Unit 3 : Marxism :

 Karl Marx creates a methodology for social sciences (political

sciences)
 He perceived human history to have consisted of a series of
struggles between the opressing and the opressed.
 Freud saw sexual energy to be the motivating factor.
 Marx thought historical materialism as the involvement of
distribution of resources, and gain production.
 Natural political evolution involves many other systems such as:
Feudalism, bouregois capitalism, socialism, and communism.
 Bourgeois capitalism relies on the proletariat for survival.
 When profits are not reinvested, workers will grow poorer and
poorer.
 To consider political system as communist,the underclasses must
own means of production.
 Religion is the opiate of the people according to Marx.
 Workers remain largely unaware of their own oppression in
Lenin’s era.
 Marx then tried to examine the problem that Lenin dwelt on.

Marxism: Core definition based on the ideas of Karl Marx

 Marxism involves a theory of knowledge, and a political

programme.
 Generations of Marxists have developed Marx’s own work.
 There are large number of different Marxisms.
 Different readings of Marx have been influenced by the problem
of preconceptions in Marx’s philosophy.

Types of Marxism:
Orthodox Marxism:
 Orthodox Marxism has been institutionalized in Soviet Marxism.
 It allowed three basic options to philosophy : abandon
philosophy for a science of history, abstract the methodological
elements from classic works, and continue the work of Engels on
philosophy and natural sciences.
 Orthodox Marxism faces the dialectical materialist approach.

Marxist-Leninism:
 It was initiated by Lenin and it is the development of Marxism
theory.
 It was the result of pragmatic concerns of the Russian revolution.
 It is the official philosophy and approach of the Soviet state.
 It has become a hazy version of Marxism.
 Marxist-Leninism is indistinguishable from Orthodox Marxism.
 The development of the analysis of imperialism & the
development of more specific thesis about the role of the party
by Lenin are the key areas for his development of Marxism.
 Lenin argued that the last stage of Capitalism is imperialism.
 Lenin saw Socialism/communism as concerned with the
international interests of the working class.
 Lenin argued that the party would need ideas, information, and
scientific knowledge that are derived from all sections of
society.
 The party organization was based on the idea of free discussion
and agreement.
 Lenin was the advocate of Marx’s theory and materialist
epistemology.
 Lenin also argued for a reassessment of the Marxist dialectical
theory of knowledge.

Historicist Marxism
 It argues that the dialectical analysis of social processes is
dependent upon an adequate historical analysis.
 Gramsci argued for particular historical analysis tied to
predetermined theory.
 Collectiveness should be the focus of historical analysis.
 Social classes are the historical subject in the work of Lukacs &
Goldmann.
 Social classes accorded the status of proper historical subject.
 Social consciousness is the basis for the transformation of social
relations.
 Class consciousness is principal to the production of knowledge.
 Scientific knowledge in its broadest sense is part of class
Weltanchuung.
 Dichotomies of thought and action and other dualities are all
made redundant.
 The transforming self-knowledge of the subject makes these
dualities disappear.
 The dichotomus relationships are not permanent but are a
function of historical circumstances.
 Ideology is replaced by class Weltanschuung which focuses on
general system of ideas common to class.
 The concept of ideology looses its specificity.
 Such ideological knowledge is a function of false consciousness.
 All classes then have a distorted view of the relationship
between classes and their relationships to the production base.
 False consciousness maintains social structures.

Humanist Marxism:

 It refers to those Western European Marxists who wants to

develop an alternative to the Stalinist orthodoxy.
 Humanist Marxism is known as Independent Marxism or
Existentialist Marxism.
 It came to focus on the role of the individual in the development
of Socialism.
 J.P. Sartre & Merleau-Ponty are prominent Humanist Marxists.
 They were opposed to the Stalinist version of Orthodox
Marxism, especially the reliance on naturalism & scientism.
 They were also opposed to dialectical materialism view in the
Orthodox Marxist approach.
 Humanist Marxist claim denies a role for creative human action.
 Oppositions to Stalinist Marxism also claim a re-reading of
Marx based on phenomenological & existential categories.

