Resumenunidades Comentarios de Textos Literarios en Li

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Resumen Comentarios de Textos Literarios en LI
Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (UNED)
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UNIT 1: INTRODUCTION TO POSTSTRUCTURALIST THEORIES
CHAPTER 3: POST-STRUCTURALISM & DECONSTRUCTION

A. SOME THEORICAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN STRUCTURALISM AND POST –
STRUCTURALISM
One of structuralism’s characteristic views is the notion that language doesn’t just reflect or record the
world: rather, it shapes it, so that how we see is what we see. The post-structuralist maintains that the
consequences of this belief are that we enter a universe of radical uncertainty, since we can have no access to
any fixed landmark which is beyond linguistic processing, and hence we have no certain standard by which
to measure anything. This situation, of being without intellectual reference points, is one way of describing
what post-structuralists call decentred universe, one in which, by definition, we cannot know where we are.
1. ORIGINS:
 STRUCTURALISM
- Derives from linguistics
- Establishing objective knowledge
- Can reach reliable conclusions about language and the world by: observing, collecting data and making
logical deductions
- Scientific outlook
 POST-STRUCTURALISM
- Derives from philosophy
- Nietzsche’s remark “there are no facts, only interpretations”
- Procedures by calling into question what is usually taken for granted, which inherits this habit of
skepticism
- We can’t know anything for certain
2. TONE AND STYLE:
 STRUCTURALISM
- Writing tends towards abstraction and generalization
- Detached, “scientific coolness” of tone
- The style is neutral and anonymous (typical scientific writing)
- Writing tends to be much more emotive
- Tone is urgent and euphoric
- The style flamboyant and self-consciously showy
- Titles may well contain puns and allusions
- Central line based on a pun or a word-play
3. ATTITUDE TO LANGUAGE
 STRUCTURALISM
- World is constructed through language
- Language is an orderly system
- Is fundamentalist
- Develops what threaten to become terminal anxieties about possibility of achieving any knowledge
through language
COMENTARIOS DE TEXTOS LITERARIOS EN LENGUA INGLESA Página 1

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- Verbal sign is constantly floating free of the concept

- We are not fully in control of the medium of language
- Words are always “contaminated” by their opposites
- Linguistic anxiety is a keynote of the post-structuralism
4. PROJECT: FUNDAMENTAL AIMS OF EACH MOVEMENT
 STRUCTURALISM
- Questions our way of structuring and categorizing reality
- Believes we can attain a more reliable view of things
- Distrusts the very notion of reason
- Preferring the notion of the “dissolved” or “constructed” subject
B. POST-STRUCTURALISM - LIFE ON A DECENTRED PLANET
- Emerged in France in the late 1960s

- Two figures most closely associated: CRITICAL AUTHORS (texts to read)
 ROLAND BARTHES:
 Moves from a structuralist phase (The Structural Analysis of Narrative, 1966) to a post-
structuralist phase (The Pleasure of the Text, 1973).
 Between these two works came the crucial essay THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR (1968), the
independence of the literary text, the death of the author is the birth of the reader.
 The escape from all forms of textual authority.
 "Modern scriptor" is Barthes’ term and it differs from the Author in that he (the modern
scriptor) is not held to be responsible for a book in the same way. The modern scriptor does not
have a comparable authority over what he writes; for Barthes he is just the person who wrote
the text, but we must not give him authority over the text by trying to ascertain what the Author
meant with his text or try to read his life, ideas and experiences in his text. More importantly,
according to Barthes, the modern scriptor is constituted through the act of reading itself: “the
modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text”. In this respect, since the text is 'played'
(in the sense of interpretation as in playing a musical Instrument) every time a reader reads and
interprets the text, the modern scriptor is also the reader herself/himself, his/her act of reading.
Thus, the modern scriptor is half-way between the text itself and each individual reader's
particular reading of the text.
 Thus, these two terms – Author and modern scriptor – have important consequences for how we
read. Author is distinguished from reader in that the former must ‘die’ in order for the latter to
be ‘born’. This is Barthes’ provocative way of saying that the reader must not look for authority
in the Author, must somehow eliminate the Author in order to liberate meaning through the act of
reading. For Barthes, the reader interprets the text creatively and this creative reading is far
more important than the Author's intentions and ideas, which are no longer relevant or important.
 JACQUES DERRIDA:
 “Decentring of our intellectual universe, prior to this event the existence of a norm or centre in all
things was taken for granted (primarily influenced by Nietzsche, Heidegger and Freud). Instead of
movement or deviation from a known centre, all we have is “free play”. In the resulting universe
there are not absolutes or fixed points.
 A key text in post-structuralism is Derrida’s book OF GRAMMATOLOGY, there is nothing
outside the text. Essentially, the deconstructive reading of literary texts tends to be fragmented,
self-divided, and centreless.

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 Reading and interpretation it is what Derrida calls ‘doubling commentary’ which consists in
paraphrasing the text’s contents, since tries to reconstruct a pre-existing, non-textual reality.
 According to Derrida’s ideas 
- critical reading must produce the text
- reading must no transgress the text
- the reading has to be deconstructive
- there is nothing outside the text
 To Derrida:
- A Transcendent Reading: ‘searches for the signified outside the text’.
- A Critical Reading: ‘must produce signifying structure involving something in the text
unperceived by the author.
C. STRUCTURALISM AND POST-STRUCTURALISM - SOME PRACTICAL DIFFERENCES
- Post-structuralism often claims that it is more an attitude of mind than a practical method of criticism.
- Is engaged in the task of “deconstructing” the text.
- Often referred to a “reading against the grain” or “reading the text against itself” Terry Eagleton’s
definitions.
- Deconstructive reading uncovers the unconscious rather than the conscious dimension of the text.
 THE STRUCTURALIST SEEKS:

- Parallels/ Echoes
- Balances
- Reflections/ Repetitions
- Symmetry
- Contracts
- Patterns
- Effect: to show textual unity and coherence
 THE POST-STRUCTURALIST SEEKS:

- Contradictions/ Paradoxes
- Shifts/ Breaks in: Tone, Viewpoint, Tense, Time, Person, Attitude
- Conflicts
- Absences/ Omissions
- Linguistic quirks
- Aporia
- Effect: to show textual disunity
D. WHAT POST-STRUCTURALIST CRITICS DO
1. They ‘read the text against itself’.

2. They fix upon the surface features of the words.
3. They seek to show that the text is characterized by disunity.
4. They concentrate on a single passage and analyse it so intensively.
5. The look for shifts and breaks in the text and see as evidence of what is repressed. Discontinuities called
‘fault-lines’.

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E. DECONSTRUCTION: AN EXAMPLE
Three stages of the deconstructive process:
1. The ‘verbal’ stage:

This can involve a traditional form of close reading. Barry suggests looking in the text for paradoxes and
contradictions, at what might be called the purely verbal level.
2. The ‘textual’ stage:
Moves beyond individual phrases and takes a more overall view of the poem. The critic is looking for shifts or
breaks in the continuity of the poem which reveal instabilities of attitude, and hence the lack of a fixed and
unified position. They can be of various kinds: shifts in focus, shifts in time, or tone, or point of view, or
attitude, or pace, or vocabulary, in grammar.
3. The ‘linguistic stage:
It involves looking for moments in the poem when the adequacy of language itself as medium of
communication is called into question. It may involve saying that something is unsayable; or saying that it is
impossible to utter or describe something and then doing so.
 LITERARY AUTHOR
 Dylan Thomas
 Poem: ‘A refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London’
 Published in the summer of 1945
I) CONTEXT
"A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London," is a poem about mourning by Welsh poet
and writer Dylan Thomas. This poem was written and first published in 1945 in the magazine The New
Republic and a year later in 1946 in Dylan Thomas’s collection of poems, Deaths and Entrances. Its written at
the very end of the II World War, after Thomas heard news of a young girl who had died when the house she
was in was set on fire during the Nazi "Blitz" attacks.
Thomas wrote exclusively in the English language, he was acknowledged as one of the most important Welsh
poets of the 20th century and was also well known for his public readings of his poems, stories and scripts,
especially in America.
Despite the fact Thomas lived during the period of Modernism, he is considered a Romantic poet although he
refused to align with any literary group or movement.
II) FORM AND CONTENT
The text is a poem and written in verses, organized in four stanzas of six lines each.
The poetic voice in the poem is a first person narrator, we could identify it with the voice of the author which
expresses a pacifist ideology.
The structure of the poem serves to integrate the imagery by establishing a basic chronological progression
from the creation of the world to the present. The poem has in great quantity of biblical references, in the
opening lines of the first stanza, is described the Genesis or Creation; in the second stanza, ‘Zion’ and
‘Synagogue’ refer unmistakably to the Old Testament or Judaism, a direct allusion to the biblical city of
Jerusalem; in the third stanza, ‘blaspheme’ and ‘stations of the breath’ which alludes to ‘station of the cross’,
states clearly to the Christian Era; and the last stanza, bring us to London, the Thames and the present.
The rhyme scheme of the poem follows roughly ABCABC. Repetition of sounds or alliteration
The rhythm is not that of ordinary spoken language, but it is related with traditional English rhythms, thus the
long verses have four stressed syllables while the shorter verses have three.

