Feminism

Gynocriticism is the historical study of women writers as a distinct literary tradition. (Friedman 18) Elaine Showalter coined this term in her essay "Toward a Feminist Poetics." It refers to a criticism that constructs "a female framework for the analysis of women's literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt male models and theories" (quoted by Groden and Kreiswurth from "Toward a Feminist Poetics," New Feminist Criticism, 131). The work of gynocriticism has been criticized by recent feminists for being essentialist, following too closely along the lines of Sigmund Freud and New Criticism, and leaving out lesbians and women of color. (Literary Terms) Gynocriticism is the study of feminist literature written by female writers inclusive of the interrogation of female authorship, images, the feminine experience and ideology, and the history and development of the female literary tradition.[1][2] During the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds respectively, Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir began to review and evaluate the female image and sexism in the works of male writers.[2] During the nineteen sixties the feminist movement saw a reaction and opposition to the male oriented discourse of previous years.[2] Most thoroughly developed during the late seventies and early eighties, gynocriticism was a result of the interrogative critiques utilised in poststructuralism and psychoanalysis.[1]

Development as a literary critique

Gynocriticism developed as a literary critique from the theories and techniques of post-structuralism and psychoanalysis.[1] Post-structuralism is by nature, the study of the uncertain (Barry 2009). According to Barry,[2]

post-structuralism questions and interrogates the scientific certainty that structuralism took for granted, identifying the fact that language is ambiguous and therefore the universe is indeterminate. Psychoanalytic criticism focuses on the word of Freud, and the concept of the unconscious. [2] The textual content is both conscious and unconscious and the critique involves the uncovering or decoding of the two. Additionally, Freudian psychoanalysis identifies repression and sublimation, two unconscious processes that involve the struggle with identity.[2] Gynocriticism, examines the female struggle for identity and the social construct of gender.[2] If gender is inherently constructed from an ideology, then that ideology is by nature, indeterminate and fluid, susceptible to the analysis of differences. [3] According to Elaine Showalter,[2] gynocriticism is the study of not only the female as a gender status but also the 'internalized consciousnethe femaless' of . The uncovering of the female subculture and exposition of a female model is the intention of gynocriticism.[1] According to Showalter,[1] literary history has seen three distinct phases of gynocriticism. Until the twentieth century, the female literature tradition was constructed of images and values of the idealized 'feminine', constructed from the patriarchal oppression that sought to identify the woman as other.[4] During the twentieth century, the 'feminist' movement saw a reaction to the patriarchy of previous times and protested the ideology of the feminine.[1] The most recent development is the 'female' criticism, where a female identity is sought free from the masculine definitions and oppositions.[1] The recognition of a distinct female canon and the development of the 'female reader' are fundamental aspects of gynocriticism.[1]

Gynocriticism

Definition: Gynocriticism, or gynocritics, refers to the literary study of women as writers. It is a critical practice exploring and recording female

creativity. Gynocriticism attempts to understand womens writing as a fundamental part of female reality. Some critics now use gynocriticism to refer to the practice and gynocritics to refer to the practitioners.

Elaine Showalter coined the term gynocritics in her 1979 essay Towards a Feminist Poetics. Unlike feminist literary criticism, which might analyze works by male authors from a feminist perspective, gynocriticism wanted to establish a literary tradition of women without incorporating male authors. Elaine Showalter felt that feminist criticism still worked within male assumptions, while gynocriticism would begin a new phase of womens selfdiscovery.

FORMALISM

Objective correlative An objective correlative is a literary term referring to a symbolic article used to provide explicit, rather than implicit, access to such traditionally inexplicable concepts as emotion or colour.

Theory of the objective correlative The theory of the objective correlative as it relates to literature was largely developed through the writings of the poet and literary critic T.S. Eliot, who is associated with the literary group called the New Critics. Helping define the objective correlative, T.S. Eliots essay Hamlet and His Problems [1] in his book The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism discusses his view of Shakespeares incomplete development of Hamlets emotions. In this essay, Eliot states: The artistic inevitability lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion.. According to Eliot, the

feelings of Hamlet are not sufficiently supported by the story and the other characters surrounding him. The objective correlatives purpose is to express the characters emotions by showing rather than describing feelings as pictured earlier by Plato and referred to by Peter Barry in his book Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory as perhaps little more than the ancient distinction (first made by Plato) between mimesis and diegesis. (28). According to Formalist critics, this action of creating an emotion through external factors and evidence linked together and thus forming an objective correlative should produce an authors detachment from the depicted character and unite the emotion of the literary work.

