Introduction to Postmodern Literary Theory Agenda Why study literary theory?

Ideologies help us create a sense of identity

Make us feel good about ourselves

Lacan’s idea of Other

Ideologies give people a satisfying mirror image of themselves (identify with a cause)

Poststructuralism

• POSTMODERN LITERARY THEORY

• Not a unified school: A group of theoretical positions

• Self-reflexive discourse that is “aware of the tentativeness, slipperiness, ambiguities and complex interrelations between texts and meanings.” (Lye)

• Rejects:

• Totalizing view All phenomenon under one concept
• Essentialist concept Reality independent of language
• Foundationalism Stable signifying systems rooted in human thought

Poststructuralism

Poststructuralism

New Historicism & Cultural Materialism

• Recognize that history is written by the victors

• History as culturally produced--not objective narratives

• Paralleled evolution in cultural criticism

• Focus on power, culture and economics

• New Historicism: Top of social hierarchy

• Government, church, upper classes

• Cultural Materialism: Bottom of society

• Lower classes, women, gays, colonialized ethnic groups

New Historicism

• What are the relations of power suggested by the text?

• How does the work reveal a historically specific model of truth or authority?

• What historical or cultural events might illuminate the text?

• How is power operating secretly within the text?

• How is the subversion to authority contained?

• --D F Felluga

Cultural Materialism

• What is the hidden ideology? Does the author reflect a power position? (E.g., male-centric, Christian, American, Islamic?)

• What is model of identity for oppressed groups?

• How does the work reflect the author’s class, or the author’s analysis of class relations?

• How do those with less power try to subvert those with more?

• What is the utopian vision?

• How are people commodified? What commodifies them?

• Role of media & consumerism?

• --D F Felluga

Roland Barthes (1915-80)

• Transition between structuralism and poststructuralism

• Semiologist

• One of first to analyze mass media and consumerism as manipulators of reality

• “The author is dead.”

• The text is a “multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.”

Roland Barthes (1915-80)

• The reader “produces” a text on his or her own terms, forging meanings from “what has already been read, seen, done, lived.”

• OK to view literature from many perspectives: existential, psychoanalytical, Marxist, etc.

• Sees less distinction between literary and non-literary texts

Jaques Derrida (1930-)

• Skeptical postmodernist

• Attacks fundamental principles of Western philosophy

• Influenced by Nietzsche and Heidegger

• Attacks from a structuralist foundation

• Agrees that meaning is not inherent in signs

• Strongly disagrees with bifurcation of structuralism

Jaques Derrida (1930-)

• STRUCTURALISM is inherently flawed:

• Argues that all STRUCTURES have an implied center

• All systems have binary oppositions

• One part more important than another (good/evil, male/female)

• Reinforces humanist idea that speaker/subject more important

• Reinforces real self as the origin of what is being said

• This is logocentricism—basic to all Western thought since Plato

Jaques Derrida (1930-)

• BASIC THEMES:

• By deconstructing, basic units of logic are shown how they contradict themselves.

• Sees all writing as a complex, historical cultural process rooted in the relations of texts to each other and in the institutions and conventions of writing.

• Language operates in subtle and often contradictory ways.

• Certainty will always elude us.