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There is enjambment and the syntax is profoundly non-standard. The punctuation is absent everywhere
except in the last stanza. The lack of the usual punctuation and the intentional breaking of the first sentence
into three stanzas have a function: the reader must read on quickly in order to decipher the meaning of the
words: that there is not death. In the first line, the conjunction ‘until’ is subordinating the first nine lines on
three dependent clauses.
From the first stanza is possible to identify various dichotomies of the poem: light-darkness, motion-stillness,
fire-water, creation-death, player-blasphemy.
The poem is rich in metaphors such as
- “FATHERING” metaphor and personification. Creating (fathering) is becoming the father of a

child. Masculine metaphor which contrasts the figure of the mother (last stanza).
- “THE SEA TUMBLING IN HARNESS”  sea as a violent horse; harness as to keep it under
control.
- Metaphors with Judeo-Christian Biblical connotations suggesting peaceful and protected spaces:
 “THE ROUND ZION OF THE WATER BEAD” a metaphor inside a

metaphor  water drop - water bead (bubble, drop...)  the city of Zion
 “THE SYNAGOGE OF THE EARN OF CORN”
- “THE LAST VALLEY OF SACKCLOTH”: suggesting the Biblical phrase “valley of tears”
- “MY SALT SEED”: combines the two central events to the poem SALT = DEATH (mourning) –
SEED = REBIRTH (engendering)
- “NOR BLASPHEME DOWN THE STATIONS OF THE BREATH”: metaphorical allusion to

the journey towards death Jesus. In non-religious terms =journey of life, first station of breath
being birth.
- “A GRAVE TRUTH”  ironically used
- “the dark veins of her mother”  reference to mother earth
The effect of using so many present participles such as fathering, humbling, tumbling… is to give to the poem
internal cohesion and to create a sense of unbroken movement and continuity. This would in turn support the
theme of the eternal life-death cycle.
The poem has a clear theme, death and it is a frequent theme in Dylan Thomas’ poetry,
The singularity of the shape Dylan Thomas gives to his meditation on the death of a child, at the very least
intensifies its meaning in ways in which simply declaring, ‘a child has burnt to death’, would not.
III) THEORY AND CRITICISM

The first stage of the deconstructive process is the verbal stage which can involves a traditional form of close
reading. It suggests looking for paradoxes and contradictions, such as in the last line: “After the first death,
there is no other”. A first death implies a second, third, and son on… in other words, there will be indeed be
others. Post-structuralists argue that apparent contradictions like this point to the unreliability and instability of
language.
One other facet, of post-structuralism relevant here is its tendency to reverse the polarity of common binary
oppositions like male/female, day/light, light/dark, etc. and will privilege the second term and regarded as the
more desirable. In the poem it seems to be darkness, rather than light, which appears to create life, as the poet
talks of ‘the mankind making / Bird beast and flower / Fathering and all humbling darkness’. The poem gives
us a reality we can recognize, even if it inverts the terms by which we normally recognize reality. Again,
deconstructionists say that language creates its own reality and it not a reflection of that reality. Identifying
contradictory or paradoxical phrases like these, then, is the first step in reading a text ‘against itself’, revealing
how the signifiers don’t match up with expected signifieds.

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The second stage is the ‘textual’ and the reader takes a more overall view of the poem and is looking for shifts
or breaks in the continuity of the poem. These shifts reveal instabilities of attitude, lack of a fixed and unified
position which can be of various kinds, inconsistencies of focus, time, tone or point of view. They can be
found in grammar, shift from first to third person, changes in verb tenses. In the case of Thomas’ poem, it
presents significant shifts in time and point of view, moving from a geological time scale to the present, then
on to a historical vista of the ‘unmourning’ and ‘riding Thames’. Such discontinuities, make the poem
extremely unstable and present major difficulties in uncovering meaning. Note that omissions are important
here, when a text doesn’t tell us things we would expect to be told.
The ‘linguistic’ stage, finally, involves looking for moments in the poem when the adequacy of language itself
as a medium of communication is called into question, as in actually saying that something is unsayable.
Dylan’s poem is a good example, the whole poem does what it says it won’t do: the speaker professes his
refusal to mourn, but the poem itself constitutes an act of mourning.

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UNIT 1 GLOSSARY
ALLEGORY:
1. A story, play, poem, picture, etc… in which the meaning or message is represented symbolically.
2. It must be also said that in a narrower sense, involves personification, i.e. the representation of human
ideas, feelings, virtues, vices, experiences, etc. which symbolical human figures dressed or carrying
symbolical objects that allow to identify and ‘decode’ their meaning.
AUTHOR:
1. Must die in order for the reader to be born. (Roland Barthes).
2. The solely responsible for the meaning of the literary work and likens the author to the father of the book,
his child, over whom he holds the authority.
3. The term which ordinary culture uses when referring to the person who produces a literary work.
4. Post-structuralism criticism challenges the category of the ‘author’ as omniscient or the single source of
power in relation to a text, as an authority; meaning is not limited to, fixed, by or located in the person of
the author.
BINNARY OPPOSITION: “The Principle of contrast between two mutually exclusive terms: on/off, up/down,
left/right” (Baldick). Post-structuralism also argue that each term of binary is dependent on the other in order to
constitute itself.
CAPITALIST IDEOLOGY: system of ideas which refers to an “economic system, dominant in the Western world
since the breakup of feudalism, in which most of the means of production are privately owned and production is
guided and income distributed largely through the operation of markets.”
CAPITALISM: A system that emphasizes private initiative and individual effort an enterprise. Roland Barthes relates
the ideology of capitalism to the figure of the author.
DEATH OF THE AUTHOR:

1. The resistance to using information derived from the writer’s life or known intentions as part of the
process of interpretation since this presumes that the author imposes the final limit on meaning and
attributes to him (or her) a godlike status.
2. The author must die in order for the reader to be born (Barthes).
DECONSTRUCTION:
1. A way of reading that aims to uncover the disunity within the text.
2. A way of reading that notices what the writer “commands and what he does not command of the ...
language that he uses”.
DOUBLING COMMENTARY/DOUBLING THE TEXT: Reading and interpretation reproducing what the writer
thought and expressed in the text (J. Derrida).
LOGOCENTRISM: Refers to the nature of western thought, language and culture since Plato’s era. The Greek
signifier for ‘word’, ‘speech’ and ‘reason’, logos possesses connotation in western culture for law and truth, Hence,
logocentrism refers to a culture that revolves around a central set of supposedly universal principles or beliefs. (J.
Derrida).
MODERN SCRIPTOR:
1. Differs form the Author in that he is not held to be responsible for a book in the same way.
2. Has no authority over what he writes.
3. Is born simultaneasly with the text.
ORDINARY CULTURE:
1. Reads and interprets literature through its author.

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2. While Mallarmé and Valéry emphasized “writing, “linguistic activity “ and “the essentially verbal
condition of literature” over the person of the author.
PHONOCENTRISM: Depends on the association of truth with te logos as the philosophical and theological origin of
the truth understood as self-revealing thought or cosmic reason... phonocentrism [is]... the powerful idea that there is a
difference between spoken words and written signs, with all the privilige being on the side of the former (J. Derrida).
POST-STRUCTURALISM:
1. A critical practice that look for shifts and breaks in the text and see these as evidence of what is passed
over in silence by the text.
2. A critical practice that looks for hidden meanings in a text which may contradict its surface or apparent
meaning.
3. A critical practice that foregroud superficial similarities in words and make them central to the text’s
meaning.
4. A critical practice that reads the text against itself.
READER:
1. Must eliminate the Author in order to liberate meaning through the act of reading.
2. The reader and the act of reading are necessary for a text to constute itself.
REFERENT: A term which is more or less interchangeable with signified and refers to the concept to which the
signifier is related.
SIGN: A basic unit of communication, e.g. a word. Swiss linguistic Ferdinand de Saussure noted that every sign has
two elements: signifier and signigied.
SIGNIFIED: The conceptual referent of the sign (meaning). The sound or graphic mark
SIGNIFIER: The materially identifiable element such as sound or visible mark (word). What you can physically
perceive through the sound or a graphic mark.
TRASCENDENTAL SIGNIFIED: Denotes an ultimate, fixed meaning. Barthes might call this a theological
meaning or message of the Author-God.

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UNIT 2: INTRODUCTION TO NEW HISTORICISM
CHAPTER 9: NEW HISTORICISM AND CULTURAL MATERIALISM

A. NEW HISTORICISM
The term was coined by the American critic Stephen Greenblatt.
A simple definition of the new historicism is that it is a method based on the parallel reading of literary and non-
literary texts, usually of the same historical period. New historicism refuses to ‘privilege’ the literary text:
instead of a literary ‘foreground’ and historical ‘background’ it envisages and practices a mode of study in which
literary and non-literary texts are given equal weight and constantly inform or interrogate each other.
American critic Louis Montrose defines ‘equal weighting’ as a combined interest in ‘the textuality of history,
the historicity of texts’. According to Greenblatt involves ‘an intensified willingness to read all of the textual
traces of the past with the attention traditionally conferred only on literary texts’.
Greenblatt refers to the appropriated historical document as the ‘anecdote’, and the typical new historicist essay
omits the customary academic preliminaries about previously published interpretations of the play in question,
and begins with a powerful and dramatic anecdote.
The text and co-text used will be seen as expressions of the same historical ‘moment’, and interpreted
accordingly.
B. NEW AND OLD HISTORICISMS – SOME DIFFERENCES
New historicism involves the parallel study of literary (text) and non-literary (co-text), the word ‘parallel’
encapsulates the essential difference between this and earlier approaches to literature which had made some use of
historicism data.
The first and major difference between the ‘new’ and ‘old’ historicism is the practice of giving ‘equal
weighting’ to literary and non-literary material.
A second important difference is encapsulated in the word ‘archival’ in the phrase ‘the archival continuum’,
that word indicates that new historicism is indeed as historicist rather than a historical movement. That is, in
history-as-text.
C. NEW HISTORICISM AND FOUCAULT
New historicism is resolutely anti-establishment, always implicitly on the side of liberal ideals or personal
freedom and accepting and celebrating all forms of difference and ‘deviance’. This notion of the state as all-
powerful and all-seeing stems from the post-structuralist cultural historian Michael Focault whose pervasive
image of the state is that of ‘panoptic’ (meaning all-seeing): Panopticon.
Discourse is not just a way of speaking or writing but the whole ‘mental set’ and ideology which encloses the
thinking of all members of a given society. It is not singular and monolithic.
D. ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF NEW HISTORICISM
- Firstly, it is written is a far more accessible way than post-structuralism. It presents its data and draws its
conclusions.
- Secondly, the material itself is often fascinating and is wholly distinctive in the context of literary studies-
- Thirdly, the political edge of new historicist writing is always sharp.

