Resources

Postcolonial Criticism

Sat, 1 Jan 2011 20:43:03 -0600

Links
• Dr. Kristi Siegel’s Introduction to Modern Literary Theory (scroll down)
• Emory University Introduction to Postcolonial Studies
• Political Discourse: Theories of Colonialism and Post-colonialism
• Writing Commons: Post-Colonial Criticism
• Shmoop: Postcolonial Theory (multiple pages)
• Purdue OWL Postcolonial Criticism
• Wikipedia Postcolonial Criticism

History is written by the victors. Consequently, post-colonial critics explore how literature reveals the relationships between colonizers and colonized. Postcolonial theory looks at issues of power, economics, politics, religion, and culture and how these elements work in relation to colonial hegemony (western colonizers controlling the colonized).
Postcolonial critics are often concerned with who speaks for whom. The literary text itself may be examined closely to determine in what ways, explicitly or allegorically, privilege the colonizer or colonized. The text may also be examined for what it reveals about the operations of cultural difference -- the ways in which race, religion, class, cultural beliefs and customs combine to form individual identity and the world of the work.

Example from Full Essay  Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as “the other world,” the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant beastiality…
It might be contended, of course, that the attitude to the African in Heart of Darkness is not Conrad’s but that of his fictional narrator, Marlow, and that far from endorsing it Conrad might indeed be holding it up to irony and criticism. Certainly Conrad appears to go to considerable pains to set up layers of insulation between himself and the moral universe of his history. He has, for example, a narrator behind a narrator. The primary narrator is Marlow but his account is given to us through the filter of a second, shadowy person. But if Conrad's intention is to draw a cordon sanitaire between himself and the moral and psychological malaise of his narrator his care seems to me totally wasted because he neglects to hint however subtly or tentatively at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters. It would not have been beyond Conrad’s power to make that provision if he had thought it necessary. Marlow seems to me to enjoy Conrad’s complete confidence—a feeling reinforced by the close similarities between their two careers.
--From “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” by Chinua Achebe.
Questions to answer in your Congo Diary:
1. How does black and white imagery both reinforce and subvert racial attitudes? 2. How does the portrayal of “civilized” and “primitive” cultures both reinforce and subvert racial attitudes? 3. How does the comparison of the Thames and the Congo relate to a discussion of race? 4. Compare how Africans and Europeans are portrayed. Look at power structures—how has power and how is that power maintained? Who’s condemned? Who’s admired? For what reasons? What complexities surface? 5. To what extent does Marlow return to Britain physically and mentally altered from his colonial experiences.  6. Is there a possibility for resolution in the societies Conrad creates? Do any of Conrad’s characters exhibit a high moral standard? If so, what kinds of characters stick to their principles? 7. Are Marlow’s attitudes also Conrad’s attitudes? 8. Is this a racist book?

Psychoanalytical Criticism

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 20:40:13 -0600

Links
• Dr. Kristi Siegel’s Introduction to Modern Literary Theory (scroll down)
• Literariness -- Literary Theory and Criticism: Freudian Psychoanalysis
• Michael Delahoyde Psychoanalytic Criticism
• Writing Commons: Psychological Criticism
• Purdue OWL Psychoanalytical Criticism
• Wikipedia Psychoanalytical Criticism

Initially grounded in the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, whose view that works of literature, like dreams, express secret, unconscious desires, early psychoanalytic critics would seek to explore the text as a manifestation of an author’s neuroses. Psychological criticism deals with a work literature primarily as an expression, in fictional form, of the personality, state of mind, feelings, and desires of its author. The mode of reading a literary work itself is a way of experiencing the distinctive subjectivity or consciousness of its author. We investigate the psychology of a character or an author to figure out the meaning of a text. Modern psychoanalytical critics have come to see literary works as skillfully crafted artifacts that may appeal to our neuroses by tapping our own repressed wishes and fantasies. Literature accesses the power of the unconscious -- the irrational part of the psyche unavailable to a person's consciousness except through dissociated acts or dreams. The application of specific psychological principles, such as those of Sigmund Freud’s id, ego, and superego and Jacques Lacan’s imaginary, symbolic, and real, offers a particular portal for analyzing literature. Psychoanalytic criticism may focus on the writer's psyche, the study of the creative process, the study of psychological types and principles present within works of literature, or the effects of literature upon its readers

