UNIT 1.

INTRODUCTION TO POSTRUSTURALIST THEORIES

1. LITERARY TEXT: A REFUSAL TO MOURN THE DEATH, BY FIRE, OF

A CHILD IN LONDON by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

1.1. CONTEXT
- Author: Dylan Thomas
- Title: A refusal to mourn the dead, by fire, of a child in London.
o A declaration of intention: the title announces what the poem will do, although then
it ends up just the opposite.
o , by fire,: stresses that this is a sacrificial death.
- Authors nationality: a welsh poet (from Wales), born in the city of Swansea (bombed as
well during the Biltz World War II). He lived in London, the city which most
dramatically suffered the consequences of these bombings.
- Historical context: Published in 1945 in a journal, towards the end of World War II. A
girl died during the Biltz in London inspired him to write this poem.
- Literary context: Thomass work is developed in modernism, a literary movement
developed during the first half of the 20th century, characterized by formal
experimentation. It is the movement that most directly reflects the effects of the two
great world wars.

1.2. FORM AND CONTENT

1) GENRE: it belongs to the genre of poetry, more specifically lyrical poetry and Elegy

2) POETIC SPEAKER/VOICE/PERSONA:
- Written in first person
- We could identify it with the voice of the author
- It expresses a pacifist ideology

3) VISUAL ELEMENTS

a) METAPHORS:
- FATHERING: metaphor and personification. Creating (=fathering) is becoming the father of
a child. Masculine metaphor which contrasts the figure of the mother (last stanza)
- THE SEA TUMBLING IN HARNESS: sea= violent horse; harness= to keep it under control
- Metaphors with Judeo-Christian Biblical connotations suggesting peaceful and protected
spaces:
o THE ROUND ZION OF THE WATER BEAD: a metaphor inside a metaphor water
drop=water bead (bubble, drop...)=the city of Zion
o THE SYNAGOGE OF THE EARN OF CORN
- THE LAST VALLEY OF SACKCLOTH: suggesting the Biblical phrase valley of tears
- MY SALT SEED: combines the two central events to the poem SALT=DEATH (mourning)
SEED=REBIRTH (engendering)

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- NOR BLASPHEME DOWN THE STATIONS OF THE BREATH: metaphorical allusion to the
journey towards death Jesus. In non-religious terms =journey of life, first station of breath
being birth.
- A GRAVE TRUTH= ironically used
- the dark veins of her mother= reference to mother earth

b) SYNESTHESIA:
- THE SHADOW OF A SOUND (sound + sight)

4) IMAGERY (the use of language to represent ideas, feelings, objects...):

- BIRD, BEAST AND FLOWERS: it could represent various forms of life.

5) AURAL ELEMENTS
- Poem arranged in STANZAS and LINE-BREAKS (break and divide the text into different lines)
- It follows the REGULAR STANZAIC FORM= 4 stanzas of 6 lines each
- RHYME SCHEME: regular abcabc
- ALLITERATION: mankind making; bird beast, last light, sow my salt seed
- METRE and RHYTHM:
o Traditional English rhythms:
Long verses: 4 beats (stressed syllables)
Short verses (verses 2 and 5): 3 beats
o Variation in the length of the lines (from 5 syllables: beard beast and flowers to 11
the majesty and burning of the childs death

6) SYNTAX
- NON STANDARD SYNTAX and PUNCTUATION
- First sentence covers 1st, 2nd and the first line of the 3rd stanza= a syntactically complex TIME
AGENT (main verb in the 20th line= Shall I let pry)
- Intentional breaking of the first sentence into 3 stanzas: function of breaking down of the
language in correspondence with its subject matter (decomposition; the end of the world)
- ENJAMBMENT
o ... the round /Zion...
o ... to mourn / the majesty and burning of the childs death
- GERUNDS around the first stanza (making, breaking, tumbling....)= suggests action in
progress
- The recurrence of the CONJUNCTION and(6 times within the first 13 lines)

7) POETIC DEVICES/ FIGURES OF SPEECH

- PERSONIFICATION:
o FATHERING: creating is becoming the father of a child
o Her MOTHER: the earth
- PARADOX: refuses to mourn but ends up mourning

8) THEME: the death of a little girl as a result of a German Bomb during the Biltz in London
in 1940-1941 and the rebirth.

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 9) INTERRELATION FORM CONTENT
- Rhythm and syntax that recall the solemn style of a preacher and the Biblical quality of some
images
- The form reflects the speakers confusion, shock and expresses the contradiction between
intending not mourn and ending up doing so

1.3. THEORY AND CRITICISM

Post-structuralism does not take into account the authors intentions (so avoid biographical
circumstances, supposed intentions, etc. )

PS Looks for DISUNITY, rejects fixed meanings: dissolve the meanings, deconstructing it, reading
the poem against itself, in 3 stages:

THE VERBAL STAGE

Read against itself: going against the grain of the poem.

CONTRADICTIONS:

After the first death there is no other: if there is a first, there must be a 2nd, 3rd...

Juxtaposition of never and until, it will never happen but it will happen at a given moment
(until)

the still hour (...) tumbling still -lack of movement/ tumble -a violent continuous movement.

the majesty and burning: conflicting images.

PARADOXES:

tell with silence

Those internal contradictions= examples of languages unreliability and slipperiness

PS reverses the polarity of common BINARY OPPOSITIONS1 (like male and female, day and
night, light and dark... ) so that the second term is privileged and regarded as the more desirable:

- light -darkness: darkness as engendering life (rather than light), as a moment of

realization that will spring awareness.
- life and death

Those paradoxes = show that language does not reflect our world but constitutes a world of its
own, a kind of parallel universe or virtual reality.

THE TEXTUAL STAGE

A more overall view of the poem (beyond individual phrases):

DISCONTINUITIES; SHIFTS and BREAKS in the continuity of the poem (in focus, in time, in
tone, in point of view, pace, attitude, vocabulary, grammar) that show paradox and
contradictions on a large scale.

1st stanza= an impersonal phrase, which contrasts with the use of I in the 2nd stanza.

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BINARY OPPOSITION: The principle of contrast between two mutually exclusive terms; each term is
dependent on the other to constitute itself mutually exclusive terms (on/off, up/down, left/right). The study of
binary opposition is one of the key of post-structuralism.
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The first two stanzas refer to geological ages and the end of the world: the last light breaks, the
sea finally becomes still, the cycle which produces Bird beast and flowers comes to an end as
all humbling darkness descends. But the third stanza talks about the present the recent death
of the child. The majesty and burning of the childs death

The final stanza = historical progression of the history of London, as witnessed by the
unmourning water/of the riding Thames.

So we are not given a single context to contextualize the death of the child= difficult to
understand

OMMISIONS: he does not tell why he refuses to mourn, why his intention of not doing so is then
carried out

THE LINGUISTIC STAGE

Moments when language as a medium of communication is called into a question (unreliability
of language)

The whole poem does what it says it will not do: says he will not murder/the mankind of her
going with a grave truth= condemns all the accepted ways of speaking about this event, but it is
not followed by silence

Contradiction between intention and performance =a kind of paradox involving the whole text.

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 2. CRITICAL AND LITERARY THEORY: POST-STRUCTURALISM AND
DECONSTRUCTION

THEORETICAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN STRUCTURALISM AND POST-

STRUCTURALISM
Structuralism= language does not reflect the world: rather, it shapes it= how we see is what we see.

Post-Structuralism= the consequences of this belief are:

- Uncertainty: no access to any fixed landmark (reference point) beyond linguistic processing not
standard (norm, model) to measure anything.
- This lack of intellectual reference points=the DECENTRED UNIVERSE, we cannot know where we
are= all the concepts that defined the centre (and the margins) have been deconstructed.

STRUCTURALISM POST-STRUCTURALISM

ORIGINS -From linguistic (objective knowledge can -From philosophy (difficulty of achieving secure
be established) knowledge about things. Nietzsche: there are no
facts, only interpretations.
-Scientific outlook: method, system and
reason to establish reliable truths. -Scepticism, regarding any confidence in the scientific
method as naive (ignorant, simple)

TONE AND -Its writing: abstraction and generalisation -Its writing: more emotive, urgent and euphoric tone.
STYLE
-Neutral and anonymous style (typical of -Titles and/or central lines often containing puns
scientific writing) (word-play) and allusions

ATTITUDE TO -No access to the reality other than through -We are not fully in control of the language: meanings
LANGUAGE the language are fluid, subject to constant slippage.

-We need to use language to think and -Words do not have pure meaning, they are
perceive with. contaminated by their opponents (we cannot define
night without reference to day) or they are interfered by
their own history.

PROJECT It questions our way of structuring and It distrusts the notion of reason, human being is not
(fundamental categorising the reality and incite to escape an independent entity, but it is a dissolved or
aims of each from habitual modes of perception, it constructed subject: the individual = a product of
movement) believes that we can thereby (this way) attain social and linguistic forces, not an essence at all.
a more reliable view of things.

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POST-STRUCTURALISM LIFE ON A DECENTRED PLANET
PS emerged in France in the late 1960s. Two figures associated with this emergence:

Ronald Barthes:
He moved from a Structuralist phase to a PS phase as it can be seen by comparing two different
accounts of the nature of the narrative:

1) The Structural Analysis of Narrative (1966): detailed, methodological and technical

2) The Pleasure of the Text (1973): a series of random comments on narrative, arranged
alphabetically (emphasising its randomness)

Between them, The Death of the Author (1968) = the hinge (bisagra) round which he turns from
structuralism to post-structuralism:

- The independence of the literary text: the work is not determined by intention, or context.
Rather, it is free by its nature of all such control.
- The death of the author= the birth of the reader.

So he moved from seeing the text as something produced by the author to see the text as something
produced by the reader (in a way, by the language itself)

This early PS phase = the endless free play of meanings and the escape from all forms of authority.

Later= a shift to a more disciplined and austere textual republicanism suggested by Barbara Johnson
(deconstruction is not an abandonment of all restraint (control), but a disciplined identification and
dismantling of the sources of textual power)

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) (philosopher):

His lecture (discourse) Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Science = the starting
point of PS:

- He sees in modern times a particular intellectual event, which constitutes a radical break from
past ways of thought= the decentring of our intellectual universe.
- Previously, the existence of a centre or a norm in all things was taken for granted= man was
the measure of all other things (white Western norms of dress, behaviour, intellectual outlook...)
- A centre against which deviations= identified as Other and marginal.
- 20th century= this centre destroyed because of historical events, scientific discoveries, intellectual
or artistic revolutions...
- The resulting universe= there are no fixed points= we live in a decentred or relativistic
universe.
- This decentre universe of free play is liberating (as Barthes in the Death of the Author
celebrates the demise (death) of the author as ushering in an era of joyous freedom)

He published 3 books in the following years, confirming his prominence (importance):

- Speech and Phenomena

- Of Grammatology
- Writing and Difference

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All philosophical rather than literary topics, but

- His method involves the deconstructive reading of selected aspects of other philosophers
works
- Deconstructive methods borrowed by literary critics and used in the reading of literary works.

The deconstructive reading of literary texts= makes them emblems of the decentred universe (texts
previously regarded as unified artistic artefacts are shown to be fragmented, self-divided, and centre-less)

Of Grammatology= a key text in PS:

- there is nothing outside the text
- The section The exorbitant. Question of Method, on interpreting Rousseaus Essay on the
origin of languages= calls into question his own method of interpreting this text and the nature
of interpretation.
- He argues the concept of the supplement (replacement), in the sense that language replaces the
reality. What is the nature of this standing in (replacing) if the writer is inscribed in a determined
textual system, and if we all inherit the language as a ready-made (pre-cooked) system.
- So we may not be expressing ourselves when writing, but merely some aspects of the language:

The writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse by
definition cannot dominate absolutely. He uses them by only letting himself, after a fashion and up to a
point, be governed by the system. (Derrida, Of Grammatology)

- Reading and interpretation are not reproducing what the writer meant. Instead, it must produce
the text (there is nothing behind it to reconstruct).
- Reading= deconstructive rather than reconstructive.

STRUCTURALISM AND POST-STRUCTURALISM SOME PRACTICAL

DIFFERENCES
STRUCTURALISM POST-STRUCTURALISM
-shows the unity under apparent -oppositional reading to unmask internal contradictions or
disunity. inconsistencies in the text, to show the disunity which underlies its
-looks for parallels, echoes, apparent unity.
reflections... to show a unity within -they often fix on a detail which looks incidental (for ex. a metaphor)
the text, as if the text knows what it and then use it as the key of the whole text, so that everything is read
wants to do and has directed all its through it.
means towards this end. -looks for gaps, breaks, fissures and discontinuities of all kinds.

The structuralist seeks: The post-structuralist seeks:

-Parallels/Echoes -Contradictions/Paradoxes
-Balances -Shifts/Breaks in: tone, viewpoint, tense, time, person, attitude
-Reflections/Repetitions -Conflicts
-Symmetry -Absences/Omission
-Contrast -Linguistic quirks
-Patterns -Aporia

Effect: to show textual unity and Effect: to show textual disunity

coherence

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These characteristics can be illustrated by the poem The Castaway by William Cowper:

- The text works at two levels:

1) On the surface=the death of a man on a ship accident.
2) At a deeper level= Cowpers own fears and isolation, due to his mental breakdown (depression).
- Expressing CONTRADICTIONS or PARADOXES may involve showing that the feelings professed
(declared) in a poem can be at odds (in conflict) with those expressed.
The speaker says he does not blame his shipmates for his plight (bad situation): they did all they
could to save him. But elsewhere he implies that they desert him and hurry off to save
themselves.
- Pointing to BREAKS, GAPS, FISSURES, DISCONTINIUITIES= way of implying that the text lacks unity
and consistency of purpose. Changes in tone, perspective, point of view...
This text sometimes uses I and sometimes he for the man lost overboard.
- The LINGUISTIC QUIRKS which seem relevant include several kinds of linguistic oddity (peculiarity),
which undermine secure meanings.
- The term APORIA= popular in deconstructive criticism; refers to the self-contradictory nature of
a text:
It is an impasse, and designates a knot (nudo) in the text which cannot be solved because
what is said is self-contradictory.
The Death of the Author everything must be disentangled (desenredado), nothing
deciphered (decoded).
So APORIA= a knot which resists disentanglement such as contradictions, paradoxes,
shifts

WHAT POST-STRUCTURALIST CRITICS DO:

1. They read the text against itself looking for hidden meanings considered as the textual
subconscious which may contradict the surface meaning.
2. They focus on superficial similarities of the words (in sound, in their root meanings) and
bring these to the foreground (front), becoming them crucial to the overall meaning of the
text.
3. They look for inconsistencies and fissures in a text, in order to show that the text is
characterized by disunity rather than unity.
4. They concentrate on a single passage and analyze it so intensively. As a result, multiple
meanings emerge and it becomes impossible to sustain a single and stable meaning.
5. They look for shifts and breaks and see these as evidence of what is repressed (suppressed),
or silenced, or ignored by the text in its surface meaning. These discontinuities are called
fault-lines (a geological metaphor referring to the breaks in rock formations which give
evidence of previous activity and movement).

