Critical Methodologies - Formalism, Estrangement, Marxism, Bakhtin, Structuralism, Appunti di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Critical Methodologies - Formalism, Estrangement, Marxism, Bakhtin, Structuralism e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! Critical Methodologies 12.10.23 FORMALISM Russian Formalism Introduction - Autonomy and concreteness for the discipline of literary studies. - Literature as an object of study. - Literature as a specific system of concrete facts. - “Endevour to create an autonomous discipline of literary studies based on the specific properties of literary material. All that we require is theoretical and historical awareness of thefts of verbal art as such.” (B.M. Ejkenbaum) - Viktor Shklovsky, Russian literary theorist, critic, and writer of experimental prose, film scenarios, and memoirs, was one of the initiators and leading representatives of Russian Formalism. Stimulated by his experience of Russian Futurism, he gave formalism many of its crucial concepts and key words. Literariness: Opposition between poetic language and practical language. The object of study in literary science is not literature but literariness, that is, what makes a given work a literary work. The historians of literature have helped themselves to everything, environment, psychology, politics, philosophy. Instead of a science of literature, they have worked up a concoction of homemade disciplines. They seems to have forgotten that those subjects pertain to their own fields of study certainly may utilize literary monuments as documents of a defective and second-class variety among other materials. The phenomena of language ought to be classified according to the purpose for which the speaker uses his language resources in any given instance. If the speaker uses them for the purely practical purpose of communication, then we are dealing the system of practical language, in which language resources have no autonomous value and are merely a means of communication. But it is possible to conceive and find the language systems in which the practical aim retreats to the background, and language resources acquire autonomous value. Transrational Language If we stipulate that a word in order to be a word must designate a concept and must in all circumstances be meaningful. Poetic language is not just a language of images. Sounds in verse do nor merely accompany meaning, sounds have autonomous value. Independent speech function of sounds. Artistic perception is a perception that entails awareness of form. Symbolism: Harmony between form and content. Form as an outer cover filled in by content. Formalism: Form as the whole entity. Something concrete and dynamic. Substantive in itself. The poetic image is just one device among the many devices of poetic language: parallelism, comparison, repetition, symmetry, hyperbole etc. Art is conceived as a way of breaking down automatism in perception. Seeing vs. recognizing. Different functions of poetic and practical languages. Theory of Plot - Special devices of plot formation - Plot (sjuzet) vs. story (fabula). - Form: literary fact (life being deformed in structure.) - Plot devices: frame, concentration, etc. The Resurrection of the Word He asserts fundamental linguistic difference between poetic and common language. While the word in everyday speech is “petrified” (fossilized) through “habituation” and restricted to merely cognitive understanding, poetry succeeds in “revitalizing” the word, making it perceivable. By creating “new forms of art,” the poet makes us “see, not only recognize”. Estrangement Key words: estrangement fragmentation, perception A process or act that endows an object or image with “strangeness” by “removing” it from the network of conventional, formulaic, stereotypical perceptions and linguistic expressions. Estrangement attack the notion that we think in images. - Estrangement. - Making it strange. - Defamiliarization. Complication of our perceptual process. - Defective sense of time. Unconscious of time perceived as eternal, timeless present - Sense of time of an animal - Life is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Devices of Continuity: Benji’s moaning as a kind of leitmotiv & sensory experiences trigger Benji’s memory. 13.10.23 MARXISM Marxism and Literary Criticism Introduction Marxism criticism analyses literature in terms of the historical conditions which produce it. The social context of production. It aims to understand ideologies. The ideas, values and feelings by which men experience their societies at various times. To understand ideologies is to understand both past and present more deeply. Such understanding contributes to our liberation. Literature and History 26.10.23 M Murderers Among Us - The camera uses exaggerated angles to emphasize the asymmetrical power relation between the accuser and the accused. - Lang inserts scenes of mass contagion less to propel the plot forward or add psychological depth than to analyse the real-life consequences of