ENG280 - Critical Approaches to Literature FINAL

Victor Shklovsky

“Art as Technique”

Roland Barthes

“The Reality Effect”

Paul de Man

“Semiology and Rhetoric”

William Shakespeare

Hamlet 1.2

Jonathan Culler

from On Deconstruction

Michel Foucault

from “Truth and Power”

Eve Sedgwick

Between Men, chapter 1

Edward Said

from Culture and Imperialism

Karl Marx

from The German Ideology, from Capital “The Fetishism of Commodities”

Frederic Jameson

“Postmodernism and Consumer Society”

Jacques Rancière

Aisthesis, Preface and Chapter 1

“Thus a work may be (1) intended as prosaic and accepted as poetic, or (2) intended as poetic and accepted as prosaic. This suggests that the artistry attributed to a given work results from the way we perceive it. By ‘works of art,’ in the narrow sense, we mean works created by special techniques designed to make the works as obviously artistic as possible.”

Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”

“If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic”

Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”

“By this ‘algebraic’ method of thought we apprehend objects only as shapes with imprecise extensions; we do not see them in their entirety but rather recognize them by their main characteristics. We see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack. We know what it is by its configuration, but we see only its silhouette.”

Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”

“And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. ‘If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been”

Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”

“Art removes objects from the automatism of perception in several ways.”

Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”

“And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feels things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the progress of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”

Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”

“When Flaubert, describing the room occupied by Mme Aubain, Felicite’s employer, tells us that ‘an old piano supported, under a barometer, a pyramidal heap of boxes and cartons’ (‘A Simple Heart,’ from Three Tales)”

Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect”

“These authors (among many others) are producing notations which structural analysis, concerned with identifying and systematizing the major articulations of narrative, usually and systematizing the major articulations of narrative, usually and heretofore has left out, either because its inventory omits all details that are ‘superfluous’ (in relation to structure) or because these same details are treated as ‘filling’ (catalyses), assigned an indirect functional value insofar as, cumulatively, they constitute some index of character or atmosphere and so can ultimately be recuperated by structure.”

Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect”

“Is everything in narrative significant, and if not, if insignificant stretches subsist in the narrative syntagm, what is ultimately, so to speak, the significance of this insignificance?”

Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect”

“Last, we see that the whole description is constructed so as to connect Rouen to a painting: it is a painted scene which the language takes up (‘Thus, seen from above, the whole landscape had the motionless look of a painting’”

Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect”

“The irreducible residues of functional analysis have this in common: they denote wha is ordinarily called ‘concrete reality’ (insignificant gestures, transitory attitudes, insignificant objects, redundant words). The pure and simple ‘representation’ of the ‘real,’ the naked relation of ‘what is’ (or has been) thus appears as a resistance to meaning; this resistance confirms the great mythic opposition of the true-to-life (the lifelike) and the intelligible.”

Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect”

“Semiotically, the “concrete detail” is constituted by the direct collusion of a referent (thing) and a signifier (word/sound-image); the signified is expelled from the sign, and with it, of course, the possibility of developing a form of the signified, i.e., narrative structure itself.”

Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect”

“This is what we might call the referential illusion. The truth of this illusion is this: elimnated from the realist speech-act as a signified of denotation, the ‘real’ returns to it as a signified of connotation; for just when these details are reputed to denote the real directly, all that they do—without saying so—is signify it.”

Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect”

“Flaubert’s barometer, Michelet’s little door finally say nothing but this: we are the real; it is the category of ‘the rea;’ (and not its contingent contents) which is then signified; in other words, the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, becomes the very signifier of realism: the reality effect is produced, the basis of that unavowed versimilitude which forms the aesthetic of all the standard works of modernity.”

Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect”

“To judge from various recent publications, the spirit of the times is not blowing in the direction of formalist and intrinsic criticism. We may no longer be hearing too much about relevance but we keep hearing a great deal about reference, about the nonverbal “outside” to which kanguage refers, by which it is conditioned and upon which it acts.”

Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric”

“The attraction of reconciliation is the elective breeding-ground of false models and metaphors; it accounts for the metaphorical model of literature as a kind of box that separates an inside from an outside, and the reader or critic as the person who open the lid in order to release in the open what was secreted but inaccessible inside.”

Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric”

“It matters little whether we call the inside of the box the content or the form, the outside the meaning or the appearance. The recurrent debate opposing intrinsic to extrinsic criticism stands under the aegis of an inside/outside metaphor that is never being seriously questioned.”

Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric”

“In France, a semiology of literature comes about as the outcome of the long-deferred but all the more explosive encounter of the nimble French literary mind with the category of form. Semiology, as opposed to semantics, is the science or study of signs as signifiers; it does not ask what words mean but how they mean.”

Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric”

“One of the most striking characteristics of literary semiology as it is practiced today, in France and elsewhere, is the use of grammatical (especially syntactical) structures conjointly with rhetorical structures, without apparent awareness of a possible discrepancy between them.”

Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric”

“the study of tropes and of figures (which is how the term rhetoric is used here, and not in the derived sense of comment or of eloquence or persuasion) becomes a mere extension of grammatical models, a particular subset of syntactical relations.”

Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric”

“These remarks should indicate at least the existence and the difficulty of the question, a difficulty which puts its concise theoretical exposition beyond my powers. I must retreat therefore into a pragmatic discourse and try to illustrate the tension between grammar and rhetoric in a few specific textual examples.”

Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric”

“asked by his wife whether he wants to have his bowling shoes laced over or laced under, Archie Bunker answers with a question: ‘What’s the difference?’ Being a reader of sublime simplicity, his wife replies by patiently explaining the difference between lacing over and lacing under, whatever this may be, but provokes only ire. ‘What’s the difference’ did not ask for difference but means instead ‘I don’t give a damn what the difference is.’”

Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric”

“The same grammatical pattern engenders two meanings that are mutually exclusive: the literal meaning asks for the concept (difference) whose existence is denied by the figurate meaning.”

Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric”

“Confronted with the question of the difference between grammar and rhetoric, grammar allows us to ask the question, but the sentence by means of which we ask it may deny the very possibility of asking.”

Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric”

“the line is usually interpreted as stating, with the increased emphasis of a rhetorical device, the potential unity between form and experience, between creator and creation.”

Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric”

“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric”

“For it turns out that the entire scheme set up by the first reading can be undermined, or deconstructed, in the terms of the second”

Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric”

“The two readings have to engage each other in direct confrontation, for the one reading is precisely the error denounced by the other and has to be undone by it.”

Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric”

“It would seem that we are saying that criticism is the deconstruction of literature, the reduction to the rigors of grammar of rhetorical mystifications.”

Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric”

“The reading is not ‘our’ reading, since it uses only the linguistic elements provided by the text itself; the distinction between author and reader is one of the false distinctions that the reading makes evident.”

Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric”

“We end up therefore, in the case of rhetorical grammatization of semiology, just as in the grammatical rhetorization of illocutionary phrases, in the same state of suspended ignorance. Any question about the rhetorical mode of a literary text is always a rhetorical question which does not even know whether it is really questioning.”

Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric”

“Literature as well as criticism—the difference between them being delusive—is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most unreliable language in terms of which man names and transforms himself.”

Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric”

“A little more than kin, and less than kind. How is it that the clouds still hang on you? Not so, my lord; I am too much i’ the sun.”

William Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.2

“If it be, Why seems it so particular with thee? Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not ‘seems.’”

William Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.2

“Equally important but more frequently ignored is deconstruction’s questioning of the association of self-referentiality with self-presence in discussions of the literary work’s organic autonomy.”

Jonathan Culler, from On Deconstruction

“By enacting or performing what it asserts or describes, the poem becomes complete in itself, accounts for itself, and stands free as a self-contained fusion of being and doing.”

