00150--What Freudian psychoanalytic critics do?



a)         They give central importance, in literary interpretation, to the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious mind.  They associate the literary work's 'overt' content with the former, and the 'covert' content with the latter, previleging the latter as being what the work is 'really' about, and aiming to disentangle the two.
b)        Hence they pay close attention to unconscious motives and feelings, whether there by 1) those of the author, or 2) those of the characters depicted in the work.
c)         They demonstrate the presence in the literary work of classic psychoanalytic symptoms, conditions, or phrases, such as the oral, anala, and phallic stages of emotional and sexual development in infants.
d)        They make large-scale applications of psychoanalytic concepts to literary history in general, for example, Harold Bloom's book.  The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sees the struggle for identity by each generation of poets, under the 'threat' of the greatness of its predecessors, as an enactment of the Oedipus complex.

e)         They identify a 'psychic' context for the literary work, at the expense of social of historical context, privileging the individual 'psycho-drama' above the 'social drama of class conflict.  The conflict between generations or siblings, or between competing desires within the same individual looms much larger than conflict between social classes, for instance. 

00149--What Postmodernist Critics do?



1)        They discover postmodernist themes, tendencies, and attitudes within literary works of the twentieth century and explore their implications.
2)        They foreground fiction which might be said to exemplify the notion of the 'disappearance of the real', in which shifting post modern identities are seen, for example, in the mixing of literary genres (the thriller, the detective story, the myth saga, and the realist psychological novel etc).
3)        The foreground what might be called 'inter textual elements' in literature, such as parody, pastiche, and allusion, in all of which there is a major degree of reference between on text and another, rather than between the text and a safety external reality.
4)        The foreground irony, in the sense described by Umberto Eco, that whereas the modernist tries to destroy, the past, the postmodernist realises that the past must be revisited, but 'with irony' (Modernism/Postmodernism, E.D. Peter Brooker, p.227).
5)        They foreground the element of 'narcissism' in narrative technique, that is, where novels forcus on and debate their own ends and processes, and thereby 'de-natrualise' their content.
6)        They challenge the distinction between high and low culture, and highlight texts which work as hybrid blends of the two.

00148--'Landmarks' in Postmodernism [Habermas, Lyotard, Baudrillard]


                                                                                   

