00157--Postcolonialism

  
Emerged out of developments within literary studies in the late 1970s as the revolution in ‘theory’ was extended to encompass the cultural, political and economic legacy of empire and its aftermath. For many, the pivotal moment in the development of postcolonialism came with the publication of Edward Said’s path-breaking book ORIENTALISM in 1978. Here, Said linked the cultural and intellectual discourse of ‘the West’ with the material practices of colonialism. This concern with the relationship between culture and power is the dominant feature of postcolonialism, which has broadened into a disciplinary sub-field in its own right. Nevertheless, it is also a highly contested and, to a great extent, controversial area of study and this is reflected in diasgreements over the term itself.



The term ‘postcolonialism’ has emerged from these controversies as a way of marking the existence of a field of discourse rather than a particular theoretical concept – the absence of the hyphen indicating perhaps the lack of substantive content within the term. However, this is not to imply the field is therefore theoretically empty. On the contrary, it is distinguished, if not fraught, by theoretical complexity and richness; indeed, for some it is overly theoretical and this in itself is reason to suspect that far from increasing our understanding, postcolonialism tends to obfuscate the urgent political, economic and social crises that have been brought about and intensified during and after colonialism. Many critics charge it with concentrating too much on culture at the expense of a genuinely radical critique of the materialities of power and inequality in a post-colonial age. The absence of the hyphen is perhaps indicative of the indeterminacy of what exactly is meant by ‘post-colonial’ (i.e. with a hyphen). The ‘post’ clearly refers to and implies a period ‘after’ colonialism and in this strict literal sense the object of postcolonial studies is the historical period of the late twentieth century as the European empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries broke up and former colonies achieved their political independence. However, this is unsatisfactory because to suggest that colonialism has ended is to overlook the fact that the configurations of power in the colonial world have remained largely intact in the post-colonial period. That is, far from achieving independence, the former colonies have now succumbed to more subtle forms of domination.




 Analysis of neo-colonialism and the structures of domination and subordination in the postcolonial period is one of the key features of postcolonialism and so the hyphen seems misplaced from that perspective. It has been suggested that the ‘post’ refers to everything that happens after the colonial intervention so that historically postcolonialism encompasses the colonial period as well as its aftermath. This is one reason why ‘colonial discourse analysis’ is also one of the key sub-fields of postcolonialism. In examining the production and reproduction of discourses produced by and for colonialism, in deconstructing their rationales and habits of mind, in analysing colonial representations of the subjugated peoples, colonial discourse analysis seeks to lay bare the processes through which colonialism was practised culturally as well as materially, and how ideologies justifying colonialism were disseminated and embedded into consciousness. 


Colonial discourse analysis adopts Foucauldian concepts of discourse that conceive of culture as a material practice, and rejects criticism of discourse analysis as thereby privileging cultural critique over material analysis. Others, however, have criticized postcolonialism for privileging the colonial encounter as the central fact in the histories of colonized peoples. This takes for granted the centrality of European experience and posits the experience of the colonized as an adjunct to that. It thereby replicates at the level of analysis precisely that kind of dependency that remains a feature of contemporary neo-colonialism, leading some critics to suggest that postcolonialism is the ‘cultural logic’ of neo-colonialism writ small in the language of the metropolitan academy. Certainly, the theoretical sophistication of post-colonial theory, and its sometimes difficult and opaque language, extends itself to criticism that postcolonialism is an over-elaborate, abstracted and self-indulgent form of cultural analysis that does little to address the politically urgent problems of the formerly colonized world. 


The writings of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, who, along with Said have been characterized as the ‘holy trinity’ of postcolonial theory, raise objections because of their dense style. Yet, particularly in the case of Spivak, this may be seen as a postcolonial strategy of ‘deforming’ the discourse of European knowledge, a discourse that Said has shown to be deeply implicated in colonialism itself.



Ambiguity concerning the temporal scope of postcolonialism is offset by a fair degree of consensus concerning its geographical provenance. Postcolonialism sees modern colonialism as having been global in scope and so it concerns itself with a global agenda, concentrating as much on the former European (or Western) ‘centre’ as the colonial ‘peripheries’. It has extended its concern into debates concerning multiculturalism, diaspora, racism and ethnicity as the mass migrations in the postwar period by formerly colonized peoples have radically transformed the cultures and societies of their erstwhile masters. In addition, a generation of feminist scholars have examined the intersections of gender and sexuality with colonial and post-colonial discourses on race, ethnicity and nation.




00156--Intertexutality /Julia Kristeva/"inter text"

            The term inter textuality popularized especially by Julia Kristeva, is used to signify the multiple ways in which any one literary text is made up of other texts, by means of its open or covert citations and allusions, its repetitions and transformations of the formal and substantive features of earlier texts, or simply its unavoidable participation in the common stock of linguistic, and literary conventions and procedures that are "always already" in place and constitute the discourse into which we are born".
            In Kristeva's formulation, accordingly, any text is in fact an "inter text" - the site of an intersection of numberless other texts, and existing only through its relation to other texts.

00155--Narratology

            Narratology is a branch of structuralism but it has achieved a certain independence from its parent.  Narratology is not the reading and interpretation of individual stories, but the attempt to study the nature of 'story' itself, as a concept and as a cultural practice.
What narratologists do
1)        They look at individual narratives seeking out the recurrent structures which are found within all narratives.
2)        They switch much of their critical attention away from the mere 'content' of the tale, often focusing instead on the teller and the telling.
3)        They take categories derived mainly from the analysis of short narratives and expand and refine them so that they are able to account for the complexities of novel-length narratives.
4)        They counteract the tendency of conventional criticism to foreground character and motive by foregrounding instead action and structure.
5)        They derive much of their reading pleasure and interest from the affinities between all narratives, rather than from the uniqueness and originality of a small number of highly-regarded examples.

