Literary Theory – Varying ways to reading a text to find out what it means
In the profession of English literature, and to some entente in all humanities.
New criticism – the dominating way to interpret text, roughly 1920’s to 1950’s. A way of seeking out various contradictions, and figuring out how those contradictions unified the text and created meaning. As this develops, the idea of author fades away.
1960’s cultural revolution.
Psychoanalysis, unconscious: directs our thoughts and actions. Bring in the Oedipus complex, and work with exploring the latent content of dreams in order to understand yourself.
Psychoanalytic theory – reading a text with Freudian principles in mind.
Feminism - Where you read texts to discover hidden or not hidden meanings, about female desire, empowerment, equality, sexuality, gender politics, and POWER. and SUBJECTIVITY. What makes a women a woman and a man a man?
Sometimes I think people look too much for symbolism in literature and by doing so fail to enjoy the simply beauty of it. But maybe that’s because I’m not trained to go intricately in looking for symbolism and female power in a literature work, and automatically just enjoy a good story.
Your stance on how to read text (can) determine your place on the political spectrum
Text: poems, novels, plays, films, tv shows, movies, digital images, art, paintings, cds, music, graffiti, clothes merchandising, advertising, etc. What is a text? Cultural artifacts = text.
Queer Theory: gender issues, power, gender depictions, heteronormative ways of thinking. How is queer identity constructed in the text?
Power, identity, subjectivity, political significance, cultural significance, types of representation (common to all types of reading)
Deconstruction: from French philosopher Jacques Derrida. (when Howard speaks, he mimics this in a way) This is where Howard’s theories of art come from, the 70’s onward.
Oppositions:
Logos: speech, reason vs, writing or text.
Speech is privileged over writing (speech is closer to us)
Logocentric: we privilege faculty over reason over all else. In the history of the West, reason has been used to judge what makes a human human.
In literature or philosophy, or in political reports, or expeditions to far way lands, non-white peoples are judged to be without reason and therefore no fully human.
British imperialism: slave trade between England and plantations all over the world. Notion of the people they are trading of slaves have no reason, and we, as Brits, have reason and intellect. The part of the brain in the non-whites for reason is missing. In fact, if we don’t help them by enslaving them, they’ll wipe themselves out because they are barbaric.
Deconstruction: question meaning, to question stable notions of identity, to question stable notions of what a person is and so on. The point is to challenge fundamental assumptions of Western culture. What is art? What is a poem? Is a text a text?
Darwin and the advent of biological adaptation. Different human development in various geographic areas that accounts for difference in a non-essentialist way.
