Literature and History (3): From Text to Socio-Historical Contexts

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Literature and History (3)From Text to
Socio-Historical Contexts

• Michel Foucault, Marxism and Cultural Materialism

(1) Historical Methods Historicism Official
History (2) New Historicism (3) Marxism and
Cultural Materialism
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Outline How do we describe social and historical
context?

• Foucault discourse
• Marxism and Ideology
• Cultural Materialism
• Raymond Williams Structure of Feelings
• A. Gramscis Hegemony

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Q A

• What do you know about Foucault and New
  Historicism so far?
• What are the definitions of discourse and how is
  it connected to power?
• What does it mean to say that Foucault
  historicize discourse and textualize history
  (textbook 116)

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Foucault traditional historicism vs. Archaelogy

• Traditional Historicism the past as a unified
  entity, with coherent development and organized
  by fixed categories such as author, spirit,
  period and nation.
• History as Archive intersections of multiple
  discourses, with gaps and discontinuity, like
  book stacks in a library. ? archeology a
  painstaking rediscovery of struggles for meanings
  

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Foucault historicize discourse

• Every sentiment is in a certain discourse, and
  thus historically conditioned. Textbook 117
• effective history
• knowledge as perspective, with slant and
  limitations
• working without constants fixed categories or
  truths
• Working not to discover ourselves, but to
  introduce discontinuity in histories as well as
  in us.

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Context as Con-texts

• Traditional view

World
Work symbols, Characters, Allegory, etc.
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Context as Con-texts
Each square (small or large ones) here can be
seen as a discourse (or group of texts).

Society --- Production Regulation Distribution
History ---
Class, Race, Gender, Episteme
????? ?? ??
author a Text reader

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Methodology (1) from text to context

• Textual analysis
• Institutional analysis
• Analysis of society and history
• discourse analysis
• -- the text itself is already an interpretation
• 1. from the meaning of a text to the meaning
  structures (discourse) it is embedded in
  (textbook 119)
• 2. Disclose the relations between power and
  meanings.

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Thick Description

• To sort out the structures discourses of
  signification (119)
• Cultures, people and texts, all as ensemble of
  texts. (cockfight as an example 120-21)

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Context and Social ContextsA Marxist View

• See textbook 125
• Superstructure, ultimately determined by base

Super-structure Ideological State Apparatus e.g. school, family, bookstore, etc.
Base Modes of Production Means of Production Relations of Production e.g. machine or electronic reproduction e.g. type writer, printing machine, etc.
Text as a product
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Ideology

• How do we examine the relations between
  superstructure and base?

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Ideology Defined

• rigid set of ideas e.g. somebody refrains from
  eating meat for practical rather than
  ideological reasons. --negative
• ruling ideology legitimating the power of the
  dominant group--negative
• sets of ideas to justify certain organized social
  actions --could be positive or negative
• sets of ideas to justify certain actions while
  masking their real nature. negative

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Ideology Defined by Althusser

• (ref. textbook 129)
• Ideology is a Representation of the Imaginary
  Relationship of Individuals to their Real
  Conditions of Existence.
• Ideology has the function of constituting
  individual as subjects. (Interpellation)
• Ideology is not any idea it should be a system
  of ideas (representation) produced by some
  institutions (state apparatuses ????)

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Althussers Revision of Marxism

1. Sees Ideology not as just ideas or false
   consciousness (which implies true
   consciousness)
2. Argues for Literatures Relative autonomy from
   Base it is determined by Base in the last
   instance (ultimately)
3. Explains both social structure and individual
   subjects position in relation to ideology.

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Ideologies Examples

• Which of the following are ideologies
• produced by some ISA, distorting some reality ?

1. Nationalism patriotism
2. The Taiwanese populism
3. ISA school in patriarchal society

1. ????????????????????
2. ???????,???????
3. ????,?????

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Social Structureof Vulgar Marxist

• Ideology the ruling ideas of the ruling class
  imposed on the other classes.

• Superstructure
• e.g. Literature of the middle class,
• of proletariat

Parallel, reflect
Base(as foundation, center) relations of
production, means of production
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Literature/Culture Economic Base

• relatively autonomous from
• reflect, embody, perform, transform, critique
• Over-Determination

Social Levels
Multiple Ideologies
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Social Formation -- de-centered

• State Apparatuses (Repressive Ideological)

??
??
??
ISA
??
RSA
??
??
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Lit. work Relative autonomous

• over-determined
• economic influences mediated (??) through
  various ISAs

Base Base Base Base Base
? ?
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Ideology of a Text

• Multiple Ideologies produced through
• Content (e.g. theme of love, plot and character
  relations),
• Form (e.g. stream of consciousness,
  bildungsroman, ????, pastiche)
• in conjunction/disjunction with
• Social ideologies
• Ideologies of MP and LMP (the roles of internet,
  Facebook)
• Authorial ideologies

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Ideology an Artistic Example

• From Giorgiones Sleeping Venus to Titians Venus
  of Urbino (1538)

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Ideology an Artistic Example

• To Manets Olympia (1863) pay attention to her
  gaze, her hand, the black woman and the black
  cat.

