November 8th LT Readings

Theorists Nealon and Giroux engage in a discussion of western capitalism’s view of time and space in their chapter “Space/Time” in Theory Toolbox.  They characterize time as something determined by labor and management battles and organized around the capitalist view that “time is money,” although they concede that social progress has been made through the years by negotiations between labor, management, and subordinated racial groups in an effort to correct abuses and inequities between these groups.  In defining space, they discuss how the spaces we occupy, whether personal, family, school, state, regional, or national, provide frameworks for us to experience who we are in those contexts.  They also cite Foucault’s preoccupation with modern institutions and their attempts to control “the [social] space of the body”.  This brings to mind Emerson’s distrust of religious, educational, and civil institutions; his distrust based on the belief that reliance upon institutions prevents men and women from discovering the “divinity” within, something that Foucault would disagree was possible since individuals are always products of culture.  I thought the observation by Nealon and Giroux that the acceleration of travel time in the last 160 years has compressed concepts of both time and space was interesting, and I couldn’t help but think of another Romanticist, Thoreau, and how he might view the “advances” of technology and mobility, since even in his lifetime in the early-to-mid 19^th century, he thought of these as encumbrances to the development of one’s spirituality and enlightenment.

Barry’s chapter, “New Historicism and Cultural Materialism,” details the similarities and differences between these two theoretical view points.  New Historicism assigns equal value or weight to literary and non-literary texts from the same historical period, no longer placing a higher value on the “classic” works of the past.  These theorists object to and seek to deconstruct traditional attitudes toward society, deity, and the created universe that are foundational to these works.  It appears that they thereby seek to deconstruct the Judeo-Christian ethic by focusing attention on what they consider abuses of state power, patriarchal structures, colonization, etc.  Although new historicism holds to Derrida’s tenet that every facet of reality is contextual, it does not go so far as to say that it is impossible for men and women to ever attain some measure of knowable truth.  If I understand this correctly, new historicism retains some vestige of the belief that people can exercise a degree of agency when attempting to arrive at historical truth, a view which distinguishes it from cultural materialism.  Cultural materialism asserts that men and women, being cultural products, cannot transcend the material forces to which they are captive, and it opposes the view of “idealism” which represents works such as Shakespeare’s as the successful efforts of enlightened individuals to provide readers with themes and lessons of “timeless” significance.  By emphasizing the value of contemporary Marxist and feminist analysis, cultural materialism sees Shakespeare, for instance, as a cultural idol whose works support the cultural ideology of patriarchal authority, and therefore questions the validity of institutions that perpetuate the study of his works.  I find this devaluing of literature to a cultural practice distressing and am thankful that the debate between theorists and traditionalists continues.  Can it be, as Culler posed in a previous chapter on “Literature and Cultural Studies,” that we should seriously argue the value of studying contemporary soap operas rather than Shakespeare?

November 1st LT Readings

The three readings in our literary theory texts center on questions of individual identity in literature, the nature of history and ideological point of views, and Marxist criticism and its various revisions.  In Culler’s “Identity, Identification, and the Subject” chapter, he outlines four strands of modern thought regarding individual identity, delineating the self as either something that is given or something that is made.  He notes that modern literary tradition treats the self either as a given/individual who expresses his or her uniqueness through word and deed or as a given/social self shaped by one’s origins and social attributes. Theory contests this given view of the self and instead sees self as either a made/individual that becomes what it is through acts or as a made/social self formed solely by outside forces. In my view, the psychoanalytic, Marxist, feminist, and Queer Theory models ask the question “What am I?” because they regard the individual as a “product” of culture, a “subject” of social construction while the traditional literary model offers an answer to the question “Who am I?” because it see the self as a unique and largely autonomous being with the ability to develop personal qualities in response to life’s difficulties.  Culler cites an example of this ethic in the American western novel where the notion of the essential self emerges from the struggles which bring one’s character into relief, where identity is both the basis and result of individual actions.  Culler also discusses how literature makes identity a central theme and can provide readers with models of how others struggle with inner psychological forces (like Hamlet) and how others can overcome constraining external social forces (like Jane Eyre.)  It seems to me that fairy tales also serve this purpose for children and adults as they identify with a hero or heroine’s quest for love, social acceptance, and individual achievement.