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 3. CRITICAL AUTHORS

3.1. ROLAND BARTHES (1915-1968). The death of the Author (1968)

- CAPITALIST IDEOLOGY Individualism= a defining feature of capitalism.

- ALLEGORY: a story, play, poem, picture.... In which the meaning is represented symbolically...it
involves personification= representation of human ideas, feelings, virtues, vices, experiences...
with symbolical human figures carrying symbolical objects that allow to identify their meaning

- SIGNIFIED: Every sign (a word). It has two elements:

- SIGNIFIER (what you can physically perceive through a sound or a graphic mark)
- SIGNIFIED (what the sound or graphic marc conceptually refers to)

- THE PERSON OF THE AUTHOR (line 6) he links the capitalist notion of the individual to the
notion of the individual or person who writes, = the author.

- ORDINARY CULTURE reads and interprets literature through its author (his life, his testes, his
passions), while MALLARM and VALRY (French poets) emphasizes writing, linguistic
activity and the essentially verbal condition of literature over the person of the author.

- For ordinary culture, the AUTHOR:

- the person who produces literary work
- is solely responsible for the meaning of that literary work
- the father of the book (= his child over whom he holds authority=

- MODERN SCRIPTOR (Barthes term): not responsible for a book in the same way as the author
- She wrote the text, but does not have authority over it
- We must not give him this authority by trying to ascertain what he meant, his ideas, life...
- Is born simultaneously with the text. Since the text is played (as a musical instrument)
every time a reader reads and interprets the text, the modern scriptor is also the reader
himself, his act of reading.
- So is half-way between the text and each individual readers particular reading of the text.

- Author must die in order for the reader to be born: the reader must not look for authority in
the Author, must eliminate the Author in order to liberate meaning through the act of reading.

- The reader interprets the text creatively and this creative reading is far more important than the
Authors intentions and ideas, which are no longer relevant or important.

- He uses terms like AUTHOR-GOD, THEOLOGICAL, ANTI-THEOLOGICAL, TO REFUSE

GOD ... : to seek meaning in a text through its author it is like searching for a transcendent being
or God who can confer ultimate, fixed meaning on everything.

- To interpret a text through the Author = to close the writing. Meaning is liberated only if
writing is linked to an antitheological practice; writing must refuse to fix meaning... and
refuse God.
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 3.2. JACQUES DERRIDA (1930-2004). Of Grammatology (1967)

KEY TERMS:

- SIGNIFIED: meaning

- SIGNIFIER: word

- REFERENT= signified. It refers to the concept to which the signifier is related.

- TRASCENDENTAL SIGNIFIED:
- An ultimate, fixed meaning (the theological message of the Author-God for Barthes).
- Derrida is critical of the search for a transcendental signified or supreme meaning.

relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he

does not command of the patterns of the language he uses : he is sceptical of the
writers supposed authorial/ authoritative command (dominio) over what he produces. Only the reader
is able to perceive the tension (relationship) between what a writer thinks he can control and what he
cannot (what he commands and what he does not command).

He questions the validity of a reading which accepts the writers authority over his text and its
meaning, and encourages a critical reading instead, which perceives the texts discrepancies and
contradictions and from which meanings will emerge.

About WRITING-READING:
Yet if reading must not be content with doubling the text, it cannot transgress the text toward
something other than it(self), toward a referent or a signified outside the text whose content could
take place, could have taken place outside of language, that is to say, (...) outside of writing in
general. (We propose) the absence of the referent or the transcendental signified. There is nothing
outside of the text. There has never been anything but writing; (...)

Although it is not commentary, our reading must be intrinsic and remain within the text:

Reading cannot simply reproduce a text. Neither can it look for meaning (a referent, a signified) which may
be historical, biographical, psychological... outside the text. Reading can only seek meaning inside a
text: Our reading must remain within the text.

Ultimate meaning or meaning which lies beyond the text (transcendental signified) does not exist.

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UNIT 2. INTRODUCTION TO NEW HISTORICISM

LITERARY TEXT: 12 OClock News by Elizabeth Bishop

prose poem

Published in the collection Geography III in 1976, during the Vietnam War

By Elizabeth Bishop, American post-World War II poet

UNUSUAL FORM:

- It is arranged in paragraphs, not stanzas or verses

- It has italicised words in the margins

DEFAMILIARIZATION: description of familiar objects, person or situation in an unusual way, to draw

the attention of the reader to language itself.

- The poem looks like a bulletin

- Words (left) are familiar objects typically used by a journalist: personifications, metaphors
- The paragraphs (right) are metaphorical or figurative descriptions of these objects
- ANALOGY (similarity) between what a journalist can do with words and what she (a poet) can
do with words too: represent reality with false words.

The objects evoke landscapes and people of Vietnam during the War

VENTRILOQUISED VOICE: imitation of a voice that does not correspond with the ideas, belief... of the
author, to produce a specific effect= in this case DISTANCE: she does not want to be identified with
these ideas; she is critical of the official discourse ideology about Vietnam War and the media
broadcasting them.

So she imitates this discourse by using the ventriloquised voice IRONICALLY

The reader becomes aware that language can manipulate reality.

METAPOETRY or METADISCOURSE: name elements that make the poem talk about poetry itself and
language or discourse about itself.

Example: self references, self irony (to make sure that the text is interpreted as irony): on describing
the typewriter particularly shaped terraces on which the welfare of this tiny principality depends
suggest:

- The rice terraces that feed Vietnamese

- The journalists welfare: to whom earn a living depends on writing
- Bishops welfare: also writing to earn a living

So she shows how writing is affected by material and social factors.

ALLITERATION: repetition of sounds = making the text more musical

ONOMATOPAEYA: imitation of natural sounds using phonemes = sounds related to the elements of
the description (Ex. sounds imitating sound of a typewriter)

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CONNECTION BETWEEN OBJECTS PARAGRAPHS BY USING VISUAL PARALLELS (but not only):

1) GOOSNECK LAMP The full moon and the light shed by both = poor light (Shed: to shed
light physically / to clarify)
2) TYPEWRITER Shaped terraces (an urban object a rural and timeless activity)
3) PILE OF MSS (manuscripts) White, calcareous and shaly soil. Shaly: consolidated mud, like
the image of paper piled
4) TYPED SHEETS (hojas) field... it is dark speckled, like papers covered in typed words
5) ENVELOPES signboards (panel publicitario) on a truly gigantic scale suggesting
Communist propaganda in North Vietnam
6) INK- BOTTLE the mysterious, oddly shaped, black structure
- Linked to the poor light (moon light) : absence of illumination: inability to understand
- Ink- bottle: a secret weapon= writing; unreliable journalism
- The poem is also a secret weapon against that official discourse, ideology and propaganda
7) TYPEWRITER ERASER unicycle used by the unicyclist courier
- Eraser = the uniclycle used by the unicyclist courier
- The brush (brocha) = the bristling hair of the indigenes
- The verbs point to the fact that reality is being distorted by words (the reporter is guessing,
deducing...)
- appears to be: hesitant expression = unreliability of the description (is not a dead body, but
a typewriter eraser)
- The eraser anticipates the erasure of his life (cyclist) Alive, he would have been...
8) ASHTRAY (full of cigarettes) the nest of soldiers lying heaped together and in
hideously contorted positions, all dead
- Butts (colillas) = death bodies PERSONIFICATION
- The voice, in a false tone of commiseration, puts the blame (of their death) on the
"childishness and the hopeless impracticality of this inscrutable people, our opponents" or
"the sad corruption of their leaders" = negative view of the natives and the implicit idea of
technical, intellectual and moral superiority of the Americans
- The poem ends with an image of death... message: war kills.

IN CONNECTION WITH CRITICAL THEORY (POST-STRUCTURALISM)

- Poem inspired by war, its consequences

- Shape that suggests division, conflict
- BINARY OPPOSITIONS overturned by the connections (words- paragraphs)
- The imperialist binary THEM/US + condescending tone of the speaker (elusive natives...
from our superior ventage position...) + the visually separate text = poems strategy to
connect words - paragraphs
- The text emphasizes the use of language to distort reality, by using a ventriloquised voice
(not representing her ideas)
- Bishop's purpose= to make us not to identify, but to reject, those ideas.

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CRITICAL AND LITERARY THEORY: NEW HISTORICISM AND
CULTURAL MATERIALISM

NEW HISTORICISM (NH)

NH= a term coined by the American Stephen Greenblatt. His book Renaissance Self-Fashioning:
From More to Shakespeare (1980) is considered the beginning of NH

But there were some tendencies before.

NH is a method based on the parallel reading of literary and non-literary texts, usually of the same
historical period.

It refuses to privilege the literary text: instead of a literary foreground and a historical
background, literary and non-literary texts are given equal weight and constantly inform or
interrogate each other.

Louis Montrose= it is a combined interest in the textuality of history and the historicity of texts.

Greenblatt= it involves an intensified willingness to read all of the textual traces (rastros) of the past
with the attention traditionally conferred (otorgado) only on literary texts.

Paradox = it is an approach to literature in which there is no privileging of the literary.

The typical NH essay avoids making an introduction based on previous interpretations about the
play in question, and begins with an anecdote: a powerful and dramatic opening that often cite date
and place, and have the force of eyewitness account, evoking the quality of lived experience rather
than history.

These historical document are not subordinated as context, but are analysed in their own right (by
itself), so they are called co-text rather than context.

The text and co-text are seen as expressions of the same historical moment and interpreted
accordingly.

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NEW HISTORICISM and OLD HISTORICISM SOME DIFFERENCES:
NEW HISTORICISM OLD HISTORICISM

-Equal weighting (importance) to literary and non-literary texts. -Hierarchical separation

between the literary text
(object of value) and the
-Defines itself against Tillyards books. historical background (less
worth: merely the setting)

- Reading literature within the archival continuum summarises this

method= it is a historicist rather than a historical movement= -Representative of Old
interested in history as recorded in written documents, as text. Historicism: Tillyards
The Elizabethan World
-Historical events as such (como tal) are lost, so the real living Picture and
individual (individuo vivo) is substituted for the literary text which has Shakespeares History
come down to us. Plays. These books
described the set of (serie
-The word of the past replaces the world of the pass, since the events
de) conservative mental
and attitudes of the past now exist solely as writing.
attitudes (to society, deity
(God)...), which symbolize
the Elizabethan outlook
- The influence of deconstruction: It accepts Derridas there is nothing reflected in Shakespeare's
outside the text everything about the past is only accessible plays= the practice of close
through texts. reading and analysis of
patterns of imagery.
A text is thrice-processed:

1) ideology of its own time

2) ideology of our time

3) distorting web of language

Whatever is represented in a text is thereby REMADE. A new entity is

formed as the play or poem under discussion is juxtaposed with a
chosen document.

-The objection that the chosen document may not be relevant for the
play is disarmed since the aim is not to represent the past as it really
was, but to present a new reality by re-situating it.

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NEW HISTORICISM AND FOUCAULT:
NH is anti-establishment: it is on the side of liberal ideas (personal freedom, accepting all forms of
difference and deviance (desviacin)).

It despairs of the survival of people in the face of the repressive state. This notion of the state as all-
powerful and all-seeing steams from (derives from) the post-structuralist Michael Foucault (cultural
historian), whose image of the state is that of panoptic (all-seeing)2.

This state maintains its surveillance by the power of its discursive practices rather than by force

Discourse is not just a way of speaking or writing, but the whole 'mental set' and ideology that
encloses the thinking of all members of a given society. It is not singular or MONOLITIC as there are
a multiplicity of discourses.

To NH the extent of this thought control implicates that deviant thinking may become literally
unthinkable, so that the state is seen as a MONOLITHIC STRUCTURE and change becomes almost
impossible.

Foucault:

- Less distinction between repressive structures and ideological structures than

Althusser (Marxist philosopher)
- Looks at state punishment, prisons, the medical profession and legislation about sexuality as
the institutions which enable this thought control maintained.

NH represents a significant extension of literary studies (despite the word historicism): it involves
intensive close reading, in the literary-critical manner, of non-literary text.

Documents are not usually offered entire: an extract is intensively examined (contextualisation is
minimal). Little attention is paid to previous writings about the same text.

So this is a true words on the page in which context is dispensed with (got rid of)

Method not greatly valued by historians (as the interpretative weight placed on a single document is great)

ADVANTADGES AND DISADVANTADGES OF NEW HISTORICISM

1) Although founded on post-structuralist thinking, it is written in a far more accessible way
(avoiding dense style and vocabulary).
Its data and draws, its conclusions are easy to challenge, since the interpretation rests in an
empirical foundation which is openly available for scrutiny (close examination).
2) Fascinating material= it is wholly distinctive in the context of literary studies
Not citing previous discussions of the literary work results in tidy, clear and stark (escueto)
essays.
3) The political edge of NH is always sharp (agudo) but less polemic and more willing to allow the
historical evidence its own voice than straight Marxist criticism.

2
The Panopticon was a desing for a circular prison whose cells could be surveyed by a single warder (guarda)
positioned at the centre of the circle.
15
WHAT NEW HISTORICISTS DO:
1) They juxtapose literary and non-literary texts, reading the former (literary text) in the light of
the latter (non-literary text).

2) They try thereby to defamiliarise the canonical literary text, detaching it from the
accumulated weight of previous literary scholarship and seeing it as if new.

