tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28177990560929086022024-03-13T15:15:21.088-07:00Literary Criticismcriticism, theory and more literature resourceeastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817799056092908602.post-17448174611834935982008-01-01T13:18:00.000-08:002008-01-01T13:21:37.352-08:00Paul de Man’s “Semiology and Rhetoric”Form and Content<br /><br />The main argument of de Man’s seminal essay can be stated as follows: The grounds of literary meaning (and by extension all meaning) must be located in rhetoric rather than in any of the other possible dimensions (form, content, reference, grammar, logic etc.). But a rhetorical reading cannot guarantee authority over interpretations. Therefore there is no authority that can guarantee a reading. This doesn’t license us to read a text just anyway we want to. Rather it commits us to readings that take full account of the possibilities and limits of reading (and writing) generally. One name for these possibilities and limits might be deconstruction.<br /><br />de Man begins by noting a decline in what he calls “formalist and intrinsic criticism.” And he accounts for this by observing an increasing interest in reference amongst literary critics. What is at stake? By “formalist and intrinsic criticism” he designates a wide range of practices that we find dominating literary criticism throughout the middle of the twentieth century from the thirties and forties into the sixties. Notice that his article is written in 1973. So what distinguishes these practices? The word formalism implies a rather conventional but nonetheless very powerful distinction (because it appeals to common sense) between form and content. Those of us who have read our Ferdinand de Saussure know the distinction in terms of the difference between signifier (form) and signified (content). How do you make the form your object? To study the form of a work you study how it gives rise to its meaning. Imagine we meet each other at breakfast and take turns at giving an account of the party we all attended the night before. We will have a lot of different accounts of one event, a lot of forms for only one content. In the same way anyone could have written a poem about school children dancing but only W. B. Yeats could have written “Among School Children.” The poem is unique not because of its content—what it is about—but because of its form. The “New Criticism” of the thirties and forties established certain techniques of close reading, especially in the work of its figurehead I. A. Richards, whose Principles of Literary Criticism is now a modern classic. <br /><br />Now Richards would perhaps have been surprised to hear his idea of form described in terms of the metaphor of inside and outside. How does the metaphor work? Imagine a nut. A nut has a shell that, once removed, yields a nutritious centre. This is what de Man means by the following statement: “when form is considered to be the external trappings of literary meaning or content, it seems superficial and expendable.” The formalists, on the other hand, taught that it is the shell, rather than its content, that is important in literature. So when de Man observes that the trend in literary criticism has moved from form to reference, what interests him is the underlying metaphor that governs how we have up until now always—without thinking about it too much—imagined meaning to come about. That is, before we interpret a text we have already accepted an interpretation—based upon a metaphor—of what interpretation is. It is this unwitting interpretation of interpretation that interests de Man. He obviously has less concern about whether formalism, structuralism, historicism or author criticism is right or wrong. Rather he is more interested in the unwitting assumptions that these approaches all share, i.e., the metaphor of inside and outside. There is more at stake in this than you might have at first realized. Think about it: most of us (but not all) will have had some experience in what we call close reading. First year English students at NUS as well as some school students will already have learned to do what we call practical criticism (after I. A. Richards and his school). This means that we read the texts according to literary forms like figures (metaphors, similes, symbols), narrative structures (first or third person narrators, point of view, character, plot, action, etc.), formal aspects of genre (meter, rhythm and rhyme) and themes (non-referential but thematic constants like death, love, the struggle of good and evil, etc.). Here form is related to meaning “intrinsically” and no reference to the context of an outside world is necessary. One might have asked, justifiably: “what is the purpose of it?” Arguments about how the ability to evaluate a literary text is good for you, even at their most ingenious, ultimately fail to satisfy (and there have been many seemingly persuasive answers of this kind). Undoubtedly this kind of knowledge counts as a skill and those of us who can do it derive a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction from it, but the question still remains—what good does it do? How does it apply, if at all, beyond literature?<br /><br />Perhaps then it would follow that criticism should start looking outside the text to the extra-textual world of real references. George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a parodic critique of the communist revolution (and by association, all such revolutions). Shakespeare’s King Lear is a not so subtle warning to King James (it was first played to him and his small court) not to lose his throne. What we have come to understand as historicism develops as a way of extending the reach of our literary knowledge so that we can talk about its relation to historical events and processes. This is what we might call extrinsic criticism. The text now has its meaning located outside itself. What fundamentally we are left with is a defining distinction—that is not itself fully explicable—between fiction or, more generally, rhetoric and reality. An example of what often happens in literary criticism would bear this out. A text by an Asian-American author like Russell Leong features characters who are migrant Chinese in the USA very often reflecting on and getting into situations of the kind Asian-Americans get into. You might then want to argue that 1) the text in some sense translates the experience of the author; and 2) the text can be read as an engagement with actual situations that Asian-Americans find themselves in and, by extension, as a critique of ideological and historical conditions that help to determine those situations. <br /><br />So the rejection of “pure” formalism is not a rejection after all but a repetition that takes the form of a reversal: “The polarities of inside and outside have been reversed, but they are still the same polarities that are at play: internal meaning has become outside reference, and the outer form has become the intrinsic structure.” The text is regarded either as something that has its meaning inherent in it (formalism) with no need to refer outwards to contexts or other texts, or it has its meaning outside itself, in the reference to author, period, history, social relation, reader or culture (etc.). What all these approaches to texts share is the unwitting assumption that meaning can be understood on the model of inside and outside, whether the content is outside and the form inside or the form outside and the content inside.<br /><br />At this stage in the article de Man provides a very important clue as to his approach. He says he wants to avoid using the terms of the old metaphor (now we know that’s what it is) and instead relocate the problem of literary meaning by examining a couple of terms that, as he says, are “less likely to enter into chiasmic reversals.” Chiasmus is a rhetorical term (from the Greek: Chiasmus, “a diagonal arrangement”) meaning the repetition of ideas in inverted order. Shakespeare’s got a good one:<br /><br />But O, what damned minutes tells he o’er<br />Who dotes, yet doubts; suspects, yet strong loves. (Othello 3.3)<br /><br />So instead of this endless repetition of a powerful yet clearly awkward notion of interpretation and meaning, de Man gets his alternative terms “pragmatically from the observation of developments and debates in recent critical methodology.” What’s he saying? He will get his new explanation of reading from reading. Notice that there is no attempt offered to formulate yet another original theory. The “new” terms are “as old as the hills” and they are to be derived from current critical theory texts.<br /><br />Semiology, Grammar and Rhetoric<br /><br />He’s right of course to observe that his alternative terminology is “as old as the hills.” What should be instructive is that it allows considerable rigor in his textual and theoretical analysis. Notice, again, that he is not proposing a new theory. He is analyzing a simultaneously theoretical and practical situation as he finds it. It is simultaneously theoretical and practical because he refuses to read the theory as if it was a simple meta-language (a vocabulary to be used for discussing language). He reads it as if it too needs reading. This is how he was able to tease out the metaphor that lies unheeded at the grounds of most notions of meaning and interpretation. And he deals with the problems of reading by reading texts that deal with the problems of reading (but which text doesn’t?).<br /><br />We don’t, I hope, have to spend too much time on the question of semiology. Semiology establishes some basic tenets: the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, the system of differences that gives the sign its value, and the conventional codes that operate as prompts for signification, sometimes making it seem rather culture bound. (What is it that frees language from cultural specificity? The arbitrariness of the sign and its repeatability: ah, bold and italics, must be important). Remember this: a sign does not simply refer to its referent (on the model of re-presentation). A sign is coded according to its system and that’s how it comes to have its particular meanings. Notice that in passing de Man observes that French writers (poets and novelists) seem always to have been aware of this, while only since structuralism have French critics twigged to it: a first definitive instance of the affirmation of the explanatory power of literature itself. <br /><br />Now, grammar. After de Saussure, whose structural linguistics aims to derive general laws of language, the grammatical laws (which are as structural as anything) tended to become a rather privileged object of structuralist analysis. A simple grammatical structure (sentence: noun phrase/verb phrase/noun phrase) can generate increasingly complex structures both at the level of the sentence and beyond to the paragraph, the chapter, the book even. At the level of the sentence alone some complexity is possible. See the first sentence from the paragraph of Proust (Wolfreys 336), which has four lines of phrases all generated from the model: noun phrase/verb phrase/noun phrase. <br /><br />In literary structuralism, especially in France, the analysis of deep grammatical structures went hand in hand with the analysis of rhetorical tropes (figures of discourse). What this means is that the two axes of language, the syntagmatic (at the level of the generated sentence) and the paradigmatic (the axis of substitutions) can be read as operating together in a discourse. We can thus explain what de Man means by “assimilations of rhetorical transformations or combinations to syntactical, grammatical patterns” with reference to the coexistence in structuralist theory of patterns of both metonymy (which is syntagmatic) and metaphor (which is paradigmatic). The syntagmatic axis is composed of the marks (words to you and I) that we find (or put) together in a given text:<br /><br />O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,<br /><br />Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?<br /><br />O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,<br /><br />How can we know the dancer from the dance?<br /><br />In this example, which I’ve stolen from de Man, all the elements that we find in the four lines are to be regarded as belonging together only syntagmatically—they are found together because that’s where they’ve been put. When we think about what they mean, then we inevitably turn to the paradigmatic axis, which we cannot see because it belongs to the system (and not to the parole). We cannot see it, that is, because it is the axis of possible substitutions (imagine I re-write Yeats’s verse: “O banana tree, little-rooted flourisher,” and you can see what kinds of substitutions are possible). However to understand metaphor now no longer as just a kind of substitution but more as a kind of combination we find that a possible substitution is given in the third and fourth lines, where the question about the dancing body seems to be a kind of repetition of the question about the tree, thus making the dancer in some metaphorical sense equivalent to the tree. Here, then, we have a metaphorical substitution on a metonymic axis. de Man’s point is that we might in this way have chosen to include the metaphor within (and thus subordinate to) the grammatical, linear unfolding without acknowledging that there may be tensions between the two modes of signification in the discourse itself. That is, the assimilation operates as a kind of smoothing over device to help us finish off the interpretation.<br /><br />Remember: de Man deals with the problems of reading by reading texts that deal with the problems of reading. Perhaps its not that obvious to us that “Among School Children” is a text about reading—but does it matter? de Man can read it as if it was and certainly, then, it would seem to be.<br /><br />So what is at stake? The difference between metaphorical substitutions and metonymic combinations (rhetoric and grammar) can be seen as a kind of repetition of a deeper and older opposition: between rhetoric and logic. But (a big, big but) metonymy is not a grammatical category. It is no less figurative than metaphor. The predicative structure of a sentence (noun/verb/phrase) cannot guarantee its meaning—as the example of Archie Bunker’s rhetorical question shows. In that case, as de Man says, “the same grammatical pattern engenders two meanings that are mutually exclusive: the literal meaning asks for the concept (difference) whose existence is denied by the figurative meaning.” The question, “what’s the difference?” actually means “there’s no difference.” Now the point—as de Man points out in the next paragraph—is this: the only way out of the confusion engendered by this paradox is through an intention that cannot be reduced to the grammar of the statement. What Archie Bunker means by the question is not contained by the question’s grammar. And nor is it contained by any other verifiable aspect of the statement. This is the meaning of rhetoric. When the meaning of a statement cannot be established through an analysis of its grammar we call it rhetorical. So when de Man says that, “rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration,” he is drawing attention to the fact that meaning (intentions people have when they make statements or when they read statements) cannot not be based on firm logical grounds. Rhetoric is abyssal and aberrant. You can hope to be understood but you cannot guarantee it. Once we recognize that grammar is subordinate to rhetoric we are in the realm of interpretive decisions. The structuralist dream of a fully analyzable language is now lost. But there’s more at stake than that. The logical grounds of interpretation have gone entirely—especially when we deal with the literary text, which is “above the norm” in rhetorical meaning. Both logic and grammar are questionable when we read a literary text. Grammar assumes a simple logical one-to-one relationship between language unit (word, sentence, etc.) and meaning. Rhetoric contests that assumption. Logic postulates the possibility of universal truth (a concept that independently of its objects remains unchangeable, eternal and unaffected by rhetoric). We know from de Saussure that such a concept has no place in a system like the language system, which provides meaning only through the values that the differences between signifiers allow. In other words, when we make meaningful statements we do so by acting on the combined resources of difference and rhetorical substitution. This gives us considerable freedom but at a cost—we can no longer hope to control or to limit the structures of linguistic meaning and the multiple possibilities of confusion that always threaten. But please pay attention to the implications of this last point. If as readers of literature we can no longer guarantee a fully controllable text, then so long as we can show where these limitations reside—as de Man has done with his examples—we have won considerable interpretive freedom for our rhetorical readings.<br /><br />Metaphor and Metonymy<br /><br />It remains for me to say a few words about de Man’s reading of Proust. He has chosen the example for a simple reason: it thematizes reading (“the most striking aspect of this passage is the juxtaposition of figural and meta-figural language”). The role of the meta here is very, very, important. When some faculty (language, consciousness, experience, thought) takes itself as its own topic or object we can identify a self-reflexive or auto-referential role. Such a role always exhibits—in the form of paradox or contradiction—irrevocable limits to logical, formal or empirical analysis. Ask me about this—there are many examples of the self-reflexive paradox and each of them can be revealing in different ways. Now, in the case we have before us, the paradox reveals itself in two different ways. First we have a meta-figurative discourse and, second, we have a meta-reader-ly discourse, which thematizes reading. <br /><br />First we have a passage of fiction (and figurative discourse), which thematizes the role of figurative discourse. This is the text in its two dimensions overlapping. The two dimensions of a text are as follows: it is composed first of what we might call its statement. This is the level of content (whether considered extrinsic or intrinsic). It is what the text is about. But all texts are composed of a second dimension, that of their enunciation, the writing or speaking (the “how”) of the text. In traditional terms this would be its form. But in de Man’s “new” terminology form would not do, because the word suggests empirical and analyzable elements, and, as we’ve, seen this would miss the rhetorical aspects of meaning and intention. Here instead of form we can talk about performance. In this way we can actually make sense of the difference between Archie Bunker’s intention and his wife’s interpretation. The subject of the statement changes when the subject of its enunciation changes. The “image repertoire” that Roland Barthes writes about occurs at the level of enunciation. When you read a text, the subject of (its) enunciation is you. So reading is just as much a kind of performance as writing, which is why de Man maintains that the difference between literature and criticism is delusive. (Student: “Are we doing criticism or literature?” Teacher: “What’s the difference?”). <br /><br />The second way that a paradox of self-reflexivity is revealed is in the fact that a reader (Paul de Man) is reading a text in terms of the way it thematizes the problems of reading. In this way de Man can read the text as rigorously as possible in terms of what the text itself—as a rhetorical entity—makes possible, even necessary. In other words the text makes a claim (at the level of its statement) on behalf of the value of presence, according to which the most essential figurative tropes are metaphorical as opposed to metonymical. But in the performance the text reveals a praxis (the Greek word for action or practice in the sense of something that one habitually does)—i.e., it achieves its effects—through metonymic combinations, which ground the metaphorical substitutions. The metaphorical substitutions of the terms presence, essence, action, truth and beauty are grounded in a metonymic chain (i.e., they are brought together by proximal and thus accidental association). What this does is to lessen—at the very least—the authority of the rhetorical mode. But it doesn’t replace that authority with a new one. Rather it opens up the space of reading as something that cannot be closed, that remains open, undetermined and exposed to chances of its future that no authority could determine or calculate in advance. It does not do this after the fact but as the very possibility of its own mode of existence (as a rhetorical entity). This is what de Man means when he points out that Proust’s text cannot simply be reduced to the mystical assertion of the superiority of metaphor over metonymy. He writes:<br /><br />The reading is not “our” reading, since it uses only the linguistic elements provided by the text itself; the distinction between the author and the reader is one of the false distinctions that the reading makes evident. The deconstruction is not something we have added to the text but it constituted it in the first place. A literary text simultaneously asserts and denies the authority of its own rhetorical mode, and by reading the text as we did we were only trying to come closer to being as rigorous a reader as the author had to be in order to write the sentence in the first place. (339).<br /><br />Please pay special attention to the meaning of the word deconstruction in this passage. It doesn’t matter what you want to say about writing because when you write the conditions and possibilities of writing alone determine the limits and possibilities of your statement. And those conditions and possibilities are revealed when anybody writes about writing or reads a text in terms of the way it thematizes reading. You could always make counter-factual claims about it but the writing itself would in each case reveal the lie. So deconstruction is the name that de Man gives for the possibilities and limits of rhetoric (texts, statements and communicative events of all kinds). <br /><br />Where does it leave us? After watching the new Spielberg production, AI, I have a fresh example. Here is a cinema production that thematizes the relationships between cinema and its audiences. In this sense it is a very clever film indeed as it is able to include a narrative about narratives (telling stories); the role of mass culture for individuals (the claims in the film are that it is fundamentally benign); the role of the spectator in making the illusion “real”; the persistence and permanence of cinema as a cultural product; (etc., etc.,). It takes a spectator (like me), who is looking for the figure of the spectator in the film, to begin to see what is going on and, thus, to construct a critique—which I will leave in absentia here but we will come back to it anon.<br /><br /><br />Reference<br /><br />Paul de Man’s “Semiology and Rhetoric” was first published in Diacritics, 3:3 (Fall 1973) 27-23. You will also find it in Julian Wolfreys, ed. Literary Theories: A Reader and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. <br /><br />Source: <a href="http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/deMan.htm">http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/deMan.htm </a>eastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817799056092908602.post-5758164614713428192008-01-01T13:10:00.000-08:002008-01-01T13:17:14.638-08:00Cogito Ergo SumIt is convenient to use Descartes as a reference point because so much of what is distinctively modern is found with him. His statement cogito ergo sum--“I am thinking therefore I am”--was from early in his writings an example of one of the few most basic, “clear and distinct,” ideas a philosopher could have. The statement asserts the certainty of my existence as a consequence of the mere fact that I am thinking. So long as I can be sure that I am thinking I am sure that I exist. A lot hangs, then, on this “I am thinking.” Descartes’ most sustained and widely read demonstration of this is to be found in the first two of his Meditations, which are recommendable in their entirety. What comes to be known (admittedly rather absurdly) as The Cogito (the “I am thinking”) concerns the faculty of human judgment. What he is concerned to do in The Meditations is to prove that judgment in his sense is free of deception. If he succeeds, of course, then there’s a nice ground for human knowledge indeed. Clearly, he is attempting a fresh reading of the already traditional search for a ground for truth. It is this sense of “fresh reading” that is crucial here. The problems of philosophy, charted in the preceding sections, are only clouded further by slavish adherence to traditional authorities like Plato and especially Aristotle. The faculty of judgment ought to be free from all forms of deception, like stories and myths, certainly, but all old previous thinking, the whole cultural heritage, including the hazardous wastes of rhetoric. Furthermore, human imagination and, worst of all, the fallible evidence of the senses each in its own way serves to compromise the clarity and distinctness of proper thinking. Thus a mixture of geometry and philosophy produces what we now know as Cartesian method. Cartesian doubt is one way of characterizing this and, to be fair, Descartes certainly encourages such labels because his most influential book, The Meditations, is built upon a cunning narrative, he calls it “a fable of the mind,” in which the philosopher takes his addressees through several stages of doubting. It is advisable not to play down the literary aspects of his writing, for this will lead the casual reader into the error of taking his demonstrations, which are almost explicitly theatrical acts, as a kind of authoritative knowledge. For instance when he complains of the multiplicity of conflicting philosophical authorities, none of which contribute a convincing account of the grounds and first principles of knowledge, we may be forgiven for assuming that Descartes is announcing a historically based crisis, the breaking down of epistemological foundations. He would thus represent, as has been argued, a shift from medieval thought to a peculiarly modern one. However this would fail to do justice to the argument as we find it. Descartes’ point is not much altered from Plato’s. The thinker must each time start from scratch in order to be sure of his or her knowledge. The real question is to what extent is this escape from the multiplicity of sensuous and rhetorical distractions ever possible? The demonstrations are, at the very least, suggestive of the necessity for the kind of theatrical cunning that Descartes himself employs to get what he calls his “Archimedes’ point” across. <br /><br />Having first of all doubted the words of the authorities (which is always easy to do--why should we believe Aristotle or Plato when even they often contradict each other?) he moves on to the evidence of his senses. Why should I believe that what I experience--what I see, hear, touch, feel or taste--is real, or even a true representation of the object world to which I get this sensuous access? The question is, now, can I successfully doubt that my experience is real? Descartes uses a number of examples. Sometimes my dreams seem to be as real as when I am awake. I cannot, therefore, be certain that I am not dreaming. There are some madmen who think they are made of glass or that they are kings when they are really just poor beggars. Of the latter Descartes, rather controversially, says, “but these people are mad and it would be extravagant if I followed their example.” Instead he follows a different kind of extravagance. If I hypothesise a demon, which systematically tricks me into believing that all my experience is real when in fact it bears no relation to actuality, how can I be sure of anything at all? Added together, the doubting and the hypothesizing prove one thing for certain (while all else remains in doubt), that is, that I am doubting and that I am hypothesizing. The invention of the evil demon may of course be an invention by the evil demon too, but the fact that I can doubt even this cannot be doubted. Therefore my capacity to throw all aspects of my experience into doubt, except that fact of doubting itself, ought to be able to serve as a ground for certain knowledge. It is called cogito, “I am thinking.” Notice that when I adopt Descartes’ I, I do not say, for instance, “Descartes thinks therefore he is.” That would simply not work. It only works for what he calls “this ‘I.’” The I is a philosophical subject that remains constant in the statement, whoever occupies that place. So the autobiographical aspects of Descartes’ Meditations are purely fictional in so far as any I ought to be able to occupy that slot in the demonstration. Descartes calls his method analytic as opposed to synthetic. Traditionally the synthetic method would set out a theorem and follow it with a series of proofs. What Descartes is interested in here is putting the addressee into the position of the philosopher going through his hypotheses and doubts. <br /><br />Along the way, Descartes gives a couple of crucial demonstrations of what this “thinking,” the Cartesian judgment, involves. At a certain point in the demonstration Descartes says, “when I look out of the window I say that I see men passing by.” He then points out that this is an error caused by habitual ways of speaking. These passers-by might be automata clothed in robes with hats and masks (more Cartesian extravagance). Rather, says Descartes, “ I judge what I see to be men.” Hence the faculty of judgment gives sense to what is visible and, once again, a version of the difference between the transcendental (judgment) and the empirical (the visible) comes to organize the argument. And, once again, the rhetorical field is the frontier between the two. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Frontiers</span><br /><br />The problem raised by frontiers (both as distinguishing marks and as loci of passage) is that they reveal the multiplicity of ways in which persons and communities interact with those from whom they are or wish to be distinguished. This multiplicity is often regarded as a bad infinite because not only does it describe the multiple conditions of similarity and difference that define association per se, but also these frontiers can be marked only with reference to the particularities of a given and specific community. The bad infinite is thus finitude itself, history and historical specificity, and as such it subjects us to all the distressing vagaries of contingency and chance. In this respect the Cartesian judgement remains tied to the metaphysical tradition in which it emerged first of all as a concept. <br />The Cartesian Subject is not a Subject<br /><br />As we have seen, Descartes’ texts reveal a desire for reasonably certain grounds amongst irreducible cultural and philosophical difference. Furthermore, Descartes’ subject, now canonically referred to as the Cogito, is often today described as being in crisis. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The Subject in Crisis</span><br /><br />This is probably most marked in work following Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan who both demonstrate a tendency to see Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis as having decentred a subject commonly described as “Cartesian.” In Jacques Lacan’s Ecrits we read: “the formation of the I as we experience it in psychoanalysis ... leads us to oppose any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogito.” (1). And in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan uses Descartes to assert that while the subject of psychoanalysis is of Cartesian origin, it emerges only in the wake of the signifier (47). <br /><br />This identity is often equated with the social identity of the modern subject—an identity before anything else who is capable of making free and rational decisions. For this reason Descartes is a good place to go in order to discover the conditions out of which such an identity so powerfully emerges. What we learn is surprising, because if we consider the sense of “social or cultural identity,” we find that the so-called Cartesian subject is actually not really a subject at all. <br /><br />In “Rule Twelve” of the Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii (c.1628) Descartes describes how knowledge of the outside world passes through five relatively discrete operations or events of perception, culminating in the reasonable judgements and understanding proper to the operation of “native intelligence” or “mind.” I want to make special reference to Descartes’ qualification here, which is typical, that he “lacks the space to include all the points which have to be set out before the truth about these matters can be made clear to everyone” (CSM I 40). It would be a mistake to regard this as a passing comment, contingent on the purpose of the work in hand. Descartes’ method is predicated on the desire for a certainty that is always “embarrassed” by the so called “bad” infinite: lack of time and space, prematurity of reason, infinite regression in solving complex propositions, infinite computation with respect to probabilities, etc. Indeed, in The Meditations the same problem emerges as reason for not assenting to the standard interpretation of Man as “rational animal.” He writes “from one single question, we would fall unwittingly into an infinite number of others, more difficult and awkward than the first, and I would not want to waste the little time and leisure remaining to me by using it to unravel subtleties of this kind” (A II 427, CSM II 14). As a consistent response to this problem Descartes’ method, learned not only from geometry but from the allegorical arts as well, involves setting out “as briefly as possible ... the most useful way of conceiving everything within us which contributes to our knowledge of things” (CSM I 40). The method of explanation, which as such implicates judgement with the ability to successfully communicate the judgement itself, allows the reader to follow a chain of “suppositions” that otherwise “detract not a jot from the truth of things,” a chain exorbitant to the truth that nonetheless makes “everything much clearer” (CSM I 40). This kind of abstraction, based in part on the abstractions of algebraic geometry, subordinates logic to figuration. <br /><br />In demonstrating the first phase he asks us to conceive the process of passive corporeal sense perception as one in which senses are “impressed” by data, “in the same way in which wax takes on an impression from a seal” (CSM I 40). In this way Descartes can generalise all sense perception under the term shape (“nothing is more readily perceivable by the senses”), including colour, which is his example here. He writes: “we simply make an abstraction, setting aside every feature of colour apart from its possessing the character of shape, and conceive of the difference between white, blue, and red, etc. as being like the difference between the following figures or similar ones” (CSM I 41). His diagrams show three figures as follows: one is constructed of five equidistant lines of equal length drawn vertically; the second is a square divided into sixteen; the third is a larger version of that square but with diagonal lines bisecting each of the sixteen internal squares. The given figures are entirely arbitrary, so colour is to be understood through the abstract principle of differentiation per se. The generalisation is therefore regarded as being sufficient owing to the special quality this time of a good infinite. He writes: “The same can be said about everything perceivable by the senses, since it is certain that the infinite multiplicity of figures is sufficient for the expression of all the differences in perceptible things” (CSM I 41). And, because infinity can be grasped neither by the senses nor by the imagination, we know that the intellect will never run out of means (figures) for representing its objects in abstraction. Again, in The Meditations, Descartes asks rhetorically:<br /><br />Is it not that I imagine that this wax, being round, is capable of becoming square, and of passing from a square to a triangular figure? No indeed, it is not that, for I conceive of it as capable of undergoing an infinity of similar changes, and as I could not embrace this infinity by my imagination, consequently this conception I have of the wax is not the product of the faculty of imagination. (105) <br /><br />So the frontier between the object world and the transcendental judgement actually constitutes the meeting point of two types of infinity. The first is the multiplicity of worldly forms and the second is the ability of human judgement to find potentially infinite substitutions for representing them. Descartes’ philosopher is thus the master of a universe of signs, which each time need the perpetually creative activity of interpreting judgement. <br /><br />The mind is thus simply the name for an exorbitance, the excess that infinity suggests, which lies between the subject and the outside world. The difference between good and bad infinity thus characterises the frontier itself as an absolutely necessary condition of representation and, as we would see if we took a sufficiently complex range of the colour spectrum and represented each difference with a graphic mark, writing. This just is the Cogito. Writing in this sense in fact defines Descartes’ universe not only as semiotic but also as constituted essentially by a relation to “the other” as potentially infinite and randomly determined addressee.<br />Authority and Enlightenment<br /><br />Descartes’ writing abounds with masks, guises, performances and representations of all kinds, each acting as mediation for the otherwise absent light of reason itself. More than a hint is given here as to Descartes’ participation as a social subject. “Actors,” he writes in his very early Praeambula (c.1619), “taught not to let any embarrassment show on their faces, put on a mask. I will do the same. So far, I have been a spectator in this theatre which is the world, but now I am about to mount the stage, and I come forward masked” (CSM I 2). There is no proper scholarly context for this passage although it does bear traces of the Renaissance and Baroque traditions that surface from time to time in Descartes’ texts. But this “I” we will gradually come to think of as the Cogito itself, as “this ‘I’” in The Meditations (CSM II 17); and Discourse on Method, Descartes’ “autobiography,” is in fact a biography or as he calls it “a fable” of reason (CSM I 112), in which reason adopts the role of the good citizen, pretends to accept the most conservative, normative and dominant of historically and nationally established principles for a “provisional moral code” in order to demolish them and rebuild them on firmer grounds (CSM I 122-131). On this note what will come to be known as the call of Enlightenment is sounded. <br /><br />The status of the Discourse itself is important. On the one hand it demonstrates the way that a single philosopher arrives at a level of certainty from which to proceed in developing a well founded knowledge. The demonstration is, as Descartes is at pains to point out, at best a history but perhaps better understood as a fable, like the pictorial representations of Renaissance art: <br /><br />I shall be glad to reveal in this discourse what paths I have followed, and to represent my life in it as if it were a picture ... but I am presenting this work only as a history or, if you like, a fable in which, among certain examples worthy of imitation, you will perhaps also find many others that it would not be right to follow. (CSM I 112) <br /><br />So the Discourse may offer examples for imitation, but imitation should be understood here in a specific way. What the Discourse reveals in this passage is that the very grounds for the certainty of any given singular understanding can only be represented in the ungrounded rhetoric of fable or resemblance, the “being-like” of allegorical representation. Descartes’ rationalist legacy emphasises rather too easily the role of mathematics in an epistemology understood in terms of exactitude conditioned by order and measure. The rationalist aspects of Descartes’ legacy were developed par excellence by G. W. Leibniz, who substituted the logical structure of judgement for Descartes’ suspension of assent. But we are able to read in the writing of this early modern philosopher that resemblance and exactitude are neither coincidental nor opposite (which we know is true of all relations of difference and identity). Rather, both are grounded in the infinite frontier itself, which is difference, understood by us as the Cogito—“I am thinking”—my existence as representability. <br /><br />Thus the notion of imitation that Descartes employs is quite subtle and must be understood as a term in the series of models, masks, fables and representations of all kinds that characterise his work, the importance always of choosing one’s authorities, or models, with prudence. Thus what is to be imitated might perhaps best be thought in terms of imitation itself: <br /><br />Fables make us imagine many events as possible when they are not. And even the most accurate histories, while not altering or exaggerating the importance of matters to make them more worthy of being read always omit the baser and less notable events; as a result, the other events appear in a false light. (CSM I 114) <br /><br />So the Discourse combines fable (which conventionally offers an allegorical version of proliferating images, doublings and subtle illusions) with the necessary idealising finitude of a history, with its lacunae and arbitrary over-emphasis on selected aspects of an otherwise chaotic constellation of events and relations (the bad infinite). This very important qualification, which again points to Descartes’ consistent philosophical practice, must be taken into consideration when reading the fable/history of the Discourse itself, which records a vast pretence.<br /><br />Architectural Metaphors<br /><br />The nature of the pretence should be regarded as a kind of “temporary accommodation,” in line with the architectural metaphors he uses. For instance, he says: “before starting to rebuild your house, it is not enough simply to pull it down ... you must also provide yourself with some other place where you can live comfortably while building is in progress” (CSM I 122). This metaphor is of course constructed upon the subtle foundations of a whole allegorical system of architectural metaphors, which develop as a response to the familiar problems. <br /><br />With regard to philosophy (as we have already observed), not one of its problems is not subject to disagreement (CSM I 115). And this situation is repeated in the empirical world where Descartes, while mixing with people of different humours, ranks and races, discovers “almost as much diversity as I had done earlier among philosophers” (115). So the problem of diversity is answered through the concept of singularity, and the architectural metaphor goes to work: <br /><br />Buildings undertaken and completed by a single architect are usually more attractive and better planned than those which several have tried to patch up by adapting old walls built for different purposes. Again, ancient cities which have gradually grown from mere village into large towns are usually ill-proportioned, compared with those orderly towns which planners lay out as they fancy on level ground. Looking at the buildings of the former individually, you will often find as much art in them, if not more, than in those of the latter; but in view of their arrangement—a tall one here, a small one there—and the way they make the streets crooked and irregular, you would say it is chance, rather than the will of men using reason, that placed them so.” CSM I 116).<br /><br />Paradoxically Descartes’ aesthetic would favour new cities like Singapore or Milton Keynes over London, Venice or Dublin, while enjoying the particular buildings, squares or even neighbourhoods of the latter over the former. But no single architect could compose a well ordered whole out of eccentric individual visions. Again, for Descartes, the randomness that seems to have determined the way cities have grown is representative of the way individuals, who are sometimes capable of reasoned judgments, find that they are mere parts in an irreducible and chaotic diversity when faced with each other. This passage by Descartes is echoed by the twentieth century German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, in a famous passage from the Logical Investigations, where he compares language to an ancient city: <br /><br />Our language can be seen as an ancient city; a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses. (8) <br /><br />In Wittgenstein’s description the “new boroughs” seem to conform to Descartes’ ideal of “orderly” planning, overlaid, as Rationalism itself is supposed to have been, on ancient foundations, chaotic yet brilliant with baroque beauty. But both descriptions (one just after the beginning of modernity, the other just before the end) are linked by a single thread, by which the bad infinite becomes good in analogy. Citizens are already subjects who must speak in the peculiar metrics, write in the labyrinthine marks associated with the places where they live. <br /><br />In the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure we read about the myths of language-change. In part Three of The Course in General Linguistics he notes that in the view of the early linguists, “anything which departed from an established order was an irregularity, a violation of an ideal form. Their illusion, very characteristic of the period, was that the original state of the language represented something superior, a state of perfection. They did not even inquire whether that earlier state had not been preceded by a still earlier one” (162). Saussure then proceeds to demonstrate that “the main factor in the evolution of languages, and the process by which they pass from one state of organisation to another, is analogy” (162). And it is precisely analogy that serves to “counterbalance the diversifying effect of sound change” (160). Analogy turns chaos into regularity. It converts a bad finite into infinite possibility for change. It demonstrates yet another way in which reason is necessarily linked to the exorbitance of rhetorical processes. And it reveals a notion of chance that is consonant with necessity. Language, if only in this sense, belongs to the generalization that reveals a massive tendency to inertia in community: the more participants there are who may influence change, the less chance there is for fundamental change to occur. Saussure again observes that: “Legal procedures, religious rites, ship’s flags, etc. are systems used only by a certain number of individuals acting together and for a limited time. A Language on the contrary, is something in which everyone participates all the time, and that is why it is constantly open to the influence of all. This key fact is by itself sufficient to explain why a linguistic revolution is impossible” (74). <br /><br />This is more or less what Descartes is saying with the architectural metaphor: <br /><br />We never see people pulling down all the houses of a city for the sole purpose of rebuilding them in a different style to make the streets more attractive; but we do see many individuals having their houses pulled down in order to rebuild them, some even being forced to do so when the houses are in danger of falling down and their foundations are insecure. This example convinced me that it would be unreasonable for an individual to reform a state by changing it from the foundations up and overturning it in order to set it up again; or again for him to plan to reform the body of sciences or the established order of teaching them in the schools. (117) <br /><br />Here, Descartes’ pretence to conservatism with regard to issues of education and state reform is in fact a radicalism regarding the desire to construct the grounds for individual critical distance from existing social standards and norms. Citizenship is the mask of a subjectivity that ensures social existence but that is open to a radical exorbitance—the exorbitance of the Cogito, or writing, or analogy—which all name the possibility of a substitutions that cannot be named in fact. <br /><br />So the architectural metaphors are not merely metaphors. They do the very work that the metaphors describe: they offer the exorbitant ground of a surrogate vocabulary without which “rebuilding” would remain one of the transient dreams of imagination; analogy offers the possibility of an exterior locus to the temporary accommodation of historical conditions. More crucially analogy does the work of architecture itself. As G. W. F. Hegel writes in his Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, the task of architecture: <br /><br />Lies in so manipulating external organic nature that it becomes cognate to the mind, as an artistic outer world [...] It raises an enclosure round the assembly of those gathered together, as a defence against the threatening of the storm, against rain, the hurricane, and wild beasts, and reveals the will to assemble, although externally, yet in conformity with principles of art. (91) <br /><br />Architecture thus resembles the ways in which communities guard themselves against the chaos that is their outside, it “resembles” them and offers a kind of communal identity in style and structure. Martin Heidegger, in the twentieth century also writes, on the purpose of a Greek Temple: “It is the templework that fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human beings. The all-governing expanse of this open relational context is the world of this historical people” (42). Here the specific nature of the architecture stands not only as the symbolic representation of a historically grounded people, but it also determines the essential experience of their world in its entirety. <br /><br />It is always a possibility for Hegel, however, that architecture exceeds its limits and becomes sculpture, “for the limit of architecture ... is that it retains the spiritual as an inward existence over against the external forms of the art” (91). The “spirit” of a community is never “contained” as an inward form; it is rather already the sculptured exterior of architecture itself, because architecture inspires its material and forms “as the determinant content on behalf of which it sets to work” (91). In other words spirit builds its dwelling place around itself against a hostile outside, but that dwelling always bears the inventive trace of spirit itself, thus externalised in the becoming-sculpture of architecture, the dwelling itself. Spirit just is the sculpture of its external form. What all this says, very briefly, is that the essence of humans is what they build themselves, whether out of the ruins of inherited legacies, or bravely, independently, against the storm. This hint of heroism is never far from the modernist version of things. If the analogy between architecture and language is taken seriously, then the suggestion is that the human is no more or less than the milieu of the historical, cultural edifice, in language or in buildings, where the human must dwell for this dwelling just is the human. If so then we dwell in a radically unfinished project. <br />Responsibility<br /><br />The modern subject, then, may seem something like an infant, shrouded in a terrifying authority which it needs in order to define itself; or it is something like Descartes’ I masquerading in the guise of the good citizen in order to be the true philosopher, enclosed by the architecture of geographical and historical forms but opening those forms up at their limits to an exorbitance that is spirit, or reason, nothing but this exorbitance. <br /><br />Descartes solves the problem of cultural difference with reference to the infinity of figures available for representation. But the masquerade of subjectivity can be overcome only through the recognition of selfhood as masquerade, i.e., by reason. Reason however, as otherness itself, can only ever be manifest in the extravagant forms, the fables and fictions of the philosophical oeuvre, the extravagant fashions and necessary chances that help construct the bizarre cities of modernity and postmodernity. Only an engagement with the exorbitance of the frontier itself will help account for the conditions and responsibilities of the modern (and the postmodern) self. We should just add that any attempt to understand cultural frontiers within an already established framework (the finitude of a conceptual system), will discover that the frontier is not reducible to the available concepts. And because these limits to political thought are points of potential transformation, potential for change is thus conditioned by this infinite frontier.<br /><br />Source: <a href="http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/cogito.htm">http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/cogito.htm</a>eastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817799056092908602.post-16035542732342944162008-01-01T12:49:00.000-08:002008-01-01T13:02:55.061-08:00Lacan and LanguageJacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst who from 1953 until 1980, in addition to his own clinical practice, gave regular seminars in Paris to an audience sometimes amounting to 800, many of whom were distinguished intellectuals in their own right. Lacan’s influence over the last 20 years or so on nearly all humanities disciplines cannot be doubted. His influence has been especially marked in literary criticism, film theory, art history and theory, continental philosophy and in some areas of social and political thought. Several schools of psychoanalysis have evolved out of his own, but otherwise his relation to established psychoanalytic institutions is strained, to say the least. His theory is by his own account a development of systematic reading of Sigmund Freud’s own works, and in fact his seminars, which are beginning to appear in transcriptions, are always based around particular texts by Freud. But many other influences are apparent, including surrealism, continental philosophy and structural linguistics, which provides much of his vocabulary if not his theoretical base. He uses other sciences like biology, optics, mathematics and physics more for their metaphorical resources rather than any objective principles. This is an important point: Lacan follows Freud in making use of analogies to explain otherwise unexplainable things, so in this respect we can see that psychoanalysis shares some similar characteristics with literature and art generally. There is, for instance, an insistence on the rhetorical dimension underlying human experience. Lacan’s writings provide the clearest example of this aspect of psychoanalysis, so much so that, according to Lacan, literature and psychoanalysis are merely two different types of discourse with the same aims—that is, to expose the discursive dimension of knowledge, power and social relations as the locus of determinations on emotional life.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Unconscious is the Discourse of the Other</span><br /><br />According to Lacan, the human subject is always split between a conscious side, a mind that is accessible, and an unconscious side, a series of drives and forces which remain inaccessible. The cost of human “knowledge” is that these drives must remain unknown. What is most basic to each human entity is what is most alien. This (S) is the symbol that Lacan uses to figure the subject in its division. We are what we are on the basis of something that we experience to be missing from us—our understanding of the other—that is the other side of the split out of which our unconscious must emerge. Because we experience this “something missing” as a lack we desire to close it, to fill it in, to replace it with something. Lacan calls this lack desire. Desire is what cannot be satisfied even when our demands are met. All our needs are at once converted into desires that cannot be satisfactorily fulfilled. This is why sexuality cannot be considered as the result of a need. The unconscious manifests itself by the way it insists on filling the “gap” that has been left by the very thing the subject feels is lacking in him or her, that is the unconscious! (The unconscious attempts to fill in the gap caused by the unconscious).<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Unconscious is structured like a Language</span><br /><br />Lacan borrows some ideas of linguistics that Freud did not have access to. As we have seen, Saussure showed that a sign is not necessarily something that connects a word or name to a thing, but is in fact something which connects a sound or image to a concept. The sound or image is called a signifier. The concept is called a signified. Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers (in a given context). When Saussure’s theory is put together with Freud’s it is not difficult to see that the movement of signifiers, which generates meaning, must remain fundamentally unconscious. Meaning may only have a place in what Lacan calls “the signifying chain.” So the signifier has primacy over the signified, which means that meaning is generated not by the normal meaning of a word but by the place the word has in a signifying chain.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Metaphor and Metonymy</span><br /><br />Brief Reminder<br />Metaphor: substitutes a word for another word.<br />Metonymy: involves a linear form of displacement.<br /><br />These two axes of language—substitution and displacement—correspond to the working of the unconscious. Metonymy, which carries language along its syntagmatic axis, corresponds to the displacement of desire that characterizes the dream work in Freud. Metaphor, on the other hand, corresponds to the paradigmatic axis, the axis of substitution and, therefore, corresponds to that aspect of condensation whereby different figures can be substituted or are condensed into one through an overdetermined nodal point.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Compare Freud’s distinction to Saussure’s formulation:</span><br /> Signified Conscious<br /> Signifier Unconscious<br /><br /><br />Lacan turns the formulation on its head:<br /><br /> Sr<br /> Sd<br /><br />Henceforth the unconscious, sexuality and fantasy can be pictured as the Signifier over the signified. The unconscious is constituted in the same way as our intrinsic ability to speak. Desire is left always unsatisfied and is either displaced from signifier to signifier or it is substituted for—one signifier for another—and the whole process makes up a “chain of signifiers,” which remains unconscious but which, like the unconscious, leaves traces of itself, traces which may be read.<br /><br />Metonymy follows the horizontal line of signifiers, which never cross the bar (of repression) that leads to the signified and to signification. Just as desire is always deferred from one object to the next, so the signifier suspends signification while following the horizontal chain. Each signifier that fails to cross the bar has exactly the same meaning. If signifies lack (desire).<br /><br />Metaphor is placed in a vertical relation. One signifier can substitute as the signified for another signifier. “Crossing the bar” is really the action of one signifier becoming signified by taking the place reserved for the signified itself—the bar allows the substitution of one signifier for another:<br /><br /> Sr S<br />Sd î Sr<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sexuality and Sexual Difference</span><br /><br />One of the most controversial contributions of psychoanalysis has been on the issue of sexuality and sexual difference. Most famously Freud introduced a new definition of sexuality. We need to first look at the more traditional one (which still has adherents today) and then examine the nature of the Freudian definition. The terms on which sexuality is usually defined turn on the relation between notions of normality and notions of perversity. Freud was at his most controversial when he stated that he had discovered a form of sexuality present in infants. At this stage the infant expresses his or her sexuality polymorphously (taking many forms)—that is, with no particular fixed object or aim, just a kind of indulgent pleasure. The meaning of this pleasure is then presented back to the adolescent in a kind of deferred action in which primal fantasies are given a more fixed shape (helped along by the notorious Oedipus Complex) with a socially sanctioned object type and a useful aim in reproduction.