To argue, as does Chinua Achebe, that Joseph Conrad’s The
Heart of Darkness fails to grant full humanity to the Africans it depicts is a perspective informed
by a postcolonial literary theory that presupposes a history of exploitation and racism. Critics
that explain the climactic drowning of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening as a suicide generally
call upon a supporting architecture of feminist and gender theory. The structure of ideas that
enables criticism of a literary work may or may not be acknowledged by the critic, and the status
of literary theory within the academic discipline of literary studies continues to evolve.

Literary theory and the formal practice of literary interpretation runs a parallel but less well
known course with the history of philosophy and is evident in the historical record at least as far
back as Plato. The Cratylus contains a Plato's meditation on the relationship of words and the
things to which they refer. Plato’s skepticism about signification, i.e., that words bear no
etymological relationship to their meanings but are arbitrarily "imposed," becomes a central
concern in the twentieth century to both "Structuralism" and "Poststructuralism." However, a
persistent belief in "reference," the notion that words and images refer to an objective reality, has
provided epistemological (that is, having to do with theories of knowledge) support for theories
of literary representation throughout most of Western history. Until the nineteenth century, Art,
in Shakespeare’s phrase, held "a mirror up to nature" and faithfully recorded an objectively real
world independent of the observer.

Modern literary theory gradually emerges in Europe during the nineteenth century. In one of the
earliest developments of literary theory, German "higher criticism" subjected biblical texts to a
radical historicizing that broke with traditional scriptural interpretation. "Higher," or "source
criticism," analyzed biblical tales in light of comparable narratives from other cultures, an
approach that anticipated some of the method and spirit of twentieth century theory, particularly
"Structuralism" and "New Historicism." In France, the eminent literary critic Charles Augustin
Saint Beuve maintained that a work of literature could be explained entirely in terms of
biography, while novelist Marcel Proust devoted his life to refuting Saint Beuve in a massive
narrative in which he contended that the details of the life of the artist are utterly transformed in
the work of art. (This dispute was taken up anew by the French theorist Roland Barthes in his
famous declaration of the "Death of the Author." See "Structuralism" and "Poststructuralism.")
Perhaps the greatest nineteenth century influence on literary theory came from the deep
epistemological suspicion of Friedrich Nietzsche: that facts are not facts until they have been
interpreted. Nietzsche's critique of knowledge has had a profound impact on literary studies and
helped usher in an era of intense literary theorizing that has yet to pass.

Attention to the etymology of the term "theory," from the Greek "theoria," alerts us to the partial
nature of theoretical approaches to literature. "Theoria" indicates a view or perspective of the
Greek stage. This is precisely what literary theory offers, though specific theories often claim to
present a complete system for understanding literature. The current state of theory is such that
there are many overlapping areas of influence, and older schools of theory, though no longer
enjoying their previous eminence, continue to exert an influence on the whole. The once widely-
held conviction (an implicit theory) that literature is a repository of all that is meaningful and
ennobling in the human experience, a view championed by the Leavis School in Britain, may no
longer be acknowledged by name but remains an essential justification for the current structure
of American universities and liberal arts curricula. The moment of "Deconstruction" may have
passed, but its emphasis on the indeterminacy of signs (that we are unable to establish
exclusively what a word means when used in a given situation) and thus of texts, remains
significant. Many critics may not embrace the label "feminist," but the premise that gender is a
social construct, one of theoretical feminisms distinguishing insights, is now axiomatic in a
number of theoretical perspectives.

While literary theory has always implied or directly expressed a conception of the world outside
the text, in the twentieth century three movements—"Marxist theory" of the Frankfurt School,
"Feminism," and "Postmodernism"—have opened the field of literary studies into a broader area
of inquiry. Marxist approaches to literature require an understanding of the primary economic
and social bases of culture since Marxist aesthetic theory sees the work of art as a product,
directly or indirectly, of the base structure of society. Feminist thought and practice analyzes the
production of literature and literary representation within the framework that includes all social
and cultural formations as they pertain to the role of women in history. Postmodern thought
consists of both aesthetic and epistemological strands. Postmodernism in art has included a move
toward non-referential, non-linear, abstract forms; a heightened degree of self-referentiality; and
the collapse of categories and conventions that had traditionally governed art. Postmodern
thought has led to the serious questioning of the so-called metanarratives of history, science,
philosophy, and economic and sexual reproduction. Under postmodernity, all knowledge comes
to be seen as "constructed" within historical self-contained systems of understanding. Marxist,
feminist, and postmodern thought have brought about the incorporation of all human discourses
(that is, interlocking fields of language and knowledge) as a subject matter for analysis by the
literary theorist. Using the various poststructuralist and postmodern theories that often draw on
disciplines other than the literary—linguistic, anthropological, psychoanalytic, and
philosophical—for their primary insights, literary theory has become an interdisciplinary body of
cultural theory. Taking as its premise that human societies and knowledge consist of texts in one
form or another, cultural theory (for better or worse) is now applied to the varieties of texts,
ambitiously undertaking to become the preeminent model of inquiry into the human condition.

Literary theory is a site of theories: some theories, like "Queer Theory," are "in;" other literary
theories, like "Deconstruction," are "out" but continue to exert an influence on the field.
"Traditional literary criticism," "New Criticism," and "Structuralism" are alike in that they held
to the view that the study of literature has an objective body of knowledge under its scrutiny. The
other schools of literary theory, to varying degrees, embrace a postmodern view of language and
reality that calls into serious question the objective referent of literary studies. The following
categories are certainly not exhaustive, nor are they mutually exclusive, but they represent the
major trends in literary theory of this century.

Traditional Literary Criticism

Academic literary criticism prior to the rise of "New Criticism" in the United States tended to
practice traditional literary history: tracking influence, establishing the canon of major writers in
the literary periods, and clarifying historical context and allusions within the text. Literary
biography was and still is an important interpretive method in and out of the academy; versions
of moral criticism, not unlike the Leavis School in Britain, and aesthetic (e.g. genre studies)
criticism were also generally influential literary practices. Perhaps the key unifying feature of
traditional literary criticism was the consensus within the academy as to the both the literary
canon (that is, the books all educated persons should read) and the aims and purposes of
literature. What literature was, and why we read literature, and what we read, were questions that
subsequent movements in literary theory were to raise.

Formalism and New Criticism

"Formalism" is, as the name implies, an interpretive approach that emphasizes literary form and
the study of literary devices within the text. The work of the Formalists had a general impact on
later developments in "Structuralism" and other theories of narrative. "Formalism," like
"Structuralism," sought to place the study of literature on a scientific basis through objective
analysis of the motifs, devices, techniques, and other "functions" that comprise the literary work.
The Formalists placed great importance on the literariness of texts, those qualities that
distinguished the literary from other kinds of writing. Neither author nor context was essential
for the Formalists; it was the narrative that spoke, the "hero-function," for example, that had
meaning. Form was the content. A plot device or narrative strategy was examined for how it
functioned and compared to how it had functioned in other literary works. Of the Russian
Formalist critics, Roman Jakobson and Viktor Shklovsky are probably the most well known.

The Formalist adage that the purpose of literature was "to make the stones stonier" nicely
expresses their notion of literariness. "Formalism" is perhaps best known is Shklovsky's concept
of "defamiliarization." The routine of ordinary experience, Shklovsky contended, rendered
invisible the uniqueness and particularity of the objects of existence. Literary language, partly by
calling attention to itself as language, estranged the reader from the familiar and made fresh the
experience of daily life.

The "New Criticism," so designated as to indicate a break with traditional methods, was a
product of the American university in the 1930s and 40s. "New Criticism" stressed close reading
of the text itself, much like the French pedagogical precept "explication du texte." As a strategy
of reading, "New Criticism" viewed the work of literature as an aesthetic object independent
of historical context and as a unified whole that reflected the unified sensibility of the artist.
T.S. Eliot, though not explicitly associated with the movement, expressed a similar critical-
aesthetic philosophy in his essays on John Donne and the metaphysical poets, writers who Eliot
believed experienced a complete integration of thought and feeling. New Critics like Cleanth
Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and W.K. Wimsatt placed a similar focus on
the metaphysical poets and poetry in general, a genre well suited to New Critical practice. "New
Criticism" aimed at bringing a greater intellectual rigor to literary studies, confining itself to
careful scrutiny of the text alone and the formal structures of paradox, ambiguity, irony, and
metaphor, among others. "New Criticism" was fired by the conviction that their readings of
poetry would yield a humanizing influence on readers and thus counter the alienating tendencies
of modern, industrial life. "New Criticism" in this regard bears an affinity to the Southern
Agrarian movement whose manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, contained essays by two New Critics,
Ransom and Warren. Perhaps the enduring legacy of "New Criticism" can be found in the
college classroom, in which the verbal texture of the poem on the page remains a primary object
of literary study.

……………………………………………………………….
Marxism and Critical Theory
Marxist literary theories tend to focus on the representation of class conflict as well as the
reinforcement of class distinctions through the medium of literature. Marxist theorists use
traditional techniques of literary analysis but subordinate aesthetic concerns to the final social
and political meanings of literature. Marxist theorist often champion authors sympathetic to the
working classes and authors whose work challenges economic inequalities found in capitalist
societies. In keeping with the totalizing spirit of Marxism, literary theories arising from the
Marxist paradigm have not only sought new ways of understanding the relationship between
economic production and literature, but all cultural production as well. Marxist analyses of
society and history have had a profound effect on literary theory and practical criticism, most
notably in the development of "New Historicism" and "Cultural Materialism."

The Hungarian theorist Georg Lukacs contributed to an understanding of the relationship

between historical materialism and literary form, in particular with realism and the historical
novel. Walter Benjamin broke new ground in his work in his study of aesthetics and the
reproduction of the work of art. The Frankfurt School of philosophers, including most notably
Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse—after their emigration to the United
States—played a key role in introducing Marxist assessments of culture into the mainstream of
American academic life. These thinkers became associated with what is known as "Critical
theory," one of the constituent components of which was a critique of the instrumental use of
reason in advanced capitalist culture. "Critical theory" held to a distinction between the high
cultural heritage of Europe and the mass culture produced by capitalist societies as an instrument
of domination. "Critical theory" sees in the structure of mass cultural forms—jazz, Hollywood
film, advertising—a replication of the structure of the factory and the workplace. Creativity and
cultural production in advanced capitalist societies were always already co-opted by the
entertainment needs of an economic system that requires sensory stimulation and recognizable
cliché and suppressed the tendency for sustained deliberation.

The major Marxist influences on literary theory since the Frankfurt School have been Raymond
Williams and Terry Eagleton in Great Britain and Frank Lentricchia and Fredric Jameson in the
United States. Williams is associated with the New Left political movement in Great Britain and
the development of "Cultural Materialism" and the Cultural Studies Movement, originating in
the 1960s at Birmingham University's Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Eagleton is
known both as a Marxist theorist and as a popularizer of theory by means of his widely read
overview, Literary Theory. Lentricchia likewise became influential through his account of trends
in theory, After the New Criticism. Jameson is a more diverse theorist, known both for his impact
on Marxist theories of culture and for his position as one of the leading figures in theoretical
postmodernism. Jameson’s work on consumer culture, architecture, film, literature and other
areas, typifies the collapse of disciplinary boundaries taking place in the realm of Marxist and
postmodern cultural theory. Jameson’s work investigates the way the structural features of late
capitalism—particularly the transformation of all culture into commodity form—are now deeply
embedded in all of our ways of communicating.
Karl Marx: Becoming a Socialist
In our previous lecture, we learned how Karl Marx's ideas are studied and used by philosophers,
historians, economists, sociologists and political scientists. Marx's ideas were seen as so radical
that he was perceived as an inspiration to revolutionists and a threat by leaders of state
governments.