Habermas
            A major 'moment' in the history of postmodernism  is the influential paper 'Modernity - an Incomplete Project' delivered by the contemporary German theorist Jurgen Habermas in 1980.  For Habermas the modern period begins with the Enlightenment, that period of about one hundred years, from  the mid-seventeenth to the mid eighteenth century.  when a new faith arose in the power of reason to improve human society.  Such ideas are expressed or embodied in the philosophy of Kant in Germany, Voltaire and Diclesot in France, lake and Hume in Britain.
            In Britain the term 'The Age of Reason' was used (till recently) to designate the same period.  The so-called Enlightenment 'project' is the fostering of this belief that a break with tradition, blind habit, and slavish obedience to religious precepts and prohibitions, coupled with the application of reason and logic by the disinterested individual, can bring about a solution to the problems of society.  This outlook is what Habermas means by 'modernity'.  The French Revolution can be seen as a first attempt to test this theory in practice.  For Habermas this faith in reason and the possibility of progress survived into the twentieth century, and even survives the catalogue of disasters which makes up this century's history.  The cultural movement known as modernism subscribed to this 'project', in the sense that it constituted a lament for a lost sense of purpose, a lost coherence, a lost system of values.  For Habermas, the French post-structuralist thinkers of the 1970s, such as Derrida and Foucault, represented a specific repudiation of this mind of Enlightenment 'modernity'.  They attacked in his view, the ideals of reason, clarity, truth and progress, and as they were thereby detached from the quest for justice, he identified them as 'young conservatives'.
          Lyotard
  The term 'postmodernism'  was used in the 1930s. but its current sense and vogue can be said to have begun with Jean.  Francois Lyotard's The postmodern condition:  A Report of knowledge.  Lyotard's essay 'answering the Question:  What is Postmodernism'?, first published in 1982, added in 1984 as an appendix to The Post Modern Condition and included a Brooker's Modernism/Postmodernism, 1992, takes up this debate about the enlightenment, mainly targeting Habermas, in a slightly oblique manner.  Lyotard opens with a move which effectively turns the debate into a struggle to demonstrate that one's opponents are the real conservatives (a familiar 'bottom line' of polemical writing on culture).  'From every direction', he says, 'we are being urged to put an end to experimentation', and after citing several other instances he writes (obviously of Habermas):
            I have read a tinker of repute who detends modernity against those who he calls the neo-conservatives.  Under the banner of post-modernism, the latter would like, he believes, to get rid of the uncompleted project of modernism, that of the Enlightenment. 
            Habermar's is simply one voice in a chorus which is calling for an end to 'artistic experimentation' and for 'order....unity, for identity, for security'  In a word, there voices want 'to liquidate the heritage of the avant-gardes'. For Lyotard the Enlightenment whose project Habermas wishes to continue is simply one of the would-be authoritative 'overarching', 'totalising' explanations of things - like Christianity, Marxism, or the myth of scientific progress.  These 'Metanarratives' ('Super-narratives), which purport to explain and reassure, are really illusions, fostered in order to smother difference, opposition, and plurality.  Hence Lyotard's famous, definition of postmodernism, that it is, simply, 'incredulity towards meta narratives'.  'Grand Narratives' of progress and human perfectibility, then, are no longer tenable, and the best we can hope for is a series of 'mini narratives', which are provisional, contingent, temporary, and relative and which provide a basis for the actions of specific groups in particular local circumstances.  Post modernity thus 'deconstructs' the basic aim of the Enlightenment, that is 'the idea of a unitary end of history and of a subject.
     Baudrillard       
Another major theorist of postmodernism is the contemporary French writer Jean Baudrillard, whose book simulations (1981) marks his entry into this field.  Baudrillard is associated with what is usually known as 'the loss of the real', which is the view that in contemporary life the pervasive influence of images from film, TV, and advertising has led to a loss of the distinction between real and imagined, reality and illusion, surface and depth.  The result is a culture of 'hyper reality', in which distinctions between there are eroded.  His propositions are worked out in his essay 'Simulacra and Simulations reprinted in abridged form in Brooker, 1992.  He begins by evoking a past era of 'fullness', when a sign was a surface indication of an underlying reality, but merely of other signs?  Then the whole system becomes what he calls a Simulacrum.  He then substitutes for representation the notion of simulation.  The sign reaches its present stage of emptiness in a series of steps, which will try to illustrate by comparing them to different kinds of paintings.
            First the sign represents a basic reality:  Let's take as an example of this representations of the industrial city of Salford in the work of the twentieth-century British artists L.S. Lowry.  Mid-century life of working people in such a place was hard, and the paintings have an air of monotony and repetitiveness-cowed, stick-like figures fill the streets, coloures are muted, and the horizon filled with grim factory-like buildings.  As signs, then, Lowry's painting seem to represent the basic reality of the place they depict. 
            The second stage for the sign is that it misrepresents or distorts the reality behind it.  As an example of this let's take the glamourised representations of cities like Liverpool and Hull in the painting of the Victorian artist Atkinson Grimshaw.  These paintings show the cities at night, wet pavements reflecting the bright lights of dockside shops, the moon emerging from behind clouds, and a forest of ships' marts silhouetted against the sky.  Life in these places at that time was presumably grim, to, but the painting offer a romantic and glamourised image, so the sign can be said to misrepresent what it shows.
            The third stage for the sign is when the sign disguises the fact that there is no corresponding reality underneath.  To illustrate this, take a device used in the work of the surrealist artist Rene Magritte, where, in the painting, an easel with a painter's canvas on it is shown standing alongside a window: on the canvas in the painting is painted the exterior scene which we can see through the window.  But what is shown beyond the window is not reality, against which the paint within the painting can be judged, but simply another sign, another depiction, which has no more authority or reality than the painting within the painting (which is actually a representation of a representation).
            The fourth and last stage for the sign is that it bears no relation to any reality at all.  As an illustration of this stage we have simply to imagine a completely abstract painting, which is not representational at all, like one of the great purple mood canvases of Mark Rothko, for instance.  These four paintings are not exactly the examples of the four stages of the sign, but the four stages that can be thought of as analogous to the four different ways in which these paintings signify or represent things.

00147--Distinction between Modernism and Post modernism.



