Contemporary Literary Theory

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Contemporary Literary Theory Feminism
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Agenda

• POSTMODERNISM
• LITERARY THEORY
• New Criticism
• Structuralism
• Archetypal / myth criticism
• Marxist / ideological
• Psychoanalytical
• Poststructuralism
• Deconstruction theory
• Cultural materialism
• Feminism
• Queer theory
• Postcolonialism

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Western Humanist View of Language
What Is Language?
as

• People are the same everywhere
• There are universal laws and truths
• Knowledge is objective, independent of culture,
  gender, etc.
• Language is a man-made tool that refers to real
  things / truths
• I, the subject, speak language
• I have a discernible self
• The self is the center of existence

TRADITIONAL WESTERN MODERN THINKING
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Literary Theory
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Modernity PostModern
Universality vs. localism

• Literature as expression of universal truths
  contained in archetypal metaphors

• Literature as an ideological expression of local,
  culturally constructed truths that are highly
  fluid and dependent on the readers perspective
  in time and place

POSTMODERNISM
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Modernity PostModern
Universality vs. localism

• Art is representational
• Language and imagery can be used to evoke the
  real
• Metaphysics of presence (I, the speaker, am
  present and impose order on the universe
  presence or being is central to all systems of
  thought)

• Language is a system of relations from which the
  referent is absent
• Signification without representation
• I am just a part of the signifying system of
  language language speaks me

POSTMODERNISM
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Structuralist PostStructuralist
Universality vs. localism

• Universal meaning
• Meaning is culturally independent

• Culture inseparable from meaning

POSTMODERNISM
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The PostModern Turn
Now What?

• The white-Western-male view of the world is dead
• Truth, identity, gender, etc. are social
  constructs, contingent and local
• Its all relative and pluralistic
• The author is dead. The reader rules.
• All literature is propaganda.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Literary Theory
Three Perspectives

• THE AUTHOR

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Literary Theory
Three Perspectives

• THE AUTHOR

• THE TEXT

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Literary Theory
Three Perspectives

• THE AUTHOR

• THE TEXT

• THE READER

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Literary Theory
Celebrating Diversity

• Different constructs of reality
• Lenses through which we see the world

?
POSTMODERNISM
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Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
Ancient History
as

• POETICS Mimetic Theory (learn through example
  representation)
• History represents the particular
• Poetry represents the universal
• Complete and unified action, beginning middle
  and end, short memorable stories
• Good plot reversal of fortune
• Anagnorsis recognition of an unknown truth
• Tragic mimesis Great characters that evoke pity
  and fear
• Comedy Flawed characters

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Structuralism
Hidden Structures

• The forces governing human behavior are hidden
  but detectable
• Search for underlying hidden structures
• Science grand unifying theory
• Psychology
• Sociology
• Anthropology universal archetypes
• Language

PRECURSORS OF POSTMODERNISM
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New Criticism (1950s)
The Sanctity of the Text
as

• View literature as a valid form of knowledge and
  as a communicator of truths inaccessible via
  scientific and other discourse
• A work of literature has an organic structure
• Objective way of analyzing literature
• Authors intentions are irrelevant
• The meaning is in the text (textual criticism)

TEXTUAL THEORY
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Archetypal Criticism
The Savage Mind
as

• CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS
• French anthropologist
• Took Saussures theories about language and
  applied them to the study of myth and culture
• Man obeys laws that are inherent in the brain
• Myths are not made by an individualbut by the
  collective human consciousness

STRUCTURALISM
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Claude Levi-Strauss
The Grammar of Myth

• Every culture organizes knowledge into binary
  pairs
• Different myths are all variations on a number of
  very basic themes
• A kind of grammar for narratives inherent in the
  human mind
• Certain constant universal structures called
  mythemes

STRUCTURALISM
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Claude Levi-Strauss
The Same Old Stories

• LANGUAGE predates the individual
• REALITY is a product of language
• Jonah and Christ are the same story
• Thus all myths are timeless
• Hero needs to overcome an obstacle
• A story about a guy who loves a girl who is
  inaccessible
• Woman wants to make chicken soup has no chicken
• SAME STORY incomplete/completeness

STRUCTURALISM
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Structuralism
Language Creates Us

• Literature reflects universal psyche of the
  human mind
• Language and culture produce subjects(the I is
  decentered)
• Binary oppositions (organizing thought patterns
  that are based upon universal laws)
• Good / evil
• Spiritual / earthly
• Masculine / feminine
• Rational / emotional
• Community / individual desire

STRUCTURALISM
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Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Repressed Truths
as