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Deferred Action</span><br /><br />Nachtragtlichkeit describes the ways in which an infantile experience that is either incomprehensible or traumatic is nonetheless somehow retained by memory unconsciously and reactivated at a later time in a different context. The notion comes from an early stage in Freud’s speculations and was used to explain the mechanism of hysteria, in which a traumatic early experience is reactivated in terms of a less traumatic later provocation. He sometimes explains this with the mildly comic story of a young man infatuated with women. “A young man who was a great admirer of feminine beauty was talking once of the good-looking wet nurse who had suckled him when he was a baby. ‘I’m sorry,’ he remarked, ‘that I didn’t make a better use of my opportunity.’” (IoD 295). This is not, of course, an example of deferred-action, but it does illustrate the notion by emphasising an inability at the early stage to understand or to act at all on experiences, which are retrospectively activated in later life. Freud’s commentators have found the notion more useful than he evidently did, in so far as the rhetorical aspect has become much more obvious. Signification involves the constant reactivation of significant material in new and unpredictable contexts, which thus produces new significance and new meanings. <br /><br />Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality can be a frustrating read, with its delays and detours and often inconclusive observations. Perhaps because of this, however, it remains one of the key books on sexuality and sexual difference both within and outside the institution of psychoanalysis. There are two striking aspects to Freud’s work on sexuality. The first involves his use of the mainstream professional views of his time. He doesn’t simply critique these or oppose them and he doesn’t even try to produce a convincing alternative vocabulary to talk about these issues. So his quite stark departure from mainstream knowledge is made within the terms and the frameworks of that knowledge itself, which is why the standard oppositions like normal and perverse, masculine and feminine, etc. remain part of the vocabulary. However the system governing the meanings of that vocabulary is both subverted and transformed in Freud’s text. The second aspect involves his use of evidence in relation to the professional views. Basically he employs the same hypothetical framework but transforms it through his rigorous and tenacious insistence on the evidence—what happens to the theory when one confronts it with these facts? The theory changes. Perversity, which was once a category for sexuality gone wrong, a perversion of normal sexuality (like fetishism, same sex desire, bestiality, even masturbation), becomes the general condition of all sexuality per se. Normal desire, on the contrary, which had an extremely narrow definition supported (as it still is) by everyday common-sense assumptions, is now understood as being one of the numerous contingent possibilities of a general perversity. Thus Freud appears to be saying extremely odd things in a rather traditional language. In that language, that framework, that vocabulary, however, Freud’s theories remain the only ones that work. <br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sexuality</span><br /><br />Freud describes the psychoanalytic theory of sexuality in the following way:<br /><br />Psychoanalysis considers that a choice of object independently of its sex—freedom to range equally over male and female objects—as it is found in childhood, in primitive states of society and early periods of history, is the original basis from which, as a result of restriction in one direction or the other, both the normal and the inverted types develop. Thus from the point of view of psychoanalysis the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact based on an attraction that is ultimately of a chemical nature. (Freud, 1915).<br /><br />In other words, the normal assumption is that normal sexuality involves an exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women. Both the implicit one way sign [men è women] and the exclusive nature of the interest are present in the traditional notions. Of course it is obvious that sexual interest ranges all over the place and that women fancy other people as much as men do. But for the traditional views these would have been problems. For Freud, that is no less true, but for him the normal version (boxed above) is also a problem and has no clear explanation. For him the evidence shows that sexuality is grounded in a condition where there is no pre-existing object and no defined aim. The pleasure principle is unscrupulous. <br /><br />Some rudimentary definitions of sexuality don’t much help. The standard definitions of sexuality grow out of husbandry. Sexuality has the following related meanings: the condition of being sexed; being male or female; having sexual characteristics; feelings or desires to a specified degree (over-, under-, etc.); the condition of having a sex. Thus the sexuality of someone (their being one or other of the sexes) gets extended to also signify behavioural characteristics. You might begin to expect certain types of behaviour from one or the other sex and you can justly express shock or concern when people behave outside those norms. So what is a sex? The dictionary tells us that Sex is that by which an animal or plant is male or female; the quality of being male or female; either of the divisions according to this, or its members collectively; the whole domain connected with this distinction. (In so far as I am sexed, my sex is male; I share this quality with the whole of the male sex; but I share the quality of being sexed with the entire human race as well as the animal and plant kingdoms). It seems that we are not going to get very far without encountering some aspect of our universally shared sexual difference. This is all very well if you are mating chicks or growing violets. In that case the distinctions have a practical and functional purpose. This is the female and this is the male. Put them together in these particular ways and they will produce. In so far as people reproduce in these ways too, a kind of loose analogy emerges, conferring specific meaning upon each relation that may or may not have a sexual aspect (in the biological sense). The idea that biology is at the root of human sexual relations, and thus explains human sexuality, is at best grounded in the loosest of analogies. Psychoanalysis has played an important role in helping to undo these narrow and ungrounded assumptions. Along the way it has revealed a tangle of problems.<br /><br />Psychoanalysis, without departing from the traditional vocabulary, develops an extended and transformed understanding of the concept of sexuality. Before Freud, sexuality was most likely to be defined as an instinct with a predetermined object and aim. The object was a member of the opposite sex. The aim was for union of the genital organs in coitus. The sole function was considered to be reproduction. Any kind of sexuality or sexual behaviour that does not aim for reproduction is considered to be perverse. Again the influence from cultivation and husbandry is clear. What is the good of a stud that won’t mount the mare? But psychoanalysis questions the notion of perversity.<br /><br />Freud takes one of the most influential and highly respected authorities on the matter, Krafft-Ebing, as an example of the normative explanation. This is Krafft-Ebing:<br /><br />During the time of maturation of physical processes in the reproductive glands, desire arise in the consciousness of the individual, which have for their purpose the perpetuation of the species (sexual instinct) [...] with opportunity for the natural satisfaction of the sexual instinct, every expression of it that does not correspond with the purpose of nature, i.e. propagation—must be regarded as perverse.<br /><br />According to this view, nature somehow makes itself felt in the consciousness of the mature adult, in the form of a conscious desire to mate with a member of the opposite sex. Nature, in this sense, is simply the need for the reproduction of the race (that peculiarly nineteenth century notion of evolution is evident here). The only “natural” satisfaction of this itch, this desire, would be subordinated to the purposes of nature. Anything that does not obviously lead to reproduction is not natural (“it’s not natural!”), because it would be a perversion of nature’s aim. As usual with scientific views of this time, purpose itself, the Greek telos, is the unanalysed aspect underlying these assumptions. Krafft-Ebing, it is important to remember, is merely representing the popular views in scientific discourse.<br /><br />Freud responds explicitly to these views at the beginning of his “Three Essays on Sexuality”:<br /><br />Popular opinion has quite definite ideas about the nature and characteristics of this sexual instinct. It is generally understood to be absent in childhood, to set in at the time of puberty in connection with the process of coming to maturity and to be revealed in the manifestations of an irresistible attraction exercised by one sex upon the other; while its aim is presumed to be sexual union. [...] We have every reason to believe, however, that these views give a very false picture of the true situation. If we look into them more closely we shall find that they contain a number of errors, inaccuracies and hasty conclusions.<br /><br />In the “Three Essays” Freud doesn’t substitute a new theory for the old ones. Rather he extends and transforms the popular and scientific notions of sexuality by correcting the errors, clarifying the inaccuracies and rethinking the hasty conclusions that make up what he calls the “false picture.” A new picture thus emerges out of the ruins of a now transformed vocabulary.<br /><br />The evidence against holding to the false picture is available in everyday life. Freud also draws explicitly from his fund of analytic experience, in many cases with distressed men and women of the inherently conservative European bourgeoisie, who had never been able to voice their discomfort about their own apparently perverse desires. The distinction between normal and perverse is so riddled with overlaps that it is impossible to extricate the two. There are numerous perversions and they are common (though not explicitly talked about in Freud’s time). Not only are there numerous varieties of different object but also there are uncountable and creative methods for achieving satisfaction. On the model of means and ends, the normal view holds that sexuality manifests in activities designed to achieve the aim of reproduction. The end is reproduction; the method is union of the male and female genitals. However in Freud’s experiences with his patients, the methods often overlap between the normal and perverse. In other words very similar kinds of activities occur whether there is an obviously reproductive function or not. Men and women will have “sex” in all kinds of ways including “normal” coitus. The ends are as various as the means. Furthermore, same sex relations, as well as masturbation and the fantasies of all kinds that accompany it, each exhibit similar routes to satisfaction, in terms for instance of flirting and foreplay. Even a comfortably heterosexual couple will use a creative variety of methods, including coitus, to achieve satisfaction. So what is consistent in all this is not the function of reproduction at all but the function of satisfaction. Thus the reproductive teleology has no ground in evidence at all. <br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Evidence against Normativity</span><br /><br /><br />The distinction between the normal and the perverse is riddled with overlaps.<br /><br />A great diversity of sexual “perversion” not only exists but is common.<br /><br />This diversity involves not only the choice of sexual object but also the type of activity used to obtain satisfaction.<br /><br />In the popular view, the “normal” type of sexual activity involves only coitus between members of the opposite sexes with the aim of reproduction.<br /><br />But the “normal” and the “perverse” are not so easily separated.<br /><br />For instance, the usual form of satisfaction may become temporarily impossible, so a “perverse” satisfaction may replace it.<br /><br />And the sort of foreplay leading up to normal sexual behaviour is usually also found leading up to perverse types as well.<br /><br />Freud often found that repressed wishes and desires are of a sexual kind and that the repressed wish in these cases is a perverse sexual wish. He concluded that the so-called normal types of behaviour belong with the forces of rational and socially acceptable convention defensive of the desiring and creative agency. In other words the normative version of sexuality is socially rather than biologically determined. There is a biological difference but—like all difference—it is meaningful only in terms of the institutions that organise experience is specific ways. And we are back in the rhetorical dimension. The libido is thus a kind of undetermined force that becomes bound by the various kinds of restriction, paradigmatically the Oedipus Complex, that represent the institutions of culture and society.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Oedipus</span><br /><br />Freud was struck by the similarity between the myth of Oedipus and his own discoveries of unconscious processes. The myth is most clearly dramatised in the plays of Sophocles (who was a contemporary of Socrates). In Sophocles’ drama the unfolding of the tragedy involves Oedipus’ gradual discovery of his own guilt. He discovers that he has in ignorance killed his father and that the woman he loves and has married is none other than his mother. As a consequence of his discovery he blinds himself and exiles himself from his home. In fulfilling the oracle that begins the story he fails to escape his predestined fate. This is Freud’s explanation: “It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father” (IoD 364). Freud argues that the power of this artwork lies in the ability of the poet to force us into a transferred recognition of what he calls “our own inner minds.” Those same impulses (to patricide and incest with the mother) are still lurking yet “suppressed” within all of us. Oedipus’ unconscious guilt (which is literal—he is not at first conscious of his guilt) stands figuratively for our own unconscious guilt. “Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of these wishes, repugnant to morality, which have been forced upon us by Nature, and after their revelation we may all of us well seek to close our eyes to the scene of our childhood” (IoD 365). This last sentence has many resonances. Freud points out in a footnote to a later edition that it is this part of his theory that has provoked the most embittered denials, fiercest opposition and the most amusing distortions (100 year later we are often led to suspect that this is still the case). Thus the blinding scene is a metaphorical indication of the vicious resistance to the insights that psychoanalysis offers. Freud also, significantly, likens not the myth itself but the action of the play to the processes of psychoanalysis. He says that it “consists in nothing other than the processes of revealing, with cunning delays and ever-mounting excitement—a process that can be likened to the work of a psycho-analysis” (363). It places Freud firmly within the canon of arguments about false-consciousness (along with Plato, Descartes, Marx and Wittgenstein). But we need to ask, what is the so-called “Nature” that the Oedipus myth actually represents (the truth behind the false and blinded consciousness). Freud’s use of he word Nature in fact already illustrates how he is replacing the traditional biological ground of sexuality (the cultivation/husbandry ground) with an alternative in the Oedipus complex.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Phylogenetic Hypothesis</span><br /><br />Freud returned many times to the question of innate disposition and perhaps the most outrageous, yet most consistently held, version is the hypothesis of phylogenesis, which follows a somewhat Darwinian trend. Here, at its most extreme, the argument suggest that in human pre-history a great tribal father was actually killed by the jealous horde and that all of us are born with traces of this pre-historical guilt carried through the genetic phylum (like hair-colour in the chromosomes). One thing is constant here. There is a constitutional anxiety (the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaarde had in the previous century coined the phrase “anxiety over nothing”) that is related unconsciously to a desire for the death of the father and a desire for union with the mother. <br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sexual Difference</span><br /><br />It is Freud’s account of the Oedipus Complex and its modes of resolution that really grounds the psychoanalytic theory of sexual difference. As such the theory is diagnostic only in so far as it attempts to lay bare the underlying structures that lead to certain tendencies in the relations between people. Unlike the traditional notions there is no sense of what men and women should or should not be like, how they should live in terms of their sexual differentiation. It attempts, instead to find out how people come to be as they actually are in the first place.<br /><br />In classical psychoanalysis the father represents a third term which must break the imagined dyadic unit of mother and child. Until the “father” interrupts it, the mother-child unit—a perfect self-contained dyad—is asocial. The father stands for social symbolisation. In terms of this structure the distinction between men and women exists but it only has meaning symbolically. Lacan provides the following witty diagram, based upon the story of the two children, a boy and a girl, in a train who, on arriving at a station see this sign:<br /><br />The boy exclaims, “we are at Gentlemen.” The girl responds by saying, “no we’re not, we’re at Ladies.” The two doors indicate the ways in which boys and girls are given the choice of two alternatives—each of which has intractable meaning in terms of the other—as to where they each are in the social topography. The doors are themselves just signifiers as are the different sexes. Sex (male and female) is always subject to identifications, which tell me who I am in terms of my gender. In traditional terms sex would be the empirical dimension of sexuality and gender would be the transcendental structure or system that gives us its meaning. As we have already indicated, however, the distinction between the empirical and the transcendental is already extremely problematic, so we are going to have to find some way of dealing with the difference itself.<br /><br />Lacan’s version of the triangulated Oedipus complex (mother—child—father) combines Freud’s theory with structural linguistics, developed as we have seen particularly from the theories of Saussure, Levi-Strauss and Jakobson. The relationship between the child and mother is imagined in the infant’s unconscious as something that was once self-contained and entirely satisfying but has since been broken up. The post-break-up (which is a psychoanalytic version of the fall from grace, mankind now banished from its eternal Garden of Eden) is in fact the child’s beginning. Its prehistory is nothing but an imaginary desire. In other words the child’s experience begins with a feeling of something having been lost. The symbol of this loss is like a third term that has come between the mother and the child—the father who (in a literal version) comes home from work at the end of an otherwise perfect day ordering his dinner and smelling of pipe smoke and the intrusive outside. Lacan calls this “third term” the symbolic because it “symbolises” all relations. Freud had called this third term “the father,” perhaps because of the specific nature of his own upbringing, his dreams, and the dreams of most of his patients (who were mostly bourgeois Europeans). But the father is just a symbol too (anything can represent it). Symbolisation works because we make imaginary identifications, which are based upon proximity and immediate experience (the contiguous axis, or metonymy). What we imagine to be the case is always to be understood symbolically and that makes it seem real (the paradigmatic axis, or metaphor). Symbolisation thus acts as an introduction to the world that is at the same time an introduction of lack. The introduction of a meaningful element disrupts the perfect unity of the imaginary relation, which only has the sense of a perfect unity by virtue of the meaningful element that excludes perfection. The experience of lack is therefore the very thing that gives us the sense that there was something to lack in the first place—it gives meaning to my partial relations and opens my experience to the other—which, of course, I cannot experience at all. The real in Lacan’s theory is a plenum. A plenum is something complete in itself, so full that nothing need be added to it. However because experience is determined by the relation between the symbolic and the imaginary (Lacan’s complicated version of the transcendental and the empirical) the plenum is figured only as an impossible outside. It can therefore appear as a horrifying mysterious thing (enter the house of horror) that sometimes threatens to break open the illusion (our social reality) brought about by the symbolisation of our imaginary desires.<br /><br />Lacan was so taken by the similarities between Freud’s theory of the unconscious and structural linguistics that he was able to come up with some fairly systematic concordances. At the risk of over-schematising (which Lacan attempted to resist, though his theory encourages it) we might chart them in the following way:<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Symbolic</span><br /> <br />Imaginary<br /> Real<br />Father<br />Mother<br />All<br />Paradigm<br />Syntagm<br />The Impossible<br />Metaphor<br />Metonymy<br />Literal language<br />Condensation<br />Displacement<br />Death<br />Relation to the Other<br />Relation to the object<br />No relation<br /><br />Under the Symbolic we find the system of differences between signifiers that determines their meanings, which Lacan relates to the metaphorical dimension of figurative language (this stands in for that and excludes it). He felt that Freud’s explanation of the dream-work allied metaphor to the process of condensation (which puts different images together under the single sign of a metaphorical nodal point). Under the Imaginary we find proximal identifications that indicate the relations of individual desire, which Lacan relates to the metonymic dimension of figurative language (this stands in a proximal and inclusive relation to that). He felt that Freud’s explanation of the dream work allied the movement of metonymy to the process of displacement (which in a disguised way displaces from an object of immense intensity to an object of relatively trivial significance). Metonymy tends to exclude the meaningful aspect of language for the sake of being-next-to while metaphor privileges the meaningful aspect of proximal signs by giving them meaning, thrusting signification underneath them, under the symbolic “cut” of the bar between signifier and signified in Saussure’s diagram of the sign.<br /><br /><br /> S S<br /> S æ S<br /><br />Under The Real, in contradistinction to these runaway overdetermined signs, lies the impossible experience of the plenum. The real stands for literal meaning (as opposed to literal uses of meaning, which are always possible). In so far as no experience of the real is possible (experience is the consequence of the interaction between imaginary identifications and symbolic signification) it stands for the impossible. The ideal, beyond signification, which stands in for the fact that there is no real relation, is the non-relational possibility itself, or just death. We can fairly clearly see, I think, that relations of any kind are only possible through certain kinds of signification. In terms of desire, the proximal relation (I just want to get next to you) blots out signified meaning in favour of contiguous relation (pure chance in its extreme form, which is a little disconcerting for those who are waiting for Mr Right). This is perhaps best experienced as a kind of jouissance (the French term denotes ecstatic enjoyment) or petit-mort (little death, a colloquialism for orgasm). In terms of the symbolic, relations are overdetermined by many permutations of social identification, including gender, class, position, status etc. Anything like a real relation is of course impossible, as is a pure symbolic or pure imaginary relation. Everything seems to appropriate bits of everything else like a perpetually shifting system of parasites with no non-parasitical host. Everything to a certain extent depends upon something of its others. <br /><br />As far as the Oedipal Triangle is concerned it is possible to map a Lacanian triangle over a Freudian one, in the following way:<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">FREUD (OEDIPUS) LACAN (SOCIALISATION)</span><br /><br />Lacan and the theoretical imagination<br /><br />We should say something about Lacan’s style. In most people’s minds the difference between literary text and theoretical text could not be more marked. Literary texts are full of images, narratives, concrete situations, sometimes wildly imaginative sequences, or they are formally structured pieces, like different types of poem. Theory is a dry discourse, with long, technical sounding terms, full of abstract ideas, objective and perhaps coldly scientific. It often seems difficult if not downright perverse, to apply these coldly scientific systems of ideas to the multifarious and rich fund of personal experience. Lacan’s style suggests that he is concerned to enliven scientific discourse with the metaphorical fecundity of literature. But, at the same time, he seems to want to use the descriptive clarity of scientific formulations to suggest, metaphorically, the otherwise indefinable and sometimes inexplicable aspects of the ordinary common experiences. As the contemporary psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has written: “Psychoanalysis began as a kind of virtuoso improvisation within the science of medicine; and free association is itself ritualised improvisation. With the invention of psychoanalysis Freud glimpsed a daunting prospect: a profession of improvisers. And in the ethos of Freud and his followers, improvisation was closer to the inspiration of the artists than to the discipline of scientists.” So we can already glimpse the point of psychoanalysis for critical theory: a confluence of separate traditions—scientific and artistic—produces something new—psychoanalytic theory.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Returning to Freud</span><br /><br />“We are not following Freud, we are accompanying him. The fact that an idea occurs somewhere in Freud’s work doesn’t, for all that, guarantee that it is being handled in the spirit of the Freudian researches. As for us, we are trying to conform to the spirit, to the watchword, to the style of this research” <br /><br />Freud is, on one level, replying to an ancient prejudice—that which derives human experience from consciousness. For Freud, consciousness is an effect of instinctual neurological or biological drives. The hypotheses of two principles of mental functioning distinguishes between that of pleasure, which wants immediate satisfaction, and that of reality, which puts off the satisfaction of desire for a more appropriate and safer moment. We are not, on this model, born rational and responsible, nor do we learn rationality and responsibility—these are simply terms that describe the instinct for survival in negotiation with the instinct for the reduction of unpleasant impulses. Freud later modified his hypothesis of two principles and reduced them both to a single, rather frightening one, called the death instinct. For him what is typical of instincts is that they tend towards an absolute reduction of all disturbing impulses (even pleasure aims for this). On the one hand the death instinct aims for immediate cessation of dangerous impulses yet, on the other hand, it tones this drive down as a dangerous impulse itself. So in the complex reality of social existence this death instinct can be understood as both the law (the symbolic) and (imaginary) desire in a kind of negotiation. The game that we now know as Fort-Da, which was played by Freud’s grandson, exemplifies the kind of strategies that the unconscious employs to contain the sense of loss that operating in a social world imposes. The mother—as the sole source of comfort and sustenance, leaves for work and is absent for very long periods of time. The infant plays a game with a cotton reel on a string, shouting “Fort” (gone) when it is on the other side of the cot’s curtains and “Da” (here) when he reels it back. Symbolically the cotton reel stands in as a substitute for the mother (oh the power of fantasy). And the reeling-in that the child repeatedly practices stands for the imaginary control he has over a contingent and arbitrary exterior. The reality principle, of course, concerns the child’s ability to tolerate the truth of the outside—oh no, the mother really is absent and this cotton reel is just a cotton reel. The process of mourning after the death of a loved one is very similar. It is this process that allows us to now explore the increasingly influential work of Melanie Klein.<br /><br />Source: <a href="http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/lacan.htm">http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/lacan.htm</a>eastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817799056092908602.post-16926576916982099182007-09-19T13:59:00.000-07:002007-09-19T14:04:06.541-07:00Some Elements of Structuralism and its Application to Literary TheoryThis is a collection of ideas from various authors gathered together by Professor John Lye for the use of his students. This document is copyright John Lye 1996, but may be freely used for non-proft purposes. If you have any suggestions for improvement, please mail me.<br /> I. General Principles<br /> 1. Meaning occurs through difference. Meaning is not identification of the sign with object in the real world or with some pre-existent concept or essential reality; rather it is generated by difference among signs in a signifying system. For instance, the meaning of the words "woman" and "lady" are established by their relations to one another in a meaning-field. They both refer to a human female, but what constitutes "human" and what constitutes "female" are themselves established through difference, not identity with any essence, or ideal truth, or the like.<br /><br /> 2. Relations among signs are of two sorts, contiguity and substitutability, the axes of combination and selection: hence the existence of all 'grammars', hence all substitutions, hence the ability to know something by something else, or by a part of it in some way -- hence metonymy and metaphor. The conception of combination and selection provides the basis for an analysis of 'literariness' or 'poeticality' in the use, repetition and variation of sound patterns and combinations. It also provides keys to the most fundamental elements of culture.<br /><br /> 3. Structuralism notes that much of our imaginative world is structured of, and structured by, binary oppositions (being/nothingness, hot/cold, culture/nature); these oppositions structure meaning, and one can describe fields of cultural thought, or topoi, by describing the binary sets which compose them. As an illustration, here is a binary set for the monstrous<br /><br /> 4. Structuralism forms the basis for semiotics, the study of signs: a sign is a union of signifier and signified, and is anything that stands for anything else (or, as Umberto Eco put it, a sign is anything that can be used to lie).