Contemporary Literature Final Exam

Formalism

Pays attention to the form and structure of works of literature. It used to be called the "new criticism." Just one school of criticism of literature. Formalists believe that the form is inseparable from the content..

Verbal Icon

The idea that a work is an autonomous artifact that exists outside of its creator. (Ex: Keats doesn't ask the urn who made it- "sylvan historian")

Heresy of Paraphrase

Because form and content are considered one by formalists, to paraphrase is to get rid of content as well. You can't understand a piece of writing through solely paraphrasing because the form is so important. Don't get rid of it!

Close Reading

A method of minute attention that looks at the work itself. It pays close attention to structural elements (tones, symbols, points of view, rhythm, etc) It investigates how these structural elements shape the poem and the interpretation. Formalists believe that the form is inseparable from the content. Form and content are rightly considered one.

The Intentional Fallacy

the fallacy of basing an assessment of a work on the author's intention rather than on one's response to the work.

Affective Fallacy

the supposed error of judging or evaluating a text on the basis of its emotional effects on a reader

ideal reader

Has received formal training in literature theory and will be able to get to the heart of the work by selecting the most appropriate and useful method to criticize the work. A poem should be a verbal icon.

Defamiliarization

the literary device whereby language is used in such a way that ordinary and familiar objects are made to look different

Eros or Libido

the drive of life, love, creativity, and sexuality, self-satisfaction, and species preservation

Displacement

When one instinct can borrow from another, Wanting to express x/y/z but being unable to, so releasing your desires elsewhere, I.e., eating when stressed

Erotogenic zones

areas in the body that garner an erotic response/arousal because it has heightened sensitivity. (Ex: genitals, small of back, neck)

Oedipal Crisis

The Oedipal complex occurs during the Phallic stage of development (ages 3-6) in which the source of libido (life force) is concentrated in the erogenous zones of the child's body (Freud, 1905). During this stage, children experience an unconscious feeling of desire for their opposite-sex parent and jealousy and envy toward their same-sex parent. The Oedipus complex is successfully resolved when the boy begins to identify with his father as an indirect way to have the mother.

Dream Work

Posited by Freud. The unconscious ciphering that transforms the latent content into the manifest content. Ego is not paralyzed in sleep but is distorted in unconscious material as id wells up. Sleeping ego is focused on the wish to contain sleep. Ego symbolically allows id's desire. The type of displacement in dreams = symbolism. In dreams, the latent content is what the id really wants

Latent Content

The hidden meaning of fantasy or dream. What the ID desires.

Manifest Content

The actual images, thoughts, and content contained within the dream that the Ego remembers in the morning.

Preconscious

in Freud's theory, the level of consciousness in which thoughts and feelings are not conscious but are readily retrievable to consciousness. Non threatening stuff that you have temporarily forgotten. When reminded can easily be brought up.

Unconscious

according to Freud, memories that are locked away because they are disruptive or forbidden or painful to remember

Superego

the part of personality that, according to Freud, represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgment (the conscience) and for future aspirations. By 5, part of the outside world has been incorporated into the psyche. Acts as the parent toward our brain, punishing and rewarding. Contains expectations. Culture imbedded here

Conscience

torments us; generates when you violate a norm and do something society deems wrong.

Id

a reservoir of unconscious psychic energy that, according to Freud, strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives. The id operates on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification.

The talking cure

The patient is made to "confess" "Maybe we can reach people using language" The patient is made to offer up material that might seem to be unimportant to the patient but the analyst gathers material for the cure from interpreting dreams, catching slips of the tongue, etc. Thus, the patient presents a wealth of material that is under full control of the conscious. The analyst must then interpret the patient in the same way that literary analysts do. In the successful outcome, the ego can accept the demands it used to repress

neurosis

when the Ego spends too much time being internal and doesn't act in the world as it "needs" to. Argument for why people have neuroses or might be mentally unwell. Freud also argues that we're all neurotic a little, but writers/artists are especially, as it contributes to the need for artistic expression of that clash and serve as symbolic satisfactions for the Id.

Psychosis

this is when the internal clash becomes so bad that the Ego turns entirely inward.

Ego Ideal

the part of the superego that consists of standards of what one would like to be. Representative of the cultural past.

