MA II Sem I မဟာ ဒုႏွစ္-ပ ၀က္အဂၤလိပ္စာ

Paper I : Literary Theories II
Structuralism Vs Post-structuralism
Structuralism was a fashionable movement in France in 50s and 60s, that studied the underlying structures inherent in cultural products such as texts, and utilizes analytical concepts from linguistics, psychology, anthropology and other fields to understand and interpret those structures. Although the structuralist movement fostered critical inquiry into these structures, it emphasized logical and scientific results. Many stucturalists sought to integrate their work into pre-existing bodies of knowledge. This was observed in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure in linguistics, Claude Levi-Strauss in Anthropology, and many early 20th-Century psychologists.
Structuralist approaches to literature challenge some of the most cherished beliefs of the ordinary reader. The literary work is the child of an author's creative life, and expresses the author's essential self. The text is the place where we entered into a spiritual or humanistic communication with an author's thoughts and feelings. Another fundamental assumption which readers often make is that a good book tells the truth about human life that novels and plays try to "tell things as they really are". However, structuralists tried to persuade us that the author is "dead" and that literary discourse has no truth function.
Roland Barthes put the structuralist view powerfully and he argued that writers only have the power to mix already existing writings, to reassemble or redeploy them, writers cannot use writing to express themselves but only to draw upon that immense dictionary of language and culture which is "always ready written". It would not be misleading to use the term "anti-humanist" to describe the spirit of structuralism. Indeed the word has been used by structuralists themselves to emphasis their position to all forms of literary criticism in which the human subject is the source and origin of literary meaning.
The general assumptions of post-structuralism derive from critique of structuralist premises. The work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, compiled and published after his death in a single book "Course in General Linguistics"(1915), has been profoundly influential in shaping contemporary literary theory. His two key ideas provide new answers to the questions "What is the object of linguistic investigation?" and "What is the relationship between words and things?"
Saussure rejected the idea that language is a word-heap gradually accustomed over time and that its primary function is to refer to things in the world. In his view, words are not symbols which correspond to referents, but rather are "signs" which are made up of two parts: a mark, either written or spoken, called a "signifier"; and a concept called a "signified". The view may be represented thus:
SYMBOL = THING
Saussure's model is as follows:
SIGN = signifier
signified
Things have no place in the model. The elements of language acquire meaning not as the result of some connection between words and things, but only as parts of a system of relations. Consider the sign-system of traffic lights:
red-amber-green
signifier (red)
signified (stop)
The sign signifies only within the system "red=stop/ green=go/ amber=prepare for red or green". The relation between signifier and signified is arbitrary: there is no natural bond between red and stop no matter how natural it may feel.
Language is one among many sign systems (some believe it is the fundamental system). The science of such system is called "semiotics" or "semiology".
At some point in the late 1960s, structuralism gave birth to "post-structuralism". Some commentators believe that the later developments were already inherent in the earlier phase. One might say that post-structuralism is simply a fuller working-out of the implications of structuralism. But this formulation is not quite satisfactory, because it is evident that post-structuralism tries to deflate the scientific pretensions of structuralism. If structuralism was heroic in its desire to master the world of artificial signs, post-structuralism is comic and anti-heroic in its refusal to take such claims seriously. However, the post-structuralist mockery of structuralism is almost a self-mockery: post-structuralists are structuralists who suddenly see the error of their ways.


Hans Robert Jauss: Horizon of expectations

Jauss is an important German exponent of "reception theory". He has given a historical dimension to reader-oriented criticism. He tries to compromises between Russian Formalism which ignores history and social theories which ignore the text. He borrows the term "paradigm" from the philosophy of science. The term refers to the scientific framework of concepts and assumptions operating in a particular period. "Ordinary science" does its experimental work within the mental world of a particular paradigm; until a new paradigm displaces the old one and throws up new problems and establishes new assumptions.
"Horizon of expectations" is the term used by Jauss. He uses this term to describe the criteria readers use to judge literary text in any given period. By using the criteria, the reader can judge a poem as an epic, or a tragedy or a pastoral. We can also know what is poetic or literary use of language or non-literary use of languages. Ordinary writing and reading will work within such a horizon. For example, within the English Augustan period, Pope's poetry was judged according to the criteria which were based upon values of clarity, naturalness and stylistic decorum. However, it can be said that modern readings of Pope work within a changed horizon of expectations. During the second half of the eighteenth century commentators asked question whether Pope was a poet at all. They suggested that he lacked the imaginative power required of true poetry. His poems are now valued by their wit, complexity, moral insight and their renewal of literary tradition.
From the original horizon of expectations, we can know how the work was valued and interpreted when it appeared. However, the work does not establish its meaning finally. Therefore, according to Jauss, the work is not universal and its meaning is not fixed forever. It is open to all readers in any period. A literary work is not an object which stands by itself and which offers the same face to each reader in each period. However we should not ignore our own historical situation. For example, in "The Tiger" by William Blake, there may be historical movement which indicates the violence forces of the French revolution. So, reader's judgement in the period of revolution may not be the same as that of today.
Jauss borrows the philosophical term," hermeneutics", form Hans-Georg Gadamer. Gadamer argues that all interpretations of past literature arises from a dialogue between past and present. Our understanding of a work will depend on our own cultural environment. We also have to note the work's own dialogue with history. Our present perceptive always involves a relationship to the past which can only be grasped through the perceptive of the present. A hermeneutical notion of "understanding" views understanding as a "fusion" of past and present. In this case, we can go to the past through the present.
Jauss recognizes that the prevailing expectations of the writer's day may be in a position which is against the writer. Jauss examines that the work of Baudelarie "Les fleurs de mal" created uproar and attracted legal prosecution. It offended the norms of bourgeois morality and the canons of romantic poetry. However, a literary work can produce a new aesthetic horizon of expectations. Later, Jauss assesses psychological, linguistic and sociological interpretations of Baudelaire's poems.
In conclusion, according to Jauss' horzon of expectations, we can note that the criteria used by readers to judge literary texts may be different according to historical periods. Therefore, interpretations of readers may not be the same.