<br /><br /> 5. Central too to semiotics is the idea of codes, which give signs context -- cultural codes, literary codes, etc. The study of semiotics and of codes opens up literary study to cultural study, and expands the resources of the critic in discussing the meaning of texts. Structuralism, says, Genette, "is a study of the cultural construction or identification of meaning according to the relations of signs that constitute the meaning-spectrum of the culture."<br /><br /> 6. Some signs carry with them larger cultural meanings, usually very general; these are called, by Roland Barthes, "myths", or second-order signifiers. Anything can be a myth. For example, two-story pillars supporting the portico of a house are a mythic signifier of wealth and elegance.<br /><br /> 7. Structuralism introduces the idea of the 'subject', as opposed to the idea of the individual as a stable indivisible ego. Toquote from Kaja Silverman in The Subject of Semiotics,<br /><br /> The term 'subject' foregrounds the relationship between ethnology, psychoanalysis, and semiotics. It helps us to conceive of human reality as a construction, as the product of signifying activities which are both culturally specific and generally unconscious. The category of the subject thus calls into question the notions both of the private, and of a self synonymous with consciousness. It suggests that even desire is culturally instigated, and hence collective; and it de-centers consciousness, relegating it....to a purely receptive capacity. Finally, by drawing attention to the divisions which separate one area of psychic activity from another, the term 'subject' challenges the value of stability attributed to the individual.<br /><br /> The value of the conception is that it allows us to 'open up', conceptually, the inner world of humans, to see the relation of human experience to cultural experience, to talk cogently of meaning as something that is structured into our 'selves'.<br /><br /> There is no attempt here to challenge the meaningfulness of persons; there is an attempt to dethrone the ideology of the ego, the idea that the self is an eternal, indivisible essence, and an attempt to redefine what it is to be a person. The self is, like other things, signified and culturally constructed. Post-structuralism, in particular, will insist that the subject is de-centered.<br /><br /> 8. The conception of the constructed subject opens up the borders between the conscious and the unconscious. The unconscious itself is not some strange, impenetrable realm of private meaning but is constructed through the sign-systems and through the repressions of the culture. Both the self and the unconscious are cultural constructs.<br /><br /> 9. In the view of structuralism our knowledge of 'reality' is not only coded but also conventional, that is, structured by and through conventions, made up of signs and signifying practices. This is known as "the social construction of reality."<br /><br /> 10. There is, then, in structuralism, a coherent connection among the conceptions of reality, the social, the individual, the unconscious: they are all composed of the same signs, codes and conventions, all working according to similar laws.<br /><br /> II. Structuralism, culture and texts<br /> 1. Structuralism enables both the reading of texts and the reading of cultures: through semiotics, structuralism leads us to see everything as 'textual', that is, composed of signs, governed by conventions of meaning, ordered according to a pattern of relationships.<br /><br /> 2. Structuralism enables us to approach texts historically or trans-culturally in a disciplined way. Whenever we have to look more objectively, when we are transversing barriers of time, say, or of culture or interest, then the structural method, the search for principles of order, coherence and meaning, become dominant.<br /><br /> 3. This sort of study opens up for serious cultural analysis texts which had hitherto been closed to such study because they did not conform to the rules of literature, hence were not literature but 'popular writing' or 'private writing' or 'history' and so forth. When the rules of literary meaning are seen as just another set of rules for a signifying arena of a culture, then literature loses some aspects of its privileged status, but gains in the strength and cogency of its relationship to other areas of signification. Hence literary study has expanded to the study of textuality, popular writing has been opened up to serious study, and the grounds for the relationship between the meaning-conventions of literature and the way in which a culture imagines reality have been set, and we can speak more clearly of the relation of literary to cultural (or, 'human', or 'every-day') meanings.<br /><br /> 4. As everything that can be known, can be known by virtue of its belonging to a signifying system, then everything can be spoken of as being textual.<br /><br /> 1. All documents can be studied as texts -- for instance, history or sociology can be analyzed the way literature can be.<br /><br /> 2. All of culture can be studied as text. Anthropology, among other fields, is revolutionized through ethnography; qualitative rather than quantitative study becomes more and more the norm in many areas of social science.<br /><br /> 3. Belief-systems can be studied textually and their role in constructing the nature of the self understood.<br /><br /> 5. Consequently much greater attention is paid to the nature of language-use in culture. Language-use relating to various social topics or areas of engagement has become known as "discourse." Although "discourse" is a term more prevalent in post-structuralist thinking, it is of its nature a structuralist development.<br /><br /> III. Structuralism and literature<br /> See my summary of Gerard Genette's "Structuralism and Literary Criticism" for more ideas.<br /><br /> 1. In extending the range of the textual we have not decreased the complexity or meaning-power of literature but have in fact increased it, both in its textual and in its cultural meaningfulness. If the reader and the text are both cultural constructions, then the meaningfulness of texts becomes more apparent, as they share meaning-constructs; if the cultural is textual, then the culture's relation to the textuality of literature becomes more immediate, more pertinent, more compelling. Literature is a discourse in a world of discourses, each discourse having its protocols for meaning and typical uses of language, rhetoric, subject area and so forth.<br /><br /> 2. The thesis that what seems real to us is coded and conventional leads to a consideration of how 'reality' is represented in art -- what we get is a 'reality effect'; the signs which represent reality are 'naturalized', that is, made to seem as if we could see reality through them -- or in another way of saying, made to seem to be conforming to the laws of reality. This is achieved through 'vraisemblance', truth-seeming, or 'naturalization'. Some elements of vraisemblance (from Culler, Structuralist Poetics) are as follows.<br /><br /> 1. There is the socially given text, that which is taken as the 'real' world -- what is taken for granted. That we have minds and bodies, for instance. This is a textual phenomenon. (Every term of "we have minds and bodies", the relations between most of these terms, and what we mean by them, in fact codify culturally specific assumptions.)<br /><br /> 2. There is the general cultural text: shared knowledge which would be recognized by participants as part of culture and hence subject to correction or modification but which none the less serves as a kind of 'nature'. This is the level at which we interpret motive, character and significance from descriptions of action, dress, attitude and so forth. "Jake put on his tuxedo and tennis shoes" will provide an interpretation of Jake or will look forward to an explanation of why he broke the cultural code, in this case a dress code. "Harry gazed for hours on the picture of Esmeralda" is a culturally coded statement: we read Harry's attitude, and so forth. We 'imitate' 'reality' by recording cultural codes.<br /><br /> 3. There are the conventions of genre, a specifically literary and artificial vraisemblance -- "the series of constituent conventions which enable various sorts of works to be written." The lines<br /><br /> Turning and turning in the widening gyre<br /> The falcon cannot hear the falconer;<br /> Things fall apart; The center cannot hold;<br /> Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world<br /><br /> require certain conventions of reading. If we were to read it as part of a paragraph in Dickens they would make less sense. One convention of literature is that there is a persona who is articulating the text -- that it comes from some organizing consciousness which can be commented on and described. Genre is another convention: each genre designates certain kinds of action as acceptable and excludes others.<br /><br /> 4. There is what might be called the natural attitude to the artificial, where the text explicitly cites and exposes vraisemblance of the kind directly above, so as to reinforce its own authority. The narrator may claim that he is intentionally violating the conventions of a story, for instance, that he knows that this is not the way it should be done according to the conventions, but that the way he is doing it serves some higher or more substantial purpose -- the appeal is to a greater naturalness or a higher intelligibility.<br /><br /> 5. There is the complex vraisemblance of specific intertextualities. "When a text cites or parodies the conventions of a genre one interprets it by moving to another level of interpretation where both terms of the opposition can be held together by the theme of literature itself." -- e.g. parody, when one exploits the particular conventions of a work or style or genre, etc. Irony forces us to posit an alternate possibility or reality in the face of the reality-construction of the text. All surface incongruities register meaning at a level of the project of interpretation itself, and so comment as it were on the relation between 'textual' and 'interpretive' reality. <br /><br /> In short, to imitate reality is to represent codes which 'describe' (or, construct) reality according to the conventions of representation of the time.<br /><br /> 3. The conventions of reading. We read according to certain conventions; consequently our reading creates the meaning of that which we read. These conventions come in two 'layers':<br /><br /> 1. how we (culturally) think that reality is or should be represented in texts, which will include the general mimetic conventions of the art of the period, which will describe the way in which reality is apprehended or imagined, and<br /><br /> 2. the conventions of 'literature' (and of 'art' generally), for instance,<br /><br /> 1. the rule of significance whereby we raise the meaning of the text to its highest level of generalizability (a tree blasted by lightning might become a figure of the power of nature, or of God);<br /><br /> 2. the convention of figural coherence, through which we assume that figures (metonyms, metaphors, 'symbols') will have a signifying relationship to one another on a level of meaning more complex than or 'higher' than the physical;<br /><br /> 3. the convention of thematic unity, whereby we assume that all of the elements of the text contribute to the meaning of the text. These are all conventions of reading.<br /><br /> 4. The facts that some works are difficult to interpret, some are difficult to interpret for its contemporaries but not for later readers, some require that we learn how its contemporaries would have read them in order fully to understand them, these facts point to the existence of literary competence, the possession by the reader of protocols for reading. When one reads modernist texts, such as The Waste Land, one has to learn how to read them. One has in fact to learn how to read Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and so forth. Culler remarks that<br /><br /> reading poetry is a rule-governed process of producing meanings; the poem offers a structure which must be filled up and one therefore attempts to invent something, guided by a series of formal rules derived from one's experience of reading poetry, which both make possible invention and impose limits on it.<br /><br /> 5. Structuralism is oriented toward the reader insofar as it says that the reader constructs literature, that is, reads the text with certain conventions and expectations in mind. Some post-structural theorists, Fish for instance, hold that the reader constructs the text entirely, through the conventions of reading of her interpretive community.<br /><br /> 6. In joining with formalism in the identification of literariness as the focus on the message itself as opposed to a focus on the addressee, the addresser, or the referential function of the message, structuralism places ambiguity, as Genette points out, at the heart of the poetic function, as its self-referential nature puts the message, the addresser and the addressee all in doubt. Hence literary textuality is complexly meaningful.<br /><br /> 7. Structuralism underlines the importance of genre, i.e., basic rules as to how subjects are approached, about conventions of reading for theme, level of seriousness, significance of language use, and so forth. "Different genres lead to different expectations of types of situations and actions, and of psychological, moral, and esthetic values." (Genette)<br /><br /> 8. The idea that literature is an institution is another structuralist contribution; that a number of its protocols for creation and for reading are in fact controlled by that institutional nature.<br /><br /> 9. Through structuralism, literature is seen as a whole: it functions as a system of meaning and reference no matter how many works there are, two or two thousand. Thus any work becomes the parole, the individual articulation, of a cultural langue, or system of signification. As literature is a system, no work of literature is an autonomous whole; similarly, literature itself is not autonomous but is part of the larger structures of signification of the culture.<br /><br /> 10. The following are some points based on Culler's ideas about the advantages of structuralism, having to do with the idea that literature is a protocol of reading:<br /><br /> 1. Structuralism is a firmer starting-point for reading literature as literature than are other approaches, because literariness and/or fictionality does not have to be shown to be inherent in the text, but in the way it is read. It explains, for instance, why the same sentence can have a different meaning depending on the genre in which it appears, it explains how the boundaries of the literary can change from age to age, it accommodates and explains differing readings of a text given differing reading protocols -- one can read a text for its 'literary' qualities or for its sociological or ideological qualities, for instance, and read as complex a text in doing so.<br /><br /> 2. One gains an appreciation of literature as an institution, as a coherent and related set of codes and practices, and so one sees also that reading is situated reading, that is, it is in a certain meaning-domain or set of codes. It follows that when literature is written, it will be written under these codes (it can break or alter the codes to create effects, but this is still a function of the codes).<br /><br /> 3. Consequently one can be more open to challenges to and alterations of literary conventions.<br /><br /> 4. Once one sees that reading and writing are both coded and based on conventions one can read 'against the grain' in a disciplined way, and one can read readings of literature -- reading can become a more self-reflexive process.<br /><br /> IV. Structural Analysis<br /> As structuralism is so broad a theory with such extensive ramifications, there will be different ways of doing structural analysis. Here are some possible approaches.<br /><br /> 1. The study of the basic codes which make narrative possible, and which make it work. This is known generally as narratology, and often produces what might be called a grammar of narrative. Greimas, Barthes, Todorov and others investigated what the components and relations of narrative are. This gives rise to such things as Barthes division of incidents into nuclei and catalyzers, and his promulgation of five codes of narrative, given briefly here, as adapted from Cohen and Shires:<br /><br /> 1. proairetic -- things (events) in their sequence; recognizable actions and their effects.<br /><br /> 2. semic -- the field where signifiers point to other signifiers to produce a chain of recognizable connotations. In a general sense, that which enables meaning to happen.<br /><br /> 3. hermeneutic -- the code of narrative suspense, including the ways in which the story suspends closure, structures parallels, repetitions and so forth toward closure.<br /><br /> 4. symbolic -- marks out meaning as difference; the binaries which the culture uses/enacts to create its meanings; binaries which, of course,but disunite and join.<br /><br /> 5. reference -- refers to various bodies of knowledge which constitute the society; creates the familiarity of reality by quoting from a large assortment of social texts which mediate and organize cultural knowledge of reality -- medicine, law, morality, psychology, philosophy, religion, plus all the clichs and proverbs of popular culture.<br /><br /> 6. diegetic (C&S's addition) -- the narration, the text's encoding of narrative conventions that signify how it means as a telling. <br /><br /> 2. The study of the construction of meaning in texts, as for instance through tropes, through repetitions with difference. Hayden White analyzes the structure of Western historical narrative through a theory of tropes; Lodge shows how metaphor and metonymy can be seen to form the bases respectively of symbolic and realist texts.<br /><br /> 3. The study of mimesis, that is, of the representation of reality, becomes i) the study of naturalization, of the way in which reality effects are created and the way in which we create a sense of reality and meaning from texts; ii) the study of conventions of meaning in texts.<br /><br /> 4. Texts are also analyzed for their structures of opposition, particularly binary oppositions, as informing structures and as representing the central concerns and imaginative structures of the society.<br /><br /> 5. Texts can be analyzed as they represent the codes and conventions of the culture -- we can read the texts as ways of understanding the meaning-structures of the cultures and sub-cultures out of which they are written and which they represent.eastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817799056092908602.post-6818680522668409672007-09-19T13:58:00.000-07:002007-09-19T13:59:18.043-07:00What is Postmodernism?Postmodernism is a complicated term, or set of ideas, one that has only emerged as an area of academic study since the mid-1980s. Postmodernism is hard to define, because it is a concept that appears in a wide variety of disciplines or areas of study, including art, architecture, music, film, literature, sociology, communications, fashion, and technology. It's hard to locate it temporally or historically, because it's not clear exactly when postmodernism begins.<br /><br />Perhaps the easiest way to start thinking about postmodernism is by thinking about modernism, the movement from which postmodernism seems to grow or emerge. Modernism has two facets, or two modes of definition, both of which are relevant to understanding postmodernism.<br /><br />The first facet or definition of modernism comes from the aesthetic movement broadly labeled "modernism." This movement is roughly coterminous with twentieth century Western ideas about art (though traces of it in emergent forms can be found in the nineteenth century as well). Modernism, as you probably know, is the movement in visual arts, music, literature, and drama which rejected the old Victorian standards of how art should be made, consumed, and what it should mean. In the period of "high modernism," from around 1910 to 1930, the major figures of modernism literature helped radically to redefine what poetry and fiction could be and do: figures like Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Proust, Mallarme, Kafka, and Rilke are considered the founders of twentieth-century modernism.<br /><br />From a literary perspective, the main characteristics of modernism include:<br /><br />1. an emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity in writing (and in visual arts as well); an emphasis on HOW seeing (or reading or perception itself) takes place, rather than on WHAT is perceived. An example of this would be stream-of-consciousness writing.<br /><br />2. a movement away from the apparent objectivity provided by omniscient third-person narrators, fixed narrative points of view, and clear-cut moral positions. Faulkner's multiply-narrated stories are an example of this aspect of modernism.<br /><br />3. a blurring of distinctions between genres, so that poetry seems more documentary (as in T.S. Eliot or ee cummings) and prose seems more poetic (as in Woolf or Joyce).<br /><br />4. an emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and random-seeming collages of different materials.<br /><br />5. a tendency toward reflexivity, or self-consciousness, about the production of the work of art, so that each piece calls attention to its own status as a production, as something constructed and consumed in particular ways.<br /><br />6. a rejection of elaborate formal aesthetics in favor of minimalist designs (as in the poetry of William Carlos Williams) and a rejection, in large part, of formal aesthetic theories, in favor of spontaneity and discovery in creation.<br /><br />7. A rejection of the distinction between "high" and "low" or popular culture, both in choice of materials used to produce art and in methods of displaying, distributing, and consuming art.<br /><br />Postmodernism, like modernism, follows most of these same ideas, rejecting boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony, and playfulness. Postmodern art (and thought) favors reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity (especially in narrative structures), ambiguity, simultaneity, and an emphasis on the destructured, decentered, dehumanized subject.<br /><br />But--while postmodernism seems very much like modernism in these ways, it differs from modernism in its attitude toward a lot of these trends. Modernism, for example, tends to present a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history (think of The Wasteland, for instance, or of Woolf's To the Lighthouse), but presents that fragmentation as something tragic, something to be lamented and mourned as a loss. Many modernist works try to uphold the idea that works of art can provide the unity, coherence, and meaning which has been lost in most of modern life; art will do what other human institutions fail to do. Postmodernism, in contrast, doesn't lament the idea of fragmentation, provisionality, or incoherence, but rather celebrates that. The world is meaningless? Let's not pretend that art can make meaning then, let's just play with nonsense.<br /><br />Another way of looking at the relation between modernism and postmodernism helps to clarify some of these distinctions. According to Frederic Jameson, modernism and postmodernism are cultural formations which accompany particular stages of capitalism. Jameson outlines three primary phases of capitalism which dictate particular cultural practices (including what kind of art and literature is produced). The first is market capitalism, which occurred in the eighteenth through the late nineteenth centuries in Western Europe, England, and the United States (and all their spheres of influence). This first phase is associated with particular technological developments, namely, the steam-driven motor, and with a particular kind of aesthetics, namely, realism. The second phase occurred from the late nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century (about WWII); this phase, monopoly capitalism, is associated with electric and internal combustion motors, and with modernism. The third, the phase we're in now, is multinational or consumer capitalism (with the emphasis placed on marketing, selling, and consuming commodities, not on producing them), associated with nuclear and electronic technologies, and correlated with postmodernism.<br /><br />Like Jameson's characterization of postmodernism in terms of modes of production and technologies, the second facet, or definition, of postmodernism comes more from history and sociology than from literature or art history. This approach defines postmodernism as the name of an entire social formation, or set of social/historical attitudes; more precisely,this approach contrasts "postmodernity" with "modernity," rather than "postmodernism" with "modernism."<br /><br />What's the difference? "Modernism" generally refers to the broad aesthetic movements of the twentieth century; "modernity" refers to a set of philosophical, political, and ethical ideas which provide the basis for the aesthetic aspect of modernism. "Modernity" is older than "modernism;" the label "modern," first articulated in nineteenth-century sociology, was meant to distinguish the present era from the previous one, which was labeled "antiquity." Scholars are always debating when exactly the "modern" period began, and how to distinguish between what is modern and what is not modern; it seems like the modern period starts earlier and earlier every time historians look at it. But generally, the "modern" era is associated with the European Enlightenment, which begins roughly in the middle of the eighteenth century. (Other historians trace elements of enlightenment thought back to the Renaissance or earlier, and one could argue that Enlightenment thinking begins with the eighteenth century. I usually date "modern" from 1750, if only because I got my Ph.D. from a program at Stanford called "Modern Thought and Literature," and that program focused on works written after 1750).<br /><br />The basic ideas of the Enlightenment are roughly the same as the basic ideas of humanism. Jane Flax's article gives a good summary of these ideas or premises (on p. 41). I'll add a few things to her list.<br /><br />1. There is a stable, coherent, knowable self. This self is conscious, rational, autonomous, and universal--no physical conditions or differences substantially affect how this self operates.<br /><br />2. This self knows itself and the world through reason, or rationality, posited as the highest form of mental functioning, and the only objective form.<br /><br />3. The mode of knowing produced by the objective rational self is "science," which can provide universal truths about the world, regardless of the individual status of the knower.<br /><br />4. The knowledge produced by science is "truth," and is eternal.<br /><br />5. The knowledge/truth produced by science (by the rational objective knowing self) will always lead toward progress and perfection. All human institutions and practices can be analyzed by science (reason/objectivity) and improved.<br /><br />6. Reason is the ultimate judge of what is true, and therefore of what is right, and what is good (what is legal and what is ethical). Freedom consists of obedience to the laws that conform to the knowledge discovered by reason.<br /><br />7. In a world governed by reason, the true will always be the same as the good and the right (and the beautiful); there can be no conflict between what is true and what is right (etc.).<br /><br />8. Science thus stands as the paradigm for any and all socially useful forms of knowledge. Science is neutral and objective; scientists, those who produce scientific knowledge through their unbiased rational capacities, must be free to follow the laws of reason, and not be motivated by other concerns (such as money or power).<br /><br />9. Language, or the mode of expression used in producing and disseminating knowledge, must be rational also. To be rational, language must be transparent; it must function only to represent the real/perceivable world which the rational mind observes. There must be a firm and objective connection between the objects of perception and the words used to name them (between signifier and signified).<br /><br />These are some of the fundamental premises of humanism, or of modernism. They serve--as you can probably tell--to justify and explain virtually all of our social structures and institutions, including democracy, law, science, ethics, and aesthetics.<br /><br />Modernity is fundamentally about order: about rationality and rationalization, creating order out of chaos. The assumption is that creating more rationality is conducive to creating more order, and that the more ordered a society is, the better it will function (the more rationally it will function). Because modernity is about the pursuit of ever-increasing levels of order, modern societies constantly are on guard against anything and everything labeled as "disorder," which might disrupt order. Thus modern societies rely on continually establishing a binary opposition between "order" and "disorder," so that they can assert the superiority of "order." But to do this, they have to have things that represent "disorder"--modern societies thus continually have to create/construct "disorder." In western culture, this disorder becomes "the other"--defined in relation to other binary oppositions. Thus anything non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, non-hygienic, non-rational, (etc.) becomes part of "disorder," and has to be eliminated from the ordered, rational modern society.<br /><br />The ways that modern societies go about creating categories labeled as "order" or "disorder" have to do with the effort to achieve stability. Francois Lyotard (the theorist whose works Sarup describes in his article on postmodernism) equates that stability with the idea of "totality," or a totalized system (think here of Derrida's idea of "totality" as the wholeness or completeness of a system). Totality, and stability, and order, Lyotard argues, are maintained in modern societies through the means of "grand narratives" or "master narratives," which are stories a culture tells itself about its practices and beliefs. A "grand narrative" in American culture might be the story that democracy is the most enlightened (rational) form of government, and that democracy can and will lead to universal human happiness. Every belief system or ideology has its grand narratives, according to Lyotard; for Marxism, for instance, the "grand narrative" is the idea that capitalism will collapse in on itself and a utopian socialist world will evolve. You might think of grand narratives as a kind of meta-theory, or meta-ideology, that is, an ideology that explains an ideology (as with Marxism); a story that is told to explain the belief systems that exist.