            Jeremy Hawthorn's concise Glossary of contemporary literary theory defines the two terms.  Both, he says, give great prominence to fragmentation as a feature of twentieth century art and culture, but they do so in very different moods.
"        The modernist features it in such a way as to register a deep nostalgia for an earlier age when faith was full and authority intact.  In the wasteland the persona says, as if despairingly of the poem, "There fragments I have shored against my ruins".  In instances like this there is a tone of lament, pessimism, and despair about the world which finds its appropriate representation in these 'fractured' art forms.
"        For the postmodernist, by contrast, fragmentation is an exhilarating,  liberating phenomenon, symptomatic of our escape from the claustrophobic embrace of fixed systems of belief.  In a word, the modernist laments fragmentation while the postmodernist celebrates it.
"        An important aspect of modernism was a fierce asceticism which found the over elaborate art forms of the nineteenth century deeply offensive and repulsive.  This asceticism has one of its most characteristic and striking manifestations in the pronouncements of modernist architects.
"        By contrast, postmodernism rejects the distinction between 'high' and popular' art which was important in modernism, and believes in excess, in gaudiness and in 'bad taste' mixtures of qualities.  It disdains (the modernist asceticism as elitist.

00146--Post Modernism



            A knowledge of modernism is necessary to understand post modernism.  'Modernism' is the name given to the movement which dominated the arts and culture of the first half of the twentieth century.  Modernism is the name given to movement which dominated the arts and culture of the first half of the twentieth century.  Modernism was that earthquake in the arts which brought down much of the structure of pre-twentieth century practice in music, painting, literature, and architecture.  One of the major epicenters of this earthquake seems to have been Vienna, during the period of 1890-1910, but the effects were felt in France, Germany, Italy and eventually even in Britain, in art movements like Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.  Its after-shocks are still being felt today, and many of the structures it toppled have never been rebuilt.  Without an understanding of modernism, then, it is impossible to understand twentieth-century culture.
            The period of high modernism was the twenty years from 1910 to 1920 and some of the literary 'high priests' of the movement (writing in English) were T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stephane Mallarme, Andre Gide, Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke.  Some of the important characteristics of the literary modernism practised by these writers include the following:
1)        A new emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity, that is, on how we see rather than what we see (a preoccupation evident in the use of the stream-of-consciousness technique).
2)        A movement (in novels) away from the apparent objectivity provided by such features as: Omniscient external narration, fixed narrative points of view and clear-cut moral position.
3)        A blurring of the distinctions between genres, so that novels tend to become more lyrical and poetic, for instance, and poems more documentary and prose like.
4)        A new liking for fragmented forms, discontinuous narrative, and random-seeming collages of disparate materials.
            The overall result of these shifts is to produce a literature which seems dedicated to experimentation and innovation.  After its high point, modernism seemed to retreat considerably in the 1930s, partly no doubt, because of the tensions generated in a decade of political and economic crisis, but a resurgence took place in the 1960.  However, modernism never regained the pre-eminence it has enjoyed in the earlier period.

00145--Deconstruction // 3 stages of deconstructive process


 The verbal, the textual and the linguistic stages, being illustrated using Dylan Thomas's poem 'A Refusal to Mourn in Death, by fire, of a  child'
a)        The verbal
            The verbal stage is very similar to that of more conventional forms of close reading.  It involves looking in the text for paradoxes and contradictions, at what might be called the purely verbal level.  For instance the final line of Thomas's poem reads 'After the first death there is not other'.  This statement contradicts and refutes itself: if something is called the first then a sequence is implied of second, third, fourth and so on.  so, the phrase 'the first death' clearly implies, at the literal level, that there will be others.  Internal contradictions of this kind are indicative, for the deconstructionist, of language's endemic unreliability and slipperiness.
b)        The Textual stage
            The 'textual' stage of the method moves beyond individual phrases and taxes a more overall view of the poem.  At this second stage the critic is looking for shifts or breaks in the continuity of the poem: these shifts reveal instabilities of attitude, and hence the lack of a fixed and unified position.  They may be shifts in focus, shifts in time or tone or point of view or attitude or pace or vocabulary.  They may well be indicated in the grammar, for instance, in a shift from first person to third, or past tense to present.  Thus they show paradox and contradiction on a larger scale than is the case with the first stage, taking a broad view of the text as a whole.  In the case of the 'A refusal to mourn', for instance, there are major time shifts and changes in viewpoint, not a smooth chronological progression.  Thus, the first two stanzas imagine the passing of geological aeons and the coming of the 'end of the world' - the last light breaks, the sea finally becomes still, the cycle which produces 'Bird beast and flower' comes to an end as 'all humbling darkness', descents.  But the third stanza is centred on the present - the actual death of the child, 'The majesty and burning of the child's death'.  The final stanza takes a broad vista like the first two, but it seems to centre on the historical progression of the recorded history of London, as witnessed by 'the un mourning water/of the riding Thames'.  Hence, no single wider context is provided to 'frame' and contextualise the death of the child in a defined perspective, and the shifts in Thomas's poem make it very difficult to ground his meaning at all.
c)         The Linguistic stage
            Involves looking for moments in the poem when the adequacy of language itself as a medium of communication is called in to question.  Such moments occur when, for example, there is implicit or explicit reference to the unreliability of untrustworthiness of language.  It may involve, for instance, saying that something is unsayable; or saying that it is impossible to utter or describe something and then doing so; or saying that language inflates, or deflates, or misrepresents its object, and their continuing to use it anyway.  In 'A refusal to mourn', for instance, the whole poem does what it says it won't do:  the speaker professes his refusal to mourn, but the poem itself constitutes and act of mourning.