Jonathan Culler, from On Deconstruction

“The response to the legend which the speaker imagines and represents is an invocation and representation of the lovers that asks them to invoke God and to ask Him for a further representation of their love which could serve as pattern.”

Jonathan Culler, from On Deconstruction

“We have, therefore, not so much a self-contained urn as a chain of discourses and representations: the legend describing the lovers, the verse representation of this legend, the celebratory portrayal of the lovers in the response of those who have heard the legend, the request which the lovers are asked to formulate, and the pattern from above that will generate further versions of their love.”

Jonathan Culler, from On Deconstruction

“Brooks answers the poem itself: ‘the poem itself if the well-wrought urn which can hold the lovers’ ashes.’ If this is so, if the poem is the urn, then one of the principal features of this urn is that it portrays people responding to the urn.'“

Jonathan Culler, from On Deconstruction

“Brooks’s own book is called The Well Wrought Urn: the combination in his pages of Donne’s urn and Brooks’ response to it becomes itself an urn.”

Jonathan Culler, from On Deconstruction

“The structure is one of proliferation rather than crystalline closure. The structure of self-reference works in effect to divide the poem against itself, creating an urn to which one responds and an urn which includes a response to the urn.”

Jonathan Culler, from On Deconstruction

“For a long period, the ‘left’ intellectual spoke and was acknowledged the right of speaking in the capacity of master of truth and justice. He was heard, or purported to make himself heard, as the spokesman of the universal. To be an intellectual meant something like being the consciousness/conscience of us all. I think we have here an idea transpoed from Marxism, from a faded Marxism indeed.”

Michel Foucault, from “Truth and Power”

“Truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.”

Michel Foucault, from “Truth and Power”

“‘Truth’ is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements.”

Michel Foucault, from “Truth and Power”

“The political question, to sum up, is not error, illusion, alienated consciousness, or ideology; it is truth itself. Hence the importance of Nietzsche.”

Micheal Foucault, from “Truth and Power”

“Two loves I have of comfort and despair, / Which like two spirits do suggest me still; The better angel is a man right fair, / The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.”

Eve Sedgwick, Between Men, chapter 1

“The dominant syntactic structure, then, is highly symmetrical. Even within the list above, however, which is taken from the sonnet’s first nine lines, and more strongly in the last five lives, semantic differences eddy about and finally wash over the sonnet’s syntactic formality. By the end, even the syntactic symmetry is gone: the female has mastered three active verbs, while the male has only one, passive verb; and more importantly, the female has an attribute (a “hell”) to which it is not syntactically clear whether the male has a counterpart.”

Eve Sedgwick, Between Men, chapter 1

“However, I am saying that within the world sketched in these sonnets, there is not an equal opposition or a choice posited between two such institutions as homosexuality (under whatever name) and heterosexuality.”

Eve Sedgwick, Between Men, chapter 1

“Gender and genitals we have always with us; but ‘family,’ ‘sexuality,’ ‘masculine,’ ‘feminine,’ ‘power,’ ‘career,’ ‘privacy,’ ‘desire,’ the meanings and substance of gender and genitals, are embodied in times and institutions, literature among them.”

Eve Sedgwick, Between Men, chapter 1

“We are on solid ground with V.G. Kiernan when he says that ‘empires must have a mould of ideas or conditioned reflexes to flow into, and youthful nations dream of a great place in the world as young men dream of fame and fortunes.’”

Edward Said, from Culture and Imperialism

“Almost all colonial schemes begin with an assumption of native backwardness and general inadequacy to be independent, ‘equal,’ and fit.”

Edward Said, from Culture and Imperialism

“I am saying, however, that European culture often, if not always, characterized itself in such a way as simultaneously to validate its own preferences while also advocating those preferences in conjunction with distant imperial rule.”

Edward Said, from Culture and Imperialism

“The inherent mode for this counterpoint is not temporal but spatial.”

