LITERARY CRITICISM:FREE NOTES

00158--FEMINISM AND QUEER THEORY

Feminist criticism is part of the broader feminist political movement that

seeks to rectify sexist discrimination and inequalities. While there is no single

feminist literary criticism, there are a half dozen interrelated projects: exposing

masculinist stereotypes, distortions; and omissions in male-dominated

literature; studying female creativity, genres, styles, themes, careers, and

literary traditions; discovering and evaluating lost and neglected literary

works by women; developing feminist theoretical concepts and methods;

examining the forces that shape women's lives, literature, and criticism, ranging

across psychology and politics, biology and Cultural history; and creating

new ideas of and roles for women, including new institutional arrangements.

Feminist theory and criticism have brought revolutionary change to literary

and cultural studies by expanding the Canon, by critiquing sexist representations

and values, by stressing the importance of gender and sexuality, and

by 'proposing institutional and sodal reforms.

Theorists of a "feminist aesthetic" argue that women have a literature of

their own, possessing its own images, themes, characters, forms, styles, and

canons. In Elaine Showalter's pioneering account' of British novelists from

the early nineteenth 'century to the 19705, for example, women writers form

a subculture sharing distinctive economic, political, and professional realities,

all of which help determine specific problems and artistic preoccupations

that mark women's literature. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

propose that nineteenth-century women writers had to negotiate alienation

and psychological disease in order to attain literary authority, which they

achieved by reclaiming the heritage of female creativity, remembering their

lost foremothers, and refusing the debilitating cultural roles of angel and

monster assigned to them by patriarchal society. Countering Harold Bloom's

masculinist "anxiety of influence" (explained above), Gilbert and Gubar's

"anxiety of authorship" depicts the precursor poet as a sister or mother whose

example enables the creativity of the latecomer writer to develop collaboratively

against the confining and sickening backdrop of forbidding male literary

authority. Diseases common among ,women in male-dominated,

misogynistic societies include agoraphobia, anorexia, bulimia, claustrophobia,

hysteria, and madness in general, and they recur in the images, themes,

and characters of women's literature.

As Judith Fetterley insists in The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach

to American Fiction (1978), women read differently than men. She examines

classic American fiction from Irving and Hawthorne to Hemingway and

Mailer and points out that this is not "universal" but masculine literature,

which forces women readers to identify against themselves. Such literature

neither expresses nor legitimates women's experiences, and in reading it

women have to think as men, identify with male viewpoints, accept male

values and interests, and tolerate sexist hostility and oppression. Under such

conditions women must become "resisting readers" rather than assenting

ones, using feminist criticism as one way both to challenge male domination

of the institutions of literature and to change society.

As concepts such as the anxiety of authorship, ecriture feminine, and the

potential of the Imaginary order suggest, psychoanalysis is fundamental to .a

great deal of feminist theory and criticism. However, feminist psychoanalysIs

is typically revisionist: it has had to work through and criticize the "phallocentric"

presuppositions and prejudices of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan,

and other pioneering psychoanalysts. For example, the feminine anxiety of

authorship-in its opposition to the masculine anxiety of influence-reconfigures

the "oedipal" relationship between Writers as cooperative and

nurturing rather than competitive and rivalrous. Similarly, ecriturefeminine

transforms Lacan's idea of the Imaginary, casting it not simply as an infantile

sphere of primary drives superseded on the way to the patriarchal Symbolic

order but as a liberating domain of bodily rhythms and pulsations associated

with the mother that permeates literature, especially modern experimental

poetry. Moreover, the pre-Symbolic Imaginary order, a realm of bisexual/

androgynous/polymorphous sexuality, opens the possibility of sexual liberation

from the suffocating confines of the "compulsory heterosexuality" that

dominates patriarchal culture.

Within feminist circles, there are political differences and conflicts of

interest among women of color and white women, women from different

classes, women of different sexualities, women belonging to different nations

and groups, and women who are liberals, conservatives, radicals, and revolutionaries.

