Alienation

Identify

Alienation is Karl Marx’s theory which refers to the separation of things that naturally belong

together, or to antagonism between things that are properly in harmony.

Define

Marx believed alienation to be a systematic result of capitalism. An example is the alienation of labour

and product. In the past farmers used to farm the land and the fruits of their labour produced the

products such as grains or vegetables and they owned these products. Capitalism saw many people

working in factories making such things as shoes. In that scenario an alienation of labour and product

occurs since the workers that put in the labour to make the shoes do not own the fruits of their labour

since the factory does.

False Consciousness

Identify

False consciousness is the Marxist thesis that material and institutional processes in capitalist society

are misleading to the working class. Members of a subordinate class (workers, peasants, serfs) suffer

from false consciousness in that their mental representations of the social relations around them

systematically conceal or obscure the realities of subordination, exploitation, and domination they

suffer.

Define

Marx asserts that social mechanisms emerge in class society that systematically creates distortions,

errors, and blind spots in the consciousness of the underclass. If these consciousness-shaping

mechanisms did not exist, then the underclass, always a majority, would quickly overthrow the system

of their domination. So the institutions that shape the person’s thoughts, ideas, and frameworks

develop in such a way as to generate false consciousness and ideology. An example of this would be

the concept in American Culture of upward mobility. That anyone who tries hard enough can become

rich and successful and that a ‘rags to riches’ story is possible for all. This is a false consciousness.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it”

Identify

The famous quote from Karl Marx, it is his 11th thesis on Feuerbach.

Define

Marx was challenging the practice of philosophers of interpreting the world and viewing interpretation

as being the fundamental purpose. Marx believed philosophy was always too late as it viewed and

explained history after it happened while Marx not only wanted to understand while it happened but he

wanted to shape it thus he says the point is to change the world, history.

Base and Superstructure

Identify

The base/superstructure model is a theoretical framework that charts the different parts of society

proposed by Marx and Engels. It is a model that regards the base as the economic foundation of

society. The cultural, political and social forms of life are, then, superstructures which are created out

of the base and also serve to develop and extenuate the economic base. Although Marx may have

posited that the base influences the superstructure in only one direction, Gramsci is convinced that there

is a "necessary reciprocity" (193) between the two.

Define

The base refers to the means of production of society; tools, equipment, buildings and technologies.

The superstructure is formed on top of the base, and comprises of society's ideology, legal system,

political system, and religions. Since the base creates and influences the superstructure according to

Marx ideology—how we think, what we take to be true—is determined by material things, our

economic conditions; that our consciousness simply reflects material conditions that are already there.

This model would say the French Revolution occurred not because of a social or political factors but

because of economic factors which were reflected in the social factors.

Signifiers and the Signified

Identify

In Saussure's theory of linguistics signifier and signified are terms used in literary criticism to describe

the components of a sign: the signifier is the word or sound, and the signified is the thing or idea it

represents.

Define

A 5 dollar bill is a signifier, because its meaning is culturally derived. There is no "thing" that a 5 dollar

bill is, save a piece of paper that has more cultural importance than other pieces of paper. The buying

power of that 5 dollar bill is its signified. The relationship of the 5 dollar bill (exchange value) to its

buying power (use value) is the relationship of the signifier to the signified. Or the sound of the word

“tree” is the signifier while the concept of the “tree” which it represents is the signified.

Mutability / Immutability

Identify

These terms are from Ferdinand de Saussure’s “Course in General Linguistics” where he discusses

the mutability and immutability of signs. Mutability points to the characteristics of a sign, therefore

language, to evolve and change while immutability points towards the limitations of this change.

Define

Saussure discusses the simultaneous mutability and immutability of the signs meaning that signs are

mutable since there is no intrinsic reason why the sounds (signifier) “dog” should represent the actual

(signified) dog. An example is how time changes the relationship between signifier (sound-image) and

signified (concept), therefore the sign. Example once “mouse” only meant a furry rodent but now it also

signifies a component of a computer. However signs are immutable because a consensus of the whole

society is needed to change the meaning of a sign, or what the signifier signifies, and this is tied to

language which is overly complex and so change is very unlikely to happen.

Langue/Parole

Identify

Ferdinand de Saussure originally made the distinction between language and parole. Langue is the

system of rules and conventions which is independent of, and pre-exists, individual users while parole

is the individual’s speech act itself. Thus langue is the knowledge and parole is the performance based

on that knowledge.