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E. WHAT NEW HISTORICISTS DO
1. Greenblatt’s main innovation was to juxtapose literary and non-literary texts, reading the former in the
light of the latter (the plays of the Renaissance period).
2. They try thereby to ‘defamiliarise’ the canonical literary text, detaching it from the accumulated weigh of
previous literary scholarship and seeing it as if new.
3. The focus attention (within both text and co-text) on issues of state power and how it is maintained, on
patriarchal structures and their perpetuation, and on the process of colonisation, with its accompanying ‘mind-
set’.
4. The make use of aspects of the post-structuralist outlook, especially Derrida’s notion that every facet of the
reality is textualised, and Foucault’s idea of social structures as determined by dominant ‘discursive
practices’.
F. CULTURAL MATERIALISM
The British critic Graham Holderness describes cultural materialism as ‘a political form of historiography’
meaning the study of historical material within a politicised framework, this framework including the present
which those literary texts have in some way helped to shape.
The term ‘cultural materialism’ was made current in 1985 when it was used by J. Dollimore and A. Sinfield.
They define the term in a foreword as designating a critical method which has four characteristics:
1. Historical Context: ‘undermines the transcendent significance traditionally accorded to the literary text’.
Here the word ‘transcendent’ roughly means ‘timeless’.
2. Theoretical method: signifies a break with liberal humanism and absorbing the lessons of structuralism, post-
structuralism.
3. Political Commitment: signifies the influence of Marxist and feminist perspectives and break from the
Conservative-Christian framework.
4. Textual Analysis: ‘locates the critique of traditional approaches where it cannot be ignored’.
The two words in the term ‘cultural materialism’ are further defined:
1. ‘Culture’ will include all forms of culture. This approach does not limit itself to ‘high’ cultural forms like the
Shakespeare play.
2. ‘Materialism’ signifies the opposite of ‘idealism’. ‘Materialist’ belief is that culture cannot ‘transcend the
material forces and relations of production’.
Instead of Foucault’s notion of ‘discourse’, British left-wing critic, R. Williams invented the term ‘structures of
feeling’: these are concerned with ‘meanings and values as they are lived and felt’. Cultural materialism
particularly involves using the past to ‘read’ the present.
G. HOW IS CULTURAL MATERIALISM DIFFERENT FROM THE NEW HISTORICISM?
One difference ‘men and women make their own history but not in conditions of their own choosing’:
1. Cultural materialism: tend to concentrate on men and women make their own history.
2. New historicism: tend to focus on the ‘power of social and ideological structures’ which restrain them.
An important difference:
1. New historicism: the co-texts are documents contemporary with Shakespeare. They situate the literary text in
the political situation of its own day.
2. Cultural materialism may be programme notes for a current Royal Shakespeare Company production. They
situate the literary text within that of ours.

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H. WHAT CULTURAL MATERIALIST CRITICS DO
1. They read the literary text (very often Renaissance play) in such a way as to enable us to ‘recover its
histories’, that is, the context of exploitation from which it emerged.
2. At the same time, they foreground those elements in the work’s present transmission and contextualising
which caused those histories to be lost in the first place (for example, the ‘heritage’ industry’s packaging of
Shakespeare in terms of history-as-pageant, national bard, cultural icon, and so on).
3. They use a combination of Marxist and feminist approaches to the text, especially in order to do the first of
these, and in order to fracture the previous dominance of conservative social, political, and religious
assumptions in Shakespeare criticism in particular.
4. They use the technique of close textual analysis, but often employ structuralist and post-structuralist
techniques, especially to mark a break with the inherited tradition of close textual analysis within the
framework of conservative cultural and social assumptions.
 CO-TEXT
 Mary McCarthy
 Extract taken from the article ‘Report from Vietnam II: The Problems of Success’.
 Published: New York Times, May 4, 1967
 CRITICAL AUTHORS
 Hayden White
 Extract from ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artifact’, 1978
 ‘Verbal fictions’
 ‘Historical events are value-neutral’. Whether they find their place finally in a story that is tragic,
comic, romantic, or ironic […]
 ‘Fiction-making’
 According to White, historical narratives do not only arrange past events in a particular way,
according to certain fiction-making conventions; they are also metaphors which propose a
similarity between those events and certain story models. These story models in turn (=a su vez) are
meaningful to us in culturally accepted ways:
‘[…] historical narratives are not models of past events and processes but also metaphorical
statements which suggest a relation of similitude between such events and processes and the
story types that we conventionally use to endow the events of our lives with culturally
sanctioned meanings. […]’
 ‘The older distinction between fiction and history, in which fiction is conceived as the representation
of the imaginable and history as the representation of the actual, must give place to the recognition
that we can only know the actual by contrasting it with or likening it to the imaginable.’
 Stephen Greenblatt
 Extract from ‘Introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance’, 1988
 ‘Mainstream literary history’
 ‘The new historicism erodes the firm ground of both criticism and literature. It tends to ask questions
about its own methodological assumptions and those of others […], it might encourage us to examine
the ideological situation not only of Richard II but of Dover Wilson on Richard II’.

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 LITERARY AUTHOR
 Elizabeth Bishop
 Poem: ‘12 O’Clock News’
 It was published in the 1976 collection Geography III.
I) CONTEXT
The fragment is part of a poem in prose titled “12 O’Clock News” by Elizabeth Bishop, considered one of the
most distinguished American poets of the twentieth century.
The poem was included in the 1976 collection Geography III. It was written and published during the Vietnam
War, at a time when the US had a strong conservative government and mass media heavily affected public
opinion. Opposition to the war grew in strength in its later years.
Bishop's life spanned both the Postmodern and Contemporary literary periods, as well as the Confessional
poetry movement, although her writings can't be easily categorized.

Though at first glance the fragment may not seem to be a poem, as it is not written in verse, we can deduce its
true nature by the presence of poetic devices and the figurative intent of the text. The way it is written in
conjunction with the title is designed to emulate a news broadcast, or more specifically, a war dispatch.
It is visually structured into two columns: a list of common items related to writing on the left and their highly
figurative descriptions on the right. The descriptions make use of metaphors and personification to depict the
objects on the left (typewriter – “abrupt escarpment”, “elaborate terracing”).
1) GOOSNECK LAMP – “The full moon” and the light shed by both = poor light (Shed: to shed
light physically / to clarify).
2) TYPEWRITER – “abrupt escarpment”, “elaborate terracing” (an urban object – a rural and timeless
activity).
3) PILE OF MSS (manuscripts) – “White, calcareous and shaly soil”. Shaly: consolidated mud, like
the image of paper piled.
4) TYPED SHEETS (hojas) – “field... it is dark –speckled”, like papers covered in typed words
5) ENVELOPES – signboards “on a truly gigantic scale” suggesting Communist propaganda in North
Vietnam
6) INK- BOTTLE – the “mysterious, oddly shaped, black structure”
- Linked to the poor light (moon light): absence of illumination: inability to understand
- Ink- bottle: a secret weapon= writing; unreliable journalism
- The poem is also a secret weapon against that official discourse, ideology and propaganda
7) TYPEWRITER ERASER – unicycle used by the “unicyclist courier”

- Eraser: the unicycle used by the “unicyclist courier”
- The brush: the “bristling hair of the indigenes”
- The verbs point to the fact that reality is being distorted by words (the reporter is
guessing, deducing...).
- “appears to be”: hesitant expression = unreliability of the description (is not a dead body,
but a typewriter eraser).
- The eraser anticipates the “erasure” of his life (cyclist) “Alive, he would have been...”
8) ASHTRAY (full of cigarettes) – the “nest of soldiers” lying “heaped together” and “in hideously
contorted positions, all dead”
- Butts: death bodies  PERSONIFICATION

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- The voice, in a false tone of commiseration, puts the blame (of their death) on the
"childishness and the hopeless impracticality of this inscrutable people, our opponents" or
"the sad corruption of their leaders"  negative view of the natives and the implicit idea
of technical, intellectual and moral superiority of the Americans.
- The poem ends with an image of death... message: war kills.
Alliteration is exemplified by the repetition of |l|, |g|, |p|, |r| and |n| sounds in the typewriter paragraph and
serves to provide musicality and rhythm to the text.
The poetic voice is that of a first person narrator, a reporter perhaps, who describes what they are seeing. The
author does not identify with the ideas expressed, but rather creates a ventriloquised voice to establish distance
between the reader and the ideology present in the poem. The way reality can be distorted by language is an
important theme in the text.

While “12 O'Clock News” does not specifically state a time and place, if we take into account the period in
which it was written and published, we can infer that it is linked to the Vietnam War.
The official ideology and prevailing rhetorical strategy in the United States during the war was of pro-war
propaganda, made possible through the appearance of mass media and their support of the picture that was to
be painted for the general public.
Bishop's poem reacts to this prevalent discourse by describing, in an ironic manner, another side of the war
that was rarely shown to Americans at the time. The title, along with the poem, implies that the reality of the
war was mediated through the news. Families sat down to watch the “12 O'Clock News” and accepted that the
information they were being given was true, when the war was actually very different to what was being
broadcast on televisions and radios. For example, citizens were never informed that a small American plane
bombed a lone Vietnamese cyclist with enough explosives to level a whole platoon.
Using defamiliarisation (by describing the familiar objects in the left column of the poem in an unfamiliar
way), Bishop urges the reader to reflect upon the language used and become wary of the ways words can
distort reality.