3) They focus attention (within both texts and co-texts) on issues of state power and how it is
maintained, on patriarchal structures and their perpetuation, and on the process of
colonisation, with its accompanying mind-set

4) They make use, in doing so, of aspects of the post-structuralist outlook, especially Derrida's
notion that every facet of reality is textualised, and Foucault's idea of social structures as
determined by dominant discursive practices

16
CRITICAL AUTHORS:

HAYDEN WHITE, The Historical Text as Literary Artifact (1978)

DEFINITIONS:
- NARRATIVE:
- A telling of some true or fictitious event or connected sequence of events, recounted by a
narrator to a narratee.
- It should be distinguished from descriptions of qualities, states, or situations, and also from
dramatic enactments of events [...].
- A set of events (the story) recounted in a process of narration (or discourse).

- STORY: a narrative or tale recounting a series of events. In the modern distinction between
story and PLOT:
- Story: the full sequence of events as we assume them to have occurred in their likely order,
duration, and frequency
- Plot: a particular selection and (re-)ordening of these.

- ROMANCE: a fictional story in verse or prose that relates improbable adventures of idealized
characters in some remote enchanted setting; or a tendency in fiction opposite to realism.

- TRAGEDY: a serious play (or a novel) representing the disastrous downfall of a central character,
the protagonist.

- COMEDY: a play (or other literary composition) written chiefly to amuse its audience by
appealing to a sense of superiority over the characters depicted (described, represented)...normally
closer to the representation of everyday life, rather than tragedy, and explore common human
failings rather than tragedys disastrous crimes. Happy ending for the leading characters.

- SATIRE: it exposes the failings of individuals, institutions, or societies to ridicule and scorn (reject).

- EPIC: long narrative poem celebrating the great deeds (hazaas) of one or more heroes

TERMS AND EXPRESSIONS:

- VERBAL FICTIONS (paragraph 1): a construct which is made of words and based on invention
rather than reality.

- VALUE-NEUTRAL (par. 2): he says that historical events acquire narrative value only after the
historian organizes them into a specific plot type (as a story that is tragic, comic, romantic).
Before that, their narrative value is potential and neutral.

- EMPLOTED (par. 3): organized into a plot.

- FICTION MAKING (par. 4): the historian bestows (give) a particular significance upon certain
historical events and then matches them up with a precise type of plot. This is what is involved
when we make fiction, he says.

- TAILORING (par. 7): adapting the facts to a particular story form.

17
WHITES STATEMENTS AND THEIR MEANING:
[H]istorical narratives are not only models of past events and processes,
but also metaphorical statements which suggest a relation of similitude
between such events and processes and the story types that we
conventionally use to endow (do tar d e) the events of our lives with culturally
sanctioned (approved, agreed) meanings (par. 6).

Historical narratives do not only arrange past events in a particular way, according to certain fiction-
making conventions; they are also metaphors which propose a similarity between those events and
certain story models. These story models are meaningful to us in culturally accepted ways.

When a given concourse of events is emplotted as a tragedy, this simply

means that the historian has so described the events as to remind us of
that form of fiction which we associate with the concept tragic (par. 8).

He associates literary or narrative terms (emplotted, tragedy, fiction) with how a historian identifies
certain historical events. That identification adopts the name of a particular narrative genre such as
tragedy (or comedy, epic...)

The older distinction between fiction and history, in which fiction is

conceived as the representation of the imaginable and history as the
representation of the actual, must give place to the recognition that we
can only know the actual by contrasting it with or likening it to the
imaginable (par. 10).

We can use deconstructive or poststructuralist terms to explain his methodology. He challenges

standard or established binaries such as history/fiction and actual/imaginable to argue that the
actual is like the imaginable...by analogy, history is like fiction.

18
STEPHEN GREENBLATT, Introduction to The Power of Forms in the English
Renaissance (1988).
Clearly it is not the text alone [] that bears the full significance of
Shakespeares play, [] [but] rather the storys full situation the genre
it is thought to embody, the circumstances of its performance, the
imaginings of its audience that governs its shifting meanings.

Greenblatt argues that the meanings (which are not fixed but shifting) of Shakespeares play,
Richard II, are not determined only by the text of the story but its full situation (which includes its
genre, the conditions of when it was performed, the audiences thoughts and expectations...)

DISCREPANCY (paragraph 4) refers to:

The critic John Dover Wilson (1881-1969) interpreted Richard II as expressing loyalty to the monarchy
and portrays (represent) the overthrow (removal, defeat) of the legitimate king as sacrilegious.
However, Queen Elizabeth Is anxiety over the plays possible message led her to identify with the
deposed (removed) king of Shakespeares play and to claim that it had been performed 40tie times in
open streets. It is this interpretative discrepancy Greenblatt notes and wishes to analyse.

MAINSTREAM LITERARY HISTORY (Greemblant) =OLD HISTORICISM (Barry)

The text contains some words and phrases associated with this concept (par. 5):

- dominant historical scholarship

- earlier historicism
- monological
- a single political vision
- identical [with] the entire literate class
- internally coherent and consistent
- the status of historical fact
- a stable point of reference

WHAT THE NEW HISTORICISM DO (par. 6):

New Historicism undermines fixity in critical and literary practice. New historicism is self-
interrogating and it interrogates others; he encourages an investigation into the belief system
underpinning (supporting) Richard II and also that of John Dover Wilsons interpretation of Richard II.

19
UNIT 3. INTRODUCTION TO FEMINISM AND GENDER

1. LITERARY TEXT: THE AWAKENING by Kate Chopin

CONTEXT:

The Awakening, was published in 1899, when women still were regarded as a legal
property of their husbands.

Author: Kate Chopin, American writer, born in St Louis, Missouri. She belongs to the literary
period of modernism.
She came to prominence at the end of the century with her short stories, many about Louisiana
life. She was admired in her lifetime for her 'charming' depictions (pictures) of 'local colour'
Is the story of a woman's sense of oppression in conventional marriage and her burning desire
(not uncomplicatedly fulfilled) for liberty. It was widely criticised, and it sparked off the
downturn of Chopins career as a writer.
Since the late 1960, is regarded as a classic of American literature; a staple (essential) of
literature and womens studies university courses.
Although Chopins short fiction belongs to the realm of local color, The Awakening
transcends the regionalist label because of its universal themes and its poetic prose style.

New Woman writing

A body of fiction and drama concerning the 'New Woman', a type of self-assertive (confident and
expression of one selfs view, desires...) younger woman much discussed in the British press in
the 1890s as the focus for public debates about marriage and women's rights. ...the New Woman
was a hopelessly idealistic creature attempting to reverse accepted gender roles by taking the
sexual initiative with men, smoking cigarettes, riding bicycles... In literary works she is more
often a tragic victim of marriage laws, tied to a drunken husband. ...

Local Color writing

A kind of fiction that came to prominence in the USA in the late 19th century, and was devoted to
capturing the unique customs, manners, speech, folklore, and other qualities of a particular
regional community, usually in humorous short stories.

SOME POINTS:
- Genre: novel; poetic prose style; New Woman Writing, Local Color
- Themes: patriarchy, marriage, motherhood, womens independence, self-assertiveness,
desire and sexuality
- Anonymous narrator; seems to align with Chopin herself
- Point of view: narrated in 3rd person but the narrator often shows her sympathy for Edna.
- Setting:
o Time: 1899, the beginning of Industrial Revolution and Feminist Movement
o Place: Grand Isle (a popular summer vacation spot for wealthy Creoles from New
Orleans); and New Orleans.
- Symbols: bird (freedom), sea

20
ANALYSIS:
Part 1: chapters 1-16
SETTING: Set at Grand Isle, the summer resort (centro turstico) at the coast of New Orleans.

The PROCESS OF AWAKENING TO SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, SENSUALITY AND SEXUALITY of Edna

Pontellier, the heroine of the novel: a process of INNER VISION through existential solitude and
communion with nature that will give way to the rest of the events in the second part of the story.

CH.1:

Social atmosphere and exoticism of Grand Isle is described.

The parrot talking in French symbolizes:

- the bicultural atmosphere of Creoles (French-American)

- it could represent Edna herself, anticipating her inner alienation as if her understanding of
her awakening paralleled learning a new language no one understood
- a bilingual situation could represent cultural exile or alienation

Description of Mr. Pontellier: emphasis on his vision and glasses, the power of male gaze, the way
masculine vision (symbolizing patriarchal societys vision) will define and exclude parts of Ednas
identity.

Edna and Robert are introduced: coming walking from the beach under a big white sunshade.
Exuberant description of nature and the presence of the sea for the first time

CH.2: description of Edna

Her eyes (in contrast to the description of her husbands gaze in previous chapter)=the importance of
gaze, vision, the way to perceive the world and the inner self for Edna throughout the book.

Through her power of seeing as a metaphor for awakening she reaches a new level of
consciousness and self.

Edna comes from Mississippi, not belonging to the Creole community.

CH.3:

Quarrel between Edna and her husband = shows his attitude towards her role as wife and mother.

Ednas crying = the first sign of her souls discontent with her female situation. Crying in the middle of
the night, inspired by the sea and nature =described as a release from a kind of oppression

CH.6:

Ednas relations with

- Adele Ratignolle based on female bonding, although they are very different
- Robert Lebrun based on sensual, spiritual and romantic bonding.

Ednas painting and her feeling out of place with certain Creole cultural behaviours, above all in
relation to intimacy and the way they express affection as Catholics.

21
The first sign of awakening in Edna= following her instincts, swimming with Robert

Symbolic description of nature and the sea: the harmony Edna is acquiring in relation with her
natural surroundings and the sea is represented in the narrative voice that for the first time becomes
poetic, musical, organic, placing the reader in an emphatic position in relation to Edna. Relevant
fragments:

In short, Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human
being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her. ...But
the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and
exceedingly disturbing... The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering,
clamouring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose
itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of
the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace. (p. 57)

CH.7:

Female bonding between Edna and Adele at the beach: sensuous description of their clothes, the
position sitting together, the touch of their hands, the complicity and intimacy represented by the
narrator, they are sitting facing the sea, that space of liberty that provides freedom of thought.

Edna describes a vision of her childhood: walking through the tall grass meadow (prado) feeling free
and escaping from mass (a vision repeated at the end of the book, a journey the reader has to her
psyche that can give us clues at a symbolic level to the workings of her souls).

Parallelism between the symbols of the meadow of her childhood and the sea at Grand Isle; about
the relation between the walking child opening her way through the tall grass and Edna learning to
swim in the sea, and how meadow and sea represent self-assertive environments against the
constriction of patriarchal society (as a child symbolized by mass and family, at present represented
at the cottages where she becomes wife and mother).

Her belief in romantic love and romance as an ideal that has shaped and held her soul and
personality until finding her husband, which was her guide towards a more realistic way of living.
Romance is a part of Ednas belief system that will be awakened this summer, as recovering a part
that was hidden or repressed in her.

CH.10: the collective night swim. Edna felt moved deeply by Mademoiselle Reiszs music as a
spiritual exercise that brought her alert and put her in contact with her inner self and nature. Edna
has been trying to learn to swim the whole summer.

As the last stage of her awakening process Edna finds herself able to swim alone at the sea that
night. The description of that night by the narrator is symbolic and full of magic. It is interesting that
it is a collective swim, they are all there, as representing society, but Ednas transformation or
metamorphosis that occurs at the moment she is able to swim without Robert or her husbands
help is revelatory: it is a solitary act that represents the strength of her female soul finding her
freedom against societal restrictions and expectations. She turns around and faces the horizon,
moving ahead and away from them, however, as a child that has just discovered how to walk alone
she feels afraid of the possibilities of freedom and goes back to her husband.

The night walk towards the cottages with Robert reveals not only their complicity and intimacy but
how they both understand the almost magical moment of what is happening to both of them, and
22
how he understands the importance of Ednas awakeningshe is not alone. The narrator= an
atmosphere of spirituality, magical and symbolic nature that is shared by both characters.

CH. 12-13: Edna and Robert go by boat to a mass at Cheniere Caminada, an adjacent island= the
first action and decision Edna takes after awakening to her true self, her inner self-consciousness,
she went through as a metamorphosis the night before at the sea.

She is in connection with her wishes and desires...an independent woman that decides before
everyone gets up she is going to call Robert to go together to Cheniere Caminada. She is in control of
her life and decisions.

The symbolic weight of all the events: her headache at mass could symbolize her spiritual rejection of
male authority through church; her sleep at Madam Antoines cot has a fairy-tale sensual
atmosphere: the white bedroom, her loosened clothes and hair in bedthey are like rituals towards
a rebirth, symbolized by the bath after she wakes up, as a baptism welcoming her new soul and self.
She is in total contact now with her sensual and spiritual self, she eats what and when she wishes,
she leaves with Robert when she wishes, she is freed from children and family.

CH.16: end of the summer and the first section of the book.

Robert is leaving... first signs of depression in Edna.

Relevant conversation between Adele and Edna to understand what will happen later on. By now
Adele represents the dutiful mother and wife, the kind of conventional woman that is happy with the
role society has imposed on her. Edna is treated as a contrasting model of femininity to that of
Adeles, above all in relation to maternity. In this chapter there is a recollection of a conversation
between the two in which Edna outlines her attitude toward motherhood within her new
understanding of herself. Edna had once told Madame Ratignolle that she would never sacrifice
herself for her children, or for any one. Then had followed a rather heated argument the two
women did not appear to understand each other or to be talking the same language. Edna tried to
appease her friend, to explain: I would give up the unessential I would give my money, I would
give my life for my children but I wouldnt give myself. I cant make it more clear its only
something which I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.

PART II: Chapters 17-39

- Set at New Orleans, in Mr. and Mrs. Pontelliers residence.
- It describes how Ednas life starts changing due to her understanding of her new self and her
new awakened soul and how it crashes with societys expectations.
- This new consciousness of her independence leads her to take vital decisions, among which
is the decision to live alone. These chapters describe the development of her new life until
her decision in the last chapter.

CH.17: Description of the family house at Esplanade Street in New Orleans.

- Description of Mr. Pontellier at the house, emphasizing his possessions and controlling role
within the family home.
- Edna dares to change her daily routing by going out of the house and not attending the
visitors. When her husband asks her in surprise, she says she did it because she felt like going
out. We see a trace of liberty at this action.

23
 - There is a symbolic crashing of the wedding ring at her room when she is alone and looks
for solace looking through the window at the night.

CH. 18: Edna visits Adele Ratignolles family.

- Last paragraph (Edna felt depressed rather than soothed after leaving them) is revealing of
the power of her ability to see things differently.
- She feels pity for Adeles domestic harmony and her inability to feel lifes delirium. She
starts realizing that family life does not suit her soul.