Nealon and Giroux present the nature of history as one that is always subject to interpretation in Theory Toolbox, explaining that history is a narrative told from a particular, ideological point of view.  From this they deduce that history is therefore a constructed vision of the past rather than a reconstruction of it.  They discuss how an author’s point of view reflects deep, ideological presuppositions and that these produce context rather than discover it.  I find it ironic that Nealon and Giroux advocate an engagement with “multiple historical narratives” while branding the American ideology of “Manifest Destiny” as “bunk,” despite the significant place it occupies among historical perspectives.  Shouldn’t a reader of history be able to access and consider all views?

In our third reading, Barry describes Marxist criticism and the changes it has experienced through the decades as it transitioned from Marxist to Leninist to Engelsian and then to the most recent New Criticism model.  As envisioned by Marx and Engels, communism is a materialist philosophy which explains society in terms of the natural world only, a closed system which does not allow for the existence of a supernatural world.  The Marxist model of society is based on state-owned means of production, distribution, and exchange of goods and atop this base sits the superstructure of cultural ideas, law, art, and even religion, all determined by the nature of the economic base.  Leninist Marxist criticism initially encouraged modern forms of art, but soon exerted direct control over literature and the arts, outlawing liberal views and imposing a “socialist realism” framework which supported party philosophy.  Barry explains that René Welleck and Roman Jakobson then imported a revised form of Engelsian Marxist criticism known as Russian Formalism to America and some western European countries.  Louis Althusser was also a proponent of the Marxist “New Criticism” movement which promotes a more subtle view of how society works than traditional Marxism provides.  In this revision of Marxist criticism, the concession of a “relative autonomy” of the arts” avoids the more rigid “economics as central” argument of Leninist criticism.  I found it striking that Althusser accuses capitalism of thriving on the “trick” of interpellation by making us feel as though we’re making choices when there actually are no choices available (political parties, for instance,) while in Marxist societies the possibility of political choice is, without question, non-existent.   

October 25 LT Readings

The October 25 readings were thought-provoking as they discussed the power of language to shape our assumptions and ways of thinking about culture and identity.  Culler details how literary utterance and specifically “performative” language can bring into being characters and their actions and also bring into being the ideas it deploys.  Literature can be an act of speaking things into existence and although this can support the idea of man or woman as a creator, Culler contends that the performative act “breaks the link between meaning and the intention of the speaker” because the act one performs with words is “determined” by social convention. (p. 97) Culler cites Derrida’s view that performatives only work if they are socially recognized and repeatable (iterable) phrases such as “I do” or “I promise.”  Judith Butler then applies the performative act of language to gender, asserting that even gender is created by acts, that one “becomes a man or a woman by repeated acts that depend on social convention.”  Both Culler and Barry discuss the implications of using the performative concept as a model or “stake” for thinking about social processes, such as the nature of identity and how it is formed, particularly sexual identity.  Barry quotes the Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader’s claim that “lesbian/gay studies does for sex and sexuality what women’s studies does for gender” by making sexual orientation “a fundamental category of analysis and understanding.”  Ironically, Barry ties the understanding of identity within lesbian/gay studies with that of postmodernism, a view that identity is “a constant switching … of roles and positions,”  and he points out that such “anti-essentialism” undermines the foundation on which “identity politics” depends, that is, discrimination based on gender, race, or sexual orientation. (p. 140)

