Literary Theory 2019

The baby as “homelette”: it spreads out gradually and starts experiencing otherness through separation (little losses/lacks).

The mirror stage (Imaginary): self-recognition, self-idealization, separation and self-estrangement

• Approaching identity from outside àsees the ‘I’ as another
• the Self is also a fictional construct and a misperception with defining characteristics the child does not experience (e.g., coordination, wholeness).
• The ego as narcissistic process whereby we bolster up a fictive sense of unitary selfhood by finding something in the world with which we can identify. 

• Associated with language acquisition
• Mother = 1^strepresentative of the Symbolic order, Father = 2^nd(surpassing her)
• Father signifies law & social regulation
• Language as a system of differences excluding the possibility of presence, generating desire 
• language as desire excludes fulfillment
• Father (objet grand A / Autre) as ideal self suggests the subject’s deficiency

Phallus = Transcendental Signifier (symbol) guaranteeing order and stability of the system

• not the ‘real’ world outside (which is more closely associated with the Symbolic), but that which cannot be conceptualized by the others
• The real marks the state of nature from which we have been forever severed by our entrance into language
• resists possession (also conceptually)
• constitutes trauma: disconnection or unsuccessful sublimation of drives (Freudian ID)
• does not arouse pleasure

Two methods active in dream-work:

1. Condension (Verdichtung): Several dream-thoughts, images or events that are similar are condensed (or combined / compressed) into one image. A single figure can be turned into a collective image, combining often contradictory elements.
-> Metaphoric principle (Saussure/Jakobson)

2. Displacement (Verschiebung): Something that is of little significance in the latent dream-thoughts is moved to the center of the manifest dream-content (and vice versa)
-> The emotion associated with one idea or experience is detached from it and attached to another one.
-> Metonymic principle (Saussure/Jakobson)

- Dreams distort the repressed to avoid the ego’s censorship.

- The distortion needs to be neutralized through analysis.

- positivist attitude to interpretation: Dreams written in ‘code’  -> uncovering true significance by ‘translating’ them.

• radicalizes the Saussurean principles of arbitrariness and difference: Language entails practices of metonymical and metaphorical displacement in a much more radical way than Freud believed.
• The unconscious is composed less of signs– stable meanings – than of signifiers with multiple, contradictory meanings.
• The unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers, whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed.
• This is why Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a ‘sliding of the signified beneath the signifier': 
  slippage of the signified (unconscious, the original desire) under what can be known and talked about (the symbolic order, the chain of signifiers, what we can talk about, the replacement for the original desire) defies knowledge about my unconscious, therefore defies the unity of both in a unified, whole I.
• Access to the Real is practically impossible.

• the Real : the Symbolic ≈ Signified : Signifier.
• The bar separating S/s becomes insurmountable and it is thus impossible to represent the self adequately. 
• Signifier and signified as “distinct orders”, with the signifier merely in transfer
• While Lacan, too, sees a mechanism of metaphor and metonymy at work in dreams, he is much more skeptical than Freud about the possibility of making dreams positively meaningful.
• The impossibility of re-presenting the self adequately: lost in metonymic and metaphoric slippage.
• Lacan rewrites Descartes “I think, therefore I am” as “I am not where I think, and I think where I am not.”
• Important: The signifiers liberation from any obligation to represent the world of real objects.

• In critical theory and deconstruction, phallogocentrism is a neologism coined by Derrida to refer to the privileging of the masculine (phallus) in the construction of meaning in Western culture designating the privileging of masculinity in speech, writing, and thought

• deconstruction of Western philosophy from a female point of view, constructing something new
• Questions the supposedly neutral position of the (male) observer and analyst 
  -> Subjective position!
• Advocates rethinking of the whole idea of what it means to be human: The binary logic (defining it against the other instead of by itself) and the notion of prototype (an idea, not reality) have been an obstacle to this question. How we interpret difference is subject to change.
• Not essentialist: Differences are not set in stone
• Experiencing difference allows us to be part of something bigger than ourselves.

• Critique of Descartes’s cogito: Descartes defines the human by erasing that which makes us human: having a body and relationships with others.
• Human beings do not exist in isolation, but as embodied subjects in relation to other subjects.
• Critique of the single unified male subject of Western philosophy.
• Lacans/Freuds neutrality isn’t really neutral.
• Our awareness of the body is mediated by language and relationships. Conversely, language and relationships and philosophy are equally mediated by the body.
• Gender as the relationship between nature and culture.

• She names mimicry as a possible way for women to subvert the current systematicity. 
• Irigaray argues that parody is a repetition with a difference and helps to prevent the uncritical reiteration of the system. 
• The goal should be a new system instead of ‘simple’ equality in the already existing order. 