• KEY CONCEPTS
• Id, Superego, Ego
• Resolution of Oedipus complex gt the Self
• Repression
• Dreams displacement and condensation(metaphor
  and metonomy)
• Neurosis and psychosis
• Transference

PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
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B. F. Skinner (1904-1990)
Behavior Modification
as

• We cant know the mind--so why worry about it?
• Focus on behavior what is observable
• Perceptions, thoughts, images, feelings are
  subjective and immune to measurement
• Operant conditioning (aversive reinforcing
  stimuli)
• Skinner Box-- rat in a cage
• Walden II (utopian vision)

PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
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Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Class Struggle
as

• Communist Manifesto
• Saw capitalism as a driving force of history
• Predicted that it would conquer the world
• Lead to globalization of national economies and
  cultures
• Would divide world between haves and
  have-nots
• Class struggle
• Advocated abolition of private property,
  traditional marriage, concentration of political
  power in the hands of the proletariat

IDEOLOGICAL CRITICISM
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Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Text as Power

• Questions a Marxist literary critic would ask
• Who was the text written for? Is it a power
  play on the part of one class to dominate
  another?
• What is the underlying ideology?
• Does the main character affirm or resist
  bourgeoise values?
• Whose story gets told? Who is left out?
• In what way are characters or groups of
  peoplecommodified?
• Role of media consumerism?

IDEOLOGICAL
IDEOLOGICAL CRITICISM
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Jacques Lacan (1901-81)
(Transitional)
Language Is Us
as

• Self and identity are social constructions.
• Our unconscious is just not inside us.
• It is formed by language which is outside us and
  constructs our sense of self.
• Language, our parents, the unconscious, the
  symbolic order represent the OTHER.

PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
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Jacques Lacan (1901-81)
We Want Our Mothers
as

• IMAGINARY PHASE One with mother (Oedipal)
• MIRROR STAGE We recognize a separate being in
  mirror, feel lack for mother recognition of
  OTHER but not SELF birth of the never-fulfilled
  ego (ideal self-image)
• SYMBOLIC (Oedipal crisis) World of language and
  authority Father rules reason and order
  unconscious is formed emergence of desire
• REAL Ultra-conscious experiences that lie beyond
  Language such as death, terror, ecstasy, love
  inexpressible Kants thing in itself the
  complete unattainable world

PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
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Jacques Lacan (1901-81)
We Want Our Mothers
as

• Phallogocentric view of life
• Male bias of authority
• God the Father
• We move from the lost plenitude of the originary
  mother-infant symbiotic state to a state
  dominated by Language and Logos (reason,
  knowledge, systems of order)
• This provokes a sense of desire
• Feminists based theories upon Lacan

PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
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Jacques Lacan (1901-81)
We Want Our Mothers
as

• IMAGINARY Privileges fantasies and dreams
• SYMBOLIC Tries to make sense of the sensory
  through cultural authority, policeable by the
  intellect
• (Freud tried to translate the Imaginary Order
  into the conceptual Symbolic Order)

PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
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Jacques Lacan (1901-81)
The Unconscious As Other
as

• There is no separation between self and society.
• Society inhabits and informs the individual.
• Humans continue to look for an imaginary
  wholeness and unity
• We have a perpetual lack of wholeness (perennial
  lack).

PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
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Jacques Lacan (1901-81)
The Unconscious As Other
as

• We constantly negate our identities.

PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
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Poststructuralism
Rejection of Essentialism
as

• POSTMODERN LITERARY THEORY
• Not a unified school A group of theoretical
  positions
• Self-reflexive discourse that is aware of the
  tentativeness, slipperiness, ambiguities and
  complex interrelations between texts and
  meanings. (Lye)
• Rejects
• Totalizing view All phenomenon under one concept
• Essentialist concept Reality independent of
  language
• Foundationalism Stable signifying systems rooted
  in human thought

POSTMODERNISM
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Poststructuralism
All Truths Are Cultural
as

• STRUCTURALISM
• The individual is sacred
• The mind as the realm of meaning
• Universal laws and essences
• Inherent universal meanings that precede the text

• POSTSTRUCTURALISM
• The subject is a cultural construct
• Mind created from interactions as situated
  symbolic beings
• Truth is local language creates reality
• Meaning is intertextual, determined by social
  discourse changes with history

POSTMODERNISM
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Poststructuralism
A Rose is Not a Cow
as

• Meanings are often hidden in the texts
• Real meaning can be unlocked by deconstructing
  the text
• Must consider psychological, cultural,
  ideological, gender and other power positions
  of author, characters, intended readers
• Words are an endless chain of signifiers,
  pointing to nothing but themselves

POSTMODERNISM
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Roland Barthes (1915-80)
The Author Is Dead
as

• The author is dead.
• The text is a multi-dimensional space in which a
  variety of writings, none of them original, blend
  and clash.
• The reader produces a text on his or her own
  terms, forging meanings from what has already
  been read, seen, done, lived.