CH. 19:

Ednas husband starts worrying about her mental health

He is more than anything angry at his wifes decision to neglect her wifely duties.

We are told by the narrator about Ednas mood swings.

She also decides to devote herself to painting as her own personal medium for self-expression, as a
way of taking care of her souls needs.

CH.21: Edna visits Mademoiselle Reisz in the city.

Her relationship with the pianist will become central in the development of the new Edna.

How differently Edna was attached to Adele at Grand Isle and now she is to older Ms. Reisz, they
represent different female models, both provide Edna with female bonding and friendship.

Ms. Reisz tells she had received a letter from Robert from Mexico= Robert enters the plot and Ednas
life again.

Edna tells her she has decided to become an artist, Ms. Reisz tells her she needs a courageous soul.
The soul that dares and defies

CH.22-23: Ednas husband goes to visit Doctor Mandelet to talk about her wife.

His point of view represents societys discomfort and rejection in relation to a change of roles of
women as dutiful wives and mothers.

Societys rejection at Ednas awakening is represented through the eyes of her husband, his decision
to visit the doctor represents how the society of that time considered womens attempts to stand
out of their assigned roles as signs of madness.

The doctor (through the narrative voice): a sensitive man that is able to see beyond the surface,
understanding Ednas awakening in relation to sexual and spiritual freedoman opposite perception
to the husbands.

Emphasis on gaze and speech, in fact waking up in the sun involves the act of opening ones eyes to
the light (p. 123).

The doctor observed his hostess attentively and noted a subtle change which had transformed her
from the listless (indiferente) woman into a palpitating with the forces of life. Her speech was warm and
energetic. There was no repression in her glance or gesture. She reminded him of some beautiful,
sleek animal waking up in the sun.
24
CH.26-27: Edna matures her decision of moving to live alone at a small house (pigeon house) she
has seen for rent. She has an income from an inheritance= she will be economically independent

First, she tells Ms. Reisz: we know about this important event in the plot through the conversation
Edna and the pianist have in this chapter.

Ms. Reisz makes Edna confess her love for Robert. Ms. Reisz sees this is a big step outside societys
approval and compares Edna to a bird. Comparisons with birds will be recurrent as a symbol of
freedom and idealism. She says: The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and
prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted,
fluttering back to earth. Relate it to another bird symbol in the last chapter.

CH. 30:

Ednas Ritual dinner of emancipation. Her 29th birthday= symbolic age for literary heroines in
search of independence.

The gathering (meeting) at the table= symbols of royalty and ceremony in the luxurious ornaments.

It is the ritual of her maturity as independent woman.

A special ritual moment like the baptism (bautismo) and ritual sleep at Cheniere Caminada, or the night
swim. Chopin marks Ednas awakening process and steps through symbolic rituals full of sensual
elements.

CH.31-33: Edna grows in independence and inner strength and self-assertion:She began to look
with her own eyes; to see and to apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life (p.151).

The stronger she feels inside, the more rejection she finds from society, through the figures of her
husband and Adele who considers her acts irresponsible and childish.

She visits her children= she gets in touch with her maternity side again but the weight of the taste
of her freedom is heavier in the plot, in that way she says goodbye to them.

Robert appears, they meet at Ms. Reisz. They get together at Ednas new place and they declare
their love to each other.

CH.36: the climax of Edna and Roberts love story. Robert tells her about the reason of his leaving
at Grand Isle (to Mexico), he was in love with her but she belonged to her husband.

Edna expresses her new self to him by asserting that she does not belong to her husband anymore.
This is an important and revolutionary assertion from a woman at that time: I am no longer one of
Mr. Pontelliers possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose. This idea is in fact
too ahead of her time even for Robert, who does not seem to understand and be able to assimilate
Ednas new idea of independence.

This climax is broken by the news of Adeles difficult childbirth, Edna leaves Robert to go to assist
her friend.

CH.37: why the author chooses this event (Adeles childbirth) as a breaking point for Edna and
Roberts story, the one that separates them?

When she is back he is not there for never to return.

25
This event is a kind of regression in the plot towards the reality of women at the time (family roles
and maternity). Even Adele tells Edna at the end of the chapter to think of the children, to hang on
her responsibility as mother and wife. Adeles birthday breaks the atmosphere of romance and
idealization lived through the previous chapter.

CH. 39: Edna returns to Grand Ile, the place where she started her process of awakening.

The narrative voice reasons to us her thoughts, how she concludes that to live for her children is not
what she wants, that she expects now something precise from life

Through a poetic language the narrative voice describes the sensuality that springs from the sea, the
sea that represented freedom and that stood as an important symbol of awakening in the first part
(repeating the words from chapter 6: the voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering,
clamoring ).

We find the symbol of a bird with broken wing (remember bird as symbol of freedom) This falling
bird represents also Ednas failing at facing societys disapproval (also, Roberts disapproval).

She becomes naked in front of the sea= a symbolic image of true self and body sensuality, a female
self rid of societys pressures and expectations, standing in communion with the immensity and
freedom of the sea: she felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it
had never known.

Ednas fear into the water is balanced through the image she recollects of her childhoods meadow at
Mississippi, an image of freedom and rebellion against societys norms.

A thought of her husband and children: they were part of her life. But they need not have thought
that they could possess her, body and soul

The symbolism of the whole passage, the use of circular images that takes us back to different
important moments in the story, and the ambiguity of the end: is she committing suicide? Is this a
tragic or a happy and liberating death? Does she actually die?

26
 2. FEMINIST CRITICISM

FEMINISM AND FEMINIST CRITICISM

The womans movement of 1960s = a renewal of an old tradition of thought and actions with its
books (which diagnosed the problem of inequality and proposed solutions):

- A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) Mary Wollstonecraft (discussing male writers
like Milton, Pope and Rousseau)
- Women and Labour (1911)- Olive Schreiner
- A Room of Ones Own (1929) Virginia Woolf
- The Second sex (1949) Simone de Beauvoir

Also some male contributions:

- The Subjection of Women (1869)- John Stuart Mill

- The Origin of the Family (1884) Friedrich Engel

The womens movement was literary from the start and realised the significance of the images of
women promulgated by literature; it was vital to combat them and question their authority.

Feminist criticism= important womens movements way of influencing everyday attitudes

conditioning and socialization underpins a crucial set of distinctions (Toril Moi):

- feminist: a political position

- female: a matter of biology
- feminine: a set of culturally defined characteristics.

Much of the force of feminism lies in the distinction between female and feminine (Moi)

The representation of women in literature= one of the most important forms of socialization, since
it constituted acceptable models of feminine with legitimate goals and aspirations.

For ex., in 19th century fiction=very few women work for a living (only by urgent necessity). The focus of
interest is on the heroines choice of marriage partner, which will decide her social position and will
determine her happiness and fulfilment (or the lack of these) in life.

Feminist criticism in the 1970s:

- The major effort went into exposing the mechanism of patriarchy (the cultural mind-set
(=disposicin) in men and women which perpetuated sexual inequality)
- Critical attention to influential images of women, constructed by male writers.
- It was combative and polemical

In 1980 feminist criticism underwent 3 changes:

- More eclectic: making use of other approaches (Marxism, Structuralism, linguistics...)

- It switched its focus from attacking male versions of the world to exploring the nature of
the female world and outlook.
- The need of construct a new cannon of womens writing (by rewriting the history of novel and
poetry)

27
Elaine Showalter described this change as a shift from androtexts (books by men) to gynotexts
(books by women). She coined the term gynocritics (=the study of gynotexts):

- A wide and varied field

- Its subjects are: the history, styles, themes, genres, and structures of writing by women;
the psychodynamics of female creativity; the trajectory of the individual or collective
female career; and the evolution of laws of a female literary tradition.

She also detects in the history of womens writing:

- a feminine phase (1840-1880): women writers imitated dominant male artistic norms and
aesthetic standards
- a feminist phase (1880-1920): radical and often separatist positions
- a female phase (1920 onwards (=en adelante)): looked particularly at female writing and
experience.

The reasons for this phasing:

- the need of a terminology to obtain a theoretical respectability

- The need (in intellectual disciplines) to establish a sense of progress, enabling early and cruder
examples of feminist criticism to be given their rightful credit and acknowledgment

But feminist criticism has been remarkable since 1970s for the wide range of positions existing within
it. Debates and disagreements have centred on three areas:

1) The role of theory

2) The nature of language
3) The value or otherwise (=or not value) of psychoanalysis

28
 FEMINIST CRITICISM AND THE ROLE OF THEORY
The major division within FM: disagreements about the amount and type of theory that featured in it

ANGLO-AMERICANS FRENCH

-More sceptical about recent critical theory more cautious in using it -Much of their work based on Post-
structuralist and psychoanalytic
criticism
-Interested in traditional concepts like theme, motif (pattern), characterization.

-More theoretical; as its starting

point the insights of major post-
-conventions of literary realism; literature as a series of representations of
structuralists, especially Lucan,
womens lives and experience (which can be measured and evaluated against reality)
Focault and Derrida.

-major business of FC: close reading and explication of individual literary text
-The literary text is not a
representation of reality, or the
reproduction of a personal voice
-Much in common with the the liberal humanist approach to literature, expressing a personal experience.
although they use historical data and non-literary material (diaries,
memories...) in understanding the literary text.
-They deal with concerns other
than literature, writing about
-Its major representatives: Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert and Susan language, representation and
Gubar, Patricia Stubbs, Rachel Brownstain. psychology

-Its definitive works appeared in the late 1970s -Its major figures: Julia Kristeva,
Hlne Cixous, Luce Irigaray

-Most of them are American (rather than Anglo).

-Particularly concerned with
ENGLISH FEMINIST CRITICISM is different (from American): it tends to be language and psychology (see next
socialist feminist, aligned with cultural materialism or Marxism (it cannot points)
be placed into a non theoretical category)

But its existence has been hidden by some popular books summarising FM
(Feminist Literary Studies: An Introduction (Ruthven); Sexual/Textual Politics
(Toril Moi).

-Groups and authors that shows the importance of this movement: Marxist
Feminist Literature Collective (Cora Kaplan); Literature Teaching Politics
Collective (Catherine Belsey)

-its key works appeared in the mid-1980 and remains active and influential

29
FEMINIST CRITICISM AND LANGUAGE
A fundamental issue= if it is a form of language inherently feminine or not, with a long-standing
tradition of debate:

Virginia Woolf in A Room of Ones Own:

- Language use is gendered = when a woman turns to (recurre a) a novel she finds that there is
no common sentence ready for her use
- Ex. of a mans sentence, not making its qualities explicit but characterising it by carefully
balanced and patterned rhetorical sequences= unsuited for a womans use; women writers
trying to use it fare badly (les va mal)

Jane Austen rejected it;

- she devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her use (but not describing it)
- The characteristics of a womans sentence=the clauses are linked in looser (free) sentences,
rather than carefully balanced and patterned, as in male prose.

So generally the female writer suffers the handicap of having to use a medium (prose writing) which
is essentially a male instrument

Dale Spenser = thesis that the language is masculine in Man Made Language (1981): language is
not a neutral medium: its role as the instrument through which patriarchy finds expression

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar Sexual Linguistic: Gender, Language and Sexuality: if normative
language can be seen as male-oriented, there might be a form of language which is free from this
trend, or even oriented towards female.

Therefore, French theorists posited (proposed) the existence of an criture feminine, facilitating the free
play of meanings within the framework of loosened grammatical structures.

To Hlne Cixous (The Laugh of the Medusa),

- This kind of writing exists in a realm (area) beyond logic: this practice can never be
theorized... it will take place in areas other than those subordinated to pshilosophico-
theoretical domination.
- The user of such language is seen as a perennial (eternal) freedom-fighter in an anarchic realm
of perpetual opposition: peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate
- Is uniquely the product of female physiology: ... women must write through their bodies,...
invent the language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetoric, regulations and codes...

Then, ecriture fminine is transgressing, rule-transcending by nature.

But this view of Cixous raises many problems: its realm of the body is seen as somehow immune
(impregnable) to social and gender conditioning (regulations, codes) and able to emit a pure essence of
the feminine, which makes difficult to square with a femininity as a social construct, not a given
entity which is somehow just mysteriously there.

30
To Julia Kristeva in The System and the Speaking Subject distinguishes two aspects of the language
(which are always present in a given sample):

- SYMBOLIC:
o Associated with authority, order, fathers, repression and control (the family, normality...)
o The self is fixed and unified
- SEMIOTIC:
o Is not characterized by logic and order, but by displacement, slippage,
condensation...
o It suggests a much looser, more randomised way of making connections, one which
increases the available range of possibilities.
o She sees the semiotic as the language of poetry as opposed to prose and she
examines specific works (although this concept is associated with female, her major
examples are male writers)

The model is that of the unconscious and the conscious, and the Lacanian re-use of these notions:

- Symbolic = the surface (established structures...); the side stressed by the Structuralists, the
Saussurean network of differences.
- Semiotic = the linguistic unconscious; a realm of floating meanings and slippage...The post-
structuralist view of language (a feature of deconstruction process: to see the unconscious
part of the text disrupting the surface or conscious meaning.

Jackes Lacan distinguished the realms of:

- IMAGINARY: of the young child at the pre-linguistic, pre-Oedipal stage. The self is not
distinguished from others. Child lives in an Edenlike realm, free of desire and deprivation.
- SYMBOLIC: The semiotic is inherently subversive and threatens the SYMBOLIC order
(conventions, cultural values...)

For some feminist this visionary semiotic female world and language is a vital theatre of
possibilities; its value= the imagining of alternatives to the world which we have now.

For others rational= men / emotive, intuitive, trans-rational and privatised arena= women

FEMINIST CRITICISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

Kate Millets Sexual Politics (1969): she condemns Freud as a source of patriarchal attitudes against
which feminists must fight = great influence within feminism

But important books defends Freud: Juliet Michells Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974)= uses
Millets own concepts to defend Freud, especially the distinction between sex (biology) and gender (a
construct; learned not natural): a crucial distinction to feminism.

Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949): One is not born a woman; rather one becomes a
woman.

Mitchell defends Freud= according to him, female sexuality (heterosexuality in general) is not there
naturally from the start, but is formed by early experiences (he shows this process). Gender roles
must be malleable and changeable, not inevitable and unchangeable givens (established facts).

