Identifications
You can use this space to ask questions or work collaboratively on identifications for the comps.
You can use this space to ask questions or work collaboratively on identifications for the comps.
posted by Jeff at
6:41 PM
10 Comments:
Regarding poststructuralism there are a couple of things to consider:
- While it is a reaction against structuralism, it is also a continuation of its stance that language is a self-contained system that does not bear a direct relationship to referents outside of it. It takes that position to its extreme by positing a radical skepticism about the possibility of attaining any secure knowledge or understanding, since "there is nothing outside the text."
- I would not say the Saussure sought to integrate structuralism into pre-existing disciplines. He is considered the founder of structuralism, which was a radical break from traditional linguistics in that it didn't seek to trace language back to its historical roots but rather to study the ways by which it creates meaning. It was very different from the linguistics that preceded it.
- While many poststructuralists would say that any study or act of analysis will have cultural determinants, it is more about showing how the object is always a textual/linguistic problem and that knowledge is therefore never secure.
- I think any account of poststructuralism should mention deconstruction as its applied critical method.
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Jeff, at 8/15/2006 7:25 AM
Regarding modernism, I think you need to explain it more as a literary movement. You should emphasize its experimentation with form, such as the disruption of chronological narrative, emphasis on multiple points of view, the development of poetic prose, the depiction of subjectivity through stream of consciousness technique, and so on. There was also an emphasis on new, controvertial subject matters. If I were taking the exam I would also name a few key writers and mention that some people recognize a later stage of modernism after about 1930, called High Modernism.
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Jeff, at 8/15/2006 7:38 AM
Just wanted to jump in for a clarification on the "High Modernism" thing. I think the period from 1910 to 1930 is considered the "High Modernism" period, at least according to Barry and some others I've read.
Robert
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Robert Damon, at 8/15/2006 2:10 PM
On the posted definition of modernism, I think Jeff's point about specifying it as a literary movement and speaking to the key characteristics of that movement would work better. As it stands it seems a little too abstract. That's only one guy talkin' though.
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Robert Damon, at 8/15/2006 2:17 PM
Here's a couple more for your feedbacking and commenting pleasure. I don't want to be that guy offering commentary without being receptive to it myself...
Modernism- In regard to literature, Modernism may be described as a movement which challenged established literary conventions and sought to create a literature which was capable of speaking to the experience of life in a drastically changing world. It was a revolutionary response in style, form, and subject matter to a crisis brought on by factors such as rapid industrialization, the demands of an increasingly urban lifestyle, the cataclysm of World War I, and the influence of thinkers such as Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, who questioned fundamental assumptions about central organizing principles of society and personality. Important modernist writers include Charles Baudelaire (who predates the period but is considered as a major influence and contributor), James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, etc.
Modernism challenged bourgeois values and the comforts of the stylistic excess of the Victorian era by abandoning traditional narrative form, experimenting with chronological presentation by jumping back and forth in time, questioning perspective and objectivity by depicting multiple points-of-view, and presenting a fragmented and random seeming literature which they felt was a more appropriate depiction of modern life. The time period of modernism is largely viewed as the period from 1890 – 1945 (the end of WWII), but some extend it back into the mid-nineteenth century and as far forward as the 1960’s. The most explosive creative period, referred to as “high modernism”, is placed generally around 1910 to 1930. This period featured the greatest diversity in experimentation and expression of the modernist era, and the year 1922 alone is notable for the appearance of Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist”, Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe, and Woolf’s Jacob’s Room.
Feminist Criticism- Directly linked to the feminist movement of the 1960’s, feminist criticism traces its roots back to the proto-feminism of the mid to late nineteenth century, and the work of writers such as Mary Woolstonecraft, Olive Schreiner, Virginia Woolf, John Stuart Mill, and Freidrich Engels. Directly concerned with the role of literature in the systematic patriarchal oppression of women, feminist criticism seeks to explore the depiction of women in literature and to examine how this depiction affects women psychologically, politically, and socially. It includes in its mission a reevaluation of the canon, attempting to discover the work of women which has been marginalized due to patriarchal societal conditions, as well as a redefinition of power relations, challenging historical representations of women as non-normative, “Other”, “lack”, or part of nature.
This perspective is especially relevant to the work of Simone de Beauvoir, who’s The Second Sex (1949) according to Abrams, addressed the representation of women as secondary to men and “challenged ‘the great collective myths’ of women in the work of male writers.”(93) Mary Ellman, Kate Millet, and Elaine Showalter produced important works of feminist criticism in the late ‘60’s and 70’s, challenging the traditional depiction of women and patriarchal domination, Showalter is renowned for coining the term “gynocriticism” which is a female framed approach for examining the work of women exclusively. An important and controversial aspect of more recent feminist criticism comes from the influence of linguistics and concerns the idea of whether or not there is an exclusively women’s voice or writing, an ecriture feminine, and the examination of the influence of the patriarchy in the structure of language itself.
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Robert Damon, at 8/15/2006 5:38 PM
I don't have anything to add to Robert's modernism identification other than to say that High Modernism is also considered the more mature or well-wrought expressions of modernist technique, exemplified by the writers named.
The feminism entry looks fine.
What's good about both of these is that they give a brief sense of what the movements grew out of and reacted to, while **identifiying** the key figures, works, dates, concepts and practices.