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What is the literary work as an art form? What is the relationship between its structural components and its meaning (if it has any)? Can one speak about the content as distinct from the form of the poem? What is the best method to probe the essence of the literary text? These are a few of the questions the New Critics raised and discussed, establishing a kind of critical canon for about two generations.

More often than not those texts were comparatively shorter poems and the approach employed by the New Critics was an exacting CLOSE READING.Attention was paid to what the text says and how it does it: in general they favored precision and tightness,a discourse that employs irony and ambiguity. A poem contains everything that is needed for its interpretation, and critics are at fault if they resort to arguments which take into account extraneous elements in their demonstration. Every word in the text is significant, not only through its denotative, but also through its

connotative force. The word etymology itself may supply important cues for the understanding of the work. Lost senses of the words, shades of meaning, rhetorical figures are all significant guidelines for the understanding of the literary object. As a verbal icon [6] the poem is characterized by an all-atonceness of meaning, in which everyphonetic, syntactic, lexical and rhetorical element becomes significant.Like the Russian Formalists, the New Critics emphasized the principle according to whichform and content are inseparable. As Mark Schorer has put it, modern criticism has shown that to speak of content as such is not to speak of art at all,but of experience; and that it is only when we speak of the achieved content, the form, the work of art as a work of art, that we speak as critics. The difference between content, or experience, and achieved content, or art, is technique. [7] The meaning ofa literary text cannot exist, that is, outside and without an artful arrangement of words. Criticism, Ransom contends, should be objective, should cite the nature of the object rather than its effects upon the subject. Such criteria for judging the worth of a literary work as the readers impulse to read it twice, the psychological effects it has upon them (the oblivion of the outer world, the flowing of tears, spiritual ecstasy, and so on), are inappropriate for a well-founded critical undertaking. Even Aristotelian catharsis is an invalid criterion; moreover the Stagirite did not forget to analyze the objective features of the work as well. A less subtle type of commentary is the test used by Broadway producers who hire a dependable person to seat himself in a trial audience and count the laughs produced by the comical plot on the stage; yet, both Aristotles catharsis, Ransom remarks, and the latter method are concerned with the effects, and not with what is in the literary work.Likewise, the use of such vocabulary as: moving, exciting, pitiful, admirable, and even beautiful is actually uncritical, as it deals with properties discovered in the subject, not in the literary object. Ransoms dismissal of receptionist criticism was later on clearly and strongly systematized by W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley in the renowned essay THE AFFECTIVE FALLACY (1949).

The second exclusion from the field of criticism concerns the procedures of synopsis and paraphrase, which make up the delight of highschool classes and womens clubs, as Ransom sardonically remarks. Even if they are used by the genuine critic sometimes, he or she does not consider the plot as identical with the real content, but just as an abstract from it. The idea will be expanded later on by Cleanth Brooks, in THE HERESY OF PARAPHRASE (the last chapter of his book The Well Wrought Urn, 1947), where he opposed the notion of content or subject matter to that of structure, on which the value of a literary work actually depends. It is heretical to summarize the content of a text, and thus to overlook its form, because in this way you play off literary works against scientific ones.

Another item on Ransoms catalogue refers to what he calls historical studies, in fact including historical, biographic, bibliographic ones, as well as comparative literature. The last one may be, however,a stimulating instrument of analysis, unless the critic resorts to mechanical analogies and is content with making parallel citations.

Linguistic studies are also mentioned by Ransom on the negative list,though he is careful to distinguish between a mere recording of unusual, archaic or foreign words and allusions, and on the other hand, those linguistic references which are helpful to the understanding of the poem as a whole.Moral studies, too, may be partially helpful to the critic, provided the view of the whole content is not relinquished. Similarly, Ransom mentions in the end any other studies which represent an abstract or prose content taken out of the work, such as those dealing with Spensers view of the Irish question, Shakespeares understanding of the law, Miltons geography, and so on. Literature furnishes materials for almost any domain of knowledge, but the critics business is to dwell on the literary assimilation of these sources.

