Dana Multitasker 1

A LUCID AND CRISP STUDY OF

LITERARY THEORY
FOR UGC NET

BY: - SAURABH THAKUR

@DANA_MULTITASKER
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CONTENTS

Serial No. Topic Page No.

1 Feminism 5-26
2 Marxism 27-49
3 Psychoanalytical Literary Theory 50-63
4 Russian Formalism 64-71
5 New Criticism 72-82
6 Structuralism 83-94
7 Poststructuralism 95-103
8 Deconstruction 104-113
9 Existentialism 114-125
10 Modernism and Postmodernism 126-132
11 Reader Response Theory 133-139
12 New Historicism 140-142
13 Archetypal Criticism 143-145
14 Postcolonial literary Criticism 146-153
15 Stylistic 154-155
16 Narratology 156-159
17 Phenomenology 160-163
18 Hermeneutics 163-164
19 Queer Theory 165-166
20 Ecocriticism 166-167
21 Ecofeminism 167-168
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About Dana Multitasker

The real name of Dana Multitasker is Saurabh Thakur, who has been Gold Medalist
in MA English and completed MPhil from Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla. He has
qualified NET (four times), HP SET (4th Rank), and pursuing PhD (Entrance Topper) from
the same university. He belongs to Sirmaur district of Himachal Pradesh. He has taught in the
department of English, HPU as a research scholar for one year and has been former Assistant
Professor in AP Goyal Shimla University, and also a guest lecturer in PCPs held in The
International Centre for Distance Education and Open Learning (ICDEOL), Shimla. He has
been a published poet in numerous magazines and co-authored English poetry anthologies such
as Shades of Ink and Colour of Dreams. He is also a recognized Hindi-Urdu ‘Shayar’ who
keeps performing in various open-mic events including ‘The Social House,’ Delhi. ‘Dana’
(seed) is a name his schoolmates used to tease him because of his notorious behavior and short
stature. Due to the passage of time, juniors started calling him ‘Dana Bhai’ which he took as
a token of respect. ‘Multitasker’ is the epithet people gave him by seeing his multi-
dimensional activities on social media. Later, he chose this name for YouTube and Instagram
because of its deadly combination.

You can follow and contact him on Instagram and subscribe to his YouTube channel
with the same name @Dana_Multitasker. He also has a vlogging channel viz. @Dana_Vlogs.
You can also write him on prinsthakur89@gmail.com
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Literary Theory

Literary theory is the core part of English Literature and major focus of UGC NET
exam and any interview or entrance test that one faces for PhD or Assistant/Associate
Professor. Many times, I have watched my own YouTube lectures while preparing for such
interviews which made me realize that how essential is it to stay in touch with literary theory
and keep revising it time and again. Perhaps, one cannot write or read in an influential way
without being competent in literary theory. Literary theory is an indispensable thing that helps
you doing the doctoral research as well. Thus, to tackle questions related to literary theory, one
needs to have conceptual knowledge and deep understanding of every theory that we are going
to discuss further.

Let us understand Literary Theory

Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for
literary analysis. It is the body of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of literature.
By literary theory we refer not to the meaning of a work of literature but to the theories that
reveal what literature can mean. Literary theory is a description of the underlying principles,
one might say the tools, by which we attempt to understand literature. All literary interpretation
draws on a basis in theory but can serve as a justification for very different kinds of critical
activity. It is literary theory that formulates the relationship between author and work; literary
theory develops the significance of race, class, and gender for literary study, both from the
standpoint of the biography of the author and an analysis of their thematic presence within
texts. In simple words, it is a perspective with which we look at and interpret a text.

The practice of literary theory became a profession in the 20th century, but it has
historical roots that run as far back as ancient Greece (Aristotle's Poetics is an often cited early
example), ancient India (Bharata Muni's Natya Shastra), ancient Rome (Longinus's On the
Sublime) etc. The aesthetic theories of philosophers from ancient philosophy through the 18th
and 19th centuries are important influences on current literary study. The theory and criticism
of literature are tied to the history of literature.
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Feminism

‘Feminism’ is taken from the Latin word ‘Femina’ which means woman. Charles
Fourier, a utopian socialist and French philosopher, is credited with having coined the word
‘féminisme’ in Theorie des Quatre Mouvements et des Destinees Generales (published in
1808). Feminist literature covers the canon of nonfiction, fiction, poetry, essays (and more)
that relates to women's equality in all arenas including social, political, and domestic.
Essentially, feminist literature covers a wide range of written expression, but what they all have
in common is a focus on the female experience and how it changes, expands, and evolves.
Note: The writers, their works, publishing year, and their terms are important.

Major Feminist Writers:

 Mary Wollstonecraft
 Virginia Woolf
 Simone de Beauvoir
 Elaine Showalter
 Margaret Fuller
 Kate Millet
 Helen Cixous
 Luce Irigaray
 Toril Moi
 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
 Judith Butler
 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
 Julia Kristeva (will be covered in Psychoanalytic Literary Theory)

The 'women's movement' of the 1960s was not, of course, the start of feminism. Rather,
it was a renewal of an old tradition of thought and action already possessing its classic books
which had diagnosed the problem of women's inequality in society, and (in some cases)
proposed solutions. These books include Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of
Women (1792), which discusses male writers like Milton, Pope, and Rousseau; Olive
Schreiner's Women and Labour (1911); Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One's Own (1929), which
vividly portrays the unequal treatment given to women seeking education and alternatives to
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marriage and motherhood; and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949), which has an
important section on the portrayal of women in the novels of D. H. Lawrence. Male
contributions to this tradition of feminist writing include John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of
Woman (1869) and The Origin of the Family (1884) by Friedrich Engels.

Waves of Feminism:

The first wave of feminism (1890s-1960s) took place in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century in the United States, emerging out of an environment of urban industrialism
and liberal and socialist politics. First wave feminism sought political and legal equality
specifically, women’s right to vote.

The second wave of feminism (1960s-1980s) began in 1960s and was sparked by the
publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystery (1963). The second wave was also a result
of the protests against the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City in 1968. In this phase,
sexuality and reproductive rights of women were prominent issues.

The third wave of feminism (1990s-2010) began in the late twentieth century and is
instructed by postcolonial theory. The name ‘Third Wave’ came from Rebecca Walker’s article
“Becoming the Third Wave”. This wave grew with the emergence of the “Riot grrrl,” a
subcultural movement that combines feminism, punk music and politics in Olympia,
Washington, in the early 1990s. Third wave feminists embrace individualism in women and
diversity and sought to redefine what it meant to be a feminist. Major focus was on women’s
different colour, ethnicity, nationality, religion, culture etc.

Fourth wave feminism (2010-present) refers to rejuvenation of interest in feminism that

began in 2010s. The fourth wave strives for greater gender equality with a focus on gender
norms and the marginalization of women in society. Its majorly focuses on sexual harassment,
rapes, molestation etc., in the era of social media.
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Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an English writer, philosopher, and advocate of

women's rights. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several
unconventional personal relationships at the time, received more attention than her writing.
Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists
often cite both her life and her works as important influences. She is often regarded as the first
feminist writer.

Major Works:

Note: The chronology of all major writer’s works is important. Learn the publishing years by
heart of the books in bold letters.

 Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the

More Important Duties of Life (1787).
 Mary: A Fiction (1788).
 Original Stories from Real Life: With Conversations Calculated to Regulate the
Affections and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness (1788).
 A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund
Burke; Occasioned by His Reflections on the Revolution in (1790).
 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Moral and Political Subjects
(1792).
 An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution; and the Effect It Has produced
in Europe (1794).
 The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria. Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication
of the Rights of Woman (1798). [Published posthumously; unfinished]

During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the
French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally
inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men
and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.
After Wollstonecraft's death, her widower published a Memoir (1798) of her life, revealing her
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unorthodox lifestyle, which inadvertently destroyed her reputation for almost a century.
Wollstonecraft married the philosopher William Godwin, one of the forefathers of the
anarchist movement.

Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English writer, considered one of the
most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of
consciousness as a narrative device. From 1897 to 1901, she attended the Ladies' Department
of King's College London, where she studied classics and history and came into contact with
early reformers of women's higher education and the women's rights movement. Encouraged
by her father Leslie Stepher, Woolf began writing professionally in 1900. Stephen family
moved from Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury, where, in conjunction with the
brothers' intellectual friends, they formed the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group. In 1912,
she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917, the couple founded the Hogarth Press, which
published much of her work. Woolf had romantic relationships with a woman Vita Sackville-
West. In 1915, she had published her first novel, The Voyage Out. Woolf became one of the
central subjects of the 1970s movement of feminist criticism and her works have since attracted
much attention and widespread commentary for "inspiring feminism". Throughout her life,
Woolf was troubled by mental illness (bipolar disorder). She attempted suicide at least twice
and in 1941, at age 59, Woolf died by drowning herself in the River Ouse at Lewes.

Major Works (Non-Fiction):

 Modern Fiction (1921)

 Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924)
 “Profession for women” (an abbreviated version of the speech Virginia Woolf delivered
before a branch of the National Society for Women’s Service on January 21, 1931.)
 A Room of One’s Own (1929)
 Three Guineas (1938)

Among Woolf's non-fiction works, one of the best known is A Room of One's Own
(1929), a book-length essay. Considered a key work of feminist literary criticism, it was written
following two lectures she delivered on "Women and Fiction" at Cambridge University the
previous year. In it, she examines the historical disempowerment women have faced in many
spheres, including social, educational and financial. One of her most famous dictum is
contained within the book "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to
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write fiction". Much of her argument is developed through the "unsolved problems" of women
and fiction writing to arrive at her conclusion, although she claimed that was only "an opinion
upon one minor point". In doing so, she states a good deal about the nature of women and
fiction, employing a quasi-fictional style as she examines where women writers failed because
of lack of resources and opportunities, examining along the way the experiences of the Brontës,
George Eliot and George Sand, as well as the fictional character of Shakespeare's sister,
equipped with the same genius but not position. She contrasted these women who accepted a
deferential status with Jane Austen, who wrote entirely as a woman.

In this essay, Woolf uses metaphors to explore social injustices and comments on
women's lack of free expression. Her metaphor of a fish explains her most essential point, "A
woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction". She writes of a
woman whose thought had "let its line down into the stream". As the woman starts to think of
an idea, a guard enforces a rule whereby women are not allowed to walk on the grass. Abiding
by the rule, the woman loses her idea. Here, Woolf describes the influence of women's social
expectations as mere domestic child bearers, ignorant and chaste.

In one section Woolf invents a fictional character, Judith, Shakespeare's sister, to

illustrate that a woman with Shakespeare's gifts would have been denied the opportunity to
develop them. Like Woolf, who stayed at home while her brothers went off to school, Judith is
trapped in the home: "She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as
he was. But she was not sent to school." While William Shakespeare learns, Judith is
chastised by her parents should she happen to pick up a book, as she is inevitably abandoning
some household chore to which she could be attending. Judith is betrothed, and when she does
not want to marry, her father beats her, then shames her into the marriage. While William
establishes himself, Judith is trapped by what is expected of women. She runs away from home
to London, is harassed and laughed at when she tries to become an actor, and is finally made
pregnant by an actor-manager who said he would help her. She kills herself and "lies buried
at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle". William
lives on and establishes his legacy.

The writer Arnold Bennett had written a review of Woolf's Jacob's Room (1922) in
Cassell's Weekly in March 1923, which provoked Woolf to rebut it. She recorded in her diary
in June that Bennett accused her of writing about characters that couldn't survive. Her response
was published in the United States in Nation and Athenaeum in December as Mr. Bennett and
Mrs. Brown (1924).

Although Three Guineas is a work of non-fiction, it was initially conceived as a

"novel–essay" which would tie up the loose ends left in her earlier work, A Room of One's
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Own. The book was to alternate between fictive narrative chapters and non-fiction essay
chapters, demonstrating Woolf's views on war and women in both types of writing at once.
This unfinished manuscript was published in 1977 as The Pargiters. When Woolf realised the
idea of a "novel–essay" wasn't working, she separated the two parts. The non-fiction portion
became Three Guineas. The fiction portion became Woolf's most popular novel during her
lifetime, The Years, which charts social change from 1880 to the time of publication through
the lives of the Pargiter family. It was so popular, in fact, that pocket-sized editions of the novel
were published for soldiers as leisure reading during World War I.

Works such as A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) are frequently
taught as icons of feminist literature in courses that would be very critical of some of her views
expressed elsewhere.

Simone de Beauvoir
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a French
existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist activist. Though she did not
consider herself a philosopher, and even though she was not considered one at the time of her
death, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory.

Note: - One writer can belong to more than one school or movement simultaneously.

Major Works:

 She Came to Stay (1943)

 All Men are Mortal (1946)
 The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
 The Second Sex (1949)
 The Mandarins (1954)
 Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958)
 The Coming of Age (1970)

Beauvoir wrote novels, essays, biographies, autobiographies, and monographs on

philosophy, politics, and social issues. She was known for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex,
a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism;
and for her novels, including She Came to Stay (1943) and The Mandarins (1954). Beauvoir
was intellectually precocious, fuelled by her father's encouragement; he reportedly would
boast, "Simone thinks like a man!". She was also known for her open, lifelong relationship with
French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. They both met during her college years. Intrigued by
her determination as an educator, he intended to make their relationship romantic. However,
she had no interest in doing so. During October 1929, Jean-Paul Sartre and Beauvoir became a
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couple. After they were confronted by her father, Sartre asked her to marry him on a provisional
basis: One day while they were sitting on a bench outside the Louvre, he said, "Let's sign a
two-year lease". Though Beauvoir wrote, "Marriage was impossible. I had no dowry". Scholars
point out that her ideal relationships described in The Second Sex and elsewhere bore little
resemblances to the marriage standards of the day. Instead, she and Sartre entered into a
lifelong "soul partnership", which was sexual but not exclusive, nor did it involve living
together.

The Second Sex (French: Le Deuxième Sexe) is a 1949 book by the French
existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, in which the author discusses the treatment of
women throughout history. Beauvoir wrote this book between 1946 and 1949. She published
the work in two volumes: Facts and Myths and Lived Experience. Some chapters first
appeared in journal Les Temps modernes. One of Beauvoir's best-known books, The Second
Sex is often regarded as a major work of feminist philosophy and the starting inspiration point
of second-wave feminism.

This book turns the existentialist mantra that existence precedes essence into a feminist
one: "One is not born but becomes a woman.” With this famous phrase, Beauvoir first
articulated what has come to be known as the sex-gender distinction, that is, the distinction
between biological sex and the social and historical construction of gender and its attendant
stereotypes. Beauvoir defines women as the "second sex" because women are defined as
inferior to men. She pointed out that Aristotle argued women are "female by virtue of a certain
lack of qualities", while Thomas Aquinas referred to women as "imperfect men" and the
"incidental" being. She quotes "In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the
ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without
feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.”

Volume 1:

Beauvoir asks "What is woman?" She argues that man is considered the default, while
woman is considered the "Other": "Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not herself
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but as relative to him." Authors whose views Beauvoir rejects include Sigmund Freud and
Alfred Adler, and Friedrich Engels. Beauvoir argues that while Engels, in his The Origin of
the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), maintained that "the great historical defeat
of the female sex" is the result of the invention of bronze and the emergence of private property,
his claims are unsupported. According to Beauvoir, two factors explain the evolution of
women's condition: participation in production and freedom from reproductive slavery. She
writes that motherhood left woman "riveted to her body" like an animal and made it possible
for men to dominate her and Nature.

Volume 2:

Presenting a child's life beginning with birth, Beauvoir contrasts a girl's upbringing with
a boy's, who at age 3 or 4 is told he is a "little man". A girl is taught to be a woman and her
"feminine" destiny is imposed on her by society. She has no innate "maternal instinct". A girl
comes to believe in and to worship a male god and to create imaginary adult lovers. The
discovery of sex is a "phenomenon as painful as weaning" and she views it with disgust. When
she discovers that men, not women, are the masters of the world this "imperiously modifies her
consciousness of herself". Beauvoir describes puberty, the beginning of menstruation, and the
way girls imagine sex with a man. She relates several ways that girls in their late teens accept
their "femininity", which may include running away from home, fascination with the
disgusting, following nature, or stealing.

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter is a superb autobiography and offers an intimate

picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the
conventional expectations of her class, and striking out on her own with an intellectual and
existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in the 1920s.

Beauvoir published her first novel She Came to Stay in 1943. It has been assumed that
it is inspired by her and Sartre's sexual relationship with Olga Kosakiewicz and Wanda
Kosakiewicz.

The Mandarins (1954) won France's highest literary prize, the Prix Goncourt. The
book is set after the end of World War II and follows the personal lives of philosophers and
friends among Sartre's and Beauvoir's intimate circle, including her relationship with American
writer Nelson Algren, to whom the book was dedicated.

In 1944, Beauvoir wrote her first philosophical essay, Pyrrhus et Cinéas, a discussion
on existentialist ethics. She continued her exploration of existentialism through her second
essay The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947); it is perhaps the most accessible entry into French
existentialism. In the essay, Beauvoir clears up some inconsistencies that many, Sartre
included, have found in major existentialist works such as Being and Nothingness. In The
Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir confronts the existentialist dilemma of absolute freedom vs. the
constraints of circumstance.
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Elaine Showalter
Elaine Showalter (born January 21, 1941) is an American literary critic, feminist, and
writer on cultural and social issues. She influenced feminist literary criticism in the United
States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics, a term describing the
study of "women as writers". Showalter is a specialist in Victorian literature and the Fin-de-
siècle (turn of the 19th century). Her most innovative work in this field is in madness and
hysteria in literature, specifically in women's writing and in the portrayal of female characters.
Major Works:
 The Double Critical Standard: Criticism of Women Writers in England, 1845-1880
(1969) was her PhD thesis which later turned as a book: -
A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (1978)
 Towards a Feminist Poetics (1979)
 Feminist Criticism in Wilderness (1981)
 The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture (1830–1980) (1985),
 Speaking of Gender (1989)
 Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle (1990),
 Sister’s Choice (1991)
 Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997),
 Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (2001).
 Teaching Literature (2002).
Terms:
 Gynocriticism

In Towards a Feminist Poetics, Showalter traces the history of women's literature,

suggesting that it can be divided into three phases:

1. Feminine: In the Feminine phase (1840–1880), "women wrote in an effort to equal the
intellectual achievements of the male culture, and internalized its assumptions about female
nature".

2. Feminist: The Feminist phase (1880–1920) was characterized by women's writing that
protested against male standards and values, and advocated women's rights and values,
including a demand for autonomy.

3. Female: The Female phase (1920- present) is one of self-discovery. Showalter says,
"women reject both imitation and protest—two forms of dependency—and turn instead to
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female experience as the source of an autonomous art, extending the feminist analysis of culture
to the forms and techniques of literature"

Gynocriticism:

Gynocriticism or gynocritics is the term coined by Elaine Showalter in her essay

“Towards a Feminist Poetics” to describe a new literary project intended to construct "a
female framework for the analysis of women's literature". By expanding the historical study of
women writers as a distinct literary tradition, gynocritics sought to develop new models based
on the study of female experience to replace male models of literary creation. Gynocriticism
was designed as a "second phase" in feminist criticism – turning to a focus on, and interrogation
of female authorship, images, the feminine experience and ideology, and the history and
development of the female literary tradition. Gynocriticism also examines the female struggle
for identity and the social construct of gender. According to Elaine Showalter, gynocritics is
the study of not only the female as a gender status but also the 'internalized consciousness' of
the female. Gynocriticism accordingly challenged a Freudian psychoanalytic perspective
whereby the female inherently suffers envy of men and feelings of inadequacy and injustice,
combined with feelings of intellectual inferiority.

Showalter coined the term "gynocritics" to describe literary criticism based in on a

female perspective. Probably the best description Showalter gives of gynocritics is in Towards
a Feminist Poetics:

In contrast to an angry or loving fixation on male literature, the program of

gynocritics is to construct a female framework for the analysis of women's
literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather
than to adapt male models and theories. Gynocritics begins at the point when we
free ourselves from the linear absolutes of male literary history, stop trying to fit
women between the lines of the male tradition, and focus instead on the newly
visible world of female culture.

This does not mean that the goal of gynocritics is to erase the differences between male
and female writing; gynocritics is not "on a pilgrimage to the promised land in which gender
would lose its power, in which all texts would be sexless and equal, like angels.” Rather
gynocritics aims to understand women's writing not as a product of sexism but as a fundamental
aspect of female reality. Gynocriticism helped reclaim from obscurity a vast body of early
female writings, often published in Virago, as well as producing such feminist classics as The
Madwoman in the Attic.

Major works and their brief summary:

The Double Critical Standard contains a lengthy and much-discussed chapter on

Virginia Woolf.
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The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (1985)
discusses hysteria, which was once known as the "female malady" and according to Showalter,
is called depression today. Showalter demonstrates how cultural ideas about proper feminine
behaviour have shaped the definition and treatment of female insanity from the Victorian era
to the present.

Sexual Anarchy: Gender at Culture at the Fin de Siecle (1990) outlines a history of
the sexes and the crises, themes, and problems associated with the battle for sexual supremacy
and identity.

In Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997) Showalter argues that
hysteria, a medical condition traditionally seen as feminine, has persisted for centuries, and is
now manifesting itself in cultural phenomena in the forms of socially and medically accepted
maladies. Psychological and physical effects of unhappy lives become "hysterical epidemics"
when popular media saturate the public with paranoid reports and findings, essentially
legitimizing, as Showalter calls them, "imaginary illnesses".

Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (2001) surveys feminist

icons since the 18th century, situated mostly in the US and the United Kingdom like Mary
Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Camille Paglia.

Teaching Literature (2002) is essentially a guide to teaching English literature to

undergraduate students in university. Showalter covers approaches to teaching theory,
preparing syllabi and talking about taboo subjects among many other practical topics.

Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents (2005) is a study of the
Anglo-American academic novel from the 1950s to the present.

Margaret Fuller
Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1810-1850) was an American journalist, editor, critic,
translator, and women's rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism
movement. She was the first American female war correspondent and full-time book reviewer
in journalism. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) is considered the first major
feminist work in the United States. She became the first editor of the transcendentalist journal
The Dial in 1840. She became the first woman allowed to use the library at Harvard College.
In 1846, she was sent to Europe for the Tribune as its first female correspondent.

Major Works:

• The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Women (1843)

• Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844)

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• Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)

• Literature and Art (1852).

Fuller was an advocate of women's rights and, in particular, women's education and the
right to employment. Fuller, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, wanted to stay free of what
she called the "strong mental odor" of female teachers. She also encouraged many other
reforms in society, including prison reform and the emancipation of slaves in the United States.

Kate Millet
Katherine Murray Millett (1934 –2017) was an American feminist writer, educator,
artist, and activist. She has been described as "a seminal influence on second-wave
feminism", and is best known for her book Sexual Politics (1970), which was based on her
doctoral dissertation at Columbia University.

Major Works:

• Sexual Politics (1970)

• Flying (1974)

• Sita (1976)

• The Loony Bin Trip (1990)

• The Politics of Cruelty (1994) [about state-sanctioned torture in many countries].

• Mother Millett (2001), [about her relationship with her mother].

She became a spokesperson for the feminist movement following the success of the
book Sexual Politics (1970). Millett was one of the first writers to describe the modern concept
of patriarchy as the society-wide subjugation of women. Millett wrote several books on
women's lives from a feminist perspective. For instance, in the book The Basement:
Meditations on a Human Sacrifice (1979), completed over four years, she chronicled the
torture and murder of Indianapolis teenager Sylvia Likens by Gertrude Baniszewski in 1965
that had preoccupied her for 14 years. With a feminist perspective, she explored the story of
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the defenceless girl and the dynamics of the individuals involved in her sexual, physical and
emotional abuse.

Sexual Politics:

Sexual Politics is based on her PhD dissertation and regarded as a classic of feminism
and one of radical feminism's key texts. Sexual Politics analyses the subjugation of women in
prominent art and literature in the 20th century, specifically looking at the presence of male
domination in culture. It is a critique of patriarchy in Western society and literature, addressed
the sexism and heterosexism of the modern novelists D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and
Norman Mailer and contrasted their perspectives with the dissenting viewpoint of the
homosexual author Jean Genet. Millett argues that "sex has a frequently neglected political
aspect" and goes on to discuss the role that patriarchy plays in sexual relations, looking in the
works of abovementioned writers. Millett questioned the origins of patriarchy, argued that sex-
based oppression was both political and cultural, and posited that undoing the traditional family
was the key to true sexual revolution. She argues that these authors (above) view and discuss
sex in a patriarchal and sexist way. In contrast, she applauds the more nuanced gender
politics of homosexual writer Jean Genet. Other writers discussed at length include Sigmund
Freud, George Meredith, John Ruskin, and John Stuart Mill. Sexual Politics was largely
influenced by Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 book The Second Sex.

According to biographer Peter Manso, The Prisoner of Sex was written by Norman
Mailer in response to Millett's Sexual Politics.

Helen Cixous
Hélène Cixous (born 1937) is a professor, French feminist writer, poet, playwright,
philosopher, literary critic and rhetorician.

Major Works:

• The Laugh of the Medusa (1975)

• The Newly Born Woman (1975)

• Coming to Writing (1977)

• Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (1991)

• Stigmata: Surviving Texts (1998)

• Voils (1998) [with Jacques Derrida].

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Terms:

 Ecriture Feminine

She founded the first centre of feminist studies at a European university at the Centre
universitaire de Vincennes of the University of Paris. She has published widely, including
twenty-three volumes of poems, six books of essays, five plays, and numerous influential
articles. She published Voiles (Veils) with Jacques Derrida and her work is often considered
deconstructive. In introducing her Wellek Lecture, subsequently published as Three Steps on
the Ladder of Writing, Derrida referred to her as the greatest living writer in French Language.
Cixous wrote a book on Derrida titled Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint.

In 1969, she published her first novel, Dedans (Inside), a semi-autobiographical work
that won the Prix Médicis.

Along with Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, Cixous is considered one of the mothers
of poststructuralist feminist theory. In the 1970s, Cixous began writing about the relationship
between sexuality and language. Like other poststructuralist feminist theorists, Cixous believes
that our sexuality is directly tied to how we communicate in society.

Cixous is best known for her article "The Laugh of the Medusa", which established
her as one of the early thinkers in post-structural feminism. It has become a seminal essay,
particularly because it announces what Cixous called écriture féminine, a distinctive mode of
writing for women and by women. In the essay, Cixous issues an ultimatum: that women can
either read and choose to stay trapped in their own bodies by a language that does not allow
them to express themselves, or they can use the body as a way to communicate.

Ecriture Feminine:

She says that it is a writing style that attempts to move outside of the conventional rules
found in patriarchal systems. She argues that Écriture Feminine allows women to address
their needs by building strong self-narratives and identity. Cixous aimed to establish a genre of
literary writing that deviates from traditional masculine styles of writing, one which examines
the relationship between the cultural and psychological inscription of the female body and
female difference in language and text. She commands women to focus on individuality,
particularly the individuality of the body and to write to redefine self-identity in the context of
her history and narrative. Écriture féminine as a theory foregrounds the importance of language
for the psychic understanding of self.

Cixous uses the term the "Logic of Antilove" to describe her understanding of the
systematic oppression of women by patriarchal figures.

*Note*: - Sometimes, it becomes difficult to understand literary theory by reading

because of the complexity of language. Understanding this fact, I decided to make
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YouTube lectures in Hindi, because the main motive is to make my students understand.
But, as a student of English language, we need to work on our comprehension level
because the exams and interviews that we face will be in English only. If you find these
notes tough, read them once and go to my YouTube channel’s playlist section, watch
videos of the same, come back, and read the notes again. This will definitely help you
improve and grow.

Luce Irigaray
Luce Irigaray (born 1930) is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist,
psycholinguist, psychoanalyst and cultural theorist who examined the uses and misuses of
language in relation to women.

Major Works:

• Speculum of the Other Woman (1974)

• The Sex Which is Not One (1977)

• Elemental Passions (1982)

• An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1982)

• I Love to You (1990)

• The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (1999)

Irigaray employs three different modes in her investigations into the nature of gender,
language, and identity: the analytic, the essayistic, and the lyrical poetic. As of October 2021,
she is active in the Women's Movements in both France and Italy.

In the 1960s, Irigaray started attending the psychoanalytic seminars of Jacques Lacan
and joined the Freudian School of Paris directed by Lacan. She was expelled from this school
in 1974, after the publication of her second doctoral thesis Speculum of the Other Woman,
later retitled as Speculum: De l'autre femme, which received much criticism from both the
Lacanian and Freudian schools of psychoanalysis.

Her most extensive autobiographical statements thus far are gathered in Through
Vegetal Being (2016) [co-authored with Michael Marder].
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Speculum of the Other Woman (Speculum de l'autre femme):

This was her first major book, based on her second dissertation. In Speculum, Irigaray
engages in close analyses of phallocentrism in Western philosophy and psychoanalytic theory,
analyzing texts by Freud, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant. The book's most cited
essay, "The Blind Spot of an Old Dream," critiques Freud's lecture on femininity.

This Sex Which is Not One:

In addition to more commentary on psychoanalysis, including discussions of Lacan's

work, This Sex Which is Not One also comments on political economy, drawing on structuralist
writers such as Lévi-Strauss. For example, Irigaray argues that the phallic economy places
women alongside signs and currency, since all forms of exchange are conducted exclusively
between men.

"Women on the Market" (Chapter Eight of This Sex Which is Not One):

Irigaray draws upon Karl Marx’s theory of capital and commodities to claim that
women are exchanged between men in the same way as any other commodity is. She argues
that our entire society is predicated on this exchange of women. Her exchange value is
determined by society, while her use value is her natural qualities. Thus, a woman’s self is
divided between her use and exchange values, and she is only desired for the exchange value.
This system creates three types of women: the mother, who is all use value; the virgin, who is
all exchange value; and the prostitute, who embodies both use and exchange value.

Elemental Passions (1982) can be read as a response to Merleau‐Ponty's article “The

Intertwining—The Chiasm” in The Visible and the Invisible.

The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (1999), critiques Heidegger's emphasis on

the element of earth as the ground of life and speech and his "oblivion" or forgetting of air.

She continued to conduct empirical studies about language in a variety of settings,

researching the differences between the way men and women speak. This focus on sexual
difference is the key characteristic of Irigaray's oeuvre, since she is seeking to provide a site
from which a feminine language can eventuate. Irigaray is active in a feminist movement in
Italy, but she refused to belong to any one movement because she does not like the competitive
dynamic between the feminist movements.

Toril Moi
Toril Moi (born 1953 in Farsund, Norway) is James B. Duke Professor of Literature
and Romance Studies and Professor of English, Philosophy and Theatre Studies at Duke
University. She works on feminist theory and women's writing; on the intersections of
literature, philosophy and aesthetics; and is fundamentally concerned with "finding ways of
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reading literature with philosophy and philosophy with literature without reducing the one to
the other."

