On Marxist, Feminist, Ecocritical, and Queer
Criticism
Introduction
In contemporary literary studies, critical theories
such as Marxism, Feminism, Ecocriticism, and Queer Criticism have provided
fresh lenses to interpret literature and the socio-cultural dynamics it
reflects. These approaches not only expand our understanding of texts but also
shed light on issues like power dynamics, environmental ethics, gender
representation, and sexual identity. Through these critical frameworks, we
interrogate traditional narratives and unravel the influences of ideology,
patriarchy, ecological consciousness, and heteronormativity.
Marxist
Criticism
Rooted
in the theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marxist Criticism
explores the socioeconomic forces that shape literature. It positions
texts as products of the cultural and economic structures of their time.
Key texts like The German Ideology emphasize the impact of ideology
on societal structures, while thinkers like Antonio Gramsci and Fredric
Jameson explore hegemony and cultural materialism. Marxist critics often
analyze class struggle, the role of the author’s social background, and
the ways literature reinforces or challenges dominant ideologies.
Feminist
Criticism
Feminist
Criticism examines literature through the lens of gender inequality and
the patriarchal structures embedded in cultural narratives. Foundational
texts like Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own advocate for women’s
intellectual independence and critique male-dominated literature.
Feminist critics such as Simone de Beauvoir and Elaine Showalter analyze
the marginalization of women, the social construction of gender, and the
representation of women as "Other" or aligned with nature,
which has traditionally subordinated them in the cultural hierarchy.
Ecocriticism
Ecocriticism
engages with literature to highlight environmental concerns and human
relationships with nature. Influential works such as Rachel Carson’s Silent
Spring and Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac emphasize
ecological preservation and critique the anthropocentric exploitation of
nature. Ecocritics interrogate the binary between nature and culture,
exploring how literature reflects the socio-ecological consciousness and
promotes sustainable, ethical interactions with the environment. This
approach often includes postcolonial and gendered perspectives,
acknowledging how ecological degradation disproportionately impacts
marginalized communities.
4. Queer
Criticism
Queer
Criticism, or Lesbian and Gay Studies, challenges heteronormative
ideologies and examines the representation of queer identities in
literature. This framework not only uncovers homoerotic subtexts in
mainstream literature but also questions rigid gender roles and
boundaries. Texts like Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble have
profoundly influenced Queer Theory, introducing the concept of gender as
performative rather than inherent. Queer critics deconstruct societal
norms around sexuality, gender fluidity, and the visibility of queer
identities in canonical literature, providing a broader understanding of
identity.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge Biographia Literaria: Chapter 14
In chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria, S.T. Coleridge thrown his philosophical-critical insights on following issues. These issues are discussed in the below given presentation.
Two Cardinal Points of Poetry
Coleridge’s views towards Wordsworth’s poetic creed
Difference between Poem and Prose
Definition of Liegitimate Poem & Function of Poem
Difference between Poem and Poetry
After viewing this presentation, to check your understanding of Coleridge's views in Ch 14 of Biographia Literaria, take this online quiz.
Jacques Derrida: “Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”
(from The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Donato E. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Uni Press 1970)
Define deconstruction:
Deconstruction, as applied in the criticism of literature, designates a theory and practice of reading which questions and claims to "subvert" or "undermine" the assumption that the system of language provides grounds that are adequate to establish the boundaries, the coherence or unity, and the determinate meanings of a literary text. Typically, a deconstructive reading sets out to show that conflicting forces within the text itself serve to dissipate the seeming definiteness of its structure and meanings into an indefinite array of incompatible and undecidable possibilities.
Q. Expound Derrida’s concept of decentering centre and suplimentarity.
Q. Discuss how Derrida asserts the inexhaustibility of the text and thus keeps it perpetually open to new discoveries.
Q. Comment upon the post-structuralist view that there is no ‘a-textual origin’ of text.
Q. The Post Structuralist critic 'read the text against itself so as to expose what might be thought of as the 'textual subconscious', where meanings are expressed which may be directly contrary to the surface meaning.
A:
Deconstruction: In the criticism of literature, Deconstruction is a theory and practice of reading which questions and claims to ‘subvert’ or ‘undermine’ the assumption that the system of language provides grounds that are adequate to establish the boundaries, the coherence or unity, and the determinate meaning of a literary text. Typically, a deconstructive reading sets out to show the conflicting forces within the text itself to dissipate the seeming definiteness of its structure and meaning into indefinite array of incompatibility and undecidable possibilities.
