Literary Theory - University of Calicut BA English 2019 Past Paper PDF

LITERARY THEORY V SEMESTER BA ENGLISH CORE COURSE: ENG5 B08 2019 Admission onwards UNIVERSITY OF CALICUT School of Distance Education Calicut University- P.O, Malappuram - 673635, Kerala. 19014  School of Distance Education UNIVERSITY OF CA...

LITERARY THEORY V SEMESTER BA ENGLISH CORE COURSE: ENG5 B08 2019 Admission onwards UNIVERSITY OF CALICUT School of Distance Education Calicut University- P.O, Malappuram - 673635, Kerala. 19014  School of Distance Education UNIVERSITY OF CALICUT School of Distance Education Study Material V SEMESTER BA ENGLISH CORE COURSE: ENG5 B08 LITERARY THEORY Prepared by: Smt. SWATHI ANILKUMAR V, Assistant Professor of English, Educos Arts and Science College, Kuttiady, Kozhikode. Scrutinized by: Dr. MUHAMMED NOUFAL. K, Asst. Professor, Department of English, CKGM Govt. College, Perambra, Kozhikkode. DISCLAIMER “The author shall be solely responsible for the content and views expressed in this book” Literary Theory 2  School of Distance Education CONTENTS 1 Module 1 7 2 Module 2 13 3 Module 3 26 4 Module 4 39 5 Module 5 49 Literary Theory 3  School of Distance Education Introduction to the Course Literary Theory is an unavoidable discipline as far as English literature is concerned. Today, we regard Theory as equal as literature and gives an equal space in higher education syllabus. This course offers an overview of the development of Literary Theory worldwide from its origin to the present. This SLM will have five modules; First module deals with the period before theory as it developed as a distinct discipline. Second module outlines the developed form of theory in the second half of the 20th century. In the third module the discussion is on the cultural perspectives regarding theory with a special focus on Marxism, Cultural Studies and Cultural Materialism. Fourth module points out the Feminist aspects of Theory and Queer studies. The last module talks about the Theory in the postmodern period including Postcolonial studies and Ecocriticism. This paper covers every section in detail and the reference books provided will help you to understand the paper in detail. The aim of this course is to make you knowledgeable in the field of Theory that may help you to think critically about the world that we live in. We wish you a happy learning experience. Literary Theory 4  School of Distance Education Syllabus  Module I: Liberal Humanism versus Theory. 1. Liberal Humanism: Dominant aspects of Liberal humanism with examples. 2. Literary Theory: Dominant aspects of literary theory with examples. Linguistic Turn – Critical turn – Paradigm shift  Module II: Structuralism, Poststructuralism and Psychoanalysis. 1. Structuralism: Saussure - Sign, Signifier, Signified – Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes – Structuralist narratology. 2. Poststructuralism: Derrida, Logocentrism, Aporia, Decentering. 3. Psychoanalytic Theory: Unconscious. Freud – Id, Ego, Superego, Oedipus Complex. Lacan – Imaginary, Symbolic, Real, Mirror Stage.  Module III: Marxism, Cultural Studies, Cultural Materialism and New Historicism. 1. Marxism: Base, Superstructure, Materialism, ideology. The Frankfurt School – Culture industry. Antonio Gramsci – The formation of the intellectuals, Subaltern. Louis Althusser – Ideological State apparatus and Interpellation. 2. Cultural Studies: Culturalism, New Left, CCCS, Raymond Williams’ definition of Culture, Structure of feeling, Stuart Hall and the ‘popular’, and the two paradigms of Cultural Studies. Literary Theory 5  School of Distance Education 3. Cultural Materialism & New Historicism: Marxist framework of Culture and History, Historiography, Foucauldian notion of Power, Difference with Old Historicism, Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose.  Module IV: Feminism and Queer Theory 1. Feminism: The three waves in feminism, Gynocriticism, French Feminism - Ecriture feminine, Sexual Politics, Marxist Feminism, Lesbian Feminism, Backlash, Black Feminism, Dalit Feminism, Postfeminism, Womanism. 2. Queer Theory: Social constructionism of gender and sexuality, LGBTIQ, Transgender identity  Module V: Postmodernism, Postcolonialism, and Ecocriticism 1. Postcolonialism: Eurocentrism, Orientalism, Alterity, Diaspora, Hybridity, Uncanny, Strategic Essentialism, Subaltern Studies, Postcolonial Critique of Nationalism. 2. Postmodernism: Critique of Enlightenment and Universalism, Habermas’s notion of Modernity as an Incomplete Project, Lyotard’s concept of incredulity towards metanarratives, Baudrillard’s ideas of Simulation, Simulacra and hyperreality, Brian McHale’s concept of Postmodernist literatures. 3. Ecocriticism: Anthropocentrism, Shallow Ecology vs Deep Ecology, Environmental Imagination, Ecofeminism Literary Theory 6  School of Distance Education Module 1 Liberal Humanism An Introduction It is a universally acknowledged fact that art and literature transcend time. Either it is a poem, a novel, or any kind of cultural artifact, we all accept the timeless nature it possesses. As we see in John Keats's comparison of the Grecian urn as a 'sylvan historian,' every art tells a story that breaks its spatial and temporal limits that is History. If a question is asked how on earth this happens, we will have to go back to the notions of Matthew Arnold where he stated, it is the culture, in which a particular art form is produced, actually transcends history. And, the minds which create such transcendental works are also of greater importance. These ideas got developed in the later decades, finding a way to formulate a canon for literature, especially English literature. The Western philosophy itself is, to an extent, centred on Human individuality and underscores the vitality of human actions to frame an excellent culture. This can be called the Liberal Humanist perception. Peter Barry denotes Liberal Humanism as the 'theory before theory' that outlines how English became an academic subject, how the Western canon came into being, what are its features and who were the prominent writers. There emerged many critical ideologies and theories to evaluate arts, whether a work of art satisfies Literary Theory 7  School of Distance Education the conditions to be a great work of art or not. Still, aspects of Liberal Humanism in a text might not be visible, so the critic hast to bring it 'to the surface by a conscious effort of will.’ To sum up, it assumes that Liberal Humanism is an umbrella term comprising the development of literature up to New Criticism. Criticisms of Plato and Aristotle also prepared the path for English literature to grow with its multifaceted areas; hence the period begins from Plato to New Criticism as a theory. The establishment of Oxford and Cambridge Universities in Britain was a milestone in the development of English studies. Earlier, these institutions worked principally on religious propaganda and they used the English language as a tool for its growth even outside the country. The next turn of English studies has happened with the process of colonization in different parts of the world. English became a superpower weapon in those countries to convert many of them to Christianity. Though the agenda was to spread religion, Englishmen introduced English with a liberal colouring as it is engaged with transcendental literature. Even the leaders of colonized countries supported the growth of English as a distinct discipline since it appeals to everyone irrespective of any differences (caste, class, etc.) English literature became a universal one through the conscious effort on the part of the colonizers. Literature needs thorough scrutinization to make it worthy for the betterment of common people. So that literary criticism is essential. The Western philosophy believed in the necessity of criticism on a greater level. As we have seen, Plato and Aristotle had inaugurated this Literary Theory 8  School of Distance Education even before centuries. But later, during the 1920s, criticism arose as a particular branch of knowledge with thinkers like I. A. Richards, William Empson, and F. R. Leavis. Their efforts culminated in the birth of New Criticism as we see it today. Features of Liberal Humanist Reading To find out the 'distilled essence' in English literature, which means the Liberal Humanist aspects, critics need to go through some procedures. Listed below are some of them. 1. Keep an attitude towards literature. Remember that good literature is any piece of writing that surpasses the constraints of time and space 2. Better, fix the meaning of a text by reading it alone because a well-written text imbibes its meaning in itself. Socio-political understanding is not needed. Merely a verbal analysis will work out. 3. Since human nature is unchangeable, its portrayal must be relatable at any time in history. Things written about them must also liberate them from that particular period. 4. Make sure that the literary piece does not show any interest in any of the political propaganda but foregrounds human values only because it will manipulate people with a specialized design. 