00144--What post- structuralist critics do?



1)        They read the text against itself' so as to expose what might be thought of as the 'textual subconscious', where meanings are expressed which may be directly contrary to the surface meaning.
2)        They fix upon the surface features of the words - similarities in sound, the root meanings of words, a 'dead' (or dying) metaphor and bring there to the foreground, so that they become crucial to the overall meaning.
3)        They seek to show that the text is characterised by disunity rather than unity.
4)        They concentrate on a single passage and analyse it so intensively that it becomes impossible to sustain a 'univocal' reading and the language explodes into 'multiplicities of meaning'.
5)        They look for shifts and breaks of various kinds in the text and see these as evidence of what is repressed or glossed over or passed over in silence by the text.  These discontinuities  are sometimes called 'fault-lines', a geological metaphor referring to the breaks in rock formations which give evidence of previous activity and movement.

00143--Structuralism and Post- structuralism-some practical differences








      The structuralist seeks                                  The post- structuralist seeks
            Parallels/Echoes                                           Contradictions/paradoxes
            Balances                                                        Shifts/Breaks in:  Tone
                                                                                                            Viewpoint
                                                                                                            Time
                                                                                                            Person
                                                                                                            attitude
            Reflections/Repetitions                              Conflicts                   
            Symmetry                                                      Absences/Omissions
            Contrasts                                                       Linguistic quirks
            Patterns                                                          Aporia
            Effect:  To show textual unity and               Effect:To show textual disunity
            Coherence

00142--Post-structuralism [The Death of the Author/Roland Barthes/Jacques Derrida/Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences]



            Post-structuralism emerged in France in the late 1960.  The two figures most closely associated with this emergence are Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida.  Barthes's work around this time began to shift in character and move from a structuralist phast to a post-structuralist phase.  The essay 'The Death of the Author' by Barthes shows his change of phase from structuralism to post- structuralism.  In that essay he announces the death of the author, which is a rhetorical way of assisting the independence of the literary and its immunity to the possibility of being unified or limited by any notion of what the author might have intended, or 'crafted' into the work.  Instead the essay makes a declaration of radical textual independence: the work is not determined by intention or context.  Rather the text is free by its very nature of all restraints.
            The early phase of post- structuralism seems to license and revel in the endless free play of meanings and the escape from all forms of textual authority.  Later there is an inevitable shift from his textual permissiveness to the more disciplined and austere textual republicanism.  According to Barbara Johnson, deconstruction is not a hedonistic abandonment of all restraint, but a disciplined identification and dismantling of the sources of textual power.
            The second key figure in the development of post- structuralism in the late 1960s is the philosopher Jocques Derrida.  Indeed, the starting point of post- structuralism may be, taken as his 1966 lecture, 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences'.  In this paper Derrida sees in modern times a particular intellectual 'event' which constitutes a radical break from part ways of though, loosely associating this break with the philosophy of Nietzche and Heidegger and the psychoanalysis of Freud the event concerns the (decentring) of our intellectual universe.
            Prior to this event the existence of a norm or centre in all things was taken for granted: thus 'man', as the Renaissance Slogan had it, was the measure of all other things in the universe:  White Western norms of  dress,  behaviour, architecture, intellectual out look, and so on, provided a firm centre against which deviations, aberrations, variations could be detected and identified as 'Other' and marginal.  In the twentieth century, however, these centres were destroyed or eroded; sometimes this was caused by historical events - such as the way the First World War destroyed the illusion of steady material progress, or the way the Holocaust destroyed the notion of Europe as the source and centre of human civilisation; sometimes it happened because of scientific discoveries - such as the way the notion of relativity destroyed the ideas of time and space as fixed and central absolutes, and sometimes, finally, it was caused by intellectual or artistic revolutions - such as the way modernism in the arts in the first thirty years of the century rejected such central absolutes as harmony in music, chronological sequence in narrative, and the representation of the visual world in art.
            In the resulting universe there are no absolute or fixed points, so that the universe we live in is 'decentred' or inherently relativistic.  Instead of movement or deviation from a known centre, all we have is 'free play' (or play' as the title of the essay has it).  In the lecture Derrida embraces this decentred universe of free plays as liberating, just as Barthes in "The Death of the Author" celebrates the demise of the author as ushering in an era of joyous freedom.  The consequences of this new decentred universe are impossible to credit but we must enedeavour not to be among 'those who....turn their eyes away in the face of the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself' (Newto p.154).  This powerful often apocalyptic tone of post structuralist writing.
            If we have the courage, the implication is, we will enter this new Nietzcheque universe, where there are no guaranteed facts, only interpretations, none of which has the stamp of authority upon it, since there is no longer any authoritative centre to which to appeal for validation of our interpretations.