To Ransoms catalogue of uncritical procedures we should add one more anathema: THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY, as it was named in another essay by Wimsatt and Beardsley, bearing this title and published first in 1946. It refers to the critics mistake of taking into account for their interpretation the genesis of the work, such as the authors biography, psychologyandparticularlyhisintentions.It is only because an artifact works that we infer an intention of the artificer, the authors maintain. A poem should not mean but be. [9] A poem can be only through its meaning - since its medium is words - yet it is, simply is - in the sense that we have no excuse for inquiring what part is intended or meant.[10]

If the value of a poem cannot be stated setting out from the authors intentions, or from the readers reactions, if it does not depend on content or subject matter in the usual sense of these words, then in what terms can the critic approach it? Cleanth Brooks asserts that it is in terms of STRUCTURE that the common goodness which the poems share will have to be stated.[11]

Before Brooks, Ransomwas also concerned with the nature of poetic structure, which he considered in opposition to that of science, setting out from the well-known pronouncement that science deals exclusively in pure symbols, but art deals essentially, though not exclusively, in iconic signs. [12] The phrase though not exclusively allowed Ransom to admit that the structure ofthe poem is an admixture ofbothabstract logic and irrelevant, foreign local matter. In other words, the poem is a loose logical structure with an irrelevant local texture.(114)

For Brooks structure is not quite a satisfactory term, as he acknowledges in The Well Wrought Urn. Transcending Ransoms use of the

word, he means by it something far more internal than the metrical pattern or the sequence of images, far more complex than any statement abstracted from it.For instance, the structure of Alexander Popes Rape of the Lock cannot be reduced to the heroic couplet as such (the heroic couplet has been used so many times with so different effects), neither to the mock-epic convention in general (although this term implies a certain attitude and is therefore nearer to the kind of structure Brooks has in mind). This concept of structure cannot be equated with form, which is usually conceivedasa kindof envelopewhichcontains thecontent (194). It is not only the material that counts, but also the ordering of the material, he claims.

Yet, Brookss definition of structure is obviously one which goes beyond the territory of pure formalism into a broader humanistic field, as it includes philosophical and psychological elements besides linguistic and rhetorical ones: poetic structure means for him a structure of meanings, evaluations, and interpretations; it is informed by a principle of unity, which seems to be one of balancing and harmonizing connotations, attitudes, and meanings (195).

On the other hand, the principle of unity does not involve the arrangement of the elements in homogeneous groupings, but it means uniting the like with the unlike. The process of structuration necessarily involves moments of conflict, tension, contradictory attitudes. Therefore positive unity is not achieved by an algebraic simplification,but by a harmonization of the opposites within the poem.

This accounts. according to Brooks, for the frequent occurrence, in the New Critics lexicon, of such terms designating conflict or divergence as ambiguity, paradox, complex of attitudes and irony the last one being the most annoying to the reader (195) and Brookss favorite interpretive

operator.

The structure of the poem, according to Brooks, is like that of a play: it is based on conflict. Therefore the conclusion of any literary text is the working out of the various tensions which result from propositions, metaphors, or symbols, and the final unity is the outcome of a process resembling the development of a drama. Commenting on the personae, or the speakers in a poem, the New Critics emphasized the dramatic structure of the poem, based on an equilibrium of forces, be they rhetorical, symbolic, semantic, and so on.