Structuralist Marxism: see Structuralism & Althusser:

 Marxism is an economic and social system based upon political

and economic theories of Karl Marx & Friedrich Engel.
 Marxism theory is a theory in which class struggle is a central
element in the analysis of social change.
 Marxism is the antithesis of Capitalism.
 Marxism is the system of socialism of which public ownership
of means of production are dominant.

Unit 4: psychoanalysis criticism

Introduction:
 Psychoanalytic criticism originated in the work of Freud.
 Freud developed a language that described a model that
explained human psychology.
 Theories of Freud are concerned with the nature of the
unconscious mind.
 Freud wrote literary criticism as well as psychoanalytic
theory.
 Psychoanalytic criticism written in 1950 tended to
psychoanalyze the individual author.
 Literary works were read as fantasies that allowed authors to
protect themselves from deep anxieties.
 Psychoanalytic critics after 1950 began to emphasize the
ways in which authors create works.
 They shifted their focus from the author’s psyche toward the
psychology of the reader & text.
 Norman Holland theories focus more on the reader than the
text.
 Those theories helped to establish reader-response criticism.
 Winicott have questioned the tendency to see reader/text as an
either/or construct.
 Jacque Lacan focused on language and language-related
issues.
 He treats the unconscious as a language.
 He has a different view about the dream not like Freud’s one.
 Lacan views the dream as a form of discourse.
 Lacan also revised the view of Freud’s concept of Oedipus
complex by relating it to the issue of language.
 Lacan argues that the pre-oedipal stage is also a mirror stage.
 Lacan associates the subsequent oedipal stage with what he
calls symbolic order.
 Lacan’s three orders of subjectivity are the imaginary, the
symbolic, and the real order.

How does all this relate to literature?

 Psychoanalytic criticism reveals how literary texts are formed

as well as the meaning of that formation.
 The focus of analysis can be on: the author, the work’s
contents, the work’s formal construction, and the reader.
 According to Freud, literary texts are like dreams.
 They express unconscious material in the form of complex
displacements.
 Literature displaces unconscious desires and motives into
imagery with no similarities to its origin.
 Literary work has a conscious and an unconscious meaning
according to the Freudian psychoanalytic critics.
 Lacan’s theory is useful to literary theory because it is about
our relationships to language.
 Language & the unconscious are identical in Lacanian
criticism view.
 Metaphor and metonymy are relevant with Freud’s theories of
condensation and displacement.
 Lacan’s evidence to the claim of the unconscious being
structured like language, is the use by the unconscious of
these linguistic means.
 Lacan sees a linguistic aspect to Freud’s work.
 Lacan refused conventional views of charachterization.
 The unconscious is the kernel of our being.
 Lacan sees characters as an assemblage of signifiers.
 According to Lacan, language is fundamentally detached
from any referent in the world.
 Lacanian literary critics investigate the unconscious behind
the language of the text in what is known as deconstruction.
 Literary text is seen as a demonstration of Lacanian views
about language and the unconscious by Lacanian literary
critics.

Psychoanalysis in literature

 All psychoanalytic approaches to literature have one thing in

common which is the application of a psychological theory
which was created outside of the realm of literature as a
standard to evaluate a literary work.
 All the theories are “Universalist”.
 Psychoanalytic theories are frequently coupled with other
schools of literary criticism.

Unit 5: Micheal Foucault

Introduction:

 The relationship between power and knowledge is the theme

that underlies all Foucault’s work.
 Scientific knowledge are really just means of control.
 Foucault maintains that the author function doesn’t
correspond to the single self (person).
 The I who narrates is different from the person who actually
wrote the words.
 The classic example of this difference is Marcel Proust’s “A
la recherche du temps pérdu” in which there is a complex
interplay between Marcel (the narrative voice) and Proust
himself.
 Foucault is attracted by the role of an author claiming to
return to the initial common sense model of the author.
 There are complications with the identity of the author.
 Foucault formulated the issue in The Order of Things.
 Every language personifies a rich conceptual structure.
 Shakespearean English for example is vehicle for discussing
falconry, but not football.
 The resources of Elizabethan English contribute in
Shakespeare’s interests in falconry.
 Shakespeare’s inability to give an accurate account of football
game is due to the fact that football didn’t exist in his era.
 Any language has to be in its historical development so as we
can actually use it.
 There are limitations in the structure of any language.
 Much of what authors write is a result of the language they
are employing not of their own ability.
 Language is the thing that is speaking in much of the text.
 A classical idea sees the author as accepting and deploying
standard structures.
 Writing is presented as a matter of individuals in the classical
and romantic views.
 They differ only over what is expressed.
 Foucault interests in another mode in which authors can relate
to language.
 This sort of authorship corresponds to a certain sense of
literary Modernism associated with the death of the author.