Derrida was the most influential philosopher in 70s and 80s of last century. His philosophy is the further extension of structuralism and is better called as Post-Structuralism. He carries this structuralist movement to its logical extreme and his reasoning is original and startling. We have seen in this movement that as in New Criticism, the attention was shifted from the writer to the work of literary text; consequently textual analysis became more important than extra textual information. Further, the author disappeared and only the text remained. This is what we called the stylistic and structuralist position. The meaning as it emerges from the text (the illocutionary force) alone counted. In this process the importance of the reader and his understanding increased, and the Reader Response or Reception Theory came into being. Derrida gives the same process a further and final push according to which what matters is the reading and not the writing of the text. At times one feels, though not quite justifiably, that, in Derrida even the text disappears and what is left behind is an individual’s reader response to it. Now the reader rules the supreme, and the validity of his reading can not be challenged. However, the structure of each reading has to be coherent and convincing.
Decentering the Centre
Derrida deconstructs the metaphysics of presence. That is to say that according to Derrida there is no presence or truth apart from language. He seeks to prove that the structurality of the structure does not indicate a presence above its free play of signs. This presence was earlier supposed to be the centre of the structure which was paradoxically thought to be within, and outside this structure, it was truth and within, it was intelligibility. But Derrida contends that, ‘the centre could not be thought in the form of a being-presence’, and that in any given text, there is only a free play of an infinite number of sign substitutions. A word is explained by another word which is only a word not an existence. Thus a text is all words which are just words, not indicative of any presence beyond them. In the words of John Sturrock, “The resort to language or sign entails, we know the loss of all uniqueness and immediacy. The sign is not the thing in itself”. It is utteractive or repeatable. A sign which was uttered only once would be not sign. It is the types of which each utterance is token.
There is no a-textual origin of a text. The author’s plan of a book is a text. His realization of the same book is another text. Its summary is third text. A text kindles a text and there is no truth beyond the text that the text seeks to represent or explain. There is no reality other than textuality. The textuality is the free play of signifiers. There is no signified that is not itself a signifier.
In the words of John Sturrock, Derrida seeks to undermine “a prevailing and generally unconscious ‘idealism’, which asserts that language does not create meanings but reveals them, thereby implying that meanings, pre-exists their expression”. This for Derrida is nonsense. For him there can be no meaning which is not formulated, we cannot reach outside language.
Supplementarity
The concept of supplementarity follows from decentrring the centre. A literary text is a work of language and language as such according to Derrida, is like time, ever in a state of flux. Just as time has no origin, so also the origin of language is inconceivable. All that we can say is that it came into being fully, not bit by bit along with the emergence of man, and will disappear along with man. Derrida quotes and approves Levi-Strauss who writes: “Whatever may have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance in the scale of animal life, language could only have been born in one full swoop (all at a time). Things could not have set about signifying progressively. Following a transformation the study of which is not the concern of the social sciences, but rather of biology and psychology, a crossing over came about from a stage where nothing had a meaning to another where everything possessed it”.
But language being a flux is not ever the same. It is always gaining in new elements and loosing the older ones. “The totality of the myths of a people”, Derrida quotes Levi-Strauss again, “is of the order of the discourse. Provided that these people do not become physically or morally extinct, this totality is never extinct. Such a criticism would therefore be equivalent to re-approaching a linguist with writing the grammar of a language without having recorded the totality of the words which have been uttered since that language came into existence and without knowing the verbal exchanges which will take place as long as the language continues to exist.” Totalisation is thus useless and impossible. The language paradoxically comes into being as a quest of imaginary truth apart from language and continues to realize the lack of truth in the words that it employs. The freeplay of signifiers, “a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ‘ensemble’ permitted by the lack. The absence of centre of a origin is the movement of supplimentarity. The super abundance of the signifier, its supplementary character, is thus the result of a finitude, that is to say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented. The process of supplementarity has no end. Because positive & concrete definition is impossible for any term, every term necessarily requires a supplement or supplements, something or some things which help(s) it exist and be understood. Yet, at the same time, the object(s) which the supplement is (are) supplementing is (are) (a) supplements itself. Extend this web in all directions and the relationship between bricolage, play, and the supplementary begins to make sense.
The same applied to any literary text. We look for the truth of the text which in fact is only language, and create in our quest another text through our criticism to supplement the lack of the original text. Supplement the lack of the original text - reading is reactivating the expressivity of the text with the help of its indicative signs. But in the words of John Sturrock, “the meanings that are read into it may or may not coincide with the meanings which the author believes he or she has invested it with. A reasonable view is that a large number of these meanings will coincide depending on how far separable author and reader are in time, space and culture; but that a large number of other meanings will not coincide. For language have powers of generating meanings irrespective of the wishes of those of who use it.”
Of course, the discussion here barely begins to scratch the surface of the implications made by Derrida, for within not even a full fourteen pages of text, has established the foundation of one of the most significant revolutions in the history of thought. Of course, saying that Derrida demonstrated how the history of thought contradicted itself and in so doing imploded the foundation of Western philosophy. Yet, there is scant little chance of denying that Derrida himself holds some special place in this development: if not as its father then at least as its catalyst.
