New Criticism, (1920-1950)-ish, is a way of seeking out contradictions in a text and figuring out how these contradictions unify the text and create meaning. It solely looks at the text itself, studying what the author meant.
Cultural revolution in America, England and France (1960's) brought about numerous literary theories.
Psychoanalytic Theory - psychoanalysis. The unconscious directs our thoughts and actions, such as the idea of the Oedipus complex, a son loving his mother so he kills his father to replace him. Freud came up with the idea in early 20th century. People study latent content of dreams in order to understand out lives. Psychoanalysts are studying us like one would a book, people began to apply this to actual books and began studying books with a freudian lense.
Feminism Theory - Feminism began as a movement for women's equality and rights in the 50,60,70's. People began to read texts to discover hidden or not hidden meanings about female desire, empowerment, equality, sexuality, gender politics and POWER and SUBJECTIVITY. What makes a woman a woman and a man a man?
Critical Race Theory is similar to feminism theory except instead of gender politics, it examines racial politics.
Queer Theory - gender issues, power, gender depictions, heteronormative ways of thinking. It is similar to feminism and critical race theory, but how is queer identity constructed in a text?
There are those that oppose this idea, claiming that we shouldn't be looking for political ideas in texts. It becomes less about what the author meant and more about larger social issues. Books now have larger cultural meanings. With these new movements, people begin to project their ideas onto the text, seeing only the parts that fit with their social understanding instead of reading the book as a whole entity.
Texts Now: poems, novels, plays, films, TV shows, movies, digital images, art, paintings, cd's, music, graffiti, clothes, merchandising, advertising, etc. These are all cultural artifacts. All of these theoretical movements bring politics into the classroom. It's common to read texts for these issues: power, identity, subjectivity, political significance, cultural significance, types of representation, instead of just reading the text for what the story is about. We rip apart the text and scrutinize and label and consider until everything fits into nice little compartments that have been defined. We can't enjoy the text for the beauty of the words or the rhythm; we must define it. It's not good or bad, it simply is.
Deconstructionists (1970's onward) - question meaning, question stable notions of identity, question stable notions of what a person is, etc.
- Privileged Oppositions: Logos (Speech, reason) vs Writing/text. We grant more authority to speech/reason than we do writing/non-reason because it is "closer" to ourselves. Logocentric - we the faculty of reason over all else. In the history of the West, reason has been used to judge what makes a human human.
In literature or philosophy, or in political reports, or expeditions to far away lands, non-white people are judged to be without reason and therefore not human. British imperialism, the slave trade between England and its plantations all over the word utilize this thinking to justify enslavement of a people, in order to not have to deal with the moral ramifications of their actions.
How we make meaning? Is a text a text? What is art? What is a poem? Challenging fundamental assumptions of Western culture is what deconstruction seeks to do. They challenge the use of reason as the defining meaning of being "human". What is reason though? Could it be that different people use different reason? We are all human and we all use reason but it how we use and how we define it that sets us apart. Neither definition is right or wrong, but we will privilege our meaning because its ours. If we simply disregard other definitions, that is wrong; privileging is human nature (we all do it!).
Essentialism - what is the essence of the human? Darwin and the advent of biological adaptation have affected our thinking. Different human developments in various geographic areas that accounts for difference in a non-essentialist way. This lead to the culture wars.
No comments:
Post a Comment