00141--Distinctions between structuralism and post-structuralism




a)        Origins
"        Structuralism derives ultimately from linguistics.  Linguistics is a discipline which has always been inherently confident about the possibility of establishing objective knowledge.  It believes that if we observe accurately, collect data systematically, and make logical deductions then we can reach reliable conclusions about language and the world.  Structuralism inherits this confidently scientific outlook:  it too believes in method, system and reason as being able to establish reliable truths.
 "       By contrast, post-structuralism derives ultimately from philosophy.  Philosophy is a discipline which has always tended to emphasise the difficulty of achieving secure knowledge about things.  This point of view is encapsulated in Nietzsche's famous remark 'there are no facts, only interpretations:  Philosophy is, so to speak, sceptical by nature and usually undercuts and questions commonsensical notions and assumptions.  Its procedures often begin by calling into question what is usually taken for granted.  Post structuralism inherits this habit of scepticism, and intensifies it.  It regards any confidence in scientific method as naive, and even derives a certain masochistic intellectual pleasure from knowing for certain that we can't know anything for certain (fully conscious of the irony and paradox which doing this entils.
2)        Ione and style
"        Structuralist writing tends towards abstraction and generalisation:  it aims for a detached, 'scientific coolness' of tone.  Given its derivation from linguistic science, this is what we would expect.  An essay like Roland Barthes's 1966 pice 'Introduction to the structural Analysis of Narrative' is typical of this tone and treatment, with its discrete steps in an orderly exposition, complete with diagrams.  The style is neutral and anonymous, as is typical of scientific writing.
"        Post-structrualist writing, by contrast, tends to be much more emotive.  Often the tone is urgent and euphoric, and the style flamboyant and self-consciously showy. Titles may well contain puns and allysions, and often the central line of the argument is based on a pun or a word - play of some kind.
3)        Attitude to Language
"        Structuralists accept that the world is constructed through language, in the sense that we so not have access to reality other than through the linguistic medium.  All the same, all the same, it decides to live with that fact and continue to use language to think and perceive with.  After all language is an orderly system, not a chaotic one, so realising our dependence upon it need not induce intellectual despair.
"        By contrast, post-structuralism is much more fundamentalist and believe reality itself is textual.  Post-structuralism develops the idea that any knowledge is attainable through language.   
4)        Project (the fundamental aims)
"        Structuralism, firstly, questions our way of structuring and categorising reality, and prompts us to break free of habitual modes of perception or categorisation, but it believes that we can thereby attain a more reliable view of things.
"        Post-structuralism is much more fundamental:  It distrusts the very notion of reason, and the idea of human being as an independent entity, preferring the notion of the 'dissolved' or 'constructed' subject, whereby what we may think of as the individual is really a product of social and linguistic forces - that is, not an essence at all, merely a 'tissue of textualities'.

00140--What does a structuralist do with the text?



