Reading Writing and Reception

1. Compare two models of texts by Eco and Barthes.

Umberto Eco	Roland Barthens
closed text • a text interpreted against the intention of the author who did not take into account such a possibility. • e.g. Superman comics and 007 by Ian Fleming are closed texts open to aberrant interpretations, • the texts take the reader along a predetermined path, but can be read for different ideological purposes. It is popular literature that serves to perpetuate and produce naïve readings.	Readable texts: • traditionally intelligible (lisible), • eg: 007 by Ian Fleming • (texte du plaisir), ‘pleasure of the text’ – is offered by straight, fast reading, ignoring the play of language, allowing lapses of concentration
open text • an open text is a text that allows multiple or mediated interpretations by the readers. • e.g. Finnegans Wake	Unreadable texts: • those which cannot be properly read (scriptable) – • e.g.Finnegans Wake • ( texte du jouissance), involving the reader

2. Present the phenomenological models in literary studies. (Iser, Ingarden)

Wolfang Isner	Roman Ingarden
• a text may have several potential ‘realisations’; • its full potential is made by an infinite number of readers; • the collective number of readings forms an abstracted, informed reader who is the projected addressee of text. Reading means that a text provokes a reader to respond to posed expectations, and thus to fill the textual ‘gaps’.	• the text as an object to be made concrete. • The act of reading - a concretisation of the consciousness of the reader

3. How is text independent of its author?

New Criticism rejected the claims of the author: text is objective.

Barthes ‘The death of the Author’: To accept the claims of the author means imposing limits on that text. Meaning is not ‘ultimate and author-centred’. The text is ‘tissue of quotations’, it is the reader who must process and ultimately realise its culture.

Norman Holland (‘Unity Identity Text Self’): ‘identity theme’

The reader who encounters the sub-text is one possessed of a unique ‘identity theme’, an element which organises the interpretation of a text according to that theme. The text is read in order to replicate the mind of a reader. Interpretation is always a function of personality of an individual reader.

4. Name the scholars

Roman Ingarden (1893 – 1970) a Polish philosopher who worked in phemenology (study of the structures of experience and consciousness) and aesthetics

Wolfgang Iser (1926 2007), a German literary scholar, known for his reader -response theory in literary theory

Roland Barthes (1915 –1980) was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, semiotician

Umberto Eco (born 1932), Italian philosopher, semiotician, novelist

Jonathan Culler (born 1944) his published works are in the fields of structuralism, literary theory and criticism

Norman Holland

Hans Robert Jauss

5. Glossary

affective fallacy: Wimsatt and Beardsley’s statement in The Verbal Icon (1954) that elements relating to emotional effects should not and cannot be part of criticism. The focus on the reader’s response would lead to ‘impressionism and relativism’.

alethic: Relating to truth. Fiction and other kinds of literary discourse are said to operate in a non-alethic system.

aporia: In rhetoric, a moment of deliberation or hesitation on the part of the speaker. In deconstructive terms, the moment when the text’s logic undoes itself.

closed text: For Eco (1979) a text is paradoxically open to aberrant readings.

closure: Resolution or completion at the end of a work.

différance: Derrida’s term combining two senses of the verb différer; to differ and to defer. The new word points out how language never contains full meaning: it is always deferred and different.

formal feature: Any feature of a text which can be noted as immanent. This includes arrangement on the page, structure and formal semantic relations.

gaps: For Iser, the gaps in a text are those elements which are indeterminate and which the reader has to fill. These might include macro-gaps, such as plot enigmas, and micro-gaps, such as the relation between the proposition contained in one clause and that contained in another.

hermeneutic: Concerning interpretation. horizon of expectations: Jauss (1982a) claimed that every text was read against a set of cultural expectations which change through time. The ‘horizon of expectations’ is a pragmatico-cultural frame through which meaning is generated.

identity theme: Norman Holland sugested that every reader comes to a text possessed of his or her unique identity theme – a psychological condition which dictates the interpretation of texts.

interpretative strategy: Implicit and largely unconscious strategies the reader constructs to make sense of texts.

interpretive community: An homogeneous community or group of readers where particular interpretations are sanctioned. See in particular Culler (1981) and Fish (1975).

kernel sentence: (Chomsky) ‘Core’ sentence upon which the complex sentence of ordinary discourse is founded.

lisible: ‘Readable’, for Barthes. This is like Eco’s closed text. locution and illocution: See Chapter 1, Speech Acts.

metonym: A ‘telling detail’, normally a nominal, of a text. Elements such as descriptions of clothes, furniture and others relating to appearance are invariably metonymic. See in particular David Lodge’s The Modes of Modern Writing (1977).