I found Nealon’s and Giroux’s discussion of ideology interesting. They begin their chapter by stating “Ideology is a tough thing to get at” because it is the study of ideas which are immaterial in nature, a study which attempts to show “the way things are” and to create a general social agreement or consensus about meaning and purpose.  They describe ideologies as “stakes of ideas” engaged in the production of knowledge in the fields of science (the physical world,) philosophy (the metaphysical world,) politics (the social world,) and religion (the supernatural world.)  The authors argue that a society’s ideology or “common sense … can’t be examined or challenged or rearranged,” but, on the contrary, it seems to me that each successive generation engages in an active discourse which challenges its older generation’s scientific, philosophical, political, and religious ideologies, and then attempts to retain that which it considers valuable and correct or discard that which it deems no longer credible.  I do think the authors’ question asking “What unarticulated premises stand behind our knowledge?” is a good one, and I believe that one of the most important services literature performs in society is that it prompts readers to examine commonly-held ideas too often unexamined and taken for granted in their individual and social lives.

Variations on Snow White

Of the four readings of the Snow White tale, three are narratives reflecting traditional cultural views and one is a poem presenting the modern feminist view.  The traditional tale of The Young Slave (1634) reflects a theological cultural context as Lilla, the unmarried sister of an Italian baron, becomes pregnant by something akin to Immaculate Conception.  Unfortunately, a fairy inadvertently curses her daughter Lisa and she dies at seven years of age.  Although Lilla supernaturally preserves Lisa’s body in seven caskets of crystal, she dies of grief a year later and entrusts the key to the room holding Lisa’s casket to her brother for safekeeping.  It is the baron’s wife, “impelled by jealousy, consumed by curiosity” who ironically frees Lisa from death and then makes her a slave.  When the Baron overhears Lisa revealing her true identity to a doll he has given her, and hears her threat to kill herself, the Baron knocks down the door and rescues her from suicide, an irreparable sin in Catholicism.  He then orders a great banquet to welcome her home (reminiscent of the biblical parable of the prodigal son) and as his guests listen to her story they weep at the cruelty of his wife and rejoice when the Baron drives her out of the household.

There is vivid cultural imagery and symbolism threaded throughout the second traditional version, Snow White (1812) by the Grimm Brothers.  In the initial scene, a queen sits looking out from an ebony-framed window at the snow and wishes for a child “as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the window frame.”  The cultural meaning of color in this scene is thought-provoking; white for purity, red for blood or danger, and black for mourning or death.  The queen gives birth to Snow White shortly after the wish scene and then she dies, her daughter then governed by a beautiful, vain stepmother who turns “green with envy” (which the Disney version uses to great effect) when Snow White’s beauty exceeds her own, according to the Magic Mirror. Snow White finds refuge when she happens upon the home of her surrogate family, the seven dwarfs, but because she fails to heed their warning not to let anyone in the house while they’re away, she falls prey to the devices of her stepmother disguised as an old peddler woman.  As in The Slave Girl version, Snow White’s body does not decay in death and this allows the possibility for the love of the dwarfs and a prince to free her from death.  Again, the stepmother/queen is publicly humiliated but in Grimms’ version, she also dies a grotesque, painful death as a result of her cruel vanity.

The longest of the traditional tales, Lasair Gheug, the King of Ireland’s Daughter (1891) introduces a cultural stock villain of Scottish lore, the eachrais urlair, an evil old woman who, together with stepmother/queen, plots to kill the king’s daughter out of greed.  There are many twists and turns in the story, but in the end, Lasair Gheug devises a way to reveal how the eachrais urlair and stepmother/queen have framed her and she publicly exposes her stepmother as a “monster” who is then “burnt in fire,” a type of hellish punishment similar to the Grimm Brothers’ red-hot iron shoes.  These traditional narratives fulfill Aristotle’s definition of an effective narrative, discussed by Culler on pages 84-85 of Literary Theory, by providing “an end relating back to the beginning … an end that indicates what has happed to the desire that led to the events the story narrates.”