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Ideology An Artistic Example Manets Olympia
(1863)

• pay attention to her gaze, her hand, the black
  woman and the black cat.
• --multiple ideologies
• sexual capitalism critiqued by revising the
  meanings of nudity and flowers
• the blackness inscribed as a backdrop.
• Form shallow depth, strong color contrast

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Literary Examples A Rose for Emily

• A Rose for Emily
• Ideologies of love and death, Emily the
  Souths past
• Form (e.g. we-witness narrator)
• in conjunction/disjunction with
• Social ideology industrial capitalism
• Ideologies of MP and LMP (unreliable narrator,
  rich symbolism)
• Authorial ideology guilt and nostalgia

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Literary Examples Rip Van Winkle

• Rip Van Winkle
• Ideologies of escape,
• Form (e.g. historicism, narrative frames)
• in conjunction/disjunction with
• Social ideology Declaration of Independence as
  a glorious movement
• Ideologies of MP and LMP (Knickerbockers as
  historian)
• Authorial ideology escape vs. political
  commitment

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A Filmic Example The Curious Case of Benjamin
Button

• Universal Theme of Love mismatches more than
  perfect match of minds and ages

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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

• American (male) innocence thru a Pastiche of
  history
• But where Gump actively trivialized history,
  Benjamin Button effectively ignores it Although
  Benjamin briefly exchanges fire with a German
  submarine during World War II, and Hurricane
  Katrina makes a cameo toward the end, this movie
  about a white baby raised by a black adoptive
  mother during the inglorious years of the Jim
  Crow South never so much as addresses race once.
• (source)

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Methodologies Some Suggestions

• How do we connect text and context?
• Class relations, economic determinism and the
  influences of (literary) relations of production
  in or of the texts
• Art and ideology contradictions within some
  ideologies or between ideologies and reality in a
  text or a group of texts. (textbook 125-26)
• Pierre Macherey the Textual Unsaid

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Pierre Macherey the split text the textual
unsaid

• A text is as split as a Lacanian subject.
• Split between its overt (or intended) meaning and
  its unconscious or the hidden (and unintended)
  meaning caused by
• literary form
• contradictions in ideology
• the material conditions of production in the
  society in which the text is produced and
  consumed.

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Pierre Macherey the textual unsaid/unconscious

• Is constructed in the moment of its entry into
  literary form.
• ? literary genre (historical novel) and form
  (ending) as a constraint
• Structure-- reveals not unity, homogeneity and
  autonomy, but defect, falsity and secrecy. (chap
  1 131)
• the critics do not look for unity, but for
  the multiplicity and diversity of its possible
  meanings, its incompleteness, the omissions which
  it displays but cannot describe, and above all
  its contradictions. (Belsey 109)

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Pierre MachereyThe Said vs. the Unsaid

• (chap 1 130) this meaning is not buried in its
  depths, masked or disguised it is not a question
  of hunting it down with interpretations. It is
  not in the work but by its side on its margins,
  at that limit where it ceases to be what it
  claims to be because it has reached back to the
  very conditions of its possibility. It is then no
  longer constituted by a factitious necessity, the
  product of a conscious or unconscious intention.
• Chap 2 194-95

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the textual unsaid example

• Sherlock Holmes ????
• Its pattern enigma followed by disclosure (with
  total explicitness and scientific spirit) ?
• Its ideologies positivism and realism (as a lit.
  form)
• Its unsaid The stories are haunted by shadowy,
  mysterious and silent women.

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Cultural Materialism

• studies the contemporariness of the text the
  way in which they address their own present and
  our present, too (chap 2 188)its moment of
  production, consumption, and the social relations
  it is embedded in.
• a literary criticism that places texts in a
  material, that is socio-political or historical,
  context in order to show that canonical texts,
  e.g. Shakespeare, are bound up with a repressive,
  dominant ideology, yet also provide scope for
  dissidence.
• examines ideas and categorize them as radical or
  non-radical according to whether they contribute
  to a historical vision of where we are and where
  we want to be. (Wilson 35-36).