31
So the notion of penis envy3 shouldnt be taken as concerning the organ itself, but that organ as an
emblem of social power and its advantages.

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar = social castration, meaning women's lack of social power.

Jane Gallop's Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1982) in this line, from Freud to Lacane= what is implicit
in Freud is explicit in Locans system, namely (specifically) that the phallus (penis) is not the physical
biological object but a symbol of the power which goes with it.

Although men are better advantaged than women in Locans writings, he also shows men as
powerless, since the fullness of signification which the phallus represents is not attainable by either
men or women.

Locans way of writing embodies the feminine or semiotic aspect of language, rather than the
masculine or symbolic aspect.

The British critic Jacqueline Rose in The Haunting of Sylvia Path and along with Juliet Mitchell
Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the cole freudienne (1982) = the argument in favour of Lacan
and Freud again that it shows sexual identity as a cultural construct (giving insider accounts of
how this construction takes place)

The defence of Freud and Lacan has been more favourably received by French and British feminists
than by Americans.

WHAT FEMINIST CRITICS DO:

1. Rethink the canon (norma), aiming at the rediscovery of texts written by women.
2. Revalue women's experience.
3. Examine representations of women in literature by men and women.
4. Challenge representations of women as Other, as lack, as part of nature.
5. Examine power relations which obtain in texts and in life, with a view to breaking them
down, seeing reading as a political act, and showing the extent of patriarchy.
6. Recognise the role of language in making what is social and constructed seem transparent
and natural.
7. Raise the question of whether men and women are essentially different because of biology,
or are socially constructed as different.
8. Explore the question of whether there is a female language, an criture fminine, and
whether this is also available to men.
9. Re-read psychoanalysis to further explore the issue of female and male identity.
10. Question the popular notion of the death of the author, asking whether there are only
subject positions... constructed in discourse, or whether, on the contrary, the experience is
central.
11. Make clear the ideological base of supposedly neutral or mainstream literary
interpretations.

3
Penis envy: Supposed envy of the male's possession of a penis, postulated by Freud to account for some
aspects of female behaviour (notably the castration complex) but controversial among modern theorists.
32
 3. CRITICAL AUTHORS

SANDRA M. GILBERT (b. 1936) and SUSAN GUBAR (b. 1944). From The
Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century
Literary Imagination (1979). From Chapter 2: Infection in the Sentence:
The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship4.
DEFINITIONS:
- *patriarchal: adjective which describes a system of male authority which oppresses women
through its social, political and economic institutions

- *imagery: the use of language to represent objects, actions, feelings, thoughts, ideas, states of
mind and any sensory or extra-sensory experience. Image does not necessarily mean a mental
picture.

- *allusion: usually an implicit reference, perhaps to another work of literature or art, to a person
or an event. It is often a kind of appeal to a reader to share some experience with the writer.

- *personae: plural of persona [a Latin loanword]. In literary and critical jargon, persona has come
to denote the person (the I of an alter ego) who speaks in a poem or novel or other form of
literature

- attempt the pen: try to write

- kingly admonitions: stern advice uttered by a male monarch

- paradigm: model, example

- male counterpart: male equivalent or complement

- stereotypes: standardised, simplified and fixed conceptions.

ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE:
Bloom: anxiety of influence = the (male) writers fear that his works are fatally overshadowed
even owned in some way by those of previous (male) authors.

The author can only counter (oppose) the paternal influence of (male) literary ancestors by
aggressively challenging and nullifying them, much as Oedipus nullified his father.

4
The Madwoman in the Attic is Bertha Mason, a character in Charlotte Bronts novel Jane Eyre (1847). Bertha,
Rochesters first wife, may be considered to embody the repressed potential of women.
33
OEDIPAL (adj.):
From the Greek mythological character, Oedipus, the king of Thebes who married his mother and
killed his father. Gilbert and Gubar describe the literary conflict between a male author and his
precursors as an Oedipal struggle in the sense that the male author must kill his father in order
to survive and become his own person.

ANXIETY OF AUTHORSHIP
In response to Blooms anxiety of influence, Gilbert and Gubar propose a feminised anxiety of
authorship: ... Her inability to see herself as a (hostile, aggressive, i.e. masculine) precursor,
therefore, leads to a fear that she cannot write, that writing will lead to her isolation or
annihilation.

*Is the product of womens fear that they cannot create

IN PREVIOUS EXAMS:
- What novel do Gilbert and Gubar think is a female version of Bildungsroman?:
Wuthering Heights.
- According to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, women writers: have traditionally been
represented as angels or monsters by male writers

**Bildungsroman: a type of novel concerned with the education, development, and maturing of a young
protagonist.

34
 4. LESBIAN/GAY CRITICISM

Lesbian and gay theory:

It emerged as a distinct field only by the 1990s.

Growing significance and acceptance:

- lesbian and gay studies sections in bookshops and academic catalogues

- undergraduate (university student) courses.

It is a multi-disciplinary field, with a predominance of cultural studies over literary material.

Books about gay writers, or by gay critics, are not necessarily part of lesbian and gay studies, nor are
books that are part of this field directed solely at a gay readership or relevant only to gay sexuality.

PURPOSE:

- Its defining feature: making sexual orientation a fundamental category analysis and
understanding
- Social and political aims (like FC), an oppositional design upon society; resistance of
homophobia and hetero-sexism, and the ideological and institutional practices of
heterosexual privilege.

Lesbian feminism (LF):

Differences of emphasis between lesbian and gay theory, and two major strands (aspect) of thinking
within lesbian theory:

First, LF emerged in the 1980s as an annexe of FC, before acquiring disciplinary independence.

1990: feminism successful and institutionalised lesbian studies claimed the radical ground vacated
(leaved) by feminism.

This academic feminism:

- No room for difference (racial, cultural, or sexual)

- Universalised the experience of white, middle-class, urban heterosexual women.

African-American critics claimed that academic feminism reproduced the structures of patriarchal
inequality within itself by excluding the voices and experiences of black women.

Lesbian critics argued that feminism assumed the existence of an essential female identity (common
to all women) irrespective of differences (of race, class, or sexual orientation) Bonnie Zimmerman
attacked this essentialism (What has never been: an overview of lesbian feminist criticism) the way
perceptual screen of heterosexism prevented any consideration of lesbian issues

The Madwoman in the Attic (by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar) contains only a single passing
(transitory) reference of lesbianism.

Classic feminism had marginalised and ignored lesbianism.

35
THE WOMAN IDENTIFIED WOMAN (by the Radicalesbian collective; ed. Anne Koedt) a crucial essay
in the development of LF says:

- Lesbianism= the most complete form of feminism

- Lesbianism= central to feminism, since it rejects from various form of collusion (connivance) with
patriarchal exploitation and instead consists of relationships among women which constitute
a form or resistance to, and a radical reorganising of, existing forms of social relations.

The essay Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence, by Adrianne Rich the notion of
LESBIAN CONTINUUM= it designates a wide variety of women behaviour: from informal mutual help
networks set up by women within particular professions or institutions, through supportive female
friendships, and, finally, to sexual relationships.

- Zimmerman= this notion has the virtue of suggesting interconnections among the various
ways in which women bond together.
- Paulina Palmer= it desexualise lesbianism, becoming it almost wholly a political act, rather
than a sexual orientation. It is also a moral condemnation of female heterosexuality as a
betrayal of womens interests, implying that women can only achieve integrity through
lesbianism.

These two ideas (woman identified woman and the lesbian continuum) introduced the notion of
choice and allegiance (loyalty) into matters of sex and gender sexuality is not as something
natural, but as a construction and as subject to change.

Result= lesbianism separated from feminism through the eighties, but only in the nineties rejects the
essentialism inherited by feminism.

QUEER THEORY
1990s= a second and less essentialist notion of lesbianism emerged

It designated as Libertarian Lesbianism by Paulina Palmer, breaks away from feminism and makes
new allegiances, particularly with gay men rather than with other women.

They are part of the field of queer theory or queer studies (terms used by gays, despite its
homophobic origins queer (marica)). Conference on queer theory at the University of California, 1990

It rejects female separatism and sees an identity of political and social interests with gay men.

The key question when choosing between these two possible alignments= if it is gender or sexuality
the more fundamental aspect in personal identity.

For some, accepting queer theory perpetuates the patriarchal subservience (sumisin) of women's
interests to men's.

36
Lesbian/gay studies within queer theory have drawn on (recurrir a) poststructuralist work of the
1980s. The pair heterosexual/homosexual is deconstructed like binary oppositions, in which the
second term is privileged rather than the first one, showing that the distinction is not absolute and
that it is possible to reverse the hierarchy.

- Diana Fuss (Inside/outside: lesbian theories, gay theories): calls into question the stability of the
hetero/homo hierarchy
- Richard Meyers (essay about the film star Rock Hudson): he was gay; it was a shock, but the
qualities which made his image attractive to women were related to his homosexuality (for
straight (conventional) women a place of sexual safety, domesticity without male domination; for
straight men a role-model without requiring an exhaustive work of machismo to measure up
to its masculinity)

Judith Butler: identity categories (gay, straight) = instruments of regulatory regimes,

- as the normalising categories of oppressive structures, OR

- as the rallying points (puntos de reunion) for contestations against that very oppression.

So the concept of homosexuality is part of homophobic discourse; a medical-legal term, preceding

the invention of the term heterosexual (a consequence of the notion of homosexuality). So identity:

- Is not stable, is not essential, it can be changed.

- All identities are a kind of impersonation (a kind of imitation for which there is no original)

It is called into question the distinction between the naturally-given (heterosexuality) and the
rejected Other (homosexuality). Self and Other are always implicated in each other. What is
identified as the external Other is usually part of the self which is rejected and hence projected
outwards.

Eve Kosofsky Segwick (Epistemology of the Closet)= coming out of the closet (openly revealing
gay/lesbian orientation) is not a single absolute act (gayness may be revealed to family, friends...
but not to your insurance company). Thus:

- Being in or out is not a simple dichotomy; sexual orientation alone does not make a
person a complete outsider of all patriarchal or exploitive taint (contamination).
- Identity = a complex mixture of chosen allegiances, social position and professional roles,
rather than a fixed inner essence.

Political consequences of this ANTI-ESSENTIALISM:

- Such categories (heterosexual, homosexual) do not designate fixed essences= are simply part of
a structure of differences, without fixed terms, like Saussurean signifiers [word].
- Instead, an anti-essentialist, postmodernist concept of identity= like an amalgam (mixture) of
everything which is provisional, contingent (subject to change) and improvisatory.
- Political consequence= if we claim gayness or blackness as a shifting signifier, it is difficult
to carry out a political campaign on its behalf= there is no identity if identity is changing.

37
Literary-critical consequences of anti-essentialism: the difficulty of deciding what a lesbian/gay text
is. The possibilities (Zimmerman) are a text:

1) Which is written by a lesbian/gay

2) Which is written about lesbians/gays
3) That express a lesbian/gay vision

- But only writing by or about lesbian/gays is not enough= gayness is not an essential,
unchangeable category, but a part of a complex of other factors.
- Solution= to adopt an approach historically specific: is not the same a novel written by a gay
or about gayness in the 1920s as in the 1980s; critique will involve showing how this is so.
- 3: critics need to be aware of wider metaphorical extensions of gayness.
- 3: the risk that gayness becomes too emblematic (symbolic, not realistic), since it will tend to
be romanticised and stand as a textual emblem of resistance and disruption of all kinds.
- Also the consequence of devaluating literary realism. Lesbian/gay criticism of the recent
queer theory tends to favour text and genres which subvert literary realism (like thrillers,
comic and parodic fiction, and sexual fantasy) It tends to be anti-realistic.

What lesbian/gay critics do:

1. Identify and establish a canon of classic lesbian/gay writers whose work constitutes a
distinct tradition (in the 20th century writers such as Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson...)
2. Identify lesbian/gay episodes in mainstream (normal) work and discuss them as such, rather
than reading same-sex pairings in non-specific ways, for instance, as symbolising two aspects
of the same character.
3. Set up an extended, metaphorical sense of lesbian/gay so that it connotes a moment of
crossing a boundary, or blurring a set of categories. All such liminal (crossing a boundary)
moments mirror the moment of self-identification as lesbian or gay, which is necessarily an
act of conscious resistance to established norms and boundaries.
4. Expose the homophobia of mainstream literature and criticism, as seen in ignoring or
denigrating the homosexual aspects of the work of major canonical figures.
5. Foreground (bring to the front line) homosexual aspects of mainstream literature which have
previously been glossed over (hidden).
6. Foreground literary genres, previously neglected (abandoned), which significantly influenced
ideals of masculinity or femininity.

38
 5. CRITICAL AUTHORS

ADRIENNE RICH (1929-2012). From Compulsory Heterosexuality and

Lesbian Existence, Foreword (prembulo) (1980, 1986)

DEFINITIONS:
- DISEMPOWERS: weakens, removes power from in this case, women.
- WOMAN IDENTIFICATION: to feel identification with women (as opposed to men).
- ACADEMIC JOURNALS (scientific magazines): learned magazines which publish scholarly articles
- HETEROCENTRICITY: the practice of viewing reality from a heterosexual perspective.
- MALE RIGHT OF ACCESS: the moral and legal privilege to intervene in all aspects of a
womans life.
- AGEISM: stereotyping of and discrimination against people because they are old.

LESBIAN EXISTENCE and LESBIAN CONTINUUM

Lesbian existence = the actual presence of lesbians, past and present

Lesbian continuum =all experiences shared by women experiences that strengthen bonds among
themselves and against male oppression.

RICH CRITICIZES THE EQUATING OF LESBIAN EXISTENCE WITH MALE HOMOSEXUALITY

Because it suppresses female reality once more; it erases the specific experiences of lesbians,
assuming them to be the same as those of gay men.

COMPULSORY HETEROSEXUALITY:
This term is closely related to the expression male right of access; it is the main mechanism
underlying and perpetuating male dominance.

39
BARBARA SMITH (b. 1946). Toward a Black Feminist Criticism (1977).

DEFINITIONS:
- OVERWHELMING: overpower with emotion, bury beneath a huge mass, submerge utterly.
She feels overpowered by and helpless in the face of the task of breaking the massive silence
surrounding writing by Black women (note the capitalization of Black)
- NUMBING: v. to numb=to remove all sensation from; to paralyze, stupefy.
- GALLING: if something is galling, it causes extreme indignation, irritation, annoyance.

overwhelming, numbing, galling She conveys the ongoing (= continuing) nature of the problem

- OSTENSIBLE (apparent): Ostensible feminists are not real feminists.