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UNIT 2 GLOSSARY
ANECDOTE: In New Historicsism essays is ‘a powerful dramatic document that works like a co-text’.
CO-TEXT: A historical document which is contemporary with and studied alongside a literary document.
COMEDY: A play or literary composition written chiefly to amuse its audience by appealing to a sense of superiority
over the characters depicted with a usually happy ending for the leading characters.
CULTURAL MATERIALISM:
1. A critical practice that concentrates on the interventions whereby men and women make their own history and
situate the literary text in the political situation of our own (and now of its own day as New Historicist do).
2. A critical practice that reads the literary text in a way as to enable us to “recover histories”.
3. A critical practice that works mainly within tradional notions of the canon.
EMPLOTMENT: The process by which a text is organized into a plot.
EMPLOTTED: Organized into a plot.
EPIC: A long narrative poem celebrating the great deeds of one or more legendary heroes in a grand ceremonious
style.
EQUAL WEIGHTING: A combined interest in “the textuality of history, the historicity of texts” (L. Montrose).
FICTION-MAKING: The historian bestows a particular significance upon certain historical events and them
matches them up with a precise type of plot.
MAINSTREAM LITERARY HISTORY: Old historicism, dominant historical scholarship, monological, earlier
historicism, single political vision, internally coherent and consistent, the status of historical fact, a stable point of
reference.
NARRATIVE:
1. A set of events (the story) recounted in a process of narration (or discourse).
2. A telling of some true or fictitious event or connected sequence of events, recounted by a narrator.
NEW HISTORICISM:
1. A critical practice that gives equal weighting to literary and non-literary texts.
2. A critical practice that insists on the textualization of reality (from Derrida) and the premise that society is
governed by the collusion between discourse and power (from Foucault).
3. A critical practice which looks for manifestations in text and co-text of State power, patriarchy and
colonization.
PLOT:
1. A particular selection and reordering of the full sequence of events (story).
2. The pattern of events and situations in a narrative or dramatic work.
ROMANCE:
1. A fictional story in verse or prose that relates improbable adventures of idealized characters in some remote or
enchanted setting.
2. A tendency in fiction opposite to that of realism.
SATIRE: A mode of writing that exposes the failings of individuals, institutions, or societies to ridicule and scorn.
STORY:
1. The full sequence of events as we assume them to have occurred in their likely order, duration and frequency.
2. In modern narratology, the sequence of imagined events that we reconstruct form the actual arrangement of a
narrative.
3. In the everyday sense, any narrative or tale recounting a series of events.

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TAILORING: Adapting the facts to a particular story form.
TRAGEDY: A serious play or novel representing the disastrous downfall of a central character, the protagonist.
VALUE-NEUTRAL: Historical events acquire narrative value only after the historian organizes them.
VERBAL-FICTIONS: A construct which is made of words and based on invention rather than reality.

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UNIT 3: INTRODUCTION TO FEMINISM AND GENDER
CHAPTER 6: FEMINIST CRITICISM

A. FEMINISM AND FEMINIST CRITICISM
The “women’s movement” of the 1960s was not, of course, the start of feminism. Rather, it was a renewal of
an of tradition of thought and action already possessing its classic books which had diagnosed the problem
women’s inequality in society. These books include:
- Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792).

- Olive Schreiner’s Women and Labour (1911).
- Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929).
- Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949).
The feminist literary criticism of today is the direct product of the ‘women’s movement’ of the 1960s.
The concern with ‘conditioning’ and ‘socialisation’ underpins a crucial set of distinctions between the terms,
as Toril Moi explains:
- Feminist: political position

- Female: a matter of biology
- Feminine: a set of culturally defined characteristics
Feminist pointed out, for example, that in 19th century fiction very few women work for a living, unless they
are driven to it by dire necessity. Instead, the focus of interest is on the heroine’s choice of marriage partner,
which will decide her ultimate social position and exclusively determine her happiness and fulfilment in life,
or her lack of these.
In feminist criticism in the 1970s the major effort went into exposing what might be called the mechanisms
of patriarchy, the cultural ‘mind-set’ in men and women which perpetuated sexual inequality.
Then, in the 1980s, in feminism, the mood changed:
- Firstly, feminist criticism became much more eclectic, meaning that it began to draw upon the findings
and approaches of other kinds of criticism.
- Secondly, it switched its focus from attacking male versions of the world to exploring the nature of the
female world and outlook, and reconstructing the lost or suppressed records of female experience.
- Thirdly, attention was switched to the need to construct a new canon of women’s writing by rewriting
the history of the novel and of poetry.
Elaine Showalter, for instance, described the change in the late 1970s as a shift of attention:
- From ‘androtexts’, books by men

- To ‘gynotexts’, books by women
She coined the term ‘gynocritics’, meaning the study of gynotexts. But gynocriticism is a broad and varied
field, the subjects of gynocriticism are, she says: ‘the history, styles, themes, genres, and structures of writing
by women; the psychodynamics of female creativity; the trajectory of the individual or collective female
career; and the evolution or laws of a female literary tradition’.
Showalter also detects in the history of women’s writing different phases:
- Feminine phase (1840-80): in which women writers imitated dominant male artistic norms and aesthetic
standards;
- Feminist phase (1880-1920): in which radical and often separatist positions are maintained;
- And finally a female phase (1920 onwards): which looked particularly at female writing and female
experience.

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B. FEMINIST CRITICISM AND THE ROLE OF THEORY
 Anglo-American:
- It has tended to be more sceptical about recent critical theory.
- It maintains a major interest in traditional critical concepts like theme, motif, and characterisation.
- They seem to accept the conventions of literary realism, and treat literature as a series of representations
of women’s lives and experience which can be measured and evaluated against reality.
- It has a good deal in common approach to literature, although feminist also place considerable emphasis
on the use of historical data and non-literary material (such as diaries, memoirs, social and medical
history) in understanding the literary text.
- Elaine Showalter is usually takes as the major representative, also Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.
- Definitive works in the so-called ‘Anglo-American’ appeared in the late 1970s.
 English feminist criticism is often distinctly different from American:

- It tends to be ‘socialist feminist’ in orientation, aligned with cultural materialism or Marxism.
- Representatives: Cora Kaplan
- The British ‘socialist feminist’ tradition produced its key works in the mid-1980s and remains active and
influential.
 ‘French’ feminism:
- It is more overtly theoretical, taking as its starting-point the insights of major post-structuralist,
especially Lacan, Focault and Derrida.
- For these feminist critics, the literary text is never primarily a representation of reality, or a
reproduction of a personal voice expressing the minutiae of personal experience.
- They have other concerns, they write about language, representation, and psychology…
- The major figures: Julia Kristeva, Hèléne Cixous
C. FEMINIST CRITICISM AND LANGUAGE
Another opinion is the question of whether or not there exists a form of language which is inherently
feminine. For instance:
- Virginia Woolf in her essay A Room of One’s Own, suggests that language use is gendered, she quotes
‘That is a man’s sentence’
- This thesis that the language is ‘masculine’ in this sense is developed by Dale Spender in the early 1980s
in her book Man Made Language.
- This view that the language is man-made is challenged from within feminism by Sandra Gilbert and
Susan Gubar in the essay ‘Sexual Linguistics: Gender, Language, Sexuality’.
- French theorists, therefore, have posited the existence of an écriture feminine. The term is that of the
French theorist Hèléne Cixous, from her essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’. For Cixous this kind of
writing is somehow uniquely the product of female physiology, which women must celebrate in their
writing. Écriture feminine, then, is by its nature transgressive, rule-transcending, intoxicated.
- Further expression of the notion of the écriture feminine is found in the writing of Julia Kristeva.
Kristeva uses the terms the symbolic and the semiotic to designate two different aspects of language. In
her essay ‘The System and the Speaking Subject’:
1. The symbolic aspect is associated with authority, order, fathers, repression and control. This
symbolic facet of language maintains the fiction that the self is fixed and unified.
2. By contrast, the semiotic aspect of discourse is characterised not by logic or order, but by
‘displacement, slippage, condensation’. Kristeva sees the semiotic as the language of poetry as
opposed to prose.
The model, again, is that of the unconscious and the conscious, and the Lacanian re-use of these notions.
The symbolic is the orderly surface, this aspect of language is the side stressed by the structuralists, the

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Saussurean ‘network of differences’. The process of deconstruction is to see it as the ‘unconscious’ of the
text emerging into and disrupting the ‘conscious’ or ‘surface’ meaning.
Kristeva is indebted to Jacques Lacan and his distinction between two realms, the Imaginary and the
Symbolic. The Imaginary realm is that of the young child at the pre-linguistic, pre-Oedipal stage.
D. FEMINIST CRITICISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
The story so far of feminism’s relationship with psychoanalysis can be said to begin with Kate Millet’s
Sexual Politics in 1969 which condemns Freud as a prime source of the patriarchal attitudes against which
feminist must fight. Juliet Mitchell defends Freud against Millet.
The distinction, so crucial to feminism, between sex (biology) and gender (construc, something learned not
‘natural’) is what Simone de Beauvoir invokes in the famous first sentence in Part Two of The Second Sex
when she writes ‘One is not born a woman; rather, one becomes a woman’.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar use the idea of ‘social castration’, for this term signifies women’s lack of
social power.
Another significant name in the rehabilitation of Freud is the British critic Jacqueline Rose, her project is to
combine the insights of feminism, psychoanalysis and politics. In Rose’s own work there is a strong and
growing interest in listening to the voices of the hitherto excluded ‘Other’, particularly those of the cultures
and races which had no place in the work of Freud and Lacan.
E. WHAT FEMINIST CRITICS DO
1. Rethink the canon, aiming at the rediscovery of texts written by women.

2. Revalue women’s experience.
3. Examine representations of women in literature by men and women.
4. Challenge representations of women as ‘Other’, as ‘lack’, as part of ‘nature’.
5. Examine power relations which obtain in texts and in life, with a view to breaking them down, seeing reading
as a political act, and showing the extent of patriarchy.
6. Recognise the role of language in making what is social and constructed seem transparent and ‘natural’.
7. Raise the question men and women are ‘essentially’ different because of biology, or are socially constructed
as different.
8. Explore the question of whether there is a female language, an écriture feminine, and whether this is also
available to men.
9. ‘Re-read’ psychoanalysis to further explore the issue of female and male identity.
10. Question the popular notion of the death of the author, asking whether there are only ‘subject positions…
constructed in discourse’, or whether, on the contrary, the experience (e.g. of a black or lesbian writer) is
central.
11. Make clear the ideological base of supposedly ‘neutral’ or ‘mainstream’ literary interpretations.
 SANDRA GILBERT and SUSAN GUBAR

 Extract from The Madwoman in the Attic
 In response to the masculinised version of literary rivalry represented by Harold Bloom’s
‘anxiety of influence’ Gilbert and Gubar propose a feminised ‘anxiety of authoship’:
Male literary ancestors are associated with the patriarchal attempt to define the woman
author, reducing her subjectivity to stereotypes (angel, monster) and her potential to define
herself. The male power conflict with a literary precursor does not reflect the female writer’s
sense of her own gender (=género). Her inability to see herself as a (hostile, aggressive, i.e.
masculine) precursor, therefore, leads to a fear that she cannot write, that writing will lead to
her isolation or annihilation.