• Irigaray analyses the system of kinship, of giving the women of a mans family away to men of another social group (Lévi-Strauss)
• She applies the Marxist concepts of capital and commodity to it. 
• The incest taboo as the centre of cultural organization leads to female exogamy (they are given away) and male endogamy (they stay, give away and maintain). 
• Men play out “hom(m)osexuality” (kinship system) through the bodies of women. The use value of the female body (her means of reproduction) are turned into exchange value (socially determined) and women become a currency (all the same). 
• Thus, women are exchangeable goods that ensure the persistence of the patrilinear line. 

• Genesis of the phallogocentric economy: a result of the exchange of woman, which in turn is a precondition for the market economy to work in the first place.

The way out of phallogocentrism lies in acknowledging the bisexual element. ‘Bisexual’ here is not about being attracted to both sexes, it’s about the presence of each in both.

• Claims a bisexual foundation in both sexes. Repressed homosexuality of the male, in which females are turned into a commodity within male relationships.
• The world is revolving “between men” and is based on trafficking of women.
• Repressing women is a way of repressing the homosexual, because the homosexual would involve a feminine side 

1. (Asexual) bisexuality seeing sexuality as a consequence of a sense of lack created by a division from original wholeness (Ur-myth)
2. True bisexuality is erotic, it is inherent in both man and woman being condition of all invention

-> in a certain way woman is bisexual – man having been trained to aim for glorious phallic monosexuality.

• (in theory) not feminine writing but writing that reflects the basic bisexuality of all humanity.
• antithesis of masculine writing / women’s means of escape
• Challenges women to write themselves out of the world men constructed for women. Put themselves into words (Rosemarie Tong) 
• Problem: Confirms the old dichotomies and an essentialist view of sexuality 

-> paradox: trying to overcome essentialism confirms it. 

shared a sense of identity “constituted of exclusion and nonbelonging” & of thinking and speaking from the margins of France while having been cultured by it

How does the world ‘appear’ to human beings (‘phenomena’ = that which appears) and how do we situate ourselves in a world of appearances?

How is it possible to know anything about the world and about ourselves? What are the terms and conditions of this knowledge?

What aesthetic experience does art afford? What is our imaginative and creative response to art? How does beauty relate to truth? (-> In classical art the two were equated.)

How do we become a self in the world? How do we become a social self? What processes of censorship and division does this entail? How does art relate to and what does it reveal about such processes?

How is the self politicized? How do political structures become common- sensical? Is there a way out of ideology?

• traces the development of the term “literature”: from meaning ‘written’ and ‘literate’, the term comes to mean imaginative writing in a wide sense, then an elevated type of imaginative writing
• from there a matter of taste connected to the sensibility to appreciate this type of writing.
• Williams sees the contemporary concept of literature as a product of an ideologically charged, historical process of redefinition steered by the interests of a rising bourgeois class.
• exclusive rather than inclusive
• sees literature as a product of a particular historical context, but not simply as a mirror of this context. -> His attempt to revise Marx’ reductionist view of literature and culture as being part of a superstructure determined by the base of the means of production (cp. old model).

• Attempt to reconnect literature with history, but to concede it a status of relative autonomy and transgressive force.
• A critique of the pure aestheticism of the New Criticism and the Formalism prevalent in British literature departments in the 1920 and 1930s. 
• Williams sees literature as a shifting human product linked with concepts such as literacy, imagination, taste, and beauty, all of which are inflected by socio-historical conditions and therefore subject to change.

• 18th century: “culture” related with civilization / is even used as a synonym for it. 

-> linked to human development and progress.

• Starts to be used to indicate a particular form of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general. In Romanticism, this develops into an identification of national culture and local traditions.

• forms the basis for a rise of nationalism

• The works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity. This use comes relatively late, but is related to the first usage which relates culture to civilization and the notion of progress. 

-> most widespread use today: culture is music, literature, painting and sculpture, theatre and film.

• While society and community are assemblages of people, culture is an assemblage of imaginings and meanings – of how human beings imagine and conceive their existence in this world.
• symbolic representation
• ideological
• The imaginings and meanings that form culture can never be fixed or solidified; they remain subject of negotiations and may be dismantled.

• Competing interests lead to disputes and negotiations of meaning. 
  -> Relevant for new historicism and the negotiations between discourses
• Williams’ distinction between dominant culture vs. residual elements (remnants of an older, obsolete culture) and emergent elements that may oppose the dominant culture (traces of a dawning culture).
• Culture does notform a unified whole.

• Distinction into particular cultures with its own system of meanings
• Each individual belongs to different such particular cultures and behaves in accordance to its rules (what Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘habitus’)
• Culture does not form a unified whole.

• proliferation of discourses through wide reach of media
• homogenizing vs. niche markets
• Media “mediate” meanings that exist not just “out there”, but that are implicated in the way we make sense of things and of ourselves.

