Literary Criticism

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Literary Criticism

• Class 7

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• Michel Foucault
• (1926-1984)

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• Influences post-structuralism, New Historicism,
  cultural studies, queer theory, literature and
  medicine, institutional bases of writers and
  critics, identity formation. (Norton 1615)
• Edward Said Orientalism, or Western discourse of
  the East

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• 1961 Madness and Civilization
• 1963 The Birth of the Clinic
• 1966 The Order of Things
• 1969 The Archaeology of Knowledge
• 1975 Discipline and Punish The Birth of the
  Prison
• 1976 The History of Sexuality

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• Key Terms

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Discourse (1)

• Briefly, language as it is used by and within
  various constituencies (the law, medicine, the
  church, for example) for purposes to do with
  power relationships between people.
• (Wolfreys 65)
• Discourse ideology in action
• (Dobie 170)

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Discourse (2)

• Human subjectivity and identity itself is
  produced out of various discursive formations as
  a result of the subjects entry into language.
• Language is always already shot through and
  informed by figurations and encryptions of power
  . . . relationships and networks.
  (Wolfreys 66)

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Discourse (3)

• Through discourse, knowledge power.
• Discourse disposes it puts everything in its
  place. Modern power penetrates everywhere, giving
  a specific name to every possible variant of
  human action so as to master the world and leave
  nothing unexamined, unknown, uncatalogued.
  (Norton 1619)

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Discursive Formation

• The principle of dispersion and redistribution
  of discourse
• A structurally interactive flow serving,
  inescapably, a political or ideological function
  
• (Wolfreys 69)

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Episteme

• Deep-rooted, unconscious structures for
  organizing knowledge.
• (Norton 1616)
• The rules and constraints outside which
  individuals cannot think or speak without running
  the risk of being excluded or silenced.
• (Dobie 170)

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Genealogy (1)

• Describing the present through an analysis of the
  forces that created it. (Norton 1616)
•  Genealogy does not claim to be more true than
  institutionalized knowledge, but merely to be the
  missing part of the puzzle. 
• http//www.california.com/rathbone/foucau10.
  htm

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Genealogy (2)

• It works by isolating the central components of
  some current day political mechanism and then
  traces it back to its historical roots. These
  historical roots are visible to us only through
  two separate bodies of genealogical knowledge
  the dissenting opinions and theories that did not
  become the established and the local beliefs and
  understandings. http//www.california.com/rathbon
  e/foucau10.htm

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Power

• Depersonalized Power does not belong to anyone,
  nor does it all emanate from one specific
  location, such as the state.
• Decentered Rather, power is diffused throughout
  the capillaries (???) of the social system.
• 
  (Norton 1618)

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Power/Knowledge

• The production of knowledge is wedded to
  productive power. Modern power requires
  increasingly narrow categories through which it
  analyzes, differentiates, identifies, and
  administers individuals. (Norton 1620)

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Body Politics

• Power operates through the daily disciplines and
  routines to which bodies are subjected.
  (Norton 1618)

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Why is Foucault a post-structuralist?

• By focusing on the larger systematic social
  forces, Foucault highlights the social
  construction of the subject and thereby
  deconstructs the self.
  (Norton 1617)

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Anti-humanism

• He objects to humanism, esp. its claim that we
  are individuals with unique nature, possessing
  coherent interior identities, motives, desires,
  and conscious intentions.
• (Norton 1617)

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Counter-enlightenment

• Connected the rise of the individual with a
  tremendous decrease in freedom.
• In each case, an institution demands, examines
  and watches over all subjects, and punishes
  deviants.
• Such a society is prisonlike, or carceral.
• (Norton
  1618)

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Anti-Marxism

• Foucault contends that since power operates in
  innumerable places and taking many different
  forms, there is no single privileged place for
  the political activist to go to work, no locus of
  power whose removal will bring the whole system
  tumbling down. (Norton 1618)

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New Historicism (1)

• New Historicism gives equal weighting to
  literary and non-literary material (Barry 174).
• It is a mode of study in which literary and
  non-literary texts are given equal weight and
  constantly inform or interrogate each other
  (Barry 172).

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New Historicism (2)

• Old Historicism
• (1) Were the characters based on real people?
• (2) Do the events recounted in the text
  re-create experiences from the authors life?
• (3) Does the text capture the spirit of the
  times accurately? (Dobie 167)

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New Historicism (3)

• New Historicism
• How does the text reveal and comment on the
  disparate discourses of the culture it depicts?
  (Dobie 167)

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Food for Thought (1)

• What did you learn in kindergarten?

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Food for Thought (2)

• What are you told to do when you go to the
  hospital?

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Food for Thought (3)

• Foucault argues that modern societies intervene
  from day one to shape, train, and normalize
  individuals (Norton 1618). Do you agree? What
  social institutions have been involved in doing
  this to you?

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Food for Thought (4)

• What information would you hold back from your CC
  teacher? How about your boss?

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Questions to Ask of a Text (1)

• What various discourses do you meet in the text?
• Which ones are powerful?
• Which represent the experience of people who have
  traditionally been overlooked, marginalized, or
  misrepresented?
• What conflicts do you discern in the text between
  the discourse of the powerful and that of the
  powerless? (Dobie 180)

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Questions to Ask of a Text (2)

• What are the social rules observed in the text?
• Is the text critical of them? Or does it treat
  them as models of behavior?
• How does this text support or challenge the
  values, beliefs, and/or practices of the culture
  it depicts?
• How does the ideological stance imply about the
  culture it depicts, that of the authors time,
  and that of subsequent periods? (Dobie 180)

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• Michel Foucault
• The Carceral.
• Discipline and Punish
• The Birth of the Prison.

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Jeremy Bentham's nineteenth-century prisonThe
"Panopticon"
http//www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/new
historicism/modules/foucaultcarceralmainframe.html

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Prison cell
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Prison school
http//www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/new
historicism/modules/foucaultcarceralmainframe.html

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(Fludernik 44)
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References

• Dobie, Ann B. Theory into Practice.
  Thomson/Heinle, 2002.
• Fludernik, Monica. Carceral Topography
  Spatiality, Liminality, and Corporeal in the
  Literary Prison.Textual Practice, 1999 Spring
  13 (1) 43-77.
• Leitch, Vincent B, ed. The Norton Anthology of
  Theory and Criticism. 2001.
• Wolfreys, Julian. Critical Keywords in Literary
  and Cultural Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.