Example from Full Essay  The scientist Freud was concerned to analyze logically the seeming illogic, the apparent irrationality, of dreams and, on occasion, of nightmares. Both he and Conrad penetrated into the darkness, the darkness entered into when people sleep or when their consciences sleep, when they are free to pursue secret wishes, whether in dreams, like Freud’s analysands [patients], or in actuality, like Kurtz and his followers. The key word is darkness; the black of the jungle for Conrad is the dark of the sleeping consciousness for Freud.
In still another sense, Marlow, in his trip up the Congo, has suffered through a nightmare, an experience that sends him back a different man, now aware of depths in himself that he cannot hide. The tale he narrates on the Nellie is one he is unable to suppress; a modern version of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, he has discovered a new world and must relate his story to regain stability. The account is a form of analysis -- for him and for Conrad. In a way, it provides a defense against Kurtz’s vision.
--From “Introduction to the Danse Macabre: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” by Frederick R. Karl
Questions to answer in your Congo Diary: 1. Apply Freud’s model of the mind, composed of id, ego, and superego, to Marlow’s journey. 2. How is HOD a study of human nature in symbolic terms? What might the journey, the river, the jungle, Kurtz, etc. represent? 3. What role do dreams and/or nightmare play in an understanding of the novel? (Not necessarily literal dreams, but aspects of the book or characters with dreamlike qualities? 4. How is HOD a quest for identity? How might Freud’s theories contribute to an understanding of such an identity? 5. What is “the horror, the horror” in psychological terms? 6. How reliable a narrator is Marlow? (An unreliable narrator, in a literary sense, means that what the character reports is not necessarily accurate, but an interpretation of the world through that character’s prejudices and failings, that character’s “psychology.” If the character doesn’t perceive accurately, he/she can’t report accurately. Unreliable doesn’t mean “can’t be counted on.”) 7. What do you think are the strengths of this approach? The weaknesses?
Please go easy on the application of Freud. Only apply what is useful in giving insight into the meaning of the book.

Reader Response Criticism

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 20:43:36 -0600

Links
• Dr. Kristi Siegel’s Introduction to Modern Literary Theory (scroll down)
• Writing Commons: Reader-Response Criticism
• Literariness -- Literary Theory and Criticism: Reader Response Criticism
• Shmoop: Reader Response Theory (multiple pages)
• Michael Delahoyde Reader-Response Criticism
• Purdue OWL Reader Response
• Wikipedia Reader Response Criticism

Reader response critics focus on the activity of reading a work of literature and turn away from the traditional idea that a literary work is an artifact that has meaning built within it. Shifting perspective from the work to the reader converts the literary work into an activity that goes on in a reader’s mind. It is through this interaction that meaning is made. The features of the work itself -- narrator, plot, characters, style, and structure -- are less important than the interplay between a reader’s experience and the text. Advocates of this perspective believe that literature has no inherent or intrinsic meaning that is waiting to be discovered. A reader is a producer rather than a consumer, of meaning.
This critical approach is not a subjective, impressionistic free-for-all, nor a legitimizing of all half-baked, arbitrary, personal comments on literary works. It examines the ways readers experience texts, joining with the author “to help the text mean.” An important part of such studies may be seek to explain the diversity (and often divergent) responses readers may have.

