IGNOU MEG 5 - Literary Criticism & Theory Block-8 Contemporary Literary theory

Important Questions from MEG 5 Block 8 Contemporary Literary Theory:

1. Evaluate the salient features of post - colonialism.

2. Analyze the historical importance of Post-colonialism for the Third World

3. Discuss critically the seminal issues that Post-Colonial theory addresses.

4. What are the major concerns of postcolonial theorists ?

5. Briefly introduce two major post-colonial critics and their contribution to our understanding of literature.

6. In what ways does postmodernism differ from modernism ?

7. What is meant by postmodernism ? Discuss with reference to Lyotard.

8. How do you think postmodernism differs from modernism ?

9. The general characteristics of reading in post-colonial criticism is that a text is 'read back' from the perspective of the colonized." Comment critically on the statement

10. Attempt a critique of post-colonial theory with special reference to Said, Spivak and Bhabha.

11. Trace the emergence of cultural studies with reference to the theories of Edwards Said, Spivak and Bhabha.

12. What does Spivak mean by `Subalternity' ? Explain with examples.

13. Evaluate either Freud’s or Lacan’s contribution to the understanding of literature. 2

14. How are ‘lack’ and ‘desire’ closely connected in Lacan’s theory ?.2

15. Discuss lacan's main contribution to critical theory

16. Write briefly on the importance of Freud in a study of literature.

17. Write a critical note on the essentials of Marxist literary theory OR Freudian psychoanalysis

18. What are Foucault's views on discourse and power ?

19. Do you think Foucault’s views on discourse and power influenced Said’s Orientalism ?

20. How is Orientalism an additional approach to the understanding of literature ? Trace its origin and applicability

21. Critically interpret Edward Said's concept of Orientalism.

22. Attempt a critique of Midnight's Children as a postmodernist text.

23 What is Raymond Williams' contribution to Cultural Studies

Unit-1 Some Basic Issues

UNIT 2 POSTMODERNISM: THE BASICS

Modernism is a cover term for certain tendencies in early twentieth century art and literature. The motivating slogan at the back of these tendencies was 'make it new'. The heyday of Modernism was the period between 19 10 and 1930. Postmodernism fully came into its own in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. Modernism also has skepticism but of a less absolute kind. Also, postmodernism is satisfied with surfaces whereas Modernism did strive for a certain kind of 'depth'. Postmodernism's fascination is with popular art forms and its mood is less elegiac than that of Modernism. Postmodernism does not fully abandon modernism's mood of alienation. However, whereas the modernist writer was more keen on trying to wrest a meaning from the world through myth, symbol or formal complexity, the postmodernist writer greets absurdity or meaningless existence with an indifference which combines resignation, fatigue and playfulness.

JEAN FRANCOIS LYOTARD AND JEAN BALTDRILLARD

Baudrillard's book Simulations (first translated into English in 1983) theorized the 'loss of the real'. Lyotard's main argument is that the 'truth claims' and assumed consensus on which a lot of history and its 'grand narratives' stand are an illusion. The 'grand narratives' (talk in terms of progress through rationality) are untenable and repressive. They lack credibility. They impose restrictive boundaries on an otherwise pluralist cultural formation. They delimit discourse and exclude or marginalise voices that do not suit the dominant groups. Baudrillard's main contention is that 'the real' is now defined in terms of the media in which it moves. The pervasive influence of images from television and advertising has led to a loss of the distinction between the real and the imagined.

MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN AS A POSTMODERNIST TEXT

Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight S Children (1983) which is concerned with the 'life' of Saleem Sinai who was born at midnight on August 15, 1947 is a good example of a postmodernist text. Rushdie seeks to,challenge the conventional narrative through blurred boundaries of discourse, through textual play, through explicit or implicit parody and through the hybridization of language. His dealings with Padma are sometimes mocking and sometimes loving. He keeps mocking his own self all the time. The hold of realism is loosened through fantasy. The 'local' is celebrated as we find in the loving care which Rushdie bestows on details of Bombay life. Irony is playful and liberating. Mimicry also has an important role in the proceedings. Ideas about origins, centre, presence and historical explanation itself are undetermined all the time. More than this, an element of the mock-heroic is also at work. Exaggerations of various kinds and the element of bathos (anti-climax), introduced at crucial points in the narrative are all part of the overall playful thrust.

