LITERARY INVESTIGATIONS FINAL EXAM

St. Thomas Aquinas & Dante: 4 Senses of Scripture

1. Literal: a close interpretation of the surface text

2. Allegroical: bridges connect between Old and New Testament

3. Moral: ethical meaning, spiritual development

4. Anagogical: the light of the end of the world & Catholic "four last things"

Immanuel Kant: CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT

-How we can define beauty

MAJOR moves:

- constructs categories of the Agreeable, the Good, & the Beautiful

the AGREEABLE

-gratifies, delight comes form satisfaction & pleasurable sensations

the GOOD

-beneficial to some end, stems form having an interest/investment not necessarily relying on sensations, but related to concepts

DON'T HAVE TO UNDERSTAND PURPOSE

the BEAUTIFUL

-must be judged contemplatively & indifferently. NOT a cognitive judgement. the beautiful PLEASURES

-ALL other humans should find this beautiful like i do, we demand the agreement of others

Kant: MAIN IDEA

Subjective Universality —> aesthetic judgments claim to be universally valid to all rational beings.

- when someone judges something to be beautiful, others should also be able to appreciate its beauty

NEW CRITICS

Cleanth Brooks

Wimsatt & Beardsley

CLEANTH BROOKS: "Letter to the Teacher" from Understanding Poetry

-idea of close reading —> respect for the stubbornness of texts

- not reading to find a theme or meaning

READING FOR TENSIONS & PARADOXES

Wimsatt & Beardsley: "the Intentional Fallacy"

(look at papers)

3 Types of Evidence for the Meaning of a Poem

1. Internal (power itself contains them)

2. External (private conversation w the author)

3. Intermediate (interpretations we can draw from what the author has said or what we know)

POST-STRUCTURALISTS

-Roland Barthes

-Jacques Derrida

ROLAND BARTHES: "The Death of the Author"

- Post-Structuralism

- Metanarratives: building interpretative system for problem solving, making sense of the world

- We should be skeptical

NEW CRITICISM vs STRUCTURALISTS

- New Criticism based on educational teaching methods

- Structuralists mimic European combativeness

- Structuralists do NOT like categories and labels

JACQUES DERRIDA: "of Grammatology"

- Suspicion of LANGUAGE to convey unproblematic truth

- Rejects Logocentricism and Binary Thinking

Logocentricism

Connected to the western sense that meaning is contained in logic, reason, word, message, & Christianity gives it an added meaning

- Christ as the Divine word/logic

BELIEF THAT BINARIES ARE STABLE AND REAL CATEGORIES

(ex: God/Word)

What does Derrida warn about?

- Thinkers are seduced by the idea of a single reality that governs the world

- language is too slippery

- we CANNOT group thing into oppositional binary systems

Are Binaries stable?

No, they are not fundamentally separated

Derrida says when we set up opposites it ignores the way they interact with each other

Signifer

- arbitrary structure that potins to a concrete reality (ex: Tree)

Signified

concept the signifier points to (ex: concept of a tree)

Why is Derrida worried?

Worried that we will take the categories developed by language and think they are stable and real

- EVERYTHING that produces meaning is language

What happens when writing proliferates as speech?

it becomes more unstable, DISRUPTING THE BINARY

Deconstruction

the process of identifying these unstable binary categories and showing the internal contradictions, messiness lurking behind the seemingly stable structures

DECONSTRUCTION IS PLAYFUL

PSYCHOANALYSIS IN LITERATURE

- Sigmund Freud

- Philip Rieff

- Jacques Lacan

SIGMUND FREUD

we think we understand ourselves, but it is just stories we tell ourselves that are not true

- driven by unconscious drives deeply repressed —> Will SLIP OUT and make themselves known

Id

desires

Superego

civilized force that polices

Ego

product of negotiation between conscious drives and rational thought

DRAWBACK TO FREUD

if you approach literature by thinking there is always hidden meaning it will evoke a sense of paranoia

The unconscious

No direct access, repressed, unconscious desires become "manifest" in dreams, physical tics, joke, mistakes, errors

Ego, Id, super-ego

All influenced by the unconscious, but the Id is the only one completely "hidden" in the unconscious

What does civilization do to our unconscious?