PRECURSORS OF POSTMODERNISM
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Jaques Derrida (1930-)
Down with Descartes
as
Deconstruction is a theory of reading which aims
to undermine the logic of opposition within
texts.

• Skeptical postmodernist
• Attacks fundamental principles of Western
  philosophy
• Influenced by Nietzsche and Heidegger
• Attacks from a structuralist foundation
• Agrees that meaning is not inherent in signs
• Strongly disagrees with bifurcation of
  structuralism

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Jaques Derrida (1930-)
Language as Metaphor

• Nietzsche influence
• Language is radically metaphorical in nature
• Every idea originates through an equating of the
  unequal
• Metaphors are essentially groundless
• All assumptions must be questioned
• Must consider vast plurality of wills to power

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Jaques Derrida (1930-)
The Dangers of Dualism
as

• STRUCTURALISM is inherently flawed
• Argues that all STRUCTURES have an implied center
• All systems have binary oppositions
• One part more important than another (good/evil,
  male/female)
• This is logocentrismbasic to all Western thought
  since Plato

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Jaques Derrida (1930-)
Whats Black Is White
as

• LANGUAGE MEANING
• A meaning is always temporal and part of a
  network of meanings, part of a chain of meanings
  in a chain or system to which it belongs which is
  always changing.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Jaques Derrida (1930-)
Viv Le Difference
as

• THE SELF AS FICTION
• Our self-presence is a fiction, we are in a
  constant state of differing and deferrence. As
  our center is not really a center, our
  self-presence is a fiction we create to disguise
  the play of opposition and displacement within
  which we live.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Jaques Derrida (1930-)
Ecriture
as

• INTERTEXTUALITY
• All texts refer to other texts (just as signs
  refer to other signs).
• No interpretations are final.
• The authority of any text is provisional.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Jaques Derrida (1930-)
No Final Signified
as

• STRUCTURALISM
• Signified
• Signifier

DECONSTRUCTION Signified Signifier
Signifier Signifier
POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Jaques Derrida (1930-)
The Unsaid Truth
as

• DECONSTRUCTIVE INTERPRETATION
• Find binary opposition and implied center
• Refute claims
• Find contradictions, self-imposed logic that is
  faulty
• Focus on what text is saying is other than what
  it appears to be saying
• Look for gaps, margins, figures, echoes,
  digressions, discontinuities

Malerationalism
Femaleemotions
POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Jaques Derrida (1930-)
Deconstructing Rousseau
as

• BINARY OPPOSITIONS
• Nature / culture
• Health / disease
• Purity / contamination
• Simplicity / complexity
• Good / evil
• Speech / writing

• ASSUMED CENTER
• Nature is good
• WHAT HE IS REALLY SAYING
• Theme of lost innocence
• Naïve romantic illusion
• Western guilt overcolonization

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Jaques Derrida (1930-)
Male Domination
as

• Exclusions and repressions as important as what
  is saidin fact are more central they point to
  the contingency of a central part
• What is not said provides clues to authors real
  views of power
• Male Western authorities have encoded within
  their work silence about women and others
  (rationalized exploitation of others without
  knowing it).

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Jaques Derrida (1930-)
Under Erasure
as

• Man can find truth in nature.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Jaques Derrida (1930-)
Richness of Language

• FREEDOM FROM TYRANNY
• Meaning circulates by difference, by being other.
• It is creative and inventive.
• Affirms multiplicity, paradoxes, richness of our
  life .
• Frees ourselves from tyrannies of univocal
  readings.
• Opposes humanism, which puts man at the center.
  One can talk about ideas and work with views that
  man is at the center only by placing them under
  erasure.
• Closer to reality, less artificial

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Jaques Derrida (1930-)
Destruction is Good
as

• "If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive
  reading, it is not the text, but the claim to
  unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying
  over another. A deconstructive reading is a
  reading which analyses the specificity of a
  text's critical difference from itself."

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Jaques Derrida (1930-)
Fuzzy Reality
as

• Some literature that recognizes the highly
  mediated nature of our experience, and are
  playful, ironic, explicitly intertextual and
  deconstruct themselves may be closer to reality.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Jaques Derrida (1930-)
What is Truth?

