00136--The common bedrock for critical theory.

Applicable to different approaches in critical theory.

                        For Theory:

            Politics is pervasive

            language is constitutive

            Truth is provisional

            meaning is contingent and

            Human nature is a myth

            Many of the notions which we would usually regard as the basic 'givens' of our existence (including our gender identity, our individual selfhood, and the notion of literature itself) are actually fluid and unstable things, rather than fixed and reliable essence.  Instead of being solidly 'there in the real world of fact and experience, they are socially constructed, that is, dependent on social and political forces and on shifting ways of seeing and thinking.  Hence, no overarching fixed truths' can ever be established.  The results of all forms of intellectual enquiry are provisional only.

            Every practical procedure (for instance literary criticism) presupposes a theoretical perspective of some kind.  To deny this is to place our own theoretical position beyond scrutiny as something which is 'common sense' or 'simply given'.  The problem with this view is that it tends to discredit one's own project along with all the rest, introducing a 'relativism' which disables argument and cuts the ground  from under any kind of commitment.

            Language itself conditions, limits, and predetermines what we see.  Thus all reality is constructed through language, so that nothing is simply 'there' in an unproblematical way-everything is a linguistic/textual construct.  In literature as in all writing, there is never the possibility establishing fixed and definite meanings: rather, it is characteristic of language to generate infinite webs of meaning so that all texts are necessarily self contradictory, as the process of deconstructions will reveal.

            There is no final court of appeal court of appeal in there matters, since literary texts, once they exist, are viewed by the theorist as independent linguistic structures whose authors are always 'dead' or 'absent'.

00133--Briefly explain the term Gender studies.

            Gender studies is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry increasingly prominent since the second half of the 1980s.  It arose from and is closely tied to women's studies and also gay, lesbian, and men's studies.  Starting with the premise that the gender of an individual does not flow naturally or inevitably from her or is anatomical sex, gender studies analyses the way gender identity is constructed in literature and in society, for both women and men.  Conventional Women's studies focused exclusively on women and women's writing.

            Gender studies turns away from this exclusive focus on women and women's writing, and examines the way "masculinity" and "femininity" come to have certain meanings at a particular place and time.  It stresses the necessary inter-relatedness of there meanings what is considered typically masculine in a given society depends in part on being different from what is feminine, and that is feminine or not being masculine.   Gender studies also points out that what is considered gender-neutral or "universal" is often, in fact, implicitly male and exclusive of the female.  Ironically, some feminists have worried that gender studies itself, by rejecting the polemical, compensatory attention to woman characteristic of women's studies, may run the risk of slipping back into a bias that favours men.

00115--How does literature become anti theological?

            All theological attitudes pre suppose a pre-decided, finite and monolithic answer to all questions.  Literature is no more ready to agree with such an arbitrary concept.  Post structuralism argues that there are so many meanings than the one 'intended by the author.  In the multiplicity of writing, there is nothing to be deciphered; everything is to be disentangled.

            The space of writing is to be ranged over not to be pierced.  Writing posits meaning endlessly; simultaneously meaning evaporates endlessly.  This results in a systematic exemption of meaning.  The task of offering a single, finite and fixed meaning is that of religion.  Literature refuses to offer this kind of a single, finite and fixed meaning and thus literature becomes an anti theological activity.

00111--How does Barthes establish that Author is a construct?

            In the 1920s itself, structuralism proved three things about the workings of language and hence literature.  The primary assumption is that meaning occurs through difference.  Meaning is not identification of the sign with object in the real world or with some pre-existent concept or essential reality; rather it is generated by difference among sings in a signifying system.  Saussure argued that there is no natural or innate relation between the signifier and the signified.  Secondly Saussure argued that signs only make sense as part of a formal, generalized and abstract system.  His conception of meaning was purely structural and relational rather than referential:  primacy is given to relationships rather than to things.  Signs cannot be defined in terms of some 'essential' or 'intrinsic nature'.  Signs refer primarily to each other.  The traditional notion has been that language is a medium of communication and it communicates a reality, which is pre-existent.  But structuralism argued that it is language, which constitutes reality.  The critics like Barthes took these findings and applied it in the study of literature.  Once there arguments are applied in the care of literature, the author turns out to be a mere construct.  Barthes does only this.