Deconstruction, not critique
Traditional Western metaphysics advances on the basis of critique. You find the weakness in your antagonist's argument, and by this means show it to be false. In the tradition of Pope and Swift, you
may then ridicule the argument, thereby persuading your reader to take your side against your antagonist. You go on to replace the previous position with your own views, which are then subject to
critique in their turn. Deconstruction, however, is not critique. Derrida treats Levi-Strauss with respect, and his project is not to persuade us to repudiate Saussure, still less to ridicule him (though there are moments of comedy in his account of the sermon against the sin of writing delivered by the moralist from Geneva). Instead, he points out that Saussure's own book does not sustain the opposition between speech and writing it takes for granted and reiterates. On the contrary, the Course records (as an outrage) the invasion of the rejected writing into speech itself. Spelling, Saussure declares with horror, is changing pronunciation. Let us conclude with M. H. Abram’s observation in ‘How to do things with texts?’: - “Derrida emphasizes that to deconstruct is not to destroy; that his task is to “dismantle the metaphysical and rhetorical structures” operative in a text “not in order to reject or discard them, but to reconstitute them in another way”; - that he puts into question the “search for the signified not annul it, but to understand it within a system to which such a reading is blind.”
What post-structuralist critics do?
1. They 'read the text against itself so as to expose what might be thought of as the 'textual
subconscious', where meanings are expressed which may be directly contrary to the surface meaning.
2. They fix upon the surface features of the words - similarities in sound, the root meanings of words, a 'dead' (or dying) metaphor and bring these to the foreground, so that they become crucial to the overall meaning.
3. They seek to show that the text is characterized by disunity rather than unity.
4. They concentrate on a single passage and analyze it so intensively that it becomes impossible to
sustain a 'univocal' reading and the language explodes into 'multiplicities of meaning'.
5. They look for shifts and breaks of various kinds in the text and see these as evidence of what is
repressed or glossed over or passed over in silence by the text. These discontinuities are sometimes called 'fault-lines', a geological metaphor referring to the breaks in rock formations which give evidence of previous activity and movement.
Gerard Genette: Structuralism and Literary Criticism
Part I
What is structuralism? How is it applied to the study of literature?
Structuralism (Structuralist Criticism): It is the offshoot of certain developments in linguistics and anthropology. Saussure’s mode of the synchronic study of language was an attempt to formulate the grammar of a language from a study of parole. Using the Saussurean linguistic model, Claude Levi-Strauss examined the customs and conventions of some cultures with a view of arriving at the grammar of those cultures. Structuralist criticism aims at forming a poetics or the science of literature from a study of literary works. It takes for granted ‘the death of the author’; hence it looks upon works as self-organized linguistic structures. The best work in structuralist poetics has been done in the field of narrative.
In literary theory, structuralism is an approach to analyzing the narrative material by examining the underlying invariant structure. For example, a literary critic applying a structuralist literary theory might say that the authors of West Side Story did not write anything "really" new, because their work has the same structure as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In both texts a girl and a boy fall in love (a "formula" with a symbolic operator between them would be "Boy + Girl") despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other ("Boy's Group - Girl's Group" or "Opposing forces") and conflict is resolved by their death.
The versatility of structuralism is such that a literary critic could make the same claim about a story of two friendly families ("Boy's Family + Girl's Family") that arrange a marriage between their children despite the fact that the children hate each other ("Boy - Girl") and then the children commit suicide to escape the arranged marriage; the justification is that the second story's structure is an 'inversion' of the first story's structure: the relationship between the values of love and the two pairs of parties involved have been reversed.
Structuralistic literary criticism argues that the "novelty value of a literary text" can lie only in new structure, rather than in the specifics of character development and voice in which that structure is expressed.
Gerard Genette and Structuralistic Criticism
Gerard Genette writes at the outset in his essay ‘Structuralism and Literary Criticism’ that methods developed for the study of one discipline could be satisfactorily applied to the study of other discipline as well. This is what he calls “intellectual bricolage[i]’, borrowing a term from Claude Levi-Strauss. This is precisely so, so far as structuralism is concerned. Structuralism is the name given to Saussure’s approach to language as a system of relationship. But it is applied also to the study of philosophy, literature and other sciences of humanity.
Structuralism as a method is peculiarly imitable to literary criticism which is a discourse upon a discourse[ii]. Literary criticism in that it is meta-linguistic in character and comes into being / existence as metaliterature. In his words: “it can therefore be metaliterature, that is to say, ‘a literature of which literature is the imposed object’.” That is, it is literature written to explain literature and language used in it to explain the role of language in literature.