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 LITERARY AUTHOR
 Kate Chopin
 Novel: The Awakening
 First published in 1899
I) CONTEXT
The extract is part of the novel ‘The Awakening’ written by Kate Chopin. It was published in 1899, when
women still were regarded as a legal property of their husbands.
It is the story about a 19th century woman who deals with her sexual awakening and the sense of
oppression in a conventional marriage, and willing to defy the conventions of Louisiana Creole society to
gain spiritual independence.
During an era in which women primarily cared for her children, husband, and home, Pontellier took a personal
journey to learn about herself as more than just a "mother-woman". She ultimately battles against the social
cultures of her time. This process of rebellion was far ahead of both Chopin and Pontellier's time.
This novel was considered highly controversial because of its overtly feminist themes, and it is now seen as a
landmark work of early feminism. Kate Chopin is now considered by some scholars as a precursor of
American modernist literature.
The novel is divided into thirty-nine short chapters, each consisting of a single significant scene.
Most of the story is told through the viewpoint of Edna Pontellier, using a narrative voice, an exceptionally
sensitive and observant woman who can see into the characters of other people. The scenes not only present
the various characters’ personalities but also paint a picture of homes, furnishings, clothing, servants,
entertainment, and other aspects of life in the late nineteenth century.
Chopin portrays her experiences of the Creole lifestyle, in which women were under strict rules and limited to
the role of wife and mother. It is not impossible not to see something of Kate Chopin in Edna. She was not
abandoned by her own husband, but widowed, so she knew well the feeling of abandonment and the ensuing
loneliness. She also flirted and had encounters with other men, so she knew that sense of desire and lust that
comes from unrequited love.
In the novel, there are several occasions in which Kate Chopin uses symbolism. Symbolism, a literary device,
is the use of symbols to signify ideas and qualities by giving them symbolic meanings that are different from
their literal sense.
 Birds –It is clear that the parrot represents Edna’s unspoken feelings towards her husband. It
also represents how Edna is caged in her society, without much freedom to live as she pleases.
As Edna is walking towards the ocean in the end of the novel we see a bird with a broken
wing. Many have a different interpretation of this injured bird. Some would say that the bird is
a representation of Edna finally breaking away from the idea of Victorian womanhood, this is
because throughout the entire novel we see caged birds and now we are finally seeing a bird
that is free despite its injury. Other say that this injured bird represents Edna’s failure to live
outside of the expectations that society had placed on to her at this time.
 Ocean – The ocean can be interpreted to represent many different things. While the Pontellier
family are vacationing at the resort Edna teaches herself how to swim. This signifies her
“awakening”, her realizing that she holds some sort of independence. It is as if this first swim
was Edna’s first taste of freedom and after that she becomes more and more rebellious. The

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ending of the book all depends on how the reader perceives it to be. Many questions whether
or not Edna dies in the end of the novel. If Edna is thought to be dead, then it is an ironic
death because the sea is where she discovered herself. Those that believe Edna purposely kills
herself justify her death as saying the ocean is what Edna believed what would free her from
the chains that were placed on her by society.
This is not a story about marriage or motherhood but instead a story about the woman herself and her thoughts
about life which are sometimes radical, sensual and certainly autonomous and separate from her role as a wife
or mother.

This novel points out the idea yet unexplored in English literature, patriarchal society, a piece of literature to
explore through the lens of feminist criticism.
In order to understand the feminist themes and influences in The Awakening is important to know that
feminist criticism focuses on the patriarchal language and masculine ideology examining powers relations
which obtain in texts and in life, with a view to breaking them down, seeing reading as a political act, and
showing the extent of patriarchy. This feminist criticism also concerns with to rethink the canon, aiming at the
rediscovery the works written by forgotten female authors, hidden away by a patriarchal society; revalue
women’s experience; examine representations of women in literature by men and women; and, also, raise the
question of whether men and women are ‘essentially different because of biology, or are socially constructed
as different.
At the time this novel was released in 1899, the idea of feminist theory of literature did not exist and literature
world was male dominated. Kate Chopin wrote during the first wave of feminism and her writings greatly
influenced the movement and gave an outlet to the voices of women. The first wave of feminism is known as
the suffrage movement, begun in the mid-19th century and was a fight against injustices suffered by women.
Going back to The Awakening, Mrs Pontellier is such a powerful and strong character because of Chopin has
given her a voice, an autonomous identity, Chopin uses subtlety to infuse her work with ideas of feminism and
woman’s rights. The Awakening has become one of the classics of feminist literature because of its theme of
sexual awakening and a woman’s right to freedom of choice in matters of love.

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UNIT 3 GLOSSARY OF “FEMINIST CRITICISM”
ALLUSION: A reference to another work of literature or art, to a person or an event.
ANXIETY OF AUTHORSHIP: The woman author’s fear that she is unable to create or that writing will destroy her.
ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE: Harold Bloom

1. The male author’s fear that he is not his own creator and that previous male authors have priority over his
writings.
2. The struggle for identity by male poets who feel threatened by the achievements of their predecessors.
ANDROTEXTS: Books written by men (Elaine Showalter).
ATTEMPT THE PEN: Write.
ÉCRITURE FÉMININE: The term for women’s writing in French feminist theory. It describes how women’s
writing is a specific discourse closer to the body, to emotions and to the unnameable, all of which are represented by
the social contract.
FEMALE: A matter of biology (T. Moi).
FEMININE: A matter of cultural defined characteristics (T. Moi).
FEMINIST CRITICISM:
1. A critical practice that asks whether men and women are essentially (because biologically) different, or
whether difference is one more social construct.
2. A critical practice that challenges hierarchies (power rations) in writing and in real life with a view to
breaking them down, seeing reading as a political act and exposing patriarchy.
3. A critical practice that examines representations of women literature by men and women.
4. A critical practice that explores the question of whether there is a female language or écriture feminine (a
feminine practice of writing) and whether men can practice that writing too.
5. A critical practice that goes back to psychoanalysis to continue exploring male and female identity.
6. A critical practice that questions constructions of women as “Other”, as “lack”, as part of “nature”.
7. A critical practice that re-asses women’s lives (revalue women experience).
8. A critical practice that re-writes the canon and seek to rediscover women-authored texts (rethinks the canon
for the rediscovering of texts written by women).
FEMINIST: A political position (Toril Moi).
GYNOCENTRISM: Literally, woman-centred. In critical practice, it refers to the presumption that the reader and the
writer of a literary work are both female, and that the critical act is also aimed towards the woman reader.
GYNOCRITICS: Meaning the study of gynotexts. The term was coined in English by Elaine Showalter.
GYNOTEXTS: Books written by women (Elaine Showalter).
INTERTEXTUALITY: It refers to the ways in which all utterances (whether written or spoken) necessarily refer to
other utterances, since words and linguistic/grammatical structures pre-exist the individual speaker and the individual
speech. Intertextuality can take place consciously, as when a writer sets out to quote form or allude to the words of
another.
IMAGERY: Convers the use of language to represent objects, actions, feelings, thoughts, ideas, states of mind and
any sensory or extra-sensory experience. An image does not necessarily mean a ‘mental picture’.
KINGLY ADMONITIONS: Stern advice uttered by a male monarch.
MALE COUNTERPART: Male equivalent or complement.
OEDIPAL STRUGGLE: (feminist criticism) The male author must ‘kill his father’ in order to survive and become
his own person.
PARADIGM: Model, example.

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PATRIARCHAL: A system of male authority which oppresses women through its social, political, and economical
institutions.
PERSONAE: (plural of persona) Has come to denote the person (the ‘I’ of an alter ego) who speaks in a poem or
novel or other form of literature.
SEMIOTIC (LANGUAGE): Characterized not by logical order but by displacement, slippage and condensation
which suggest a much loser and randomized way of making connections (J. Kristeva).
STEROTYPES: Standardized, simplified and fixed conception (according to Gubert and Gilbert, female writer is
reduced to stereotypes by her male precursor).
SYMBOLIC (LANGUAGE): Associated with authority, order, fathers, repression and control; maintains the fiction
that the self is fixed and unified (Julia Kristeva).
SYNESTHESIA: The evocation of one sense in terms of another.

