MA English Literary Theory and Criticism PDF

M.A. ENGLISH SEMESTER - II (CBCS) LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM “PAPER TWO : STRUCTURALISM ONWARDS” SUBJECT CODE : 93308  © UNIVERSITY OF MUMBAI Prof. Suhas Pednekar Vice-Chancellor,...

M.A. ENGLISH SEMESTER - II (CBCS) LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM “PAPER TWO : STRUCTURALISM ONWARDS” SUBJECT CODE : 93308  © UNIVERSITY OF MUMBAI Prof. Suhas Pednekar Vice-Chancellor, University of Mumbai, Prof. Ravindra D. Kulkarni Prof. Prakash Mahanwar Pro Vice-Chancellor, Director, University of Mumbai, IDOL, University of Mumbai, Program Co-ordinator : Dr. Santosh Rathod Dept. of English, IDOL, University of Mumbai, Mumbai Editors : Dr. Susmita Dey & Dinesh Kumar Course Writers : Dr. Dinesh Kumar Associate Professor, V.G. Vaze College, Mulund (E), Mumbai Dr. Shilpa Sapre - Bharmal Dr. Pratima Das Board of Studies in English Associate Prof., Smt. C.H.M. College, University of Mumbai, Ulhasnagar - 3, Dist. Thane Head Dept. of English, Dist. Thane D.B.J. College, Chiplun Dr. Nilakshi Roy Dr. Sunla Pillai Associate Prof. Dept. of English Asst. Prof. Dept. of English, V.G. Vaze College, R.K.T. College, Ulhasnagar - 3 Mulund (E), Mumbai Thane Dr. Susmita Dey Ms. Neeta Chakravarthy Head Dept. of English Asst. Prof. Dept. of English Associate Professor, Ramniranjan Jhunjhunwala College, V.G. Vaze College, Ghatkopar (W), Mumbai Mulund (E), Mumbai March 2021, Print - I Published by : Director, Institute of Distance and Open Learning , Universityof Mumbai, Vidyanagari, Mumbai - 400 098. ipin Enterprises DTP Composed Tantia : Ashwini Jogani Industrial Estate, Unit No. 2, Arts VileGround Floor, Parle (E), Sitaram Mumbai Mill Compound, - 400 099. Printed by : J.R. Boricha Marg, Mumbai - 400 011  CONTENTS Unit No. Title Page No. 1. The Death of The Author - Roland Brathes 1 2. "Simulacra and Simulations" - Jean Baudrillard 8 3. "The Politics of Theory : Iddological Positions in the Postmodernism Debate" - Fredric Jameson 15 4. "Feminism and Critical Theory" - Gayatri Spivak 21 5. "Reading Process : A Phenomenological Approach" - Wolfgang Iser 34 6. "Resonance and Wonder" - Stephen Greenblatt 40 7. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora" - Stuart Hall 47 8. "Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis" - Cheryll Glotfelty 56   I M.A. Semester - II Syllabus for M.A. English Literary Theory and Criticism Unit 1: Structuralism, Post structuralism and Deconstruction: 1. Roland Barthes – “The Death of the Author” 2. Jean Baudrillard – “Simulacra and Simulations” (Both the essays are from Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader) Unit 2: Marxism, Feminism and Ideology 1. Fredric Jameson – “The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism Debate” 2. Gayatri Spivak – “Feminism and Critical Theory” (Both the essays are from Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader) Unit 3: Reader Response and New Historicism 1. Wolfgang Iser – “Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach” (From Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader) 2. Stephen Greenblatt – “Resonance and Wonder” (From Learning to Curse) Unit4: Postcolonialism, Diaspora and Ecocriticism 1. Stuart Hall – “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (From Theorizing Diaspora) 2. Cheryll Glotfelty – “Literary Studies in an age of Environmental Crisis” (From The Ecocriticism Reader) A) Internal Assessment – 40% Sr. No. Particulars Marks 1. One assignment/project based on curriculum to 20 Marks be assessed by the teacher concerned 2. One classroom presentation on the project 10 Marks 3. A viva voce based on the project 10 Marks Students of Distance Education (IDOL) to appear for 100 marks paper with two sections based on the syllabi of two semesters in place of the semester end examinations, presentation and viva voce. Following Methods can be used for tests and assignment (40 marks)  Analytical session (content analysis of literary theories to be decided by the Department center where the course is offered)  Class presentation: on theories and approaches  Writing position papers  Book review of theories and criticism  Article review: selected from journals and books  II  Seminar participation  Writing research papers  Project: Interpretation of literary and cultural texts(films, drama and Television shows) on the basis of given critical approaches or theories B) Semester End Examination Pattern 60 Marks Question 1: Essay on the theories from unit 1: (1 out of 2,) : 15 Marks Question 2: Essay on the theories from unit 2 (1 out of 2) : 15 Marks Question 3: Essay on the theories from unit 3 (1 out of 2) : 15 Marks Question 4: Essay on the theories from unit 4 (1 out of 2) : 15 Marks Sources of the prescribed texts  Braziel, Jana Evans and Anita Mannur (Ed.) Theorizing Diaspora. London: Blackwell, 2003.  Enright, D.J. and Chickera, Ernst de. (Ed.) English Critical Texts. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1962.  Glotfelty, Cheryll and Harold Fromm (Ed.) The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1996.  Lodge, David and Nigel Wood (Ed.) Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (Second edition). New Delhi: Pearson, 1988.  Raghavan V. and Nagendra (Ed.) An Introduction to Indian Poetics. Madras: MacMillan, 1970. References  Adams, Hazard. Critical Theory Since Plato. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.  Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. (8th Edition) New Delhi: Akash Press, 2007.  Baldick, Chris. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.  Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. New Delhi: Viva Books, 2008.  Drabble, Margaret and Stringer, Jenny. The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.  Fowler, Roger. Ed. A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms. Rev. ed. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987.  Habib, M. A. R. A History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present. London: Blackwell, 2005.  Harmon, William; Holman, C. Hugh. A Handbook to Literature. 7th ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J. : Prentice-Hall, 1996.  III  Hall, Donald E. Literary and Cultural Theory: From Basic Principles to Advanced Application. Boston: Houghton, 2001.  Hudson, William Henry. An Introduction to the Study of Literature. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2007.  Jefferson, Anne. and D. Robey, eds. Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative Introduction. London: Batsford, 1986.  Keesey, Donald. Contexts for Criticism. 4th Ed. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2003.  Latimer, Dan. Contemporary Critical Theory. San Diego: Harcourt, 1989.  Lentriccia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1980.  Lodge, David (Ed.) Twentieth Century Literary Criticism. London: Longman, 1972.  Murfin, Ross and Ray, Supryia M. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. Boston: Bedford/St.Martin's, 2003.  Nagarajan M. S. English Literary Criticism and Theory: An Introductory History. Hyderabad: Orient Black Swan, 2006.  Natoli, Joseph, ed. Tracing Literary Theory. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1987.  Ramamurthi, Lalitha.An Introduction to Literary Theory. Chennai: University of Madras, 2006.  Selden, Raman and Peter Widdowson. A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. 3rd Ed. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1993.  Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. New York: Garland Publishing, 1999.  Wolfreys, Julian. ed. Introducing Literary Theories: A Guide and Glossary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Syllabus Prepared by: Dr. Dinesh Kumar (Convener) V.G. Vaze College, Mulund. Members: 1) Dr. R. M. Badode, Professor, Dept. of English, University of Mumbai. 2) Dr. M.A Shekh, Shivaji University, Kolhapur. 3) Dr. Shobha Ghosh, Dept. of English, University of Mumbai.   1 1 THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR” – ROLAND BARTHES Unit structure : 1.0 Objectives 1.1 Introduction: Structuralism and Poststructuralism 1.2 Structuralism 1.4 Overview of the essay 1.5 Conclusion 1.6 Key Terms 1.7 Check Your Progress 1.0 OBJECTIVES The basic objective of this unit is to familiarize the learners with the basic tenets of structuralist and poststructuralist literary theories. It also aims to impart the learners with the knowledge of Roland Barthes’ views on text and authorship. 1.1 INTRODUCTION: SEMIOTICS, STRUCTURALISM AND POSTSTRUCTURALISM Semiotics is the science of signs, verbal and nonverbal. According to Ferdinand de Saussure, who uses the term "semiology" to describe his enterprise, a sign is composed of a signifier (an acoustic image) and a signified (a concept or meaning), the relationship between the two being arbitrary and conventional. Language is a system of differences without any positive terms. Semiotics holds that all linguistic and social phenomena are texts, and the object is to reveal the underlying codes and conventions that make them meaningful. Claude Levi- Strauss applies semiotics to cultural anthropology; Jacques Lacan applies it to Freudian psychoanalysis; Michel Foucault, to the history of disease, insanity, and sexuality; and Roland Barthes, to fashion, photography, wrestling, food, and so on. Structuralism is a theory of literature that focuses on the codes and conventions that undergird all discourse and on the system of language as a functioning totality. This system which Ferdinand de Saussure calls langue, is "the whole set of linguistic habits which allow an individual to understand and to be  2 understood." Anticausal and antiphilological, structuralism deliberately ignores the historical origins of the various elements of language, the external context of linguistic acts, the agents who use language, and the individual speech acts themselves (parole). Structuralism sees language as a system of differences without any positive terms, embraces the arbitrariness and conventionality of the sign, brackets any consideration of the referent, and generates a vocabulary of oppositions, all of which are more or less synonymous: langue and parole, synchrony and diachrony, system and event, signifier and signified, code and message, metaphor and metonymy, paradigm and syntagm, selection and combination, substitution and context, similarity and contiguity. In each case, the first term is privileged. Although Saussurian linguistics is its paradigm, what is of interest is how structuralism analogically extends Saussure's terms into the analysis of literature. Roland Barthes provides a good example. "Literature" Barthes writes, "is simply a language, a system of signs. Its being [être] is not in its message, but in this 'system.' Similarly, it is not for criticism to reconstitute the message of a work, but only its system, exactly as the linguist does not decipher the meaning of a sentence, but establishes the formal structure which allows the meaning to be conveyed." Rather than interpreting the meaning or value of a work, the critic examines the structures that produce meaning. The intentionality of the author is thereby disregarded; language and structures – not the consciousness of an author or the willed verbal acts that emanate from it – generate meaning. Poststructuralism is a critical theory that uses the concepts of Saussurian linguistics (sign, signifier, signified, langue, parole, and so forth) and the structuralist application of these terms to the study of literature as a system of signs for the purposes of subverting or deconstruction these concepts and centrality of meaning. Poststructuralism is a blanket term and refers to diverse writings such as the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, the late criticism of Roland Barthes, the psychoanalytic revisionism of Jacques Lacan, the feminist criticism of Gayatri Spivak, and so forth. 