• What, therefore, is truth? A mobile army of
  metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms truths
  are illusions of which one has forgotten that
  they are illusions
• -- Nietzsche

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Jaques Derrida (1930-)
A Long Way from Aristotle

• TRADITIONAL THEORIES
• Mimetic
• Didactic
• Expressive of truths

• DECONSTRUCTION
• The author is dead
• History and literature become processes of
  intertextuality
• The careful reader is king

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Jean Baudrillard (1929-)
You Are What You Consume

• Cultural materialist
• Consumer objects signs that differentiate the
  population
• Our postmodern society is no longer real. It is
  a simulation of the real.
• Mass media consumerism have created a new myth
  of reality that we accept as real.
• We live in a state of hyper-reality.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Jean Baudrillard (1929-)
The Myth of America

• America is a spectacle
• An illusionary paradise
• TV is the world
• Advertising gives consumers illusion of freedom
• All is well is the party line
• Illusion perpetuated by media culture

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Jean Baudrillard (1929-)
The Matrix

• Simulacrum a copy of a copy whose relation to
  the model has become so attenuated that it can no
  longer properly be said to be a copy. It stands
  on its own as a copy without a model.
• The airless atmosphere has asphyxiated the
  referent, leaving us satellites in aimless orbit
  around an empty center. We breathe an ether of
  floating images that no longer bear a relation to
  any reality whatsoever.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Jean Baudrillard (1929-)
The Matrix

• In The Matrix, people are living what has
  already been lived and reproduced with no reality
  anymore but that of the cannibalized image (Paul
  Martin).
• Neo hides illegal software in Baudrillards book,
  Simulacra and Simulation (like Western gun
  fighters hid guns in Bibles).
• The virtual replaces the real.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Feminist Literary Theory
The Second Sex

• SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR (1908-1986)
• The Second Sex
• Questioned the othering of women by Western
  philosophy
• Rediscovery of forgotten womens literature
• Revolutionary advocacy of sexual politics
• Questioning of underlying phallocentric, Western,
  rational ideologies
• Pluralism gender, sexual, cultural, ethnicity,
  postcolonial perspectives

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Feminist Literary Theory
Gender As a Social Construct

• Exorcise the male mind
• Deconstructs logocentricism of male discourse
• Sees gender as a cultural construct
• So are stereotypes
• Focus on unique problems of feminism
• History and themes of women literature
• Female language
• Psycho-dynamics of female creativity

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Feminist Literary Theory
Feminizing Freud

• JULIA KRISTEVA (1941-)
• Psychologist, linguist novelist
• Influenced by Barthes, Freud Lacan
• Dismantles all ideologies, including feminism
• Does not consider herself a feminist
• Disagrees with patriarchal views of Freud and
  Lacan
• Pre-Oedipal maternal body source of semiotic
  aspect of language

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Feminist Literary Theory
Feminizing Freud

• SEMIOTIC SYMBOLIC SIGNIFICATION
• SEMIOTIC
• The bodily drive as it is discharged in
  signification
• Associated with the rhythms, tones, and movement
• Associated with the maternal body

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Feminist Literary Theory
Feminizing Freud

• SYMBOLIC
• Associated with the grammar and structure of
  signification.
• Makes reference possible.
• The logic of signification is already operating
  within the materiality of the body.
• There is a maternal regulation or law which
  prefigures the paternal law which Freudian
  psychoanalysts have maintained is necessary for
  signification. The regulation or grammar and laws
  of language, then, are already operating on the
  level of matter (the maternal body).

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Feminist Literary Theory
I Am Woman

• ABJECTION (to throw away dispicable)
• Identity is constituted by excluding anything
  that threatens one's own (or one's group's)
  borders.
• The maternal function is a threat to a womans
  identity.
• In a patriarchial society, we are forced to
  accept out maternal bodies (cannot abject them).
• Thus women develop depressive sexuality.
• But no need to reject motherhood--just need a new
  discourse of maternity--and willingness ti
  explore and accept multiple identities.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Feminist Literary Theory
Feminizing Freud

• Maternal regulation is the law before the law.
• Freud and Lacan maintain that the child enters
  the social by virtue of the paternal function,
  specifically paternal threats of castration.
• Kristeva asks why, if our only motivation for
  entering the social is fear, more of us aren't
  psychotic?

