Ann Stedman's Class Blog

Transform of Literary Theory

Final Project: Mordred

I thought that for my blog for this week I would write out what I am doing for my final paper and what I have discovered while writing.

As you all know, I’m writing about Mordred, the “bad guy” in the King Arthur legends who eventually kills Arthur. If you’ve seen the BBC version of Merlin where Mordred has made some appearances – that’s not the same Mordred I’m writing about. While taking short breaks from writing my paper I’ve looked up his character from the TV series, and I have no idea where they’re getting this information. Totally different from the legends of Arthur. Just letting you know in case you have watched it. :)

At any rate, as I’ve said, he is the villain by the end of the story of Camelot, and is basically composed of one big ball of psychoanalysis. For one thing, his mother and father (King Arthur) were half-siblings, making him his own cousin and King Arthur his uncle/father. And, to get rid of Mordred, Arthur had him (and many other baby boys) put into an unmanned boat and set adrift in the sea (Mordred being the only survivor). If that doesn’t mess up a kid, then we can also add post-colonial studies with oppression since Arthur had to reconquer the area where Mordred and his mother lived. Because of this, especially in the more modern texts, there is an element of anger that goes deeper than his own past within Mordred.  There is also an element of national pride at wanting to reclaim his ancestors’ honor from the Britons, especially in T. H. White’s Once and Future King.

So, what have I learned while researching this knight? Well, lots really. First, I’ve learned I’m not the only crazy person who wants to learn more about him, and second, I’ve learned that his character has evolved over the years. This is the only character in the world that I’ve loved and felt a connection with from the moment I read about him, and learning that there is more to him than what major writers of the Arthurian myths say  is fascinating!

In regards to my paper in this class, I’m looking into a passage from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur that gives Mordred (the bad guy) a very well versed and somewhat wise speech about young knights and how you shouldn’t mock them. This speech is something that you wouldn’t expect Sir Mordred the Traitor to say (even me, because as much as I love him, he’s a total jerk). And as I work through my sources, I’ve seen that Mordred’s true function comes at the end when he betrays Arthur (and sometimes Lancelot and Guinevere), and that’s when authors use his character. However, throughout Malory’s work he drifts through the chapters, sometimes given a minor action or simply mentioned in passing along with his other half-brothers. But his appearance, unless you have a total crush on him like me, doesn’t call much attention to himself (except for the speech he gives). He can drift through the text and be used as a minor character at will because everyone understands that he will soon betray Arthur, but not until the end. Until then, he isn’t dangerous.

The only example I can give you to Mordred-drifting is Draco Malfoy and his role in Harry Potter. If Malfoy is mentioned within the text then the reader pays attention because you know he is up to no good. Mordred can be mischievous as well, but in a different way: he usually happens to be battling against the knight Malory has pegged as the hero cause he has allied himself with a rival king (this doesn’t mean an EVIL king, just a rival one to the other side – rivalries were a dime a dozen then), and he usually looses (he’s not that good of a knight).

When trying to explain this to my mom, I finally ended with: “Mordred becomes the hobbit we send into Mordor because he won’t be noticed.”

Now, what I’ve written here is just a small portion of my paper (maybe a sentence or two…or three), but it is such an interesting thought that I figured I’d do a blog post about it.

by  /  April 27, 2012  /  Posted in: Uncategorized

Presentation for Post Colonialism

Hi all,

Here’s my presentation for tonight.

The one thing I would like to add are these two videos by the British comedian Eddie Izzard. In these two videos, The First Thanksgiving and Flags, he goes about colonization by the British. Incredibly funny, just ask Alyce. :)

Colonial, Post-Colonial, and Transnational Studies

As Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan write: “Instead of Homer, Aeschylus, Pindar, Seneca, and Cicero, men in training now read Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, and Eliot” (1071), and this is something incredibly true. The language of English has become the most important language within literature thanks to Great Britain’s global empire. The English language and culture are central aspects in many parts of the world, and when it came to colonizing, cultures used language as a form of control. Historical documents from former colonies by the colonizers/colonized changed the way scholars discussed literature and what works were chosen to put within ‘the great canon.’

