Introduction to Postmodern Literary Theory Agenda Why study literary theory?

Jaques Derrida (1930-)

• TRADITIONAL THEORIES

• Mimetic

• Didactic

• Expressive of truths

Michel Foucault (1926-84)

• Views language in the framework of power

• Denies Marxist concept of class oppression

• Denies all grand schemes

• Power is found only in discourse

• All social relations are relations of power

• Everyone oppresses others through discourse

• Everything we say, think, read is regulated by the world in which we live

Michel Foucault (1926-84)

• NIETZSCHE INFLUENCE:

• Rejects Hegelian dialectic (past/present connection)

• Gealogy of Morals: local, discontinuous knowledges vs. unified orderly narrative

• How society deals with fringe elements (madness)

• From power in a sovereign king, to impersonal bureaucratic powers that silently oppress us

• Will to power vs. objective claims of truth

Michel Foucault (1926-84)

• Metaphor: Panopticon (19th English prison design: people feel they are being watched at all time)

• Surveillance, regulation and discipline

• All-knowing God
• Freud’s superego (monitor of desires)
• Big Brother (files, computer monitoring)

• Power becomes system of surveillance which is interiorized

• Social engineering and psychological manipulation

Michel Foucault (1926-84)

• Society disciplines populations by sanctioning the knowledge claims of various micro-ideologies--education, medicine, criminology

• Anti-Marxist:

• Does not believe in any total single theory
• State and class power overrated
• The “subject” is the locus of multiple, dispersed and decentered discourses

• Anti-humanist

Michel Foucault (1926-84)

• TEXTUAL THEORY:

• Sees historic texts as a “series of fictions”

• Focus on discourses--all types of texts on a subject--not authors

• The author is decentered; merely a subject position within a text

• Discourse regulated by rules of exclusion, internal systems of control

Michel Foucault (1926-84)

• APPLICATION TO LITERATURE:

• We are never totally free to say anything we want:

• Some have privileged right to speak (experts)
• Rituals, doctrines and traditions

• What is the source of the discourse?

• What are the regulating institutions or ideologies?

• How are discourses controlled selected, organized and redistributed?

Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998)

• Collapse of grand narratives: “The supreme fictions we tell ourselves about ourselves.”

• Classless society (Marxism)
• Freedom of humanity
• Total unity of knowledge
• Democracy through capitalism

Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998)

• The end of the Enlightenment project

Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998)

• Art removed from life (neither sacral or courtly)

• Individualistic fragmented society is here to stay

• No one can grasp all that is going on

• Capitalism created hedonism, narcissism, lack of social identity

Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998)

• Computerized knowledge has become the principle force of production

• From the “building of minds” to the acquiring of knowledge as a product that can be bought and sold

• Knowledge as a commodity that nations will fight over

• Multinational corporations breaking down sovereignty of nations

Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998)

• Language is a game based upon social contracts

• To speak is to fight

• Science and big business speaking louder

• Nations trying to pass science off as an epic

• Who will control knowledge?

Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998)

• Big stories are bad

• Little stories are good

Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998)

• APPLICATION TO LITERATURE:

• Beware of grand narratives

• “Truth” is in fragmentation, montage, mini-narratives

• Avant-garde, non-organic art ‘the historic norm” (Adorno)

• “The only possible authentic expression of alienation in late capitalistic society.”

• View discourses as language games (none are privileged)

• People (characters) are “nodes” where pluralistic lines of discourse intersect

Jean Baudrillard (1929-)

• Cultural materialist

• Consumer objects = signs that differentiate the population

• Our postmodern is no longer real. It is a simulation of the real.

• Mass media & consumerism have created a new myth of reality that we accept as real

• We live in a state of hyperreality

• McLuhan: The medium is the message

Jean Baudrillard (1929-)

• America is a spectacle

• An illusionary paradise

• TV is the world

• Advertising gives consumers illusion of freedom

• “All is well” is the party line

• Illusion perpetuated by media & culture

• “Kerouac with brains”

Feminist Literary Theory

• SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR (1908-1986)

• The Second Sex

• Questioned the “othering” of women by Western philosophy

• Rediscovery of forgotten women’s literature

• Revolutionary advocacy of sexual politics

• Questioning of underlying phallocentric, Western, rational ideologies

• Pluralism: gender, sexual, cultural, ethnicity, postcolonial perspectives

Feminist Literary Theory

• Exorcise the male mind

• Deconstructs logocentricism of male discourse

• Sees gender as a cultural construct

• So are stereotypes

• Focus on unique problems of feminism:

• History and themes of women literature
• Female language
• Psycho-dynamics of female creativity

Feminist Literary Theory

• JULIA KRISTEVA (1941-)

• Psychologist, linguist & novelist

• Influenced by Barthes, Freud & Lacan

• “Dismantles all ideologies,” including feminism

• Does not consider herself a feminist

• Disagrees with “patriarchal” views of Freud and Lacan

• Maternal body source of language and “laws” (not paternal anti-Oedipal drive)