5. Confirm that the text follows an organic unity and is written with 'sincerity.' Everything a text wants to convey must be rendered implicitly using proper vocabulary. Literary Theory 9  School of Distance Education The rise of New Criticism in the Western curriculum saw a drastic change in the attitudes concerning the evaluation of literature. This inaugurated the era of theory in which several other theories took part either as unison or as opposition to the preceding one. Literary Theory The word theory came from a Greek word 'theoria' which means contemplation or speculation. Literary theory is recognized as the systematized, organized analysis of literary texts. Theory speculates meaning of literary texts, firstly placing it on the backdrops of any accepted conceptualization and secondly reading it very closely with all possibilities. Literary theory studies the production, distribution and reception of meanings in literary texts, as well as the author, reader and context of the texts. Sometimes theory appears to be political also because it unsettles the established meanings of a text. New Criticism, the first among the theories, sought to evaluate literary texts in a scientific way. Subjective apprehensions of literary texts that made use of the Liberal Humanist ideology couldn't resolve the real tensions a text addressed. To fix it, a New critic I. A. Richards proposed "close reading" in his works Principles of Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism, which means to understand a text by validating it on the merits of its form. William Empson discussed the multiple semantic possibilities a text holds. At the same Literary Theory 10  School of Distance Education time, Cleanth Brooks tried to figure out how poetic devices and techniques could determine a genre in his essays like “Language of Paradox”. Other major exponents of New Criticism were Wimsatt and Beardsley. They introduced terms like ‘intentional fallacy (reading a text by assuming the author’s intentions) and affective fallacy’(reading a text on behalf of a reader’s perspective) that persist in literary criticism. Russian Formalism and Prague School of Linguistics are a couple of similar movements that emerged in Russia as a counter part to the Marxian philosophy of considering a work of art as a weapon for social reformation. Jan Mukarovsky and Roman Jakobson were the most popular among them. Their contributions of concepts like ‘literariness’ lead us to look at the particular way of using language that can ‘defamiliarize’ an ordinary object with a celestial essence. All these approaches share one thing in common: the significance of form in which a text is written that is made possible by using language in different ways. Thus, what they preferred more was a formalistic analysis to a contextual analysis of a text. Linguistic Turn and Critical Turn Following New Criticism, or rather extending its scope, Structuralism came into being with the theories drafted by the Swiss Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Though this was a purely linguistic venture, critics like Roland Barthes and others utilized it to understand Literary Theory 11  School of Distance Education literature better. Critics argued about the importance of language as a 'system' for meaning generation in literary texts. This particular attempt in criticism is termed as the ' Linguistic Turn'. Linguistic Turn was followed by another one named the Critical Turn. Critical turn advocates critical thinking regarding everything. After Structuralism, movements like Post structuralism, Postcolonialism, Marxism, etc., began to view a text by adjusting its focus on the unpinning of concealed meanings of texts. Re-readings on the verbal play, contextual analysis, historiographic rendition, and undermined literary texts' meanings were done through these moves. This paradigm shift brought about a new method of critical understanding of the world in which we live. Literary Theory 12  School of Distance Education Module 2 Structuralism Structuralism is an intellectual movement that began in France in the 1950s and is first seen in the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and the literary critic Roland Barthes. This movement has its roots in the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure's thinking though it got its momentum during the 1960s and 1970s. The central point of discussion of this movement was the construction of meanings in different areas. Owing to the ideas of Saussure, structuralists believed that meaning is always an attribute of things, or meanings are attributed to the things by the human mind. That means no word has any inherent connection with the thing it signifies. Structuralism is an explicit opposition to mimetic criticism (the view that literature is primarily an imitation of reality). The essence of this thought is the belief that things cannot be understood in isolation - they have to be seen in the context of the larger structures they are part of (hence the term 'structuralism'). Structuralism influenced many, and its reactions were immense. Post Structuralism, deconstruction etc. were some of the later outcomes. Ferdinand de Saussure Saussure was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His main contribution to Structuralism was Literary Theory 13  School of Distance Education his theory of a two-tiered reality about language. The first is the langue, the abstract layer of language, while the second, the parole, refers to the actual speech or the individual articulation of language that we hear in real life. Saussure's most influential work, Course in General Linguistics (1916) provides two modes of language study; synchronic and diachronic, along with his seminal ideas on Sign, Signifier, and the Signified. According to Saussure the synchronic study of language will give information about the use of language at a given point of time, whereas Diachronic approach studies the growth of language through different periods in history. The beneficial part of these studies was that it could make people think about how far language can manipulate and be manipulated by society. With the help of language, every system around us, even a single person’s mind, gets operated. Sign, Signifier, Signified Saussure proposed that it is a system of signs that expresses ideas and thereby creates meanings. He further explains, a sign is a complex or combination of signifier (symbol) and signified(referent). In short, human society is built upon these numerous signs - simply words. And the attributed meanings create life, though they are not 'real.' Saussure's ideas can be summarized as seen in the following diagram Literary Theory 14  School of Distance Education Signifier (Sound/ image) Sign Signified (Concept) Saussure then identifies three important notions to show how this system works. a) Meaning is Arbitrary - words and their possible meanings have no one to one connection b) Meaning is Relational - one word has its possible meaning when it is adjoined with some other word c) Language Constitutes Reality - traditionally, it is believed language reflects reality, but Saussure found that it is the language (words) that creates reality. His findings were phenomenological since they challenged many essential or fundamental thoughts revolving around big and strong systems such as religion, gender identity, history etc. Claude Levi-Strauss and ‘Structuralist Anthropology’ Levi- Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was a key in developing the theories of Structuralism. He applied the structuralist outlook to the interpretation of myth. Myths are Literary Theory 15  School of Distance Education considered to be the building blocks behind each society. The structuralist approach to anthropology elucidates the idea that individual tale (the parole) from a cycle of myths did not have a separate meaning but could only be understood by considering its position in the whole cycle (the langue). Moving from the particular to the general, placing the individual work within a wider structural context, is the typical Structuralist way of understanding 'meanings'. His concept of ‘bricolage’ explained that the existing signs are used in a way they are not meant to be used. This is what happens with myth and mythology. At the same time modern western philosophy, including structuralist thoughts, work in a far more scientific way regarding meaning generation. Strauss's interpretation of the Oedipus myth, fixing it in the larger context of Theban tales, is a famous example of structuralist approach to mythology. Roland Barthes and the Transition phase Roland Barthes was a significant figure in the early phase of Structuralism, who applied the structuralist method to the general field of modern culture. He worked in many fields like literary theory, philosophy, semiotics, etc. In his work Mythologies (1957) Barthes attempted a detailed, anthropological study on modern France's culture. The most crucial concern he held was to reveal the significance of language in writing. Barthes's "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative" is concerned with examining the correspondence between the structure of a sentence and that of a larger narrative, hence making ways to get hold of how structure determines the system and vice versa. Literary Theory 16  School of Distance Education Structuralist thinkers, including Barthes, were not interested in extracting the meaning from a given work or text but rather worked to understand what are the implicit systems like abstract codes and conventions that govern it from inside to create meaning. Barthes’ transition from being a Structuralist to a Poststructuralist by moulding ideas like ‘the death of the author’ actually marks the development of Structuralism to Poststructuralism. Structuralist Narratology Structuralist Narratology illustrates how a story’s meaning develops from its overall structure (the langue) rather than from each individual's single tale (the parole). Major proponents who made detailed analyses on narratology were Barthes and Tzvetan Todorov (Todorov coined the term 'narratology'). Opposing the traditional method of linear narrative, which is horizontal, Saussure argues thata vertical axis is also there in a narrative that needs thorough study to trace out the meaning. He defined them as syntagmatic and paradigmatic studies, respectively. The latter is the complex one where the external factors of a work, such as codes and conventions, take part. Basically, Structuralist methods tend to uncover the 'binary oppositions' that determine a text. Binary oppositions seemed to regulate the whole system or structure according to Structuralism and both these approaches made it possible to value a text under the light of a system to which that particular text also belongs. Peter Barry's Beginning Theory provides what a Structuralist Critic does while reading a text. 1. They analyse prose narratives, relating the text to some Literary Theory 17  School of Distance Education larger containing structure (a particular genre, a network of intertextual connections, universal narrative structure, recurrent patterns or motifs, etc.) 2. Interpret the text with the underlying structure of the language. 3. Apply the concept of systematic patterning and structuring to the text. Structuralist Narratology systematized the study of plot, characters and symbols in a text to identify the play of language that attributes meaning to it. A J Greimas, one of the earliest practitioners of Structuralist Narratology, used Saussure’s theories to make yet another branch of it, called Structuralist Semiotics. Post Structuralism Post Structuralism is rather a philosophical endeavour that shattered the proposed ideas of Structuralism regarding meaning generation. The pioneer of this new phase of literary criticism is Jacques Derrida, who began to unpick the logic of Structuralism in 1966, pointing out certain basic instabilities in the founding concepts of 'structure' and 'binary oppositions.’ This path- breaking movement questioned the fixities of a structure upon which human life is concentrated by making it clear that nothing can be 'scientific' as we see in Structuralism or Marxism since humans are altogether subjective. In terms of linguistic theory, the distinctive view of post- structuralism is that the signifier (a written word, for example) is not fixed to a particular signified (a concept), and so all meanings are provisional. Literary Theory 18  School of Distance Education Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction Derrida, a French philosopher, is best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction. He questioned the assumptions of the Western philosophical tradition and also, more broadly Western culture. Regarding Derrida's view, the complicated nature of Western Culture resulted from ‘binary oppositions. Derrida articulated his much- acclaimed concept 'Deconstruction' as a counter drug, an approach to find out the multiplicities of possible meanings in a text. He affirms that a text and its words, in itself, is protesting against the attempts to conclude a single meaning to it. Hence a text is an open entity, not a closed one. Derrida's1966 lecture 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences' closely analyses the 'rupture’ that occurred in our history, an obvious turn against the 'centres' constituted by binary oppositions. The Deconstructive reading involves a journey from one signifier to another signifier, not signified as Saussure said. Derrida opined that if a signifier does not really connect to a signified and the relation between the two is arbitrary, meaning creation is not valid. He concluded; it is difficult to assert meanings for a text. Meanings are not static; they flow. Coming to an end or conclusion becomes an uphill task if we take it for granted that no words can direct us to any definite signified or concept. Deconstructive reading will permit a reader to take a text to any level with various possibilities. Though Saussure is said to be the founder of Modern Linguistics and Semiotics, Derrida observed a second problematic Literary Theory 19  School of Distance Education hint in his concepts; and that was Saussure's fondness for 'logocentrism'. Another critic was Roland Barthes whose essay “The Death of the Author” (1966) maintained the argument of deconstruction by emphasizing that a text becomes a reservoir of meanings the moment a reader consumes the text's intentions. Logocentrism and Phonocentrism Derrida’s Of Grammatology responds in-depth to what he calls Saussure's logocentric argument. Logos means word/centre/reason that holds the essence of something. According to Saussure, the spoken form alone constitutes the object and, thereby, reality. Derrida proposes, Saussure gave privilege to speech over writing and he termed it Phonocentrism a manifestation of Logocentrism. Logocentrism was alternately called 'metaphysics of presence' by Derrida. He criticizes this idea by stating that it is impossible to constitute an object without its appearance in the written image since the speaker is absent. Simply, he means a word (sign) can be manipulated if its script is not written correctly despite its utterance in sound. Thus, he doubts how meanings can be real. Derrida's readings find out that the whole European canon is built upon such conflicts rooted in binaries. He puts forth deconstructive reading to handle this problem. Derrida coined another term ‘phallogocentrism’, a portmanteau of phallocentrism (idea that phallus or male sexual organ is the centre of the social world) and logocentrism, to identify the privileging of masculine gender in the construction of meaning. Logocentrism Literary Theory 20  School of Distance Education itself is a troublesome idea because it fixes a centre to everything where no centre is valid since signifier and signified are not connected. So, the logocentric world prefers the masculine identity to feminine one. Aporia Aporia is an irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disconnection in a text, argument, or theory. This impasse occurs due to the working of binaries such as man/woman, black/white, night/day etc. A text remains unresolvable where neither of the term(of the binaries) is privileged because both are necessary for each other's existence. Because of this, none can be dismissed. This situation is termed as ‘aporia’. Decentring. According to Liberal Humanism, the supreme centre of the world is man and his cognitive activities. This idea was smashed when Structuralism advocated that humans are just part of a big structure/system that needs a centre to hold it. In time Post Structuralism, through Derrida, maintained the notion that nothing is permanent and none of the things revolves around a centre (binaries). Deconstructionist critics reduced the human subject to one of the effects engendered by the differential play of language. Decentring thus appeared an anti-humanistic idea that began to interrogate each and every belief system by reducing them to mere subjects. Psycho-Analytic Theory Principally, Psychoanalysis is a means of analysis Literary Theory 21  School of Distance Education and therapy for neuroses. The procedures of psycho- analytic criticism were established by Sigmund Freud. Later this theory applied in literary criticism in order to understand how far a work of art can substitute the hidden passions of the author or to understand the inner psychological conflicts of the characters in that work. Sigmund Freud Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, who made history with his magnum opus The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). His contributions marked a new era in literary criticism. Freud’s concepts like divisions of the human mind into Conscious, Sub Conscious and Unconscious and the ideas like Id, Ego and Super Ego began to be applied extensively in literature too. Yet his exaggerated visions on human sexuality in relation to human behaviour happened to receive vehement attacks from some of the later theoreticians. Unconscious and Conscious All of Freud's works depend upon the notion of the unconscious, which is the part of the mind beyond consciousness that strongly influences our actions. Freud calls this sphere of the human mind the 'repository' of suppressed feelings. Man's unrefined passions and untamed desires get repressed here for fear of societal norms on morality. On the other hand, there is a Conscious sphere that is totally under the control of standards and rules. And it is this sphere that makes all of us behave "properly " in society. Literary Theory 22  School of Distance Education Id, Ego and Super Ego Later in his career, Freud suggested a three-part, rather than a two-part model of the psyche, dividing it into the Id, Ego and Super-Ego. These three 'levels' of the personality roughly correspond to unconscious, consciousness, and conscience. He explained each of them in detail as follows Id - it is the primitive and instinctual part of the mind that contains sexual and aggressive drives and hidden memories Ego - is the realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego. Super Ego - operates as a moral conscience or ideal ego. This represents our conscience. Ego Super- Ego Id Freud firmly believed that an artist represents his/her Id (Unconscious - repressed - desires) through art. He made studies on William Shakespeare and other writers as well to delineate how far the characters on the stage may imply the inner soul of the author. His observation on Hamlet remains a milestone in the applied realm of Literary Theory 23  School of Distance Education psychoanalysis in literature. Oedipus Complex: An Example As we see in the play Hamlet, Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, cannot avenge his father's murder though he knew his own mother and uncle were the culprits. Freud observes that Hamlet has an Oedipus complex, that is, a repressed sexual desire for his own mother and a consequent wish to kill his father. Thus, his uncle, who married his mother, has merely done what Hamlet himself secretly wished to do: hence the difficulty for him of being the avenger. Freud associated Hamlet's condition with its author Shakespeare and explained that Shakespeare wrote the play immediately after his father's death in 1601, bringing out his own inner feelings. This radical finding came out in Interpretation of Dream and got a wide range of response from both supporters and opposers. Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) Lacan was a renowned French psychoanalyst and is credited for his theories related to human mind development. Substituting the psycho-sexual development formulated by Freud, he suggested some social aspects are also there, that determine a child's growth, not only the physique. By Stating the three phases of a child's mental growth, he was actually questioning the orthodox psychoanalysis theories based totally on Freudian thought. Literary Theory 24  School of Distance Education Three Phases of Child's Mental Development Lacan identifies three stages, or 'orders' in Lacanian terms, in making a child's psyche as the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. 1. the Imaginary - It is the pre-linguistic stage where the child sees himself reflected in the mirror and considers himself a whole unity and identifies himself with the mother. No distinction is understood here. Lacan termed this 'mirror stage' since it is all about self- reflections. 