Edward Said, from Culture and Imperialism

“More clearly than anywhere else in her fiction, Austen here synchronizes domestic with international authority, making it plain that the values associated with such higher things as ordination, law, and propriety must be grounded firmly in actual rule over possession of territory.”

Edward Said, from Culture and Imperialism

“In order more accurately to read works like Mansfield Park, we have to see them in the main as resisting or avoiding that other setting, which their formal inclusiveness, historical honesty, and prophetic suggestiveness cannot completely hide. In time there would no longer be a dead silence when slavery was spoken of, and the subject became central to a new understanding of what Europe was.”

Edward Said, from Culture and Imperialism

“But precisely because Austen is so summary in one context, so provocatively rich in the other, precisely because of that imbalance we are able to move in on the novel, reveal and accentuate the interdependence scarcely mentioned on its brilliant pages.”

Edward Said, from Culture and Imperialism

“The task is to lose neither a true historical sense of the first, nor a full enjoyment or appreciation of the second, all the while seeing both together.”

Edward Said, from Culture and Imperialism

“Far from examining its general philosophic premises, the whole body of its inquiries has actually sprung from the soil of a definite philosophical system, that of Hegel. Not only in their answers but in their very questions there was a mystification.”

Karl Marx, from The German Ideology, from Capital “The Fetishism of Commodities”

“Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-proces.”

Karl Marx, from The German Ideology, from Capital “The Fetishism of Commodities”

“The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation commodities,’ its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.”

Karl Marx, from The German Ideology, from Capital “The Fetishism of Commodities”

“As the coat and the linen are two qualitatively different use values, so also are the two forms of labour that produce them, tailoring and weaving. Were these two objects not qualitatively different, not produced respectively by labour of different quality, they could not stand to each other in the relation of commodities. Coats are not exchanged for coats, one use-value is not exchanged for another of the same kind.”

Karl Marx, from The German Ideology, from Capital “The Fetishism of Commodities”

“A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour.”

Karl Marx, from The German Ideology, from Capital “The Fetishism of Commodities”

“But, so soon as it steps forth that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than ‘table-turning’ ever was.”

Karl Marx, from The German Ideology, from Capital “The Fetishism of Commodities”

“A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the produces to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.”

Karl Marx, from The German Ideology, from Capital “The Fetishism of Commodities”

“There is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”

Karl Marx, from The German Ideology, from Capital “The Fetishism of Commodities”

“The concept of postmodernism is not widely accepted or even understood today.”

Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”

“This list would seem to make two things clear at once: first, most of the postmodernisms mentioned above emerge as specific reactions against the established forms of high modernism, against this or that dominant high modernism which conquered the university, the museum, the art gallery network, and the foundations.”

Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”

“The second feature of this list of postmodernisms is the effacement in it of some key boundaries or separations, most notably the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture.”

Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”

“Now parody capitalizes on the uniqueness of these styles and seizes on their idiosyncrasies and eccentricities to produce an imitation which mocks the original.”

Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”

“That is the moment at which pastiche appears and parody has become impossible. Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody’s ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic.”

Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”

“What we have to retain from all this is rather an aesthetic dilemma: because if the experience and the ideology of the unique self, an experience and ideology which informed the stylistic practice of classical modernism, is over and done with, then it is no longer clear what the artists and writers of the present period are supposed to be doing.”

Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”

“You are in this hyperspace up to your eyes and your body; and if it seemed to you before that that suppression of depth I spoke of in postmodern painting or literature would necessarily be difficult to achieve in architecture itself, perhaps you may now be willing to see this bewildering immersion as the formal equivalent in the new medium.”

Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”

“This latest mutation in space—the postmodern hyperspace—has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.”

Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”

“namely the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past”

Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”

“We have seen that there is a way in which postmodernism and its social moment? We have seen that there is a way in which postmodernism replicates or reproduces—reinforces—the logic of consumer capitalism; the more significant question is whether there is also a way in which it resists that logic. But that is a question we must leave open.

Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”