Unit 6: Class & post-structuralism

Introduction:
 Class in cultural studies is paralleled by its fortune in
poststructuralist literary theory.
 The work of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, inspired a broad
body of writing.
 Traditional criticism knew a tension between valuing a
work & placing it in its historical context.
 Leavis argued that the context of the work could only ever
be a construction.
 According to Leavis, literature could only respect the
complexity of cultural values.
 Human autonomy couldn’t be appreciated since Marxism
used an abstract language as Leavis claimed.
 Tony Bennett claims that this abstract language reinforces
class differentiation at the level of language.
 The first wave of the theory of class & poststructuralism
includes the work of Althusser & Macherey.
 They argued that literature wasn’t an expression of a
class’s collective consciousness.
 Althusser describes the ability of art to show us where
ideology detaches itself as art.
 The relationship between literature & ideology relied on a
distinction between authentic art & mediocre art.
 Poststructuralism is known as a deconstruction which
challenged this distinction.
 Literature as a superior form of writing was under the
attack of cultural studies.
 Cultural studies consider literary value as an ambiguous
value.
 Literature contained no fundamental merit which set it
apart from popular writing.
 All texts are discussed in terms of six related concepts:
institution, sign system, ideology, gender, identification,
and subject position.
 The elimination of differences between texts is consistent
with the operation of exchange.
 The dissolution of the idea of literature was paralleled by
the dissolution of class.
 The traditional account of class had ignored the issues of
race, gender, and culture.
 Race, gender, sexuality and culture cannot be separated
from class.
 The film of The Full Monty is the example of how that
gender and sexuality cannot be separated from class
because it claims to appreciate the difference between the
heterogeneity of postmodern identity and the homogeneous
one of class.
 Inequality has become a visible and talked-about feature in
British society in the mid-1990s.
 The widening gap of the rich and poor is resulted in a
consensus that “we are all middle class now”.
 By contrast, Tony Harrison in his poems, confronted the
cultural establishment over its exclusion of the working
class.
 Despite that, Harrison has no sense of the working-class
traditions.
 Tony Parsons claimed that something has died in the
working class.
 He fails to appreciate how market forces damaged working
class communities.

Conclusion:

 The poststructuralism approach focused on race, gender

instead of economics of class.
 Class implies an ability to imagine society as a structured
whole.
 Poststructuralism is suspicious of the idea of the whole.
 Poststructuralism was in part a reaction to a view of
literary work as a complex unity.
 Poststructuralism argued that the work could generate
many meanings based its claim on Saussure view.
 Language in Saussure view was a system of concepts for
organizing reality.
 Literary works should be viewed as constructs not as
mirror images.
 The goal of poststructuralism criticism was to draw
attention to the constructed nature of the work to create
diversity.
 Poststructuralism is part of the Marxist tradition.
 It saw literature as a branch of the dominant ideology.
 Poststructuralism contained a contradiction.
 It recognized that cultural products were embedded in a
social context but on the other hand, it seemed to imply
that their meanings could be endlessly multiplied without
any sense.
 The dislocation between class and culture represents a
departure from two traditions: the Marxist tradition and the
English tradition.
 The Marxist tradition sees culture as an expression of
bourgeois capitalism.
 English tradition sees culture as a corrective of a profit-
driven society.
 Those two traditions are complementary even they are
distinct.
 Tressell realized that literature supports human against
economic values.
 Literature has the potential of offer an image of a full and
rich life.
 Popular culture appears to be classless.
 Popular culture based on consumption rather than
production.
 It appeals to individuals rather than groups.
 Popular culture equates human qualities with commodities
and identifies the popular with the profitable.
 The goal of class analysis is to understand the connection
between a particular economic arrangement and a
particular cultural expression.
 Class is no longer defined in terms of owners and non-
owners of means of production.
 The global movement of money makes it hard to get a
local class identity.
 Money determines the very coordinates of culture: its
structures of representation and means of evaluation.
  There is no part of culture life that does not speak in the
idiom of money.

