English 345 Fall 2001

Shakespeare

Stephan Flores

Writing Assignment: Essay 1, 1750 words (6-7pp., double-spaced)

Due date: in class, 10-12-01

Note that this advice can also serve as a guide to Essay 2 (8-10 pp., at least two secondary sources/criticism to be referenced/consulted, either through Works Cited page and notes or Works Consulted page, with brief note about the critical relevance)--Essay 2 is due on Dec. 12. An alternative approach to this assignment might consider responding to a large, overarching question through specific instances, arguments, and claims: What have you learned through this class this semester? What has been most productive or problematic, compelling or constructively (?) confusing about studying these plays, posing and exploring the kinds of questions and problems over one or more plays? Have particular premises or modes of analysis been particularly useful? What contexts of value or importance affect your observations and claims (for example, what is to be learned or gained in studying Shakespeare/Renaissance England, studying Shakespeare in performance/production and through texts, does such study have value in the college curriculum, in high school, should the Shakespeare requirement for English majors be retained or dropped, what can one learn about the nature of interpretation, of representation, of ideology, of power, of identities and relations and the social construction of meanings). Have your own critical strategies for making sense of literature and drama developed this semester--how so? why?

I expect that the most interesting and thoughtful essays will tend to convey or describe the play's text in relation to (in support of) an interpretive response by linking how a play 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 play's historical context, the challenges and choices posed by performance, and the structuring effects of genre. 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.

Take care not to define your topic too broadly: generally you will be more successful in focusing a hypothesis if you do not attempt to compare two plays, unless you provide a clear and useful basis for comparison. I encourage you to consult and to refer to secondary sources of criticism (carefully read and refer to one or two recent essays on the play in question), as well as to the critical/historical introductions at the beginning of The Norton Shakespeare and the headnote introductions to each play, when appropriate and useful. As usual, you should consider your audience to be familiar with the play (avoid plot summary), using quotes, paraphrase, and summary primarily to support your analysis; however, if you foreground your critical approach (theoretical perspective), you will probably rely more heavily on such explanatory (expository) techniques as quotes, paraphrase, and summary. Among the works on reserve, I particularly recommend Dollimore's and Sinfield's chapters in Political Shakespeare, Belsey's, Dollimore's, and Sinfield's essays in Alternative Shakespeares ( on sexual difference in comedies, history and ideology), the essays in Rewriting the Renaissance, and particularly Gerald Graff's and James Phelan's introduction to their case study on The Tempest--these are valuable even if you do not plan to write on the particular plays that these critics discuss.

If you are less interested in the "critical essay" mode of interpretation and response, you might consider an analytic review of a play's critical reception or history of performance by comparing several critical essays (e.g., 1-2 essays from 1950-60s? vs 1-2 essays from late 80s-90s), or compare essays with significantly different interpretations, or analyze a particular performance (via film). If you were given the heretical opportunity to rewrite (for text/performance) or extend the final scenes of a play, what would you write and why?

You might choose to direct your essay to performers rehearsing a production of the play in question: identify and address some question that these performers might have, an issue that might be bothering them as they prepare to put on the play (see Ch. 5 of Ways of Making Literature Matter: A Brief Guide, eds. John Schilb and John Clifford, Bedford/St. Martin's P, 2001).

Finally, please discuss your topic (s) with me and others, and give yourself time to work through several drafts of the essay, and to share a draft with me or with classmates or consult a peer tutor at the Writing Center (third floor, Commons, Academic Programs area).

SOME CRITICAL THEORIES AND PRACTICES THAT YOU MIGHT REVIEW (if you've taken English 210) AS YOU REFLECT ON THE CRITICAL METHODS AND PREMISES THAT SHAPE YOUR OWN ANALYSES OF SHAKESPEARE THIS SEMESTER

New Criticism

For this "approach" attend to the ways that tension or conflict--in dramatic action, character traits, tone, images and figurative language, tone, sounds, rhythms--cohere or become juxtaposed to produce the literary text's whole effect and thematic unity, where irony and paradox may work to convey ideas "experientially" and to resolve tension through aesthetic form.

Structuralism

Instead of focusing solely on how a specific play works by relating its form to its meaning in new critical fashion, structuralism inquires into the larger system--the linguistic and discursive structure--that shapes literature itself by determining the "grammar" or semiotic codes that govern the production of and possibilities for meaning. What rules or conventions enable particular texts to be "coded" and "decoded?"

