HUMANISM THROUGH DECONSTRUCTION

Theoretical Foundations

Major Branches of Critical Theory

Intrinsic Criticisms “Humanist” Critical Theory

(Classical Civ.  20’s)

New Criticism (formalism)

(1920’s  40’s)

Structuralism

(emerged 60’s  70’s)

Deconstruction

(peaked in the late 70’s)

Extrinsic Criticisms

Psychoanalysis (Freud,

Lacan, Jung) New Historicism (White, Foucalt) Sociological Criticisms Feminist Critical Theory Queer Theory Political Criticisms Marxism

Post Colonialism

Pants on the ground, pants on the ground….

  What socio cultural niches do these two fashion choices represent?

how do these choices define themselves in opposition to societal norms? What are the societal norms in terms of jeans?

 A formalist/new critic would write about tight or baggy jeans, exploring the symbolic meanings, ambiguity, paradox, etc.   A structuralist would write about tight and baggy jeans, focusing on how the two ideas define each other via a system of binary opposition. He might then write about the larger systems of which these pants are just a part (fashion, music, race, socio-economic class).

A deconstructionist would start off focusing on the binary and then expose that it’s a false dichotomy shifting his interest to the full range of possible jean tightnesses and the people who wear them, possibly even why they wear them and when they wear them.

Humanist Critical Theory

It only lasted 2000 years

Humanism

 In broad, philosophical terms, “humanism” is a world view or perspective that rejects anything supernatural as an explanation for existing phenomena. Everything that we can observe with our senses can be explained by human investigation and thought  Humanist Critical Theory focuses on the study of literature because of it’s enriching value.

 What does it teach us?

Plato (c 427-347 BCE)

   Begins tradition of didactic moral criticism  What does this work teach us?

 Part of what we call “Humanist” criticism revolves around this question  With this central question, the best literature is that which informs our morality Plato was not a fan of art and literature Plato gave us the “theory of forms”  non-material abstract forms (or ideas), and not the material world compose the highest and most fundamental reality.

 Things in the material world are reproductions of these ideals  Art is then a reproduction of a reproduction

Plato’s lasting influence

   The material world we perceive through our senses is not the real world, but an imperfect copy of an ideal  Art works to reproduce or represent that perceivable material world

The world is organized into binary opposites: rational/irrational, good/evil, male/female, public private (For Plato, Art was the binary opposite of Reason)

Literature is important and needs to be regulated or supervised, because it has a powerful effect on it’s readers  Content (which causes the effect) is more important than form

Aristotle (c 384-322 BCE)

  Aristotle's understanding of the nature of reality was different than Plato’s  For Aristotle, “reality” does not reside in a static world of ideal forms, our world is not an imitation; rather, reality is our ever-changing world of appearances and perceptions.

   Did not believe that art was a “reproduction” of nature, and thus was not inherently inferior.

Further, art doesn’t “lie”, rather it reveals truths in a different way than rational deduction.

Art, for Aristotle, is not the binary opposite of reason Aristotle’s Poetics is the first work of literary criticism in the western tradition  Less interested in content, more interested in form  The role of hamartia, pathos and catharthsis in tragedy were concerns of Aristotle

  Aristotle's work was to discover similarities and differences in form and to deduce general principals of organization  Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species?

 This is an Aristotelian system of organization Aristotle treats poetry the same  His Poetics investigates what poetry is rather than what it does

New Criticism

The text, the whole text, and nothing but the text

New Criticism

    Peaked in the 1930’s and 40’s Focus on “the text itself”  Symbolism + Ambiguity + Irony + Patterns + Paradox + Tension = Organic Unity (the sign of quality literature) Grew out of the Humanist approach (some even lump New Criticism/Formalism in with Humanist Critical Theory) Replaced biographical/historical criticism that dominated the 19 th century   No more combing the authors letters and diaries trying to find authorial intent Authorial intent is unknowable!

  The Intentional Fallacy – it’s fallacious (false) to think that you can know what the author intended The author doesn’t even know what they intended  They could be influenced by their unconscious minds

The New Critic Asks…

 What single interpretation of the text best establishes its organic unity? In other words, how do the text’s formal elements, and the multiple meanings those elements produce, all work together to support the theme, or overall meaning, of the work?  a great work will have a theme of universal human significance  When we cover post-colonialism, this idea of “universal human significance” will be brought into question  Historically, “universal human significance” usually means “appeals to western white males”

 Organic Unity – how the text’s formal elements, and the multiple meanings those elements produce, all work together to support the theme, or overall meaning, of the work.