Ego

The ego represents and enforces the reality-principle, lives in the moment, and is concerned with personal safety. It integrates the inner and outer worlds.

Self-knowledge

Freudian goal for psychoanalysts to give clients back control over the Ego.

The Interpretation of Dreams

Book by Sigmund Freud about the theory of dreams and methods to interpret them.

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Interpretation driven by the idea that things are not what they appear to be. Looking through the many layers for the right answer. Psychoanalysis is a hermeneutic of suspicion.

The Canon

understood "list" of the most influential, significant literature works, specifically the Western Canon. Very old-fashioned. Very white and very man.

The Anxiety of Influence

Harold Bloom's somewhat startling/darker/more aggressive theory for how writers become part of the Canon. All poets are belated and feel as if they live in the shadow of their predecessor. Thus, a new writer acts like an Oedipal son, usurping the fathers (older poets) before them.

Intertextuality

multiple works being connected to each other, through inspiration or otherwise, going into the idea that very poem is a misinterpretation of another poem.

misprision

The strong young writer must willfully misread the precursor. To revise the precursor's project by miswriting it purposely (misprision)

Archetypes

Images in the collective unconscious. Predispositions to things that cause us to respond to certain stimuli in certain ways. Great works of literature employ archetypes

Carl Jung (1875-1961)

Freud's favorite pupil but also heretic, agreed with him on many aspects of psychoanalysis but had one exception.

Jung's Exception

the idea that we have a personal consciousness and unconscious, but there is also a collective unconscious.

collective unconscious

Carl Jung's concept of a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traced from our species' history that is embedded alongside the personal unconscious.

Northrop Frye

Tries to link/mix formalism with psychoanalysis to create archetypal criticism by showing literary genres arise from the collective unconscious. He sees 4 major genres: Romance, Comedy, Tragedy, Satire/Irony. Why only 4? Because there are 4 seasons. Literature is messy. Frye gives it order, so it is immediately attractive. But it is only a system of organization. It does not tell you what to do with it. The orderliness is attractive but not applicable to other cultures around the world.

Jacques Lacan

Argues that our relationship with language shapes our unconscious minds and our conscious minds

The Prison-House of Language

Language is random. Lacan says that the signifier and the signified are no longer chained in our world. Language is a barrier to the world. We will never be able to see the world without the influence of language.

Real Presence

what we had as kids when we assumed language and what they signified were the same, instead of things being more metaphorical.

The Imaginary Order

the process of gaining language. 1. Oceanic state - infant's needs are met, can't distinguish world from self. 2. Mirror stage - child looks into mirror and understands own body as separate from the world, learns name but also the illusion of internal consistency. Everything begins becoming connected with the golden chain.

Symbolic Order

a continuation of the process when symbols become involved through development. 3. The "Oedipal Crisis"/The Law of the Father. 4. Adult state of deferred desire.

The Phallas/Law of the Father

Child is not the parent, they are a part of the family. Parents are stronger and caregivers. Identity based on differences. Boys lose touch more completely with the imaginary order than girls do because girls can't directly assume the order of their father's powerDesire- Language is what hollows being into desire

Signified

the physical thing or concept that is described by the signifier.

Signifier

word on a page that describes something, such as "cat" for the physical animal.

The Sign

the signifier and the signified together.

Prophetic Marxism

Script for history. Inevitable logic that would eventually lead to the establishment of a communist state world wide. Nobody puts faith in this anymore

The Golden Chain

the concept of the "chain" that connects the word and the physical thing; the idea of it being a divine, innate process even though signifiers only really have any use due to the distinction of language.

Analytic Marxism

Past and present societies and their cultural productions (like literature) It studies them by paying attention to wealth/power/ prestige in a culture MONEY TALKS. POWER TALKS. PRESTIGE TALKS

The subject

unconscious consumers of these ideologies forced upon them by their society; internalized.

Marxism

A theory of society Material philosophy Life is don't determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life "Always historicize" Slowly overtime we gave away our pleasures for safety

Alienation

In an industrial society the fruits of the worker's toil is alienated from the toil itself"Our work is the largest component of the meaning of our lives...Alienation is a spiritual unrooting and disconnectedness."