1.2 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Roland Gerard Barthes was a renowned essayist and social and literary critic whose writings on semiotics – the scientific study of symbols and signs – helped establishing poststructuaralism and opened new avenues in literary theory. In 1976, Barthes became the first person to hold the chair of Literary Semiology at the Ecole de France. His outstanding works include Writing Degree Zero, Mythologies, S/Z and The Pleasure of the Text. Other leading  3 radical French thinkers such as Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida influenced or were influenced by Barthes. Barthes' ideas are offered as alternatives to the methods of traditional literary studies and they have had a considerable following in the academic world of 1960s and 70s. According to Barthes, classical literary criticism has never paid any attention to reader as a subject who negotiates the signs in a text. He advocates for multi level – nearly playful – literary criticism based on the theoretical position that the structural elements of the text point to contradictions and paradoxes. 1.3 OVERVIEW OF THE ESSAY Roland Barthes, a renowned poststructuralist is associated with deconstruction and semiology. Incidentally, poststructuralism, which is considered as an extension and re-working of structuralism, makes certain statements about language. It indicates that language is a slippery medium and hence no truth can be referred to in language. This argument is based on the theoretical premise that words, which are the signs in a language, may have definite number of signifiers but infinite number of signifieds. This theory indicates that no text can claim to have single meaning or theological meaning and that it is basically pluralistic, creating a semantic free play. One can say that poststructuralism generates a linguistic anxiety which calls into question all definite meanings. Roland Barthes, who started as a structuralist, eventually moved into this theoretical position. His major writings in the 1960s and 1970s question both structuralism and western philosophy which are controlled by binary logic. His seminal essay ‘Death of the Author’, written in 1968, is a classic example of his engagement with poststructuralism, semiotics and deconstruction. Barthes, who belongs to the tradition of French Academic Criticism, questions the validity of literary history by asserting that the history of literature is often mistaken for the history of authors. He claims that lexias (small units of meaning/sense) carry many different meanings simultaneously on different levels as they are taken from different cultural sources. His basic argument is that text is not a site of definite meaning but a location wherein meanings blend and clash to generate a polysemi. Barthes opens the essay with a quote from Balzac’s novel, Sarrasine where the author offers a description of a “castrato disguised as a woman” (Lodge: 162): “This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries,her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious  4 sensibility.” (Lodge:162) Barthes’ concern here is with “Who is speaking thus” (163) in the novel: the “hero of the story” (163)? “Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of woman” (163) “Balzac the author professing ‘literary’ ideas on femininity” (163)? “Is it universal wisdom” (163)? “We shall never know” (163), he responds for “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral space... where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost” (163). When “writing begins” (163), he argues, the “voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death” (163). In other cultures, Barthes claims, the “responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator whose ‘performance’ – the mastery of the narrative code – may possibly be admired but never his genius” (163). The concept of the author is historically-and culturally-specific, he argues, the product, that is, of a specific historical stage of a particular culture: the early modern period of Western Europe. The notion of the Author is “a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’” (164). It is, he contends, only “logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author” (164) who continues to predominate in “histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines,... in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their person and their work through diaries and memoirs” (164). The “image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions” (164). Literary criticism, he argues, still consists for the most part in seeking an “explanation of a work... in the man or woman who produced it” (164). Such a view is predicated upon the assumption that a literary work is “always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the author ‘confiding’ in us” (164). Barthes argues that ancient literature never emphasized on the personality of author. He also explains how certain French writers were trying to unsettle the author from the centre of the text. He talks about Stephane Mallarme who had first tried to substitute author’s power with the power of language. Mallarme had maintained that it is the language that speaks and not the authors. Barthes also mentions Paul Valery who had made an attempt to attack subjective interpretations of texts and also the critical thought based on the theory of interiority or self. He had mentioned that self, subjectivity or interiority, is a mere superstition as it is only a verbal condition. However, Barthes is severely critical of New  5 Criticism though this school of criticism is largely analytical and objective. He argues that New Criticism fails to remove the author from the study and identifies the text with the author. Barthes also comments on surrealism. He partly appreciates the surrealists’ experiments with language though he believes that the surrealists’ claim to subvert the code or norm of language cannot be accepted. Barthes’ argument is that every writer is located within language and that no code can be subverted; it can only be played upon. Equally important, the author is thought to “nourish the book” (164) and to be “in the same relation of antecedence to the work as a father to his child” (164), which is to say that he “exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it” (164). However, writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, ‘depiction’ (as the Classics would say; rather, it designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given in the first person and in the present tense, in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered – something like the I declare of kings or the I sing of very ancient poets. (165) Modern texts must be conceptualised, consequently, as ‘Authorless’. In lieu of the Author, Barthes speaks of the “scriptor” (165) who neither precedes nor ‘fathers’ the text. Rather, s/he is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. (165) Barthes considers writing as linguistic process. He explains that linguistically author is never more than the instance of writing i.e. a writer becomes a writer only in the moments of using language. This also means that the relation between author and the text is not cause and effect. Barthes is of the opinion that language has no person or personal identity but only a subject. Subject is the one who uses language but not the one who creates language. Hence, Barthes’ argument is that language can never implicate subjectivity, self, originality or genius. This would also mean that writing is a neutral exercise in language and the ideas generated in  6 a text are the ideas inherent in a language. Barthes makes the famous statement that an author is just the shadow of his book and instead of writer a scriptor is born. Scriptor can be an individual who inscribes others’ text on a medium which is readily available. As mentioned earlier, Barthes believes that text has no single meaning. This is largely because that once the text is written, it belongs to the domain of language. Since language doesn’t belong to any individual, the text too doesn’t belong to any individual. This would mean that the author loses the authorial control over the single meaning. Once the author loses the control over single meaning, the readers will be able to detect many meanings and even paradoxes and contradictions. This marks the metaphorical death of the author when the text disowns the author. According to Barthes, a text which is a linguistic construct has a multi-dimensional space in which varieties of writings, taken from different cultural sources blend and clash. What Barthes means here is that when a writer uses language, he also draws upon the different voices, quotes and ideas which are there in the language itself. It also means that there are voices and text of other writers in every text that is written. This leads to the famous statement of Barthes – “Text is a tissue of quotations.” Barthes is also of the opinion that in the process of writing, the writer draws his ideas from different cultures and hence, the text is not a unified expression of meaning but possibly an inter- textual pastiche. Hence, he also believes that any claim to understand the text fully is unreliable. He argues that it is necessary to question the role of the critic in the light of this awareness. He indicates that conventional schools of criticism – biographical, romantic, or even New Criticism – try to discover the author beneath the text. Once the author is discovered, the critic believes that the text is explained. Barthes proposes a different approach and he says that literature and criticism are controlled by the author and, even worse, by the critic. The new sensibility that Barthes points out is that there is nothing to be deciphered in the text but it should be disentangled from the grasp of authors and critics. The final argument in the essay is that a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination i.e. the reader ultimately becomes more important than the author. Reader, according to Barthes, is outside the domains of history, biography and psychology and shares only the language with the author. Such a reader is not concerned with the personality or the genius of the author. Finally, Barthes comes back to the quote from Balzac and says that these views are not of anyone in particular; their source is language itself.  7 1.4 CONCLUSION Within the traditional schema of the literary work, the author is conceptualised as the father to the work. Barthes points out that it may in fact be the other way around. What we know about the author is less the origin of the text than the effect of what we read there. We cannot confirm the meaning of a text by reference to the putative life of the writer; indeed, what we know about the writer is precisely what we can deduce from the text. The text, paradoxically, gives birth to the writer in this way. Barthes concludes that the primary determiner of meaning in the text is the reader who does not just passively ingest the writer’s intention. Rather, the reader is the active producer of meaning who arrests the play of signifiers in the manner that he or she sees fit. 1.5 KEY TERMS Semiology, Polysemi, Intertextuality, Pastiche. 