Poetry and Theory
Three
theoretical modes:
·
reflection of language, representation
and categories of critical thought undertaken by deconstruction and
psychoanalysis
·
analyses of the role of gender and
sexuality in every aspect of literature and criticism by feminism and then
gender studies and Queer theory
·
development of historically oriented
cultural criticisms studying a wide range of discursice practices involving
many objects nor previously thought of as having a history
Theoretical movements
Russian Formalism
·
critics should concern themselves with
the literariness of literature
·
redirecting attention from authors to
verbal devices
·
instead of asking 'what does the author
say here?' one should ask 'what happens to the sonnet here?'
·
key figures: Roman Jakobson, Boris
Eichenbaum, Victor Shklovsky
New Criticism
·
arose in the US in the 1930s and 1940s
·
focuses attention on the unity or
integration of literary works
·
treats poems as aesthetic objects
rather than historical documents
·
examined interactions of verbal
features rather than historical intentions and circumstances of their authors
·
elucidate individual works of art
·
focusing on ambiguity, paradox, irony
and effects of connotation and poetic imagery New Criticism sought to show the
contribution of each element to form to a unified structure
·
key figures: Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe
Ransom, W.K. Wimsatt
Phenomenology
·
emerged from the work of philosopher
Edmund Husserl
·
trying to bypass the problem of
seperation between subject and object, consciousness and the world
·
focusing on the phenomenal reality of
objects as they appear to consciousness
·
reader-response criticism
·
readers producing meaning by making
connections, filling in things left unsaid, anticipating and conjecturing
·
key figures: Georges Poulet, J. Hillis
Miller, Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser
Structuralism
·
focus on how meaning is produced
·
origins in opposition to phenomenology
·
goal: to identify the underlying
structures that make experience possible
·
analyse structures that operate
unconsciously (structures of language, psyche, society)
·
seeks not to produce new
interpretations of works but to understand how they can have meanings and
effects that they do
·
not easy to distinguish structuralism
from semiotics
·
key figures: Roman Jakobson, Roland
Barthes Gérard Genette
Post-Structuralism
·
developed since thinkers realized that
it is impossible to describe a complete or coherent signifying system because
systems are always changing
·
emphasize a critique of knowledge,
totality and the subject
·
key figures: Roland Barthes, Jaques
Lacan, Michel Foucault
Deconstruction
·
critique of the hierarchical
oppositions that have structured Western thought: inside/outside, mind/body,
literal/metaphorical, speech/writing etc.
·
key figures: Jaques Derrida
Feminist Theory
·
version of post-structuralism trying to
deconctruct the opposition man/woman
·
two strands: women's writings as
representations of the experience of women and a theoretical critique of the
heterosexual matrix
·
rejection of psychoanalysis as well as
brilliant rearticulation of psychoanalysis
·
feminism has effectet a substantial
transformation of literary education in the US and GB
·
key figures: Elaine Showalter,
Jaqueline Rose, Mary Jacobus, Kaja Silverman
Psychoanalysis
·
impact on literary studies as mode of
interpretation and as theory about language, identity and the subject
·
authoritative meta-language or
technical vocabulary which can be applied to literary works
·
subject as an effect of language
·
transference
·
key figure: Jaques Lacan
Marxism
·
texts belong to a superstructure
determined by the economic base
·
to interpret cultural products is to
relate them back to the base
·
subject is an effect constitutet in the
processes of the unconscious, of discourse and of the relatively autonomous
practices that organize society
·
key figure: Louis Althusser
New Historicism/Cultural Materialism
·
British cultural materialism defined as
'the analysis of all forms of signification, including quite central writing,
within the actual means and conditions of their production.'
·
US new historicism centred on the
Renaissance
·
key question for new historicists
'subversion and containment'
·
key figures: Raymond Williams, Stephen
greenblatt, Louis Montrose
Post-Colonial Theory
·
understand the problems by the European
colonization and its aftermath
·
attempt to intervene in the
construction of culture and knowledge
Minority Discourse
·
study of black, Latino, Asian-American
and Native American writing
Queer Theory
·
uses the marginal to analyse the
cultural construction of the centre – heterosexual normativity
·
key figures: Eve Sedgwick, Judith
Butler