Toward a Foucauldian Literary Criticism

Poetics Today ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 471-499
Author(s):  
Ryan Devitt
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Georges Bataille ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Marquis De Sade ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Friedrich Hölderlin

Abstract The article argues for the renewed relevance of Foucault's early essays on literature, written throughout the 1960s, given a return to anthropological reflection in so much literary theory today (especially through affect theory and “new” phenomenologies—both of which rely on older categories supplied by psychoanalysis). On one hand, Foucault reminds us of all the “warped and twisted forms of reflection” that arise from anthropological thought, with its assumptions regarding the “unthought” and the hidden structures of sense and perception. This same Foucault, on the other hand, is deeply engaged with literature; his writings on a range of authors—from Homer and Cervantes, to Friedrich Hölderlin and the Marquis de Sade, to Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot—constitute nothing less than an oeuvre. And yet, despite proposals to move beyond Foucauldian critique and its orthodoxy in literary studies today, hardly anything has been thought or said about this body of work in which Foucault, as David Carroll points out, “has the most to say about literature and language.” This lacuna is all the more surprising, since Foucault's early essays offer a rich and fruitful understanding of the being of literature as more than a limpid reflection of the body. In his reading of Bataille and Blanchot in particular, Foucault offers a unique vision of literature that is neither suspicious nor negative but that, in connection with his well-known critique of finitude, culminates in a hopeful call for openness.

The Pluralist Interpretation of Chinese Marxist Aesthetics in Contemporary European Scholarship

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Qilin Fu ◽  
Shubo Gao
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Variation Theory ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Universal Applicability

In Europe there have appeared several important collections on Marxist literary theory, such as Francis Mulhern’s Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism (1992) and Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne’s Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (1996). However, Chinese voices are not included at all in these volumes. Maybe this lacuna results from a lack of awareness of Chinese Marxist aesthetics on the part of most European literary historians and critics. In this article, we seek to discuss the circumstances of European scholars’ contacts with Chinese Marxist aesthetics, mainly in the 1960s and 1970s. Starting from the variation theory perspective proposed by Shunqing Cao we will discuss how European scholars read and misread what they perceived as the meaning and universal applicability of what was happening in China at the time. The discussion is divided into three parts: the utopian interpretation of the Chinese theory of revolution in France, the critical reception by Eastern European Marxists, and the sympathetic interpretation by sinologists such as the Dutch diplomat and literary scholar Douwe Fokkema.

scholarly journals James Bond’s Biopolitics

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Wieland Schwanebeck
Keyword(s):  
Population Control ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Biological Processes ◽  
James Bond ◽  
Secret Service ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One

This chapter traces Foucauldian technologies of power in the James Bond universe and characterises the Bond franchise’s biopolitics in the cultural environment of the 1960s and 1970s, when 007 became a mass phenomenon. The majority of the chapter is dedicated to a case study of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Ian Fleming’s tenth Bond novel (1963) and the sixth film in the EON series (1969). The chapter highlights the intersection between reproduction and fertility on the one hand and the infliction of death and mass genocide on the other, and it examines how James Bond juxtaposes the disciplinary means that are directed against the body (as an organism) on the one hand, and the state-powered regulation of biological processes that control the population on the other. The two versions of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service amount to the franchise’s most straightforward foray into the realm of biopolitics and would pave the way for the franchise’s subsequent biopolitical and eugenic moments, like when the figure of the genocidal villain gets to articulate the franchise’s own subliminal agenda regarding population control and the future of the (British) species.

“Outer” and “Inner” Body in Mikhail Bakhtin’s Literary Theory

2014 ◽  
Vol 14-15 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Géza S. Horváth
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
New Vision ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Act And Being

Bakhtin subordinates the experience of the body to the experience of the action, to the participation in the event of being. The world's thickening into body around the man is named as a new reality, an “aesthetic reality” by Bakhtin: “the artist and art as a whole create a completely new vision of the world, a new image of the world, a new reality of the world’s mortal flesh [реальность смертной плоти мира], unknown to any of the other clturally creative activities. [. . .] Aesthetic activity collects the world scattered in meaning and condenses it into a finished and self-contained image [образ]. This constitutes the analogy of the body and the artistic form for the creative view. The aesthetic activity gathers and thickens into a complete, sufficient- for-itself image the world dispersed from the perspective of the sense. The problem of the outer and inner body is treated in this paper in the light of Bakhtin’s philosophy of the act and being.

