literary theory provides different lenses for critics to use in order to view and talk about art, literature and culture.
Our Major Theorists:
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940):
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002):
Hans Robert Jauss (1921-1997):
Slavoj Žižek (1949-present):
- A famous essayist, literary critic, and philosopher, his works cover an eclectic range of topics. He is often grouped with other famous Ashkenazi, European, and Marxist philosophers in the Frankfurt School of Social Theory.
- A prodigious and meticulous writer, Benjamin was famous for proposing a liberatory agenda often fused with ideas gleaned from his own interest in mystical Judaism, Kabbalah.
- He critiqued Historicism, claiming that we must reject the concept that the past is a continuum of progress. He claims that articulating the past historically does not portray it realistically, but is deeply interconnected with the moment in which you are revisiting it.
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002):
- A French sociologist of culture and literature, he emphasized culture’s embeddedness in the social, but he in no way reduced culture to society.
- Coined term “cultural capital”, which refers to knowledge or skills that aid in upward social mobility - e.g., use of proper English, education, ability to communicate effectively with the social elite, knowledge of “high” art, etc.
- Literature is a form of “ cultural capital,” more specifically “objectified cultural capital.” That is, a physical object such as a book or a painting that conveys possession of cultural capital (knowledge of “high” art). However, while one may possess a physical object of cultural capital, one still needs the cultural capital necessary (knowledge, education) to “consume” or understand the work’s cultural meaning, whose transmission does not accompany the sale of the painting (except when a vendor or broker chooses to explain the painting's significance to the prospective buyer, thus giving them the knowledge).
- Cultural goods can be appropriated both materially – which presupposes economic capital – and symbolically.
- Coined the term habitus, the idea that your actions and dispositions exist in relation to, or as a result of, existing social structures. Here, Bourdieu closely examines the reciprocal relationship between subjects and their environment.
Hans Robert Jauss (1921-1997):
- Served on WWII on Russian Front and was imprisoned afterwards.
- Considered the founder of the Constance School.
- Argued reading medieval texts is “disorienting,” and wrote about the alterity of the Middle Ages
- Interested in the conflict between literary history and literary theory
- Established claim that perception is fundamental to the way humans encounter literary texts
- Claimed that literature is historical, and can only be understood as a product of history
- Known for his work in social science philosophy, literary criticism, and history. Most of his philosophical work has been focused in anthropology.
- Defines mimetic desire as the idea that all of our desires originate because they are provoked by another’s desire.
- In the Homosocial Triangle, the “subject” is drawn to the “model” through the “object.” He asserts that male homosocial bonding is based on heterosexual attraction to the “object,” and the “model” gains esteem from the “subject” by ‘possessing’ the “object.” In short, one man (subject) may idolise another (model) based on the type of woman (object) he “possesses”.
- Mimetic Desire: The desires we formulate stem from other peoples desires.
- Mimetic Rivalry: The central conflict stems from our mimetic desire. This occurs because people imitate what they want, which usually happens to be the same as what another person wants.
- Scapegoat Mechanism: Singling out of another person or party in order to not have to deal with the conflict. Forcing someone to take the blame for something they didn’t do.
- Mediation: When a person has an influence over another person’s wants. That is, when a person’s want is imitated by someone else, that person becomes the “model” or what’s known as the “mediator.” This idea is very popular in the marketing world. Celebrities or professional sports players are used as models.
Slavoj Žižek (1949-present):
- Slovenian continental philosopher, critical theorist, and film critic, with contributions to fields as varied as hermeneutics, political theory, Marxism, and film studies.
- His particular brand of thought is largely Lacanian (a self-described card-carrier of that title) psychoanalytic lens to both political structures and popular culture.
- Performs semiotics on just about everything - the argument that life is a text, which is important and relevant to our class because we are essentially attempting to perform semiotics on the past, viz. to interpret it and break it down analytically, if possible.
Our Major Theories
Homosociality:
Humanism:
Lacanian Desire (from Jacques Lacan’s Desir):
Longue durée:
Mnemonics:
Neoplatonism:
New Historicism:
Post-humanism:
Post-structuralism:
Jacques Derrida (1930-present): post-structural theorist
Simulacra (Singular: Simulacrum):
Structuralism: (Saussure & Barthes)
Subjectivity:
Jacques Lacan claimed that there were three different ways of knowing/being:
Stephen Greenblatt builds on Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, and others
- Involves same-sex relationships that are not of a sexual/romantic nature.
- Jean Lipman-Blumen first defined it in 1976 as a social preference for one’s own sex.
- Eve Sedgwick popularized the term homosocial to describe male homosocial desires and love triangles involving two male friends and one woman; she asserts that there is a continuum between homosociality and homosexuality.
Humanism:
- The belief in humans, individually and collectively, over the idea of established faith and belief. Humans are the center of the universe rather than there being an all powerful deity.
- Three forms of humanism exist:
- Renaissance humanism: a movement that occurred in the fifteenth century to influence and push occupations that required more grounded forms of thinking. Dropped the idea of narrowly going through life to achieve goals.
- Secular humanism: a well-grounded form of humanism that cherished all things other than the supernatural, spiritual, or any other forms of belief that cannot be confirmed with logic, critical thinking or rational thought.