Example from Full Essay

Heart of Darkness, again taking our critical topic as our theoretical example, is rather obviously trying to do something to its reader, to change him or his mind in some way. For one thing, as almost every critic has recognized, the work is obviously -- if complexly --critiquing late nineteenth-century imperialism. But Heart of Darkness, even as it mounts this explicit critique, also explicitly practices the dogma of disinterestedness, a paradoxical feat accomplished primarily by making Marlow’s act of tale-telling adhere to Shelley’s image: the tale seems more like meditation than speech, and the audience seems less hearing than overhearing. There Marlow sits, almost invisible in the deepening darkness, simply thinking aloud. Or so it seems. The presence of his immediate audience seems almost if not entirely incidental, almost unnecessary to the telling of his tale.
A reader response critic would observe that so many “seemings” should make us wary, suspicious of what we seem to be seeing. He might also observe that one of the tale's “actions” is not only the usual conflict of characters, but also the less usual conflict of aesthetics and rhetoric here being discussed. Put otherwise, different definitions of literature are at war in Heart of Darkness, and the reader is being asked to sit in judgment on this agony as well as on that being narrated by Marlow, the most obvious instance of which is his struggle with Kurtz or, if you will, himself. All that we can be certain of, given Conrad's superior artistry, in this work and in his others, is that each request for the reader's judgment is designed to prompt rethinking of his conventional or received ways of thinking about and valuing art -- and of the “persons” it fabricates.
--From “Darkening the Reader: Reader Response Criticism and Heart of Darkness” by Adena Rosmarin.
Questions to answer in your Congo Diary:
1. What is the central focal point of reader response theory? 2. What is an interpretive community? Why do different interpretive communities produce different readings of texts? 3. Explain the difference between understanding the reader as a consumer and understanding the reader as a producer of meaning. 4. Does reader response theory suggest that any interpretation is valid? Explain why or why not. 5. What does a reader response critic pay attention to when she reads a text? 6. As a reader response critic, how might you create meaning from Heart of Darkness? 7. What do you think are the strengths of this approach? The weaknesses?

Deconstruction

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 20:44:06 -0600

Links
• Dr. Kristi Siegel’s Introduction to Modern Literary Theory (scroll down)  • Writing Commons: Post-Structuralist, Deconstructive Criticism
• Literariness -- Literary Theory and Criticism: deconstruction
• Michael Delahoyde Deconstruction
• Shmoop: Deconstruction Theory (multiple pages)
• Wikipedia Deconstruction

Deconstruction involves the close reading of texts in order to demonstrate that any given text has irreconcilably contradictory meanings, rather than being a unified, logical whole. As J. Hillis Miller, the preeminent American deconstructor, has explained in an essay entitled "Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure" (1976), "Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently solid ground is no rock but thin air."
Deconstruction was both created and has been profoundly influenced by the French philosopher on language Jacques Derrida. Derrida, who coined the term deconstruction, argues that in Western culture, people tend to think and express their thoughts in terms of binary oppositions. Something is white but not black, masculine and therefore not feminine, a cause rather than an effect. Other common and mutually exclusive pairs include beginning/end, conscious/unconscious, presence/absence, and speech/writing. Derrida suggests these oppositions are hierarchies in miniature, containing one term that Western culture views as positive or superior and another considered negative or inferior, even if only slightly so. Through deconstruction, Derrida aims to erase the boundary between binary oppositions—and to do so in such a way that the hierarchy implied by the oppositions is thrown into question.