Major Works:

• Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985)

• Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1994)

• What Is a Woman? And Other Essays (1999)

• Sex, Gender, and the Body (2005)

• Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy (2006).

• Revolution of the Ordinary (2017)

• Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies (2019)

Moi made her name with Sexual/Textual Politics, a survey of second-wave feminism
in which she contrasted the more empirical Anglo-American school of writings, such as
gynocriticism, with the more theoretical French proponents of Ecriture feminine. While
widely perceived at the time as an attack on the Anglo-American approach, Moi would later
highlight her respect for their more politicized stance, as opposed to the idealism of the post-
structuralists. The book would also explore the concept of androgyny, along with its links to
the anti-essentialism of the French school.

Sexual/Textual Politics was followed by further explorations of contemporary French

feminists such as Julia Kristeva, before Moi turned to her ground-breaking 1994 study of
Simone de Beauvoir. Over the following decade, however, her focus of attention shifted to
ordinary language philosophy from existentialism. Her most recent book, Revolution of the
Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell (2017), articulates an
ordinary language philosophy-inspired approach to the task of literary criticism.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

*Note*: - Spivak belongs to Feminism, Postcolonialism, Deconstruction, and
Marxism simultaneously. Therefore, I am covering her only here by explaining
everything a NET aspirant needs to know.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (born in Calcutta, India, 1942) is an Indian scholar,

literary theorist, and feminist critic. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and
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a founding member of the establishment's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. She
has often referred to herself as a "practical Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist".

Major Works:

 Translation of Derrida’s book Of Grammatology in 1967

 Myself Must I Remake (1974) [Her dissertation on W.B. Yeats)
 In Other Worlds (1987)
 Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993)
 A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999)
 Death of a Discipline (2003)
 Can the Subaltern Speak? (2008)
 Other Asias (2008)
 An Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization (2012).

Terms:

 Subaltern
 Strategic Essentialism
 Epistemic Violence

Her essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988), established Spivak among the ranks
of feminists who consider history, geography, and class when thinking about women. In all her
work, Spivak's main effort has been to try to find ways of accessing the subjectivity of those
who are being investigated. In "Can the Subaltern Speak?", Spivak discusses the lack of an
account of the Sati practice, leading her to reflect on whether the subaltern can even speak. She
argues that the abolition of the Hindu rite of sati in India by the British has been generally
understood as a case of “White men saving brown women from brown men''. She is hailed as
a critic who has feminized and globalized the philosophy of deconstruction, considering the
position of the subaltern.

Subaltern:

In postcolonial studies and in critical theory, the term subaltern designates and
identifies the colonial populations who are socially, politically, and geographically excluded
from the hierarchy of power of an imperial colony and from the metropolitan homeland of an
empire. Antonio Gramsci coined the term subaltern to identify the cultural hegemony
(Gramsci’s concept) that excludes and displaces specific people and social groups from the
socio-economic institutions of society, in order to deny their agency and voices in colonial
politics.
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Spivak’s predominant ethico-political concern has been for the space occupied by the
subaltern, especially subaltern women, both in discursive practices and in institutions of
Western cultures.

In the early 1980s, she was also hailed as a co-founder of postcolonial theory, which
she refused to accept fully, as has been demonstrated in her book Critique of Postcolonial
Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), which suggests that so-called
postcolonial theory should be considered from the point of view of who uses it in what interest.
This book explores how major works of European metaphysics (e.g., Kant, Hegel) not only
tend to exclude the subaltern from their discussions, but actively prevent non-Europeans from
occupying positions as fully human subjects. In this work, Spivak launched the concept of
"sanctioned ignorance" for the "reproducing and foreclosing of colonialist structures".

Strategic Essentialism:

It refers to a political tactic or a sort of temporary solidarity (unity) for the purpose of
social action in which minority groups, nationalities, or ethnic groups mobilize on the basis of
shared gendered, cultural, or political identity to represent themselves. For example, women's
groups have many different agendas that potentially make it difficult for feminists to work
together for common causes. "Strategic essentialism" allows for disparate groups to accept
temporarily an "essentialist" position that enables them able to act cohesively. The concept also
comes up regularly in queer theory, feminist theory, deaf studies, and specifically in the work
of Luce Irigaray, who refers to it as mimesis.

Epistemic Violence:

For Spivak, to commit 'epistemic violence' is to actively obstruct and undermine non-
Western methods or approaches to knowledge. This imperialist subjugation of non-Western
understanding is a way of constituting the colonial subject solely as a heterogeneous 'Other'.
Epistemic violence employs apparent subtle methods, for example through education, religion,
politics, social integration and development projects.

In 1967, on her regular attempts at self-improvement, Spivak purchased a book, by an

author unknown to her, entitled De la grammatologie. She decided to translate the book by an
unknown author, and wrote a long translator's preface. This publication was immediately a
success, and the Translator's Preface began to be used around the world as an introduction to
the philosophy of deconstruction launched by the author, Jacques Derrida, whom Spivak met
in 1971.

Apart from Derrida, Spivak has also translated the fiction of the Bengali author,
Mahasweta Devi, the poetry of the 18-century Bengali poet Ramprasad Sen, and most recently
A Season in the Congo by Aimé Césaire.
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Judith Butler
Judith Pamela Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American philosopher and gender
theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave
feminism, queer theory, and literary theory.

Major Works:

 Performative Acts and Gender Constitution (1988)

 Gender Trouble (1990)
 Imitation and Gender Insubordination (1991)
 Bodies That Matter (1993)
 Excitable Speech (1997)
 Undoing Gender (2004)
 Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015)

Terms/Ideas:

• Gender Performativity

• Gender as Social Construction

Butler is best known for her books Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity (1990) in which she argues that gender is a kind of improvised performance. This book
discusses the works of Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan,
Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault.

In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), she challenges
conventional notions of gender and develops the theory of gender performativity. This theory
has had a major influence on feminist and queer scholarship. Her works are often studied and
debated in film studies courses emphasizing gender studies and performativity in discourse.
Butler has also supported lesbian and gay rights movements.

Gender Performativity:

First coined by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble. In the book, Butler sets out to criticize
what they consider to be an outdated perception of gender. This outdated perception, according
to Butler, is limiting in that it adheres to the dominant societal constraints that label gender as
binary. In scrutinizing gender, Butler introduces a nuanced perception in which they unite the
concepts of performativity and gender. In chapter one, Butler introduces the unification of the
terms gender and performativity in stating that "gender proves to be performance—that is,
constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though
not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed".
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In demystifying this concept, Butler sets out to clarify that there is indeed a difference
in the terms gender performance and gender performativity. In a 2011 interview, Butler stated
it this way:

When we say that gender is performed, we usually mean that we've taken on a
role; we're acting in some way... To say that gender is performative is a little
different, because for something to be performative means that it produces a series
of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an
impression of being a man or being a woman... We act as if that being of a man or
that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that's simply
true about us, a fact about us. Actually, it's a phenomenon that is being produced
all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say
that nobody really is a gender from the start.

— Judith Butler, Your Behavior Creates Your Gender (2011)

*Note*: - In simple words, gender performativity is a phenomenon in which our

performance is not in our control because we behave in the way the dominant group of
society is performing, because they set the rules and roles for the genders in the society.
It means that if a woman is raised like a man, she will ultimately behave like a man
because she is the product of that societal construction.

Butler emphasizes the role of repetition in performativity, making use of Derrida's

theory of iterability.

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

Sandra M. Gilbert (born December 27, 1936) is an American literary critic and poet
who has published in the fields of feminist literary criticism, feminist theory, and
psychoanalytic criticism. She is best known for her collaborative critical work with Susan
Gubar (an American author and distinguished Professor Emerita of English and Women's
Studies at Indiana University), with whom she co-authored, among other works, The
Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary
Imagination (1979). This text is widely recognized as central to second-wave feminism. They
examine Victorian literature from a feminist perspective. Gilbert and Gubar draw their title
from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, in which Rochester's wife (née Bertha Mason) is kept
secretly locked in an attic apartment by her husband.

In this work, they examine the notion that women writers of the nineteenth century were
confined in their writing to make their female characters either embody the "angel" or the
"monster", a struggle which they argue stemmed from male writers' tendencies to categorize
female characters as either pure, angelic women or rebellious, unkempt madwomen. They also
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explore the way women were inhibited in their writing by what they called the Anxiety of
Authorship – the lack of legitimating role-models for the nineteenth-century woman
writer.
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Marxism
Marxism is a social, political, and economic philosophy named after Karl Marx. It
examines the effect of capitalism on labor, productivity, and economic development and argues
for a worker revolution to overturn capitalism in favor of communism. Marxism posits that
the struggle between social classes—specifically between the bourgeoisie, or capitalists, and
the proletariat, or workers—defines economic relations in a capitalist economy and will
inevitably lead to revolutionary communism.

What is communism in simple words?

Communism is a type of government as well as an economic system (a way of creating

and sharing wealth equally). In a Communist system, individual people do not own land,
factories, or machinery. Instead, the government or the whole community owns these things.

Key Points of Marxism:

• Marxism is a social, political, and economic theory originated by Karl Marx that
focuses on the struggle between capitalists and the working class.

• Marx wrote that the power relationships between capitalists and workers were
inherently exploitative and would inevitably create class conflict.

• He believed that this conflict would ultimately lead to a revolution in which the working
class would overthrow the capitalist class and seize control of the economy.

Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of

historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations
and social conflict as well as a dialectical perspective to view social transformation.
Karl Marx (1818-1883), a German philosopher, and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), a
German sociologist (as he would now be called), were the joint founders of this school of
thought. Marx was the son of a lawyer but spent most of his life in great poverty as a political
exile from Germany living in Britain (he was expelled after the 1848 'year of revolutions').
Engels had left Germany in 1842 to work in Manchester for his father's textile firm. They met
after Marx had read an article by Engels in a journal to which they both contributed. They
themselves called their economic theories 'Communism' (rather than 'Marxism'), designating
their belief in the state ownership of industry, transport, etc., rather than private ownership.
Marx and Engels announced the advent of Communism in their jointly-written Communist
Manifesto of 1848. The aim of Marxism is to bring about a classless society, based on the
common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Marxism is a
materialist philosophy: that is, it tries to explain things without assuming the existence of a
world or of forces beyond the natural world around us, and the society we live in. It looks for
concrete, scientific, logical explanations of the world of observable fact. (Its opposite is idealist
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philosophy, which does believe in the existence of a spiritual 'world elsewhere' and would offer,
for instance, religious explanations of life and conduct).

Marxian economics focuses on the criticisms of capitalism, which Karl Marx wrote
about in his book Das Kapital, published in 1867.

Social classes:

Marx distinguishes social classes on the basis of two criteria, i.e. ownership of means
of production and control over the labour power of others. Following this criterion of class
based on property relations, Marx identified the social stratification of the capitalist mode of
production with the following social groups:

Proletariat: "the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production
of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live." The capitalist mode of
production establishes the conditions that enable the bourgeoisie to exploit the proletariat as
the worker's labour generates a surplus value greater than the worker's wage.

Lumpenproletariat: the outcasts of society, such as the criminals, vagabonds, beggars,

or prostitutes, without any political or class consciousness. Having no interest in national, let
alone international, economic affairs, Marx claimed that this specific sub-division of the
proletariat would play no part in the eventual social revolution.

Bourgeoisie: those who "own the means of production" and buy labour power from the
proletariat, thus exploiting the proletariat. They subdivide as bourgeoisie and the petite
bourgeoisie.

Petite bourgeoisie: those who work and can afford to buy little labour power (i.e. small
business owners, peasants landlords and trade workers). Marxism predicts that the continual
reinvention of the means of production eventually would destroy the petite bourgeoisie,
degrading them from the middle class to the proletariat.

Landlords: A historically important social class who retain some wealth and power
and also sometimes work themselves.

Peasantry and farmers: a scattered class incapable of organizing and effecting socio-
economic change, most of whom would enter the proletariat while some would become
landlords.
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Class conflict:

It also referred to as class struggle and class warfare, is the political tension and
economic antagonism that exists in society consequent to socio-economic competition among
the social classes or between rich and poor.

Class consciousness:

It denotes the awareness—of itself and the social world—that a social class possesses
as well as its capacity to rationally act in their best interests. According to Marx, workers first
become conscious of sharing common grievances against capitalists (thus forming a class “in
itself”) and eventually develop an awareness of themselves as forming a social class opposed
to the bourgeoisie (thus becoming a class “for itself”), the proletariat. In simple words, to form
a class which can compete the dominant class in the society.

Surplus Value:

In Marxian economics, surplus value is the difference between the amount raised
through a sale of a product and the amount it cost to the owner of that product to manufacture
it: i.e. the amount raised through sale of the product minus the cost of the materials, plant and
labour power. The concept originated in Ricardian socialism, with the term "surplus value"
itself being coined by William Thompson in 1824; According to Marx's theory, surplus value
is equal to the new value created by workers in excess of their own labor-cost, which is
appropriated by the capitalist as profit when products are sold.

Base and Superstructure:

In Marxist theory, society consists of two parts: the base (or substructure) and
superstructure. The base refers to the mode of production which includes the forces and
relations of production (ex. employer–employee work conditions, the technical division of
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labour, and property relations) into which people enter to produce the necessities and amenities
of life. The superstructure refers to society's other relationships and ideas not directly relating
to production including its culture, institutions, political power structures, roles, rituals,
religion, media, and state. The relation of the two parts is not strictly unidirectional. The
superstructure can affect the base. However, the influence of the base is predominant.

Major writers of Marxist Literary Theory

 Karl Marx
 Friedrich Engels
 Antonio Gramsci
 Terry Eagleton
 Gyorgy Lukacs
 Louis Althusser
 Nicos Poulantzas
 Pierre Bourdieu
 Fredric Jameson
 Theodor Adorono
 Max Horkheimer
 Walter Benjamin
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 Raymond Williams (will be covered in my other notes series i.e., Cultural Studies.
Although, I have already made a lecture on him. Find it in the playlist “Cultural
Studies” on my YouTube channel).

Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (1818 –1883) was a German philosopher, critic of political
economy, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist
revolutionary. Marx's political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on
subsequent intellectual, economic, and political history.

Major Works:

 The Communist Menifesto (1848)

 Das Capital (1867-1883) [In 3 volumes]
 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1932)
 Grundrisse (1939)

The Communist Menifesto:

Marx is famous for analysing history in terms of class struggle, summarised in the initial
line introducing The Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing society is
the history of class struggles.”

The Communist Manifesto is divided into a preamble and four sections, the last of
these a short conclusion. The introduction begins: "A spectre is haunting Europe—the
spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to
exorcise this spectre."

The first section of the Manifesto, "Bourgeois and Proletarians", elucidates the
materialist conception of history of class struggles.

"Proletarians and Communists", the second section, starts by stating the relationship
of conscious communists to the rest of the working class. The communists' party will not
oppose other working-class parties, but unlike them, it will express the general will and defend
the common interests of the world's proletariat as a whole, independent of all nationalities.

The third section, "Socialist and Communist Literature", distinguishes communism

from other socialist doctrines prevalent at the time—these being broadly categorised as
Reactionary Socialism; Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism; and Critical-Utopian Socialism
and Communism.
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"Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Opposition Parties", the

concluding section of the Manifesto, briefly discusses the communist position on struggles in
specific countries in the mid-nineteenth century.

Friedrich Engels
Frederick Engels (1820 –1895), was a German philosopher, critic of political
economy, historian, political theorist and revolutionary socialist.

Major Works:

 The Holy Family (1844)

 The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845)
 The Peasant War in Germany (1850)
 Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)
 Dialectics of Nature (1883)
 The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884)

Terms:

• Dialectical Materialism

• Historical Materialism

• False Consciousness

Engels developed what is now known as Marxism together with Karl Marx. In 1845,
he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations
and research in English cities. In 1848, Engels co-authored The Communist Manifesto with
Marx and also authored and co-authored (primarily with Marx) many other works. Later,
Engels supported Marx financially, allowing him to do research and write Das Kapital. After
Marx's death, Engels edited the second and third volumes of Das Kapital. Additionally, Engels
organised Marx's notes on the Theories of Surplus Value which were later published as the
"fourth volume" of Das Kapital. In 1884, he published The Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State on the basis of Marx's ethnographic research.
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Dialectical materialism:

It is a philosophy of science, history, and nature developed in Europe and based on the
writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxist dialectics, as a materialist philosophy,
emphasizes the importance of real-world conditions and the presence of contradictions within
things, in relation to but not limited to class, labor, and socioeconomic interactions. This is in
contrast to the idealist Hegelian dialectic, which emphasizes the observation that
contradictions in material phenomena could be resolved by analyzing them and synthesizing a
solution whilst retaining their essence. Marx supposed that the most effective solution to the
problems caused by said contradictory phenomena was to address and rearrange the systems
of social organization at the root of the problems.

*Note*: If sometimes you are not able to retain what a term actually meant, then please
remember which term belongs to which writer at least. This can also fetch you one question.

Historical Materialism:

Karl Marx's theory of history, historical materialism, locates historical change in the
rise of class societies and the way humans labour together to make their livelihoods. For Marx
and Engels the ultimate cause and moving power of historical events are to be found in the
economic development of society and the social and political upheavals wrought by changes
to the mode of production. Historical materialism provides a profound challenge to the view
that the historical process has come to a close and that capitalism is the end of history.

*Note*: - Simply, they trace the history of a society with a Marxist perspective.
These concepts are actually simple, but the secondary sources from where I have
gathered this information use complex language. Do not panic. Make your vocabulary
strong. I want you to be familiar with this formal or what we say Academic Writing,
so that you can comprehend the question paper which is using a subjective approach
and mostly set on concepts (assertion and reason) now. For simplest explanation, I
have made lectures on YouTube which are for free @Dana_Multitasker.

False consciousness:

It is a term used in Marxist theory to describe ways in which material, ideological, and
institutional processes are said to mislead members of the proletariat and other class actors
within capitalist societies, concealing the exploitation intrinsic to the social relations between
classes. Friedrich Engels used the term "false consciousness" in an 1893 letter to Franz
Mehring to address the scenario where a subordinate class wilfully embodies the ideology of
the ruling class. (Note: - You may find it similar to Gramsci’s Hegemony, which will be
discussed further.)
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Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Francesco Gramsci (1891-1937) was an Italian Marxist philosopher,
journalist, linguist, writer, and politician. He wrote on philosophy, political theory, sociology,
history, and linguistics. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Communist
Party of Italy. A vocal critic of Benito Mussolini and fascism, he was imprisoned in 1926 where
he remained until his death in 1937.

Major Works:

• Prison Notebooks (1947)

• The Modern Prince and Other Writings (1949)

• Southern Question (1995)

Notable Ideas/Terms:

 Cultural Hegemony
 Political Society and Civil Society
 Traditional and Organic Intellectuals
 Subaltern (Coined by Gramsci: already discussed in Spivak)
 The need for popular workers' education to encourage development of intellectuals
from the working class.

The Prison Notebooks were a series of essays written by Gramsci who was imprisoned
by the Italian Fascist regime in 1926. The notebooks were written between 1929 and 1935,
when Gramsci was released from prison to a medical center on grounds of ill-health. The
notebooks were smuggled out of the prison in the 1930s. The first edition was published in
1947 and won the Viareggio Prize a few months later.

Cultural Hegemony (Simply—rule by consent, or ideology):

Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how the
state and ruling capitalist class – the bourgeoisie – use cultural institutions to maintain power
in capitalist societies. The bourgeoisie, in Gramsci's view, develops a hegemonic culture using
ideology, rather than violence, economic force, or coercion. Hegemonic culture propagates its
own values and norms so that they become the "common sense" values of all. Cultural
hegemony is therefore used to maintain consent to the capitalist order, rather than the use of
force to maintain order. In Marxist philosophy, cultural hegemony is the dominance of a
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culturally diverse society by the ruling class who manipulate the culture of that society—the
beliefs and explanations, perceptions, values, and mores—so that the worldview of the ruling
class becomes the accepted cultural norm.

*Note*: - Meetha zehar de kr pyar se maarna. Logon ko yakeen dilaana ki hm hi tumaare liye
sahi hai or fir unhe brbaad kr dena.

Political society: (the police, the army, legal system, etc.) which dominates directly
and coercively.

Civil society: (the family, the education system, trade unions, etc.) where leadership is
constituted through ideology or by means of consent.

Traditional and Organic Intellectuals:

Gramsci gave much thought to the role of intellectuals in society. He stated that all men
are intellectuals, in that all have intellectual and rational faculties, but not all men have the
social function of intellectuals. He defines traditional intellectuals as those who see
themselves as autonomous and independent from the ruling social group, believing to stand for
truth and reason (for ex. Clergy, Priests etc). Organic intellectuals, on the other hand, emerge
from and are tied to a social class within an economic structure. "organic" intellectuals
articulate, through the language of culture, the feelings and experiences which the masses could
not express for themselves. To Gramsci, it was the duty of organic intellectuals to speak to the
obscured precepts of folk wisdom, or common sense, of their respective political spheres.
These intellectuals would represent excluded social groups of a society, what Gramsci referred
to as the subaltern.

Terry Eagleton
Terence Francis Eagleton (Feb. 1943) is an English literary theorist, critic, and public
intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster
University.

Major Works:

*Note*: - He has written many books. Learn the bold ones, and read others to an extent that
you can identify them if they appear in the matching question.

 The New Left Church [as Terence Eagleton] (1966)

 Shakespeare and Society: Critical Studies in Shakespearean Drama (1967)
 The Body as Language: Outline of a New Left Theology (1970)
 Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (1975)
 The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality, and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson
(1982)
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 Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)

 The Function of Criticism (1984)
 Saints and Scholars (1987; a novel)
 The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990)
 Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (1990)
 The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996)
 Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1996)
 The Gatekeeper: A Memoir (2002)
 Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (2002)
 After Theory (2003)
 The English Novel: An Introduction (2005)
 Holy Terror (2005)
 The Meaning of Life (2007)
 Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (2009)
 On Evil (2010)
 Why Marx Was Right (2011)
 How to Read Literature (2013)
 Culture and the Death of God (2014)
 Hope without Optimism (2015)

Notable Ideas/Terms:

• Good/Bad Utopianism

In Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983, revised 1996), Eagleton surveys the

history of theoretical approaches to literature, from its beginnings with Matthew Arnold,
through formalism, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, to post-structuralism. In the process, he
demonstrates what is the thesis of the book: that theory is necessarily political. Theory is
always presented as if it is unstained by point of view and is neutral, but in fact it is impossible
to avoid having a political perspective. Peter Barry has said of the book that it "greatly
contributed to the 'consolidation' of literary theory and helped to establish it firmly on the
undergraduate curriculum".

His memoir The Gatekeeper recounts, Eagleton's Marxism has never been solely an
academic pursuit. He was active in the International Socialists and then the Workers' Socialist
League whilst in Oxford. He has been a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.

After Theory (2003) was written two decades later, after the end of the great period of
High Theory – the cultural theory of Foucault, the postmodernists, Derrida, and others. Looking
back, Eagleton evaluates its achievements and failures, and proposes new directions needing
to be pursued. He considers that among the great achievements of Theory were the expansion
of objects of study (to include gender, sexuality, popular culture, post-colonialism, etc.)
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Eagleton sees football as a new opium of the people distracting ordinary people from
more serious, important social concerns.

Gyorgy Lukacs
György Lukács (1885 –1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary historian,
critic, and aesthetician. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive
tradition that departed from the Marxist ideological orthodoxy of the Soviet Union. He
developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of
Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also a philosopher of Leninism.

Major Works:
• The Theory of the Novel (1916)
• History and Class Consciousness (1923)
• The Destruction of Reason (1954)
• The Historical Novel (1955)

Notable Ideas/Terms:
• Reification
• Class consciousness (discussed earlier).
• Transcendental homelessness
• The genre of tragedy as an ethical category

As a literary critic Lukács was especially influential due to his theoretical developments
of realism and of the novel as a literary genre.

Reification:
Meaning of ‘reification’: the act of treating something abstract, such as an idea,
relation, system, quality, etc., as if it were a concrete object.
In Marxism, reification (transl. "making into a thing") is the process by which social
relations are perceived as inherent attributes of the people involved in them, or attributes of
some product of the relation, such as a traded commodity. This implies that objects are
transformed into subjects and subjects are turned into objects, with the result that subjects are
rendered passive or determined, while objects are rendered as the active and determining factor.
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Transcendental homelessness:
[Transcendental means beyond normal human experience, knowledge, reason or
understanding, especially in a religious or spiritual way].
Transcendental homelessness is a philosophical term coined by George Lukács in his
1914–15 essay Theory of the Novel. Lukács quotes Novalis at the top of the essay, “Philosophy
is really homesickness—the desire to be everywhere at home”. Lukács suggests that the era of
Homerian epics, was characterized by a "closed totality" where the pre-reflexive hero is
connected to a cosmic destiny (a home of the soul) so that loneliness is transformed into a solid
position in the universe. In the modern novel, however, the subject is without ties to the eternal
and thus loneliness is more pronounced—the loneliness of a soul that cannot find a cosmic
(transcendental) home. He defines Transcendental homelessness as the "longing of all souls
for the place in which they once belonged, and the 'nostalgia… for utopian perfection, a
nostalgia that feels itself and its desires to be the only true reality'".
In addition to his standing as a Marxist political thinker, Lukács was an influential
literary critic of the twentieth century. His important work in literary criticism began early in
his career, with The Theory of the Novel, a seminal work in literary theory and the theory of
genre. The book is a history of the novel as a form, and an investigation into its distinct
characteristics.
Lukács's later literary criticism includes the well-known essay "Kafka or Thomas
Mann?", in which Lukács argues for the work of Thomas Mann as a superior attempt to deal
with the condition of modernity, and criticises Franz Kafka's brand of modernism.

Structural Marxism
Structural Marxism is an approach to Marxist philosophy based on structuralism,
primarily associated with the work of the French philosopher Louis Althusser and his students.
It was influential in France during the 1960s and 1970s, and also came to influence
philosophers, political theorists and sociologists outside France during the 1970s.
Writers:
• Louis Althusser
• Nicos Poulantzas
• Maurice Godelier
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Louis Althusser

Louis Pierre Althusser (1918 – 1990) was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born
in Algeria and studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became
Professor of Philosophy. Althusser was a long-time member and sometimes a strong critic of
the French Communist Party. His arguments and theses were set against the threats that he
saw attacking the theoretical foundations of Marxism. In 1980, he killed his wife, the
sociologist Hélène Rytmann, by strangling her. He was declared unfit to stand trial due to
insanity.

Major Works:
• Reading Capital (1965) with Pierre Macherey
• For Marx (1965)
• Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1970)
• Essays on Ideology (1984)

Notable ideas:
• Epistemological break
• Ideological state apparatuses
• Repressive state apparatuses
• Interpellation

Epistemological break:
[Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemologists
study the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of
belief, and various related issues].
Epistemological break Or Epistemological rupture is a notion introduced in 1938 by
French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, and later used by Louis Althusser. Althusser argues
that Marx's thought has been fundamentally misunderstood and underestimated. He fiercely
condemns various interpretations of Marx's works—historicism, idealism and economism. He
says that Marx's thought contains a radical "epistemological break". His break represents a
shift in Marx's work to a fundamentally different "problematic", i.e., a different set of central
propositions and questions posed, a different theoretical framework.
“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)” is
an essay by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. First published in 1970, it
advances Althusser's theory of ideology. Where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels posited a
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thinly-sketched theory of ideology as false consciousness, Althusser draws upon the works of
later theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to proffer a more
elaborate redefinition of the theory. Althusser's theory of ideology has remained influential
since it was written.

Repressive state apparatuses:

The ruling class uses repressive state apparatuses (RSA) to dominate the working
class. The basic, social function of the RSA (government, courts, police and armed forces, etc.)
is timely intervention within politics in favour of the interests of the ruling class, by repressing
the subordinate social classes as required, using either violent or nonviolent coercive means.
The ruling class controls the RSA because they also control the powers of the state (political,
legislative, armed). [Somewhat similar to Gramsci’s Political society].

Ideological state apparatuses:

Ideological state apparatuses (ISA), according to Althusser, use methods other than
physical violence to achieve the same objectives as RSA. They may include educational
institutions (e.g. schools), media outlets, churches, social and sports clubs and the family. These
formations are ostensibly apolitical and part of civil society, rather than a formal part of the
state (i.e. as is the case in an RSA). Instead of expressing and imposing order, through violent
repression, ISA disseminate ideologies that reinforce the control of a dominant class. He
believes that no single ISA produces in us the belief that we are self-conscious agents. Instead,
we derive this belief in the course of learning what it is to be a daughter, a schoolchild, black,
a steelworker, a councillor, and so forth. [Somewhat similar to Gramsci’s hegemony and civil
society]

Interpellation
Introduced in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Interpellation is the
process by which we encounter a culture's or ideology's values and internalize them. According
to Althusser, every society is made up of ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) and repressive
state apparatuses (RSAs) which are instrumental to constant reproduction of the relations to
the production of that given society. Interpellation describes the process by which ideology,
embodied in major social and political institutions (ISAs and RSAs), constitutes the very nature
of individual subjects' identities through the process of "hailing" them in social interactions.

Nicos Poulantzas

Nicos Poulantzas (1936 –1979) was a Greek-French Marxist political sociologist and
philosopher. In the 1970s, Poulantzas was known, along with Louis Althusser, as a leading
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Structural Marxist and, while at first a Leninist, he eventually became a proponent of

democratic socialism. He is best known for his theoretical work on the state.

Major Books:
• Political Power and Social Classes (1968)
• Fascism and Dictatorship (1979)

Ideas:
• Theory of the state

Poulantzas's theory of the state reacted to what he saw as simplistic understandings

within Marxism. Instrumentalist Marxist accounts held that the state was simply an instrument
in the hands of a particular class. Poulantzas disagreed with this because he saw the capitalist
class as too focused on its individual short-term profit, rather than on maintaining the class's
power as a whole, to simply exercise the whole of state power in its own interest.
Borrowing from Antonio Gramsci's notion of cultural hegemony, Poulantzas argued
that repressing movements of the oppressed is not the sole function of the state. Rather, state
power must also obtain the consent of the oppressed. It does this through class alliances, where
the dominant group makes an "alliance" with subordinate groups as a means to obtain the
consent of the subordinate group. In his later works, Poulantzas analysed the role of what he
termed the "new petty bourgeoisie" in both consolidating the ruling classes hegemony and
undermining the proletariat's ability to organise itself.

Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu (1930 – 2002) was a French sociologist and public intellectual.
Bourdieu's contributions to the sociology of education, the theory of sociology, and sociology
of aesthetics have achieved wide influence in several related academic fields (e.g.
anthropology, media and cultural studies, education, popular culture, and the arts).

