Literary Theory - Week 9 Flashcards

Who are of imagination all compact?

According to Theseus, those of imagination are like the lunatic, the lover, and the poet.

What is the dialectical character of cultural representations, according to Montrose?

The fantasies by which A Midsummer Night's Dream has been shaped are also those to which it gives shape.

According to Harold Brooks, what is the play's central theme?

Love aspiring to and consummated in marriage, or to a harmonious partnership within it.

According to Gayle Rubin, what is a sex/gender system?

A socio-historical construction of sexual identity, difference, and relationship.

Whether or not Queen Elizabeth was physically present at the first performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream, what was a condition of the play's imaginative possibility?

Her pervasive cultural presence was a condition of the play's imaginative possibility.

Who is Simon Forman?

A professional astrologer and physician, amateur alchemist, and avid playgoer who dreamt he was with the Queen, and that she was a little elderly woman in a coarse white petticoat all unready.

What effort was made concerning the suppressed Marian cult?

A concerted effort was in fact made to appropriate the symbolism and the affective power of the suppressed Marian cult in order to foster an Elizabethan cult.

Who is Andre Hurault, Sieur de Maisse?

Ambassador extraordinary of the French King Henri IV who described the English Queen in his journal.

According to a foreign visitor, what signified Elizabeth's status as a maiden?

Her bosom was uncovered, as all the English ladies have it till they marry.

In Forman's wordplay, what coexists?

The subject's desire for employment coexists with his desire for mastery.

With one vital exception, all forms of public and domestic authority in what country and period?

Elizabethan England was vested in men: in fathers, husbands, masters, teachers, magistrates, lords.

Titania treats Bottom as if he were both what?

Her child and her lover.

What is ubiquitous in Elizabethan texts?

Descriptions of the Amazons.

Who is Spenser's Artegall?

Hero of the Legend of Justice, becomes enslaved to Radigund.

What does this cultural fantasy assimilate?

Amazonian myth, witchcraft, and cannibalism into an anti-culture which precisely inverts European norms of political authority, sexual license, marriage practices, and inheritance rules.

What are Theseus' characteristically Protestant notions about the virtue of virginity?

Maidenhood is a phase in the life-cycle of a woman who is destined for married chastity and motherhood.

What did the Amazons reject?

They rejected marriages with men and alliances with patriarchal societies.

Where does Shakespeare's play naturalizes Amazonomachy?

In the vicissitudes of courtship.

According to the play, what dissolves the bonds of sisterhood at the same time that they forge the bonds of brotherhood?

Marital couplings dissolve the bonds of sisterhood at the same time that they forge the bonds of brotherhood.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, as in other Shakespearean comedies, what is the drive toward a festive conclusion?

To fabricate a temporary accommodation between law and libido.

What does A Midsummer Night's Dream dramatize a set of claims for?

Claims for a spiritual kinship among men that is unmediated by women; for the procreative powers of men; and for the autogeny of men.

According to traditional embryological theories, such as The Problemes of Aristotle, what are paternity and maternity?

Paternity is procreative, the formal and/or efficient cause of generation; maternity is nurturant, the material cause of generation.

What does Oberon's epithalamium represent procreation as?

The union of man and woman, and marriage as a relationship of mutual affection.

As personified in Shakespeare's fairies, what do the divinely ordained imperatives of Nature do?

Personifications of forces in Nature at once sanctions and subverts the doctrine of domestic hierarchy.

Amazonian mythology seems symbolically to embody and to control a collective anxiety about the power of the female to not only what?

Dominated or rejected the male but to create and destroy him.

Having destroyed Radigund and liberated Artegall from his effeminate thraldome, what does Britomart do?

Reforms what is left of Amazon society.

What do women's bodies do?

Bodies-and, in particular, the Queen's two bodies-provide a cognitive map for Elizabethan culture, a veritable matrix for the Elizabethan forms of desire.

What did the Anomalous Queen Elizabeth do?

By the skillful deployment of images that were at once awesome and familiar, this perplexing creature tried to mollify her male subjects while enhancing her authority over them.

What mediates the transitions between maidenhood and wifehood, daughterhood and motherhood?

These transitions are mediated by the wedding rite and the act of defloration.

In royal pageantry, what does the Queen do?

Queen Elizabeth is always the cynosure; her virginity is the source of magical potency.

What is Shakespeare's text?

A cultural production in which the processes of cultural production are themselves represented.

New Historicism

Literary text as a work deeply embedded within historical, cultural, and social contexts.

Old Historicism

History as an objective background that influences literature.

New Historicism's View of History

History as a constructed narrative where literature and history co-construct each other.

Old Historicism's View of Texts

Texts as reflections of history.

New Historicism's View of Texts

Literary and non-literary texts as interconnected discourses.

Old Historicism's Approach to Power

Taking dominant ideologies at face value.

New Historicism's Approach to Power

Highlighting how power shapes historical and literary narratives while focusing on suppressed voices.

E.M.W. Tillyard

The Elizabethan World Picture (1943). Literary reflection: Writers like Shakespeare uncritically echoed the same worldview. Monolithic view of history: The book presupposes all Elizabethans shared this vision.

New Historicism's Response to Old Historicism

Question how power manufactured the “world picture,” highlight contradictions, and analyze marginalized voices.

New Historicism Analysis

Analyze literary works within their specific historical, social, and political contexts and treat history as a dynamic text subject to interpretation.

Postmodern

Skepticism toward historical objectivity.

Foucault

Literary texts are intertwined with historical power dynamics.

New Historicist Approaches to Literature

Juxtapose literary and non-literary texts and defamiliarize the canonical literary text.

New Historicist Approaches to Literature Focus

Focus on issues of state power, patriarchal structures, the process of colonisation.

Post-Structuralist Outlook

Every facet of reality is textualized, and social structures are determined by dominant discursive practices.

New Historicism - A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The play illuminates ambivalent attitudes of Englishmen towards Elizabeth I, exposing the contemporary male anxiety towards the female leader of a patriarchal country.

Titania

Powerful, regal; lustful, bestial, dismissive of male authority.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1596)

Record of Simon Forman’s dream (1597). Shakespeare’s representations of Titania (a queen) and Bottom (a commoner).

Insights of New Historicism

Interconnecting literature and history, demonstrating the importance of contextual analysis, and allowing diverse and nuanced readings of texts.

Critiques of New Historicism

Underestimating the universal qualities of texts, too much emphasis on power, and a fragmented approach to history.