Literary Theory and "On Beauty"

Literary Theory - varying ways to read and make meaning of a ext

New Criticism: 1920s-1950s - the dominating idea of how to interpret texts. It was a way of seeking out contradictions in a text and figuring out how those contradictions unified the text and created meaning.

1960s: Cultural revolutions in USA, England, and France carries over to the English departments of American universities - psychoanalysis and feminism, for example.

Psychoanalysis - studies the unconscious; finds the meaning in dreams; use of the Oedipus and Electra complexes; psychoanalytic theory (read a text using Freudian theories to discover the workings of a text's unconscious), etc.

Feminism - part of the movement for women's equality and rights through the 1970s. In the 70s, this is where you read texts to discover hidden or not hidden meanings about female desire, empowerment, equality, sexuality, gender politics, and power. And subjectivity. What makes a woman a woman a man a man.

Who cares what the author thought or meant?

Critical Race Theory: texts have larger cultural meanings. Texts include poems, novels, plays, films, TV shows, movies, digial images, art, painting, CDs, music, graffiti, clothes, merchandising, advertising, etc. These are all cultural artifacts - items you can interpret.

Queer Theory - Gender issues, power, gender depictions, heteronormative ways of thinking, etc. How is queer identity constructed in a text?

Power, identity, subjectivity, political significance, cultural signifance, types of representation. Literary theory is difficult to understand, and it is blamed for politicizing the classroom.

Deconstruction: French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. Questions meaning to question stable notions off identity, to question stable notions of what a person and so on.

Opposing it: Logos: speech, reason vs. writing or text. We grant more authority speech and reason than writing or non-reason.

Subjectivity - "1: of, relating to, or constituting a subject: as aobsolete : of, relating to, or characteristic of one that is a subject especially in lack of freedom of action or in submissiveness. 2: of or relating to the essential being of that which has substance, qualities, attributes, or relations. 3 a: characteristic of or belonging to reality as perceived rather than as independent of mind"

Logocentric - "1 : a philosophy holding that all forms of thought are based on an external point of reference which is held to exist and given a certain degree of authority 2 : a philosophy that privileges speech over writing as a form of communication because the former is closer to an originating transcendental source." We privilege th faculty of reason over all else. In the history of the West reason has been used to judge what makes a human human.

Example of Logocentricsm: In literature or philosophy or political reports, or expeditions to far away places, non-white peoples are judged to be without reason and therefore not fully human. Another, more specific example is British imperialism: slave trade between England and its plantations. The reasoning for the slave trade was the old "Us v. Them" - we have logic and reason on our side, they don't, we are responsible for them, therefore, enslavement is justified because they can't take care of themselves.

Essentialism : What is the essence of the human?

*THESE ARE ALL TOOLS TO STUDY AND QUESTION, NOT TO BE MADE INTO IDEALS FOR A PERSONAL CRUSADE. Why do Monty Kipps and Howard Belsey feel free to adhere so strongly to just one theory of literature, to the near-exclusion of all others, when all it does is limit and blind them?

Different human developments in various geographic areas that accoutns for differences in an essentialist way.

Culture wars

How do we make meaning?

Is a text just a text?

What is art?

What is a poem?

Challenging fundamental assumptions of Western culture.

Darwin and the advent of biological adaptation -

FOR FUN: Chocolate sculpture!