<br /><br />Lyotard argues that all aspects of modern societies, including science as the primary form of knowledge, depend on these grand narratives. Postmodernism then is the critique of grand narratives, the awareness that such narratives serve to mask the contradictions and instabilities that are inherent in any social organization or practice. In other words, every attempt to create "order" always demands the creation of an equal amount of "disorder," but a "grand narrative" masks the constructedness of these categories by explaining that "disorder" REALLY IS chaotic and bad, and that "order" REALLY IS rational and good. Postmodernism, in rejecting grand narratives, favors "mini-narratives," stories that explain small practices, local events, rather than large-scale universal or global concepts. Postmodern "mini-narratives" are always situational, provisional, contingent, and temporary, making no claim to universality, truth, reason, or stability.<br /><br />Another aspect of Enlightenment thought--the final of my 9 points--is the idea that language is transparent, that words serve only as representations of thoughts or things, and don't have any function beyond that. Modern societies depend on the idea that signifiers always point to signifieds, and that reality resides in signifieds. In postmodernism, however, there are only signifiers. The idea of any stable or permanent reality disappears, and with it the idea of signifieds that signifiers point to. Rather, for postmodern societies, there are only surfaces, without depth; only signifiers, with no signifieds.<br /><br />Another way of saying this, according to Jean Baudrillard, is that in postmodern society there are no originals, only copies--or what he calls "simulacra." You might think, for example, about painting or sculpture, where there is an original work (by Van Gogh, for instance), and there might also be thousands of copies, but the original is the one with the highest value (particularly monetary value). Contrast that with cds or music recordings, where there is no "original," as in painting--no recording that is hung on a wall, or kept in a vault; rather, there are only copies, by the millions, that are all the same, and all sold for (approximately) the same amount of money. Another version of Baudrillard's "simulacrum" would be the concept of virtual reality, a reality created by simulation, for which there is no original. This is particularly evident in computer games/simulations--think of Sim City, Sim Ant, etc.<br /><br />Finally, postmodernism is concerned with questions of the organization of knowledge. In modern societies, knowledge was equated with science, and was contrasted to narrative; science was good knowledge, and narrative was bad, primitive, irrational (and thus associated with women, children, primitives, and insane people). Knowledge, however, was good for its own sake; one gained knowledge, via education, in order to be knowledgeable in general, to become an educated person. This is the ideal of the liberal arts education. In a postmodern society, however, knowledge becomes functional--you learn things, not to know them, but to use that knowledge. As Sarup points out (p. 138), educational policy today puts emphasis on skills and training, rather than on a vague humanist ideal of education in general. This is particularly acute for English majors. "What will you DO with your degree?"<br /><br />Not only is knowledge in postmodern societies characterized by its utility, but knowledge is also distributed, stored, and arranged differently in postmodern societies than in modern ones. Specifically, the advent of electronic computer technologies has revolutionized the modes of knowledge production, distribution, and consumption in our society (indeed, some might argue that postmodernism is best described by, and correlated with, the emergence of computer technology, starting in the 1960s, as the dominant force in all aspects of social life). In postmodern societies, anything which is not able to be translated into a form recognizable and storable by a computer--i.e. anything that's not digitizable--will cease to be knowledge. In this paradigm, the opposite of "knowledge" is not "ignorance," as it is the modern/humanist paradigm, but rather "noise." Anything that doesn't qualify as a kind of knowledge is "noise," is something that is not recognizable as anything within this system.<br /><br />Lyotard says (and this is what Sarup spends a lot of time explaining) that the important question for postmodern societies is who decides what knowledge is (and what "noise" is), and who knows what needs to be decided. Such decisions about knowledge don't involve the old modern/humanist qualifications: for example, to assess knowledge as truth (its technical quality), or as goodness or justice (its ethical quality) or as beauty (its aesthetic quality). Rather, Lyotard argues, knowledge follows the paradigm of a language game, as laid out by Wittgenstein. I won't go into the details of Wittgenstein's ideas of language games; Sarup gives a pretty good explanation of this concept in his article, for those who are interested.<br /><br />There are lots of questions to be asked about postmodernism, and one of the most important is about the politics involved--or, more simply, is this movement toward fragmentation, provisionality, performance, and instability something good or something bad? There are various answers to that; in our contemporary society, however, the desire to return to the pre-postmodern era (modern/humanist/Enlightenment thinking) tends to get associated with conservative political, religious, and philosophical groups. In fact, one of the consequences of postmodernism seems to be the rise of religious fundamentalism, as a form of resistance to the questioning of the "grand narratives" of religious truth. This is perhaps most obvious (to us in the US, anyway) in muslim fundamentalism in the Middle East, which ban postmodern books--like Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses --because they deconstruct such grand narratives.<br /><br />This association between the rejection of postmodernism and conservatism or fundamentalism may explain in part why the postmodern avowal of fragmentation and multiplicity tends to attract liberals and radicals. This is why, in part, feminist theorists have found postmodernism so attractive, as Sarup, Flax, and Butler all point out.<br /><br />On another level, however, postmodernism seems to offer some alternatives to joining the global culture of consumption, where commodities and forms of knowledge are offered by forces far beyond any individual's control. These alternatives focus on thinking of any and all action (or social struggle) as necessarily local, limited, and partial--but nonetheless effective. By discarding "grand narratives" (like the liberation of the entire working class) and focusing on specific local goals (such as improved day care centers for working mothers in your own community), postmodernist politics offers a way to theorize local situations as fluid and unpredictable, though influenced by global trends. Hence the motto for postmodern politics might well be "think globally, act locally"--and don't worry about any grand scheme or master plan. <br /><br />:source: http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/pomo.htmleastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817799056092908602.post-45284539935426254592007-09-19T13:53:00.000-07:002007-09-19T14:05:20.536-07:00Reception and Reader-Response Theory<p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><strong>Reader-response</strong> theory may be traced initially to theorists such as <strong>I. A. Richards</strong> (<em>The Principles of Literary Criticism</em>, <em>Practical Criticism</em> and <em>How to Read a Page</em>) or <strong>Louise Rosenblatt</strong> (<em>Literature as Exploration</em> or <em>The Reader, the Text, the Poem</em>). For Rosenblatt and Richards the idea of a "correct" reading--though difficult to attain--was always the goal of the "educated" reader (armed, of course, with appropriate aesthetic apparatus). For <strong>Stanley Fish</strong> (<em>Is There a Text in this Class?</em>, <em>Surprised by Sin: The Reader in "Paradise Lost"</em> and <em>Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of the Seventeenth-Century Reader</em>), the reader's ability to understand a text is also subject a reader's particular "interpretive community." To simplify, a reader brings certain assumptions to a text based on the interpretive strategies he/she has learned in a particular interpretive community. For Fish, the interpretive community serves somewhat to "police" readings and thus prohibit outlandish interpretations. In contrast <strong>Wolfgang Iser</strong> argued that the reading process is always subjective. In <em>The Implied Reader</em>, Iser sees reading as a dialectical process between the reader and text. For <strong>Hans-Robert Jauss</strong>, however (<em>Toward an Aesthetic of Reception</em>, and <em>Aesthetic Experience</em> <em>and</em> <em>Literary Hermeneutics</em>), a reader's aesthetic experience is always bound by time and historical determinants. </span></p> <p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 151, 0);font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><strong>Key Terms:</strong></span></p> <blockquote style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> <p><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><strong>Horizons of expectations</strong> - a term developed by Hans Robert Jauss to explain how a reader's "expectations" or frame of reference is based on the reader's past experience of literature and what preconceived notions about literature the reader possesses (i.e., a reader's aesthetic experience is bound by time and historical determinants). Jauss also contended that for a work to be considered a classic it needed to exceed a reader's horizons of expectations. </span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><strong>Implied reader</strong> - a term developed by Wolfgang Iser; the implied reader [somewhat akin to an "ideal reader"] is "a hypothetical reader of a text. The implied reader [according to Iser] "embodies all those predispositions necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect -- predispositions laid down, not by an empirical outside reality, but by the text itself. Consequently, the implied reader as a concept has his roots firmly planted in the structure of the text; he is a construct and in no way to be identified with any real reader" (<a href="http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/glossary/Implied_reader.html">Greig E. Henderson and Christopher Brown - Glossary of Literary Theory</a>).</span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><strong>Interpretive communities</strong> - a concept, articulated by Stanley Fish, that readers within an "interpretive community" share reading strategies, values and interpretive assumptions (<a href="http://www.cnr.edu/home/bmcmanus/readercrit.html">Barbara McManus</a>).</span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><strong>Transactional analysis</strong> - a concept developed by Louise Rosenblatt asserting that meaning is produced in a transaction of a reader with a text. As an approach, then, the critic would consider "how the reader interprets the text as well as how the text produces a response in her" (Dobie 132</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> - see </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><em>General Resources</em> below).</span></p> <p><span style="font-size:100%;"><strong><span style="color: rgb(0, 151, 0);font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;" >Further References:</span></strong></span> </p> <ul><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Austin, J. L.<em>How to Do Things with Words.</em> 1962</span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Bleich, David. <em>Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism</em>. 1978 </span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Bloom, Harold. <em>A Map of Misreading</em>. 1975.</span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Booth, Stephen. <em>An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets</em>. New Haven: Yale UP, 1969.</span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Culler, Jonathan. <em>The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction.</em> 1981.</span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Eco, Umberto. <em>The Role of the Reader.</em> 1979.</span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Fish, Stanley. <em>Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities</em>. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980.</span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Holland, Norman.<em> 5 Readers Reading</em>. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975.</span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Iser, Wolfgang. <em>The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response.</em> Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1974.</span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >---. <em>The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett</em>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.</span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Jauss, Hans Robert. <em>Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics</em>. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982.</span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >---. <em>Toward an Aesthetic of Reception.</em> U of Minneapolis P, 1982.</span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Mailloux, Steven. <em>Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction. </em>1982 </span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Holland, Norman. <em>The Dynamics of Literary Response</em>. 1968, <em>5 Readers Reading</em>. 1975 </span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Ong, Walter. <em>Orality and Literacy</em>. New York: Methuen, 1982.</span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Richards, I.A. <em>How to Read a Page</em>. 1942.</span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><em>---. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment</em>. 1929. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935.<em> </em> </span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Riffaterre, Michael. <em>Semiotics of Poetry</em>. 1978. </span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Rosenblatt, Louise. <em>The Reader, the Text, the Poem</em>. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1978.</span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Suleiman, Susan R., and Inge Crosman, eds. <em>The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation.</em> Princeton UP, 1980.</span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Tompkins, Jane, ed. <em>Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism</em>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980.</span></li></ul> <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 151, 0);font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><strong>Suggested Websites:</strong></span> </p> <ul><li><span style="font-size:100%;"><a href="http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/rr.html"><span style="font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;">"Reader Response: Various Positions" - Dr. John Lye - Brock University</span></a></span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><a href="http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/reader-response_theory_and_criticism.html">Reader Response Theory and Criticism - Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism</a></span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader-response_criticism">Reader-Response Criticism - Wikipedia</a></span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><a href="http://www.english-literature.org/essays/reader-response.html">"The Author, the Text, and the Reader" - Clarissa Lee Ai Ling, The London School of Journalism</a></span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><a href="http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/poetry/critical_define/crit_reader.html">Definition of Reader-Response Criticism - virtuaLit</a></span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><a href="http://www.xenos.org/essays/litthry4.htm">"Reader-Response Theory of Stanley Fish" by Chris Lang</a> </span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><a href="http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/iser/">Wolfgang Iser (and reader-response theory) by David Albertson - Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and Arts</a></span></li></ul> </blockquote>eastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817799056092908602.post-62528227753075846872007-09-19T13:51:00.000-07:002007-09-19T14:05:32.281-07:00Phenomenology and Hermeneutics<p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><strong><em>Phenomenology</em></strong><br /> Phenomenology is a philosophical method, first developed by Edmund Husserl (HUHSS-erel), that proposed "phenomenological reduction" so that everything not "immanent" to consciousness must be excluded; all realities must be treated as pure "phenomena" and this is the only absolute data from which we can begin. Husserl viewed consciousness always as intentional and that the act of consciousness, the thinking subject and the object it "intends," are inseparable. Art is not a means of securing pleasure, but a revelation of being. The work is the phenomenon by which we come to know the world (Eagleton, p. 54; Abrams, p. 133, Guerin, p. 263).</span> </p> <p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><strong><em>Hermeneutics</em></strong><br /> Hermeneutics sees interpretation as a circular process whereby valid interpretation can be achieved by a sustained, mutually qualifying interplay between our progressive sense of the whole and our retrospective understanding of its component parts. Two dominant theories that emerged from Wilhelm Dilthey's original premise were that of E. D. Hirsch who, in accord with Dilthey, felt a valid interpretation was possible by uncovering the work's authorial intent (though informed by historical and cultural determinants), and in contrast, that of Martin Heidegger (HIGH-deg-er) who argued that a reader must experience the "inner life" of a text in order to understand it at all. The reader's "being-in-the-world" or <em>dasein</em> is fraught with difficulties since both the reader and the text exist in a temporal and fluid state. For Heidegger or Hans Georg Gadamer (GAH-de-mer), then, a valid interpretation may become irrecoverable and will always be relative.</span> </p> <p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><strong>Key Terms:</strong></span></p> <blockquote style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> <p><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><strong>Dasein</strong> - simply, "being there," or "being-in-the world" - Heidegger argued that "what is distinctive about human existence is its <em>Dasein</em> ('givenness'): our consciousness both <em>projects</em> the things of the world and at the same time <em>is subjected to </em> the world by the very nature of existence in the world" (Selden and Widdowson 52 - see <em>General Resources</em> below).</span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><strong>Intentionality</strong> - "is at the heart of knowing. We live in meaning, and we live 'towards,' oriented to experience. Consequently there is an intentional structure in textuality and expression, in self-knowledge and in knowledge of others. This intentionality is also a distance: consciousness is not identical with its objects, but is intended consciousness" (quoted from Dr. John Lye's website - see suggested resources below).</span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><strong>Phenomenological Reduction</strong> - a concept most frequently associated with Edmund Husserl; as explained by Terry Eagleton (see <em>General Resources</em> below) "To establish certainty, then, we must first of all ignore, or 'put in brackets,' anything which is beyond our immediate experience: we must reduce the external world to the contents of our consciousness alone....Everything not 'immanent' to consciousness must be rigorously excluded: all realities must be treated as pure 'phenomena,' in terms of their appearances in our mind, and this is the only absolute data from which we can begin" (55).</span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><strong>Further references:</strong></span> </p> <ul><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Blanchot, Maurice. <em>The Space of Literature.</em> </span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Derrida, Jacques. <em>Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs.</em></span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Gadamer, Hans-Georg. <em>Truth and Method</em>. New York: Crossroad, 1982.</span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Habermas, Jürgen (JUR-gen HAH-bur-mahs). <em>Communication and the Evolution of Society. </em></span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Halliburton, David. <em>Poetic Thinking: An Approach to Heidegger. </em></span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Heidegger, Martin.<em> Being and Time. </em>Trans. John Macquarrie. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.</span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Hirsch, E.D. <em>The Aims of Interpretation. </em></span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Husserl, Edmund. <em>The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy</em>. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1970.</span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Magliola, Robert R. <em>Phenomenology and Literature: An Introduction.</em> </span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" > Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. <em>Phenomenology of Perception</em>. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962.</span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Palmer, Richard. <em>Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schliermacher.</em> </span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" >Ricouer, Paul. <em>The Conflict of Interpretation: Essays in Hermeneutics.</em></span><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" > </span></li></ul> <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 151, 0);font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><strong><span style="color: rgb(51, 0, 51);">Suggested Websites:</span> </strong></span> </p> <ul><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/">"Phenomenology" - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy</a></span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" > <a href="http://www.phenomenologyonline.com/">Phenomenology Online - page developed by Max van Manen</a></span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" > <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology">"Phenomenology" - Wikipedia</a></span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><a href="http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/6i.htm">"Phenomenology: Bracketing Experience" - by Garth Kemerling (Philosophy Pages)</a></span></li><li><span style=";font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;font-size:100%;" ><a href="http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/ph.html">"Some Principles of Phenomenological Hermeneutics" by Dr. John Lye (Brock University)</a></span></li></ul> </blockquote>eastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817799056092908602.post-82397653091252129882007-09-19T13:48:00.000-07:002007-09-19T13:51:39.876-07:00ExistentialismExistentialism is a philosophy (promoted especially by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus) that views each person as an isolated being who is cast into an alien universe, and conceives the world as possessing no inherent human truth, value, or meaning. A person's life, then, as it moves from the nothingness from which it came toward the nothingness where it must end, defines an existence which is both anguished and absurd (Guerin). In a world without sense, all choices are possible, a situation which Sartre viewed as human beings central dilemma: "Man [woman] is condemned to be free." In contrast to atheist existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard theorized that belief in God (given that we are provided with no proof or assurance) required a conscious choice or "leap of faith." The major figures include Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre (sart or SAR-treh), Albert Camus (kah-MUE or ka-MOO) , Simone de Beauvoir (bohv-WAHR) , Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers (YASS-pers), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (mer-LOH pawn-TEE).<br /><br />Key Terms:<br /><br />Absurd - a term used to describe existence--a world without inherent meaning or truth.<br /><br />Authenticity - to make choices based on an individual code of ethics (commitment) rather than because of societal pressures. A choice made just because "it's what people do" would be considered inauthentic.<br /><br />"Leap of faith" - although Kierkegaard acknowledged that religion was inherently unknowable and filled with risks, faith required an act of commitment (the "leap of faith"); the commitment to Christianity would also lessen the despair of an absurd world.<br /><br />Further references:<br /><br />* Barrett, William. Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy.<br />* Camus, Albert. The Stranger.<br />* Cooper, D. Existentialism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.<br />* Hannay, A. Kierkegaard, London: Routledge, 1982.<br />* Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.<br />* Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling.<br />* Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. See chapter 3.<br />* Marcel, G. The Philosophy of Existentialism, New York: Citadel Press, 1968.<br />* Moran, R. Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self Knowledge, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.<br />* Nietzsche, Fredrich. Beyond Good and Evil.<br />* Ricoeur, P. Oneself as Another. Tr. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.<br />* Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Humanism and Being and Nothingness.<br />* Taylor, C. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Suggested Websites:</span><br /><ul><li><a href="http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/poetry/critical_define/crit_marx.html"><span style="font-family:Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;font-size:85%;">"Definition of Marxist Criticism" - virtuaLit (Bedford-St. Martin's resource)</span></a></li><li><span style="font-family:Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;font-size:85%;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism">"Marxism" - Wikipedia Encyclopedia</a></span></li><li><span style="font-family:Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;font-size:85%;"><a href="http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/marxist_theory_and_criticism-_2.html">Marxist Theory and Criticism - from the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Criticism</a></span></li><li><a href="http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/marxism.html"><span style="font-family:Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;font-size:85%;">"Marxism and Ideology" by Dr. Mary Klages - University of Colorado at Boulder</span></a></li></ul>eastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817799056092908602.post-49126069401544836022007-09-19T13:45:00.000-07:002007-09-19T13:47:06.176-07:00Some Characteristics of Contemporary TheoryContemporary Literary Theory is not a single thing but a collection of theoretical approaches which are marked by a number of premises, although not all of the theoretical approaches share or agree on all of the them.<br /><br />1. Meaning is assumed to be created by difference, not by "presence," (that is, identity with the object of meaning). As the revisionist Freudian Jacques Lacan remarks, a sign signals the absence of that which it signifies. Signs do not directly represent the reality to which they refer, but (following the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure) mean by difference from other words in a concept set. All meaning is only meaning in reference to, and in distinction from, other meanings; there is no meaning in any stable or absolute sense. Meanings are multiple, changing, contextual.<br /><br />2. There is no foundational 'truth' or reality in the universe (as far as we can know)--no absolutes, no eternalities, no solid ground of truth beneath the shifting sands of history. There are only local and contingent truths generated by human groups through their cultural systems in response to their needs for power, survival and esteem. Consequently, values and identity are cultural constructs, not stable entities. Even the unconscious is a cultural construct, as Kaja Silverman points out in The Subject of Semiotics, in that the unconscious is constructed through repression, the forces of repression are cultural, and what is taboo is culturally formulated.<br /><br />3. Language is a much more complex, elusive phenomenon than we ordinarily suspect, and what we take normally to be our meanings are only the surface of a much more substantial theatre of linguistic, psychic and cultural operations, of which operations we are not be fully aware. Contemporary theory attempts to explore the implications (i.e., the inter-foldings, from 'plier', to fold) of levels of meaning in language.<br /><br />4. Language itself always has excessive signification, that is, it always means more than it may be taken to mean in any one context; signification is always 'spilling over', especially in texts which are designed to release signifying power, as texts which we call 'literature' are. This excessive signification is created in part by the rhetorical, or tropic, characteristics of language (a trope is a way of saying something by saying something else, as in a metaphor, a metonym, or irony), and the case is made by Paul de Man that there is an inherent opposition (or undecidability, or aporia) between the grammatical and the rhetorical operations of language.<br /><br />5. It is language itself, not some essential humanness or timeless truth, that is central to culture and meaning. Humans 'are' their symbol systems, they are constituted through them, and those systems and their meanings are contingent, relational, dynamic.