In Genette’s words, ‘if the writer questions the universe, the critic questions literature, that is to say, the universe of signs. But what was a sign for the writer (the work) becomes meaning for the critic (since it is the object of the critical discourse), and in another way what was meaning for the writer (his view of the world) becomes a sign for the critic, as the theme and symbol of a certain literary nature’. Now this being so, there is certain room for reader’s interpretation. Levi-Strauss is quite right when he says that the critic always puts something of himself into the works he read.
The Structuralist method of criticism:
Literature, being primarily a work of language, and structuralism in its part, being preeminently a linguistic method, the most probable encounter should obviously take place on the terrain of linguistic material. Sound, forms, words and sentences constitute the common object of the linguist and the philologist to much an extent that it was possible, in the early Russian Formalist movement, to define literature as a mere dialect, and to envisage its study as an annex of general dialectology.
Traditional criticism regards criticism as a message without code; Russian Formalism regards literature as code without message. Structuralism by structural analysis makes it possible to uncover the connection that exists between a system of forms and a system of meanings, by replacing the search for term by term analysis with one for over all homologies (likeness, similarity)”.
Meaning is yielded by the structural relationship within a given work. It is not introduced from outside. Genette believed that the structural study of ‘poetic language’ and of the forms of literary expression cannot reject the analysis of the relations between code and message. The ambition of structuralism is not confined to counting feet and to observe the repetition of phonemes: it must also study semantic (word meaning) phenomena which constitute the essence of poetic language. It is in this reference that Genette writes: “one of the newest and most fruitful directions that are now opening up for literary research ought to be the structural study of the ‘large unities’ of discourse, beyond the framework – which linguistics in the strict sense cannot cross – of the sentence.” One would thus study systems from a much higher level of generality, such as narrative, description and the other major forms of literary expression. There would be linguistics of discourse that was a translinguistics.
Genette empathetically defines Structuralism as a method is based on the study of structures wherever they occur. He further adds, “But to begin with, structures are not directly encountered objects – far from it; they are systems of latent relations, conceived rather than perceived, which analysis constructs as it uncovers them, and which it runs the risk of inventing while believing that it is discovering them.” Furthermore, structuralism is not a method; it is also what Ernst Cassirer calls a ‘general tendency of thought’ or as others would say (more crudely) an ideology, the prejudice of which is precisely to value structures at the expense of substances.
Genette is of the view that any analysis that confines itself to a work without considering its sources or motives would be implicitly structuralist, and the structural method ought to intervene in order to give this immanent study a sort of rationality of understanding that would replace the rationality of explanation abandoned with the search of causes. Unlike Russian Formalist, Structuralists like Genette gave importance to thematic study also. “Thematic analysis”, writes Genette, “would tend spontaneously to culminate and to be tested in a structural synthesis in which the different themes are grouped in networks, in order to extract their full meaning from their place and function in the system of the work.” Thus, structuralism would appear to be a refuge for all immanent criticism against the danger of fragmentation that threatens thematic analysis.
Genette believes that structural criticism is untainted by any of the transcendent reductions of psychoanalysis or Marxist explanation. He further writes, “It exerts, in its own way, a sort of internal reduction, traversing the substance of the work in order to reach its bone-structure: certainly not a superficial examination, but a sort of radioscopic penetration, and all the more external in that it is more penetrating.”
Genette observes relationship between structuralism and hermeneutics also. He writes: “thus the relation that binds structuralism and hermeneutics together might not be one of mechanical separation and exclusion, but of complementarity: on the subject of the same work, hermeneutic criticism might speak the language of the assumption of meaning and of internal recreation, and structural criticism that of distant speech and intelligible reconstruction.” They would, thus, bring out complementary significations, and their dialogue would be all the more fruitful.
Thus to conclude we may say, the structuralist idea is to follow literature in its overall evolution, while making synchronic cuts at various stages and comparing the tables one with another. Literary evolution then appears in all its richness, which derives from the fact that the system survives while constantly altering. In this sense literary history becomes the history of a system: it is the evolution of the functions that is significant, not that of the elements, and knowledge of the synchronic relations necessarily precedes that of the processes.
He is largely responsible for the reintroduction of a rhetorical vocabulary into literary criticism, for example such terms as trope and metonymy. Additionally his work on narrative, best known in English through the selection Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, has been of importance. His major work is the multi-part Figures series, of which Narrative Discourse is a section.
This outline of Genette's narratology is derived from Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. This book forms part of his multi-volume work Figures I-III. The examples used in it are mainly drawn from Proust's epic In Search of Lost Time. One criticism which had been used against previous forms of narratology was that they could deal only with simple stories, such as Vladimir Propp's work in Morphology of the Folk Tale. If narratology could cope with Proust, this could no longer be said.