Ideology

Is what convinces us to ascent to our own domination and ascent to the general unfairness of the system In stable regimes ideology rather than force controls workersCheaper to put phrases in people's head than use force. Makes us do things against our interest but we believe it is our own idea. Ideology links literature to the primary economic focus

Complicity and Resistance Continuum

how literature can be either complicit to the ideologies surrounding it at the time or resisting.

Superstructure/base

Superstructure is cultural productions and base is labor, economics, industry. Superstructure of any culture owes itself to the base. Sometimes superstructure nudges the base. Mostly, culture listens to culture.

Ideological state apparatus

Agencies of the state which serve to spread dominant ideology and justify the power of the dominant social class. Cheaper to put ideas in people's heads than police on every corner. Each strata of society comes up with multiple narratives about why the world works the way it does

Interpellation or Hailing

Offers people a particular identity which they accept as natural. In this way, the dominant class exerts a power over individuals

Hegemony

From Marxism. When a narrative about why our society is the way it is becomes widely accepted. If a story becomes hegemonic it means it has carved a niche in most people's heads that becomes difficult to dislodge

Reader Response Theory

acknowledging the significance of readers and their varying responses to the text in literary analysis.

Cultural Poetics/The "New Historicism"

both complicit and resistant of ideology, believes every ideology has its weak spots.

Organic form

"You know a Classic when you see it" because it has organic form. Like the body, we have everything we need in it and if you took anything away, it wouldn't work. Art should be the same where everything contributes and pulls its weight without anything superfluous..For the Marxists organic form is always an illusion. It's an appearance of balance but will always have faults

Wolfgang Iser

Rejects the formalist conception of a "verbal icon," saying it is more of a temporal experience. He argues reading literature is more like listening to an orchestra than looking at a picture. This means reading is not smoothly linear

Deconstruction

literary theory practice (Derrida) that deconstructs these signifiers as products of systems of meanings and as a part of binary oppositions with both a dominant and supplement (man/woman or mind/body)

Textual "Gaps"

when a storyline or plot, a setting, characterization, or a proper point of view is missing or underdeveloped. Gives the reader something to do and something to imagine. Too few textual gaps doesn't involve readers enough

Concretization

When the reader fills in the textual gaps themselves. If you have read it you have concretized it. Yes, interpretations will vary but stop short of "anything will go". Readers can concretize it as long as the text is still internally consistent with itself

Horizon of Expectations

Pre understanding of texts, we all come to a text with preconceptionsA great text will expand our horizon of expectations "What at first seems like an affirmation of our conceptions ends up challenging them"Some novels, "airport novels" don't challenge anything → this is mere "culinary" artIf our horizon of expectations is expanded to fit a text, once it has expanded, has this text not just turned into a "culinary" piece of literature

Mere "Culinary" Works

Just entertainment, "Airport novels," novels that don't challenge or expand our horizon of expectations

The Narrative Transaction

Real Author: Flesh and blood, had a checking accountImplied Author: Who we imagine when we read, sometimes can be far more idealizedNarrator: Who is telling the story/speaking, can be different than the implied author, doesn't have to beNarratee: The person within the text listening to the story (i.e. Walton or Victor)Implied Reader: Who the author thinks they are writing toReal Reader: Me (person who is actually reading the text)

Interpretive Communities

groups who interpret texts similarly because they share similar social positions and experiences. they keep us in check with interpretations of a text, policing each other. This is because interpretation is always a structure of constraints. If it's too chaotic, a string of argument won't stand.

Différence

a mix of the French "to differ" and "to defer." Idea that meanings of language is made through differences, not identities, so we can never feel secure in the meaning of our language because it is part of a contingent society.

Transcendental Signifiers

a word in Western systems of thought that certain concepts still have the golden chain, supposedly "free" from the concept of différence. (Ex: God, Self, Reason, Democracy)

"Metaphysical" Systems of Thought

the systems that still search for the supposed "eternal" transcendental signifiers.

Logocentrism

the longing to define a word at its center, a want for order and final authority, for certainty and security.