            The most basic difference between liberal humanist and structuralist reading is that the structuralist's comments on structure, symbol, and design, become paramount, and are the main focus of the commentary while the emphasis on any wider moral significance, and indeed on interpretation itself in the broad sense, is very much reduced.  So instead of going straight into the content, in the liberal humanist manner, the structuralist presents a series of parallels, echoes, reflections, patters and contrasts so that the narrative becomes highly schematised, is translated in fact, into what we might call a verbal diagram.  What we are looking for, and where we expect to find it, can be indicated as in the diagram below.  We are looking for the factors listed on the left, and we expect to find them in the parts of the tale listed on the right.
            Parallels                                                         Plot
            Echoes                                                           Structure
            Reflections/Repetitions         in                  Character/Motive
            Contrasts                                                       Situation/circumstance
            Patterns                                                          Language/Imagery

00139--S/Z by Barthes. 5 codes identified by Barthes in S/Z are:


Roland Barthes

            Barthes book S/Z was published in  1970.  The  book is above Balazac's thirty page story 'Sarrasine'.  Barthes's method of analysis is to divide the story into 561 'lexies' or units of meaning, which he then classifies using five 'codes', seeing there as the basic underlying structures of all narratives.
            The five codes identified by Barthes in S/Z are:
1)        The proairetic code - This provides indications of actions.  ('The ship sailed at midnight'  they began again', etc)
2)        The hermeneutic code - This code poses questions or enigmas which provide narrative suspense.  (For instance the sentence 'He' knocked on a certain door in the neighbourhood of Pell street' makes the reader wonder who lived there, what kind of neighbourhood it was, and so on).
3)        The cultural code - This code contains references beyond the text to what is regarded as common knowledge.  (For example, the sentence 'Agent Agentis was the kind of man who sometimes arrives at work in odd socks' evokes a pre-existing image in the reader's mind of the kind of man this is - a stereotype of bungling incompetence perhaps contrasting that with the image of brisk efficiency contained in the notion of an 'agent'.
4)        The semic code -  This is also called the connotative code.  It is linked to theme, and this code when organized around a particular proper name constitutes a 'character'. 
5)        The symbolic code - This code is also linked to theme, but on a larger scale, so to speak.  It consists of contrasts and pairings related to the most basic binary polarities male and female, night and day, good and evil, life and art, and so on.  There are the structures of contrasted elements which structuralists see as fundamental to the human way of perceiving and organising reality.

00138--What structrualist critics do?




1)        They analyse (mainly) prose narratives, relating to text to some larger containing structure, such as:
        a)  the conventions of a particular literary genre, or
       b)  a network of inter textual connections, or
      c)  a projected model of an underlying universal narrative structure, or
      d)  a notion of narrative as a complex of recurrent patterns or motifs.
2)        They internet literature in terms of a range of underlying parallels with the structures of language, as described by modern linguistics,.
3)        They apply the concept of systematic patterning and structuring to the whole field of western culture, and across cultures, treating as 'systems of signs' anything from Ancient Greek Myths to brands of soap powder.

00137--Structuralism.




            Structuralism is an intellectual movement which began in France in the 1950s and is first seen in the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and the literary critic Roland Barthes.  It is difficult to define structuralism in a 'bottom line' proposition.  The essence of Structuralism is the belief that things can not be understood in isolation-they have to be seen in the context of the larger structures they are part of.  Hence the term structuralism.  Structuralism was imported into Britain mainly in the 1970s.
            The structure in question here are those imposed by our way of perceiving the world and organising experience, rather than objective entities already existing in the external world.  It follows from this that meaning or significance isn't a kind of core or essence inside things: rather, meaning is always outside.  Meaning is always an attribute of things, in the literal sense that meanings are attributed to the things by the human mind, not contained within them.
            Take a poem titled 'Good Morrow' by Donne.  Our immediate reaction as structuralists would probably be to insist that it can only be understood if we first have a clear notion of the genre which it paradies and subverts.  Any single poem is an example of a particular genre.  A poem to its genre is like a phrase spoken in English to the English language as a structure with all its rules, its conventions, and so on.  Donne's poem belong to the genre called alba or 'dawn song', a poetic form dating from the twelfth century in which lovers lament the approach of daybreak because it means that they must part.
            In order to understand alba one should know the notion of the concept of courtly love, and then again the structure of 'poetry' as a whole in which 'Good Morrow' is a part of.  Thus the structrualist 'approach' to the poem is actually taking us away from the very poem, into large and comparatively abstract questions of genre, history, and philosophy rather than closer and closer to it.

