Literary theory part 2 Flashcards
New Historicism
is all about paying close attention to the historical context of literary works.
Self-fashioning
Self-fashioning is this term coined by the Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, who made it up to describe the way that Renaissance authors like William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe created identities for themselves (and for their characters) according to the social, cultural, and political codes of their time.
Culture as text
New Historicism
how important it is to “stick to the canon,”
Stephen Greenblatt and Harold Bloom
Cultural Poetics
New Historicism
Representation
A literary work (or an art work) that depicts aspects of social or cultural life is representing what those aspects are like in real life.
Historical Materialism
Basically, everything that we do—including what we think—is determined by our material conditions
Circulation
This idea has to do with the circulation of power. The New Historicists like to study and understand the way power circulates in a society, from the big people down to the little people—and sometimes back up again
NEW HISTORICISM AUTHORS
Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher were inspired by three theorists: Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz, and Raymond Williams.
The second important group of New Historicists focus on the Romantic period.
Marjorie Levinson and Jerome McGann study the “big” Romantic poets—William Wordsworth, John Keats, and George Gordon (more commonly called “Lord”) Byron
Greenblatt’s book on New Historicism
His 1980 book, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare,
Renaissance clique on New Historicism
Greenblatt, Catherine Gallagher and Louis Adrian Montrose
New Historicism emerged partly in response to
New Criticism
The approach of New Historicists
So the New Historicists get down with studying “non-canonical” works alongside “canonical” works
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY BUZZWORDS
Resistance Empire/Imperialist Subaltern- poor person Colonizer/Colonized Appropriation Hybridity Neo-colonial/neo-colonialism Marginalization Strategic essentialism
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY AUTHORS
Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Edward Said
The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literature
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin
Orientalism
1978: Edward Said’s Orientalism
Can the subaltern speak?”’
1988: Gayatri Spivak’s essay
Homi Bhabha’s
1994: Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture
White Teeth
2000: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth
Empire
2001: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire
players of poco
Edward Said Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin Gayatri Spivak Chinua Achebe Homi Bhabha Chandra Talpade Mohanty Frantz Fanon Stuart Hall
Poststructuralism
One of the basic assumptions that shape poststructuralist thinking is that every aspect of human experience—our modes of communication, social habits, values, wallpaper preferences, even our personal identities—are textual.
Signification
It’s an active, ongoing process of producing meaning.
Ferdinand de Saussure, language works by combining two things:
signifiers and signifieds.
Signifiers
words
Signified
things or concepts that words are supposed to refer to.
Of Grammatology
Derrida
Transcendental Signified
we can never get meaning to hold still. We can never reach Absolute Truth.
Text
“an activity of production.”: Roland Barthes
Discourse
language activity
Ideology
ideologies are cultural and created by discourse
Simulacrum/Simulation
Jean Baudrillard
a simulacrum
a simulacrum is a copy or image of something
Simulation,
means pretending to have something that you don’t.
Rhizome
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
In their classic study A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
Deleuze and Guattari point out that Western philosophy has always used a metaphor of a tree to describe itself.
Langue
A French word referring to the deep structure (or grammar) underneath language.
Parole
utterances or speech acts.
Parole is governed by the same
langue
Sign
Signifier+ signified
Semiology
A discipline that takes the study of signs as its subject.
Binary opposition
A pair of words or concepts that are opposite in meaning.
Function
A pair of words or concepts that are opposite in meaning.
Vladimir Propp, the number of functions in fairy tales is limited to
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