Karl Marx's work has had an everlasting impact on the arena of sociology in that his views
opened the door to the study of how one's social class has a direct influence on one's life
experiences and life chances. His work also opened the door for many differing perspectives on
the issue of the wealthy and the poor in society.

While in Paris from 1843 to 1845, Marx was able to meet with other radical thinkers and
revolutionists, for Paris had become a center for all things social, political and artistic. Here,
Marx was able to study socialist theories that were not available to him in Germany.

It was during this time that Marx met and became lifelong friends with Friedrich Engels and was
immersed into the socialist world, focusing on the conditions of the working class. For the first
time, Marx was beginning to understand the conditions and misery of the working-class people.

He wrote many editorials regarding such and, once again, was expelled from his country - but
this time by the French government. Marx would spend much of his life expelled from Germany
and other countries as a result of his radical (for the times) thinking. Karl Marx was expelled
from Germany and a number of other countries for his radical ideas

Theories of Social Class

Karl Marx was one of the first social scientists to focus mainly on social class. His main focus
on social class was that one's social class dictated one's social life.

Basically, Marx meant that if one is in the upper class, life was one of leisure and abundance,
while those in the lower class lived lives of hardship and poverty.

According to Marx, there was one social element that would determine where one fit in the
social class hierarchy: that of who controls the means of production, meaning who owned the
resources necessary to produce what people needed to survive.

The wealthy would be the individuals who owned the land and factories. The wealthy would then
control all elements of society - including the livelihoods of the lower, working class. The lower,
working class would work for hourly wages on the land or in the factories.

Marx wanted to better understand how so many people could be in poverty in a world where
there was an abundance of wealth. His answer was simple: capitalism.

According to sociologist John Macionis, the wealthy and the working poor 'have opposing
interests and are separated by a vast gulf of wealth and power, making class conflict inevitable.'

Alienation and Revolution

In history, those members of the aristocracy and the church owned the means of production, and
the peasants worked for the aristocracy. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, Marx
thought that he would see more of the working poor rise financially and socially. However, this
did not materialize.

In the industrial society, the aristocracy was replaced by the capitalists (also known as the
bourgeoisie). These were the people who owned businesses with the goal of earning a profit, and
the working class was replaced by the proletariat, the people who labored for wages.

Marx believed that this system was inherently unfair. Under capitalism, Marx believed that the
workers would become poorer and poorer and experience alienation. Alienation is seen as the
workers becoming more distanced from, or isolated from, their work, resulting in a feeling of
powerlessness.

To replace this alienation and extreme social class structure, Marx believed that capitalism had to
end and be replaced by a socialist system that would make all equal and have all people's needs
met.

In his work with Fredrick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Marx stated, 'The proletarians
have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.' Thus, Marx had called for a
workers' revolution where the proletarians would rise up against the bourgeoisie, overthrowing
capitalism. To Marx's despair, though, such revolutions occurred in various countries such as
Russia and China, but did not occur in the more industrialized nations of the time, like Britain
and Germany.

Capitalism and Socialism

To get a better understanding of Karl Marx's disdain for capitalism and how he felt that the
answer to social inequality was socialism, let's look at the two economic systems in a bit more
detail. Capitalism and socialism are different types of economic systems that exist and are used
by many countries. The United States is considered a capitalist country, while Denmark is
considered a socialist country. While both the United States and Denmark have a democratic
government, they differ in their economic systems.

Capitalism is an economic system where the means of production is owned by private

individuals. In this system, the economy and the use of resources are controlled by individual
business owners and private companies. A capitalist system is also known as free market
enterprise.

The main focus of capitalism is profit - businesses exist to make money. When one owns a
company or manages a company, the goal is to earn a profit or to increase the price of stock in
the business firm. Essentially, the purpose of capitalism is the accumulation of as much wealth
for the owners as possible.

Under capitalism, government plays a very minor role - or should, at least. Capitalism is based
off of the idea of laissez-faire, which is French for 'let them do.' The government's role in
capitalism is to make certain that the playing field for all businesses is even by enforcing laws
and regulations.
The pros of capitalism are that capitalism allows individuals the opportunity to increase their
personal financial growth. This increase in wealth is the reward for individual hard work and
dedication in the capitalist system.

…………………………………………………………………
Structuralism and Literary Criticism
Structuralism is a theoretical paradigm in sociology, anthropology and linguistics positing that
elements of human culture must be understood in terms of their relationship to a larger,
overarching structure or system. It works to uncover the structures that underlie all the things
that humans do, think, perceive, and feel. Alternatively, as summarized by philosopher Simon
Blackburn, Structuralism is "the belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible
except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and behind local
variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract culture".

Structuralism originated in the early 1900s, in the structural

linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague, Moscow
and Copenhagen schools of linguistics. In the late 1950s and early '60s, when structural
linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in
importance, an array of scholars in the humanities borrowed Saussure's concepts for use in their
respective fields of study. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was arguably the first such
scholar, sparking a widespread interest in Structuralism.

The structuralist mode of reasoning has been applied in a diverse range of fields,
including anthropology, sociology, psychology, literary criticism, economics and architecture.
The most prominent thinkers associated with structuralism include Lévi-Strauss, linguist Roman
Jakobson, and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. As an intellectual movement, structuralism was
initially presumed to be the heir apparent to existentialism. However, by the late 1960s, many of
structuralism's basic tenets came under attack from a new wave of predominantly French
intellectuals such as the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, the philosopher and social
commentator Jacques Derrida, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and the literary critic
Roland Barthes Though elements of their work necessarily relate to structuralism and are
informed by it, these theorists have generally been referred to as post-structuralists.

In the 1970s, structuralism was criticised for its rigidity and ahistoricism. Despite this, many of
structuralism's proponents, such as Jacques Lacan, continue to assert an influence on continental
philosophy and many of the fundamental assumptions of some of structuralism's post-
structuralist critics are a continuation of structuralism.
Overview
The origins of structuralism connect with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure on linguistics,
along with the linguistics of the Prague and Moscow schools. In brief, de Saussure's structural
linguistics propounded three related concepts.

1. De Saussure argued for a distinction between langue (an idealized abstraction of

language) and parole (language as actually used in daily life). He argued that the
"sign" was composed of both a signified, an abstract concept or idea, and a
"signifier", the perceived sound/visual image.
2. Because different languages have different words to describe the same objects or
concepts, there is no intrinsic reason why a specific sign is used to express a given
signifier. It is thus "arbitrary".
3. Signs thus gain their meaning from their relationships and contrasts with other
signs. As he wrote, "in language, there are only differences 'without positive terms.'
As summarized by philosopher John Searle, de Saussure established that 'I understand
the sentence "the cat is on the mat" the way I do because I know how it would relate to an
indefinite—indeed infinite—set of other sentences, "the dog is on the mat," "the cat is on the
couch," etc.'

The term "structuralism" itself appeared in the works of French anthropologist Claude
Lévi-Strauss. This gave rise, in France, to the "structuralist movement", which spurred the work
of such thinkers as Louis Althusser, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, as well as the structural
Marxism of Nicos Poulantzas. Most members of this movement did not describe themselves as
being a part of any such movement. Structuralism is closely related to semiotics.

Blending Freud and de Saussure, the French (post) structuralist Jacques

Lacan applied structuralism to psychoanalysis and, in a different way, Jean Piaget applied
structuralism to the study of psychology. But Jean Piaget, who would better define himself as
constructivist, considers structuralism as "a method and not a doctrine" because for him "there
exists no structure without a construction, abstract or genetic".

Michel Foucault's book The Order of Things examined the history of science to
study how structures of epistemology, or episteme, shaped the way in which people imagined
knowledge and knowing (though Foucault would later explicitly deny affiliation with the
structuralist movement).

In much the same way, American historian of science Thomas Kuhn addressed the
structural formations of science in his seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Though less concerned with "episteme", Kuhn nonetheless remarked at how coteries of scientists
operated under and applied a standard praxis of 'normal science,' deviating from a standard
'paradigm' only in instances of irreconcilable anomalies that question a significant body of their
work.

Although the French theorist Louis Althusser is often associated with a brand of
structural social analysis which helped give rise to "structural Marxism", such association was
contested by Althusser himself in the Italian foreword to the second edition of Reading Capital.
In this foreword Althusser states the following:

"Despite the precautions we took to distinguish ourselves from the 'structuralist' ideology ...,
despite the decisive intervention of categories foreign to 'structuralism' ..., the terminology we
employed was too close in many respects to the 'structuralist' terminology not to give rise to an
ambiguity. With a very few exceptions ... our interpretation of Marx has generally been
recognized and judged, in homage to the current fashion, as 'structuralist'... We believe that
despite the terminological ambiguity, the profound tendency of our texts was not attached to the
'structuralist' ideology."

Proponents of structuralism would argue that a specific domain of culture may

be understood by means of a structure—modelled on language—that is distinct both from the
organizations of reality and those of ideas or the imagination—the "third order". In Lacan's
psychoanalytic theory, for example, the structural order of "the Symbolic" is distinguished both
from "the Real" and "the Imaginary"; similarly, in Althusser's Marxist theory, the structural order
of the capitalist mode of production is distinct both from the actual, real agents involved in its
relations and from the ideological forms in which those relations are understood.

According to feminist theorist, Alison Assiter, four ideas are common to the
various forms of structuralism. First, that a structure determines the position of each element of a
whole. Second, that every system has a structure. Third, structural laws deal with co-existence
rather than change. Fourth, structures are the "real things" that lie beneath the surface or the
appearance of meaning.

Structuralism in linguistics

In Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (written by

Saussure's colleagues after his death and based on student notes), the analysis focuses not on
the use of language (called "parole", or speech), but rather on the underlying system of language
(called "langue"). This approach examines how the elements of language relate to each other in
the present, synchronically rather than diachronically. Saussure argued that linguistic signs were
composed of two parts:

1. a "signifier" (the "sound pattern" of a word, either in mental projection—as when one
silently recites lines from a poem to one's self—or in actual, physical realization as part
of a speech act)
 2. a "signified" (the concept or meaning of the word)
This was quite different from previous approaches that focused on the relationship between
words and the things in the world that they designate. Other key notions in structural linguistics
include paradigm, syntagm, and value (though these notions were not fully developed in
Saussure's thought). A structural "idealism" is a class of linguistic units (lexemes, morphemes or
even constructions) that are possible in a certain position in a given linguistic environment (such
as a given sentence), which is called the "syntagm". The different functional role of each of these
members of the paradigm is called "value" (valeur in French).

Saussure's Course influenced many linguists between World War I and World War
II. In the United States, for instance, Leonard Bloomfield developed his own version of structural
linguistics, as did Louis Hjelmslev in Denmark and Alf Sommerfelt in Norway. In
France Antoine Meillet and Émile Benveniste continued Saussure's project. Most importantly,
however, members of the Prague school of linguistics such as Roman Jakobson and Nikolai
Trubetzkoy conducted research that would be greatly influential. However, by the 1950s
Saussure's linguistic concepts were under heavy criticism and were soon largely abandoned by
practicing linguists:

"Saussure's views are not held, so far as I know, by modern linguists, only by literary
critics and the occasional philosopher. [Strict adherence to Saussure] has elicited wrong film and
literary theory on a grand scale. One can find dozens of books of literary theory bogged down in
signifiers and signifieds, but only a handful that refer to Chomsky."