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CHAPTER 7: LESBIAN/GAY CRITICISM

A. LESBIAN AND GAY THEORY
Lesbian and gay literary theory emerged prominently as a distinct field only by the 1990s.
What, then, is the purpose of lesbian/gay criticism? The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader tells us that
‘lesbian/gay studies does for sex and sexuality approximately what women’s studies does for gender’. In
lesbian /gay criticism, the defining feature is making sexual orientation ‘a fundamental category of analysis
and understanding’. It has social and political aims, in particular ‘an oppositional design’ upon society, for it
is ‘informed by resistance to homophobia and heterosexism… the ideological and institutional practices of
heterosexual privilege’.
B. LESBIAN FEMINISM
There are differences of emphasis between lesbian and gay theory, and two major strands of thinking within
lesbian theory itself.
The first of these is lesbian feminism, which is best understood by seeing it initially in the context of its own
origins from within feminism, for lesbian studies emerged in the 1980s as a kind of annex of feminist
criticism, before acquiring disciplinary independence:
- On this reading of the situation, feminism found it difficult to accommodate difference, whether racial,
cultural, or sexual, and tended to universalize the experience of white, middle-class, urban
heterosexual women. This kind of critique of feminism originated in the work of African-American
critics who pointed out that academic feminism had reproduced the structures of patriarchal inequality
within itself by excluding the voices and experiences of black women.
This case is memorably put, for instance, in Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell
hooks.
- A similar accusation against feminism was made by lesbian critics: feminism assumed, they argued, that
there existed an essential female identity which all women had in common irrespective of differences of
race, class, or sexual orientation.
‘Classic’ feminism, then, had marginalized or ignored lesbianism. This is argued in another crucial essay
in the development of lesbian feminism, ‘The woman identified woman’ by the Radicalesbian collective,
published in Radical Feminism. The lesbian feminist position identified in this essay makes lesbianism
central to feminism.
The conflict between heterosexual feminist and lesbians defused in another important essay, by Adrienne
Rich, which introduced the notion of the ‘lesbian continuum’ in her essay ‘Compulsory heterosexuality and
lesbian existence’.
This concept of the lesbian continuum designates a wide variety of female behaviour:
- Help networks among women

- Supportive female friendships
- Lesbian sex
The two ideas of the ‘woman identified woman’ and the ‘lesbian continuum’ overlap and introduce the
notion of choice and allegiance into matters of sex and gender, so that the sexuality is not seen as something
merely ‘natural’ and unchanging, but rather as a construction and as subject to change.
In the 1990s a second, less essentialist, notion of lesbianism had emerged, within the sphere of what is now
known as ‘queer theory’.

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C. QUEER THEORY
The second kind of lesbian thinking, designated libertarian lesbianism by Paulina Palmer, breaks away from
feminism and makes new allegiances, in particular, with gay men rather than with other women, and this kind
of lesbian theory itself as a part of the field of ‘queer theory’ or ‘queer studies’, terms increasingly used by
gays, is spite of the homophobic origins of the word ‘queer’.
Queer theory rejects female separatism and instead sees an identity of political and social interest with gay
men. The key underlying question is whether it is gender or sexuality. Choosing the latter of course
emphasizes lesbianism as a form of sexuality, rather than a form of female bonding or patriarchal resistance.
One of the main points of post-structuralism was to ‘deconstruct’ binary opposition, showing:
- firstly, that the distinction between paired opposites is not absolute
- and secondly, that it is possible to reverse the hierarchy within such pairs, and so, ‘privilege’ the second
term rather than the first.
Hence, in lesbian/gay studies the pair heterosexual/homosexual is deconstructed in this way.

The opposition within this pair is seen:
- firstly, as inherently unstable: as Diana Fuss put it, in the introduction to Inside/outside: lesbian theories,
gay theories.
- Judith Butler, a prominent contributor to Inside/Outside, points out in her essay that ‘identity
categories’, like ‘gay’ and ‘straight’, ‘tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the
normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for liberatory contestations of that
very oppression’. Thus, lesbianism, say, is not a stable, essential identity, so that, ‘identity can become a
site of contest and revision’.
- Sedgwick considers how coming ‘out of the closet’ (openly revealing one’s gay or lesbian sexual
orientation) is not a single absolute act. According to her subject identity is necessarily a complex
mixture of chosen allegiances, social position, and professional roles, rather than a fixed inner essence.
- ‘Identity politics’ means those which campaign for and by groups disadvantaged by some aspect of their
identity, such as their gender, their race, or their sexual orientation.
The literary-critical consequences of anti-essentialism are twofold:

- Firstly, there is the obvious difficulty of deciding what a lesbian/gay text is. The possibilities are (in a
slightly re-worked version of Zimmerman’s formulation) that a lesbian/gay text is:
1. One which is written by a lesbian
2. One written about lesbians
3. One that expresses a lesbian ‘vision’
- A final, and more specific literary-critical consequence of anti-essentialism is a tendency to devalue

literary realism, since it tends to rely upon notions of fixed identities and stable points of view.
D. WHAT LESBIAN/GAY CRITICS DO
1. Identify and establish a canon of ‘classic’ lesbian/gay writers whose work constitutes a distinct
tradition. These are, in the main, 20th century writers, such as a, for lesbian writers in Britain: Virginia
Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Dorothy Richardson, Rosamond Lehman, and Radclyffe Hall.
2. Identify lesbian/gay episodes in mainstream work and discuss them as such (for example, the
relationship between Jane and Helen in Jane Eyre), rather than reading same-sex pairings in non-
specific ways.
3. Set up an extended, metaphorical sense of ‘lesbian/gay’ so that in connotes a moment of crossing a
boundary, or blurring a set of categories. All such ‘liminal’ moments mirror the moment of self-
identification as lesbian or gay, which is necessarily an act of conscious resistance to established
norms and boundaries.

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4. Expose the ‘homophobia’ of mainstream literature and criticism, as seen in ignoring or denigrating the
homosexual aspects of the work of major canonical figures, for example, by omitting overtly
homosexual love lyrics from selections or discussions of the poetry of W.H. Auden.
5. Foreground homosexual aspects of mainstream literature which have previously been glossed over,
for example the strongly homo-erotic tenderness seen in a good deal of First World War poetry.
6. Foreground literary genres, previously neglected, which significantly influenced ideals of masculinity
or femininity, such as the 19th century adventure stories with a British ‘Empire’ setting.
 ADRIENNE RICH
 Extract from “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Continuum”
 Rich Discusses the therms: Lesbian existence refers to the actual presence of lesbians, past and
present, while lesbian continuum refers to all experiences shared by women – experiences that
strengthen bonds among themselves and against male oppression.
 Rich criticizes the equating of “lesbian existence with male homosexuality” because it
suppresses female reality once more; it erases the specific experiences of lesbians, assuming them
to be the same as those of gay men.
 Compulsory heterosexuality: This term is closely related to the expression male right of access;
it is “the main mechanism underlying and perpetuating male dominance” (Humm 44).
 BARBARA SMITH
 Extract from “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism”
 “This invisibility”: Black women’s existence, experience, and culture and the brutally complex
systems of oppression which shape these [things].
 The Black feminist critic can use the following principles:
i. a fundamental commitment to exploring the inevitable presence of sexual, racial and
identity politics in Black women’s writing;
ii. the acknowledgement that she can identify a Black female literary trajectory;
iii. knowing that this trajectory parallels historically Black male and white female literary
traditions;
iv. and also that Black women authors reveal common literary practices rooted in shared
political, social and economic experiences.

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 LITERARY AUTHOR
 Elizabeth Bishop
 Peom: In the Waiting Room
 First published in 1976
I) CONTEXT
This poem was included in her last book of poetry “Geography III”, which was published in 1976, by
Elizabeth Bishop, considered one of the most distinguished American poets of the twentieth century.
In The Waiting Room is a long, poem that focuses on the reaction of a young girl who, whilst waiting for her
Aunt Consuelo in the dentist's waiting room, picks up a National Geographic magazine and looks at the
pictures.
From that moment on the poem takes the reader into the mind of this young six-year-old, captivated and
slightly horrified by what she sees in the adult magazine.
She is still in the waiting room, aware of all that goes on around her - she hears her Aunt Consuelo scream -
but emotionally she is transported to a different place.
Bishop's life spanned both the Postmodern and Contemporary literary periods, as well as the Confessional
poetry movement, although her writings can't be easily categorized.

The reader becomes a confidant of this personal experience. In fact, the poem is a narrative poem that is
written in free verses, structured in five stanzas.
There is no regular, set end-rhyme scheme to the lines and no rhythmic pattern. Some lines are tri
meter, others dimeter, with variations, but the overall impression is that the form is prose chopped into
punctuated lines. The poem sounds like a story any person would tell a friend in the course of an intimate
conversation. There is a perfect correspondence between form and content.
Through the first-person voice, the poetic ‘I’, the poem describes the speaker’s moment of recognition of her
identity and place in the world as a woman. The moment occurs while she is in the waiting room of a dentist.
Identification with other women. The speaker description of what her feelings on this moment of
identification suggest vertigo, confusion, disorientation even other bodily reactions.
Careful use of punctuation, together with enjambment, that guides the voice and pace and
understanding.
The poet uses commas, dashes and end stops (periods, full stops) to regulate the reader's pace, so there are
pauses to reflect the girl's hesitation as she sits digesting the pictures.
Alliteration occurs from time to time - while I waited - beneath a big black wave - which brings interest to the
texture of the words; and assonance is used - wound round and round.
The simile - like the necks of light bulbs - helps the reader picture exactly what the girl is seeing in the
National Geographic.
The poet incorporates all of these devices with mostly simple language and a first person perspective to take
the reader right into the dentist's waiting room, where a small girl sits hardly daring to look up.
First Stanza (lines 1-35)
The scene is set. A little girl sits in the dentist's waiting room. Her Aunt Consuelo is 'inside' being worked on
by the dentist. This is a simple enough start for the reader, we're even told the name of the town and the state
as if the speaker wants to nail exactly where it is the event took place.

