The Post-Theory Theory Novel

Theorizing the Subject, 2020

Ever since the Greek philosophers and fabulists pondered the question "What is man?," inquiries into the concept of the subject have troubled humanists, eventuating in fierce debates and weighty tomes. In the wake of the Descartes's cogito and Enlightenment thought, proposals for an ontology of the idealist subject's rationality, autonomy, and individualism generated tenacious questions regarding the condition of pre-consciousness, the operation of feelings and intuitions, the subject-object relation, and the origin of moral and ethical principles. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Marx, and theorists he and Engels influenced, pursued the materialist bases of the subject, through analyses of economic determinism, self-alienation, and false consciousness. Through another lineage, Freud and theorists of psychic structures pursued explanations of the incoherence of a split subject, its multipartite psychodynamics, and its relationship to signifying systems. By the latter 20th century, theorizations of becoming a gendered woman by Beauvoir, of disciplining power and ideological interpellation by Foucault and Althusser, and of structuralist dynamics of the symbolic realm expounded by Lacan, energized a succession of poststructuralist, postmodern, feminist, queer, and new materialist theorists to advance one critique after another of the inherited concept of the liberal subject as individualist, disembodied (Western) Man. In doing so, they elaborated conditions through which subjects are gendered and racialized and offered explanatory frameworks for understanding subjectivity as an effect of positionality within larger formations of patriarchy, slavery, conquest, colonialism, and global neoliberalism. By the early decades of the 21st Formatted: Centered Deleted: Nineteenth Deleted: Twentieth Deleted: Twentieth Deleted: racialized, and Deleted: Twenty-first century, posthumanist theorists dislodged the subject as the center of agentic action and distributed its processual unfolding across trans-species companionship, trans-corporeality, algorithmic networks, and conjunctions of forcefields. Persistently, theorists of the subject referred to an entangled set of related but distinct terms, such as the human, person, self, ego, interiority, and personal identity. And across diverse humanities disciplines, they struggled to define and refine constitutive features of subject formation, most prominently relationality, agency, identity, and embodiment.

Christianity and Literature, 2004

Beyond postmodernism"-one can almost hear a sigh of relief. Finally we can say out loud what a growing number of books admit: postmodernism as a movement of renewal has run its course. In literary studies it is not just the inclusion of postmodernism in encyclopedia entries but also its own evident inability to come up with engaging new readings that signal the end of postmodern literary theory. This does not mean that we have already reread the traditional literary canon in postmodern terms but rather that any such readings have become more or less predictable. Postmodern literary theory was born of a desire to liberate from the predictable, a desire for constant renewal and unexpected interpretations, but it has clearly exhausted this potential.

ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 2013

2015

This course illustrates how literary theory is applied to the nineteenth-century novel. The approach is basically practical, focussing on how formalism, Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis (to name a few schools) have studied fiction, and how you, as students, read both fiction and critical material. The nineteenth-century novel is chosen for two basic reasons: first, for its focus on the modern institutions of life which theory has taken a deep interest in, such as romance, marriage, the family, the nation-state; second, the nineteenth-century novel not only represents the golden age of English literature but it is also the genre and century which all critical schools have arguably felt the need to analyse in great depth.

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 2010

From Ian Watt on, accounts of the rise of the novel have focused on historical processes such as the emergence of the companionate domestic sphere, the rise of middle-class individualism, and the feminization of the literary marketplace. The novel has been analyzed in such terms as an agent and/or a product of the forces of modernization and secularization. I want here to make a case that this fundamentally secular account cannot explain key elements of the early novel's representational repertoire, and in particular why the topic of the legitimate marriage became so crucial to the genre's development after samuel Richardson, at least until Jane austen's time. This is not to reject the historicism implicit in all "rise of the novel" theses but to insist on the explanatory power of a different history. In particular, I want to make the case that the settings from within which marriage came to acquire sufficient signifying power to become a central event for english prose fiction were primarily political and religious-or, better, theopolitical-rather than simply social or literary. This is to say that literary history needs a new understanding of both history and social theory to account for the marriage plot's particular negotiation of connections among the sacred, the governmental, and the civic.