media-fueled paranoia and suspicion. - Lethal effects of false rumors. - The circulation of falsehhods triggers collective hysteria ending in madness and violence. - M highlights the velocity of communication and the power of technological media networks that include the telegraph, telephone, radio, gramophone, film, photography and printed press. - Berlin in the 1930s was a media saturated metropolis (sixty daily newspapers published/ three daily editions all competing for the latest scoop). - Sensationalism inheres in the very delivery of the news; readers need the fix and tabloids supply it. Lang dissects the circulation of news as a social process, demonstrating how it can engender a mass rejection of reason. - The film’s desperate search for the invisible murder becomes itself a destructive endevour, fraying the social fabric and ultimately tearing it apart. - Lang’s M is less the story of a serial killer that a critique of how mass media function in a fully-networked environment. - A society already weakened by World War I, the Great Influenza of 1918, the economic distress of hyperinflation in 1923 and rising unemployment after 1929, was highly susceptible to misleading news that stocked division, fear, anger and resentment, keeping the citizen in a constant state of panic and agitation. - The Weimer Republic has become Exhibit A for the fragility of democracy. - M is a crucial document about the economic, social and political crises of pre-Hitler Germany. - It depicts a grim society with unblinking realism, probing a criminal underworld so powerful that it constitutes a shadow state, whose strength is proportional to the weakness of the state, paralyzed by extreme political polarization. - M provides a penetrating analysis of pro-fascist tendencies that are easily manipulated by the media and used by populist demagogues. - It desplays the very precarity of democracy under pressure. Vulnerability of the democratic order. Diagnosis of a society in crisis. Berlin, 1931 - The making of M coincided with the rapid disintegration of the political and social structures of the Weimar Republic. - Massive unemployment, rising criminality, political unrest. Focus on criminals and beggars, prostitutes. - 1930 elections: millions voted for the National Socialists. - Berlin became the site of wild strikes, mass demostrations and street battles. - The SA kept Berlin in a state of permanent alarm and nervous agitation. - M presents a society at war with itself. Sound : Rethink the entire film apparatus in the wake of the sound revolution in cinema. Haarman – most infamous serial killer of the time  nickname: ’Man in Black’ «Wait wait just a little while / The Man in Black will soon come to you». Scene set in a Berlin Tenement house: although the space seems protected and safe, the murderer’s spirit has invaded it through the sound of the gruesome nursery rhyme, which, in a serial fashion, is repeated three times. The children’s song off-screen, with its allusions to elimination and deprivation, underlines and intensifies the desolate images. Lang’s off-screen sound expands the field of vision and suggests a space outside the frame. Sound affirms presence and life; silence connotes absence and death. Inanimate objects stand in for an absent – and violently silenced – person. The children’s game mimics the nature of serial killing (anyone could be next). The camera’s look from above no close-up, no eye-level position which might support emotional cathexis. Unrelenting process of elimination: one child after the other. Rhyme (not reason) decides who will be next as the soudns of the girl’s voice indentifies each new victim. Coming after the cries, the silence is eerie. We have no doubt about Elsie’s fate. The ballon at once evokes her nad metonymically replaces her. Transition from the sight of the telegraph wires, touched and activated by Elsie’s balloon, to the sound of street hawkers. The transition essentialises the unprecedented speed with which information was disseminated in 1931 Berlin. Within no time, Elsie’s murder has become a headline story. At their crescendo, the sounds take on a threatening quality, suggesting the increasingly irrational pursuit of more and faster sensations. 27.10.23 BAKHTIN Language, Openness and Struggle - Highly distinctive concept of language. - Battle between centrifugal forces that seeks to keep things apart and centripetal forces that strive to make things cohere. Present in Culture, Nature, Individual - Consciousness, Individual Utterances. - The most complete and complex reflection of these forces is found in human language, and the best transcription of language so understood is the novel. - Language reflects this struggle in an active way —> fragility and ineluctably historical nature of language, the coming and dying of meaning. - «A language is stratified into languages that are socio-ideological: languages belonging to professions, to genres, languages peculiar to particular generations, etc. This stratification and diversity of speech will spread