Professional Documents
Culture Documents
2-5 The Formalists, Russia, 1910s. “Lit language is a set of deviations from a norm … a ‘special’ kind of language, in
contrast to the ‘ordinary’ language we commonly use.” Ordinary lang is different for different classes, regions, ages,
etc. Lit lang is an assemblage of devices (sound, rhythm, narrative techniques, etc) and the lit content is merely present
as the reason to use these in a particular way.
6-7 However, it’s possible to read anything as literature, giving the text a more general significance beyond its
pragmatic purpose (reading it “non-pragmatically”). So whether something is lit depends on how one reads it. Lit is a
“functional rather than ontological” term; “it tells us about what we do, not about the fixed being of things.”
8-9 Lit is often what we think of as good. As this is a value judgement there can be no objective category of writing that
is literature; it’s whatever we say it is.
10-14 But what we say it is is shaped by inescapable social ideologies. Our value judgements “refer in the end not
simply to private taste, but to the assumptions by which certain social groups exercise and maintain power over others.”
4. Post-Structuralism
110-111 The signified (the concept of a boat) is not only what it is because of its signifier (“boat”) but also because of
all the signifiers it isn’t (“moat”, “boar”, etc). Look up a signifier in a dictionary and the signified (the definition) is
made up of more signifiers, etc. “Structuralism divided the sign from the referent”, post-structuralism “divides the
signifier from the signified.” “Meaning is not immediately present in a sign.” The meaning of a word in a text is affected
by those before and after it.
111-112 “It is difficult to know what a sign ‘originally’ means” because its context is always different. I can never be
fully present to you through what I say or write because the meaning of the signs is always in flux. I can also never have
a pure meaning or intention myself as I am made up of language.
113 Western philosophical tradition “has consistently vilified writing” because it is always at one remove from one’s
consciousness, whereas speech is more immediate. But this ignores the mutability of the signs in speech too.
114-116 There can be no transcendental, original meaning to a thought-system as we always want to go beyond it. First
principles can always be “deconstructed” as products of a particular system of meaning. They are often defined by what
they exclude, are part of the binary opposition beloved of structuralism (and ideologies in general).
117-118 Roland Barthes. A “healthy” sign draws attention to its own arbitrariness. Signs which pass themselves off as
“natural” and the only way of seeing the world are authoritarian and ideological. Realist literature has this “natural
attitude”, tries to give us reality “as it is” and denies the productive character of language. The “double” sign “gestures
to its owm material existence at the same time as it conveys a meaning”. Formalists, Czec structuralists, German
Weimar Republic (including Brecht), Bolshevik Futurists.
119-120 A lit work is no longer something to be read but something writable. It is not a stable structure and the critic is
now a producer not just consumer. A “writable” text has no set meaning, “an inexhaustible tissue or galaxy of
signifiers”. Barthes’ S/Z (1970), a study of Balzac’s story Sarrasine.
122-125 [Stuff about Paris in 1968 etc. Can’t quite fathom the exact relationship between that and post-structuralism.]
125-130 [More stuff about politics and post-structuralism that leaves me wanting a definition of what post-structuralism
actualy is. It sounds important but is very vague. Feminism. Michel Foucault.]
5. Psychoanalysis
131-132 Freud. We must work to survive and in doing so we repress the “pleasure principle”, our tendencies to pleasure
and gratification. We might “sublimate” unfulfilled desires by directing them to a more socially valued end.
132-135 As children grow, become aware of sexuality. Oedipus complex. Acceptance of and adoption of
masculine/feminine roles. “We turn from incest to extra- familial relations; and from Nature to Culture”.
136-137 The child now has an ego, identity, but only by repressing its guilty desires into the unconscious. Dreams are
our main access to the unconscious. They are “symbolic fulfilments of unconscious wishes” but filtered by the ego and
confused by the unconscious — metaphor, metonymy.
137-138 We may have unconscious desires that won’t be denied but find no outlet. “The desire forces its way in fro the
unconscious, the ego blocks it off defensively, and the result of this internal conflict is what we call neurosis.”
Psychoanalysis sees unresolved conflicts behind neuroses which stem from the Oedipal moment. If the ego cannot partly
repress the unconscious desire psychosis occurs, the unconscious builds up an alternative, delusional reality.
142-146 Jacques Lacan’s take on Freudianism. Reinterprets him in the light of structuralist and post-structuralist
theories and looks at the relationship to language.
146-147 The unconscious and dreams, for Lacan, is composed not of signs but of signifiers, and it is not obvious what
they signify. Language is slippery and we can never say exactly what we mean or mean what we say. When we use “I” in
a sentence we can never fully represent ourself.
147-148 Literature draws attention to how something is said, not just what is said, unlike, say a textbook. The work will
not be taken for the absolute truth and the reader is encouraged to think about this particular representation of reality.
Bertolt Brecht. Avant-garde film-making vs Hollywood.
148-150 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Lenin and Philosophy (1971). Individuals are
merely products of several social structures. But we experience ourselves as free, autonomous individuals. How? We feel
that society is not an impersonal structure but something that addresses us personally, as though the world is centered
on ourselves. Ideology is the set of beliefs and practices that does this centering. It is things like going to church, voting,
letting wome through doors first, how I dress.
150 For Lacan the unconscious is not just within us but an effect of our relations with one another. Language is similar.
Language, the unconscious, parents, the symbolic order — the ‘Other’.
159 Harold Bloom rewrote literary history in terms of the Oedipus complex. A poet is overshadowed by a previous poet,
like a son is a father, and tries to disarm that strength by revising and recasting the earlier poem. A return to Protestant
Romanticism of heroic battling giants.
160-161 Classical narrative for Freud, something is lost, it is distressing but exciting, but we know the object will be
restored. But also what we have might one day disappear forever.
162 Naturalistic theatre, eg Shaw: the discourse may urge change and criticism but the form enforces the solidity of this
social world. To break with these ways of seeing it would need to move beyond naturalism (later Ibsen and Strindberg),
jolting audience out of the reassurance of recognition. Brecht’s “estrangement effect” makes the most taken-for-
granted aspects of reality unfamiliar to unsettle the audience’s convictions.
163 Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique (1974). [Don’t understand the description of the “semiotic”.]