Structuralism

The science of signs

Structuralism

 It’s a methodology   you are engaged in structuralist activity if you examine the physical structures of all the buildings built in urban America in 1850 to discover the underlying principles that govern their composition, for example, principles of mechanical construction or of artistic form. You are also engaged in structuralist activity if you examine the structure of a single building to discover how its composition demonstrates the underlying principles of a given structural system.

System and Instance, Langue and Parol

 In the first example of structuralist activity, you’re generating a structural system of classification  In the second, you’re demonstrating that an individual item belongs to a particular structural class.

 Structuralism is about using instances to define the systems of which they are a part or about exploring instances through the systems that define them  Langue – Structuralist term for the system  Parole – Structuralist term for individual instances

  In terms of literary study, the same model of structuralist activity holds true.

 You are not engaged in structuralist activity if you describe the “structure” (order of events, sentence composition) of a short story to interpret what the work means or evaluate whether or not it’s good  you are engaged in structuralist activity if you examine the structure of a large number of short stories to discover the underlying principles that govern their composition, for example, principles of narrative progression (the order in which plot events occur) or of characterization (the functions each character performs in relation to the narrative as a whole).   Examples from the audience?

If all noir stories or westerns share general patterns of diction (style of speaking), this is of structuralist interest in structuralist activity you describe the structure of a single literary work to discover how its composition demonstrates the underlying principles of a given structural system (of all the works like it).

     Generally, structuralists are not interested in    individual buildings individual literary works individual phenomena of any kind They are interested only in what those individual items can tell us about the structures that underlie and organize all items of that kind. Structuralism sees itself as a human science whose effort is to understand, in a systematic way, the fundamental structures that underlie all human experience and, therefore, all human behavior and production. Structuralism isn’t a field of study.

It’s a method of systematizing human experience that is used in many different fields of study: for example, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and literary studies.

Where do these structures come from?

   Structuralists believe they are generated by the human mind, which is thought of as a structuring mechanism. This is an important and radical idea because it means that the order we see in the world is the order we impose on it. Our understanding of the world does not result from our perception of structures that exist in the world. The structures

we think we perceive in the world are products of human consciousness

Key Structuralist Vocab

   Differance (say it like you’re French) simply means that our ability to identify an entity (such as an object, a concept, or a sound) is based on the difference we perceive between it and all other entities. binary oppositions: two ideas, directly opposed, each of which we understand by means of its opposition to the other.  we understand up as the opposite of down, female as the opposite of male, good as the opposite of evil, black as the opposite of white, and so on. a linguistic sign consisting, like the two sides of a coin, of two inseparable parts: signifier + signified.     A signifier is a “sound-image” (a mental imprint of a linguistic sound); the signified is the concept to which the signifier refers. Thus, a word is not merely a sound-image (signifier), nor is it merely a concept (signified). A sound-image becomes a word only when it is linked with a concept. the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary

Sign, Signifier, Signified



I just told you that the connection between the words we use and what they mean is totally arbitrary

 anyone think that’s crazy?  Anyone want to shout out the obvious counter example?



But Mr. Hayworth! a rooster says Cockadoodledo! Surely in this case signifier=signified!



In French it goes: cocorico



In Dutch it's: kukeleku



In German it's: kikeriki

Sapir-Whorf

 Learning a new language carries with it the potential to learn to see the world in new ways.  If native speakers of English learn to speak an Eskimo language, they may learn to see snow quite differently,  there are many different words for what English calls snow, depending on the size and texture of the flake, the density of the snowfall, the angle at which it falls, the direction from which the storm originates, and so on.