Define

In the chess analogy langue would be the knowledge of the rules of the game that will allow a player to

play the game while parole is the actual playing of the game, i.e. moving the chess pieces and making

moves.

Synchronic/ Diachronic

Identify

Saussure coined these terms. Diachronic analysis concerns itself with the evolvement and change over

time of that which is studied: thus diachronic linguistics is also known as historical linguistics, and is

concerned with the development of a language or languages over time. A synchronic study or analysis,

in contrast, limits its concern to a particular moment of time. Thus synchronic linguistics takes a

language as a working system at a particular point in time without concern for how it has developed to

its present state

Define

Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic methods, for example, studies language as a functioning system of

signs existing in the here and now thus they follow the synchronic.

Antifoundationalism (destruction of metanarrative)

Identify

Antifoundationalism, according to such as Jacques Derrida, is the rejection of the idea of a single

unified whole in which everything is ultimately interrelated. The existence of what we call knowledge

only exists because we have created it. If posed with the question, "if a tree falls in the forest, and no

one is around, would it make a sound?" the antifoundationalist may doubt whether the tree even fell in

the first place, after all, nobody saw the tree fall in the first place. In essence results don’t necessarily

define the means.

Define

It is the belief that everything exists only because we believe it is there. In one of Derrida's essay's,

"Deconstruction of Actuality", he states that absolute sense of actuality which are postulated by society

need not be heeded since the absolutes themselves have been tainted by the method by which they were

communicated.

Deconstruction

Identify

Associated with the writings of Jacques Derrida it is a method of reading and theory of language that

seeks to subvert, dismantle, and destroy any notion that a text or signifying system has any boundaries,

margins, coherence, unity, determinate meaning, truth, or identity.

Define

Deconstruction, unlike structuralism; which privileges structure over event, insists on the paradox of

structure and event. Deconstruction's central point is that total context is unmasterable. Though

meaning is context-bound, context is boundless. Deconstruction challenges the idea of a frozen

structure and advances the notion that there is no structure and a direct relationship between signifier

and signified is no longer tenable and instead we have infinite shifts in meaning relayed from one

signifier to another; play.

Play

Identify

A concept from Jacque Derrida’s essay titled “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human

Sciences”. Derrida asserts that words and their meanings are produced in the play of differences.

Define

Derrida argued against, in essence, the notion of a knowable center a structure that could organize the

differential play of language or thought but somehow remain immune to the same "play" it depicts

Transcendental Signifier

Identify

Jacque Derrida argued that dominant ideological discourse relies on the metaphysical illusion of a

transcendental signified - an ultimate referent at the heart of a signifying system which is portrayed as

'absolute and irreducible', stable, timeless and transparent - as if it were independent of and prior to that

system.

Define

A "transcendental signified" is a signified which transcends all signifiers, and is a meaning which

transcends all signs. All other signifieds within that signifying system are subordinate to this dominant

central signified which is the final meaning to which they point. Derrida noted that this privileged

signified is subject to historical change, so that Christianity focused on God, Romanticism focused on

consciousness and so on. Without such a foundational term to provide closure for meaning, every

signified functions as a signifier in an endless play of signification.

Autotelic

Identify

A term adopted by New Critics, of which Cleanth Brooks is one of them. New Critics call for a more

‘objective’ criticism focusing on the intrinsic qualities of a work rather than on its biographical or

historical context.

Define

New Criticism tends to emphasize the text as an autotelic artifact, something complete with in itself,

written for its own sake, unified in its form and not dependent on its relation to the author's life or

intent, history, or anything else. A term used to distinguish the self-referential nature of literary art from

didactic, philosophical, critical, or biographical works. These were works that were looked at without

attention to their origins or effects.

Centripetal force

Identify

A term introduced by M.M Bakhtin in “Discourse in the Novel” it is one of two forces in operation

whenever language is used. Centripetal force (and he gets this term/idea from physics) tends to push

things toward a central point.

Define

Bakhtin says that monologic language operates according to centripetal force: the speaker of monologic

language is trying to push all the elements of language, all of its various rhetorical modes into one

single form or utterance. Monologia is a system of norms, of one standard "official" language that

everyone would have to speak and centripetal force is the one acting upon it. This is the opposite of

Heteroglossia where instead of one central way of speaking there are many.

Heteroglossia

Identify

A term introduced by M.M Bakhtin in “Discourse in the Novel”. Heteroglossia is the idea of a

multiplicity of languages all in operation in a culture. Heteroglossia tends to move language toward

multiplicity, not as with the poststructuralist theorists in terms of multiplicity of meaning for individual

words or phrases, but by including a wide variety of different ways of speaking, different rhetorical

strategies and vocabularies.

Define

It is the collection of all the forms of social speech, or rhetorical modes, that people use in the course of

their daily lives. An example is all the different languages an individual uses in the course of a day.

People talk to friends in one way, to their professor in another way, to their parents in a third way, and

to a waiter in a restaurant in a fourth way, etc.

Ideal I

Identify

Ideal-I is the Freudian term meaning the ideal identity in light of which one measures one's actual ego.

Lacan also utilizes this concept in his mirror stage.

Define

In the mirror stage, the encounter with the imago of a whole, stable, autonomous self presents the infant

with an ideal image of him- or herself that does not correspond with the infant's present experiential

reality. In making a "connection" to this ideal image through identification, the infant enters a lifelong

quest to correspond wholly with this Ideal-I. According to Lacan, this quest can never be fulfilled,

because human existence is in essence a striving for a never-attainable perfection. Lacan does not put a

positive spin on this observation: while the mirror stage allows human individuals to come to know

themselves as "I", by establishing a permanent split within the subject's self-image, this process also

lays the foundation for forms of psychic distress such as anxiety, neurosis, and psychosis.

Mirror Stage

Identify

The "mirror stage" is an important early component in Jacque Lacan’s critical reinterpretation of the

work of Freud. It takes place during the Imaginary Order which structures our psyche.

Define

Lacan proposes that human infants pass through a stage in which an external image of the body (such

as reflected in a mirror) produces a psychic response that gives rise to the mental representation of an

"I". The infant identifies with the image, which serves as a gestalt of the infant's emerging perceptions

of selfhood, but because the image of a unified body does not correspond with the underdeveloped

infant's physical vulnerability and weakness, this imago is established as an Ideal-I toward which the

subject will perpetually strive throughout his or her life.

Symbolic Order

Identify

Symbolic Order is one of the three orders that structure the human psyche according to Jacque Lacan.

Define

It is the social world of linguistic communication, knowledge of ideological conventions, and the

acceptance of the law. Once a child enters into language and accepts the rules and dictates of society, it

is able to deal and communicate with others. The symbolic is made possible because of one’s

acceptance of the Name-of-the-Father; those laws and restrictions that control both your desire and the

rules of communication. The symbolic order works in tension with the imaginary order and the Real. It

is closely bound up with the superego and the phallus.

Defamiliarization

Identify

A concept coined by Viktor Shklovsky and found in his essay “Art as Technique”, he terms

defamiliarization as one of the crucial ways in which literary language distinguishes itself from

ordinary, communicative language, and is a feature of how art in general works, namely by presenting

the world in a strange and new way that allows us to see things differently.

Define

It is the distinctive effect achieved by literary works in disrupting our habitual perception of the world,

enabling us to ‘see’ things afresh, according to the theories of some English Romantic poets and of

Russian Formalism.

Gynocriticism

Identify

Elaine Showalter coined this term in her essay "Toward a Feminist Poetics." It is the historical study

of women writers as a distinct literary tradition. It refers to a criticism that constructs a female

framework for the analysis of women's literature, to develop new models based on the study of female

experience, rather than to adapt male models and theories.

Define

Gynocriticism aimed to recover women writers and define a “feminine” writing style. The theory

maintained that there was an inherently feminine characteristic. Showalter claims all literary sub-

cultures evolve through three major phases and the phases she defines for females are:

Feminine-- IMITATIVE: imitation of male (dominant) forms

Feminist -- PROTEST AND ADVOCACY: rebelling against standards, values and stereotype

Female -- SELF-DISCOVERY: a literature of their own; no more imitation= GYNOCRITICISM

Gramsci

Identify

Antonio Gramsci, an Italian, was a leading Marxist thinker. Like Althusser, he rejected Vulgar

Marxism, insisting on the independence of ideology from economic determinism. Gramsci also rejected

crude materialism, offering a humanist version of Marxism which focused on human subjectivity.

Define

He influenced Marxist thoughts through his concept of hegemony which changed the Marxist view of

how the ruling class ruled. Raymond Williams even borrowed the concept to explain the way in which

a prevailing world-view saturates a society, becomes naturalized and established as ‘common sense’ so

that it becomes difficult to think outside of it.

Hegemony

Identify

Antonio Gramsci used the term hegemony to denote the predominance of one social class over others.

This represents not only political and economic control, but also the ability of the dominant class to

project its own way of seeing the world so that those who are subordinated by it accept it as 'common

sense' and 'natural'.

Define

Through hegemony it becomes difficult to think outside of or even to notice its shaping presence. It

permeates throughout society; it is an entire system of values, attitudes, beliefs and morality that has the

effect of supporting the status quo in power relations. It is the process by which a dominant culture

maintains its dominance through the use of institutions to formalize power and the employment of a

bureaucracy to make power seem abstract and so not attached to any one individual. An example is of

aristocratic hegemony in Britain in the seventeenth-century when the masses believed it was the natural

order of the world to have a King, aristocrats and then the merchants and then the poor.

Hermeneutics

Identify

The word hermeneutics has its origin in the name Hermes, the Greek god who served as messenger for

the gods. It is the study of interpretation and describes the interpretation of meanings. Originally

applied to the interpretation of the Bible, in the nineteenth century hermeneutics came to be

considered as a general theory of interpretation applied to texts of all description.

Define

Hermeneutics involves cultivating the ability to understand things from somebody else's point of view,

and to appreciate the cultural and social forces that may have influenced their outlook. Hermeneutics is

the process of applying this understanding to interpreting the meaning of written texts and symbolic

artifacts.

Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Identify

It is a term used by the French hermeneutic philosopher Paul Ricoeur who calls Karl Marx and

Sigmund Freud, among others, masters of the hermeneutics of suspicion.

Define

According to Ricoeur, the hermeneutics of suspicion is a method of interpretation which assumes that

the literal or surface-level meaning of a text is an effort to conceal the political interests which are

served by the text. The purpose of interpretation is to strip off the concealment, unmasking those

interests. It unmasks and unveils weak claims. It suspects the credibility of the superficial text and

explores what is underneath the surface to reveal a more authentic dimension of meaning.

ISA/RSA

Identify

This is Althusser’s division of the superstructure into the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) and the

Ideological State Apparatus (ISA). The ISA is the structure of control maintained through the

manipulation of a given culture’s symbolic order. Through this structure, ideology is deployed,

reinforced, and morphed in order to maintain the integrity of the given power structure. RSA is the total

structure of control maintained through violent, militarized social intervention. Its functions are to

defend the social system from invasion.

Define

An example of the RSA in a society would be armed services, national guards, police, prison systems,

and intelligence and security agencies. Our laws and prison system works by punishing those that

commit acts that are not accepted by the society thus is it repressive. ISA on the other hand works

differently to conform people to the social norm. It is achieved through using ideology and the family,

schools, the church, and the media function as the educational institutions through which ideology

replicates itself.

Ideology

Identify

Raymond Williams argues for an understanding of ideology as not limited to an expression of ideas

but as a system of signification. Ideology has a pejorative connotation, it signifies doctrinaire beliefs

and rigid attitudes that are considered partisan and based on ideas ahead of facts. There are three senses

to the term ideology:

1) a system of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group

2) a system of illusionary beliefs, false consciousness, which can be contrasted with true knowledge

3) the general process of the production of meaning and ideas

Define

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would qualify as believers of the first definition while Gramsci would

go with the second.

Procrustean Bed

Identify

The term is from Greek mythology where Procrustes was a bandit who invited every passerby to lie

down. If the guest proved too tall, he would amputate the excess length; if the victim was found too

short, he was then stretched out on the rack until he fit.

Define

In literary terms this points to a reading of texts where the text is forced to fit into an ideology or

concept. An example would be to see Marxist ideology represented in everything even a cartoon of

Winnie the Pooh.

Touchstone

Identify

Touchstone, as used in literary terms (touchstone method), was formulized by Matthew Arnold in his “The Study of Poetry.” It means any physical or intellectual measure by which the validity of a concept can be tested.

Define

Through his touchstone method he introduced scientific objectivity to critical evaluation by providing

comparison and analysis as the two primary tools of criticism. A touchstone can be a short passage

from the great masters’ works of literature that is used in determining other poetry and artist's works of

literature literary value or merit. This sense was first applied by Matthew Arnold, whose essay “The

Study of Poetry” gives Hamlet’s dying words to Horatio as an example of a touchstone.