In contrast, Anne Sexton’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a modern feminist critique, parodies the cultural contexts of the traditional versions.  As Barry points out in his chapter on feminist criticism, feminists seek to expose the “mechanisms of patriarchy” in the cultural representations of women in literature and call into question those symbols they believe associated with authority, fathers, and repression.  Sexton views Snow White as a “lovely number,” a virginal china doll, and likens her whiteness to “a bonefish,” something stiff and dead.  In her poem she paints the proud stepmother/queen as a victim of a patriarchal society’s demand for the prize of physical beauty; a demand that transforms her into a ghoul “lapping her slim white fingers” as she chews what she believes is Snow White’s heart “like a cube steak.”  In other modern cultural references that disrupt the reader’s traditional images of the tale, she substitutes an Ace Bandage for the Grimms’ corset laces and red-hot roller skates for their red-hot iron shoes.  The feminist moral to Sexton’s tale appears to be that both Snow White and her stepmother are captive to the patriarchal voice of the mirror, a cultural script in which feminist critics Susan Gilbert and Susan Gubar view “women (as) enmeshed in a discourse connecting beauty, death, and femininity,” on page 77 of Classic Fairy Tales.

Beauty and the Beast

Familial relationships are an important focal point of Madame de Beaumont’s Beauty and the Beast and the story takes place in that context.  There is no mother or mother figure initially in the story and (the mother’s absence not being explained) and this allows for the youngest daughter to take center-stage in her father’s affections, although not exclusively, as he demonstrates a concern for the education and well-being of his other two daughters and three sons.  “Beauty” is the youngest daughter and the only person named in the narrative until a non-descript monster named “Beast” in introduced.  Beauty’s wealthy merchant father loses his fortune “out of the blue” and is forced to move his family to a humble country house where he and his sons work the land and Beauty, refusing “a number of gentlemen who would have been happy” to marry her devotes herself to domestic life, again assuming the role of the absent wife and mother.  This situation mirrored a common reality in 18^th and 19^th century family life with many a wife dying in childbirth, often leaving the children to take on many adult responsibilities.  When the merchant receives a letter informing him that a ship containing his merchandise has arrived safely in its home port, a clue to the reason for his sudden loss, he sets out to reclaim his wealth and status only to discover there is a lawsuit over his merchandise.  Caught in a fierce snowstorm as he travels home, and on the verge of death in the dark of night, the dejected merchant suddenly sees a bright light that leads him to an immense castle and thanks God for His intervention.  Magically, he finds hay for his horse in the stable and a table laden with food with just one place setting, but strangely, there is no other person in sight.  After a night of rest and a prepared breakfast in the morning, he remembers Beauty’s request to bring her a rose on his return home and he plucks a rose from a nearby magnificent arbor.  It is then that Beast appears and loving his roses “more than anything in the world” demands that the merchant pay with his life for the offense.  When the merchant explains the reason he plucked the rose, the Beast offers forgiveness only if one of his daughters dies in his place, echoing a theme of substitutionary, sacrificial death that 18^th century readers were surely familiar with.  Now fate seems to be working against the merchant father and even as he returns home with a large chest of treasure Beast has given him, he mourns that plucking the rose will cost an innocent life.

Beauty asked for a rose, a symbol of heraldry and a flower of great beauty but one also bearing thorns.  Both she and Beast consider a rose of great value and this is the first evidence of a kinship between the two and is also the literary device that brings them together.  Beauty’s self-sacrificing insistence to go back to the Beast’s castle in her father’s place displays a virtuous inner character which, in her case, corresponds to a beautiful outer appearance.  This theme of the “abstract quality of virtue” and “the transformative power of love” are lessons Madame de Beaumont considered essential for children to learn.  Beast is kind to Beauty despite being a “horrible figure” and this lifts Beauty’s spirits as she “puts herself in God’s hands.”  When Beast grants her wish to return home to visit her family, she discovers that “it is neither good looks nor great wit that makes a woman happy with her husband but character, virtue, and kindness, and Beast has all those qualities.”  She returns to Beast to say she’ll marry him and this pronouncement breaks the magic spell that has hidden a young handsome prince in the body of the beast.  Now his outer appearance and inner virtue mirrors Beauty’s and all incongruity between them is resolved; nonetheless, a “grand fairy” (a mother figure at last) warns Beauty not to let becoming a noble queen destroy her many virtues.  The grand fairy reunites the family and makes one final moral point by turning Beauty’s two jealous sisters (whom de Beaumont ironically calls “nasty creatures”) into statues at the door of her palace to witness her happiness and experience a corrective to their malice and envy. 