1.7 CHECK YOUR PROGRESS Q.I Say if the following statements are true or false 1. According to Roland Barthes, it is language and not the author, which controls the meaning in a text. 2. Barthes observes that every literary text has a definite meaning. 3. “Death of the Author” is an attack on traditional theories and criticism. Q.II Define the following: 1. Poststructuralism 2. Pastiche 3. Semiology 4. Polysemi Q.III Answer the following: 1. Explain the poststructuralist argument in Roland Barthes “Death of the Author” 2. What does Barthes mean by the expression “Death of the Author”? Discuss. 3. “Text is a tissue of quotations”. Explain Barthes’ statement in the light of the essay that you have studied.   8 2 “SIMULACRA AND SIMULATIONS”– JEAN BAUDRILLARD Unit structure : 2.0 Objectives 2.1 Introduction 2.2 About the Author (Jean Baudrillard) 2.2 “Simulacra and Simulations” An Overview 2.3 Conclusion 2.4 Key Terms 2.5 Check Your Progress 2.0 OBJECTIVES The basic objective of this unit is to familiarize the learners with the essay of Jean Baudrillard on simulacra and simulations. This unit also aims to make the learners understand Baudrillard's views on postmodernism, reality and society. 2.1 INTRODUCTION Over the past three decades, technology and human ingenuity have made it possible to create all kinds of fakes and simulations that are so realistic. The process is already so far advanced that, today, a substantial part of our surroundings is made up of objects and images and people that appear to be something other than what they are. The sheer number of simulations that now exist and their realism is inevitably changing not only our surroundings, but our psychology and behaviour. One of the most important changes can be found is the fact that we now routinely experience simulation confusion, in which we mistake realism for reality and think some of these fakes and simulations really are what they imitate. We experience simulation confusion when we receive an advertisement in the mail that is disguised as an official notice, and, at first, fall for it and assume it is an official notice. Many thinkers deem that simulation is a symptom of the postmodern society.  9 2.2 ABOUT THE AUTHOR (JEAN BAUDRILLARD) Jean Baudrillard (1927 - 2007) was one of the foremost French literary theorists and intellectual figures of the contemporary era whose writings combine philosophy, social theory and cultural metaphysics. His writings reflect on the key events of the epoch. As a sharp critic of contemporary society, culture and intellectual climate, Baudrillard is considered as a major proponent of French postmodern theory. His prolific writing, reflected in more than 30 books, carry insightful commentaries on class, gender, race, structure of modern society, postmodern consumerism, the world of media and the technology-driven society; particularly interesting are Baudrillard's views on the impact of new media, information technology and cybernetic communication in the creation of a different social order. Baudrillard has been identified as a cult figure in postmodern theory and his analysis of culture and philosophy has given him the status of an original theorist. He also associated himself with the French Left in the 1960s by opposing French and the US intervention in the Algerian and Vietnamese wars. His first book was The System of Objects (1968) followed by another work, The Consumer Society (1970). These early works of Baudrillard deal with semiology and they explain how objects are encoded with the system of signs and meanings that make contemporary media and consumer societies. These works also deal with advertising, packaging, display fashion, emancipated sexuality, mass media and culture in the wake of the multiplied commodities and the abundance of signs and spectacles. Baudrillard claims that commodities are bought and displayed for both their sign value and their use value. Baudrillard also has an ambivalent relationship with classical Marxism. On one hand he has expressed the Marxian critique of commodity production and on the other hand he fails to discuss the potential of the working class in the consumer society. Baudrillards “Simulation and Simulacra” announces a rupture between modern and postmodern societies. This essay marks his departure from modern social theory to indicate that the modern societies are organized around the production and consumption of commodities while postmodern societies are organized around simulation and the play of images and signs. He indicates that postmodernism is a situation in which codes, models and signs are the organizing forms of new social order where simulation rules. According to him, postmodern society is a society of simulation in which identities are constructed by the appropriation of images, codes and models. He also argues that  10 economics, politics, social life and culture are all governed by the mode of simulation. In Baudrillard’s view, codes and models determine how goods are consumed and used, politics that unfold culture is produced and day to day life is lived. Baudrillard’s vision of the postmodern universe is one of hyper reality in which entertainment, information and communication technologies provide more intense experiences than those of ordinary day to day life. According to him, the realm of hyper-real, created by media simulations of reality, amusement parks like the Disney Land, malls, consumer fantasy lands and TV Sports are more real than the real. In such a world, he observes, models, images and codes of hyper real come to control thought and behavior. He indicates that in the postmodern world, individuals escape from the 'desert of the real' for the ecstasies of hyper reality made by the computer, media and technology-driven experience. In this world, subjectivities are lost and the new form of experience emerges that renders previous social theories and politics irrelevant. Other significant works of Baudrillard include The Mirror of Production (1973), For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1973), Fatal Strategies (1990), Symbolic Exchange and Death (1993), The Transparency of Evil (1993), and Screened Out (2002). With all these works, Baudrillard has raised a few questions on classical philosophy and social theory. These works have also proposed theoretical strategies on writing literary forms culture, modernity and postmodernity. 2.2 “SIMULACRA AND SIMULATIONS” – AN OVERVIEW “Simulacra and Simulation”, a path breaking philosophical statement by Jean Baudrillard was published in 1981. This work is known for linkages and signs and how they relate to the contemporary society. In this essay, Baudrillard argues that human beings have started replacing reality and meaning with symbols and signs and consequently, what is taken as reality is actually a simulation of reality. According to Baudrillard, simulacra refer to the signs of culture and communication media that create the reality human beings perceive. This reality is a world saturated with imagery, marked with audio visual media and commercial advertising. Baudrillard maintains that these simulacra of the real surpass the real world and thus become hyper real – a world that is more real than real, preceding the real. According to Baudrillard, apathy and melancholy dominate human perception in the world and they begin undermining Nietzsche's feeling of resentment. Baudrillard illustrates his basic arrangement using a fable drawn from the work of Jorge Louis Borges. In it ,a map is created  11 in a great empire that is so detailed that it is as large as the empire itself. The actual map grows and decays as the empire itself is conquered and becomes a lost territory. When the empire crumbles, all that is left is the map. In Baudrillard view, it is the map that human beings are living in, the simulation of reality and it is a reality that is crumbling away from disuse. The basic premise of Baudrillards simulacra and simulation is the statement – "the simulacrum is never that concedes the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true." (Baudrillard 429) Incidentally, the concept of simulacra or simulacrum was already in circulation in French philosophical thought like that of Giles Deleuze before the publication of Baudrillards work. Baudrillard uses ‘simulacra’ to indicate material image which appears as something else without having the features or essence of that something. This concept is similar to plateau's objection to artistic representation that replaces the real. In his essay, Baudrillard makes the readers think as to what happens in a world which blocks all access to the real and in which only simulacra and simulations exist. It is also essential to understand the range of implications of the terms – simulations and simulacra. Merriam Webster dictionary defines simulation as a counterfeit or the imitative representation of the functioning of one system or process by means of the functioning of another. It is also defined as an examination of a problem not subject to direct experimentation. Simulacrum, Webster dictionary defines, as an image or representation or as an insubstantial semblance of something. According to Baudrillard, simulation is the condition of the world in which we live. He maintains that simulations take over our relationship with real life, fostering a kind of hyper-reality which is a copy that has no original. He argues that this hyper reality happens when the difference between reality and representation collapses and we are not able to perceive an image as reflecting anything other than a symbolic exchange of signifiers in culture, not the real world. Baudrillard goes on to describe three different orders of simulacra. The first is in which the reality is represented by the image as a map represents the territory. The second order of simulacra is the one in which the distinction between reality and representation is blurred. The third order, he observes, is in which the relationship between reality and representation is replaced with the simulation. Reality thus is lost in favour of a hyper reality. To prove his point that the contemporary era is that of simulations, Baudrillard furnishes the examples of Disney Land and Watergate. He illustrates the point that these locations produce a hyper reality  12 that let us believe that we can tell reality from representation, the real from the imaginary and the copy from its original. Though it is a debatable stand whether or not we live in a world of simulacra, the term is very important in the light of how we perceive medium. Baudrillard’s belief is that the concept of simulation is vital in shaping our notion of the real and the original, revealing the preoccupation of media, not as a means of communication but as a means of representation. When media reach a certain advanced stage, they integrate themselves into daily 'real experience to such an extent that the unmediated sensation is indistinguishable from the mediator. Consequently, the simulation becomes confused with its