Major Works:
• Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979)
• Masculine Domination (1998)
• On Television (1996)
Terms and Ideas:
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• Distinction (It has appeared in matching question UGC NET once)

• Cultural Capital
• Field
• Habitus
• Doxa
• Reflexivity
• Symbolic Violence

Cultural Capital:
Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron coined and defined the term cultural
capital in the essay "Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction" (1977). Bourdieu
then developed the concept in the essay "The Forms of Capital" (1985). In the field of
sociology, cultural capital comprises the social assets of a person (education, intellect, style of
speech, style of dress, etc.) that promote social mobility in a stratified society. Cultural capital
functions as a social relation within an economy of practices (i.e. system of exchange), and
includes the accumulated cultural knowledge that confers social status and power; thus cultural
capital comprises the material and symbolic goods, without distinction, that society considers
rare and worth seeking. There are three types of cultural capital:
(i) Embodied capital, (ii) Objectified capital, and (iii) Institutionalised capital.

Social capital:
It is "the networks of relationships among people who live and work in a particular
society, enabling that society to function effectively". It involves the effective functioning of
social groups through interpersonal relationships, a shared sense of identity, a shared
understanding, shared norms, shared values etc.

Bourdieu's work was primarily concerned with the dynamics of power in society,
especially the diverse and subtle ways in which power is transferred and social order is
maintained within and across generations. His best-known book is Distinction: A Social
Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979), a sociological report about the state of French
culture, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position, or more
precisely, are themselves acts of social positioning. He proposes in this book that those with a
high volume of cultural capital – non-financial social assets, such as education, which promote
social mobility beyond economic means – are most likely to be able to determine what
constitutes taste within society. Those with lower volumes of overall capital accept this taste,
and the distinction of high and low culture, as legitimate and natural, and thus accept existing
restrictions on conversion between the various forms of capital (economic, social, cultural).
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Those with low overall capital are unable to access a higher volume of cultural capital because
they lack the necessary means to do so.
Pierre Bourdieu's work emphasized how social classes, especially the ruling and
intellectual classes, preserve their social privileges across generations despite the myth that
contemporary post-industrial society boasts equality of opportunity and high social mobility,
achieved through formal education.
Habitus:
In sociology, habitus comprises socially ingrained habits, skills and dispositions. It is
the way that individuals perceive the social world around them and react to it. These
dispositions are usually shared by people with similar backgrounds (such as social class,
religion, nationality, ethnicity, education and profession) and opportunities. Thus, the habitus
represents the way group culture and personal history shape the body and the mind; as a result,
it shapes present social actions of an individual.
Field:
A field is a setting in which agents and their social positions are located. The position
of each particular agent in the field is a result of interaction between the specific rules of the
field, agent's habitus and agent's capital (social, economic and cultural). Fields interact with
each other, and are hierarchical: most are subordinate to the larger field of power and class
relations. Field is a system of social positions (for example, a profession such as the law)
structured internally in terms of power relationships (such as the power differential between
judges and lawyers).
Doxa:
Doxa (to appear, to seem, to think, to accept) is a common belief or popular opinion. In
classical rhetoric, doxa is contrasted with episteme ('knowledge'). Pierre Bourdieu, in his
Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972), used the term doxa to denote a society's taken-for-
granted, unquestioned truths. The doxa, in Bourdieu's view, is the experience by which the
natural and social world appears as self-evident. Bourdieu's Distinction (1979) provides the
humanist instances of his application of the term, where doxa sets out limits on social mobility
within the social space that are on the characteristic consumption of each social individual:
certain cultural artifacts are recognized by doxa as being inappropriate to actual social position;
hence, doxa helps to petrify social limits—the "sense of one's place"—and one's sense of
belonging, which is closely connected with the idea that "this is not for us.

Symbolic Violence:
Symbolic violence describes a type of non-physical violence manifested in the power
differential between social groups. It is often unconsciously agreed upon by both parties and is
manifested in an imposition of the norms of the group possessing greater social power on those
of the subordinate group. Symbolic violence can be manifested across different social domains
such as nationality, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnic identity.
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Reflexivity:
In epistemology, and more specifically, the sociology of knowledge, reflexivity refers
to circular relationships between cause and effect, especially as embedded in human belief
structures. A reflexive relationship is bidirectional with both the cause and the effect affecting
one another in a relationship in which neither can be assigned as causes or effects.

Fredric Jameson
(Belongs to Western Marxism and also Postmodernism)
Fredric Jameson (born April 14, 1934) is an American literary critic, philosopher and
Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends,
particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism.
Major Works:
• Marxism and Form (1971)
• Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (1979)
• The Political Unconscious (1981)
• Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism (1986)
• Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (1988)
• Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)
• The cultural turn (1998)
• Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions
(2005)

Notable Ideas:
 National allegory
 Political unconscious
Jameson published the article "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism" in the journal New Left Review.
Jameson viewed the postmodern "skepticism towards metanarratives" as a "mode of
experience" stemming from the conditions of intellectual labor imposed by the late capitalist
mode of production.
Two of Jameson's best-known claims from Postmodernism are that postmodernity is
characterized by pastiche and a crisis in historicity. Jameson argued that parody (which implies
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a moral judgment or a comparison with societal norms) was replaced by pastiche (collage and
other forms of juxtaposition without a normative grounding). Relatedly, Jameson argued that
the postmodern era suffers from a crisis in historicity: "there no longer does seem to be any
organic relationship between the American history we learn from schoolbooks and the lived
experience of the current, multinational, high-rise, stagflated city of the newspapers and of our
own everyday life".
He also belongs to the school of Dialectics (related to dialogue), also known as the
dialectical method, is a discourse between two or more people holding different points of view
about a subject but wishing to establish the truth through reasoned argumentation.
National allegory:
It tends to be focused on the lives of ordinary people, however, rather than heads of
state or aristocracy, using their mundane daily struggles as a means of illustrating the state of
the nation. It is also known as national personification which is an anthropomorphic
personification of a state or the people it inhabits.
Jameson called third world literature as national allegories. His controversial essay
'Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism' sets out his theory of what
he calls 'third-world literature,' positioning it as a form of national allegory. Fredric Jameson's
proposal that all third world texts be read as "national allegories" has been one of the more
influential and important attempts to theorize the relationship of literary production to the
nation and to politics.
Political Unconscious:
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act is a 1981 book by
the Marxist literary theorist Fredric Jameson. Often cited as a powerful overview and
methodological guide, it is the work with which Jameson made his greatest impact. The book
opens with one of Jameson's most famous bons mots, 'Always historicise!' Jameson holds that
the cultural text is tied to an ideological-political "unconscious" which underlies it. This
political hidden background expresses a class conflict which is expressed in the text in a
complex manner.
It shows Jameson's interpretive framework, including his neo-Lacanian idea of
unconscious ideology and his invocation of structural causality to reconcile Marxist and post-
Marxist perspectives, which was largely borrowed from Louis Althusser.
He also distinguished between three things:
1. Market Capitalism: Which was in Romantic and Victorian Age
2. Monopoly: In Modern Age
3. Late or Multinational capitalism: Postmodern age
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Frankfurt School

The Frankfurt School was a school of social theory and critical philosophy associated
with the Institute for Social Research, at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1929. the Frankfurt
School comprised intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents dissatisfied with the
contemporary socio-economic systems (capitalist, fascist, communist) of the 1930s. The
Frankfurt School perspective of critical investigation is based upon Freudian, Marxist and
Hegelian premises of idealist philosophy. Like Karl Marx, the Frankfurt School concerned
themselves with the conditions (political, economic, societal) that allow for social change
realized by way of rational social institutions. The philosophical tradition of the Frankfurt
School – the multi-disciplinary integration of the social sciences – is associated with the
philosopher Max Horkheimer, who became the director in 1930, and recruited intellectuals
such as Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse.
Major Writers:
 Max Horkheimer
 Theodore Adorno
 Herbert Marcuse
 Walter Benjamin
 Eric Fromm
 Jurgen Habermas

Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer (1895 –1973) was a German philosopher and sociologist who was
famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the Frankfurt School of social research.
Horkheimer addressed authoritarianism, militarism, economic disruption, environmental crisis,
and the poverty of mass culture using the philosophy of history as a framework. This became
the foundation of critical theory.
Major Works:
 Between Philosophy and Social Science (1930–1938)
 Eclipse of Reason (1947)
 Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) In collaboration with Theodor Adorno.
Notable Ideas:
 Culture Industry
Dialectic of Enlightenment is a work of philosophy and social criticism written by
Horkheimer and Adorno. One of the core texts of critical theory, it explores the socio-
psychological status quo that had been responsible for what the Frankfurt School considered
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the failure of the Age of Enlightenment. Together with Adorno's The Authoritarian
Personality (1950) and Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (1964), it has had a major
effect on 20th-century philosophy, sociology, culture, and politics, especially inspiring the
New Left of the 1960s and 1970s.

Eclipse of Reason is a 1947 book by Max Horkheimer, in which the author discusses how
the Nazis were able to project their agenda as "reasonable".
Culture Industry:
The term culture industry was coined by the critical theorists Adorno and
Horkheimer, and was presented as critical vocabulary in the chapter "The Culture Industry:
Enlightenment as Mass Deception", of the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), wherein
they proposed that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods—
films, radio programmes, magazines, etc.—that are used to manipulate mass society into
passivity. Consumption of the easy pleasures of popular culture, made available by the mass
communications media, renders people docile and content, no matter how difficult their
economic circumstances. The inherent danger of the culture industry is the cultivation of false
psychological needs that can only be met and satisfied by the products of capitalism; thus
Adorno and Horkheimer especially perceived mass-produced culture as dangerous to the more
technically and intellectually difficult high arts. In contrast, true psychological needs are
freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness, which refer to an earlier demarcation of human
needs, established by Herbert Marcuse.

Theodor Adorno

Theodor W. Adorno (1903 –1969) was a German philosopher, sociologist,

psychologist, musicologist, and composer known for his critical theory of society. He was a
leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. As a critic of both fascism and what
he called the culture industry, his writings strongly influenced the European New Left.
Major Works:
 Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) [with Horkheimer]
 The Authoritarian Personality (1950)
 Minima Moralia (1951)
 Negative Dialectics (1966)
Term:
 Culture Industry [already explained above]
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Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse (1898 –1979) was a German-American philosopher, sociologist, and

political theorist.

Major Works:
 Reason and Revolution (1941)
 Eros and Civilization (1955)
 One-Dimensional Man (1964).

Notable Ideas:
 Technological rationality
 Repressive Tolerance
 Repressive desublimation

Technological rationality:
It is a philosophical idea postulated by the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert
Marcuse in his 1941 article, "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology". It gained
mainstream repute and a more holistic treatment in his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man. It
posits that rational decisions to incorporate technological advances into society can change
what is considered rational within that society. Marcuse writes that technological progress has
the potential to free humanity from its requirement to labor for survival. Freedom from labor
is true freedom for humanity, and this freedom from labor can be achieved from technological
rationality. But instead of embracing this freedom, humanity has been subsumed by a new
system of reason rooted in technological innovation. This new rationality, technological
rationality, encompasses all elements of life and replaces political rationality.
Repressive Tolerance:
A Critique of Pure Tolerance is a 1965 book by the philosopher Robert Paul Wolff,
the sociologist Barrington Moore Jr., and the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, in which the
authors discuss the political role of tolerance. This book contains a foreword entitled
"Repressive Tolerance", by Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse argues that "the realization of the
objective of tolerance" requires "intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and
the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or
suppressed." He makes the case for "liberating tolerance", which would consist of intolerance
to right-wing movements and toleration of left-wing movements.
*Note*: Aren’t getting anything? No worries! Remember the name of the above terms
and its proponent only. There are so many things to remember more important than this.
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Repressive desublimation:
Coined in his 1964 work One-Dimensional Man, that refers to the way in which, in
advanced industrial society (capitalism), "the progress of technological rationality is
liquidating the oppositional and transcending elements in the “higher culture.”

Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (1892 –1940) was a German Jewish philosopher,
cultural critic and essayist. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism,
Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and
influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He
was associated with the Frankfurt School.
Major Works:
 The Task of the Translator (1923)
 "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935),
 "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940).
Ideas:
 Auratic Perception
 Aestheticization of politics
Auratic Perception:
Coined in the essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" of
cultural criticism which proposes and explains that mechanical reproduction devalues the aura
(uniqueness) of an object of art. It denotes the aesthetic faculty, by means of which civilization
may recover an appreciation of myth.
Aestheticization of politics:
It is an idea first coined by Walter Benjamin as being a key ingredient to fascist regimes.
Benjamin said that fascism tends towards an aestheticization of politics, in the sense of a
spectacle in which it allows the masses to express themselves without seeing their rights
recognized, and without affecting the relations of ownership which the proletarian masses aim
to eliminate.
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Psychoanalytic Literary Theory

Psychoanalytic literary criticism (emerged in the 1960s), is literary criticism or literary

theory which, in method, concept, or form, is influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis
begun by Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis itself is a form of therapy which aims to cure mental
disorders 'by investigating the interaction of conscious and unconscious elements in the mind'.
The classic method of doing this is to get the patient to talk freely, in such a way that the
repressed fears and conflicts which are causing the problems are brought into the conscious
mind and openly faced, rather than remaining 'buried' in the unconscious. This practice is based
upon specific theories of how the mind, the instincts, and sexuality work.
Psychoanalytic criticism adopts the methods of "reading" employed by Freud and later
theorists to interpret texts. It argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret
unconscious desires and anxieties of the author, that a literary work is a manifestation of the
author's own neuroses. Psychoanalytic criticism views the artists, including authors, as
neurotic. However, an artist escape many of the outward manifestations and end results of
neurosis by finding in the act of creating his or her art a pathway back to saneness and
wholeness. The object of psychoanalytic literary criticism, at its very simplest, can be the
psychoanalysis of the author or of a particularly interesting character in a given work. The
criticism is similar to psychoanalysis itself, closely following the analytic interpretive process
discussed in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams and other works. Critics may view the
fictional characters as psychological case studies, attempting to identify such Freudian
concepts as the Oedipus complex, Freudian slips, Id, ego and superego, and so on, and
demonstrate how they influence the thoughts and behaviors of fictional characters.
The key concepts which are used in Psychoanalytic criticism include: Unconscious,
repression, sublimation, super-ego, id, Infantile sexuality, Oedipus complex, libido, oral, anal,
and phallic, transference, projection, Freudian slip, dream work, displacement, etc.
What Freudian psychoanalytic critics do:
1. They give central importance, in literary interpretation, to the distinction between
the conscious and the unconscious mind.
2. Hence, they pay close attention to unconscious motives and feelings, whether these
be (a) those of the author, or (b) those of the characters depicted in the work.
3. They demonstrate the presence in the literary work of classic psychoanalytic
symptoms, conditions, or phases, such as the oral, anal, and phallic stages of emotional and
sexual development in infants.
Major Writers:
 Sigmund Freud
 Jacques Lacan
 Carl Gustav Jung
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 Julia Kristeva
 Alfred Adler
 Karen Horney

Minor Writers:

 Michael Balint.
 Nina Coltart.
 David Bell.
 Rosine Perelberg.

Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of
psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies in the psyche through
dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst. He qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881
at the University of Vienna. Upon completing his habilitation in 1885, he was appointed a
docent in neuropathology and became an affiliated professor in 1902. Freud left Austria to
escape Nazi persecution and died in exile in the United Kingdom in 1939.

In founding psychoanalysis, Freud developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of

free association and discovered transference, establishing its central role in the analytic
process. Freud's redefinition of sexuality to include its infantile forms led him to formulate the
Oedipus complex as the central tenet of psychoanalytical theory. His analysis of dreams as
wish-fulfillments provided him with models for the clinical analysis of symptom formation and
the underlying mechanisms of repression. On this basis, Freud elaborated his theory of the
unconscious and went on to develop a model of psychic structure comprising id, ego and super-
ego. Freud postulated the existence of libido, sexualised energy with which mental processes
and structures are invested and which generates erotic attachments, and a death drive, the
source of compulsive repetition, hate, aggression, and neurotic guilt.

Freudian interpretation is popularly thought to be a matter of attributing sexual

connotations to objects, so that towers and ladders, for instance, are seen as phallic symbols.
This kind of thing had become a joke even in Freud's own lifetime, and we should remember
that he once said, 'Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar'. (Freud was a heavy cigar smoker, mind
you, so he had a vested interest in saying that.) In reality, Freudian interpretation is often highly
ingenious, rather than highly simplistic.
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Major Books:

 The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)

 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901)
 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905)
 Totem and Taboo (1913)
 On Narcissism (1914)
 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)
 The Future of an Illusion (1927)
 Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)

Terms and Ideas:

 Unconscious
 Oedipus Complex
 Defense Mechanism
 Repression
 Id, Ego, Super-ego
 Libido
 Death Drive
 Transference

Unconscious:

The unconscious mind (or the unconscious) consists of the processes in the mind which
occur automatically and are not available to introspection and include thought processes,
memories, interests, and motivations.
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Oedipus Complex:

Sigmund Freud introduced the concept in his book Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
and coined the expression in his paper “A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men”
(1910). In Freud's original formulation, the Oedipus complex is a purportedly universal phase
in the life of a young boy in which he hates his father and wishes to have sex with his mother.
These wishes may be unconscious.

Freud later expanded this idea into the claim that both boys and girls are subject to the
Oedipus complex, with different results: boys experience castration anxiety, and girls
experience penis envy. Sometimes the term positive Oedipus complex is used to refer to a
child's sexual desire for the opposite-sex parent and hatred for the same-sex parent, while
negative Oedipus complex refers to the desire for the same-sex parent and hatred for the
opposite-sex parent. Freud considered that the child's identification with the same-sex parent
is the successful outcome of the complex. If unsuccessful, it may lead to neurosis.

Freud rejected the term Electra complex, introduced by Carl Jung in 1913, as a
proposed equivalent complex among young girls.

Defense Mechanism:

In psychoanalytic theory, a defence mechanism is an unconscious psychological

operation that functions to protect a person from anxiety-producing thoughts and feelings
related to internal conflicts and outer stressors.

Repression (Dabi hui feelings):

Repression is a key concept of psychoanalysis, where it is understood as a defense

mechanism that "ensures that what is unacceptable to the conscious mind, and would if recalled
arouse anxiety, is prevented from entering into it." According to psychoanalytic theory,
repression plays a major role in many mental illnesses, and in the psyche of the average person.

As Sigmund Freud moved away from hypnosis, and towards urging his patients to
remember the past in a conscious state, 'the very difficulty and laboriousness of the process led
Freud to a crucial insight'. The intensity of his struggles to get his patients to recall past
memories led him to conclude that 'there was some force that prevented them from becoming
conscious and compelled them to remain unconscious ... pushed the pathogenetic experiences
in question out of consciousness. I gave the name of repression to this hypothetical process'.

Id, Ego, Super-ego:

The id, ego, and super-ego are a set of three concepts in psychoanalytic theory
describing distinct, interacting agents in the psychic apparatus (defined in Sigmund Freud's
structural model of the psyche). The three agents are theoretical constructs that describe the
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activities and interactions of the mental life of a person. In the ego psychology model of the
psyche, the id is the set of uncoordinated instinctual desires; the super-ego plays the critical
and moralizing role; and the ego is the organized, realistic agent that mediates between the
instinctual desires of the id and the critical super-ego.

Alright, do not panic! let us understand it one by one:

Id:

The id is the instinctual component of personality that is present at birth, and is the
source of bodily needs and wants, emotional impulses and desires, especially aggression and
the libido (sex drive). The id acts according to the pleasure principle.

Ego:

The ego acts according to the reality principle; i.e., it seeks to please the id's drive in
realistic ways that, in the long term, bring benefit, rather than grief.

Super-ego:

The super-ego reflects the internalization of cultural rules, mainly taught by parents
applying their guidance and influence and acts according to morality principle.

*If still it is confusing, you can watch my lecture on Sigmund Freud.*

Libido:

Libido is a person's overall sexual drive or desire for sexual activity. Libido is
influenced by biological, psychological, and social factors. libido, concept originated by
Sigmund Freud to signify the instinctual physiological or psychic energy associated with sexual
urges and, in his later writings, with all constructive human activity. In the latter sense of eros,
or life instinct, libido was opposed by thanatos, the death instinct (death drive) and source of
destructive urges; the interaction of the two produced all the variations of human activity. Freud
considered psychiatric symptoms the result of misdirection or inadequate discharge of libido.

Death Drive:

In classical Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the death drive is the drive toward death
and destruction, often expressed through behaviors such as aggression, repetition compulsion,
and self-destructiveness. It was originally proposed by Sabina Spielrein in her paper
"Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being" in 1912, which was then taken up by
Sigmund Freud in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This concept has been translated as
"opposition between the ego or death instincts and the sexual or life instincts".
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Transference:

Transference is a phenomenon within psychotherapy in which the feelings a person had

about one thing are unconsciously redirected or transferred to the present situation. It usually
concerns feelings from a primary relationship during childhood. At times, this transference can
be considered inappropriate. Transference was first described by Sigmund Freud, who
considered it an important part of psychoanalytic treatment. It is common for people to transfer
feelings about their parents to their partners or children (that is, cross-generational
entanglements).

*NOTE*: - For example a person is sceptic while making new boyfriend or girlfriend who
resembles his/her ex in manners, voice, or external appearance. After experiencing one
‘Bewafa Sanam’ (Infidel partner) we think that everybody is alike. Therefore, the feelings of
ex-partner get transferred to the next.

Jacques Lacan

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (1901 – 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and
psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan
published papers that were later collected in the book Ècrits. His work made a significant
impact on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism,
critical theory, feminist theory and film theory, as well as on the practice of psychoanalysis
itself. Lacan took up and discussed the whole range of Freudian concepts. Lacan went on to
establish new psychoanalytic institutions to promote and develop his work, which he declared
to be a "return to Freud".

Major Books:
 The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1973)
 Feminine Sexuality (1975)
 The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (1977)
 The Psychoses (1981)

Notable Terms and Ideas:

1. Imaginary/Mirror Stage
2. Symbolic Stage
3. Real Stage
 Desire
 Lack
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Imaginary Stage:

Each of the three terms (Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real) emerged gradually over
time, undergoing an evolution in Lacan's own development of thought. Of these three terms,
the 'imaginary' was the first to appear. The imaginary stage is the dimension of images,
conscious or unconscious, perceived or imagined. It is the fundamental narcissism by which
the human subject creates fantasy images of both himself and his ideal object of desire. The
imaginary order is closely tied to Lacan's theorization of the mirror stage.

Mirror Stage:

The mirror stage is based on the belief that infants recognize themselves in a mirror
(literal) or other symbolic contraption which induces apperception (the turning of oneself into
an object that can be viewed by the child from outside themselves) from the age of about 6 to
18 months.

It also represents the paradigm of "Imaginary order".

Symbolic Stage:

Symbolic Order is the social world of linguistic communication, intersubjective

relations, knowledge of ideological conventions, rituals, norms, and the acceptance of the law
(also called the "big Other"). Once a child enters into language and accepts the rules and
dictates of society, it is able to deal with others. The acceptance of language's rules is aligned
with the Oedipus complex, according to Lacan. The symbolic is made possible because of your
acceptance of the Name-of-the-Father, those laws and restrictions that control both your
desire and the rules of communication. Through recognition of the Name-of-the-Father, you
are able to enter into a community of others.
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The Real Stage:

The Real Order is the totality of reality, the intelligible form of the horizon of truth of
the field-of-objects that has been disclosed. The state of nature from which we have been
forever severed by our entrance into language. Only as new-born children were we close to this
state of nature, a state in which there is nothing but need. A baby needs and seeks to satisfy
those needs with no sense for any separation between itself and the external world or the world
of others.

Desire:

In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan argues that "man's

desire is the desire of the Other." This entails the following: Desire is the desire of the Other's
desire, meaning that desire is the object of another's desire and that desire is also desire for
recognition. Lacan follows Spinoza in arguing that "desire is the essence of man." Desire is
simultaneously the heart of human existence and the central concern of psychoanalysis.
However, when Lacan talks about desire, it is not any kind of desire he is referring to, but
always unconscious desire.

Lack:

Lacan first designated a lack of being: what is desired is being itself. "Desire is a relation
to being to lack. The lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It is not the lack of this or that,
but lack of being whereby the being exists". In "The Direction of the Treatment and the
Principles of Its Power" (Écrits) Lacan argues that desire is the metonymy of the lack of
being.

Note: For better understanding, you can watch my lecture on the same.

Carl Gustav Jung

Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who
founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry,
anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies. He came
to the attention of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis and two men conducted a
lengthy correspondence and collaborated, for a while, on a joint vision of human psychology.
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Major Works:

 The Theory of Psychoanalysis (1915)

 Dictionary of Analytical Psychology (1921)
 Synchronicity (1952)
 Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961)
 The Red Book (2009)

Major Terms and Ideas:

 Analytical Psychology
 Collective Unconscious
 Electra Complex
 Anima & Animus
 Individuation
 Archetypal Phenomena
 Shadow
 Extraversion and Introversion

Analytical Psychology:

It is a term coined by Carl Jung to describe research into his new "empirical science"
of the psyche. It is a theory of mind that emphasizes the importance of wholeness for each
individual. It was designed to distinguish it from Freud's psychoanalytic theories as their seven-
year collaboration on psychoanalysis was drawing to an end between 1912 and 1913.

Collective Unconscious:

Sometimes referred to as the "objective psyche," the collective unconscious refers to

the idea that a segment of the deepest unconscious mind is genetically inherited and not shaped
by personal experience. It refers to the unconscious mind and shared mental concepts.
According to Jung, the human collective unconscious is populated by instincts, as well as by
archetypes: ancient primal symbols such as The Great Mother, the Wise Old Man, the Shadow,
the Tower, Water, and the Tree of Life. He believed that the concept of the collective
unconscious helps to explain why similar themes occur in mythologies around the world.

Electra Complex:

As proposed by Carl Jung in his The Theory of Psychoanalysis (1915), it is a girl's

psychosexual competition with her mother for possession of her father. In the course of her
psychosexual development, the complex is the girl's phallic stage; a boy's similar experience
is the Oedipus complex (Freud). The Electra complex occurs in the third—phallic stage (ages
3–6)—of five psychosexual development stages: the oral, the anal, the phallic, the latent, and
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the genital—in which the source of libido pleasure is in a different erogenous zone of the
infant's body.

Anima & Animus:

The anima and animus are described in Carl Jung's school of analytical psychology as
part of his theory of the collective unconscious. Jung described the animus as the unconscious
masculine side of a woman, and the anima as the unconscious feminine side of a man, each
transcending the personal psyche. Jung's theory states that the anima and animus are the two
primary anthropomorphic archetypes of the unconscious mind, as opposed to the theriomorphic
and inferior function of the shadow archetypes. He believed they are the abstract symbol sets
that formulate the archetype of the Self.

Individuation:

According to Jungian psychology, individuation is a process of psychological

integration. "In general, it is the process by which individual beings are formed and
differentiated from other human beings; in particular, it is the development of the psychological
individual as a being distinct from the general or collective psychology. It is a completely
natural process necessary for the integration of the psyche.

Archetypal Phenomena/Jungian Archetypes:

Jungian archetypes are defined as universal, primal symbols and images that derive
from the collective unconscious. They are the psychic counterpart of instinct. It is described as
a kind of innate unspecific knowledge, derived from the sum total of human history, which
prefigures and directs conscious behavior. They are underlying base forms, or the archetypes
from which images and motifs such as the mother, the child, the trickster etc. emerge.

Shadow:

In analytical psychology, the shadow (also known as repressed id, shadow aspect, or
shadow archetype) is an unconscious aspect of the personality that does not correspond with
the ego ideal, leading the ego to resist and project the shadow. In short, the shadow is the self's
emotional blind spot.

Extraversion and Introversion:

The traits of extraversion (also spelled extroversion) and introversion are a central
dimension in some human personality theories. The terms introversion and extraversion were
introduced into psychology by Carl Jung. Extraversion tends to be manifested in outgoing,
talkative, energetic behavior, whereas introversion is manifested in more reflective and
reserved behavior. Jung defined introversion as an "attitude-type characterised by orientation
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in life through subjective psychic contents", and extraversion as "an attitude-type characterised
by concentration of interest on the external object".

Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician,
psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-
1960s. She is also prominent in structuralist and poststructuralist thought and became
influential in international critical analysis, cultural studies and feminism after publishing her
first book, Semeiotikè, in 1969.

Kristeva has been regarded as a key proponent of French feminism together with
Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray. Kristeva has had a remarkable
influence on feminism and feminist literary studies in the US and the UK, as well as on readings
into contemporary art, although her relation to feminist circles and movements in France has
been quite controversial. Kristeva made a famous disambiguation of three types of feminism
in "Women's Time" in New Maladies of the Soul (1993); while rejecting the first two types,
including that of Beauvoir, her stands are sometimes considered rejecting feminism altogether.
Kristeva proposed the idea of multiple sexual identities against the joined code of "unified
feminine language".

Major Works:

 Desire in Language (1969)

 Powers of Horror (1980)
 Tales of Love (1983)
 Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1987)
 The Old Man and the Wolves (1991) {It was a novel}
 Passions of Our Time (2018)

Major Terms and Ideas:

 Intertextuality
 The Semiotic and the Symbolic
 Abjection
 Chora
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Intertextuality:

Intertextuality is the shaping of a text's meaning by another text, either through

deliberate compositional strategies such as quotation, allusion, calque, plagiarism,
translation, pastiche or parody, or by interconnections between similar or related works
perceived by an audience or reader of the text. These references are sometimes made
deliberately and depend on a reader's prior knowledge and understanding of the referent, but
the effect of intertextuality is not always intentional and is sometimes inadvertent. It is the
phenomenon of a continual exchange and relationship building between texts.

Intertextuality has been differentiated into Referential and Typological categories.

Referential intertextuality refers to the use of fragments in texts.

Typological intertextuality refers to the use of pattern and structure in typical texts.

The Semiotic and the Symbolic:

One of Kristeva's most important contributions is that signification is composed of two

elements, the symbolic and the semiotic. The semiotic is different from the discipline of
Semiotics (a systematic study of sign processes and meaning making) founded by Ferdinand
de Saussure. Kristeva's semiotic is closely related to the infantile pre-Oedipal referred to in
the works of Freud. It is an emotional field, tied to the instincts, which dwells in the fissures
and prosody of language rather than in the denotative meanings of words. Furthermore,
according to Birgit Schippers, the semiotic is a realm associated with the musical, the poetic,
the rhythmic, and that which lacks structure and meaning. It is closely tied to the "feminine",
and represents the undifferentiated state of the pre-Mirror Stage infant.

Upon entering the Mirror Stage, the child learns to distinguish between self and other,
and enters the realm of shared cultural meaning, known as the symbolic (as we studied in
Lacan). In Desire in Language (1980), Kristeva describes the symbolic as the space in which
the development of language allows the child to become a "speaking subject," and to develop
a sense of identity separate from the mother. This process of separation is known as
“Abjection,” whereby the child must reject and move away from the mother in order to enter
into the world of language, culture, meaning, and the social. This realm of language is called
the symbolic and is contrasted with the semiotic in that it is associated with the masculine, the
law, and structure.