Example from Full Essay

The meanings of the stories of most seamen, says the narrator, are inside the narration like the kernel of a cracked nut. I take it the narrator means the meanings of such stories are easily expressed, detachable from the stories and open to paraphrase in other terms, as when one draws an obvious moral: “Crime doesn’t pay,” or “Honesty is the best policy,” or “The truth will out,” or “Love conquers all.” The figure of the cracked nut suggests that the story itself, its characters and narrative details,are the inedible shell which must be removed and discarded so the meaning of the story may be assimilated. This relation of the story to its meaning is a particular version of the relation of container to thing contained. . .The meaning is adjacent to the story, contained with it as nut within shell, but the meaning has no intrinsic similarity or kinship to the story. . .The one happens to touch the other, as shell surrounds nut, as bottle its liquid contents.
It is far otherwise with Marlow’s stories. Their meaning -- like the meaning of a parable -- is outside, not in. It envelopes the tale rather than being enveloped by it. The relation of container and thing contained is reversed. The meaning now contains the tale. Moreover, perhaps because of that enveloping containment, or perhaps for more obscure reasons, the relation of the tale to its meaning is no longer that of dissimilarity and contingency.
--From “Heart of Darkness Revisited” by J. Hillis Miller
Questions to answer in your Congo Diary:
1. What do deconstructionists believe about meaning in a text? 2. What is the accepted, or obvious, view of this novel, which might well be “de-constructed”? 3. What are binary oppositions and how are they important to deconstruction? 4. Explain how one term in a binary opposition can be considered privileged. 5. What does a deconstructionist look for when reading a text? 6. As deconstructionist, what might you look for in Heart of Darkness? 7. What do you think are the strengths of this approach? The weaknesses?

Feminist Criticism

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 20:44:23 -0600

Links
• Dr. Kristi Siegel’s Introduction to Modern Literary Theory (scroll down)
• Writing Commons: Feminist Criticism
• Michael Delahoyde Feminist Criticism
• Shmoop: Feminist Theory (multiple pages)
• Purdue OWL Feminism
• Wikipedia Feminist Criticism

Feminist theory advocates examining how women are treated in a political, economic, social, psychological, personal, and aesthetic sense within the literary work. Scholars attempt to understand the intersecting points of femininity and questions underlying patriarchal tensions within novels and interrogate the ways in which our literary expectations are contingent upon female subordination.
views of women and their role. Almost too obviously, feminist criticism will focus on the female characters in a work and how they function. It may also reveal women as representative of the “Other,” the deviation from the dominant masculine characters. When we use the gender lens, we examine patterns of thought, behavior, value, and power in interactions between the sexes.

Example from Full Essay

What men have said so far, for the most part, stems from. . .the power relation between a fantasized obligatory virility meant to invade, to colonize, and the consequential phantasm of woman as a “dark continent” to penetrate and to pacify. (Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”)
A story about manly adventure narrated and written by a man, Heart of Darkness might seem an unpropitious subject for feminist criticism. As my epigraph suggests, however, a feminist approach to Conrad’s story of colonizing can interrogate its complex interrelation of patriarchal and imperialist ideologies. By examining the women in Marlow’s narrative, we can identify the patriarchal-imperialist blend that requires the kinds of women he creates. To do so is to engage in a feminist critique of ideology, for, as Myra Jehlen puts it, “Feminist thinking is really rethinking, an examination of the way certain assumptions about women and the female character enter into the fundamental assumptions that organize all our thinking.”
Such rethinking about Heart of Darkness reveals the collusion of imperialism and patriarchy: Marlow’s narrative aims too “colonize” and “pacify” both savage darkness and women. Silencing the native laundress and symbolizing the equally silent savage woman and the Company women, Marlow protects himself from his experience of the darkness they stand for. The two speaking women he creates, his aunt and the Intended, perform a similar function. As we will see later, Marlow, by restricting unsatisfactory versions of imperialist ideology to them, is able to create his own version, a belief to keep the darkness at bay.
--From “Too Beautiful Altogether: Patriarchal Ideology in Heart of Darkness” by Johanna M. Smith
Questions to answer in your Congo Diary:
1. How is Marlow’s aunt portrayed? How is she described?  2. What does Marlow mean early in Part 1 when he suggests that women are “out of touch with truth” and live in a beautiful world of their own?  3. At the appointment with the Company in Brussels, how are the two women portrayed and what might be their symbolic meaning?  4. What role does Kurtz’s African mistress play? What kind of language is used to describe her? Is it consistent? How is she representative or not representative of her culture and race? 5. Discuss the portrayal of Kurtz’s Intended. How is she representative or not representative of her culture and race? 6. What is the significance of Marlow’s lie to the Intended? What’s Marlow’s attitude toward lying? Is his lie justified or not? 7. What do you think are the strengths of this approach? The weaknesses?