New Criticism: A critical practice that dominated the middle part of the twentieth century. Central figures include Wimsatt and Beardsley, Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate, all conservatives from America’s Southern States. Their central tenet was that the meaning of a text lies in the arrangement of the ‘words on the page’ and they rejected the notion that the author was the sole source and arbiter of meaning.

open text: Eco’s well-defined text, such as Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

phenomenology: Philosophy associated with Husserl, who said that objects do not have independent existence, but are filtered through human consciousness.

polysemantic: Having many possible meanings.

reception-aesthetic: Theory of the reception and interpretation of texts based on the work of Jauss and Gadamer in particular.

scriptible: ‘Writable’. The modernist and postmodernist text, which awaits a competent readership.

synecdoche: A part-to-whole relationship in language. An element is referred to through reference to a part of it (‘all hands on deck’). Synecdoche is very closely related to metonymy.

transformation: (Chomsky) All derived sentences are transformations of kernel sentences.

Feminism

1. What are the main concerns of feminist criticism?

• New sets of evaluative criteria corresponding with women’s writing, different (not inferior) from male output.

• Increase in range of texts available (diaries, journals, letters, autobiographies)

The reason for including texts by women about women into mainstream:

• the male authors promote the sexist ideology by repeating the stereotypical images,

• particular roles and character types constrain women. (e.g.– virgins: passive, vulnerable vs whores: sexually assertive)

• Representing women positively in literature either by drawing on their unique experience or by altering the stereotyped visions of women,. (e.g. childbirth, rape, menstruation)

2. Explain the concept of ecriture feminine.

• feminine writing / writing-the-body; a dramatic subversion of form and of traditional literary values, away from masculine standards,

• Special female writing is a discourse emotional, sensual, connected with body and erotic.

• The source of the feminine writing is the darkest subconscious spheres of identity

• Writing style is sensual, broken, elliptic, metaphorical erotically, bodily, as opposed to male symbolic system.

• whatever symbolic systems currently exist – the most prominent of these systems being language – they are not adequate, they place women within a restrictive system in which it is impossible to be active subjects.

• French feminism: Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva

3. How do prominent French feminists rebel against patriarchal symbolic system?

Helen Cixous:

• emphasises the hierarchical order of language, an order that privileges certain terms over others and ultimately reduces the

• She tends to a matter of the opposition between male and female. She argues that feminine is absent from the patriarchal order of language, it is represented only in the negative.

• Seeking woman, she presents a hierarchical list of oppositions (e.g. sun/moon, culture/nature) Such binary oppositions struggle with one another for supremacy to create order through a fixed language within which one one side is always the winner and master.

• This hierarchical, fixed structure is logocentric, and phalocentric since it is the masculine who wins.

• Cixous maintains that the link between femininty and biological females is arbitrary therefore either men or women may identify with the feminine. Therefore both men and women are capable of producing feminine writing

Luce Irigaray

• insists on the subversive potential of women writers who must work within the symbolic system into which they are placed

• women are not adequately represented by existing symbolic systems and they are not given a proper place in a patriarchal world.

• parody of masculine theorists and their philosophical rhetoric as a way of expressing ‘the feminine’ in a position of resistance to the masculine symbolic.

• the act of subversion is the only strategy for women within the masculine symbolic,

• She uses the female body as a counter-strategy to the use of the male body. Male bodies and their pleasures are distinct from female bodies and sexual pleasure. It is the folly of patriarchy to define women according to their lack of the phallus, so it is equally mistaken to define their language, their existence under the symbolic system, according to the masculine model.

• Instead of the monologic, rational, fixed discourse of phallogocentrism, she suggests an alternative pattern for a feminine discourse.

Julia Kristeva

• rejects any essential identity between women, suggesting that the term can only be useful as an organisational category for political action,

• Language is crucial to the determination of subjectivity.

• She uses Lacan’s term Symbolic, to designate the phallocentric language, but she also introduces her own term , the ‘semiotic’, which represents the repressed, feminine S aspect of language, which is always capable of disrupting or subverting the Symbolic.

• Evidence of the semiotic can be witnessed in non-rational discourses marginalised by the Symbolic (ravings of the hysteric, psychotic patients, avante-garde artists).

• All subjects go through the semiotic stage, this aspect is always present (like unconscious) more or less evident.

• Although it is representative of the repressed feminine side, it is present in both male and female subjects.

• She insists on the instability of subjectivity.

4. Name the scholars

Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Kate Millet, Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva

Virginia Woolf - the spiritual mother of the 2nd wave, academic feminism

Elaine Showalter – ‘gynocriticism’

5. Glossary

Desire: To be distinguished from straightforward sexual desire, Desire in the Lacanian scheme of things is a longing to return to a state of non-differentiation, of completeness. Once a subject has entered the Symbolic system, there is a schism between self and self-representation. This split is experienced as Desire for what is lacking (the phallus).