- OBLIVIOUS: ignorant of, blind or insensitive.
- BLACK WOMAN-IDENTIFIED ART: art that focused on, inspired by and giving the perspective of
Black women.
- SEXUAL POLITICS: The political character of sexuality, based on the unequal power of sexual
relations
- RACIAL POLITICS: The political character of race, based on the unequal power of white-black
relations

PARAGRAPH 1: some groups have traditionally not written about Black lesbian writers: White male
critics, Black male critics, white women critics, Black women critics.

THIS INVISIBILITY (par. 3): referring to the Black womens existence, experience, and culture
and the brutally complex systems of oppression which shape these [things] (par. 2).

SOME OF THE PRINCIPLES (par. 5) a Black feminist critic could use:

- Commitment to exploring the inevitable presence of sexual, racial and identity politics in
Black womens writing
- The acknowledgement that she can identify a Black female literary trajectory
- Knowing that this trajectory parallels historically Black male and white female literary
traditions
- Black women authors reveal common literary practices rooted in shared political, social and
economic experiences.

40
 6. ELIZABETH BISHOP, POEM IN THE WAITING ROOM

CONTEXT:
In the Waiting Room was written by Elizabeth Bishop, an American post World-War II poet.

This poem was included in her last book of poetry Geography III, which was published in 1976.

It was written in the late 60s a period called The Movement, focused on anti-romanticism and
attempted to evoke nostalgia.

PAUSES, INTONATION, STRESSES (AND THE FORM OF THE VERSE)

On hearing, it sounds like a story, a personal anecdote with a special significance to her

As if she were confiding in the reader (reader as her confidant)

GENRE: a NARRATIVE POEM, written in FREE VERSE, with NO RHYME or FIXED METER OR RHYTHM
(the text is a series of four-, three and even two beat verses of varying length)

Not constrained by strict formal rules= not poem sounding

It sounds like a story told by a friend. Perfect correspondence between form and content
** Free verse has no regular meter or line length and depends on natural speech rhythms.

SUMMARY
Through the poetic I (first-person voice) the poem describes a young girls moment of
awakening; of recognition of her identity and place in the world as a woman, while she is in the
waiting room of a dentist.

It unfolds as the poem progresses, and is prompted (caused) by certain sensory experiences (looking at
photographs (NG) of erupting volcanoes, of explorers Osa and Martin Johnson, of bare-breasted
African women and their children, and hearing a cry of pain)

This identification with other women and her aunt= strong but not comfortable= suggests vertigo,
confusion, disorientation and other bodily reactions.

Something important has happened to shape her self-awareness, but this awareness is not clear and
stable, and the poem expresses her confusion as it does her new-found sense of self.

This experience of the poetic I is an epiphany EPIPHANIES: moments of special

significance, awareness or revelation in the experience of the poetic person in a poem (or a
character in a novel).

"MOMENTS OF BEING"= to express these moments when reality seems to be more intense and a
kind of revelation takes place in the heightened consciousness of an individual (Virginia Woolf).

41
COMMENTS:
Many references to the real world are unreliable: the NG copy does not contain the photographs
mentioned, Osa and Martin Johnson were active in the 1920s (not in 1918).

Narrator= an older speaker telling an experience she had when she was a little girl (the poetic
speaker, we cannot really say it is Elizabeth Bishop herself). as we grow older, we
reinterpret and understand better experiences from our childhood.

But memory is unreliable and sometimes we jumble (mix up) different memories together. We project
some of our adult ideas onto our recollections (memories) of our younger selves to construct a better
version of ourselves.

The image in the lines the inside of a volcano / black, and full of ashes; /
then it was spilling over / in rivulets of fire (lines 17-20)
A dramatic and a precise image (easy to visualize: an erupting volcano)

It has a sexual component: erupting volcanoes are a clich for sexual passion

It is connected to the rest of the poem: the colour black re-appears in 3 more associative contexts:

1) The breasts of African women (black, naked women, l. 28),

2) As part of the speakers sensation of falling off the world into cold, blue-black space (l. 59)
3) Echoing the initial volcano image,... the speakers final vision of herself in the waiting
room, which was bright / and too hot. It was sliding / beneath a big black wave (l. 90-92).

Being (the poem) partly about identity, the initial volcano image indicates the speakers confusion
and the sudden awareness of who and what she is in relation to the world, the waiting room,
other people (specially other women)

Identity= as terrifyingly unstable= like the lava from an erupting volcano in this confusing feeling of
identification (with other women, her aunt, her sense of her own self as an individual).

The image of the explorers Osa and Martin Johnson Osa and Martin
Johnson/dressed in riding breeches, / laced boots, and pith helmets (lines
21-23)

It is part of the sequence of the speakers identifying journey.

We cannot initially say this is the woman and this is the man: both wear masculine attire (clothes);
their names do not help to differentiate man-woman

Uncertainty about identity and gender; a woman is masculinized in her attire.

42
The image of "A dead man slung (hang) on a pole 'Long pig,' the caption (words
underneath a photo) said" (l. 24-25). Can it be explained in terms of a girls

awakening sexuality and as a challenge to compulsory heterosexuality in

terms of Adrienne Rich?
Unpleasant and disturbing image= it refers to the name (the euphemism) some tribes used to call
dead human bodies that were destined to be eaten in cannibal rituals.

Images of Babies with pointed heads (l. 26) and the black, naked women with necks/wound round
and round with wire (ll. 28-29) = practices related to different standards of beauty in other cultures
(which may be shocking from a Western point of view).

The image of the man (dead; will be eaten) and the womens necks, constricted (made narrower) by wire
(metal strand) (the bound neck suggests restriction of movement, pain, torture...), may arouse strong feelings
in the young speaker: disgust, revulsion, fear and terror for.

The impression, strangeness that other human groups and their customs cause on the girl is
emphasized: identification with them as humans // difference from them.

Images related to maternity and children near the beginning and towards
the end of the poem (ll. 26-31, l. 81) images which do not present
motherhood and child-rearing (bringing up) in a positive or traditional light.

Images of mothers with the stretched necks, the "horrifying breasts" (l. 31) evoking the effect of
breast-feeding (l. 26) = suggests hostility to compulsory heterosexuality, later expressed in "you are
one of them. / Why should you be one, too?" (l. 62-63) = she rejects motherhood, which is the
indefectible result of "compulsory heterosexuality"

Why should I be my aunt, or me, or anyone? What similarities Boots, hands, the family voice I felt
in my throat, or even the National Geographic and those awful hanging breasts held us together or
made us all just one? (l. 75-83)

She identifies with the black mothers ("What similarities /[]/ and those awful hanging breasts / held us
together / or made us all just one?") // she rejects such identification and expresses her desire to be
different from them ("Why should I be []?").

So the speaker imply (insinuate):

- hostility towards compulsory heterosexuality and a male right of access (in Rich's terms)
- questioning of traditional womens roles in general. (no cute images of mothers smiling
with babies in arms.... but sth else entirely)

43
Suddenly, from inside,/came an oh! of pain/Aunt Consuelos voice/not
very loud or long (ll. 36-39)
= we think that it is Aunt Consuelo who voices her pain inside the dentist's room.

But first verse = "inside", not "inside the dentist's room".

Then it says it was "Aunt Consuelo's voice".

Then the speaker's reflection about her Aunt: "I wasn't at all surprised; / even then I knew she was / a
foolish, timid woman. / I might have been embarrassed, / but wasn't []",

But the whole interpretation is changed with: "[] What took me / completely by surprise / was that
it was me: / my voice, in my mouth." the speaker says that it was herself who uttered the
exclamation of pain at seeing the National Geographic pictures. So the exclamation came from
inside her.

The text is devised (designed) to provoke the same kind of confusion and surprise in the reader's as
the one the speaker felt when hearing herself exclaim "oh!" in a voice that was very similar to that
of her aunt (it is not far-fetched (unlikely) for we all have similar voices to our relatives).

This prompts (causes) the speaker's identification with her aunt (next six lines) and then the
uncomfortable, anxious identification with other women.

The speaker is outside the dentist's room (where we are led to think Aunt Consuelo emits her cry of
pain) = There is an outside / inside movement characteristic of the entire poem that gives
expression to the young speakers attempts to understand her growing sense of who she is in
relation to her surroundings and the outer world in general (the dentists waiting room, grown-up
people ... Aunt Consuelo, the round, turning world)

The distinction outside / inside, her aunt / herself collapses; the speaker becomes one with her
aunt in an intense experience (an epiphany) that shocked her:

- identification with her aunt and with other women,

- rejection of this identification and the need of being different from them (rejection of being
a mother, of the traditional role of women)

So she feels anxiety, panic; she passes out (lose consciousness) for a while: The waiting room was bright
and too hot (l. 90-01)

- She loses consciousness: "It was sliding / beneath a big black wave, / another, and another"
(l. 91-93)
- Then she regains consciousness: "Then I was back in it" (l. 94).

This intense wave-like sensation could also be interpreted as the speaker's first experience of
lesbian desire that results in an intense orgasm (sexual intercourse (relation) = a form of 'being one' or
'being intimately united' with somebody else).

44
In she was/a foolish, timid woman (ll. 41-42)
The stress on "she implies a differentiation with the speaker (I am not/a foolish, timid woman)
and a criticism of the aunt for accepting her traditional female role (being "foolish, timid").

It explains her anxious desire not to be like her aunt.

"even THEN I knew she WAS / a foolish, timid woman" indicates that the speaker is older and she is
remembering what she felt as a little girl of nearly seven years of age

I was my foolish aunt (l. 49):

Again, identity= the speaker may fear she will end up like Aunt Consuelo.

I we were falling, falling suggests a pan (all including)- identificatory process, typical of a very
young person trying to make sense of who she is.

45
UNIT 4. INTRODUCTION TO ETHNIC AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

1. LITERARY AUTHORS: JOSEPH CONRAD, HEART OF DARKNESS

SUMARY AND ANALYISIS: http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/heart/section1.rhtml

1.1. CONTEXT
- Heart of Darkness, first published in 1899 as The Heart of Darkness, when it was serialised
in the Blackwood Magazine. In 1902 published in book form as Heart of Darkness
(presented in episodes)
(along with other two short stories)
- It is a NOVELLA (= short story in Italian) that belongs to the fiction or narrative genres.
- Author: Joseph Conrad
- Authors nationality: polish. He was born in Poland but in 1886 was granted the British
nationality. Although he had always considered himself a polish, he wrote in English. He is
regarded as one of the greatest novelist in English.
- Conrad worked for the Societ Anonyme du Haunt-Congo in 1890 and the witnessed colonialist
corruption and exploitation of natives. In this trip along the Congo River he became a disabused
(disillusioned) men (like Marlow)
- Historical context: Queen Victorias diamond jubilee (bodas de diamante) in 1897: it prompted a
general exaltation of the British Empire, the imperial idea and Great Britains role as a world
power extending civilisation on the colonised territories.
At the time Heart of Darkness was written, the British Empire was at its peak, and Britain
controlled colonies and dependencies all over the planet.
- It is a MODERNIST text: it challenges many of the conventions of the 19th century realist novel
and short story. Its main feature= EXPERIMENTATION

1.2. FORM AND CONTENT

1) GENRE:
- Written in prose, it is a fiction novella (short novel).
- It is a modernist text: it challenges many of the conventions of the 19th century realist novel and
short story.
- Its main feature= experimentation
o The use of different narrators (with different points of view)
o The use of defamiliarisation in the description and narration and the deferral of meaning
of many Marlows observations (he describes sth or sb imperfectly and later in the
narration it becomes clearer and his opinions about it are expressed)
o Symbolic and allegorical style and content
o Inexplicable and inexpressible mystery that contributes to the vagueness of the meaning
of Marlows experience in Africa
o The uncertainty about what Kurtz did, his symbolism as a character (Kurtz= short in
German); the paradoxical nature of the attraction he exerts on Marlow and his being
hollow (empty inside, artificial, insincere); the difficulty in knowing what he represents in the
elusive (escurridizo) core of the novel

46
POETIC SPEAKER/VOICE/PERSONA:
- Different narrators (with different points of view); there is a narrator behind a narrator.
- He uses the pronoun YOU to refer the group on the boat (including Marlow himself), his friends
on the Nellie (Thames) as he tells them the narration and the readers (involving them in his
thoughts...)

IMAGERY: a constant use of imagery through the book (dark, gloomy, threatening images...)

POETIC DEVICES/ FIGURES OF SPEECH

- DEFAMILIARIZATION: he uses this in the sense of describing something or someone imperfectly
as he did not know but he later sees the light and expresses his opinion
- BINARY OPPOSITION: the Africans are sometimes the only ones described as aliens but some
other times the Western people are the so-called aliens.
- ALLEGORIES and METAPHORS: the book is full of them these were strong, lusty, red-eyed
devils...
- CONTRASTS: darkness/ illumination, enlightment Marlow wants to show himself as a Buddha
in enlighten his friends about the horrors of colonialism in Africa, in order to get rid of the
negative karma and liberate himself from the attachment to this world.
- ANTITHESIS: Thames and the Congo River

THEME(s):
- The main theme: the exploitation of Africa and Africans by white colonialism and
imperialism, and the degeneration, inhumanity, and general corruption of whites by
carrying out this exploitation unrestrained by any of the moral and legal limitations
established in Europe.
- Untrustworthiness of appearances
- The nature of truth
- The moral/spiritual journey of Marlow
- The lack of humanity towards other humans

1.3. NOTE
The terms negro, nigger used in the text are offensive nowadays but were descriptive at that
time (as a reference to race). So they do not reflect a racist consideration f Africans.

Nigger became a derogatory noun while negro remained neutral, along with coloured.

Then, negro, nigger, coloured, of colour= rejected by Civil Right campaigners (struggle for
Civil Rights): no longer acceptable: taboo words that must be avoided

Black is generally accepted as a descriptive adj., but sometime avoided.