Madam de Beaumont wrote this moral tale at the dawn of the Enlightenment, a time when there was a belief that individuals could bring about solutions to the problems of society.  Barry discusses this in the “Postmodernism” chapter of the Beginning Theory reading.  He cites the differing views of three postmodernist thinkers; Jurgen Habermas, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard, marking their writings as a major moment in the postmodernist movement.  Habermas states that the modern era began with the Enlightenment movement in the mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries when that movement broke with a strict adherence to long-held religious precepts and attempted to replace them with a secular faith in reason.  Surprisingly, Habermas manages to maintain his faith in reason despite a “catalog” of twentieth century disasters and he criticizes Derrida and Foucault for attacking the ideals of reason, clarity, truth, and progress. 

In response, Lyotard criticizes Habermas’s plea for postmodernists to “put an end to experimentation” and argues that postmodernists must deconstruct the basic aims of the Enlightenment.  Instead of accepting “metanarratives” that attempt to explain and reassure man there exists a “unitary end of history,” Lyotard claims that the best modern man can hope for is a series of contingent, temporary “mininarratives” valid only for specific groups in particular circumstances.

Baudrillard writes about the “loss of the real” or the loss of distinction between reality and illusion, image and substance, which brought to mind the theme of outer and inner representations of beauty and virtue depicted in Beauty and the Beast. He states that in the past (once upon a time?) a sign was believed to be a surface indication of an underlying reality but that postmodernism questions this belief and proposes that a sign can disguise the reality beneath or that a sign may bear no relation to any reality, citing Disneyland as an example of a simulation, not a representation, of an idealized America that never was.

I thought it interesting that Barry ends his chapter with an example of a postmodernist critique by Jeffrey Nealon, co-author of The Theory Toolbox text we are reading in class.  In his essay “Samuel Beckett and the Postmodern …,” Nealon explores the idea of “language games” where he defines “truth” as narrowly applicable, like rules that govern a game and are only valid within the context of that game, a view similar to the “mininarratives” advocated by Lyotard.  Nealon criticizes two characters in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, who wish for a “Grand Narrative” that will give significance to the seemingly meaningless trials they endure, their lives “riven with nostalgia for the lost wholeness of the past” (a wholeness represented in Beauty and the Beast.)  In Nealon’s view, these characters never “breakthrough” to the greater postmodernist realization that they will have to settle for a “mininarrative” on which to base their understanding of the particular circumstances and trials of their lives.

Little Red Riding Hood

Little Red Riding Hood


In reading the four versions of Little Red Riding Hood, it's interesting to note the differences between them. The two more traditional versions are those of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. Both these versions present Little Red as a pretty village girl, adored by her mother and grandmother, and the red cap or hood made for her by her grandmother easily identifies her. In both versions she is an innocent charged with taking cakes to her ill grandmother and to do so, she must travel through the woods where a wily Wolf lurks. When she encounters the Wolf he pretends to be her friend but the reader knows he intends to trick her so that he can make a meal of both her and her grandmother.

Never having read the Perrault version, I was surprised to read that Little Red takes off her clothes and climbs into bed with the Wolf - she surely must have recognized him at close range! Also, the finality of both Grandmother's and Little Red's deaths is somewhat shocking, a triumph of evil over innocence. Perrault's heavy-handed "Moral" at the end of the story appears to be targeting young ladies rather than little girls, warning them of the dangers of being deceived by men who, like the wolf, may seem "tame, pleasant, and gentle" but are to be guarded against at all costs.

