April 22- Theory and On Beauty

Literary Theory: varying ways to read and make meaning of a text

New Criticism: 1920's-1950's, way of seeking out contradictions in a text and figuring out how those contradictions unified the text and created meaning
-Looking at just the text itself and trying to figure out what the author meant.
-1960's: cultural revolution in America, England and France

Psychoanalysis, Unconscious: this directs our thoughts and actions; Oedipus complex (desire for father and desire to kill mother). Latent content of dreams in order to understand, reading you as if you are a text to figure out what dreams and thoughts mean.

Feminism: movement for woman's equality and rights in the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's. Where you read texts to discover hidden or not hidden meanings about female desire, empowerment, equality, sexuality, gender politics, and POWER and SUBJECTIVITY. What makes a woman a woman, a man a man? Who cares what the author thought?

Critical Race Theory: how do the depictions of race determine power?

Texts have a larger cultural meaning. With the various theoretical movements the meaning of a "text" changes.
--Texts: poems, novels, plays, films, TV shows, movies, digital images, art, painting, CD's, music, graffiti, clothes, merchandising, advertising, cultural artifact--- anything that can be interpreted.

Queer Theory: gender issues, power, gender depictions, hetero-normative ways of thinking. Analyzing a text for any type of gender issues. How is queer identity constructed in a text?

Theories that look at a text to analyze and attempt to delve deeper: Power, identity, subjectivity, political significance, cultural significance, types of representation.

Deconstruction: French philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Came along in the 1970's and onward. Question meaning, to question stable notions off identity, to question stable notions of what a person is. Questioning how language makes meaning. Challenging the fundamental meanings of Western culture.

Privileged Oppositions

Logos: speech and reason in Greek. Speech is always privileged over reason. Speech and reason are always privileged over textual writing. We grant more authority to speech and reason than to writing and non reason.
Logocentric: we privilege the faculty of reason over all else. In the history of the West, reason has been used to judge what makes a human a human. In literature and philosophy, in political reports or expeditions too far away-lands, non-white peoples are judged to be without reason and therefore not fully human.

Essentialism: What is the essence of the human