THEORY LECTURE NOTES/HANDOUTS/SUMMARIES
 

NEW CRITICISM SUMMARY/CLASSPOINTS

--The proper task of the critic, according to New Criticism, is to look at texts as autotelic objects, severed from causes or effects.  Historical scholarship might be needed, for instance, to explain the allegorical referent in a Chaucer poem, but the text per se remains the object of scrutiny.

--New Criticism makes a fetish of the words on the page (my image of the poem found on the floor in the middle of an empty room), likes to fence off an intrinsic meaning, and--to the extent that an audience is recognized as being required for meaning--posits a professional, ideal reader. 

--Contemporary theory dislikes the idea that meaning magically, transparently, and exclusively emanates from the page.  We're much more prone these days to recognize a text's historical situatedness at the time of its writing or its reception.  You don't need to self-consciously ponder the temporal horizon then or now (and your position vis-à-vis either) in order to produce meaning.  You could make some sense of an Austen novel without knowing explicitly about the class codes of the era, but that's only because, for all the historical difference, there is a fair amount of historical continuity in social exchanges that cause embarrassment, etc. The New Critical anxiety is that when we shift our eyes from the literary text (close-reading fashion), it will become an artifact rather than art.

--New Criticism was a big hit because it seemed to promise a degree of non-flakey scientific objectivity, because of the ease with which it could be used in the classroom as both a teaching device and model for student essays, and because it secured a canon (great works are works that are complexly coherent, manifest controlled tensions and ambiguity, use paradox and irony, and so forth).  As I said mockingly in class, New Criticism leads readily to a Cliff Notes delivery: literature has "themes" that are reflected in complex, diced-up patterns of images and actions.

--New Critical practice, although officially resisting paraphrase (i.e. it is not interested in some translatable, portable content), often tends to paraphrase heavily to demonstrate the form of the content.   E.g., in the student essay on "Death of the Ball T. Gunner," the entire poem is paraphrased, in slow motion as it were, but put through the filter of the typical New Critical preoccupations with antithesis, tension, conflict, etc.

--New Criticism's criteria can--if it is important to you--be evoked to explain aesthetic or literary "greatness."  I'd be curious to hear how many of us are really willing to abandon notions of "great" texts or "complex" texts.

--At its best, New Criticism leads to intensity of analytical attention (a good thing, presumably) and it can be pleasant to trace "intrinsic" patterns of meaning; at its worse it becomes formulaic and the text ends up seeming like a piece of elaborate machinery.  

--It tends to iron out the unruly, the subversive, and the messy. 

--I encourage you to look for the unexpected, the odd sequence of images or words, that which goes against the grain of a "normative" Cliff Notes readings.  Example 1:  might "Death..." really be a pregnancy/abortion poem? Example 2: "Ode on a Grecian Urn" might be "about" strange temporalities ("slow time"), an obsessive interest in different modes of expression ("quietness," "silence," "flowery tale," "legend," etc.), or mutable/mutating bodies ("unravish'd bride"..."foster-child"..."sylvan historian").

--The neatness of art or the cultural artifact is not (to me) our ability to construe it in terms of a complex coherence, but rather the wonderful quirkiness that emerges if you let your own insights be audible to yourself. Eccentric readings are good, although they should still have explanatory power and require proof.

STRUCTURALISM

Origins in Saussure's Semiotics:

--Saussure: "the somewhat mysterious fact is rather that 'thought-sound' implies division, and that language works out its units while taking shape between two shapeless masses" (it is language that makes thought-sound cohere into meaningfulness; you cannot think without language).

--Saussure: the "community is necessary if values that owe their existence solely to usage and general acceptance are to be set up; by himself the individual is incapable of fixing a single value" (social meaning is introduced, but individual agency still denied).

--Saussure: language is a "system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of others".

--thus:

--language or a system of signs is not a mimetic, secondary reflection of reality (word "dog" not bonded to trotting creature)

--language constitutes reality (without the word "dog" you could not conceptualize the trotting creature)

--you do not decide how to conceptualize, as "community" conceptualizes

--meanings relational rather than discrete: "dog" means "dog" not because the word means what it means, but because it doesn't mean all the words related to it (pooch, wolf, etc.)