écriture féminine: A radical writing practice, the aim of which is to inscribe femininity. The feminine is excluded or repressed within the patriarchal, Symbolic order, and écriture féminine argues that existing linguistic structures are not sufficient for articulating the feminine: some new form of language has to be developed.

essentialism: Biological determinism; the denial of historical and cultural shifts in the human subject; the attribution of certain traits as unchangingly human, female, etc.

female: The biological basis of womanhood, argued as the grounds on which oppression of women, and the fight against this oppression, is based.

feminine: The cultural attributes of womanhood, as opposed to the biological, and which changes according to history and to cultural identity.

gynocriticism: A woman-centred critical practice which privileges women’s criticisms of woman-authored texts, first promoted by Elaine Showalter.

logocentrism: This term is criticised by deconstruction as the philosophical understanding of words (logos means ‘word’) possessing metaphysical presence. Logocentricism is the belief that language can be authentic, fully representative and capable of producing fixed or certain meaning.

masculinity: The culturally acquired attributes of the male, assumed by Freud as the norm against which feminine development has been judged wanting.

neologism: A new word.

patriarchy: Defined by materialist feminists as social and political domination by men, and by psychoanalytic feminists as the psychological, ideological primacy of the masculine over systems of representation.

phallocentrism: The ordering of Symbolic systems of difference around sexuality, where difference is determined according to possession or lack of the privileged signifier of the phallus. The term is mostly used in association with Lacanian discourse, and with the écriture féminine.

phallogocentrism: The connection of phallocentricism with logocentricism produces a system which privileges the phallus as both the main marker of sexual difference and as the guarantor of truth and meaning in language.

semiotic: Not to be confused with semiotics, the semiotic is aterm developed by Julia Kristeva, and indicates the pre-symbolic state of the infant, before its mind and body are regulated by language and the Symbolic order. The semiotic is the location of the feminine, after the subject has

become integrated into the masculine order. The semiotic is not abolished with the entrance of the subject into the Symbolic; it remains in a repressed form, and is evident as a disruptive force, for instance, in moments of linguistic instability, in anti-social behaviour or transgressive and avant-garde art.

Symbolic: The order of language and representation. It is the order into which the subject must become integrated to gain recognition of its self, and to be recognised by others. It is also the order which depends on repression of disruptive forces. Feminists argue that the Symbolic order is a patriarchal one which needs to be transformed to accommodate feminine aspects.

Woman: A generalised woman, used by Jacques Lacan and the French Feminists to talk about the condition in which all women are placed and the way in which they are (inaccurately) represented by male-centred discourse. The term has been criticised as being essentialist, fixed and ahistorical.

Colonialism

1. Explain the literary phenomenon of ‘empire writing back’

-Euro centrism on English Literature core courses - the choice of prescribed white writers and omitting issues of cultural identity, racism, colonialism and marginalisation.

-To draw attention to the Eurocentric bias of literature and literary analysis is to engage in a dialogue with canonical texts, showing their omissions and preferences.

-To rewrite literary classics from an alternative point of view – ‘writing back’ to the cultural heart of the empire.

2. Explain the Eurocentricism - Europe as the centre of everything

3. Explain the term of ‘postcolonialism’.

‘post-colonial’ –all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonisation to the present day

Post- colonial as a term serves marketable purposes but at the same time it is very capacious (third world, Commonwealth, migrant writing, diasporic writing etc.)

4. Name the scholars

Edward Said, Frantz Fanon ( from French Martinique), Edward Said (Palestinian), B. Ashcroft

5. Glossary

black: This term has been reclaimed from being a pejorative label, and can be used to create identification between any people of colour, although mostly it is claimed by people of African descent. Other people of colour sometimes do, and sometimes don’t, identify themselves with this term.

colonisation: The process of displacing one population and resettling the land with another, sometimes by force, and maintained by a variety of coercive measures.

Commonwealth: Boehmer defines the Commonwealth as ‘a loose cultural and political amalgam of nations which before 1947 formed part of the British empire’ (1995: 4), and although Britain is part of the Commonwealth, the term ‘Commonwealth literature’ does not usually include work by white British writers.

diasporic: Meaning ‘scattered’ or ‘dispersed’, the term can refer to migrants, or to people with more than one culture or country of origin.

empire: An extensive territory ruled over by an emperor or sovereign state.

ethnicity: Distinct from racial (biological) identity, a person’s ethnicity includes all features of his or her cultural origin, including religion, cooking traditions, philosophies, etc.

First Nations: Peoples whose land is now populated by settlers: North American Indians, Inuit, Australian aboriginals, New Zealand Maoris, South Pacific Islanders, etc.

imperial: Pertaining to those political, ideological or military practices used to establish or maintain an empire.

migrant: A person who has moved from his or her place of origin.

native: One born in a place. It can be used as a derogatory term to mean primitive or pagan, but it is also a term often preferred by First Nations (North American Indians, for example, often refer to themselves as Native).

neo-colonial: Newly colonial or currently colonial; used to refer to nations who may have gained their independence but are still subject to domination by European or US capitalism and culture.

other: Person of a different race or ethnicity; often used to mean ‘non-white’, or colonised subject.

post-colonial: Generally used to refer to a once-colonised nation that has gainedindependence, although Ashcroft et al. (1989) use the term to refer to anyperiod from the moment of colonisation onwards.

race: Used to refer to characteristics governed by genetics such as skin colour,hair colour and texture, facial features. The biological foundation of theterm has been contested as being arbitrary.

settler culture: Includes the white populations of Australia, Canada and NewZealand, where colonising cultures have established themselves as the dominantpopulation. White South Africans are also generally included in this category, although they are not the majority population.