Black women have complained that white middle-class women,

in academia as well as in the mass media, often end up speaking for feminism

or for all women, even though they tend to represent only their own interests.

Third world women, abroad and at home (Latinas, aboriginals, Asian

women), feel similarly silenced and unrepresented in mainstream social

agendas, which rarely consider their needs or issues. Lesbian women have

likewise organized themselves to ensure that their voices are heard. The

"politics of difference" opens onto a world of differences and multiple identities

among and within women themselves.

One of the main flash points among feminist critics has been identity

politics, by which is meant a politics of difference based on. some fixed or

definable identity (as a middle-class white woman, a working-class black

woman a third world brown woman, and so on). Critics of identity politics

have several major complaints. To begin with, defining feminist identity by

giving priority to race or class or geography tends to essentialize these features,

reducing people to social indicators whose "real essence" .is determined

by race or class or country of origin. Moreover an emphasis on the

multiplicity of female identities undermines the solidarity and united front

of feminists. Advocates of the politics of difference respond, m turn, that

the act of herding all women into -one homogeneous category (Woman) is

a reductive totalization and very unlikely to disturb the dominant order.

They argue that alliances and coalitions, in strategic cooperation with other

new social movements, will best and most democratically address Issues of

equality and recognition. In the spheres of theory and criticism, the politics

of difference opposes universal notions of traditional humanism and promotes

two key ideas: there are many women's literatures across the globe and there are
many modes of resistence and of resisting reading.

00157--Postcolonialism

Emerged out of developments within literary studies in the late 1970s as the revolution in ‘theory’ was extended to encompass the cultural, political and economic legacy of empire and its aftermath. For many, the pivotal moment in the development of postcolonialism came with the publication of Edward Said’s path-breaking book ORIENTALISM in 1978. Here, Said linked the cultural and intellectual discourse of ‘the West’ with the material practices of colonialism. This concern with the relationship between culture and power is the dominant feature of postcolonialism, which has broadened into a disciplinary sub-field in its own right. Nevertheless, it is also a highly contested and, to a great extent, controversial area of study and this is reflected in diasgreements over the term itself.

The term ‘postcolonialism’ has emerged from these controversies as a way of marking the existence of a field of discourse rather than a particular theoretical concept – the absence of the hyphen indicating perhaps the lack of substantive content within the term. However, this is not to imply the field is therefore theoretically empty. On the contrary, it is distinguished, if not fraught, by theoretical complexity and richness; indeed, for some it is overly theoretical and this in itself is reason to suspect that far from increasing our understanding, postcolonialism tends to obfuscate the urgent political, economic and social crises that have been brought about and intensified during and after colonialism. Many critics charge it with concentrating too much on culture at the expense of a genuinely radical critique of the materialities of power and inequality in a post-colonial age. The absence of the hyphen is perhaps indicative of the indeterminacy of what exactly is meant by ‘post-colonial’ (i.e. with a hyphen). The ‘post’ clearly refers to and implies a period ‘after’ colonialism and in this strict literal sense the object of postcolonial studies is the historical period of the late twentieth century as the European empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries broke up and former colonies achieved their political independence. However, this is unsatisfactory because to suggest that colonialism has ended is to overlook the fact that the configurations of power in the colonial world have remained largely intact in the post-colonial period. That is, far from achieving independence, the former colonies have now succumbed to more subtle forms of domination.

Analysis of neo-colonialism and the structures of domination and subordination in the postcolonial period is one of the key features of postcolonialism and so the hyphen seems misplaced from that perspective. It has been suggested that the ‘post’ refers to everything that happens after the colonial intervention so that historically postcolonialism encompasses the colonial period as well as its aftermath. This is one reason why ‘colonial discourse analysis’ is also one of the key sub-fields of postcolonialism. In examining the production and reproduction of discourses produced by and for colonialism, in deconstructing their rationales and habits of mind, in analysing colonial representations of the subjugated peoples, colonial discourse analysis seeks to lay bare the processes through which colonialism was practised culturally as well as materially, and how ideologies justifying colonialism were disseminated and embedded into consciousness.