For Allen Tate the concept of TENSION was the most useful formal tool at the critics disposal, as irony and paradox were for Brooks. The principle of tension sustains the whole structure of meaning, and, as Tate declares in Tension in Poetry (1938), he derives it from lopping the prefixes off the logical terms extension and intension (which define the abstract and denotative aspect of the poetic language and, respectively, the concrete and connotative one). The meaning of the poem is the full organized body of all the extension and intension that we can find in it. [13] There is an infinite line between extreme extension and extreme intension and the readers select the meaning at the point they wish along that line, according to their personal drives, interests or approaches. Thus the Platonist will tend to stay near the extension end, for he is more interested in deriving an abstraction of the object into a universal, and will try to find the shortest way with the dissenting ambiguities in the intensive part of the scale. For instance, Tate claims, the Platonist is likely to declare that Andrew Marvells poem To His Coy Mistress is an invitation addressed to young men to behaveimmorally, and consequently he might want to censor it. Yet, this is only one side of the tension in the poem, for the rich intensive meaning, to which we should give equal weight, points to an essential phase of the human predicament, that is the conflict between sensuality and ascetism.

In another illustration, Tate describes the metaphysical poet as beginning at or near the extensive end, and the romantic or symbolist one as beginning at the opposite point; however, each of them, by a straining feat of the imagination tries to push his meanings as far as he can towards the opposite end, so as to occupy the entire scale (86).

Within poetic structure as seen by the New Critics the concept of metaphor acquired an almost theological status. Not only is it the essence of poetry, linking the concrete and historical with the abstract and universal elements in it, and differentiating poetry from scientific and ordinary language, but as Ransom states in Poetry: A Note on Ontology (1934), in any metaphorical assertion there is a miraculism and a supernaturalism. [14]

In Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939), Brooks emphasized the essentially functional character of all metaphor, which is best evinced in the Metaphysical Poets verse. Their paradoxical conceits, in which intellectual and emotional qualities intermingle, contribute to achieve that high seriousness better than anything else. We cannot remove the comparisons from their poems without destroying their work, because those comparisons are not mere ornaments or illustrations. Metaphor is not merely subsidiary, as the Romantic and neoclassical accounts suggest. It is not just one alternative of the poets, but frequently the only means available to them. Brooks illustrates his view of metaphor with some verses from Andrew Marvells poem, The Definition of Love: As Lines so Loves oblique may well/ Themselves in every Angle greet;/ But ours so truly Parallel,/ Though infinite can never meet. In Brookss words, if we count as part of his statement, not only the proposition in its logical paraphrase, but the qualifications which it receives from the poets emphasis and the poets attitude - obviously the what that is stated is stated by the metaphor, and only by the metaphor.

[15]

Thus with the New Criticism, as an echo of Coleridgean poetics, metaphor ceased to be a mere decorating device and became a means to insight, a way to discover truth. In the latter part of our century, metaphor, which had been the queen of figures for a long time, began to lose its unique place and the critics interest turned more and more to metonymy, as a reflection of the contemporary shift from the emotive and the sensory to the intellectual. Thus even Murray Krieger, the New Critics offspring, preferred to define the poem, in Theory of Criticism (1976), as a metonymic metaphor, a case of fusion between metaphor and metonymy. One of his examples is taken from Alexander Popes epic poem The Rape of the Lock: in From silver Spouts the grateful Liquors glide,/ While Chinas Earth receives the smoking Tide, the phrase Chinas earth is both a metonym, referring to the porcelain object of art (a tea cup), and a metaphor, standing for the whole body of China, with its mushrooming population. [16]

If it is through metaphor that the mimetic and the cognitive values of literature intermingle, the wholeness of the poem (as a reflection of the oneness of reality) rests upon other principles, which are essential for the ontology of the text: paradox, irony and ambiguity. Particularly the first two concepts are so often mentioned in connection with each other by Brooks and otherNew Critics, that, functionally and intrinsically, it seems that they tend to merge into a single complex rhetorical unit. Celebrated in turn as the essence of poetry, paradox and irony equally contribute to unifying the opposites in the poetic experience and to controlling the tensions within the poem from a rhetorical and semantic vantage point.

As a neo-critical term, PARADOX becomes prominent with the

publication of Brookss The Well Wrought Urn (1947): paradox springs from the very nature of the poets language, in which connotations play as great a part as the denotations.(8) Setting out from T. S. Eliots notion ofthe perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations, [17] Brooks insists that poetic language is essentially disruptive, unlike that of science (which is intent on stabilizing its vocabulary): the terms used in the poem continually modify each other, violating their dictionary meanings.For instance in Wordsworths sonnet It Was a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free, the contradiction between the calm evening and the nuns breathless adoration (suggesting a state of tremendous excitement) is only apparent: the two states (and the two notions) go very well together, in the context of this poem.

