English 210.01 Reading-Writing-Texts Fall 1997

Stephan Flores

Writing Assignment: Essay 2--Critical Theory and Practice in Analyzing Dorfman's Death and the Maiden, or a poem from our anthology, or short fiction from the coursepack available from the UI bookstore.

Length: approximately 1400 words and titled, double-spaced, with Works Cited page

Peer-edit: 14 October (bring substantial word-processed draft to share, two copies).

Due: 10-16-97

For Essay 2, please begin by reviewing the advice offered in the assignment for Essay 1 (partially reprinted here):

In preparing to write this essay, be sure that you have kept up with the assigned reading (at least through 10 Oct. and Butler's essay on "Desire"). Recall that Chapter 12 of Approaching Poetry (222-47) and the section on "Writing Short Papers About Poetry" (454-68) are particularly helpful, but you should also keep in view the major premises and problems posed by the selections from Critical Terms for Literary Study. Although not required, note that I have placed additional resources on reserve that offer advice on writing about poetry (Poger) and writing critical essays (Warhol)--see Reading, Writing, and the Study of Literature, as well as other texts on critical theory and practice.

This assignment, like others for this semester, invites you to engage with our material by exploring the importance of critical theory in relation to a specific work of literature. You may choose to focus your analysis on a particular play, short story, or poem, with your approach or understanding of what's at stake in the literary text framed or shaped to a significant extent by our "theoretical" readings. Or you may explore the importance of a particular assertion or argument about the nature of language and literature or the process of interpretation etc., and then use a text to illustrate your concerns. In other words, whether explicitly foregrounded or clearly implied, "theoretical" concerns should help shape your essay in significant ways: you should focus your explanations (arguments, analyses, interpretations) on the literary text, though you may devote some significant attention to theoretical concepts, questions, and problems.

For those who may emphasize an analysis of a literary work, I expect that the most interesting and thoughtful essays will tend to combine descriptive and interpretive approaches by linking how a text and its reader(s) produce its meaning(s), why it does so, and to what purposes and effects. Our class discussion should also provide you with examples of various ways to address and to identify problems of interpretation and reception, and the importance of considering the work's historical context and genre. The text in question should come from our class unless I grant permission (well beforehand) for analysis of other works. For example, since the Theater Department is producing Samuel Beckett's powerful play, Endgame, at the Collette Theatre beginning October 14, you may want to find a copy of that play to read, and see the first performance before this essay is due. I also want to note that you should not submit an essay for this class that you have submitted ( or intend to submit) for a grade in another course.

For those who decide to address more directly an argument or explanation presented in one of the essays in Critical Terms for Literary Study (see a few suggestions below, but you could choose from a variety of passages or points), be careful to try to explain and consider thoughtfully what is being argued or suggested in the essay, and why it matters or what difference it makes. Can you illustrate by exploring a particular literary text through the terminology and argumentative or interpretive strategies of the essay? What is gained? Are there limits or reservations about such a premise or approach?

As usual, be careful of addressing too broad a topic, and generally you will probably be more successful in focusing a hypothesis if you do not attempt to compare two different literary texts (unless they are short poems). You need not refer to secondary sources of criticism, but if you have, for example, useful historical information on your topic you may incorporate this into your argument, and as I note above, you should also make an effort to "theorize" your analysis with some reference to our texts' comments on critical theory and practice. You should consider your audience to be familiar with the literary work you write about (avoid mere summary), using quotes, paraphrase, and summary primarily to support your analysis; however, when focusing or introducing your analysis of a critical approach (theory), you will probably rely more heavily on such explanatory (expository) techniques as quotes, paraphrase, and summary. Also keep in mind that your critical analysis should supplement or build upon our work; in short, don't simply repeat an argument we have already substantially discussed unless you were engaged substantially in that discussion.

Some writers use the first paragraph to describe an interpretative problem that arises in a specific passage or in a character (and the relations of that character to others or to the text's cultural context), or to present a conflict of critical approaches to the work. Here are some more ways to question and to explore the functions and effects of these texts. I encourage you to confer with me and your peers in developing your ideas and your writing.

CRITICAL ISSUES YOU MIGHT CONSIDER ( I realize that we haven't formally begun to consider some of the "approaches" or positions described below, but you may find these intriguing, foreshadowing theories and terms yet to come. Note that CTP refers to a text on reserve, titled Critical Theory & Practice: A Coursebook.