2. the Symbolic - During this phase the child acquires language and begins to understand different social relations, that he is not one with the mother or the primary desire of the mother and that the father's law is supreme. Distinctions are recognized here. 3. the Real - This is where the child's illusions work out betwixt the Imaginary and the Symbolic. This is more like the Unconscious. Lacanian concepts are extensively used in Feminist Criticism, whereby his association of unconscious with language becomes a crucial point. Though there are differences between Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis apparently, it's known to everyone that both stem from the same root, i.e., Freudian Unconscious. Literary Theory 25  School of Distance Education Module 3 Marxism Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, two German philosophers and economists, were the key founders of this school of thought. They published a pamphlet Communist Manifesto in 1848 that became the bible of Communist and Marxist parties worldwide. Marxism was primarily a materialist philosophy. Marx’s Das Kapital (1867) was a foundational theoretical text in which he stated the perpetual war of capitalism and the working class. The ultimate goal of Marxism was to bring about a classless society. Marxist philosophy believes that the world is progressive only because of the struggle for power between different social classes. Marx famously said that there are mainly two sections in a society: the 'haves' (one who has power and money) the 'have nots' (those who have no money and power).The tug of war between these two sections/classes marks histories and hasten progress everywhere in the world. Though Marxism appeared in the second half of the 19th century, Marxist Literary Criticism became popular in the 20th century. As a theory, Marxist literary criticism pays attention to the modes in which art and literature help maintain power relations on account of the weaker section. Literary Theory 26  School of Distance Education Base and Super Structure Base and Super Structure refers to the relationship between the economic or materialist conditions includes material production and distribution (base) of a society and the cultural products such as art, education, law, religion, media, lifestyle (superstructure)etc. It suggests that base determines and influences the superstructure. To make it clear the materialistic state or condition of a society forms the socio-cultural apparatus of that society. Ideology Ideology is alternately called 'false consciousness,' which is invisible in society but acts very strongly. It is a system of ideas, values and beliefs that we live by and use to perceive the world. According to Marxism, ideology is the factor that naturalizes economic inequality and oppression. Ideology enables the dominant classes to reinforce their power on the oppressed Thus, this is said to be the popular system of the well-off people in a society. As Marxist theorists put it, any literature can be taken as a reflection of some of the ideologies exist in that society. The task of Marxist Literary Criticism is to find out those ideologies implicit in a cultural text. Traditionally Marxism treats all art as ideological since it is the superstructure to a certain extend produced and maintained by capitalism. The Frankfurt School The Frankfurt School was a school of social theory and critical philosophy and was founded in 1923 in Germany that tried to combine ideas of Freud and Marx. Some Literary Theory 27  School of Distance Education elements of Formalism were also incorporated regarding the textual analysis. The primary aim of this school of thought was to find a new way to understand the real social problems of a society by analysing the omissions in the 19th century Marxism. Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were the important figures of this movement. They addressed the changed world's situations by placing Marxism and Psychoanalysis side by side. Culture Industry The term was coined by the critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and was presented as a critical vocabulary in the chapter "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception", of the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). A major objective of this mode of criticism was to bring forth the cultural representations in a text and identify how the economic condition of the society is influencing it so as to give evidence of how the dominant class ('haves') retain their power over the working class ( 'have nots'). According to the critics, culture was nothing but an industry where you can buy it with money. It means, always and in all aspects, culture is preserved and propagated through the 'haves'. Hence the dominant culture of a society becomes that of the upper class. Antonio Gramsci and Prison Notebooks Antonio Francesco Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist, linguist, writer and politician. He got imprisoned for his ideas against the Fascist regime in Italy. He wrote Prison Notebooks (a collection of essays Literary Theory 28  School of Distance Education about his prison life) to popularize his new socialist ideas to the world when he was released. “The Formation of the Intellectuals” is one of the popular essays in that collection. In that essay, Gramsci said that the modern intelligentsia was different from the previous one because they were actually articulating a new system in society through imposing 'hegemony’ through education and media. This was rather a one-sided articulation that does not include the proletarians. Thus, he envisioned a new model of education that can be inclusive of all different classes in a society. Gramsci is credited with yet another concept that was used widely in post-colonial studies, that is subaltern. Literally, subaltern is a word in the military jargon to identify a junior officer. He coined the term subaltern to identify the cultural hegemony that excludes and displaces specific people and social groups from the socio-economic institutions of society in order to deny their existence and voices in colonial politics. Louis Althusser Althusser was a French Marxist who is best known for his concepts such as ideologica lstructures or State ideological apparatuses and interpellation. He distinguished between state power and state control to show how the hegemony of the ruling class tames people without complaining about it. Althusser viewed state power as the evident one in the form of institutions like law, court, prison etc., that use external forces. On the other hand, state control is operated through groupings such as political parties, schools, the media, churches, the Literary Theory 29  School of Distance Education family, and art (including literature). The second one obtains silent consent from the people, while the first gets applied without any pre granted consent. However, we are not able to understand that we are being controlled because we feel like we choose it (like education, media etc.). Althusser says we are made to feel that we are choosing what we like, but we have no choice in reality. This is executed by using a trick and that is interpellation. Interpellation means the process by which we encounter a culture's or ideology's values and internalize them. The internalized values will regulate our actions unconsciously. It helps the ruling class to disseminate its interests effortlessly. Cultural Studies Culture always remains a problematic term since it encompasses innumerable versions of it around the world. Mathew Arnold's notions of culture as it is the "best" thing ever thought in the world lead to questions like whose culture and what culture he was talking about. Decades later, as a cross-disciplinary enterprise, comprising semiotics, Marxism, feminist theory, ethnography, post- structuralism, postcolonialism, social theory, etc. Cultural Studies emerged to examine the diverse manifestations of culture in different fields of society. It also makes an investigation into cultural practices that relate to more comprehensive systems of power. Many theorists observed that social, economic, and political forces and power-structures control the production of cultural materials, including literature. Therefore, literature must Literary Theory 30  School of Distance Education be viewed from a radical standpoint to recheck its mightiness as a universal entity. Precursors of modern cultural studies were Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957), Raymond Williams' famous work Culture and Society (1958) and Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957). Radical thinking of the neo-Marxist studies in the Western academia also contributed to the development of Cultural Studies as a distinct branch of knowledge. It repudiated the existing Western canon seeing it as an embodiment of privileged gender's- race's or class's notions. Disputes on " high literature" and "high art" began to question why minorities, for instance ethnic groups and postcolonial writers, could never come to the mainstream literature. Members of The New Left movement also sought to revise some of the Marxian ideas like class struggle, ideology, agency, etc., to map out the power relations that play in it. Another proposed goal of Cultural studies was to foreground the working-class culture among other celebrated high cultures. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) Richard Hoggart along with Stuart Hall founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS-1964), a research centre at the University of Birmingham. This academic centre gave space for discussion concerning popular fiction, best-selling works, advertisings, films, television programs, rock and rap music, etc. Until that time, all of the aforesaid disciplines were looked at as 'low, but with CCCS talk over on these topics made it open, and they started to be regarded as a subsection of Literary Theory 31  School of Distance Education 'culture'. Raymond William's definition of Culture Raymond Williams was an eminent Welsh socialist writer and critic. He was one among the New Left social theorists who had done comprehensive studies on the notion of ‘culture’. William's essay, titled "The Analysis of Culture", offers a three-tier definition of culture as follows. Ideal - It refers to a state or process of human perfection that has been carried out by works of universal validity and possesses permanence. This definition resembles Arnold's version of culture in a sense. Documentary - Here, recorded human experiences in the form of arts and literature are the subject of analysis. The analysis is done by criticism aiming at the discovery of 'ideal' culture Social– This part studies a particular way of culture to clarify the implicit and explicit meanings and values of it. This definition focuses on the social appearance of a specific culture. In fact, these three definitions project culture in three distinct ways but still feed off one and the other. Instead of Foucault's concept of 'discourse,' Williams introduced the term 'structures of feeling' in his book Preface to Film (1954) concerned with 'meanings and values as they are lived and felt'. Structures of feeling often oppose both explicit systems of values and beliefs and the dominant ideologies in a society. In short, the term Literary Theory 32  School of Distance Education refers to the various ways of thinking that struggle to emerge at any one particular time in history. When generations change, structures of feelings also/must change Stuart Hall’s Encoding /Decoding Stuart McPhail Hall was a Jamaican - British critic whose "Encoding /Decoding in the Television Discourse " stipulated a new mode of culture analysis. Hand in hand with Hoggart, he supervised CCCS and published many books that discuss culture and its assumptions. Yet he principally looked over 'popular culture' since the 'high culture’ undermined it '. Popular culture is generally recognized as a set of practices, beliefs, and objects that are dominant or prevalent in a society. It consists of anything in a culture irrespective of its 'standard'. In his essay "Notes on Deconstructing ' the popular”, Hall defines popular culture in many ways by using the post- structuralist method of deconstruction. He sceptically observes the existing definitions and goes for a new one, enclosing 'mass' (people) and 'working-class' culture. He finds it difficult to separate the term popular from class because, even if it is the culture of the oppressed class, what actually determines it is, the dominant culture of the dominant class of that society. Thus, for Hall, popular culture seems to be a space of constant struggle and conflict of classes. Hall's another valuable finding in cultural studies was his concept of 'two paradigms'. He discusses the two paradigms in his work "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms" which he termed as 'Culturalism' and 'Structuralism'. Literary Theory 33  School of Distance Education Culturalism is concentrated on 'experiences' that we gain from our life when we live in accordance with a culture, whereas the position of Structuralism claims experience is itself merely an effect of culture. The former insists on individuality while the latter insists individuality must be accounted as part of the pre-existing conditions. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism Grabbing influence from the Marxist literary analysis, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism dive into the historical background of a text to understand what are the political, social, and cultural intricacies that produce the text in that specific context. Both value history as an intrinsic part of literary texts and argues that it remains absolutely inseparable from it. According to Marxism, as we have seen above, a literary text is just another ‘cultural’ product in a society. A detailed examination is needed here to get what does the text really want to convey and for that, the socio-political contexts of the text also must be examined. History becomes the catalyst for both these schools of thought because it is through history and its study, anything can be realized regarding a text and its author. Simultaneously both theories reject the autonomy of the author and of the text. For them, ‘Historiography’ becomes the tool that makes this possible. While “history” deals with the past, “historiography” deals with the writings about the past. It can be defined as “the study of the way history has been and is written — the history of historical writing.” Historiography sheds light on how history has been conceived and recorded by historians. Literary Theory 34  School of Distance Education Apart from that, historiography dwells in the study of the development of history as an academic discipline through the ages. This discipline is used extensively by New Historicists and Cultural materialists to look into the history of a literary text. Background information of a text such as authorship, sourcing, interpretation, bias, style, and audience are studied using historiography by such theorists and thinkers. 1. New Historicism The term 'new historicism' was coined by the American critic Stephen Greenblatt whose book Renaissance Self- Fashioning: from More to Shakespeare (1980). It is a method based on the parallel reading of literary and non- literary texts, usually of the same historical period. Besides, it is also a critical approach that locates power relations in society as they are reflected in literary and other texts of the period. In this method, literary and non- literary texts are given equal weight. The practitioners of this concept reject the idea of literary foregrounding and historical backgrounding of a particular text. Instead, they propose that both (text and history) constantly inform or interrogate each other. They consider history as a ‘co- text’ that is used to analyze the text. Due to this, New Historicism bears a drastic difference from that of Old Historicism. According to Old Historicists, a text must be examined on the backdrops of certain sets of conservative mental attitudes (of society, to the deity, to the created universe, etc.) because the literary text is said to be a subversion of the history or the perspectives of history. For them, a text Literary Theory 35  School of Distance Education documenting past actions represent a lived reality, that is to say, a ‘history’ and an artwork of that period merely reflects it. New Historicism also accepts Derrida's view that there is nothing outside the text, in the sense that everything about the past is only available to us in textualized form. Thus, a text does not represent truth but altogether creates a new one through the play of language. Here New Historicism finds that history is also a remade, recreated, and a remodified entity in the form of language. So inherently, it hasn’t any essential difference from a literary text. To sum up, New Historicism probes into the ‘historicity of the text and textuality of the history’. Foucault and Greenblatt; Two visions of New Historicism Michael Foucault, one of the forerunners of New Historicism, redefined the term discourse in a problematic way to see how society is fed with different discourses. In Foucauldian terms, a discourse is a social system where knowledge is produced and circulated. Here Foucault describes further that ‘knowledge’ creates ‘power.’ Knowledge, which is supposed to be an unnatural entity, and power that works primarily by repression or suppression are mutually connected and is operated through different agencies. He uses these terms to signify that power is constituted through accepted forms of knowledge. Foucault was of the view that all of the histories that we see today imbibe a certain amount of power in them. But it is not visible overtly. Still, it operates inside a text. Literary Theory 36  School of Distance Education Stephen Greenblatt is an American Shakespearean, literary historian, and author. Greenblatt is one of the founders of new historicism whose works like Renaissance self-fashioning, Shakespearean negotiations, etc., suggested a new way of reading Shakespeare and his period. He is also co-founder of the literary-cultural journal Representations which often publishes articles by new historicists. His essay titled ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’ brings up a new perception by comparing King Lear with Harsnett’s ‘Devil-Fiction’ to show how both literature (text) and history (co-text) converse. Later he used the term "cultural poetics" to denote the same concept of New Historicism. Louis Montrose’s contributions Louis Montrose is yet another important figure in New Historicism who, like Greenblatt, made studies on Shakespeare and the Elizabethan age. His essay, “Shaping Fantasies,” demonstrates how the pastoral form of the sixteenth century as used by Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene contributed to the creation of a particular image of Queen Elizabeth I. This image of the queen reinforced the subject-monarch relationship differently: it showed the queen as an approachable and friendly soul. Circulation (A crucial term in New Historicism); that is, the circulation of power can be spotted in such literary works. 2. Cultural Materialism The term 'cultural materialism' was coined by the British left-wing critic Raymond Williams and popularized by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield during the 1980s. Literary Theory 37  School of Distance Education They used it as a subtitle for their collected work Political Shakespeare. Cultural Materialism was influenced by Williams’ coinage of 'structures of feeling' that can be substituted with Foucault’s ‘discourse’. Cultural Materialists believe that the New Historicists generate apolitical readings for a text; hence it goes for 'a politicized form of historiography'; a Marxist orientation towards New Historicism. Doing this will help a critic to fence off the discarded or silenced historical aspects a literary or non-literary text contain. As a highly politicized attempt, Cultural Materialism keeps an eye on using criticism to transform the social order by applying “dissident reading” which interrogates the hidden political agenda and power structures within a text. Questions about the marginalized and exploited classes are asked frequently in this mode of readings and, that aims at bringing out the misrepresentations of them in order to rectify it. Cultural materialists always seemed cynical of the liberal humanist interpretations of texts. Literary Theory 38  School of Distance Education Module 4 Feminism and Queer Theory Feminism an Outline In the last decades of the 18th century, Feminist ideology appeared as a distinctive thought that questioned the then existing social conditions regarding women's rights. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) is one of those notable books that reminded women about their rights. An unforgettable writer who evidently showed compassion for fellow women was Virginia Woolf, whose classics like Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando depicted many dynamic female characters. Woolf was a critic as well and her critical work, A Room of One’s Own (1929), demanded women to get a single room to contemplate and produce artistic creations. The developed form of Feminist Criticism was reborn in the post-1968 period. Many feminist academicians started to investigate stereotyped representations of female characters, which are mostly created by male writers. Yet, writings of famous 19th century female writers like Jane Austin and Charlotte Bronte also became subjects for demystifying female identity. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar jointly wrote an anthology titled The Madwoman in the Attic in 1979 (the title alludes to a character in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre) which aims to re-examine the existing literary phenomenon. The book Literary Theory 39  School of Distance Education opens with a highly polemical interrogation, “is a pen a metaphorical penis?” that explicitly questions the male domination in literary creations. The later 1970s witnessed new woman-centred literary histories seeking to trace an autonomous tradition of women's literature. The critics called for écriture feminine (feminine writing') in order to write about the distinctly female 'experience' in literature. Three Waves of Feminism Though Feminism got its momentum as a whole during the 1970s, there occurred many singular movements that contributed to its growth. Its history can broadly be divided into three and each includes different agendas with regard to female Independency. 