wider and penetrate to ever deeper levels so long as a language is alive and still in the process of becoming. - The construction of the self. The language is for dialog. The dialog is for the self and the others. For unity. - Diogalism: the use in a text of different tones or viewpoints, whose interaction or contradiction are important to the text's interpretation. - All meaning is relactive. - Horizon is pushed forward and perspective is open. We are always in the present. - In order to close our perspective we need to die, or we need to see ourselves from the view of others. We need to project ourselves into a literary character. - Connection between the selfhood (not finished) and the project of language itself. They both exist to mean something, in order to mean something. They go with coherence. Heteroglossia - “A unitary language is not something that is given, but is in its very essence something that must be posited – at every moment in the life of a language it opposes the realities of HETEROGLOSSIA but at the same time the sophisticated ideal of a single, holistic language makes the actuality of its presence felt as a force resisting an absolute heteroglot state; it posits definite boundaries for limiting the potential chaos of variety, thus guaranteeing a more or less maximal mutual understanding.” - The difference between Sassure and Bakhtin, theory and practice etc. - Heteroglossia manifests itself in POLYPHONY and CARNIVALIZATION. - Heteroglossia is Bakhtin’s way of referring, in any utterance of any kind, to the peculiar interaction between the two fundamentals of all communication: on the one hand, a mode of transcription must, in order to do its work of separating out texts, be a more or less fixed system. But these repeatable features, on the other hand, are in the power of the particular context in which the utterance is made; this context can refract, add to, or, in some case, even subtract from the amount and kind of meaning the utterance may be said to have when it is conceived only as a systematic manifestation independent of context. Formalists vs. Bakhtin Unlike formalism Bakhtin argues the coherence within the language, and individual experience regarding to our nature and culture in an literary product. While the New Critics regarded literature as a form of human understanding, the Formalists thought of it as a special use of language. Formalism concentrates on the internal elements of a literary work, like its structure and language, in an objective and scientific manner, disregarding the author's intentions and social context. In contrast, Bakhtinian theory emphasizes the social and dialogic aspects of literature, highlighting the importance of diverse voices, interaction, and context in creating meaning. Formalism is concerned with the text itself, while Bakhtinian theory delves into the dynamic interplay of voices and perspectives within and around the text. Utterance - Immense plurality of experience  basic scenario is two actual people talking to each other in a specific dialogue at a particular time in a particular place. - Each two people are a consciousness at a specific point in the history of defining itself through the choice it has made – out of all the possible existing languages available to it at that moment - of a discourse to transcribe its intention in this specific exchange. - Their development as individuals will have prosecuted as a gradual appropriation of a specific mix of discourses that are capable of best mediating their own intentions. - All transcription systems – including the speaking voice in a living utterance - are inadequate to the multiplicity of the meanings they seek to convey. - My voice gives the illusion of unity to what I say; I am, in fact, constantly expressing a plenitude of meaning, some intendend, some others of which I am unaware. - Stress on the speech aspect of language, UTTERANCE. - There is no such thing as a «general language», a language that is spoken by a general voice, that may be divorced from a specific saying, which is charged with particular overtones. Language, when it means, is sombody talking to sombedy else, even when that someone else is one’s own inner voice. - Emphasis on COMMUNICATION and DIALOGUE. Marxists vs. Bakhtin They are different in terms of context. From a literary standpoint, Marxists examine literature through the lens of social and economic structures, analyzing how it reflects and influences class struggles and societal disparities. They explore the socioeconomic backgrounds of authors and the potential for literature to drive social change. Bakhtin, however, concentrates on the intricacies of language and dialogue in literary works. His theory of "polyphony" emphasizes the diverse voices and perspectives within texts, highlighting the richness of interactions. Bakhtin's approach underscores the importance of context and multiple viewpoints in understanding literary meaning. In essence, Marxists focus on socioeconomic themes, while Bakhtin emphasizes the dynamic interplay of voices and languages within literature. Both perspectives offer distinct insights into the analysis of literary works. The Novel - A particular assemblage of discourses and voices. - The novel dramatizes the gaps that always exist between what is told and the telling of it, constantly experimenting with social, discursive and narrative asymmetries. - Literary language is not presented in the novel as a unitary, completely finished off, indubitably adequate language – it is represented precisely as a living mix of varied and opposing voices. The novel is something composed of different genres. - Other genres are constituted by a set of formal features for fixing language that pre-exist any specific utterance within the genre. The novel by contrast seeks to shape its form to languages: it constantly experiments with new shapes in order to display the variety and immediacy of speech DIVERSITY. - It is a super genre, whose power consists in its ability to engulf and ingest all other genres (the different and separate languages peculiar to each) - Consciously structured hybrid of languages. - Multiplicity of styles in their mutual echoing, or as the word constantly re-involved in a dialogue. - POLEMICAL WORD. History of a Form - ‘Novel’ is the B. gives to whatever force is at work within a given literary system to reveal the limits, the artificial constraints of that system. Literary systems are comprised of canons, and ‘novelization’ is fundamentally anti-canonical. - Meta poetic aspect. Implied author. Delano is Delano is the reader. The suspension of the belief of the author. It might be interpreted. Enigmatic and interpretation. Meta narrative symbols. - Narrative is build on what plot. Narrative plot. Series of heterogeneous events - Harlequin mask carnival mask. Barber is consulted with masculinity. Passive subject. Decadent leaders. The fall of the Roman Empire loose morality for example. Southern and European decadence. The end of the performance. Dostoyevsky poetics. From Bakhtin’s perspective. Sıcrates dialogue. Socratic dialogue. The Idiot. The Servant movie. missed one class here 10.11.23 In A Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough. - Juxtaposition of two images. We are under the image of impressionism - Sort of metaphor. Association is not immediate. It is far away. - Metaphors are usually ornaments but with modernist poetry not ornamental but interpretative tools. - The contrast between the scene and the images used to express those emotions that the poet felt in the precise moment. - Mixing image and word. T.S. Eliot on Hamlet HAMLET / \ Work Character - Shakespeare failed because the character failed. - Exterior and the interior don’t quite match. - The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative’ - Work of art cannot be interpreted - Hamlet is a stratification that it represents the efforts of a series of men, each making what he could out of the work of his predecessors. - In the earlier play the motive was a revenge motive simply; that the action or delay is caused, as in the Spanish Tragedy, solely by the difficulty of assassinating a monarch surrounded by guards; and that the 'madness' of Hamlet was feigned in order to escape suspicion, and successfully. - Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is a play dealing with the effect of a mother's guilt upon her son, but Shakespeare was unable of impose this motive successfully upon the "intractable material of the old play. more on here T.S. Eliot on Ulysses, Order and Myth - Joyce juxtaposes … - Myths are used as frames. They help us isolate and interpret reality. The myth originally where attempts to explain the origins. - The myths are an attempt to explain creation. (Like The Bible) - Myth is to understand the present. more on here Erich Auerbach’s Analyses of To The Lighthouse on The Brown Stocking Beg. Mid. End |———|—————————|————————————-> Room “Never did Spatialized Time Swiss Girl anybody look so sad.” A Coherent Whole People Meaningful Telephone Conversation Finalized, Framed, Closed Unitary - Teleology: the theory that everything has a special purpose or meaning. Some things happen, or exist, for the sake of other things. - The object of this essay is to understand the time and how she uses it. - Small random facts - The pharanteses and the usage of time - Flashback within the flashback. - Theological. Pure Duration. - The exterior time of the objective plot is a time that is arithmetical and mathematical. It is a series of moments that can be calculated and measured. - She was the object, but now is the object. - To express a new consciousness of time. - Auerbach focuses on two things: the continuity with plot & rapture, breaking of plot - "Never did anybody look so sad" is not an objective statement. In rendering the shock received by one looking at Mrs. Ramsay's face, it verges upon a realm beyond reality. - The writer as narrator of objective facts has almost completely vanished; almost everything stated appears by way of reflection in the consciousness of the dramatis personae. - Yet in such cases there was hardly ever any attempt to render the flow and the play of consciousness adrift in the current of changing impressions. Instead, the content of the individual's consciousness was rationally limited to things connected with the particular incident being related or the particular situation being described. - Disruption of framing. - The essential characteristic of the technique represented by Virginia Woolf is that we are given not merely one person whose consciousness is rendered, but many persons, with frequent shifts from one to the other. - There is an attempt to approach her from many sides as closely as human possibilities of perception and expression can succeed in doing. - Every character obeys to a different time, which breaks the unity of time. - The design of a close approach to objective reality by means of numerous subjective impressions received by various individuals (and at various times) is important in the modem technique which we are here examining. It basically differentiates it from the unipersonal subjectivism which allows only a single and generally a very unusual person to make himself heard and admits only that one person's way of looking at reality. - These are the characteristic and distinctively new features of the technique: a chance occasion releasing processes of consciousness; a natural and even, if you will, a naturalistic rendering of those processes in their peculiar freedom, which is neither restrained by a purpose nor directed by a specific subject of thought; elaboration of the contrast between "exterior" and "interior" time. The three have in common what they reveal of the author's attitude. - In Virginia Woolf's case the exterior events have actually lost their hegemony, they serve to release and interpret inner events, whereas before her time (and still today in many instances) inner movements preponderantly function to prepare and motivate significant exterior happenings. and satisfy our curiosity. The fact that it is a snail is an aporia, an impassable moment or pain in narrative, a hermeneutic abyss. The ending tells us nothing. - Split between story and discourse: denaturalize or defamiliarize our sense of how narratives function. Each telling is different and also its reading is open to multiple directions. - Relation between teller and listener or reader. - Focus is not the events or the actions told, but the relationship between the author or teller and the reader or listener. - “To tell a story is to claim a certain authority, which listeners grant.” - Our understanding of a text is pervaded by our sense of the character, trustworthiness and objectivity of the figure who is narrating. Example: Jonathan Swifts’s essay A Modest Proposal: to prevent the children of the poor to be a burden, such children should be sold to the rich. - We necessarily conceive of an ‘implied author’ who has very different views and motives and who is making a political point about the immorality of the English Government. - Our understanding of the ironic force of the text relies on our distinguished between two voices or personae of the narrator and the implied author. - Scheherazade in A Thousand and One Nights. - Enactment of forms of power. “To tell a story is to exercise power” (Chambers). - Storytelling is often used as an oppositional practice, a practice of resistance used by the weak against the strong. - It changes its other (The narratee), through the achievement and maintenance of authority, in ways that are politically radical. - Narrative power: without it the weak might not be heard. Social and political importance of stories as expressed by the old man in Chinua Achebe's novel Anthills of the Savannah (1987). - The story is our escort; without it we are blind. Does the blind man own his Escort No, neither do we the story; rather it is the story that owns us and directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on the face that sets one people apart from their neighbour. (124) - Things cannot be understood in isolation. - Context of the larger structures they are part of. - Meaning is always outside. It is an attribute of things. - Moving away from the interpretation of the individual literary work. - Parallel drive towards understanding the larger, abstract structures which contain the literary work. - Structures: genres, poetic or narrative. Saussure - He studies the patterns and functions of language. - Patterns and functions of language in use today. - Emphasis on how meaning are maintained and established and on the functions of grammatical structures. - Meanings we give to words are ARBITRARY. - Meaning are maintained by CONVENTIONS. - Words are UNMOTIVATED SIGNS. No inherent connection between a word and what ir designates. - If language is based on arbitrariness, then language isn’t a reflection of the world and of experience, but a SYSTEM quite separate from it. - Menings of words are relational. No words can be defined in isolation from other words. Male/female, day/night… etc. You