Revision

How and why did English appear as a discipline in education?

• With the English Education Act in 1835, the  East India Company officially made English the medium of instruction in Indian education, and required the study of English literature.

• English Literature is taught to the Indian population as a mould of the English way of life, morals, and taste which serves as a tool with which the English can train Indians to be  good and faithful company servants, who consent to their own oppression. (Gramsci)

• Therefore, English becoming a discipline had primarily a civilising mission (because religion failed as Indians could not be converted to Christianity)

The study of English Language in the Victorian era

• According to Matthew Arnold (The Study of Poetry, 1880) as new discoveries are being made constantly, people have to turn to poetry to interpret life, and to console and sustain themselves.

• He argues that without poetry, science would appear incomplete.

What is literature’s role in politics?

• After WWI, literature turned into a solace, and an alternative to the nightmare of history.

• English becomes not only a subject, but the supremely civilizing subject, the spiritual essence of social formation.

Who were E.M.W. Tilyard and I.A Richards? How did they think about English literature?

• E.M.W. Tilyard and I.A Richards were lecturers at Cambridge University who, in 1917.

• They wanted to create a subject that would study English literature in its own right, not just a source of examples of how English was used in Shakespeare’s time, or as pale imitations of Greek and Latin works.

• As the intellectual inheritors of Arnold, they believed that literature would restore a sense of humanity to the world, in the face of modernity, of the growth of dehumanizing technology and the machine age.

What did I.A Richards say about literary analysis and literary works in his essay “Practical Criticism” (1924)

• He argued that literary analysis has to achieve the precision of science.

• This gave the basis on which self-legitimation of English as university discipline was possible.

• He further argued that literary analysis is “practical” as it is morally elevating, has social utility and can be applied to specific works.

• He also stated that a work of art is a work of a genius which has an organic unity: nothing can be added or withdrawn (each part contributes to the perfection of the whole), transcends historical time and geographical place.

• Thus, applying this notion to poetry, he claimed that the poem has an intrinsic artistic worth that is independent from any context, incl. the author’s biography, which gave a stable ground for the emergence of the practice of “close-reading”: an “objective” way of reading literary texts.

What do we mean by tradition and canon?

• Tradition: “the storehouse of Western values” → for T.S. Eliot: Western values equaled universal human values. 

• Canon: anauthoritative list of great works of literature that everyone with sensibility should study and admire.The term’s origins are rooted in religion, more precisely in how biblical writings were established as authorised. However, judgements of worth cannot be neutral and disinterested. The process of canonisation is historical and geographical (i.e. not “natural”), it does not happen in a vacuum, there are always vested interests, cultural elite, reviewers, professors in power position, etc.)

What debates have been circulating around the canon?

• Debates surrounding the canon have historically focused on the selection of “great texts,” evolving from 18th-century arguments over the comparative worth of specific writers to T.S. Eliot's contention that individual talent must be judged against a simultaneous “Tradition” rather than through Romantic originality.

• A central controversy exists between the belief that canonical works possess “intrinsic artistic worth” capable of “civilising” readers and the counter-argument that canonisation is a non-objective process driven by the “vested interests” of a cultural elite.

• Furthermore, the canon's purported representation of “universal human values” is critiqued as a construct of power that enforces specific cultural ideals, such as “Englishness,” rather than neutral aesthetic standards.

What is close reading? Why is it a problematic approach?

• Close reading involves the intense scrutiny of a piece of prose or poetry, concentrating on the words on the page, and disregarding the work’s context.

• Close reading supposes that the literary text has an intrinsic artistic worth, transcending all particularities of time and space. (I.A. Richards)

• However, in reality the judgement of intrinsic worth depends, in fact, on an external context, on the time- and space-specific criteria of those who make the value judgement.

What is New Criticism?

• New Criticism is a style of criticism advocated by a group of academics writing in the first half of the 20th century.

• New Criticism, like Formalism, considered texts as autonomous and “closed,” meaning that everything that is needed to understand a work is present within it. 

• The 5 key ideas of New Criticism:

  • Autonomy of the literary text (Literature must be understood “in itself”)

  • Literary artefact (a system of language)

  • Heresy of paraphrase (the impossibility of paraphrasing a poem)

  • Intentional fallacy

  • Affective fallacy (when readers convey their own emotional responses to the text)

Who was John Crowe Ramson?

• He 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.

What is intentional fallacy?

• Intentional fallacy happens when readers evoke what the author “meant”.

• According to New Criticism, what the author intended is never relevant to the literary work, and it is also unavailable.

• To invoke the intention of the author is to threaten the integrity of the literary text. (“Never trust the artist, trust the tale” (D.H. Lawrence))

What is literariness?

• Roman Jakobson: “The subject of literary scholarship is not literature in its totality but literariness i.e. that which makes of a given work a work of literature.”

• Concerned with the how of literature rather than the what.

• Form becomes more important than meaning.  

What does defamiliarization mean in the context of language and object?

• Viktor Shklovsky: "defamiliarization" of automated perceptions, “defamiliarization” of objects, as if we saw them for the first time.

• Defamiliarization makes “the stone stony”, and the literary work “literary”, foregrounding its literariness (what makes the given work a work of literature).

Who was Paul de Man? What was his definition of ideology?

• Paul de Man was first and foremost a Romanticist, a literary critic and literary theorist.

• He argued that there is a gap between reality and language, and that because of this language creates reality.

• He claimed that there is no point of view, which is outside language as we are born into a world of language that determines us (“il n’y a pas de hors texte”, a notion taken from Derrida).

• He said that “What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism.”

  • This means, that there is a difference between referent (natural reality) and the referential function of language (linguistic reality), so ideology is when we think that the meaning constituted by language is the same as natural reality, when we apply linguistically constructed meanings to the real world (and act accordingly).

Who was Jacques Derrida?

• Derrida was a French philosopher who developed the philosophy of deconstruction.

• He argued that the language that determines the world and us is a system of differences.

• Consequently, meanings are products of differences, each sign gets its meaning because of its difference from every other sign.

What is the difference between constative and performative statements? How do they fit into binary oppositions?

• In performative statements, signs have no referent in reality, only a referential function, whereas in constative statements, signs “represent” reality.