<br /><br />6. The meaning that appears as normal in our social life masks, through various means such as omission, displacement, difference, misspeaking and bad faith, the meaning that is: the world of meaning we think we occupy is not the world we do in fact occupy. The world we do occupy is a construction of ideology, an imagination of the way the world is that shapes our world, including our 'selves', for our use.<br /><br />7. A text is, as the etymology of the word "text" proclaims, a tissue, a woven thing (L. texere, to weave); it is a tissue woven of former texts, echoes of which it continually evokes (filiations, these echoes are sometimes called), woven of historical references and practices, and woven of the play of language. A text is not, and cannot be, 'only itself', nor can it properly be reified, said to be 'a thing'; a text is a process of engagements. Literary Theory advocates pushing against the depth, complexity and indeterminancy of this tissue until not only the full implications of the multiplicities but the contradictions inevitably inherent in them become more apparent.<br /><br />8. The borders of literature are challenged by the ideas<br /><br /> a) that all texts share common traits, for instance that they all are constructed of rhetorical, tropic, linguistic and narrative elements, and<br /><br /> b) that all experience can be viewed as a text: experience insofar as it is knowable is consequently symbolically configured, and human activity and even perception is both constructed and known through the conventions of social practice; hence as a constructed symbolic field experience is textual. <br /><br />While on the one hand this blurring of differentiation between 'literature' and other texts may seem to make literature less privileged, on the other hand it opens those non-literary (but not non-imaginative, and only problematically non-fictional) texts, including 'social texts', the grammars and vocabularies of social action and cultural practice, up to the kind of complex analysis that literature has been opened to.<br /><br />9. So the nature of language and meaning is seen as more intricate, potentially more subversive, more deeply embedded in psychic, linguistic and cultural processes, more areas of experience are seen as textual, and texts are seen as more deeply embedded in and constitutive of social processes.<br /><br />None of these ideas shared by contemporary theories are new to the intellectual traditions of our culture. It appears to many, however, that Literary Theory attacks the fundamental values of literature and literary study: that it attacks the customary belief that literature draws on and creates meanings that reflect and affirm our central (essential, human, lasting) values; that it attacks the privileged meaningfulness of 'literature'; that it attacks the idea that a text is authored, that is, that the authority for its meaningfulness rests on the activity of an individual; that it attacks the trust that the text that is read can be identified in its intentions and meanings with the text that was written; and ultimately that it attacks the very existence of value and meaning itself, the ground of meaningfulness, rooted in the belief in those transcendent human values on which humane learning is based.<br /><br />On the other hand, 'theory people' point out that theory does is not erase literature but expands the concept of the literary and renews the way texts in all areas of intellectual disciplines are or can be read; that it explores the full power of meaning and the full embeddedness of meanings in their historical placement; that it calls for a more critical, more flexible reading.<br /><br />It is the case that Literary Theory challenges many fundamental assumptions, that it is often skeptical in its disposition, and that it can look in practice either destructive of any value or merely cleverly playful. The issue is whether theory has good reasons for the questioning of the assumptions, and whether it can lead to practice that is in fact productive.<br /><br />© 1997, 2000 by John Lye. This text may be freely used, with attribution, for non-profit purposes.<br />As are all of my posts for this course, this document is open to change. If you have any suggestions (additions, qualifications, arguments), mail the author: jlye@brocku.caeastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817799056092908602.post-51234602005321244492007-09-19T13:44:00.000-07:002007-09-19T13:45:09.289-07:00Derrida and DeconstructionHeidegger meant by "the end of philosophy" the end of a philosophy rooted in metaphysics. He argued that the only real philosophical questions have to do with "being" (ontology) and that "transcendental" questions were meaningless. By the sixties, the notion of the "end of philosophy " had developed into the notion that philosophy was nothing other than the ideology of the western ethos. The liberal humanist tradition presented a de facto situation (its own pre-eminence) as a de jure situation (its truth). In other words, it presented its traditional privilege as a natural superiority. Such a position is ideological.<br />Derrida argued that Heidegger had not escaped transcendentalism, that his "Being" was as transcendental as any other "Transcendental Signified." He also argued that even if the charge against philosophy as ideology were true, the charge was levelled in the language of philosophy, which can not be escaped. All that was really being asked was that the dominant ideology (philosophy = the ideology of the western ethos) be replaced by another broader or at least different ideology such as Marxism (philosophy=discourse of the ruling class), Freudianism (philosophy =sexual symptom), anti-Freudianism (philosophy =phallocratic ideology). In the end, he argued, the order of reason is absolute, "since it is only to itself that an appeal against it can be brought, only in itself that a protest against it can be made; on its own terrain, it leaves us no other recourse than to stratagem and strategy."<br />Derrida did not quarrel with Heidegger's position that history, as perceived in the philosophic tradition was over; only that Heidegger himself had not escaped it. Derrida raised the question of what there was to say after philosophy was over (but ironically still in place, because reason is absolute and can only be questioned in its own terms). The strategy he chose was duplicity, the playing of a double game. He would operate in the language of reason, since there was no other, but try to lay traps for it by posing it problems it could not answer, exposing the inherent contradictions in apparently reasonable positions. He called this strategy deconstruction, after Heidegger's term destruktion.<br />For Heidegger, destruktion was essentially, the history of the inquiry into history. Dasein , the individual's being in the world, is often trapped by the everyday ordinariness of life into interpreting itself in terms of the world it knows and the tradition it inherits. This condition Heidegger calls fallenness, and the individuals who have fallen into it das man (the they). Anyone who wishes to live authentically must escape from the average everyday ordinariness of life and contemplate his/her own death (non-being, or nothingness). This is done through the agency of angst , a kind of generalized suffering caused by the fear of dying, and the intellectual exercise of destruktion. Destruktion, then is a combination of a negative analysis of "today," the average everyday world and a positive analysis of history that tries to achieve authenticity through the rigorous questioning of accepted authority. Often this means breaking a word into its component parts in order to trace its history.<br />Derrida's deconstruction is a more limited but even more rigorous form of interrogation. Since the "speaking subject," when he/she speaks, must speak the language of reason, there must exist some silent region where the double agent deconstructor can sort out his stratagem against the Logos, the rules of reason. In order for this to be possible, two conditions must maintain:<br />1. In order for the double game of duplicity to be played, the language of philosophy must already be full of duplicity (both in its sense of doubleness and its sense of hypocrisy or lying.)<br />2. The strategist (speaking subject, deconstructor) must resist the power of Logos (reason) by maintaining a indefensible position of empiricism, erasing the distinction between truths of fact and truths of reason. This will be accomplished through différance.<br />For Heidegger, difference was the result of temporality. Since history and language precede the self and help construct the self, the self can never step outside itself and see itself outside of history and language. The self (in Heidegger's language dasein) can only conceive an historically past self, different from the existential self experiencing the world in the present. In that sense, the self (as subject) is always different from the self (as object).<br />Derrida's concept la différance contains two notions: difference and deference, a separation of identity and a separation in time. Derrida came to his notion through an attempt to show the impossibility of Husserl's promise of a "phenomenology of history" by deconstructing the notion. He showed that a phenomenology of history would have to answer the question "how is a truth possible for us?" But if a truth is to be truth, it must be absolute, independent of any point of view(unless, of course, we are God, in which case the question is meaningless). Phenomenology seeks the origin of truth, and it locates this origin in an inaugural fact which by definition can only occur once.<br />The phenomenologist argues that only the present exists. The past is retained in the present through the present ruins of a civilization that is absent. The future is mooted, or predicted, but only in the present. But in order for the past to be retained in the present and the future to beannounced in the present, the present must not only be present. It must also be a present that is still to come (future) and a present that is already past (past). At this point difference appears. The present is not identical with itself.<br />This difference raises again the problem of the inaugural fact Suppose we have the trace of some inaugural event, say the stone foundations at L'Anse aux Meadows. Out of our present we may for ourselves assume these to be Viking remains, though we cannot with certainty know what meaning they had for their makers. We cannot make our meaning coincide with their meaning, yet we know that when that past was a present, it had all the properties of a present. That other must also be a same. Again, this failure of the past to coincide with itself is a source of différance.<br />If we are to develop a phenomenology of history we must posit what Husserl called "a principle of principles." This principle is that history is meaningful, and however confused or in need of mediation, it can be transmitted from generation to generation. It is univocal, even though it can never be articulated at any moment. Being and meaning can never coincide except at infinity, so meaning is always deferred. The de jure situation (what is right) and the de facto situation (what is fact) can also never coincide. The reason for this is that there is an originary difference between fact and right, being and meaning.<br />Another necessary but paradoxical concept is the idea of originary delay. Derrida argues that a first is only a first by consequence of a second that follows it. The first is only recognizable as a first and not merely a singular by the arrival of the second. The second is therefore the prerequisite of the first. It permits the first to be first by its delayed arrival. The first, recognizable only after the second, is in this respect a third. Origin, then is a kind of dress rehearsal, what Derrida calls la répétition d'une première, in terms of the theatre, a representation of the first public performance which has not yet occurred. The original, in that sense, is always a copy. In this way, Derrida deconstructs Husserl's principle of principles which always relied on being able to distinguish the original from later copies.<br />If we apply the same analysis to signs and things in the "real" world we come to the paradoxical situation that the sign precedes the referent. The sign "dog," precedes the four-legged barking creature because the creature is only recognizable as that after the sign "dog" has been applied to it. Derrida has shown that, contrary to Husserl's notion of a pure origin, consciousness never precedes language,, and we cannot see language as a representation of a silently lived through experience.<br />This is the core of deconstructive thinking. We can only understand the priority of the sign by an enquiry into writing. Earlier, we looked at graphemes (the units of writing) as a second-order sign system. Derrida sees the relationship between these signs as semiological. The graphic sign stands in for the phonemic sign. It is therefore "the sign of a sign," while the oral sign is the "sign of the thing." Writing is then supplementary. (Even the oral sign is supplementary, since it exists as supplement to the "real world." The graphic sign of writing is particularly supplemental since it is a supplement to a supplement, a sign of a sign.) In Off Grammatology Derrida argues that writing should not be subordinated to speech, and this subordination is nothing more than an historical prejudice. He argues further that to define a graphic sign is to define any sign. Every sign is a signifier whose signified is another signifier. Think of looking up signifiers in a dictionary. What you get is a list of other signifiers. Meaning is always deferred.<br />The idea of the supplement raises some interesting questions. We can think of the origin as a place where there is no originary, only a supplement in the place of a deficient originary. It is deficient for this reason. We can think of the supplement as a surplus, something extra added to the whole and outside of it. But if the whole is really the whole, then nothing can be added to it. If the supplement is something and not nothing, then it must expose the defect of the whole, since something that can accomodate the addition of a supplement must be lacking something within itself. Derrida calls this "the logic of the supplement."<br />In the same way, the present is only present on the condition that it allude to the absence from which it distinguishes itself. Metaphysics, Derrida argues, is the act of erasing this distinguishing mark, the trace of the absent. We may now define trace as the sign left by the absent thing, after it has passed on the scene of its former presence. Every present, in order to know itself as present, bears the trace of an absent which defines it. It follows then that an originary present must bear an originary trace, the present trace of a past which never took place, an absolute past. In this way, Derrida believes, he achieves a position beyond absolute knowledge.<br />Derrida distinguishes between a meditating on presence, which he defines as philosophy, and the possibility of meditating on non-presence. How can these two kinds of thinking, one of which takes issue with the other co-exist? Derrida argues that philosophy is always already there (not that it has always been.) Philosophy can only be a thinking of presence, since experience is lived and tested in the present. The other kind of thinking which is not philosophical cannot therefore appeal to individual empirical experience. Instead it appeals to a general experience.<br />At the level of text, then, the appeal is to writing in general. Every text is a double text. It is philosophical and and understood by classical interpretation at one level of its reading. But it also contains traces and contradictions, indications of the second text which a classical reading can never uncover. No synthesis is possible. The second text is not an opposite which can be reconciled. It is what Derrida calls its counterpart, slightly phased. It requires a deconstructive reading of the difference (what Derrida calls a double science or double séance).<br />The meditation on non-presence is a meditation on the self as other. Every metaphysical text is separated from itself by what Derrida calls a "scarcely perceptible veil." A slight displacement in the reading of the text<br />is sufficient to collapse one into the other, to make comedy wisdom or vice versa. Derrida's duplicity splits the metaphysical text in two, revealing its inherent contradictions. Derrida's analysis insists on the undecidability of words, their unresolvable contradictions.<br />One of the most important concepts in Derrida's analysis is the idea of "sous rature," (under erasure.) Heidegger often crossed out the word Being (Being) and let both the word and its erasure stand. He felt the Being was prior to and beyond signification or meaning, and hence to signify it was inadequate, though there existed no alternative. Derrida extends this practise to all signs. Since any signifier has as its signified another signifier, it always defers meaning and it always carries traces of other meanings. It must therefore be studied as defective, incomplete, under erasure.<br /><br />A few (over-simplified) definitions:<br /><br />Grammatology: The science of writing. Derrida proposes to move beyond traditional models of writing that describe its history and evolution to develop a theory of writing, to apply that theory and to move in the direction of a new writing. The difficult in doing so is the result of the relationship between writing and metaphysics.<br /><br />The metaphysics of presence. The assumption that the physical presence of a speaker authenticates his speech. Speaking would then precede writing (the sign of a sign), since the writer is not present at the reading of his text to authenticate it. Spoken language is assumed to be directly related to thought, writing a supplement to spoken language, standing in for it. This is the result of phonocentrism the valorization of speech over writing.<br /><br />Logocentrism: "In the beginning was the word." Logocentrism is the belief that knowledge is rooted in a primeval language(now lost) given by God to humans. God (or some other transcendental signifier: the Idea, the Great Spirit, the Self, etc;) acts a foundation for all our thought, language and action. He is the truth whose manifestation is the world. He is the foundation for the binaries by which we think: God/Man, spiritual/physical, man/woman, good/evil. The first term of the binary is valorized, and a chain of binaries constitutes a hierarchy.<br /><br />Binary Oppositions: The hierarchical relation of elements that results from logocentrism. Derrida is interested more in the margins, the supplements, than in the centre.<br /><br />The supplement: Derrida takes this term from Rousseau, who saw a supplement as "an inessential extra added to something complete in itself." Derrida argues that what is complete in itself cannot be added to, and so a supplement can only occur where there is an originary lack. In any binary set of terms, the second can be argued to exist in order to fill in an originary lack in the first. This relationship, in which one term secretly resides in another, Derrida calls invagination.<br /><br />Originary lack: Some absence in a thing that permits it to be supplemented.<br /><br />Metonymic chain: Derrida argues with Saussure's notion that signs are binary. (signifier, signified) The signified, he says, is always a signifier in another system. As a result, meaning cannot be in a sign, since it is always dispersed, deferred and delayed. (dictionary analogy). In terms of a text, then, all signifiers must be seen as defective. A signifier always contains traces of other signifiers.<br /><br />Trace: The indications of an absence that define a presence. (The present is known as the present only through the evidence of a past that once was a present.) The traces of other signifiers in any signifier means that it must always be read under erasure.(sur rasure).<br /><br />Erasure: The decision to read a signifier or a text as if its meaning were clear, with the understanding that this is only a strategy.<br /><br />Difference (Différance) A pun on difference and deference. Any signifier (or chain of signification, ie. text) must infinitely defer its meaning because of the nature of the sign (the signified is composed of signifiers). At the same time, meaning must be kept under erasure because any text is always out of phase with itself, doubled, in an argument with itself that can be glimpsed through the aporias it generates.<br />Deconstruction: an attempt to dismantle the binary oppositions which govern a text by focussing on the aporias or impasses of meaning. A deconstructive reading will identify the logocentric assumptions of a text and the binaries and hierarchies it contains. It will demonstrate how a logocentric text always undercuts its own assumptions, its own system of logic. It will do this largely through an examination of the traces, supplements, and invaginations in the text.<br /><br />:link source: http://130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/Derrida.htmleastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817799056092908602.post-48818828710547093202007-09-19T13:42:00.000-07:002007-09-19T13:43:55.454-07:00Franz Stanzel: Narrative Theory and the Typological CircleFranz Stanzel set out to derive a comprehensive typology of all conceivable narrative structures. His intent, he said,was "to systematize the various kinds and degrees of mediacy." (Mittelbarkeit) [1] that result from the shifting relationship between the story and how it is being told. Stanzel says that his project is to show how novels and short stories "render their mediacy."[2] and thus affect the structure of the narrative. "Render" is the translation of the German verb gestalten and connotes the act of in-forming and shaping. Stanzel writes:<br /><br />Whenever a piece of news is conveyed, whenever something<br /><br />is reported, there is a mediator- the voice of a narrator is<br /><br />audible. I term this phenomenon "mediacy."[3]<br /><br />Three basic narrative positions:<br /><br />1 First-person narrative: The world of the characters is identical to the world of the narrator.<br /><br />2 Authorial narrative situation: The narrator is outside the world of the characters.<br /><br />3 Figural narrative situation: There is no apparent narrator. A reflector character thinks, feels and perceives. An illusion of im-mediacy is created.<br /><br />(In fact, all narration is first-person because there is always a narrator between the reader and the story.)<br /><br />The constitutive elements of mediacy<br /><br />1 Person: The narrator either exists as a character within the world of the fictional events of the story, or he exists outside it.<br /><br />2.Perspective: Perspective may be internal (limited), located in the story, in the protagonist or in the centre of the action, or it may be external (omniscient) outside the story or or its centre of action located in a narrator who does not belong to the world of the characters, or who is merely a subordinate figure.<br /><br />3 Mode: Who is narrating? The narration may be highly personalized or relatively invisible. Mode distinguishes between what Stanzel calls reportorial narration and scenic presentation. (Otherwise distinguished as "showing" and "telling" or mimesis and diegesis.) Modal possibilities constitute a continuum.<br /><br />Dominance:<br /><br />In each of the three narrative situations, another constitutive element or pole of the binary opposition associated with it attains dominance over the other constitutive elements and their poles.<br /><br />1 Authorial narrative situation: Dominance of external perspective.<br /><br />2 First-Person narrative situation: Dominance of fictive world.<br /><br />3 Figural narration: Dominance of the reflector mode.<br /><br />Possibilities of narrative mediation:<br /><br />Does the narrator belong to the world of the story, or does he remain in another realm of existence?<br /><br />2 Does the narrator give the reader an external view of the narrated events, or does he present them from within?<br /><br />Does the narrator directly convey information to the reader, or does he filter it through the consciousness of one or several characters?<br /><br />Prototype:<br /><br />Stanzel uses the term "prototype" for the narrative situation most widely used in any particular period. Victorian writers preferred the authorial narrative or the quasi-autobiographical form of the first-person narration. Twentieth century writers combine authorial and figural elements. At any time, some writers deviate from the historic norm by defamiliarizing the conventions through estrangement. This accounts for the historical development of the form.<br /><br />Stanzel's typology is used to determine the predominance of the narrative situations in a work. It should be understood that the narrative situation can change at any point. A work is complex of basic narrative forms whose profile may be charted. As well, an individual reader reads according to reading strategies which may very from reader to reader(the indeterminacy of the reader, who through a kind of inertia maintains his spatio-temporal orientation until the text conspicuously signals a change).<br /><br />Profile of a narrative: The alternation between diegetic-narrative and mimetic-dramatic parts of a narrative (and the overlapping of the two structural elements in "indirect speech" and "free indirect style."<br /><br />Rhythm of a narrative: The succession of the basic forms of narration( summary, report, description, commentary, scenic presentation interspersed with action report).<br /><br />Narrative Forms :<br /><br />Narrative modes<br /><br />overt mediacy covert mediacy<br /><br />indirect direct<br /><br />personalization impersonalization<br /><br />telling showing<br /><br />summary scenic presentation<br /><br />report 1. Scene with extensive dialogue and brief<br /><br />impersonal allusions to the context and action.<br /><br />description<br /><br />comment 2. Reflection of the fictional events in the<br /><br />consciousness of a fictional character.<br /><br />Non-narrative forms:<br /><br />dramatic forms:<br /><br />speech<br /><br />dramatised scene<br /><br />The Opposition Mode: Teller Character and Reflector Character<br /><br />a)Teller mode: The teller is there to tell, report, witness, comment, anticipate, recapitulate. He provides a generalized summary or a complete record of events.<br /><br />b) Reflector mode: The reflector is there to mirror in his own consciousness what is going on in the world outside(or inside). He pretends to be giving an unmediated view, as if the reader were presented with the thing itself. Mediation is camouflaged. He provides arbitrary details, apparently the result of existential situations.<br /><br />The value of any detail is determined by the mode. <br /><br />:link source: http://130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/Stanzel_Narration.htmleastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817799056092908602.post-65484009438545110832007-09-19T13:40:00.000-07:002007-09-19T13:42:12.150-07:00The New CriticsmThe term "New Criticism" defines the critical theory that has dominated Anglo-American literary criticism for the past fifty years. Its method of close reading and emphasis on the text provided a corrective to fuzzy biographical criticism and subjective enthusiasm, but for many teachers in North America and Britain, it became not a method of criticism, but criticism itself. Alternatives to its interpretive strategies have until recently been regarded with deep suspicion. It is important to understand the precepts of the New Criticism as critical positions and not as the truth about literature before looking at other strategies.<br /><br />The New Criticism posits that every text is autonomous. History, biography, sociology, psychology, author's intention and reader's private experience are all irrelevant. Any attempt to look at the author's relationship to a work is called "the intentional fallacy." Any attempt to look at the reader's individual response is called "the affective fallacy."<br /><br />New Criticism argues that each text has a central unity. The responsibility of the reader is to discover this unity. The reader's job is to interpret the text, telling in what ways each of its parts contributes to the central unity. The primary interest is in themes. A text is spoken by a persona (narrator or speaker) who expresses an attitude which must be defined and who speaks in a tone which helps define the attitude: ironic, straightforward or ambiguous. Judgements of the value of a text must be based on the richness of the attitude and the complexity and the balance of the text. The key phrases are ambivalence, ambiguity, tension, irony and paradox.<br /><br />The reader's analysis of these elements lead him to an examination of the themes. A work is good or bad depending on whether the themes are complex and whether or not they contribute to the central, unifying theme. The more complex the themes are and the more closely they contribute to a central theme (unity) the better the work.<br /><br />Usually, the New Critics define their themes as oppositions: Life and death, good and evil, love and hate, harmony and strife, order and disorder, eternity and time, reality and appearance, truth and falsehood, emotion and reason, simplicity and complexity, nature and art. The analysis of a text is an exercise in showing how all of its parts contribute to a complex but single (unified) statement about human problems.<br /><br />The method the reader must use is "close analysis." The reader must look at the words, the syntax, the images, the structure (usually, "the argument"). The words must be understood to be ambiguous. (The more possible meanings a word has, the richer the ambiguity. The reader should search out irony (ambiguous meaning) and paradox (contradictory meaning, hence also ambiguity). The reader must discover tensions in the work. These will be the results of thematic oppositions, though they may also occur as oppositions in imagery: light versus dark, beautiful versus ugly, graceful versus clumsy. The oppositions may also be in the words chosen: concrete versus abstract, energetic versus placid)<br /><br />The reader must guard against two evils, stock responses (autumn should not make the reader sad unless the poem directs sadness at the thought of autumn) and idiosyncratic (affective) responses. (Lush grass should not make the reader think of cows however often he or she has seen cows in lush grass unless the poem clearly directs the reader to associate cows and lush grass. (See, Jonathon Culler, The Pursuit of Signs)<br /><br />The key texts are:<br /><br />Brooks and Warren Understanding Poetry<br /><br />William Empson Seven Types of Ambiguity<br /><br />I. A. Richards Practical Criticism<br /><br />Cleanth Brooks The Well Wrought Urn.