Literary Theory 2019
by Dr. Ladina Bezzola / Dr. Thomas Claviez
by Dr. Ladina Bezzola / Dr. Thomas Claviez
Set of flashcards Details
Flashcards | 99 |
---|---|
Language | English |
Category | Literature |
Level | University |
Created / Updated | 12.12.2019 / 15.11.2021 |
Weblink |
https://card2brain.ch/box/20191212_literary_theory_2019
|
Embed |
<iframe src="https://card2brain.ch/box/20191212_literary_theory_2019/embed" width="780" height="150" scrolling="no" frameborder="0"></iframe>
|
epistemology
How is it possible to know anything about the world and about ourselves? What are the terms and conditions of this knowledge?
aesthetics
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.)
psychology
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?
culture, power relations, ideological indoctrination
Marxism
How is the self politicized? How do political structures become common- sensical? Is there a way out of ideology?
Raymond Williams
Main Points
- 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).
Raymond Williams
‘New’ left view of culture
- 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.
Raymond Williams
Three Culture(s)
- 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.
Jeff Lewis
Culture is an assemblage of imaginings and meanings
that may be consonant, disjunctive, overlapping, contentious, continuous or discontinuous.
These assemblages may operate through a wide variety of human social groupings and social practices.
In contemporary culture these experiences of imagining and meaning-making are intensified through the proliferation of mass media images and information.
- 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.”
Gramsci
Hegemony
- 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”.
Grasmci
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.
Stuart Hall
Main Points
- 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.
Jonathan Dollimore, Alan Sinfield
Cultural materialism
- 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”
Raymond Williams
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.
New Historicism
- 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.
New Historicism
Method
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.
New Historicism
Orientation / Focus
- 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.
Old historicism vs New historicism
- Old historicism: literary text in the foreground; historical context in the background
- New historicism: Different text types are given equal weight and used to supplement and interrogate each other
Stephen Greenblatt
Poetics of culture & social energy
- Culture as a heterogeneous network. The aim of the new historicist critic is the inquiry into the relations between distinct cultural practices
- make visible the poetics of culture that underlies these relations.
- Juxtaposition of literary works with other discourses (juridical, economic, medical, philosophical, social, etc.) to show how these ‘language games’
Similar to Jauss, Greenblatt emphasizes that the aesthetic value of a work of art is constituted through a dialogue between it and its readers.
What Greenblatt adds to this is the concept of social energy, that replaces Jauss' emphasis of the quality of literary ”newness” or innovation.
- “The ’life’ that literary works seem to possess long after the death of the author / of the culture for which the author wrote is the historical consequence, however transformed and refashioned, of the social energy initially encoded in those works. ... I want to understand the negotiations through which works of art obtain and amplify such powerful energy” (499).
Cultural Materialism
vs New historicism
- British vs American
- More optimistic in tendency: focus on opposition to / intervention in dominant culture
vs More pessimistic about the possibility of political intervention - Uses the past to ‘read’ the present (e.g. primary focus on Shakespeare’s fetishistic role as national icon)
vs Radical skepticism about the possibility of attaining secure knowledge
-> post-structuralist influence - Often analyzes modern documents
vs Situates the literary text in the political situation of its own day
Postcolonialism
- Postcolonial theory is concerned withexplaining the political, aesthetic, economic, historical, and social impact of European colonial rule around the world in the 18th through the 20th century.
- Claim: The world we inhabit can only be understood in relation to the history of imperialism and colonial rule. European history, philosophy, literature are inextricably connected to this history.
- Postcolonial: suggests ‘after’ the colonial era, but doesn’t mean that colonialism is over.
-> Lingering forms of colonial authority. - To put it differently, former colonies that have acquired their independence are still exploited by western countries.
Postcolonialism: focal questions
- Are the crises of the 3rd world always to be understood in terms of coloniality?
- Can the social, psychological, political etc. theories developed in and about the West be transferred to the former colonies? If we approach the former colonies differently, do we keep ‘othering’ them?
- What significance / importance does postcolonial identity have in light of postmodern deconstruction of the concept?
- The feminist critic bell hookscounters: "It‘s all right and nice giving up your identity – when you got one."