 

In the 1960s there was an “enormous transformation” within literature – England expanded their canon to include literature of the Commonwealth, former colonies began to see more “indigenous traditions” emerge, and in America writing from African Americans began to become recognized. These changes brought about new forms of literary criticism where scholars began to be more interested in post-colonial writers instead of writers that focused upon the “European traditions” (1072).  Even classic European works began to be critiqued in a new way; for example, scholars took the characters Caliban from William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” and Mrs. Rochester from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and began to see them as victims of oppression from colonization. Interest in resistance within literature of colonization began to grown in the 1980s as well (1072-1073).

 

Much of this theory was shaped by other theories that we have already studied:

  • Ethical and racial problems within the literature
  • Feminism – reproduction has been used to create ties to families and clans, but also plays a part in race and cultural ties since certain races are given privileges within a society. [Think back to Gayle Rubin’s essay “The Traffic of Women.”]
  • Post-Structuralism – the “imaginary constructs” of displacement becomes substituted by the “history of a permanent migratory dislocation on ontologizing image of home or of a homeland, a proper place where a spuriously pure ethnos can authenticate itself” (1073).

 

Language, however, is becoming a very important topic within the studies of Post-Colonialism, especially since identities and loyalties belong under what language you call your mother-tongue.  For the language of English, this means that the canon of literature changed to accommodate more voices within the realm of literature.

 

Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. “Introduction: English Without Shadows: Literature on a World Scale.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. 1071-1074. Print.

 

Questions:

• What do you think about the idea of Post-Structuralism with land and displacement?

• We have not read any articles pertaining to the Native Americans. However, after reading Ngugi’s article can you see similarities within the struggle of language? Are there concepts here that as Americans we are hiding from ourselves because it is too painful?

• What other theories could we tie into Post-Colonialism?

*****

“But is one source of empire was the national parochialism embodies in the ideal of the teaching of one’s national literature alone and one result of the new ethnic, post-colonial, and international criticism is a sense of how all national literatures especially those with global connections or with apparently singular ethnic roots, always cast shadows and are therefore always shadowed by their others, from Caliban to Mrs. Rochester to Beloved, then perhaps English itself should be reconsidered as a project of knowledge limited by national and linguistic boundaries.” (1074) – Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan; “English Without Shadows: Literature on a World Scale”

 

“Getting to grips with these literatures involves getting to grips with three basic issues: history, language, and theory. History has to do with context; language with medium; and theory, with approach.” (1075)– Dennis Walder; “History”

 

“A new justification for empire, replacing the older props of autocratic government and mercantilism, soon gained popularity: the idea of a great imperial destiny to plant British people and institutions overseas, based on the twin foundations of British emigration to, and investment in, colonies of British settlement. The empire could be used to remedy social ills of the mother country.” (1096) – C. C. Eldridge; “The Revival of the Imperial Spirit”

 

“… Austen reals herself to be assuming (just as Fanny assumes, in both sense of the word) the importance of an empire to the situation at home…Since Austen refers to and uses Antigua as she does in Mansfield Park, there needs to be a commensurate effort on the part of her readers to understand concretely the historical valences in the reference; to put it differently, we should try to understand what she referred to, why she gave it the importance she did, and why indeed she made the choice, for she might have done something different to establish Sir. Thomas’s wealth.” (1119) – Edward Said; “Jane Austen and the Empire”

 

“But there is more to it: communication between human beings is also the basis and process of evolving culture. In doing similar kinds of things and action over and over again under similar circumstances, similar even in their mutability, certain patters, moves, rhythms, habits, attitudes, experiences, and knowledge emerge…There is a gradual accumulation of values which in time become almost self-evident truths governing their conception of what is right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, courageous and cowardly, generous and mean in their internal external relations.” (1133-1134) – Ngugi wa Thiong’o; “Decolonising the Mind”

 