Kristeva departs from Lacan in the idea that even after entering the symbolic, the
subject continues to oscillate between the semiotic and the symbolic. Therefore, rather than
arriving at a fixed identity, the subject is permanently "in process". Because female children
continue to identify to some degree with the mother figure, they are especially likely to retain
a close connection to the semiotic.
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Chora:

Kristeva is also known for her adoption of Plato’s idea of the chora, meaning "a
nourishing maternal space". Kristeva's idea of the chora has been interpreted in several ways:
as a reference to the uterus, as a metaphor for the relationship between the mother and child,
and as the temporal period preceding the Mirror Stage.

Alfred Adler
Alfred Adler (1870 – 1937) was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and
founder of the school of individual psychology. His emphasis on the importance of feelings
of inferiority, the inferiority complex, is recognized as an isolating element which plays a key
role in personality development. Alfred Adler considered a human being as an individual
whole, and therefore he called his psychology "Individual Psychology".

Major Books:

 Understanding Human Nature (1927)

 The Science of Living (1929)
 What Life Could Mean to You (1931)

Major Terms and Ideas:

 Individual Psychology
 Inferiority Complex
 Superiority Complex
 Style of Life

Individual Psychology:

Adler believes that the main motives of human thought and behaviour are individual
man's striving for superiority and power, partly in compensation for his feeling of inferiority.
In Adler's theory, individuals work to overcome feelings of inferiority and to act in ways that
benefit the social interest. The term "individual psychology" does not mean to focus on the
individual. Adler said one must take into account the patient's whole environment, including
the people the patient associates with. The term "individual" is used to mean the patient is an
indivisible (that cannot be divided or split into smaller pieces) whole. He used this name to
describe his emphasis on the uniqueness and unity of the individual.
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Inferiority Complex:

In psychology, an inferiority complex is an intense personal feeling of inadequacy,

often resulting in the belief that one is in some way deficient, or inferior, to others. According
to Alfred Adler, a feeling of inferiority may be brought about by upbringing as a child (for
example, being consistently compared unfavorably to a sibling), physical and mental
limitations, or experiences of lower social status (for example, being treated unfavorably by
one's peers).

Superiority Complex:

Superiority complex is a term coined by Alfred Adler in the early 1900s, as part of his
school of individual psychology. One of many views on superiority complex is that it is a
defense mechanism that develops over time to help a person cope with feelings of inferiority.
Individuals with this complex typically come across as supercilious, haughty, and disdainful
toward others. They may treat others in an imperious, overbearing, and even aggressive
manner. In everyday usage, the term "superiority complex" is used to refer to an overly high
opinion of oneself.

Style of Life:

The term style of life was used by psychiatrist Alfred Adler as one of several constructs
describing the dynamics of the personality.
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Russian Formalism
Russian formalism was a school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the
1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars
(mentioned below) who revolutionised literary criticism between 1914 and the 1930s by
establishing the specificity and autonomy of poetic language and literature. Russian formalism
exerted a major influence on thinkers like Mikhail Bakhtin (not basically a part of Russian
Formalism but is important) and on structuralism as a whole. The movement's members had a
relevant influence on modern literary criticism, as it developed in the structuralist and post-
structuralist periods. Under Stalin it became a pejorative term for elitist art.

The term "formalism" was first used by the adversaries of the movement, and as such
it conveys a meaning explicitly rejected by the Formalists themselves.

Russian Formalism is the name now given to a mode of criticism which emerged from
three groups, MLC: The Moscow Linguistic Circle (1915) OPOJAZ group (1916) and Prague
Linguistic Circle (PLC): to which Roman Jakobson also contributed.

Basically, Russian Formalists are concerned about the form of a literary work that what
type of literary devices are used in the formation of a text. Although, Russian Formalism is
often linked to American New Criticism because of their similar emphasis on close reading,
the Russian Formalists regarded themselves as a developers of a science of criticism and are
more interested in a discovery of systematic method for the analysis of poetic text. Russian
formalism is distinctive for its emphasis on the functional role of literary devices and its
original conception of literary history. Russian Formalists advocated a "scientific" method for
studying poetic language.

Mechanistic Formalism

The OPOJAZ, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language group, headed by Viktor
Shklovsky was primarily concerned with the Formal method and focused on technique and
device. Literary works, according to this model, resemble machines: they are the result of an
intentional human activity in which a specific skill transforms raw material into a complex
mechanism suitable for a particular purpose. A clear illustration of this may be provided by the
main argument of one of Viktor Shklovsky's early texts, "Art as Device" (1917).

Organic Formalism

Disappointed by the constraints of the mechanistic method some Russian Formalists

adopted the organic model. They utilized the similarity between organic bodies and literary
phenomena in two different ways: as it applied to individual works and to literary genres. Just
as each individual organism shares certain features with other organisms of its type, and species
that resemble each other belong to the same genus, the individual work is similar to other works
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of its form and homologous literary forms belong to the same genre. The most widely known
work carried out in this tradition is Vladimir Propp's "Morphology of the Folktale" (1928).

As in ST Coleridge’s opinion, organic formalism is when art is derived from the

content. Form is not imposed on the content rather the form is a product of the content.

Major Writers:

 Viktor Shklovsky
 Roman Jakobson
 Yuri Tynianov
 Vladimir Propp
 Boris Eichenbaum
 Boris Tomashevsky
 Mikhail Bakhtin
 Grigory Gukovsky

Viktor Shklovsky
Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky (1893-1984) was a Russian and Soviet literary theorist,
critic, writer, and pamphleteer. He is one of the major figures associated with Russian
formalism. During the First World War, he volunteered for the Russian Army and
eventually became a driving trainer in an armoured car unit in St. Petersburg. There, in
1916, he founded OPOYAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language).

Works:

 Art as Technique/Device (1917)

 Zoo, or, Letters Not about Love (1923)
 Theory of Prose (1925)

Terms:

 Defamiliarization or Ostranenie
 Fabula and Syuzhet
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Defamiliarization or Ostranenie:

The term "defamiliarization" was first coined in 1917 by Russian formalist Viktor
Shklovsky in his essay "Art as Device" (alternate translation: "Art as Technique"). It is the
artistic technique of presenting to audience common things in an unfamiliar or strange way
so they could gain new perspectives and see the world differently. Shklovsky invented the term
as a means to "distinguish poetic from practical language on the basis of the former's
perceptibility. Essentially, he is stating that poetic language is fundamentally different than the
language that we use every day because it is more difficult to understand: Poetic speech is
formed speech. Prose is ordinary speech. According to the Russian formalists who coined the
term, it is the central concept of art and poetry. The concept has influenced 20th-century art
and theory, ranging over movements including Dada, postmodernism, epic theatre, science
fiction, and philosophy.

Fabula and Syuzhet:

Fabula equates to the thematic content of a narrative and syuzhet equates to the
chronological structure of the events within the narrative. Vladimir Propp and Viktor
Shklovsky originated the terminology as part of the Russian Formalism movement in the early
20th century. Narratologists have described fabula as "the raw material of a story", (story or
theme) and syuzhet as "the way a story is organized" (plot).

Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson (1896-1982) was a Russian-American linguist and
literary theorist. A pioneer of structural linguistics, Jakobson was one of the most celebrated
and influential linguists of the twentieth century. He developed revolutionary new techniques
for the analysis of linguistic sound systems, in effect founding the modern discipline of
phonology. Jakobson's concept of underlying linguistic universals, particularly his celebrated
theory of distinctive features, decisively influenced the early thinking of Noam Chomsky,
who became the dominant figure in theoretical linguistics during the second half of the
twentieth century.

(In linguistics, a distinctive feature is the most basic unit of phonological structure that
distinguishes one sound from another within a language).

Through his decisive influence on Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, among
others, Jakobson became a pivotal figure in the adaptation of structural analysis to disciplines
beyond linguistics, including philosophy, anthropology, and literary theory; his development
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of the approach pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure, known as "structuralism", became a

major post-war intellectual movement in Europe and the United States.

Works:

• Theses on Language (1928) in collaboration with Yuri Tynianov

• Fundamentals of Language (1956)

• Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics (1960)

• Language in Literature (1969)

• The Poetry of Grammar and the Grammar of Poetry (1980)

Terms:

• Six functions of language

• Markedness

• Metaphor/Paradigm

• Metonymy/Syntagm

Six functions of language: (communication functions), according to which an effective

act of verbal communication can be described. Each of the functions has an associated factor.
For this work, Jakobson was influenced by Karl Bühler's organon model, to which he added
the poetic, phatic and metalingual functions.

1. The referential function: corresponds to the factor of Context and describes a

situation, object or mental state.

2. The poetic function: focuses on "the message for its own sake" (how the code is used)
and is the operative function in poetry as well as slogans.

3. The emotive function: relates to the Addresser (sender) and is best exemplified by
interjections and other sound changes that do not alter the denotative meaning of an utterance
but do add information about the Addresser's (speaker's) internal state, e.g. "Wow, what a
view!" Whether a person is experiencing feelings of happiness, sadness, grief or otherwise,
they use this function to express themselves.

4. The conative function: engages the Addressee (receiver) directly and is best
illustrated by vocatives and imperatives, e.g. "Tom! Come inside and eat!"
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5. The phatic function: is language for the sake of interaction and is therefore associated
with the Contact/Channel factor. The Phatic Function can be observed in greetings and casual
discussions of the weather, particularly with strangers. It also provides the keys to open,
maintain, verify or close the communication channel: "Hello?", "Ok?", "Hummm", "Bye"...

6. The metalingual (alternatively called "metalinguistic" or "reflexive") function: is the

use of language (what Jakobson calls "Code") to discuss or describe itself.

Metaphor and Metonymy:

Metaphor (drawing a similarity between two things or selection of words) and metonymy
(drawing a contiguity or closeness between two things, just like “crown for the king” or
combination of words) are two fundamental opposite poles along which a discourse with
human language is developed. It has been argued that the two poles of similarity and contiguity
are fundamental ones along which the human mind is structured; in the study of human
language the two poles have been called metaphor and metonymy, while in the study of the
unconscious they have been called condensation and displacement. In linguistics, they are
connected to the paradigmatic and syntagmatic poles.

In his 1956 essay, "The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles", Roman Jakobson describes
the couple as representing the possibilities of linguistic selection (metaphor) and combination
(metonymy); Jakobson's work became important for such French structuralists as Claude Lévi-
Strauss and Roland Barthes. In his essay, Jakobson also argues that metaphor is the basis for
poetry, especially as seen in literary Romanticism and Symbolism, whereas metonymy forms
the basis for Realism in literature.

Yuri Tynyanov
Yury Nikolaevich Tynyanov (1894 –1943) was a Soviet writer, literary critic,
translator, scholar and screenwriter. He was an authority on Pushkin and an important member
of the Russian Formalist school.

In 1928, together with the linguist Roman Jakobson, he published a famous work titled
Theses on Language, a predecessor to structuralism.

Vladimir Propp
Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp (1895-1970) was a Soviet folklorist and scholar who
analysed the basic structural elements of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irreducible
structural units.
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His Morphology of the Folktale was published in Russian in 1928. Although it

represented a breakthrough in both folkloristics and morphology and influenced Claude Lévi-
Strauss and Roland Barthes, it was generally unnoticed in the West until it was translated in
1958. His morphology is used in media education and has been applied to other types of
narrative, be it in literature, theatre, film, television series, games, etc., although Propp applied
it specifically to the wonder of fairy tale.

Major Works:

 Morphology of the Folktale (1928)

 Historical Roots of the wonder tale (1946)
 Russian Epic Song (1955–1958)

Terms:

 31 functions and 7 roles.

According to Propp, based on his analysis of 100 folktales, there were 31 basic structural
elements (or 'functions') that typically occurred within Russian fairy tales. He identified these
31 functions as typical of all fairy tales, or wonder tales in Russian folklore. These functions
occurred in a specific, ascending order (1-31, although not inclusive of all functions within any
tale) within each story. This type of structural analysis of folklore is referred to as
"syntagmatic".

He also concluded that all the characters in tales could be resolved into 7 abstract character
functions (roles). These roles or character types are:

1. The villain
2. The dispatcher
3. The helper
4. The princess or prize, and often her father
5. The donor
6. The hero
7. The false hero
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Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895 –1975) was a Russian philosopher, literary
critic and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language. His
writings on a variety of subjects inspired scholars working in a number of different traditions
(Marxism, semiotics, structuralism, religious criticism) and in disciplines as diverse as literary
criticism, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and psychology. Although Bakhtin was
active in the debates on aesthetics and literature that took place in the Soviet Union in the
1920s, his distinctive position did not become well known until he was rediscovered by Russian
scholars in the 1960s.

Works:

 Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929) [Terms: Polyphony and Unfinalizability]

 Rabelais and His World (1965) [Carnival, Carnivalesque, and Grotesque]
 The Dialogic Imagination (1975) [Chronotope and Heteroglossia]
 Toward a Philosophy of the Act (1986)

Terms:

 Heteroglossia
 Dialogism
 Chronotope
 Carnivalesque
 Polyphony
 Unfinalizability

Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics is considered to be Bakhtin's seminal work, a work

in which he introduces a number of important concepts.

Unfinalizability:

The concept of unfinalizability is particularly important to Bakhtin's analysis of

Dostoevsky's approach to character, although he frequently discussed it in other contexts. He
summarises the general principle behind unfinalizability in Dostoevsky thus:

“Nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about
the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future
and will always be in the future”.

Note: It means that nothing is final and related to an ending with suspense.
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Polyphony:

In literature, polyphony is a feature of narrative, which includes a diversity of

simultaneous points of view and voices. The concept was introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin, using
a metaphor based on the musical term polyphony. Bakhtin's primary example of polyphony
was Fyodor Dostoevsky's prose. According to Bakhtin, the chief characteristic of
Dostoevsky's novels is "a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses,
a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices".

Carnivalesque:

Carnivalesque is a literary mode that subverts and liberates the assumptions of the
dominant style or atmosphere through humour and chaos. It originated as "carnival" in
Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and was further developed in Rabelais
and His World. For Bakhtin, "carnival" (the totality of popular festivities, rituals and other
carnival forms) is deeply rooted in the human psyche on both the collective and individual
level. Though historically complex and varied, it has over time worked out "an entire language
of symbolic concretely sensuous forms" which express a unified "carnival sense of the world,
permeating all its forms".

Heteroglossia:

The term heteroglossia describes the coexistence of distinct varieties within a single
language. Heteroglossia is the presence in language of a variety of "points of view on the world,
forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its
own objects, meanings and values. The term translates the Russian literally, "varied-
speechedness", which was introduced by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin in his
1934 paper published in English as "Discourse in the Novel." The essay was published in
English in the book The Dialogic Imagination.

Dialogism:

Dialogics or dialogism, according to Bakhtin, means the process in which meaning is

evolved out of interactions (dialogues) among the author, the work and the reader or listener.
Also, these elements are affected by the contexts in which they are placed, namely by social
and political forces.

Chronotope:

In literary theory and philosophy of language, the chronotope is how configurations of

time and space are represented in language and discourse. The term was taken up by Russian
literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin who used it as a central element in his theory of meaning in
language and literature. Bakhtin developed the term in his 1937 essay "Forms of Time and of
the Chronotope in the Novel". Here Bakhtin showed how different literary genres operated
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with different configurations of time and space, which gave each genre its particular narrative
character.

New Criticism
New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American
literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. New criticism is an analytic literary
criticism that is marked by concentration on the language, imagery, and emotional or
intellectual tensions in literary works. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to
discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic
object. The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New
Criticism.

The work of Cambridge scholar I. A. Richards, especially his Practical Criticism and
The Meaning of Meaning, which offered what was claimed to be an empirical scientific
approach, were important to the development of New Critical methodology. Also very
influential were the critical essays of T. S. Eliot, such as "Tradition and the Individual
Talent" and "Hamlet and His Problems", in which Eliot developed his notions of the
"theory of impersonality" and "objective correlative" respectively. Eliot's evaluative
judgments, such as his condemnation of Milton and Dryden, his liking for the so-called
metaphysical poets, and his insistence that poetry must be impersonal, greatly influenced the
formation of the New Critical canon.

New Criticism developed as a reaction to the older philological and literary history
schools of the US North, which focused on the history and meaning of individual words and
their relation to foreign and ancient languages, comparative sources, and the biographical
circumstances of the authors (New Historicism). The New Critics felt that this approach tended
to distract from the text and meaning of a poem and entirely neglect its aesthetic qualities in
favour of teaching about external factors. On the other hand, the New Critics disparaged the
literary appreciation school, which limited itself to pointing out the "beauties" and morally
elevating qualities of the text, as too subjective and emotional. Condemning this as a version
of Romanticism, they aimed for a newer, systematic and objective method.

New Critics believed the structure and meaning of the text were intimately connected
and should not be analyzed separately. In order to bring the focus of literary studies back to
analysis of the texts, they aimed to exclude the reader's response, the author's intention,
historical and cultural contexts, and moralistic bias from their analysis (Close Reading).
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Major Writers:

 I.A. Richards
 Allen Tate
 William Empson
 Cleanth Brooks
 F.R. Leavis
 John Crowe Ransom
 Robert Penn Warren
 William K. Wimsatt
 Monroe Beardsley
 Rene Wallek
 R.P Blackmur
 Ronald Crane
 Leroy Searle

The Fugitives

The Fugitives also known as The Fugitive Poets, is the name given to a group of poets
and literary scholars at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who published a literary
magazine from 1922 to 1925 called The Fugitive. The group, primarily was driven by

 Robert Penn Warren

 John Crowe Ransom
 Donald Davidson
 Allen Tate

They formed a major school of twentieth century poetry in the United States. With it, a
major period of modern Southern literature began. Their poetry was formal and featured
traditional prosody and concrete imagery often from experiences of the rural south. The group
has some overlap with two later groups Southern Agrarians and New Criticism.

I.A Richards
Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893-1979) known as I. A. Richards, was an English
educator, literary critic, poet, and rhetorician. His work contributed to the foundations of the
New Criticism, a formalist movement in literary theory which emphasized the close reading of
a literary text, especially poetry, in an effort to discover how a work of literature functions as
a self-contained and self-referential æsthetic object.
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Major Works:

 The Foundations of Aesthetics (1922) with C.K Ogden

 The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and
of the Science of Symbolism (1923), by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards
 Principles of Literary Criticism (1924)
 Practical Criticism (1929)
 The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936).

Terms:

 Four Types of Meaning

 Pseudo Statement

Four Types of Meaning:

The meaning of a word depends upon four factors:

Sense, Feeling, Tone, Intention (learn the sequence)

Pseudo Statement:

A term used by Richards to distinguish between Scientific and Poetic truth. He says that
scientific expression is verifiable but poetic language is not verifiable thus it is a pseudo (false)
statement.

Practical Criticism (1929), is an empirical study of inferior response to a literary text.

As an instructor in English literature at Cambridge University, Richards tested the critical-
thinking abilities of his pupils; he removed authorial and contextual information from thirteen
poems and asked undergraduates to write interpretations, in order to ascertain the likely
impediments to an adequate response to a literary text. That experiment in pedagogical
approach – critical reading without contexts – demonstrated the variety and the depth of the
possible textual misreadings that might be committed, by university student and layman alike.

Feedforward:

According to Richards, feedforward is the concept of anticipating the effect of one's

words by acting as our own critic. It is thought to work in the opposite direction of feedback,
though it works essentially towards the same goal: to clarify unclear concepts. Existing in all
forms of communication, feedforward acts as a pretest that any writer can use to anticipate the
impact of their words on their audience. According to Richards, feedforward allows the writer
to then engage with their text to make necessary changes to create a better effect.
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The semantic triangle:

Richards and Ogden created the semantic triangle to deliver improved understanding to
how words come to mean. The semantic triangle has three parts, the symbol or word, the
referent, and the thought or reference. In the bottom, right corner is the Referent, the thing,
in reality. Placed at the left corner is the symbol or word. At the top point, the convergence of
the literal word and the object in reality; it is our intangible idea about the object. Ultimately,
the English meaning of the words is determined by an individual's unique experience.

Allen Tate
John Orley Allen Tate (1899 – 1979), known professionally as Allen Tate, was an
American poet, essayist, social commentator, and poet laureate from 1943 to 1944.

Major Works:

 Ode to the Confederate Dead (1928) A poem.

 Reason in Madness: Critical Essays (1941)
 The Man of Letters in the Modern World (1955)

Major Terms:

Tension in Poetry:

‘Tension in Poetry’ is taken from Tate’s The Man of Letters in the Modern World.
The essay deals with tension as the life of a poem. He divides tension in two parts: Extension
(extensive or denotative meaning) and Intension (intensive or connotative meanings). It
reveals Tate’s view that a good poem is one in which the Extension and the Intension are in a
state of tension. Tension is a balance maintained in an artistic work (such as a poem, painting,
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or musical composition) between opposing forces or elements; a controlled dramatic or

dynamic quality.

"Ode to the Confederate Dead" is a long poem by the American poet-critic Allen
Tate published in 1928 in Tate's first book of poems, Mr. Pope and Other Poems. It is one of
Tate's best-known poems and considered by some critics to be his most "important". Heavily
influenced by the work of T. S. Eliot.

William Empson
Sir William Empson (1906 –1984) was an English literary critic and poet, widely
influential for his practice of closely reading literary works, a practice fundamental to New
Criticism. His best-known work is his first, Seven Types of Ambiguity, published in 1930.
Jonathan Bate has written that the three greatest English literary critics of the 18th, 19th and
20th centuries are Johnson, Hazlitt and Empson, "not least because they are the funniest".

Major Terms:

 Seven Types of Ambiguity

Seven Types of Ambiguity is a work of literary criticism by William Empson which

was first published in 1930. It was one of the most influential critical works of the 20th century
and was a key foundation work in the formation of the New Criticism school. The book is
organized around seven types of ambiguity that Empson finds in the poetry he discusses. An
ambiguity is represented as a puzzle to Empson. Empson reads poetry as an exploration of
conflicts within the author.

Seven types:

1. The first type of ambiguity is the metaphor, that is, when two things are said to be alike
which have different properties. This concept is similar to that of metaphysical conceit.

2. Two or more meanings are resolved into one. Empson characterizes this as using two
different metaphors at once.

3. Two ideas that are connected through context can be given in one word simultaneously.

4. Two or more meanings that do not agree but combine to make clear a complicated state of
mind in the author.
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5. When the "author is discovering his idea in the act of writing..." Empson describes a simile
that lies halfway between two statements made by the author.

6. When a statement says nothing and the readers are forced to invent a statement of their own,
most likely in conflict with that of the author.

7. Two words that within context are opposites that expose a fundamental division in the
author's mind.

Cleanth Brooks
Cleanth Brooks (1906 –1994) was an American literary critic and professor. He is best
known for his contributions to New Criticism in the mid-20th century and for revolutionizing
the teaching of poetry in American higher education. His best-known works, The Well
Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947) and Modern Poetry and the Tradition
(1939), argue for the centrality of ambiguity and paradox as a way of understanding poetry.
With his writing, Brooks helped to formulate formalist criticism, emphasizing "the interior life
of a poem" and codifying the principles of close reading.

Brooks was also the preeminent critic of Southern literature, writing classic texts on
William Faulkner, and co-founder of the influential journal The Southern Review with
Robert Penn Warren.

Major Works:

 Understanding Poetry (1938) A poetry anthology by Brooks and Robert Penn

Warren
 Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939)
 The Well wrought Urn (1947) most important.

Major Terms:

 The Heresy of Paraphrase

The Heresy of Paraphrase is the title of a chapter in The Well-Wrought Urn. Brooks
argued that meaning in poetry is irreducible, because "a true poem is a simulacrum of
reality...an experience rather than any mere statement about experience or any mere
abstraction from experience." Brooks emphasized structure, tension, balance, and irony over
meaning, statement, and subject matter. He relied on comparisons with non-verbal arts in order
to shift discussion away from summarizable content.

The heresy is that of assuming that the meaning of a work of art (particularly of poetry)
can be paraphrased. According to Brooks, who here followed an argument of Benedetto Croce,
the meaning of a poem consists precisely in what is not translatable. Poetic meaning is bound
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up with the particular disposition of the words—their sound, rhythm, and arrangement—in
short, with the “sensory embodiment” provided by the poem itself. To alter that embodiment
is to produce either another poem (and therefore another meaning) or something that is not a
work of art at all, and which therefore lacks completely the kind of meaning for which works
of art are valued. Hence no poetry is translatable, and critics cannot do better than to point to
the objective features of the poem that most seem to them to be worthy of attention.

Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren (1905 – 1989) was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic
and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship
of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth
Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for All the King's Men
(1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won
Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.

Major Works:

 Understanding Poetry (1938) A poetry anthology by Robert Penn Warren and

Cleanth Brooks
 Understanding Fiction (1943) by Warren and Brooks
 All the King’s Men (1946)
 World Enough and Time (1950)
 Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965)

John Crowe Ransom

John Crowe Ransom (1888 –1974) was an American educator, scholar, literary critic,
poet, essayist and editor. He is considered to be a founder of the New Criticism school of
literary criticism. As a faculty member at Kenyon College, he was the first editor of the widely
regarded Kenyon Review. Highly respected as a teacher and mentor to a generation of
accomplished students, he also was a prize-winning poet and essayist. He was a founding
member of the Fugitives and was also the editor of the same magazine. His first volume of
poems, Poems about God (1919), was praised by Robert Frost and Robert Graves.

Major Works:
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 Poems about God (1919)

 God without Thunder (1930)
 The World’s Body (1938)
 The New Criticism (1941)

Major Terms:

He distinguished between three kinds of poems:

 Physical poem
 Platonic poem
 Metaphysical

William K. Wimsatt & Monroe Beardsley

William Kurtz Wimsatt (1907 – 1975) was an American professor of English,

literary theorist, and critic. Wimsatt is often associated with the concept of The Intentional
Fallacy and The Affective Fallacy which were two essays written in The Verbal Icon with
Monroe Beardsley.

Major works:

 The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Series of essays between 1941 &
1952)
 Hateful Contraries: Studies in Literature and Criticism
 Literary Criticism: A Short History

Major Terms:

 Intentional fallacy
 Affective fallacy
 Concrete Universal

The Concrete Universal: Wimsatt attempts to determine how specific or general (i.e.,
concrete or universal) a verbal representation must be in order to achieve a particular effect.
What is the difference, for example, between referring to a “purple cow” and a “tan cow with
a broken horn” (Verbal Icon )? In addressing such questions, Wimsatt attempts to resolve
what it is that makes poetry different from other forms of communication, concluding that
“what distinguishes poetry from scientific or logical discourse is a degree of concreteness
which does not contribute anything to the argument but is somehow enjoyable or valuable for
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its own sake.” For Wimsatt, poetry is “the vehicle of a metaphor which one boards heedless
of where it runs, whether cross-town or downtown — just for the ride”

Monroe Curtis Beardsley (1915 –1985)

He was an American philosopher of art. His work in aesthetics is best known for its
championing of the instrumentalist theory of art and the concept of aesthetic experience.
Beardsley was elected president of the American Society for Aesthetics in 1956.

Major Works:

 Practical Logic (1950)

 Aesthetics (1958) (an introductory text)
 Aesthetics: A Short History (1966).
 He also edited a well-regarded survey anthology of philosophy, The European
Philosophers from Descartes to Nietzsche.

Intentional Fallacy:

One of the critical concepts of New Criticism, “Intentional Fallacy” was formulated
by Wimsatt and Beardsley in an essay in The Verbal Icon (1946) as the mistake of attempting
to understand the author’s intentions when interpreting a literary work. Claiming that it is
fallacious to base a critical judgement about the meaning or value of a literary work on
“external evidences” concerning the author’s intention, Wimstt and Beardsley held that “the
design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the
success of a work of literary art.” This is closely associated with the New Critical notion of the
“autotelic text”, according to which the meaning of a work is contained solely within the work
itself, and any attempt to understand the author’s intention violates the autonomy of the work.

Note: It means that we are committing an error when we try to know the intention of the
author to analyse any literary work. According to new critics, we should focus on
language and try to find out meaning out of that only.

Affective fallacy:

It is a term from literary criticism used to refer to the supposed error of judging or
evaluating a text on the basis of its emotional effects on a reader. In literary criticism, the
affective fallacy refers to incorrectly judging a piece of writing by how it emotionally affects
its reader. In other words, if you think a poem about a three-legged puppy is poignant because
it makes you bawl your eyes out, you're wrong. It is the misconception that arises from judging
a poem by the emotional effect that it produces in the reader.
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F.R Leavis
Frank Raymond "F. R." Leavis (1895 –1978) was an English literary critic of the
early-to-mid-twentieth century. He taught for much of his career at Downing College,
Cambridge, and later at the University of York.

In 1929 Leavis married one of his students, Queenie Roth, and this union resulted in a
collaboration that yielded many critical works. 1932 was an annus mirabilis for them, when
Leavis published New Bearings in English Poetry, his wife published Fiction and the
Reading Public, and the quarterly periodical Scrutiny was founded.

Scrutiny, the critical quarterly that he edited until 1953, using it as a vehicle for the new
Cambridge criticism, upholding rigorous intellectual standards and attacking the dilettante
elitism he believed to characterise the Bloomsbury Group.

New Bearings in English Poetry was the first major volume of criticism Leavis was to
publish, and it provides insight into his own critical positions.

He has been frequently associated with the American school of New Critics, a group
which advocated close reading and detailed textual analysis of poetry. Although there are
undoubtedly similarities between Leavis's approach to criticism and that of the New Critics
(most particularly in that both take the work of art itself as the primary focus of critical
discussion), Leavis is ultimately distinguishable from them, since he never adopted a theory of
the poem as a self-contained and self-sufficient aesthetic and formal artefact, isolated from the
society, culture and tradition from which it emerged. New Bearings, devoted principally to
Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, and was an
attempt to identify the essential new achievements in modern poetry.

In 1948, Leavis focused his attention on fiction and made his general statement about
the English novel in The Great Tradition, where he traced this claimed tradition through Jane
Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad. Contentiously, Leavis, and his
followers, excluded major authors such as Charles Dickens, Laurence Sterne and Thomas
Hardy from his canon, characterising Dickens as a "mere entertainer", but eventually,
following the revaluation of Dickens by Edmund Wilson and George Orwell, Leavis changed
his position, publishing Dickens the Novelist in 1970.

The Common Pursuit, another collection of his essays from Scrutiny, was published
in 1952.