  • Language is inherently performative, rather than constative.

• Furthermore, language is a system of signs, which is itself a system of differences

  • No item has significance in itself, but derives its significance entirely from its relationship with other signs.

  • Every item is defined by what it is not.

  • Our thinking is also determined by hierarchical binary oppositions: presence (+) / absence (-); male (+) / female(-); light (+) / darkness (-); white (+) / black ( -); etc. -> one term is always privileged (+).

  • Yet, this value attribution is not based on actual facts! (ideology)

What is Derrida’s différence?

• In his theories, Derrida put heavy emphasis on différAnce: the meaning of each sign changes in time, it means something else in a different context or at a different time and these contexts are never saturated.

• This means that there is no closure and the meaning is always deferred (has no definite meaning), and that nothing is outside the text.

• He further argued that we cannot have access to any kind of “reality” behind language that could give us the “true” meaning, claiming that all our knowledge is mediated through texts: writing is orphaned (absence of the author), deconstruction of the hierarchical binary opposition between literal and metaphorical

What is the difference between author and narrator?

The author is a real human being who wrote the story, whereas the narrator is the entity in the literary work who is telling the story.

Narrative, story, discourse

• Narrative - succession of events

• Story - what is told (chronological order of events as they are reconstructed in the reader’s mind)

• Discourse - how it is told (words of the narrative in the order they appear in the text)

• plot ~ story

Paratext

Publisher’s apparatus (cover, placement of title, ISBN code)

Narrative situations

• Real author - the actual historical person who wrote the text

• Implied author - the version of the author who emerges from a particular text

• Narrator - the entity who is telling the story

• Narrate - to whom the narrator tells their discourse

• Implied reader - the profile of readerly traits that seems to be assumed by the text

• Real reader - the one that actually reads the narrative

Narrative voice

• Extradiegetic narrator - outside the story

• Intradiegetic narrator - inside the story (generally characters)

• Heterodiegetic narrator - does not take part in the story (can be extra- or intradiegetic)

• Homodiegetic narrator - takes part in the story (also intradiegetic)

Narration styles

• First person narration - I (unreliable)

• Third person narration - limited (intradiegetic, focalizer) or omniscient narrator (extradiegetic)

• Overt narrator - the narrator announces his or her presence through self-reference

• Covert narrator - their presence seems to be unnoticeable

• Second person narration - you

• First person plural narration - we

Narrative levels

• Primary narrative level

• Embedded tales

• Mise-en-abyme - when a short narrative reflects in miniature what happens in a large scale in the narrative (Hamlet’s mouse trap)

• Character narration - secondary narrator for an embedded narration

• Meta ellipsis/ frame breaking

• Reliable vs. unreliable narrator

Characters

• Flat characters - do not develop in the course of action, types

• Round characters - do develop in the course of action and have more than one quality

• External characterisation - appearance, clothing, etc.

• Internal characterisation - morals, values, emotions, etc.

Definition types

• Direct definition - adjectives 

• Indirect definition - action, appearance, environment (social, physical), name, speech

Speech types

• Quoted/ direct speech

• Reported/ indirect speech

• Free indirect speech

Representing consciousness

• Psycho-narration - the narrator explains what a character thinks or feels

• Free indirect speech/ narrated monologue - keeps the character’s tone and style, but transforms first into third person, and also keeps the tense of the narration = double voiced

• Interior monologue/ stream of consciousness - the narration slips in and out of the character’s mind and back to the actual narration

Story time, discourse time

• Story time - the time that actually transpires within the imaginary world of the text

• Discourse time - the amount of textual space devoted to the representation of narrative contents.

Duration/speed

• Mimesis - showing

• Expansion - long discourse, short story

• Diegesis - long story, short discourse ~ summary

• Gap/ ellipsis - story time without discourse time

Order and disorder

• Ulterior narration - events are narrated after they happen, use of past tense 

• Anterior narration -  events are narrated before they happen, future or conditional tenses

• Simultaneous narration - story is told as the events unfold, present tense

• Intermittent narration - relates events that happen between moments of writing (epistolary novels, and diary forms)

• Analepsis - flashback

• Prolepsis - flashforward/ anticipation

What is metaellipsis?

• Metaelipsis happens when the narrator violates the existing frame of the narrative. (e.g. the extradiegetic narrator enters into his or her own story world.)

• It generally happens in metafiction: when the novel draws attention to its own fictionality (e.g. Vanity Fair, The French Lieutenant’s Woman)

What is psychoanalysis?

• Psychoanalysis calls on individuals to recall the childhood events and fantasies that shaped their personalities (importance of memory!) – making conscious the hidden recesses of the mind -> cure: more or less coherent narrative identity.

• The analyst reads and interprets the patient's dreams, fantasies, talk. -> Psychoanalysis is first and foremost a theory of reading and interpretation -> very similar to literary analysis!

What is psychoanalytic criticism?

Psychoanalytic criticism: studies either an author’s “unconscious” motivations, or that of characters (e.g. Hamlet’s oedipal problems and not Shakespeare’s)

How does Freud describe the topography of the mind? (Id, Ego, Super-ego)

Id - lawless, driven by desire to have its needs instantly gratified.

Super-ego (ego ideal) - guardian of norms (conscience: a sense of guilt over violations of rules).

Ego - preserves the self by telling it to hold back on its desires and negotiate with reality, moderates between Id and Super Ego.

What stages does a child’s development have, according to Freud?

• According to Freud, a child's development begins with the Pre-Oedipal phase, a period of symbiotic dependence on the mother where the child experiences autoerotic pleasure through the oral, anal, and phallic stages.

• This is followed by the Oedipal phase, where the child develops an incestuous desire for the mother, which is interrupted by the father's entry into the dynamic.

• For the male child, this stage concludes when the fear of castration (primary repression) forces him to repress these desires, identify with the father, and accept the “reality principle”.

Explain the Pre-Oedipal Phase of Freud’s theory!