“For this reason, there is some urgency in the need for innovative theories of history and popular memory, particularly mass media memory. Asking what single term might adequately replace ‘post-colonialism’, for example, begs the questions of rethinking the global situation as a multiplicity of powers and histories, which cannot be marshaled obediently under the flag of a single theoretical term, be that feminism, Marxism or post-colonialism.” (1195) – Ann McClintock; “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-colonialism’”

 

“Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is – and does not simply represent – a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world.” (12) – Edward W. Said; Orientalism

by  /  April 22, 2012  /  Posted in: Post-Colonial

Post-Colonalism and Language

Within Ngugi wa Thiong’o's essay “Decolonising the Mind,” the first quote from his essay that really spoke to me was:

The choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment, indeed in relation to the entire universe. Hence language has always been at the heart of the two contending social forces in the Africa of the twentieth century. (1126)

Language is how people define themselves and how culture creates itself within a society. In certain areas of Africa their own language is no longer considered as valuable as English or French – or, in other words, the “mother-tongues” of the countries that once called certain areas of Africa a colony.

But language, as Ngugi points out, is more important than many people believe, especially in regards to culture and day-to-day lives. For example, language as simply communication has three aspects/elements (1133):

  • We use it in relations to life and production, especially as people engage with others in a labor process and establish themselves “in the act of a people, a community of human beings, producing wealth or means of life like food, clothing, house” (1133). Or interacting in reality to build a community and a culture.
  • Language as spoken words, where it “imitates the language of real life” and becomes the “communication in production” (1133).
  • And finally, language as the written word that “imitates the spoken [word]” (1133).

As you can see, Ngugi compares language with Marx and production, which compares it to cultural materialism, especially the cultural aspect since language creates the culture. He explains this aspect by saying that language repeats over and over, creating the norms of society:

In doing similar kinds of things and action over and over again under similar circumstances, similar even in their mutability, certain patters, moves, rhythms, habits, attitudes, experiences, and knowledge emerge. Those experiences are handed over to the next generation and become the inherited basis for their further actions on nature and on themselves. There is a gradual accumulation of values which in time become almost self-evident truths governing their conception of what is right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, courageous and cowardly, generous and mean in their internal external relations. (1133-1134)

It is like if you say something enough times then you will begin to believe it. Our culture is like that because it is passed down through our language. Such as saying “please” and “thank you” – these are utterances that culture has taught us to say to be polite.  Ngugi writes that language as culture has three aspects/elements as well (1134):

  • Language reflects our culture through words, conveying our likes/dislikes to others.
  • Language creates an image of ourselves, helping us form a conception of what we are as a community.
  • And finally, language transmits images through the use of spoken words – food, I believe is a good example in regards to culture. If I said “breakfast” we would all come up with a image in our minds that we associate with “breakfast,” but our images would be totally different in other cultures.

wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. “Decolonising the Mind.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. 1126-1150. Print.

by  /  April 20, 2012  /  Posted in: Post-Colonial
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Within Literature

What I thought was fascinating about the essays we read for class this week was that Shelley Fisher Fishkin (“Interrogating “Whiteness”") and Toni Morrison (“Playing in the Dark”) discussed the canon for American literature and how it all borrows from other cultures, especially the African American culture. Until I got into graduate school I really did not hear much about the canon – I had heard my professors complaining that certain works were not in our textbooks, but had thought it was mainly because of the editor. This semester I have heard more about the canon and issues within it.

One of the points I liked in Fishkin’s essay was the merging of African American culture within a text that has always been considered a white, male text. Fishkin lists authors who have written articles about African American jazz  influences and “black dialect” in T. S. Elliot’s poetry. On author she mentions, Michael North, who wrote The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language & Twentieth-Century Literature, observed “preemptive mimicry of blacks in a traditional American device allowing whites to rebel against English culture and simultaneously use it to solidify their domination at home” (North, 81). This quote is really interesting to me in the idea of mimicry as rebelling against English literature. On the one hand, the mimicry suggested was the raciest mimicries people did of the African Americans, but at the same time writers were going against the English literature that sets the standards for what is good literature.

