engl 251 theories and their brain-parents

russian formalism by russian futurists

brought on by a need for revolution of culture and politics from young russians, especially students. they wanted their artistic groups to look like political parties. they wanted to reinvent art—avant-garde work was the goal to inspire change.

russian futurists were specifically poets who had a “hatred for already existing language,” wanting to distance themselves from common sense and universal taste.

viktor shklovskii was a prominent critic wrote “the resurrection of the word". he claimed that all words had an image attached: month had moon, for example. he says these metaphors are now dead, and resurrecting them is the goal so that “form is sensed” and we can look at how words mean rather than just what they mean.

three things according to russain formalism

• the object of literary theory is literariness

• literature has value because it forces us to sense the form of words and the forms of communication

• the method of literary criticism is the discovery and evaluation of literary techniques. this method requires us to look at texts in a particular way. we don’t think about what a writer wants to say, we don’t explain narratives by what the characters are doing—we think about how a technique makes form visible

defamiliarization

suggested by viktor shklovskii: making the familiar unfamiliar out of concern that the familiar has become too easy and unchallenging. works are literary precisely to the extent that they defamiliarize the world. this defamiliar condition can be temporary as times change, but that’s fine and factored into the concept.

• not every formalist agreed with defamiliarzation, worried that not every artistic technique needed to aim to defamiliarize. they did agree that literariness depended on the difference between the way language was used in poetry and how it’s used in everyday communication

viktor wanted to apply this to prose, too, not just poetry. he mentions it in “art of technique”, specifically the usage of an unusual narrator who is unfamiliar with what they see and therefore describes the story in a weird way. this can also be done by presenting events of the story out of order.

this is where plot v story was established: story is how events are played out in “real life”, plot is how they’re artistically presented in writing.

metalanguage

paul de man said literary theory got underway with the introduction of linguistic terminology in the metalanguage about literature. metalanguage = the language with which we talk about literature

sign + sign-system and structuralism

proposed by ferdinand de saussure

• created synchronic linguistics: focuses on language as a state in the present rather than as something evolving

• saw language as a system (which is something simultaneous, not historical), the basic linguistic unit of language is the sign. signs acquire their meaning and identity (plus the image attached) dependent on their place in the system. syntagm = sequence of signs (so basically a sentence)

  • sign = sound pattern united with meaning

he created the basis of structuralism

• belief that the system determines meaning of signs and defines them for us based on their placement within the system. signs used in lit were not labels for things in the world, but rather effects/consequences of a system

  • ex: characters were not descriptions of fictional people. but rather signs that acquired a particular significance because of their relationship with other characters in the story

structuralist applications

there are two types of Action: search and struggle

• search typically only involves one actant (character). it’s a quest for them to find something, a happy ending or an item

• struggle is between multiple actants (characters). one actant can put another in a struggle (like the evil queen putting snow white in a struggle for survival). it becomes a push-and-pull dynamic

• actants in a story will have a mission that drives their actions in the narrative

basically language and literature are easy to understand and criticize when you break it down into individual moving parts that are all just relative to each other. don’t worry about historical relevance or sociological impact, just the words in their way

gerard genette coined the term anachronism in the structuralist analysis and uses it to describe differences between the chronology of the plot and that of the story itself

deconstruction

provided by jacques derrida

• literary theory does not move in a straight line, this is what builds the base of deconstruction

• believed philosophy needed to incorporate the rules of structuralism

“paradox about a paradox”: assumes that all discourse, even historical narrative, is essentially disguised self-revelatory messages. since we’re subjective beings, texts have no fixed meaning, and so we need to decontruct and break everything down (like structuralism does) to truly ensure we do not miss things

modernism/formalism

formalism, by georg lukács, is what we now call modernism. by formalism, he meant the use of experimental techniques in fiction, like stream-of-consciousness, or surrealism, which he thought dwelled on the subjective experience at the expense of objective representation.

