FEMINISM

Feminisms
•De Beauvoir, excerpt from The Second Sex (NATC, 1403-14)
•Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa" (NATC, 2035-56)
•Gilbert and Gubar, excerpt from The Madwoman in the Attic (NATC, 2021-34)

Simone de Beauvoir suggests that sexuality is oppressive and that while both genders are essential, they are not equal. A woman has a very specific role within the gender, and it is that of the master-slave relationship. Within the slave (feminine) aspect, another problem is that women cannot band together. Solidarity is difficult between women, which may contribute to the gender being suppressed. According to definition, “Feminist theory, which emerged from these feminist movements, aims to understand the nature of gender inequality by examining women's social roles and lived experience; it has developed theories in a variety of disciplines in order to respond to issues such as the social construction of sex and gender.”

With regards to the male to female relationship, de Beauvoir says that “And moreover woman is taught from adolescence to lie to men, to scheme, to be wily. In speaking to them she wears an artificial expression on her face; she is cautious, hypocritical, play-acting” (1270). She suggests that women are essentially trained to be submissive, to bottle their emotions, personalities, and their interests to intrigue men. It may have once been hiding admiration for reading or writing, but now it has evolved into silicone personalities. De Beauvoir also says that “the fact is that she would be quite embarrassed to decide what she is” (1269). The social pressure and stigma of
the male identity does not allow any allocation for the female identity. Women are meant to believe that they must be identified in contrast of what they are not, in this case, a man. It should be noted that “Some of the earlier forms of feminism have been criticized for taking into account only white, middle-class, educated perspectives. This led to the creation of ethnically-specific or multiculturalists forms of feminism.”Of course the well known stigma is that a man is aggressive, the alpha male. So, when women are pressed up against this concept, they become the opposite turning from subservient to independent.

Psychoanalysis & Text

PsychoanalysisI: Freudian Foundations
•Freud, all selections in NATC (913-56)
•Review Foucault, excerpts from The History of Sexuality in NATC
•Lacan, “The Mirror Stage” and “The Agency of the Letter” (NATC, 1278-1302)


Psychoanalytic theory builds upon the ideas of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), and his followers, such as Carl Jung (1875-1961), Ernest Jones (1879-1958), Melanie Klein (1882-1960), Joan Riviere (1883-1962) and, most importantly, Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). It can be used to analyze the characters within a literary text by examining their personality and mechanisms used to develop the material. Utilizing this method can yield useful clues such as symbols, actions and settings. To put it simply, Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism studies how the mind works and it is seen in ‘literature. It studies three minds in relation to the text which are, author, characters, and reader. “Freud’s theory replaced the idea of coherent and autonomous human self (which is a humanist idea) with the idea of human ego existing on the fringe of the all powerful Unconscious- the huge area of human self existing outside of human awareness.”

The theory is not without its critics, most notably from those who argue that it is the impact of society on the individual that matters in determining behavior, rather than inner psychic conflicts. Freud's analysis of human sexuality also has the tendency to be considered sexist and homophobic, though feminists will still draw from some of his conclusions. “The concepts of psychoanalysis can be deployed with reference to the narrative or poetic structure itself, without requiring access to the authorial psyche” (an interpretation motivated by Lacan's remark that the unconscious is structured like a language). “Freudian theory, in Lacanian interpretation, is chiefly about decentering or marginality of human self in relation to itself.”Or the founding texts of psychoanalysis may themselves be treated as literature, and re-read for the light cast by their formal qualities on their theoretical content (Freud's texts frequently resemble detective stories, or the archaeological narratives of which he was so fond).

New Historicism

NewHistoricism/Cultural Poetics/Cultural Studies
•Foucault, all selections in NATC (1615-70)
•Greenblatt, excerpt in NATC (2250-2254)
•Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies” (NATC, 1895-1910)

New Historicism has been defined as “the history of the text and the textuality of history.” Coined by Stephen Greenblatt around 1980, practitioners began utilizing this method (such as J.W. Lever and Jonathan Dollimore) to parallel the reading of literary and non-literary texts, usually of the same time period. This method refuses to privilege literary text.

Using the New Historicism method, Greenblatt suggested that historical anecdotes are given within the text which can then be related to the time. This places the literary text within the frame of a non-literary text, allowing literature and history to occupy the same weight of emphasis of literary interpretation.

So what does Greenblatt mean when he uses the term “enabling presumptions”? The movement establishes itself upon four main arguments. The first is that literature is historical. Essentially
this means “that a literary work is not primarily the record of one mind’s attempt to solve certain formal problems and the need to find something to say; it is a social and cultural construct shaped by more than one consciousness.” The proper way to understand it, therefore, is through the culture and society that produced it. The second argument then is that literature is not a distinct category of human activity. “It must be assimilated to history, which means a particular vision of history.”

The third dispute suggests that “like works of literature, man himself is a social construct, the sloppy composition of social and political forces”—there is no such thing as a human nature that
transcends history. Renaissance man belongs inescapably and irretrievably to the Renaissance. There is no continuity between him and us; history is a series of "ruptures" between ages and men. Consequently, and lastly, the historian/ critic is trapped in his own "historicity." No one can
rise above his own social formations, his own ideological upbringing, in order to understand the past on its terms. A modern reader can never experience a text as its contemporaries experienced it. It becomes a parallel reading rather than a hierarchy. Given this fact, the best a modern historicist approach to
literature can hope to accomplish, according to Greenblatt, is "to use the
text as a basis for the reconstruction of an ideology."