The clearest and most important example of Prague school structuralism lies in phonemics.
Rather than simply compiling a list of which sounds occur in a language, the Prague school
sought to examine how they were related. They determined that the inventory of sounds in a
language could be analyzed in terms of a series of contrasts. Thus in English the sounds /p/ and
/b/ represent distinct phonemes because there are cases (minimal pairs) where the contrast
between the two is the only difference between two distinct words (e.g. 'pat' and 'bat'). Analyzing
sounds in terms of contrastive features also opens up comparative scope—it makes clear, for
instance, that the difficulty Japanese speakers have differentiating /r/ and /l/ in English is because
these sounds are not contrastive in Japanese. Phonology would become the paradigmatic basis
for structuralism in a number of different fields.

Structuralism in literary theory and criticism

In literary theory, structuralist criticism relates literary texts to a larger structure, which may be a
particular genre, a range of intertextual connections, a model of a universal narrative structure, or
a system of recurrent patterns or motifs. Structuralism argues that there must be a structure in
every text, which explains why it is easier for experienced readers than for non-experienced
readers to interpret a text. Hence, everything that is written seems to be governed by specific
rules, or a "grammar of literature", that one learns in educational institutions and that are to be
unmasked.

A potential problem of structuralist interpretation is that it can be highly reductive, as scholar

Catherine Belsey puts it: "the structuralist danger of collapsing all difference." An example of
such a reading might be if a student concludes the authors of West Side Story did not write
anything "really" new, because their work has the same structure as Shakespeare's Romeo and
Juliet. In both texts a girl and a boy fall in love (a "formula" with a symbolic operator between
them would be "Boy + Girl") despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other
("Boy's Group - Girl's Group" or "Opposing forces") and conflict is resolved by their death.
Structuralist readings focus on how the structures of the single text resolve inherent narrative
tensions. If a structuralist reading focuses on multiple texts, there must be some way in which
those texts unify themselves into a coherent system. The versatility of structuralism is such that a
literary critic could make the same claim about a story of two friendly families ("Boy's
Family + Girl's Family") that arrange a marriage between their children despite the fact that the
children hate each other ("Boy - Girl") and then the children commit suicide to escape the
arranged marriage; the justification is that the second story's structure is an 'inversion' of the first
story's structure: the relationship between the values of love and the two pairs of parties involved
have been reversed.

Structuralistic literary criticism argues that the "literary banter of a text" can lie only in new
structure, rather than in the specifics of character development and voice in which that structure
is expressed. Literary structuralism often follows the lead of Vladimir Propp, Algirdas Julien
Greimas, and Claude Lévi-Strauss in seeking out basic deep elements in stories, myths, and more
recently, anecdotes, which are combined in various ways to produce the many versions of the ur-
story or ur-myth.

There is considerable similarity between structural literary theory and Northrop Frye's archetypal
criticism, which is also indebted to the anthropological study of myths. Some critics have also
tried to apply the theory to individual works, but the effort to find unique structures in individual
literary works runs counter to the structuralist program and has an affinity with New Criticism.
History and background

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, existentialism, such as that propounded by Jean-Paul Sartre,
was the dominant European intellectual movement. Structuralism rose to prominence in France
in the wake of existentialism, particularly in the 1960s. The initial popularity of structuralism in
France led to its spread across the globe.
Structuralism rejected the concept of human freedom and choice and focused instead on the way
that human experience and thus, behavior, is determined by various structures. The most
important initial work on this score was Claude Lévi-Strauss's 1949 volume The Elementary
Structures of Kinship. Lévi-Strauss had known Jakobson during their time together at the New
School in New York during WWII and was influenced by both Jakobson's structuralism as well
as the American anthropological tradition. In Elementary Structure she
examined kinship systems from a structural point of view and demonstrated how apparently
different social organizations were in fact different permutations of a few basic kinship
structures. In the late 1950s he published Structural Anthropology, a collection of essays
outlining his program for structuralism.

By the early 1960s structuralism as a movement was coming into its own and some believed that
it offered a single unified approach to human life that would embrace all disciplines. Roland
Barthes and Jacques Derrida focused on how structuralism could be applied toliterature.

The so-called "Gang of Four" of structuralism was Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Barthes, and
Foucault.

Structuralism and Post structuralism

Like the "New Criticism," "Structuralism" sought to bring to literary studies a set of objective
criteria for analysis and a new intellectual rigor. "Structuralism" can be viewed as an extension
of "Formalism" in that that both "Structuralism" and "Formalism" devoted their attention to
matters of literary form (i.e. structure) rather than social or historical content; and that both
bodies of thought were intended to put the study of literature on a scientific, objective basis.
"Structuralism" relied initially on the ideas of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure.
Like Plato, Saussure regarded the signifier (words, marks, symbols) as arbitrary and
unrelated to the concept, the signified, to which it referred. Within the way a particular
society uses language and signs, meaning was constituted by a system of "differences" between
units of the language. Particular meanings were of less interest than the underlying structures of
signification that made meaning itself possible, often expressed as an emphasis on "langue"
rather than "parole." "Structuralism" was to be a metalanguage, a language about languages, used
to decode actual languages, or systems of signification. The work of the "Formalist" Roman
Jakobson contributed to "Structuralist" thought, and the more prominent Structuralists included
Claude Levi-Strauss in anthropology, Tzvetan Todorov, A.J. Greimas, Gerard Genette, and
Barthes.

The philosopher Roland Barthes proved to be a key figure on the divide between "Structuralism"
and "Poststructuralism." "Poststructuralism" is less unified as a theoretical movement than its
precursor; indeed, the work of its advocates known by the term "Deconstruction" calls into
question the possibility of the coherence of discourse, or the capacity for language to
communicate. "Deconstruction," Semiotic theory (a study of signs with close connections to
"Structuralism," "Reader response theory" in America ("Reception theory" in Europe), and
"Gender theory" informed by the psychoanalysts Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva are areas of
inquiry that can be located under the banner of "Poststructuralism." If signifier and signified are
both cultural concepts, as they are in "Poststructuralism," reference to an empirically certifiable
reality is no longer guaranteed by language. "Deconstruction" argues that this loss of reference
causes an endless deferral of meaning, a system of differences between units of language that has
no resting place or final signifier that would enable the other signifiers to hold their meaning.
The most important theorist of "Deconstruction," Jacques Derrida, has asserted, "There is no
getting outside text," indicating a kind of free play of signification in which no fixed, stable
meaning is possible. "Poststructuralism" in America was originally identified with a group of
Yale academics, the Yale School of "Deconstruction:" J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartmann, and
Paul de Man. Other tendencies in the moment after "Deconstruction" that share some of the
intellectual tendencies of "Poststructuralism" would included the "Reader response" theories of
Stanley Fish, Jane Tompkins, and Wolfgang Iser.

Lacanian psychoanalysis, an updating of the work of Sigmund Freud, extends "Postructuralism"

to the human subject with further consequences for literary theory. According to Lacan, the
fixed, stable self is a Romantic fiction; like the text in "Deconstruction," the self is a decentered
mass of traces left by our encounter with signs, visual symbols, language, etc. For Lacan, the self
is constituted by language, a language that is never one's own, always another’s, always already
in use. Barthes applies these currents of thought in his famous declaration of the "death" of the
Author: "writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin" while also applying a
similar "Poststructuralist" view to the Reader: "the reader is without history, biography,
psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by
which the written text is constituted."

Michel Foucault is another philosopher, like Barthes, whose ideas inform much of
poststructuralist literary theory. Foucault played a critical role in the development of the
postmodern perspective that knowledge is constructed in concrete historical situations in the
form of discourse; knowledge is not communicated by discourse but is discourse itself, can only
be encountered textually. Following Nietzsche, Foucault performs what he calls "genealogies,"
attempts at deconstructing the unacknowledged operation of power and knowledge to reveal the
ideologies that make domination of one group by another seem "natural." Foucaldian
investigations of discourse and power were to provide much of the intellectual impetus for a new
way of looking at history and doing textual studies that came to be known as the "New
Historicism."

Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous

works of a series of mid-20th-century French and continental philosophers and critical theorists
who came to international prominence in the 1960s and '70s.

Post-structuralism is defined by its relationship to its predecessor, structuralism, an intellectual

movement developed in Europe from the early to mid-20th century which argued that human
culture may be understood by means of a structure—modeled on language (i.e., structural
linguistics)—that differs from concrete reality and from abstract ideas—a "third order" that
mediates between the two. Post-structuralist authors all present different critiques of
structuralism, but common themes include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of the structures
that structuralism posits and an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute those
structures. Writers whose work is often characterised as post-structuralist include Jacques
Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, and
Julia Kristeva, although many theorists who have been called "post-structuralist" have rejected
the label.
Existential phenomenology is a significant influence; Colin Davis has argued that post-
structuralists might just as accurately be called "post-phenomenologists".

Theory
Destabilized meaning

In the post-structuralist approach to textual analysis, the reader replaces the author as the primary
subject of inquiry. This displacement is often referred to as the "destabilizing" or "decentering"
of the author, though it has its greatest effect on the text itself. Without a central fixation on the
author, post-structuralists examine other sources for meaning (e.g., readers, cultural norms, other
literature, etc.). These alternative sources are never authoritative, and promise no consistency.

In his essay "Signification and Sense", Emmanuel Levinas remarked on this new field of
semantic inquiry:

...language refers to the position of the listener and the speaker, that is, to the contingency of
their story. To seize by inventory all the contexts of language and all possible positions of
interlocutors is a senseless task. Every verbal signification lies at the confluence of countless
semantic rivers. Experience, like language, no longer seems made of isolated elements lodged
somehow in a Euclidean space... [Words] signify from the "world" and from the position of one
who is looking.

Deconstruction

A major theory associated with Structuralism was binary opposition. This theory proposed that
there are certain theoretical and conceptual opposites, often arranged in a hierarchy, which
human logic has given to text. Such binary pairs could include Enlightenment/Romantic,
male/female, speech/writing, rational/emotional, signifier/signified, symbolic/imaginary.

Post-structuralism rejects the notion of the essential quality of the dominant relation in the
hierarchy, choosing rather to expose these relations and the dependency of the dominant term on
its apparently subservient counterpart. The only way to properly understand these meanings is to
deconstruct the assumptions and knowledge systems that produce multiplicity, the illusion of
singular meaning.

Post-structuralism and structuralism

Structuralism was an intellectual movement in France in the 1950s and 1960s that studied the
underlying structures in cultural products (such as texts) and used analytical concepts from
linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and other fields to interpret those structures. It
emphasized the logical and scientific nature of its results.

Post-structuralism offers a way of studying how knowledge is produced and critiques

structuralist premises. It argues that because history and culture condition the study of underlying
structures, both are subject to biases and misinterpretations. A post-structuralist approach argues
that to understand an object (e.g., a text), it is necessary to study both the object itself and the
systems of knowledge that produced the object.
Historical vs. descriptive view

Post-structuralists generally assert that post-structuralism is historical, and they classify

structuralism as descriptive. This terminology relates to Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction
between the views of historical (diachronic) and descriptive (synchronic) reading. From this
basic distinction, post-structuralist studies often emphasize history to analyze descriptive
concepts. By studying how cultural concepts have changed over time, post-structuralists seek to
understand how those same concepts are understood by readers in the present. For example,
Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization is both a history and an inspection of cultural
attitudes about madness. The theme of history in modern Continental thought can be linked to
such influences as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of
Morals and Martin Heidegger's Being and time.

Scholars between both movements

The uncertain distance between structuralism and post-structuralism is further blurred by the fact
that scholars generally do not label themselves as post-structuralists. Some scholars associated
with structuralism, such as Roland Barthes, also became noteworthy in post-structuralism. Lévi-
Strauss, Lacan, Barthes, and Foucault were the so-called "Gang of Four" of structuralism. All
but Lévi-Strauss became prominent post-structuralists. The works of Jacques Derrida, Gilles
Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva are also counted as prominent examples of post-
structuralism.

The critical reading carried out by these thinkers sought to find contradictions that an author
includes, supposedly inevitably, in his work. Those inconsistencies are used to show that the
interpretation and criticism of any literature is in the hands of the reader and includes that
reader's own cultural biases and assumptions. While many structuralists first thought that they
could tease out an author's intention by close scrutiny, they soon argued that textual analysis
discovered so many disconnections that it was obvious that their own experiences lent a view
that was unique to them.

Some observers from outside the post-structuralist camp have questioned the rigor and
legitimacy of the field. American philosopher John Searle argued in 1990 that "The spread of
'poststructuralist' literary theory is perhaps the best known example of a silly but noncatastrophic
phenomenon." Similarly, physicist Alan Sokal in 1997 criticized "the
postmodernist/poststructuralist gibberish that is now hegemonic in some sectors of the American
academy." Literature scholar Norman Holland argued that post-structuralism was flawed due to
reliance on Saussure's linguistic model, which was seriously challenged by the 1950s and was
soon abandoned by linguists: "Saussure's views are not held, so far as I know, by modern
linguists, only by literary critics and the occasional philosopher. [Strict adherence to Saussure]
has elicited wrong film and literary theory on a grand scale. One can find dozens of books of
literary theory bogged down in signifiers and signifieds, but only a handful that refer to
Chomsky."

History
Post-structuralism emerged in France during the 1960s as a movement critiquing structuralism.
According to J.G. Merquior[3] a love–hate relationship with structuralism developed amongst
many leading French thinkers in the 1960s.
The period was marked by political anxiety, as students and workers alike rebelled against the
state in May 1968, nearly causing the downfall of the French government. At the same time,
however, the support of the French Communist Party (FCP) for the oppressive policies of the
USSR contributed to popular disillusionment with orthodox Marxism. Post-structuralism offered
a means of justifying these criticisms, by exposing the underlying assumptions of many Western
norms.

Two key figures in the early post-structuralist movement were Jacques Derrida and Roland
Barthes. In a 1966 lecture "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences",
Jacques Derrida presented a thesis on an apparent rupture in intellectual life. Derrida interpreted
this event as a "decentering" of the former intellectual cosmos. Instead of progress or divergence
from an identified centre, Derrida described this "event" as a kind of "play."

Although Barthes was originally a structuralist, during the 1960s he increasingly favored post-
structuralist views. In 1967, Barthes published "The Death of the Author" in which he announced
a metaphorical event: the "death" of the author as an authentic source of meaning for a given
text. Barthes argued that any literary text has multiple meanings, and that the author was not the
prime source of the work's semantic content. The "Death of the Author," Barthes maintained,
was the "Birth of the Reader," as the source of the proliferation of meanings of the text.

Post-structuralist philosophers like Derrida and Foucault did not form a self-conscious group, but
each responded to the traditions of phenomenology and structuralism. Phenomenology, often
associated with two German philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, rejected
previous systems of knowledge and attempted to examine life "just as it appears" (as
phenomena).[13] Both movements rejected the idea that knowledge could be centred on the
human knower, and sought what they considered a more secure foundation for knowledge.[14]

In phenomenology this foundation would be experience itself; in structuralism, knowledge is

founded on the "structures" that make experience possible: concepts, and language or signs.
Post-structuralism, in turn, argues that founding knowledge either on pure experience
(phenomenology) or systematic structures (structuralism) is impossible. This impossibility was
meant not a failure or loss, but a cause for "celebration and liberation."[14]

Major works
Barthes and the need for metalanguage

Although many may have felt the necessity to move beyond structuralism, there was clearly no
consensus on how this ought to occur. Much of the study of post-structuralism is based on the
common critiques of structuralism. Roland Barthes is of great significance with respect to post-
structuralist theory. In his work, Elements of Semiology (1967), he advanced the concept of the
"metalanguage". A metalanguage is a systematized way of talking about concepts like meaning
and grammar beyond the constraints of a traditional (first-order) language; in a metalanguage,
symbols replace words and phrases. Insofar as one metalanguage is required for one explanation
of first-order language, another may be required, so metalanguages may actually replace first-
order languages. Barthes exposes how this structuralist system is regressive; orders of language
rely upon a metalanguage by which it is explained, and therefore deconstruction itself is in
danger of becoming a metalanguage, thus exposing all languages and discourse to scrutiny.
Barthes' other works contributed deconstructive theories about texts.
…………………………………………………………………

New Historicism
"New Historicism," a term coined by Stephen Greenblatt, designates a body of theoretical and
interpretive practices that began largely with the study of early modern literature in the United
States. "New Historicism" in America had been somewhat anticipated by the theorists of
"Cultural Materialism" in Britain, which, in the words of their leading advocate, Raymond
Williams describes "the analysis of all forms of signification, including quite centrally writing,
within the actual means and conditions of their production." Both "New Historicism" and
"Cultural Materialism" seek to understand literary texts historically and reject the formalizing
influence of previous literary studies, including "New Criticism," "Structuralism" and
"Deconstruction," all of which in varying ways privilege the literary text and place only
secondary emphasis on historical and social context. According to "New Historicism," the
circulation of literary and non-literary texts produces relations of social power within a
culture. New Historicist thought differs from traditional historicism in literary studies in several
crucial ways. Rejecting traditional historicism's premise of neutral inquiry, "New Historicism"
accepts the necessity of making historical value judgments. According to "New Historicism," we
can only know the textual history of the past because it is "embedded," a key term, in the
textuality of the present and its concerns. Text and context are less clearly distinct in New
Historicist practice. Traditional separations of literary and non-literary texts, "great" literature
and popular literature, are also fundamentally challenged. For the "New Historicist," all acts of
expression are embedded in the material conditions of a culture. Texts are examined with an eye
for how they reveal the economic and social realities, especially as they produce ideology and
represent power or subversion. Like much of the emergent European social history of the 1980s,
"New Historicism" takes particular interest in representations of marginal/marginalized groups
and non-normative behaviors—witchcraft, cross-dressing, peasant revolts, and exorcisms—as
exemplary of the need for power to represent subversive alternatives, the Other, to legitimize
itself.

Louis Montrose, another major innovator and exponent of "New Historicism," describes a
fundamental axiom of the movement as an intellectual belief in "the textuality of history and the
historicity of texts." "New Historicism" draws on the work of Levi-Strauss, in particular his
notion of culture as a "self-regulating system." The Foucaldian premise that power is ubiquitous
and cannot be equated with state or economic power and Gramsci's conception of "hegemony,"
i.e., that domination is often achieved through culturally-orchestrated consent rather than force,
are critical underpinnings to the "New Historicist" perspective. The translation of the work of
Mikhail Bakhtin on carnival coincided with the rise of the "New Historicism" and "Cultural
Materialism" and left a legacy in work of other theorists of influence like Peter Stallybrass and
Jonathan Dollimore. In its period of ascendancy during the 1980s, "New Historicism" drew
criticism from the political left for its depiction of counter-cultural expression as always co-opted
by the dominant discourses. Equally, "New Historicism’s" lack of emphasis on "literariness" and
formal literary concerns brought disdain from traditional literary scholars. However, "New
Historicism" continues to exercise a major influence in the humanities and in the extended
conception of literary studies.

………………………………………………………………..
Postcolonial Criticism
Though not the first writer to explore the historical condition of postcolonialism, the Palestinian
literary theorist Edward Said's book Orientalism is generally regarded as having inaugurated the
field of explicitly "Postcolonial Criticism" in the West. Said argues that the concept of "the
Orient" was produced by the "imaginative geography" of Western scholarship and has been
instrumental in the colonization and domination of non-Western societies. "Postcolonial" theory
reverses the historical center/margin direction of cultural inquiry: critiques of the metropolis and
capital now emanate from the former colonies. Moreover, theorists like Homi K. Bhabha have
questioned the binary thought that produces the dichotomies—center/margin, white/black, and
colonizer/colonized—by which colonial practices are justified. The work of Gayatri C. Spivak
has focused attention on the question of who speaks for the colonial "Other" and the relation of
the ownership of discourse and representation to the development of the postcolonial
subjectivity. Like feminist and ethnic theory, "Postcolonial Criticism" pursues not merely the
inclusion of the marginalized literature of colonial peoples into the dominant canon and
discourse. "Postcolonial Criticism" offers a fundamental critique of the ideology of colonial
domination and at the same time seeks to undo the "imaginative geography" of Orientalist
thought that produced conceptual as well as economic divides between West and East, civilized
and uncivilized, First and Third Worlds. In this respect, "Postcolonial Criticism" is activist and
adversarial in its basic aims. Postcolonial theory has brought fresh perspectives to the role of
colonial peoples—their wealth, labor, and culture—in the development of modern European
nation states. While "Postcolonial Criticism" emerged in the historical moment following the
collapse of the modern colonial empires, the increasing globalization of culture, including the
neo-colonialism of multinational capitalism, suggests a continued relevance for this field of
inquiry.

History is written by the Victors

Post-colonial criticism is similar to cultural studies, but it assumes a unique perspective on

literature and politics that warrants a separate discussion. Specifically, post-colonial critics are
concerned with literature produced by colonial powers and works produced by those who
were/are colonized. Post-colonial theory looks at issues of power, economics, politics, religion,
and culture and how these elements work in relation to colonial hegemony (western colonizers
controlling the colonized).

Therefore, a post-colonial critic might be interested in works such as Daniel Defoe's Robinson
Crusoe where colonial "...ideology [is] manifest in Crusoe's colonialist attitude toward the land
upon which he's shipwrecked and toward the black man he 'colonizes' and names Friday" (Tyson
377). In addition, post-colonial theory might point out that "...despite Heart of Darkness's
(Joseph Conrad) obvious anti-colonist agenda, the novel points to the colonized population as the
standard of savagery to which Europeans are contrasted" (Tyson 375). Post-colonial criticism
also takes the form of literature composed by authors that critique Euro-centric hegemony.

A Unique Perspective on Empire

Seminal post-colonial writers such as Nigerian author Chinua Achebe and Kenyan author Ngugi
wa Thiong'o have written a number of stories recounting the suffering of colonized people. For
example, in Things Fall Apart, Achebe details the strife and devastation that occurred when
British colonists began moving inland from the Nigerian coast.
Rather than glorifying the exploratory nature of European colonists as they expanded their
sphere of influence, Achebe narrates the destructive events that led to the death and enslavement
of thousands of Nigerians when the British imposed their Imperial government. In turn, Achebe
points out the negative effects (and shifting ideas of identity and culture) caused by the
imposition of western religion and economics on Nigerians during colonial rule.

Power, Hegemony, and Literature

Post-colonial criticism also questions the role of the western literary canon and western history
as dominant forms of knowledge making. The terms "first-world," "second world," "third world"
and "fourth world" nations are critiqued by post-colonial critics because they reinforce the
dominant positions of western cultures populating first world status. This critique includes the
literary canon and histories written from the perspective of first-world cultures. So, for example,
a post-colonial critic might question the works included in "the canon" because the canon does
not contain works by authors outside western culture.

Moreover, the authors included in the canon often reinforce colonial hegemonic ideology, such
as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Western critics might consider Heart of Darkness an
effective critique of colonial behavior. But post-colonial theorists and authors might disagree
with this perspective: "...as Chinua Achebe observes, the novel's condemnation of European is
based on a definition of Africans as savages: beneath their veneer of civilization, the Europeans
are, the novel tells us, as barbaric as the Africans. And indeed, Achebe notes, the novel portrays
Africans as a pre-historic mass of frenzied, howling, incomprehensible barbarians..." (Tyson
374-375).

Typical Questions:

 How does the literary text, explicitly or allegorically, represent various aspects of
colonial oppression?
 What does the text reveal about the problematics of post-colonial identity, including the
relationship between personal and cultural identity and such issues as double
consciousness and hybridity?
 What person(s) or groups does the work identify as "other" or stranger? How are such
persons/groups described and treated?
 What does the text reveal about the politics and/or psychology of anti-colonialist
resistance?
 What does the text reveal about the operations of cultural difference - the ways in which
race, religion, class, gender, sexual orientation, cultural beliefs, and customs combine to
form individual identity - in shaping our perceptions of ourselves, others, and the world
in which we live?
 How does the text respond to or comment upon the characters, themes, or assumptions of
a canonized (colonialist) work?
 Are there meaningful similarities among the literatures of different post-colonial
populations?
 How does a literary text in the Western canon reinforce or undermine colonialist ideology
through its representation of colonialization and/or its inappropriate silence about
colonized peoples? (Tyson 378-379)

List of scholars to understand this theory:

  Edward Said - Orientalism, 1978; Culture and Imperialism, 1994
 Kamau Brathwaite - The History of the Voice, 1979
 Gayatri Spivak - In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, 1987
 Dominick LaCapra - The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance,
1991
 Homi Bhabha - The Location of Culture, 1994

…………………………………………………………………………………

Reader-Response Criticism
Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the
reader (or "audience") and their EXPERIENCE OF A LITERARY WORK, in contrast to other
schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the
work
Although literary theory has long paid some attention to the reader's role in
creating the meaning and experience of a literary work, modern reader-response criticism began
in the 1960s and '70s, particularly in America and Germany, in work by Norman Holland,
Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, Hans-Robert Jauss, Roland Barthes, and others. Important
predecessors were I. A. Richards, who in 1929 analyzed a group of Cambridge undergraduates'
misreadings; Louise Rosenblatt, who, in Literature as Exploration (1938), argued that it is
important for the teacher to avoid imposing any "preconceived notions about the proper way to
react to any work"; and C. S. Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism (1961).

Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an ACTIVE AGENT who

imparts "real existence" to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation. Reader-
response criticism argues that literature should be viewed AS A PERFORMING ART in which
each reader creates his own, possibly unique, text-related performance. It stands in total
opposition to the theories of Formalism and the New Criticism, in which the reader's role in re-
creating literary works is ignored. New Criticism had emphasized that only that which is within a
text is part of the meaning of a text. No appeal to the authority or intention of the author, nor to
the psychology of the reader, was allowed in the discussions of orthodox New Critics.

Types
One can sort reader-response theorists into three groups: those who
focus upon the individual reader's experience ("individualists"); those who
conduct psychological experiments on a defined set of readers ("experimenters");
and those who assume a fairly uniform response by all readers ("uniformists"). One
can therefore draw a distinction between reader-response theorists who see the
individual reader driving the whole experience and others who think of literary
experience as largely text-driven and uniform (with individual variations that can
be ignored). The former theorists, who think the reader controls, derive what is
common in a literary experience from shared techniques for reading and
interpreting which are, however, individually applied by different readers. The
latter, who put the text in control, derive commonalities of response, obviously,
from the literary work itself. The most fundamental difference among reader-
response critics is probably, then, between those who regard individual differences
among readers' responses as important and those who try to get around them.
Individualists
In the 1960s, David Bleich began collecting statements by influencing students of their
feelings and associations. He used these to theorize about the reading process and to refocus
the classroom teaching of literature. He claimed that his classes "generated" knowledge, that is,
knowledge of how particular persons recreate texts.
Michael Steig and Walter Slatoff have, like Bleich, shown that students' highly personal
responses can provide the basis for critical analyses in the classroom. Jeffrey Berman has
encouraged students responding to texts to write anonymously and share with their classmates
writings in response to literary works about sensitive subjects like drugs, suicidal thoughts, death
in the family, parental abuse and the like. A kind of catharsis bordering on therapy results. In
general, American reader-response critics have focused on individual readers' responses.
American magazines like Reading Research Quarterly and others publish articles applying
reader-response theory to the teaching of literature.
In 1961, C. S. Lewis published An Experiment in Criticism, in which he analyzed readers' role in
selecting literature. He analyzed their selections in light of their goals in reading.
In 1967, Stanley Fish published Surprised by Sin, the first study of a large literary work
(Paradise Lost) that focused on its readers' experience. In an appendix, "Literature in the
Reader", Fish used "the" reader to examine responses to complex sentences sequentially, word-
by-word. Since 1976, however, he has turned to real differences among real readers. He explores
the reading tactics endorsed by different critical schools, by the literary professoriate, and by
the legal profession, introducing the idea of "interpretive communities" that share particular
modes of reading.
In 1968, Norman Holland drew on psychoanalytic psychology in The Dynamics of Literary
Response to model the literary work. Each reader introjects a fantasy "in" the text, then modifies
it by defense mechanisms into an interpretation. In 1973, however, having recorded responses
from real readers, Holland found variations too great to fit this model in which responses are
mostly alike but show minor individual variations.
Holland then developed a second model based on his case studies 5 Readers Reading. An
individual has (in the brain) a core identity theme (behaviors then becoming understandable as a
theme and variations as in music). This core gives that individual a certain style of being—and
reading. Each reader uses the physical literary work plus invariable codes (such as the shapes of
letters) plus variable canons (different "interpretive communities", for example) plus an
individual style of reading to build a response both like and unlike other readers' responses.
Holland worked with others at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Murray
Schwartz, David Willbern, and Robert Rogers, to develop a particular teaching format, the
"Delphi seminar," designed to get students to "know themselves".
Experimenters
Reuven Tsur in Israel has developed in great detail models for the expressivity of poetic rhythms,
of metaphor, and of word-sound in poetry (including different actors' readings of a single line
of Shakespeare). Richard Gerrig in the U.S. has experimented with the reader's state of mind
during and after a literary experience. He has shown how readers put aside ordinary knowledge
and values while they read, treating, for example, criminals as heroes. He has also investigated
how readers accept, while reading, improbable or fantastic things (Coleridge's
"willing suspension of disbelief"), but discard them after they have finished.
In Canada, David Miall, usually working with Donald Kuiken, has produced a large body of
work exploring emotional or "affective" responses to literature, drawing on such concepts from
ordinary criticism as "defamiliarization" or "foregrounding". They have used both experiments
and new developments in neuropsychology, and have developed a questionnaire for measuring
different aspects of a reader's response.
There are many other experimental psychologists around the world exploring readers'
responses, conducting many detailed experiments. One can research their work through their
professional organizations, the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and
Media, and International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, and through such psychological
indices as PSYCINFO.
Two notable researchers are Dolf Zillmann and Peter Vorderer, both working in the
field of communications and media psychology. Both have theorized and tested ideas about what
produces emotions such as suspense, curiosity, surprise in readers, the necessary factors
involved, and the role the reader plays. Jenefer Robinson, a researcher in emotion, has recently
blended her studies on emotion with its role in literature, music, and art.
Uniformists
Wolfgang Iser exemplifies the German tendency to theorize the reader and so posit a
uniform response. For him, a literary work is not an object in itself but an effect to be explained.
But he asserts this response is controlled by the text. For the "real" reader, he substitutes an
implied reader, who is the reader a given literary work requires. Within various polarities created
by the text, this "implied" reader makes expectations, meanings, and the unstated details of
characters and settings through a "wandering viewpoint". In his model, the text controls. The
reader's activities are confined within limits set by the literary work.
Another important German reader-response critic was Hans-Robert Jauss, who defined literature
as a dialectic process of production and reception (Rezeption—the term common in Germany for
"response"). For Jauss, readers have a certain mental set, a "horizon" of expectations
(Erwartungshorizont), from which perspective each reader, at any given time in history, reads.
Reader-response criticism establishes these horizons of expectation by reading literary works of
the period in question.
Both Iser and Jauss, and the Constance School they exemplify, return reader-response criticism
to a study of the text by defining readers in terms of the text. In the same way, Gerald
Prince posits a "narratee", Michael Riffaterre posits a "superreader", and Stanley Fish an
"informed reader." And many text-oriented critics simply speak of "the" reader who typifies all
readers...
Objections

Reader-response critics hold that in order to understand a text, one must look to the processes
readers use to create meaning and experience. Traditional text-oriented schools, such
as formalism, often think of reader-response criticism as an anarchic subjectivism, allowing
readers to interpret a text any way they want. Text-oriented critics claim that one can understand
a text while remaining immune to one's own culture, status, personality, and so on, and hence
"objectively."
To reader-response based theorists, however, reading is always both subjective and objective.
Some reader-response critics (uniformists) assume a bi-active model of reading: the literary work
controls part of the response and the reader controls part. Others, who see that position as
internally contradictory, claim that the reader controls the whole transaction (individualists). In
such a reader-active model, readers and audiences use amateur or professional procedures for
reading (shared by many others) as well as their personal issues and values.
Another objection to reader-response criticism is that it fails to account for the text being able to
expand the reader's understanding. While readers can and do put their own ideas and experiences
into a work, they are at the same time gaining new understanding through the text. This is
something that is generally overlooked in reader-response criticism.
Some argue that 'artworks' are now purposely being fabricated which lack meaning but rather the
'artworks' are fabricated only to generate a reader response. The reader response then is corralled
via interpretative communities. Reader response rather than handing a freedom to the reader
empowers the leaders of an interpretative community against the reader. The reader has no
ground to evaluate the 'artwork' as the artwork is senseless. Only a reader response, basically an
emotive response, is legitimate. The Web provides an ideal way to form such interpretative
communities. The power of reader response strategy is that people are fundamentally 'hungry' for
culture and will attempt to impart meaning even to artworks that are senseless. Of course, people
can always opt out of these interpretative communities centered on senseless artworks with little
to no loss via-a-vis culture and almost certainly a cultural gain.
Extensions

Reader-response criticism relates to psychology, both experimental psychology for those

attempting to find principles of response, and psychoanalytic psychology for those studying
individual responses. Post-behaviorist psychologists of reading and of perception support the
idea that it is the reader who makes meaning. Increasingly, cognitive
psychology, psycholinguistics, neuroscience, and neuropsychoanalysis have given reader-
response critics powerful and detailed models for the aesthetic process. In 2011 researchers
found that during listening to emotionally intense parts of a story, readers respond with changes
in heart rate variability, indicative of increased activation of the sympathetic nervous system.
Intense parts of a story were also accompanied by increased brain activity in a network of
regions known to be involved in the processing of fear, including amygdala.[1]
Because it rests on psychological principles, a reader-response approach readily generalizes to
other arts: cinema (David Bordwell), music, or visual art (E. H. Gombrich), and even to history
(Hayden White). In stressing the activity of the scholar, reader-response theory justifies such
upsettings of traditional interpretations as, for example, deconstruction or cultural criticism.
Since reader-response critics focus on the strategies readers are taught to use, they address
the teaching of reading and literature. Also, because reader-response criticism stresses the
activity of the reader, reader-response critics readily share the concerns of feminist critics, and
critics of Gender and Queer Theory and Post-Colonialism.
………………………………………………………………………….

Feminist criticism is concerned with "...the ways in which literature (and other cultural
productions) reinforce or undermine the economic, political, social, and psychological
oppression of women" (Tyson). This school of theory looks at how aspects of our culture are
inherently patriarchal (male dominated) and "...this critique strives to expose the explicit and
implicit misogyny in male writing about women" (Richter 1346). This misogyny, Tyson reminds
us, can extend into diverse areas of our culture: "Perhaps the most chilling example...is found in
the world of modern medicine, where drugs prescribed for both sexes often have been tested on
male subjects only" (83).