Pre-Oedipal phase: symbiotic relationship with the mother

• Helpless, completely dependent on his mother

• Oral phase: the child sucks his mother’s breast for milk  -- pleasurable – mouth: organ of survival + erotogenic zone –> drive to incorporate objects

• Anal phase: sadistic, the child derives pleasure from expulsion and destruction, desire for retention and possessive control

• Phallic phase: focus on the genitals

What is the difference between the Oedipal Phase of the male and female child in Freud’s theory?

Male child: Incestuous desire for the mother in the dyadic relationship

→ Father enters the picture: primary repression: the child represses his desire for the mother out of a fear of castration (primary repression)

→ Formation of the unconscious (where the prohibited desire for the mother is repressed). Reality principle: the child takes on his father’s role and becomes a man

→ His desire is directed to other women.

Female child (highly problematic, not really developed by Freud!): Incestuous desire for the mother

→ Father enters the picture: the girl perceives that she is “inferior” (lacks the penis), just like her mother

→ Turns in disillusionment form the mother to the father: she desires her father (and envies his penis), wants to seduce him. Since this project is doomed to failure, she returns to her mother for identification, renounces the desire for her father - and wants a baby instead. If the oedipal stage is not successfully overcome: “castration complex”

What are the defense mechanisms? List the 6 types!

• Defense mechanisms are unconscious psychological strategies used to protect an individual from anxiety caused by unacceptable thoughts or feelings.

• The six types identified are:

  • repression (keeping disturbing thoughts unconscious)

  • denial (blocking external events from awareness)

  • projection (attributing one's own unwanted thoughts to others)

  • displacement (satisfying an impulse with a substitute object)

  • regression (reverting to an earlier psychological state under stress)

  • sublimation (channeling impulses into socially acceptable activities like work or art)

What is death drive/ Thanatos?

• Thanatos, or the death drive, is a concept introduced by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) to describe a drive that opposes the “pleasure principle” (Eros).

• It explains the phenomenon of “repetition compulsion,” where individuals involuntarily repeat repressed, negative experiences or return to infantile stages instead of remembering them as belonging to the past.

• This drive manifests in the inability to learn from experience, leading people to be repetitively haunted by nightmares or traumas.

What is the difference between mourning and melancholy?

• Mourning is considered a "healthy" response to loss that involves "working through" sadness until the loss is overcome and the individual can invest energy into a new object.

• Melancholy, in contrast, is a pathological condition characterized by an inability to heal or displace energy onto new objects; instead, the individual incorporates the lost object into themselves, leading to self-hatred and an endless return to the loss,.

How is trauma defined by Freud?

• Freud defines trauma (Greek for “wound”) as an intense event that breaks through the “protective shield of consciousness,” leaving a memory trace in the unconscious that cannot be immediately assimilated or remembered.

• Because the event is not consciously registered at the time it occurs, it is followed by a “period of latency” before returning to haunt the individual through flashbacks and nightmares.

• Ultimately, trauma acts as a “disease of memory” wherein the individual is “possessed by the past,” involuntarily repeating the experience rather than integrating it into conscious memory.

How does Lacan rework Freud from a structuralist and post-structuralist perspective?

• Lacan reinterprets Freud’s biological concepts through structuralist and post-structuralist theories of discourse, rewriting the Oedipal process as the child's entry into the Symbolic stage, which is governed by the “Name of the Father” as the Law of language.

• He posits that the Mirror Stage creates an illusory, structuralist unity where the signifier (image) and signified (child) are harmoniously fused in a state of fullness.

• However, the entry into the Symbolic realm introduces post-structuralist anxiety by revealing that language relies on the absence of the object it signifies; consequently, desire becomes an “endless movement from one signifier to another,” vainly attempting to fill the lack of the mother with substitute objects (objets petit a).

What is imaginary misrecognition?

• According to Lacan, imaginary misrecognition occurs during the “Mirror Stage” when a child, who physically experiences their body as fragmented, identifies with a reflected image of themselves (in a mirror or the mother's eyes) that appears as a unified whole.

• This identification is termed “misrecognition” because the child mistakes this external, illusory image of coherence for their actual self, a process that fundamentally bases the ego on an illusion of mastery and wholeness.

• Consequently, the self is not innate but is constructed through the “gaze of the other,” creating a narcissistic union where the subject and object seem harmoniously fused without lack or gap.

How does Laura Mulvey employ Lacan in her work “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”?

• Laura Mulvey draws on Lacan's concept of the mirror phase to argue that cinema constructs a fundamentally male gaze, in which the woman is invariably constituted as the passive object rather than a subject.

• She suggests that just as a child identifies with a unified image in the mirror, the spectator identifies with the male protagonist, creating a dynamic where the camera, the protagonist, and the audience share a voyeuristic gaze that treats the woman as an object.

How does Lacan describe personality formation?

• According to Lacan, personality formation begins in the Mirror Stage, where the child forms a “specular I” by identifying with a unified image of themselves, a process of "imaginary misrecognition" that provides an illusion of wholeness.

• This evolves into the “social I” when the child enters the Symbolic stage, or the domain of the Father, where they submit to the Law of language and cultural norms.

• Lacan distinguishes between two fathers in this process: the Oedipal father who intervenes to prohibit the child's access to the mother, and the symbolic Father who represents the absolute power of the Law and functions as the “transcendental signifier”.

• Ultimately, this order is structured by the big Other (or the Phallus), which guides discourse and instills the “ego ideal,” forcing the subject to navigate a world defined by lack and deferred meaning.

What does Kristeva criticize in Lacan’s symbolic order?

• Julia Kristeva criticizes the oppressiveness of Lacan’s symbolic order, which she identifies as a patriarchal sexual and social structure dominated by the rational Law of the father.

• She challenges the totality of this order by distinguishing it from the semiotic, a “residue of the pre-Oedipal stage” associated with the maternal body and inarticulate drives that is never fully repressed upon entering language.

• Ultimately, she argues that the semiotic persists as a disruptive force within language — manifesting through rhythm, tone, and material qualities — that serves to subvert the established meanings and binary oppositions of the symbolic order.

What are the main arguments of La Révolution du langage poétique?

• The main arguments of Julia Kristeva's La Révolution du langage poétique (1974) focus on the tension between two elements of language: the symbolic and the semiotic.