Feminist Literary Theory

• Masculine symbolic order represses feminine semiotic order

• Semiotic open to men and women writers

• Semiotic is “creative”--marginal discourse of the avant garde

• Raw material of signification from pre-Oedipal drives (linked to mother)
• Realm of the subversive forces of madness, holiness and poetry
• Creative, unrepressed energy

Feminist Literary Theory

• Challenges Judeo-Christian icons of woman

• Balancing act: live within Lacan’s symbolic order of patriarchal laws without losing uniqueness

• Women can produce own symbols and language

• Multiplicity of female expression

• “To break the code, to shatter language, to find specific discourse closer to the body and emotions, to the unnamable repressed by the social contract.” --Kristeva

Feminist Literary Theory

• ALICE JARDINE, Gynesis (1982)

• Woman as a binary opposition

• Man/woman

• Rational/irrational
• Good/evil

• Implied male logocentricism

• The concept of jouissance

Helene Cixcous

• Critic, novelist, playwright

• Picks up where Lacan leaves off

• Denounces patriarchal binary oppositions

• Women enter into the Symbolic Order differently

• Deconstructs patriarchal Greek myths

• Femininity (jouissance) unrepresentable in phallocentric scheme of things

• Favors a “bisexual” view

Helene Cixcous

• Women are closer to the Imaginary

• Women more fluid, less fixed

• The individual woman must write herself

• Feminine literature: not objective; erase differences between order and chaos, text and speech; inherently deconstructive

• Admires Joyce and Poe

• Men can produce feminist literature

Luce Irigaray

• Expose patriarchal foundations of Western philosophy & psychology

• Women are more than defective men

• Western culture, identity, logic and rationality are all symbolically male

• Mother-daughter relationship has been unsymbolized

• Language as elusive, shifting, undogmatic

Queer Theory

• Gender and sexuality not “essential” to identity

• Socially constructed

• Mutable and changeable

• Self shaped by language, signs and signifiers.

• Self becomes a subject in language, with more multiplicity of meaning.

• Sex as (1) animal instinct and (2) socially constructed behavior shaped by ethics/morals

• Western ideas of sexual identity come from science, religion, economics and politics and were constructed as binary oppositions

Queer Theory

• Queer theory deconstructs all binary oppositions about human sexuality.

• Encourages the examination of the world from an alternative view.

• Allows for the inclusion of gender, sexuality, race and other areas of identity by noticing the distinctions between identities, communities, and cultures.

• Challenges heterosexism and homophobia, in addition to racism, misogyny and other oppressive discourses while celebrating diversity.

Queer Literature

• Queer activism seeks to break down traditional ideas of normal and deviant, by showing the queer is what is thought of as normal, and the normal is queer.

• Queer theory reconstructs knowing and understanding by challenging tradition.

Queer Literature

• Unmasks signs of homosexuality in “old” literature

• Reveals how cultures construct negative identities of homosexuals

• A political form of academics (change views)

• Views sexuality as a complex array of social codes and forces, individual activity and institutional power

Postcolonialism

• Attempts to resurrect colonized cultures

• Deconstruct Western view of third-world nations as “otherness”

• Edward Said: “Orientalism” was an artificial word constructed by the West to talk about and the East (Typical binary opposition)

• Empire-building nations used literature as power

• Ingrained Western myths & phallic logocentricism in colonized people

Postcolonialism

• Denied richness of diversity within cultures

• “Totalizations” or stereotypes are based upon nostalgic experiences of colonizers

• Attempt to “rebuild a present” (since past is lost)--and come to grips with lack of identity

• A weapon of resistance and subversion

• Written in hybrid language

Theory Speak

• "If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime superstate the need to be decoded as the 'now-all-but-unreadable DNA' of a fast deindustrializing Detroit, just as his Robocop-like strategy of carceral negotiation and street control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration through the violence upon the racially heteroglossic wilds and others of the inner-city."

So?

• The white-Western-male view of the world is dead

• New Criticism, Marxism & Structuralism are passe

• We now have a new set of “lenses” to view the world

• We understand the importance of being suspicious (literature is not necessarily sincere)

• We recognize that truth, identity, gender, etc. are social constructs, contingent and local

• We recognize the power of discourse

• PM “explains” the global world in which we live

The Dangers of Postmodernism

• Can lead to intellectual nihilism & cynicism

• From the comfortable foundation of humanism to absolute relativism and pluralism

• Whose lens is “correct”? Who says so?

• Is humanism really all that bad?

• It’s all theory

• How do we use theory? Apply all to all texts?

• Glib, hip intellectualism

Where Do We Go from Here?

• Has the progress of history come to a dead-end? (as Foucault and Lyotard suggest)

• Have we reached the point of self-defeating moral relativism?

• Jameson:

• We need narratives, and some sort of history
• We need to re-endow the individual
• History, literature have important functions

• Sarup:

• We need to keep the Enlightenment project alive

Hyperpostpostmoderndeconstuctruralism

• Common sense

“Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” Adrienne Rich

• Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen, Bright topaz denizens of a world of green. They do not fear the men beneath the tree; They pace in sleek chivalric certainty. Aunt Jennifer's fingers fluttering through her wool Find even the ivory needle hard to pull. The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand. When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by. The tigers in the panel that she made Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.