This is an introduction to the contemporary practice of literary criticism and to literary theory. We will be guided by questions around the acts of reading and writing: What is it to read? What presuppositions (social/cultural/political/etc.) do authors and critics bring to the text and how can we articulate them? How are we influenced in reading by our own presuppositions? And how do those presuppositions influence what we, in turn, write about literature and the theories that seek to illuminate it?

PG and Research Department of English, Lady Doak College, 2019

This paper discusses John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman as a postmodern narrative by also bringing its experimental nature into the forefront. Postmodernism foregrounds irony, experimentation and intertextual notions. Characterized by irreverent wit and a startling clarity of vision, the narration seeks to parody Victorian conventions and mores, including their way of life, with special reference to femininity, masculinity, religion, sex and patriarchy. Fowles subtly criticizes their hypocrisy by projecting a Darwinian palaeontologist as the protagonist, thereby mocking its very foundation that was religion. The novel also parodies its own nature as fiction by giving a narrator who appears omniscient but does not even know how it ends. Thus, it acquires three endings, thereby reminding the readers of the nature of its fictionality. The paper will analyse how Fowles has created a postmodern masterpiece by incorporating elements of metafiction, non-linearity, anachronism, intertextuality and parody into this brilliant narrative. Experimentation and Postmodernism in The French Lieutenant's Woman Postmodernism is a literary theory that developed around the latter half of the twentieth century. The 1960s could be said to mark the dying out of modernism and the advent of postmodernism. It would be hard to define what postmodernism is without studying it in relation to its precursor, modernism. In a lot of ways, it is similar to modernism but it celebrates the very thing that the latter bemoans, chiefly, fragmentation. It is a groundbreaking literary theory that is characterized by, apart from many other things, Christy 1

Oxford University Press eBooks, 2016

Literature did not become the subject ofan academic discipline until the last two decades of the 19th century and, until the 1940s, liter ary scholarship consisted chiefly ofphilological and historical schol arship and moralized aesthetic commentary (Abrams 1997; Graff 2007). During the 1930s, "The New Criticism" introduced methods for the intensive formal analysis oftheme, tone, and style. During the late 1970s, "poststructuralism" or "postmodernism," spearheaded by the "deconstructive" philosophy ofJacques Derrida, produced a revolution in literary studies. Deconstruction identifies language or "discourse" as the primary constitutive material of human experi ence. In its political aspect, post structuralism seeks to undermine traditionally dominant terms in social, psychological, and sexual binaries: ruling classes versus the oppressed, whites versus people of color, colonialists versus colonized peoples, mentally healthy people versus the insane, law-abiding citizens versus outlaws, males versus females, and heterosexuals versus homosexuals. In modern Western civilization, science is itself a dominant cultural value and is con trasted with terms such as superstition, foith, ignorance, mysticism, and ideology. In its epistemological aspect, poststructuralist theo ries of science seek to undermine the ideas of "truth" and "reality" through which science claims normative epistemic authority (Gross

Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Literature and Psychology: Writing, Trauma and the Self, 2019

This is my second revision.7/26/17 In this essay, I mean to urge graduate students who are not yet admirers of theory to restrain their own critical whimsies and do the hard work of studying the historical and biographical setting of poems and novels. I have no hope or intent of changing the minds of graduate faculty who revere theory, for to turn them away from their beliefs cannot be done. Theory is too deep into their psyche. I do hope, however, to convince graduate students that contemporary literary theories they are being taught to revere are not necessary to interpretation—that is, if they wish to find the intended meaning of the poet or author. As examples I look at Freud and Feminism Authors I cite include Shakespeare, Milton, Faulkner, and Sylvia Plath