Otherwise, Brooks admits, few will agree that poetry is the language of paradox, because the latter defines the hard, bright and witty discourse of sophistry, not that of the soul, which is mainly emotive. Yet, if we consider Wordsworths poetry for instance, his typical poem appears to be based on a paradoxical situation, although it is characterized by simplicity and direct attack. In some cases, the paradox not only underlies the poem, but even informs it. Wordsworth himself, Brooks points out, let the intention of paradox be read in his poetry, when he admitted that his purpose was to choose incidents and situations from common life,but to handle them in such a way that ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect.(7) Otherinstances of paradoxical poems are, in Brookss reading, John Donnes Canonization, in which the author daringly treats profane love as if it were divine love, and John Keatss Ode on a Grecian Urn. The paradox of the speaking urn reaches a climax in the enigmatic final pronouncement, beauty is truth, truth beauty,which in fact is not a violation of the objective correlative doctrine, but a speech in character, supported by the dramatic context.

Actually in Brookss theory the use of the term paradox is so much expanded that it tends to refer to any kind oftext which expressively produces awed surprise (6).

IRONY, in Brookss glossary the twin brother of paradox, has a very similar role to play in the poem. According to the New Critics precursor, I. A. Richards,irony is characteristic of poetry of the highest order, as it brings in the opposite, complementary impulses, in order to achieve a balanced poise.When they talk about this poetic principle, Richards, Brooks and other new Critics do not primarily have in mind verbal irony (a rhetorical or verbal mode based on a figure of ambiguity), but the so-called situational irony. The latter type was first described by the German romantic theorists, especially Friedrich Schlegel, who defined it as a means of revealing, through ambivalence, the paradoxical essence of the world. It brings into relief the weakness of the human spirit confronted with the incomprehensible nature of life. One example of romantic irony is the position of the fully conscious artist , who must be both creative and critical, who allegedly means to give an account of reality, though he knows it is impossible, and whose work is meant to be about the world, though it is fiction.

In The Well Wrought Urn, Brooks states that this kind of irony isthe critics most general term which points out to that recognition of incongruities pervading all poetry and to the poets controlled acceptance of them; it also points out to the kind of qualification which the various elements in a context receive from the context (209).

We expect, of course, to find irony in Alexander Popes mock-heroic poem The Rape of the Lock, but there is a more profound irony where one may expect it less, such as in Keatss Ode on a Grecian Urn, or in

Wordsworths ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. Thus in the last poem, Brooks contends,

the thrusts and pressures exerted by the various symbols are not avoided by the poet, but played one against the other: in a perverse mode of thought, it is the child who is the best philosopher, it is from shadows that the light emerges, growth into manhood appears as an incarceration within a prison. [18]

Poems do not contain abstract statements: any assertion is made under the pressure of the context, and this makes it be potentially ironic. Even the arithmetical truth, 2+2=4, becomes ironic within the framework of a poem by Lawrence Housman.

The ironic tone can be affected by the skillful disposition of the context: the question in Thomas Grays Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard becomes a rhetorical one, as the obvious truth is suggested by the adjoining images. Honor, storied urn, animated bust, as personifications (be they sculptures, or words on grandiloquent epitaphs), get in ironic contrast with the humbleness of the country churchyard graves and consequently appear empty, flat and lifeless:

Can storied urn or animated bust

Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?

Can Honors voice provoke the silent dust,

Or Flattry soothe the dull cold ear of death ?

Celebrating dissension among the words and among the partial meanings of the literary work, the New Critics actually praise the organic wholeness of the poem, as an essential axiological prerequisite. This and the method of close reading have probably been the most powerful influences their school has exerted on the forthcoming generations of critics for about two decades.

However, their doctrine grew little by little out of fashion beginning with the late 1950s, as the archetypal, psychoanalytical, and mainly structuralist approaches to literature were gaining ground. Of all these trends, structuralism was the only one possible to place in the same category of doctrines with the New Criticism, that is doctrines which imply the autonomous nature of the art object. But apart from that, the cherished beliefs and goals of structuralism were so radically different that the two trends can hardly be viewed as relations.