Unbreakable Lens vs. Breakable Wall

our current way of living the world can be seen as a world that cuts us off from the original Shakespeare. In that belief, there is a determinate meaning available from Shakespeare that can only be achieved by thinking in Shakespeare's time, but the truth is that, inevitably, every era will look at Shakespeare through their own concerns, so instead of seeing it as a wall, cultures make of Shakespeare what they need to make with him through their own unbreakable lens.

A Text Aporia

a weak point in a doomed effort to keep transcendental signifiers transcendental.

Freeplay

how every word contains a trace of every other word

The Rustle of Language

works speaking to each other like the rustle of leaves on trees, a way of pleasurably interacting with texts intertextually.

Le Plaisir Du Texte

the pleasure of text, reading for the sake of enjoyment and experience literature as something that lives and interacts with other work.

Literature vs Writing

literature is more about the individual author where names and separation from other texts matters, whereas if we call it writing, we see the author more as a scriptor and part of a larger, anonymous and ongoing creation process.

Author vs. Scriptor

spontaneous, every text is written here and now vs Born from a pure expression of inscription versus an act of artistic expression

Determinate meaning

one, finite meaning. If we could know 100% how Joyce intended to end The Dead it would be a determinate meaning

Discourse

A 'discourse' is defined by Foucault as any group of statements which belongs to a single system of formation.

Discursive

Discursive relations (i.e. relations between discursive statements) are not internal to a discursive formation. Instead, they explain its limits. Discursive formation identifies and describes written and spoken statements with semantic relations that produce discourses.

Masculinist

the term that describes how a character who acts according to the dictates of patriarchy

Sex-Gender System

How the raw material of biological sexual differences are turned into a system that sorts people into two gender categories. The difference between sex and gender- sex is the product of your biology and gender is the product of your culture (what someone has put between your ears).

Patriarchy

a set of systems in a culture that elevate males for the sake of subjugating females.

Madonna v. Wh0re (Angel in the House v. Madwoman in the Attic)

in Victorian literature usually the man has to choose between them and he finds the Wh0re alluring but almost always ends up the Madonna in the end. The Madwoman has power, the Angel does not. Men often see women as either saintly Madonnas or debased prostitutes

Feminine

the strife of women under patriarchy is carefully coded. Charlotte Brontë, any of the Brontës, Austen.

Female

female ways of knowing the world and talking about the world are openly articulated and celebrated, as well as contrasted with male ways of talking about the world. Virginia Woolf.

Feminist

women writers are explicitly dramatizing the plight of women by men, a protest against it is quite visible in plot, and their figures would be Kate Shelby or Charlotte Perkins Gilman ("The Yellow Wallpaper"). Forthright.

Personal Criticism

Personal criticism links the issues found in literature to real life experiences. Found to be more female because it is more emotional.Binary oppositions dictate that women are emotional and men are rational. To get a really rational text one must squeeze all emotions out. Academic prose are masculine because everyone learns you are not supposed to talk about your personal experiences.

The Traffic of Women

Gayle Rubin. if it is women who are being exchanged, it is the men exchanging her to another man, that are link. A distinction between gift and givers: the women are made gifts and the men, givers. Women are in no position to experience the benefit of their own circulation. It's still part of the marriage ceremony that the father gives away the bride to the husband.

Imasculation

making a woman act like a man. Women writers may adopt a male pen name.

Emasculation

making a man act like a woman.

The Panopticon

disciplinary concept brought to life in the form of a central observation tower placed within a circle of prison cells

Carceral society

the spreading of techniques for regulating human behavior and surveillance processes typical of modern prisons throughout society as a whole. More and more aspects of life are becoming subject to the kind of disciplinary power that we usually associate with the panopticon and prison

Authenticity

accurate recuperation of pre-colonial traditions and culture. Can be applied to literature and storytelling, though can be very difficult. Has to do, in part, with language choice in postcolonial literature— does the authenticity of writing in a native tongue outweigh the subversiveness and sometimes the convenience of writing in the language of the colonizer?

Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

Believes that no author has the power to constrain. Once written it is out of the author's control

Power/knowledge

You never get power without knowledge or knowledge without power. They "directly imply one another". As knowledge grows through discourse so do the avenues of power. Literature helps distribute knowledge/power

Gender as performance

Gender is a corporeal project/study. Gender is acted just as a performance. Butler says that gender is "an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts"