Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Shakespeare...Final Comments on Critical Theory and the Academy

As a former liberal humanist--swiftly converted to a struggling novice literary theorist through the rigors of critical theory and the academy, I became particularly charmed with the world of psychoanalysis and feminism and how these theories can be applied to examine a text. However, once I had selected my text on which to write my critical essay, I was immediately startled by the connections between psychoanalysis and feminism and was even taken by surprise realizing that my use of feminist theory and a bit of New Historicism arose sort of spontaneously out of research and analysis. All of a sudden I was taken back by how both of these theories can be applied to a text and how they specifically relate to the culture in which the text was written. So many fascinating ideas and thoughts began running through my mind, my only regret being that even the time allotted for me to write the essay did not allow enough preparation for me to fully get all of my ideas down on paper. As Helena would I would both remark, "Tis partly my own fault"...anyway...
First of all, what interested me most about this class was specifically the relationship between literary theory and the political and ideological turmoil of the 20th century, or any time period for that matter. The way in which ideology is experienced by our culture and how it is tied up in very intimately personal ways was fascinating to me and was first was introduced during our discussion of Marxism...which was an area of interest to me when psychoanalysis was introduced. This ideological and political aspect tied up in culture can also be applied to human relationships and the human personality, as well as the social order. The motives of human society are what intrigued me and was what I wanted to focus on for my critical essay. For the text I chose A Midsummer Night's Dream (because I happen to love the play) and first focused myself on interpreting sexuality and social order through the representation of the two leading female characters (Hermia and Helena). I referred Freud and discussed how every human being undergoes a repression of the 'pleasure principle' by the 'reality principle' and how this repression affects whole societies, particularly the patriarchal hierarchy. From there I discussed how women are often associated with animal imagery and are in many ways tamed through the process of establishing harmony and unity...at the end of the play the patriarchy is not overthrown, the fearful element of oppression is taken out of the equation, and the joyous turn of events seems only temporary...through my progression in writing this paper I also discussed how Athens is a male-oriented oedipalized world and how Hermia has a terrible dream which signifies several things about the social order as well as her inner emotions and motivations...All of a sudden I was finding connections between psychoanalysis and feminism and I did not even realize it! The fact that I can discuss both of these theories in my paper and think critically about them points to how much I have learned in this class and how I can relate these theories to one another, even fusing them together to examine this play and Renaissance culture--which I want to say a few words about now. It seemed to me that Shakespeare's female characters undergo constant suffering in terms of being restrained and tamed in order to fit within the patriarchal structure...and seemed as though passivity and dependency on others are played out as traditional roles for women of the time period and fits into the accepted norms concerning romantic passion and desire...the women even justify cruelty of men by lowering themselves to men--reflecting a typical psychology of love during the Renaissance, in which a man was to woo a woman and the woman was to maintain a timid role...leading to the destruction of the female self. After writing about this in my paper I later realized that I was making use of a tiny bit of New Historicism in that I was focused on patriarchal structures and their perpetuation! All of these thoughts and ideas seemed so exciting and fascinating for me to think and write about...I only wish I could spend more time developing these thoughts and further combining these theories and seeing where I end up...
Just to wrap up a bit at the end of this post, I would like to thank a few people for helping me get through this difficult experience. I will definitely admit that I was close to tears leaving this class several occasions, seemingly having had all of what I had previously known about literature, authorship, etc. completely turned upside down. I also have to thank Terry Eagleton for writing The Significance of Theory and Literary Theory An Introduction because throughout the course I read through these books and they greatly helped me sort through my confusion. *Also, the participation of others in the discussions of the class greatly helped me understand the topics and helped inspire me to muster the courage to participate in class, even though I still felt confused at times. Thank you!!

Spivak, Salman Rushdie, and Postcolonialism

I have been interested in the theory of postcolonialism for a while, yet I don't think I really was fully aware of this, considering I am a novice concerning the whole literary theory realm. A favorite writer of mine and a person that has perpetually interested me is Salman Rushdie. Having been born in Pakistan and having been educated in England, he represents a sort of hybridization of different cultures. He views himself as a sort of uprooted person of various intermingling cultures that celebrates his impurity and various transformations. His intensely involved and highly controversial novel, The Satanic Verses definitely reflects his celebration of intermingling and the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, etc. It also fears what the Postcolonial critic, (such as Spivak for example would have something to say about), which is the sense of 'absolutism' and purity concerning race that postcolonial critics are seeking to dismantle concerning the Western canon of literature. Rushdie also has many interesting thoughts one being that "newness" only enters the world through intermingling, and that the "hotchpotch" of society must be embraced. The postcolonial critic would definitely argue vociferously that those who oppose the inclusion of literary works of other cultures as part of the human condition are contributing to the loss and weakening of their own cultures. I agree with Rushdie that we all have emigrated, and that there is no absolute universal origin that can be imposed upon literature. The idea that change is caused by fusion and conjoining is so fascinating to me as well as the 'cultural polyvalency' that postcolonial critics attempt to develop and examine...