Cf. Lewis: “Culture is best understood as the process of meaning-making within a given social group.”

• Explanation for why the Fascist movement was so popular among farmers and workers against what seemed to be their best interest
• Failure of Marx’s theory that predicted the uprising of the working class.
• Hegemony means ‘domination’, but Gramsci realized that, rather than by brute force, the domination of Mussolini’s Fascist government worked in more subtle ways: by creating consensus.
• Through the manipulation of language, culture, morality, common sense, hegemony ‘naturalizes’ what are man-made structures of domination.
• The power of the dominant class is by no means stable. Hegemony of the ruling class is always at risk of being destabilized.
• Gramsci refines Marx’ crude definition of ideology as ‘false consciousness’. The concept of hegemony will be further developed by Louis Althusser.

To see through these machinations and to educate the working classes about them is the task of the “organic intellectual”.

• The ‘organic intellectual’ is somebody who is intellectually superior to the working class,but at the same time able to retain the ties to them, and is not being lured away by the seductions of either political poweror the ivory tower (cf. Stuart Hall)
• Gramsci was aware of the risk of patronizing the proletariat and of the dangers involved.

• Provides a historical inventory of the dynamics and changes within the leftist paradigm of British cultural theory.
• Foregrounds the very problem of the ‘organic’ intellectual: theoretical, intellectual work vs. practical political work
• Influenced by Gramsci and Williams, he defines hegemony not as a homologic realm of control and determination, but as an arena of conflicting interests, coalitions, and struggles.
• Criticizes the rigidity and “the profound Eurocentrism of Marxist theory”
• The “organic intellectual” must work on two fronts: be at the very forefront of theory and transmit those ideas beyond the intellectual class.

-> Social responsibility of the intellectual: Do the thinking with rather than for the outsiders of academia.

• Main intent: to allow the literary text to ‘recover its histories’
• practicing theory on canonical texts which continue to be the focus of massive amounts of academic attention ->  prominent national and cultural icons (e.g., Shakespeare!)
• “cultural”: includes all forms of culture (cp. Williams’ definition)
  “materialism” vs. idealism: belief that culture cannot transcend the material forces and relations of production -> adapted Marxist position
• Strongly influenced by Raymond Williams.
• Uses Williams’ concept of “structures of feeling”

• concerned with ‘meanings and values as they are lived and felt’.
• often antagonistic both to explicit systems of values and beliefs, and to the dominant ideologies within a society.
• characteristically found in literature, opposing the status quo
  e.g. the moral values conveyed in Dickens’ novels represent human structures of feeling which oppose Victorian commercial and materialist values.
   
• Williams used the concept to problematize (though not refute) Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony. Hegemony, which can be thought of as either ‘common sense’ or the dominant way of thinking in a particular time and place, can never be total, Williams argued, there must always be an inner dynamic by means of which new formations of thought emerge.
• Structure of feeling refers to the different ways of thinking vying to emerge at any one time in history. It appears in the gap between the official discourse of policy and regulations, the popular response to official discourse and its appropriation in literary and other cultural texts.

• Term coined by Stephen Greenblatt (but not only him)
• Ostensibly refuses to privilege the literary text.  
• parallel reading of literary and non-literary texts
• Clear privileging of literary texts despite claims to the contrary.
• Characterized by a combined interest in “the textuality of history & the historicity of texts” (Montrose)
• Literature seen as socially-produced and socially productive (revision of Marxist model)
• history-as-text
• cp. Derrida: “there is no outside text”
• historicist vs. historical orientation: historical events considered to be irrevocably lost; all we are left with are texts.

Everything about the past that is recorded as text is “thrice-processed”:

(1) through the ideology/outlook/discursive practices of its own time

(2) through those of our time

(3) through the distorting web of language itself.

• All a new historicist reading can offer is a permutation. The aim then is not to represent the past as it really was, but to present a new reality by re-situating it.
• New Historicism involves “an intensified willingness to read all of the textual traces of the past with the attention traditionally conferred only on literary texts.” (Greenblatt)

Historical documents are co-texts rather than contexts.

• Anti-establishmentin orientation
• Strong focus on Renaissance literature 
  -> theatrical culture - absolutist state
• Stateas all-powerful and all-seeing like Bentham’s Panopticon-prison (cf. Foucault)
• maintains its surveillance not by physical force and intimidation, but by the power of its ‘discursive practices’ (Foucault)
• cp. Gramsci’s concept of ‘hegemony’
• Discourse = ‘mental set’ / ideology which encloses the thinking of all members of a given society
• A great deal of interpretive weight is typically placed on a single non-literary co-text.
• Clear privileging of literary texts despite claims against the contrary.
• Less obviously political than other Marxist schools.