<br /><br />:;source: http://130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/New_Criticism.htmleastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817799056092908602.post-31009166995334348792007-09-19T13:36:00.000-07:002007-09-19T13:39:23.134-07:00Saussure and the Sign<p style="font-style: italic;">Semiotics: the system of signs. (D. Arnason)</p><p>The following should not be supposed to represent a definitive explanation. The basic position offered is Saussure's linguistics, but some of the ideas belong to Jacobson and Pierce. There are hidden philosophical implications in the definitions, some of which might even be contradictory. Almost all my definitions are over-simplified. Think of these sheets as a help in entering the discourse.</p><p> The fundamental philosophic position behind a science of semiotics is that language and history precede the self. We are born into a world where language is already there and history has already decided how language will be used. (This sounds inflexible. If everything is already decided, how can new meanings be generated? The structuralist argument is that history can change the rules, but individuals cannot.)</p><p> The Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, having lost faith in philology and the historical (<i>diachronic)</i> study of language, argued for studying language as it exists as a system at a particular point in time (<i>synchronically</i>). He argued for dividing language into three levels, <i>langage</i>, by which he meant the human capacity to evolve sign systems, <i>langue,</i> what we think of as a language, such as English or French, and <i>parole,</i> any individual speaker's particular use of the language. Saussure was chiefly interested in <i>langue</i> as an a-historical phenomenon.</p><p> <img src="http://130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/Signs21.gif" /><img src="http://130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/Signs22.gif" /> </p><p> </p><p> A sign is something which stands for something else. The most common signs are words in a language, but traffic signals, punctuation, and visual markers may also be signs. At a broader level, clothing, gestures and even sentences or whole texts may be signs in a larger sign system. In Kurt Vonnegut's novel <i>The Sirens of Titan</i> , the earth and all of human history have been created by a travelling alien to represent a single word: "Greetings," being sent from one super-civilization to another. </p><p> </p><p> <b>Linguistic signs (words)</b></p><p> A spoken language sign is composed of one or more <i>phonemes</i> (material sounds that the voice constructs out of the flow of air across the vocal chords and through the mouth.) The sign may also be represented by <i>graphemes,</i> written representations of letters. A system of <i> graphemes</i> is sometimes called a second-order sign system since it represents the first order system (<i>phonemes.)</i> <i>Phonemes</i> or <i>graphemes </i> may be combined to construct <i>morphemes</i> (syllables or words) and these in turn may be combined to form <i>lexemes</i> (unit of content meaning.) The act of joining morphemes to create units of meaning is called <i>semiosis.</i></p><p> </p><p> <b>Difference:</b></p><p> Signs are distinguished from each other by their difference. Thus the sign "dog" is differentiated from "hog," "dig," or "log" by a single letter. The knowledge of any term is dependent on knowledge of the system.</p><p> </p><p> <b>The Binary Nature of Signs:</b></p><p> Signs are composed of two distinct but inseparable parts, the <i>signifier, </i>and the <i>signified</i>.</p><p> </p><p> Signifier: The materially produced representation. DOG</p><p> </p><p> Signified: The mental concept to which the signifier refers. Four- legged barking animal.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> The external world</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> <b>Signs may be transitive, intransitive or transcendental:</b></p><p> Transitive: "dog" refers to an object in the external world.</p><p> Intransitive: "and" refers to a grammatical function.</p><p> Transcendental: "God" does not refer to a verifiable object in the external world</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> <b>Signs are arbitrary.</b></p><p> There is no necessary relationship between the sign "dog" and the four legged barking animal to which it refers. </p><p> </p><p> <b>Signs are conventional. </b></p><p> The sign "dog" is understandable only because we have agreed that "dog" will refer to four-legged barking animals. We might have chosen any other combination of letters, "chien" for instance.</p><p> </p><p> <b>The intentionality of signs:</b></p><p> Signs are intentional. They are sent by a sender who wishes to communicate and understandable only to those who understand what is coded in the sign. For instance, smoke in a forest may be nothing more than the indication of a fire, or it may be a sign from one lover to another that the way is clear.</p><p> </p><p> <b>The persistence of signs:</b></p><p> Although signs are arbitrary and conventional, they are always already there. The sign "dog" was arbitrarily chosen before any of us was born, and the agreement that it should represent a four-legged barking animal was made before our arrival. This doesn't mean that it cannot change, only that we cannot individually change it by an act of will.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> <b>The slippage of signs:</b></p><p> The relationship between the signifier and the signified is not fixed. Dictionary meanings indicate the most common relationships between signifiers and signifieds in any particular period. Quite often, however, new signifieds alter the meaning of a sign. "Gay" for instance, has recently come to mean "homosexual" rather than "happy." The signified has slipped out from under the signifier. (Language is always engaged in slippage.)</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> <b>The signifier and the signified:</b> Jacques Derrida points out that the signified is always itself composed of signifiers. Thus my term "four-legged barking animal" operates as the signified of "dog," but is itself a series of signs composed of several signifiers with their own signifieds. In this way, definition is always either infinite or circular.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> <b>Semiosis:</b></p><p> Semiosis is the arrangement of morphemes into larger units of sense. As such, it functions in two ways. It combines elements syntagmatically in a horizontal relationship of contiguity (makes a sentence) and selects elements paradigmatically in a vertical relationship of selectivity (chooses which signs to use). The term "semiosis" is used quite differently by certain post-structuralists</p><p> <img src="http://130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/Signs23.gif" /> </p><p> Semiosis always precedes the fundamental narrative elements <i>mimesis</i> (showing) and <i>diegesis</i> (telling).</p><p> </p><p> Any large arrangement of semiotic units constitutes a <i>discourse</i>. In the broader sense, a discourse consists of the vocabulary, the system of pronounciation, the grammar and syntax and the rules for generating meanings that belong to any group. Thus we may speak of the discourse of the lower class, or the discourse of sports announcers, or the discourse of medicine, or the discourse of fashion. There are no privileged discourses. Another way of saying this is that there is no correct English, no fixed rules about how language may be used. Some discourses are preferable to others under certain conditions, but all discourses are culturally determined, and rely on their power to coerce speakers to enter them.</p>eastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817799056092908602.post-64164936021253158912007-09-19T12:08:00.000-07:002007-09-19T12:10:47.382-07:00Comparative literatureComparative literature (sometimes abbreviated "Comp. lit.") is critical scholarship dealing with the literature of two or more different linguistic, cultural or national groups. While most frequently practiced with works of different languages, it may also be performed on works of the same language if the works originate from different nations or cultures among which that language is spoken. Also included in the range of inquiry are comparisons of different types of art; for example, a comparatist might investigate the relationship of film to literature.<br /><br />Students and instructors in the field, usually called "comparatists," have traditionally been proficient in several languages and acquainted with the literary traditions and major literary texts of those languages. Some of the newer sub-fields, however, stress theoretical acumen and the ability to consider different types of art concurrently, over high linguistic competence.<br /><br />The interdisciplinary nature of the field means that comparatists typically exhibit some acquaintance with translation studies, sociology, critical theory, cultural studies and history. As a result, comparative literature programs within universities may be designed by scholars drawn from several such departments. This eclecticism has led critics (from within and without) to charge that Comparative Literature is insufficiently well-defined, or that comparatists too easily fall into dilettantism, because the scope of their work is, of necessity, broad. Some question whether this breadth affects the ability of Ph.D.s to find employment in the highly specialized environment of academia and the career market at large, although such concerns do not seem to be borne out by placement data that shows comp. lit. graduates to be hired at similar or higher rates than their compeers in English.[1]<br /><br />Since World War II, there have been three major international conferences in Comparative Literature: in 1965, 1975 and 1993. The published notes from each conference reveal the contested nature of the field, and deal largely with disputes over theoretic rigor, linguistic incompatibility and the fundamental goals of the field.<br /><br />Notable English-language comparatists include H.M. Posnett, Susan Bassnett, Charles Bernheimer, Terry Eagleton, Edward Said, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Early work</span><br /><br />The work considered foundational to the field, and the first to be so-titled, was New Zealand scholar H.M. Posnett's Comparative Literature, published in 1886. However, antecedents can be found in the ideas of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose vision of "world literature (Weltliteratur)" was widely cited by Posnett. In addition, the novels of Honoré de Balzac, many of which ruminate on the supposed "nature" of people from different nations, could be interpreted as an early form of comparativism, albeit fictionalized.<br /><br />During the late 19th Century, comparatists were chiefly concerned with deducing the purported zeitgeist or "spirit of the people", which they assumed to be embodied in the literary output of each nation. Although many comparative works from this period would be judged chauvinistic, Eurocentric or even racist by present-day standards, the intention of most scholars during this period was to increase the understanding of other cultures, not to assert superiority over them (although politicians and others from outside the field used their works for this purpose).<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />French School</span><br /><br />In the early part of the 20th century until WWII, the field was characterised by a notably empiricist and positivist approach, termed the "French School", in which scholars examined works forensically, looking for evidence of "origins" and "influences" between works from different nations. Thus a scholar might attempt to trace how a particular literary idea or motif traveled between nations over time.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">American School</span><br /><br />Reacting to the French School, postwar scholars, collectively termed the "American School", sought to return the field to matters more directly concerned with literary criticism, de-emphasising the detective work and detailed historical research that the French School had demanded. The American School was more closely aligned with the original internationalist visions of Goethe and Posnett (arguably reflecting the postwar desire for international co-operation), looking for examples of universal human "truths" based on the literary archetypes that appeared throughout literatures from all times and places.<br /><br />Prior to the advent of the American School, the scope of comparative literature in the West was typically limited to the literature of Western Europe and North America, predominantly literature in English, German and French literature, with occasional forays into Italian literature (primarily for Dante) and Spanish literature (primarily for Cervantes). One monument to the approach of this period is Erich Auerbach's book Mimesis, a survey of techniques of realism in texts whose origins span several continents and three thousand years.<br /><br />The approach of the American School would be familiar to current practitioners of Cultural Studies and is even claimed by some to be the forerunner of the Cultural Studies boom in universities during the 1970s and 1980s. The field today is highly diverse: for example, comparatists routinely study Chinese literature, Arabic literature and the literatures of most other major world languages and regions as well as English and continental European literatures.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Current developments</span><br /><br />Indeed, there is a movement amongst some comparatists to re-focus the field entirely away from the nation-based approach with which it has previously been associated (see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline, Columbia University Press, 2004; or Steven Totosy de Zepetnek's framework of comparative cultural studies). These scholars advocate a cross-cultural approach that pays no heed to national borders. It remains to be seen whether this approach will be successful, given that the field had its roots in nation-based thinking and that much of the literature under study was (and is) inspired by issues relating directly to the nation-state.[surce: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_Literature">wikipedia</a>]eastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817799056092908602.post-28281982041749620882007-09-19T12:06:00.000-07:002007-09-19T12:08:06.606-07:00Semiotic literary criticismSemiotic literary criticism, also called literary semiotics, is the approach to literary criticism informed by the theory of signs or semiotics. Semiotics, tied closely to the structuralism pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure, was extremely influential in the development of literary theory out of the formalist approaches of the early twentieth century.<br /><br />The early forms of literary semiotics grew out of formalist approaches to literature, especially Russian formalism, and structuralist linguistics, especially the Prague school. Notable early semiotic authors included Vladimir Propp, Algirdas Julius Greimas, and Viktor Shklovsky. These critics were concerned with a formal analysis of narrative forms which would resemble a literary mathematics, or at least a literary syntax, as far as possible. They proposed various formal notations for narrative components and transformations and attempted a descriptive taxonomy of existing stories along these lines.<br /><br />Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (orig. Russian pub. 1928; English trans. 1958) provides an example of the formal and systematic approach. In successive chapters, Propp analyzes the characters, plot events, and other elements of traditional folktales (primarily from Russia and Eastern Europe). For each of these key components he provides a letter designation (with superscripts to designate specific subtypes). He proceeds to analyze individual tales by transposing them into this notation and then to generalize about their structure. For example:<br /><br /> Analysis of a simple, single-move tale of class H-I, of the type: kidnapping of a person.<br /><br /> 131. A tsar, three daughters (α). The daughters go walking (β³), overstay in the garden (δ¹). A dragon kidnaps them (A¹). A call for aid (B¹). Quest of three heroes (C↑). Three battles with the dragon (H¹–I¹), rescue of the maidens (K4). Return (↓), reward (w°). (Propp 128)<br /><br />He then gives the complete structure of this story in one line of notation, the analysis complete and ready to be compared systematically with other tales:<br /><br /> αβ³δ¹A¹B¹C↑H¹–I¹K4↓w°<br /><br />Later semiotic approaches to literature have often been less systematic (or, in some special cases such as Roland Barthes's S/Z, they have been so specifically and exhaustively systematic as to render the possibility of a complete literary semiotics doubtful). As structuralist linguistics gave way to a post-structuralist philosophy of language which denied the scientific ambitions of the general theory of signs, semiotic literary criticism became more playful and less systematic in its ambitions. Still, some authors harbor more scientific ambition for their literary schemata than others. Later authors in the semiotic tradition of literary criticism include Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Michael Riffaterre, and Umberto Eco.<br /><br />References<br /><br />* Jonathan Culler. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. ISBN 0-8014-9224-6.<br /> o Structuralist Poetics. ISBN 0-8014-9155-X.<br />* Terrence Hawkes. Structuralism and Semiotics. ISBN 0-415-32153-0 (second edition); ISBN 0-520-03422-8.<br />* Vladimir Propp. Morphology of the Folktale. ISBN 0-292-78376-0.eastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817799056092908602.post-70695650779301195002007-09-19T12:05:00.000-07:002007-09-19T12:06:40.966-07:00Psychoanalytic literary criticismPsychoanalytic literary criticism is literary criticism which, in method, concept, theory or form, is influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalytic reading has been practiced since the early development of psychoanalysis itself, and has developed into a rich and heterogeneous interpretive tradition.<br /><br />Freud wrote several important essays on literature, which he used to explore the psyche of authors and characters, to explain narrative mysteries, and to develop new concepts in psychoanalysis (for instance, Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva). His sometime disciples and later readers, such as Carl Jung and later Jacques Lacan, were avid readers of literature as well, and used literary examples as illustrations of important concepts in their work (for instance, Lacan argued with Jacques Derrida over the interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter").<br /><br />The object of psychoanalytic literary criticism, at its very simplest, can be the psychoanalysis of the author or of a particularly interesting character. In this directly therapeutic form, it is very similar to psychoanalysis itself, closely following the analytic interpretive process discussed in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. But many more complex variations are possible. The concepts of psychoanalysis can be deployed with reference to the narrative or poetic structure itself, without requiring access to the authorial psyche (an interpretation motivated by Lacan's remark that "the unconscious is structured like a language"). Or the founding texts of psychoanalysis may themselves be treated as literature, and re-read for the light cast by their formal qualities on their theoretical content (Freud's texts frequently resemble detective stories, or the archaeological narratives of which he was so fond).<br /><br />References:<br /> * Barthes, Roland. Trans. Stephen Heath. “The Death of the Author.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.<br /> * Bowie, Malcolm. Psychoanalysis and the Future of Theory. Cambridge, MA: B. Blackwell, 1994.<br /> * Ellmann, ed. Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism. ISBN 0-582-08347-8.<br /> * Felman, Shoshana, ed. Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise. ISBN 0-8018-2754-X.<br /> * Frankland, Graham, Freud’s Literary Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.<br /> * Freud, Sigmund. Trans. Alix Strachey. “The ‘Uncanny.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.<br /> * Freud, Sigmund. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 Volumes. trans and ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74.<br /> * Hert, Neil. “Freud and the Sandman.” The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.<br /> * Hoffmann, E.T.A. The Devil’s Elixirs. Trans. Ronald Taylor. London: J. Calder, 1963.<br /> * Hoffmann, E.T.A. “The Sandmann.” Weird Tales. Trans. J.T. Bealby. Freeport NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970.<br /> * Muller and Richardson, eds. The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading. ISBN 0-8018-3293-4<br /> * Rudnistsky, Peter L., Ellen Handler Spits, Eds. Freud and Forbidden Knowledge. New York: New York University Press, 1994.<br /> * Smith, Joseph H. Ed. The Literary Freud: Mechanisms of Defense and the Poetic Will. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980.eastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817799056092908602.post-22459233228378235892007-09-19T12:02:00.000-07:002007-09-19T12:05:05.406-07:00post-colonial theoryPostcolonialism ( postcolonial theory, post-colonial theory) is a set of theories in philosophy, film, and literature that deal with the cultural legacy of colonial rule.<br /><br />As a literary theory (or critical approach), it deals with literature produced in countries that once were colonies of other countries, especially of the European colonial powers Britain, France, and Spain; in some contexts, it includes countries still in colonial arrangements. It also deals with literature written in colonial countries and by their citizens that has colonised people(s) as its subject matter. Colonised people, especially of the British Empire, attended British universities; their access to education that still unavailable in the colonies created a new criticism, mostly literary, and especially in novels. Postcolonial theory became part of the critics resources in the 1970s; most take Edward Said's book Orientalism as its foundation work.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Subject matters</span><br /><br />Postcolonialism deals with the cultural identity matters of colonised societies: the dilemmas of developing a national identity after colonial rule; the ways in which writers articulate and celebrate cultural identity (often reclaiming it from and often maintaining strong connections with the coloniser); how a colonised people's knowledge served the coloniser's interests, and how the subordinate people's knowledge is generated and used; and the ways in which the colonist's literature justified colonialism via images of the colonised as a perpetually inferior person, society, and culture.<br /><br />The creation of binary opposition structures the way we view others. In colonialism's case, the Oriental and the Westerner were distinguished as different from each other (i.e. the emotional, decadent Orient vs. the principled, progessive Occident). This opposition justified the 'white man's burden', the coloniser's self-perceived "destiny to rule" naturally sub-ordinate peoples.<br /><br />In Post-Colonial Drama: theory, practice, politics, Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins state: "the term postcolonialism — according to a too-rigid etymology — is frequently misunderstood as a temporal concept, meaning the time after colonialism has ceased, or the time following the politically determined Independence Day on which a country breaks away from its governance by another state, Not a naïve teleological sequence which supersedes colonialism, postcolonialism is, rather, an engagement with and contestation [sic] of colonialism's discourses, power structures, and social hierarchies ... A theory of postcolonialism must, then, respond to more than the merely chronological construction of post-independence, and to more than just the discursive experience of imperialism."[1]<br /><br />Colonised peoples reply to the colonial legacy by writing back to the center, when the indigenous peoples write their own histories and legacies using the coloniser's language (i.e. English, French, Dutch, et cetera) for their own purposes.[2] "Indigenous decolonization" is the intellectual impact of postcolonialist theory upon communities of indigenous peoples, thereby, their generating postcolonial literature.<br /><br />A single, definitive definition of postcolonial theory is controversial; writers have strongly criticised it as a concept embedded to identity politics. Ann Laura Stoler, in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, argues that the simplistic oppositional binary concept of Coloniser and Colonised is more complicated than it seems, because it is a category that in reality is fluid and shifting; postcolonial works emphasise the re-analysation of categories assumed to be natural and immutable.<br /><br />Postcolonial Theory, as metaphysics, ethics, and politics, addresses matters of identity, gendre, race, racism, and ethnicity with the challenges of developing a post-colonial national identity, of how a colonised people's knowledge was used against them in service to the coloniser's interests, and of how knowledge about the world is generated under specific relations between the powerful and the powerless, repetitively circulated and finally legitimated in service to certain imperial interests. Yet, postcolonial theory encourages thought about the colonised's creative resistance to the coloniser, and how that resistance complicates and gives texture to European imperial colonial projects.<br /><br />Postcolonial writers object to the colonised's depiction as hollow "mimics" of Europeans or as passive recipients of power. Consequent to Foucauldian argument, postcolonial scholars, i.e. the Subaltern Studies collective, argue that anti-colonial resistance accompanies every deployment of power.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Middle East, Postcolonialism, and National identity</span><br /><br />In the last decade, Middle Eastern studies and research produced works focusing upon the colonial past's effects on the internal and external political, social, cultural, and economic circumstances of contemporary Middle Eastern countries; cf. Raphael Israeli's "Is Jordan Palestine?" in Israel, Hashemites and the Palestinians: The Fateful Triangle, Efraim Karsh and P.R. Kumaraswamy (eds.)(London: Frank Cass, 2003), pp.49-66 and Nazih Ayubi's Overstating the Arab State (Bodmin: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2001) pp.86-123<br />A particular focus of study is the matter of Western discourses about the Middle East, and the existence or the lack of national identity formation:[3]<br /><br /> “... [M]ost countries of the Middle East, suffered from the fundamental problems over their national identity. More than three-quarters of a century after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, from which most of them emerged, these states have been unable to define, project, and maintain a national identity that is both inclusive and representative”.[4]<br /><br />As the quotation notes, independence and the end of colonialism have not ended social fragmentation and war in the Middle East. As Larbi Sadiki understood and noted in The Search for Arab Democracy: Discourses and Counter-Discourses (2004), because European colonial powers drew borders discounting peoples, ancient tribal boundaries, and local history, the Middle East’s contemporary national identity problem is traceable from imperialism and colonialism.<br /><br />Indeed, ‘in places like Iraq and Jordan, leaders of the new state were brought in from the outside, [and] tailored to suit colonial interests and commitments. Likewise, most states in the Persian Gulf were handed over to those who could protect and safeguard imperial interests in the post-withdrawal phase’,[5]<br /><br />Thus, the Middle East's difficulties in defining national identity partly stem from state boundaries defined by colonial boundaries; ‘with notable exceptions like Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, most [countries] ... had to [re-]invent, their historical roots’ after colonialism. Therefore,‘like its colonial predecessor, postcolonial identity owes its existence to force’.[6]<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Criticism of focusing up on national identity</span><br /><br />Scholars criticise and question the recent post-colonial focus on national identity. The Moroccan scholar Bin 'Abd al-'Ali argues that what is seen in contemporary Middle Eastern studies is 'a pathological obsession with ... identity'.[7]Nevertheless, Kumaraswamy and Sadiki argue that the problem of the lack of Middle Eastern identity formation is widespread, and that identity is an important aspect of understanding the politics of the contemporary Middle East. Whether the countries are Islamic regimes (i.e. Iran), republican regimes (i.e. Egypt, Syria, and Algeria), quasi-liberal monarchies (i.e. Jordan and Bahrain), democracies (i.e. Israel and Turkey), or evolving democracies (i.e. Iraq and Palestine), ‘the Middle Eastern region suffers from the inability to recognize, integrate, and reflect its ethno-cultural diversity.’ [8]<br />Ayubi (2001) questions if what Bin 'Abd al-'Ali described as an obsession with national identity may be explained by 'the absence of a championing social class?'[9] [more information, visit this <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonial_literary_criticism">link</a>]eastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817799056092908602.post-11443975544137365252007-09-19T12:00:00.000-07:002007-09-19T12:02:12.983-07:00Feminist literary criticismFeminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or by the politics of feminism more broadly. Its history has been broad and varied, from classic works of nineteenth-century women authors such as George Eliot and Margaret Fuller to cutting-edge theoretical work in women's studies and gender studies by "third-wave" authors. In the most general and simple terms, feminist literary criticism before the 1970s -- in the first and second waves of feminism -- was concerned with the politics of women's authorship and the representation of women's condition within literature. Since the arrival of more complex conceptions of gender and subjectivity and third-wave feminism, feminist literary criticism has taken a variety of new routes. It has considered gender in the terms of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, as part of the deconstruction of existing relations of power, and as a concrete political investment.