Key Concepts in Literary Theory
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FANTASY 33 and religious or quasi-religious contexts, whereby colonising and invading forces have assumed non-white and/or non-Christian cultures to be barbaric, 'heathen', or, in some instances, not human. Ethnocentrist attitudes thus transform relative difference between cultures into value judgments mobilised by an ideology of hierarchical identification and comparison in which questions of race also figure exten-sively. As a corrective to ethnocentric tendencies, cultural relativism has stressed that cultures can not be evaluated for their merits or faults in comparison with other cultures; rather, a structural approach to ethnic cultural analysis has emerged which seeks to identify the various constituent elements and their interrelations within a culture which gives a particular culture its identity. However, such an approach is still not free from the problematic of ethnocentrism in-asmuch as the act of analysis and the epistemological frame-works that generate analysis can still be marked invisibly by cultural assumptions. Ethnography—Systematic and organised recording and classifi-cation of human cultures. Existentialism—A philosophical movement that involves the study of individual existence in an infinite, unfathomable universe. Existentialism devotes particular attention to the individual's notion of free will and interpersonal responsi-bility without any concrete knowledge of what constitutes right and wrong. A variety of twentieth-century thinkers and writers have explored the possibilities of existentialism, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger and Simone de Beauvoir, among others. False consciousness—Illusory or mistaken beliefs, the term is used in marxist theories to designate the beliefs of groups with whom one disagrees or who are in need of liberation and enlightenment; otherwise, the belief on the part of the middle classes which insists that class-based interests are not posi-tioned ideologically but are universal. Fantasy—In everyday language, fantasy refers simply to the workings of the imagination, but in different theoretical
FEMINISM 111 Levinas, Emmanuel. Basic Philosophical Writings, eds Adriaan T. Pe-perzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington, IN, 1996. Miller, J. Hillis. The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin. New York, 1987. Newton, Adam Zachary. Narrative Ethics. Cambridge, MA, 1995. Norris, Christopher. Truth and the Ethics of Criticism. New York, 1994. Nussbaum, Martha C. Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York, 1990. Nussbaum, Martha C. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston, 1995. Nussbaum, Martha C. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge, 1986. Parker , David. Ethics, Theory, and the Novel. Cambridge, 1994. Parr, Susan Resneck. The Moral of the Story: Literature, Values, and American Education. New York, 1982. Phelan, James (ed). Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology. Colum-bus, 1988. Robbins, Jill. Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature. Chicago, 1999. Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transac-tional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale, IL, 1978. Siebers, Tobin. The Ethics of Criticism. Ithaca, NY, 1988. Williams, Bernard. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, 1985. Worthington, Kim L. Self as Narrative: Subjectivity and Community in Contemporary Fiction. Oxford, 1996. Feminism Though not a unified, single critical 'voice', feminist literary criticisms are in broad agreement on their shared role as political and politicised criticisms directed at matters of gender, sexuality and identity. Developing critical languages from the political discourses of the women's movement of the 1950s and 1960s, feminist criticism addresses the representation of women in literature and culture, in the work of both female and male authors. Critical feminisms have also concerned themselves with the role of the reader from a gendered perspective and with the study of women's writing. Feminist criticism has also addressed the relation of gender to matters of class and race, and has,
GENDER nonetheless like oneself. The other also has self-conscious-ness, hence the reciprocity suggested by Hegel in the inter-subjective structure. Of this structure, Hegel remarks that 'a self-consciousness, in being an object, is just as much "I" as "object". With this, we already have the concept of Spirit. . . Spirit is . . . the absolute substance which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousnesses . . . Self-con-sciousness exists in and for itself, when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another, that is, it exists only in being acknowledged'. Thus Geist names the unity of distinct self-reflexive subjects qua social unity. Moreover, Hegel's think-ing on Geist implicitly shows how the concept is fundamen-tally empty unless it comes into being as a result of a hermeneutics of self-conscious reciprocity. Such a