The Grimms' tale, however, provides the reader with the proverbial "happy ending" by bringing resolution to the narrative. Although the Wolf succeeds in eating both Grandmother and Little Red, he has apparently swallowed them whole (a bit of magic to be sure.) When the huntsman hears the Wolf snoring in Grandmother's bed, he realizes the Wolf has eaten Grandmother and cuts her out of the sleeping wolf's belly because "she could still be saved." Out come an intact Grandmother and Little Red, and the huntsman, Grandmother, and Little Red all profit from the near-fatal experience. Not wanting to leave the reader without an alternative rendition of how Little Red and Grandmother could have avoided the nasty situation all together, the Grimms also present a short tale demonstrating how Grandmother and Little Red could have out-maneuvered the Wolf without the huntsman's help if they had been less trusting. They turn the tables on the Wolf and lure him to his death by exploiting his hunger and drowning him in a trough of broth!

In contrast, “The Story of Grandmother” published by Paul Delarue and “The Little Girl and the Wolf” by James Thurber are not morality tales. There is no personalization of any of the characters - no names, no illumination of motivation or emotion displayed, and the Little Girl is no innocent, but clever enough to extricate herself from the Wolf's clutches, in one version by pretending to have to "go" outside and escaping back to her home in safety and in Thurber’s version by pulling an automatic revolver out of her basket of food for Grandmother and shooting the Wolf dead. No magic or moral needed here.

When I finished last week's reading in Beginning Theory by Barry, I did the activity he listed about why I decided to study English on page 8. I wrote that one of the reasons I decided to study English was because of learning experiences I had in high school when reading books like Melville's Billy Budd, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, and Shakespeare's Macbeth. These works provided me with new ways of thinking about the human condition and man's relationship to others and to God, the natural and supernatural planes, and man's place in the universe, and also allowed for exploration of these issues in thought-provoking class discussions.

In this week's readings from the books on Theory, I discovered that my view of the function and value of literature is one that was prevalent prior to the 19th century but is no longer in vogue with modern literary theorists. From Barry's chapter on "Liberal Humanism," I'm apparently in Aristotle's camp because I have a "reader-centered" approach to literature, and believe that individual character is revealed through actions that lead to decisions readers can identify with. I think this is why fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood remain popular through generations of children, because tragedy or near-tragedy create "pity and fear," sympathy for and empathy with the plight of the protagonist, and are cathartic in nature, helping us as children and adults to deal with our own fears. I also believe a story should have some point or significance, making the effort to read it "worth it," as Culler discusses in Literary Theory. Both Culler and Barry highlight the movement of British critics in the 19th century to view the function of literature as a vehicle to replace a declining national belief in religion, with literature providing a special place of moral scenarios which would unify society by giving the "middle class and aristocrats alternative values” and giving “the lower class a stake in the culture." Culler cites the novels of Jane Eyre and Uncle Tom's Cabin as examples of vehicles of ideology that were also instruments for that ideology's undoing; however, Culler then goes on to state that modern criticism rejects this as a legitimate function of literature.

I thought the chapter on “Author/ity” in the Theory Toolbox was interesting in its discussion of why certain works of literature are considered worthy of study and how the word "author" is both a verb and a noun. "To become an author is to be invested with author/ity, to be taken seriously and respected for your accomplishments." While I agree that the author is not always in control of the meaning of his or her text and that there can be multiple meanings for readers because each reader is a unique individual who is capable of discerning meaning apart from the author, I disagree that the author therefore has no control over his or her meaning, as Foucault claims. I believe an author's meaning depends on the credibility that the community of readers gives to his or her works and that the text, apart from the author, cannot produce its own meaning. I find myself more in agreement with Matthew Arnold's view that if readers will read the best works by the great masters (Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton) it will encourage "a direct relationship between the individual reader and the literary greats" and help readers establish a basis for judging new writing, a view that Barry calls a "protestant aesthetic."

Mary's Theory:

Mary's Theory: