Introduction to the Study of Cultures and Literatures in English

- Introduction to the Study of Cultures and Literatures in English
- Előszó
- Contents
- Part 1 What is English Studies?
  - 1. What is a university? A proseminary
  - 2. Paradigms and paradigm shifts
  - 3. What is English Studies? English as a university subject
  - 4. Ideology, criticism, history
  - 5. Registers of Culture
  - 6. Canon formation and alternative reading practices
- Part 2 Fields of English Studies. Language, Literature, Culture, and Critical Approaches
  - 1. Preliminary problems: definitions, scientific expectations
  - 2. Ontological problems: the way literature exists
    - Semiotics
    - Literary communication
    - Language and Critical Thinking
    - The Language of the Sciences and the Language of Literature
  - 3. Methodological problems: the way we understand texts
    - Meaning and context
    - The Process of Interpretation
  - 4. The Theory of Genres
    - Genres and Their Historical Changes
    - Genre-generating Factors and Historical Changes
  - 5. Poetry and Figurative Language
    - Exercise in Interpretation / 1
      - I First level of meaning
      - II Second level of meaning
      - III Third level of meaning
      - IV Fourth level of meaning
  - 6. Narrative Fiction
    - Exercise in Interpretation / 2
      - I First level of meaning
      - II Second level of meaning
      - III Third level of meaning
  - 7. Drama
    - Exercise in Interpretation / 3
      - I First level of meaning
      - II Second level of meaning
  - Self test I
  - 8. Literature, Culture, and the Reading Subject: An Overview of Major Trends in Literary and Cultural Theory
    - I Preliminaries
    - II Formal critical trends: from the authorial intention to the close reading of the text (1st shift)
    - III Contextual aproaches: from text to context
    - The critique of structuralism
  - Self test II
  - 9. Critical Literature Consulted and Recommended
  - 10. Appendix

« Previous | Next »

# The critique of structuralism

The theory of literature must be based on a theory of the PROCESS of signification, as opposed to the structuralist understanding of meaning as the result of a linguistic ACT which is carried out by that transcendental ego of phenomenology which is the Cartesian self-identical subject.

The study of the MICRODYNAMICS AND THE MACRODYNAMICS of the subject opens up the homogeneous, self-transparent Cartesian ego for its socio-political positionality and its psychosomatic heterogeneity, in a signifying process that is not static but is a dialectic of macrodynamic and microdynamic agencies.

a/ The Semiotics of the Sign and the Subject

- Ferdinand de Saussure: language is a system of differences where elements attain (a negative) value only in relation to all the other elements, and not to reality. The relationship between the signifier and the signified is conventional, arbitrary: reality, the referent is not part of the signifying system.

- Poststructuralism: the signifier's arbitrariness and instability determine signification: the signifier has an uncontrollable capacity to refer to various signified, and a signifier does not refer to a signified in the first place, but to other signifiers; the signified is sliding on the chain of signifiers: the fundamental characteristic of language is this free play which the subject cannot control, we only try to fix this chain when we produce meaning, but the meaning is always unstable;

Since the signifier is not tied to the signified, the author cannot have power over the writing after the point of creation: “the death of the author” (Roland Barthes) and the birth of the plural text.

The idea of the PLURAL TEXT: the structuralist attempt to discover every possible text in the deep structure of a text is criticized by the poststructuralist realization that every text is based on a play of DIFFERENCE, referring to everything that has already been written.

READERLY TEXT: classic expressive realism, the reader is a passive CONSUMER of a fixed, prefabricated meaning.

WRITERLY TEXT: modern practice, reader is an active producer of meaning.

Death of the author: The author is the epitome of capitalist ideology, born with empiricism, rationalism, the prestige of the individual; however, the play of the signifier is not controlled by the author, the plural text has an infinite meaning-generating capacity.

- Emile Benveniste: language is constitutive of subjectivity: "ego is he who says ego". Human subjectivity is produced in the social symbolic order where the signifiers that work in meaning-production are always ideologically determined.

- Thus, the signifier is constitutive of the subject: semiotics studies how the codes setting up possible relations between signifiers and signified are determined by historically specific social-political strategies.

b/ Psychoanalysis

- the Freudian revolution: the subject is a heterogeneous system; the signifying process has two modalities, the unconscious and the conscious are both participating.

