Theory and Criticism

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Theory and Criticism
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Literary theories

• Changes in literary theories according to
  philosophical framework of time
• Changes in approaches to literature
• Some theories foreground author, others the
  reader and text, others text only, others text as
  embedded in socio-historical contexts

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Positivism / Biographical approach

• Authorial intention
• Originated in 19th century
• Records facts about authors life and times and
  sees them as cause/condition for text
• Grounds ambiguous literary text in palpable
  facts, reduces literature to effect of reality
• Underestimates that authors intention and aims
  surpass authors subjective experience
• Looks at stages of literary production of text
  and draws conclusion about the conscious shaping
  of text
• Compares authors life with text and suggests
  cause-effect-relation between the two

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Objective Hermeneutics

• Theory of interpretation focuses on
  understanding of text
• Places author in historical context and
  foregrounds humanist understanding of
  individuals motivation
• E.D. Hirsch claims that authors intention gives
  text a timeless meaning
• Searches for authorial intention and fixed
  meaning in text (other theories say this is
  intentional fallacy! because readers
  understanding might be taken as authors
  intention)
• However, fixed meaning of text does not
  correspond with significance for reader

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Psychoanalysis

• Freud decentering of conscious self superego,
  id, ego (conscience, consciousness, unconscious)
• Oedipus complex (child/son identifies with
  father, rivals with him for love of mother)
• Electra complex (child/daughter identifies with
  mother and rivals with her for love of father)
• penis envy penis as symbolic of norm and power
  in a patriarchal model of gender,
• girls phantasy it was castrated, envies and
  desires penis
• anxiety of castration boy sees that some
  individuals do not have penis, fear to lose ones
  own, maybe that father will punish him for his
  desire for mother
• ?phallocentric thinking (Luce Irigaray)
  malenorm, femalelack, deficit
• Repressed desires because of confining social
  norms

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Psychoanalysis

• Traumdeutung literature functions like
  dreams?overt meaning on surface of text conceals
  latent, covert meanings hidden in text
• Two patterns of texts/dreams
• Condensation combines and concentrates multiple
  experiences in complex images
• Displacement deferred meaning, one thing/meaning
  is substituted by another, both closely related

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Psychoanalysis

• Lacan language acquirement provides
  (patriarchal) symbolic order
• identity formation in mirror stage through
  separation of self from its other (mirror image)
• This split between I and me, self and
  m/other, consciousness and subconsciousness
  generates desire for unitygtimpossiblegtlack and
  absence of of unity, harmony are central features
  of identity
• Oedipus/Electra complex are derived from
  classical fiction this understanding has to
  betransported to the order of the symbolic
• father is a symbolic function of power (der große
  Andere), other authority figures can appear as
  this father figure (police men, clergy, teachers)
  child has to submit to this power and at the same
  time strives for it it is included in symbolical
  order of society, language

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New Criticism

• Intrinsic approach (werkimmanent)
• Against authors meaning approach
• Concentrate on text itself and its aesthetic
  value independent of authorial intention,
  sociopolitical context, and readers response
• Close reading meticulous analysis of form and
  content, connotative meanings
• Denotation primary meaning
• Connotation secondary meaning, associations
• Criticism too narrow to understand texts beyond
  poetic quality, avoid historical, cultural
  contexts of authors, readers

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Formalism/ Structuralism/ Semiotics

• Russian Formalism ignored authorial intention,
  sociopolitical context, and readers response
• Author degraded from genius to craftsperson
  that works with artistic devices
• Structuralism/ Semiotics literature is
  linguistic system, system of signs
• Focus on how signs in text and society are
  encoded and decoded
• Concentration on textual structures, binary
  oppositions
• Close textual analysis and/or analysing texts
  based on cultural systems
• Form follows function/ form supports content
• Genette narrative voice/focalization,
  heterodiegetic/homodiegetic voice

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Formalism/ Structuralism/ Semiotics

