IDEOLOGY AND LITERATURE

2018

Because literature carries permanent thoughts, feelings and ideas about life and the world (of human togetherness and nature), it is so natural that the representation of the people who are powerful and those who are powerless becomes a task of literature. Literature is more than just a historical or cultural artefact as it introduces us to new worlds of experience. With modern literature the writers turned to be social critics and became preoccupied with what was wrong in their social surroundings. Brooks' book, America's Coming-of-Age (1915) with its indifference to leadership encouraged other American artists to overemphasize their dissatisfaction (Cerrito & Dimauro, 1999, p. 152). For many modernist novelists the world became an unfair universe, controlled by powerful people who did not tolerate any interference on their affairs. There has been an insistence that empowerment is not something that can be bestowed by others, but about recognizing inequalities in power, asserting the right to have rights and acting to press for and bring about structural change in favour of greater equality (Batliwala, 1993).This article is to present and discuss a variety of world authors' portrayal of the powerful and the powerless people in their writing. RESUME Parce que la littérature véhicule des pensées, des sentiments et des idées permanents sur la vie et le monde (de la nature et de la convivialité humaines), il est si naturel que la représentation des personnes qui sont puissants et de ceux qui sont sans pouvoir devienne une tâche de la littérature. La littérature est plus qu'un artefact historique ou culturel, elle nous introduit dans de nouveaux mondes d'expérience. Avec la littérature moderne, les écrivains sont devenus des critiques de la société et se sont préoccupés de ce qui n'allait pas dans leur environnement social. Le livre de Brooks, America's Coming-Age (1915), indifférent au leadership, incite d'autres artistes américains à surestimer leurs mécontentement (Cerrito et Dimauro, 1999, p. 152). Pour de nombreux romanciers modernistes, le monde est devenu un univers injuste, contrôlé par des personnes puissantes qui ne toléraient aucune ingérence dans leurs affaires. Certains insistent sur le fait que l'autonomisation ne peut pas être conférée par d'autres mais consiste à reconnaître les inégalités de pouvoir, à faire valoir le droit d'avoir des droits et à faire pression pour obtenir un changement structurel en faveur de plus d'égalité (Batliwala, 1993). Cet article a pour but de présenter et de discuter des écrits d'une variété d'auteurs dans le monde d'après leur description des personnes puissants ou impuissants.

Paragraph, 1988

Barthes: ideology, culture, subjectivity Je n'ai pas du tout une pensée politique, historique ou sociologique. (Roland Barthes) To pose political questions about Barthes's texts is to challenge the above statement.1 It is certainly not to lay claim to an inheritance. Barthes has no legitimate heirs: his work cannot be appropriated in accordance with a Law.2 Nor can the text be placed under the sign of an authorial political commitment expressed and lived outside it. 'Au fond, s'il fallait vous définir, l'étiquette ď "intellectuel de gauche" collerait pour une fois assez bien' (At bottom, if one had to define you, the label of 'left-wing intellectual' would for once fit quite well), suggests an interviewer. Barthes shrugs his shoulders: 'Ce serait à la gauche de dire si elle me comprend parmi ses intellectuels' (It would be for the left to say if it counts me as one of its intellectuals) ; all he will admit to is an obstinately anarchist sensibility.3 Up to the Left, then, to decide what use it can make of Barthes in its political and theoretical projects. The present paper offers no more than suggestions about possible lines to follow. It is not, furthermore, really a question of making use of Barthes. By this I mean two things. The first, with an important qualification that I shall make presently, is that the aim is not to judge Barthes as the moral subject of his ideological positions, although the positions themselves come under scrutiny. Such evaluations can be left to the bourgeois ideology of the ultimate responsibility of the individual subject. 'We know', as Barthes tends to say in his bouts of theoretical euphoria, that the text resists attribution to an individual: it escapes, goes beyond its author. Paradoxically, though, one of the ways in which the text of Barthes escapes its author is precisely in being attributed to him, against its own drift. The economy it enters into is not an authorless one. At one point Barthes wonders if literature is going to regain its medieval status as 'un objet à commentaires, un tuteur d'autres langages' (an object for commentaries, a prop for other languages),4 but this would require an institutional death of the author: the medieval culture that identified 'author' and 'authority' was paradoxically far less author-centred than our own, commenting on pagan, Christian and Moslem authors alike without concern for their individuality. It is a fact-cultural, political and ideological-that modern Western culture consumes texts 'by