Feminist criticism is also concerned with less obvious forms of marginalization such as the
exclusion of women writers from the traditional literary canon: "...unless the critical or historical
point of view is feminist, there is a tendency to under-represent the contribution of women
writers" (Tyson 82-83).

Common Space in Feminist Theories

Though a number of different approaches exist in feminist criticism, there exist some areas of
commonality. This list is excerpted from Tyson:

1. Women are oppressed by patriarchy economically, politically, socially, and

psychologically; patriarchal ideology is the primary means by which they are kept so
2. In every domain where patriarchy reigns, woman is other: she is marginalized, defined
only by her difference from male norms and values
3. All of western (Anglo-European) civilization is deeply rooted in patriarchal ideology, for
example, in the biblical portrayal of Eve as the origin of sin and death in the world
4. While biology determines our sex (male or female), culture determines our gender
(masculine or feminine)
5. All feminist activity, including feminist theory and literary criticism, has as its ultimate
goal to change the world by prompting gender equality
6. Gender issues play a part in every aspect of human production and experience, including
the production and experience of literature, whether we are consciously aware of these
issues or not (91).
Feminist criticism has, in many ways, followed what some theorists call the three waves of
feminism:

1. First Wave Feminism - late 1700s-early 1900's: writers like Mary Wollstonecraft (A
Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792) highlight the inequalities between the sexes.
Activists like Susan B. Anthony and Victoria Woodhull contribute to the women's
suffrage movement, which leads to National Universal Suffrage in 1920 with the passing
of the Nineteenth Amendment
2. Second Wave Feminism - early 1960s-late 1970s: building on more equal working
conditions necessary in America during World War II, movements such as the National
Organization for Women (NOW), formed in 1966, cohere feminist political activism.
Writers like Simone de Beauvoir (Le deuxième sexe, 1972) and Elaine Showalter
established the groundwork for the dissemination of feminist theories dove-tailed with
the American Civil Rights movement
3. Third Wave Feminism - early 1990s-present: resisting the perceived essentialist (over
generalized, over simplified) ideologies and a white, heterosexual, middle class focus of
second wave feminism, third wave feminism borrows from post-structural and
contemporary gender and race theories (see below) to expand on marginalized
populations' experiences. Writers like Alice Walker work to "...reconcile it [feminism]
with the concerns of the black community...[and] the survival and wholeness of her
people, men and women both, and for the promotion of dialog and community as well as
for the valorization of women and of all the varieties of work women perform" (Tyson
97).

List of scholars to further explore this theory:

 Mary Wollstonecraft - A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792

 Simone de Beauvoir - Le deuxième sexe, 1972
 Julia Kristeva - About Chinese Women, 1977
 Elaine Showalter - A Literature of Their Own, 1977; "Toward a Feminist Poetics," 1979
 Deborah E. McDowell - "New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism," 1980
 Alice Walker - In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, 1983
 Lillian S. Robinson - "Treason out Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon,"
1983
 Camile Paglia - Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art, 1990

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Feminist criticism:

A criticism advocating equal rights for women in a political, economic, social, psychological,
personal, and aesthetic sense. On the thematic level, the feminist reader should identify with
female characters and their concerns. The object is to provide a critique of phallocentric
assumptions and an analysis of patriarchal visions or ideologies inscribed in a literature that is
male-centered and male-dominated. Such a reader denounces the outrageously phallic visions of
writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer, refusing to accept the cult of
masculine virility and superiority that reduces woman to a sex object, a second sex, a submissive
other. As Judith Fetterley puts it, "Feminist criticism is a political act whose aim is not simply to
interpret the world but to change it by changing the consciousness of those who read and their
relation to what they read. . . [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 exorcizing the male
mind that has been implanted in us." On the thematic level, then, the reader rejects stereotypes
and examines woman as a theme in literary works.

On the ideological level, the reader seeks to learn not to accept the hegemonic perspective of the
male and refuses to be coopted by a gender-biased criticism. Gender is largely a cultural
construct, as are the stereotypes that go along with it: that the male is active, dominating, and
rational, whereas the female is passive, submissive, and emotional. Gynocritics strive to define a
particularly feminine content and to extend the canon so that it might include works by lesbians,
feminists, and women writers in general. According to Elaine Showalter, gynocriticism is
concerned with "woman as the producer of textual meaning, with the history, themes, genres,
and structures of literature by women. Its subjects include the psychodynamics of female
creativity; linguistics and the problem of a female language; the trajectory of the individual or
collective female literary career; literary history; and, of course, studies of particular writers and
works."

On the deconstructionist level, the aim is to dismantle and subvert the logocentric assumptions of
male discourse -- its valorization of being, meaning, truth, reason, and logic, its metaphysics of
presence. Logocentrism is phallocentric (hence the neologism "phallogocentrism"); it
systematically privileges paternal over maternal power, the intelligible over the sensible.
Patriarchal authority demands unity of meaning and is obsessed with certainty of origin. The
French feminists in particular construe "woman" as any radical force that subverts the concepts,
assumptions, and structures of traditional male discourse -- the realism, rationality, mastery, and
explanation that undergird it. By contrast, the American and British feminists mainly engage in
empirical and thematic studies of writings by and about women.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………

Feminist criticism is a literary form of criticism that gives the perspective of writing through a
feminist perspective. It is a political form of literature that analyzes the questions of how male
and females relate to each other and the world, the repression of women and how women are
portrayed in literature.

Feminist literature is fiction or nonfiction which supports the feminist goals of defining, establishing
and defending equal civil, political, economic and social rights for women.

goals of feminist criticism as: (1) To develop and uncover a female tradition of writing, (2) to
interpret symbolism of women's writing so that it will not be lost or ignored by the male point of
view, (3) to rediscover old texts, (4) to analyze women writers and their writings from a female
perspective, ...

Feminist criticism is concerned with "...the ways in which literature (and other cultural productions)
reinforce or undermine the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of women" (Tyson).
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………….
Social construction of gender
The idea that gender difference is socially constructed is a view present in many philosophical
and sociological theories about gender. According to this view, society and culture create gender
roles, and these roles are prescribed as ideal or appropriate behavior for a person of that specific
gender. Some argue that the differences in behavior between men and women are entirely social
conventions, whereas others believe that behavior is influenced by universal biological factors to
some extent, with social conventions having a major effect on gendered behavior.

The idea that gender difference is socially constructed is a view present in many philosophical
and sociological theories about gender. According to this view, society and culture create
gender roles, and these roles are prescribed as ideal or appropriate behaviour for a person of that
specific gender.

Social constructionism or the social construction of reality (also social concept) is a theory of
knowledge in sociology and communication theory that examines the development of jointly
constructed understandings of the world that form the basis for shared assumptions about reality.
The theory centers on the notions that human beings rationalize their experience by creating
models of the social world and share and reify these models through language.

"Gender" refers to a person's perceived or projected social location within culturally established
designations between masculine and feminine behaviors (e.g., gender refers to a person's attempt
to signify a masculine or feminine self as well as a person's attempt to categorize someone else in
terms of their ...

What are gender roles in sociology?

Gender roles are based on norms, or standards, created by society. In the U.S., masculine roles
are usually associated with strength, aggression, and dominance, while feminine roles are
associated with passivity, nurturing, and subordination.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………….

The Traditions of Feminist Criticism

According to Yale Professor Paul Fry in his lecture The Classical Feminist Tradition from 25:07,
there have been several prominent schools of thought in modern feminist literary criticism:

 First Wave Feminism: Men's Treatment of Women

In this early stage of feminist criticism, critics consider male novelists' demeaning
treatment or marginalisation of female characters. First wave feminist criticism includes
books like Marry Ellman's Thinking About Women (1968) Kate Millet's Sexual Politics
(1969), and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970). An example of first wave
feminist literary analysis would be a critique of William Shakespeare's Taming of the
Shrew for Petruchio's abuse of Katherina.
 Second Wave Feminism: Gynocriticism
Elaine Showalter pioneered gynocriticism with her book A Literature of Their Own
(1977). Gynocriticism involves three major aspects. The first is the examination of
 female writers and their place in literary history. The second is the consideration of the
treatment of female characters in books by both male and female writers. The third and
most important aspect of gynocriticism is the discovery and exploration of a canon of
literature written by women; gynocriticism seeks to appropriate a female literary
tradition. In Showalter's A Literature of Their Own, she proposes the following three
phases of women's writing:
1. The 'Feminine' Phase - in the feminine phase, female writers tried to adhere to
male values, writing as men, and usually did not enter into debate regarding
women's place in society. Female writers often employed male pseudonyms
during this period.
2. The 'Feminist' Phase - in the feminist phase, the central theme of works by female
writers was the criticism of the role of women in society and the oppression of
women.
3. The 'Female' Phase - during the 'female' phase, women writers were no longer
trying to prove the legitimacy of a woman's perspective. Rather, it was assumed
that the works of a women writer were authentic and valid. The female phase
lacked the anger and combative consciousness of the feminist phase.

………………………………………………………………………………..
Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalytic feminism and Feminist psychoanalysis are based on Freud and

his psychoanalytic theories, but they also supply an important critique of it. It maintains
that gender is not biological but is based on the psycho-sexual development of the individual, but
also that sexual difference and gender are different notions. Psychoanalytical feminists believe
that gender inequality comes from early childhood experiences, which lead men to believe
themselves to be masculine, and women to believe themselves feminine. It is further maintained
that gender leads to a social system that is dominated by males, which in turn influences the
individual psycho-sexual development. As a solution it was suggested by some to avoid the
gender-specific structuring of the society coeducation. From the last 30 years of the 20th
Century, the contemporary French psychoanalytical theories concerning the feminine, that refer
to sexual difference rather than to gender, with psychoanalysts like Julia Kristeva, Maud
Mannoni, Luce Irigaray, and Bracha Ettinger, have largely influenced not only feminist theory
but also the understanding of the subject in philosophy and the general field of psychoanalysis
itself. These French psychoanalysts are mainly post-Lacanian. Other feminist psychoanalysts and
feminist theorists whose contributions have enriched the field through an engagement with
psychoanalysis are Jessica Benjamin, Jacqueline Rose,

Postcolonial Feminism
Postcolonial feminism is a subset of feminism that developed as a response to the fact that
feminism seemed to focus solely on the experiences of women in Western cultures. Postcolonial
feminism seeks to account for the way that racism and the long-lasting political, economic, and
cultural effects of colonialism affect non-white, non-Western women in the postcolonial world.
Postcolonial feminism originated as a critique of feminist theorists in developed countries. The
critique points out the universalizing tendencies of mainstream feminist ideas and argues that
women living in non-Western countries are misrepresented.

Postcolonial feminism argues that by using the term "woman" as a universal group, women are
then only defined by their gender and not by social class, race, ethnicity, or sexual
preference. Postcolonial feminists also work to incorporate the ideas of indigenous and
other Third World feminist movements into mainstream Western feminism. Third World
feminism stems from the idea that feminism in Third World countries is not imported from the
First World, but originates from internal ideologies and socio-cultural factors.

Postcolonial feminism has strong ties with indigenous movements and wider postcolonial theory.
It is also closely affiliated with black feminism because both black feminists and postcolonial
feminists argue that mainstream Western feminism fails to adequately account for racial
differences. Postcolonial feminism, black feminism, and other racially-conscious strands of
feminism have struggled to add racial and ethnic differences among women to the feminist
dialogue.

Postcolonial feminism is sometimes criticized, mostly as a response from mainstream feminism,

which argues, for example, that postcolonial feminism weakens the wider

…………………………………………………………………….