  • The Symbolic vs. The Semiotic: Kristeva distinguishes the symbolic — the patriarchal, rational order governed by the Law of the Father — from the semiotic, which represents the “residue of the pre-Oedipal stage” and is associated with the maternal body and inarticulate drives.

  • Persistence in Language: She argues that while the heterogeneous flow of the semiotic is repressed when a child enters articulate language, it is never totally eliminated; instead, it persists as a “pulsional pressure” within language itself, manifesting through rhythm, tone, and material qualities that act as the "other" of language.

  • Revolutionary Potential: This persistence allows for a “revolution” in which the semiotic undermines the oppressive symbolic order. This is particularly evident in modernist literature and symbolist poetry (such as that of Mallarmé or Joyce), where the disruption of language throws binary oppositions (like masculine/feminine or sane/mad) into confusion and subverts established social meanings.

What is the theory of the Abject?

• The theory of the abject posits that the development of a unitary subject requires the exclusion or denigration of the maternal and the bodily to prevent the self from falling back into an undifferentiated state.

• The abject refers to those parts of ourselves — such as the corpse, vomit, or the maternal — that are expelled because they seem to “infect” the subject, yet they continue to hover at the periphery of the “clean and proper” self as something both familiar and strange.

• Kristeva extends this concept to politics in Strangers to Ourselves (1991), arguing that societal rejection of the “stranger” or “foreigner” is actually a projection of this internal abjection, representing the “stranger in ourselves” that we deny and expel.

What is the definition of trauma?

• Trauma is a phenomenon, a radical disruption that dislocates the boundaries of our modes of understanding, by which it brings us to the limits of what we can conprehend.

• It introduces a “new ignorance” to numerous fields of studies, including literature, sociology, and psychoanalysis.

What are the peculiarities of its pathology? 

• Trauma is fundamentally paradoxical, because primarily it is a phenomenon that is defined not by the event itself but the way it is belatedly experienced.

• The traumatic event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time of its occurrance so its pathology manifests as the “repeated possession” of the individual by the event later on.

• According to Caruth, the impact of the traumatic event lies precisely in its refusal to be simply located in a specific place or time.

What are the implications of the fact that the return of the traumatic event is “literal”?

• Literality refers to the way traumatic dreams, flashbacks, and hallucinations return as exact, unmediated repetitions of the event rather than as symbols or interpretations.

• This is because they are unassimilable to associative chains of meaning.

• They do not represent a hidden desire but simply return the patient to the site of the accident.

• Because the event was not "fully known" or "assimilated" at the time it occurred, the survivor does not possess the memory; rather, the event "possesses" the survivor.

In what sense trauma (the literal return) is called a “crisis of truth”?

• Trauma is a "crisis of truth" because it provides a direct encounter with a reality that the survivor cannot integrate into their conscious understanding.

• The event is too overwhelming to be processed at the moment it occurs, it exists as a "void" or "gap" in the survivor's knowledge, returning later not as a memory, but as a literal, intrusive repetition.

Why can we say that the force of the traumatic event resides in the collapse of its understanding? How does it relate to the fact that victims go “apparently unharmed”? 

• Trauma is characterized by the fact that it is not fully experienced or understood at the moment it occurs.

• Because the mind cannot properly register the event during its impact, a gap or void is created in the victim’s understanding.

• The force of trauma lies in this collapse of comprehension rather than in the event itself.

• Although victims may appear “apparently unharmed” at the time, the unassimilated fragments of the traumatic experience return later, manifesting as the repeated possession of the individual.

What is latency? 

• Latency is the fundamental period of delay between the occurrence of a traumatic event and the subsequent onset of its symptoms.

• It is a defining psychological "incubation period" meaninf that the event is not fully "assimilated or experienced" at the moment of impact.

Comment on the notions: testimony, psychoanalysis, literature, writing

• Testimony is the discursive mode par excellence of our era: a discursive practice and a performative speech act.

  • To testify is not just to report facts but to "vow to tell" and to produce one's own speech as material evidence for a truth that is currently in crisis.

  • Therefore, testimony is a radically unique and noninterchangeable burden.

• Psychoanalysis provides the framework for understanding why testimony is necessary by identifying the pathological peculiarities of trauma, such as latency.

  • It deals with the "central enigma" of the "apparently unharmed" victim who only develops symptoms after a period of delay.

  • The role of the psychoanalyst (or the listener) is to hear in the testimony the "survivor’s departure" from the trauma.

• Literature is a "point of conflation between text and life" that can penetrate the reader like an "actual life". It has the power to create an "alignment between witnesses."

• Writing is the active process of bearing witness and reappropriating language from those who caused the trauma.

What does it mean to “bear witness”?  

• To bear witness is to assume a solitary and inescapable ethical responsibility to testify to an experience that exceeds the self.

• The witness does not speak merely about others, but for others and to others, serving as the medium through which testimony is realized (Levinas).

• Addressed to others, testimony transcends the individual witness, positioning them as a vehicle for a reality, stance, or occurrence beyond personal experience.

Comment on the imperative of bearing witness in Felman’s account of the narrator in Camus’s The Plague (16) 

• The imperative to bear witness arises from conditions of radical human exposure and vulnerability, particularly in situations with no cure (like the plague).

• What demands testimony is the urgent scandal of illness (literal or metaphorical) that disrupts the human world and mobilizes the witness’s attention.

• Although it emerges from incurable conditions, the act of witnessing itself carries a healing force, as the capacity to bear witness already participates in a process of ethical and human healing.

What are the implications of Celan’s writing in German? (33-34)

• Celan’s decision to write in German is important because he believed that only one’s mother tongue can express one’s personal truth, while writing in another language would only produce lies.

• By continuing to write in German, the language tied to his own exclusion and to Nazi terror, Celan reclaims the language in which testimony must be given.

• His poetry breaks and reshapes German, changing its meanings and structures to create a new poetic language that is his own.

• In doing so, Celan seeks to take German back from its Nazi past and recover the mother tongue as the last remaining possession of the dispossessed, using it to orient himself and make sense of reality after the traumatic experience.

Who are the people in the poem who dig a grave, and who are they digging the graves for?

• The Jewish camp inmates, referred to in the text as "his Jews".