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Simple start, simple language. Yet as the first stanza progresses the little girl becomes increasingly aware of
the slightly oppressive atmosphere. She notices the early dark, the grown ups, her aunt being a long time. To
keep boredom at bay she picks up a National Geographic. She's only six but she's able to read what is an adult
magazine. Precocious child? Maybe.
The pictures signify the impending change. First an erupting volcano, then an eccentric couple, then a dead
man who might be a meal for cannibals, and pointy headed babies, black naked women with saggy breasts and
strange long necks - the images pile up and overwhelm the innocent girl.
She's too self-conscious to stop reading and looking so she goes through the whole magazine before studying
the cover, which seems to frame, like a picture frame, all of the images. The breasts in particular.
Second Stanza (lines 36-53)
The reader is gradually taken into the mind of the girl, focused on the pages of the National Geographic but
then a cry of pain from her aunt brings the speaker back into the reality of the waiting room. This reality is
short-lived however.
Her aunt's familiar voice becomes her own, unthinking family voice. The girl instinctively connects with her
own blood and cannot stop herself - she is her aunt, two become one and they are falling, the girl is falling out
of her childhood and into a different dimension.
Third Stanza (lines 54-89)
The consciousness of the child is changing - she becomes aware of her connection with her aunt and all the
others gathered in the waiting room. This is a shockingly odd revelation. Everyone is in this world together
and even the girl herself will become one of them, she will grow up, become a woman with breasts.
Despite her questions and existential doubts, growing into an adult will be painful, involve a few screams
perhaps, but the process is unavoidable. Note the use of specific language to help reinforce the idea of
alienation and discomfort:
the sensation of falling off.... into cold, blue-black space.
I scarcely dared to look/to see what it was I was.... I gave a sidelong glance
shadowy......nothing stranger could ever happen.
those awful hanging breasts.... a cry of pain...
What future awaits this girl pondering the whys and wherefores of her identity, chewing over the strong
images in the magazine as her timid aunt cries out in pain behind the dentist's door?
Fourth Stanza (lines 90-93)
It's as if all the emotion and feelings of the previous three stanzas flood through the girl's being in the shape of
black waves, dark forces that are in danger of swamping the reality of the here and now. She is fearful of what
she might become, she can't know what will happen when she's a woman, she only knows she isn't yet ready
for that 'unlikely' adult world.
Fifth Stanza (lines 94-99)
At the end is there a sign of relief for this girl who seems to want time to stop and her growth hormones to not
exist? There's a definite reality check. The girl, with no mention of Aunt Consuelo, no mention of the dental
appointment ending, simply admits that it is still February, she is still in Massachusetts, and humanity is still
at war.
Young people often can't wait to grow up but that transition to adulthood can be a challenge. I wonder if she
regretted ever picking up that National Geographic?
In The Waiting Room starts and ends with straight facts. The reader knows exactly where and when this little
girl's emotional state begins to change. She will soon grow up and become a woman, a connected member of
the human race. But it won't be easy, like a visit to the dentist.

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UNIT 3 GLOSSARY OF “LESBIAN/GAY CRITICISM”

ACADEMIC JOURNALS: Learned magazines which publish scholarly articles.
AGEISM: A term which refers to the systematic stereotyping of and discrimination against people because they are
old.
BLACK-WOMAN INVISIBILITY: Black women’s existence, experience and culture and the brutally complex
systems of oppression which shape these. (B. Smith).
BLACK-WOMAN IDENTIFIED ART: Art which focuses on, is inspired by and gives the perspectives of Black
women.
COMPULSORY HETEROSEXUALITY:
1. A term in radical and lesbian theory for the enforcement of heterosexuality. It includes the ideological and
political control of women’s sexuality.
2. The main mechanism underlying and perpetuating male dominance (Adrienne Rich).
DISEMPOWER: Weakens, removes power from (in this case, women).
GALLING: (adj.) Causes extreme indignation, irritation, annoyance.
GENDER STUDIES: The study of gender as an analytical reference.
GENDER: Denotes the cultural constitution of femininity or masculinity, the notions concerning what is ‘appropriate’
to either gender, and the ways in which these serve ideologically to maintain gendered identities.
HETEROCENTRITY:
1. The belief that heterosexuality is the only ‘normal’ mode of sexual and social relations.
2. The practice of viewing reality (or human relations) from a heterosexual perspective.
LESBIAN CONTINUUM: Term that avoid the clinical ring of lesbianism and refers to all experiences shared by
women, experiences that strengthen bond among themselves and against male oppression.
LESBIAN/GAY CRITICISM:
1. A critical practice in which the defining feature is making sexual orientation a fundamental category of
analysis and understanding.
2. A critical practice that creates an alternative canon of lesbian/gay writer’s works.
3. A critical practice that equates the sense of being lesbian or gay with the metaphorical transgression of
boundaries or limits of the ‘normal’.
4. A critical practice that exposes homosexual characteristics of standard literary works.
5. A critical practice that focuses on literary genres which have strongly shaped western standards of masculinity
or femininity.

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6. A critical practice that reveals the homophobia of standard literature and criticism which suppress certain
explicitly homosexual material or simply fail to study it.
7. A critical practice that selects lesbian/gay passages in standard literary works and analyze them as such.
MALE RIGHT OF ACCESS: The moral and legal privilege to intervene in all aspects of a woman’s life.
NUMBING: (v. numb) To remove all sensations from; to paralyze, stupefy.
OBLIVIOUS: Ignorant of, blind or insensitive towards.
OSTENSIBLE FEMINISTS: Apparent seeming, not real feminists (Barbara Smith).
OVERWHELMING: (v. overwhelm) To overpower with emotion, bury or drown beneath a huge mass, submerge
utterly.
QUEER THEORY OR STUDIES: A critical practice that rejects female separatism an instead sees an identity of
political and social interests with gay men. The term is intended to mark a critical distance from the earlier and
marginalized ‘gay and lesbian’.
RACIAL POLITICS: The political character of race which is based on the unequal power of white-black relations.
SEXUAL POLITICS: The political character of sexuality which is based on the unequal power of sexual relations.
WOMAN IDENTIFICATION: To feel an identification with women (as opposed to men).

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UNIT 4:INTRODUCTION TO ETHNIC AND POST-COLONIAL STUDIES
CHAPTER 10: POSTCOLONIAL CRITICISM

 BACKGROUND
Postcolonial criticism emerged as a distinct category only in the 1990s. It gained currency through the
influence of such books as: In Other Worlds by Gayatri Spivak.
One significant effect of postcolonial criticism is to further undermine the universalist claims once made on
behalf of literature by liberal critics. To judge all literature by a single, supposedly ‘universal’, standard. This
universalism is rejected by postcolonial criticism; whenever a universal signification is claimed for a work,
then, white, Eurocentric norms and practices are being promoted, and all others correspondingly relegated to
subsidiary, marginalised roles.
The ancestry of postcolonial criticism can be traced to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
and voicing what might be called ‘cultural resistance’ to Frances’ African empire. Fanon argued that the first
step to ‘colonialised’ people is finding a voice and an identity is to reclaim their own past, then the second is
to begin to erode the colonialist ideology.
Hence, another major book, which can be said to inaugurate postcolonial criticism proper is Edward Said’s
Orientalism (1978), which is a specific exposé of the Eurocentric universalism which takes for granted both
the superiority of what is European or Western, and the inferiority of what is not. Said identifies a
European cultural tradition of ‘Orientalism’, which is a particular and long-standing way of identifying the
East as ‘Other’ and inferior to the West. The Orient, the East becomes the projection of those aspects of
themselves which Westerners do not choose to acknowledge.
At the same time, the East is seen as fascinating realm of the exotic, the mystical and the seductive. It also
tends to be seen as homogenous. Their emotions and reactions are always determined by racial considerations
rather than by aspects of individual status or circumstances.
 POSTOCOLONIAL READING
Characteristics of postcolonial criticism or areas of concern:
- First, postcolonial writers evoke or create a precolonial version of their own nation, rejecting the modern
and the contemporary, which is tainted with the colonial status of their countries. An awareness of
representations of the non-European as exotic or immoral ‘Other’.
- Second, some postcolonial writers have concluded that the colonisers’ language is permanently tainted,
and that to write in it involves a crucial acquiescence in colonial structures.
- Third, emphasis on identity as doubled, or hybrid, or unstable. Chinua Achebe publishing his first
novel, Things Fall Apart, was criticised by an early reviewer for affecting to identify with African
villagers when actually his university education and his broadcasting job in the capital city of Lagos
should make him identify with the values of ‘civilisation’.
- Fourth, stress on ‘cross-cultural’ interactions phases of colonial literature

1) ‘Adopt’: they begin with an unquestioning acceptance of the authority of European models and
with the ambition of writing works that will be masterpieces entirely in this tradition. Since the
writer’s ambition is to adopt the form as it stands, the assumption being that it has universal
validity.
2) ‘Adapt’: since it aims to adapt the European form to African subject matter, thus assuming
partial rights of intervention in the genre.
3) ‘Adept’: in the final phase there is a declaration of cultural independence whereby African
writers remake the form to their own specification, without reference to European norms. Since its
characteristic is the assumption that the colonial writer is an independent ‘adept’ in the form, not a
humble apprentice.

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This notion of the double or fluid identity explains the great attraction which post-structuralism and
deconstruction have proved to be for the postcolonial critic. Post-structuralism is centrally concerned to
show the fluid and unstable nature of personal and gender identity, the shifting, ‘polyvalent’, contradictory
currents of signification within texts, and the way literature itself is a site on which ideological struggles are
acted out. This post-structuralist perspective is seen in the work of such representative figures as
Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabah.
Edward Said, who is less overtly theoretical, seems to accept some of the premises of liberal humanism.
The three stages mentioned earlier provide a way of seeing postcolonial literature, they closely parallel the
development stages of feminist criticism:
- In it is earliest phase, postcolonial criticism took as its main subject matter white representations of
colonial countries and criticized these for their limitations and their bias  This corresponds to the early
1970s phase of feminist criticism when the subject matter was the representation of women by male
novelists.
- The second phase of postcolonial criticism involved a turn towards explorations of themselves and
their society by postcolonial writers. At this stage the celebration and exploration of diversity, hybridity,
and difference become central. This is the stage when, in the title of the well-known pioneering work in
this field, ‘the empire writes back’  This corresponds to the ‘gynotext’ phase of feminist criticism,
when there is a turn towards the exploration of female experience and identities in books by women.
 WHAT POSTCOLONIAL CRITICS DO
1. They reject the claims to universalism made on behalf of canonical Western literature and seek to
show its limitations of outlook, especially its general inability to empathise across boundaries of
cultural and ethnic difference.
2. They examine the representation of other cultures in literature as a way of achieving this end.
3. They show how such literature is often evasively and crucially silent on matter concerned with
colonisation and imperialism.
4. They foreground questions of cultural difference and diversity and examine their treatment in relevant
literary works.
5. They celebrate hybridity and ‘cultural polyvalency’, the situation whereby individuals and groups
belong simultaneously to more than one culture.
6. They develop a perspective, not just applicable to postcolonial literatures, whereby states marginality,
plurality and perceived ‘Otherness’ are seen as sources of energy and potential change.
 Chinua Achebe
 Extract from ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’ (1975, revised
1977,1978).
 The role of the narrators in Heart of Darkness: According to Achebe, Conrad tries to insulate
himself from ‘the moral universe’ of his novel by creating not one, but two narrators. Achebe
declares the attempt to create a cordon sanitaire (‘sanity barrier’) between Conrad and his two
narrators to be a failure, since there is no third or ‘alternative’ narrator (or frame of reference) that
would enable the reader to judge the characters.
 Achebe argues that what is wrong with Conrad’s portrayal of Africans is that it is not a portrayal
of Africans at all, but a place ‘which eliminates the African as human factor’.
 John Hillis Miller

 Extract from ‘Should We Read Heart of Darkness?’ (2002)
 Eurocentric: this term was coined by Egyptian Marxist economist Samir Amin un 1988; literally
it means ‘centred on Europe’, i.e. considering the world, history, social phenomena, and cultural
aspects such as literature form a European point of view, especially reflecting a white, male,
heterosexual and metropolitan or colonizer outlook.