Actually one can find some convergence between the New Critical persuasions and some poststructuralist views; it is no wonder that the deconstructive school has been described as a kind of New New Criticism. Harold Blooms interest in the poem as such, and his emphasis on the autonomy of literature, the deconstructors belief that the surface of the text is only apparently quiet, and their method of searching the text with a magnifying glass for relevant details can be mentioned in this respect; likewise, the poststructuralist notion of the death of the author, or the idea

that there is nothing outside the text. The deep motivations of these tenets put forward by the New Critics and, respectively, by postructuralist authors are, however, as wide apart as can be.

Of all critical doctrines that have prevailed on the English-speaking scene in the postwar decades, the New Criticism is perhaps the best qualified to be called a real school of critical approach to literature. Though it lacked the tightness and the scientific rigor of other formalist currents, like the Russian school or the structuralist movement, though it was not the product of a single, circumscribed philosophical voice, and it was not spared the centrifugal moves of some dissident voices, such as Yvor Winters, Kenneth Burke and others, the New Criticism had the inner resources and the power to endure in the academic world for several decades. Todayits closest (hostile) brother, the deconstructive school, is out of commission, too, and cultural criticism has decisively taken the lead. Yet, even now, some of the New Critical procedures, like close reading, the search for irony and paradox, are still there, hidden, as it were, on the side of the road, for fear the conservative aesthetic ideology they carry along be untimely recollected. MARXISM

Fetishism In Karl Marx's critique of the political economy of capitalism, commodity fetishism is the transformation of human relations, derived from the trading of commodities in the market, whereby the social relationships among people are expressed with objectified economic relationships, between the commodities and the money used to buy them. Commodity fetishism transforms the subjective, abstract aspects of economic value into objective, real things that people believe have intrinsic value.[1] The theory of commodity fetishism is presented in the first chapter of Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867), at the conclusion of the analysis

of the value-form of commodities, to explain that the social organisation of labour is mediated through market exchange, the buying and the selling of commodities (goods and services). Hence, in a capitalist society, social relations between peoplewho makes what, who works for whom, the production-time for a commodity, etc.are perceived as economic relations among objects, that is, how valuable a given commodity is when compared to another commodity. Therefore, the market exchange of commodities masks (obscures) the true economic character of the human relations of production, between the worker and the capitalist.[2]

Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction (Foucault)

Kari Boyd McBride These influential theories of the second half of the twentieth century, all of which are focused on language, have their origins in the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), particularly his Cours de linguistique gnrale (1916) or Course in General Linguistics, taken from his students' lecture notes and published posthumously. Contrary to many of the linguistic theories of the day, which focused on diachronic linguistics or the changes in languages over time, Saussure developed a theory of synchronic language, how language works in the present. He argued that the relationship between the spoken word (signifier) and object (signified) is arbitrary and that meaning comes through the relationship between signs, which are for Saussure the union of signified and signifier. So the word "tree" means by custom only and not through any intrinsic relationship between the sound and the thing. That's why both "arbol" and "tree" can both signify the same signified. English speakers construct meaning by distinguishing between tree and treat and trek as well as between tree and bush and flower. Meaning, then, comes from understanding what a thing IS NOT rather than from knowing in any kind of ontological sense what a thing IS. Meaning is constructed through difference, particularly through binary pairs (man/woman, good/evil). There is no absolute Platonic ideal "out there" to

anchor meaning. There is no truth that is not constructed. There is nothing outside language. Language speaks (through) us. Language is thus a system of signs or a semiotic system, but merely one of many, all of which construct meaning, which does not exist outside the semiotic system.

Some anthropologists seized on Saussure's theory of semiotic structure to analyze and understand a variety of cultures, which, they theorized, could be mapped "scientifically" through a structuralist methodology. Literary critics also drew on Structuralism to map the semiotics of genres and individual works and, in the process, to challenge the formalist / humanist criticism that had dominated literary study in the first half of the century. Perhaps most influential was Roland Barthes (1915-1980) who proclaimed the death of the author. That is, if language speaks us, then the author is relatively unimportant to the process of writing.