--this may seem non-intuitive, but it begins to make more sense if you ponder that "woman" or "light" only has conceptual meaning in terms of "man" or "dark"

 --by extrapolation: all of culture is semiotically or structurally meaningful.  Nothing is natural, nothing is firmly anchored, nothing is just itself, everything is relationally coded

Types and Method

--anthropological structuralists such as Levi-Strauss look at rituals/taboos (high/low, purity/impurity, raw/cooked, dirt/clean)

--narratologists look at genre features or elaborately code all aspects of narrative in the abstract

--regardless, structuralism methodologically involves some combination of horizontal and vertical sequence, either within one text/ritual or across multiple texts/rituals

--useful, because you can generate meaning/interpretation by pondering opposites, inversions, etc.

--ex. #1:
straight pants--flair pants--capri--skirt                   kilts or robes seem "odd" because anomalous in U.S.

male...............female                                                   

covers leg................doesn't cover leg  

--above could lead to an analysis of different cultures' encoding of skin/covering relations

--ex. #2:  different (than Barry) structural approach to Poe's "Oval Portrait"

--a sequence of movements inside (we go inside story per se, inside ruin, inside room, to corner, to painting)

--sequence also about representation: dead woman, painted woman, story about painted woman, within frame of wounded man, within tale given to us

--hmmm: burials within burials

--hmmm: cryptogram (buried meaning=buried bodies) recurs in Poe, which is interesting 

--ex. #3: Blake's "London"

--freedom======chartered/bounded

--natural=======artificial

--flowing=======rigid/framed

--fluid

--tears, river, blood, sigh (metaphorically)        

--flowing watercolor==============rigid impressed marks of engraving

--creative artist=================laboring artisan (at this point we could join structural and Marxist interpretation, saying that the poem "London" expresses the contradictions of laboring activity in a transitional historical period)

Differences from New Criticism:

--with New Criticism, although authorial intent is irrelevant, the sense of a created artifact is prized

--the Anglo-American tradition is an empiricist one, liking what registers immediately on the senses; so New Criticism likes to look at the immediate effects of tensions and so on in a text, to examine the unique complicated web of a poem or a narrative as a sensuous-cognitive organic whole.

--Structuralism looks at the empirical text itself, as does New Criticism, but sees thru or beneath the concrete contents of the text to see a deeper structure or mechanics at work

What it All Means:

--it tends to put agency in the system rather than the creator of the artistic or cultural artifact  (Cooper, Twain, and directors of Rockford Files, Lethal Weapon, and Miami Vice do not design/intend the White/Ethnic male in woods or on boat sequence--it is the deep structure of the U.S. adventure/detective story; Bronte does not intend the Cathy/Heathcliff story to instantiate the Persephone myth, in turn a version of sun-going-down)

--thus Frye: "we begin to wonder if we cannot see [great] literature . . . as spread out in conceptual space from an unseen center"
 

--thus Todorov: "literature becomes only a mediator, a language, which poetics uses for dealing with itself" (more radically, your identity/your subjectivity/your desire is merely a locale for cultural discourse to operate; you think you are "you" but actually "you" are but a fold in the elaborate skein of cultural codes)

--structuralists sometimes propose an objective science of underlying structures; but structuralists themselves are imposing the structure.  This leads to debates in anthropology about interpretation; natives see only surface meanings of their culture, the outsider interpreter sees the deep structure (but, vice-versa, structuralism provides a method of getting around the impasse of cultural otherness--many cultures may share deep structure archetypes)

--structuralism is the necessary first step towards post-structuralism, in which human agency is radically de-centered, and in which indeterminacy rules

--thus Barthes: "the text . . . only exists in the movement of a discourse. . . . As for the Text, it reads without the inscription of the Father. . . ."

Connections with other Theoretical/Interpretive Methods:

--structuralism sees the particular as a manifestation of some more general principle or structure.  If we add the word "symptom," we can make the jump to Freud, with the manifest divulging the latent.  For Freud, discrete personalities exhibit the symptoms of underlying/buried unconscious tensions, etc.

--we can then make a leap to a notion of an ideological unconsciousness.  One theorist (who joins Marxism and Freud), P. Macherey says there is "unconsciousness of the work (not of the author)... which is history, the play of history beyond its edges, encroaching on those edges, this is why it is possible to trace the path which leads from the haunted work to that which haunts it" (examples: my example of Blake's "London" above or Edward Said's reading of colonial/plantation context of Austen's Mansfield Park)

WHAT POST-STRUCTURALISM INHERITS FROM STRUCTURALISM/AND

HOW IT DEPARTS FROM IT

--Most fundamentally, post-structuralism shuns the notion of human agency and intentionality in texts; in a like fashion, structuralism emphasizes a deep structure that produces the particularities of a text or the behaviors/codes of a culture.