source. However, Baudrillard reminds that simulation is different from the image and the icon in the active nature of its representation. What are represented are not copies of static entities but rather the process of feeling and experiencing themselves. Beginning as a primarily visual representation, the simulacrum (the image of a simulation) has been extended theoretically to indicate the contemporary media culture. The terms simulation and simulacra have subtly different meanings. Oxford English Dictionary defines simulation as “the action or practice of simulation with intent to deceive”. It also considers simulation "as a false assumption or a display, a surface resemblance or imitation of something." It also extends the definition by indicating that it is "the technique of imitating the behavior of some situation or process... by means of suitably analogous situation or apparatus". All these definitions convey the ideas that simulation is a set of action and it is deceitful in its display. In comparison, simulacrum is defined in Oxford English Dictionary as "a material image, made as a representation of some deity person or thing". It is also defined "as something having merely a form or appearance of a certain thing without possessing its substance or proper qualities". The same dictionary expands the definition as "a mere image, a spacious imitation or likeness of something". These definitions indicate that like simulation, simulacrum bears a resemblance to the thing that it imitates only on the surface level, but contrary to simulation’s mimicry of a process or situation, simulacrum is a static entity, a mere image. Baudrillard writes that an effective simulation will not merely deceive one into believing in a false entity but rather signifies the destruction of an original reality that it has replaced. He observes: "to simulate is not simply to feign... Feigning or dissimulation leaves the  13 reality intact... Whereas simulation threatens the difference between true and false, between real and imaginary" (Baudrillard: 1984: 237). Baudrillard’s view is that reality is so nebulous though rooted in terms like truth and real and an effective simulation will destroy it completely, leaving the deceived in a world without meaning. Simulation, for Baudrillard, brings human beings into a circular world in which the sign is not exchanged for meaning, but merely for another sign. He elaborates this point: …what if God himself could be simulated, that is to say reduced to the signs which attest his existence? Then the whole system becomes weightless... Never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself in an uninterrupted circuit. (Baudrillard: 1984: 239). According to Baudrillard, what is simulated is what is mediated and vice-versa. Those experiences in real life that are explicitly presented as mediated are classified as a higher order of simulation, one which simulates simulating too falsely suggests a real that exists outside the surface of truth. Disney Land, according to him, is the prime example of this phenomenon. He explains: Disney Land is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when infact the Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of hyper real and off – simulation". (Baudrillard: 1984: 240). For Baudrillard, as there is nothing that is not simulated, everyday experiences of human beings are mediated through simulacra. Baudrillard reminds the readers that the experience in a hyper real world is one in which media are not simply located in their own sealed spaces, but dispersed around human beings, in all forms of experience. His point is that there is no longer any medium in the literal sense: it is now intangible, diffused and diffracted in the real. What he means is that the medium is no longer presented to human beings as a medium (in the sense of a mediator) and the diffuseness of the medium means that what the individual believes to be real is never unmediated. Life in a mediated world, according  14 to Baudrillard, is now spectralised and the events are filtered by the medium, creating the dissolution of television into life and the dissolution of life into television. 2.3 CONCLUSION Baudrillard’s philosophy implicates that a system of empty signs which signal the destruction of original reality has permeated into human society and sensibility. He also reveals the anxiety for the impending death of the real. His essay gains its significance in the wake of media like internet and video games which have proliferated the copies of the original. Baudrillard’s theory on simulation and simulacra throw light into the postmodern age, specially on its politics and aesthetics of representation. 2.4 KEY TERMS Simulation, Simulacra, Hyper-reality. Mediation 2.5 CHECK YOUR PROGRESS QI True or False 1. Simulation, according to Baudrillard, is same as the image or icon. 2. Simulation unlike simulacra, involves mimicry. 3. Hyper-reality and simulation are distinct features of postmodern age, according to Baudrillard. 4. Baudrillard’s view on simulation agrees with Plato's view on representation. 5. Simulation and simulacrum bear resemblance to the thing that it imitates only on the surface level. QII Define the following terms: 1. Simulation 2. Simulacra 3. Hyper-reality 4. Late capitalism 5. Postmodern era.   15 3 “THE POLITICS OF THEORY: IDEOLOGICAL POSITIONS IN THE POSTMODERNISM DEBATE” – FREDRIC JAMESON Unit structure : 3.0 Objectives 3.1 Fredric Jameson 3.2 Postmodernism 3.3 “The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism Debate”: An Overview. 3.4 Conclusion 3.5 Key Terms 3.6 Check Your Progress 3.0 OBJECTIVES The basic objective of this unit is to introduce the readers to Fredric Jameson’s views on Postmodernism. The unit also aims to explain the Marxist perspective on Postmodernism. 3.1 INTRODUCTION: POSTMODERNISM Postmodernism is a term that is used in a variety of art forms, and across domains and disciplines. It is used in the contexts of architecture, visual art, popular culture, fiction, literary theory and social sciences. Tim Woods in Beginning Postmodernism explains the aesthetics of Postmodernism. He defines Postmodernism as: Aesthetic self-reflexivity, in which artifacts explore their own constitution, construction and shape (eg: novels in which narrators comment on narrative forms, or paintings in which an image is left unfinished, with `roughed-in’ or blank sections on the canvas). (Woods: p-7)  16 Plurality is considered to be the characteristic feature of postmodernism. Self, truth and vision appear to be pluralistic and fragmented in postmodern expression. Tim Woods explains this aspect of postmodernism in the contexts of reason and identity: Postmodernism pits reasons in the plural – fragmented and incommensurable – against the universality of modernism and the long standing conception of the human self as a subject with a single, unified reason. The subject is the space demarcated by the `I’, understood as a sense of identity, a selfhood, which is coherent, stable, rational and unified. Based upon this sense of individuality (‘individuus’ is the Latin word for ‘undivided’), it is believed that people possess agency and can use their capacities to alter, shape and change the world in which they live. (Woods: 9 - 10) Postmodern Theory is largely suspicious of the notion of unified coherence self, which is considered to be the foundation of rationality. Hence, it no longer believes in ideology or belief system. 3.2 FREDRIC JAMESON Fredric Jameson is a famous American theorist who has worked extensively on Literary Theory, Marxism, Culture Studies and the relationship between art forms and ideology. Jameson positions himself as a Marxist analyst who tries to locate, like Georg Lukacs, the ideological apparatus that operates within the literary movements like Modernism and Postmodernism. Jameson provides his neo-Marxist perspectives in his works – Marxism and Form, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and The Politics of Postmodernism. Jameson tries to deviate from conventional European models of literary theory by extending his interest in various cultural expressions like television serials, films, painting and architecture.  17 3.3 “THE POLITICS OF THEORY: IDEOLOGICAL POSITIONS IN THE POSTMODERNISM DEBATE:” AN OVERVIEW. Fredric Jameson who has taught at several American academic centres including Harvard, Yale and Duke University, has been generally considered as a leading proponent of Marxism in America. His works also reveal his grasp on structuralist and poststructuralist theories. One of the major concerns in Jameson's writing has been postmodernism. He analyses postmodernism in terms of its features and its socioeconomic context of late capitalism. Jameson’s theory is that postmodernism is a product of consumer society and it reflects the ideology of multinational capitalism. Jameson's essay, "The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in Postmodernism Debate", is one of three influential articles he has published on the theme of postmodernism and its ideology. This essay, first published in 1984, explores the paradox of postmodern art which seems to be capable of generating advocacy and appropriation from politically reactionary and progressive critics. Jameson provides an in-depth Marxist analysis of the aesthetics and ideology of postmodernism. Jameson begins the essay with the statement that the problem of postmodernism is both aesthetic and political. He also states that postmodernism symbolizes a social system which is structured on consumer society and capitalism. To prove these arguments, Jameson analyses the logical possibilities of various theories on modernism and postmodernism and the structure of the new commercial culture from which postmodernism emerges. Jameson is of the opinion that art forms which are classified under postmodernism such as poetry of John Ashbery, music of John Cage and the painting of Andy Warhol are so varied in techniques and experiments that they reflect the same fragmentation of modernism. He also analyses the new narratives of William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon and Ishmael Read to suggest that they produce what might be called as nostalgia art. Jameson also considers postmodern architecture of Robert Venturi, Michael Groove and Charles Moore to prove the point that architectural postmodernism is not a unified period style but rather a wide range of allusions to the styles of the past. Jameson also maintains that the debate on style is also a debate on the politics of postmodernism. Jameson reminds that, as Ihab Hasan points out, postmodern style could be considered as anti-modernist. Jameson's opinion is that certain theorists like Tom Wolfe and Charles Jencks who are pro-postmodernists believe that postmodernism subverts modernist ideology. He says that Wolfe  18 and Jencks attack the utopian impulses of modernism, critiquing the reactionary cultural politics of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. In the hands of Wolfe and Jencks, along with those of Hilton Kramer, postmodernism liberates people of responsibility of classical modernism by celebrating superficiality. Their stand is that postmodernism is fundamentally anti-middle class. However, Jameson reminds the reader that these theorists cannot disengage themselves completely from capitalism. He points out that the foundation of postmodernism is the