Cultural Studies, 2002

This essay arises from my scepticism about the received notion, prevalent both in literary and cultural studies, that Roland Barthes’s work of the 1960s constituted an abandonment of the previous decade’s social critique. To the contrary, understanding Barthes’s socio-cultural development following World War II and in the French cultural context helps to situate the political engagement of his writings in the 1950s and to clarify the continued political commitment of this work from the 1960s onward. This revised perspective, one not limiting Barthes to works such as Mythologies, helps us better comprehend Barthes’s continuing legacy for sociosemiotic critique both in literary criticism and in cultural studies and to create new ground for interdisciplinary dialogue that is very much needed in an era of questioning the limits and borders of this field.

This paper reviews the concept and the corpus of English literature and its development in the context of culture and the academy from the 18 th Century onwards. I argue that the category of literature is a 'liquid' notion best understood as a form of 'social action' (after Eagleton) relevant to wider social, cultural, and political contexts that produce and 'consume' it. In the academy, through extending the notion of the institution to a wider social and political context, literature could be best understood as an 'institutional reality' reflecting perceived relations of power. Deeming literature as an ideological tribute is crucially important to arguing against the monolithic and essentialist (Anglo-American literary tradition) as embodying a universal value that still prevail in post-colonial institutions. This argument helps conceptualise and interrogate the cultural constructs embodied in English literature, in general, and the English canonical texts, in particular; it also makes it possible to refute the claim that literature transcends its local boundaries and nationalist sentiments to articulate the universal concerns and values of all people. In my approach to these claims and assumptions, I resort to a critical narrative review to the 'story' of the English literature in cultural, political, social, geographical and institutional contexts.. In academy, particularly in post-colonial settings, I conclude that the adopted literary tradition reflects a matrix of relations of power and institutional affiliations. Such conceptualisation of literature helps to challenge the claim that English literature largely embodies a humanistic enterprise of universal values and uniform human experience. Literature has been subordinate to the fluidity of cultural tenets, which in themselves have undergone several historic, paradigmatic, and institutional transfigurations and perversions. Both the notions of culture and literature are subject to similar social and historical trajectories. 'Institutionalising' literature has epitomised the concept and determined its value, and how it mirrors wider cultural relations of power. Drawing on these observations, I argue that there always exists interplay between the text and the wider context responsible for producing and disseminating literature, which intersects with institutionally established ideologies and practices. I understand the notion of context to refer to the 'system' or the 'institutional cultural capital ' (Bourdieu, 1998) that is responsible for normalising and regulating textual knowledges, and which projects literature as an 'institutional reality '. As Popatia (1998) argues, the interaction between text and context is often governed by an ideological and hegemonic discourse that seeks to prove itself as the most legitimate.

Roland Barthes: Applying Structuralism to Mass Culture Once a month for two years, from 1954 to 1956, Roland Barthes published a newspaper column exploring and scrutinizing current events to educate the French public about mass culture 1 and structuralist thought. For Barthes, structuralist thought was the combination of linguistics analysis with cultural analysis to form semiology: studying underlying contexts and meanings behind signs and symbols. Barthes"s work was compiled together in a 1957 French book titled Mythologies 2 and in 1972 Annette Lavers translated selected works from the original French piece into English. These pieces are grouped together by the underlying theory of structuralism and "insistence and repetition" (Barthes 1972:11) rather than through substantive similarities. It is this episodic vignette style where Barthes repeatedly scrutinized images, actions, texts, and objects, ("language-objects") which revealed the pervasiveness of, essentially, bourgeois ideologies: which is one, the lesser of two, definition of Barthes"s "mythologies."

1993