--As one of the "Go" sites puts it, "the author is canceled out, since the text is a function of a system, not of an individual."

--Whereas structuralism pretty much ignores the individual altogether, however, post-structuralism often wants to know how "subjectivity"--one's sense of identity--is produced.  Or, rather than looking through the text to perceive a deeper structure, post-structuralism would be fascinated by the text as a site for the play of political, historical, gendered, etc. forces or discourses. 

--Additionally, post-structuralism is likely to emphasize the tensions, ruptures, contingency, and hybridity of those produced identities.  For the post-structuralist, the human subject is less a unified entity than a fold in the texture of endless context and textuality itself.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DECONSTRUCTION AND POST-STRUCTURALISM

--Derrida, a philosopher (he does not really analyze texts in a lit.-crit. way very frequently; literature people accuse him of obscurity and needless nuance, but all good, contemporary philosophy may be equally difficult and seemingly obscure), wants to undermine what he calls logocentricism, the effort to always find a core truth or presence from which other subsidiary truths may be produced, and which usually operates in terms of a binary structure (good/evil, light/dark, European/non-European, man/woman, mind/body, penis/penis absence, speech/writing, masterpiece work/parasitical interpretation and so on).

--Post-structuralists (Foucault, Kristeva, Lacan--virtually ALL critics these days!) adopted Derrida's meticulous method of de-centering, and more particularly of de-centering the subject, to vaster historical, psychological, or feminist issues.  

--Thus in Foucault: power, although producing the subject via the panoptical gaze, does not emanate from any particular source. 

--For post-structuralists, typically, texts exhibit anxiety or even pathology (ruptures of all sorts), without being grounded in an author.

--Post-structuralists tend to be much more dour and less "play"-ful than Derrida.  One always has a sense with Derrida that his own virtuoso performance is what is on stage.  One seldom comes away from a Derrida interpretation with what I call portable knowledge.  (I'm referring to the early Derrida.) 

--He prefers (as he says in one of the quotes in a "Go" site) a practice that is "inventive or it's nothing at all ... it opens up a passageway."  Those of you familiar with Emerson's writings will recognize a certain newness preoccupation.  But Derrida could be deconstructed here himself--e.g., invention/tradition.  Derrida needs all the traditional philosophers (Rousseau) whom he debunks.

--All the wordplay that Derrida and his acolytes are/were given to is largely passé.  This is because post-structuralism now joins with all sorts of political criticism (Said and other post colonialists) that, although making everything infinitely vexed, still wants to make "interventions" in the world or discursive realm.

--At what point does an interpretation become too extravagant, too exhibitionist, too wacky?  What would be the rule-book or the measuring stick from whence we might determine an immoderate reading?  According to Derrida, you cannot return to the "truth" of the text to measure the "truth" of the interpretation about it.  If there were an original/origin "truth" to the text, why, after all, would we need to interpret it?  If you think about it, our customary conception of interpretation requires that the text hides its truth from itself--so we, as critics, can discover/reconstruct it (it is "buried" or "hidden" in common parlance).  Deconstructive criticism, though, isn't really "about" the text; it re-weaves the text, produces it, is an act of intellectual creative play rather than a secondary, parasitical reflection of the text (that might "reconstruct" it).  Strickly speaking, this might mean that anything goes, but Derrida in fact maintains a tightrope act between fairly standard close-reading (even New Critical) exegesis and subversive or undermining slippage.  The adroit way he makes "nonsense" of Plato's text depends on a goodly proportion of sense-making.
 

HOW TO USE DECONSTRUCTION AND POST-STRUCTURALISM

--See the Warren Hedge's "Go" site "Using Deconstruction to Astonish Friends and Confound Enemies".  The technique of investigating binary oppositions is truly useful.