Unit 7: Levis Strauss & Structural anthropology

Introduction:
 Structural Anthropology derived many of its concepts from
Linguistics.
 Structural linguistics is the basis from which structural
anthropology has taken its concepts and their relation.
 Jacobson considered the phoneme to be relational and
meaningless signs.
 Structural anthropology is explained by the example of
Mathematic where a point is defined by its relationship to
other points.
 Strauss uses this relational concept of phonemics as a
methodological model for research in mythology.
 He formulates the distinctions between mythical elements
and the rules that govern their relations.
 Strauss analyses the relationship between elements that he
calls “Mythemes”.
 “Mythemes” consists of relations that produce meanings.
 Strauss studies the relationships between individual
mythemes.
 Strauss concludes that mythemes are relative and negative
entities.
Mythical structure:
 Strauss said that the nature of a relation is similar to
deriving the meaning of an unknown word.
  The word must be analysed in as many contexts as
possible to be understood.
 Getting the meaning of a word goes through examining
its syntactic relation to the other parts of a sentence.
 Mythemes then emerge from an analysis of oppositions
produced by narrative elements.
 Folktales elements vary in its forms, functions,
motivations, etc.…
 Strauss confirms that all variants should be analysed
structurally.

Semiotics & identity construction

Introduction:

 Semiotics can be defined as the study of signs or

symbols and their implementation in a specific context
or in a cultural context.
 The relation between Semiotics and identity was
emerged from 20th century French psychoanalytic
theory.
1) Brief history
1-1Semiotics
 Semiotics is the study of signs or symbols and their
transmission through or between cultures.
 Semiotics study how the connection between the thing
represented and the sign is formed.
 Most of semiotic studies derive from the lectures on
language by Saussure.
 Saussure’s theory includes two inseparable parts of a
sign: the signifier and the signified.
 The relationship between these two inseparable parts is
arbitrary.
 Saussure differs between speech act and language.
 Charles Pierce developed another theory of Semiotics
that is different from Saussure’s one.
 Pierce theory sees Semiotics as the proposition which
creates intelligibility.
 Pierce’s work is cited in pragmatic philosophy while
Saussure’s ideas are about language.
 Many semiotic theorists focus on the flux of meaning
and how it may be represented.
 Semiotic and structural analysis focus less on identifying
the sign in many other fields such as: literary criticism,
cultural studies, mythology, etc.
 The sign is located as a part of a particular system since
the arbitrary relationship within the sign itself is specific.

1-2 Identity construction

 Theories of identity construction also emerged from

French psychoanalytic theory in the 20th century.
 Artifacts of culture make up the symbolic order
comprising of three realms: Imaginary, symbolic, and
real.
 The local cultural sphere dictates which identity can be
formed or adopted.
 A unique identity can be created from facing a number
of signs.
 Cultural sign can be damaged by the creation of an
alternate or multiple identities.

2- Relation to theory:
2-1 Deconstruction
  Deconstruction can be defined as a method of textual
analysis and individual investigation.
 It was first emerged from the works of Jacques Derrida
in 1960s and 1970s.
 It involves close reading of a text or cultural artifact.
 Deconstruction is based on Saussurean structuralism.
 It redefines the nature and function of a sign.
 Deconstruction relates to identity construction in how
ideologies are built and represented.