Breaking News!

Drop what you're doing and pay close attention, because one of Hollywood's hottest young starlets is now reportedly romancing 30 yr. old Ryan Reynolds...This past Easter weekend Scarlett Johansson was spotted wining and dining the hunk at all of the trendiest Hollywood hot spots appearing to get very cozy and looking very lovey dovey...Photos have been splashed all over entertainment programs and the internet, causing the inevitable media frenzy...(read more at the bosh.com for all your entertainment and gossip news needs)
I have one question concerning the coverage and attention directed towards this "juicy" story...What would Cixous or any other feminist critic have to say about our sick obsession with young Hollywood actresses and their romantic interests? It seems as though paparazzi stalk these young women at every turn, capturing every move, bad hair day, or miss-matched outfit. However, before I get to Cixous I will speak to how this story would be viewed from the feminist perspective...First of all, a feminist would point out that the focus of our society is extremely skewed. Our media coverage is not aimed at highlighting the achievements of women in the arts, athletics, or any other fields, rather it is focused on their appearance, romantic interests, and dating lives. Women in the media are glorified and presented as hot, sexy bombshells and that's about it...they are presented with as much depth as a shallow puddle. Cixous points out that subordination of the feminine to the masculine order is basically the condition for the functioning of our social machine. Cixous would probably note that the media portrays women in this fashion because in a way, it enables men to control and have power over women. By continually depicting women as sexual objects, women become nothing more than that...and the media reinforces this so heavily that these women become overexposed, half-crazy beings at a loss for all dignity (think bald headed Britney Spears bashing an SUV with an umbrella). Cixous points out that ideological apparatus is extremely effective in reinforcing the power of masculine domination. She also points out that phallocentrism is the enemy of everyone, and that it is time to invent the other history. We invent the condition in which there is only one dominant sex through the abasement of women. By focusing on the appearance and sexuality of women, they become passive and this further reinforces the hierarchy...

I loved Ken Rufo's virtual lecture on Jean Baudrillard. Even though I was intimidated by its length for a moment, once I began reading I found it to be challenging, but worded in such a way that it really helped me to understand the different concepts he was referring to. The examples he gave were great and I actually felt confident after reading it. The concepts of Baudrillard's that Rufo referred to helped me to link different theories we have studied in class by finding some similarities between them. Rufo explained how for Marx the commodity is structured very much like the sign, and how money equates to a pure value of exchange, Baudrillard also suggests that Sausure's semiotics and Marx's critique of capital are very similar. This reminded me of when we were studying Saussure and structuralism in class and Marie stated how money, like the seasons of the year, are a representation and help create a model of a system. Rufo explains that Marxism is just another model and such a simulation ends up inadvertently feeding the idea of production that Marx fought so vigorously against. (I really wonder what Marx would have said in response to a statement like this!) Rufo explains that Baudrillard argues that Marx got it backwards! He also argues that psychoanalysis did not discover the unconscious, but really makes use of it as an expository device...All of these grand statements seemed very bold and gave me the impression that Baudrillard is very interested in teasing out different possibilities and rethinking theories. At the end of the post Rufo listed some interesting things about Baudrillard, one being that he was a professional photographer. I found this very interesting because photographers look for ways to capture reality, their photographs are simulations and reproductions of real people, places, and things. Baudrillard wrote extensively about the pervasiveness of simulations, which made me wonder a bit about his thoughts on photography and film, considering Derrida's vigorous reaction against the capturing and distribution of one's image...

"What's In a Name?"

"...that which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet."
Those Shakespearean lines famously uttered by Juliet to her star-crossed lover tell us that a name is nothing more than an artificial and meaningless convention, and that she loves the person called Montague, but not the family associated with it. Is a name nothing more than a meaningless convention? What is the function of a name? In the same sense one can ponder the notion of the 'author' and authorship. Here is why Shakespeare is great, he poses a question then steps away... Shakespeare, as Michel Foucault would say, establishes the "endless possibility of discourse." However, I need to stay on task and try to make some sense of Foucault's essay "What is an Author?".
In his essay Foucault comes to the conclusion that an author's name is not simply an element of speech. The purpose of the author's name is that it serves as a means of classification, that it can "group together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others. A name also establishes different forms of relationships among texts." One of the main points I extracted from his essay was that the function of the author is to specifically characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within society.
However, it is very interesting that Foucault points out that these aspects of an individual, which we designate as an author are our own psychological projections which allow us to handle texts. As a literature major I would definitely agree in the statement that the author helps explain the presence of certain events in a text. By reading the author's biography, one can analyze his position in terms of his socio-economic class etc. Another interesting point of discussion is how the 'author-function' arises. Foucault breaks it down to the division between the author and what he calls the 'second self' and that the author function arises out of the two.
Searching through some academic blogs in hopes of reading more about this notion of the author I found a blog entitled Meaningless that referred to John Lye's essay, "The ‘death of the author’ as an instance of theory". This essay brought up some interesting points, one being that how can we (the readers )guarantee (and should we even guarantee this?) that we are in fact reading the text 'properly' as the author would have had us read it. Our reading of an author's work is an interpretation which can result in various meanings. This point also brings me back to Foucault's argument over what is meant by an author's "work"? How is it decided what constitutes the work of a writer, considering that a writer would have obviously left behind hundreds of thousands of written artifacts...Again, these are such interesting questions to pose and it seems it all comes down to interpretation and meaning...and maybe Foucault is correct in stating that, "we lack a theory to encompass the questions generated by a work and the empirical activity of those who naively undertake the publication of the complete works of an author".