Colonial discourse analysis adopts Foucauldian concepts of discourse that conceive of culture as a material practice, and rejects criticism of discourse analysis as thereby privileging cultural critique over material analysis. Others, however, have criticized postcolonialism for privileging the colonial encounter as the central fact in the histories of colonized peoples. This takes for granted the centrality of European experience and posits the experience of the colonized as an adjunct to that. It thereby replicates at the level of analysis precisely that kind of dependency that remains a feature of contemporary neo-colonialism, leading some critics to suggest that postcolonialism is the ‘cultural logic’ of neo-colonialism writ small in the language of the metropolitan academy. Certainly, the theoretical sophistication of post-colonial theory, and its sometimes difficult and opaque language, extends itself to criticism that postcolonialism is an over-elaborate, abstracted and self-indulgent form of cultural analysis that does little to address the politically urgent problems of the formerly colonized world.

The writings of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, who, along with Said have been characterized as the ‘holy trinity’ of postcolonial theory, raise objections because of their dense style. Yet, particularly in the case of Spivak, this may be seen as a postcolonial strategy of ‘deforming’ the discourse of European knowledge, a discourse that Said has shown to be deeply implicated in colonialism itself.

Ambiguity concerning the temporal scope of postcolonialism is offset by a fair degree of consensus concerning its geographical provenance. Postcolonialism sees modern colonialism as having been global in scope and so it concerns itself with a global agenda, concentrating as much on the former European (or Western) ‘centre’ as the colonial ‘peripheries’. It has extended its concern into debates concerning multiculturalism, diaspora, racism and ethnicity as the mass migrations in the postwar period by formerly colonized peoples have radically transformed the cultures and societies of their erstwhile masters. In addition, a generation of feminist scholars have examined the intersections of gender and sexuality with colonial and post-colonial discourses on race, ethnicity and nation.

00156--Intertexutality /Julia Kristeva/"inter text"

The term inter textuality popularized especially by Julia Kristeva, is used to signify the multiple ways in which any one literary text is made up of other texts, by means of its open or covert citations and allusions, its repetitions and transformations of the formal and substantive features of earlier texts, or simply its unavoidable participation in the common stock of linguistic, and literary conventions and procedures that are "always already" in place and constitute the discourse into which we are born".

In Kristeva's formulation, accordingly, any text is in fact an "inter text" - the site of an intersection of numberless other texts, and existing only through its relation to other texts.

00155--Narratology

Narratology is a branch of structuralism but it has achieved a certain independence from its parent. Narratology is not the reading and interpretation of individual stories, but the attempt to study the nature of 'story' itself, as a concept and as a cultural practice.

What narratologists do

1) They look at individual narratives seeking out the recurrent structures which are found within all narratives.

2) They switch much of their critical attention away from the mere 'content' of the tale, often focusing instead on the teller and the telling.

3) They take categories derived mainly from the analysis of short narratives and expand and refine them so that they are able to account for the complexities of novel-length narratives.

4) They counteract the tendency of conventional criticism to foreground character and motive by foregrounding instead action and structure.

5) They derive much of their reading pleasure and interest from the affinities between all narratives, rather than from the uniqueness and originality of a small number of highly-regarded examples.

00154--What Marxist Critics do.

1) They make a division between the 'overt' (manifest or surface) and 'covert' (latent or hidden) content of a literary work (much as psychoanalytic critics do) and then relate the covert subject matter of the literary work to basic Marxist themes, such as class struggle, or the progression of society through various historical stages, such as, the transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism. Thus, the conflicts in King Lear might be read as being 'really' about the conflict of class interest between the rising class (the bourgeoisie) and the falling class (the feudal overlords)

2) Another method used by Marxist critics is to relate the context of a work to the social-class status of the author. In such cases an assumption is made (which again is similar to those mode by psychoanalytic critics) that the author is unaware of precisely what he or she is saying or revealing in the text.