bertolt brecht disagreed with him, saying that realism was a goal, not a style or method of writing: to get people to see the world realistically a writer had to employ a variety of techniques, some of which might look old-timey and some, experimental

political commitment

basically when a writer is committed to presenting their work with real-life issues (i.e., politics). i really can’t understand how this could be more complicated than that

raymond williams talks about it a lot i guess. he wrote “marxism and literature”

it’s important to note the intentions and political views of the author aren’t necessarily decisive when assessing the political value of their work. for example, lukács was a supporter of the monarchy, but his writing was progressive in that regard.

marxist criticism

karl marx. shocker. And friedrich engels

• based on the idea that humans are distinctive because they engage in what marx calls “the social production of their existence”. in other words: while animals go through natural cycles based on their natural urges and needs (food shelter etc), humans create things that can and are built upon by next generations

• issue here is that humans have not shared the means of production they have created. only a privileged minority has control over these means, and we call this control “property”

• relations of production: relationships between classes

• commons: land that was owned by the society at large

• marx believed class relationships were exploitative. doesn’t matter if a capitalist is a good person, they own the surplus the workers have produced and keep it as profit. he wanted to replace capitalism with a different system

in terms of literature:

• terry eagleton spearheaded it

• premised on the idea that literature is part of the ideological world and part of the struggle. it cannot be a neutral sphere, devoted solely to beauty or humanity as a whole in a society that is fundamentally divided (by captialism, as marx would say)

• posed the question: what is the relation of literature to ideology? marx and engels would argue that literary works are just ideological forms like everything else. they attempt to make us comfortable with ideas or practices that favor capitalism. if they’re radical though, they undermine support for capitalist ideas and make us desire an alternative idea

psychoanalytic criticism

sigmund freud

• unconscious vs conscious: unconscious holds all spatial metaphors, urges, and repressed impulses. consciousness experiences disturbances depending on how full the unconscious is (freudian slip)

• mental illness stems from being too repressed. more you’ve repressed, the more disturbed you are, and this disturbance manifests as a psych disorder (hysterics, neuroticism, etc)

• “kids are inherently sexual because all their touches with mother and father are erotic in nature”. fucking freak.

jacques lacan had stuff to say too:

• the symbolic order: once a child positions itself as separate from the mother physically, it is caught within language and enters the symbolic order. this changes the nature of its impulses and desires because the child is now singular, recognizes it’s an “I want” type of desire instead of mindlessly allowing desire to flow through it (i.e., need for contact with mother is instinctual, automatic, not personal)

first-wave/liberal feminism

movement for the legal equality of women. hoped to achieve this through legislation. aimed to eradicate discrimination against women in all spheres of public and private life

radical feminism

“women who want to be equal to men lack ambition”

• they argued that women, by virtue of their position in society, had distinctive and valuable qualities that should be nurtured and built upon, qualities that could improve society as a whole.

• these feminists didnt want to say that women were equal to men. they believed women were different and that difference should be given room to develop and grow

• focused on the organization of women by creating spaces without male supervision

socialist feminism

wanted to combine the feminist struggle with the traditional aspirations of the left, so they were interested in the women’s role in the workplace and how women perform unpaid labor in the household. they especially focused on the fate of impoverished women, who did not receive the same support impoverished men had

fourth-wave feminism, gender construction

believers sought to deconstruct the gender system as a whole

• issue was not just inequality, or the devaluing of women, but rather the division between men and women. the binary opposition needed to be deconstructed

• wanted to erase the boundaries between male and female in favor of a fluid array of gender identities

judith butler…so cool…said even sex was a social construction and wasn’t that big of a deal when considering identity

feminist literary theory

umbrella term for the various ways we can analyze feminism or criticize sexism in literature

• evolved with the times

• five ways to go about it:

  • criticize sexism in lit

  • advocate for women’s criticism (gynocriticism)

  • ecriture feminine: feminine, fluid, sensual way of writing

  • feminist psychoanalytic theory—basically psychoana, but with feminism in mind

  • american poststructuralist feminism

postcolonial theory

• the outside factor/external body that is introduced into literary studies isn’t a set of ideas or principles, but interest in a particular situation

• a concern with how the colonial past has influenced and continues to influence the writing and understanding of literature

WED Du Bois