• They are forced to "musically accompany their own grave-digging."

• The poem repeatedly contrasts the literal digging in the earth with a "grave in the breezes" or "in the clouds," where "one lies unconfined."

• This evokes the image of the crematoria: while they dig in the ground, their final resting place will be in the air.

Who is the person who writes and “whistles his Jews out”?

• The German master and the commandant of the concentration camp.

• The executioner who "whistles his pack" and "whistles his Jews out," commanding them to "jab deeper into the earth" to dig their own graves.

• His speech acts are "dehumanizing and annihilating interjections" that reduce the victims to "marionettes of his own pleasure" and "musical instruments."

Expound and explain the implications of the metaphor of drinking, of the drunkenness of torture, and of the ways in which Celan’s treatment of the metaphor subverts its traditional use. 

• The performance of drinking is traditionally a poetic metaphor for yearning, for romantic thirst, for desire.

• However, Celan’s poetry transforms it into the abusive figure of and endless and limitless exposure, a figure for the impotent predicament and the unbreakable ordeal of having to endure, absorb, continue to take in with no end and no limit.

• The durnkness of torture perverts and demystifies the Hellenic-mythic connotation of libidinal euphoric Dionysiac drinking of wine and poetry, and the Christian connotation of ritual consecration and Eucharistic, sacred drinking of Christ’s blood and virtue.

• Celan exposes the brutality of torture and the collapse of symbolic traditions that once promised transcendence, and turns drinking into an image of brutal suffering and survival.

Comment on its relationship to the Eucaristic image. (36 par.1; 3) 

• Celan’s image of the “drunkenness of torture” strips the Christian ritual of sacred drinking of its redemptive implications. Instead of the Eucharistic act of drinking Christ’s blood as a source of salvation and virtue, the poem suggests a literal and horrific drinking of blood.

• This image connects to the Christian figure of the wound, which traditionally functions as a mythic symbol that allows suffering to be transcended through resurrection.

• Celan subverts this tradition by refusing transcendence altogether: unlike Christ’s death, which is erased by resurrection, the blood and ashes of the death camps remain concrete and unerasable.

• The poem insists that the historical reality of massacre and racial annihilation cannot be redeemed, spiritualized, or overcome through myth or ritual, but must be confronted as an absolute and irreversible fact.

Comment on its perverted relationship with the mother’s breast. (par.2) 

• “black milk” → image of a child striving to drink from the mother’s breast

  • denatured “black milk”, tainted possibly by blackened, burnt ashes, springs not from the mother’s breast but from the darkness of murder and death, from the blackness of the night and of the “dusk” that “falls to Germany” when death uncannily becomes a “master”

  • liquified black milk ~ dark blood, burn ashes

  • the drinking takes place not at the maternal source but at the deadly source, of the wound, at the bleeding site of reality as stigma 

Comment on Felman’s exploration of the German master.

• The German master, the commandant, who directs the orchestra of the camp to celebrate, in an ecstatic death fugue, at once the wounding of the earth and their own destruction and annihilation → the very practice of his language annihilates the Jews, by actively denying them as subjects, by reducing subjective individuality to a mass of indistinct, debased, inhuman objects

• Germany has instituated death as Mesiter, as a master-teacher → taught a lesson that can nevet be forgotten

What are the implications of the scene being estheticised, how is it estheticised, and how does it subvert this estheticisation?  

Implications of estheticization:

• violence is being estheticized → by estheticizing its own dehumanization, by transforming its own murderous perversity into the cultural sophistication and cultivated trances of a hedonistic art performance

• the "esthetic principle of stylization" can make an unthinkable fate appear to have meaning, effectively transfiguring the event and removing its horror → injustice to violence’s victims

Subversion of estheticization:

• the poem acts to "de-estheticize itself" and "write against itself"

• opposes the "melodious ecstasy" of the music with the "dissonance of the commandant's speech acts" and the "violence of his verbal abuse," → exposes the "masquerade of cruelty as art"

• “black milk” = failure to forget

• juxtaposes the "golden hair" of Margarete (an Aryan ideal) with the "ashen hair" of Shulamith (the Jewish victim), creating a "dissonance of golden and of ashen"

How estheticization is present in the poem:

• the poem utilizes "melodious ecstasy," "poetic pleasure," and the structure of a fugue to depict the concentration camp experience

• the German master is portrayed as a maestro or meister-singer—a master of arts who directs an orchestra of inmates to musically accompany their own grave-digging → producing death as an artistic masterpiece

• the victims are reduced from subjective individuals to "musical instruments of [the master's] own sadistic passion"

What does Felman mean by saying that the esthetic pleasure forgets? What does it forget, and how are we made to remember what is unforgettable? 

• Esthetic pleasure acts as a form of "artistic drunkenness" or "amnesia" that obscures the reality of the events it depicts

• Remembering is an encounter with a "gap" in understanding—a "void" where the "unforgettable" returns precisely because it cannot be fully assimilated into conscious knowledge or beautiful form

• Drinking of “black milk”: the impossibility of forgetting and of getting a break from suffering and memory → the unforgettable return of what the esthetic pleasure has forgotten

Comment on the implications of the address “your golden hair Margarete/ your ashen hair Shulamith”. (What is the bitter difference between them, and what is the shocking irony in their juxtaposition?) 

• The hair reduced to ashes, the burnt hair of one race as opposed to the esthetic idealization and self-idealization of the other race

• Beauty reduced to smoke

• The dissonance of golden and of ashes produces only “black milk” as an answer to one’s thirst, one’s longing, one’s desire

• A clash between the "dreamy yearnings of the desiring address" and the "dehumanizing and annihilating interjections" of the Holocaust

• Both figures are addressed as subjects of desire and "called-for-answers," yet the longing for Shulamith is "bound to remain unanswered" because she has been physically annihilated

• The "golden" ideal of German culture is shown to be inextricably linked to the "ashen" remains of its victims

• The Commandant writes to his "golden" Margarete while simultaneously directing the "ashen" Shulamith and her people into their graves

Where does Celan locate the essence of the Holocaust? (Why?) 