UNIT 3 PSYCHOANALYSIS: FREUD AND LACAN

FREUD AND LACAN: INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

Sigmund Freud – Psychoanalytic Criticism (Simplified Notes)

🧠 Basic Info:

Freud (1856–1939): Austrian neurologist, founder of psychoanalysis
Studied the unconscious mind, dreams, and human behavior
Believed that many of our thoughts and actions are influenced by repressed desires

Core Concepts:

🔹 Unconscious Mind:

Most of our mental activity is unconscious (hidden below awareness)
Repression: Pushing uncomfortable desires or memories out of consciousness
These repressed ideas still influence behavior

🔹 Three Parts of the Mind:

Id:
- Instincts and desires (pleasure-driven)
- “I want it now!” (e.g., a child grabbing candy)
Ego:
- Rational, reality-based part
- “Let’s wait until after dinner.”
Superego:
- Moral conscience
- “You shouldn’t eat candy at all—it’s bad!”

🧩 Simple Link:

Id = Pleasure
Ego = Reality
Superego = Morality

Child Development (Psychosexual Stages):

Freud believed children go through erogenous zones:
1. Oral (0–1): Sucking thumb/bottle (pleasure from mouth)
2. Anal (1–3): Potty training (pleasure from control)
3. Phallic (3–6): Awareness of genitals
💥 Oedipus Complex:
- A boy feels love for his mother, sees father as rival
- Leads to guilt, fear, and identification with father

Dreams and the Unconscious:

💤 Dreams = Wish Fulfillment

A way for repressed desires to be expressed
Seem strange because the mind censors the real message

🛠 Dream Work (How mind changes hidden desires into dream images):

Condensation – Many ideas → 1 image
Displacement – Emotion moves from real target → safe one
Representation – Thoughts → Symbols/images
Secondary Revision – Brain makes dream logical after waking

📌 Example:
Dreaming of climbing a mountain → might symbolize sexual desire (repressed wish)

Everyday Examples of the Unconscious:

Freudian Slip: Accidentally saying something revealing
Jokes: Often reveal hidden thoughts
Forgetting names, misreading – Can show inner conflicts

Jacques Lacan (Freud Revisited):

French psychoanalyst
Key ideas: Desire, Lack, and Otherness
Linked Freud with language theory

LACAN'S MAIN IDEAS

Jacques Lacan – Key Psychoanalytic Concepts (Simplified Notes)

🧠 Who was Lacan?

French psychoanalyst (1901–1981)
Combined Freud’s psychoanalysis with Saussure’s linguistics
Famous quote: “The unconscious is structured like a language.”

🔤 Language and the Unconscious

The unconscious mind works like language—it has structure, rules, and symbols.
Our identity ("subject") is shaped by language.
Language creates meaning, but also confusion and gaps.

🧩 Simple Example:
When a child learns the word “mother,” they realize the mother can be absent. Language both names and separates things.

🧱 Lacan’s Three Orders (Mental Development Stages)

Imaginary Order (Infancy)
- No clear difference between self and others
- Child sees a mirror image and starts forming an identity
- No language yet
- 🪞 Example: A baby thinks they are one with their mother
Symbolic Order (Language + Culture)
- Begins when the child enters language and society
- Introduces rules, names, and authority
- Includes the Law of the Father (social rules)
- The child gives up the mother (desire) and joins culture
Real Order (Beyond words)
- What cannot be expressed in language
- Raw experience, trauma, or confusion
- 🚫 Example: A feeling of loss or fear that has no words

💔 Key Ideas about Desire and Identity

💥 Lack:
- We are born into a feeling of separation or loss (from mother)
- This lack creates desire
💬 The Other:
- A symbol of the world outside us (society, culture, people)
- The Other creates our desires by showing us what we are missing
❤️ Desire ≠ Need:
- Need = physical (e.g., food, water)
- Demand = emotional (e.g., love, attention)
- Desire = begins where need and demand separate
- We chase fantasy objects that we think will complete us

🧿 The Phallus and the Law of the Father

Phallus = Not a body part, but a symbol of power and absence
Represents:
- The law and the rules of society
- The loss of the mother’s exclusive attention (for boys)
The Father = a symbol of cultural authority, not just a person

👦 Male child’s journey:

Gives up desire for the mother
Accepts social rules (Symbolic Order)
Gains identity in society through language and role

🔑 Main Takeaways for Students

Lacan mixes Freud (psychoanalysis) and Saussure (language)
The unconscious is like a language—structured, symbolic, and full of hidden meanings
Our identity and desires are shaped by language, culture, and “lack”
Desire is endless—we’re always searching for something we feel is missing
The Symbolic Order is where we gain identity but lose primal unity

UNIT 4 POSTCOLONIAL THEORY: SAID, SPIVAK AND BHABHA

Poststructuralist Influence on Postcolonial Theory

Key Thinkers:

Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan — major French poststructuralist thinkers who deeply influenced literary theory.
In postcolonial theory, Foucault’s influence is especially strong, seen in the work of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha.
- Spivak is more influenced by Derrida
- Bhabha draws more from Lacan

The 'Holy Trinity' of Postcolonial Theory

Edward Said – Orientalism (1978)