2-2 Pop culture

 Pop culture studies emerged in British and US

academies as part of the projects of cultural studies.
 Cultural studies focused on the relationship between
texts and the power they carried with them.
 Gramsci in his theory of hegemony makes pop culture
the key site of the production and reproduction of
hegemony.
 Pop culture theory focuses on low culture opposed to
high culture.
Unit 8: Issues in Semiotics
Introduction:
 Semiotic started to become an approach to cultural
studies in the late 1960s.
 It was partly a result of the work of Roland Barthes.
 Barthes declared that semiology aims to perceive any
system of sign.
 Semiotics was influence by its importance in the work of
the centre for contemporary cultural studies.
 Semiotics is very essential for anyone in the field to
understand it.
 Nowadays, the term semiotics is likely used as an
umbrella term to hug the whole field.
 Semiotics is a field of study that involves many different
methodological tools.
 Umberto Eco states that Semiotics is concerned with
everything that can be taken as a sign.
 In semiotic sense, signs take the form of images,
gestures, objects, etc.
 For Saussure, semiology was a science that studies the
role of signs as part of social life.
 On the other hand, Pierce sees semiology as the formal
doctrine of signs.
 Pierce declared that every thought is a sign.
 Semiotics and Semantics have common concern with the
meaning of signs.
 John sturrock argues that there is a difference between
Semiotics and semantics concerning signs because
semiotics concerns with how signs mean while semantics
focus on what words mean.
 Semiotics teaches us that reality is a system of signs.
 We create meaning according to a complex interplay of
codes.
 Semiotics learn us that we live in a world of signs.
 Studying semiotics let us be aware that signs are
transparent.
 The study of signs is the study of the construction of
reality.

Unit 9: Ferdinand de Saussure & Roman Jacobson

1- The impact of Saussure’s ideas :

 Saussure’s ideas were used by the famous Prague school.
 Trubetzkoy and Jacobson developed the methods of
structural literary analysis.
 Saussure’s ideas influenced the Leonard Bloomfield’s
“distributionalism”
 Most of Saussure’s ideas resonate outside Linguistics.

2- The impact of Jacobson ideas:

 Jacobson stressed that the aim of historical linguistics is

the study of systematic changes within a language.
 Jacobson & Trubetzkoy developed the Prague school of
linguistics.
 They argued that synchronic phonology must be
considered in the light of diachronic phonology.
 Jacobson & Halle developed a binary system that
defines a speech sound.
 Jacobson was influential in the development of
Structuralism.
 The psychoanalysis work of Lacan was influenced by
Jacobson’s work.

Unit 10: Orientalism & cultural representation

Introduction:

 Orientalism is a book published by Edward Said in 1978

about the cultural representations.
 Orientalism is defined as the West’s patronizing
representations of the East.
 Edward said that orientalism is inextricably tied to
imperialist societies who produced it.
 Edward said that the social, economic, and cultural
practices of ruling Arab elites indicate that they are
imperial satraps.
 The Arab elites have internalized the romanticized Arab
culture created by French, British, and American
orientalists.
 Edward debated Orientalism with historians and scholars
of area studies.
 The historian Bernard Lewis described the thesis of
Orientalism as anti-Western.

The other:

 Western knowledge of the Eastern depicts the orient as a

non-European other.
 The notion of an Orient has played an important role in
constructing European culture.
 The binary relationship of strong-West and weak-East
reinforces the cultural stereotypes.
 Orientalism combines the different societies of the
Eastern world into the homogenous world of the Orient.

Occidental and Oriental Origins:

 Edward said that Western world sought the Eastern

world for more than 2,000 years.
 Western scholars appropriated for themselves the
interpretation and translation of Oriental languages.
 Europeans wrote the history of Asia and created the
“exotic East”.

Influence:
 Jean Gerome illustrates in his book “The snake
Charmer” the beauty and cultural ambiguity of “the
exotic Orient”.
 Orientalism impacts other fields such as: Literary theory,
Cultural studies, and human geography.
 Edward’s method of post-structuralism analysis derived
from the analytic techniques of Derrida and Foucault.

Unit 11: Gender feminism

 Gender is relevant to many other disciplines such as:

literary theory, Drama studies, film theory, etc.
 All these disciplines differ in their approaches to how
and why Gender is studied.
 In Sociology, anthropology for example, Gender is
studied as a practice.
 In Cultural studies, gender is more often examined
 In Politics, gender can be viewed as a foundational
discourse.
 Gender study is a discipline in itself that combines
methods and approaches from wide range of disciplines.
 Each field came to regard gender as something
performative.
 Gender can be divided into three categories: gender
identity, gender expression, and biological sex.
 These three categories of gender break down it into
social, biological, and cultural constructions.
 These constructions focus on how the meaning of
femininity and masculinity is able to fluctuate depending
on various constrains surrounding them.
 The field of Gender studies was influenced by many
psychoanalytic theorists such as: Freud, Lacan, Kristeva,
and Blechner
 Gender is studied differently by each of these theorists.
 In Freudian system, women are mutilated.
 On the other hand, Lacan organizes gender according to
different unconscious structures.
 The sexuation of an individual has more to do with
gender identity.
 Kristiva contends that patriarchal cultures have to
exclude the maternal and the feminine so as they come
into being.
 Blechner argued that there is a “gender fetish” in
Western society.
 The gender of sexual partners is given enormous
disproportionate attention over other factors such as age
& social class.
 Bracha transformed subjectivity in modern
psychoanalysis since the early 1990s.
 She proposes the idea of Demeter-Persephone
Complexity.
 Cultures can have various norms of maleness &
masculinity.
 In many societies, being gay is simply being a male who
lets himself be penetrated.

