Hello friends!
I am Bhavna Sosa, a student from the English Department, MKBU. In this task given by our prof. Dilip Barad sir. This blog is based on contemporary Western theories like marxism, ecocriticism, feminism and queer theory.
1)Marxism:-
What is Marxism?
In literary theory, a Marxist interpretation reads the text as an expression of contemporary class struggle. Literature is not simply a matter of personal expression or taste. It somehow relates to the social and political conditions of the time.
Marx called the economic conditions of life the base or infrastructure. The base includes everything from technology and raw materials to the social organization of the workplace. This economic base has a powerful effect on the superstructure, Marx’s term for society, culture, and the world of ideas.
Marxism is a social, political, and economic philosophy named after Karl Marx. It examines the effect of capitalism on labor, productivity, and economic development and argues for a worker revolution to overturn capitalism in favor of communism. Marxism posits that the struggle between social classes-specifically between the bourgeoisie, or capitalists, and the proletariat, or workers-defines economic relations in a capitalist economy and will inevitably lead to revolutionary communism.
Here some key points :
- Marxism is a social, political, and economic theory originated by Karl Marx, which focuses on the struggle between capitalists and the working class.
- Marx wrote that the power relationships between capitalists and workers were inherently exploitative and would inevitably create class conflict.
- He believed that this conflict would ultimately lead to a revolution in which the working class would overthrow the capitalist class and seize control of the economy.
What Marxist critics do ?
Marxism has a significant impact on the social institutions and analyzes how certain classes hegemonized the working class and controls everything. The approach helped literary critics understand the cultural and ideological influence of the society a writer depicts in his writing.
Example:-
Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin
A classic movie by Charlie Chaplin is a Marxist film? Chaplin was always sensitive to social problems. England has always been the land of socialist battles. Highgate cemetery is a sufficient proof of how deeply related England is to Marx’s life.
This film could be seen as a social accusation toward industrialization . If one wants to better understand what proletariat alienation is, this is the film to see. This movie is based on a simple concept which it explains well through stereotypical and ironic characters.
A society that works in a crazy context cannot be fit for man, who continuously searches to be free. If it is only a critical film more than constructive one, it reflects a particular aspect of industrial proletariat problems, a very old problem that is a socialist vindication but at the same time, is the basis of Marx’s philosophy.
2) Ecocriticism:-
"Ecocriticism is the study of literature and environment from an interdisciplinary point of view where all sciences come together to analyze the environment and brainstorm possible solutions for the correction of the contemporary environmental situation."
According to M.H.Abraham...
Ecocriticism was a term coined in the late 1970s by combining "criticism" with a shortened form of "ecology"-the science that investigates the interrelations of all forms of plant and animal life with each other and with their physical habitats.
"Ecocriticism" (or by alternative names, environmental criticism and green studies) designates the critical writings which explore the relations between literature and the biological and physical environment, conducted with an acute awareness of the damage being wrought on that environment by human activities."
Ecocriticism investigates the relation between humans and the natural world in literature. It deals with how environmental issues, cultural issues concerning the environment and attitudes towards nature are presented and analyzed. One of the main goals in ecocriticism is to study how individuals in society behave and react in relation to nature and ecological aspects. This form of criticism has gained a lot of attention during recent years due to higher social emphasis on environmental destruction and increased technology. It is hence a fresh way of analyzing and interpreting literary texts, which brings new dimensions to the field of literary and theoretical studies. Ecocriticism is an intentionally broad approach that is known by a number of other designations, including "green (cultural) studies" "ecopoetics" and "environmental literary criticism.
Major writer in the field:
Jonathan Bate (considered widely as the father of Ecocriticism in England)
Cheryll Glotfelty (father of Ecocriticism in the USA)
Laurence CoupePatrick D Murphy
Concept of Ecocriticism :-
1. It is claimed that the reigning religions and philosophies of Western civilization are deeply anthropocentric.
2. Prominent in ecocriticism is a critique of binaries such as man/nature or culture/nature, viewed as mutually exclusive oppositions.
One poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in England some twenty years later, in “Inversnaid”:
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
3. Many ecocritics recommend, and themselves exemplify, the extension of “green reading” (that is, analysis of the implications of a text for environmental concerns and toward political action) to all literary genres, including prose fiction and poetry, and also to writings in the natural and social sciences.
4. A conspicuous feature in ecocriticism is the analysis of the differences in attitudes toward the environment that are attributable to a writer’s race, ethnicity, social class, and gender.
5. There is a growing interest in the animistic religions of so-called “primitive” cultures, as well as in Hindu, Buddhist, and other religions and civilizations that lack the Western opposition between humanity and nature, and do not assign to human beings dominion over the nonhuman world.
Example :-
" I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" by Wordsworth
I gave an example of this theory so I can take a great example of an ecocritical reading of Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is Scott Hess’s article “John Clare, William Wordsworth, and the (Un)Framing of Nature.”
Hess argues that Wordsworth treats the daffodils like a photo on a postcard. Wordsworth doesn’t involve himself in nature. Instead, he looks at nature from afar (like a cloud), and leaves as soon as he has had his fill. In other words, Wordsworth acts like the tourist who comes by once and snaps a quick picture before moving on.