bourgeoisie itself. Though it tries to reject the middle class values, he says that postmodernism repudiates and entertains the middle class and hence it has a symbiotic relationship with the capital. Jameson also considers the theoretical positions of Jurgen Habermas, Francois Lyotard, Manfredo Tafuri and Hilton Kramer to classify them into pro-postmodernists and anti-postmodernists. Jameson explains that Habermas’ view of postmodernism springs from his conviction that modernism attacks the middle class sensibility. Though Habermas critiques the utopian spirit of modernism, he refuses to consider postmodernism as enlightenment. Hence, Jameson believes that Habermas is a pro- modernist and anti-postmodernist. According to Jameson, both Tafuri and Lyotard are political figures and they have a commitment to older revolutionary tradition. While Lyotard endorses the supreme value of aesthetic innovation as a form of revolution, Tafuri has a Marxist framework to analyze postmodern art. Jameson also reminds the readers that Tafuri, despite declaring the traditional Marxist tradition, has affiliation with post-Marxism like Lyotard has. According to Jameson, Tafuri's Marxism is pessimistic and his judgement on postmodernism is largely conditioned by this pessimism. By analyzing the political positions held by the various theorists, Jameson comes to the point that postmodernism should not be merely understood on aesthetic grounds but also on its cultural and historical context. However, he doesn't believe in making any absolute moralizing judgments on postmodernism but rather believes that ideological judgements on postmodernism are necessary. He states that a judgement on ourselves and on cultural productions will enable one to grasp a present historical period. Jameson also takes the theoretical engagements on postmodernism that overlooks the complacencies of postmodernism and salutes the new forms in postmodernism. He argues that it is relevant to assess postmodernism as a new cultural production or as a social reconstruction of late capitalism. Jameson's view is that, in the architectural context, postmodernism has refused the high modernist space by generating a radical disjunction from the spatial context of traditional art. He states that postmodernist buildings celebrate the insertion into the heterogeneous fabric of commercial strip and fast-  19 food landscapes of the contemporary American cities. These buildings, with their commercial icons and spaces, renounce the high modernist claim to innovation. Jameson's point is that this new architecture with its populist outlook emerges from a new commercial culture – beginning with advertisements and moving on to the formal packaging of all kinds from products to buildings to bestsellers and films. Jameson also considers postmodernism as an aesthetic entity that effaces the traditional distinction between high culture and mass culture. He also argues that it creates illusions and fantasies as any capitalist endeavor would. Jameson believes that postmodernism tries to alter the realm of authentic experience by altering the surrounding environment. Such an effort to create philistinism of schlock and kitsch, of commodification and of Readers’ Digest culture is an effort to create the illusions of a new object world. According to him, B-grade Hollywood films, the Las Vegas strip, airport paperback books of popular biography, science fiction or fantasy novel are all the crucial symptoms of the same process. In the final reckoning, the problem of postmodernism for Jameson is only a manifesto of a cultural mutation or commercial culture. He also believes that the postmodernist claim of having created a depoliticized society is not acceptable. He maintains that it is necessary to resist the cultural positions of postmodernism to locate oneself properly in both the present and the past. 3.4 CONCLUSION Fredric Jameson clearly reveals his concern for the society and his Marxist leaning in the analysis of postmodernism. He also shows a strong resistance to accept the point of thinkers like Lyotard and Ihab Hassan that postmodernism is a verifiable socio- cultural reality. He also emphasizes the point that postmodernism, like modernism, is a capitalist cultural product. 3.5 KEY TERMS Late Capitalism, Multinational Capitalism, Consumer Capitalism, Postmodernism, schlock and kitsch 3.6 CHECK YOUR PROGRESS Q1 Say if the following statements are true or false 1. Fredric Jameson, though supports modernism, attacks postmodernism on its ideological ground. 2. Postmodernism, according to Jameson, is as varied as modernism in its manifestation.  20 3. Fredric Jameson provides a Marxist interpretation of postmodernism. 4. Jameson believes that postmodernism creates a depoliticized society. 5. Jameson believes that postmodernism tries to alter the realm of authentic experience by altering the surrounding environment. Q.II Define the following: 1. Late Capitalism 2. Modernism 3. Postmodernism Q.III Answer the following: 1. How does Jameson make a Marxist assessment of the aesthetic and political aspects of postmodernism? 2. Explain how Jameson evaluates various theoretical positions on modernism and postmodernism in the essay.   21 Unit-4 “FEMINISM AND CRITICAL THEORY” – Gayatri Spivak Unit structure : 4.0 Objective 4.1 Introduction to Feminism 4.2 Key Terms and Concepts in Feminist Literary Theory 4.3 Introduction to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 4.4 “Feminism and Critical Theory”: An Overview 4.5 Conclusion 4.6 Key Terms 4.7 Check Your Progress 4.0 OBJECTIVE The objective of this unit is to familiarize the readers with basic concepts and terms used in Feminist Literary theories. It also aims to impart the learners with the knowledge of Gayatri Spivak’s views on Feminism, Marx and Freud. 4.1 INTRODUCTION TO FEMINISM Feminism is considered as an organized movement, which promotes equality for men and women in political, economic and social spheres. Feminists, in general, believe that women are oppressed mainly due to their gender in the dominant ideology or patriarchy. Patriarchy is a system, which oppresses women through its social, economic, political institutions and cultural practices. Men, to maintain greater power over women have created boundaries and obstacles for women. Patriarchy also perpetuates the oppression of minorities and homosexuals. Various schools of Feminism like Radical Feminism; Liberal Feminism, Cultural Feminism and Socialist Feminism have advocated drastic changes in the power relation between men and women. Feminist theory is an extension of Feminism that tries to interrogate gender bias through theoretical engagement. Feminist theories have developed largely under three main categories: a. Theories having an essentialist focus, which include Psychoanalytic Feminism.  22 b. Theories aimed at defining and establishing a feminist literary canon or theories seeking to re-interpret and re-vision literature, culture and history. This branch includes Gynocriticism and Liberal Feminism. c. Theories focusing on sexual difference and sexual politics. This group includes Gender Studies, Lesbian Studies, Cultural Feminism, Socialist Feminism and Queer Theory. Simon De Beauvoir’s study, The Second Sex, is generally considered to be the origin of feminist literary theory. Though Beauvoir’s work is attacked for a flawed perception of her own body politics, it is nevertheless considered as a ground breaking book of feminist theory that interrogates the ‘othering’ of women by Western philosophy. However, merely unearthing women’s literature did not ensure a prominent place for feminist theory. Hence, subsequent feminist theories were engaged in assessing and questioning number of preconceptions inherent in a literary canon dominated by male beliefs. Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique (1963), Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1970), Judith Fetterley’s The Resisting Reader (1978), Elaine Showalter’s Literature of Their Own (1977) and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s Mad Woman in the Attic (1979) are just a handful of many critiques that question cultural, sexual intellectual and / or psychological stereotypes about women. 4.2 KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS IN FEMINIST LITERARY THEORY A discourse in Feminism or a feminist interpretation of cultural text invariably touches upon certain terms and concepts that are popularized by various branches of feminist literary theory. A basic understanding of these terms and concepts is integral in the study of feminist approaches to literature and cultural expressions. Feminist Critique According to Elaine Showalter, Feminist Critique is an interpretation of text from the feminist perspective to expose clichés, stereotypes and negative images of women, generally focusing on male literary and theoretical texts. Feminist Critique also calls attention to the gaps in literary history that has largely excluded writings by women. This approach which dominated feminist criticism first emerged in the 1970s and is strongly linked to the decade’s political agendas. Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics, for example, connects the mis-treatment of women in fiction by Henry Miller and others to the oppression of women in a patriarchal society. Showalter suggests that by continuing to emphasize writings by men, the strategy of Feminist Critique remained largely dependent on the existing models of interpretation.  23 The main interest of Feminist Critique is to explore the extent of patriarchal ideology in literature, namely to explore the material forms of social, economic and political discrimination of women. Further, it examines the representations of women and homosexuals to show how gender, in contrast to biological sex, is culturally constructed and how; therefore, masculinity and femininity are depicted in literature. Ecriture Feminine This concept was mainly developed in the work of French feminist, Helene Cixous. She defines it as writing from / by the female body. Founded in part on Jacques Derrida’s linguistic theories, it is a revolutionary concept that tries to explode the oppressive structures of the conventional, androcentric (male- centred) language and thought. According to Cixous, what makes ecriture feminine strong is the subversive and excessive character of female sexuality; like feminine sexuality, it is multiple instead of single, diffused instead of focused, oriented towards process instead of goal. Celebrating multiplicity and openness, ecriture feminine breaks apart the binary oppositions that organize masculine writing: head / heart, active / passive, culture / nature, father / mother. However, ecriture feminine has met with certain objections because it often seems to define femininity as a quality inherent in female biology and essentially opposed to masculinity thereby reinforcing the very distinction it tries to dismantle. Yet in French, the adjective feminine is ambiguous – referring both to biological sex (the female) and to cultural / historical gender (the feminine) – and this ambiguity is also present in the references to ecriture feminine by Cixous and others. Though it frequently invokes the images of the female body, ecriture feminine is sometimes defined as a product of culture and history as per instance, the idea that women learn to speak with and through their bodies more than men do. Thus, it can also be applied to describe a style of women-centred writing. 