Afro-American: a politically correct alternative

47
 1.4. COMMENT ON THE FOLLOWING EXTRACT:

-FANCY sth: want -YELL: scream -CURSING; CURSE: maldecir,

-ACCURSED: maldito -A WHIRL: tumult increpar
-SUBDUED: sumiso -LIMB: arm, leg... of a person, animal -UNEARTHY: fantasmal,
-ANGUISH: angustia (extremidades del cuerpo) sobrenatural
-TOIL: hard work, effort -FOLIAGE: leaves, greenery (ramaje) -KINSHIP: family parentesco
-FRENZY: histeria, furor -UPROAR: alboroto

DESCRIPTION OF THE PLACE AND THE PEOPLE WHO INHABIT IT:

A place removed from Western notions of civilisation: is prehistoric and like the night of the first
ages. The inhabitants seem hardly human or rational beings they yell, move in a whirl of black
limbs and express themselves through an incomprehensible frenzy; Marlow calls one of them
prehistoric man and feels he is about to enter a madhouse. The place is described as accursed and
he and the crew feel appalled (shocked) by their surroundings and its inhabitants. The language is
overwhelmingly negative, revealing the explorers-exploiters fear and mistrust of the physical and
human environment.

The narrator underlines the ALIEN nature of the country and its inhabitants to the eyes of white men
(ALIEN meaning other, strange, foreign). A place the reader would not like to visit, the impossible
communication with the Africans is threatening to create a conflict out of fear felt in both sides.

48
IS IT A RACIST TEXT? COMPARISONS, BINARY OPPOSITIONS:

All the parts of this excerpt= COMPARISON between Europeans and Africans

Terms like remote, too far... underline THE DISTANCE; THE DIFFERENCE in cultural evolution

However, the comparison in this part establishes LIKENESS: it emphasises their COMMON
HUMANITY and the excitement provoked by accepting it despite cultural differences.

Marlow use YOU to refer the group on the boat, including himself. In this you are also included
his friends on the Nellie (Thames) as he is telling them the narration, and also the readers = we are
involved in these thoughts and it makes us think about our common humanity with Africans.

In the 1st paragraph: a BINARY OPPOSITION between the explorers and the natives (the Other of
Europeans)

We can invert the relationship: Europeans as the negative Other to Africans (the invading aliens
who do not belong to Africa)

We can break the following part into 3 sections:

In previous lines:

- Discourse of colonialism is present taking possessions, to be subdued... Africans

described as a mass of limbs (not as individuals); a black and incomprehensible frenzy...
- Africans identified as The prehistoric man = linked with the landscape becoming a
prehistoric earth (pointing to a difference in time and cultural evolution).

But now= no reference to race. Enumeration of the Africans actions= they are possible meanings of
their movements, shouts... but they are meanings that EUROPEANS CANNOT IDENTIFY because they
lack of the necessary knowledge We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings:
they do not belong there: HERE THE EUROPEANS ARE IDENTIFIED AS THE OTHER.

49
In the 2nd section: two comparisons

1) Europeans to phantoms: Marlow changes the point of view, he sees the Europeans as
Africans probably would: like ghosts, spirits
2) Europeans shocked sane men watching crazy people; as not understanding what they see. It
introduces an ESSENTIAL difference between Africans Europeans. Racism= essentialist
position considering a race essentially inferior than another one. Binary opposition (Africans-
mad/ Europeans- sane): Africans the negative element.

BUT in the last part= difference of historical and cultural evolution (not race). Africans (prehistoric
stage) / Europeans (more advanced culturally and materially): here the Africans are not characterised
by the negative element of the binary opposition. It is the Europeans= they cannot remember=
their culture works like an impediment to understand the Africans. They seem to be dead, ghosts
(their failure of communication, inaction...)

these comparisons; binary oppositions balance each other and show that THE TEXT IS NOT RACIST.

1.5. COMMENT ON THE FOLLOWING EXTRACT:

50
Descriptions: words like death, decay, decomposition, weakness, futility... = negative
picture of the Companys station

Depiction (depict: represent, describe) of machinery= it points to the corruption and chaos of colonialism

1st paragraph: description that underlines the mismanagement of the Company and its irrational
actions: not taken care equipment, upside down (al revs) railway-truck, rusting and decaying
equipment; the absurdity of blasting (blow up) with explosives a cliff that was not an obstacle to the
railway line.

2nd paragraph: Marlow describes the Africans they are dehumanised, reduced to slavery, as if
they were animals. The description shows that they are bad treated, enslaved... The detail of the
loincloth (taparrabos) = dehumanises them: the short ends behind waggled to and fro like tails.
Marlow describes what he sees (not what he feels, which is delayed).

Next lines= they are treated unjustly: but these men could by no stretch of the imagination be
called enemies. They were called criminals...= here he empathizes with the Africans (how all must
be incomprehensible to them) and makes the (Western) reader change the point of view= again
DEFAMILIARISATION, to see the phenomenon of colonisation from an unfamiliar point of view.

This description shows slavery without naming it. It shows the effect of colonisation
(dehumanisation, weakening) on the Congolense, not Marlows racism (he later ironises about
colonialism and expresses his reaction: he was appalled-shocked)

51
Outraged (indignado) law: ironic and sarcastic. If Africans couldnt be identified as enemies, the law
of whites cannot be outraged: it is an unjust law.

Their thinness (delgadez), their efforts, difficult breathing, their deathlike indifference of unhappy
savages= description that makes us think of ourselves as witnesses.

Africans identified as raw matter (=material prima) metaphor, it is a product now and Marlow
empathises with the guard (the overseer=supervisor): he understand his fears, his prudence. He read
his body language and what it means. He is afraid of white men. He inverts the common racist
observation that blacks all look the same = all the white men look alike. Again it makes the reader
change its point of view.

The African guard understands that Marlow is not dangerous and with a large, white, rascally grin,
and a glance at his charge, seemed to take me into partnership in his exalted trust: rascally
(=malvado) referring to moral is linked to white (grin=teeth): indicating the negative consequences of
colonisation.

By focusing on the whiteness of his smile and its rascality (maldad), Marlow associates whiteness with
immorality and makes the African guard (not a Congolense but probably a Zanzibari soldier) somebody
who has been corrupted by white colonialism. Conrad intends to make readers consider different
points of view and realise its effects and condemn it.

3th paragraph: Marlow explains his friends how he felt My idea was to let the chain-gang get out of
sight before I climbed the hill. You know Im not particularly tender...

The kind of life he has chosen is a mistake: such sort of life as I had blundered into.

These were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils that swayed and drove men men I tell you: emphasising
the power of these devils. The devil was of a different kind: it was flabby, pretending, weak-eyed
devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly: a more dangerous devil because he worked more subtly and
the consequences were really negatives. In our Western imagination devils are linked with
darkness= this is relevant to the meaning of the whole novella.

The DEVILS= a way of ALLEGORISING the HUMAN VICES (vicios) of violence, greed (gula, avaricia), and
hot desire, which come to control even mentally strong men. the flabby (fat), pretending, weak-eyed
devil of rapacious (greedy=codicioso) and pitiless folly (disparate). It is a vice that dominates the whole
enterprise of the Company and whose worst example is Kurtz.

4th paragraph: what this incident meant for Marlow; how he connects this with his experience of
meeting Kurtz: How insidious he could be, too, I was only to find out several months later and a
thousand miles farther (the devil is the one that possessed Kurtz). Marlow is shocked: For a
moment I stood appalled, as though by a warning.

By the end of this excerpt Marlow has shed (abandoned) his detached voice and he condemns the
colonial enterprise, identified now with sth devil-like. This metaphorical devil is not an African
religious element, but a Western element= inversion related to the darkness: the destructive effects
of colonialism.

52
 1.6. TEXT ANALYISIS (VIDEOCLASS)

- I had to LOOK AFTER THE SAVAGE: paternalistic figure

- SPECIMEN: as if he was a plant, an animal as a sort of less human figure
- IMPROVED specimen (because he can fire up a boiler (he can use Western equipment)
- AS SEEING A DOG IN A PARODY OF BREECHES AND A FEATHER HAT: a comparison, a simile =
The native is compared to a dog: he looks ridiculous, like a dog in a circus.
- A FEW MONTS OF TRAINING (how to use the boiler) HAD DONE FOR THAT REALLY FINE CHAP (guy).
- He is identified as a FINE CHAP: this is ironic and patronising (condescending; treat with an apparent kindness
which betrays a feeling of superiority)
- AND HE HAD FILED TEETH TOO, AND THREE ORNAMENTAL SCARS ON EACH OF HIS CHEEKS: it is
a description which focuses on the native aspects of the African man, on his physical
characteristics... to a Western reader the African seems ridiculous.
- HE OUGHT TO HAVE BEEN CLAPPING HIS HANDS AND STAMPING HIS FEET ON THE BANK: a
commentary made by Marlow on Western influences on Africans. It seems like Marlow is
patronising again, diminishing the importance of this African native...
- But what follows: INSTEAD OF WHICH HE WAS HARD AT WORK, A THRALL (=slave) TO STRANGE
WHICHCRAFT: trying to discover how the boiler works, so Marlow is assuming the viewpoint of
the native. FULL OF IMPROVING KNOWLEDGE: an ironic commentary (is not really an improving
knowledge; he does not know using the steam)
- HE WAS USEFUL BECAUSE HE HAD BEEN INSTRUCTED: in that ironic commentary about how he
has been instructed there is also a negative commentary on what Westerns are doing in Africa.
They are not really improving anyone, they are exploiting the natives.
- Marlow changes his outlook at the end of the fragment: BUT THE SANGS WERE THICK, THE
WATER WAS TREACHEROUS AND SHALLOW, THE BOILER SEEMED INDEED TO HAVE A SULKY
DEVIL IN IT, AND THUS NEITHER THAT FIREMAN NOR I HAD ANY TIME TO PEER INTO OUR CREEPY
THOUGHTS.
- At the beginning of the text there is a distance between the native and Marlow. At the end there
is a closer relationship. Marlow adopts his point of view. THE BOILER SEEMED INDEED TO HAVE A
SULKY DEVIL IN IT. Both are afraid of the boiler (it can explode). Both are linked by those creepy
thoughts, their fear. There is an identification between them. There is a common humanity
between them. This is material to think that there is not racist attitude.
- Depending on which point of view we are asked to adopt, we have to focus on the aspects that
suggest the text is racist or the aspects that suggest just the opposite.

53
 2. CRITICAL AND LITERARY THEORY: POSTCOLONIAL CRITICISM

BACKGROUND
It emerged as a distinct category only in the 1990s

It rejected the universalism, which discreetly promotes to a elevated status works that follow white,
Eurocentric norms and practices, and all the rest are marginalised

Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth):

- For centuries the European colonising power have devaluated the nations past
- First step is to reclaim ones own past, the second is to erode the colonialist ideology by
which that past have been devaluated.

Edward Said (Orientalism, 1978): (book that inaugurated postcolonial criticism)

- A specific expos of the Eurocentric universalism takes for granted the superiority of what is
European or Western and the inferiority of what is not
- Orientalism= a particular way of identifying the East as Other and inferior to the West;
the Orient features in the Western mind as a sort of surrogate (substitute) and underground
self, which means:
o East= the projection of aspects of themselves which Westerns do not acknowledge
(admit) such as cruelty, decadence, laziness...
o Paradoxically, the East is seen as the exotic, the mystical and the seductive
o Also seen as homogenous: people as anonymous masses rather than individuals,
their actions determined by instinctive emotions (terror, fury...) rather than by
conscious decisions. Their emotions determined by racial considerations rather than
by aspects of individual circumstances

POSTCOLONIAL READING
Reading with the perspective of Orientalism we see how Yeats in his two Byzantium poems
(1929, 1932) provides an image of Istanbul identified with sensuality and exotic mysticism. Yeats
adopts an ethnocentric (or Eurocentric) perspective= East as an exotic Other

According to E. Said, Yeats expresses the desire to regain contact with an earlier, mythical,
nationalistic Ireland (as postcolonial writers), related to Fanons idea of the need to reclaim the past.

Postcolonial writers create a precolonial version of their own nation, rejecting the modern and the
contemporary, which is tainted (contaminated) with the colonial status of their countries.

Then, first characteristic of postcolonial criticism: an awareness of representations of the non-

European as exotic or immoral Other.

For Yeats (as often with the postcolonial writer) there is an uneasy (uncomfortable) attitude to the
colonial language: his injunction (order) to Irish poets, that they should learn their craft (destreza), implies
the need to serve a humble apprenticeship (humilde aprendizaje).

54
The linguistic deference (submission) amounts to (sirve para) a sense that the linguistic furniture belongs to
somebody else, and therefore shouldnt be moved around without permission. Some postcolonial
writers have concluded that the colonisers language is permanently tainted, and that to write in it
involves a crucial acquiescence (consent) in colonial structures.

Then, language itself is a second area of concern in postcolonial criticism.

Yets, being a member of the Protestant ruling class in Ireland, has a double identity (as coloniser and
colonised): the recognition of such double identities is one of the strengths of the postcolonialist
view.

This emphasis on identity as doubled, or hybrid, or unstable is a third characteristic of the

postcolonial approach.

The double or hybrid identity is precisely what the postcolonial situation brings into being (creates):

shift in the 1980s and 1990s postcolonial writers using primarily African or Asian forms,
supplemented (complemented) with European-derived influences, rather than as working primarily
within European genres like the novel and merely adding to them a degree of exotic Africanisation.

3 PHASES (or stages) OF POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE:

1) The ADOPT phase of colonial literature: an unquestioning acceptance of the authority of

European models (especially in the novel) and the ambition of writing masterpieces in this
tradition. The writer adopt the form as it stands, assuming that it has universal validity.
2) The ADAPT phase: it aims to adapt the European form to African subject matter, thus
assuming partial rights of intervention in the genre.
3) The ADEPT phase: a declaration of cultural independence whereby African writers remake
the form to their own specification, without reference to European norms. The writer is an
independent adept in the form, not a humble apprentice (1st phase), or a mere licensee
(2nd phase).

This stress on cross-cultural interactions is a fourth characteristic of post-colonialist criticism.

Post-structuralism is attracted by this notion of double, divided, fluid identity: the mind-set (way of
thinking) of post-structuralism and deconstruction (showing unstable, fluid nature of personal and gender identity,
contradictions within the text, literature as a site on which ideological struggles are acted out represented-) is suited
(appropriate) to expressing the numerous contradictions and allegiances (loyalties) of which the
postcolonial writer is constantly aware.

Postcolonial writers with this post-structuralist perspective: Henry Louis Gates Jr, Gayatri Spivak,
Homi Bhabha. In their works:

- A complex Derridean-Foucauldian notion of textuality and fields of discourse

- The surface of the writing is difficult and the route through to any consequent political action
is necessarily indirect.