• The radical disruption of address and the subsequent collapse of witnessing

• The distinction between we (who “drink” and “dig”) and he (who “writes and who “commands”) → the very essence of the violence, and of Holocaust

• The incapacity of “we” to address in this poem of apostrophe and of the address, the “he”, the other as a human subject

Why is there a need to de-estheticise art? What does it mean that, as Adorno said, “After Auswitz, it is no longer possible to write poems?” (39-40)  

• Arises from the inherent danger that traditional beauty can cover historical trauma = "injustice to the victims" → their suffering appears meaningful or consumable

• Writing poetry is "barbaric," focuses on the "esthetic principle of stylization"

• Turning the agony of victims into an artistic "masterpiece" or a "hedonistic art performance"

• If art is to exist, it must be "equal to its own historical impossibility" and meet the "incredible demands of suffering" without offering the false consolation of beauty

• Art must de-estheticise itself to "justify henceforth its own existence"

• De-estheticisation ensures the poem does not become a "fetish" and remains a "testimonial project of address"

• To be true to the "extremity that eludes the concept," art must be "thinking against itself"

How can art still resist estheticisation? What does Celan say about it? 

• The poem becomes a "self-critical resistance" to its own beauty

• Celan explicitly stated that poetry must henceforth "distrust the beautiful" and "shun melody" → rejecting "melodious musicality" and the "drunken infatuation" with verse

• Art must strive for "precision"

  • The language of the poem should "name and places," focusing on the specificities of the historical experience rather than general esthetic pleasure (Celan)

• "Breakage of the word," where the poem intentionally disrupts its own "self-possessed control of sense" and unity

• The poem should act as a "manifest form of language" that seeks out a "thou"—a listener—to recognize the specificity of an annihilated experience

What are the implications of “silence”?

• Represents a fundamental "void" or "hole" in the psyche and in history

• Trauma is often an event that is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time it occurs, it remains "unclaimed"

• This historical "gap" manifests as a "frightful falling mute"—a state where language has been so violated by "death-bringing speech" that it can no longer function normally

• Silence is a deliberate poetic strategy used to "de-estheticize" art

• Celan’s later poetry exhibits a "tendency toward silence"

• Silence = anti-fetish

• A "counterpoint of sound and silence"

What is the difference between the “essence of the Holocaust” (cf. 20) and Celan’s “testimonial project of address”? (42-43) 

• The difference lies in the distinction between a radical act of silencing and the struggle to recreate a listener who can hear that silence

• The "essence of the Holocaust" is the void created by the "master"—a state where address is impossible because the victim has been turned into an object

• Celan’s "testimonial project of address" is the act of reaching across that void → transform poetry from a project of "artistic mastery" into a "drifting testimony" that seeks a human encounter

• The essence of the Holocaust = shattered mirror that no longer reflects a human face

• The testimonial project of address = the painstaking effort to gather those sharp, broken shards and arrange them → they might catch the light of a listener’s eye

Connect the introduction on trauma to Celan’s (traumatic) poetry. 

• Freud defines trauma as an event experienced "too soon" to be fully known, resulting in a period of "latency" before the survivor is inextricably "possessed" by the past, unable to integrate the experience into conscious memory.

• Shoshana Felman connects this concept to Paul Celan’s poetry, arguing that his work does not merely report on the Holocaust but enacts the "breakage of the verse" to mirror the "breakage of the world," thereby bearing witness to a catastrophe that defies standard understanding.

• Just as trauma is a "wound" that resists simple healing, Celan’s poetry—such as Death Fugue—attempts to speak from within the "state of being stricken," using repetitive and disrupted language to penetrate the "injury inflicted" by history and reconstruct a reality that has been shattered.

What is the difference between feminism and gender studies?

• While feminism concerns itself with the belief that women, just because they are women, are treated inequitably within a society, which is organised to prioritise male viewpoints and concerns, gender studies focuses upon the historical, social, and psychological systems within which sexual identity becomes meaningful.

• Furthermore, the premise of gender studies is that there is a difference to be made between SEX (male/female) as something biologically given, GENDER (masculine/feminine) as a social construct, and SEXUALITY (heterosexual/homosexual), as a variable sexual behaviour and orientation. I

  • t also questions the naturalization of a patriarchal system, which defines male heterosexuality as the norm.

Who was Michel Foucault?

• Foucault was a French historian of ideas and philosopher, who was also an author, literary critic, political activist, and teacher.

• Foucault's theories primarily addressed the relationships between power versus knowledge and liberty, and he analyzed how they are used as a form of social control through multiple institutions.

Explain the argument of the History of Sexuality!

• Discourse, discoursive formations do not “describe things”, but both constitute their objects and generate knowledge about their objects.

• Based on this, knowledge is inherently normative knowledge which brings about regulation that sustains Power.

• There are different methods of producing “Knowledge”: observation → examination → normalising judgment: sane-mad, heterosexual-homosexual, normality-perversion.

• Foucault shows that what we perceive as “natural” (such as the existence of the “homosexual” as a concept) is in fact culturally and historically constructed by the discourse of psychiatry (psychiatry became a “discipline” in the 19th c.).

What is ideology critique?

• Ideology critique argues that what has been taken as natural and neutral (i.e “obvious”) is shown to be cultural, historical and strongly biased; as sth. that helps to maintain existing (historically developed and culturally constructed) power relations.

• For instance, feminists don’t deny the biological differences between men and women (many celebrate them), but they don’t agree that physical shape, size or bodily chemistry make men naturally superior to women – physical differences don’t make men better leaders, more intelligent, or more courageous

Who was Mary Wollstonecraft?

• Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 – 1797) was an English writer and philosopher best known for her advocacy of women's rights.

• She wrote an essay titled Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) in which she argued for women’s right to education, which would have paved the way for their economic independence.

Explain the situation of women in the Victorian Age!

• Married women could still not inherit nor keep personal property, as  everything belonged to their husband, including the copyright laws of their own work.

• In case of a divorce, the husband could divorce his wife solely on the grounds of adultery, whereas if a woman wanted to divorce, she had to prove incest or bigamy in addition to adultery.

• Moreover, after the divorce the husband got all the property and even became the natural guardian of children.

