Purposes of Reading with Multiple Lenses of Interpretation

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Purposes of Reading with Multiple Lenses of
Interpretation
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From Melissa Troise

• To open up students and readers to several ways
  of interpretation, going beyond New Criticism
  and/or Reader Response
• To avoid the standard prescribed reading by the
  teacher and/or SparkNotes
• To resist the idea that meaning is closed,
  singular, static, and findable

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The Feminist Critiques goals

• To rediscover work of women writers overlooked by
  a masculine-dominated culture
• To revisit works by men and review them with
  consideration of a womans point of view
• To expose elements that have been accepted as the
  norm, revealing misogyny that is overlooked

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Feminist Theory points of criticism

• Recognize differences between men and women
• Consider language difference
• Examine different genres to include journals,
  diaries, and personal letters
• Analyze women in power and power relationships
  between sexes
• Note and attack the social, economic, and
  political exploitation of women
• Notice division of labor and economics
• Consider closely the female experience

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Essential questions for a feminist reading

• What stereotypes of women are present?
• Do the female character play major or minor
  roles? Are they supportive or independent?
• If female characters have power, what kind is it?
• How do male characters treat or talk about female
  characters?
• Is the work sympathetic to female characters?

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Showalter

• feminist criticism cannot go around forever in
  mens ill-fitting hand-me-downs, the Annie Hall
  of English studies.

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Similarities between Marxist and Feminist
Criticism

• Both are political
• Both interrogate textual features with
  considerations of power and oppression
• Invite the examination of texts with sense of
  prevailing ideologies

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Marxist literary theory

• Aims to Interrogate rather than acknowledge the
  texts that constitute our cultural heritage.
• Based on the philosophies of Karl Marx, and the
  idea that whoever control the means of production
  control society (AKA Dialectical materialism)
• Maintains an understanding that literature is a
  reflection of culture and that culture can be
  affected by literature.

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Four main areas of study

• Economic power
• Society shaped by forces of production
• Two classes bourgeoisie and proletariat
• Capitalism leads to commodification (wanting
  things not for their usefulness but for their
  social value). Commodification is used to keep
  proletariat oppressed.
• Materialism versus spirituality
• Society is not based on ideals or abstractions,
  but things.
• People are not destroyed by spiritual failure,
  only material failure

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Four Main Areas of Study

• Class conflict
• Capitalist societies will inevitably experience
  conflict b/t social classes
• Dialectical materialism conflict between owners
  and workers and their respective ideas
• Divisions of race, ethnicity, gender and religion
  are artificial, which keep the proletariat from
  unifying against their oppressor
• Art, literature, and ideologies
• Art and lit. are effective vehicles for the
  bourgeoisie to instill their value system on the
  proletariat
• Art and lit. are enjoyable to experience,
  therefore dangerously appealing modes of
  persuasion
• Satire, irony, humor are modes of criticism,
  opportunities for the proletariat

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Essential Questions for a Marxist Reading

• Who are the most powerful people in the text?
  Who are the powerless? Who receives the
  attention?
• Is there a class conflict and struggle?
• Is there alienation and fragmentation evident in
  any of the characters?
• How do the powerful suppress the powerless?
  News? Media? Religion? Lit.?
• What does the society value?
• Do other types of criticismfeminist,
  psychoanalyticaloverlap the Marxism?

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What is Psychoanalytical Theory?

• Began with Sigmund Freud 1856-1939
• Provides two different approaches to reading
  literature
• Examines the literature itself (formalist, New
  Critical approach)
• Examines the author (much more like New
  Historicism which examines the conditions under
  which the text was created)

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Examining the text

• Considers Oedipal connotations, that is sons
  desire for his mother, fathers envy of the son,
  and the rivalry for mothers attention (and any
  other variant).
• Examines the meaning of dreams. Recognizes
  symbols and archetypal implications.
• Considers the three parts of subconscious the
  id, superego, and ego.

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Jungian Archetypes

• Carl Jung 1875-1961
• Developed the idea of a collective unconscious
  (a reservoir of the experiences of our species)
  and Jungian archetypesa figurethat repeats
  itself in the course of history wherever creative
  fantasy is fully manifested.
• We are born to recognize archetypes, as evidenced
  in their repetition across cultures

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Arche(types)

• Archetypal characters Hero, scapegoat, loner or
  outcast, temptress, trickster, Earth mother /
  goddess, wise old man
• Archetypal images colors (red means?), numbers
  (3, 13, 7, 4, etc.), water, gardens
• Archetypal situations / myths the quest, the
  fall, renewal of life, heros journey

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Psychoanalytical Theory and Authorship

• According to the second view, an essential
  relationship exists between the author and the
  work itself. This is not a concern of New
  Criticism.
• Writing is not blatantly autobiographical, but is
  heavily influenced by the authors experiences.

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Aim of Psychoanalysis of Author

• To explain or interpret the work, to achieve a
  better understanding.
• To establish an understanding about the authors
  perspective on key historical issues.
• To better know the author as a person (an
  autobiographic window into their lives).
• To explore latent or subconscious desires of
  authors to better understand their id.

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What is Deconstruction?

• Difficult to definebecause the process of
  deconstruction resists arriving at any final
  conclusion, the word itself resists definition,
  for to define it is to limit its meaning
• Finds its basis in the work of Jacques Derrida
  and his works Of Grammatology and Dissemination
• Deconstruction is itself, in a word, an
  illustration of the tension felt between
  opposites or dichotomies (construction/destruction
  )

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Say what?

• Oh, it gets worse

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What it isnt

• Derrida states that deconstruction is not an
  analysis, a critique, or a method.
• It is not simple New Criticism, Structuralism, or
  Formalism.
• It is unconcerned with the context of creation.

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Ok, now Im severely confused.

• So is your teacher.

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Structuralism

• Structuralism An interdisciplinary movement of
  thought which enjoyed a high vogue through the
  1960 and early 1970s.
• In lit. crit., structuralism rejected mere
  interpretation as a fruitless endeavor subject to
  the vagaries of intuitive response.
• Only through examining the structural features of
  textspoetic devices, narrative functions,
  techniques of linguistic defamiliarizationcould
  criticism place itself on a firm (inductive and
  adequately theorized) methodogical footing.
• Basis in Aristotles Poetics

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Formalism / New Criticism

• Interpretation and evaluation that focuses on the
  text itself, its form rather than on the context
  of its creation.
• Unconcerned with biographical, cultural, or
  historical context.
• Close readings / explications found their
  strength within New Criticism movement
• I. A. Richards was a proponent of Formalism and
  New Criticism multiple meanings always present,
  no One and Only One True Meaning.
• The words on the page were all that mattered
  importation of meanings from outside the text was
  quite irrelevant and potentially distracting.

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Post-Structuralism

• Often confused with and used to describe
  Deconstruction
• Marked by a linguistic turn, the idea that all
  perceptions, concepts, and truth-claims are
  constructed in language
• Saussure, Neitzche, and Foucault all have their
  influence within the field.