3) A third Marxist method is to explain the nature of a whole literary genre in terms of the social period which 'produced' it. For instance, The Rise of the Novel, by Ian Watt, relates the growth of the novel in the eighteen century to the expansion of the middle classes during that period. The novel 'speaks' for this social class, just as, for instance, tragedy 'speaks for' the monarchy and the nobility, and the Ballad 'speaks for' for the rural and semi-urban 'working-class'.

4) A fourth Marxist practice is to relate the literary work to the social assumptions of the time in which it is 'consumed', a strategy which is used particularly in the later variant of Marxist criticism known as cultural materialism.

5) A fifth Marxist practice is the 'politicisation of literary form', that is, the claim that literary forms are themselves determined by political circumstances. For instance, in the view of some critics, literary realism carries with it an implicit validation of conservative social structures: for others, the formal and metrical intricacies of the sonnet and the iambic pentameter are a counterpart of social stability, decorum, and order.

00153--Cultural Materialism

Is a term, employed by the British neo-Marxist critic Raymond Williams, which has been adopted by a number of other British scholars, especially those concerned with the literature of the Renaissance, to indicate the Marxist orientation of their mode of new historicism - Marxist in that they retain a version of Marx's view of cultural phenomena as a "superstructure" which in the last analysis, is determined by the "material" (that is, economic) "base". They insist that, whatever the "textuality" of history, a culture and its literary products are always to an important degree conditioned by the material forces and relations of production in their historical era. They are particularly interested in the political significance, and especially the subversive aspects and effects, of a literary text, not only in its own time, but also in later versions that have been revised for the theatre and the cinema. Cultural materialists stress that their criticism is itself oriented toward political "intervention" in their own era, in an express "commitment", as Jonathan Dollimore and Allan Sinfield have put it, "to the transformation of a social order which exploits people on grounds of race, gender and class". (Foreword to Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Criticism).'

Similar views are expressed by those American exponents of the new literary history who are political activists: indeed, some of them claim that if new historicists limit themselves to analysing examples of class dominance and exploitation in literary texts, but stop short of a commitment to remake the present social order, they have been co-opted into "complicity" with the formalist literary criticism that they set out to displace.

00152--Bakhtin Mikhail

In the 1920s, when Bakhtin was lying the conceptual foundations for the development of his thought, the mainstream of Russian literary theory was dominated by the Russian Formalists. Like the structuralists after him Bhakhtin agreed with the Formalists' emphasis on language, but he disagreed with two positions fundamental to the Formalists view of literature. First that the text is merely the sum of its devices, and object crafted by the artist; and, second, that a literary work is to be assessed strictly on its own terms, without reference

While the Soviet Marxists condemned the Formalists for ignoring the ideological aspects of literature, Bakhtin in turn, resisted the Marxist, tendency to reduce literature to ideology. "The study of the verbal art", he insists in 'Dialogic Imagination", "can and must overcome the divorce between an abstract 'formal' approach and equally abstract 'ideological' approach". In Bakhtin's view, form and idea are of a piece. The formal aspects of literature are part of its message, and the nature of its message determines the form it assumes. Further, according to Bakhtin, the ideological atmosphere or the historical milieu in which the work arises has a bearing on its form and content.

Such a view is grounded in Bakhtin's dialogic concept of language and literature. A novel, for example, is neither an isolated artifact nor a static "structured on an uninterrupted mutual interaction with the discourse of life". The novel, in other words, not only reflects the forces of dialogic exchange but also is itself such a force. As the embodiment of the forces of interaction, discourse in the novel revolves around encounters between various voices or ideas. "The idea begins to live", says Bakhtin in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics "only when it enters into genuine dialogic relationships with other ideas.

00151--What Lacanian critics do?

1) Like Freudian critics they pay close attention to unconscious motives and feelings, but instead of excavating for those of the author or characters, they search out those of the text itself, uncovering contradictory under currents of meaning, which lie like a subconscious beneath the 'conscious' of the text. This is another way of defining the process of 'deconstruction'.