1. Deconstruction (form of poststructuralism)

Rather than striving to show that a text's ambiguities can be resolved and be seen to cohere in a unified whole (New Criticism), or to presume that all discursive action is primarily predetermined (structuralism), deconstruction attends to contradictions that threaten to undermine such unity or structural stability. A deconstructive analysis exposes figures and oppositions that privilege particular positions and meanings. For example, deconstruction notes how binary oppositions (nature/culture, literal/figurative) demonstrate a particular logic or philosophy of meaning (constituting a rhetorical argument, a culturally positioned and arbitrary arrangement that serves a particular order of things--see Steven Lynn, Texts and Contexts) and then proceeds to question the priority of one term over another, both to show their interdependence and to suggest how "such privileging imposes an interpretive template on the subject being examined" (AP 242, see summary of method on p.244). Once the hierarchy is questioned and even reversed, the opposition may be displaced into a different context to challenge the function of the opposition itself (e.g., reading/writing may not only be opposed and inverted, but considered from another view (context) as radically destabilized in even determining what is written or read (refer back to Graff's essay in CTLS, or read further essays in that anthology by Rowe, Johnson, or Bové).

2. New Historicism

Here are some key assumptions of new historicist theory and practice as summarized by H. Aram Veeser and Steven Lynn (Texts and Contexts 131):

1. that every expressive act is embedded n a network of material practices;

2. that every act of unmasking, critique, and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes;

3. that literary and non-literary texts circulate inseparably;

4. that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths nor expresses inalterable human nature;

5. that a critical method and language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe;

6. that history is knowable only in the sense that all texts are knowable--that is by interpretation, argument, speculation;

7. literature is not simply a mirror of historical reality; history in fact isn't a mirror of historical reality. Literature is shaped by history, and even shapes history; it is also distorted by history, and is even discontinuous with history.

8. Historians and critics must view "the facts" of history subjectively; in fact, the "facts" must be viewed as their creation.

Such premises invite you to explore how a specific literary text represents a particular cultural (social, political, economic, class, religion, gender--ideology) perspective that may be peculiar to its historical context. In his essay "Culture," Stephen Greenblatt suggests that we ask these questions:

a. What kinds of behavior, what models of practice, does this work seem to enforce?

b. Why might readers at a particular time and place find this work compelling?

c. Are there differences between my values and the values implicit in the work I am reading?

d. Upon what social understandings does the work depend?

e. Whose freedom of thought or movement might be constrained implicitly or explicitly by this work?

f. What are the larger social structures with which these particular acts of praise or blame might be connected?

3. Finally, in your analysis you could draw upon (or respond to) Greenblatt by explaining, distinguishing, and illustrating the concepts of "mobility," "constraint," and "exchange [circulation]" in relation to a particular text.

4. In what ways, for example, does one of the texts represent a particular cultural (social, political, economic, class, religion, gender) perspective, problem, or conflict?

5. Recent cultural and historical criticism often turns upon debate over whether texts represent (instantiate, produce?) efforts to subvert or resist dominant ideology, or whether a particular text's final effects work to contain, appropriate, or even reproduce such efforts, thus sustaining the power of the dominant order of things. Consider the utility of this opposition between subversion and containment in relation to specific conflicts and contradictions in the work under discussion. Moreover, when does the this polarized opposition seem less useful and incisive? Are there ways to negotiate the seeming impasse?

6. What kinds of solutions does the work offer to the problems it articulates? Why?

7. To what extent do you agree with a particular essay/theoretical approach to the text and why? Can you extend or further illustrate the critical insights and arguments to other aspects of the work or to another text?

8. Ideology

Refer again to James H. Kavanagh's comments on ideology, and reread Chapter 14, "Culture" in Approaching Poetry.