R. P. Blackmur
Richard Palmer Blackmur (1904 –1965) was an American literary critic and poet.
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Major Works:

Poetry:

 From Jordan's Delight (1937)

 The Second World (1942)

Criticism:

 The Double Agent: essays in craft and elucidation (1935)

 The Expense of Greatness (1940)
 Studies in Henry James (1983)

Chicago Aristotelians
The Chicago School of literary criticism was a form of criticism of English literature
begun at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, which lasted until the 1950s. It was also called
Neo-Aristotelianism, due to its strong emphasis on Aristotle's concepts of plot, character and
genre. It was partly a reaction to New Criticism, a then highly popular form of literary
criticism, which the Chicago critics accused of being too subjective and placing too much
importance on irony and figurative language. They aimed instead for total objectivity and a
strong classical basis of evidence for criticism.

The New Critics regarded the language and poetic diction as most important, but the
Chicago School considered such things merely the building material of poetry. Like Aristotle,
they valued the structure or form of a literary work as a whole, rather than the complexities of
the language. Despite this, the Chicago School is considered by some to be a part of the New
Criticism movement.

Ronald Salmon Crane (1886–1967) is considered the founder of the Chicago

Aristotelians. Neo-Aristotelianism is a view of literature and rhetorical criticism propagated
by the Chicago School.

Writers associated with it are:

 Ronald S. Crane
 Elder Olson
 Richard McKeon
 Wayne Booth.
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Structuralism
Structuralism is an intellectual movement which began in France in the 1950s and is
first seen in the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and the literary critic Roland
Barthes. It is difficult to boil structuralism down to a single 'bottom-line' proposition, but if
forced to do so it would be that its essence is the belief that things cannot be understood in
isolation - they have to be seen in the context of the larger structures they are part of
(hence the term 'structuralism'). Structuralism was imported into Britain mainly in the 1970s
and attained widespread influence, and even notoriety, throughout the 1980s. In sociology,
anthropology, archaeology, history, philosophy, and linguistics, structuralism is a general
theory of culture and methodology that implies that elements of human culture must be
understood by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structures
that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel. As an intellectual
movement, structuralism also became the heir to existentialism.

The structures in question here are those imposed by our way of perceiving the world
and organising experience, rather than objective entities already existing in the external world.
It follows from this that meaning or significance isn't a kind of core or essence inside things:
rather, meaning is always outside. Meaning is always an attribute of things, in the literal sense
that meanings are attributed to the things by the human mind, not contained within them.

Emile Durkheim based his sociological concept on 'structure' and 'function', and from
his work emerged the sociological approach of structural functionalism.

Apart from Durkheim's use of the term structure, the semiological concept of
Ferdinand de Saussure became fundamental for structuralism. Saussure conceived language
and society as a system of relations. His linguistic approach was also a refutation of
evolutionary linguistics.

Russian functional linguist Roman Jakobson was a pivotal figure in the adaptation of
structural analysis to disciplines beyond linguistics, including philosophy, anthropology, and
literary theory. Jakobson was a decisive influence on anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, by
whose work the term structuralism first appeared in reference to social sciences.

By the late 1960s, many of structuralism's basic tenets came under attack from a new
wave of predominantly French intellectuals/philosophers such as historian Michel Foucault,
Jacques Derrida, Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and literary critic Roland Barthes.

Though elements of their work necessarily relate to structuralism and are

informed by it, these theorists eventually came to be referred to as post-structuralists.
Many proponents of structuralism, such as Lacan, continue to influence continental philosophy
and many of the fundamental assumptions of some of structuralism's post-structuralist critics
are a continuation of structuralist thinking.
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In literary theory, structuralism challenged the belief that a work of literature reflected
a given reality; instead, a text was constituted of linguistic conventions and situated among
other texts. An example of structuralism is describing an apple. An apple is crisp, sweet, juicy,
round, and hard. Another example of structuralism is describing your experience at the ocean
by saying it is windy, salty, and cold, but rejuvenating.

What structuralist critics do:

 They analyse (mainly) prose narratives, relating the text to some larger containing
structure, such as: (a) the conventions of a particular literary genre, or (b) a network of
intertextual connections, or (c) a projected model of an underlying universal narrative
structure, or (d) a notion of narrative as a complex of recurrent patterns or motifs.
 They interpret literature in terms of a range of underlying parallels with the structures
of language, as described by modern linguistics. For instance, the notion of the
'mytheme', posited by Levi-Strauss, denoting the minimal units of narrative 'sense', is
formed on the analogy of the morpheme, which, in linguistics, is the smallest unit of
grammatical sense. An example of a morpheme is the 'ed' added to a verb to denote the
past tense.
 They apply the concept of systematic patterning and structuring to the whole field of
Western culture, and across cultures, treating as 'systems of signs' anything from
Ancient Greek myths to brands of soap powder.

Major Writers:

 Ferdinand de Saussure
 Roland Barthes
 Louis Althusser (covered in Marxism)
 Jacques Lacan (covered in Psychoanalytic theory)
 Claude Levi Strauss
 Charles Sanders Peirce
 Roman Jakobson (covered in Russian Formalism)
 Wilhelm Wundt
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Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 –1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher.
His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics
in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and
one of two major founders (together with Charles Sanders Peirce) of semiotics, or semiology,
as Saussure called it. Ferdinand de Saussure is one of the world’s most quoted linguists, which
is remarkable as he himself hardly published anything during his lifetime.

Major Works:

 A Course in General Linguistics (1916): This book consists of his lectures about
important principles of language description in Geneva between 1907 and 1911
which were collected and published by his pupils (Charles Bally & Albert
Sechehaye) posthumously.
 Works published in his lifetime includes two monographs and a few dozen of papers
and notes, all of them collected in a volume of some 600 pages published in 1922.

Major Terms:

 Structural Linguistics
 Semiology
 Langue and Parole
 Signifier and Signified
 Synchrony and Diachrony
 Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic
 Linguistic Sign
 Semiotic Arbitrariness
 Laryngeal Theory

Structural linguistics:

Structural linguistics or structuralism, in linguistics, denotes schools or theories in

which language is conceived as a self-contained, self-regulating semiotic system whose
elements are defined by their relationship to other elements within the system. It is derived
from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and is part of the overall approach of
structuralism.

Semiology:

Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes
(semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves
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signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something, usually called a
meaning, to the sign's interpreter.

Langue and Parole:

It is a theoretical linguistic dichotomy distinguished by Ferdinand de Saussure in his

Course in General Linguistics.

The French term langue ('language') encompasses the abstract, systematic rules and
conventions of a signifying system; it is independent of, and pre-exists, the individual user. It
involves the principles/system of language, without which no meaningful utterance, or parole,
would be possible.

In contrast, parole ('speech') refers to the concrete instances of the use of langue,
including texts which provide the ordinary research material for linguistics.

Langue (language) is the language system shared by a speech community and

according to Saussure the genuine topic of linguistics, whereas parole (speech) signifies the
act of speaking in actual situations by an individual.

Example: Suppose someone listens to a word in Hindi. That someone does not know Hindi.
Hindi as a Langue (the grand structure) remains intact someone knows it or not. However,
someone from our example will have to depend on Hindi as a Langue to be able to use it
(Parole).

Linguistic Sign:

In semiotics, a sign is anything that communicates a meaning that is not the sign itself
to the interpreter of the sign. The meaning can be intentional such as a word uttered with a
specific meaning, or unintentional, such as a symptom being a sign of a particular medical
condition. Signs can communicate through any of the senses, visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory,
or taste.

Arbitrariness:

Arbitrariness of sign means there is no logical or intrinsic relationship between signifier

(sound pattern) or signified (concept). For example, an English-speaking society has agreed
upon the word “dog” to refer to the four-legged animal with distinct features but in Urdu-speech
community society the word “dog” used for a person shows his nature who has done something
wrong or committed a crime.
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Sign- Signifier & Signified:

In semiotics, signified and signifier (French: signifié and signifiant) stand for the two
main components of a sign, where signified pertains to the "plane of content", while signifier
is the "plane of expression".

For Saussure, the signified and signifier are purely psychological: they are form rather
than substance. The signifier is interpreted as the conceptual material form, i.e. something
which can be seen, heard, touched, smelled or tasted; and the signified as the conceptual ideal
form. In other words, "contemporary commentators tend to describe the signifier as the form
that the sign takes and the signified as the concept to which it refers." The relationship between
the signifier and signified is an arbitrary relationship: "there is no logical connection" between
them. This differs from a symbol, which is "never wholly arbitrary." The idea that both the
signifier and the signified are inseparable is explained by Saussure's diagram, which shows
how both components coincide to create the sign.

The signifier is what you call something (the word "tree" for tree), whereas the signified
is the concept of the thing itself, and all other related concepts: all iterations of "tree," plus
"bush" and "shrub" and anything else tree-like.

Note: I have tried my best to explain this concept in an easier way in my lecture on YouTube
of the same. It would be better if you read first and then watch my lectures to digest the content
and its meaning for good.

Synchrony and Diachrony:

Synchrony (At a particular moment) and Diachrony (Historical) are two

complementary viewpoints in linguistic analysis. A synchronic approach considers a language
at a moment in time without taking its history into account. Synchronic linguistics aims at
describing a language at a specific point of time, often the present.
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In contrast, a Diachronic approach, as in historical linguistics, considers the

development and evolution of a language through history. For example, the study of Middle
English—when the subject is temporally limited to a sufficiently homogenous form—is
synchronic focusing on understanding how a given stage in the history of English functions
as a whole. The diachronic approach, by contrast, studies language change by comparing
the different stages. Saussure considers the synchronic perspective as systematic but argued
that language change is too unpredictable to be considered a system.

Syntagmatic (Structure) and Paradigmatic (Choice of words):

Syntagmatic relation and paradigmatic relation are introduced by Saussure (1974) to

distinguish two kinds of signifiers: one concerns positioning (syntagmatic) and the other
concerns substitution (paradigmatic). Paradigmatic relations are widely used in thesauri and
other knowledge organization systems, while syntagmatic relations are generally related to co-
occurrences in some context.

Laryngeal Theory:

Laryngeal consonants (a term often used interchangeably with guttural consonants)

are consonants with their primary articulation in the larynx.

The laryngeal theory is a theory in the historical linguistics of the Indo-European

languages positing that:

• The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) had a series of phonemes beyond those

reconstructable by the comparative method. That is, the theory maintains that there were sounds
in Proto-Indo-European that no longer exist in any of the daughter languages, and thus, cannot
be reconstructed merely by comparing sounds among those daughter languages.

• These phonemes, according to the most accepted variant of the theory, were laryngeal
consonants of an indeterminate place of articulation towards the back of the mouth.

Inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure’s discovery, Laryngeal theory regards the presence

of a breathy sound in the ancient Indo-European languages that explains many complexities
about the Proto-Indo-European language.

Roland Barthes
We will discuss Barthes only as a structuralist here. He belongs to post structuralism too, which
will be discussed further in detail.

Roland Gérard Barthes (1915 –1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist,
philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign
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systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture. His ideas explored a diverse range of
fields and influenced the development of many schools of theory, including structuralism,
anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism.

Barthes's analysis is influenced by the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de

Saussure; both Barthes and Saussure aim to explore and demystify the link between a sign and
its meaning. But Barthes moves beyond structuralism in that he criticises the propensity of
narratology to establish the overall system out of which all individual narratives are created,
which makes the text lose its specificity (différance).

Major Works:

 Writing Degree Zero (1953)

 Mythologies (1957)
 The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (1964)
 The Death of the Author (1968)
 S/Z (1970)
 Empire of Signs (1970)
 The Pleasure of the Text (1975)
 A Lover’s Discourse (1977)
 Image-Music-Text (1977)

Barthes's book S/Z, published in 1970 of some two hundred pages, is about Balzac's thirty-
page story 'Sarrasine'. Barthes's method of analysis is to divide the story into 561 lexies', or
units of meaning, which he then classifies using five 'codes', seeing these as the basic
underlying structures of all narratives. So, in terms of our opening statement about
structuralism (that it aims to understand the individual item by placing it in the context of the
larger structure to which it belongs) the individual item here is this particular story, and the
larger structure is the system of codes, which Barthes sees as generating all possible actual
narratives, just as the grammatical structures of a language can be seen as generating all
possible sentences which can be written or spoken in it.

The five codes identified by Barthes in S/Z are:

1. The Proairetic code (the narrative drive of the text):

This code provides indications of actions. ('The ship sailed at midnight' 'They began
again', etc.) The proairetic code encompasses the actions or small sequences of the narrative
which creates narrative tension. By telling us that someone 'had been sleeping', we now
anticipate them waking up, thus creating a small structure of narrative tension and expectation.
Out of these units, the whole narrative has a forward drive.
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2. The Hermeneutic code (the mysteries of the text):

This code poses questions or enigmas which provide narrative suspense. (For instance,
the sentence 'He knocked on a certain door in the neighbourhood of Pell Street' makes the
reader wonder who lived there, what kind of neighbourhood it was, and so on).

3. The Cultural code (the background knowledge of the text):

This code contains references out beyond the text to what is regarded as common
knowledge. The cultural code is constituted by the points at which the text refers to common
bodies of knowledge. These might be agreed, shared knowledge (the real existence of the
Faubourg Saint-Honoré) or an assertion of axiomatic truths.

4. The Semic code (the resonances of the text):

This is also called the connotative code. It is linked to theme, and this code when
organised around a particular proper name constitutes a 'character'. The semic code will thus
work to construct an evolving character through signifiers like name, costume, physical
appearance, psychological traits, speech, and lexis, which may also have different connotations
in different contexts elsewhere in the story.

5. The Symbolic code (the symbolic structure of the text):

This code is also linked to theme, but on a larger scale, so to speak. It consists of
contrasts and pairings related to the most basic binary polarities - male and female, night and
day, good and evil, life and art, and so on. These are the structures of contrasted elements which
structuralists see as fundamental to the human way of perceiving and organising reality.

Claude Levi Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908 –2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose
work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology.

Major Works:

 Race and History (1952)

 Tristes Tropiques (1955) (trans: A World on the Wane)
 The Savage Mind (1962)
 Mythologiques (1964)
 Structural Anthropology (1966)

Lévi-Strauss argued that the "savage" mind had the same structures as the "civilized"
mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere. These observations culminated
in his famous book Tristes Tropiques (1955) that established his position as one of the central
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figures in the structuralist school of thought. As well as sociology, his ideas reached into many
fields in the humanities, including philosophy. Structuralism has been defined as "the search
for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity."

Lévi-Strauss spent the second half of the 1960s working on his master project, a four-
volume study called Mythologiques. In it, he followed a single myth from the tip of South
America and all of its variations from group to group north through Central America and
eventually into the Arctic Circle, thus tracing the myth's cultural evolution from one end of the
Western Hemisphere to the other. He accomplished this in a typically structuralist way,
examining the underlying structure of relationships among the elements of the story rather than
focusing on the content of the story itself.

Major Terms and Ideas:

 Structuralist theory of mythology

 Bricolage
 Mytheme
 Alliance Theory
 Floating Signifier

Structuralist theory of mythology:

In structural anthropology, Strauss makes the claim that "myth is language". Through
approaching mythology as language, Lévi-Strauss suggests that it can be approached the same
way as language can be approached by the same structuralist methods used to address language.
Thus, Lévi-Strauss offers a structuralist theory of mythology; he clarifies, "Myth is
language, functioning on an especially high level where meaning succeeds practically at 'taking
off' from the linguistic ground on which it keeps rolling."

Bricolage:

In the arts, bricolage (French for "DIY" or "do-it-yourself projects") is the construction
or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work
constructed using mixed media. The term bricolage has also been used in many other fields,
including anthropology, philosophy, critical theory, education, computer software, and
business.

Mytheme:

In structuralism-influenced studies of mythology, a mytheme is a fundamental generic

unit of narrative structure (typically involving a relationship between a character, an event, and
a theme) from which myths are thought to be constructed. For example, the myths of Greek
Adonis and Egyptian Osiris share several elements, leading some scholars to conclude that they
share a source.
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The alliance theory:

Alliance theory also known as the general theory of exchanges, is a structuralist

method of studying kinship relations. It finds its origins in Strauss's Elementary Structures
of Kinship (1949) and is in opposition to the functionalist theory of Radcliffe-Brown.

A floating signifier:

Originated by Strauss sometimes also referred to as an empty signifier, is a signifier

without a referent in semiotics and discourse analysis, such as a word that points to no actual
object and has no agreed upon meaning.

Charles Sanders Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 –1914) was an American philosopher, logician,
mathematician and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism".

Educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for thirty years, Peirce made major
contributions to logic, a subject that, for him, encompassed much of what is now called
epistemology and the philosophy of science. He saw logic as the formal branch of semiotics,
of which he is a founder, which foreshadowed the debate among logical positivists and
proponents of philosophy of language that dominated 20th-century Western philosophy.
Additionally, he defined the concept of abductive reasoning, as well as rigorously formulated
mathematical induction and deductive reasoning.

Works:

 The Fixation of Belief

Terms and Ideas:

 Triadic Model of Sign

 Three Kinds of Sign

Triadic Model of Sign:

When Ferdinand de Saussure was formulating his two part ‘dyadic’ model of the sign,
consisting of a ‘signifier’, or the form that a sign takes, and the ‘signified,’ or concept it
represents, American, Charles Sanders Peirce was theorizing his own model of semiotics and
signs.
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In contrast to Saussure’s model, Peirce formulated a three-part triadic model consisting of

1. Interpretant

2. Representamen

3. Object

Below are two diagrams which explain the model with example:

Three kinds of signs:

Types of Signifiers — The Categories of Signs

1. Index/Indexical
2. Icon/Iconic
3. Symbol/Symbolic

Peirce said the form a sign takes, its signifier, can be classified as one of three types an
icon, an index, or a symbol.

1. An Icon has a physical resemblance to the signified, the thing being represented. A
photograph is a good example as it certainly resembles whatever it depicts.
2. An Index shows evidence of what’s being represented. A good example is using an
image of smoke to indicate fire.
3. A Symbol has no resemblance between the signifier and the signified. The connection
between them must be culturally learned. Numbers and alphabets are good examples.
There’s nothing inherent in the number 9 to indicate what it represents. It must be
culturally learned.
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Poststructuralism
Post-structuralism is a term for philosophical and literary forms of theory that both
build upon and reject ideas established by structuralism, the intellectual project that preceded
it. Though post-structuralists all present different critiques of structuralism, common themes
among them include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of structuralism, as well as an
interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute its structures. Accordingly, post-
structuralism discards the idea of interpreting media (or the world) within pre-established,
socially constructed structures.

Is post-structuralism a continuation and development of structuralism or a form of

rebellion against it? In one important sense it is the latter, since a very effective way of rebelling
is to accuse our predecessors of not having the courage of their convictions. Thus,
poststructuralists accuse structuralists of not following through the implications of the views
about language on which their intellectual system is based. As we saw, one of structuralism's
characteristic views is the notion that language doesn't just reflect or record the world: rather,
it shapes it, so that how we see is what we see. The post-structuralist maintains that the
consequences of this belief are that we enter a universe of radical uncertainty, since we can
have no access to any fixed landmark which is beyond linguistic processing, and hence we
have no certain standard by which to measure anything. Without a fixed point of reference
against which to measure movement you cannot tell whether or not you are moving at all. You
have probably at some time had the experience of sitting in a stationary train with another train
between yourself and the far platform. When that train begins to move you may have the
sensation that it is your train which is moving and only realise this isn't so when the other train
has gone and you again see the fixed point of the platform. Post-structuralism says, in effect,
that fixed intellectual reference points are permanently removed by properly taking on board
what structuralists said about language.

Post-structuralism emerged in France during the 1960s as a movement critiquing

structuralism. According to J. G. Merquior, a love–hate relationship with structuralism
developed among many leading French thinkers in the 1960s. Poststructuralists deny the
fixed meaning or a particular structure of a text and also reject the binary oppositions.

In a 1966 lecture titled "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences", Jacques Derrida presented a thesis on an apparent rupture in intellectual life.
Derrida interpreted this event as a "decentering" of the former intellectual cosmos. Instead of
progress or divergence from an identified centre, Derrida described this "event" as a kind of
"play.”

A year later, Roland Barthes published "The Death of the Author", in which he
announced a metaphorical event: the "death" of the author as an authentic source of meaning
for a given text. Barthes argued that any literary text has multiple meanings and that the author
was not the prime source of the work's semantic content. The "Death of the Author," Barthes
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maintained, was the "Birth of the Reader," as the source of the proliferation of meanings of
the text.

Structuralism proposes that human culture can be understood by means of a structure

that is modelled on language. As a result, there is concrete reality on the one hand, abstract
ideas about reality on the other hand, and a "third order" that mediates between the two. On the
other hand, a post-structuralist critique, then, might suggest that in order to build meaning out
of such an interpretation, one must (falsely) assume that the definitions of these signs are both
valid and fixed, and that the author employing structuralist theory is somehow above and apart
from these structures they are describing so as to be able to wholly appreciate them. The rigidity
and tendency to categorize intimations of universal truths found in structuralist thinking is a
common target of post-structuralist thought, while also building upon structuralist conceptions
of reality mediated by the interrelationship between signs.

Major writers whose works are often characterised as post-structuralist include:

 Michel Foucault
 Roland Barthes
 Jacques Derrida (specifically belongs to Deconstruction)
 Jean Baudrillard (will be covered in Postmodernism)
 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Already covered in Feminism)
 Umberto Eco
 Judith Butler (covered in Feminism)
 Slavoj Zizek
 Julia Kristeva (covered in Psychoanalytic Theory)
 Giles Deluze and Felix Guattari

Michel Foucault
Paul-Michel Foucault (1926 –1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas,
writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the
relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control
through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault
rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in
communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies,
literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.

Major Works:

 Madness and Civilization (1961)

 The Birth of the Clinic (1963)
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 The Order of the Things (1966)

 What is an Author? (1969)
 Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)
 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975)
 The History of Sexuality (1976)

He published his first major book, The History of Madness (1961). After obtaining
work between 1960 and 1966 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, he produced The Birth
of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things (1966), publications that displayed his increasing
involvement with structuralism, from which he later distanced himself. These first three
histories exemplified a historiographical technique Foucault was developing called
"archaeology."

Foucault subsequently published The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). In 1970,

Foucault was admitted to the Collège de France, a membership he retained until his death. He
also became active in several left-wing groups involved in campaigns against racism and
human rights abuses and for penal reform. Foucault later published Discipline and Punish
(1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), in which he developed archaeological and
genealogical methods which emphasized the role that power plays in society.

Foucault died in Paris from complications of HIV/AIDS; he became the first public
figure in France to die from complications of the disease.

Major Terms and Ideas:

 Biopolitics and Biopower

 Discourse
 Discourse Analyses
 Dispositif/dispositive
 Episteme
 Genealogy
 Governmentality
 Gaze
 Power-Knowledge
 Panopticon
 Parrhesia
 Visibilities
 Regimes of truth

Biopower and Biopolitics:

Biopower relates to the practice of modern nation states and their regulation of their
subjects through "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the
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subjugations of bodies and the control of populations". Foucault first used the term in his
lecture courses at the Collège de France, and the term first appeared in print in The Will to
Knowledge, Foucault's first volume of The History of Sexuality.

Biopolitics, which aligns more closely with the examination of the strategies and
mechanisms through which human life processes are managed under regimes of authority over
knowledge, power, and the processes of subjectivation.

Discourse:

Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of

communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as
sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. Following pioneering
work by Michel Foucault, these fields view discourse as a system of thought, knowledge, or
communication that constructs our experience of the world. Since control of discourse
amounts to control of how the world is perceived, social theory often studies discourse as a
window into power.

Foucault adopted the term 'discourse' to denote a historically contingent social system
that produces knowledge and meaning. He notes that discourse is distinctly material in effect,
producing what he calls 'practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak'.

Discourse analysis:

Foucauldian discourse analysis is a form of discourse analysis, focusing on power

relationships in society as expressed through language and practices, and based on the theories
of Foucault. Besides focusing on the meaning of a given discourse, the distinguishing
characteristic of this approach is its stress on power relationships. These are expressed
through language and behaviour, and the relationship between language and power.

Dispositif:

Dispositif or dispositive is a term used by Foucault, generally to refer to the various

institutional, physical, and administrative mechanisms and knowledge structures which
enhance and maintain the exercise of power within the social body.

Episteme:

In philosophy, episteme is a term that refers to a principle system of understanding (i.e.,

knowledge), such as scientific knowledge or practical knowledge. Plato contrasts episteme with
doxa: common belief or opinion.

For Foucault, an episteme is the guiding unconsciousness of subjectivity within a given

epoch – subjective parameters which form an historical a priori. He uses the term épistémè in
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his The Order of Things, in a specialized sense to mean the historical, non-temporal, a priori
knowledge that grounds truth and discourses, thus representing the condition of their possibility
within a particular epoch.

Genealogy:

In philosophy, genealogy is a historical technique in which one questions the

commonly understood emergence of various philosophical and social beliefs by attempting to
account for the scope, breadth or totality of discourse, thus extending the possibility of analysis,
as opposed to the Marxist use of the term ideology to explain the totality of historical discourse
within the time period in question by focusing on a singular or dominant discourse (ideology).

In the late twentieth century, Michel Foucault expanded the concept of genealogy into
a counter-history of the position of the subject which traces the development of people and
societies through history. His genealogy of the subject accounts "for the constitution of
knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, and so on, without having to make reference to a
subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty
sameness throughout the course of history."

Governmentality:

It is a concept first developed by Foucault in the later years of his life, roughly between
1977 and his death in 1984, particularly in his lectures at the Collège de France during this
time. Governmentality can be understood as:

• The organized practices (mentalities, rationalities, and techniques) through which

subjects are governed.

Gaze:

The gaze in the philosophical and figurative sense, is an individual's awareness and
perception of other individuals, other groups, or oneself. Michel Foucault, in Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), developed the concept of the gaze to illustrate the
dynamics of socio-political power relations and the social dynamics of society's mechanisms
of discipline.

Power-Knowledge:

According to Foucault's understanding, power is based on knowledge and makes use of

knowledge; on the other hand, power reproduces knowledge by shaping it in accordance with
its anonymous intentions. Power (re-) creates its own fields of exercise through knowledge.

The panopticon:
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It is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English

philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept of the design
is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the
inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched. Foucault argued the panopticon's
ultimate goal is to induce in the inmates a state of conscious visibility. This assures the
automatic functioning of power. To him, this form of incarceration is a “cruel, ingenious cage.”

Parrhesia:

In rhetoric, parrhesia is a figure of speech described as "speaking candidly or asking

forgiveness for so speaking". This Ancient Greek word has three different forms, as related by
Michel Foucault.

Visibilités:

It is a term used by Michel Foucault to designate all that carries meaning other than
statements.

Regimes of truth:

It is a term coined by Foucault, referring to a discourse that holds certain things to be

"truths". Foucault sought to explore how knowledge and truth were produced by power
structures of society.

Roland Barthes
We have already discussed his works and personal information in Structuralism. Now,
we will discuss Barthes as a Poststructuralist and his major terms/ideas. His work The
Death of the Author (1968) made him a post structuralist. Roland Barthes in this famous
essay from a post-structuralist position took a stand against the notion of authority in a
text. Structuralists believe that there is a fixed meaning and centre, but Barthes in this
book rejected this notion and attributed the meaning of a text to different readers of the
same book.

"The Death of the Author" is a 1967 essay which argues against traditional literary
criticism's practice of relying on the intentions and biography of an author to definitively
explain the "ultimate meaning" of a text. Instead, the essay emphasizes the primacy of each
individual reader's interpretation of the work over any "definitive" meaning intended by the
author, a process in which subtle or unnoticed characteristics may be drawn out for new insight.

The essay's first English-language publication was in the American journal Aspen, in
1967; the French debut was in the magazine Manteia, (1968). The essay later appeared in an
anthology of Barthes's essays, Image-Music-Text (1977), a book that also included his "From
Work to Text".
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With his work Mythologies (1957), he becomes an important figure in cultural studies
as well.

Terms:

 Readerly and Writerly text

 Author and Scriptor
Doxa (common Language)
 Paradoxa (Different from common people: like poetic language)
 Work (which is complete)
 Text (incomplete)

The Readerly Text (texts that are straightforward and demand no special effort to understand):

Barthes argues that most texts are readerly texts. Such texts are associated with classic
texts that are presented in a familiar, linear, traditional manner, adhering to the status quo in
style and content. Meaning is fixed and pre-determined so that the reader is a site merely to
receive information.

The Writerly Text (whose meaning is not immediately evident and demand some effort on
the part of the reader):

By contrast, writerly texts reveal those elements that the readerly attempts to conceal.
The reader, now in a position of control, takes an active role in the construction of meaning.
The stable meaning, or metanarratives, of readerly texts is replaced by a proliferation of
meanings and a disregard of narrative structure. There is a multiplicity of cultural and other
ideological indicators (codes) for the reader to uncover. The reader approaches the text from
an external position of subjectivity. By turning the reader into the writer, writerly texts defy
the commercialization and commodification of literature.

Doxa and Paradoxa:

He believes what pretends to be natural, universal and evident is in fact an outcome of

a naturalization process; a process through which the ideological is finally configured as the
Evident. Accordingly, the final result of the naturalization process, according to Barthes is a
Doxa which embodies the Evident. Therefore, on his way to criticize the Evident and also
reveal the ideological implications of Doxa, Barthes proposes Paradox as the antithesis of
Doxa. Paradox is actually a weapon against the intrigues of language, on the basis of which it
would be possible to experience a different reading of the text.

Author and Scriptor:

Author is the creator of a text who uses original imagination. Barthes believes that
author is not practical nowadays. In the modern world, author is represented by scriptor whose
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only power is to combine pre-existing texts in new ways. The "Author-God" maintained with
his work "the same relation of antecedence a father maintains with his child," the scriptor "is
born simultaneously with his text.”

Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco (1932 –2016) was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician,
novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator. In English, he is best known for
his popular 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, a historical mystery combining semiotics in
fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory, as well as Foucault's
Pendulum (1988), his novel which touches on similar themes.

Major Terms/Ideas:

 Open Text (like Barthes Readerly text)

 Closed Text (writerly text)
 The open work
 The intention of the reader
 The limits of interpretation

Note: Just remember the names.

Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek (born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and
public intellectual.

He is the most famous associate of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, a group

of Slovenian academics working on German Idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, ideology
critique, and media criticism. His breakthrough work was 1989's The Sublime Object of
Ideology, his first book in English.

Zižek has been called "the leading Hegelian of our time", and "the foremost exponent of
Lacanian theory"

Major Books:

 The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

 The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) Film project
 The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012) Film project
 Pandemic (2020)
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Ideas:

 Interpassivity
 Over-identification
 Ideological fantasy (ideology as an unconscious fantasy that structures reality)

Interpassivity:

It is a term from media studies that refers to the phenomenon whereby a piece of art or
technology seems to act on the audience or user's behalf; it is the opposite of interactivity. The
term was coined (in German) by Robert Pfaller in 1996, and was quickly taken up by Slavoj
Žižek.