Rereading that statement even makes me pauses, but I guess it is true. English literature has always set the bar for writing since its classics are so highly regarded (Austin, Pope, Shakespeare). But by mimicking the dialects of another race within America, many writers were breaking away from the English type of writing. After all, we do not have the “cockney” accent England does, so what the dialect writers mimicked was our own, right?

I think that is a really cool thought. Especially since it is something that I had never really thought about. In fact, seeing other cultures influences in the “white, male” text was something I never thought of either. Like Toni Morrison in her essay “Playing in the Dark,” I read like a reader, but once I hit grad school I read like a writer (1004). [However, I would go so far as to say I'm not 100% a writer yet since every semester I learn something new about writing.]

Morrison goes on to say that America has made its own brand of “Africanism” through its culture: “Here in that nexus, with its particular formulations, and in the absence of real knowledge or open-minded inquiry about Africans and African-Americans, under the pressures of ideological and imperialistic rationales for subjugations, and American brand of Africanism emerged…” (1007). Now, as we all know throughout this semester, I never back down in my blogs from saying, “I don’t understand that statement,” and here it is not different. I think I understand what she is talking about, like Fishkin said when white culture mimicked the African American culture within literature (or any type of media). It became purely an American invention and was not owned by any other country, even Africa.

My question is, does my guess sound about right or am I missing something important?

Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Interrogating “Whiteness”.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. 975-987. Print.

Morrison, Toni. “Playing in the Dark.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. 1005-1017. Print.

2 Comments by  /  April 13, 2012  /  Posted in: Critical Race Theory
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Gender Studies

Judith Halberstam’s article “Female Masculinity” was my favorite among the essays our class was to read for Gender Studies theory, mainly because there were so many aspects that I could identify with when the tomboy is mentioned. Halberstam notes that “[t]omboyism generally describes an extended childhood period of female masculinity” (938), meaning when a girl enjoys doing things that a boy would usually do. I myself was a tomboy as a child (I know – *gasp!* *shock*- right?) and remember all the times my grandmother desperately tried to get me to act more like a girl.

But once I started working at a day camp when I was in high school and seeing how girls took on the tomboy role, I’d have to guess that the scale of “tomboy” changes on who is making the observation. Comparing myself to the tomboys in my group who play sports, have only guy friends, and wear nothing but boy clothes, I’d have to say I was pretty tame. The reason I was a tomboy was because I liked Star Wars, and girls couldn’t like Star Wars so I had to have only guy friends. I have never been able to throw a ball over three feet and I’m pretty sure a butterfly could beat me at a race. I was nothing compared to the tomboys I saw at day camp.

But oddly enough, there were some girls who were considered “girls” but pushed into the “guy circle” because they happen to like “boy stuff”. For example, here’s a dialogue I had with one of the nine-year-old girls one summer who was suddenly not with her group of friends (who were all girls and did not associate with the boys because they were boys and they’re gross):

“They don’t want to hang out with me anymore. They said I should go play with the boys.”

“Why?”

“Cause I said I don’t like Hannah Montana.”

“Okay…well, what do you like?”

“I said I liked the Justice League and the new show with Iron Man.”

Because she liked a show that is considered more “masculine” and did not like a show that is more “feminine” then she was automatically pushed to the “masculine” side of the sphere in the tomboy genre.

Maybe my whole example here did not make much sense, because I don’t want to seem like I’m attacking the tomboy. In fact, if I have daughters I wouldn’t mind them being tomboys. But I do think it’s interesting that we automatically attach that name to a girl if she likes something “masculine”. Some girls are offended when they are called a tomboy (really – there were tears over that example I just mentioned above – she wanted to be a girl and not a boy, and by that time the boys didn’t want her playing with them either). Halberstam’s quote made me remember her anger at being called a tomboy:

Tomboyism is punished, however, when it appears to be the sign of extreme male identification (taking a boy’s name or refusing girl clothing of any type) and when it threatens to extend beyond childhood and into adolescence. Teenage tomboyism presents a problem and tends to be subject to the most severe efforts to reorient. We could say that tomboyism is tolerated as long as the child remains prepubescent; as soon as puberty begins, however, the full force of gender conformity descends on the girl. (938)

