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Literary Criticism

Literary Criticism. Class #7. Michel Foucault (1926-1984). Influences : post-structuralism, New Historicism, cultural studies, queer theory, literature and medicine, institutional bases of writers and critics, identity formation. (Norton 1615)

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Literary Criticism

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  1. Literary Criticism Class #7

  2. Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

  3. Influences: post-structuralism, New Historicism, cultural studies, queer theory, literature and medicine, institutional bases of writers and critics, identity formation. (Norton 1615) • Edward Said: Orientalism, or Western discourse of the East

  4. 1961Madness and Civilization • 1963The Birth of the Clinic • 1966 The Order of Things • 1969The Archaeology of Knowledge • 1975Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison • 1976The History of Sexuality

  5. Key Terms

  6. Discourse (1) • Briefly, “language as it is used by and within various constituencies (the law, medicine, the church, for example) for purposes to do with power relationships between people.” (Wolfreys 65) • Discourse = ideology in action (Dobie 170)

  7. Discourse (2) • “Human subjectivity and identity itself is produced out of various discursive formations as a result of the subject’s entry into language.” • Language is “always already shot through and informed by figurations and encryptions of power . . . relationships and networks.”(Wolfreys 66)

  8. Discourse (3) • Through discourse, knowledge = power. • “Discourse disposes: it puts everything in its place. Modern power penetrates everywhere, giving a specific name to every possible variant of human action so as to master the world and leave nothing unexamined, unknown, uncatalogued.”(Norton 1619)

  9. Discursive Formation • The “principle of dispersion and redistribution” of discourse • “A structurally interactive flow serving, inescapably, a political or ideological function” (Wolfreys 69)

  10. Episteme • Deep-rooted, unconscious structures for organizing knowledge. (Norton 1616) • The rules and constraints outside which individuals cannot think or speak without running the risk of being excluded or silenced. (Dobie 170)

  11. Genealogy (1) • Describing the present through an analysis of the forces that created it. (Norton 1616) • Genealogy does not claim to be more true than institutionalized knowledge, but merely to be the missing part of the puzzle. http://www.california.com/~rathbone/foucau10.htm

  12. Genealogy (2) • It works by isolating the central components of some current day political mechanism and then traces it back to its historical roots.These historical roots are visible to us only through two separate bodies of genealogical knowledge: the dissenting opinions and theories that did not become the established and the local beliefs and understandings. http://www.california.com/~rathbone/foucau10.htm

  13. Power • Depersonalized: Power does not belong to anyone, nor does it all emanate from one specific location, such as the state. • Decentered: Rather, power is diffused throughout the “capillaries”(毛細管) of the social system. (Norton 1618)

  14. Power/Knowledge • The production of knowledge is wedded to productive power. Modern power requires increasingly narrow categories through which it analyzes, differentiates, identifies, and administers individuals. (Norton 1620)

  15. Body Politics • Power operates through the daily disciplines and routines to which bodies are subjected. (Norton 1618)

  16. Why is Foucault a post-structuralist? • By focusing on the larger systematic social forces, Foucault highlights the social construction of the ‘subject’ and thereby deconstructs the self. (Norton 1617)

  17. Anti-humanism • He objects to humanism, esp. its claim that “we are ‘individuals’ with unique nature, possessing coherent interior identities, motives, desires, and conscious intentions.” (Norton 1617)

  18. Counter-enlightenment • Connected the rise of the individual with “a tremendous decrease in freedom.” • “In each case, an institution demands, examines and watches over all subjects, and punishes deviants.” • Such a society is prisonlike, or “carceral”. (Norton 1618)

  19. Anti-Marxism • Foucault contends that since power operates in innumerable places and taking many different forms, there is no single privileged place for the political activist to go to work, no locus of power whose removal will bring the whole system tumbling down. (Norton 1618)

  20. New Historicism (1) • New Historicism gives “equal weighting” to literary and non-literary material (Barry 174). • It is “a mode of study in which literary and non-literary texts are given equal weight and constantly inform or interrogate each other”(Barry 172).

  21. New Historicism (2) • Old Historicism: (1) Were the characters based on real people? (2) Do the events recounted in the text re-create experiences from the author’s life? (3) Does the text capture the spirit of the times accurately?(Dobie 167)

  22. New Historicism (3) • New Historicism: How does the text reveal and comment on the disparate discourses of the culture it depicts?(Dobie 167)

  23. Food for Thought (1) • What did you learn in kindergarten?

  24. Food for Thought (2) • What are you told to do when you go to the hospital?

  25. Food for Thought (3) • Foucault argues that “modern societies intervene from day one to shape, train, and normalize individuals”(Norton 1618). Do you agree? What social institutions have been involved in doing this to you?

  26. Food for Thought (4) • What information would you hold back from your CC teacher? How about your boss?

  27. Questions to Ask of a Text (1) • What various discourses do you meet in the text? • Which ones are powerful? • Which represent the experience of people who have traditionally been overlooked, marginalized, or misrepresented? • What conflicts do you discern in the text between the discourse of the powerful and that of the powerless? (Dobie 180)

  28. Questions to Ask of a Text (2) • What are the social rules observed in the text? • Is the text critical of them? Or does it treat them as models of behavior? • How does this text support or challenge the values, beliefs, and/or practices of the culture it depicts? • How does the ideological stance imply about the culture it depicts, that of the author’s time, and that of subsequent periods? (Dobie 180)

  29. Michel Foucault “The Carceral.” Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.

  30. Jeremy Bentham's nineteenth-century prison:The "Panopticon" http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/newhistoricism/modules/foucaultcarceralmainframe.html

  31. Prison cell

  32. Prison school http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/newhistoricism/modules/foucaultcarceralmainframe.html

  33. (Fludernik 44)

  34. References • Dobie, Ann B. Theory into Practice. Thomson/Heinle, 2002. • Fludernik, Monica. “Carceral Topography: Spatiality, Liminality, and Corporeal in the Literary Prison.”Textual Practice, 1999 Spring; 13 (1): 43-77. • Leitch, Vincent B, ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2001. • Wolfreys, Julian. Critical Keywords in Literary and Cultural Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

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