Roland Barthes : the Plural text
Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a French literary critics, literary and social theorist, philosopher and semiotician. Barthes' work extended over many fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, Marxism and post-structuralism. His definition on literature is that it is a message of the signification of things and not their meaning. He opposed the idea that language is a natural, transparent medium through which reader grasps a solid and unified "truth" or "reality".
One of his earlier work in 1967 is "the Elements of Semiology" in which he described two orders: "first order" and "second order". The semiological investigator regates language as a second-order discourse which operates in Olympian fashion upon the first order object language. The structuralist discourse itself could become the object of explanation. The second-order language is called a metalanguage. Any metalanguage could be put in the position of a first-order language and be interrogated by another metalanguage.
In 1968, Birthes published "The Death of the Author" in which he announced a metaphorical event: the "death" of the author as an authentic source of meaning for a given text. Barthes argued that any literary text has multiple meanings, and that the author was not the prime source of the work's semantic content. "The Death of the Author", Barthes maintained, was "The Birth of the Reader", as the source of the proliferation of meanings of the text. "The Death of the Author" is sometimes considered to be a post-structuralist work, since it moves past the conventions of trying to qualify literature, but others see it as more of a transitional phase for Barthes in his continuing effort to find significance in culture outside of the bourgeois norms. Indeed the notion of the author being irrelevant was already a factor of structuralist thinking.
In "The Pleasure of the Text"(1975), Barthes explores the reckless abandon of the reader. He concludes that there are two sense of pleasure. Within pleasure there is "bliss" and its diluted form "pleasure". The general pleasure of the text exceeds a single transparent meaning. The text of bliss unsettles the reader's historical, cultural and psychological assumptions which bring a crisis to his relation with language. According to Barthes, the "bliss" is very close to boredom.
Barthes' "S/Z"(1970) is the most impressive post-structuralist performance. The attempt to uncover the structure is vain because each text possesses a "difference". A realistic novel offers a closed text with a limited meaning. Other texts encourage the reader to produce meanings. A realistic novel allows the reader only to be a consumer of a fixed meaning, while the avant-garde text turns the reader into a producer. The first type is called "readerly" and the second is "writerly". Barthes applies this in a massive analysis of a short story by Balzac called Sarrasine. The end result was a reading text that established five major codes; "Hermeneutic, Semic, Symbolic, Proairetic and Culture", which determine various kinds of significance, with numerous laxias throughout the text. From this project Birthes identify what it was he sought in literature: an openness for interpretation.

Feminism
Feminism is a discourse that involves various movements, theories, and philosophies which are concerned with the issue of gender difference, advocate equality for women, and campaign for women's rights and interests. According to some, the history of feminism can be divided into three waves. The first wave was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the second was in the 1960s and 1970s and the third extends from the 1990s to the present. Feminist theory emerged from these feminist movements.
Feminism criticism of the earlier period is more a reflex of "first-wave" preoccupations than a fully fledged theoretical discourse of its own. But two significant figures: Virginia Woolf-the founding mother of the contemporary debate; and Simone de Beauvior, with whose "The Second Sex"(1949), the first wave may be said to end.
Virginia Woolf's fame conventionally rests on her own creative writing as a woman and later feminist critics have analysed her novels extensively from very different perspectives. But she also produced two key texts which are major contributions to feminist theory; A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). Like other first-wave feminists, Woolf is mainly concerned with women's material disadvantages compared to men - her first text focusing on the history and social framework of women's literary production, and the second on the relations between male power and the professions.
Woolf's common gift to feminism is her tribute that gender identity is socially constructed and can be challenged and transformed, but on the subject of feminist criticism she also constantly examined the problems facing women writers. She believed that women had always faced social and economic obstacles to their literary ambitions.
One of the Woolf's most interesting essays about women writers is "Professions for Women", in which she regards her own career as hindered in two ways. First, as with many nineteenth-century writers, she was imprisoned by the ideology of womanhood; the ideal of "the Angel in the House". Second, the taboo about expressing female passion prevented her from 'telling the truth about (her) own experiences as a body'. Her attempts to write about the experiences of women, therefore, were aimed at discovering linguistic ways of describing the confined life of women, and she believed that when women finally achieved social and economic equality with men, there would be nothing to prevent them from freely developing their artistic talents. Contemporary feminist critics have deconstructed these male "looking glass" components of Woolf's work.
Simone de Beauvoir is a French feminist, lifelong partner of Jean-Paul Sartre, pro-abortion and women's-rights activist, founder of the newspaper Nouvelles feminisme and of the journal of feminist theory. Her major and hugely influential book The Second Sex (1949) is clearly preoccupied with the 'materialism' of the first wave. De Beauvoir's work carefully distinguishes between sex and gender, and sees an interaction between social and natural functions but without any notion of biological determinism. In common with other 'first-wave' feminists, she wants freedom from biological difference and the social enfranchisement of women's rational abilities, and she shares with them a suspect of 'femininity'.