1. First Wave Feminism (19th and early 20th centuries) - The First Wave was concerned with the political and legal inequalities women had faced in society, particularly the issues like women's suffrage and property rights. 2. Second Wave Feminism (1960s–1980s) - “The Personal is Political” was the slogan of this period, which concentrated on the cultural inequalities, gender norms, and the role of women in society. This period began to assert the feminine self as an independent one with all social privileges. 3. Third Wave Feminism (1990s–2000s)- This move expanded the scope of Feminism beyond the European countries. Here the focus was given to Literary Theory 40  School of Distance Education redefining the female-self, irrespective of geographical variations. Today, Feminism is considered a robust anti-foundational movement since it bravely challenged many customs and even could find a separate space of its own worldwide. Gynocrticism Gynocrticism (la gynocritique) is a term coined by Elaine Showalter, an American literary critic, in her essay "Towards a Feminist Poetics” (1979) that urged for a separate and autonomous model of literary theory exclusively for women. The program of gynocritics, she says, "is to construct a female framework for the analysis of women's literature " and thereby to make new models from female experiences. Here, women become the producer of literary texts instead of being passive readers or inactive characters in the male-dominated literary world. It took a deviation from the male constructed literary history to construct a singular female tradition. The primary aim of this move was to find out a new way and ‘language’ for representing women where women become the producers of their own literature. French Feminism Feminist thinkers were there in France from the time of the French Revolution itself. These thinkers gave focus on female representation in society, especially in political affairs. British outcry for women's suffrage reverberated in France also and it is this demand became a milestone in French Feminism. In the second wave of Feminism, we see several marvellous thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir, Literary Theory 41  School of Distance Education Helen Cixous etc. whose theories overtly questioned the male authority over women. Beauvoir's “The Second Sex” in 1949 announced women to gain autonomy in all aspects, whereas Cixou's concept écriture féminine, which she introduced in her essay "The Laugh of Medusa" (1975), desperately urged to formulate a new and special language for women to frame her story without any error. Further expression of the notion of the ecriture feminine is found in the writing of Julia Kristeva in which she combined ideas like semiotics with it. French Feminist ideologies travelled barrier-free and influenced many. Parallelly, Feminism was making its way out in the UK and the USA also. Sexual Politics Sexual Politics (1970) by Kate Millett, was one such influential work in American Feminism. It is regarded as a classic of radical feminism. In this book, she attacks Freud's male-biased psychoanalytic theory as well as the phallocentric writings of DH Lawrence, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller and Jean Genet. Millet was also keen to observe how the mechanism of society works on the principles of male power. Types of Feminism 1. Marxist Feminism Marxist Feminism probes into issues such as how women are exploited through and under capitalism, why women's labour is uncompensated and on what account woman's unpaid domestic labour and sex relations always remain under strict constraints of society. Literary Theory 42  School of Distance Education 2. Lesbian Feminism Etymologically the word lesbian came from the name of a Greek island, ‘Lesbos’, homeland to the 6th – century BCE poet Sappho. She is considered to be one of the earliest woman poets of the world who showed compassions to women and wrote about them. As the word suggests, this movement made women think about her fellow women and focus on maintaining such relationships. It is considered a logical result of Feminism. The movement arose in the early 1970s out of dissatisfaction with second-wave feminism and the gay liberation movement. One of the most compelling forces behind this movement was the growing discontent among women regarding the normalization of heterosexuality. Adrienne Rich’s essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” introduced a new term ‘lesbian continuum ’which means lesbianism not only talks about genital experience of two women but it also makes way for one woman to identify herself with another one and proclaimed that every woman has a potential to be a lesbian. Lesbian relations were supported by many, only to shatter the patriarchal reign over the women community. Other activists like Chrys Ingraham, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, etc. also pointed out the same issues. Ingraham views heterosexuality as a ‘not normal’ practice, yet it came into being and passing from one generation to the next only to entertain various marriage industries to gain power and money. Moreover, it must be noted that, these industries are also created and controlled by patriarchy. Literary Theory 43  School of Distance Education 3. Black Feminism Black Feminism emerged as a resistance towards the race discrimination inside Feminism. It suggested that Feminism has been a white ideology since there were no experience shared of a black woman. Black Feminism seeks to empower and emancipate women not just in relation to whites but also with regard to black men. They held a predominant argument that black women had to experience discrimination on two grounds: firstly, because they are women, secondly because they are black women. Through this movement, the critics tried to form communities of black women to share similar experiences. 4. Womanism The term was coined in 1989 by scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe the intertwined impacts of racism and sexism upon black women. One of the famous African American writers Alice Walker defined womanism as follows; "womanism is to feminism as purple is to lavender" which means there is a narrow gap between feminism and womanism. Womanism supports the idea that the woman's culture is not an element of her femininity but rather the lens through which her femininity exists. Blackness is the lens here through which her femininity is recognized. 5. Dalit Feminism Gradually Feminist thoughts reached in the far east countries also. In India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka Feminism began to appear in an unprecedented Literary Theory 44  School of Distance Education way. There arose a new perspective that included questioning of caste and gender roles among the Dalit population concerning feminism. This led to Dalit Feminism. Complications related to caste differences and inequality started to get investigated through many of the conferences and meetings in these lands to bring forth untouchable, marginalized Dalit women to the mainstream. Hitherto, Dalit women remained silent about the violence imposed upon them because of their caste identity. Organizations like the National Federation of Dalit Women and the All-India Dalit Women's Forum helped a lot to the growth of Dalit Feminism in India. Meena Kandasamy, Gogu Shyamala, Joopaka Subhadra, etc. are some of the prominent writers who share Dalit Feminist ideologies through their works. 6. Post Feminism Post Feminism bears a contrast with the existing Feminist ideas by and large mainly due to the latter's fissures in accomplishing its goals. Another aspect says that post feminism emerged when the targeted aims of feminism are achieved. Post feminism can be referred a critical way of understanding the changed relations between feminism, popular culture and femininity. Queer Theory In language the word queer means a ‘difference from what is believed to be usual or normal’. In Queer Theory, Literary Theory 45  School of Distance Education it is often used to denote the combined area of gay and lesbian studies and criticism. Still, the earlier connotations of the term "queer" were derogatory in nature because same-sex affairs seemed something unnatural at that time. Homosexuality was equated with criminality, and society always punished both with the same measures because both were considered impermissible by society. But today's world recognizes these categories as natural and thus, the term nowadays points towards the scholastic inquiries to gay and lesbian lives. With such analysis, it tries to uncover the misrepresentation of lesbian and gay (homosexual), bisexual, and transgender communities (LGBT) throughout history. Judith Butler, an American philosopher, discusses the building blocks of ‘gender performativity’ in her seminal work Gender trouble (1990). What Butler was saying that the identity a man or woman wears in a society is entirely based upon the notion of heterosexuality. The discourse on heterosexuality is that much stronger so that it can influence everything that happens in a society. She alludes the term taboo used by Freud to explain that society is not built with incest prohibition but with the prohibition of homosexuality. Then the real question arises; what about the identity of a homosexual person? Why isn’t their identity never gets accepted by society? It is to these questions Queer theory tries to find an answer. Literary Theory 46  School of Distance Education LGBTQ LGBT community enhanced the scope for sexual minorities to get identified in society. A common variant of this is LGBTQ that adds the letter Q that stands for Queer. Stonewall riots in the USA, which was carried out in1969, can be seen as an opening event for the entry of LGBTQ to the political and academic discussions. The riot was a series of spontaneous demonstrations by members of the gay community against a police raid took place in 1969. From there, they considered the possibility of becoming a group of same taste and same experience sharing people. Transgender Identity The identity of transgender people was also a problematic one for society since it possesses both female and male sex qualities. Their gender identity or gender expression is created when the recognition comes that their behaviour differs from the sex that they were assigned at birth. In earlier times, just like the homosexual community, transgenders were also