            In the structuralist approach to literature there is a constant movement away from the interpretation of the individual literary work and a parallel drive towards understanding the larger, abstract structures that contain them.  These structures are usually abstract such as the notion of the literary or poetic, or the number of narrative itself.  

00136--The common bedrock for critical theory.


Applicable to different approaches in critical theory.
                        For Theory:
            Politics is pervasive
            language is constitutive
            Truth is provisional
            meaning is contingent and
            Human nature is a myth
            Many of the notions which we would usually regard as the basic 'givens' of our existence (including our gender identity, our individual selfhood, and the notion of literature itself) are actually fluid and unstable things, rather than fixed and reliable essence.  Instead of being solidly 'there in the real world of fact and experience, they are socially constructed, that is, dependent on social and political forces and on shifting ways of seeing and thinking.  Hence, no overarching fixed truths' can ever be established.  The results of all forms of intellectual enquiry are provisional only.
            Every practical procedure (for instance literary criticism) presupposes a theoretical perspective of some kind.  To deny this is to place our own theoretical position beyond scrutiny as something which is 'common sense' or 'simply given'.  The problem with this view is that it tends to discredit one's own project along with all the rest, introducing a 'relativism' which disables argument and cuts the ground  from under any kind of commitment.
            Language itself conditions, limits, and predetermines what we see.  Thus all reality is constructed through language, so that nothing is simply 'there' in an unproblematical way-everything is a linguistic/textual construct.  In literature as in all writing, there is never the possibility establishing fixed and definite meanings: rather, it is characteristic of language to generate infinite webs of meaning so that all texts are necessarily self contradictory, as the process of deconstructions will reveal.
            There is no final court of appeal court of appeal in there matters, since literary texts, once they exist, are viewed by the theorist as independent linguistic structures whose authors are always 'dead' or 'absent'.

135--"If the pen is a metaphorical penis, from what organ can females generate texts"? Explain.



            This was a question raised by the 19th century male theorists to silence those who argued for women's writing.  In the male centred western culture, the author is considered as a father.  For him, the pen is an instrument of generative power like the penis.  Out of this prejudiced concept, they argue that women lack the power and instrument for literary creation.  The argument goes like this:  The author is the father of a text.  No woman can be a father so a woman cannot be an author.
            Feminists respond to this conclusion by rejecting the fundamental analogy of the Author/Father.  On the other hand women generate texts from the brain, they would say.  It can also be the word processor, with its microchips, inputs and outputs.  And the whole thing seems like a metaphorical womb.  Instead of the image of literary paternity, images of literary maternity predominated the 18th 19th centuries.  They started to view the author more as a mother than as a father.  Showalter says that by analogy, the process of literary creation is more similar to gestation, labour and delivery than insemination.  Showalter rewrites the earlier question like this:
            "If to write is metaphorically to give birth, from what organ can males generate texts"?

00134--Describe the three national variants in Feminist Literary criticism as presented by Showalter.



            In the 1980's women's writing asserted itself as the central project of feminist literary study through hundreds of essays and research papers.  In the 1970s, French Feminist theories had certain differences of opinion with the American feminist movements and theories.  Differences were mainly regarding the method of study.  But now, they are solved.  The new French feminism have much in common with radical American feminist theories.  The concept of ecriture feminine, is a significant theoretical formulation in French feminist criticism today.  Showalter comments "ecriture feminine is a hope for the future". 
            The three major national variants in feminist criticism Showalter talks about are:
a)         English Feminist Criticism which is essentially Marxist.  In the analysis of women issues, it stresses oppression.
b)        French Feminist Criticism.  This is essentially Psychoanalytic.  In its methods of reading and theory, French Feminist Criticism stress Repression. 
c)         American Feminist criticism.  This school is essentially Textual.  In the analysis of women's issues American Feminist Criticism stresses Expression.
            With all there differences, the three variants have still become gynocrtic.  Theories of women's writing presently make use of four models of difference.  The are:  Biological, linguistic, psychoanalytic and cultural.  Each model represents a school of gynocentric feminist criticism.  Each has its own favourite texts, styles and methods.

00133--Briefly explain the term Gender studies.