• Viktor Shklovsky literary texts as deviation
  from conventional rules of language
• Literature has ordinary content from life
  experiences
• Interest in how this ordinary content is
  transmitted, literature as system of stylistic
  devices (ordinary/poetic language and everyday
  topics)
• Interest in metafictional, self-referential texts
  that foreground constructedness of text and
  literary devices

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Poststructuralism

• Roland Barthes death of the authorgtbirth of the
  reader
• Against god-like status of authors, mere
  craftspeople
• There are no new texts, text consist of mere
  authorial reflection of previously existing
  texts, of socio-political influencesgt no
  aesthetic agency of author
• Reader is important to shape text
• Reader employs cultural codes, system of
  associated commonplaces, Vorwissen to construct
  meaning of textgt endless meanings because of
  intertextuality and various readers
• intertextuality

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Poststructuralism

• Jacques Derrida deconstruction
• We perceive world as opposites black/white,
  civilized/barbarian, male/female, cause/effect,
  beginning/end, conscious/unconscious,
  presence/absence, speech/writing, culture/nature,
  heaven/earth (opposites are necessary to define
  the other these dichotomies are latently
  hierarchical, privileging the first)
• Objective is to blur the boundaries of such
  oppositions and challenge the implied hierarchies
• Concept of deferred presence the signified
  concept is never present in itself every
  concept is necessarily inscribed in a chain
  system, within which it refers to another and to
  other concepts (Derrida, Différance).

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Poststructuralism

• Meaning of words differ and defergt endless chain
  of signifiersgt endless meanings, you cant pin
  down the precise meaning of a word
• There is no homogeneous/universal meaning of a
  text texts are not unified from beginning to end
  or organized around a single center
• Literary analysis reads text against the grain of
  obvious meaning, looks for contradictions in
  text, may come up with contradictory readings of
  a text
• reading a text is to find meaning, find its error
  and new reading, find error/contradiction/incohere
  nce in thatad infinitum this process renders
  illumination throughout the various stages of
  readings
• criticism no coherent, conclusive
  interpretation destructive and arbitrary reveal
  weaknesses and contradictions of texts show
  what a text does not do instead of what it does

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Marxism and Cultural Materialism

• Marx/Engels Base/Superstructure
• Not consciousness determines life but life
  determines consciousness (material world
  conditions human mind, materialistic not
  idealistic approach)
• Analysis/criticism of capitalism, focus on
  functionality/value of individuals/things,
  analysis of power structures, who owns means of
  (literary) production?, who is exploited?, who
  benefits?
• Ideology neutral or falsifying, collectively
  held systems of ideas and beliefs that interpret
  the world (deceptive ideologies exprexx interests
  of those in power and legitimize the status quo)
• Literature expresses particular ideology or is
  potential criticism of ideology
• Stresses ideological function of literature over
  aesthetic value

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Marxism and Cultural Materialism

• Raymond Williams cultural materialism locates
  text in its material contexts, and enhances the
  relevance of language, communication, culture
• There are dominant and oppositional cultural
  forces

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New Historicism

• Informed by poststructuralism, reader-response
  theory, feminist, cultural, Marxist criticism
• Breaks down barriers between literature, history,
  social sciences
• But history is not linear and progressive
  contradiction between past and historiographys
  interpretation of past history as fictiongt
  cannot be background of literature, as itself it
  is fiction
• Michelle Foucault thought and knowledge form and
  are formed in discourses
• Discourses regulate our framework of thought
• Discourses establish authorities, fields of
  knowledge, claims to power
• Will to truth gt will to power
• relationship between knowledge and power (who
  creates/ shapes/ defines knowledge and
  discourse?)
• Power is a system of forces