Gynocriticism
Gynocriticism is the historical study of women writers as a distinct literary tradition. Elaine
Showalter coined this term in her essay "Toward a Feminist Poetics." It refers to a criticism that
constructs "a female framework for the analysis of women's literature, to develop new models
based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt male models and theories" (quoted
by Groden and Kreiswurth from "Toward a Feminist Poetics," New Feminist Criticism, 131).
The work of gynocriticism has been criticized by recent feminists for being essentialist,
following too closely along the lines of Sigmund Freud and New Criticism, and leaving out
lesbians and women of color. (Literary Terms)

Gynocriticism is the study of feminist literature written by female writers inclusive of the
interrogation of female authorship, images, the feminine experience and ideology, and the
history and development of the female literary tradition. During the late eighteen hundreds and
early nineteen hundreds respectively, Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir began to review
and evaluate the female image and sexism in the works of male writers. During the nineteen
sixties the feminist movement saw a reaction and opposition to the male oriented discourse of
previous years. Most thoroughly developed during the late seventies and early eighties,
gynocriticism was a result of the interrogative critiques utilised in post-structuralism and
psychoanalysis.
Development as a literary critique
Gynocriticism developed as a literary critique from the theories and techniques of post-
structuralism and psychoanalysis. Post-structuralism is by nature, the study of the uncertain
(Barry 2009). According to Barry, post-structuralism questions and interrogates the scientific
certainty that structuralism took for granted, identifying the fact that language is ambiguous and
therefore the universe is indeterminate. Psychoanalytic criticism focuses on the word of Freud
and the concept of the unconscious. The textual content is both conscious and unconscious and
the critique involves the uncovering or decoding of the two. Additionally, Freudian
psychoanalysis identifies repression and sublimation, two unconscious processes that involve the
struggle with identity. Gynocriticism, examines the female struggle for identity and the social
construct of gender. If gender is inherently constructed from an ideology, then that ideology is by
nature, indeterminate and fluid, susceptible to the analysis of differences. According to Elaine
Showalter, gynocriticism is the study of not only the female as a gender status but also the
'internalized consciousness' of the female. The uncovering of the female subculture and
exposition of a female model is the intention of gynocriticism.

According to Showalter, literary history has seen three distinct phases of gynocriticism. Until the
twentieth century, the female literature tradition was constructed of images and values of the
idealized 'feminine', constructed from the patriarchal oppression that sought to identify the
woman as “other”. During the twentieth century, the 'feminist' movement saw a reaction to the
patriarchy of previous times and protested the ideology of the feminine. The most recent
development is the 'female' criticism, where a female identity is sought free from the masculine
definitions and oppositions. The recognition of a distinct female canon and the development of
the 'female reader' are fundamental aspects of gynocriticism.

Gynocriticism and psychology

Gynocriticism arose as a feminist critique as a result of the Freudian psychoanalytic perspective
of the female inadequacy. According to Freudian psychology, the female possesses a
psychological deficiency in the lack of male anatomy and as a result suffers envy and feelings of
inadequacy and injustice combined with feelings of intellectual inferiority. However it is not just
the physical female inadequacy that led to the inception of gynocriticism. The male 'phallic
prejudice' itself, creates a female consciousness that demands a critique of the female
perspective. The prejudice against the female, incites a specific noesis that gets attributed to the
female. Psychologist Karen Horney theorised that the ideal of woman is not necessarily innate to
her sex but that the patriarchal pressures and cultural influence compel her to behave in
conformity with the image. This prejudice has concealed the female literary tradition to the point
of imitating the masculine.

However gynocriticism aims to uncover a female psyche, it frequently fails to encompass the
female as a whole. Often critics critique the feminist literature to the exclusion of other
considerations such as race, class, social interest, political inclination, religion and sexuality.
According to Friedman, the self 'is not singular, it is multiple'. Identity is not constructed of
gender alone. The female encompasses other attributes such as race, class, sexuality etc. that are
all subject to different positions of oppression and are in fact, related. The separation of these
properties would create a one-dimensional view of the female. However if gender and identity
are merely constructs then it becomes difficult to assign any inherent qualities of nature or
language by which to

Gynocriticism is a literary theory that is relatively new and continues to evolve. From the
perspective of Gynocriticism, until the patriarchal ideology of the female is resolved and gender
inequality and social subjugation are neutralised, then it remains necessary to review and
examine the female literary canon. Indeed, even when gender inequality is no longer an issue,
interrogation of 'female' literature will remain valuable, as it is the study of sameness and
difference in gender that delineates the 'female' literary theory.

Gynocritics:
Elaine Showalter coined the term "gynocritics" to describe literary criticism based in on a
female perspective. Probably the best description Showalter gives of gynocritics is in Toward a
Feminist Poetics:

In contrast to [an] angry or loving fixation on male literature, the program of gynocritics
is to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new
models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt male models and
theories. Gynocritics begins at the point when we free ourselves from the linear absolutes
of male literary history, stop trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition,
and focus instead on the newly visible world of female culture. (New, 131)

This does not mean that the goal of gynocritics is to erase the differences between male and
female writing; gynocritics is not "on a pilgrimage to the promised land in which gender would
lose its power, in which all texts would be sexless and equal, like angels" (New, 266). Rather
gynocritics aims to understand women’s writing not as a product of sexism but as a fundamental
aspect of female reality.

Showalter acknowledges the difficulty of "[d]efining the unique difference of women’s writing"
which she says is "a slippery and demanding task" in "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness"
(New, 249). She says that gynocritics may never succeed in understanding the special differences
of women’s writing, or realize a distinct female literary tradition. But, with grounding in theory
and historical research, Showalter sees gynocriticism as a way to "learn something solid,
enduring, and real about the relation of women to literary culture" (New, 249). She stresses
heavily the need to free "ourselves from the lineal absolute of male literary history". That is
going to be the point where gynocritics make a beginning.

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Deconstruction is a critical outlook concerned with the relationship between

text and meaning. Jacques Derrida's 1967 work Of Grammatology introduced the
majority of ideas influential within deconstruction. According to Derrida and taking
inspiration from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, language as a system of signs and
words only have meaning because of the contrast between these signs. As Rorty contends
"words have meaning only because of contrast-effects with other words...no word can
acquire meaning in the way in which philosophers from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell
have hoped it might—by being the unmediated expression of something non-linguistic
(e.g., an emotion, a sense-datum, a physical object, an idea, a Platonic Form)". As a
consequence meaning is never present, but rather is deferred to other signs. Derrida refers
to the - in this view, mistaken - belief that there is a self-sufficient, non-deferred meaning
as metaphysics of presence. A concept then must be understood in the context of its
opposite, such as being/nothingness, normal/abnormal, speech/writing, etc.

Finally, Derrida argues that it is not enough to expose and deconstruct the way
oppositions work and then stop there in a nihilistic or cynical position, "thereby
preventing any means of intervening in the field effectively". To be effective,
deconstruction needs to create new terms, not to synthesize the concepts in opposition,
but to mark their difference and eternal interplay. This explains why Derrida always
proposes new terms in his deconstruction, not as a free play but as a pure necessity of
analysis, to better mark the intervals. Derrida called undecidables, that is, unities of
simulacrum, "false" verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be
included within philosophical (binary) opposition: but which, however, inhabit
philosophical oppositions, resisting and organizing it, without ever constituting a third
term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of Hegelian dialectics (e.g.
différance, archi-writing, pharmakon, supplement, hymen, gram, spacing).

In the 1980s, the Postmodernism era, deconstruction was being put to use in a range of
theoretical enterprises in the humanities and social sciences, including law anthropology,
historiography, linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, and feminism. In the
continental philosophy tradition, debates surrounding ontology, epistemology, ethics,
aesthetics, hermeneutics, and philosophy of language still refer to it today. Within
architecture it has inspired deconstructivism, and it remains important in general within
art, music, and literary criticism.

Etymology
Derrida's original use of the word "deconstruction" was a translation of Destruktion, a
concept from the work of Martin Heidegger that Derrida sought to apply to textual
reading. Heidegger's term referred to a process of exploring the categories and concepts
that tradition has imposed on a word, and the history behind them. Derrida opted for
deconstruction over the literal translation destruction to suggest precision rather than
violence.

Deconstruction according to Derrida

Basic philosophical concerns

Derrida's concerns flow from a consideration of several issues:

1. A desire to contribute to the re-valuation of all western values, built on the 18th century
Kantian critique of reason, and carried forward to the 19th century, in its more radical
implications, by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
 2. An assertion that texts outlive their authors, and become part of a set of cultural habits
equal to, if not surpassing, the importance of authorial intent.
3. A re-valuation of certain classic western dialectics: poetry vs. philosophy, reason vs.
revelation, structure vs. creativity, episteme vs. techne, etc.

To this end, Derrida follows a long line of modern philosophers, who look backwards to Plato
and his influence on the western metaphysical tradition. Like Nietzsche, Derrida suspects Plato
of dissimulation in the service of a political project, namely the education, through critical
reflections, of a class of citizens more strategically positioned to influence the polis. However,
like Nietzsche, Derrida is not satisfied merely with such a political interpretation of Plato,
because of the particular dilemma modern humans find themselves stuck in. His Platonic
reflections are inseparably part of his critique of modernity, hence the attempt to be something
beyond the modern, because of this Nietzschian sense that the modern has lost its way and
become mired in nihilism.

Différance

Différance is an important idea within deconstruction, it is the observation that the meanings of
words come from their synchronity with other words within the language and their diachrony
between contemporary and historical definitions of a word. Understanding language according
Derrida required an understanding of both viewpoints of linguistic analysis. The focus on
diachronity has led to accusations against Derrida of engaging in the Etymological fallacy.

There is one statement by Derrida which has been of great interest to his opponents, and which
appeared in an essay on Rousseau (part of the highly influential Of Grammatology, 1967), It is
the assertion that "there is no outside-text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte), which is often
mistranslated as "there is nothing outside of the text". The mistranslation is often used to suggest
Derrida believes that nothing exists but words. Michel Foucault, for instance, famously
misattributed to Derrida the very different phrase "Il n'y a rien en dehors du text" for this
purpose. According to Derrida, his statement simply refers to the unavoidability of context that is
at the heart of différance.

For example, the word "house" derives its meaning more as a function of how it differs from
"shed", "mansion", "hotel", "building", etc. (Form of Content, that Louis Hjelmslev distinguished
from Form of Expression) than how the word "house" may be tied to a certain image of a
traditional house (i.e. the relationship between signifier and signified) with each term being
established in reciprocal determination with the other terms than by an ostensive description or
definition: when can we talk about a "house" or a "mansion" or a "shed"? The same can be said
about verbs, in all the languages in the world: when should we stop saying "walk" and start
saying "run"? The same happens, of course, with adjectives: when must we stop saying "yellow"
and start saying "orange", or exchange "past" for "present? Not only are the topological
differences between the words relevant here, but the differentials between what is signified is
also covered by différance.

Thus, complete meaning is always "differential" and postponed in language; there is never a
moment when meaning is complete and total. A simple example would consist of looking up a
given word in a dictionary, then proceeding to look up the words found in that word's definition,
etc., also comparing with older dictionaries from different periods in time, and such a process
would never end.
Metaphysics of presence

Derrida describe the task of deconstruction as the identification of metaphysics of presence or

logocentrism in western philosophy. Metaphysics of presence is the desire for immediate access
to meaning, the privileging of presence over absence. This means that there is an assumed bias in
certain binary oppositions where one side is placed in a position of one over another, such as
good over bad, speech over the written word, male over female among other oppositions. Derrida
writes, "Without a doubt, Aristotle thinks of time on the basis of ousia as parousia, on the basis
of the now, the point, etc. And yet an entire reading could be organized that would repeat in
Aristotle's text both this limitation and its opposite." To Derrida the central bias of logocentrism
was the now being placed as more important than the future or past. This argument is largely
based on the earlier work of Heidegger, who in Being and Time claimed that the theoretical
attitude of pure presence is parasitical upon a more originary involvement with the world in
concepts such as the ready-to-hand and being-with.