[1] It has been closely associated with the birth and growth of queer studies. And the more traditionally central feminist concern with the representation and politics of women's lives has continued to play an active role in criticism.<br /><br />Lisa Tittle has defined feminist theory as asking "new questions of old texts." [citation needed] She cites the 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, (5) to resist sexism in literature, and (6) to increase awareness of the sexual politics of language and style.<br /><br />Further reading<br /><br />* Judith Butler. Gender Trouble. ISBN 0-415-92499-5.<br />* Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. ISBN 0-300-08458-7.<br />* Toril Moi. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. ISBN 0-415-02974-0; ISBN 0-415-28012-5 (second edition).<br />* Rita Felski, "Literature After Feminism" ISBN 0-226-24115-7<br />* Annette Kolodny. "Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism."eastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817799056092908602.post-72201409484248853612007-09-19T11:57:00.000-07:002007-09-19T12:00:21.268-07:00Marxist literary criticismMarxist literary criticism is a loose term describing literary criticism informed by the philosophy or the politics of Marxism. Its history is as long as Marxism itself, as both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels read widely (Marx had a great affection for Shakespeare, as well as contemporary writings like the work of his friend Heinrich Heine). In the twentieth century many of the foremost writers of Marxist theory have also been literary critics, from Georg Lukács to Fredric Jameson.<br /><br />The English born Literary critic and cultural theorist Terry Eagleton, in his important 1976 work Marxism and Literary Criticism, defines Marxist criticism this way:<br /><br />"Marxist criticism is not merely a 'sociology of literature', concerned with how novels get published and whether they mention the working class. It's aim is to explain the literary work more fully; and this means a sensitive attention to its forms, styles and meanings. But it also means grasping those forms, styles and meanings as the product of a particular history."<br /><br />The simplest goals of Marxist literary criticism can include an assessment of the political "tendency" of a literary work, determining whether its social content or its literary form are "progressive"; however, this is by no means the only or the necessary goal. From Walter Benjamin to Fredric Jameson, Marxist literary critics have also been concerned with applying lessons drawn from the realm of aesthetics to the realm of politics.<br /><br />Further reading, see also:<br />* <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism">Cultural Marxism</a><br />* <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_aesthetics">Marxist aesthetics</a>eastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817799056092908602.post-65089731580216372682007-09-19T11:53:00.000-07:002007-09-19T11:57:00.535-07:00Criticism of structuralism: Michel FoucaultMichel Foucault (IPA pronunciation: [miˈʃɛl fuˈko]) (October 15, 1926 – June 25, 1984) was a French philosopher, historian and sociologist. He held a chair at the Collège de France, giving it the title "History of Systems of Thought," and taught at the University of California, Berkeley.<br /><br />Michel Foucault is best known for his critical studies of various social institutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine, the human sciences, and the prison system, as well as for his work on the history of human sexuality. Foucault's work on power, and the relationships among power, knowledge, and discourse, has been widely discussed and applied. Sometimes described as postmodernist or post-structuralist, in the 1960s he was more often associated with the structuralist movement. Foucault later distanced himself from structuralism and always rejected the post-structuralist and postmodernist labels.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Criticisms of Foucault</span><br /><br />Many thinkers have criticized Foucault, including Charles Taylor, Noam Chomsky, Ivan Illich, Camille Paglia, Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Nancy Fraser, Pierre Bourdieu, Alasdair MacIntyre (1990), Richard Rorty, Slavoj Žižek and historian Hayden White, among others. While each of these thinkers takes issue with different aspects of Foucault's work, most share the orientation that Foucault rejects the values and philosophy associated with the Enlightenment while simultaneously secretly relying on them.[4] This criticism is developed, for example, in Derrida (1978). It is claimed that this failure either makes him dangerously nihilistic, or that he cannot be taken seriously in his disavowal of normative values because in fact his work ultimately presupposes them.<br /><br />Foucault has also been criticized for his careless use of historical information with claims that he frequently misrepresented things, got his facts wrong, extrapolated from insufficient data, or simply made them up entirely. For example, some historians argue that what Foucault called the "Great Confinement" in Madness and Civilization did not in fact occur during the 17th century, but rather in the 19th century,[5] which casts doubt on Foucault's association of the confinement of madmen with the Age of Enlightenment.<br /><br />Sociologist Andrew Scull argued that thousands of previously untranslated footnotes in Madness and Civilization reveal a very lax standard of scholarship in Foucault's work, "It is as though nearly a century of scholarly work had produced nothing of interest or value for Foucault’s project. What interested him, or shielded him, was selectively mined nineteenth-century sources of dubious provenance. Inevitably, this means that elaborate intellectual constructions are built on the shakiest of empirical foundations, and, not surprisingly, many turn out to be wrong."[6]<br /><br />Madness and Civilization was also famously criticized by Jacques Derrida who took issue with Foucault's reading of René Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy. Derrida's criticism led to a break in their friendship and marked the beginning of a fifteen-year–long feud between the two. (At one point, in a 1983 interview with Paul Rabinow, Foucault seemed to criticize Derrida's reading of Plato's Phaedrus in Of Grammatology, considering the writing/speech distinction unimportant.) They eventually reconciled in the early 1980s.<br /><br />There are also notable exchanges with Lawrence Stone and George Steiner on the subject of Foucault's historical accuracy, as well as a discussion with historian Jacques Leonard concerning Discipline and Punish. Sociologist Richard Hamilton also argues against Discipline and Punish, suggesting that large portions of the book are incoherent or invalid. For example, Foucault places great emphasis on Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, suggesting it is a model for the modern prison, but Hamilton notes that the panopticon was never built and only one extant prison uses that model. In the book, however, Foucault did not suggest that the Bentham's panopticon had been constructed, and did not suggest that prisons explicitly modeled themselves after it.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Foucault's changing viewpoint</span><br /><br />The study of Foucault's thought is complicated because his ideas developed and changed over time. Just how they changed and at what levels is a matter of some dispute amongst scholars of his work. Some scholars argue that underneath the changes of subject matter there are certain themes that run through all of his work. But as David Gauntlett (2002) suggests:<br /><br /> Of course, there's nothing wrong with Foucault changing his approach; in a 1982 interview, he remarked that 'When people say, "Well, you thought this a few years ago and now you say something else," my answer is… [laughs] "Well, do you think I have worked [hard] all those years to say the same thing and not to be changed?"' (2000: 131). This attitude to his own work fits well with his theoretical approach — that knowledge should transform the self. When asked in another 1982 interview if he was a philosopher, historian, structuralist, or Marxist, Foucault replied 'I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning' (Martin, 1988: 9).<br /><br /> – David Gauntlett, Media, Gender and Identity, London: Routledge, 2002)<br /><br />In a similar vein, Foucault preferred not to claim that he was presenting a coherent and timeless block of knowledge; rather, as he says:<br /><br /> I would like my books to be a kind of tool-box which others can rummage through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area… I would like the little volume that I want to write on disciplinary systems to be useful to an educator, a warden, a magistrate, a conscientious objector. I don't write for an audience, I write for users, not readers.<br /><br /> – Michel Foucault (1974), 'Prisons et asiles dans le mécanisme du pouvoir' in Dits et Ecrits, t. II. Paris: Gallimard, 1994, pp. 523–4). [source: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault">wikipedia</a>]eastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817799056092908602.post-68999172048503992382007-09-19T11:48:00.000-07:002007-09-19T11:51:14.473-07:00Aesthetic distance: Alienation effectThe alienation effect (from the German Verfremdungseffekt) is a theatrical and cinematic device "which prevents the audience from losing itself passively and completely in the character created by the actor, and which consequently leads the audience to be a consciously critical observer."[1] The term was coined by playwright Bertolt Brecht to describe the aesthetics of epic theatre.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Origin</span><br /><br />The term of Verfremdungseffekt is rooted in the Russian Formalist notion of the device of making strange or "priem ostranenie"[2], which literary critic Viktor Shklovsky claims is the essence of all art. Not long after seeing a performance by Mei Lanfang's company in Moscow in the spring of 1935[3], Brecht coined the German term to label an approach to theater that discouraged involving the audience in an illusory narrative world and in the emotions of the characters. Brecht thought the audience required an emotional distance to reflect on what is being presented in critical and objective ways, rather than being taken out of themselves as conventional entertainment attempts to do.<br /><br />The proper English translation of Verfremdungseffekt is a matter of controversy. The word is sometimes rendered as defamiliarization effect, estrangement effect, distantiation, distancing effect or alienation effect. Fredric Jameson, in his book Brecht and Method, translates it as "the V-effekt", and many scholars simply leave the word untranslated.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Techniques</span><br /><br />The Alienation-effect is achieved by the way the "artist never acts as if there were a fourth wall besides the three surrounding him [...] The audience can no longer have the illusion of being the unseen spectator at an event which is really taking place." [4] The use of direct audience-address disrupts stage illusion and generates the A-effect. In performance the performer "observes himself"; his object "to appear strange and even surprising to the audience. He achieves this by looking strangely at himself and his work." [5]<br /><br />By disclosing and making obvious the manipulative contrivances and "fictive" qualities of the medium, the viewer is alienated from any passive acceptance and enjoyment of the film as mere "entertainment". Instead, the viewer is forced into a critical, analytical frame of mind that serves to disabuse him of the notion what he is watching is necessarily an inviolable, self-contained narrative. This alienation effect serves a didactic function insofar as it teaches the viewer not to take the style and content for granted, since the medium itself is highly constructed and contingent upon many cultural and economic conditions.<br /><br />In theater musical and pantomimic effects are used as barriers to empathy; in film self-reflexive film techniques are employed to disrupt the narrative flow and break the fourth wall to draw attention to the film-making process itself by addressing the viewer.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Notes</span><br /><br /> 1. ^ Brecht, Bertolt, "Brecht on Theater", page 91. Hill and Wang, 1957<br /> 2. ^ Brecht, Bertolt "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting", page 99. Hill and Wang, 1964<br /> 3. ^ Brecht, Bertolt "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting", page 99. Hill and Wang, 1964.<br /> 4. ^ Brecht, Bertolt "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting", page 91. Hill and Wang, 1964.<br /> 5. ^ Brecht, Bertolt "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting", page 92. Hill and Wang, 1964.<br /><br />::source: wikipediaeastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817799056092908602.post-81706065194668242912007-09-19T11:45:00.000-07:002007-09-19T11:48:17.063-07:00Literary theoryLiterary theory is the theory (or the philosophy) of the interpretation of literature and literary criticism. Its history begins with classical Greek poetics and rhetoric and includes, since the 18th century, aesthetics and hermeneutics. In the 20th century, "theory" has become an umbrella term for a variety of scholarly approaches to reading texts, most of which are informed by various strands of Continental philosophy.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Literary theory and literature</span><br /><br />One of the fundamental questions of literary theory is "What is literature?", though many contemporary theorists and literary scholars believe either that "literature" cannot be defined or that it can refer to any use of language. Specific theories are distinguished not only by their methods and conclusions, but even by how they define a "text." For some scholars of literature, "texts" comprises little more than "books belonging to the Western literary canon." But the principles and methods of literary theory have been applied to non-fiction, popular fiction, film, historical documents, law, advertising, etc., in the related field of cultural studies. In fact, some scholars within cultural studies treat cultural events, like fashion or football riots, as "texts" to be interpreted. By this measure, literary theory can be thought of as the general theory of interpretation.<br /><br />Since theorists of literature often draw on a very heterogeneous tradition of Continental philosophy and the philosophy of language, any classification of their approaches is only an approximation. There are many "schools" or types of literary theory, which take different approaches to understanding texts. Most theorists, even among those listed below, combine methods from more than one of these approaches (for instance, the deconstructive approach of Paul de Man drew on a long tradition of close reading pioneered by the New Critics, and de Man was trained in the European hermeneutic tradition).<br /><br />Broad schools of theory that have historically been important include the New Criticism, formalism, Russian formalism, and structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism, feminism and French feminism, new historicism, deconstruction, reader-response criticism, and psychoanalytic criticism.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">History</span><br /><br />The practice of literary theory became a profession in the 20th century, but it has historical roots that run as far back as ancient Greece (Aristotle's Poetics is an often cited early example) and ancient Rome (Longinus' On the Sublime and Horace's Ars Poetica), and the aesthetic theories of philosophers from ancient philosophy through the 18th and 19th centuries are important influences on current literary study. The theory and criticism of literature are, of course, also closely tied to the history of literature.<br /><br />The modern sense of "literary theory," however, dates only to approximately the 1950s, when the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure began strongly to influence English language literary criticism. The New Critics and various European-influenced formalists (particularly the Russian Formalists) had described some of their more abstract efforts as "theoretical" as well. But it was not until the broad impact of structuralism began to be felt in the English-speaking academic world that "literary theory" was thought of as a unified domain.<br /><br />In the academic world of the United Kingdom and the United States, literary theory was at its most popular from the late 1960s (when its influence was beginning to spread outward from elite universities like Johns Hopkins and Yale) through the 1980s (by which time it was taught nearly everywhere in some form). During this span of time, literary theory was perceived as academically cutting-edge research, and most university literature departments sought to teach and study theory and incorporate it into their curricula. Because of its meteoric rise in popularity and the difficult language of its key texts, theory was also often criticized as faddish or trendy obscurantism (and many academic satire novels of the period, such as those by David Lodge, feature theory prominently). Some scholars, both theoretical and anti-theoretical, refer to the 1970s and 1980s debates on the academic merits of theory as "the theory wars."<br /><br />By the early 1990s, the popularity of "theory" as a subject of interest by itself was declining slightly (along with job openings for pure "theorists") even as the texts of literary theory were incorporated into the study of almost all literature. As of 2004, the controversy over the use of theory in literary studies has all but died out, and discussions on the topic within literary and cultural studies tend now to be considerably milder and less acrimonious (though the appearance of volumes such as Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, edited by Daphne Patai with Will H. Corral, may signal a resurgence of the controversy). Some scholars draw heavily on theory in their work, while others only mention it in passing or not at all; but it is an acknowledged, important part of the study of literature.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Differences among schools</span><br /><br />The intellectual traditions and priorities of the various kinds of literary theory are often radically different. Even finding a set of common terms to compare them by can be difficult.<br /><br />For instance, the work of the New Critics often contained an implicit moral dimension, and sometimes even a religious one: a New Critic might read a poem by T.S. Eliot or Gerard Manley Hopkins for its degree of honesty in expressing the torment and contradiction of a serious search for belief in the modern world. Meanwhile a Marxist critic might find such judgments merely ideological rather than critical; the Marxist would say that the New Critical reading did not keep enough critical distance from the poem's religious stance to be able to understand it. Or a post-structuralist critic might simply avoid the issue by understanding the religious meaning of a poem as an allegory of meaning, treating the poem's references to "God" by discussing their referential nature rather than what they refer to.<br /><br />Such a disagreement cannot be easily resolved, because it is inherent in the radically different terms and goals (that is, the theories) of the critics. Their theories of reading derive from vastly different intellectual traditions: the New Critic bases his work on an East-Coast American scholarly and religious tradition, while the Marxist derives his thought from a body of critical social and economic thought, and the post-structuralist's work emerges from twentieth-century Continental philosophy of language. To expect such different approaches to have much in common would be naïve; so calling them all "theories of literature" without acknowledging their heterogeneity is itself a reduction of their differences.<br /><br />In the late 1950s, Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye attempted to establish an approach for reconciling historical criticism and New Criticism while addressing concerns of early reader-response and numerous psychological and social approaches. His approach, laid out in his Anatomy of Criticism, was explicitly structuralist, relying on the assumption of an intertextual "order of words" and universality of certain structural types. His approach held sway in English literature programs for several decades but lost favor during the ascendence of post-structuralism.<br /><br />For some theories of literature (especially certain kinds of formalism), the distinction between 'literary' and other sorts of texts is of paramount importance. Other schools (particularly post-structuralism in its various forms: new historicism, deconstruction, some strains of Marxism and feminism) have sought to break down distinctions between the two and have applied the tools of textual interpretation to a wide range of 'texts', including film, non-fiction, historical writing, and even cultural events.<br /><br />Bakhtin argued that the "utter inadequacy" of literary theory is evident when it forced to deal with the novel; other genres are intact already stabilized while the novel is still young and developing.[1]<br /><br />Another crucial distinction among the various theories of literary interpretation is intentionality, the amount of weight given to the author's own opinions about and intentions for a work. For most pre-20th century approaches, the author's intentions are a guiding factor and an important determiner of the 'correct' interpretation of texts. The New Criticism was the first school to disavow the role of the author in interpreting texts, preferring to focus on "the text itself" in a close reading. In fact, as much contention as there is between formalism and later schools, they share the tenet that the author's interpretation of a work is no more inherently meaningful than any other. [source: wikipedia]eastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2817799056092908602.post-10452262418249510642007-09-19T11:42:00.000-07:002007-09-19T11:45:31.358-07:00Literary criticismLiterary criticism is the study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals. Though the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.<br /><br />Whether or not literary criticism should be considered a separate field of inquiry from literary theory, or conversely from book reviewing, is a matter of some controversy. For example, the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism draws no distinction between literary theory and literary criticism, and almost always uses them together to describe the same concept. Some critics consider literary criticism a practical application of literary theory, as criticism always deals directly with a literary work, albeit from a theoretical point of view.<br /><br />Modern literary criticism is often published in essay or book form. Academic literary critics teach in literature departments and publish in academic journals, and more popular critics publish their criticism in broadly circulating periodicals such as the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, The Nation, and The New Yorker.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">History of literary criticism</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Classical and medieval criticism</span><br /><br />Literary criticism has probably existed for as long as literature. Aristotle wrote the Poetics, a typology and description of literary forms with many specific criticisms of contemporary works of art, in the 4th century BC. Poetics developed for the first time the concepts of mimesis and catharsis, which are still crucial in literary study. Plato's attacks on poetry as imitative, secondary, and false were formative as well.<br /><br />Later classical and medieval criticism often focused on religious texts, and the several long religious traditions of hermeneutics and textual exegesis have had a profound influence on the study of secular texts.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Renaissance criticism</span><br /><br />The literary criticism of the Renaissance developed classical ideas of unity of form and content into literary neoclassicism, proclaiming literature as central to culture, entrusting the poet and the author with preservation of a long literary tradition. The birth of Renaissance criticism was in 1498, with the recovery of classic texts, most notably, Giorgio Valla's Latin translation of Aristotle's Poetics. The work of Aristotle, especially Poetics, was the most important influence upon literary criticism until the latter eighteenth century. Lodovico Castelvetro was one of the most influential Renaissance critics who wrote commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics in 1570.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />19th-century criticism</span><br /><br />The British Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century introduced new aesthetic ideas to literary study, including the idea that the object of literature need not always be beautiful, noble, or perfect, but that literature itself could elevate a common subject to the level of the sublime. German Romanticism, which followed closely after the late development of German classicism, emphasized an aesthetic of fragmentation that can appear startlingly modern to the reader of English literature, and valued Witz – that is, "wit" or "humor" of a certain sort – more highly than the serious Anglophone Romanticism. The late nineteenth century brought renown to authors known more for critical writing than for their own literary work, such as Matthew Arnold.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The New Criticism</span><br /><br />However important all of these aesthetic movements were as antecedents, current ideas about literary criticism derive almost entirely from the new direction taken in the early twentieth century. Early in the century the school of criticism known as Russian Formalism, and slightly later the New Criticism in Britain and America, came to dominate the study and discussion of literature. Both schools emphasized the close reading of texts, elevating it far above generalizing discussion and speculation about either authorial intention (to say nothing of the author's psychology or biography, which became almost taboo subjects) or reader response. This emphasis on form and precise attention to "the words themselves" has persisted, after the decline of these critical doctrines themselves.<br /><br />Mikhail Bakhtin introduced the concepts of heteroglossia, dialogism and chronotope, making a significant contribution to the realm of literary scholarship (Holquist xxvi).<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Theory</span><br /><br />In 1957 Northrop Frye published the influential Anatomy of Criticism. In his works Frye noted that some critics tend to embrace an ideology, and to judge literary pieces on the basis of their adherence to such ideology.<br /><br />In the British and American literary establishment, the New Criticism was more or less dominant until the late 1960s. Around that time Anglo-American university literature departments began to witness a rise of a more explicitly philosophical literary theory, influenced by structuralism, then post-structuralism, and other kinds of Continental philosophy. It continued until the mid-1980s, when interest in "theory" peaked. Many later critics, though undoubtedly still influenced by theoretical work, have been comfortable simply interpreting literature rather than writing explicitly about methodology and philosophical presumptions.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">History of the Book</span><br /><br />Related to other forms of literary criticism, the history of the book is a field of interdisciplinary enquiry drawing on the methods of bibliography, cultural history, history of literature, and media theory. Principally concerned with the production, circulation, and reception of texts and their material forms, book history seeks to connect forms of textuality with their material aspects.<br /><br />Among the issues within the history of literature with which book history can be seen to intersect are: the development of authorship as a profession, the formation of reading audiences, the constraints of censorship and copyright, and the economics of literary form.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />The current state of literary criticism</span><br /><br />Today interest in literary theory and Continental philosophy coexists in university literature departments with a more conservative literary criticism of which the New Critics would probably have approved. Acrimonious disagreements over the goals and methods of literary criticism, which characterized both sides taken by critics during the "rise" of theory, have declined (though they still happen), and many critics feel that they now have a great plurality of methods and approaches from which to choose.<br /><br />Some critics work largely with theoretical texts, while others read traditional literature; interest in the literary canon is still great, but many critics are also interested in minority and women's literatures, while some critics influenced by cultural studies read popular texts like comic books or pulp/genre fiction. Ecocritics have drawn connections between literature and the natural sciences. Many literary critics also work in film criticism or media studies. Some write intellectual history; others bring the results and methods of social history to bear on reading literature.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Bibliography</span><br /><br /> * Habib, M.A.R. A History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present.ISBN 0-631-23200-1<br /> * Encyclopedia of literary critics and criticism, ed. by Chris Murray, London [etc.] : Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999<br /> * Holquist, Michael. Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, Second Edition. Routledge, 2002.<br /> * Holquist, Michael. “Introduction.” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. By Mikhail Bakhtin. Eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. ix-xxiii.<br /> * Holquist, Michael. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. By Mikhail Bakhtin. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1981.<br /><br />Source: Wikipediaeastern writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01563580254991659859noreply@blogger.com0