- the concept of the unconscious: the repressed region of primary processes (attachment to the mother, identification with the outside, desire); the social subject is constituted by the successful repression of primary desires through the realization of the Father’s (phallus: key-signifier) power; fear of castration and acceptance of the Father’s ( = the social patriarchal symbolic order) rule: Oedipalization.

- Jacques Lacan: “The unconscious is structured like a language.”

The agency of the Signifier is constitutive of the subject both on the conscious and the unconscious level. The psychic apparatus is formed by signification, subjectivity is produced by the emergence of the signifier which separates the subject from the Real. The subject is constituted through losses: the fundamental experience of the human being is that of lack. The Signifier emerges as a compensation for the losses through which the split subject is produced (loss of the mother, the breast, etc.): the engine of signification is the Desire continuously emanating from the core of our repressed primary desires.

- the unconscious makes itself manifest through linguistic symptoms: word play, slippages, failure of communication, puns, ambiguities, metaphors.

c/ Deconstruction

- aims at uncovering the logic of Western metaphysics behind our discourses: signification is always meaning- or truth-production, but the elements participating are dependent on a hierarchy of value (soul / body, good / bad, masculine / feminine) which is always metaphysical (i.e., socially conventional, not inherently true).

- the rehabilitation of the disprivileged supplement (woman in relation to man, writing in relation to speaking, the composite in relation to the linear);

The process of deconstructive analysis:

1/ showing the metaphysical hierarchies that constitute the (ideological) framework in which the text participates;

2/ reversing the hierarchy, showing that the system has no inherent fixity, there is no central, key signifier or a transcendental signified (e.g., God in theology) that determines or guarantees values and the one and only meaning of things;

3/ leaving the free play between the two orders rather than setting up one as prior to, better than the other.

d/ New Historicism

- rejection of traditional (positivistic) historicism which studies literary history as a linear development reflecting the nation's evolution and the “spirit of the age”;

- Michel Foucault: social discourses (e.g., literature) are governed by historically specific technologies of power which determine what can be part of our language, i.e., our knowledge. Power/knowledge is a social functioning, setting up systems of exclusion that shape our reality through ideological discourses and institutions.

Human beings are born into subject positions in society that are distributed continuously by discursive technologies of power.

Power interpellates the subject (Louis Althusser): ideology or power objectivizes and subjectivizes the human being at the same time; internalizing a false feeling of individuality (misrecognition) is becoming an object to power.

Power sets up regimes of truth in society (Foucault):

1. dividing practices (turn reality into a system of binary oppositions);

2. institutionalization of binarisms (disciplines that regulate knowledge);

3. power is exercised on free subjects only: self-subjection (voluntary submission the establishment).

- Ideology is the most extensive technology to set up relations of power in society: certain marginal or subversive discourses may try to undermine this dominance of ideology.

- Literature often fulfils this subversive role: it questions the legitimacy, the working of the ideological apparatuses, the position of rulers, etc. BUT: resistances like this may always be pre-scripted and contained by ideology itself (this is called the safety-valve theory).

- New Historicism studies how texts reflect the antagonisms, struggles, ideological tensions and discontinuities of a historical era, always bearing in mind that our interpretations inevitably contain our own historical positionality: we cannot have an “objective” approach to history, which is always our fictional discourse about the past.

e/ Feminist criticism

- Western society is a patriarchal, male-dominated structure, with the constitutive male / female binarism, which sets up technologies suppressing women and assigning them to definite social roles and categories (psychoanalysis: the Phallus is a key-signifier according to which the human subject is constituted and enters society's symbolic order);

The critique of the ideological canon:

- canon-formation and editorial policy have been determined by these patriarchal rules in the Western literary institution;

- the male perspective usually organizes the fabric of the LWA: the male GAZE working in the text assigns a predetermined role to the reader: feminist criticism aims at showing these biased strategies and inherent prejudices in literature through the application of a different, feminine perspective;

- literature as a semiotic practice is also feminine (Julia Kristeva) in the sense that it plugs the subject back into (repressed) psychic drives attached to the MOTHER (mainly through rhythm and deviation): this practice resists the patriarchally determined identity-formation of the main social discourses.

« Previous | Next »