‘Only Connect’: Text and Theory

1. ‘Only Connect’:Text and Theory

2. What We Read Children’s Literature Sci-Fi The Canon Shakespeare Milton Wordsworth Keats Detective Fiction Thriller Tennyson Dickens Jane Austen Chick Lit Popular Culture

3. What We Read Hamlet Batman Atonement The Reader Harry Potter Whale Rider Pride and Prejudice Survivor

4. How We Read Reader Author Text • Stable meaning • Task of reader to work out author’s intention

5. How We Read ‘The death of the author is the birth of the reader.’ Roland Barthes Background Society Text Reader Author Culture Ideology • Reader Response • Meanings – fluid, flexible, multiple

6. How We Read Literary Theory: • Different ways of approaching, looking at text • Fashions come and go, new theories and approaches invented Examples: • New Historicist • Post-colonial • Marxist • Psychoanalytic • Feminist

7. Advantages • Reader centre stage • Multiplicity • Different voices heard • Connections between texts: links, commonalities, divergences, intertextuality BUT: • Still need textual analysis, support

8. How We Read Texts New Historicist: • Text in historical context • Text shaped by cultural, political, ideological world in which produced For Example: • Hard Times – 19th trade union movement, education act • The Tempest – exploration and discovery • The Captive Wife – convicts, cultural contact, 19th attitudes towards women

9. How We Read Texts Post-colonial: • Examine representations of race, Empire, power imbalance • Indigenous voice/perspective For Example: • The Tempest – Ariel and Caliban indigenous, Prospero as coloniser • Mansfield Park – Edward Said – society/wealth founded on slave trade (Antigua) • Salman Rushdie, Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace

10. How We Read Texts Marxist: • Class struggle key feature of history, human interaction • How do texts represent society, class? For Example: • Wuthering Heights – Heathcliff’s pursuit of wealth and power • Jane Eyre – Jane a ‘lady’, inheritance secures her class position

11. How We Read Texts Psychoanalytic: • Freud – loss experienced upon separation from mother’s body, id versus ego • Jungian archetypes, collective unconscious • Jacques Lacan – structure of self and relation to the social, mirror stage For Example: • Bruce Wayne and Batman – ego and id, chaos and order • Bertha in Jane Eyre – the suppressed self • Goblin Market – sexuality and desire

12. How We Read Texts Feminist: • Representation of women in literature • Desire to recover ‘silenced’ writers • Patriarchal structure of society and language For Example: • Jane Austen – predicament of 18th Century women • Aphra Behn, Dorothy Wordsworth, Louisa Baker, Dorothy Parker • John Donne – ‘she is all states, all Princes I’; ‘Ah my America, my new found land’ – male conqueror critiqued

13. Dr Jekyll and Mr HydeRobert Louis Stevenson

14. Charles Darwin Origin of Species (1859) Evolutionary Scale: Natural Selection ‘Civilised’ Man ‘Savage’ Ape

15. Atavistic CriminalCesare Lombroso, Criminal Man (1876): • Ears of unusual size, standing out from the head as do those of the chimpanzee • Nose twisted, upturned, or flattened in thieves, or aquiline or beak-like in murderers, or with a tip rising like a peak from swollen nostrils. • Lips fleshy, swollen, and protruding • Chin receding, or excessively long, or short and flat, as in apes. • Abnormally hairy • Excessive length of arms, extra fingers and toes

16. New Historicist Reading -‘a large, well-made, smooth- faced man of fifty, with something of a slyish cat perhaps, but every mark of capacity and kindness…’ Jekyll: Genial Doctor Hyde: Ape-Like, Deformed, Atavistic Criminal • ‘impression of deformity…hardly • human…something troglodytic…’ • -‘ape-like fury’ • -‘like a monkey’ • -‘animal terror’ • -‘face…great muscular activity…debility of constitution’ • -‘hand…corded and hairy’ • -‘ape-like tricks’, ‘ape-like spite’

17. Post-Colonial and Marxist Readings Superiority/Evolved Nature of ‘Civilised’ Man an Illusion Crimes of a Middle Class Man Jekyll/Hyde ‘Primitive’ Lurks Within No Sense of Evolutionary Progress Hyde: Middle Class, Hyde Described As ‘Gentleman’

18. Sigmund FreudStudies on Hysteria, 1895 • Id – instinctual self , location of desires, repressed because socially unacceptable, a threat to the ego (pleasure principle) • Ego – conscious self (reality Principle) • Superego – conscience (internalisation of punishments and warnings) and ego ideal (shaped by rewards and positive models) • Return of the Repressed – can never banish id, will emerge at some point

19. Psychoanalytic Reading Ego Ideal: Respected, Charitable Doctor Conscience: Wrong to Indulge Desires Superego Ego: Jekyll ‘his wonderful selfishness and circumscription to the moment…’ The Return of The Repressed… Id: Hyde Anti-Calvinist Allegory ‘his every act and thought centred on self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity…’

20. Study in Addiction • Attraction of altered state (Hyde) • Dependency on/ enslavement by Hyde • Illusion of self-control, belief can be free of Hyde when choose • Concealment, manipulation of others • Compulsive behaviour • Despair, retreat into pathological reclusiveness, underworld • Inability to achieve desired effect • Triumph of Hyde Jekyll compares self with ‘drunkard’

21. Feminist Reading? • ‘Weeping like a woman or a lost soul…’ • Hyde as the Repressed Feminine? • Hyde as Product of Male Environment • ‘…the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask’ • The Back Door • A Warning: Text and Context Queer Studies Reading?

22. Belonging or Alienation?

23. Settler Indigenity • ‘It is only by going native that the European arrivant can become native.’ (Terry Goldie) • ‘To surrender the furnishings of a culture both European and bourgeois is to come into the sensuality of a “natural occupancy” of the new land. The pleasure afforded by these fictions is that they allow the heirs of a settler society to imagine our unhistoric origin as the possibility of the making of a settlement without a colony.’ (Linda Hardy)

24. ‘Colonial Being’ (Stephen Turner) • New place like home • Eliminate indigenous population Colonial • To be at home/of the new place • To be indigenous New Zealander • fantasized history • illusory continuity; historical discontinuity • myth-making Colonial Being

25. Becoming Māori • Language and Affection • Rechristening • Symbolic Wedding Night • Moko • Baptism

26. Displaced Woman • Sacrifice of Self • Voice-Over – ‘Sadness’ and ‘Despair’ • Dissolving Words • Ocean – Symbolic Separator • Celtic Theme Tune

27. Mister Pip, Lloyd Jones • Post-Modern Power to Reader: Liberation and Transformation • Post-Colonial? Exploitation and the Culture of Violence • Dickens Appropriated; Oral and Written, Feminine and Masculine • Cultural Colonisation? • Masculine Voice?

28. Katherine Mansfield, How Pearl Button was Kidnapped Nigel Brown, Names Painting Katherine Mansfield, 1985-93, Private  Collection, Photograph Nicola Topping. Anne Estelle Rice, Katherine Mansfield, 1918

29. How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped New Historicist Reading: • Written 1910 • New Zealand female suffrage 1885 • Maori – fatal impact, assimilation • Puritan society – tradition of literary critique of Puritan mindset – Mansfield attacks the ‘box’ mentality of early 20th century New Zealand secular Puritanism

30. How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped Feminist Reading: • House, ‘box’, domestic space of conformity and traditional female domestic drudgery ‘In the kitchen, ironing-because-its-Tuesday’ • Pearl – rebellious, desirous of new horizons and experiences • Shedding of ‘shoes and stocking, her pinafore and dress’, freeing from female constraint, expectation

31. How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped Psychoanalytic Reading: • Ego Ideal: • mother at home • Boxes = order • Conscience: • ‘nasty things’ • policemen Super-Ego • Archetype: • Socialisation of individual • Fantasy of escape Ego: Pearl Freud: Journey away from Mother Escape Id: Instinctual Self

32. How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped Post-Colonial Reading: • Cultural encounter – Maori culture seen as warm, communal, loving, spontaneous; Pakeha culture as restricting, sterile and claustrophobic • Maori stereotypes – ‘fat’, ‘dusty’, ‘naked’, admiring of Pearl’s ‘yellow curls’ • Witi Ihimaera’s ‘The Affectionate Kidnappers’ – ‘a tamariki all alone – no good’, ‘gone into darkness, gone into the stomach of the Pakeha …eaten up by the white man’

33. How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped Marxist Reading: • Bourgeois Pakeha society: individual ownership = conformity, alienation, ‘nasty things’ • Maori society: communal, warmth, laughter • Pearl instinctively Marxist in outlook and preferences

34. Bibliography:Literary Theory • Gregory Castle, The Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory (2007) • Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP 1997) • Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minnesota UP 1996) • Patricia Waugh, ed., Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide (2006)

35. Bibliography:Mister Pip, River Queen • John Lovell, Mister Pip Teacher’s Guide (Longman, 2008) • Jennifer Lawn, ‘What the Dickens: Storytelling and Intertextuality in Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip,’ in Floating Worlds: Essays on Contemporary New Zealand Fiction, ed. Anna Jackson and Jane Stafford (Victoria University Press, 2009)pp 142-63 • Mark Llewellyn, ‘What is Neo-Victorian Studies?’ Neo-Victorian Studies 1:1 (2008) pp. 177-180 on Mister Pip • Bruce Babington, ‘What Streams May Come: Navigating Vincent Ward’s River Queen’ Illusions Winter (2008) pp. 9-13 • Kirstine Moffat, ‘The River and the Ocean: Indigenity and Dispossession in River Queen’ Moving Worlds, Special Issue: New New Zealand, 8:2 (2009) pp. 94-106