Ideology is less tenacious as a "set of ideas" than as a system of representations, perceptions, and images that precisely encourages men and women to "see" their specific place in a historically peculiar social formation as inevitable, natural, a necessary function of the "real" itself. . . . there is no such thing as social discourse that is nonideological. . . . Ideology is a social process that works on and through every social subject, that, like any other social process, everyone is "in," whether or not they "know" or understand it. It has the function of producing an obvious "reality" that social subjects can assume and accept, precisely as if it had not beenb socially produced and did not need to be "known" at all. The "nonideological" insistence does not mark one's freedom from ideology, but one's involvement in a specific, quite narrow ideology which has the exact social function of obscuring--even to the individual who inhabits it--the specificity and peculiarlity of one's social and political position, and of preventing any knowledge of the real processes that found one's social life. ("Ideology" 310-12 Critical Terms for Literary Study)

9. Post-structuralist Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice

Refer again to Meltzer's essay "Unconscious" and Butler's essay "Desire." You might consider, in particular, how the concept of the "subject" or "subjectivity" challenges the notion of an autonomous, personal self (individualism, purely private desires). For example, Kaja Silverman suggests that the term "subject" or our "subjectivity" can be regarded as the "product of signifying activities which are both culturally specific and generally unconscious . . . . it suggests that even desire is culturally instigated, and hence collective" (qtd. in CTP 142). Or consider why and how the "literary critic occupies thus at once the place of the psychoanalyst . . . and the place of the patient" (Felman qtd. in CTP 144). If you want to take up Lacan's contention that all subjectivity (knowing/desire) is predicated on loss, absence, and failure, you might find Madan Sarup's excellent introduction to Lacan well worth reading (Ch. 1 of Post-structuralism and Postmodernism, on reserve). A Lacanian reading recognizes that what one discovers within the discourse of anOther--the unconscious--is a trace of what is actively reading within oneself; in effect, the text reads the reader (subject) who unconsciously repeats its structures and thereby dismantles distinctions between subject (critic) and object (textual other), master/slave, reading and writing. When such apparently mutual recognition occurs--when I feel that I understand the text and that it seems to understand, even to interpret me, then reading and interpretation are also forms of desire, where my interpretive narrative or its story become "love" stories exchanged in the interest of knowledge of each other. Freud and Lacan argue that this process of "transference" and counter-transference is at work within, or structures, all kinds of communication, particularly acts of "interpretation." Can you show within a work or in your relation to a work how a reading/interpreting Subject projects his or her desire(s) onto another (text), and show how that which the Subject perceives as Other may be his or her culturally-inflected, unconscious desires already active within himself/herself? Why does Judith Butler argue that "language is bound to founder on the question of desire? (370 CTLS)?

10. Feminist Theory and Practice

As Ch. 6 of CTP notes, feminist criticism offers diverse, heterogeneous perspectives on such important but problematic issues as the "definition and stability of a gendered identity" and how to characterize, recognize, and critique the "gender-based struggle for power over definition and meanings" (CTP 229). As Germaine Greer argued in the early 1970s, feminine stereotypes are acts of--or effects of--commodification within a system of patriarchal capitalism that deals in the display and exchange of women. Should "feminist" critics today continue to explore such exchanges of representations of women in literary texts? In the mid 1980s, Hélène Cixous argued that the "feminine" is largely absent from the patriarchal order of language, appearing only as negative, subordinated terms in a series of figurative, binary oppositions that produce and are produced by phallogocentrism (CTP 245). Rather than dwelling upon the "otherness" of feminine discourse, Luce Irigaray insists on the subversive, parodic, multivalent potential of écriture féminine. How do such assertions and observations affect your sense of what's at stake in coming to terms with the genders of discourse? If we acknowledge the instability of subjectivity--withJulia Kristeva and other anti-essentialists--what happens to efforts to make a difference--a collective, political difference--in the name of "women" or "feminism?" Do the difficulties of defining "lesbian" writing (CTP 250-53) also inhabit feminist criticism in general? Criticism in general? What relations do "gender studies" or "men's studies" bear to "women" studies? Myra Jehlen states that "speaking of gender does not mean speaking only of women. As a critical term 'gender' invokes women only insofar as in its absence they are essentially invisible. And it brings them up not only for their own interest but to signal the sexed nature of men as well, and beyond that the way the sexed nature of both women and men is not natural but cultural. In this sense, gender may be opposed to sex as culture is to nature so that its realtion to sexual nature is unknown and probably unknowable: how, after all, do we speak of human beings outside of culture?" (Critical Terms for Literary Study 265). After discussing the "performative" nature of gender, Jehlen declares provocatively: "It is logically impossible to interrogate gender--to transform it from axiom to object of scrutiny and critical term--without also interrogating race and class" (272). Can you explain, emulate, illustrate what Jehlen means?

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