--For example, from last class, Blake's "London Poem":

freedom                    chartered/bounded

natural                      artificial

flowing                      rigid/framed

secretions/                corrupt power    

victimhood/

innocence

(tears, blood, sighs)

--The deconstructionist might, rather than looking at the above as some structuralist meta-narrative of authority/liberty, focus on the peculiarity of the "sigh" image.... perhaps pondering, at length, how physically embodying the "sigh" as abjection empowers the unseen prophet "marking" the scenes of woe.  The prophet is implicitly there, but not seen.  Also note the instability/oscillating meaning of "mark": as actively making marks, but also as passively noting, as remarking.  The prophet's invisibility, in fact, produces the marks/scars that he sees, because if he were embodied ("subjectified") he would be caught up in some narrative of human interaction/dialogue.  Indeed, he is not unlike the panoptical gaze that Foucault speaks about!  (It took me relatively little time to write this paragraph because I was MERGING BASIC CLOSE-SCRUTINY READING SKILLS AND THE THEORY OF DERRIDA AND FOUCAULT; THE THEORY TRULY MADE ME SEE NEWLY A POEM I’VE TAUGHT MANY TIMES OTHERWISE IN A HUMDRUM MANNER.)

--More recent post-structuralists would be less interested in this sort of playful reading than in unpacking the radical divisions within the speaker-prophet (sadistic/masochist, say) or the complex historical contexts that could produce this poem (the split position of the artisan: artist/laborer, watercolor/etching, original prophet/copyist) during the early Nineteenth-Century.  The New Historicist might bring to evidence all sorts of artisan manuals, urban topographical maps, and medical guides and so forth to show how the "text" links up with and bleeds into a complicated "context."

--The danger is that such reversals as I enacted above (about the sigh) can become mere exercises in virtuosity: ingenuity and play-of-the-critic's mind become overly on display. 

--However, making connections of a text in a complicated post-structuralist way to psychoanalytical theories or theories of history/historical context is what I myself do.  The text, to be sure, tends to get de-throned as a masterpiece, but the eruption of history or theories of interiority into the text can be quite fun.

--Also, post-structuralism--because it sees no firm barrier between a "literary" text and cultural texts or forms--allows you to analyze lots of different things (my colleague, Prof. Jamie Sutton, analyzes in his book key poems of Spenser, but also British country-house estates and tons of other intriguing stuff). 

POSTMODERNISM

--Unlike New Criticism, Structuralism, or Post-structuralism,  Postmodernism is not really a theoretical/critical approach.  Some of our theorists are postmodernist (Deleuze and Guattari); others are reflecting upon it or critiquing it (Jameson, Lyotard, Baudrillard.)

--It is rather a style or aesthetic or culture theory (you could have a post-structuralist interpretation of Spenser, but not a postmodernist interpretation of Spenser … or could you?).  It usually involves some collapse of depth into surface (so everything is representational surface: my CSI example--you could chart the TV show as typically being about Illumination/Truth being revealed by Authority (main detective) or Logocentric trajectories (using a combination of Foucault and Derrida and Lacan); or you might focus on the high-filmic production value, the sheen of metal objects, the fetishized patterns of blood spills, concluding that the series is all texture, with viscera collapsing into surface, the graphic into the graph.

--It defines an era (i.e. now).

--What gets confusing is that postmodernism's characteristic preoccupations can get converted into a certain style of thought with certain tendencies:

1. It likes to play with category breaking: mechanical/body overlaps in particular.   One can imagine a postmodernist critic focusing on the machinery/carnage of war; all forms of mechanical surrogacy, the fascination of cyborg identities, etc.  In my "CSI" crime show example: one might focus on the techno-gloss (hardness) of the forensic microscopes and other apparatus against the pliable skin/bodies (soft) of the sundry corpses.

2. It likes to play with media-hall-of-mirrors.

--Thus the Gulf War becomes videogame, videogame becomes advertisement for the Navy Seals (or vice versa … there was an ad in which the champs of a video competition turn out to be so good because they are Navy Seals, and so are very good at playing the simulation of themselves).

--Whereas some might simply say that the saturation of media into our culture does not make all of culture/reality a “media” event, the postmodernist might.

3.  It likes baroque forms of eroticism or sexuality (I just made that term up …  another habit of postmodernists is term-coinage), by which I mean any  form of sexuality that inverts or tells the lie to some “traditional” nuclear form of bourgeois enticement and fulfillment.

4. It is endlessly restless.  And so likes to enumerate, just as I am doing here … as a substitution for rigorous sequential thinking.

5. It is endlessly nervous about being profound.  All that is profound must be profaned with irony.  (Deleuze and G. joke about waking up and casually composing.)