Below are the five main concepts used by Genette in Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. They are primarily used to look at the syntax of narratives, rather than to perform an interpretation of them.
Order
Say a story is as follows: a murder occurs (event A); then the circumstances of the murder are revealed to a detective (event B), finally the murderer is caught (event C).
Arranged chronologically the events run A1, B2, C3. Arranged in the text they may run B1 (discovery), A2 (flashback), C3 (resolution).
This accounts for the 'obvious' effects the reader will recognise, such as flashback. It also deals with the structure of narratives on a more systematic basis, accounting for flash-forward, simultaneity, as well as possible, if rarely used effects. These disarrangements on the level of order are termed 'anachrony'.
Frequency
The separation between an event and its narration allows several possibilities.
An event can occur once and be narrated once (singular). (Give me more – Oliver)
'Today I went to the shop.'
An event can occur n times and be narrated once (iterative). (valour of Macbeth, sleepless nights)
'I used to go to the shop.'
An event can occur once and be narrated n times (repetitive). (Tess’s molestation and its aftereffect)
'Today I went to the shop' + 'Today he went to the shop' etc.
An event can occur n times and be narrated n times (multiple). (Moll’s escapades into immoral behaviour)
'I used to go to the shop' + 'He used to go to the shop' + 'I went to the shop yesterday' etc.
Duration
The separation between an event and its narration means that there is discourse time and narrative time. These are the two main elements of duration.
"Five years passed", has a lengthy discourse time, five years, but a short narrative time (it only took a second to read).
James Joyce's novel Ulysses has a relatively short discourse time, twenty-four hours. Not many people, however, could read Ulysses in twenty-four hours. Thus it is safe to say it has a lengthy narrative time.
Voice
Voice is concerned with who narrates, and from where. This can be split four ways.
Where the narration is from
Intra-diegetic: inside the text. eg. Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White(1859)(Chocolate, Musafir)
Extra-diegetic: outside the text. eg. Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Is the narrator a character in the story?
Hetero-diegetic: the narrator is not a character in the story. eg. Homer's The Odyssey (Samay in Mahabharat,)
Homo-diegetic: the narrator is a character in the story. eg. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (Moll Flanders) Pilgrim’s Progress
Mood
Genette said narrative mood is dependent on the 'distance' and 'perspective' of the narrator, and like music, narrative mood has predominant patterns. It is related to voice.
Distance of the narrator changes with narrated speech, transposed speech and reported speech.
Perspective of the narrator is called focalization. Narratives can be non-focalized, internally focalized or externally focalized.
Genette, G (1980) Chapter 4: 'Mood' in Narrative Discourse, pp. 161 - 211, 1980, New York, Cornell University Press.
The other major figure in the early phase of structuralism was Roland Barthes, who applied the structuralist method to the general field of modern culture. He examined modern France (of the 1950s) from the standpoint of a cultural anthropologist in a little book called Mythologies which he published in France in 1957. This looked at a host of items which had never before been subjected to intellectual analysis, such as: the difference between boxing and wrestling; the significance of eating steak and chips; the styling of the Citroen car; the cinema image of Greta Garbo's face; a magazine photograph of an Algerian soldier saluting the French flag. Each of these items he placed within a wider structure of values, beliefs, and symbols as the key to understanding it. Thus, boxing is seen as a sport concerned with repression and endurance, as distinct from wrestling, where pain is flamboyantly displayed. Boxers do not cry out in pain when hit, the rules cannot be disregarded at any point during the bout, and the boxer fights as himself, not in the elaborate guise of a make-believe villain or hero. By contrast, wrestlers grunt and snarl with aggression, stage elaborate displays of agony or triumph, and fight as exaggerated, larger than life villains or super-heroes. Clearly, these two sports have quite different functions within society: boxing enacts the stoical endurance which is sometimes necessary in life, while wrestling dramatises ultimate struggles and conflicts between good and evil. Barthes's approach here, then, is that of the classic structuralist: the individual item is 'structuralised', or 'contextualised by structure', and in the process of doing this layers of sigificance are revealed. (Source: Peter Barry: An Introduction to Theory)
Roland Barthes - S/Z
Structuralist criticism: examples
These examples are based on the methods of literary analysis described and demonstrated in Barthes's book S/Z, published in 1970. This book, of some two hundred pages, is about Balzac's thirty-page story 'Sarrasine'. Barthes's method of analysis is to divide the story into 561 lexies', or units of meaning, which he then classifies using five 'codes', seeing these as the basic underlying structures of all narratives. So in terms of our opening statement about structuralism (that it aims to understand the individual item by placing it in the context of the larger structure to which it belongs) the individual item here is this particular story, and the larger structure is the system of codes, which Barthes sees as generating all possible actual narratives, just as the grammatical structures of a language can be seen as generating all possible sentences which can be written or spoken in it. I should add that there is a difficulty in taking as an example of structuralism material from a text by Barthes published in 1970, since 1970 comes within what is usually considered to be Barthes's post-structuralist phase, always said to begin (as in this book) with his 1968 essay 'The Death of the Author'. My reasons for nevertheless regarding S/Z as primarily a structuralist text are, firstly, to do with precedent and established custom: it is treated as such, for instance, in many of the best known books on structuralism (such as Terence Hawkes's Structuralism and Semiotics, Robert Scholes's Structuralism in Literature, and Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics). A second reason is that while S/Z clearly contains many elements which subvert the confident positivism of structuralism, it is nevertheless essentially structuralist in its attempt to reduce the immense complexity and diversity possible in fiction to the operation of five codes, however tongue-in-cheek the exercise may be taken to be. The
truth, really, is that the book sits on the fence between structuralism and post-structuralism: the 561 lexies and the five codes are linked in spirit to the 'high' structuralism of Barthes's 1968 esssay 'Analysing Narrative Structures', while the ninety-three interspersed digressions, with their much more free-wheeling comments on narrative, anticipate the 'full' post-structuralism of his 1973 book The Pleasure of the Text. The five codes identified by Barthes in S/Z are:
1. The proairetic codeThis code provides indications of actions. ('The ship sailed at midnight' 'They began again', etc.)