- Religious humanism: a combining of humanism with religion that centers on humans as the key component to the civilized world.
Lacanian Desire (from Jacques Lacan’s Desir):
- “Desire full stop is always the desire of the Other which basically means that we are always asking the Other what he desires” (Lacan, My Teaching, 38)
- Dependance on the “Other” for recognition is responsible for structuring our desires and drives. The other can be another person/counterpart, or can be the bigger culture (including morals, ideals, etc.).
- You are unknowable to yourself, the way you try to recognize yourself/get recognition is to go into analysis. This, then, puts you into a never ending vortex, an atemporal space, that creates a feeling of further isolation.
- In many ways, history and the past serve as the “other,” which expounds upon the idea of alterity.
Longue durée:
- This theory of history emerged mid 20th Century from the French Annales School, especially theorists Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, and Fernand Baudel.
- Focuses on long-term patterns and shifts in society (100-200 years) instead of individual events, and forces us to think about cause and effect in a deeper, building historical sense.
- Essential theory: the “wave metaphor,” or the idea that there are deeper currents to history, repeating sequences that are larger than the immediate.
Mnemonics:
- Now called theory of memory, called "loci memory" in the Middle Ages.
- Imagined the brain as a round library filled with shelves. Once they learned something they placed it on a visualized shelf and attached it with a color in a section.
Neoplatonism:
- Theory that beauty is the image of God reflected in the everyday, and it serves as a sign that points you towards God/goodness.
- Gives relevance to art and literature during the time period - their aesthetics could be allowed because they were representations of God.
- Offers a sense of order within the universe, which was rare in the chaotic Middle Ages.
New Historicism:
- New Historicism is both an attempt to understand a literary work through its historical context and an attempt to understand history through literature. Critics argue that this reduces the historical to the literary or the literary to the historical - and denies human agency/creativity.
- Neither authors nor historians can be objective because they are subjected to the world around them.
- According to the Johns Hopkins Guide to literary theory, Greenblatt never intended for New Historicism to be a theory, but an “array of reading practices that investigate a series of issues that emerge when critics seek to chart the ways texts… both represent a society’s behavior patterns and perpetuate, shape, or alter that culture’s dominant codes” (535).
- Traditional historians ask, "What happened? What does this event tell us about history?" New Historicists ask, "How has the event been interpreted? What do these interpretations tell us about the interpreters?"
- See also: Stephen Greenblatt
Post-humanism:
- Created to challenge the beliefs of humanism, notably the belief that humanity is the center of the universe.
- Used to re-evaluate the relationship that humans have with the world. In post-humanism, the individual realizes that humans are not, as they imagined themselves to be, the center of the universe, but rather that in the future someone or something else (AI, artificial life-forms, alien life-forms) could take a similar stance.
- Advocated heavily by Cary Wolfe, who is a key spokesperson for the movement.
Post-structuralism:
Jacques Derrida (1930-present): post-structural theorist
- Derrida claims that to observe structure, you must be able to stand outside of it.
- He argues that it is impossible to fully remove and separate oneself from structure, and therefore, there is no possible way to fully and unbiasedly understand/analyze it.
- Foucault rejects the haven of the text, literary or otherwise, on the grounds that the disciplines that have developed in the course of the past two centuries around such texts are themselves part of the problem that needs to be analyzed.
- Literary texts and nonliterary texts are placed on the same plane, subjected to the same analytic tools, and interrogated in relation to the same contextual landscapes.
- Knowledge is constructed in concrete historical situations in the form of discourse; knowledge is not communicated by discourse but is discourse itself, and can only be encountered textually.
Simulacra (Singular: Simulacrum):
- Literally defined as the image or copy of something else
- Derivative of Plato's line of thought, the idea that the reality we experience is only a lesser copy of an actual reality that exists on some other level
- Mainly developed by the postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard, who argues that Western capitalism as we know it has moved from focusing on "real things," to focusing on "images of things."
- Baudrillard's essential claim is that in today's world, the line between what is real life and imagined/simulated life is not always clear
- Uses the example of articles written about characters from television shows because people care more about fictional people than real ones, and are so invested in these virtual characters and realities that they seem real
- Refers to the lack of difference between reality and simulation as "hyperreality"
- Ironically, St. Augustine laments how we care more about fictional characters like Dido than our own soul in his 5th century masterpiece, Confessions.
- We found this idea relevant when looking at the ways in which history has been rewritten as creative non-fiction, or even as fiction itself, yet these narratives still purport to be 'real'
Structuralism: (Saussure & Barthes)
- Looks for larger patterns across a mode or genre, especially in language
- Saussure examines the systematic nature of language; words only truly hold meaning in relationship to each other
- This relates to our study of semiotics, and the ways in which language does not successfully represent meaning on its own
Subjectivity:
Jacques Lacan claimed that there were three different ways of knowing/being:
- The Real, which we don’t have access to and can never truly know (this includes the self and the other)
- The Imaginary, which is what we believe we know (through our sensory perception)
- The Symbolic, which are individual/cultural ways of knowing, e.g. language
Stephen Greenblatt builds on Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, and others
- Claims that you are not an individual, but a subject
- Defines us all as subjects to larger systems, and subject to a particular time and place