Emmanuel Levinas

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Katz
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Philosophical Problem ◽  
The Other ◽  
Husserlian Phenomenology ◽  
Ethical Project

Emmanuel Levinas (b. 1906–d. 1995) was a French-Jewish thinker known primarily as the philosopher of the ‘other.’ He studied with Husserl and Heidegger in the 1920s. He introduced phenomenology to France through his translation of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations into French, and he developed a lifelong friendship with Maurice Blanchot. Prior to the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany, Levinas’s philosophical work focused on Husserlian phenomenology. His thought took a dramatic turn in the mid-1930s when he focused on the philosophical threat of Nazism. He spent 1940–1945 in a German POW camp. Returning to Paris after the war, he immediately went back to work for the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), where he became director of the École Normale Israélite Orientale (Enio), the Jewish day school. He resumed working on his question from the 1930s—the philosophical problem of identity and transcendence—with an added urgency in the wake of World War II. From 1946 until his death in 1995, Levinas’s ethical project searched for a way to address this philosophical problem of escape, developing a view of the self as an ethical subject that allows one to transcend the self without leaving the body behind. From the 1940s to the early 1960s, he developed the first version of his ethical project. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he responded to criticisms of that early work. Central to Levinas’s description of the ethical relationship are references to literary works including Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare. Although Levinas was an observant Jew, the biblical narratives, in addition to being part of a sacred text, also serve as rich sources of examples for the philosophical descriptions of the ethical relationship he develops. Levinas is not obviously identified with literary theory—not in the way that Derrida is, for example. He did become popular within literary theory circles in the 1990s and might be taught more frequently in comparative literature departments than in philosophy departments, especially in the United States. His friendship with both Blanchot and Derrida had a significant impact not only on their thinking but also those who whose work was influenced by them. References to terms like the other/Other, the trace, hospitality, ethics, and alterity found throughout Blanchot and Derrida, and now more commonly in literary theory, can be traced back to Levinas’s ethical project.

scholarly journals Periferni polemički diskursi povodom Mandićeve knjige Romani krize – kritički paratekst ili „politikantska uzbuna“?

2021 ◽  
pp. 50-64
Author(s):  
Miranda Levanat-Peričić
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
The Body ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Common ◽  
Literary Period

Publication of a book of literary reviews Romani krize (The Novels of Crisis) by Igor Mandić in Belgrade in 1996, as well as the book promotion in Serbia, have been the subject of sharp attacks on its author in the Croatian media. In this “case,” which Mandić himself called “the chase of the collegial choir of elite commentators” for an “insignificant book of literary reviews,” several peripheral levels that are attempted to impose as dominant or to compete for a more favorable discursive position can be distinguished. First of all, the complex of peripheral is in the very status of literary criticism, the marginal letter, inferior to the prestigious discourses of belletristic and literary theory. However, as Mandić underlined in the foreword to The Novels of Crisis, this “by status wholly devalued writing, no matter how small, could always be used as a ‘symptom’ to raise some sort of ward-heeler’s alarm.” Regardless of the ironic modus of this attitude, the “ward-heeler alarm” that followed completely departed from the subject of this Mandić’s collection, or a decade of Serbian and Croatian literary productions, from the 80’s to the 90’s. Finally, precisely this literary period, which Mandić defined as a decade after the death of J. B. Tito and M. Krleža until the break-up of the SFRY, as the last decade of literary and cultural life in a common state, after its disintegration remained on the historical periphery of newly established national canons. However, the most important peripheral level of the whole of this “case” is concerned with the approach to the body of texts that this book deals with, i.e. a comparative study of Serbian and Croatian literature. At the time it was published in 1996, from peripheral cultural positions the comparative approach to the Croatian and Serbian literature was perceived as a radical political provocation that comes from the common past, in the wake of its renewal. In this work special attention is given to Mandić’s choice of Serbian and Croatian literary titles, hence to the very content of the Novels of Crisis. However, since the cultural context of this book goes beyond the literary criticism of the decade to which it relates, its significance is looked into from the aspect of polemical discourses this book produced, even at the periphery of the Croatian nineties.

Motherhood as a Space for the Other: A Dialogue between Mother Maria Skobtsova and Hélène Cixous

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-146
Author(s):  
Kateřina Bauerová
Keyword(s):  
Creative Writing ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Helene Cixous ◽  
Opening Up

The article deals with the issue of motherhood as a space for the other in terms of its being a space shared with the other on both the biological level and also in the metaphorical sense of the word, where motherhood means accepting the other into the wider space of the body of a family, of society, and of the whole universe. This opening up of one’s space for the other necessarily implies that the space diminishes. The article explores the theme through the work of two writers, Mother Maria Skobtsova (1891–1945) and Hélène Cixous (b. 1937), as both reflect in their lives the idea of motherhood as a space for the other. It puts their voices into conversation from their different discourses. Mother Maria speaks the language of theology and poetry, and the artistic language of icons; Hélène Cixous the language of literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and creative writing.

“Outer” and “Inner” Body in Mikhail Bakhtin’s Literary Theory

2014 ◽  
Vol 14-15 (1) ◽  
pp. 144-154
Author(s):  
Géza S. Horváth
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
New Vision ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Act And Being

Bakhtin subordinates the experience of the body to the experience of the action, to the participation in the event of being. The world's thickening into body around the man is named as a new reality, an “aesthetic reality” by Bakhtin: “the artist and art as a whole create a completely new vision of the world, a new image of the world, a new reality of the world’s mortal flesh [реальность смертной плоти мира], unknown to any of the other clturally creative activities. [. . .] Aesthetic activity collects the world scattered in meaning and condenses it into a finished and self-contained image [образ]. This constitutes the analogy of the body and the artistic form for the creative view. The aesthetic activity gathers and thickens into a complete, sufficient- for-itself image the world dispersed from the perspective of the sense. The problem of the outer and inner body is treated in this paper in the light of Bakhtin’s philosophy of the act and being.