Eskimo Snow Lexemes

     

Snow particles

Snowflake - qanuk Frost -kaneq Fine snow/rain particles kanevvluk Drifting particles natquik Clinging particles – nevluk      

Fallen snow

 Fallen snow on the ground - aniu Soft, deep fallen snow on the ground – muruaneq Crust on fallen snow – qetrar Fresh fallen snow on the ground – nutaryuk Fallen snow floating on water – qanisqineq      

Snow formations

Snow bank – qengaruk Snow block – utvak snow (formation) about to collapse – navcite

Meterological events

Blizzard – pirtuk Severe blizzard cellallir

  structuralism does not attempt to interpret what individual texts mean or even whether or not a given text is good literature.  Issues of interpretation and literary quality are in the domain of surface phenomena, the domain of parole.

 This lack of interest in quality is what separates the structuralist approach to literature from, say, the humanist/neoclassicists who hold a text up to Aristotle's definition of tragedy and evaluate it against it Structuralism seeks instead the langue of literary texts, the structure that allows texts to make meaning, often referred to as a grammar or even poetics because it governs the rules by which fundamental literary elements are identified (for example, the hero, the damsel in distress, and the villain) and combined (for example, the hero tries to save the damsel in distress from the villain).

   The monomyth or “hero’s journey” is not an explicitly structuralist concept But…   Structuralist Claude Levi-Strauss focused on myths, breaking them down to “mythemes”.

 Phoneme – smallest unit of sound    Morpheme – smallest unit of meaning in a language Grapheme – smallest unit in written language Mytheme – smallest unit in mythology Vladimir Propp took this approach with folktales Meme

Structuralism and I Love Lucy



I Love Lucy has it’s own langue that has helped to shape the langue of sitcoms in general



Suppose a long-lost episode of I Love Lucy was discovered, we start to watch it, full of suspense…

 At the 13 minute mark, Lucy gets lost!

 What happens next?

   Each episode stages a problem before the midpoint commercial and resolves that problem before the episode ends.

We know the formula so well we hardly have to think about it, but thinking about it helps us to know it better Now let’s try something different…  We hit the 13 minute mark, Lucy dies!

    Since we have an adept competence as readers of sitcoms, we know that Lucy can’t die.

It’s not in the form, it’s not part of the langue, it’s not part of the poetics of classical form sitcoms.

 If she did die, of course, it’d turn out that she wasn’t really dead, she was only playing, some other character had made a terrible mistake… but would the poetics, the conventions of the form, even allow that?

At the end of the episode, nothing can be any different than at the start of the episode Take three, we hit the thirteen minute mark, Lucy discovers she’s pregnant, and then—Lucy has an abortion!

 What, why not?

 It’s TV in the Eisenhower Administration  Even though women had abortions in the fifties, not TV characters, and certainly not national idols, not Lucy.

 No problem can arise that can’t be solved and fully resolved by the end of the hour.  There are unspoken rules or codes of social decorum and censorship  If we were to list those rules, we’d learn a great deal about sitcoms, their evolution, and the cultures that they express and repress

  Later sitcoms defined themselves by including what the earlier, classic sitcoms excluded    All in the Family (1971-1979) Roseanne (1988-1997) Seinfeld (1989-1998)   Family Guy (1999- ) The Office (2005- ) After all in the family, things that were unimaginable in I Love Lucy –many of the same crises of social, political, and cultural strife that fill the daily news shape the routine plots while still harkening back to the form they inherited.

 The dialogue between earlier and later sitcoms is intertextuality, which simply means understanding one text by comparing it to another.

With Peter Pan or Hamlet



Of what systems is Peter Pan/Hamlet an instance of?

 How does it help to define that system?

 How is it defined by it?



What systems of binaries are at play within the novel?

Deconstruction

Meaning is slippery

In Review, Structuralism

• • • All meaning is imposed upon reality by the human mind through language. It is impossible to know reality but through language.

– While this is a huge idea, structuralists themselves did very little with it. The full potential of this approach was most effectively realized by various poststructuralist movements such as deconstruction Structuralism is a method not a field of study, most famously it has been applied to literature, anthropology, and linguistics Structuralists seek to define systems by their instances and instances by the systems of which they are apart

Deconstruction

    Initiated by Jaques Derrida in 1967 Deconstruction is at the heart of everything that’s followed it. Deconstruction relies on disunity and decentering 

In their definition of a system, structuralists are finding a center and seeing how it organizes everything around it into a secure, stable, unified order.



Deconstructionists do not believe in perfect systems or single explanations.