determi-nation on Hegel's part is what allows him to propose human history as a history of spirit, where spirit comes to manifest itself in and through the conscious relationships of human beings who acknowledge their shared being. More generally, the term denotes the manner in which we imagine or con-ceive of nationhood, culture and social or political move-ments, in the form of a shared 'spirit' which constitutes our identity as English, German, American, Liberal, Democrat, Socialist and so on. Hence, geist refers to our shared assump-tions - often unarticulated except as the idea of national identity, for example - or cultural ideology, by which same-ness is asserted at the expense of that which is different or other within the constitution of identity. However, because the term is doubled and divided 'internally' by its different meanings and is therefore haunted by the condition of undecidability, there is, as Jacques Derrida argues, always something 'invisible' within the idea of geist which disturbs the very premise of the shared assumption which is grounded on the notion of undifferentiated identity and what that seeks to exclude but which returns nonetheless. Gender—Term denoting the cultural constitution of notions concerning femininity or masculinity and the ways in which these serve ideologically to maintain gendered identities. In much sociological and feminist thought, gender is defined
COMMODIFICATION ship. As a consequence of colonial occupation and the discourses and practices generated and maintained by colo-nisers, the idea of colonialism may also be said to designate the attributes of the specific political and epistemological discourses by which the colonising power defines those who are subjected to its rule. Postcolonialism refers in literary studies to literary texts produced in countries and cultures that have come under the control of European powers at some point in their history. Commodification—The process by which an object or a person becomes viewed primarily as an article for economic exchange - or a commodity. Also the translation of the aesthetic and cultural objects into principally economic terms. The com-modification of an object or the raw materials from which it is produced is a sign of the transformation from use-value to exchange-value. The term is used in feminist theory to describe the objectification of women by patriarchal cultures. Through the processes of commodification, the work of art lacks any significance unless it can be transformed by economic value into a mystified, desired form, the labour having gone into its production having been occluded. Commodity fetishism—Term used by marxist critics after Marx's discussion in Volume I of Capital to describe the ways in which products within capitalist economies become objects of veneration in their own right, and are valued way beyond what Marx called their 'use-value'. Commodity fetishism is understood as an example of the ways in which social relations are hidden within economic forms of capitalism. Condensation—A psychoanalytic, specifically Freudian, term referring to the psychic process whereby phantasmatic images assumed to have a common affect are condensed into a single image. Drawing on the linguistic work of Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan compares the Freudian notion of condensation to the work of metaphor. Connotation/denotation—A word's connotations are those feel-ings, undertones, associations, etc. that are not precisely what the word means, but are conventionally related to it, especially in poetic language such as metaphor. The word
Bakhtin employed the term as a means for explaining the hybrid nature of the modern novel and its many competing utterances. Heuristic—A heuristic argument is one that depends on assump-tions garnered from past experience, or from trial and error. History/historicism—History designates, broadly, the study or record of a series of chronological events. In addition to denoting a sphere of knowledge that explores past events, history refers to the events or phenomena that affect a given nation or institution. A somewhat vague term, historicism in critical discourse suggests either that human thought is historically grounded and undergoes epistemological trans-formations during the course of history (so that what con-stitutes the idea of beauty in aesthetic thought does not remain static but changes, for example), or that history is understood as a ideological process, whereby transforma-tions occur as part of a general and necessary series of developments. More generally, historicism connotes an as-pect of literary criticism that studies literary works within their heterogeneous or interrelated historical contexts. In addition to exploring the social or cultural forces at work in a given literary text, historical critics attempt to account for the reception and literary significance of that work in the past and the present. Historical critics recognise that literary works function as the product of the social, historical and cultural forces inherent in the era of their composition. Homophobia—Fear and hatred of homosexuals. Homosocial—Term coined by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to de-scribe the networks of male-male relationships in literature and in culture at large. Homosociality covers a spectrum of male relationships from father and son, buddies, love rivals, sports opponents and team-mates, club members and so on -which might all be undertaken by strictly 'straight men' -through to entirely homosexual relationships at the other end of the spectrum. Humanism/humanist—Western European philosophical dis-course, the first signs of which emerged in the Early Modern Period, and, subsequently, critical mode that argues for the