-> is the ethnic voice not as solid as we had hoped? - Poststructuralism and identity critique as important starting points for poststructuralist criticism.Problem: They, too, are products of Western debates.
Frantz Fanon
- One of the earliest and most influential postcolonialist thinkers
- His book The Wretched of the Earth served as a kind of blueprint for later postcolonial criticism. It had a great impact on the American civil rights movement and on African anticolonial writers.
- Trained psychoanalyst. Takes a psychoanalytic approach to culture.
- Cp. the beginning of chapter “Colonial War and Mental Disorders” in The Wretched of the Earth: “Because it is a systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask the question constantly: ‘In reality, who am I?’”
Fanon
Defining national identity without nationalism
- How can a postcolonial national consciousness be developed w/o falling into (isolationist) nationalism?
- How can a national consciousness be “the all-embracing crystallization of the innermost hopes of the whole people” rather than reflecting the aspirations of the “underdeveloped middle class”?
- Influenced by Marxism, Fanon is aware of its Eurocentric roots (cp. Stuart Hall).
-> Requires modification
Fanon
The role of the middle class
- Sadly, the mission of the local, degenerate bourgeoisie is not to transform the nation. It is on the line between the nation and a rampant capitalism, masked as neo-colonialism.
- Fanon castigates the national bourgeoisie for lacking the characteristics that were responsible for colonialism in the first place!
- Rather than acting in an “organic” way (cp. Gramsci), the local middle class feels more affiliation with the former colonizers class and actually prolongs the hegemony of the colonizers, becoming the overseers of their old colonial masters.
- This means: instead of funding the new and takings risks, the middle class overtakes the old which prolongs the hegemony (dominance) of colonialism
Fanon
Two dangers in the development of national unity
1. extreme localism: “re-tribalisation” of Africa (1578)
2. The idea of African unity: “African unity, that vague formula, yet one to which the men and women were passionately attached, and whose operative value served to bring immense pressure to bear on colonialism, African unity takes off that mask and crumbles into regionalism inside the hollow shell of nationality itself” (1583).
It complicates the development of national unity is the fact that Africa, as a very diverse continent, is home to many different tribes. Therefore, there is the danger of re- tribalization which makes it extremely difficult for tribes to think in similar ways (e.g. in terms of a nation-wide economy).
Too Cosmoplitan - panafrican transcending boundaries, want to take on european culture, identity is split, there are multiple cultures
OR
Too local - retribalisation
Fanon
The role of culture
Fanon is aware of how important culture is to forge a nation (Marx neglects role of culture)
“Every effort is made to bring the colonized person to admit the inferiority of his culture, which has been transformed into instinctive patterns of behavior, to recognize the unreality of this ‘nation,’ and, in the last extreme, the confused and imperfect character of his own biological structure... Within the framework of colonial domination there is not and there will never be such phenomena as new cultural departures or changes in the national culture” (1587).
the “frenzied fashion” in which the intellectual takes on the culture of the occupying power
vs.
the stereotyped formalism of the uneducated masses
- “On National Culture” is the fourth chapter of The Wretched of the Earth.
- The section deals with the legitimacy of the claims of Nation which Fanon draws a link between nationalism and culture.
- Native intellectuals are drawn to the idea of a universal black culture because they learned to value universalism in their European-focused educations: “The native intellectual will try to make European culture his own.”
- Fanon sees becoming a Europhile native intellectual as attractive but doomed.
- According to Fanon, rather than imitate European culture or promote a global black culture, native intellectuals must realize their culture is national.
- Aural storytellers can create a new form of culture, but it has been suppressed by colonialism (Marx argued that art belongs to the superstructure and cannot transcend its base... But storytellers do the transcend base).
Fanon
Envisioning a new culture
- Cultural emancipation is required. New culture must be liberated to be “alive” again.