Being a tomboy is only allowed when the child is younger, but once she becomes a pre-teen the gender roles are forced upon her by her family and society. It’s a scary moment when you realize that you can’t enjoy the things you did as a child since they are considered “boy-ish”. Star Wars was like that for, because where I went to school Star Wars was stupid and only for boys. I refused to give that up and had no friends. :)

But this tomboyism doesn’t just hit girls, because society will not let there be a “tomgirl”. Boys are not allowed to like any type of feminine object. I can give another example from my work at the day camp when a boy once said he liked Hannah Montana, but then realized what he said and quickly turned around to add “cause she’s hot and I like hot girls.” Oddly enough, that makes it okay since the male is watching the show to get satisfaction from looking at the female body (creepy sounding, but okay). God forbid in our society that we allow a boy to enjoy anything that may have a female as the main character.

Halberstam, Judith. “Female Masculinity.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. 934-956. Print.

3 Comments by  /  April 6, 2012  /  Posted in: Gender Studies
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The Many Layers of Feminism

When it comes to Feminism sometimes I get lost, which is odd to me because I am a female. Surely Feminism, the girl power theory, should be something I can understand, right? However, in undergrad I began to learn that Feminism is more than simply “Girl Power! Down with Men!” type of theory, but instead like every other theory there are layers within the concept. There are different parts and not all about bringing down the male gender.

The article that I really enjoyed for this week’s reading was Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women” because it combined Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxism with the theory of Feminism. Since she used the other theories that we have studied in class, many of the points about Feminism made more sense to me. In this essay she used the concept of the sex/gender system in regards to the other theories, which “is the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied” (771). The sex/gender systems are how society forces the genders to act in a certain way, which also leads to how sexuality is used within marriage systems as well.

Marx theorists are not as concerned with gender since the idea is about the worker, which could be either gender (771). However, because of the gender rules many women are subjected to the position of homemaker within the relationship, making housework her primary job, but it is housework that Rubin believes is what makes the commodities produced from the wages of labor usable:

Food must be cooked, clothes cleaned, beds made, wood chopped, etc. Housework is therefore a key element in the processof the reproduction of the laborer from whom the surplus value istaken…It can be further argued that since no wage is paid for housework, the labor of women in the home contributes to the ultimate quantity of surplus value realized. (773)

Housework, the work of the women, is what makes the commodities valuable, and this type of work does not give out wages, as Rubin notes. However, I believe that she is leaving out the housekeeper job in this analysis. In some cultures (and time periods) housework is the only job a woman could get that would give her the wages she would need for her family. However, it would become a vicious cycle then since the woman would also need to do her own housework in her own home after the day is done, and that labor does not have a value attached to it.

It is not only housework that is a part of the Marxist theory since women’s bodies are traded in the form of marriage and sex. Sex here becomes a social product, but this is more than simply using sex as a means of reproduction (775). With the exchange of women through marriage blood becomes bonded through the children and kinship ties are formed.

Kinship systems do not merely exchange women. They exchange sexual access, genealogical statuses, lineage names and ancestors, rights and people – men, women, and children – in concrete systems of social relationships…In this sense, the exchange of women is a profound perception of a system in which women do not have the full rights to themselves. The exchange of women becomes an obfuscation if it is seen as a cultural necessity and when it is used as the single tool with which an analysis of a particular kinship is approached. (780)

With this in mind this exchange becomes much more than simply the “I Dos” at the alter – whole families are merged within the woman that is traded in the culture. This image, while completely true many times, is actually a bleak one for a female reader.

But when looking at Feminism in a psychoanalysis form itshows how the gender roles trap women (and men) in certain positions. These roles all depend upon the culture with who does what job, and especially who can be in love with whom – gender becomes a division between the sexes and forces us to act as we do (782). But what I found very interesting about this article was the Rubin is more interested in getting rid of the burden of the gender roles, since that is what cause us all to act in certain ways and how society keeps the genders in line (so to speak).