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari

Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher, and Félix Guattari, a French psychoanalyst and
political activist, wrote a number of works together (besides both having distinguished
independent careers).

Their conjoint works are:

 Capitalism and Schizophrenia

 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
 What is Philosophy?
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Deconstruction
Deconstruction is a form of philosophical and literary analysis, derived mainly from
work begun in the 1960s by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, that questions the
fundamental conceptual distinctions, or “oppositions,” in Western philosophy through a close
examination of the language and logic of philosophical and literary texts. In the 1970s the term
was applied to work by Derrida, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, and Barbara Johnson, among
other scholars. It is a continuation of poststructuralism. In the 1980s it designated more loosely
a range of radical theoretical enterprises in diverse areas of the humanities and social sciences.

The term deconstruction refers to approaches to understand the relationship between

text and meaning. Derrida defined it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms
and essences which take precedence over appearances, instead considering the constantly
changing complex function of language, making static and idealist ideas of it inadequate.

In simple words, deconstruction means to deconstruct (to reconstruct) the text or

the structures in a work and to bring out a meaning which is hidden or ignored. In short,
it is “thinking of the unthought.” To “deconstruct” an opposition is to explore the tensions
and contradictions between the hierarchical ordering (binary oppositions) assumed in the text
and other aspects of the text’s meaning, especially those that are indirect or implicit or that rely
on figurative or performative uses of language. Through this analysis, the opposition is shown
to be a product, or “construction,” of the text rather than something given independently of it.

Deconstruction argues that language, especially in idealist concepts such as truth and
justice, is irreducibly complex, unstable, and difficult to determine, making fluid and
comprehensive ideas of language more adequate in deconstructive criticism. Derrida once said,

‘THERE IS NO OUTSIDE-TEXT’: -

‘Text’ requires a clearer explication in Derrida:

1. ‘Text’ is not restricted by a book's margins or binding.

2. A text overruns, spills over its borders. The end of the ‘book’ is not the end of ‘writing’.
3. Every text carries ‘traces’ of other texts (you can relate it to the notion of
intertextuality).
4. Every text is, therefore, a network of other texts, from which it differs.

The world, constructed through and in language takes on a textualized form, based on
difference, deference and multiplicity. There is no reality outside language. Since language is
inherently unstable (due to its arbitrariness, traces, absences and deferment) we cannot come
to a definite meaning about reality or identity. All we have as reality is a system of shifting
signifiers, difference and openness, full of ambiguity, absences, traces of other texts. This
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notion of reality being located within writing—or text—leads Derrida to declare: ‘there is no
outside text.’

Major Writers:

 Jacques Derrida
 J. Hillis Miller
 Paul de Man
 Barbara Johnson

Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida (1930 – 2004) was an Algerian-born French philosopher. He
developed a philosophical approach that came to be known as deconstruction, which he
utilized in numerous texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics
of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. He is one of the
major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy.

During his career, Derrida published more than 40 books, together with hundreds of
essays and public presentations. He had a significant influence on the humanities and social
sciences, including philosophy, literature, law, anthropology, historiography, applied
linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, architecture, and political theory.

In most of the Anglosphere, where analytic philosophy is dominant, Derrida's influence

is most presently felt in literary studies due to his longstanding interest in language and his
association with prominent literary critics from his time at Yale. He also influenced architecture
(in the form of deconstructivism), music, art, and art criticism.

Major Books:

 "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (1966)
 Of Grammatology (1967)
 Speech and Phenomena (1967)
 Writing and Difference (1967)
 Margins of Philosophy (1972)
 Specters of Marx (1993)
 Archive Fever (1995)
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Particularly in his later writings, Derrida addressed ethical and political themes in his
work. These writings influenced various activists and political movements. He became a well-
known and influential public figure, while his approach to philosophy and the notorious
abstruseness of his work made him controversial.

Major Terms and Ideas:

 Différance
 Phallogocentrism
 Free play
 Arche-writing
 Metaphysics of presence
 Pharmakon
 Trace
 Hauntology
 Supplement

Note: I have already made a lecture on Derrida on YouTube. Now, I am going to make
another lecture to explain his ideas in a better way to clear some confusions that I could
not do in my previous lecture. Perhaps, the day when you are reading these notes, I must
have already made that new lecture! Go to my channel and then to «playlist« and check
out «Deconstruction». You can check all the playlists regarding Literary Theory and can
watch one by one as per your need and convenience.

Différance:

Differance is a French term coined by Jacques Derrida. It is a central concept in

Derrida's deconstruction, a critical outlook concerned with the relationship between text and
meaning. The term différance means "difference and deferral of meaning." It is the idea that
individual words cannot impart a full meaning alone but must be accompanied by other words.
Differance is a play on the French verb differer, which means both “to defer” (postpone) and
“to differ.” Derrida uses both of these meanings to describe his concept.

Derrida first uses the term différance in his 1963 paper "Cogito et histoire de la folie".
The term différance then played a key role in Derrida's engagement with the philosophy of
Edmund Husserl in Speech and Phenomena. The term was then elaborated in various other
works, notably in his essay "Différance" and in various interviews.

The ⟨a⟩ of différance is a deliberate misspelling of différence, though the two are
pronounced identically. This misspelling highlights the fact that its written form is not heard,
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and serves to further subvert the traditional privileging of speech over writing (see arche-
writing and logocentrism), as well as the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible.

Phallogocentricism:

In critical theory and deconstruction, phallogocentrism is a neologism coined by

Derrida to refer to the privileging of the masculine (phallus) in the construction of meaning.
The term is a blend word of the older terms phallocentrism (focusing on the masculine point
of view) and logocentrism (focusing on language in assigning meaning to the world).

Derrida and others identified phonocentrism, or the prioritizing of speech over writing,
as an integral part of phallogocentrism. Derrida explored this idea in his essay "Plato's
Pharmacy".

Free play:

Free Play is a literary concept from Jacques Derrida's 1966 essay, "Structure, Sign,
and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences". In his essay, Derrida speaks of a
philosophical "event" that has occurred to the historic foundation of structure. Before the
"event", man was the centre of all things. After the "event", however, man could no longer be
judged the centre of the universe. Without this centralized reference, all that is left is "free
play".

Arche-Writing:

"Arche-writing" is a term used by Derrida in his attempt to re-orient the relationship

between speech and writing.

Derrida argued that as far back as Plato, speech had been always given priority over
writing. In the West, phonetic writing was considered as a secondary imitation of speech, a
poor copy of the immediate living act of speech. Derrida argued that in later centuries
philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and linguist Ferdinand de Saussure both gave writing a
secondary or parasitic role. In Derrida's essay “Plato's Pharmacy”, he sought to question this
prioritising by firstly complicating the two terms speech and writing.

Derrida noted that Plato argued that writing was "poisonous" to memory, since writing
is a mere repetition, as compared to the living memory required for speech. Derrida points out
however, that since both speech and writing rely upon repetition they cannot be completely
distinguished.

Note: This will be clarified more in my new lecture I mentioned above.

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Metaphysics of Presence:

The concept of the metaphysics of presence is an important consideration in

deconstruction. Deconstructive interpretation holds that the entire history of Western
philosophy with its language and traditions has emphasized the desire for immediate access to
meaning, and thus built a metaphysics or ontotheology based on privileging Presence over
Absence.

Pharmakon:

In critical theory, Pharmakon is a concept introduced by Derrida that can mean either
remedy, poison, or scapegoat. In his "Plato's Pharmacy", Derrida explores the notion that
writing is a pharmakon in a composite sense of these meanings as "a means of producing
something". Derrida uses pharmakon to highlight the connection between its traditional
meanings and the philosophical notion of indeterminacy. "

Trace:

Trace is one of the most important concepts in Derridian deconstruction. In the 1960s,
Jacques Derrida used this concept in two of his early books, namely Writing and Difference
and Of Grammatology. Because the meaning of a sign is generated from the difference it has
from other signs, especially the other half of its binary pairs, the sign itself contains a trace of
what it does not mean, i.e. bringing up the concepts of woman, normality, or speech may
simultaneously evoke the concepts of man, abnormality, or writing.

Hauntology:

Hauntology (a portmanteau of haunting and ontology) is a range of ideas referring to

the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a
ghost. The term is a neologism first introduced by Derrida in his 1993 book Specters of Marx.
Derrida initially used the term to refer to his idea of the atemporal nature of Marxism and its
tendency to "haunt Western society from beyond the grave." It describes a situation of
temporal and ontological disjunction in which presence, especially socially and culturally, is
replaced by a deferred non-origin.

The Yale School

The Yale school is a colloquial name for an influential group of literary critics,
theorists, and philosophers of literature that were influenced by Jacques Derrida's philosophy
of deconstruction. Many of the theorists were affiliated with Yale University in the late 1970s,
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although a number of the theorists – including Derrida himself – subsequently moved to or

became affiliated with the University of California, Irvine.

During the period between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, Yale University was the
home of a variety of thinkers who were indebted to deconstruction. The group included high-
profile literary scholars such as:

 Paul de Man
 Geoffrey Hartman
 J. Hillis Miller
 Harold Bloom
 Shoshana Felman

This group came to be known as the Yale School and was especially influential in
literary criticism because Paul de Man, Miller, Hartman and Bloom are all considered to be
prominent literary critics. The four critics listed above, along with Derrida, contributed to an
influential anthology, Deconstruction and Criticism. However, Harold Bloom's position was
always somewhat different from that of the rest of the group, and he later distanced himself
from deconstruction.

As a school of thought, the Yale School is more closely allied with the post-structuralist
dimensions of deconstruction as opposed to its phenomenological dimensions. Additionally,
the Yale School is philosophically affined to the 1970s version of deconstruction that John D.
Caputo has described as a "Nietzschean free play of signifiers" and not the 1990s version of
deconstruction that was far more concerned with political and ethical questions.

Paul de Man
Paul de Man (1919 -1983) was a Belgian-born literary critic and literary theorist.
Along with Jacques Derrida, he was part of an influential critical movement that went beyond
traditional interpretation of literary texts to reflect on the epistemological difficulties inherent
in any textual, literary, or critical activity.

Major Works:

 Blindness and Insight (1971)

 The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984)
 The Resistance to Theory (1986) *Important*
 Aesthetic Ideology (1996)

Major Terms and Ideas:

 Aesthetic ideology
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 All Language is rhetorical language

Aesthetic Ideology offers the definitive resource to de Man's thoughts on philosophy,

politics, and history. The core of Aesthetic Ideology is a rigorous inquiry into the relation of
rhetoric, epistemology, and aesthetics, one that presents radical notions of materiality.

J. Hillis Miller
Joseph Hillis Miller (1928 – 2021) was an American literary critic and scholar who
advanced theories of literary deconstruction.

Miller was associated with the Yale School, who advanced deconstruction, an analytical
approach of associating and drawing linkages between literary text and the associated meaning.
The theory espoused that words and texts had linkages to other expressed words and texts.
These built on ideas and themes that Derrida and de Man had brought along from Europe, while
Miller joined them. He applied these techniques to a range of American and British works,
including prose as well as poetry.

Miller defined the movement as searching for "the thread in the text in question
which will unravel it all", and said that there are multiple layers to any text, both its clear
surface and its deep countervailing subtext.

Miller's "The Critic as Host" could be viewed as a reply to M. H. Abrams, who

presented a paper, "The Deconstructive Angel," at a session of the Modern Language
Association in December 1976, criticizing deconstruction and the methods of Miller. Miller
presented his paper just after Abrams's presentation at the same session. He made the case that
words and text lacking objective outside or providing meaning didn't mean they were the
"prison-house of language," but, instead, they were a "place of joy" where the critics had the
freedom to associate and provide various possibilities eventually guiding the meaning.

He was also noted to have made the topic of deconstruction more accessible to a wider
audience by publishing in magazines including Newsweek, and The New York Times
Magazine.

Major books:

 Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (1958)

 Poets of Reality (1965)
 Fiction and Repetition (1982)
 Theory Now and Then (1991)
 The Medium is the Maker (2009)
 Reading for Our Time (2012)
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 An Innocent Abroad: Lectures in China (2015)

 Thinking Literature Across Continents (2016) with Ranjan Ghosh

Geoffrey H. Hartman
Geoffrey H. Hartman (1929 – 2016) was a German-born American literary theorist,
sometimes identified with the Yale School of deconstruction, although he cannot be categorised
by a single school or method. Hartman spent most of his career in the comparative literature
department at Yale University, where he also founded the Fortunoff Video Archive for
Holocaust Testimonies. His work explores the nature of the creative imagination, as well as
the interrelationship of literature and literary commentary. He had great and long-term interest
in William Wordsworth on which he wrote a lot.

Major Works:

 The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, and Valéry

(1954)
 Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays, 1958-1970 (1970)
 Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (1980)
 Saving the Text (1981)

Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom (1930 – 2019) was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor
of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was described as "probably the most famous
literary critic in the English-speaking world." Following the publication of his first book in
1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several
books discussing religion, and a novel.

Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literary
departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment"
(multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others).

Bloom began his career with a sequence of highly regarded monographs on Percy
Bysshe Shelley (Shelley's Myth-making) William Blake, and Wallace Stevens. In these, he
defended the High Romantics against neo-Christian critics influenced by such writers as T. S.
Eliot, who became a recurring intellectual foil. Bloom had a contentious approach: his first
book, Shelley's Myth-making, charged many contemporary critics with sheer carelessness in
their reading of the poet.
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Major Books:

 The Anxiety of Influence (1973)

 A Map of Misreading (1975)
 The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy (1980) his only Novel
 The American Religion (1993)
 The Western Canon (1994)
 Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998)

Major Terms and Ideas:

 The Anxiety of Influence

 Tessera
 Clinamen
 Kenosis
 Daemonization
 Askesis
 Apophrades
 He once said: "Hamlet … is not going to heaven, hell, purgatory, or limbo, or to any
other theological fantasy. He has been there, done that, in his exhaustive drama. …
For Hamlet himself, death is not tragic but an apotheosis."

Anxiety of influence:

It refers to the psychological struggle of aspiring authors to overcome the anxiety posed
by the influence of their literary antecedents. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry is
a 1973 book by Harold Bloom. It was the first in a series of books that advanced a new
"revisionary" or antithetical approach to literary criticism. Bloom's central thesis is that poets
are hindered in their creative process by the ambiguous relationship they necessarily maintain
with precursor poets. While admitting the influence of extraliterary experience on every poet,
he argues that "the poet in a poet" is inspired to write by reading another poet's poetry and will
tend to produce work that is in danger of being derivative of existing poetry, and, therefore,
weak. Because poets historically emphasize an original poetic vision in order to guarantee their
survival into posterity, the influence of precursor poets inspires a sense of anxiety in living
poets. Thus, Bloom attempts to work out the process by which the small minority of 'strong'
poets manage to create original work in spite of the pressure of influence.

Bloom introduces his six revisionary ratios in the following manner, which he
consistently applies in this book:

1. Clinamen: Bloom defines this as "poetic misreading or misprision proper".

The poet makes a swerve away from the precursor in the form of a "corrective movement".
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2. Tessera: Bloom defines this as "completion and antithesis". The author

"completes" his precursor's work, retaining its terms but meaning them in a new sense, "as
though the precursor had failed to go far enough".

3. Kenosis: Bloom defines this as a "breaking device similar to the defence

mechanisms our psyches employ against repetition compulsions", in other words "a
movement toward discontinuity with the precursor".

4. Daemonization: Bloom defines this as a "movement towards a personalized

Counter-Sublime, in reaction to the precursor’s Sublime".

5. Askesis: Bloom defines this as a "movement of self-purgation which intends

the attainment of a state of solitude".

6. Apophrades: Bloom defines this as the “return of the dead”. The poet, toward
the end of his/her life, opens up his poem – this time deliberately rather than naturally – to the
precursor's influence.

Bloom had a deep appreciation for William Shakespeare and considered him to be the
supreme center of the Western canon. The first edition of The Anxiety of Influence almost
completely avoided Shakespeare, whom Bloom then considered barely touched by the
psychological drama of anxiety. The second edition, published in 1997, added a long preface
that mostly expounded Shakespeare's debt to Ovid and Chaucer, and his agon with
contemporary Christopher Marlowe, who set the stage for him by breaking free of
ecclesiastical and moralizing overtones.

In his later survey, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), Bloom provided an
analysis of each of Shakespeare's 38 plays, "twenty-four of which are masterpieces."

The two paragons of his theory were Sir John Falstaff of Henry IV and Hamlet, whom
Bloom saw as representing self-satisfaction and self-loathing, respectively. These two
characters, as well as Iago and Cleopatra, were believed by Bloom to be "the four
Shakespearean characters most inexhaustible to meditation.”
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Existentialism
Existentialism is a form of philosophical inquiry that explores the problem of human
existence and centers on the subjective experience of thinking, feeling, and acting.
Existentialist thinkers frequently explore issues related to the meaning, purpose, and value of
human existence. In the view of an existentialist, the individual's starting point has been called
"the existential angst", a sense of dread, disorientation, confusion, or anxiety in the face of
an apparently meaningless or absurd world. Existentialism is a philosophy that stresses the
importance of human experience, and says that everyone is responsible for the results of their
own actions.

The term existentialism was coined by the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel
Marcel in the mid-1940s. When Marcel first applied the term to Jean-Paul Sartre, at a
colloquium in 1945, Sartre rejected it. Sartre subsequently changed his mind and in 1945,
publicly adopted the existentialist label in a lecture to the Club Maintenant in Paris, published
as Existentialism Is a Humanism, a short book that helped popularize existentialist thought.

Existentialism is associated with several 19th- and 20th-century European

philosophers who shared an emphasis on the human subject, despite often profound differences
in thought. Among the earliest figures associated with existentialism are philosophers:

 Søren Kierkegaard
 Friedrich Nietzsche
 Fyodor Dostoevsky

They critiqued rationalism and concerned themselves with the problem of meaning. In
the 20th century, prominent existentialist thinkers included:

 Jean-Paul Sartre
 Albert Camus
 Martin Heidegger (will be covered in Phenomenology)
 Simone de Beauvoir
 Karl Jaspers
 Gabriel Marcel
 Paul Tillich

Some scholars argue that the term should be used only to refer to the cultural movement
in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s associated with the works of the philosophers Sartre,
Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus. Others extend the term to
Kierkegaard, and yet others extend it as far back as Socrates. However, it is often identified
with the philosophical views of Sartre.
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Existentialism is generally considered to have originated with Kierkegaard, and the

first prominent existentialist philosopher to adopt the term as a self-description was Sartre.
Sartre posits the idea that "what all existentialists have in common is the fundamental
doctrine that existence precedes essence," as the philosopher Frederick Copleston explains.

In a lecture delivered in 1945, Sartre described existentialism as "the attempt to draw

all the consequences from a position of consistent atheism." For others, existentialism need
not involve the rejection of God, but rather "examines mortal man's search for meaning in a
meaningless universe," considering less "What is the good life?", instead asking "What is
life good for?

Some major concepts of Existentialism:

Existence precedes essence:

Sartre argued that a central proposition of existentialism is that existence precedes

essence, which is to say that individuals shape themselves by existing and cannot be perceived
through preconceived and a priori categories, an "essence". The actual life of the individual is
what constitutes what could be called their "true essence" instead of an arbitrarily attributed
essence others use to define them. Human beings, through their own consciousness, create their
own values and determine a meaning to their life. This view is in contradiction to Aristotle and
Aquinas who taught that essence precedes individual existence. Although it was Sartre who
explicitly coined the phrase, similar notions can be found in the thought of existentialist
philosophers such as Heidegger, and Kierkegaard.

Sartre said in his lecture Existentialism is a Humanism: "Man first of all exists,
encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards."

Absurdism:

The notion of the absurd contains the idea that there is no meaning in the world beyond
what meaning we give it. This meaninglessness also encompasses the amorality or "unfairness"
of the world. This can be highlighted in the way it opposes the traditional Abrahamic religious
perspective, which establishes that life's purpose is the fulfilment of God's commandments.
This is what gives meaning to people's lives. To live the life of the absurd means rejecting a
life that finds or pursues specific meaning for man's existence since there is nothing to be
discovered.

In simple words, absurdity is the meaninglessness of life. According to Albert

Camus, the world or the human being is not in itself absurd. The concept only emerges through
the juxtaposition of the two; life becomes absurd due to the incompatibility between human
beings and the world they inhabit.
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The second view, first elaborated by Søren Kierkegaard, holds that absurdity is
limited to actions and choices of human beings.

It is because of the devastating awareness of meaninglessness that Camus claimed in

The Myth of Sisyphus that "There is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and
that is suicide." Albert Camus identified existentialism with philosophical suicide in the
series of the absurd, and with a reduction of human life to its historical dimension in the
subsequent series of revolt. In each case, existentialism was seen as life-denying, and as such,
as diametrically opposed to Camus's own life-affirming outlook.

Facticity (What is, is; What happens, happens; Jo hai vo hai, baat khatm):

Facticity is defined by Sartre in Being and Nothingness (1943) as “in-itself”, which

delineates for humans the modalities of being and not being. This can be more easily
understood when considering facticity in relation to the temporal dimension of our past: one's
past is what one is, in that it co-constitutes oneself. Facticity is a limitation and a condition of
freedom. It is a limitation in that a large part of one's facticity consists of things one did not
choose (birthplace, etc.), but a condition of freedom in the sense that one's values most likely
depend on it. However, even though one's facticity is "set in stone" (as being past, for instance),
it cannot determine a person: the value ascribed to one's facticity is still ascribed to it freely by
that person. As an example, consider two men, one of whom has no memory of his past and
the other who remembers everything. Both have committed many crimes, but the first man,
remembering nothing, leads a rather normal life while the second man, feeling trapped by his
own past, continues a life of crime, blaming his own past for "trapping" him in this life. There
is nothing essential about his committing crimes, but he ascribes this meaning to his past.

Authenticity:

Many noted existentialists consider the theme of authentic existence important.

Authenticity involves the idea that one has to "create oneself" and live in accordance with this
self. For an authentic existence, one should act as oneself, not as "one's acts" or as "one's genes"
or as any other essence requires. The authentic act is one in accordance with one's freedom.
(jisme apko kisi aur ke liye badalna na pade: The real you)

The Other and the Look:

The Other (written with a capital "O") is a concept more properly belonging to
phenomenology and its account of intersubjectivity. However, it has seen widespread use in
existentialist writings, and the conclusions drawn differ slightly from the phenomenological
accounts. The Other is the experience of another free subject who inhabits the same world as
a person does. In its most basic form, it is this experience of the Other that constitutes
intersubjectivity and objectivity. To clarify, when one experiences someone else, and this Other
person experiences the world (the same world that a person experiences)—only from "over
there"—the world is constituted as objective in that it is something that is "there" as identical
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for both of the subjects; a person experiences the other person as experiencing the same things.
This experience of the Other's look is what is termed the Look (sometimes the Gaze).

Angst and dread:

"Existential angst", sometimes called existential dread, anxiety, or anguish, is a term

common to many existentialist thinkers. It is generally held to be a negative feeling arising
from the experience of human freedom and responsibility. The archetypal example is the
experience one has when standing on a cliff where one not only fears falling off it, but also
dreads the possibility of throwing oneself off. In this experience that "nothing is holding me
back", one senses the lack of anything that predetermines one to either throw oneself off or to
stand still, and one experiences one's own freedom.

Despair:

Despair is generally defined as a loss of hope. In existentialism, it is more specifically

a loss of hope in reaction to a breakdown in one or more of the defining qualities of one's self
or identity. If a person is invested in being a particular thing, such as a bus driver or an
upstanding citizen, and then finds their being-thing compromised, they would normally be
found in a state of despair—a hopeless state. For example, a singer who loses the ability to sing
may despair if they have nothing else to fall back on—nothing to rely on for their identity.
They find themselves unable to be what defined their being.

Soren Kierkegaard
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813 –1855) was a Danish theologian, philosopher, poet,
social critic, and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist
philosopher. He is also known as father of existentialism. He wrote critical texts on organized
religion, Christianity, morality, ethics, psychology, and the philosophy of religion, displaying
a fondness for metaphor, irony, and parables. Much of his philosophical work deals with the
issues of how one lives as a "single individual", giving priority to concrete human reality over
abstract thinking and highlighting the importance of personal choice and commitment. He was
against literary critics who defined idealist intellectuals and philosophers of his time.

Kierkegaard's theological work focuses on Christian ethics, the institution of the

Church, the differences between purely objective proofs of Christianity, the infinite qualitative
distinction between man and God, and the individual's subjective relationship to the God-Man
Jesus the Christ, which came through faith. His early works were written using pseudonyms.
He wrote Upbuilding Discourses under his own name and dedicated them to the "single
individual" who might want to discover the meaning of his works.

Major Works:
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 Either/Or (1843)
 Fear and Trembling (1843)
 Repetition (1843)
 Diary of a Seducer (1843)
 The Concept of Anxiety (1844)
 The Sickness unto Death (1849)

Major Terms and Ideas:

 Infinite qualitative distinction

 Knight of faith
 Leap of faith
 Three Stages on life's Way
 Present age

The infinite qualitative distinction:

Sometimes translated as infinite qualitative difference, is a concept coined by

Kierkegaard. The distinction emphasizes the very different attributes of finite and temporal
men and the infinite and eternal qualities of a supreme being.

The knight of faith:

It is an individual who has placed complete faith in himself and in God and can act
freely and independently from the world. Kierkegaard vicariously discusses the knight of
faith in several of his pseudonymic works, with the most in-depth and detailed critique
exposited in Fear and Trembling and in Repetition.

A leap of faith:

A Leap of Faith in its most commonly used meaning, is the act of believing in or
accepting something outside the boundaries of reason. According to Kierkegaard, faith does
not have logic, reason, and rationality. Therefore, the definition of a leap of faith is a person
having trust in something despite the lack of logic, reason, and rationality. They leap,
figuratively, to interact or explore this thing. The phrase is significant to understanding the
stages of human existence, which comprise a transition from one stage to another through this
leap. Kierkegaard maintains that the transition from one quality to another can take place only
by a "leap". When the transition happens, one moves directly from one state to the other, never
possessing both qualities.

This phrase is commonly attributed to Søren Kierkegaard; however, he never used the
term, as he referred to a qualitative leap. A leap of faith according to Kierkegaard involves
circularity insofar as the leap is made by faith. In his book Concluding Unscientific Postscript,
he describes the core part of the leap of faith: the leap. “Thinking can turn toward itself in order
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to think about itself and skepticism can emerge. But this thinking about itself never
accomplishes anything.” Kierkegaard says thinking should serve by thinking something.
Kierkegaard wants to stop "thinking's self-reflection" and that is the movement that constitutes
a leap.

Three Stages on Life’s Way:

Early American Kierkegaard scholars tried to reduce the complexity of Kierkegaard's

authorship by focusing on three levels of individual existence, which are named in passing
by one of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms, Johannes Climacus, who wrote Concluding Unscientific
Postscript.

1. Aesthetic Stage: Kierkegaard was interested in aesthetics, and is sometimes referred

to as the "poet-philosopher" because of the passionate way in which he approached
philosophy. Aesthetic life is defined in numerous different ways in Kierkegaard's
authorship, including a life defined by intellectual enjoyment, sensuous desire, and an
inclination to interpret oneself as if one were "on stage."
2. Ethical Stage: The second level of existence is the ethical. This is where an individual
begins to take on a true direction in life, becoming aware of and personally responsible
for good and evil and forming a commitment to oneself and others.
3. Religious Stage: The ethical and the religious are intimately connected: a person can
be ethically serious without being religious, but the religious stage includes the ethical.
Whereas living in the ethical sphere involves a commitment to some moral absolute,
living in the religious sphere involves a commitment and relation to the Christian God.

Present Age:

The term "present age" is a concept in the philosophy of Kierkegaard. He argues the
present age drains the meaning out of ethical concepts through passionless indolence. The
concepts are still used, but are drained of all meaning by virtue of their detachment from a life
view which is passion-generated and produces consistent action.

Jean Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (1905 – 1980) was one of the key figures in the
philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology), a French playwright, novelist,
screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, as well as a leading figure in 20th-
century French philosophy and Marxism. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature
despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer
should not allow himself to be turned into an institution."

Sartre held an open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist
philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural
and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered
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bourgeois, in both lifestyles and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually
destructive conformity ('bad faith') and an "authentic" way of "being" became the dominant
theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work Being and
Nothingness (1943). Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism Is a
Humanism (1946), originally presented as a lecture.

Major Works:

 The Transcendence of the Ego (1936)

 Being and Nothingness (1943)
 The Age of Reason (1945)
 Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946)
 Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960)

Major Terms and Ideas:

 Bad Faith
 Nothingness
 "Hell is other people"
 Situation

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, sometimes

published with the subtitle A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is a 1943 book by the
philosopher Sartre. In the book, Sartre develops a philosophical account in support of his
existentialism, dealing with topics such as consciousness, perception, social philosophy, self-
deception, the existence of "nothingness", psychoanalysis, and the question of free will. While
a prisoner of war in 1940 and 1941, Sartre read Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927),
which uses the method of Husserlian phenomenology as a lens for examining ontology. Sartre
attributed the course of his own philosophical inquiries to his exposure to this work.

Though influenced by Heidegger, Sartre was profoundly skeptical of any measure by

which humanity could achieve a kind of personal state of fulfillment comparable to the
hypothetical Heideggerian "re-encounter with Being". In Sartre's account, man is a creature
haunted by a vision of "completion" (what Sartre calls the being that causes itself), which many
religions and philosophers identify as God. Born into the material reality of one's body, in a
material universe, one finds oneself inserted into being. In accordance with Husserl's notion
that consciousness can only exist as consciousness of something, Sartre develops the idea that
there can be no form of self that is "hidden" inside consciousness. On these grounds, Sartre
goes on to offer a philosophical critique of Sigmund Freud's theories, based on the claim that
consciousness is essentially self-conscious.
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Bad Faith:

In the philosophy of existentialism, bad faith is the psychological phenomenon

whereby individuals act inauthentically, by yielding to the external pressures of society to adopt
false values and disown their innate freedom as sentient human beings. Bad faith also derives
from the related concepts of self-deception and ressentiment. Sartre cites a café waiter, whose
movements and conversation are a little too "waiter-esque". His voice oozes with an eagerness
to please; he carries food rigidly and ostentatiously; "his movement is quick and forward, a
little too precise, a little too rapid". His exaggerated behaviour illustrates that he is acting as a
waiter, as an object in the world: an automaton whose essence is to be a waiter. But that he is
obviously acting believes that he is aware that he is not a waiter, but is rather consciously
deceiving himself. (Means he is away from an authentic life)

Nothingness:

Sartre’s ideas in his book Being and Nothingness are heavily influenced by Being
and Time by Heidegger, but Heidegger later stated that he was misunderstood by Sartre. Sartre
defines two kinds of "being". One kind is être-en-soi, the brute existence of things such as a
tree. The other kind is être-pour-soi which is consciousness. Sartre claims that this second kind
of being is "nothing" since consciousness cannot be an object of consciousness and can
possess no essence. Sartre, and even more so, Jaques Lacan, use this conception of nothing as
the foundation of their atheist philosophy. Equating nothingness with being leads to creation
from nothing and hence God is no longer needed for there to be existence.