2) They demonstrate the presence in the literary work of Lacanian psychoanalytic symptoms or phases, such as the mirror-stage or the sovereignty of the unconscious.

3) They see the literary text as an enactment or demonstration of Lacanian views about language and unconscious, particularly the endemic elusiveness of the signified, and the centrality of the unconscious. In practice, this results in favaouring the anti-realist test which challenges the conventions literary representation.

4) They treat the literary text in terms of a series of broader Lacanian orientations, towards such concepts as lack or desire, for instance.

00150--What Freudian psychoanalytic critics do?

a) They give central importance, in literary interpretation, to the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious mind. They associate the literary work's 'overt' content with the former, and the 'covert' content with the latter, previleging the latter as being what the work is 'really' about, and aiming to disentangle the two.

b) Hence they pay close attention to unconscious motives and feelings, whether there by 1) those of the author, or 2) those of the characters depicted in the work.

c) They demonstrate the presence in the literary work of classic psychoanalytic symptoms, conditions, or phrases, such as the oral, anala, and phallic stages of emotional and sexual development in infants.

d) They make large-scale applications of psychoanalytic concepts to literary history in general, for example, Harold Bloom's book. The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sees the struggle for identity by each generation of poets, under the 'threat' of the greatness of its predecessors, as an enactment of the Oedipus complex.

e) They identify a 'psychic' context for the literary work, at the expense of social of historical context, privileging the individual 'psycho-drama' above the 'social drama of class conflict. The conflict between generations or siblings, or between competing desires within the same individual looms much larger than conflict between social classes, for instance.

00149--What Postmodernist Critics do?

1) They discover postmodernist themes, tendencies, and attitudes within literary works of the twentieth century and explore their implications.

2) They foreground fiction which might be said to exemplify the notion of the 'disappearance of the real', in which shifting post modern identities are seen, for example, in the mixing of literary genres (the thriller, the detective story, the myth saga, and the realist psychological novel etc).

3) The foreground what might be called 'inter textual elements' in literature, such as parody, pastiche, and allusion, in all of which there is a major degree of reference between on text and another, rather than between the text and a safety external reality.

4) The foreground irony, in the sense described by Umberto Eco, that whereas the modernist tries to destroy, the past, the postmodernist realises that the past must be revisited, but 'with irony' (Modernism/Postmodernism, E.D. Peter Brooker, p.227).

5) They foreground the element of 'narcissism' in narrative technique, that is, where novels forcus on and debate their own ends and processes, and thereby 'de-natrualise' their content.

6) They challenge the distinction between high and low culture, and highlight texts which work as hybrid blends of the two.

00148--'Landmarks' in Postmodernism [Habermas, Lyotard, Baudrillard]

Habermas

A major 'moment' in the history of postmodernism is the influential paper 'Modernity - an Incomplete Project' delivered by the contemporary German theorist Jurgen Habermas in 1980. For Habermas the modern period begins with the Enlightenment, that period of about one hundred years, from the mid-seventeenth to the mid eighteenth century. when a new faith arose in the power of reason to improve human society. Such ideas are expressed or embodied in the philosophy of Kant in Germany, Voltaire and Diclesot in France, lake and Hume in Britain.

In Britain the term 'The Age of Reason' was used (till recently) to designate the same period. The so-called Enlightenment 'project' is the fostering of this belief that a break with tradition, blind habit, and slavish obedience to religious precepts and prohibitions, coupled with the application of reason and logic by the disinterested individual, can bring about a solution to the problems of society. This outlook is what Habermas means by 'modernity'. The French Revolution can be seen as a first attempt to test this theory in practice. For Habermas this faith in reason and the possibility of progress survived into the twentieth century, and even survives the catalogue of disasters which makes up this century's history. The cultural movement known as modernism subscribed to this 'project', in the sense that it constituted a lament for a lost sense of purpose, a lost coherence, a lost system of values. For Habermas, the French post-structuralist thinkers of the 1970s, such as Derrida and Foucault, represented a specific repudiation of this mind of Enlightenment 'modernity'. They attacked in his view, the ideals of reason, clarity, truth and progress, and as they were thereby detached from the quest for justice, he identified them as 'young conservatives'.