Feminist psychoanalytic theory

 Many feminist theorists such as Bracha, Mitchell,

Jessica Benjamin developed a feminist psychoanalysis.
 They argued that psychoanalytic theory is vital to the
feminist project.
 Feminism must be criticized like other theoretical
traditions.
 Firestone in “The Dialectic of Sex” calls Freudianism
the misguided feminism.
 Elizabeth Grosz accuses Lacan of maintaining a sexist
tradition in psychoanalysis however others such as
Butler, Bracha, and Gallop have used Lacanian work to
develop gender theory.
 According to Daniel Beaune & Caterina Rea, gender
studies often criticized psychoanalysis based on a rigid
and timeless version of the parental order.

Unit 12: Post-Modernism

Introduction:

 Postmodernism is a late 20th century movement

characterized by broad scepticism, subjectivism, or
relativism.
 It is an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in
maintaining political and economic power.

Postmodernism and modern philosophy:

 Postmodernism is a reaction against philosophical

assumptions and values of modern period of Western
history.
 Many Doctrines associated with postmodernism can be
described as the denial of the general philosophical
viewpoint.
 Postmodernism is against the philosophical viewpoint of
the existence of an objective natural reality whose
properties are logically independent of human beings.
 According to postmodernists, reality is a conceptual
construct and an artefact of scientific practice and
language.
 Postmodernism is also against descriptive and
explanatory statements that can be objectively true or
false.
 Postmodernism also denies that there will be a change of
societies to the better due to the development of science
and technology.
 Postmodernists consider that science and the
development of technologies led to massive killing in
the World War II.
 Postmodernists consider logic and reason as destructive
and oppressive because they are used by evil people.
 For postmodernists, reason and logic are only valid
within the established intellectual traditions.
 Postmodernists deny that there is such a thing as human
nature that exists at birth rather than learnt.
 Postmodernists insist that all aspects of human
psychology are completely and socially determined.
 Postmodernists deny that language represents reality
outside itself; they said that language is not a mirror of
nature.
 Postmodernists claim that language is semantically self-
contained or self-referential.
 The meaning of a word is not a static thing in the world,
it is indeed a range of contrasts and differences with the
meaning of the other words.
 Meanings are endlessly deferred.
 Postmodernists reject philosophical foundationalism that
says that humans can acquire knowledge about natural
reality.
 General theories that explain many aspects of the social
world can be constructed.
 Derrida equated the theoretical tendency toward totality
with totalitarianism.

Postmodernism and Relativism:

 Many characteristics of doctrines of postmodernism

imply some form of metaphysical or ethical relativism.
 Postmodernists deny that there are aspects of reality that
are objective.
 Reality knowledge is constructed by discourses.
 This means that the discourse has no greater purchase on
the truth than do alternative perspectives.
 Postmodernists characterize science and the use of
reason and logic as “Enlightenment rationality”.
 Relativism said that if postmodernists are correct that
reality, knowledge, and value are relative to discourse,
then the discourses of Enlightenment are no longer
needed or justified.
 This raises a lot of questions that should have an answer.
 Postmodern answer to these questions is that the
prevailing discourses in any society reflect the values
and interests of the dominant groups.
 Postmodernists defend that what counts as knowledge in
a given era is always influenced in complex ways.
 Luce Irigaray argued that the science of solid mechanics
is better developed than the science of fluid mechanics.
 Postmodernists regard their position as uniquely
democratic.
 This position allows them to know the unjust hegemony
of Enlightenment discourses.
 Postmodernism became the unofficial philosophy of the
new movement of “identity politics” in the 1980s and
90s.