4.3 INTRODUCTION TO GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK Nigel Wood, the co-editor of Modern Criticism and theory: A Reader (1988) has rightly pointed out that it is particularly difficult to characterize the thinking of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak(1942- ).He holds the view that Spivak not only introduced deconstructive critical strategies into literary criticism but also developed wider cultural analysis. Her introduction to the translation of Jacques Derrida’s De la Grammatologie into English (1967; trans. 1976, as of Grammotology) offers the most cogent Third World feminist insight into the deconstruction’s political agenda. Spivak’s allegiance to the semantic associations of the alienation of the voices of the Third World Women cannot be ignored because it  24 points out inherent possible antagonisms between feminist, marxist and deconstructive readings. In her seminal essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Spivak points out how an exclusively textual route towards understanding non- western customs is necessary to correlate to occidental patterns of understanding. In tune with this essay, varied perspectives are highlighted in her 1986 essay “Feminism and Critical Theory”. In this essay, she positions herself outside the theoretical debate to get at the material forces that give rise to particular brand of feminism. 4.4 “FEMINISM AND CRITICAL THEORY”: AN OVERVIEW In “Feminism and Critical Theory” Spivak embarks upon a series of comments on a few essentialist notions of ‘woman’ by articulating her thoughts on the issues and relationships intersecting feminism with Marxism, psychoanalysis and deconstruction. She begins her essay by enlisting her notions on feminism within the ambit of poststructuralist critical discourse. Such an analysis holds importance because the issues emerging from the above mentioned disciplines continue to interest people and the configurations arising out of these ideas continue to change. The essay progresses in four sections. The first section deals with the talk she gave several years ago. The second section is reflects her earlier work. The third section holds an intermediate moment. And finally the fourth section incorporates the present. Each section reflects her strong insights on beliefs about various critical debates. Although the essay is short, it is loaded with comprehensive arguments on feminism and critical theory. The first section of the essay deals with the problems of essentialsing definitions and its relations to women in critical discourses. She states that no definition can be applied to both the genders – the only alternative to definition can be that of a polemical or provisional one. As definition reshapes itself in varied circumstances, it should not be misinterpreted as a kind of dichotomy. As a deconstrucinist, Spivak calls for a debate on the very enterprise of redefining the premises of any theory in literary criticism. She comments: “ One, no rigorous definition of anything is ultimately possible, so that if one wants to, one could go on deconstructing the opposition between man and woman, and finally that it is a binary opposition that displaces itself” (Spivak: 495). Spivak’s concerns on the politics of production of language is reflected in this essay wherein she propounds that most critical theory sees the text as a discourse of human science wherein the problem of the discourse of human science isclearly visible. In this  25 way, Spivak indicates: “In the general discourse of humanities, there is a sort of search for solution, where as in literary discourse there is a playing out of a problem as the solution, if you like”. (P- 495) This argument is further elaborated in the way that the human discourse can be articulated in three shifting ‘concepts’: “language, world and consciousness”.(p.495) Spivak makes a point by stating that any world is organized through language: an expression that we cannot possess, for we are operated upon by those languages. This category of language then, embodies the categories of world and consciousness even as it is determined by them. Spivak comments: “A safe figure, seemingly outside of the language – (speech) – writing opposition, is the text – a weave of knowing and not-knowing which is what knowing is. (This organizing principle- language, writing, a text- might itself be a way of holding at bay a randomness incongruent with consciousness)” (P-495). Spivak further advocates that theorists consider Marxian theory as texts of labour, production, circulation and distribution and Freud as a psychoanalyst. However, she claims that it is necessary to understand human textuality as something which represents the world and the self. She states: “This human textuality can be seen not only as world and self, as the representation of a world in terms of a self at play with other selves and generating this represention, but also in the world and self, all implicated in an intextuality”(PP.495-496). Hence, such a concept of textuality should not necessarily reduce the world to just texts, linguistics texts, books, criticism and teaching. Spivak critiques the tendency of the critical pracices that take literary text as offering a solution whereas. in reality, one should be awre of unavailability of a unified solution. In Spivak’s view Marx’s or Freud’s interpretations are seen in terms of evidence and demonstration. Spivak thus comments: “They seem to bring forth evidence from the world of man or man’s self, and thus prove certain kinds of truths about world and self”.(p.496).However, Spivak reminds that their depiction of self and world are based on inadequate evidence and she counters by an idea asserting that, “I would like to fix upon the idea of alienation in Marx and the idea of normality and health in Freud.” (p-496) According to Spivak, one way of understanding Marx is in terms of use-value, exchange-value and surplus value. Marx’s notion of use value is that which is directly consumed by the agent. Exchange value is what can be achieved in terms of either labour power or money. Surplus value is considered to be more worthy because in the process of abstraction through exchange – the buyer of labour’s work gets more (in exchange) than the worker needs for subsistence.  26 In this context, Spivak interestingly allegorizes the relationship of a woman within the above triad parameter –“use”, “exchange” and “surplus”. She illustrates the case of a traditional woman in a given social situation. On one hand she is the one who produces more than subsistence and becomes a source of continuous production for man or capitalist who owns her or his labour power. Another view she holds is that the mode of production of housework is also not capitalist, hence such an analysis could be paradoxical. On the other hand, in relation to the contemporary woman is the one who seeks financial compensation for housework by abstracting use value into exchange value. It is in this bargain, Spivak argues that the situation of domestic workplace cannot relate to Marxian theory, which is considered as ‘pure exchange ‘. In Spivak’s point of view, the Marxian exigency leads to two queries: “What is the use-value of unremunerated woman’s work for husband or family? Is the willing insertion into the wage structure a curse or a blessing? It is in this context Spivak confronts as to how would then one fight this idea, which is universal and patriarchal, that wages in fact are the only means of value-producing work? Nor does she quite agree with the saying that “ Housework is beautiful.” (496-497) Moreover, what would be the implications of leaving women outside the purview of capitalist economy only. In lighter vein, she adds that “Radical feminism can here learn a cautionary lesson from Lenin’s capitulation to capitalism.” (p.497) that nothing is more interesting than the idea of externalization or alienation because within this framework of capitalist system “the labour process externalizes and the worker is considered as a commodity”(p.497). Having broached upon the earlier ideas, Spivak feels the need to elaborate the notion of reproduction with Marxian paradigm. She argues that a womb makes the woman an agent in any theory of production.But in matrilineal and patrilineal societies, “The man retains legal property rights over the product of a woman’s body. On each separate occasion, the custodial decision is a sentimental questioning of man’s right. The current struggle over abortion right has fore grounded this acknowledged agenda” (p-497). Spivak also expresses the view that time has come to rework the theory of production and to interrogate Marx’s view that women and children make desexualized labour force. She then calls for rewriting rules of economy and social elthics from a feminist point of view and questions essentialisations and Marx’s transgression in relation to where ”rules for humanity and criticism of socialites are based on inadequate evidence”. (p.497) She then suggests, “that if the nature and history of abbreviation, labour and the production of property are reexamined in terms of women’s work and childbirth, it can lead in to a reading of Marx beyond Marx”.(497-498)  27 Spivak then comes to an idea where she expresses that it is wiser to move beyond Marx to Freud who wrote Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud’s outstanding study of “imagined”, anticipated and avoided pain made observations on subject’s history and theory. In this connection, Spivak unearths the relatively untouched and undefined concepts such as womb-envy as against Freud’s Penis-envy. It is here she places on record the importance of womb as “a tangible place of production”(P.498) where there is pain in productivity and normality without sentimentalizing the pain of the subject in relation to childbirth, because “The opposition of pleasure and pain is questioned in the physiological normality’ of woman” (p.498) as subtly figures in Freud’s texts. It is here Spivak comes in and says that if one deconstructs the pain of man and women it operates differently. She aligns with Luce Irirgaray and admits that since the “womb is a place of the carrier and the carried which needs correction”. Spivak also charts “the itinerary of womb- envy in the production of a theory of consciousness” and points out how “the idea of the womb as a place of production is avoided both in Marx and in Freud” (p.498) with exception of the American neo- Freudian, Erich Fromm, a prolific critic of on Freud’s legacy. Spivak takes the argument forward on Freud and says that her task is not to reject the idea of penis-envy but to avail the idea of womb-envy to define human psychology and production in society. She says “In Freud, the genital stage is pre-eminently phallic, not clitoral or vaginal. This particular gap is significant. The hysteron remains the place which constitutes only the text of hysteria. Everywhere there is a non-confrontation of the idea of the womb as a workshop, except to produce a surrogate penis” (p.498). Spivak says that these are certain ideas of the world and self that circulate out Freudian and Marxist theoretical bases which need to be examined. In this context, Spivak opines that one should not mistake the evolution of the ideas of the theorists, or the world only