Freudian Methods and Literary Criticism?

I have to unfortunately admit that I had never actually read anything written by Freud himself prior to this class. I had heard of his theories though, and had even used them to analyze literature. I also have to make another confession (and yes, it is related to what this post is going to eventually be about)...in one of the songs from the album 'Out of the Vein' by Third Eye Blind, the lead singer Stephan Jenkins sings the following lyrics:
Freud said that love
Was a good psychosis
But I don't know
I've had too many doses
He's a creep
And we all know that
He probably made it up
I always thought these lyrics were witty and funny. Not having a solid opinion of my own, I also did agree somewhat with those who thought Freud's theories were interesting, yet mostly perverse and misogynist formulations. After reading the selection by Freud in our text, I was particularly interested in going back over the text to find some sort of understanding of Freud's views on words and language. I was also very interested in how psychoanalytic criticism focused on the literary text as a manifestation of unconscious drives rather than focusing on the conscious drives or sociocultural influences. Even though Freud's ideas of condensation and displacement seemed so strange, they helped me to see how the psychoanalytic critic works to decipher symbols to uncover the 'true' structure or truth by reading through these various surfaces. Freud wrote that, "The 'creative' imagination, indeed, is quite incapable of inventing anything; it can only combine components that are strange to one another" (26). Freud and psychoanalytic critics would then believe that the truth is disguised and needs to be unlocked. Freud also relates dream-work to language and remarks that dream-work has its counterpart in the development of language. They are similar because words and sounds are malleable, meaning can often be reversed or changed as can elements in a dream. Freud also states that only later were words linked up into thoughts, so there is an interesting relationships between the development of the mnemic images into thoughts and words. Words to Freud seem to be part of the whole, parts of puzzle pieces which need to be examined and shifted around in order to figure out the larger picture, the underlying 'true' structure.

The first biography I ever wrote was of Amelia Earhart. I was in second grade and struggling to get good grades. My parents probably wrote it for me. I remember talking about her life with my parents though, writing down the simple facts of her life on a piece of paper with my Dad and then coloring a picture of her which was then neatly mounted on blue construction paper for aesthetic purposes. I remember Amelia Earhart wanted to be the first woman to fly solo around the world but tragically disappeared somewhere over the Pacific Ocean never to be seen again. After scouring 250,000 square miles of ocean the United States government called off the search and that was the end of it. The facts, pictures, and pieces of her life were assembled and recorded so that her image could be fixed in the history books. Biographies seemed so simple. Copy some facts from a book and summarize the events of the person's life and that was all. Years later I remembered my first biography experience and quickly looked Amelia Earhart up on the internet. I realized that I did not know the whole story, in fact I had no idea who this person was. The biographers seemed to all present her in the exact same way. Her image seemed so fixed and stabilized even though no one new what had happened to her and quite possibly who she really was. The image of the pretty young woman in the close fitting aviation hat was somehow destroyed.
The same fate could have easily become of Jacques Derrida. After his death simple facts and events would have been recorded with some images of him and that would have been the end of it. However this was most definitely not so and the film 'Derrida' highlights Derrida's thoughts on biography itself and the implications of capturing one's image. In terms of how Derrida is depicted though images, I would say that he is depicted in a very postmodern way. His various images accompanied by a voice reading selections of his theories highlights a decentralized view of Derrida which fittingly mirrors his thoughts in his 'Structure, Sign, and Play'. The producers of the film show Derrida in many different forms, the aging husband at home calmly making toast as well as the academic superstar traversing the world, camera crew scrambling close behind to capture every muttering of genius. There is one point in the film in which Derrida is walking down the street slightly hunched over, pipe hanging from the corner of his mouth as he occasionally looks about seemingly paranoid of the possible oncoming attack of a camera. At this point the narrator reads off facts of Derrida's life. However these facts as not given in any sort of order signifying a break with the traditional genre form of biography. One is left wondering about the truth of these facts and how having only known these random facts would leave one very far from having a better understanding of Derrida. This disunity also seems to suggest a disregard of linear narrative. This disregard of linear narrative seems to suggest that there is no one image of Derrida. Derrida himself remarks that biographers fix and stabilize a person for centuries and that the true biographer is one who does not know the whole story.
The various images of Derrida seem to wallow in their fragmentation and decentralization which Derrida himself would highly approve of. There is no one image of Derrida because there is no one truth, or one fixed and stabilized center.