Binary oppositions

A structuralist term used to describe the differential nature of any signifying system. Binary oppositions

are not facts or substances that have detectable positive qualities, but relational elements that are

detectable only by virtue of their difference from other elements intrinsic to the system itself. Thus

individual terms acquire meaning only by being cast in opposition to other terms within a system of

arbitrary and conventional signs.

Discourse

It is the formal and orderly speech or writing. In the writings of Michel Foucault, discourse is construed

as the whole mass of texts that belongs to a single "discursive formation." Foucault argues that

discursive hierarchies are established by a set of rules that is always subject to historical transformation.

He attempts to map out the way discursive territory is divided into the disciplines of science, literature,

history, philosophy, and so forth, revealing the hierarchy of discourses and the implicit power structure

at a given historical moment. For Foucault, discursive practice is necessarily interwoven with power

relations and social practices, history itself being but a "web" of discursive formations.

Metanarrative

In the terminology of postmodernism, the term 'narrative' or 'story' is used for what we might ordinarily

call a 'theory' about the way the world operates. Many such 'theories' are ordinarily taken to be the

objective 'truth'. We know, however, that there have been a variety of truths about the way things are.

For example, the 'narrative' of pre-Newtonian physics was overturned by Newton and the 'narrative' of

Newtonian physics was replaced by the 'narratives' of relativity and quantum mechanics. We may

consider that each of these steps represents a step closer to the 'truth', but that view would be rejected

by postmodernists who see such narratives as temporary until another one comes along. Sometimes

metanarrative can be used to mean the way in which we do a certain task, such as read.

Part 2 Essay

Role of Author According to:

Structuralism

Structuralism is appealing to some critics because it adds a certain objectivity, a SCIENTIFIC

objectivity, to the realm of literary studies (which have often been criticized as purely

subjective/impressionistic). This scientific objectivity is achieved by subordinating "parole" to

"langue;" actual usage is abandoned in favor of studying the structure of a system in the abstract. Thus

structuralist readings ignore the specificity of actual texts and treat them as if they were like the patterns

produced by iron filings moved by magnetic force--the result of some impersonal force or power, not

the result of human effort. In this way of looking at narratives, the author is canceled out, since the

text is a function of a system, not of an individual.

The Romantic humanist model holds that the author is the origin of the text, its creator, and hence is the

starting point or progenitor of the text.

Barthes: The author is dead

For Barthes “To give a text an Author” and

assign a single, corresponding interpretation to

it “is to impose a limit on that text.”

the author is a modern figure; product of

capitalism

language speaks, not the author

language knows a subject (proper name or

pronoun) not a person

no final meaning; author is not origin of text

de Man: The author governs the text, but he is

also ruled by the text.

Foucault: If the author was dead, we would

never experience any discourse, since literary

criticism needs a warrant (addressee)

Foucault believes author is more than a writer:

a creator (the transdiscursive authors only)

Derrida: Author as cause, source, master of text.

The author is the “transcendental signified”

Without author there would be no text

No longer the focus of creative influence, the author is merely a “scriptor” (a word Barthes uses

expressly to disrupt the traditional continuity of power between the terms “author” and “authority”).

The scriptor exists to produce but not to explain the work and “is born simultaneously with the text, is

in no way equip

Marxism

The major distinction in Marxist thought that influences literary and cultural theory is that between

Traditional Marxists and Vulgar Marxists (new)

The difference lies in the concept of ideology: Traditional Marxists tend to believe that it is possible to

get past ideology in an effort to reach some essential truth. Vulgar Marxists, especially after Louis

Althusser, tend to think of ideology in a way more akin to Jacques Lacan, as something that is so much

a part of our culture and mental make-up that it actively determines what we commonly refer to as

"reality" therefore even if there is an essential truth we cannot get to it

LOUIS ALTHUSSER represents an important break in Marxist thought, particularly when it comes to

the notion of ideology. His Lacan-inspired version of Marxism significantly changed the way many

Marxists approached both capitalism and hegemony after the Second World War.

Aesthetics

It is the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and

taste. Aesthetics is a subdiscipline of axiology, a branch of philosophy, and is closely associated with

the philosophy of art.