The gender roles are what interested me so much in this article because it is something that I never thought about with Feminism. As I said, Feminism has a lot more layers than what I thought it had, and I am excited about our discussion.

 

 

Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. 770-794. Print.

2 Comments by  /  March 30, 2012  /  Posted in: Feminism, Political Criticism, Pyschoanalysis
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Rich People: Boo! Poor People: Yay!

When beginning the reading for political criticism I felt like that I would be reading essays that mirror my political friends back home, and I was somewhat worried the discussion would have the class divided between republicans and democrats. However, the introduction into the section showed me that it was not simply about presidential politics, but instead more about economics and the class system. I guess this shows how little I knew about this concept!

Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan did a very good job in their introduction about this topic, and since I have not had time to get too deeply into Marx I will be focusing on them more.

One of the first ideas I underlined in their essay was this quote about political criticism with literature and the disagreements against using it within literature: “The argument against the importation of politics assumes, of course, that politics was not in literature in the first place and that literary criticism, even when limited to a concern for form, style, theme, and the like, is not implicitly shaped by political choices…” (643). The idea that politics is within literature is an accurate assumption to me, especially if anyone has read Russian literature before. Politics shapes the world because it is how class structure is divided and dictates the characters’ place in society. Even Jane Austin’s works deals with political issues because of the class boundaries.

When Rivkin and Ryan introduce a new topic it is really helpful when they connect it to the other theories we have read and what the differences or similarities are. With New Criticism, Rivkin and Ryan remind us that these theorists only focus on the text and outside material is not used to gain a deeper meaning of the text. Political critics, however, had concerns with this idea because they believe that erasing “history from literature constituted a turning away from crucial matters of political substance without
which literature would not be literature” (643). Without remembering the historical and political we forget why the text was written and no longer has meaning – and this would mean that the text would no longer be literature. In regards to formalism, which also isolates the text from the historical context, the Marxist critic believes that literature can only be understood if looked at in the “full context,” which includes both historical, economical, and cultural aspects (644).

Marx is the major critic within this theory, and I have been thinking about the jokes we would make in undergrad about theory papers:“Feminism: Men are evil. Marxism: Rich people Boo! Poor people Yay!” While that is all somewhat true in a joking fashion, I have learned from just beginning to read Marx that it is not as easy as that. The conflicts between the classes are very much a part of what Marx talks about, and Marxist believe that literature is active in changing the wrongs of society in the class system. Literature exposes these wrongs and that is something that I believe heavily in and that I agree with. Without literature to expose ourselves we would never change, because we can easily turn the mirror away and not look at our reflection.

Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. “Introduction: Starting with Zero.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. 643-646. Print.

3 Comments by  /  March 16, 2012  /  Posted in: Political Criticism
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Literature And History

New Historicists study a text through a historical outlook to attempt to gain the “truth” about the history within the text, which sets them apart from formalists. Formalists, as well know, look at simply the text and do not use any historical background while attempting to get to the meaning of the text. Michel Foucault, a post-structuralist historian, was the theorist who “most influenced this critical approach” and had “New Historians…see the historical as textual, and one effect is to create a new relationship between the historical and the literary text” (Rivkin and Ryan 505-506). Instead of using the historical background to influence how readers looked at a text, he wanted to create a relationship between the two factors that would work together to help gather the true meaning of the text.

I personally believe in comprehending the history behind a text when trying to understand it, because if something is misunderstood then the meaning would be completely missed. This is why formalism was so hard for me to grasp because I would constantly want to know why the text was written in a certain way. New Historicism can also be linked to reader response, because over the years readers have changed and writers have changed along with them. What may have been acceptable then may not be acceptable now, which would cause modern readers to become surprised when reading a text.

E. P. Thompson studied the first draft of William Blake’s poem “London” while also digging into the history of Blake’s time period is his essay “Witness Against the Beast.” He used the draft of the poem and historical clues to piece together instances that have connections. For example, a line from the draft is “ little blasts of fear” (7), which he believes is a connection to  “the Proclamations, the Paine-burnings and the political repressions of the State and of Reeves’ Association for the Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers” which was current at the time the poem was first drafted (534). This means that the first draft seemed to be more political that the published draft, but my question (which I don’t think was answered within the essay) was why it was changed.