discarded the status of being a living human. Instead, their depiction in histories and epics projected them as excruciating and supposed to get punishments for their distinct sexual identity. For example, a character named Shikhandi appears in the epic of Mahabharata, who is characterized as a destructive transgender. Even in the advanced society, transgenders could not find a place for their own because the binary opposition regarding sexual identity (woman and man) was that much strong and society always tried to uphold the binaries for its convenience. Literary Theory 47  School of Distance Education The notion of ‘gender performativity put forward by feminist, lesbian and gay theorists was a turning point in the case of transgenders also. With this notion, society was taught that gender is just a social construction and sex is biological. Gender roles are ‘assigned’ by the society. Living the life of a transgender is not a mistake but it is just another way of living. Thus, they are actually a ‘third gender’ besides female and male genders. Still, it is a point to remember that they achieved a position like this after a long struggle, and even now there are misconceptions about their identity. Literary Theory 48  School of Distance Education Module 5 Post Colonialism Post Colonialism concerns with the study of colonization, decolonization and the neo colonizing process. Post Structuralism and Post Modernism influenced this school to analyse the so far hidden experiences regarding colonial life. Post-Colonial critics attempted to critically analyse the history, culture, literature and modes of discourse of the former colonies of European imperial powers. The prime focus was given to the experiences of third world countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean islands and South America. Texts that are either produced in those countries or texts that are written about those countries began to be revaluated by critics in their works. Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Black Skins White Masks (1967), Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Gayatri Chakaraborthy Spivak’s In Other Words (1987) vehemently criticized the pre-designed colonial agenda in literature. The Empire Writes Back (1989) debates on how postcolonial texts constitute a radical critique of Eurocentric notions of language and literature. They claimed that literature is not something that is universal, as Liberal Humanism asserted once since it does not comprise the life of the 'colonized' in a judicial manner. However, the period literally begins with Said's Literary Theory 49  School of Distance Education arguments in his book Orientalism. He investigated how the east was portrayed or rather had to be portrayed in texts written about the east countries. Besides these critics, writers of the third world countries like Aijaz Ahmed, Homi Bhabha, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, etc. also contributed much to the development of this school. Eurocentrism and Orientalism As the word indicates, Eurocentrism or Europe- centric is a term used to demonstrate the ways in which European cultural assumptions are constructed as normal, natural and universal. This word was in use from the beginning of the 20th century in various disciplines but got its fame during the 1990s. European imperialist powers facilitated Eurocentrism through exploration, conquest and trade during the colonial period. Later on, it was executed through other media like education, religion, culture, race etc. The proponents of this plan were conscious of positing European ideas as superior to all other ideas. From there onwards, the feeling of 'otherness' was inserted into the minds of the colonized people. Edward Said drew up the word 'orientalism,' which means "a way of coming to terms with the orient that is based on the orient’s special place in European - Western experience." Simply it is the perspective about the colonized countries/Eastern countries specifically that are disseminated through a white man's / European's eyes. Literary Theory 50  School of Distance Education Said says that since this is a secondary vision of the East there are many fissures and omissions as well as many misconceptions that could create the 'other'. Thus, all of the texts produced in the course of Colonisation must be re-examined to understand it in a new but original way. Alterity The term was adopted by philosophers as an alternative to 'otherness'. The meaning of the word alterity in old Latin is ' the state of being other or different.’ The self- identity of the colonizing subject (identity of imperial culture) is inextricable from the alterity of colonized others, but it is done through a process of 'othering,' as Spivak puts it. Diaspora The voluntary or forcible movement of peoples from their homelands into new regions is a central historical fact of colonization. People started to get dislocated and displaced during and after the colonial era. This resulted in literature occasionally as a remembrance of the nostalgic past or sometimes as something that needs to get forgotten but cannot. Diaspora is the term used to analyse how writers remember their homelands, how its portrayal goes on in their works and finally how the colonial ideologies are interwoven in it. Most often, the remembering brings out the nostalgia of the writers about their "imaginary homelands" as Rushdie terms it. Sometimes this homeland becomes a " place of desire" which cannot be regained, despite the possibility of visiting the place. Literary Theory 51  School of Distance Education Hybridity Hybridity commonly refers to the creation of new transcultural forms or simply cross-cultural ‘exchange’ within the contact zone produced by colonization. The migrants' efforts to combine the culture of origin and that of the host country is termed as hybridization in Post- colonial theory. Homi K Bhabha is often acknowledged for using this term in Post-colonial Studies in relation to show the outcomes after the colonization process. However, hybridity has been widely criticized since it usually neglects the imbalance and inequality of the power relations it refers to. Uncanny Uncanny means the experience of something as strangely familiar rather than simply mysterious. Sigmund Freud popularized the term in his study of the human mind to denote the strangeness in the ordinary. Another Psycho- Analytic Critic, Lacan, explains it as a place where "we do not know how to distinguish bad and good, pleasure from displeasure." The term was adopted to Post Colonial theory with an aim to provide about the problematic condition of the once colonized selves. In his Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha explains the term in detail and calls it the 'sameness in difference. ' He identifies the self of the colonized as a split one and goes on addressing it as the 'uncanny double. ' Strategic Essentialism Strategic essentialism can be termed as the need to accept an “essentialist” position temporarily, in order to be able Literary Theory 52  School of Distance Education to act. Gayatri Spivak, in her Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography, points out the ineffective efforts of the Post-colonial theorists to bring all the diverse essentialisms (that is a feeling of togetherness beneath a common idea) under one in order to achieve a goal while there is hardly one to stick on. Spivak states that Post-colonial critics actually do something similar; hence, such criticism is more or less hypocritical. Subaltern Studies The Subaltern Studies Group (SSG) arose in the 1980s and was interested in formulating narratives against the existing model. Though Gramsci was the influential force behind this group, they were very critical of Marxists' views on Indian history, claiming that it never talked about the other suppressed classes except for peasants. Therefore, their focus was on non-elites — subalterns — as agents of political and social change, especially in South Asian countries. Major theorists of this theory were Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Shahid Amin, Erik Stoke etc. Later Spivak questioned this group in her famous essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" asking them if it is possible to raise the authentic voice of the Subalterns against the oppressors. Post-Colonial Critiques of Nationalism 1. Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community.” Anderson was an Anglo-Irish political scientist who famously declared that nation or the feeling of nation is absolutely an imagined one (1983). He used the term “imagined community” to show people from different Literary Theory 53  School of Distance Education corners of a territory feel that they are connected and united in the name of a nation but surprisingly, they might have not even met once in life! Such an ideology was a disturbing one for countries like India, which sustains the motto ‘unity in diversity.’ Postcolonial critiques find that this commonality was rather a cultural one, not a political one. Culture appears to be so complicated that it is impossible to find a clear location for the word. In short, the idea of nationalism remained a subject of discontent among postcolonial critics. 2. Partha Chatterjee and nationalism In his view, the very idea of nationalism was Western. Anti-colonial and nationalist movements adopt the ideas of modernity and sustained development and progress from the West. Then the question comes, whose essentialism is maintained and promoted through nationalism? Is it of the colonized country or of the Western colonizers? 3. Gayathri Spivak’s concept of ‘epistemic violence.’ Spivak had already discussed the problem of being an essential group in order to attain a particular goal. She asks the subaltern population (once colonized by Europeans) will it be possible to become a nationalist group since the subaltern is mutated by the episteme (knowledge system) of the Western. This epistemic violence imposed by European colonial powers will make it a tough task for the colonized community to get together to achieve the task of resisting against them. The concept of nationalism gets offended by post-colonial Literary Theory 54  School of Distance Education critiques by pointing out its disability to bring people under a common name – a postcolonial nation- since a nation does not exist. Post Modernism Thorough knowledge of Post Modernism can only be achieved by detailing the features of Modernism in the first place. 