Psychology, theories of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
N.E. Wetherick
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Causal Interaction ◽  
Scientific Psychology ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Cognitive Revolution ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Cost

The object of study in psychology is the experience and behaviour of organisms, particularly human organisms. Psychology resembles the other sciences in employing methods appropriate to material phenomena but, unlike them, the mind (sometimes held to be immaterial) is among its objects of study. If the mind were immaterial it is difficult to see how psychology could proceed. Psychology differs from the other sciences in that understanding may not permit prediction and/or control of the phenomena. This is a consequence of the fact that human organisms may become aware of causal factors that would otherwise have determined their experience or behaviour. Being aware, they have a choice. (This is not, of course, to deny that the choice may itself be determined by more remote factors.) In the seventeenth century, Descartes proposed that the mind (or soul), though immaterial, was nevertheless capable of two-way causal interaction with the material body. It is often held that what is immaterial cannot interact with what is material but Descartes’ proposal was, in its context, so valuable that it has ever since exercised a profound influence on philosophy and on what most of us take for granted (for example, the unexamined belief that the mind/soul is, in some sense, immaterial but does, in some sense, interact with the body). The possibility of scientific psychology was preserved by Leibniz’s hypothesis of psycho-physical parallelism (according to which the deity keeps mind and body running in parallel, though there is no causal interaction between them). This view did not survive the passing of an era of universal (and largely unquestioned) religious belief. At the beginning of the twentieth century behaviourism tried to do without mind, it also tried to avoid surreptitious appeal to the lay person’s unexamined ‘mind’ concept. In the 1960s, the cognitive revolution in psychology substantially broadened the range of phenomena under investigation but at the cost of allowing appeals to an unexamined ‘mind of last resort’. The headlong advance of the computer, which has taken over many functions previously reserved to members of the human species, leaves open the question whether it will, one day, take over all of them – or will be permitted to do so.

scholarly journals Walter Benjamin e Roland Barthes às margens da escritura

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 87
Author(s):  
Derick Davidson Santos Teixeira
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The Common

Resumo: A noção de escritura, desenvolvida por teóricos como Roland Barthes,Jacques Derrida e Maurice Blanchot, no século XX, possui um lugar medular nateoria da literatura e na crítica literária. O presente trabalho propõe um cotejamento entre a teoria de Walter Benjamin e de Roland Barthes no que concerne à escritura. Tomando alguns traços principais da escritura, analisados por Barthes, em conjunto com o pensamento de Benjamin acerca da narração, do declínio da experiencia e de algumas obras da literatura moderna – como a obra de Proust– é possível elucidar de que forma a escritura, operando como um limiar (Schwelle), escapa à rigidez das fronteiras que separam o pessoal e o histórico, a ordem comum do individualismo, a experiência da vivência.Palavras-chave: Roland Barthes; Walter Benjamin; escritura; limiar.Abstract: The notion of writing, developed by theorists such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot, in the 20th century, has a fundamental place when it comes to literary theory and literary criticism. This work proposes a collating between Walter Benjamin’s and Roland Barthes’ theory concerning writing. Taking some main features of writing, analyzed by Barthes, together with Benjamin’s thought about narration, the decline of experience and some modern literary works – such as Proust’s oeuvre – it is possible to elucidate how writing, working as a threshold (Schwelle), escapes from the rigidity of the borders that separate the personal and the historical, the common order and individualism, experience and “inner lived experience”.Keywords: Roland Barthes; Walter Benjamin; writing; threshold.

Aboutness and Meaning: How a Paradigm of Subject Analysis Can Illuminate Queer Theory in Literary Studies

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grant Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The Other ◽  
Subject Analysis ◽  
Intellectual Content ◽  
Cultural Minority ◽  
Information Studies ◽  
Billy Budd

This paper uses the paradigms of subject analysis in information studies to study the treatment of homosexuality in academic literary criticism. Both subject analysis and contemporary gay and lesbian culture are concerned with the distinction between “aboutness,” defined as intrinsic intellectual content, and “meaning,” defined as the various uses to which a user might put that content. An examination of the treatment of homosexuality in various critical analyses of Melville’s Billy Budd suggests that literary critics are divided on whether homosexuality is part of the story’s content, or merely part of an interpretive strategy. Furthermore, trends in literary theory have questioned the possibility that we can find any innate “aboutness” in any literary work. Nonetheless, gay-positive readings of literature, particularly works of queer theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, are re-enacting the activities of subject analysis in their works: placing literary works within broader contexts of literary, social and intellectual relationships. Furthermore, Sedgwick’s binarism between homosexuality as an explicit and visible cultural minority and homosexuality which pervades culture as a whole recreates the aboutness/meaning dichotomy of subject analysis. The paper concludes that literary theory and subject analysis, while very different, exist on a continuum with each other, and that each can benefit from the insights of the other.

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