2. The hermeneutic codeThis code poses questions or enigmas which provide narrative suspense. (For instance, the sentence 'He knocked on a certain door in the neighbourhood of Pell Street' makes the reader wonder who lived there, what kind of neighbourhood it was, and so on). (Read this to understand the difference between proairetic and hermeneutic)
3. The cultural codeThis code contains references out beyond the text to what is regarded as common knowledge. (For example, the sentence 'Agent Angelis was the kind of man who sometimes arrives at work in odd socks' evokes a preexisting image in the reader's mind of the kind of man this is - a stereotype of bungling incompetence, perhaps, contrasting that with the image of brisk efficiency contained in the notion of an 'agent'.).
4. The semic codeThis is also called the connotative code. It is linked to theme, and this code (says
Scholes in the book mentioned above) when organised around a particular proper name constitutes a
'character'. Its operation is demonstrated in the second example, below.
5. The symbolic codeThis code is also linked to theme, but on a larger scale, so to speak. It consists of contrasts and pairings related to the most basic binary polarities - male and female, night and day, good and evil, life and art, and so on. These are the structures of contrasted elements which structuralists see asfundamental to the human way of perceiving and organising reality. For better understanding of these codes, read this: https://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/5codes.htm
Part III What do Struturalist critics do?
1. They analyse (mainly) prose narratives, relating the text to some larger containing structure, such as:
(a) the conventions of a particular literary genre, or
(b) a network of intertextual connections, or
(c) a projected model of an underlying universal narrative structure, or
(d) a notion of narrative as a complex of recurrent patterns or motifs.
2. They interpret literature in terms of a range of underlying parallels with the structures of language, as described by modern linguistics. For instance, the notion of the 'mytheme', posited by Levi-Strauss, denoting the minimal units of narrative 'sense', is formed on the analogy of the morpheme, which, in linguistics, is the smallest unit of grammatical sense. An example of a morpheme is the 'ed' added to a verb to denote the past tense.
3. They apply the concept of systematic patterning and structuring to the whole field of Western culture, and across cultures, treating as 'systems of signs' anything from Ancient Greek myths to brands of soap powder.
Barry, Peter. An introduction to literary and cultural theory
Think and Write: Being a structuralist critic, how would you analyse literary text or TV serial or Film? You can select any image or TV serial or film or literary text or advertisement. Apply structuralist method and post your write up on your blog. Give link of that blog-post in the comment section under this blog.
[i] Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1966).p.17.
Under the project of eContent development, we prepared some Short Learning Videos. On this blog you will find video playlists on Aristotle's 'Poetics' and John Dryden's 'Of Dramatic Poesy'.
This content explores the work and ideas of Elaine Showalter, a prominent figure in feminist literary theory and criticism. Showalter's writings emphasize the importance of understanding the feminist tradition and its impact on literary analysis. She criticizes stereotypes of feminism and the tendency to neglect theory, arguing for a poetics of feminist criticism. Showalter divides feminist criticism into two sections: the woman as reader or feminist critique, which examines the representation of women in literature and critiques male-dominated perspectives, and the woman as writer or gynocritics, which focuses on constructing a female framework for analyzing women's literature. Showalter acknowledges the challenges of defining women's writing but sees gynocriticism as a means to understand women's relation to literary culture. She outlines three phases of women's literature: the feminine phase, the feminist phase, and the female phase, each characterized by different goals and approaches. Showalter calls for a cultural perspective in feminist criticism that recognizes the diversity of women's experiences. Overall, Showalter's views on feminist poetics are intelligent, balanced, and thought-provoking, reflecting her belief in the transformative power of feminist analysis.