• In 1849 and 1853, Bedford and Queen’s College were founded and women gained access to university education.

• Furthermore, in 1882, the Married Woman Property Act was enforced which declared the husband and wife as separate legal entities and granted the wife the right to sue the husband, and the right of decision over her own property.

Who was John Stuart Mill?

• He was the first MP to propose giving women a voting right in 1867.

• In his work “The Subjection of Women” (1869) he argued against the “legal subordination of one sex to the other”, based solely on physical strength. He further argued for the equality of rights.

What are the main arguments in A Room of One’s Own?

• Virginia Woolf claimed that women are enclosed in the domestic sphere by the patriarchal system, which assigns men to the public and political sphere and women to the domestic/ private sphere of life.

• She also argues against the male projected inferiority and weakness of women: women are mirrors in which men can pose and perform their heroic actions.

What was the aim of second wave feminism?

Its aim was to break down gender stereotypes, esp. that women belong to the household, and that the prime goal of women is to be beautiful and useful to men.

Who was Simone de Beauvoir and what did she say?

• Simone de Beauvoir was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist activist who had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory.

• In her famous work titled The Second Sex, she asserts that “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman”.

• She says that human potential must be judged in terms of both liberty and happiness.

• She distinguishes between the public/political sphere and the private/ domestic sphere and questions how women are enclosed or excluded from these spheres.

• She also argues that the woman is always situated as the “other” of man, whereas man has always an identity in himself.

• The woman is therefore defined by a lack, and becomes a screen of projection for male fantasies and fears.

Who was Kate Millet? What did she argue for?

• Kate Millet was an American feminist writer, educator, artist, and activist. In her most notable work, Sexual Politics, she argues that sex is a status category with political implications.

• Given this, patriarchy is the primary form of human oppression which creates the ideology of femininity and makes women complicit in their own oppression.

• She also employs a phallogocentric criticism with which she investigates male writers from a female point of view and the ways in which canonical male writers contribute to the degradation of women.

• She further focuses on the promotion of the role of the reader and argues that women have been educated to read bisexually, and identify with the male protagonist.

• She also uses gynocentrism, which aims to increase the number of female writers in the canon and focuses on how the female experience (voice) is represented in literature.

• She claims that the pen equals the penis in writing, implying that the authorship-Author-God are all men.

How did Wide Sargasso Sea change the trajectory of second wave feminism?

• Wide Sargasso Sea brought intersectionality into the feminist discourse, starting off 3rd wave feminism, which has taken into account the intersectionality of race, class, and gender in its analysis.

• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys is a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre , describing the background to Mr. Rochester's marriage from the point of view of his wife Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress.

• Antoinette Cosway is Rhys's version of Brontë's "madwoman in the attic". Antoinette's story is told from the time of her youth in Jamaica, to her unhappy marriage to an English gentleman, Mr. Rochester, who renames her Bertha, declares her mad, takes her to England, and isolates her from the rest of the world in his mansion.

Who was Judith Butler? What were her main arguments?

• Judith Butler is an American feminist philosopher and gender studies scholar whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of 4th wave feminism.

• Her main arguments are around the performativity of gender.

What is the performativity of gender? In what sense is gender performative?

• Gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all.

• Our gender comes into being through the repeated performance of different gender roles, which are constructed by society. 

• Yet, since it has to be reiterated, repeated again and again so that it can be sustained, it is, in fact, not fixed: there is always a possibility for change through difference, through acting out roles differently.

• Butler acknowledges social determinism, but also reclaims agency by introducing the concept of performativity

How does Butler question the naturalness of biological sex?

• The biological givens (penis, vagina, etc.) do exist but the moment they enter discourse or language or culture (as they always already do), they are immediately interpreted (they are always already seen as something – cf. Heidegger), and acquire a meaning (e.g. penis=power).

• This acquired meaning is always already determined by patriarchal society,that is: there is no pure sex, no pure biology.

• Furthermore, the idea that biological sex is something “essential” suggests that gender is an expression of sth. biologically given which  legitimates the heterosexual matrix.

• Butler argues that the belief that gender expresses biology is an ideology, a false belief system, which only serves to hide the fact that gender is always already an artificial construct and that biological sex is never without an always already pre-constructed cultural and political meaning.

What is écriture féminine?

• Cixous argues that for women to write themselves, they must (re)claim a female-centred sexuality, which she calls “écriture feminine” (female writing).

• Her ideas are very much like Kristeva’s semiotic – closer to the unconscious - rhythm, poetry, without fixed meanings, fluid, disruptive, maternal that  produces a rupture in the Symbolic order and becomes politically transformative, revolutionary.

• Her work is quite anti-essentialist (i.e. there is no such thing as essential womanhood): “But there is no invention, of other I’s, no poetry, no fiction without a certain homosexuality (interplay, thereof, of bisexuality) making in me a crytalized work of my ultrasubjectivities” (Sorties).

• There is a form of bisexuality in all forms of radical writing; thus, écriture feminine is also bisexual, as it disrupts the binary between male and female, between hetero- and homosexual, constructed by the patriarchal order.

Who is Cixous? What are her main arguments?

• Helen Cixous is a French writer, playwright and literary critic.

• She criticises Freud’s and Lacan’s “phallogocentric system” and introduces the term écriture feminine to feminist studies.

Who was Julia Kristeva? What were her main arguments?

• She is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and novelist.

• Her main argument is that the semiotic is always subversive of the symbolic.

What does Foucault mean by saying that "knowledge" of the body is "power" over it? 

• Argues that power and knowledge are mutually constitutive, meaning that they directly imply one another and cannot exist independently

• “Body” = political anatomy → identifies how the body can be trained, used, and subjected

• By "grasping" the internal processes of the body—such as its metabolism, illnesses, and reproductive capacities—power moved from a "right of seizure" (sovereignty) to the "calculated management of life"

What does it mean that "power and knowledge directly imply each other"?

• Knowledge is used to exercise power to the people

• There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, and conversely, no knowledge that does not simultaneously presuppose and constitute power relations

• Power produces knowledge → creates what qualifies as "truth" and what domains of knowledge are possible to explore

Can you explain in what sense discipline is related to knowledge? What is the "other" of discipline? What is it afraid of?