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, male/female, self/other) 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" (Approaching Poetry 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--the illusion of a stable, essential transcendental signified is created by the opposition itself (e.g., Prospero's white, male, aristocratic magical power vs. Sycorax's female, black, witchlike power).

Besides reviewing my handout on Saussure and Derrida (which you don't have!), you might reread 5.6 and 5.7 of Critical Theory & Practice (212-21), and focus on Derrida's use of the term "différance," to ponder how "we are always colluders in the construction of meaning" (218), so that what we seek to analyze or to critique becomes part of and to some extent structures our efforts to dismantle or to understand (master) it, until we can no longer confidently distinguish between the literal and the figurative, between our interpretive efforts or strategies and the text's anticipation of them.

New Historicism

Here are some key assumptions of new historicist theory and practice as summarized by H. Aram Veeser (qtd. in CTP 115) 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?

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 play.

Louis Montrose's "New Historicisms" essay is too complex to summarize here, but among his concerns is the characterization of new historicism as "an academic site of ideological struggle between containment and subversion. This struggle may be reduced to the following scenario. Critics who emphasize the possibilities for the effective agency of individual or collective subjects against forms of domination, exclusion, and assimilation have energetically contested critics who stress the capacity of the early modern state, as personified in the monarch, to contain apparently subversive gestrures, or even to produce them precisely in order to contain them" (Redrawing the Boundaries 402). Montrose wants to move beyond the containment/subversion binary opposition to understand how these concepts are mutually complicit, and to suggest that while our subjectivity/identity is produced by discourse and material forces and relationships, we may also discover facets of individual agency and the capacity for resistance: "Thus my invocation of the term subject is meant to suggest an equivocal process of subjectification: on the one hand, it shapes individuals as loci of consciousness and initiators of action, endowing them with subjectivity and with the capacity for agency; and, on the other hand, it positions, motivates, and constrains them within--it subjects them to--social networks and cultural codes, forces of necessity and contingency, that ultimately exceed their comprehension or control" (Montrose 414-15).

Ideology

In addition to the discussion on ideologies in Critical Theory & Practice (124-34), you might find James H. Kavanagh's comments on ideology helpful:

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)

Post-structuralist Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice

Reread Chapter 4 of CTP ("Subjectivity, psychoanalysis and criticism") and refer again to my own summary (handout). 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?

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?

Cultural identity, the canon, and post-colonial criticism

How is canon--the selection of texts deemed worthy of study etc.--a function of critical method? That is, do our critical theories/practices limit what we're willing to critique? Paul Lauter argues that "the literary canon as we have known it is a product in significant measure of our training in male, white, bourgeois cultural tradition, including in particular the formal techniques of literary analysis. Other cultural traditions provide alternate views about the nature and function of art, and approaches to it" (qtd. in CTP 274). Some authors engage with Eurocentric bias by "writing back" in critical dialogue with canonical works by (1) criticizing with an eye to representation of cultural difference, (2) by rewriting certain features to satirize the original, and (3) by bringing back to prominence characters who are often forgotten--for example, Caliban from Shakespeare's The Tempest or Bertha Mason from Jane Eyre (CTP 277). Another question: Why rewrite Shakespeare rather than just reread him critically? Ashcroft et al. write: The subversion of a canon is not simply a matter of replacing one set of texts with another. This would be radically to simplify what is implicit in the idea of canonicity itself. A canon is not a body of texts per se, but rather a set of reading practices . . . . These reading practices . . . are resident in institutional structures" (qtd. in CTP 284-85).

Henry Louis Gates and Trinh T. Minh-ha critique essentialist and biological definitions of racial identity, but the process of deconstructing the supposedly natural and inherently stable basis of racial identity creates another issue: "the problem of giving up race as a ground on which to fight raises the difficulty of getting one's oppression voiced and recognized. It gives away the ground on which to fight against racism and/or blindness to difference. It is very difficult to explain racism if the category of race itself is denied. Thus, some writers and critics celebrate their ethnic identity and cultural heritage and seek to recliam their subjectivity in this fashion, rather than by trying to dismantle the categories of definition which is the aim of the deconstructionists" (CTP 289).

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