Lyotard

The term 'postmodernism' was used in the 1930s. but its current sense and vogue can be said to have begun with Jean. Francois Lyotard's The postmodern condition: A Report of knowledge. Lyotard's essay 'answering the Question: What is Postmodernism'?, first published in 1982, added in 1984 as an appendix to The Post Modern Condition and included a Brooker's Modernism/Postmodernism, 1992, takes up this debate about the enlightenment, mainly targeting Habermas, in a slightly oblique manner. Lyotard opens with a move which effectively turns the debate into a struggle to demonstrate that one's opponents are the real conservatives (a familiar 'bottom line' of polemical writing on culture). 'From every direction', he says, 'we are being urged to put an end to experimentation', and after citing several other instances he writes (obviously of Habermas):

I have read a tinker of repute who detends modernity against those who he calls the neo-conservatives. Under the banner of post-modernism, the latter would like, he believes, to get rid of the uncompleted project of modernism, that of the Enlightenment.

Habermar's is simply one voice in a chorus which is calling for an end to 'artistic experimentation' and for 'order....unity, for identity, for security' In a word, there voices want 'to liquidate the heritage of the avant-gardes'. For Lyotard the Enlightenment whose project Habermas wishes to continue is simply one of the would-be authoritative 'overarching', 'totalising' explanations of things - like Christianity, Marxism, or the myth of scientific progress. These 'Metanarratives' ('Super-narratives), which purport to explain and reassure, are really illusions, fostered in order to smother difference, opposition, and plurality. Hence Lyotard's famous, definition of postmodernism, that it is, simply, 'incredulity towards meta narratives'. 'Grand Narratives' of progress and human perfectibility, then, are no longer tenable, and the best we can hope for is a series of 'mini narratives', which are provisional, contingent, temporary, and relative and which provide a basis for the actions of specific groups in particular local circumstances. Post modernity thus 'deconstructs' the basic aim of the Enlightenment, that is 'the idea of a unitary end of history and of a subject.

Baudrillard

Another major theorist of postmodernism is the contemporary French writer Jean Baudrillard, whose book simulations (1981) marks his entry into this field. Baudrillard is associated with what is usually known as 'the loss of the real', which is the view that in contemporary life the pervasive influence of images from film, TV, and advertising has led to a loss of the distinction between real and imagined, reality and illusion, surface and depth. The result is a culture of 'hyper reality', in which distinctions between there are eroded. His propositions are worked out in his essay 'Simulacra and Simulations reprinted in abridged form in Brooker, 1992. He begins by evoking a past era of 'fullness', when a sign was a surface indication of an underlying reality, but merely of other signs? Then the whole system becomes what he calls a Simulacrum. He then substitutes for representation the notion of simulation. The sign reaches its present stage of emptiness in a series of steps, which will try to illustrate by comparing them to different kinds of paintings.

First the sign represents a basic reality: Let's take as an example of this representations of the industrial city of Salford in the work of the twentieth-century British artists L.S. Lowry. Mid-century life of working people in such a place was hard, and the paintings have an air of monotony and repetitiveness-cowed, stick-like figures fill the streets, coloures are muted, and the horizon filled with grim factory-like buildings. As signs, then, Lowry's painting seem to represent the basic reality of the place they depict.

The second stage for the sign is that it misrepresents or distorts the reality behind it. As an example of this let's take the glamourised representations of cities like Liverpool and Hull in the painting of the Victorian artist Atkinson Grimshaw. These paintings show the cities at night, wet pavements reflecting the bright lights of dockside shops, the moon emerging from behind clouds, and a forest of ships' marts silhouetted against the sky. Life in these places at that time was presumably grim, to, but the painting offer a romantic and glamourised image, so the sign can be said to misrepresent what it shows.