6. It makes thinking a matter of fashion.  Sometimes achieved by essayist-bricolage-shutter-bug style of writing.

7. It has at least the pretense of being libertarian, resistant to all forms of coercive identifications, and thus (hypothetically) opens the space for better democratical outcomes.  The LARGE, GRAND NARRATIVE--so says Lyotard-- is bad; so, presumably, the little local, micro-political frisson narrative is better.

OVERVIEW OF FREUD AND LACAN AND LITERARY INTERPRETATION

--there is little point in trying to summarize Freud’s thought, as it is vastly intricate and mobile, and often socially speculative.

--you should not be as dismissive as you may want to be about such quirky things as Freud’s meditations on sexual/excrement organs or degradation/fetishism in the life of sexuality.   Freud uses the term “perversion” and sometimes he has a sort of moral superiority in regard to such sexual displacements, re-routings, obsessions, etc.  But more frequently he is amazingly progressive in his thinking about the fluidity of sexual identity that necessarily gets boxed in various ways as one proceeds out of infant polymorphousness.  There are not really, Freud thinks, more perverse boxes … just boxes that are more or less likely to lead to personal happiness or social stability.

--it is key to keep in mind that you do not need to have an author behind a text to psychoanalyze a text (see Freud's interpretations in the essay on "The Uncanny").

--here is a thought that will take the wind out of Freud's sails for you: he was writing in a time when plumbing was becoming a standard part of the bourgeois household and when psychological theory was heavily into physiological explanations of behavior (head bumps, etc).  Notice how Freud’s entire theory seems to be based on a plumbing model of mind: the pressure of libido must go this way or that way, or split off, or be channeled.  Is it not, given mind/body dualism, somewhat odd to think that mental entities/processes have a weight/volume of pressure?   

--Lacan’s most useful idea is that identity, as it is carved off from all the raw undifferentiatedness of the infant’s being, involves the notion of social construction and being constituted thru language (the mirror stage is a literal mirror, but also a trope for any mirroring that gives you back your identity).
 

DECONSTRUCTIVE/ LACANIAN READING OF THE OVAL PORTRAIT/ PURLOINED LETTER

--OP: buried structure: dead woman—within the painting—within story of painter—within P's story

--PL: Queen—letter—Prefect—Dupin--narrator

--ultimately, both are stories about representation/ they are not stories about something

--could say (using Derrida): here we see aporia in action: the interpretive knot unsolvable because of infinite regress (dead woman’s interiority not available; interior of Queen gets unfolded in inside out letter).  Poe leads us thru hermeneutical  processes (uncovering secrets) but the secret within the crypt is void.

--crypt= cryptogram = buried meaning, but point is surface code/deeper code … not content of what is buried

FEMINISM/GAY STUDIES

Foucault:

“Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.  And “Power,” insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing, is simply the over-all effect that emerges from all these mobilities.… Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover.  It is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp,  but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse … are linked to one another…. The old power of death that symbolized sovereign power was now carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life.”

--why I assigned Foucault#1: his historical validity has been questioned, but the notion of diffused, multiple/no-where-sourced power is hugely fascinating.

--why I assigned Foucault#2: he contributed hugely to the basic poststructuralist idea that there are not “essential” identities but only relational, constructed identities (sexuality is not repressed in the individual by a locatable power; sexuality is produced by the multiple filaments of power).

Judith Butler (from Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity)

--ponder the applicability of the quote below to Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging

--“The ‘abject’ [a notion of Kristeva’s] designates that which has been expelled from the body, discharged as excrement, literally rendered “Other.” This appears as an expulsion of alien elements, but the alien is effectively established through this expulsion.  The construction of the “not-me” as the abject establishes the boundaries of the body which are also the first contours of the subject.…”

--note in Blu’s Hanging: grotesque discharges or body parts rendered “other” (leper hands, for example) vs. the integrative fantasy of the novel towards the end; note, too, the birthing stones as an alternative to what-is-cast-off (I believe I just gave a paper topic hint)

Elvis’s Blue Hawaii

--the movie concludes in a scene of what another important feminist critic (Eve Sedgwick) calls compulsory heterosexuality, the all-too-confining trajectory towards bourgeois “normative” desire
--Elvis/Chad has a choice: he can go back to the childhood/maternal ocean where sexuality's destiny was not compulsorily heterosexual (he can hang with the gay slaphappy lads), etc. etc.; or he can get his phallus pointed in the direction his Big Daddy would like, and run the pineapple plantation to the betterment of patriarchy and capitalism!