Hell is other People:

The statement “hell is other people” is implicitly conditional: other people are hell for
us if our relationships with them are bad. He explains further: If my relations are bad, I am
situating myself in a total dependence on someone else. And then I am indeed in hell.

Situation:

One of the first times in which Sartre discussed the concept of situation was in Being
and Nothingness, where he famously said that “there is freedom only in a situation, and
there is a situation only through freedom... There can be a free for-itself only as engaged
in a resisting world. Outside of this engagement the notions of freedom, of determination,
of necessity lose all meaning” (Remember the name of the term only).

Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844 –1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic
and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history.
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He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the
youngest person ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869
at the age of 24. Nietzsche died in 1900, after many strokes and pneumonia.

Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favor of
perspectivism; a genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and a related theory
of master–slave morality; the aesthetic affirmation of life in response to both the "death of
God" and the profound crisis of nihilism; the notion of Apollonian and Dionysian forces; and
a characterization of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively
understood as the will to power. Nietzsche's thought enjoyed renewed popularity in the 1960s
and his ideas have since had a profound impact on 20th- and early 21st-century thinkers across
philosophy—especially in schools of continental philosophy such as existentialism,
postmodernism and post-structuralism—as well as art, literature, poetry, politics, and
popular culture.

Nihilism:

Nihilism ('nothing') is a philosophy, or family of views within philosophy, that rejects

generally accepted or fundamental aspects of human existence, such as objective truth,
knowledge, morality, values, or meaning. The term was popularized by Ivan Turgenev, who
made use of it in his novel Fathers and Sons. Nihilism is a general mood of despair at a
perceived pointlessness of existence or arbitrariness of human principles and social institutions.

There have been different nihilist positions, including that human values are baseless,
that life is meaningless, that knowledge is impossible, or that some sets of entities do not exist
or are meaningless or pointless. Earlier forms of nihilism, however, may be more selective in
negating specific hegemonies of social, moral, political and aesthetic thought.

Major Books:

 The Birth of Tragedy (1872)

 On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873)
 Human, All Too Human (1878)
 The Dawn (1881)
 The Gay Science (1882)
 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883)
 Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
 On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
 Ecce Homo (1888; first published in 1908)
 The Will to Power (various unpublished manuscripts edited by his sister Elisabeth; not
recognized as a unified work after ca 1960)
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Major Terms and Ideas:

 God is dead
 Übermensch
 Will to power
 Apollonian and Dionysian
 Nietzschean affirmation
 Amor fati
 Tschandala

"God is dead"

Also known as the death of God is a widely quoted statement made by the German
philosopher Nietzsche who used the phrase to express his idea that the Enlightenment had
eliminated the possibility of the existence of God. Proponents of the strongest form of the Death
of God theology have used the phrase in a literal sense, meaning that the Christian God, who
had existed at one point, has ceased to exist.

Nietzsche's complete statement is:

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort
ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the
world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off
us?...”

The phrase first appeared in Nietzsche's 1882 collection The Gay Science also
translated as "The Joyful Pursuit of Knowledge and Understanding". It is more famously
associated with his Thus Spoke Zarathustra which is most responsible for making the phrase
popular.

Übermensch:

The Übermensch (“Overhuman” OR “Superhuman”) is a concept in the philosophy

of Nietzsche. In his 1883 book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra he has his character Zarathustra
posit the Übermensch as a goal for humanity to set for itself. The Übermensch represents a
shift from otherworldly Christian values and manifests the grounded human ideal. In 1909,
Thomas Common translated it as "Superman", following the terminology of G B Shaw's
1903 stage play Man and Superman. Nietzsche introduces the concept of the Übermensch in
contrast to his understanding of the other-worldliness of Christianity: Zarathustra proclaims the
will of the Übermensch to give meaning to life on earth, and admonishes his audience to ignore
those who promise other-worldly fulfillment to draw them away from the earth.
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Nietzsche's Ubermensch, or Nietzsche's superman, is a creative individual who does

not merely follow or obey the laws of others, even the laws of God. The Ubermensch's
meaning, then, is a meaning of creation, both the creation of self and of the world.

Will to Power:

The will to power is a concept in the philosophy of Nietzsche. The will to power
describes what Nietzsche may have believed to be the main driving force in humans.
However, the concept was never systematically defined in Nietzsche's work, leaving its
interpretation open to debate. Usage of the term by Nietzsche can be summarized as self-
determination, the concept of actualizing one's will onto one's self or one's surroundings, and
coincides heavily with egoism. Even the theory of Will to Power is created ultimately by
Nietzsche's will to power to assert himself on the world.

Alfred Adler incorporated the will to power into his individual psychology. This can
be contrasted to the other Viennese schools of psychotherapy: Sigmund Freud's pleasure
principle (will to pleasure) and Viktor Frankl's logotherapy (will to meaning). Each of these
schools advocates and teaches a very different essential driving force in human beings.

Apollonian and Dionysian:

The Apollonian and Dionysian is a two-fold philosophical concept, based on features

of ancient Greek mythology: Apollo and Dionysus. This relationship takes the form of a
dialectic. The main theme in The Birth of Tragedy is that the fusion of Dionysian and
Apollonian Kunsttriebe ("artistic impulses") forms dramatic arts or tragedies. He argued that
this fusion has not been achieved since the ancient Greek tragedians. Apollo represents
harmony, progress, clarity, logic and the principle of individuation, whereas Dionysus
represents disorder, intoxication, emotion, ecstasy and unity (hence the omission of the
principle of individuation). Nietzsche used these two forces because, for him, the world of mind
and order on one side, and passion and chaos on the other, formed principles that were
fundamental to the Greek culture: the Apollonian a dreaming state, full of illusions; and
Dionysian a state of intoxication, representing the liberations of instinct and dissolution of
boundaries.

Nietzschean affirmation:

Nietzschean affirmation, also known as affirmation of life, is a concept in the

philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The best example of this concept can be found in
Nietzsche's The Will to Power:

“If we affirm one single moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For
nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with
happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one
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event – and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed,
justified, and affirmed.

Amor fati:

Amor fati is a Latin phrase that may be translated as "love of fate" or "love of one's
fate". It is used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one's life,
including suffering and loss, as good or, at the very least, necessary. Amor fati is often
associated with what Friedrich Nietzsche called "eternal recurrence", the idea that, over an
infinite period of time, everything recurs infinitely. From this he developed a desire to be
willing to live exactly the same life over and over for all eternity.

Tschandala:

Tschandala is a term Nietzsche borrowed from the Indian caste system, where a
chandala is a member of the lowest social class. Nietzsche's interpretation and use of the term
relied on a translation of Manusamriti by Max Müller.
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Modernism and Postmodernism

Modernism:

Literary modernism, or modernist literature, originated in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, and is characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing, in
both poetry and prose fiction writing. It is a period in literary history which started around the
early 1900s and continued until the early 1940s. Modernism experimented with literary form
and expression, as exemplified by Ezra Pound's maxim to "Make it new." This literary
movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and
express the new sensibilities of their time. The horrors of the First World War saw the
prevailing assumptions about society reassessed, and much modernist writing engages with the
technological advances and societal changes of modernity moving into the 20th century.

Modernist writers in general rebelled against clear-cut storytelling and formulaic verse
from the 19th century. Instead, many of them told fragmented stories which reflected the
fragmented state of society during and after World War I. Many Modernists wrote in free verse
and they included many countries and cultures in their poems. Some wrote using numerous
points-of-view or even used a “stream-of-consciousness” style. These writing styles further
demonstrate the way the scattered state of society affected the work of writes at that time.

Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are thought to be the mother and father of the
movement because they had the most direct influence on early Modernists. Some time after
their deaths, the Imagist poets began to gain importance. The University of Toledo’s Canaday
Center has a rich collection of poetry and critical work from that era.

Modernist literature employed a number of different experimental writing techniques

that broke the conventional rules of storytelling. Some of those techniques include blended
imagery and themes, absurdism, nonlinear narratives, and stream of consciousness—
which is a free flowing inner monologue. The theories of Sigmund Freud and Ernst Mach
also influenced early Modernist literature.

Postmodernism:

Initially emerging from a mode of literary criticism, postmodernism developed in the

mid-twentieth century as a rejection of modernism and has been observed across many
disciplines. The term postmodern was first used in 1870. John Watkins Chapman suggested
"a Postmodern style of painting" as a way to depart from French Impressionism.
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse defined by an attitude of
skepticism toward the "grand narratives" associated with modernism, opposition to notions
of epistemic certainty or the stability of meaning, and emphasis on the role of ideology in
maintaining systems of socio-political power. Postmodernism is associated with the disciplines
deconstruction and post-structuralism. Various authors have criticized postmodernism as
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promoting obscurantism, as abandoning Enlightenment rationalism and scientific rigor, and as

adding nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge.

Postmodern literature is a literary movement that eschews absolute meaning and instead
emphasizes play, fragmentation, metafiction, and intertextuality. A general and wide-
ranging term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural
and literary criticism, among others. Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed
certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality.

Modernism vs Postmodernism:

Modernism and postmodernism are two literary movements that took place in the late
19th and 20th century. Modernism is the deliberate break from the traditional form of poetry
and prose that took place in the late 19th and early 20th century. Postmodernism, a movement
that began in the mid 20th century, is often described as a reaction against modernism. The
main difference between modernism and postmodernism is that modernism is
characterized by the radical break from the traditional forms of prose and verse whereas
postmodernism is characterized by the self-conscious use of earlier styles and
conventions.

Comparison of Modernism and Postmodernism:

Modernism Postmodernism

Adheres to Western Contests Western hegemonic

hegemonic values values

Focus on the writer Focus on the reader

Focus on interiority Focus on exteriority

Alienation Collective voices

Unreliable narrator Ironic narrator

Rejection of realism Ambivalence towards realism

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Modernism Postmodernism

Literature is self-contained Literature is open and intertextual

High-brow genres Mixing of high- and low-brow

genres

Rejection of literary Parody of literary conventions

conventions

Metafictional Metafictional

Idiosyncratic language Simple language

The connection between postmodernism, posthumanism, and cyborgism has led to a

challenge to postmodernism, for which the terms Post-postmodernism and
postpoststructuralism were first coined in 2003.

Postmodernism
Major Postmodern writers are:

 Jean-François Lyotard
 Jean Baudrillard
 Fredric Jameson (already covered in Marxism)
 Richard Rorty
 Douglas Kellner

Jean Francois Lyotard

Jean-François Lyotard (1924 –1998) was a French philosopher, sociologist, and
literary theorist. He is best known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s
and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition.
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Major Books:

 Discourse, Figure (1971)

 Libidinal Economy (1974)
 The Postmodern Condition (1979)
 The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1983)

Influenced by Nietzsche, Lyotard is credited with being the first to use the term in a
philosophical context, in his 1979 work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
In it, he follows Wittgenstein's language games model and speech act theory, contrasting two
different language games, that of the expert, and that of the philosopher. He talks about the
transformation of knowledge into information in the computer age and likens the transmission
or reception of coded messages to a position within a language game.

Lyotard defined philosophical postmodernism in The Postmodern Condition as:

"Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards
metanarratives...." where what he means by metanarrative is something like a unified,
complete, universal, and epistemically certain story about everything that is.

A metanarrative (or grand narrative) in critical theory—and particularly in

postmodernism—is a narrative about narratives of historical meaning, experience, or
knowledge, which offers a society legitimation through the anticipated completion of a master
idea.

Postmodernists reject metanarratives because they reject the concept of truth that
metanarratives presuppose. Postmodernist philosophers, in general, argue that truth is always
contingent on historical and social context rather than being absolute and universal—and that
truth is always partial and "at issue" rather than being complete and certain.

Libidinal Economy is a 1974 book by Lyotard. The book was composed following the
ideological shift of the May 68 protests in France, whereupon Lyotard distanced himself from
conventional critical theory and Marxism because he felt that they were still too structuralist
and imposed a rigid "systematization of desires". Drastically changing his writing style and
turning his attention to semiotics, theories of libido, economic history and erotica, he
repurposed Freud's idea of libidinal economy as a more complex and fluid concept that he
linked to political economy, and proposed multiple ideas in conjunction with it.
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Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard (1929 –2007) was a French sociologist, philosopher and cultural
theorist. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological
communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as simulation and hyperreality.

His works are frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism.

Major Works:

 Mirror of Production (1973)

 Seduction (1978)
 Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
 America (1986)
 The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991)

Major Terms and Ideas:

 Hyperreality
 Simulacra and Simulation
 Sign Value

Hyperreality:

Hyperreality in semiotics and postmodernism, is an inability of consciousness to

distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced
postmodern societies. It is a representation, a sign, without an original referent. Proposed by
Baudrillard, the concept of hyperreality captures the inability of consciousness to distinguish
reality from a simulation of reality. This is more prominent in technologically advanced
societies. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are
seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends
and the other begins.

Umberto Eco and Baudrillard refer to Disneyland as an example of hyperreality. Eco

believes that Disneyland with its settings such as Main Street and full sized houses has been
created to look "absolutely realistic", taking visitors' imagination to a "fantastic past".

Simulacra and Simulation:

A simulacrum (plural: simulacra or simulacrums, means "likeness, semblance") is

a representation or imitation of a person or thing. These are copies that depict things that either
had no original to begin with, or that no longer have an original. Simulacra and Simulation is
a 1981 nphilosophical treatise by Buadrillard, in which he seeks to examine the relationships
among reality, symbols, and society.
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Simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real world process or system over time.

Baudrillard, in Simulacra and Simulation, introduced the concept that reality or the
principle of the Real is short-circuited by the interchangeability of signs in an era whose
communicative and semantic acts are dominated by electronic media and digital technologies.
For Baudrillard, "simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a
substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal."

Simulation, Baudrillard claims, is the current stage of the simulacrum: all is composed
of references with no referents, a hyperreality. Baudrillard argues that this is part of a historical
progression. In the Renaissance, the dominant simulacrum was in the form of the counterfeit,
where people or objects appear to stand for a real referent that does not exist (for instance,
royalty, nobility, holiness, etc.). With the Industrial Revolution, the dominant simulacrum
becomes the product, which can be propagated on an endless production line. In current times,
the dominant simulacrum is the model, which by its nature already stands for endless
reproducibility, and is itself already reproduced.

Sign Value:

In sociology and in economics, the term sign value denotes and describes the value
accorded to an object because of the prestige (social status) that it imparts upon the possessor,
rather than the material value and utility derived from the function and the primary use of the
object. The French sociologist Baudrillard proposed the theory of sign value as a philosophic
and economic counterpart to the dichotomy of exchange-value vs. use-value, which Karl Marx
recognized as a characteristic of capitalism as an economic system.

Richard Rorty
Richard McKay Rorty (1931 – 2007) was an American philosopher. Educated at the
University of Chicago and Yale University, he had strong interests and training in both the
history of philosophy and in contemporary analytic philosophy.

Major Books:

 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)

 Consequences of Pragmatism (1982)
 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989).

Rorty argues in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature that contemporary analytic
philosophy mistakenly imitates scientific methods. In addition, he denounces the traditional
epistemological perspectives of representationalism and correspondence theory that rely upon
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the independence of knowers and observers from phenomena and the passivity of natural
phenomena in relation to consciousness.
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Reader Response Theory

Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader (or
"audience") and their experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories
that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work. Modern reader-
response criticism began in the 1960s and '70s, particularly in the US and Germany. This
movement shifted the focus from the text to the reader and argues that affective response is a
legitimate point for departure in criticism. Its conceptualization of critical practice is
distinguished from theories that favor textual autonomy (for example, formalism) as well as
recent critical movements (for example, structuralism, semiotics, and deconstruction) due to
its focus on the reader's interpretive activities.

Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts "real
existence" to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation. It argues that literature
should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates their own, possibly unique,
text-related performance.

It stands in total opposition to the theories of formalism and the New Criticism, in
which the reader's role in re-creating literary works is ignored. New Criticism had emphasized
that only that which is within a text is part of the meaning of a text. No appeal to the authority
or intention of the author, nor to the psychology of the reader, was allowed in the discussions
of orthodox New Critics.

Reader-response critics include:

 Norman Holland
 Stanley Fish
 Wolfgang Iser
 Hans-Robert Jauss
 Roland Barthes (He comes here because of his The Death of the Author)
 David Bleich

Important predecessors were I. A. Richards, who in 1929 analyzed a group of Cambridge

undergraduates' misreadings; and Louise Rosenblatt, who, in Literature as Exploration
(1938), argued that it is important for the teacher to avoid imposing any "preconceived notions
about the proper way to react to any work".

Lois Tyson classified the variations into five recognized reader-response criticism approaches:

1. Transactional reader-response theory: led by Rosenblatt and supported by

Wolfgang Iser, involves a transaction between the text's inferred meaning and the individual
interpretation by the reader influenced by their personal emotions and knowledge.
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2. Affective stylistics: Established by Fish, believe that a text can only come into
existence as it is read; therefore, a text cannot have meaning independent of the reader.

3. Subjective reader-response theory: Associated with David Bleich, looks entirely

to the reader's response for literary meaning as individual written responses to a text are then
compared to other individual interpretations to find continuity of meaning.

4. Psychological reader-response theory: Employed by Norman Holland, believes

that a reader's motives heavily affect how they read, and subsequently use this reading to
analyze the psychological response of the reader.

5. Social reader-response theory: It is Stanley Fish's extension of his earlier work,

stating that any individual interpretation of a text is created in an interpretive community of
minds consisting of participants who share a specific reading and interpretation strategy.

Norman Holland
Norman N. Holland (1927-2017) was an American literary critic and Marston-
Milbauer Eminent Scholar Emeritus at the University of Florida.

Holland's scholarship focused largely on psychoanalytic criticism and cognitive

poetics, subjects on which he wrote fifteen books and nearly 250 scholarly articles. He is
widely recognized for his scholarship specifically related to psychoanalytic applications in
literary study. He was known as a major scholar of literary theory, primarily for having been
one of the pioneers of reader-response criticism.

Some of his books focusing on reader response theory:

Poems in Persons: An Introduction to the Psychoanalysis of Literature (1973)

proposes a very different model of literary processing based on a psychoanalytic theory of
identity. The central argument of the text is that writers create texts as expressions of their
personal identities and readers re-create their own identities when they respond. These
identities can be understood as a central theme or themes and behavioural variations on them,
much like a theme-and-variations in music.

5 Readers Reading (1975) pursues this conclusion based on case studies of five
university students who gave free association responses (according to psychoanalytic
technique) to three short stories. They showed that their literary experiences were shaped by
readers' identities, and not by the texts they read.
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Laughing: A Psychology of Humor (1982) surveyed theories of laughter. But the book
extended the reader-response argument to show, based on a case study of one woman, how
what one finds funny, that is, one's sense of humor, expresses one's personal identity.

Stanely Fish
Stanley Eugene Fish (born 1938) is an American literary theorist, legal scholar, author
and public intellectual. Fish is associated with postmodernism, although he views himself
instead as an advocate of anti-foundationalism. He is also viewed as having influenced the rise
and development of reader-response theory.

Major Books:

 Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967)

 Self-Consuming Artifacts (1972)
 The Fugitive in Flight (2010)

Major Terms:

Interpretive communities:

Fish is best known for his analysis of interpretive communities — an offshoot of

reader-response criticism. His work in this field examines how the interpretation of a text is
dependent upon each reader's own subjective experience in one or more communities, each of
which is defined as a 'community' by a distinct epistemology. In Fish's source the term is
explained as "the idea that it is possible to characterize a linguistic system that every speaker
shares." In the context of literary criticism, he uses this concept to argue that a reader's approach
to a text is not completely subjective, and that an internalized understanding of language shared
by the native speakers of that given language makes possible the creation of normative
boundaries for one's experience with language.

Wolfgang Iser
Wolfgang Iser (1926- 2007) was a German literary scholar. Iser is known for his
reader-response criticism in literary theory. This theory began to evolve in 1967, while he was
working in the University of Konstanz, which he helped to found in the 1960s.

Together with Hans Robert Jauss, he is considered to be the founder of the Constance
School of reception theory.
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In his approach to reader-response theory, Iser describes the process of first reading,
the subsequent development of the text into a 'whole', and how the dialogue between the reader
and text takes place. In his study of Shakespeare's histories, in particular Richard II, Iser
interprets Richard's continually changing legal policy as expression of the desire for self-
assertion. Here he attempts to apply his theory of modernity to Shakespeare.

Major Books:

 The Act of Reading (1978)

 The Implied Reader (1974)
 The Range of Interpretation (2000)

Major Terms:

 Analogy of constellation
 Artistic Pole
 Aesthetic pole
 Implied reader
 Narrative gap

Analogy of constellation:

For Iser, meaning is not an object to be found within a text, but is an event of
construction that occurs somewhere between the text and the reader. Specifically, a reader
comes to the text, which is a fixed world, but meaning is realized through the act of reading
and how a reader connects the structures of the text to their own experience. To illustrate this,
Iser uses the example of constellations: "The impressions that arise as a result of this process
will vary from individual to individual, but only within the limits imposed by the written as
opposed to the unwritten text. In the same way, two people gazing at the night sky may both
be looking at the same collection of stars, but one will see the image of a plough, and the other
will make out a dipper. The 'stars' in a literary text are fixed; the lines that join them are
variable".
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Two Poles:

A literary work, which for Iser is created when a reader and a text "converge, consists
of two "poles":

The artistic (the object, the text created by the author)

The aesthetic (the realization accomplished by the reader).

Both of these poles contribute to the two central points of Iser's theory: the concept
of "implied reader" and narrative "gaps".

Implied Reader:

The term “implied reader,” coined by Wayne C. Booth as a counterpart of the

implied author, designates the image of the recipient that the author had in the mind while
writing. Iser defines the implied reader as “a textual structure anticipating the presence of
a recipient without necessarily defining him.” The implied reader, then, designates “a
network of response-inviting structures,” which prestructure the role of the reader in the latter’s
attempt to grasp the text. Iser also sees the notion of the “implied reader” as explaining the
tension that occurs within the reader during the reading process, a tension between the reader’s
own subjectivity and the author’s subjectivity which overtakes the reader’s mentality, a tension
between two selves that directs the reader’s ability to make sense of the text.

Iser said that in a novel, there are four main perspectives: those of the narrator,
characters, plot, and the fictitious reader.
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Hans Robert Jauss

Hans Robert Jauss (1921 –1997) was a German academic, notable for his work in
reception theory (especially his concept of horizon of expectation) and medieval and modern
French literature. His approach was derived from the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer.
Jauss's reception theory focused on the reader rather than the author or text. The original
reception of a text was compared to a later reception, revealing different literary receptions and
their evolution.

Major Books:

 Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics (1982)

 Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (1982)

Major Terms and Ideas:

 Horizon of Expectation
 Horizon of Change
 Aesthetic distance

Horizon of Expectation:

"Horizon of expectation" is a term fundamental to German academic Hans Robert

Jauss's reception theory. Specifically, it is the structure by which a person comprehends,
decodes and appraises any text based on cultural codes and conventions particular to their time
in history. These horizons are therefore historically flexible meaning readers may
interpret and value a text differently from a previous generation. It emphasises the reader
as an important element in the processing of texts. According to Jauss, the reader approaches a
text armed with the knowledge and experience gained from interactions with other texts. These
earlier texts arouse familiarity for the reader based on expectations and rules of genre and style.
Jauss describes it this way, 'a literary work is not an object which stands by itself and which
offers the same face to each reader in each period'. Thus, reading is not an 'autonomous, free
and individual' experience but rather a collection of mutual concepts fitting a period or a people.

Horizon of Change:

A 'horizon of change' occurs when a reader's interaction with a new text results in
invalidation of a 'familiar experience' or provides a new encounter. A text of which no horizon
of change occurs fulfils all of the expectations of the reader and can be considered 'light
reading'. These interactions satisfy the reader's sense of familiarity in the way of 'beauty',
romanticism and the expected happy ending.
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Aesthetic distance:

The 'distance' between the horizon of expectation and the horizon of change is called
the 'aesthetic distance'.
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New Historicism
New historicism, a form of literary theory which aims to understand intellectual history
through literature and literature through its cultural context, follows the 1950s field of history
of ideas and refers to itself as a form of cultural poetics. It first developed in the 1980s,
primarily through the work of the critic Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence
in the 1990s. Greenblatt coined the term new historicism when he "collected a bunch of
essays and then, out of a kind of desperation to get the introduction done, he wrote that the
essays represented something called a 'new historicism'.

New Historicism is a literary theory based on the idea that literature should be studied
and interpreted within the context of both the history of the author and the history of the critic.
It aims to go deep into the background of a text and also of the writer. This background can be
cultural, political, economic, social etc. It is opposite to New Criticism which focuses on
language only.

In its historicism and in its political interpretations, new historicism is indebted to

Marxism. But whereas Marxism tends to see literature as part of a 'superstructure' in which
the economic 'base' (i.e., material relations of production) manifests itself, new historicist
thinkers tend to take a more nuanced view of power, seeing it not exclusively as class-related
but extending throughout society. This view derives primarily from Michel Foucault.

New historicists analyse text with an eye to history. Many of the critiques that existed
between the 1920s and the 1950s also focused on literature's historical content. These critics
based their assumptions of literature on the connection between texts and their historical
contexts.

Major Writers:

 Stephen Greenblatt
 Louis Montrose
 Harold Aram Veeser
 Lynn Hunt
 Michel Foucault (Note: great writers’ influences are found everywhere)

Harold Aram Veeser’s anthology of essays, The New Historicism (1989) is one of the
important texts of new historicism.

Influential historians behind the eruption of the new historicism are Lynn Hunt and
Michel Foucault, as they both taught at UC-Berkeley during its rise as a postmodern approach
to history.
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Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Jay Greenblatt (born 1943) is an American Shakespearean, literary historian,
and author. Greenblatt is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare (2015) and the general
editor and a contributor to The Norton Anthology of English Literature.

Greenblatt is one of the founders of new historicism, a set of critical practices that he
often refers to as "cultural poetics"; his works have been influential since the early 1980s
when he introduced the term. Greenblatt has written and edited numerous books and articles
relevant to new historicism, the study of culture, Renaissance studies and Shakespeare
studies and is considered to be an expert in these fields.

He is also co-founder of the literary-cultural journal Representations, which often

publishes articles by new historicists. His most popular work is Will in the World, a biography
of Shakespeare that was on The New York Times Best Seller list for nine weeks. He won the
Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2012 and the National Book Award for Nonfiction
in 2011 for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.

Major Works:

 Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980)

 Towards a Poetics of Culture (1987)
 Practicing New Historicism (2000)
 Hamlet in Purgatory (2001)
 Will in the World (2004)
 The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011)
 The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (2017)

Greenblatt first used the term "New Historicism" in his 1982 introduction to The
Power of Forms in the English Renaissance wherein he uses Queen Elizabeth I's "bitter
reaction to the revival of Shakespeare's Richard II on the eve of the Essex rebellion" to
illustrate the "mutual permeability of the literary and the historical". New Historicism is
regarded by many to have influenced "every traditional period of English literary history".

He has also said that “My deep, ongoing interest is in the relation between literature
and history, the process through which certain remarkable works of art are at once
embedded in a highly specific life-world and seem to pull free of that life-world”.

Greenblatt's works on New Historicism and "cultural poetics" include Practicing

New Historicism (2000), in which Greenblatt discusses how "they anecdote ... appears as the
'touch of the real'" and Towards a Poetics of Culture (1987), in which Greenblatt asserts that
the question of "how art and society are interrelated," as posed by Jean-François Lyotard and
Fredric Jameson, "cannot be answered by appealing to a single theoretical stance".
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Renaissance Self-Fashioning and the introduction to the Norton Shakespeare are regarded as
good examples of Greenblatt's application of new historicist practices.

Louis Montrose
Louis Adrian Montrose was an American literary theorist and academic scholar who
retired from the academy in 2010 to pursue a career as a photographer. His scholarship
addressed a wide variety of literary, historical, and theoretical topics and issues, and
significantly shaped contemporary studies of Renaissance poetics, English Renaissance
theatre, and Elizabeth I. Montrose was an influential early proponent of New Historicism,
especially as it applied to the study of early modern English literature and culture.

According to Louis Montrose, the theory of New Historicism is “a reciprocal concern

with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history”.

Major Books:

The Subject of Elizabeth (2006)

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Archetypal Criticism
Archetypal literary criticism is a type of analytical theory that interprets a text by
focusing on recurring myths and archetypes in the narrative, symbols, images, and character
types in literary works. As an acknowledged form of literary criticism, it dates back to 1934
when Classical scholar Maud Bodkin published Archetypal Patterns in Poetry.

Archetypal literary criticism's origins are rooted in two other academic disciplines,
social anthropology and psychoanalysis; each contributed to literary criticism in separate
ways. Archetypal criticism peaked in popularity in the 1940s and 1950s, largely due to the
work of Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye.

The job of archetypal criticism is to identify those mythic elements that give a work of
literature this deeper resonance. By their universality, myths seem essential to human culture.
However, many modern folks view myths as mere fables, expressing ancient forms of religion
or primitive versions of science. In the twenty-first century, archetypal literary criticism is no
longer widely practiced; there have not been any major recent developments in the field but it
still has a place in the tradition of literary studies.

Some Examples of Archetypes in Literature:

 Femme Fatale: A female character type who brings upon catastrophic and disastrous
events. Eve from the story of Genesis or Pandora from Greek mythology are two such
figures.
 The Journey: A narrative archetype where the protagonist must overcome a series of
obstacles before reaching his or her goal. The quintessential journey archetype in
Western culture is arguably Homer's Odyssey.
 The most famous example of an archetype is the Hero. Hero stories have certain
elements in common – heroes generally start out in ordinary circumstances, are “called
to adventure,” and in the end must confront their darkest fear in a conflict that deeply
transforms the hero.

Major Writers:

 James Frazer
 Carl Jung
 Northrop Frye
 Mod Bodkin

James Frazer
The anthropological origin of archetypal criticism can pre-date its analytical
psychology origins by over 30 years. The Golden Bough (1890–1915), written by the Scottish
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anthropologist Sir James George Frazer, was the first influential text dealing with cultural
mythologies. Frazer was part of a group of comparative anthropologists working out of
Cambridge University who worked extensively on the topic. In The Golden Bough Frazer
identifies practices and mythological beliefs shared among primitive religions and modern
religions. Frazer argues that the death-rebirth myth is present in almost all cultural
mythologies, and is acted out in terms of growing seasons and vegetation. The myth is
symbolized by the death (i.e., final harvest) and rebirth (i.e., spring) of the god of vegetation.

Carl Gustav Jung

Archetypal criticism gets its impetus from psychologist Carl Jung, who postulated that
humankind has a "collective unconscious," a kind of universal psyche, which is manifested
in dreams and myths and which harbours themes and images that we all inherit. While Frazer's
work deals with mythology and archetypes in material terms, the work of Carl Gustav Jung,
the Swiss-born founder of analytical psychology, is, in contrast, immaterial in its focus. Jung's
work theorizes about myths and archetypes in relation to the unconscious, an inaccessible part
of the mind. From a Jungian perspective, myths are the "culturally elaborated
representations of the contents of the deepest recess of the human psyche: the world of
the archetypes".

Jungian analytical psychology distinguishes between the personal and collective

unconscious, the latter being particularly relevant to archetypal criticism. The collective
unconscious, or the objective psyche as it is less frequently known, is a number of innate
thoughts, feelings, instincts, and memories that reside in the unconsciousness of all people. To
Jung, an archetype in the collective unconscious.

Primordial Images:

The archetypes to which Jung refers are represented through primordial images, a term
he coined. Primordial images originate from the initial stages of humanity and have been part
of the collective unconscious ever since. It is through primordial images that universal
archetypes are experienced, and more importantly, that the unconscious is revealed.

Northrop Frye
It was not until the work of the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye that archetypal
criticism was theorized in purely literary terms. The major work of Frye's to deal with
archetypes is Anatomy of Criticism (1957) but his essay "The Archetypes of Literature" is
a precursor to the book. Frye's thesis in "The Archetypes of Literature" remains largely
unchanged in Anatomy of Criticism. Frye's work helped displace New Criticism as the major
mode of analyzing literary texts, before giving way to structuralism and semiotics.
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Frye's work breaks from both Frazer and Jung in such a way that it is distinct from its
anthropological and psychoanalytical precursors. For Frye, the death-rebirth myth, that Frazer
sees manifest in agriculture and the harvest, is not ritualistic since it is involuntary, and
therefore, must be done. As for Jung, Frye was uninterested about the collective
unconscious on the grounds of feeling it was unnecessary: since the unconscious is
unknowable it cannot be studied.

There are two basic categories in Frye's framework:

 Comedic
 Tragic

Each category is further subdivided into two categories:

 Comedy and Romance for the comedic

 Tragedy and Satire (or ironic) for the tragic

Though he is dismissive of Frazer, Frye uses the seasons in his archetypal schema. Each season
is aligned with a literary genre:

 Comedy with spring

 Romance with summer
 Tragedy with autumn
 Satire with winter

It has been argued that Frye's version of archetypal criticism strictly categorizes works
based on their genres, which determines how an archetype is to be interpreted in a text.

Mod Bodkin
Bodkin's Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934), the first work on the subject of archetypal
literary criticism, applies Jung's theories about the collective unconscious, archetypes, and
primordial images to literature
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Postcolonial Criticism
Postcolonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural, political and economic
legacy of colonialism and imperialism.

Colonialism is a practice or policy of control by one people or power over other people
or areas, often by establishing colonies and generally with the aim of economic dominance. In
the process of colonisation, colonisers may impose their religion, language, economics, and
other cultural practices.

Imperialism is the state policy, practice, or advocacy of extending power and

dominion, especially by direct territorial acquisition or by gaining political and economic
control of other areas, often through employing hard power (economic and military power),
but also soft power (cultural and diplomatic power).

Postcolonialism focuses on the impact of human control and exploitation of colonized

people and their lands. More specifically, it is a critical theory analysis of the history, culture,
literature, and discourse of (usually European) imperial power. Sub-disciplines of postcolonial
studies examine the effects of colonial rule on the practice of feminism, anarchism, literature,
and Christian thought.

At times, the term postcolonial studies may be preferred to postcolonialism, as the

ambiguous term colonialism could refer either to a system of government, or to an ideology or
world view underlying that system. However, postcolonialism (i.e., postcolonial studies)
generally represents an ideological response to colonialist thought, rather than simply
describing a system that comes after colonialism, as the prefix post- may suggest. As such,
postcolonialism may be thought of as a reaction to or departure from colonialism in the same
way postmodernism is a reaction to modernism; the term postcolonialism itself is modelled on
postmodernism, with which it shares certain concepts and methods.

The field of postcolonialism addresses the matters that constitute the postcolonial
identity of a decolonized people, which derives from:

 The colonizer's generation of cultural knowledge about the colonized people; and
 How that Western cultural knowledge was applied to subjugate a non-European people
into a colony of the European mother country, which, after initial invasion, was effected
by means of the cultural identities of 'colonizer' and 'colonized'.

Postcolonial identity:
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Postcolonial theory holds that decolonized people develop a postcolonial identity that
is based on cultural interactions between different identities (cultural, national, and ethnic as
well as gender and class based) which are assigned varying degrees of social power by the
colonial society.

Third World:

The Third World was normally seen to include many countries with colonial pasts in
Africa, Latin America, Oceania and Asia. It was also sometimes taken as synonymous with
countries in the Non-Aligned Movement.

Colonial Mentality:

A colonial mentality is the internalized attitude of ethnic or cultural inferiority felt by

people as a result of colonization, i.e. them being colonized by another group. It corresponds
with the belief that the cultural values of the colonizer are inherently superior to one's own.

Double consciousness:

Double consciousness is the internal conflict experienced by subordinated or colonized

groups in an oppressive society. The term and the idea were first published in W. E. B. Du
Bois's autoethnographic work, The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, in which he described the
African American experience of double consciousness, including his own.

Négritude Movement:

Negritude ("Blackness") is a framework of critique and literary theory, developed

mainly by francophone intellectuals, writers, and politicians of the African diaspora during the
1930s, aimed at raising and cultivating "Black consciousness" across Africa and its diaspora.
Négritude gathers writers such as sisters Paulette and Jeanne Nardal known for having laid
the theoretical basis of the movement. Others were:

 Aimé Césaire (Martinican poet)

 Léopold Sédar Senghor
 Léon Damas (French Guiana)
 Abdoulaye Sadji

Négritude intellectuals disavowed colonialism, racism and Eurocentrism. They

promoted African culture within a framework of persistent Franco-African ties.

Major Writers in Postcolonial Theory:

 Frantz Fanon
 Edward Said
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 Homi K. Bhabha
 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (already covered)
 Aime Cesaire
 Albert Memmi
 Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Important works:

Some works written prior to the formal establishment of postcolonial studies as a

discipline have been considered retroactively as works of postcolonialist theory.

• (1924) French Colonization on Trial by Nguyen Ai Quoc

• (1950) Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire

• (1952) Black Skin, White Masks, by Frantz Fanon

• (1960) The Pleasure of Exile by George Lamming

• (1961) The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon

• (1965) The Colonizer and the Colonized, by Albert Memmi

• (1970) Consciencism, by Kwame Nkrumah

• (1978) Orientalism, by Edward Said

• (1988) Can the Subaltern Speak?, by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

• (1989) The Empire Writes Back by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin

Frantz Fanon
Frantz Omar Fanon (1925 – 1961), also known as Ibrahim Frantz Fanon, was a
French West Indian psychiatrist, and political philosopher from the French colony of
Martinique (today a French department). His works have become influential in the fields of
post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism. In the course of his work as a physician
and psychiatrist, Fanon supported Algeria's War of independence from France and was a
member of the Algerian National Liberation Front.

Fanon has been described as "the most influential anticolonial thinker of his time".
For more than five decades, the life and works of Fanon have inspired national-liberation
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movements and other radical political organizations in Palestine, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and
the United States. Fanon published numerous books, including The Wretched of the Earth
(1961). This influential work focuses on what he believed is the necessary role of violence by
activists in conducting decolonization struggles.

Major Works:

 Black Skin, White Masks (1952; trans. 1967)

 A Dying Colonialism (1959)
 The Wretched of the Earth (1961; translated into English in 1963)

Major Terms and Ideas:

 “To Become Black”

 Sociogeny
 Subjugation

To Become Black:

Nigrescence is a word with a Latin origin. It describes a process of becoming black or

developing a racial identity. Nigrescence extends through history by those victimized by racism
and white supremacy. Psychological adaptations instigated identity formation for persons of
African American descent. Frantz Fanon coined the term, "to become black", which meant
as a process of developing a black identity under conditions of oppression.

Sociogeny:

Sociogeny ("association" or "social," or "origin, source, beginning, nativity,

generation, production, or creation") or sociogenesis is the development of a social
phenomenon. That a phenomenon is sociogenetic thus indicates that it is socially produced, as
opposed to ontologically given, immutable, or static. The concept was developed by Frantz
Fanon in his 1952 book Black Skin, White Masks.

Subjugation:

In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon
analyzes and medically describes the nature of colonialism as essentially destructive. Its
societal effects—the imposition of a subjugating colonial identity—is harmful to the mental
health of the native peoples who were subjugated into colonies. Fanon writes that the
ideological essence of colonialism is the systematic denial of "all attributes of humanity" of the
colonized people. Such dehumanization is achieved with physical and mental violence, by
which the colonist means to inculcate a servile mentality upon the natives. For Fanon, the
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natives must violently resist colonial subjugation. Hence, Fanon describes violent resistance
to colonialism as a mentally cathartic practise, which purges colonial servility from the native
psyche, and restores self-respect to the subjugated.

Edward Said
Edward Wadie Said (1935 – 2003) was a Palestinian-American professor of literature
at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of
postcolonial studies. Born in Mandatory Palestine, he was a citizen of the United States by
way of his father, a U.S. Army veteran.

Educated in the Western canon at British and American schools, Said applied his
education and bi-cultural perspective to illuminating the gaps of cultural and political
understanding between the Western world and the Eastern world, especially about the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the Middle East; his principal influences were Antonio Gramsci,
Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Michel Foucault, and Theodor Adorno.

As a cultural critic, Said is known for the book Orientalism (1978), a critique of the
cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism—how the Western world perceives
the Orient. Said's model of textual analysis transformed the academic discourse of researchers
in literary theory, literary criticism, and Middle-Eastern studies—how academics examine,
describe, and define the cultures being studied. As a foundational text, Orientalism was
controversial among scholars of Oriental Studies, philosophy, and literature.

As a public intellectual, Said was a controversial member of the Palestinian National

Council, due to his public criticism of Israel and the Arab countries, especially the political
and cultural policies of Muslim régimes who acted against the national interests of their
peoples. Said was also an accomplished pianist.

Major Works:

 Orientalism (1978)
 Covering Islam (1981)
 The world, the text, and the critic (1983)
 Culture and Imperialism (1993)
 Out of Place: A Memoir (1999)
 Reflections on exile and other essays (2000)
 Culture and Resistance (2003)

Major Terms and ideas:

Orientalism:
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As a Western means of dominating and gaining authority over the Orient, Orientalism
is, in Said's words, a style of “thought” based on an ontological and epistemological distinction
between the Orient and the Occident.

 The Orient is a term for the East in relation to Europe, traditionally comprising
anything belonging to the Eastern world (considered as inferior).
 The Occident is the Western World (considered as superior).

In art history, literature and cultural studies, Orientalism is the imitation or depiction of
aspects in the Eastern world. These depictions are usually done by writers, designers, and artists
from the Western world. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the term Orientalist identified a scholar
who specialized in the languages and literatures of the Eastern world. Among such scholars
were officials of the East India Company, who said that the Arab culture, the Indian culture,
and the Islamic cultures should be studied as equal to the cultures of Europe. Company rule in
India favoured Orientalism as a technique for developing and maintaining positive relations
with the Indians.

In his book Orientalism (1978), cultural critic Edward Said redefines the term
Orientalism to describe a pervasive Western tradition—academic and artistic—of prejudiced
outsider-interpretations of the Eastern world, which was shaped by the cultural attitudes of
European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. Notably, "the West" created the cultural
concept of "the East," which according to Said allowed the Europeans to suppress the
peoples of the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent, and of Asia in general, from
expressing and representing themselves as discrete peoples and cultures. Orientalism thus
conflated and reduced the non-Western world into the homogeneous cultural entity known as
"the East." Therefore, in service to the colonial type of imperialism, the us-and-them orientalist
paradigm allowed European scholars to represent the Oriental World as inferior and backward,
irrational and wild, as opposed to a Western Europe that was superior and progressive, rational
and civil—the opposite of the Oriental Other.

In concordance with philosopher Michel Foucault, Said established that power and
knowledge are the inseparable components of the intellectual binary relationship with which
Occidentals claim "knowledge of the Orient." That the applied power of such cultural
knowledge allowed Europeans to rename, re-define, and thereby control Oriental peoples,
places, and things, into imperial colonies.

Homi K. Bhabha
Homi Kharshedji Bhabha (born1949) is an Indian-British scholar and critical theorist.
He is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is one of
the most important figures in contemporary postcolonial studies, and has developed a number
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of the field's neologisms and key concepts, such as hybridity, mimicry, difference, and
ambivalence. Such terms describe ways in which colonised people have resisted the power of
the coloniser, according to Bhabha's theory. In 2012, he received the Padma Bhushan award
in the field of literature and education from the Indian government.

Major Works:

 Nation and Narration (1990)

 The Location of Culture (1994)
 Negotiating Rapture (1996)
 "Making Difference: The Legacy of the Culture Wars" (2003)
 Without Boundary (2006)

Major Terms and Ideas:

 Hybridity
 Ambivalence
 Cultural Difference
 Mimicry
 Third Space

Hybridity:

Hybridity commonly refers to the creation of new transcultural forms within the
contact zone produced by colonization. As used in horticulture, the term refers to the cross-
breeding of two species by grafting or cross-pollination to form a third, ‘hybrid’ species.
Hybridity by Homi K. Bhabha is the analysis of colonizer/colonized relations which stresses
their interdependence and the mutual construction of their subjectivities. Bhabha's notion of
hybridity and a cultural third space comes from his seminal 1994 work The Location of
Culture.

Hybridity is a mixture of cultures of colonizer and the colonised. Hybridity has

frequently been used in post-colonial discourse to mean simply cross-cultural ‘exchange’. In
India, people still follow several attires set by the colonizers. Even the language English is
given by them that we are studying today. We all are hybrid people. Bhabha contends that all
cultural statements and systems are constructed in a space that he calls the ‘Third Space of
enunciation’. He sees hybridity as a strategic reversal of the process domination through
disavowal. Hybridity reevaluates the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of
discriminatory identity effects.

Ambivalence:

Ambivalence is a kind of mixed feeling towards someone. It is the ambiguous way in

which colonizer and colonized regard one another. The colonizer often regards the
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colonized as both inferior yet exotically other, while the colonized regards the colonizer as
both enviable yet corrupt. In a context of hybridity, this often produces a mixed sense of
blessing and curse. Bhabha's argument is that colonial discourse is compelled to be ambivalent
because it never really wants colonial subjects to be exact replicas of the colonizers. Bhabha
claims that this ambivalence—this duality that presents a split in the identity of the colonized
other—allows for beings who are a hybrid of their own cultural identity and the colonizer's
cultural identity.

Cultural difference:

Bhabha presents cultural difference as an alternative to cultural diversity. In cultural

diversity, a culture is an "object of empirical knowledge" and pre-exists the knower while
cultural difference sees culture as the point at which two or more cultures meet and it is also
where most problems occur.

Mimicry:

Like Bhabha's concept of hybridity, mimicry is a metonym of presence. Mimicry

appears when members of a colonized society imitate and take on the culture of the
colonizers. Colonial mimicry comes from the colonist's desire for a reformed, recognizable
Other, as a subject of a difference that is, as Bhabha writes, "almost the same, but not quite."
Thus, mimicry is a sign of a double articulation; a strategy which appropriates the Other as it
visualizes power. He sees mimicry as a "double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of
colonial discourse also disrupts its authority.

Third Space:

The Third Space acts as an ambiguous area that develops when two or more
individuals/cultures interact. Where Mimicry, Ambivalence, and Hybridity takes place, that
space is called Third Space, because that is a separate place created by the meeting of different
cultures.
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Stylistics
Stylistics is the study of textual meaning. Historically, it arose from the late-19th- and
early-20th-century Russian formalist approach to literary meaning. For much of its history,
stylistics has been concerned with the style, and consequent meaning, of literary works.

Stylistics is the study and interpretation of texts of all types and/or spoken language in
regard to their linguistic and tonal style, where style is the particular variety of language used
by different individuals and/or in different situations or settings.

Major Writers:

 Michael Halliday
 Roman Jakobson
 Adrian Pilkington
 Charles Bally

Style includes, dialogue, accent, diction, use of grammar of an individual.

In 1909, Charles Bally proposed stylistics as a distinct academic discipline to

complement Saussurean linguistics.

Roman Jakobson brought together Russian Formalism and American New Criticism in
his Closing Statement at a conference on stylistics at Indiana University in 1958. Published as
Linguistics and Poetics in 1960, Jakobson's lecture is often credited with being the first
coherent formulation of stylistics, and his argument was that the study of poetic language
should be a sub-branch of linguistics.

Michael Halliday is an important figure in the development of British stylistics. His

1971 study Linguistic Function and Literary Style: An Inquiry into the Language of William
Golding's The Inheritors is a key essay.

Terms:

Ragister:

It was used by Halliday to explain the connections between language and its context.
For Halliday register is distinct from dialect. Dialect refers to the habitual language of a
particular user in a specific geographical or social context. Register describes the choices
made by the user.

These choices depend on three variables:

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Field:- What the participants are actually engaged in doing, for instance, discussing a specific
subject or topic.

Tenor: Who is taking part in the exchange.

Mode: The use to which the language is being put.

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Narratology
Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these
affect human perception.

It was coined by Tzvetan Todorov in 1969. Its theoretical lineage is traceable to

Aristotle (Poetics) but modern narratology is agreed to have begun with the Russian
Formalists, particularly Vladimir Propp (Morphology of the Folktale, 1928), and Mikhail
Bakhtin's theories of heteroglossia, dialogism, and the chronotope.

Writers:

 Tzvetan Todorov
 Gerard Genette
 A. J. Greimas
 Boris Tomashevsky
 Victor Shklovsky

Tzvetan Todorov
Tzvetan Todorov was a Bulgarian-French historian, philosopher, structuralist literary
critic, sociologist and essayist. With structuralist literary critic Gérard Genette, he edited the
Collection Poétique, the series of books on literary theory published in 1987.

Works:

 The Poetics of Prose (1971)

 Introduction to Poetics (1981)
 The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (1982)
 Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle (1984).

Terms:

 The Fantastic
 The Fantastic Uncanny
 Fantastic Marvelous

Todorov defines the fantastic as being any event that happens in our world that seems
to be supernatural.

In the fantastic uncanny, the event that occurs is actually an illusion of some sort. The
"laws of reality" remain intact and also provide a rational explanation for the fantastic event.
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In the fantastic marvelous, the supernatural event that occurs has actually taken place
and therefore the "laws of reality" have to be changed to explain the event.

Gerard Genette
Gérard Genette (1930 – 2018) was a French literary theorist, associated in particular
with the structuralist movement and such figures as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Works:

• Narrative Discourse (1979)

• Palimpsests (1982)
• Paratexts (1997)

Terms:

1. Order, Frequency, Duration, Voice, Mood (just remember the names in

sequence)
2. Paratext
3. Hypotext

Paratext:

In literary interpretation, paratext is material that surrounds a published main text

supplied by the authors, editors, printers, and publishers, for example prefaces, introductions
etc.

Hypotext:

Hypotext is an earlier text which serves as the source of a subsequent piece of literature,
or hypertext (current work). For example, Homer's Odyssey could be regarded as the
hypotext for James Joyce's Ulysses.

Algirdas Julien Greimas

A J Greimas (1917-1992) was a Lithuanian literary scientist who wrote most of his
body of work in French while living in France. Greimas is known among other things for the
Greimas Square. He is, along with Roland Barthes, considered the most prominent of the
French semioticians. He was a Structural Linguist.
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Works:

• Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method (1983).

• Of Gods and Men
• Structural Semantics

Terms:

 Isotopy
 Actantial model
 Greimas Square

Isotopy:

In a story, we detect an isotopy when there is a repetition of a basic meaning trait

(seme); such repetition, establishing some level of familiarity within the story, allows for a
uniform reading/interpretation of it. An example of a sentence containing an isotopy is I drink
some water. The two words drink and water share a seme (a reference to liquids), and this gives
homogeneity to the sentence.

Actantial model:

In structural semantics, the actantial model, also called the actantial narrative
schema, is a tool used to analyze the action that takes place in a story, whether real or
fictional. It was developed in 1966 by semiotician Algirdas Julien Greimas. The model
considers an action as divided into six facets, called actants.

Greimas Square:

The semiotic square, also known as the Greimas square, is a tool used in structural
analysis of the relationships between semiotic signs through the opposition of concepts, such
as feminine-masculine or beautiful-ugly, and of extending the relevant ontology.

The semiotic square, derived from Aristotle's logical square of opposition, was
developed by Algirdas J. Greimas, a Lithuanian-French linguist and semiotician, who
considered the semiotic square to be the elementary structure of meaning.

Greimas first presented the square in Semantique Structurale (1966), a book which was
later published as Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method (1983).
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Phenomenology
A phenomenon is an observable event. The term came into its modern philosophical
usage through Immanuel Kant, who contrasted it with the noumenon, which cannot be
directly observed.

Phenomenology is a philosophy of experience. For phenomenology the ultimate

source of all meaning and value is the lived experience of human beings. It is the philosophical
study of the structures of experience and consciousness. As a philosophical movement it was
founded in the early years of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl.

Phenomenology is not a unified movement; rather, the works of different authors share
a 'family resemblance' but with many significant differences. Gabriella Farina states: “In fact,
it is not a doctrine, nor a philosophical school, but rather a style of thought, a method, an open
and ever-renewed experience having different results”.

Three big names in phenomenology are:

Edmund Husserl Martin Heidegger Maurice Merleau-Ponty

What Phenomenologists do?

1. Phenomenologists reject the concept of objective research.
2. They believe that analyzing daily human behavior can provide one with a greater
understanding of nature.
3. They assert that persons should be explored. This is because persons can be understood
through the unique ways they reflect the society they live in.
4. Phenomenologists prefer to gather conscious experience, rather than traditional data.
5. They consider phenomenology to be oriented toward discovery, and therefore they
research using methods that are far less restrictive than in other sciences.
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Edmund Husserl
He was a Jewish German Atheist philosopher and mathematician who established the
school of phenomenology.

Phenomenology, in Husserl's conception, is primarily concerned with the systematic

reflection on and study of the structures of consciousness and the phenomena that appear in
acts of consciousness.

Works:

 Logical Investigations (1900)

 Cartesian Meditations (1931)

Terms and Ideas:

 Noema and Noesis

 Retentions and Protention

Noema: The ideal content of an intentional act (an act of consciousness). Edmund
Husserl used noema as a technical term in phenomenology to stand for the object or content of
a thought, judgement, or perception, but its precise meaning in his work has remained a matter
of controversy.

Noesis: The real content. The noesis is the part of the act that gives it a particular sense
or character.

Note: The explanation of these two terms are so technical, and as a NET aspirant, I think the
names will be enough to remember.

Retention and protention are key aspects of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of

temporality.

Retention: is the process whereby a phase of a perceptual act is retained in our consciousness.
It is a presentation of that which is no longer before us and is distinct from immediate
experience.

Protention: is our anticipation of the next moment. The moment that has yet to be perceived.
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Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976) was a German philosopher who is best known for
contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He is among the most
important and influential philosophers of the 20th century. He has been widely criticized for
supporting the Nazi Party after his election as rector at the University of Freiburg in 1933, and
there has been controversy about the relationship between his philosophy and Nazism.

Major Books:

 Being and Time (1927)

 What is Metaphysics? (1929)
 The Question Concerning Technology (1954)

Major Terms:

 Dasein
 Gestell
 Ontotheology
 “Language Speaks”

Dasein (Being):
In Heidegger's fundamental text Being and Time (1927), "Dasein" is introduced as a
term for the type of being that humans possess. In presenting "being" as inseparable, Heidegger
introduced the term Dasein. Dasein has been translated as "being there". Heidegger believes
that Dasein already has a "pre-ontological" and non-abstract understanding that shapes how it
lives. He also calls it "being-in-the-world". Dasein and "being-in-the-world" are unitary
concepts at odds with rationalist philosophy and its "subject/object" view since at least René
Descartes. Heidegger explicitly disagrees with Descartes, and uses an analysis of Dasein to
approach the question of the meaning of being. This meaning is "concerned with what makes
beings intelligible as beings".

Gestell:
Gestell is a German word used by twentieth-century German philosopher Martin
Heidegger to describe what lies behind or beneath modern technology. Heidegger introduced
the term in 1954 in The Question Concerning Technology.
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Ontotheology:
Ontotheology means the ontology of God and/or the theology of being. While the term
was first used by Immanuel Kant, it has only come into broader philosophical parlance with
the significance it took for Martin Heidegger's later thought.

"Language speaks":
"Language speaks" is a saying by Martin Heidegger. Heidegger first formulated it in
his 1950 lecture "Language".
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Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics is the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the

interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts. Hermeneutics is
more than interpretative principles or methods used when immediate comprehension fails and
includes the art of understanding and communication.

Modern hermeneutics includes both verbal and non-verbal communication as well as

semiotics, presuppositions, and pre-understandings. Hermeneutics has been broadly applied in
the humanities, especially in law, history and theology.
Hermeneutics was initially applied to the interpretation, or exegesis, of scripture, and
has been later broadened to questions of general interpretation. The terms hermeneutics and
exegesis are sometimes used interchangeably. Hermeneutics is a wider discipline which
includes written, verbal, and non-verbal communication. Exegesis focuses primarily upon the
word and grammar of texts. Hermeneutic, as a count noun in the singular, refers to some
particular method of interpretation.

Major Writers:

 Wilhelm Dilthey
 Martin Heidegger
 Hans-Georg Gadamer'
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Queer Theory

Emerged in the early 1990s out of Queer Studies and Women’s Studies. Queer is
an umbrella term for people who are not heterosexual. Originally meaning "strange" or
“peculiar.”

Queer studies, sexual diversity studies, or LGBT studies is the study of issues
relating to sexual orientation and gender identity usually focusing on
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender dysphoria, asexual, queer etc.
What is queer theory used for?

Queer theory is the lens used to explore and challenge how scholars,

activists, artistic texts, and the media perpetrate

gender- and sex-based binaries, and its goal is to undo hierarchies
and fight against social inequalities.

Queer theory’s origins are in LGBT studies – which focus on sexuality and gender. It
soon distanced itself from those approaches due to disagreements with the stable identities that
LGBT studies suggest. Queer theory emphasizes the fluid and humanly performed nature of
sexuality – or better, sexualities. It questions socially established norms and dualistic categories
with a special focus on challenging sexual (heterosexual/homosexual), gender (male/female),
class (rich/poor), racial (white/non-white) classifications.

Early queer theorists include:

 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

 Michael Warner
 Lauren Berlant
 Judith Butler
 Adrienne Rich
 David Halperin.

Michael Warner argued that queerness is defined by what he called

‘heteronormativity’: those ideas, narratives and discourses which suggest that
heterosexuality is the default, preferred, or normal mode of sexual orientation.
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Lauren Berlant and Warner further developed these ideas in their seminal essay, "Sex in
Public".

Ecocriticism

Ecocriticism is the study of literature and ecology from an interdisciplinary point of

view, where literature scholars analyze texts that illustrate environmental concerns and
examine the various ways literature treats the subject of nature. The term 'ecocriticism' was
coined in 1978 by William Rueckert in his essay "Literature and Ecology: An Experiment
in Ecocriticism". It was first originated by Joseph Meeker as an idea called “literary
ecology” in his The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology (1972).
It takes an interdisciplinary point of view by analyzing the works of authors, researchers
and poets in the context of environmental issues and nature. Some ecocritics brainstorm
possible solutions for the correction of the contemporary environmental situation, though not
all ecocritics agree on the purpose, methodology, or scope of ecocriticism.
In the United States, ecocriticism is often associated with the Association for the Study
of Literature and Environment (ASLE), which hosts a biennial conference for scholars who
deal with environmental matters in literature and the environmental humanities in general.
ASLE publishes a journal—Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
(ISLE)—in which current international scholarship can be found.

Ecocriticism is an intentionally broad approach that is known by a number of other

designations, including "green (cultural) studies", "ecopoetics", and "environmental
literary criticism", and is often informed by other fields such as ecology, sustainable design,
biopolitics, environmental history, environmentalism, and social ecology, among others.
Cheryll Glotfelty's working definition in The Ecocriticism Reader is that
"ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical
environment", and one of the implicit goals of the approach is to recoup professional dignity
for what Glotfelty calls the "undervalued genre of nature writing".
Lawrence Buell defines "'ecocriticism' ... as a study of the relationship between
literature and the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis.
 Dana Multitasker 167

Ecocritics investigate such things as the underlying ecological values, what, precisely,
is meant by the word nature, and whether the examination of "place" should be a distinctive
category, much like class, gender or race. Ecocritics examine human perception of wilderness,
and how it has changed throughout history and whether or not current environmental issues are
accurately represented or even mentioned in popular culture and modern literature.

Ecofeminism

Ecofeminism is a branch of feminism and political ecology. Ecofeminist thinkers draw

on the concept of gender to analyse the relationships between humans and the natural world.
The term was coined by the French writer Françoise d'Eaubonne in her book Le
Féminisme ou la Mort (1974).
Ecofeminist theory asserts a feminist perspective of Green politics that calls for an
egalitarian, collaborative society in which there is no one dominant group. Today, there are
several branches of ecofeminism, with varying approaches and analyses, including liberal
ecofeminism, spiritual/cultural ecofeminism, and social/socialist ecofeminism (or
materialist ecofeminism). Interpretations of ecofeminism and how it might be applied to
social thought include ecofeminist art, social justice and political philosophy, religion,
contemporary feminism, and poetry.

Ecofeminist analysis explores the connections between women and nature in culture,
economy, religion, politics, literature and iconography, and addresses the parallels between the
oppression of nature and the oppression of women. These parallels include but are not limited
to seeing women and nature as property, seeing men as the curators of culture and women as
the curators of nature, and how men dominate women and humans dominate nature.
Ecofeminism emphasizes that both women and nature must be respected.

Though the scope of ecofeminist analysis is dynamic, American author and ecofeminist
Charlene Spretnak has offered one way of categorizing ecofeminist work:

1) through the study of political theory as well as history.

2) through the belief and study of nature-based religions.

3) through environmentalism.
 Dana Multitasker 168

Major Writers:

 Françoise d'Eaubonne
 Vandana Shiva
 Maria Mies
 Greta Gaard
 Carol J. Adams
 Dana Multitasker 169

Thank You
&
All the best

Regards
Saurabh Thakur
Instagram: Dana_Multitasker
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