There is a quote within his essay that I absolutely love:

Some of Blake’s central images – his trees, and cloud, and caves, and serpents, and roots – have such a universal presence in mythology and literature that one may spend half a lifetime in the game of hunt-the-source. And sometimes the hunting is fruitful, provided that we remember always that the source (for its echo in Blake’s mind) is not the same thing as what he makes of it in his own art. (537)

When doing a New Historicist study we all tend to want to look up every piece of information within every word of the text, trying to see if the author’s meaning is different from what we perceive it to be in our ‘modern minds’. In undergrad I attempted to do a game of “hunt-the-source” for my first British literature paper about Edmund Spencer’s Faerie Queen, and playing that game was (pardon my French) absolute hell. Especially since I didn’t know at the time of the conflicts between the Catholic and English Churches, which made a big difference on how the symbols were used within the piece. So, as Thompson says, we have to remember that the symbols are not always the same meaning as what is shown within the text.

 

Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. “Introduction: Writing the Past.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. 505-507. Print.

Thompson, E. P. “Witness Against the Beast.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. 533-548. Print.

2 Comments by  /  March 9, 2012  /  Posted in: New Historicism
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Momma’s Boy

In class, Alyce made a very good point when we began our discussion on psychoanalysis when comparing Freud to Patricia Highsmith’s novel Strangers on a Train. I think her exact words were “Bruno and his mother. Ding-ding-ding!”

When going back through Highsmith’s novel I began making notes of all the scenes about Bruno and his mother. In Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan’s introduction, “Strangers to Ourselves,” they mentioned two instances that made me think of Bruno and his obsession with his mother. The first came from the term of splitting, which “is a way of dealing with anxiety by dividing the object of anxiety in two, one bearing all the negative feeling while the other embodies all the positive feelings one wishes to substitute for the anxieties the object or situation provokes” (390-391). This term describes people who place all their positive feelings into an object or person, and placing all their negative feelings into another. The example Rivkin and Ryan gave was children that directed all their anger towards one parents but worshiped the other. Bruno blames his father for everything bad that happens to him. He already has a strained relationship with his father, but idealizes his mother.

The major theory that would relate to Bruno would defiantly be the Oedipus Complex:

All male children, Freud argued, experience an early attachment to the mother that is sexual in nature. Only the father’s intervention, separating mother from child, prevents incest. All civilization is founded on the prohibition expressed in the father’s intervention. The male child learns to give up his initial “pre-Oedipal” desire for and attachment to the mother; instead, he identifies with the father (instead of longing to be the father with his mother) and learned to desire other women than the mother. He becomes an adult male heterosexual…. ( Rivkin and Ryan 391).

The Oedipus Complex is that the ‘male-child’ becomes in love with his mother and in turn hates his father because he gets to spend time with her sexually. It is not until the ‘male-child’ gives up his mother, becomes attached to his father, and learns to desire other women that he becomes an ‘adult male.’ However, it seems that Bruno has skipped that phase of growing away from his mother and bonding with his father, because at time he seems like a jealous lover. For example, Bruno tells Guy about a time that he threw his father’s picture out of a room. Bruno goes on to add: “‘I threw it out of my mother’s room,’ Bruno said, emphasizing the last three words. “My father put it in my mother’s room,’” (19). Bruno’s father placing a picture of himself in his mother’s room seems to set off territorial instincts within Bruno, making him get rid of the intruder.

The few moments we as readers see Bruno interacting with his mother is not entirely a lover-beloved scene, since his mother does not love him in any other sense than he is her son. But I see a relationship mirroring what call “the friend zone.” Bruno seems to be acting like a friend of a girl whom he cannot get with because he is considered a friend, but in this case, it is his own father that
is in the way.

Here is a scene between him and his mother:

“Ma, you’re getting too much sun. I don’t like your face that dark.”

“I don’t like yours that pale.”