--turning point occurs when Elvis becomes Big Daddy by spanking white castrating/promiscuous teenager

--next scene shows teenager on pillow joking about (pancake) hotcakes, and she is completely socialized

--loose phallus has become Phallus, that will allow for trajectory of compulsory sexuality to be completed and for scion to resume path of proper genealogy of plantation power

GOOD QUOTES FROM . . .

ZIMMERMAN

--"Heterosexism in feminist anthologies-like the sexism of androcentric collections-serves to obliterate lesbian existence and maintain the lie that women have searched for emotional and sexual fulfillment only through men-or not at all." (2342)

 --"The perpetual screen of heterosexism is also evident in most of the acclaimed works of feminist literary criticism. . . . This latter judgment is particularly ominous because heterosexuals often having difficulty accepting that a lesbian, often a role-playing 'butch', is in fact a woman." (2342-43)

--"Does a woman’s sexual and affectional preference influence the way she writes, reads, and thinks?  Does lesbianism belong in the classroom and in scholarship?  Is there a lesbian aesthetic distinct from a feminist aesthetic?  What should be the role of the lesbian critic?  Can we establish a lesbian ‘canon’ in the way in which feminist critics have established a female canon?  Can lesbian feminists develop insights into female creativity that might enrich all literary criticism?  Different women, of course, answer these questions in different ways, but one set of assumptions underlies virtually all lesbian criticism:  that a woman’s identity is not defined only by her relation to a male world and male literary tradition (as feminist critics have demonstrated), that powerful bonds between women are a crucial factor in women’s lives, and that the sexual and emotional orientation of a women profoundly affects her consciousness and thus her creativity." (2341)

--"Ironically, more articles on lesbian literature have appeared in traditional literary journals than in the women’s studies press, just as for years only male critics felt free to mention lesbianism.  Possibly, feminist critics continue to feel that they will be identified as ‘dykes’, thus invalidating their work." (2342)

--"Many lesbian writers and critics have also been influenced profoundly by the politics of separatism which provides a critique of heterosexuality as a political institution rather than a personal choice, ‘because relationships between men and women are essentially political, they involve power and dominance.’  As we shall see, the notion of ‘woman-identification’, that is, the primacy of women bonding with women emotionally and politically, as well as the premises of separatism, that lesbians have a unique and critical place at the margins of patriarchal society, are central to much current lesbian literary criticism." (2345)

FOUCAULT

--"Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from a practice of sodomy into a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul.  The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species." (43)

--"But this often-stated theme, that sex is outside of discourse and that only the removing of an obstacle, the breaking of a secret, can clear the way leading to it, is precisely what needs to be examined." (1658)

--"...they function as mechanisms with a double impetus: pleasure and power. The pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other hand, the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it. The power that lets itself be invaded by the pleasure it is pursuing; and opposite it, power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing off, scandalizing, or resisting...these circular incitements have traced around bodies and sexes, not boundaries not to be crossed, but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure." (45)

--"Silence itself -- the things that one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers -- is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, that an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within overall strategies.  There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say... There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and penetrate discourses." (27)

SEDGWICK

--"The apparent simplicity - the unity - of the continuum between 'women loving women' and 'women promoting the interests of women,' extending over the erotic, social, familial, economic and political realms, would not be so striking if it were not in strong contrast to the arrangement among males."  (2436)

--"The example of the Greeks demonstrates, I think, that while heterosexuality is necessary for the maintenance of any patriarchy, homophobia, against males at any rate, is not." (2437)

BUTLER

--"If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the spatial metaphor of a "ground" will be displaced and revealed as a stylized configuration, indeed, a gendered corporealization of time." (2501)

--"In a sense, Simon Watney has identified the contemporary construction of "the polluting person" as a person with AIDS in his "Policing Desire: AIDS, Pornography, and the Media" Not only is the illness figured as the "gay disease," but throughout the media's hysterical and homophobic response to the illness there is a tactical construction of a continuity between the polluted status of the homosexual by virtue of the boundary-trespass that is homosexuality and the disease as a specific modality of homosexual pollution." (2493)

--"The boundary of the body as well as the distinction between internal and external is established through the ejection and transvaluation of something originally part of identity into a defiling otherness.  As Iris Young has suggested in her use of Kristeva to understand sexism, homophobia, and racism, the repudiation of bodies for their sex, sexuality, and/or color is an ‘expulsion’ followed by a ‘repulsion’ that founds and consolidates culturally hegemonic identities along sex/race/sexuality axes of differentiation.  Young’s appropriation of Kristeva shows how the operation of repulsion can consolidate ‘identities’ founded on the instituting of the ‘Other’ or a set of Others through exclusion and domination." (2495)

POLITICAL CRITICISM

MARXIST INTERPRETATION IN GENERAL

---in a sense like structuralism, as particular superstructure forms/content (e.g., a literary work) is determined in "the last instance" by the base

--problem one: if base is determinative, becomes reductive (i.e., problem of "vulgar Marxism)

--or, problem two: connection becomes so twisted, attenuated, and mediated that the logic of base--superstructure is undercut

--note how the Frankenstein Warren Montag essay negotiates between the two:

--"A dense network of resemblances appears to allow us to identify Frankenstein's monster with the emergent proletariat' (387)

--"But such a reading is too simple; to stop here would be to reduce the literary work to a mere allegory structured by a set of symbolic equivalences...." (388)

--"On the contrary, the omission [of the workshop of 'filthy creation'] recurs throughout the work with a certain regularity that renders it integral to the work as a whole" (392)

--"The narrative thereby protects itself from the reality that it describes by casting a veil over that reality: it must continue to cover that which it reveals." (393)

--more sophisticated forms of Marxist interpretation proceed thru this detective uncovering

--problem three: does the work of art reflect wall-to-wall ideology; is it peculiarly free of the ideology; or even if the first applies, does it allow us to see the ideology? The degree of a text's separation from its own mimetic reflection of its age's ideology is always an issue.

--problem four: to what extent is ideology, in fact, wall-to-wall?  If it is, how does one account for resistance?

--example: Shakespeare's The Tempest: does the play reproduce hierarchies that everyone in Shakespeare's time believed in (the proper rule of authority, etc.) or is it subversive and sympathetic towards Caliban?

ALTHUSSER

--ideology, in a Marxist context, is not a set of beliefs we consciously hold and articulate (e.g., the ideas of the Republican party).  Nor is ideology simply foisted upon us by, say, the rulers of a society (the rulers are duped just as much as the ruled).

--it is, rather, the glue that aligns the subject to the social sphere.  It is what "everybody" agrees on implicitly (were it explicit, it could be subject to contestation after all).  It is what goes without saying. 

--interpellation is the means by which we are situated within ideology and ideology within us via immediate consent.

--Mary Klages, from one of the theory sites, summarizes:

Althusser mentions two major mechanisms for insuring that people within a State behave according to the rules of that State, even when it's not in their best interests (in regards to their class positions) to do so. The first is what Althusser calls the RSA, or Repressive State Apparatuses, that can enforce behavior directly, such as the police, and the criminal justice and prison system. . . More importantly for literary studies, however, are the second mechanism Althusser investigates, which he calls ISAs, or Ideological State Apparatuses. These are institutions which generate ideologies which we as individuals (and groups) then internalize, and act in accordance with. These ISAs include schools, religions, the family, legal systems, politics, arts, sports, etc. These organizations generate systems of ideas and values, which we as individuals believe (or don't believe); this is what Althusser examines. How do we come to internalize, to believe, the ideologies that these ISAs create, (and thus misrecognize or misrepresent ourselves as unalienated subjects in capitalism) Althusser's answer starts with the distinction between ideologies and ideology. IDEOLOGIES are specific, historical, and differing; we can talk about various ideologies, such as Christian ideology, democratic ideology, feminist ideology, Marxist ideology, etc. IDEOLOGY, however, is STRUCTURAL. Althusser says that ideology is a structure, and as such is "eternal," i.e. to be studied synchronically; this is why Althusser says (on p. 240) that ideology has no history. He derives this idea of ideology as a structure from the Marxist idea that ideology is part of the superstructure, but he links the structure of ideology to the idea of the unconscious, from Freud and from Lacan. Because ideology is a structure, its contents will vary, you can fill it up with anything, but its form, like the structure of the unconscious, is always the same. And ideology works "unconsciously." Like language, ideology is a structure/system which we inhabit, which speaks us, but which gives us the illusion that we're in charge, that we freely chose to believe the things we believe. . . .

--Althusser's notion of interpellation draws upon Lacan's idea of the "imaginary" or "mirror-stage."  Just as the child comes into unified (but misrecognized) selfhood by identifying with its idealized image in the mirror, the subject of ideology is "hailed" or "interpellated" by diverse aspects/practices of the social sphere.

 --so, ideology isn't "out there" as it were.  It is, in effect, the continual enactment of our socialization.

--example one: you pick up a yacht magazine in a dentist store.  It does not announce its products for only the rich; there is a cheerful implicit greeting ... "You, too, can partake of this pleasant leisure".  We do not ask, as we might during other circumstances (waiting for the yacht to go under the bridge), questions about class society.   There is a contradiction between what is scientifically true from the standpoint of Marxism (class structure and class struggle in terms of your daily lived experience) and what ideology does to keep you from recognizing class struggle, etc.).

--example two: as one of many possible ideologies we might explicitly articulate a belief in democratical free enterprise (versus totalitarian communism).  More subtle and insidious is the way in which private property is naturalized.  You walk into "your" house and feel good that "your" widescreen TV interpellates your subject position as somebody made very secure by the feeling that your belongings belong to you. (etc. etc).  It seems criminal for a criminal to rob you, and there are Repressive State Apparatus to take care of such deviance.  But there are also ISAs that keep you from seeing the unnaturalness of accumulated private property ownership in the first place.

POSTCOLONIAL/RACE ISSUES

1. Barbara Smith's argument for a separatist black lesbian canon derives in part from the anxiety that a more inclusive canon, based on liberal values of universal timelessness, would simply replicate "white" values: i.e., the fear that "universalism" is really a mask for whiteness.  Keep in mind Peter Barry's initial list, in which he contends that one basic tenet of theory is that universal "human nature is a myth."

2. The postcolonial desire is to escape, politically or aesthetically, the confines of European/Eurocentric perspectives.  But what sort of knowledge or identity constitutes "authentic" knowledge or identity?  Poststructuralism embraces de-centered identities; is poststructuralism compatible with postcolonial politics?

3. In response to Homi Bhabha's notoriously difficult style (he is a postcolonialist/poststructuralist) and somewhat torturous account of colonialist ambivalence, mimicry, and so on, one critic has said "you don't have to read between the lines to see political resistance."  The refined nuance of Bhabha, this critic claims, is a sign of an intellectual hubris, insensitive to the oppositional heroics and agony of real people. 

4. Said claims that there cannot be a cultural offspring of the West (people or products) not compromised by imperialistic ideology or saturated by imperialistic ideology.  His example of Austen's Mansfield Park--in which the novel ends up being about the not-quite-brought-into-view colonial plantation of the father--is summarized in Barry.  How significant, for you, is Bertram's Jamaican rum business?

5. When you start to merge theories, the problem of groundlessness appears.  In the Donne poem cited in Barry, one can see body images as coded ways of talking about imperial images; or one can see imperial relations as ways of talking about gender.  If elaborated at length, such cross-overs or transcodings can get confusing or intellectually mushy. 

6. The notion of hybridity is crucial (as are kindred notions of liminality, nomadism, diasporic cultures, and so on).  But the notion of hybridity et al (at least as elaborated by Bhabha) can get too, too baroque.   I say the following in the conclusion of my book: "Following the logic of culture being differentially defined, of always within the realm of hybridity, leads us to plotting endless lines of interconnectedness, to locating positions that can have no position because they exist only in the eerie, contentless dimension of positionality."  But then I was a theory conservative back then!

7. Fanon speaks to the need for the anti-colonialist or postcolonialist subject to search for "some very beautiful splendid era whose existence rehabilitates us both in regard to ourselves, and in regard to others."  This can become an anguished form of nostalgia (or the reverse: into the future, premature utopianism).  But without such thoughts, how pose an alternative to the debasements and subjection under colonial conditions or inherited from colonial traditions?

8. Here is an important passage from Barry: "Should we, in general, try to become super-readers, with multiple layers of sympathy and awareness, or will trying to do so merely produce blandness and superficiality?"  He is speaking of postcolonial criticism and obligations of political correctness, and his answer is that a "genuine interest ... can really only arise from aspects of your own circumstances.  These perspectives cannot be put on and off like a suit--they have to emerge and declare themselves with some urgency."  The same applies to all the theory we've been reading.  It needs to be organic with your own identity and objectives.