Orientalism is not just about politics or academic study; it is a discourse that helped Europe dominate the East by producing knowledge about it.
The Orient was portrayed as passive, backward, and unchanging, while the West was dynamic and advanced.
This portrayal helped justify colonial rule.
Said emphasizes that knowledge and power are interconnected:

“Knowledge gives power, more power requires more knowledge…” (p.36)

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak – Subalternity

Asks: "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
Defines subalterns as oppressed groups: women, colonized people, the working class.
Argues that women in postcolonial societies are doubly silenced — by patriarchy and imperialism.
She critiques how Western thinking marginalizes and ‘represents’ the third world.
Introduces the concept of “worlding” – how colonized spaces are defined and included in the West’s worldview on Western terms.
Warns against overemphasizing Western control without recognizing native resistance.

Homi Bhabha – Mimicry and Hybridity

Mimicry: Colonized people imitate colonizers, but imperfectly — this creates ambivalence, which can undermine colonial power.
Hybridity: A space between colonizer and colonized that produces new identities and resistance.
Bhabha sees colonial power as unstable and believes that resistance emerges from within the colonial system itself.
He also questions the idea of a unified nation, seeing it as an artificial imposition on diverse people.

Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan are three French thinkers (they are mostly clubbed under 'poststructuralism') who have exercised a profound influence on almost all that has happened in literary theory in recent times. In the case of postcolonial theory, the man who has exercised the greatest influence on the field is Foucault. Said's work shows his influence in a very marked way. Spivak and Bhabha also draw from him. The more obvious influence on Spivak is that of Derrida and in Bhabha's case the more obvious influence is that of Lacan.

THE HOLY TRINITY

Said's Orientalism which appeared in 1978. Said sees Orientalism as a discourse by which European culture was able to manage and even produce the orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively during the post-enlightenment period A very important statement which Said makes on page 12 of Orientalism is: Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship or institutions, nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the orient nor is it representative and expressive of a nefarious 'Western' imperialist plot to hold down the 'Orient World'. It is rather a distribution of geographical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological and philosophical text; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction but also a whole sense of 'interests'

Said's book establishes that stereotypes and general ideology about the orient. The knowledge of the Orient created by and embodied within the discourse of Orientalism serves to construct an image of the Orient and the Orientals as subservient and subject to domination by the Occident. The knowledge of 'subject traces' or 'Orientals' makes their management easy and profitable. Knowledge of the Orient is generated out of strength and such strength-generated knowledge, in turn, 'creates' the Orient, the Oriental and his/her world. In most cases the Oriental is 'contained' and 'represented' by dominating frameworks and the encoding and comparison of the orient with the West ensures in the long run that oriental culture and perspectives are a deviation and a perversion that justify an inferior status for the latter. The Orient is seen as essentially monolithic with an unchanging history, while the Occident is dynamic with an active history. Not only that, the Orient and the Oriental are seen-to be passive, non-participatory 'objects' of study. The Orient, in that sense, was sought to be established as a textual construct. On page 36 of his book Said states: Knowledge gives power, more power requires more knowledge, and so on in an increasingly profitable dialectic of information and control.

Gayatri Spivak's notion of 'subalternity'. Spivak is a leading contemporary feminist deconstructionist who pays careful attention to issues of gender and race. Her use of the term 'subaltern' is influenced by the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci. Spivak's essay 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' addressed the way the 'subaltern' woman is constructed, as absent or silent or not listened to. The 'muteness' of women in postcolonial societies is the main issue which her work confronts. The main argument of her essay is that, between patriarchy and imperialism, subject constitution and object formation, the figure of woman disappears not into a pristine nothingness, but into a marginal position between tradition and modernization. , Spivak uses the term 'subaltern' (of lower rank) for women, blacks, the colonized and the working class. Subalternity comes to suggest the repressive dominance of white Western thinking and an allegory of the displacement of the gendered and colonized (i.e. subaltern) subject, by the imposition of narratives of internationalism and nationalism. The violence inflicted by Western forms of thought upon the East is of great concern to Spivak. She takes 'the third world' to be a creation of the west that locks non-western cultures into an imperial representation. 'Worlding' is the name she gives to the process through which 'colonized space' is 'brought into the world; that is made to exist as part of a world essentially constituted by Eurocentrism. In these kinds of formulations one of the possible pitfalls is attributing an absolute power to the hegemonic discourse in creating the native and not making enough room for the resistance of the native.