They're a little listy -- packed with detail -- but that's to be expected when you're asked to write a paragraph on a very complex and often controvertial intellectual movement.
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Jeff, at 8/15/2006 9:04 PM
Here's one more...
Psychoanalytic Criticism- Evolving out of the revolutionary work of Sigmund Freud, psychoanalytic criticism concerns itself with the expression of the unconscious in literary texts, using the techniques of psychoanalysis as well as biographical and social contexts as key elements in their analysis. The unconscious meaning of the text here is the underlying psychology of the work, as illustrated in the characters or author, which may in fact diverge considerably from the author’s conscious or “manifest” intent. Freud maintained that literature consists of “the imagined, or fantasized, fulfillment of wishes that are either denied by reality or prohibited by the social standards of morality and propriety.”(Abrams; 257) Thus elements of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories such as condensation, displacement, and symbolism as well as the presence of “classic psychoanalytic symptoms” (Barry; 105) are used to examine the text and divine the “latent” content of a given work. Important later contributions to psychoanalytic theory were made by Jacques Lacan who employed the linguistic theory of Saussure in a reworking of Freud’s basic conceptual scheme, “viewing the human mind not as pre-existent to, but as constituted by the language we use.” (Abrams; 260-1) Lacan viewed the unconscious as “the nucleus of our being” (Barry; 109) and viewed its drives as based on a “lack” and desire that persistently goes unfulfilled. Lacanian psychoanalytic criticism seeks the unconscious meaning of the text itself, as opposed to a Freudian emphasis on characterization or authorial psychology, and emphasizes the centrality of the unconscious and “the endemic elusiveness of the signified.”(Barry; 115) Lacan’s work has maintained a pertinence that is evidenced by his influence on poststructuralist and feminist criticism, while Freud’s theories have been subject to challenges, especially from feminist critics due to their inherent male privileging which is viewed as evidence of patriarchal domination.
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Robert Damon, at 8/15/2006 10:32 PM
Donna Marie...in regard to the narrator label for HOD, how about framed first person ? I'm not sure, on a technical level, but it sounds like a real category...
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Robert Damon, at 8/16/2006 7:46 AM
Ok, I feel pretty good about two of my identities, but I wanted to run this one by everyone. Let me know what you think, and what I should do to change it if necessary. Thanks!!
New Historicism is an approach to literary criticism that began in the 1980s as a response to the New Criticism and other forms of criticism that looked at a piece of literature in isolation from its historical background. Whereas other forms of criticism did examine the historical background of a literary work, New Historicists took this exercise even further. Rather than use historical, non-fiction documents as background resources with which to examine a work, they examined the non-fiction documents (or, often, a single document) as an “equal” to the literary work. In other words, New Historicists pulled the “background” information to the foreground, and examined the document(s) with the literature. Using both the literature and the history of the time period, these critics aim to show how the literature is “‘situated’ within the institutions, social practices, and discourses that constitute the overall culture of a particular time and place, and with which the literary text interacts as both a product and a producer of cultural energies and codes” (Abrams 183). Assimilated into the views of New Historicism are approaches from various other forms of criticism. New Historicism is concerned with the ideology of a particular historic era (from Marxist criticism); Michel Foucault’s view that the discourse of an era determines what is considered to be knowledge and truth, and thereby defines what an era views as normal or abnormal; the concept of deconstruction, especially in determining the existence of multiple voices within a text; and the ideas of cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, including his use of “thick descriptions,” the close analysis of “a particular social production or event” that aims to “recover the meanings it has for the people involved in it” (Abrams 183). New Historicists do not just look at how the time period affected the literature, but how the literature affected the time period, or at least how it fits into it. Though this approach to criticism can be used on the literature of any time period, it has gained the most prominence in its use by scholars of the English Renaissance.
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Matt Fisher, at 8/16/2006 9:10 AM
Can someone tell me if this makes absolutely no sense?
New Historicism is a term coined by the American critic Stephen Greenblatt in the 1980s to describe the parallel reading of literary and non-literary texts, usually of the same historical period. Both the literary and the non-literary text are given equal critical weight, neither one being privileged above the other. The concern therefore lies in what another American critic, Louis Monstrose, described as a combined interest in “the textuality of history, the historicity of texts;” each text informs and interrogates the other. This equal weighting differentiates new historicism from old historicism. Another difference is that historical documents are read as texts in their own right, meaning that they can be subjected to the same kind of textual scrutiny reserved for pieces of literature. Little attention is given to previous scholarship about a text, presenting it as new and “defamiliarized.” The influence of Derrida’s view that there is nothing outside of the text brings deconstruction to the realm of new historicism, postulating that everything we know about the past is only known in textual form. This situation makes history “thrice processed:” first through the ideology of the time it was written, then through that of our own time, and finally through the instability of language itself. New historicism was first utilized by scholars of English Renaissance, particularly in the area of drama, to create political readings of the literary texts. New historicism takes an anti-establishment platform, exposing the thought control process implicated by what Michel Foucault described as the panoptic State evident in discursive practices. This element has lent new historicism to other forms of criticism, such as feminism and criticism of ethnic literature.
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Niela, at 8/16/2006 6:29 PM
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