About the author: Elaine Showalter (born January 21, 1941) is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She is one of the founders of feminist literary criticism in United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics.
She is well known and respected in both academic and popular cultural fields. She has written and edited numerous books and articles focused on a variety of subjects, from feminist literary criticism to fashion, sometimes sparking widespread controversy, especially with her work on illnesses. Showalter has been a television critic for People magazine and a commentator on BBC radio and television.
Showalter is a specialist in Victorian literature and the Fin-de-Siecle (turn of the 19th century). Her most innovative work in this field is in madness and hysteria in literature, specifically in women’s writing and in the portrayal of female characters.
Showalter's best known works are Toward a Feminist Poetics (1979), The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture (1830–1980) (1985), Sexual Anarchy: Gender at Culture at the Fin de Siecle (1990), Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997), and Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (2001). In 2007 Showalter was chair of the judges for the prestigious British literary award, the Man Booker International Prize.
Showalter's book Inventing Herself (2001), a survey of feminist icons, seems to be the culmination of a long-time interest in communicating the importance of understanding feminist tradition. Showalter’s early essays and editorial work in the late 1970s and the 1980s survey the history of the feminist tradition within the “wilderness” of literary theory and criticism. Working in the field of feminist literary theory and criticism, which was just emerging as a serious scholarly pursuit in universities in the 1970s, Showalter's writing reflects a conscious effort to convey the importance of mapping her discipline’s past in order to both ground it in substantive theory, and amass a knowledge base that will be able to inform a path for future feminist academic pursuit.
Showalter is concerned by stereotypes of feminism that see feminist critics as being ‘obsessed with the phallus’ and ‘obsessed with destroying male artists’. Showalter wonders if such stereotypes emerge from the fact that feminism lacks a fully articulated theory.
Another problem for Showalter is the way in which feminists turn away from theory as a result of the attitudes of some male academics: theory is their property. Showalter writes: ‘From this perspective, the academic demand for theory can only be heard as a threat to the feminist need for authenticity, and the visitor looking for a formula that he or she can take away without personal encounter is not welcome’. In response, Showalter wants to outline a poetics of feminist criticism.
In Toward a Feminist Poetics Showalter divides feminist criticism into two sections:
•The Woman as Reader or Feminist Critique : ‘the way in which a female reader changes our apprehension of a given text, awakening it to the significance of its sexual codes’; historically grounded inquiry which probes the ideological assumptions of literary phenomena’; ‘subjects include the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions of and misconceptions about women in criticism, and the fissures in male–constructed literary history’; ‘concerned with the exploitation and manipulation of the female audience, especially in popular culture and film, and with the analysis of woman–as–sign in semiotic systems’; ‘political and polemical’; like the Old Testament looking for the errors of the past.
One of the problems of the feminist critique is that it is male–orientated. If we study stereotypes of women, the sexism of male critics, and the limited roles women play in literary history, we are not learning what women have felt and experienced, but only what men thought women should be. […] The critique also has a tendency to naturalize women’s victimization by making it the inevitable and obsessive topic of discussion.
•The Woman as Writer or Gynocritics (la gynocritique) :
Showalter coined the term 'gynocritics' to describe literary criticism based in a feminine perspective. Probably the best description Showalter gives of gynocritics is in Towards a Feminist Poetics:
In contrast to [an] angry or loving fixation on male literature, the program of gynocritics is to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt male models and theories. Gynocritics begins at the point when we free ourselves from the linear absolutes of male literary history, stop trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition, and focus instead on the newly visible world of female culture.
This does not mean that the goal of gynocritics is to erase the differences between male and female writing; gynocritics is not “on a pilgrimage to the promised land in which gender would lose its power, in which all texts would be sexless and equal, like angels”. Rather gynocritics aims to understand the specificity of women’s writing not as a product of sexism but as a fundamental aspect of female reality. Its prime concern is to see ‘woman as producer of textual meaning, with the history themes, genres, and structures of literature by women’. Its ‘subjects include the psychodynamics of female creativity. It studies linguistics and the problem of a female language in literary text. It reviews the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career. It proposes ‘to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on women’s experience’. Its study ‘focuses on the newly visible world of female culture’; ‘hypotheses of a female sub–culture’; ‘the occupations, interactions, and consciousness of women’. It projects how ‘feminine values penetrate and undermine the masculine systems that contain them’. And at its extreme, it is ‘engaged in the myth of the Amazons, and the fantasies of a separate female society’.