can’t explain night without day, and vice versa. - Each designates the absence of the characteristics included in the other. Male: not female etc. - “In a language there are only differences with our positive terms.” DIFFERENCING NETWORK. - Language constitutes… Langue Parole - Language as grammar & structure. - A particular remark in one language only makes sense if you’re already in possession of the whole body of rules and conventions governing that verbal behavior we call language. (French, English etc.) - The individual remark is a decree Irem which only makes sense when seen in relation to a wider containşing structure. - Individual literary work (Parole) framed ins the wider context of the genre of the novel (Langue) - Grammar of a genre and rules of a genre only works for that specific genre. They all have their langue. - Midsommar for example changes it genres rules and structures to make something different. It uses disappointment. Narratology - How narratives make meaning. - What basic mechanisms and procedures are which are common to all acts of storytelling. - Attempt to study the nature of ‘story’ itself, the the interpretation of a text. - Story and Discourse, fable and sjuzhet, recite and discourse. - Aristotle’s Poetics. Character and actions are the essential elects in a sort. Character must be revealed though action i.e. through aspects of the plot. - Key elements of plot according to Aristotle: hamartia (sin or fault), anagnorisis, peripeteia. Morphology of the Folktale (1928) - Propp. Identification of recurrent structures and situations in Russian Folk Tales. - All these tales are constructed by selecting items from a basic repertoire of thirty-one - functions (possible actions). - Examples: Interdiction, interdiction is violated, the villain deceives his victim, lack, journey, tests, the hero fights the villain, the hero returns etc. - To make the plot of any given individual tale, you put together a selection of items from this list. - Character types: distribution of functions. (Pursuit, capture, punishment etc.) Villain, donor, helper, princess (the sought for person) the hero (seeker or victim). 31 different functions of characters, he found. - Armed with characters and functions we can create a plot, just as armed with the grammar, syntax, vocabulary of English (the langue) we can generate any possible utterance in English (the parole). Genette, Narrative Discourse - Showing vs. Telling, Mimetic vs Dramatising, scenic vs. relating. Diegesis means telling, the parts of narrative which are presented in this way are given in a more rapid or panoramic or summarizing way. - Focalisations = viewpoint or perspective. It depends. - External focalization: the viewpoint is outside the character depicted (what charters say or do.) - Internal focalization: the focus is on what characters feel or think. Revelation of unspoken thoughts and feelings. Focalizer or Reflector. Literature and Psychoanalysis I - Therapy: investigation of conscious and unconscious elements in the mind. - Specific theories on how the mind, the instincts, and sexuality work. - Notion of the UNCONSCIOUS: the part of the mind beyond consciousness which continue to have a strong impact on our actions. - Idea of REPRESSION: the forgetting of unsolved conflicts, unadmitted desires or traumatic past events. They are forced out of conscious awareness and into the realm of the unconscious. Personality - Ego = consciousness Super Ego = conscience Ide = unconscious - Oedipus Complex: narrative explaining the drives regulating Infantile Sexuality –> The male infant conceives the desire to eliminate the father and become the sexual partner of the mother. - Idea of LIBIDO: energy drive associated with sexual desire. Stage 1) oral 2) anal 3) phallic. - The Libido is also a generalized drive called EROS (the life instinct) the opposite of which is THANATOS (death instinct). Psychic Life - PRIMAL SCENE: witnessing, too early, of a sexual intercourse between parents. Deferred effects of a TRAUMA. Might be a real event of a fantasy. - Voyeurism. - Castration Anxiety: fear of emasculation. Role of the Father (or the Super Ego) in silencing (castrating) unconscious libido. - Literal or Metaphorical: passive stance towards life. Desire to be dominated. - Penis’ envy: counterpart in females. Psychic processes - Transference: the patient redirects their emotions towards the psychoanalyst. - Projection: when aspects of ourselves are not recognized as part of ourselves but are attributed (projected) to another. Defence mechanism and screen memory. - Freudian slip: when repressed materials in the unconscious find a breach through such everyday phenomena as slips of the tongue or of the pen or unintended actions. Dream Work - The process by which real events or desires are transformed into dream images. - Displacement: one person or event is repressed by another which is somehow associated with it. - Condensation: a single image in a dream represents multiple people or things or events or actions. - The