55
This kind of poscolonial criticism corresponds to the theoreticised French feminist criticism (Julia
Kristeva, Hlne Cixous)

Edwar Said is less overtly theoretical, he accepts some premises of liberal humanism and has more
up-front political affiliation (identification with Palestinian Arab cause): his work is reminiscent of
(bringing to mind) the Anglo-American feminist criticism (more political and accessible).

POSTCOLONIAL CRITICISM CLOSELY PARALLELS THE DEVELOPMENTAL STAGES OF FEMINIST

CRITICISM:

1) The earliest phase (before it was known as such): took as its main subject matter white
representations of colonial countries and criticised these for their limitations and their bias
(prejudices): they would discuss the representation of Africa in H. Of darkness corresponds to
the earliest phase of FC: subject matter the representation of women by male novelists.
2) Second phase: a turn towards explorations of themselves and their society by postcolonial
writers; celebration and exploration of diversity, hybridity, and difference become central.
Pioneering work: the empire writes black corresponds to the gynotext phase of FC: a turn
towards the exploration of female experiences and identities in books by women.

THE SPLIT (fracture) IN FM BETWEEN THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL VERSIONS IS ALSO

PARALLELED BY POSTCOLONIAL CRITICISM: a split between variants influenced by deconstruction
and post-structuralism (as the work of Homi Bhabha) and works written in a more accessible way
(like Saids, which accepts a good deal of liberal humanism and seems to lend itself to political
engagement)

WHAT POSTCOLONIAL CRITICS DO:

1) They reject the claims to universalism made on behalf of canonical Western literature and seek
to show its limitations of outlook, especially its general inability to empathise across boundaries
of cultural and ethnic difference. They examine the representation of other cultures in literature
as a way of achieving this end.
2) They show how such literature is often evasively and crucially silent on matters concerned with
colonisation and imperialism (for ex. the discussion of Jane Austens Mansfield Park)
3) They foreground question of cultural difference and diversity and examine their treatment in
relevant literary works.
4) They celebrate hybridity and cultural polyvalency, that is, the situation whereby individuals
and groups belong simultaneously to more than one culture (for ex, that of the coloniser,
through a colonial school system, and that of the colonised, through local and oral traditions)
5) They develop a perspective, not just applicable to postcolonial literatures, whereby states of
marginality, plurality and perceived Otherness are seen as sources of energy and potential
change.

56
 3. CRITICAL AUTHORS AND TEXTS

3.1. AN IMAGE OF AFRICA: RACISM IN CONRADS HEART OF DARKNESS

by CHINUA ACHEBE (1930-2013)

PARAGRAPH 2: That Western desire and need refers to the need of West to use the (negative,
remote...) African continent to emphasise its own state of grace (its positive qualities: civilisation,
culture, power...)

PARAGRAPH 14: the relation of the author (Conrad) to his fictional narrators: Conrad tries to in
insulate (aislar) himself from the moral universe of his novel by creating not one but two narrators.
There is an attempt to create a cordon sanitaire (Sanitary barrier in French) between Conrad and
his two narrators= a failure, since there is no third or alternative narrator (or frame of reference)
that would enable the reader to judge the characters.

ACHEBES COUNTERARGUMENT TO THE OPINION OF THE SCOTTISH STUEDENT: he argues that what
is wrong with Conrads portrayal is that it is not a portrayal of Africans at all, but a place which
eliminates the African as human factor.

*NOTE: Achebes opinion is debatable: the description of the first anonymous narrator of Marlows
looking like Buddha does introduce an alternative frame of reference that shows that Marlow is not
the typical Western imperialist man. His demeanour (behaviour) shows that his travels in the Far East
previous to his experience in Africa (page 6) eventually changed his mentality. His ideas and
perspective are different from those to be expected from a European and these have to do with
illumination and enlightenment as opposed to the darkness and the whole meaning and purpose of
the novella. Thus, the function of the first narrator is double: to offer the reader a description of
Marlow from the point of view of one of the characters outside his story, so that the readers have an
idea of what Marlow represents, and then that of offering a foil to Marlows ideas. The first
anonymous narrator is the one who believes quite innocently in the civilising power of Empire (pages
4-5), the importance of London and the Thames, and this contrasts with Marlows observation about
the Thames in the times of the Romans and then his story about his experiences on the Congo. The
first narrator is just ingenuous and unreliable as to his ideas, and the real important narrator is
Marlow, whose ideas are plausibly closer to Conrads.

57
 3.2. SHOULD WE READ HEART OF DARKNESS? by JOHN HILLIS MILLER

1) KEY TERMS:

- EUROCENTRIC
- PARABASIS: presentation of ideas by an imaginary character (= what the narrators say does
not represent Conrads ideas)
- APOCALYPSE: a literary genre that involves a revelation that is not clear or a series of
revelations in which the last one is not revealed= the ultimate meaning of the literary text is
uncertain, vague, unspecific...
- IRONY, two types are mentioned:
1) Rhetorical figure in which the meaning is contrary to the words
2) Irony is elusive (imprecise): a discrepancy between the words and their meaning, or
between actions and their results, or between appearance and reality

(in all cases there may be an element of the absurd and the paradoxical)

- PROSOPOPEIA (=PERSONIFICATION or ALEGORY): the idea or concept is represented as

a human figure with different attributes
- LEITMOTIF: a recurrent (repetitive) element in a literary text (=prosopopeias and catachresis
are recurrent through the text
- MIMETIC: that the text aims at representing reality faithfully
- ESCHATOLOGICAL: theological term related to eschatology (studies theories about the last
events in the history of the world or humankind or the beliefs concerning the end of the
world, the second coming of Christ...). Miller uses this term because of its relationship with
the future and its usual obscurity as another way to insist on the never fulfilled promise of
illumination
- MESSIANIC: from messia: the promised and future saviour (Salvador) of the Jews (Judos); Christ
a universal saviour to Christians. Negative meaning: religious fanaticism.
- TELEOLOGICAL: that something (a text...) shows an intention. He contrasts eschatological
and messianic to teleological; H. Of Darkness has no intentional definite meaning
(conceived by the author), the meaning remains indefinite.

2) STRONG READING:
To Miller a STRONG READING or A READING IN THE STRONG SENSE (par. 1) involves not just
reading superficially, but analysing and interpreting the text and showing that the reader has been
changed by the experience of the text.

Similar to Rolland Barthess ideas on the role of the reader and what she/he is supposed to do with a
text (in The death of the author). The reader is free to interpret what the revelation of Heart of
Darkness is, but he/she should try to engage in unravelling (desenredar) the complexities of the text.

3) THE LITERARY NATURE OF H. OF DARKNESS:

It is a literary text; he warns against reading it as sth different from literature

FORMAL ASPECTS that identify the text as literature (binary opposition: literature vs. journalism, history).

a) The use of IMAGERY NARRATORS that do not represent the author

58
 b) The tissue of FIGURES AND RHETORICAL DEVICES (SIMILES that work like a veil hiding
something invisible in the text, and thus MAKES OF THE TEXT AN APOCALYPSE OR AN
EXAMPLE OF APOCALYSE GENRE)
c) The use of IRONY in the text and its UNDECIDABLE NATURE
d) PROSOPOPEIAS OR PERSONIFICATION OF THE IT OR DARKNESS that Marlow encounters
in Africa, personified in the natives, but ESPECIALLY EMBODIED IN KURTZ.

By identifying the distinctive literary features (absent in other modes of writing) he follows a
structuralist strategy (they create systems based on binary oppositions according to distinctive
features that characterise or not elements in that system).

But his essay has some characteristics related to post-structuralism and Derridas deconstruction

4) PROSOPOPEIAS OR PERSONIFICATIONS OF THE IT OR THE DARKNESS

All the personification of the it or darkness = preliminary to the final personification (it,
darkness= Kurtz)

Kurtz represents the descent of the civilised European into the wild,

- uses his technical and cultural advantage to obtain absolute power over the Africans
- by perverting their beliefs in his own benefit,
- knowing himself free from the limitations established by the institutions, authorities...

He ends up absolutely corrupted: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely
(Lord Acton).

The novella only suggest the horrors and crimes committed by Kurtz, the reader is free to interpret
them and are summarised in Kurtzs dying words: The horror!, the horror! = refers not only to
things he did but also his moral corruption

The it, darkness = the moral corruption as the root of all crimes

Kurtz= the heart of darkness the main prosopopeia in the text

5) MILLER CHALLENGES INDIRECTLY ACHEBES READING OF H. OF DARKNESS

Without mentioning his name; Achebe is included among those critics who say H. Of Darkness is
racist, sexist or both (as it can be read in Achebes essay).

.. who says Conrad speaks directly for himself ... does so at her/his peril and in defiance of the most
elementary literary conventions. (Achebe identifies Conrad with both narrative voices)

He suggests that Achebe reads H. Of Darkness as a mimetic text that reflects Conrads experiences
in Africa and his opinions about Africa and Africans, ... but the novella must be read as literature,
interpret the unseeable message through the formal aspects of the text (corruption all right,
leading to torture, muss murder, rape, even cannibalism?)

there are certainly ways to read `H. Of Darkness that may do harm (to the text, to Conrad and even
the critic), for example it is read as straightforward endorsing Eurocentric, racist and sexist
ideologies= Achebes (or others) simplistic reading he book points to the evils of imperialism,
capitalism, their racism and sexism= that is the correct interpretation (paradoxically he points to the
readers freedom of interpretation but he prescribes how the text must be read).

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 6) MILLERS READING IS POST-STRUCTURALIST
Characteristics of post-structuralism and deconstruction in Millers reading:

- Attention to the formal aspects ; binary opposition (literature journalism, history) =

traditional analysis
- Attention to the text: there is nothing out of the text
- Lack of stable meaning of language: language is endlessly deferred (postponed)= definition of a word
leads to the use of synonyms and other words
- Apocalyptic deferral of meaning= The structure of H. Of D. =the structure of the endlessly
deferred promise
- Aporias (an impasse, knot in the text we cannot unravel because what is said is self-
contradictory): the ungraspable irony... that the possible meaning of the text is contrary to its
surface meaning, the unknowable nature of the it...
- Quotation taken from Derrida: The inaccessible incites from its place of hiding: a first clue
to his critical point of view.

However (we are critical of Miller):

- Although that darkness, it is not explicitly named on interpreting

- The irony, and darkness and illumination as aporias= they are not real impasses that
cannot be disentangled: The reader has to offer his/her disentanglement (=interpretation):
very limited by the formal aspects, historical setting, characters (especially Kurtz)...
- He offers a reading of what that darkness and the illumination are.
- The reader is free to interpret BUT he limits the possibilities of interpretation and he
prescribes how to read the text (binary opposition: a correct- an incurred reading).
- His post-structuralis strategies veil his traditional discussion of the novella and a correction to
the opinions of other critics.

7) RELIGIOUS OR SACRED GENRES (APOCALYPSE, PARABLE, ALLEGORY )

INTERWINED (entrelazados)
Marlow described as a Buddha (anonymous narrator): as if he had achieved some kind of illumination
with his experience in Africa ...it may be related to Buddhism (Marlow= the prosopopeia of
illumination, which contrasts with Kurtzs darkness).

This recurrent description (leitmotif) indicates that the story told by Marlow to his friends works like
a parable (short story illustrating a moral example): reader has to interpret the moral meaning.

Conrad suggests that Marlow has embraced (or represents) the ideals of Buddhism: compassion,
empathy with all human beings, detachment from the material world...

His story= a denunciation of the violence, corruption of European imperialism in PARABLE5 (as a
preaching to his friends: Marlows accounts to his friends)

So Marlow as the narrator does not represent a Eurocentric point of view, but a different outlook:
non-European, non-Christian, an illumination he acquired and has to share to his friends to enlighten
and civilise them

5
PARABLE: figure of speech, which presents a short story typically with a moral lesson at the end.
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 8) H. OF DARKNESS IS EUROCENTRIC OR NOT, ACCORDING TO WILLIAM BYSSHE
STEINS ESSAY Buddhism in the Heart of Darkness
Stein: the meaning of Marlow=Buddha transformation that has changed Marlows mentality.

He has seen the evil and has resisted it

He has the mission of teaching his friends (about the evils of colonialism, the lack of compassion...)
but fails because his friends cannot understand his story (=a parable)

Marlow does not represent the Eurocentric point of view; he is a different Other (Buddhism) that has
something to teach Europeans about themselves and their oppression of the African Other.

So Marlow represents Conrads ideas as the character is Conrads alter ego (alias): Conrad criticises
the horrors, the evil and the darkness of colonialism

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 3.3. EDWARD SAID (1935-2003): EXCERPTS FROM ORIENTALISM (1978)

3.3.1. KEY TERMS

- CULTURAL CONTESTANT: contestant is sb who takes part in a dispute. He means that
historically the Orient has challenged or rivalled the West in cultural terms.
- DISCOURSE: in contemporary critical theory means an instance of language that involves the
speaker/writer subject and listener/reader object. It may include any form of utterance (a
poem, an advertising campaign, ...) Said is unequivocal about the collusion (connivencia) of the
discourse of Orientalism with western institutional power structures.
- SURROGATE: substitute

3.3.2. THE IMAGERY ORIENT AND THE MATERIAL ORIENT (paragraph 1)

- THE IMAGERY ORIENT: represents one of the Wests most deep-rooted and persistent
images of the Other
- THE MATERIAL ORIENT: is a form of discourse supported by institutions, language,
academic study, principles, bureaucracy and a certain way of doing things (style)

3.3.3. THE MEANING OF ORIENTALISM: 3 designations

1) ACADEMIC: through its Orientalisms doctrines and theses about the Orient and the
Oriental
2) The DISTINCTION between the Orient and the Occident
3) The CORPORATE INSTITUTION OF WESTERN STYLE for controlling and shaping the orient.

3.3.4. THE MOST IMPORTANT TASK OF ALL :

To seek contemporary alternatives to Orientalism and study other cultures from a
nonrepressive and nonmanipulative perspective

3.3.5. THE NEW HISTORICIST APPROACH:

He argues that society and literature should be studied together and hopes his arguments shed light
on (clarify) structures of power and domination.

This recalls (reminds of) the NEW HISTORICICIST approach which studies literary and non-literary text
together and focuses attention on issues of State power and how it is maintained.

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