Archetypal Criticism

Sun, 26 Dec 2010 22:42:25 -0600

Links
• Dr. Kristi Siegel’s Introduction to Modern Literary Theory (scroll down)
• Michael Delahoyde Archetypal Criticism
• Literariness -- Literary Theory and Criticism: Archetypal Criticism
• Wikipedia Archetypal Criticism
• Cornsmashers: Archetypal Theory (fan site)

In criticism archetype signifies narrative designs, character types, or images, which are said to be identifiable in a wide variety of works of literature, as well as myths, dreams, and even ritualized modes of social behavior. The archetypal similarities within these diverse phenomena are held to reflect a set of universal, primitive, and elemental patterns, whose effective embodiment in a literary work evokes a profound response from the reader. The death-rebirth theme is often said to be the archetype of archetypes. Other archetypal themes include the heroic journey and the search for a father figure. Archetypal images include the opposition of heaven and hell, the river as a sign of life and movement, and mountains or other high places as sources of enlightenment. Characters can be archetypal as well; some examples are the rebel-hero, the scapegoat, the earth goddess, and the femme fatale.

Example from Full Essay
 You are aware, I am sure, that the images of Heart of Darkness are not randomly placed, but are, to a great extent, arranged in patterns of opposition.
There are, for example, things that are dark and things that are light. There are also things that are black and things that are white. Moreover, many of the things that are light or white (the candle held by the Intended in Kurtz’s painting of her or fading light on her forehead as Marlow talks to her) are surrounded by darkness, and many of the things that seem at first glance to belong to the dark or black side of things manage to partake of light and whiteness (Kurtz’s jungle bride is described as glittering and flashing, and Marlow often notices the white eyes or teeth of the black natives—or a bit of white cloth around a black man’s neck). Similarly, although Europe at the time was generally thought of as the place of light, or enlightenment, and Africa was generally thought of as the place of darkness, Marlow insists that England, too, was once one of the dark places on the earth, and that the African landscape, like Kurtz’s African bride, is often described in images of glittering light. And, along the same lines, don’t forget that the book begins at sunset in the bright Thames and moves into a night so dark that the men on the Nellie can’t see each other.
Along with opposed images such as these, is a more complicated opposition between things that are inside or within and things that are outside—things that are at the heart or center, and things that are at the periphery. We travel from the Outer Station to the Inner Station toward the heart of darkness and then outward again, presumably back toward civilization, just as we travel inward from the outside narrator to Marlow to Kurtz and then outward again until we are left with the image of that outside narrator seeing the whole world as belonging somehow to the realm of darkness. And let us not forget that the unnamed narrator tells us right away that the significance of Marlow’s tales is not, as is typically the case with sailors, inside, like a kernal in a nut, but outside, like a haze around the moon.
--From “Heart of Darkness: A Lawrence University Freshmen Studies Lecture” by Mark Dintenfass
Questions to answer in your Congo Diary: 1. Apply the pattern of the archetypal journey, a grail (grail-less?) quest, to Marlow’s journey to the Heart of Darkness. Pay attention to the descriptions of each stage of Marlow’s journey. 2. What archetypal imagery, particularly color, my signify in this novel. 3. How does an examination of Marlow as archetypal hero enhance our understanding of the novel? Can Marlow be analyzed productively as any other symbolic archetypal figure? 4. What other archetypal characters can you find in the novel? Consider the lack of named characters. What effect does this have? 5. What archetypal symbols does Conrad employ and do the archetypal meanings contribute to an understanding of the meaning of the book? 6. Consider how this novel might connect to mythic archetypes of rituals and/or sacrifice. 7. What do you think are the strengths of this approach? The weaknesses?