POSTSTRUCTURALISM 131 igaray, Kristeva, Lacan) as they have come to be translated and transformed through the Anglo-American theorising of questions of the literary and the matter of critical, textual analysis. The terms poststructuralism and theory or high theory have been assumed by some to be virtually synonymous (as have poststruc-turalism and deconstruction), and the salient discernible features in common of this so-called critical modality - allegedly - have to do with the following topics: the work of rhetoric, the destabilis-ing effects of language, the provisionality of meaning, the work of tropes and images in resisting uniformity or organic wholeness, questions of undecidability, discontinuity, the aporetic and frag-mentation, difference and otherness, the constructedness of the subject, matters of translation, and the denial or, perhaps more accurately, a critique of the referentiality or mimetic function of language. Bibliography Attridge, Derek. Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce. Ithaca, NY, 1988. Attridge, Derek and Daniel Ferrer (eds). Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French. Cambridge, 1984. Attridge, Derek, Geoffrey Bennington and Robert Young (eds). Post-Structuralism and the Question of History. Cambridge, 1987. Chase, Cynthia. Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Ro-mantic Tradition. Baltimore, MD, 1986. Cohen, Tom. Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock. Cambridge, 1995. Cohen, Tom. Ideology and Inscription: 'Cultural Studies' After Benja-min, De Man, and Bakhtin. Cambridge, 1998. De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figurai Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven, CT, 1979. De Man, Paul. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York, 1984. D e Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis, MN, 1986. de Man, Paul. Aesthetic Ideology, ed and intro. Andrzej Warminski. Minneapolis, 1996. Easthope, Antony. Poetry as Discourse. London, 1983. Easthope, Antony. British Poststructuralism since 1968. London, 1988. Harari, Josué V. (éd.). Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structur-alist Criticism. London, 1979. Johnson, Barbara. The Critical Difference. Baltimore, MD, 1980.
POWER 67 the name for a school or movement. With reference to literature and culture, 'postmodernism' is often taken to refer to any work of art which knowingly refers to its own status as a work of art, or which otherwise, from the position as elite art form, jokingly addresses the status of the art object through construction from or reference to popular culture, thereby collapsing distinctions between high and low. However, certain theorists of the postmodern, such as Fredric Jameson, Jean-François Lyotard and Teresa Ebert find the problematic of defining postmodernism a question of its being a product of particular political overdetermina-tions, which serve to produce postmodernism's often appar-ently contradictory meanings, and whereby the postmodern condition is fundamentally misrecognised in aesthetic terms. The meaning or identity of the postmodern is understood, then, as a self-conscious aesthetic component of its constitu-tion, rather than as a political effect of late-twentieth-century global capitalism. There is therefore a shift in definition from the formalist aesthetic radicalism perceived by William Spa-nos, for example, to a more politically or ideologically comprehended aspect to what we call postmodernism. Postmodernity—Term referring to the era, state of being or literary arts associated with postmodernism. Jean-François Lyotard defines postmodernity as being marked by a suspi-cion of grand narratives. The idea of a postmodern era is also one provisionally defined by the advent of tele-technologies, the emergence of globalisation and post-industrial society, and the power of the image and simulacrum within con-sumer culture, where images such as the Coke or Nike logos assume greater significance in themselves than any real product or reality to which they might refer. Power—In the work of Michel Foucault, power constitutes one of the three axes constitutive of subjectification, the other two being ethics and truth. For Foucault, power implies know-ledge, and vice versa. However, power is causal, it is con-stitutive of knowledge, even while knowledge is, concomitantly, constitutive of power: knowledge gives one