Related works by Derrida

Derrida published a number of works directly relevant to the concept of deconstruction, Of

Grammatology was the book that introduced the idea of Deconstruction. Derrida went on to
write many other books showing deconstruction in action or defining it more completely such as
Différance, Speech and Phenomena and Writing and Difference.

Application of deconstruction
Derrida's observation have had a large influence on literary criticism and post-structuralism.

Literary criticism

Derrida's method consisted in demonstrating all the forms and varieties of the originary
complexity of semiotics, and their multiple consequences in many fields. His way of achieving
this was by conducting thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of
philosophical and literary texts, with an ear to what in those texts runs counter to their apparent
systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense (authorial genesis). By demonstrating the
aporias and ellipses of thought, Derrida hoped to show the infinitely subtle ways that this
originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever be completely known, works its
structuring and destructuring effects.

Deconstruction denotes the pursuing of the meaning of a text to the point of exposing the
supposed contradictions and internal oppositions upon which it is founded—supposedly
showing that those foundations are irreducibly complex, unstable, or impossible. It is an
approach that may be deployed in philosophy, in literary analysis, and even in the
analysis of scientific writings. Deconstruction generally tries to demonstrate that any text
is not a discrete whole but contains several irreconcilable and contradictory meanings;
that any text therefore has more than one interpretation; that the text itself links these
interpretations inextricably; that the incompatibility of these interpretations is irreducible;
and thus that an interpretative reading cannot go beyond a certain point. Derrida refers to
this point as an "aporia" in the text; thus, deconstructive reading is termed "aporetic." He
insists that meaning is made possible by the relations of a word to other words within the
network of structures that language is.

Derrida initially resisted granting to his approach the overarching name "deconstruction," on the
grounds that it was a precise technical term that could not be used to characterize his work
generally. Nevertheless, he eventually accepted that the term had come into common use to refer
to his textual approach, and Derrida himself increasingly began to use the term in this more
general way.

Critique of structuralism

Derrida's lecture at Johns Hopkins University, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human
Sciences," often appears in collections as a manifesto against structuralism. Derrida's essay was
one of the earliest to propose some theoretical limitations to structuralism, and to attempt to
theorize on terms that were clearly no longer structuralist. Structuralism viewed language as a
number of signs, composed of a signified (the meaning) and a signifier (the word itself). Derrida
proposed that signs always referred to other signs, existing only in relation to each other, and
there was therefore no ultimate foundation or centre, this is the basis of différance.

Development after Derrida

Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s many thinkers were influenced by deconstruction,
including Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller. This group came to be known as
the Yale school and was especially influential in literary criticism. Several of these theorists were
subsequently affiliated with the University of California Irvine.[citation needed]

Miller has described deconstruction this way: "Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the
structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently solid
ground is no rock, but thin air."

Difficulty of definition
There have been problems defining deconstruction. Derrida claimed that all of his essays were
attempts to define what deconstruction is, and that deconstruction is necessarily complicated and
difficult to explain since it actively criticises the very language needed to explain it.

In the deconstruction procedure, one of the main concerns of Derrida is not to collapse into
Hegel's dialectic where these oppositions would be reduced to contradictions in a dialectic that
has the purpose of resolving it into a synthesis.

The presence of Hegelian dialectics was enormous in the intellectual life of France during the
second half of the 20th century with the influence of Kojève and Hyppolite, but also with the
impact of dialectics based on contradiction developed by Marxists, and including the
existentialism from Sartre, etc. This explains Derrida's concern to always distinguish his
procedure from Hegel's, since Hegelianism believes binary oppositions would produce a
synthesis, while Derrida saw binary oppositions as incapable of collapsing into a synthesis free
from the original contradiction.
Derrida has been more forthcoming with negative (apophatic) than positive descriptions of
deconstruction. When asked by Toshihiko Izutsu some preliminary considerations on how to
translate "deconstruction" in Japanese, in order to at least prevent going contrary to its actual
meaning, Derrida therefore began his response by saying that such question amounts to "what
deconstruction is not, or rather ought not to be."

Derrida states that deconstruction is not an analysis, a critique, or a method in the traditional
sense that philosophy understands these terms. In these negative descriptions of deconstruction
Derrida is seeking to "multiply the cautionary indicators and put aside all the traditional
philosophical concepts." This does not mean that deconstruction has absolutely nothing in
common with an analysis, a critique, or a method because while Derrida distances deconstruction
from these terms, he reaffirms "the necessity of returning to them, at least under erasure."
Derrida's necessity of returning to a term under erasure means that even though these terms are
problematic we must use them until they can be effectively reformulated or replaced. The
relevance of the tradition of negative theology to Derrida's preference for negative descriptions
of deconstruction is the notion that a positive description of deconstruction would over-
determine the idea of deconstruction and that this would be a mistake because it would close off
the openness that Derrida wishes to preserve for deconstruction. This means that if Derrida were
to positively define deconstruction as, for example, a critique then this would put the concept of
critique for ever outside the possibility of deconstruction. Some new philosophy beyond
deconstruction would then be required in order to surpass the notion of critique.

Derrida states that "Deconstruction is not a method, and cannot be transformed into one." This is
because deconstruction is not a mechanical operation. Derrida warns against considering
deconstruction as a mechanical operation when he states that "It is true that in certain circles
(university or cultural, especially in the United States) the technical and methodological
"metaphor" that seems necessarily attached to the very word "deconstruction" has been able
to seduce or lead astray." Commentator Richard Beardsworth explains that:

Derrida is careful to avoid this term [method] because it carries connotations of a procedural
form of judgement. A thinker with a method has already decided how to proceed, is unable to
give him or herself up to the matter of thought in hand, is a functionary of the criteria which
structure his or her conceptual gestures. For Derrida [...] this is irresponsibility itself. Thus, to
talk of a method in relation to deconstruction, especially regarding its ethico-political
implications, would appear to go directly against the current of Derrida's philosophical
adventure.

Beardsworth here explains that it would be irresponsible to undertake a deconstruction with a

complete set of rules that need only be applied as a method to the object of deconstruction
because this understanding would reduce deconstruction to a thesis of the reader that the text is
then made to fit. This would be an irresponsible act of reading because it becomes a prejudicial
procedure that only finds what it sets out to find.

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Psychoanalytic Criticism
Sigmund Freud
Psychoanalytic criticism builds on Freudian theories of psychology. While we don't have the
room here to discuss all of Freud's work, a general overview is necessary to explain
psychoanalytic literary criticism.

The Unconscious, the Desires, and the Defenses

Freud began his psychoanalytic work in the 1880s while attempting to treat behavioral disorders
in his Viennese patients. He dubbed the disorders 'hysteria' and began treating them by listening
to his patients talk through their problems. Based on this work, Freud asserted that people's
behavior is affected by their unconscious: "...the notion that human beings are motivated, even
driven, by desires, fears, needs, and conflicts of which they are unaware..." (Tyson 14-15).

Freud believed that our unconscious was influenced by childhood events. Freud organized these
events into developmental stages involving relationships with parents and drives of desire and
pleasure where children focus "...on different parts of the body...starting with the mouth...shifting
to the oral, anal, and phallic phases..." (Richter 1015). These stages reflect base levels of desire,
but they also involve fear of loss (loss of genitals, loss of affection from parents, loss of life) and
repression: "...the expunging from consciousness of these unhappy psychological events" (Tyson
15).

Tyson reminds us, however, that "...repression doesn't eliminate our painful experiences and
emotions...we unconsciously behave in ways that will allow us to 'play out'...our conflicted
feelings about the painful experiences and emotions we repress" (15). To keep all of this conflict
buried in our unconscious, Freud argued that we develop defenses: selective perception, selective
memory, denial, displacement, projection, regression, fear of intimacy, and fear of death, among
others.

Id, Ego, and Superego

Freud maintained that our desires and our unconscious conflicts give rise to three areas of the
mind that wrestle for dominance as we grow from infancy, to childhood, to adulthood:

 id - "...the location of the drives" or libido

 ego - "...one of the major defenses against the power of the drives..." and home of the
defenses listed above
 superego - the area of the unconscious that houses Judgment (of self and others) and
"...which begins to form during childhood as a result of the Oedipus complex" (Richter
1015-1016)

Oedipus Complex

Freud believed that the Oedipus complex was "...one of the most powerfully determinative
elements in the growth of the child" (Richter 1016). Essentially, the Oedipus complex involves
children's need for their parents and the conflict that arises as children mature and realize they
are not the absolute focus of their mother's attention: "the Oedipus complex begins in a late
phase of infantile sexuality, between the child's third and sixth year, and it takes a different form
in males than it does in females" (Richter 1016).
Freud argued that both boys and girls wish to possess their mothers, but as they grow older
"...they begin to sense that their claim to exclusive attention is thwarted by the mother's attention
to the father..." (1016). Children, Freud maintained, connect this conflict of attention to the
intimate relations between mother and father, relations from which the children are excluded.
Freud believed that "the result is a murderous rage against the father...and a desire to possess the
mother" (1016).

Freud pointed out, however, that "...the Oedipus complex differs in boys and girls...the
functioning of the related castration complex" (1016). In short, Freud thought that "...during the
Oedipal rivalry [between boys and their fathers], boys fantasized that punishment for their rage
will take the form of..." castration (1016). When boys effectively work through this anxiety,
Freud argued, "...the boy learns to identify with the father in the hope of someday possessing a
woman like his mother. In girls, the castration complex does not take the form of anxiety...the
result is a frustrated rage in which the girl shifts her sexual desire from the mother to the father"
(1016).

Freud believed that eventually, the girl's spurned advanced toward the father give way to a desire
to possess a man like her father later in life. Freud believed that the impact of the unconscious,
id, ego, superego, the defenses, and the Oedipus complexes was inescapable and that these
elements of the mind influence all our behavior (and even our dreams) as adults - of course this
behavior involves what we write.

Freud and Literature

So what does all of this psychological business have to do with literature and the study of
literature? Put simply, some critics believe that we can "...read psychoanalytically...to see which
concepts are operating in the text in such a way as to enrich our understanding of the work and, if
we plan to write a paper about it, to yield a meaningful, coherent psychoanalytic interpretation"
(Tyson 29). Tyson provides some insightful and applicable questions to help guide our
understanding of psychoanalytic criticism.

Carl Jung

Jungian criticism attempts to explore the connection between literature and what Carl Jung (a
student of Freud) called the “collective unconscious” of the human race: "...racial memory,
through which the spirit of the whole human species manifests itself" (Richter 504). Jungian
criticism, closely related to Freudian theory because of its connection to psychoanalysis, assumes
that all stories and symbols are based on mythic models from mankind’s past.

Based on these commonalities, Jung developed archetypal myths, the Syzygy: "...a quaternion
composing a whole, the unified self of which people are in search" (Richter 505). These
archetypes are the Shadow, the Anima, the Animus, and the Spirit: "...beneath...[the Shadow] is
the Anima, the feminine side of the male Self, and the Animus, the corresponding masculine side
of the female Self" (Richter 505).

In literary analysis, a Jungian critic would look for archetypes (also see the discussion of
Northrop Frye in the Structuralism section) in creative works: "Jungian criticism is generally
involved with a search for the embodiment of these symbols within particular works of art."
(Richter 505). When dealing with this sort of criticism, it is often useful to keep a handbook of
mythology and a dictionary of symbols on hand.

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