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Feminist Literary Theory
Feminizing Freud

• Religion, specifically Catholicism (which makes
  the mother sacred), and science (which reduces
  the mother to nature) are the only discourses of
  maternity available to Western culture.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Feminist Literary Theory
Feminizing Freud

• Maternal function cannot be reduced to mother,
  feminine, or woman.
• Kristeva tries to counter-act stereotypes that
  reduce maternity to nature.
• Each one of us is what she calls a
  subject-in-process--in contrast with traditional
  notions of an autonomous unified (masculine)
  subject.

Source Kelly Oliver, Virginia Tech
POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Feminist Literary Theory
Madness, Holiness Poetry

• Masculine symbolic order represses feminine
  semiotic order
• Semiotic open to men and women writers
• Semiotic is creative--marginal discourse of the
  avant garde
• Raw material of signification from pre-Oedipal
  drives (linked to mother)
• Realm of the subversive forces of madness,
  holiness and poetry
• Creative, unrepressed energy

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Feminist Literary Theory
I Am Woman

• Challenges Judeo-Christian icons of woman.
• Balancing act live within Lacans symbolic order
  of patriarchal laws without losing uniqueness.
• Women can produce own symbols and language.
• Multiplicity of female expression
• To break the code, to shatter language, to find
  specific discourse closer to the body and
  emotions, to the unnamable repressed by the
  social contract. --Kristeva

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Feminist Literary Theory
Binary Equals
as

• ALICE JARDINE, Gynesis (1982)
• Woman as a binary opposition
• Man/woman
• Rational/irrational
• Good/evil
• Implied male logocentricism
• The concept of jouissance

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
66
Helene Cixcous
The Joy of Jouissance
as

• Critic, novelist, playwright
• Picks up where Lacan leaves off
• Denounces patriarchal binary oppositions
• Women enter into the Symbolic Order differently
• Deconstructs patriarchal Greek myths
• Femininity (jouissance) unrepresentable in
  phallocentric scheme of things
• Favors a bisexual view

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
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Helene Cixcous
Deconstructing Sigmund
as

• Women are closer to the Imaginary
• Women more fluid, less fixed
• The individual woman must write herself
• Feminine literature not objective erase
  differences between order and chaos, text and
  speech inherently deconstructive
• Admires Joyce and Poe
• Men can produce feminist literature

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
68
Queer Theory
Queer Ideas
as

• Gender and sexuality not essential to identity
• Socially constructed
• Mutable and changeable
• Self shaped by language, signs and signifiers.
• Self becomes a subject in language, with more
  multiplicity of meaning.
• Western ideas of sexual identity come from
  science, religion, economics and politics and
  were constructed as binary oppositions

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
69
Queer Theory
Deconstructing Sex
as

• Queer theory deconstructs all binary oppositions
  about human sexuality.
• Encourages the examination of the world from an
  alternative view.
• Allows for the inclusion of gender, sexuality,
  race and other areas of identity by noticing the
  distinctions between identities, communities, and
  cultures.
• Challenges heterosexism and homophobia, in
  addition to racism, misogyny and other oppressive
  discourses while celebrating diversity.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
70
Postcolonialism
The Myth of the Orient
as

• Attempts to resurrect colonized cultures
• Deconstruct Western view of third-world nations
  as otherness
• Edward Said Orientalism was an artificial word
  constructed by the West to talk about and the
  East (Typical binary opposition)
• Empire-building nations used literature as power
• Ingrained Western myths phallic logocentricism
  in colonized people

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
71
So?
Now What?

• The white-Western-male view of the world is dead
• New Criticism, Marxism Structuralism are passe
• We now have a new set of lenses to view the
  world
• We understand the importance of being
  suspicious(literature is not necessarily
  sincere)
• We recognize that truth, identity, gender, etc.
  are social constructs, contingent and local
• We recognize the power of discourse
• PM explains the global world in which we live

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
72
The Dangers of Postmodernism
Proceed with Caution

• Can lead to intellectual nihilism cynicism
• From the comfortable foundation of humanism to
  absolute relativism and pluralism
• Whose lens is correct? Who says so?
• Is humanism really all that bad?
• Its all theory
• How do we use theory? Apply all to all texts?
• Glib, hip intellectualism

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
73
Where Do We Go from Here?
Proceed with Caution

• Has the progress of history come to a
  dead-end?(as Foucault and Lyotard suggest)
• Have we reached the point of self-defeating moral
  relativism?
• Jameson
• We need narratives, and some sort of history
• We need to re-endow the individual
• History, literature have important functions
• Sarup
• We need to keep the Enlightenment project alive

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
74
Different Ways to Read a Film/Novel

• Archetypal
• Freudian / Lacanian
• Ideological
• Deconstructionist
• Feminist
• Queer
• Post-colonial