00154--What Marxist Critics do.


1)        They make a division between the 'overt' (manifest or surface) and 'covert' (latent or hidden) content of a literary work (much as psychoanalytic critics do) and then relate the covert subject matter of the literary work to basic Marxist themes, such as class struggle, or the progression of society through various historical stages, such as, the transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism.  Thus, the conflicts in King Lear might be read as being 'really' about the conflict of class interest between the rising class (the bourgeoisie) and the falling class (the feudal overlords)
2)        Another method used by Marxist critics is to relate the context of a work to the social-class status of the author.  In such cases an assumption is made (which again is similar to those mode by psychoanalytic critics) that the author is unaware of precisely what he or she is saying or revealing in the text.
3)        A third Marxist method is to explain the nature of a whole literary genre in terms of the social period which 'produced' it.  For instance, The Rise of the Novel, by Ian Watt, relates the growth of the novel in the eighteen century to the expansion of the middle classes during that period.  The novel 'speaks' for this social class, just as, for instance, tragedy 'speaks for' the monarchy and the nobility, and the Ballad 'speaks for' for the rural and semi-urban 'working-class'.
4)        A fourth Marxist practice is to relate the literary work to the social assumptions of the time in which it is 'consumed', a strategy which is used particularly in the later variant of Marxist criticism known as cultural materialism.
5)        A fifth Marxist practice is the 'politicisation of literary form', that is, the claim that literary forms are themselves determined by political circumstances.  For instance, in the view of some critics, literary realism carries with it an implicit validation of conservative social structures: for others, the formal and metrical intricacies of the sonnet and the iambic pentameter are a counterpart of social stability, decorum, and order.

00153--Cultural Materialism

            Is a term, employed by the British neo-Marxist critic Raymond Williams, which has been adopted by a number of other British scholars, especially those concerned with the literature of the Renaissance, to indicate the Marxist orientation of their mode of new historicism - Marxist in that they retain a version of Marx's view of cultural phenomena as a "superstructure" which in the last analysis, is determined by the "material" (that is, economic) "base".  They insist that, whatever the "textuality" of history, a culture and its literary products are always to an important degree conditioned by the material forces and relations of production in their historical era.  They are particularly interested in the political significance, and especially the subversive aspects and effects, of a literary text, not only in its own time, but also in later versions that have been revised for the theatre and the cinema.  Cultural materialists stress that their criticism is itself oriented toward political "intervention" in their own era, in an express "commitment", as Jonathan Dollimore and Allan Sinfield have put it, "to the transformation of a social order which exploits people on grounds of race, gender and class".  (Foreword to Political Shakespeare:  New Essays in Cultural Criticism).'
            Similar views are expressed by those American exponents of the new literary history who are political activists: indeed, some of them claim that if new historicists limit themselves to analysing examples of class dominance and exploitation in literary texts, but stop short of a commitment to remake the present social order, they have been co-opted into "complicity" with the formalist literary criticism that they set out to displace.

00152--Bakhtin Mikhail


            In the 1920s, when Bakhtin was lying the conceptual foundations for the development of his thought, the mainstream of Russian literary theory was dominated by the Russian Formalists.  Like the structuralists after him Bhakhtin agreed with the Formalists' emphasis on language, but he disagreed with two positions fundamental to the Formalists view of literature.  First that the text is merely the sum of its devices, and object crafted by the artist; and, second, that a literary work is to be assessed strictly on its own terms, without reference
            While the Soviet Marxists condemned the Formalists for ignoring the ideological aspects of literature, Bakhtin in turn, resisted the Marxist, tendency to reduce literature to ideology.  "The  study of the verbal art", he insists in 'Dialogic Imagination", "can and must overcome the divorce between an abstract 'formal' approach and equally abstract 'ideological' approach".  In Bakhtin's view, form and idea are of a piece.  The formal aspects of literature are part of its message, and the nature of its message determines the form it assumes.  Further, according to Bakhtin, the ideological atmosphere or the historical milieu in which the work arises has a bearing on its form and content. 
            Such a view is grounded in Bakhtin's dialogic concept of language and literature.  A novel, for example, is neither an isolated artifact nor a static "structured on an uninterrupted mutual interaction with the discourse of life".  The novel, in other words, not only reflects the forces of dialogic exchange but also is itself such a force.  As the embodiment of the  forces of interaction, discourse in the novel revolves around encounters between various voices or ideas.  "The idea begins to live", says Bakhtin in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics "only when it enters into genuine dialogic relationships with other ideas.

00151--What Lacanian critics do?


1)        Like Freudian critics they pay close attention to unconscious motives and feelings, but instead of excavating for those of the author or characters, they search out those of the text itself, uncovering contradictory under currents of meaning, which lie like a subconscious beneath the 'conscious' of the text.  This is another way of defining the process of 'deconstruction'.
2)        They demonstrate the presence in the literary work of Lacanian psychoanalytic symptoms or phases, such as the mirror-stage or the sovereignty of the unconscious. 
3)        They see the literary text as an enactment or demonstration of Lacanian views about language and unconscious, particularly the endemic elusiveness of the signified, and the centrality of the unconscious.  In practice, this results in favaouring the anti-realist test which challenges the conventions literary representation.
4)        They treat the literary text in terms of a series of broader Lacanian orientations, towards such concepts as lack or desire, for instance.

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