with the purpose of appreciating a literary text because certain kinds of notions preexist in the world and consciousness of even the most ‘practical’ critic. Hence, she opines: “Part of the feminist enterprise might well be to provide ‘evidence’ so that these great male texts do not become great adversaries, or models from whom we take our ideas and then revise or reassess them. These texts must be rewritten so that there is new material for the grasping of the production and determination of literature within the general production and determination of consciousness and society.” (p.499) Here, she means that after all both men and women who produce literature have general ideas of the world and consciousness in them which they cannot define. It is with this judgment, Spivak asserts that any literature written by male or female are also governed by the general ideas of  28 the world and consciousness to which they shouldn’t essentialize them. She concludes the first section with a reasoned argument establishing that the general currency of the understanding of society will change if one continues to research women’s writing and their past in this manner, Spivak states: The kind of work I have outlined would infiltrate the male academy and redo the terms of our understanding of the context and substance of literature as part of the human enterprise. (p.499) At the beginning of second section of the essay, Spivak observes the missing element in the earlier remarks with regards to the dimension of race. Spivak renews her interest and calls for sensitivity to race, gender and class. She goes on to add that in the case of American feminist, the chief problem is in the matter of identification of racism as constituted in America. She observes that the object of investigation should be not only the history of Third World women, but “the production, through the great European theories, often by way of literature, of the colonial object”(p.499). Spivak then observes that as long as “American feminists understand ‘history’ as a positivistic empiricism that scorns “theory” (p.499) and become ignorant of its own, then it is for the ‘Third World’ to revisit theories of the First world intellectual practices and develop a reading method that is sensitive to gender, race and class. Spivak’s enquiry into gender is based on the premise that “Freud today involves a broader critique by offering a critique of his entire project. It is a critique of not only of Freud’s masculism but also of nuclear-familial psychoanalyst theories of the constitution of the sexed subject.” (P-499) This critique extends to alternate models of concern with the production of colonial discourses as well as most Western feminist challenges to Freud. She also asserts that the extended or corporate family is a socio-economic organization which interweaves sexual constitution with historical and political economy. Spivak appreciates the efforts of Giles Deluze to locate family romance within the ambit of politico-economic domination and exploitation. Spivak, in this regard, considers her critique to be an argument within larger familial situation. In the later part of the essay, Spivak openly proposes for a ‘discourse of the clitoris’ (P-500). She comments: In this interest of the broadening scope of my critique, I should like to reemphasize that the clitoris, even  29 as I acknowledge and honour its irreducible physiological effect, is , in this reading, also a short-hand for women’s excess in all areas of production and practice, an excess which must be brought under control to keep business going as usual.(p.500) Further, Spivak‘s attitude towards Marxism takes into account the historical antagonism between Marxism and Feminism. Marxists at best have either dismissed or patronized women’s struggle. Although the history of European women has been an opposition to Bolshevik and social Democrat women, Spivak contests what is important is to understand the conflict between the suffrage movement or the union movement. Such a historical problem always persisted. Spivak’s present essay is also related to the ideological development of the theory of the imagination in eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries and dictates that Marxism or Feminism cannot be separated from history. Further, Spivak claims that she is interested in class analysis of families. Her chief interest delves into reading of International feminism that which operates on production and realization of surplus value. Spivak, then,makes a study on “domestic and political economies in order to establish the subversive power of ‘women’s work’ in models in the construction of a ‘revolutionary subject’(p.501). This study has been in relation to wage theory and women’s work. She cites the example of Anotnio Negri, an autonomist who argued that “inevitable consumerism that socialized capitalism must nurture. Commodity consumption, even as it realizes surplus-value as profit, does not itself produce the value and therefore persistently exacerbates crisis. It is through reversing and displacing this tendency within consumerism, Negri suggests, that ‘revolutionary subject’ can be released”. (p.501) Spivak concludes the section of the essay by analyzing the discourse of race through history, politics, psychoanalysis, Marxist feminism that foregrounds the operations of the New imperialism. Spivak adds that it is her deconstructive view that resists essentializing the concepts of gender, race and class. Such a view will not allow her to establish a hegemonic ‘global theory’ of feminism. She feels that deconstruction doesn’t open the way for feminists, the figure and discourse of women rather opened the way for Derrida as in Derrida’s Spurs(first published as ‘La Questions du Style’ in 1975), Spivak argues: The early Derrida can certainly be shown to be useful for feminist practice, but why is it that, when he  30 writes under the sign of woman, as it were, his work becomes solipsistic and marginal? What is it in the history of that sign that allows this to happen? (p.502) Spivak keeps delving upon this question for sometime till she moves towards the third and fourth sections. The third section holds importance because it illustrates her preoccupation with some uneasy concerns about race and class - a list of illustrations from Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall.She suggests: Reading literature ‘well’ is in itself a questionable good and can indeed be sometimes productive of harm and ‘aesthetic’ apathy within its ideological framing. My suggestion is to use literature, with a feminist perspective, as a ‘nonexpository’ theory of practice.(p.502) Spivak illustrates, with a study on Drabble, how a women writer who undertakes an extreme situation, to answer the question as to ‘Why does love happen?’ She positions Jane, Drabble’s protagonist in the most ‘inaccessible privacy’ and James watches over her in empty house as she regains her strength after birthing alone by choice. The Waterfall is supposed to be a story of Jane’s love affair with James, who happens to be her cousin Lucy’s husband. Drabble describes Jane as “dreadful with blood and sweat yet love blossoms”(503). This means Drabble is taking up the challenge of feminine positivity and yet creating it as the tool of analytical strength. Drabble, Spivak says, considers Jane provisional and self suspending, where she deceives Lucy, and makes the both the women rivals. Spivak fails to understand how Drabble considers the story worth narrating. Spivak contests: “Drabble manipulates her to examine the conditions of production and determination of microstructural heterosexual attitudes within her chosen enclosure. This enclosure is important because it is from here that rules come.” (P-505) Spivak comments that Drabble doesn’t want to talk about race but sensitively lays her fingers on class. Her most important issue is sexual deprivation and not race or class. She also finds irony in Drabble creating a class bound yet analytical Jane which makes the plot doubtful and she mockingly refers it as ironical which is to be generated from ‘ outside the book’.(p.505). This means Drabble manipulates Jane’s behavior within the framework of Jane’s enclosure. Drabble admits that there are limitations to interpret any narrative the whole truth within a fictional form to the  31 ‘humanist academic’(p.506). Hence she had to change from the third person to first person narration. Spivak interprets this: What can a literary critic do with this? Notice that the move is absurdity twice compounded, since the discourse reflecting the constraints of fiction-making goes on then to fabricate another fictive text. Notice further that the narrator who tells us about the impossibility of truth-in-fiction – the classic privilege of metaphor – is a metaphor as well.(p.506) Spivak explains that there is subversion of the ‘truthful’ language, that a speaker unwittingly can get rid of by being structurally unconscious and narrate without role-playing. Spivak takes a critical view of Drabble’s third person narrator. Spivak concludes the third section of the essay by expressing that Drabble may have filled the space of the female consciousness with a particular eloquence, but fails to present problems of race and class, and the marginality of sex by her fictitious Jane. Spivak articulates: She engages in that microstructural dystopia, the sexual situation in extremis, that begins to seem more and more a part of women’s fiction. Even within those limitations, our motto cannot be Jane’s ‘ I prefer to suffer, I think’ – the privatist cry of heroic liberal women; it might rather be the lesson of the scene of writing of The Waterfall; to return to the third person within its grounds mined under. (p-506) In the fourth section of the essay, Spivak continues her tirade against the perceived comprehension of feminist students and colleagues in American academic with the production of literary texts, more so by women today. She exposes the politics of men in obstructing third world women in their wage enhancement. She illustrates a case of South Korean factory owned by Control Data, a Minnesota-based multinational corporation and says, “No one can deny the dynamism and civilizing power of socialized capital” (p- 508). The search for greater production for surplus value is rooted through the conspiracy of corporate philanthropy and civilization at a humanistic ideological level. South Korea in this case is not a  32 recepient or agent of a socialized capital. Spivak adds a new dimension to her theoretical debate by expressing that “socialized kills by remote control” happened as Americans watched South Korean men decimate women although they denied it completely later. Spivak argues that, “however active in the production of civilization as a by-product, socialized capital has not moved far from the pre- supposition of a slave mode of production” (p-508). Spivak relates another instance of Control Data’s radio commercials speaking of how its computers open the door to knowledge at workplace and home for men and women together. The acronym given to this computer system is PLATO. This means that one is given to think that this noble name represents ‘efficiency’ and ‘democracy’ in their endeavour to promote knowledge. Spivak reads into the underlying notion of the symbolic value of the acronym PLATO in their efforts for civilization. She