dream work is a very literary way of representing abstract ideas in concrete symbols. - Dreams, like literature, allude to reality in an oblique and indirect fashion. - Freud believes that a dream is an escape-hatch or safety-valve through which repressed fears, anxieties, desires or memories seek an outlet into the conscious mind and so has to enter the dream in disguise. - Return of the repressed. Repetition - Discovery of the patient need to repeat, rather than simply remember, repressed material: the need to reproduce and to work through painful material from the past as if it were present. - Compulsion to repeat, ascribed to the unconscious repressed, particularly discernible in the transference, where it can take ‘ingenious’ forms. - Sense of being subject to a perpetual recurrence of the same thing. - The Uncanny : that feeling of the daemonic, arising from involuntary repetition. Fort-da Game - Child’s play: the child makes an object disappear and reappear, alternating the exclamations fort and da. - The Child repeats, in this game, the traumatic experience of the mother’s disappearance. - Way to claim control over something which is felt as uncontrollable. - Movement from a passive role in regard to their mother’s disappearance, claiming mastery in a situation which has been compelled to submit to. - Repetition is mastery by way of transference. Peter Brooks: Freud’s Masterplot The repetition of traumatic experiences in the dreams of neurotics can be seen to have the function of seeking retrospectively to master the flood of stimuli, to perform a mastery or binding of mobile energy through developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis. Pleasure Principle and Death Drive - “An instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things.” (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle) - Instincts, which we tend to think as a drive toward change, may rather be an expression of the «conservative nature of living things». - The organism has no wish to change. - «The aim of all life is death». - The tension created by external influences has forced living substance to «diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and to make ever more complicated détours before reaching its aim of death». - “The organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.” - What operates in the text through repetition is the death instinct, the drive toward the end. - The end is the time before the beginning. Between these two moments of quiescence, plot itself stands as a kind of divergence or deviance, a postponement in the discharge which leads back to the inanimate. - Plot starts from that moment at which the story, or life, is stimulated from quiescence into a state of narratability, into a tension, a kinf of irritation which demands narration. - Beginning: the birth of an appetency, ambition, desire or intention, an awakening. - Middle: state of tension, a prolonged deviance from the quiescence of the normal, the unnarratable. - End: final illumination in death. - The desire of the text is hence desire for the end, but desire for the end reached through détour, the intentional deviance, in tension, which is the plot of narrative. - Deviance, détour, an intention which is irritation: these are characteristics of the narratable, of life as it is the material of narrative, of fabula become sjuzet. - Plot is a kind of arabesque or squiggle toward the end. - Dynamic model which effectively structures ends (death, quiescence, non-narratability) against beginnings (Eros, stimulation into tension, the desire of narrative) in a manner - Words and meanings have a life of their own, and constantly obscure and override the supposed clarity of external reality. We never reach the real, we get stuck in the context. - In the Lacanian world, you can not reach the reality. It is something that floats, and is there even before us. How So? - The two ‘dream work’ mechanisms identified by Freud, condensation and displacement, correspond to metaphor and metonymy. - The unconscious uses these linguistic means, hence is structured like a language. - Whenever the unconscious is being discussed the amount of linguistic analysis increases puns, allusions, lapsus etc. are the mechanisms which make manifest the unconscious. - Descartes: “I Think, therefore I am” vs. Lacan: “I am where I think not.” The letter kills the spirit. The signifier kills the signified. - The true self lies in the unconscious. - The true self is ex-centric to itself. How can we recover our true self? Will it ever be possible? No. Because the most that can happen is desire and desire can never be reached. Deconstruction - The Self is, then, DECONSTRUCTED. - The unconscious is the true ‘kernel of our being’. There is no relationship between this world and the signifiers. The self is a social construct, a linguistic construct. The idea of self is a fantasy. - But the unconscious is like a language and language exists as structure BEFORE the individual enters into it. We are in language even before