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Structure of Feeling

• The shape and organization of ideas and
  sentiments at particular times and in particular
  contexts (189)
• as firm and definite as structure suggests,
  yet it operates in the most delicate and least
  tangible part of our activities. emergent,
  rather than systematized (chap 2 189)
• Williams stresses the complex relation of
  differentiated structures of feeling e.g. Jane
  Austen emergent acquisitive capitalism,
  interlocking with agrarian capitalism (190)

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Structure of Feeling

• practical consciousness of a present kind . . .
  a social experience which is still in process,
  often indeed not yet recognized as social but
  taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even
  isolating.
• feelingchosen to to emphasize a distinction
  from more formal concepts of world-view or
  ideology, instead focusing on specifically
  affective elements of consciousness, meanings
  and values as they are actively lived and felt.
  (Hendler 10)
• Note 1) Williams finds ideology too formal and
  limited. 2) For him, culture is a whole way of
  life

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Structure of Feeling -- examples

• Themes of Nostalgia Migration/Wandering in Yu
  Kuang-chung and Campus Folksong in the 70s
• e.g. Taiwanese novels in the 80s
  ?????????????????????????????????????,????????????
  ?????????????(??? )
• e.g. Taipei City in Taiwanese films
• visiting Taipei in the 60s and 70s
• ???? --1970
• Taipei critiqued as a modern city 1980s
• Taipei as a postmodern city 1990s

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From Ideology to Hegemony

1. Hegemony Dominant Ideology, but not always
   controlling us
2. Gramsci considers the role of the organic
   intellectual and competing hegemonies.
3. Cultural materialists have used Gramscis theory
   of hegemony as a cultural process and his
   arguments about the relationship between common
   sense and ideology to explore the ways in which
   popular texts may articulate struggles for
   cultural power and shifts in belief systems,
   between dominant and subordinate social groups or
   forces (chap 2 191).

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Hegemony control by consent

• Ideological leadership consensual control
• "...Dominant groups in society, including
  fundamentally but not exclusively the ruling
  class, maintain their dominance by securing the
  'spontaneous consent' of subordinate groups,
  including the working class, through the
  negotiated construction of a political and
  ideological consensus which incorporates both
  dominant and dominated groups." (Strinati, 1995
  165)
• (source http//www.theory.org.uk/ctr-gram.htmhege
  )
  
  
  

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Hegemony control by consent

• E.g. popular fictionRebecca or ??
• Bromley -- Rebecca ? political hegemony --
  wants to show how popular fiction operates to
  secure consent to the political beliefs and
  interests of a ruling minority by offering
  narratives and characters whose desires and
  concerns are naturalized and legitimated by the
  text.
• ??s novel in the 70s coffee shop as a place
  of danger and wantonness lower-class female
  protagonist causing her man to rebell against
  his upper-class family (esp. father). (e.g.
  ????? ???? ?????1976 )

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Gramsci hegemony not secure

• not given to the dominant group, but "has to be
  won, reproduced, sustained." Hegemony can only
  be maintained so long as the dominant classes
  succeed in framing all competing definitions
  within their range... so that the subordinate
  groups either controlled or contained within an
  ideological space. . . (13 Norton 2455)

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Hegemony examples images of the Blacks

• Winning spontaneous consent through
  granting of
  superficial 'concessions' (Strinati,1995167 qtd
  Mystry). This involves the dominant group making
  
  'compromises' that are (or appear as)
  favourable to the dominated group, but that which
  actually do nothing to disrupt the hegemony of
  the dominators.

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black images

• I. Three stereotypes Mammy, slaves, clown
  ?spontaneous consensus to their slavery or
  inferiority.
• II. Positive images based on normative white
  ideals
• Images in late 80s e.g.
• --the middle-class household of
• The Cosby Show points out that
• there is 'nothing black' about
• the Huxtable's lifestyle
• (Mercer 19896 qtd in Mystry).

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Strategies of containment
Sympathy shown for the minorities, but with the
whites as the real heroes.

• Counter Hegemonic Practices e.g. Hip Hop.

• e.g. Cry Freedom The Last of the Mohicans,
  Dances with Wolves

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Subculture

• Hegemony the moving equilibrium
• Subculture as counter-hegemony
• alienation from the mainstream culture
• subversion to normalcy with styles.
• Subculture the meaning of style  (Dick Hebdige
  15)
• e.g. punk
• e.g. Taiwans underground band??? subsumed and
  contained by the mainstream

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Conclusion

• Literary theories as a box of tools? Yes and
  noor more precisely, different sets of
  questions.
• old and new historicism -- how to write history
  ? how to historicize a text, even that of
  fantasies?
• discourse knowledge and power ? discourse of
  Orientalism (supported by scientific studies,
  missionary books and travelogues)
• ideology interpellation imaginary relations
  vs real relations dont forget the
  sugar-coating!!!
• structure of feeling emerging and lived
• hegemony naturalized thru consensus,
  struggling hegemonies

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Next Time

• 4-1 Obasan  Chap 15-25 each group- choose a
  passage to analyze its meanings and significance
  to the whole text.
• Atonement (3/31 LA 403 at 100)

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Reference

• Mistry, Reena. Can Gramsci's theory of hegemony
  help us to understand the representation of
  ethnic minorities in western television and
  cinema? lt http//www.theory.org.uk/ctr-rol6.htmgt.
  March 23, 2010.
• Hendler, Glenn. Public Sentiments Structures of
  Feeling in Nineteenth-century American Literature
  . Chapel Hill U of North Carolina P, 2001.