With any theoretical approach there is always the danger that we misrepresent the text in order to further our own agenda. In this case it might be pointed out that Wordsworth is at pains to describe the communion he has with nature. He is not simply a solitary observer, watching from a distance. The personification of the flowers suggests a kind of kinship between people and nature. As Ralph Pite points out, “In Wordsworth’s work, ‘the natural world’ is always social, both in itself and in its relation to man. Consequently, nature does not offer an escape from other people so much as express an alternative mode of relating to them”.
So here if I look from this perspective Wordsworth sees nature as a teacher, a friend, and a mirror of what it means to be human–and yet he also respects nature’s independence, the distance and difference between humans and their environment.
3) Feminism :-
What is feminism ?
Feminism incorporates the position that societies prioritize the male point of view, and that women are treated unjustly within those societies.[6] Efforts to change that include fighting against gender stereotypes and establishing educational, professional, and interpersonal opportunities and outcomes for women that are equal to those for men.
Major works :-
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
- John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869)
- American Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)
- Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929)
- Mary Ellmann Thinking about Women (1968)
- Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics
- Judith Fetterley’s The Resisting Reader
- Patricia Meyer Spacks’ The Female Imagination (1975)
- Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own
- Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979; rev. 2000)
What feminist critics do ?
1. Rethink the canon, aiming at the rediscovery of texts written by women.
2. Revalue women's experience.
3. Examine representations of women in literature by men and women.
4. Challenge representations of women as 'Other', as 'lack', as part of 'nature'.
5. Examine power relations which are obtained in texts and in life, with a view to breaking them down, seeing reading as a political act, and showing the extent of patriarchy.
6. Recognise the role of language in making what is social and constructed seem transparent and 'natural'.
7. Raise the question of whether men and women are 'essentially' different because of biology, or are socially constructed as different.
8. Explore the question of whether there is a female language, an ecriture feminine, and whether this is also available to men.
9. 'Re-read' psychoanalysis to further explore the issue of female and male identity.
10. Question the popular notion of the death of the author, asking whether there are only 'subject positions ... constructed in discourse', or whether, on the contrary, the experience (e.g. of a black or lesbian writer) is central.
11. Make clear the ideological base of supposedly 'neutral' or 'mainstream' literary interpretations.
4) Queer Theory:-
Queer Theory critically examines the way power works to institutionalize and legitimate certain forms and expressions of sexuality and gender while stigmatizing others. Queer Theory followed the emergence and popularity of Gay and Lesbian (now, LGBT or Queer) Studies in the academy. Whereas LGBT Studies seeks to analyze LGBT people as stable identities, Queer Theory problematizes and challenges rigid identity categories, norms of sexuality and gender and the oppression and violence that such hegemonic norms justify. Queer Theory destabilizes sexual and gender identities allowing and encouraging multiple, unfettered interpretations of cultural phenomena. It predicates that all sexual behaviors and gender expressions, all concepts linking such to prescribed, associated identities, and their categorization into “normal” or “deviant” sexualities or gender, are constructed socially and generate modes of social meaning. Queer theory follows and expands upon feminist theory by refusing the belief that sexuality and gender identity are essentialist categories determined by biology that can thus be empirically judged by fixed standards of morality and “truth.”
Writers and their works :-
Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), described the categories of gender and of sexuality as performative, in the sense that the features which a cultural discourse institutes as masculine or feminine, heterosexual or homosexual, the discourse also makes happen, by establishing an identity that the socialized individual assimilates and the patterns of behavior that he or she proceeds to enact.“Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” 1977, reprinted in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African-American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell, 1994; and Ann Allen Stickley, “The Black Lesbian in American Literature: An Overview,” in Conditions: Five Two, 1979.
Example of queer theory:-
“A Genderful Pep-Talk for My Younger Self”, Pansy
In their most recent collection of poems, Pansy, Gibson continues to address gender-queer topics. However, instead of telling the reader of the hardships that result from not conforming to the gender binary, the poems take on a more empowering tone.
In "A Genderful Pep-Talk for My Younger Self," Gibson uses the second person pronoun "you,"which addresses both the reader and, as the title suggests, a younger version of the speaker. Another pronoun used in this poem is "they," which most probably represents the normative society that enforces the gender binary system. If normative gender performativity is “a repetition and a ritual” (Butler xv), these lines designate that breaking them is considered a failure according to the normative society (“they”): breaking with the expected gender roles that are associated with being “a girl,” makes one “bad at being a girl. The lines suggest the idea of refusing the notion of being bad at something, in this case performing your assigned gender, and instead, endorse the idea of celebrating yourself. Additionally, by stating, "you’re good at being yourself" the speaker challenges the idea that reaching a "coherent"gender identity ("being a girl") is something that is fundamental or necessary.
The poem indicates that “they '' feel like something is missing from the “you,” who is expected to look like “a girl,” in this case, the blush. One can assume that the blush represents femininity, just like “the doll” in the poem, “The Jewelry Store”
Thank you!!
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