- “The struggle for freedom does not give back to the national culture its former value and shapes; this struggle which aims at a fundamentally different set of relations between men cannot leave intact either the form or the content of the people‘s culture. After the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonized man.”(1592)
- In view of the detrimental state of the educated middle class it is not clear who can bring this cultural renewal about. -> “small number of honest intellectuals” and “civil servants” (1584)
- "combat literature": a writing that calls upon the people to undertake the struggle against the colonial oppressor. Fanon uses the example of Algerian storytellers changing the content and narration of their traditional stories to reflect the present moment of struggle against French colonial rule
Fanon
Romantic vision of nationalism
Building a nation + inter-national consciousness = contradiction
Wretched of the earth - Proletariat supposed to build a nation
● scars, oppression, No education / resources -> connected to Foucault's concept of power and knowledge
- “The nation gathers together the various indispensable elements necessary for the creation of a culture, those elements which alone can give it credibility, validity, life, and creative power. In the same way it is its national character that will make such a culture open to other cultures and which will enable it to influence and permeate other cultures” (1592).
- This conjunction of the national and the international seems unrealistic.
- At the same time, it seems smug and patronizing from a first world-perspective to insist on deconstructing the notion of national consciousness.
Gloria Anzaldua
Main Points
- 7thgeneration chicana focusing on ethnic and sexual identity which have both been suppressed
- Rejection & negation of Chicano/as
- Stolen land, personhood, self-respect
- Fear, distance, contempt of Gringos
- Mexico as a double: shadow of the US, doppelganger of the Gringo’s psyche
- Negotiates between wanting to have an identity and not being constrained by it
The colonizers have projected upon the colonized what is other in themselves. Otherness is ‘outsourced’ to cleanse one’s identity: Forbidden desires, unacknowledged fears and taboos are projected upon the other.
Anzaldua
Identity complications
& Chicano machismo
- She has European / authochthonous roots and is lesbian in macho chicano culture
- Sexuality is marginalised
- The machismo is a response to the deprivation & suppression of Chicano culture: deep sense of racial shame
(women are safety valves to let go of the frustrations of colonizations for men)
- Oppression becomes fear which becomes intolerance / violence
How can you strip off an identity if you don’t have one?
If you have an identity imposed on you by colonizers, you are just shedding the identity of the colonizer, you must create your own identity to shed it and create the new identity
Anzaldua
Embracing hybridity
- Anzaldúa tries to turn hybridity into something fruitful without ignoring the suffering that it also entails.
- Attempt to abolish the very norms that have defined what counts as normal, authentic, true.
- Need for a new masculinity (cp Cixous?)
- “Men, even more than women, are fettered to gender roles. Women at least have had the guts to break out of bondage. Only gay men have had the courage to expose themselves to the woman inside them and to challenge the current masculinity.”
- The border / La frontera between Mexico and the US serves as metaphor for her existence and experience.
- Argues against “identity politics” as the concept of identity has normative aspects: stability, authenticity
- At the same time: deep desire for just this stability
Anzaldua
Global race – Mestizaje
- Anzaldúa advocates a “global race” (mestizaje), a cosmic race that includes and transcends all races. This new mestiza consciousness, in her view, would also have to be “una conciencia de mujer” (2212)
- Borderland existence is defined as both a burden and an opportunity, a pathology that defies of norms.
- Cp. Cixous and Irigaray: femininity as openness toward the other, “Deconstruct, construct.”
- Before identity can be compromised and deconstructed, made to open toward others, it first needs to be created and reclaimed
Cosmic race, mestizaje, global race:
Cosmopolitan (transcends all races)
No exclusion
Female consciousness (danger of essentialism): exists in men and women
Painful and enriching
Moves between identities and criticizes both
Turning into an alternative norm that
Need to be flexible
Requires a tolerance (identities become contradictory)
Edward Said
- Born into Palestine before Israel in 1947. Educated in Egypt and the United States.
- Often considered the founder of postcolonial theory in the Humanities.
- His influential book Orientalism (1978) analyzes the processes of transference and projection involved in imagining the ‘other’, in this case the version of the Orient created by French and British colonizers in the later 18th and 19th c.
- Repertory of images that keep coming up when we think of the East and that make it difficult or impossible to address the subject freely: sensual women, mystery, despotism, monsters
- Variety of sources: cp. New historicism (also: Foucault and Gramsci as important influences)
Said
Orient vs. Occident
- “The Orient is almost a European invention” (1991).
- However, Said’s point is not that Orientalism constitutes a bunch of lies, but that it forms an artificially coherent discourse that informs the political domination of the Orient through the West.
- “Orientalism ... is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different world.”
Said
Orientalism as discourse
On Foucault, Gramsci
- “(…)Without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient.”
► Foucault’s concept of discourse, but with the belief in “the determining imprint of individual writers” on discourse formation (2008) vs. Foucault’s contention that authors aren’t authorities, but rather vessels of discourse.
- Orientalism is “not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment.” (1995)
► Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as cultural leadership: the image of the Other is created and used to keep the colonized in place.
- The discourse is shaped by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what ’we’ do and what ’they’ cannot do or understand as ’we’ do)”
Homi Bhabha
Biography
- Educated in Mumbai and Oxford
- One of the most prominent thinkers of postcolonialism
- Important publications: Nation and Narration, The Location of Culture
- It is useful to consider his relation to Said in terms of a trajectory (Verlauf).
Cp. Elaine Showalter’s distinction between two different phases of criticism as reference for Bhabha:
(1) feminist criticism as treatment of women in literature by men vs.
(2) focus on the works by women themselves.
Bhabha
Phases
Cp. Said
► Said’s Orientalism as phase 1
► Bhabha’s focus on the subject-position of the colonized as phase 2.
- At the same time, he doesn’t exclude the subject position of the colonizer because he sees the two as radically interrelated.
- Said’s structuralist vs. Bhabha’s poststructuralist approach: Said primarily concerned with binary opposition of central self and decentralized other. Bhabha criticizes binarism, arguing that positions are more ambivalent.
Bhabha
On Said and Hegel’s master-slave fable
- Master and slave exist in a structure of mutuality to each other: without slave no master and vice versa.
- Fable of class reversal: The slave to some extent controls the master in as much as the latter depends on him for his skills. The situation continues to reverse itself.
- Saussurian binarism: We can know things only negatively, never positively.
- Orientalism and Western identity: Europeans know themselves negatively as the not-other.
- Bhabha criticises Said’s use of Hegel’s master-slave opposition; where in Saussurian terms each of the opposites only “mean” by opposition to the other (in a negative way). Instead, Bhabha suggests the concept of ambivalence.
Bhabha
Ambivalence (of Colonization)
- Describes both the attitude of the colonizer and the colonized.
- Colonizer: 2 phases of historical experience:
1. Warren Hastings: “going native” (18th century): Local administrators are encouraged to learn everything about the languages and the customs of the natives while keeping an iron grip on them.
2. Charles Grant: missionary phase (19th century): insists on instilling standards of Englishness in the natives.
- Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “The Minute of Indian Education” (1835): education of Indians strictly acc. to English model
- Colonized: co-optation (Indian missionary Anud Messeh) vs. hybridity (Bible-readers under the tree, who accept Christianity on their own terms)
- Bhabha accredits neither a stable and impermeable identity, the colonised are thus never completely and utterly under the authority of the coloniser, but both identities intrude into each other.
- Thus, hybridity takes away the colonised from their own culture and puts them in an in-between space.
- With this approach, Bhabha combines Derrida’s notion of différance with the concept of disfigurement (Freud), as he deconstructs the identity of English authenticity.
Bhabha
Hybridity
- Hybridity as “double consciousness” of the colonized hovering between complete submission to authority (while still including the difference of displacement) and submission on one’s own terms.
- The concept of hybridity assumes that when we talk about colonizers and colonized, we are not thinking about two different and impermeable identities.
-> Bhabha complicates Said’s binary structure. - Not just distinction between the (English) norm and the ‘other’, but hybridity calls the very concept of (stable) identity into question.
- The ‘presence’ of colonial power can never be assumed. It can only be made visible through “effects” and “traces”.
- It also cannot be “original” because it is marked by belatedness and displacement, dislocation, repetition.
-> Bhabha combines Derrida’s idea of différance with Freud’s concept of Entstellung (disfigurement) from his analysis of dream-work - Hybridity develops in the blanks and fissures created through dislocation.