To a deconstructionist, everything is multiple, unstable, and without unity.

For Derrida, the realization that the centers of the structures we make to understand the world around us are arbitrary is a revolutionary thing  He calls this the Rupture

Rupture



Prior to this rupture, the history of western civ has been the continual substitution of one center for another

 God/s, Rational Human Mind, The Unconscious  Tyranny, Monarchy, Democracy, Communism?



With structuralism and deconstruction came the realization that the center is merely a construction

 deconstruction has a good deal to offer us:   Critical thinking and exposing hidden ideologies   they are “built into” our language.

 Not just binaries, but hierarchical binaries By finding the binary oppositions at work in a cultural production and by identifying which member of the opposition is privileged, one can discover something about the ideology promoted by that production and about the culture that made it useful tool for Marxism, feminism, and other theories that attempt to make us aware of the oppressive role ideology can play in our lives.

 What binaries are at the heart of Marxism? Feminism? GLBT Theory? Queer Theory? Post Colonialism? Race?

Language is Fluid

      President Bush says the Marines do not have to go to Iran (implying that he’s lying).

President Bush says the Marines do not have to go to Iran (implying that he’s correcting a false rumor).

President Bush says the Marines do not have to go to Iran (implying that some other group has to go).

President Bush says the Marines do not have to go to Iran (implying that another important person had said that the marines have to go to Iran).

President Bush says the Marines do not have to go to Iran (implying that they can go if they want to).

President Bush says the Marines do not have to go to Iran (implying that they have to go somewhere else).

How to Write a Deconstructionist Paper

•

Deconstructionist interpretation tends to follow what we call a double reading.

– – In the first stage, the critic identifies a confidently singular interpretation of a text, either based on the structuralist or “new” critics model.

– This should not be a paper tiger Then, in the second stage, the critic finds things that undermine the first reading, things that “break down the binary” or “explode the binary” or a moment of undecidability which you may pretentiously call aporia

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

Old Approaches

• • The New Critic might – – – seek out how each word is a symbol Find a paradoxical, ambiguous tension between the abstractness of the first line and the concreteness of the second resolve that conflict into a balance that provides organic unity to the poem A Structuralist could – – pursue a similar reading, finding a binary opposition between the opening abstraction and the concreteness that it gives way to • the first line acting as a signifier to the second lines signified Define the poem as an instance in the genre of modernist poetry and relay what meaning being a part of that system holds for the poem

•

Deconstructing “In a Station of the Metro” (1913)

The deconstructionist – Begins with the old readings and sets up a double reading • • • If the first lines abstractness can act as a signifier to the concreteness of the second line’s signified, then the second line might as well be signifier to the first lines signified – What makes one line more concrete than the other?

» Definitive Articles and Demonstrative Pronouns  Specific ghostliness? Specific but undescribed faces in a specific but undescribed crowd?

The title works as a line unto itself, interrupting the potential binary between the other two lines In the early 20 th century, perhaps the metro was abstractly a signifier of modernity at large and especially of mechanized modernity and an urban future, a future both suggested and undermined by the petals in the second line – The petals can suggest nature, antithesis (opposite) to the modernity of the metro

Implicit vs. Explicit Ideologies

 Explicit Ideology – The stated ideology expressed by a text  Implicit Ideology – An ideology expressed through actions or structure that is not explicitly stated 

Another way of deconstructing something is to explore how the implicit ideology undermines the explicit.

 Pyschoanalytic critics explore something similar when the talk of conscious and unconscious elements of a text.

In Review, Deconstructionists…

     Read the text against itself, so as to expose where meanings are expressed which might be contrary to the surface meaning  Implicit vs. Explicit ideologies  How does TEWWG undermine it’s feminist message?

  How does Barrie erode his own idealization of women and mother?

What are 1984 and BNW really saying about the value of the Proletariat?

Fixate upon surface features of words to expose the fluidity of meaning in a given text, destabilizing relationship between signifier and signified   Bush and Time Flies examples “but when at last she really came, I shot her” Seek to show that a text is categorized by disunity rather than unity Concentrate on a single passage and analyze it so intensively that it becomes impossible to maintain a single reading  Pounds’ In a Station at the Metro Undermine binaries