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New Historicism

• Literary and non-literary texts are shaped by
  dynamic network of interdependent cultural
  discourses and social practices
• Stephen Greenblatt cultural poetics
• Combines postructuralist thought about
  heterogeneous meaning of texts with Marxist ideas
  and criticism (who owns means of (literary)
  production, whose voice is expressed?, whose
  voice is silenced?)
• Field of energy between text and historical
  eventgt show the historicity of texts and the
  textuality of history
• Todorov/ Bakhtin dialogism
• "'The most important feature of the utterance
  ... is its dialogism' or the 'intertextual
  dimension,' which means that 'all discourse is in
  dialogue with prior discourses on the same
  subject. ... There is no utterance without
  relation to other utterances'" (Todorov on
  Bakhtins ideas).
• "no utterance in general can be attributed to
  the speaker exclusively it is the product of the
  interaction of the interlocutors ... the whole
  complex situation in which it has
  occurred(Voloshinov).

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Feminism and Gender Theory

• Rediscovering the works of women writers
  swallowed up, silenced by male discourses
• Revisit male texts and analyze patriarchal
  discourse and patriarchal gender roles that serve
  to oppress, discriminate women
• differentiate between (biological) sex and
  (socially constructed) gender
• Women writers in postcolonial societies,
  autobiographical writings, lesbian/ queer texts,
  constructedness of femininity
• French feminists draw on psychoanalysis
• language is male-dominated and reflects
  oppsitional binaries grounded in male/female
• Lécriture féminine womens writing and female
  language (rhythmic and unifying, fluid, chaotic)
  as opposed to male language (rational, logical)
• Female language generates from body male
  language separates body and mind (but criticized
  as essentialist!)

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Feminism and Gender Theory

• American feminists focus on analysis of female
  texts?portrayals of women, exposing patriarchal
  ideologies and tradition of masculine dominance
  inscribed in literary tradition/discourses
• Elaine Showalter gynocriticism
• sociocultural conditions, structures, themes,
  and language of womens writing
• British feminists addressed differences
  according to class, race, gender, culture and not
  only according to gender
• Postcolonial feminists stress oppression at the
  interface of class, race, gender, culture
• Look at political power relations and male
  dominance within their own cultures, look at
  oppression within their own cultural frameworks
  and political conditions
• Alice Walker womanism
• Gloría Anzalduá the New Mestiza
• Gayatri Spivak the subaltern woman

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Feminism and Gender Theory

• Judith Butler deconstructionist feminism
• Performance theory gender is performance
  through repetitive acts, citation within
  regulatory framework
• Gender is constructed, naturalized, and
  institutionalized
• critique of heterosexual matrix that defines
  heterosexuality as norm
• Gender criticism includes men
• Focus on queer, lesbian, gay studies, also mens
  studies
• technically feminist criticism is also gender
  criticism

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Postcolonial criticism

• Looks at colonial history
• Concepts of self/other otherness/alterity
  hybridity (Homi Bhabha)
• Colonial discourses shape/d identities of
  colonized peoplesgtcolonized minds
• Race is construction
• Who speaks? who is silenced? in colonial
  discourse
• Postcolonial lit lit of (formerly) colonized
  peoples of British Empire and USA/Canada
• Postcolonial lit often rewriting, mocking of
  colonial texts (e.g. Shakespeare, Bible, Sonnet)
• Postcolonial mimicry
• Contests and extends literary canon

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Reader-Response Theory

• Reception theory Text does not contain meaning
  in itself
• Analysis/construction of text depends upon the
  reading of the text
• Meaning is generated in a dialogue between the
  reader and the text, process situated in
  historical circumstances
• Wolfgang Iser text contains specific information
  and gaps of indeterminacy ? filled by
  readersgtvarious readings of same text
• Reading is process of changing perspectives in
  response to text
• Norman Holland identity theme (personal identity
  conditions reading of/reaction to text)
• Stanley Fish interpretive community (one group
  employs similar strategies of interpretation)
• System of associated commonplaces (system of
  understanding culture/society on which individual
  bases his/her reading of text)

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Sources/ Reference

• Nancy A. Walker, ed. Kate Chopin The Awakening.
  Boston/New York Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000.
• Michael Meyer. English and American Literatures.
  Tübingen and Basel A. Francke, 2004.