• Discipline is inextricably linked to knowledge through Foucault’s concept of power-knowledge: power does actively produces knowledge

• Discipline is a "physics" or "anatomy" of power that treats the body as an object to be analyzed, classified, and optimized, thereby creating a "political technology of the body”

• Disciplinary power organizes a "field of perception" where individuals are constantly observed and recorded

• ~ Panopticondiscipline functions by distributing individuals around a norm → measure, appraise, and hierarchize individuals within a domain of value and utility

• Leper and its associated rituals of exclusion as the historical "other" of disciplinary power

  • Model for dealing with the leper was one of "exile-enclosure"—a binary division between two sets of people that resulted in one group being rejected

  • The "plague" is the model that gave rise to disciplinary projects → treats the subject through meticulous "tactical partitioning," surveillance, and individualization

• Discipline is fundamentally afraid of disorder and unmanaged multiplicity

  • Fears the "mixture" of bodies, the "frenzy of passing notes," and the "undisciplined and irregular" movements of the crowd

  • Fears the "danger of contagion"

  • Fears that which is hidden

What is the difference between the handling of the plague and that of the leper? How do the two get intertwined in the 19th century? 

Leper

• model for dealing with the leper was one of "exile-enclosure"—a binary division between two sets of people that resulted in one group being rejected into a "mass among which it was useless to differentiate"

• treats the subject through rejection and "pure community"

Plague

• the "plague" is the model that gave rise to disciplinary projects → treats the subject through meticulous "tactical partitioning," surveillance, and individualization

19th century

• the two models began to overlap

• the technique of disciplinary partitioning was applied to the "lepers" of society—beggars, vagabonds, and the "disorderly"—to individualize them while still marking their exclusion

What is the relationship between binary oppositions and control/authority? (553-554) 

• Binary oppositions are foundational tools for exercising control and establishing authority by allowing power to categorize, brand, and distribute individuals within a social or political order

• Provide the "logic" through which authority decides who is included in the community and who must be excluded or subjected to specialized management

• Disciplinary power utilizes binary branding to identify and manage individuals

  • normal vs. abnormal → brand/ alter those deemed abnormal

  • mad vs. sane/ dangerous vs. harmless → allows for putting individuals into specific institutions, like asylums or prisons

• Creating a binary between what is "inside" and what is "outside" the law or political order → exclusion/inclusion and bare life (zoe)/political existence (bios)

  • authority = established through “inclusive exclusion”

  • refugee vs. citizen

• Hierarchization of populations

  • Sort and hierarchize populations, determining who has the right to act and who is an object of administration

  • active vs. passive citizens → influence on public matters vs. objects of state care (children, women, “insane”)

  • life vs. death → the ancient sovereign authority was based on the binary right to "take life or let live," modern biopower operates on the reversed binary of "making live and letting die"

Draw an image of Bentham's Panopticon. Explain, using Foucault's key-words, why it is such a perfect model for power relations. What are the necessary attributes of control/power? (enumerate as many as you can). 

The Panopticon

• The Panopticon is a circular building with a central tower surrounded by individual cells that are open to both the inner tower and the outer light

• The inmate is constantly visible to the central tower, but because of blinds and zig-zag openings, the supervisor is unverifiable → the inmate never knows exactly if or when they are being watched

• In the tower, one sees everything without ever being seen; in the cells, one is seen without ever seeing who is watching

• The Panopticon replaces the "compact, swarming, howling masses" of traditional confinement with a "collection of separated individualities" → prevents coalitions, revolts, or the "planning of new crimes"

Why is it a perfect model of power relations?

• Automatizes and individualizes power → the actual exercise of power becomes unnecessary

• Power functions as a discipline-mechanism → increases the utility of the subjects (making them more productive) while decreasing the cost and visibility of the power required to manage them

Necessary attributes of control and power

• Visibility: the subject must be placed in a field of constant, permanent visibility

• Partitioning: space must be divided into "segmental, immobile, frozen" units where each individual has a fixed place

• Individualization: power must break down the "crowd" to isolate the individual, making them a "submerged and observed solitude"

• Automaticity: the mechanism must allow power to function even in the absence of a specific supervisor; it is the arrangement of bodies, not a specific person, that creates the effect

• Unverifiability: the source of power must remain hidden or anonymous to ensure the subject behaves as if they are always under surveillance

• Classification (Knowledge): Power must record, differentiate, and compare subjects to "draw up classifications" regarding their aptitudes, characters, and "normal development"

• Permanent Registration: a "complex documentary organization" involving files, registers, and reports must maintain a permanent account of behavior

• Economy and Efficiency: power must strive for the "mildness-production-profit" principle, achieving maximum utility from the subject with the least possible economic and political expenditure

• Normalization: the system must use a norm to qualify, measure, and hierarchize individuals within a domain of value

• Functional Inversion: disciplinary mechanisms should not just neutralize danger but have a positive role in increasing skills, fire power, or productive output

What does Foucault mean by "fictitious relation"? 

• In relation with Bentham’s Panopticon

• Describes a power dynamic where a subject behaves as though they are under constant surveillance, even when no one is actually watching them → the subject is monitoring their own behavior & assumes responsibility for the constraints of power

• “Fictious” = the actual presence of a supervisor in the central tower is unverifiable to the inmate; they can never be certain if they are being looked at or not at any given moment

• Its significance: its ability to produce "real subjection" through purely mechanical and architectural means

• Power functions automatically & independent of the person exercising it

• Subjection born from mental fiction → it is unnecessary to use physical force to ensure good behavior

What is the difference between the plague stricken town and the Panopticon?

• The plague-stricken town represents an exceptional "discipline-blockade," a rigid and violent model where power immobilises and partitions individuals to arrest the spread of death and separate the pure from the impure.

• In contrast, the Panopticon is a generalizable "discipline-mechanism" designed not merely to block evil in a crisis, but to positively improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, and more effective at increasing the productive utility of society.

• While the plague model relies on "absolute violence" and negative functions to break communication and suspend time, the panoptic schema transforms this into a subtle, permanent network of surveillance that amplifies social forces such as the economy and education.