Civilization (aided by superego) puts pressure on us to renounce, repress instincts/drives which we otherwise really want to engage in

PHILIP RIEFF: "A Guide to Freud's Interpretive Style"

- The dream is NOT easily interpreted, meaning is not obvious

- Nothing is random, everything means something

- In the dream & literature we are not dealing with the thing itself, but w the emotion/idea directly

REMEMBER —> the dream is trying to trick you

LACANIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS

- Jacques Lacan: become unofficial "heir" to Freud & takes psychoanalysis deeper into linguistic study/rhetoric

- TR JOHNSON

TR JOHNSON: "The Other Side of Pedagogy"

- Argues that Lacan calls our attention to the foundational social structure of shame/honor & psychoanalysis's attempt to produce a sense of self-mastery

- a sense of oneself as having honor and authority as a MAKER OF MEANING

MARXISM & LITERATURE

- Karl Marx & Friederich Engels

- Raymond Williams

Karl Marx & Friederich Engels: "The German Ideology"

material goods & factors drive what we do, think, and believe MOTIVATED BY MONEY

- Material culture/materialism = rejects that we can know things about the nonempirical world/psychical reality we live in

MARXIST READING OF LITERATURE

1. Be clear about how you are defining and identifying what counts as the ruling class ideology (not relying on standard American liberal/conservative binaries)

2. Be attentive to power dynamics in the work of the literature itself (the ruling class has granted access to literature that you are seeing)

3. Not saying there can never be revolutionary literature (Marxists would be skeptical when this revolutionary literature receives approval)

RAYMOND WILLIAMS: "The Country & the City"

-How we can read literature through a Marxist lens

- each cultural moment contains dominant, emergent, and residual elements

Williams Key Insights

- Marxist theory helps literary study by pressuring us to be attentive to material historical particularism and not just make broad gestures to what people thought in the 1700s, as if history is stable/easily discernible

- Cycle of authentic culture dying out —> country & city = modernity, technology, and progress CANNOT ASSUME STABILITY

- IDEALIZATION based on a temporary situation and deep desire for stability to evade bitter conditions of time

NEW HISTORICS - Constraint & Mobility

-Stephen Greenblatt

STEPHEN GREENBLATT: "Culture"

- power moves through political, economic, and cultural systems in complex ways, diffused and dispersed rather than only emerging from one space

- avoids universal claims or big-picture claims

New Historicism

- paying attention to a cultural story question and applying it back into literatyre

- looking at things that bridge the literature with the cultural questions that circulate within the literature

Core Ideas from Greenblatt

- Culture as an interplay between constraint and mobility (renegotiating borders)

- Western literature is a massive stem of praise and blame

- culture both REGULATES and ALLOWS for movement

- Rejection of "strict" Marxism (power does not work in the stable way you think it does)

Race, Identity, & Literature

-Toni Morrison

-Alice Dunbar Nelson

TONI MORRISON: "Playing in the Dark "

- Brings race into conversation to bring new interpretations out of a text (does not want to throw it all away and kick them out of the canon)

- trying to open doors, but not doing it with subversion

-Claim: there is a ton of Africanist influence on the American classics (trying to represent "otherness")

Morrison's Offering to Future Methods

(1) as a way for white authors to think about their own identities

(2) a way to aesthetically depict difference/exoticism

(3) a way to help define whiteness (by contrast and juxtaposition)

(4) a way to use the Africanist figure as a "safe surrogate" for the white author to work through their own often frightening existential/philosophical questions

ALICE DUNBAR-NELSON: "A Carnival Jangle" and "Sister Josepha"

Concern for the limitations of certain forms of literary criticism as robbing literature of this idea and dismissing the difficult imaginative work of the author as artist (Anticipation of Post-Critique)

GENDER AND QUERRY THEORY

- Judith Butler

- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick