Download THE FOLLOWING TIPS COULD BE HELPFUL Some Recurrent

THE FOLLOWING TIPS COULD BE HELPFUL
Some Recurrent Ideas in Critical Theory
According to Peter Barry:
1. Many of the notions we regard as ‘givens’ of our existence (gender identity,
individual selfhood and the notion of literature itself) are actually fluid and
unstable things - not fixed and reliable essences. There is no such thing as
a fixed and reliable truth.
2. All thinking and enquiry is determined by prior ideological commitments.
The notion of disinterested inquiry is untenable.
3. Language itself contains limits and pre-determines what we see. All reality
is constructed through language. Everything is a linguistic/textual construct.
4. Definitive readings are an illusion. It is characteristic of language to
generate infinite webs of meaning so that all texts are necessarily selfcontradictory.
5. Theorists distrust ‘totalising’ notions. The concept of a great book is to be
distrusted. Likewise is the concept of a human nature as a generalised
norm. This could be Eurocentric or androcentric in fact.
In summary there are 5 main points:
1. Politics is pervasive
2. Language is constitutive
3. Truth is provisional
4. Meaning is contingent
5. Human nature is a myth
This is the basic frame of mind which theory embodies. It’s likely that a
concept you are having difficulty with will turn out to be version of one of
these positions.
What Post-Structuralist Critics Do
From Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009)
THE FOLLOWING TIPS COULD BE HELPFUL
1. They read the text against itself to expose the ‘textual subconscious’ meanings expressed which may be contrary to the surface meaning.
2. They show that the text is characterised by disunity rather than unity.
3. They concentrate on a single passage and analyse it so intensively that it
becomes impossible to sustain a ‘univocal’ reading and the language
explodes into multiplicities of meaning.
4. They look for breaks and shifts in the text (fault lines) and see these as
what is repressed or glossed over.
What Marxist Critics Do
The main tenet of Marxist criticism is that the nature of literature is influenced
by the social and political circumstances in which it is produced. But will they
take a ‘determinist’ position and argue literature is the passive product of
socio-economic forces or will they adopt a ‘liberal’ line seeing socio-economic
influences as more distant and subtle?
1. Marxists make a distinction between the overt (surface) and covert (hidden)
content of a text then relate the covert content to Marxist themes such as
class struggle.
2. They relate the context of a work to the social-class status of the author,
assuming the author is unaware of what precisely they are revealing in the
text.
3. They explain the nature of a literary genre in terms of the social period
which ‘produced’ it. eg. The rise of the novel in 18th century relates to
expansion of middle classes during that period.
4. They relate literary work to the social assumptions of the time in which it is
‘consumed’, eg. in cultural materialism.
5. They ‘politicise’ literary form, claiming the forms are determined by political
circumstance. Eg. Literary realism carries an implicit validation of
conservative social structures. Form and metrical intricacies of the sonnet
and iambic pentameter are a counterpart of social stability, decorum and
order.
What Freudian Psychoanalytic Critics Do
1. They give central importance to the distinction between the conscious and
unconscious mind (overt content and covert content of a text). They
privilege the latter as ‘what the text is really about and disentangle the two.
2. They pay attention to unconscious motives and feelings (of the author or
characters)
From Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009)
THE FOLLOWING TIPS COULD BE HELPFUL
3. They demonstrate the presence of classic psychoanalytic symptoms,
conditions or phases in a literary work: e.g. the oral, anal and phallic stages
of emotional development in infants.
4. They make large-scale applications of psychoanalytic concepts to literary
history and literature (eg Oedipus Complex)
5. They identify a ‘psychic’ context for the literary work, at the expense of the
social or historical context. They privilege the individual ‘psycho-drama’
above the ‘social drama’ of class conflict. Conflicts between generations or
siblings - or competing desires within the same individual - loom larger than
conflict between social classes.
What Feminist Critics Do
1. Rethink the canon, uncover and rediscover texts written by women
2. Revalue women’s experience
3. Examine representations of women in literature
4. Challenge representations of women as ‘Other’, as ‘lack’, as part of
‘nature’.
5. Examine power relations with a view to breaking them down, seeing
reading as a political act, showing the extent of patriarchy
6. Scrutinize the role of language in making what is social and constructed
seem transparent and ‘natural’
7. Question whether men and women are ‘essentially’ different because of
biology or if these differences are socially constructed
8. Explore whether there is a female language - ecriture feminine
9. Re-read psychoanalysis and issues of female and male identity
10. Question popular notion of ‘Death of the author’. Is the experience of
the writer (eg. black/lesbian not central)
11. Expose the ideological base of supposedly neutral or mainstream
literary interpretations.
From Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009)