literary theory Flashcards
proponent of DECONSTRUCTION
Jacques Derrida,
Deconstruction put emphasis on
Close reading
Buzzwords of Deconstruction
- Binary
- Democracy
- Differance
- Play
- Phallogocentrism
- Trace
- Presence
- Writing
What is Differance
notion of differance to describe how individual words do not convey complete meanings—they give us some idea of what a speaker means (because a horse is distinct from a dog), but they also postpone the higher-level meaning of a sentence.
Derrida’s first lecture in the US
Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences 1966
Meaning of play?
“play” is that meaning is never stable
What did Derrida think of language?
language can never be mastered. It’s always in a state of “play”; it’s always changing and so are the people who are using it.
So Derrida argues that the belief—or, really, the male chauvinist fantasy—that language can be mastered, pinned down, standardized (according to white male norms, of course) is an illusion that we would do well to outgrow.
Origin for Derrida
is always unstable
Presence / Trace
no presence only trace
Writing in deconstruction
Writing is superior to speech
deconstruction players
de Man: Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, and Harold Bloom.
Barbara Johnson, Avital Ronell, and Gayatri Spivak.
bricolage (who gave the term)
levis Strauss
In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983)
Alice Walker
Écriture Féminine
The phrase comes to us from the work of the French feminist Hélène Cixous, who encouraged women to take pleasure (like, full-on naughty pleasure) in their bodies and their writing, and to let that pleasure come out loud and clear in their work
Essentialism
Essentialism is a way of understanding a group of people based on their similarities rather than their differences
Compulsory Heterosexuality
Adrienne Rich. Rich was a lesbian feminis
Social Constructionism
In the words of Judith Butler, gender identity isn’t a given: it’s performed.
Performativity
Butler is famous for arguing that there’s no such thing as “true” sex or gender: according to her, social forces subtly push us to make our bodies and identities conform to norms that have been built up over centuries.
Materialist Feminism
they want to expose how capitalist societies depend on oppression in order to function, and, like their radical feminist friends, they’d like to shut the system down. Now there’s some material for action!
“One Is Not Born A Woman,
Monique Wittig
A materialist feminist approach to women’s oppression destroys the idea
Cyborg
Donna Haraway’s- “Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985),
First Wave of Feminism
period of public activism and writing that runs from the late-19th century until the mid-20th
Second Wave of Feminism
The second-wave slogan, “The Personal is Political,” identified women’s cultural and political inequalities as inextricably linked and encouraged women to understand how their personal lives reflected sexist power structures.
key player in second-wave feminism.
Betty Friedan