The third stage for the sign is when the sign disguises the fact that there is no corresponding reality underneath. To illustrate this, take a device used in the work of the surrealist artist Rene Magritte, where, in the painting, an easel with a painter's canvas on it is shown standing alongside a window: on the canvas in the painting is painted the exterior scene which we can see through the window. But what is shown beyond the window is not reality, against which the paint within the painting can be judged, but simply another sign, another depiction, which has no more authority or reality than the painting within the painting (which is actually a representation of a representation).

The fourth and last stage for the sign is that it bears no relation to any reality at all. As an illustration of this stage we have simply to imagine a completely abstract painting, which is not representational at all, like one of the great purple mood canvases of Mark Rothko, for instance. These four paintings are not exactly the examples of the four stages of the sign, but the four stages that can be thought of as analogous to the four different ways in which these paintings signify or represent things.

00147--Distinction between Modernism and Post modernism.

Jeremy Hawthorn's concise Glossary of contemporary literary theory defines the two terms. Both, he says, give great prominence to fragmentation as a feature of twentieth century art and culture, but they do so in very different moods.

" The modernist features it in such a way as to register a deep nostalgia for an earlier age when faith was full and authority intact. In the wasteland the persona says, as if despairingly of the poem, "There fragments I have shored against my ruins". In instances like this there is a tone of lament, pessimism, and despair about the world which finds its appropriate representation in these 'fractured' art forms.

" For the postmodernist, by contrast, fragmentation is an exhilarating, liberating phenomenon, symptomatic of our escape from the claustrophobic embrace of fixed systems of belief. In a word, the modernist laments fragmentation while the postmodernist celebrates it.

" An important aspect of modernism was a fierce asceticism which found the over elaborate art forms of the nineteenth century deeply offensive and repulsive. This asceticism has one of its most characteristic and striking manifestations in the pronouncements of modernist architects.

" By contrast, postmodernism rejects the distinction between 'high' and popular' art which was important in modernism, and believes in excess, in gaudiness and in 'bad taste' mixtures of qualities. It disdains (the modernist asceticism as elitist.

00146--Post Modernism

A knowledge of modernism is necessary to understand post modernism. 'Modernism' is the name given to the movement which dominated the arts and culture of the first half of the twentieth century. Modernism is the name given to movement which dominated the arts and culture of the first half of the twentieth century. Modernism was that earthquake in the arts which brought down much of the structure of pre-twentieth century practice in music, painting, literature, and architecture. One of the major epicenters of this earthquake seems to have been Vienna, during the period of 1890-1910, but the effects were felt in France, Germany, Italy and eventually even in Britain, in art movements like Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism. Its after-shocks are still being felt today, and many of the structures it toppled have never been rebuilt. Without an understanding of modernism, then, it is impossible to understand twentieth-century culture.

The period of high modernism was the twenty years from 1910 to 1920 and some of the literary 'high priests' of the movement (writing in English) were T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stephane Mallarme, Andre Gide, Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke. Some of the important characteristics of the literary modernism practised by these writers include the following:

1) A new emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity, that is, on how we see rather than what we see (a preoccupation evident in the use of the stream-of-consciousness technique).

2) A movement (in novels) away from the apparent objectivity provided by such features as: Omniscient external narration, fixed narrative points of view and clear-cut moral position.

3) A blurring of the distinctions between genres, so that novels tend to become more lyrical and poetic, for instance, and poems more documentary and prose like.

4) A new liking for fragmented forms, discontinuous narrative, and random-seeming collages of disparate materials.

The overall result of these shifts is to produce a literature which seems dedicated to experimentation and innovation. After its high point, modernism seemed to retreat considerably in the 1930s, partly no doubt, because of the tensions generated in a decade of political and economic crisis, but a resurgence took place in the 1960. However, modernism never regained the pre-eminence it has enjoyed in the earlier period.