            Gender studies is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry increasingly prominent since the second half of the 1980s.  It arose from and is closely tied to women's studies and also gay, lesbian, and men's studies.  Starting with the premise that the gender of an individual does not flow naturally or inevitably from her or is anatomical sex, gender studies analyses the way gender identity is constructed in literature and in society, for both women and men.  Conventional Women's studies focused exclusively on women and women's writing.
            Gender studies turns away from this exclusive focus on women and women's writing, and examines the way "masculinity" and "femininity" come to have certain meanings at a particular place and time.  It stresses the necessary inter-relatedness of there meanings what is considered typically masculine in a given society depends in part on being different from what is feminine, and that is feminine or not being masculine.   Gender studies also points out that what is considered gender-neutral or "universal" is often, in fact, implicitly male and exclusive of the female.  Ironically, some feminists have worried that gender studies itself, by rejecting the polemical, compensatory attention to woman characteristic of women's studies, may run the risk of slipping back into a bias that favours men.

00132--Explain the term Gynocrtics.



            There are two distinct modes of feminist criticism.  The first mode is concerned with women as reader and this is termed Feminist critique.  The second mode is concerned with women as writer and hence called Gynocrtics.
            The term is introduced by Elaine Showalter in her essay "Toward a Feminist Poetics" published in 1979 and later elaborated in "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness", 1981.  Gynocritics focuses on images, themes, plots, and genres, on individual authors and patterns of influence among women, in an effort to identify what is specifically characteristic of women's writing and to construct "a female framework for the analysis of women's literature".  Associated primarily with Anglo American feminist criticism of the late 1970s, gynocrtics seeks to recover the unknown, and to re-read the known, writing by women in order to 'map the territory' of a female literary tradition.
            Showalter called Gynocritics the "second phase" of feminist criticism, because it succeeded and built upon an earlier phase of "feminist critique", which has focused on women as the writers of male texts.

00131--Explain Concept of Feminist Critique.



            There are two distinct modes of feminist criticism.  The first mode is concerned with women as a reader, and this is termed Feminist Critique.  The second mode is concerned with women as writer and hence called Gyno-critics.
            Feminist critique is a historically grounded enquiry which probes the ideological assumptions of literature.  It is political and polemical and has affiliations to Marxism.  The subjects of study are mainly the image of women in literature, omissions and misconceptions of them.  According to Elaine Showalter, Feminist Critique is an interpretation of texts from a feminist perspective to expose diche's, stereotypes, and negative images of women.  Generally focusing on male literary and theoretical  texts, it also calls attention to the gaps in a literary history that has largely excluded writing by women.  This approach dominated feminist criticism when it first emerged in the 1970s and is strongly linked to the decades political agendas; Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970), for example ties the mistreatment of women in fiction by Henry Miller and others to the oppression of women in a patriarchal society.  As early as 1975, Carolyn Heilbrun and Catherine Stimpson associated such readings with the "righteous, angry" first stages of feminist criticism.  Showalter would go on to suggest that by continuing to emphasize writing by men, the strategy of feminist criticism remained dependent "on existing models" of interpretation.  It did, however, lay the foundation for what she identified as the second, "gynocritical" phase of feminist criticism, focusing on women as writers with values, methods, and traditions of their own.  It has also led to more fully elaborated theories of women as readers, and continues to be an important tool in exposing the operation of sexism in culture and society.

00130--Why does Showalter say that feminist criticism is the Wilderness now?


            The term wilderness literally means 'a large areas of land that has never been developed or used for growing crops because it is difficult to live there'.  In history, Wilderness is the woodland region, south of the Rapidan River.  It was the scene of a Civil War between the armies of Grant and Lee in 
May, 1864.  It was Carolyin Heilbrun and Catherine Stimpson, who observed that Feminist Criticism is in the Wilderness now.  The reason is that it has branched out into diverse groups and attitudes, and they cannot reach a monolithic perspective.  Originally it was Mathew Arnold who predicted that literary critics might perish in the wilderness before they reach the promised land.  To the present comment from some critics that Feminist criticism is the wilderness is clearly answered by Showalter.  She says that feminist criticism is in good company because at present, all criticism is in the wilderness.

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            Feminist criticism too lacks a systematic and unified theoretical basis.  Different thinkers interpret and explain it differently.  Black critics protest the silence of feminist criticism about black and third world women writers.  They demand a Black feminist aesthetic.  Marxist feminists want to focus on class along with gender.  Literary historians want to uncover the lost tradition.  Post structuralists want to synthesise a new critical mode that is both textual and feminist.  Psycho analytic critics prefer to talk about women's relationship to language and signification.

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