states: The slave mode of production which underlay Athenian civilization necessarily found its most pristine ideological expression in the privileged social stratum of the city, whole intellectual heights its surplus labour in the silent depths below the polis made possible. (p-508) Next, Spivak’s parable of argument leads one to a book- La carte postale- on philosophy as telecommunication (Control Data’s business) which used an unnamed, sexually indeterminate woman (control data’s victim) as a medium through which interprets the relationship between Socrates and Plato (Control Data’s acronym) traversing through Freud and beyond, wherein she comments, “Here deconstruction becomes complicit with an essentialist bourgeois feminism”. (p-509) She goes further by critiquing Control Data’s social service pages where Kit Ketchum, former treasurer of Minnesota was appointed again for commending Control Data for their commitment to employing and promoting women. It is here that Spivak doesn’t hasitate to add: “Bourgeois feminism, because of a blindness to the multinational theatre, dissimulated by ‘clean’ national practice and fostered by the dominant ideology, can participate in the tyranny of the proper and see in Control Data an extender of the Platonic mandate to women in general”. (p-509) Spivak concludes the essay by explaining her brand of feminist deconstruction: Feminism lives in the master-text as well as in the pores. It is not the determinant of the last instance. I  33 think less easily of ‘changing the world’ than in the past. I teach a small number of the holders of the can(n) on, male or female, feminist or masculinist, how to read their own texts, as best I can. (p-509) 4.5 CONCLUSION Feminist Literary Criticism by and large revalues women’s experience. It also examines representations of women, gender and sexuality in literature by men and women. Furthermore, it explores the question of whether there is a female language and a woman-centred way of thinking, experiencing and expression. Spivak rightly has expressed her views on the sexist and racist biases of literary theory and points out the limitation of the textual approach of Western literary theories on Third World subjects. 4.6 KEY TERMS Gender, Sexuality, Feminist Critique, womb-envy, essentialism, humanistic academic. 4.7 CHECK YOUR PROGRESS QI. State whether the following statements are true or false 1. Spivak appreciates the western theoretical approaches to the Third World women. 2. Spivak’s essay provides a feminist re-reading of Marx and Frued. 3. Spivak’s essay deconstructs many essentialist definitions of women, gender and class QII. Define the following Deconstruction Third World Femnism Womb-envy Commodity consumption QIII Answer the following 1. Explain how Gayatri Spivak launches into a feminist deconstruction of theories on race, gender and class in “Feminism and Critical Theory”? 2. What are Spivak’s views on Mark and Freud as revealed in Feminism and Critical Theory”?   34 5 “READING PROCESS: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH” – WOLFGANG ISER Unit structure : 5.0 Objective 5.1 Introduction: reader-Response Criticism 5.2 About the Author: Wolfgang Iser 5.3 “Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach”: An Overview 5.4 Conclusion 5.5 Key Terms 5.6 Check Your Progress 5.0 OBJECTIVE The objective of this unit is to familiarize the reader with the basic concepts of Reader Response Criticism. It also aims to introduce Wolfgang Iser’s views on reading process. 5.1 INTRODUCTION Reader-Response criticism is the systematic examination of the aspects of the text that arouse, shape, and guide a reader's response. According to reader-response criticism, the reader is a producer rather than a consumer of meanings. In this sense, a reader is a hypothetical construct of norms and expectations that can be derived or projected or extrapolated from the work and may even said to be embedded in the structure of the work. Because expectations may be violated or fulfilled, satisfied or frustrated, and because reading is a temporal process involving memory, perception, and anticipation, the charting of reader-response is extremely difficult and perpetually subject to construction and reconstruction, vision and revision. Reader-response criticism, however, does not denote any specific theory. It can range from the phenomenological theories of Wolfgang Iser and Roman Ingarten – both of whom argue that although the reader fills in the gaps, the author's intentional acts impose restrictions and conditions – to the relativistic analysis of  35 Stanley Fish, who argues that the interpretative strategy of the reader creates the text, there being no text except that which a reader or an interpretive community of readers creates. Writers such as Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss make the core of the Constance School of Criticism that propagated Reader Response theories. 5.2 ABOUT THE AUTHOR (WOLFGANG ISER) Wolfgang Iser (22 July 1926 – 24 January 2007) was a German literary scholar who studied and worked in the universities of Heidelberg and Glasgow, where he started to take an interest in inter-cultural exchange. He is known for his reader-response theory. This theory began to evolve in 1967, while he was working in the University of Konstanz, which he helped to found in the 1960s. Together with Hans Robert Jauss, he is considered to be the founder of the Constance School of Reception Aesthetics. Reader-response theory shares many goals and insights with hermeneutics; both aim to describe the reader's contact with text and the author. 5.3 “READING PROCESS: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH”: AN OVERVIEW Wolfgang Iser is a leading member of Constance School of Reception Aesthetics which developed in the 1970s, placing the reader at the center of a literary text. Reception Aesthetics or Reader Response criticism maintains that reader is actively involved in the production of meaning. It is also based on two philosophical foundations – Hermeneutics and Phenomenology. Iser, along with Stanley Fish and Hans Robert Jauss, make this significant school of thought. The basic premise of Reader Response criticism is that to read a work, the readers need to be familiar with the literary technique and conventions which the work deploys. The readers must have some grasp of the codes of a literary work and they must also mobilize their general social knowledge to recognize these codes of a work. Reader response criticism also implies that the most effective literary work forces the reader into a new critical awareness with which his/her expectations and opinions are constantly modified. Iser is of the opinion that a literary work interrogates and transforms the beliefs the reader brings to it. He also argues that while the readers modify a text with their reading strategies, it simultaneously modifies them. Iser’s reception theory is based on a liberal humanist ideology – a belief that in reading, one should be flexible and open minded, prepared to put one’s beliefs into question and allow them  36 to be transformed by the text. The theoretical base of Iser’s seminal essay, “Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach”, is Hermeneutics, a branch of philosophy which maintains that self is enriched from an encounter with the unfamiliar. Iser believes that every reading is such an encounter. However, he believes that readers do not encounter a text in a void: all readers are socially and historically positioned. Though Iser is aware of the social impact of reading, he chooses to concentrate on the psychology of reading and the aesthetic model of reading. This essay, which is a part of a full length study, The Act of Reading, published in 1978, is largely concerned with the literary text and the production of meaning in the context of the reader. While illustrating the phenomenological theory of reading, Iser establishes the point that there are two types of readers – the implied reader and the real reader. The implied reader is a part of the text itself i.e., the writer’s anticipation of the intelligence of the reader. The real reader is one who fills the gaps in the text and undergoes a process of a self- correction in the experience of reading. Further, Iser argues that reading is a dynamic process wherein the text and the reader interact to create patterns of meaning. Phenomenology is the second theoretical base of this essay. It is a branch of philosophy which maintains that consciousness is intentional, that it is directed to an object. Further, phenomenology also upholds the view that to be conscious is to be conscious of something. Iser imports this view in his Reader Response theory and tries to establish the argument that reading is an intentional act of consciousness of the reader and this act makes it possible for the reader to be conscious. Iser also uses what is called the Hermeneutic circle to explain the reading process. Hermeneutic circle could be explained as the reader’s engagement with the parts and the whole of the text. Iser maintains that readers cannot understand any part of a text without understanding the whole, yet they cannot understand the whole without understanding its parts. According to him an answer to this puzzle is that readers reconcile part and whole through successively adjusted provisional understandings. Iser establishes a point that a literary text should be conceived in such a way that it will engage the reader’s imagination because reading becomes an aesthetic experience only when it is active and co-creative. He says that the features of a text invite the readers to participate in a game of imagination. He maintains that more than the written part, the unwritten part of the text stimulates the reader’s creative participation. According to him, the written text is only an outline or a gestalt which has to be animated by the co- creative reader. Iser’s significant argument, in this essay, is that the structure of a text can never exercise complete control over reader’s comprehension and the readers participate both in the production and the comprehension of the work’s intention.  37 According to him, literary texts should contain conditions of actualization that will allow their meaning to be assembled in the responsive mind of the readers. Hence, he believes that the implied reader is a textual structure designed by the author. This concept implies that a literary text is a network of response-inviting structures which impel the reader to grasp the text in an active process. For Iser, text is a sequence of sign impulses which are received by the readers. He believes that reading is a process of inserting reader’s idea into a process of communication. This means that it is the reader who creates the signified which is constantly modified with every new sentence – the correlate. Iser illustrates this dynamic process of reading by analyzing the reader’s positions in Henry Fielding’s novel, Tom Jones. He argues that, in this novel, a reader creates a signified which is not often denoted by the signifier. By doing so, the reader creates a basic condition of comprehension. Iser also explains how reading is a process of self- correction wherein a signified is formulated by the reader which is subsequently modified. For instance, Iser explains that in Tom Jones readers initially think that Squire Allworthy has a sound sense of judgement