'Modernism' is the name given to the movement which dominated the arts and culture of the first half of the twentieth century. Twenty years from 1910 to 1930 was the period of high modernism and some of the literary 'high priests' of the movement were T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, and others. This movement was an overt rejection of traditional realism in favour of experimental forms of various kinds. All of these writers practiced fragmentation as a basis for their writings in order to deviate from Victorian Realism. They spoke out the absurdity of human life through characters such as Stephen Dedalus (Ulysses), Clarissa Dalloway (Mrs. Dalloway), etc. Even so, Modernist writers looked back on the fragmented world with a lamenting mood. They upheld nostalgic sentiments towards the lost beauty of the past. They always hoped that a better future would emerge. After modernity, another new trend emerged across philosophy, the arts, architecture, and criticism, marking a departure from modernism and it is named Post Modernism. Post Modernism was also a rejection of what it describes as the grand narratives and ideologies associated with modernism, its Enlightenment rationality Literary Theory 55  School of Distance Education and universal validity regarding arts and literature. Criticizing the ideas of objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, science, language, and social progress, Post Modernism marked a new era in human history since civilization. Major philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard came up with theories that could challenge age-old beliefs, systems, and ideologies to unfold its meaninglessness. 'Modernity- an Incomplete Project' by Juergen Habermas (1980) Juergen Habermas’s influential paper 'Modernity - an Incomplete Project' gave an account of the ‘modern project’ or rather the ‘Enlightenment project’ that shifted its focus from the traditional methods and perceptions. For Habermas modern period begins with the Enlightenment era of mid-seventeenth to the mid- eighteenth century. Enlightenment 'project' envisaged a break with tradition, blind habit, and slavish obedience to religious precepts and prohibitions so as to restate the existing systems with the weapon of reason. He believed this faith in reason and the possibility of progress survived into the twentieth century. Derrida and Foucault represented a similar refusal of Enlightenment 'modernity'. They attacked the ideals of reason, clarity, truth, progress, and the like. In short, what he suggests is that modernity is not finished but still works in different attire and so Post Modernity is just a transfigured version of modernity. Literary Theory 56  School of Distance Education Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) Lyotard was a well-known French Postmodern theorist who raised questions about the accepted definitions of postmodernism, precisely targeting Habermas. He defined Postmodernism as “incredulity towards metanarratives"; that is Postmodernism is not just an annex of modernism as Habermas puts it, but in fact, it is a withdrawal from it. He argues that Postmodern thinking prepared a way for the so far unheard stories of different groups. Lyotard gave preference for this plurality of small narratives to the grand narratives of Modernism, Marxism, etc. since these attempts to propagate ideologies on a larger level. And Postmodern period views the metanarratives as untrustworthy to an extent because it gives only a partial side of truth. Jean Baudrillard and Simulacra and Simulations (1981) Another major theorist of postmodernism is a French writer Jean Baudrillard whose propositions are furnished in his essay “Simulacra and Simulations.” Baudrillard is often associated with what is known as 'the loss of the real'. The influence of images from film, TV, and advertising of the new age has led to an incapability to realize the distinction between the real and imagined. Most importantly, it is understood that signs do not reflect reality but the other way round. Therefore, he questions the validity of any of the things that are presented to us. The difference between real and imagined gets blurred and the result is a culture of 'hyperreality' (the inability of Literary Theory 57  School of Distance Education consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality). Baudrillard posits that the whole system (system includes everything) becomes what he calls a simulacrum in the postmodern period. A simulacrum is a representation or imitation of someone or something. A simulacrum is a fantasy that holds no connection with reality. It is just a copy of the real. In his view, the process of simulation takes place through four stages; a. the sign represents a basic reality. b. sign misrepresents or distorts the reality c. sign disguises the fact that there is no corresponding reality behind. d. it bears no relation to any reality at all To make it clear he uses the example of Disneyland of Hollywood. He says Disneyland is a perfect mage of the third stage simulation, which in turn creates the last stage. Brian McHale and Post-Modernist Fictions (1987) Brian McHale is an American critic who attempted to assemble various modes of fiction under one common title; Postmodern. McHale traces the development of postmodern fiction by focusing on North American metafiction, Latin American magic realism, the French New Novel, concrete prose and science fiction. In his opinion, Postmodern fictions show an ability to' thrust its own ontological status into the foreground' and to ask questions about the world (or worlds) in which we live. Literary Theory 58  School of Distance Education These interrogations bring about new worlds inside a text that opens up a plurality in itself Ecocriticism This movement began in the US during the 1980s and the prime discussion hub of it was the relationship between literature and its physical environment. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm are the acknowledged beginners of Ecocriticism in the US, while in the UK the credit of being the beginner goes to Jonathan Bate. The UK found its emergence only a decade after with an alternative title, Green Studies. Still, Ecocriticism and Green studies are usually used interchangeably to signify this particular mode of analysis of a text by gathering data of the background environment. Works of eminent Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau of America, and Britain's Romantic writers were the important sources behind such an approach to literary creations. Anthropocentrism Though the discussion extends to problems such as how nature is perceived in literature, what are its moral and physical nuances, the fundamental point of debate is how the human conception of nature excludes the intrinsic value of nature. Since literature and theory are purely man creations, he tends to believe that nature is also something that gets its identity when human utilizes it well. Generally, Romantic poets and Transcendentalists set up a world, a physical world indeed, that asserts its identity only when human interventions grant the same. This is absolutely a human-centred attitude or an Literary Theory 59  School of Distance Education 'Anthropocentric' view. On the contrary, Ecocriticism views nature as a whole entity with its potential to act in its own way. Ecocritics thus denounce almost all of the preceding literary contributions and theories that never counted nature as an independent system. Shallow Ecology and Deep Ecology Shallow Ecology is yet another term to indicate schemes drew up by Anthropocentric perception of the environment. It holds the opinion that the environment must be protected only for the benefit of human interests. Contrary to this, Deep Ecology proposes an ideology not only for all living things in nature but also for natural resources. This thought makes room for non-human beings on the earth as well. As stated by the critics, Deep Ecology alone can stand out as a specific program solely for nature and its resources like mountains and rivers. It believes that Anthropocentrism alienated humans from their natural environment and this caused the exploitation of nature. Humans need to get to know more about the ecological system on a more profound and emotional level to recognize it is not nature that revolves around man but vice versa. Lawrence Buell and The Environmental Imagination (1995) The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, a study of how literature represents the natural environment, is one of the critical texts of Ecocriticism theory. The book strives to locate the place of nature in the history of western thought, specifically juxtaposing the human Literary Theory 60  School of Distance Education imagination of the environment and the environmental actuality in the age of industrialization. Thoreau's Walden serves as the touchstone for Buell's framework of nature- culture dichotomy and provides a rethinking of our literary and cultural reflections on nature. Ecofeminism Ecofeminism argues that patriarchal visions always subjugated women and nature through the implementation of certain values and beliefs. The unearthing of suppressed feelings of both women and nature resembles a great extent. The comparison of women with nature, ‘naturalization' of women's feelings and concepts such as 'mother earth' attained new definitions under Ecofeminist viewpoints. They rephrased the 'mother earth' concept, probably a design of patriarchy, and stated that it achieves two different connotations; a. It Naturalizes women b. It Feminizes nature Both simplified the process of suppression and discrimination of women and nature since one takes after the other. Ecofeminism seeks to shatter this oppression caused by male society with its new modes of interpretation of literature and other texts. Literary Theory 61  School of Distance Education REFERENCES 1. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin: Post- Colonial Studies 2. Chris Baldick: Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary terms 3. Hans Bertens: Literary Theory. 4. Jonathan Culler: Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. 5. M H Abrams: A Glossary of Literary Terms 6. Margaret Drabble (Editor): The Oxford Companion to English Literature-Sixth Edition 7. Peter Barry: Beginning Theory 8. Pramod K Nayar: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory 9. Terry Eagleton: After Theory. 10. Terry Eagleton: Literary Theory: An Introduction. WEB RESOURCES 1. https://literariness.org/ 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_theory 3. https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and- arts/language-linguistics-and-literary-terms/literature- general/literary-criticism Literary Theory 62