we exist. It is something that exists by default. - Liberal humanist notion of identity as centered and unique falls down. - The notion of a unique, separate self is deconstructed. - The idea of character itself becomes untenable. Reject the conventional view of characterization in literature. For example, novels always started from an unknown person before and went on with the story; but it changed because they wanted to create a novel before the character. - Lacan deconstructs the idea of the subject as a stable amalgam of consciousness. - Rejection of literary realism in favor of modernist and postmodernist experimental, fragmented, allusive text. Fragmented Self: Imaginary / Symbolic - Mechanism whereby the subject emerge into consciousness. - Before the sense of self emerges, the child exists in a realm, The Imaginary, in which there is no distinction between Self and Other. Idealization and identification with the mother. Self and other united. Mother and the son is the unity, the father is the decoherence. - Between six months and eighteen months: MIRROR STAGE, the child sees its own reflection of begins to conceive itself as a unified being, separate from the Other and the rest of the World. - At this stage the Subject enters into a language system, a structuring frame concerned with LACK and SEPARATION that triggers the signifier. - Language names what is not present (Lack) and substitutes a linguistic sign for it (Separation, S/s). What we lost get substituted by language. - This stage also marks the beginning of socialization prohibitions and restrains (The figure of the Father.) We have now the figure of the father. - The new order which the child now enters is called The Symbolic. - The realm of the Symbolic = realist literature, patriarchal order and logic. - The realm of the Imaginary = beyond logic and grammar, poetic language. We have the language of dreams. The father says no in To The Lighthouse because he represents the realism; whereas the mother represents the imaginary, the possibility when she says ‘maybe tomorrow we will go.’ - Preference for a kind of literary text in which there are constant irruptions of the Imaginary into the Symbolic. The imaginary is a real that happens right before the Word. Right before the meaning gets finalized to the static. - We can never reach the level of reality. - Repetition is never of sameness. It is something different. The Purloined Letter Characters: the Queen, the Minister, The King, The Chief of Police and Dupin, the detective. I. The king interrupts unexpectedly a dialogue between the Queen and the Minister. The Minister notices that a letter on her desk makes the Queen nervous. The minister removes the letter. II. The Queen calls the Chief of Police to find the letter. Search of the Minister apartment. No traces of the letter. III. Dupin helps the Queen in her desperate inquiry. He realizes that: a) the Minister could not risk carrying the letter on his person b) the letter is useful only if at hand at any time, hence it must be inside the house. c) if it were hidden inside the house then the police would have found it during the search d) the letter must be not hidden inside the Minister’s house found above the mantelpiece. Lacan’s Reading In the 1930s Marie Bonaparte read the tale as a symptom of the author’s neurotic inner life mother fixation and necriphilia. Lacan sees the text as a metaphor which exemplify the mechanisms and nature of the unconscious, of psychoanalysis and of language. I. The stolen letter is an emblem of the unconscious itself. The content of the letter is lacking, exactly as the content of the unconscious. Both are unknowable but everything is affected by them. II. Dupin’s investigation = process of psychoanalysis. Both use repetition and substitution. The original trauma is repeated in verbal form. Once it is conscious and verbalized, the traumatic memory is disempowered and mental well-being is restored. Dupins steals the letter from the Minister, repeating the first theft, always enacting a substitution. III. The letter is the FLOATING SIGNIFIER. In language there is an endless play of signifiers, but no simple connection with any signified content beyond language. The signified is always lost or purloined, stolen. We see the letter has a significance for everyone in the story, but we never find out precisely what is signified within it. All words are purloined letters. Repetition Compulsion. (Primal scene = first theft). The theft is the outcome of an intersubjective relationship between three terms. This whole structural situation gets repeated. The two scenes mirror each other: they dramatize the repeated exchange of “three glances, borne by three subjects, incarnated each time by different characters.” Repetition is not a psychological act committed as a function of the individual psychology of a character. What are repeated are three functional positions in a structure, three different points of view, three different relations to the act of seeing. Everything stays in the realm of