Showalter acknowledges the difficulty of “[d]efining the unique difference of women’s writing” which she says is “a slippery and demanding task” in “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness”. She says that gynocritics may never succeed in understanding the special differences of women’s writing, or realize a distinct female literary tradition. But, with grounding in theory and historical research, Showalter sees gynocriticism as a way to “learn something solid, enduring, and real about the relation of women to literary culture”.
Showalter then provides an exemplary feminist critique of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge to demonstrate that “one of the problems of the feminist critique is that it is male-oriented,” meaning that, in some sense, every feminist critique, even when criticizing patriarchy, is focused toward the male. As an alternative, Showalter presents gynocritics as a way “to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather that to adapt to male models and theories.”
To begin to trace out this radically female-centered theory, Showalter notes excerpts from feminist historians and sociologists. She then moves on to an engaging discussion of the experiences of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and other female authors to show the need for “completeness” in discussing women authors’ work way in which “it is necessary to leave oneself room to deal with other things besides [women writers'] work, so much has that work been influenced by conditions that have nothing whatever to do with art.”
Beauvoir, Cixous and Showalter: The Trio of Feminist Literary Thought
Three Phases:
From these experiences, Showalter then begins a rough sketch of some of the elements that have characterized women’s writing: awakening, suffering, unhappiness, and matrophobia, among others. She concludes with her classification of women’s writing into three phases that “establish[es] the continuity of the female tradition from decade to decade, rather than from Great Woman to Great Woman.”
Thus, Showalter traces the history of women's literature, suggesting that it can be divided into three phases:
The Feminine phase (1840–1880): Showalter sees the first phases taking place from roughly 1840 to 1880; she calls this “the Feminine phase” and declares that it is characterized by “women [writing] in an effort to equal the intellectual achievements of the male culture… The distinguishing sign of this period is the male pseudonym… [which] exerts an irregular pressure on the narrative, affecting tone, diction, structure, and characterization.”
The Feminist phase (1880–1920): The second, Feminist phase follows from 1880 to 1920, wherein “women are historically enabled to reject the accommodating postures of femininity and to use literature to dramatize the ordeals of wronged womanhood.” This phase is characterized by “Amazon Utopias,” visions of perfect, female-led societies of the future. This phase was characterized by women’s writing that protested against male standards and values, and advocated women’s rights and values, including a demand for autonomy.
The Female phase (1920— ) is one of self-discovery. Showalter says, “women reject both imitation and protest—two forms of dependency—and turn instead to female experience as the source of an autonomous art, extending the feminist analysis of culture to the forms and techniques of literature”. Significantly, Showalter does not offer a characteristic sign or figure for the Female phase, suggesting a welcome diversity of experience that is too broad to be encompassed in a single image.
Rejecting both imitation and protest, Showalter advocates approaching feminist criticism from a cultural perspective in the current Female phase, rather than from perspectives that traditionally come from an androcentric perspective like psychoanalytic and biological theories, for example. Feminists in the past have worked within these traditions by revising and criticizing female representations, or lack thereof, in the male traditions (that is, in the Feminine and Feminist phases). In her essay Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness (1981), Showalter says, "A cultural theory acknowledges that there are important differences between women as writers: class, race nationality, and history are literary determinants as significant as gender. Nonetheless, women’s culture forms a collective experience within the cultural whole, an experience that binds women writers to each other over time and space".
Conclusion: On the whole, we may conclude that her views on feminist poetics are intelligent, largely devoid of rhetorical extremities, and confidently provocative. Showalter speaks with calmly convincing authority, as one who firmly believes in the verity of what she’s saying. She is both earnest, in that she sees change needing to occur immediately, and patient, in that she expects that, given time enough, the wisdom and truth of her cause will prevail.
Additional Resources:
An extraordinary criticism of the dangers of trying to talk for those who have no voice in society. Why? Because it is extremely hard to truly understand what you have only heard about, and not experienced. Watch Macat’s short video for a great introduction to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”—one of the most important essays in the field of postcolonial studies ever written.
References:
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
Eagleton, Mary, editor. Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.
Leitch, Vincent B., editor. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.
Showalter, Elaine. ‘Toward a Feminist Poetics’. The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. London: Virago, 1986. 125- 143
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing.
Showalter, Elaine. “Toward a Feminist Poetics,” was originally published in Mary Jacobus's anthology Women Writing and Writing about Women (1979)
Thompson, Zoë Brigley. The Midnight Heart. 'Toward a Feminist Poetics' by Elaine Showalter. << http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/towards_a_feminist/>
Tolan, Fiona. Feminisms. An Oxford Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Patricia Waugh. OUP. 2006.
Wikipedia contributors. "Elaine Showalter." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 12 Oct. 2013. Web. 27 Dec. 2022.
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