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 Edward Said
 Extract from ‘Orientalism’ (1978)
 The imaginary Orient represents one of the West’s most deep-rooted and persistent images of
the Other; the material Orient is a form of discourse supported by institutions, language,
academic study, principles, bureaucracy and a certain way of doing things.
 Said assigns the following three designations or meanings to Orientalism:
1) An academic one, through its - ‘Orientalism’s- doctrines and theses about the Orient and
the Oriental.
2) The distinction between the Orient and the Occident, East and West.
3) The corporate institution or ‘Western style’ for controlling and shaping the Orient.
 LITERARY AUTHOR
 Joseph Conrad
 Novella: ‘Heart of Darkness’
 Serialized in 1899 and published in book form in 1902.
I) CONTEXT
The author is Joseph Conrad. The fragment belongs to “Heart of Darkness”, published in 1899 in the
Blackwood Magazine (1902 in book form). It is a critique of European imperialism and colonialism based on
his own personal knowledge of the situation in Belgian Congo, where the central narration is set. This novella
shows influences of Modernism, especially as regards to the use of symbolism and allegory.

(i) Who is the narrator in this fragment? Where is this fragment in the text it belongs to? Discuss the
characteristics of this narrator in the novella, (ii) Comment on the relevance of the description of the river in
the fragment in connection with the location it refers to, the location of the main narration and the title of
novella.
The first anonymous narrator whose narrative frames Marlow’s. The fragment is the end of the novella. He is
quite ingenuous; he believes in the propaganda of the civilizing mission of the West. He is a foil with
Marlow’s experience.
After Marlow’s story, this description of the Thames is allegorical, suggesting that gloom issuing from the
West becomes an immense darkness in the colonies (colonialism is the heart of darkness).
(i) How can this fragment be used to refute Chinua Achebe’s ideas on the text, (ii) in connection with this,
notice and discuss the fact that Marlow is compared with a Buddha, the location of the action in this fragment,
and the description of the river that you discussed above.
Considering my answer above, the fragment can be used to refute Chinua Achebe’s ideas that Marlow, Conrad
and “Heart of Darkness” are racist. The comparison of Marlow with a Buddha points to his views on
colonialism not being Eurocentric. His travels in Africa and the Far East seem to have changed his mind. His
body language suggests, again allegorically, that he believes in universal compassion, one of the tenets of
Buddhism, and his story works like a Buddhist parable, a story with an indirect, implicit meaning, intended to
teach his friends (and the readers).1

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As I explain above, the description of the River Thames by the first narrator at the end of “Heart of Darkness”
is part of the allegories or symbols of this short novel. The Thames flowing “sombre under an overcast sky”
suggests that gloom issues from the West to the colonies and indeed “lead[s] into the heart of an immense
darkness”. Hence, it can be interpreted that colonialism, especially as embodied by Kurtz, is the true “Heart of
Darkness” of the title, not Africa or the Africans.

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UNIT 4 GLOSSARY
ANTITHESIS:
1. Contrast or opposition between two things.
2. The direct opposite.
COLONIANISM: The direct political control of one country or society by another and refers first of all to historical
episodes, like the long history of British rule in India.
CONTESTANT: Someone who takes part in a dispute or challenge.
CULTURAL CONTESTANT: “Historically, the Orient has challenged or rivaled the West in cultural terms” (E.
Said).
DISCOURSE: An instance of language or utterance that involves the speaker/writer-subject and listener/reader-
object. Focault argued that discourse colludes with power.
ENDORSE: To confirm, to declare support or approval of.
ESCHATOLOGICAL: a theological term involving or related to eschatology, the branch of theology studying
theories about the last events in the history of the world or humankind or the beliefs concerning death, the end of the
world, and the final destiny of humankind, especially the Christian beliefs concerning the Second Coming of Christ,
the resurrection of the death, and the Last Judgement.
ETHNIC STUDIES: A critical approach to literature which challenges the universality of white discourse and
standards.
FOIL: A person or thing that enhances the qualities of another by contrast.
IMAGINERY ORIENT: Represents one of the West’s most deep-rooted persistent images of the Other.
LEITMOTIF: a recurrent theme in the works of an author or a recurrent element in a literary text.
MATERIAL ORIENT: Is a form of discourse supported by institutions, language, academic study, principles,
bureaucracy and a certain way of doing things (style).
MESSIANIC: the term derives from ‘messiah’, originally, the promised and future savior of the Jews;
MIMETIC: this term means that the text aims at representing reality faithfully.
ORIENTALISM: according to Edward Said

1. An academic meaning through its doctrines and theses about the Orient and the Oriental.
2. The corporate institution or Western Style for controlling and shaping the Orient.
3. The distinction between the Orient and the Occident, East and West.
4. The ensemble of western, usually though not exclusively European discourses and other forms of
representation of non-western cultures.
OTHER/OTHERNESS:
1. Term that names the equality or state of existence of being other or different from established norms and
social groups.
2. The distinction that one makes between one’s self and others, particularly in terms of sexual, ethnic and
relational senses of difference.
PARABASIS: It is the representation of ideas by an imaginary character. Originally the term parabasis meant that the
ideas of the author were expressed clearly.
POST-COLONIAL CRITICISM:

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1. A critical practice that refutes the claim that mainstream Western literature is somehow universal and stress its
limited perspective and blindness to cultural and ethnic species.
2. A critical practice that examines the representation of other cultures in literature as a way of achieving this
end.
3. A critical practice that looks therefore at how other cultures are represented in literature.
POST-COLONIALISM: A critical practice which stresses and examines cultural difference and diversity in
literature.
POST-COLONIAL LITERATURE: Centers on the conflicts and contradictions, as well as the advantages and sense
of liberation, that accompany life as an individual in a postcolonial state.
PROSOPOPEIA: a personification or allegory in which an idea or concept is represented as a human figure with
different attributes; the term derives from the Greek word ‘prosopon’, meaning originally ‘face’ or ‘mask’ and latter,
in Christian theology, ‘person’.
SURROGATE: (n) Substitute.
TELEOLOGICAL:
TO GET THE BETTER OF: Overcome, defeat.
VAUNTED: (adj. from v. to vaunt) To boast, to brag (synonyms: boastful, swaggering)
WESTERN DESIRE AND NEED:
1. The desire and need of the West to use the African continent to emphasize its own state of grace.
2. The desire in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe.

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UNIT 1: INTRODUCTION TO POSTSTRUCTURALIST THEORIES

CHAPTER 3: POST-STRUCTURALISM & DECONSTRUCTION

2. TONE AND STYLE:

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UNIT 1: INTRODUCTION TO POSTSTRUCTURALIST THEORIES

- Verbal sign is constantly floating free of the concept

4. PROJECT: FUNDAMENTAL AIMS OF EACH MOVEMENT

B. POST-STRUCTURALISM - LIFE ON A DECENTRED PLANET

- Emerged in France in the late 1960s

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UNIT 1: INTRODUCTION TO POSTSTRUCTURALIST THEORIES

C. STRUCTURALISM AND POST-STRUCTURALISM - SOME PRACTICAL DIFFERENCES

 THE STRUCTURALIST SEEKS:

 THE POST-STRUCTURALIST SEEKS:

D. WHAT POST-STRUCTURALIST CRITICS DO

1. They ‘read the text against itself’.

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UNIT 1: INTRODUCTION TO POSTSTRUCTURALIST THEORIES

Three stages of the deconstructive process:

1. The ‘verbal’ stage:

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UNIT 1: INTRODUCTION TO POSTSTRUCTURALIST THEORIES

- “FATHERING” metaphor and personification. Creating (fathering) is becoming the father of a

 “THE ROUND ZION OF THE WATER BEAD” a metaphor inside a

- “NOR BLASPHEME DOWN THE STATIONS OF THE BREATH”: metaphorical allusion to

III) THEORY AND CRITICISM

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UNIT 1: INTRODUCTION TO POSTSTRUCTURALIST THEORIES

DEATH OF THE AUTHOR:

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UNIT 2: INTRODUCTION TO NEW HISTORICISM

CHAPTER 9: NEW HISTORICISM AND CULTURAL MATERIALISM

The term was coined by the American critic Stephen Greenblatt.

B. NEW AND OLD HISTORICISMS – SOME DIFFERENCES

C. NEW HISTORICISM AND FOUCAULT

D. ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF NEW HISTORICISM

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UNIT 2: INTRODUCTION TO NEW HISTORICISM

E. WHAT NEW HISTORICISTS DO

G. HOW IS CULTURAL MATERIALISM DIFFERENT FROM THE NEW HISTORICISM?

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UNIT 2: INTRODUCTION TO NEW HISTORICISM

H. WHAT CULTURAL MATERIALIST CRITICS DO

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