That brings us to Bhabha, the third figure in 'the Holy Trinity' and to his key notion that is 'mimicry'. 'Mimicry' designates a gap between the norm of civility as presented by European Enlightenment and its distorted colonial imitation. It serves as the sly weapon of anticolonial civility and is an ambivalent mixture of deference and disobedience. To Bhabha the operations of the unconscious in the imperial context are far from simple because desire for, as well as fear of, 'the other', does not allow the identities of the colonizer and the colonized to stay fixed and unitary. Colonial power undermines its own authority and can paradoxically provide the means for native resistance. The site of resistance, the strategic reversal of the process of domination that looks the colonial power squarely in the eye, is marked by 'hybridity', an 'in-between' space. It not only displaces the history that creates it,,but sets up new structures of authority and generates new political initiatives. It undermines authority because it imitates it only outwardly. On account of the difficulty of categorizing different cultures into universalist frameworks, Bhabha finds the idea of the 'nation' a little problematic. He thinks that the idea stems from the imposition of a rather arbitrary 'national' character upon a necessarily very heterogeneous collection of people(s)

UNIT 5 BEGINNINGS OF CULTURAL STUDIES AND NEW HISTORICISM

Raymond Williams and Cultural Studies

Context & Contributions

Raymond Williams was central to the birth of Cultural Studies in post-war Britain.
He helped establish the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies in 1964, alongside Richard Hoggart and later Stuart Hall.
Williams’ work merged history, sociology, and literary studies, forming the foundation of Cultural Analysis.

Key Concepts

🔸 "Culture is Ordinary"

A rejection of elitist, high-culture definitions.
Emphasized everyday life, especially working-class culture, as worthy of serious study.

🔸 Structures of Feeling

Refers to the lived, emotional experiences of people in a particular time and society.
These are shared values and meanings that are felt but not always formally defined.
They reflect how individuals make sense of their lives within their social conditions.

🔸 Lived Actuality

Williams focuses on real, everyday social experience ("social experience in solution").
He values how people interpret their world through their lived culture.

Critique of Other Movements

Rejected the apolitical stance of movements like the New Critics, who focused only on formalist, aesthetic readings of texts.
Challenged cultural elitism by emphasizing ordinary people’s experiences and everyday practices.

Influence on New Historicism

Williams’ stress on culture as material, social practice influenced thinkers like Stephen Greenblatt, a key figure in New Historicism.

Criticism of Williams

Some critics argue Williams blurred lines between different aspects of culture (economic, political, ethical), creating a circular totality that may:
- Eliminate the hierarchy of priorities
- Lead to over-subjectivizing culture
- Weaken political critique by collapsing all into one cultural experience

Raymond Williams practice grows from an eclectic body of work in Britain in the post-war period which can be broadly characterized as 'cultural analysis.' That work includes 4 the impressive output of Williams himself and more generally comprises the convergence of history, sociology and English in Cultural Studies. in 1964 and the names of Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall were associated with it. Raymond Williams had 111uch to do with the founding (in 1964) of the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies. Richard Hoggart's book Title Uses of Literacy gave Cultural Studies a working class orientation. He 'read' everyday working class life, customs and habits as though they were literary texts. William's edict 'culture is ordinary' is at the heart of such a working-class orientation. The aestheticism, ahistoricism and apolitical position of groups like the New Critics were not seen in a favourable light by the Cultural Studies people. Raymond Williams's work is crucial to the beginnings of 'Cultural Studies' in Britain as they took shape in the Birmingham Centre. Towards the beginnings of New Historicism, the contribution of Stephen Greenblatt is noteworthy. Williams' was a challenge to cultural elitism from within the tradition of 'English' criticism. His stress is on 'lived actuality' or on 'social experience in solution' as lie phrases it on p. 128 of Marxist and Literature. Meanings and values actually possess a great value in Williams's science of things. These have a way of binding people together in that they furnish them with meanings that go into the making of interpretive resources at their comment and as individual members of society. They help them to arrive at a sense of a number of matters by redefining their relationship with one another. What Williams calls 'the living result' of all the elements in the general organization is precisely what gets reflected in his phrase 'structures of feeling'. These 'structures of feeling' are tied up with the belief that we are aware of our 'particular sense of life' and 'our 'particular community' when we notice the ways in which we are different from each other even as we participate in a common culture. It was Williams' firm belief that any adequate analysis of culture requires a detailed study not just of each element in it but of the organization which is 'the complex of these relationships'. But when one talks of 'the nature of the organization' it should not be something abstract but 'the nature of the organization' as experienced. Emphasis should be on 'the particular living result of all the elements in the general organization.' William's concern Williams' work, in the characteristic mode of the early New Left, tended to a dangerous conflation of productive modes, social relations, ethical, political and abstraction of 'culture'. Such a collapsing not only abolishes any hierarchy of actual priorities, Cultural Studies and New Historicism Contemporary Theory Literary reducing the social 'formation to a 'circular' Hegelian totality and striking political strategy dead at birth, but inevitably over subjectivises that formation (p.26)

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