00145--Deconstruction // 3 stages of deconstructive process

The verbal, the textual and the linguistic stages, being illustrated using Dylan Thomas's poem 'A Refusal to Mourn in Death, by fire, of a child'

a) The verbal

The verbal stage is very similar to that of more conventional forms of close reading. It involves looking in the text for paradoxes and contradictions, at what might be called the purely verbal level. For instance the final line of Thomas's poem reads 'After the first death there is not other'. This statement contradicts and refutes itself: if something is called the first then a sequence is implied of second, third, fourth and so on. so, the phrase 'the first death' clearly implies, at the literal level, that there will be others. Internal contradictions of this kind are indicative, for the deconstructionist, of language's endemic unreliability and slipperiness.

b) The Textual stage

The 'textual' stage of the method moves beyond individual phrases and taxes a more overall view of the poem. At this second stage the critic is looking for shifts or breaks in the continuity of the poem: these shifts reveal instabilities of attitude, and hence the lack of a fixed and unified position. They may be shifts in focus, shifts in time or tone or point of view or attitude or pace or vocabulary. They may well be indicated in the grammar, for instance, in a shift from first person to third, or past tense to present. Thus they show paradox and contradiction on a larger scale than is the case with the first stage, taking a broad view of the text as a whole. In the case of the 'A refusal to mourn', for instance, there are major time shifts and changes in viewpoint, not a smooth chronological progression. Thus, the first two stanzas imagine the passing of geological aeons and the coming of the 'end of the world' - the last light breaks, the sea finally becomes still, the cycle which produces 'Bird beast and flower' comes to an end as 'all humbling darkness', descents. But the third stanza is centred on the present - the actual death of the child, 'The majesty and burning of the child's death'. The final stanza takes a broad vista like the first two, but it seems to centre on the historical progression of the recorded history of London, as witnessed by 'the un mourning water/of the riding Thames'. Hence, no single wider context is provided to 'frame' and contextualise the death of the child in a defined perspective, and the shifts in Thomas's poem make it very difficult to ground his meaning at all.

c) The Linguistic stage

Involves looking for moments in the poem when the adequacy of language itself as a medium of communication is called in to question. Such moments occur when, for example, there is implicit or explicit reference to the unreliability of untrustworthiness of language. It may involve, for instance, saying that something is unsayable; or saying that it is impossible to utter or describe something and then doing so; or saying that language inflates, or deflates, or misrepresents its object, and their continuing to use it anyway. In 'A refusal to mourn', for instance, the whole poem does what it says it won't do: the speaker professes his refusal to mourn, but the poem itself constitutes and act of mourning.

00144--What post- structuralist critics do?

1) They read the text against itself' so as to expose what might be thought of as the 'textual subconscious', where meanings are expressed which may be directly contrary to the surface meaning.

2) They fix upon the surface features of the words - similarities in sound, the root meanings of words, a 'dead' (or dying) metaphor and bring there to the foreground, so that they become crucial to the overall meaning.

3) They seek to show that the text is characterised by disunity rather than unity.

4) They concentrate on a single passage and analyse it so intensively that it becomes impossible to sustain a 'univocal' reading and the language explodes into 'multiplicities of meaning'.

5) They look for shifts and breaks of various kinds in the text and see these as evidence of what is repressed or glossed over or passed over in silence by the text. These discontinuities are sometimes called 'fault-lines', a geological metaphor referring to the breaks in rock formations which give evidence of previous activity and movement.

00143--Structuralism and Post- structuralism-some practical differences

The structuralist seeks The post- structuralist seeks

Parallels/Echoes Contradictions/paradoxes

Balances Shifts/Breaks in: Tone

Viewpoint

Time

Person

attitude

Reflections/Repetitions Conflicts

Symmetry Absences/Omissions

Contrasts Linguistic quirks

Patterns Aporia

Effect: To show textual unity and Effect:To show textual disunity

Coherence