Bruno frowned. The leathery look of his mother’s forehead offended him painfully. He kissed her suddenly on the cheek.” (104)

The way I see this scene is Bruno, the lover, telling his beloved that he does not like a new addition to her appearance. But as he looks at her he sees the “leathery look of his mother’s forehead” and it reminds him suddenly of her age, making him want to kiss her. Another scene between Bruno and his mother comes when she later leaves the room:

He nodded and moistened his dry lips. He did not return her smile as she closed the door, because he felt as if a black lid had fallen on him suddenly, as if he had to escape something before it was too late. He had to see Guy before it was too late! He had to get rid of his father before it was too late! (107)

Right when his mother leaves Bruno suddenly realizes that he must see Guy and convince him to kill his father. This thought seems to come out of nowhere, and while we know Bruno has wanted to kill his father his sudden hatred surges in this scene. Seeing his mother leave reminds that Bruno must get rid of his father so he may have her to himself.

 

 

Highsmith, Patricia. Strangers on a Train. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Print.

Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. “Introduction: Stranger to Ourselves: Psychoanalysis.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. 389-396. Print.

2 Comments by  /  March 3, 2012  /  Posted in: Pyschoanalysis
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Starting To Put It All Together

It is amazing to think that our class is almost to the midterm in literary theory and how much we have all learned. With the paper coming up I have only gotten to formalism and rhetoric and reader response, but I’ve begun to really understand how these two forms connect together. In class I began to understand what each theory was and how they look at a text, but while in class I am focused on one theory and attempting to learn it. I have in mind one theory, and since each theory is hard for me to understand I
need that discussion in class for me to truly comprehend what I am reading. It is not until now that I have begun to really see how they all interlock, while before I had thought they were all separated by “barbed wire”.

With each theory I try to connect that major points with the name (so I won’t get them confused), so with Formalism I see a theory that looks at the form of the text (and only the text). It started with the Russian Formalists who “were interested both in describing the general characteristics of literary language and in analyzing the specific devices or modes of operation of such language” (Rivkin and Ryan 3). The Russian Formalists wanted to look at the text as it is and how language develops the form. They also looked at defamiliarization, when a reader (or a critic) looks at a familiar object in a different way, which helps them gain a new perspective on the object within the text. I have trouble placing the American New Critics and the Russian Formalists apart, because they seem like they have the same principles, which is that they look at the text and separate it from the author, time period, and reader’s reactions.

Of the theorists for the Formalists I used Cleanth Brooks as an example because he made the theory easier for me to understand the theory when we first discussed it in class.

With rhetoric and reader response critical theory builds off of formalism because these critics also look at the text and study the form and content on how the language works, but these critics look at how the audience reacts to the text. A rhetorician looks at how language works showing the effect the text has on the reader, whereas the reader response critic prioritizes the reader’s role with the text that helps create the meaning of the text. Like with formalism, language is very important, but the reader also plays a very important role since “[r]eception, response, and interpretation are in a sense preordained by the rhetoric of the literary work, but the audience also plays a role in shaping how the work will be understood and what meanings it will have” (Rivkin and Ryan 128). It is the audience that shapes the rhetoric in the piece because the author has the audience in mind when writing, and depending on the reaction author wants from the audience determine how language is used.

Of the theorists I used Edward P. J. Corbett and his essay “Classical Rhetoric” because it is when he discussed signification with the sign, signifier, and signified. Because these three terms continue to come up in our readings, and this is the first place I remember reading about them, I wanted to add his essay. J. L. Austin and his essay “How to do Things With Words” is also another critic that I used because he described utterances. Utterances are important to the study of language because we look at how they are used when studying language.

 

Austin, J. L. “How To Do Things With Words.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. 162-172. Print.

Brooks, Cleanth. “The Formalist Critics.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden,
MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. 22-27. Print.

Corbett, Edward P. J. “Classical Rhetoric.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. 142-161. Print.

Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. “Introduction: Formalism.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. 3-7. Print.

Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. “Introduction: Language and Action.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. 127-130. Print.

1 Comment by  /  February 17, 2012  /  Posted in: Formalism, Reader Response
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