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Showing posts with label 2CEP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2CEP. Show all posts

Sunday, January 16, 2011

2CEP- What Is Literature? by Terry Eagleton


WHAT IS LITERATURE
-Terry Eagleton
ABBREVIATIONS USED: lit= literature, lang= language


ABOUT TERRY EAGLETON:
- Still alive, from UK, Teaches at Cambridge, currently working on theology, comes from Marxist tradition.
-Raymond Williams influenced Eagleton. Williams is a key figure in culture studies. Eagleton differed from Williams, a general pattern in academic relations.


WHAT IS LITERATURE- General ideas
- Kant organized academics into disciplines
- Only 18th century Romantics, began trying to define lit.
- ‘Theory’ cannot have a single exception, because method means that all research should arrive at the same conclusion. Science does this best
- In Social Sciences, answers and conclusions are unimportant. The method or arriving at the conclusion is important, ie: how and why. ie: argumentation > conclusion


-Humanist vs Post Humanist
Post Humanists emphasize the varied ‘Positions of Author and Recipient’, and interactions of Speaker and Listener, Identity and Subject Position, Individual and Subject.
-Texts undergo cycles of relevancy
E.g.: Feminists loved, then hated, and are now re visiting Marx and his theory of labour. Environmentalists are referring to Marx’s idea on resources.


Broad topics argued by Eagleton, to define literature:
a-Imaginative writing?
b-Fact or fiction?
(His first 2 ideas, were Common Sense explanations of Literature. Common Sense is a literary concept from Plato till 1967, until Derrida broke it.)
c-Literature vs. Literature
d-Formalism (“organized violence committed on ordinary language”) (associated to Linguistics, Structuralism, Saussure). Formalism employed ‘scientific spirit (Pg 2)’: they relied on method and tried to be Objective. (Science can be falsified- Karl Popper) --Emphasis of Form/ Structure over Content -Importance of Devices
(Eagleton isn’t saying that the Formalists didn’t believe content was important. He says that Formalists believed that content isn’t the business of critics, but devices are)
e- Paradox: This estrangement from ordinary language (that the Formalists spoke of) brings us into a fuller possession of experience!
f- Norms?: Formalists identified lit. as a deviation from the norm (ordinary lang.). But what is the norm then?  Ordinary lang. itself differs across time and place. Slang doesn’t fit into this idea of the Formalists either.
g- Shift and Change: of time, place and context. (“context tells you it is literary but not the language”)
h- Making strange/ Matter of contrast (Pg 6)
i- Formalists think all lit = poetry, and thus prose is judged by the same scale as poetry.
j- “lit. may be at least as much a question of what people do to writing as of what writing does to them.” .
k- “lit is a non pragmatic discourse with no immediate practical purpose, but referring to a general state of affairs” . But what about Orwell’s essays studied as literature? (Pg 7-8)
l- Points j. and k. imply that lit is not Objective, but is up to how a person decides to read a text and not the nature of what is written (see also Point g.). There is no essence of lit (pg 8 & 9).
m- “Some texts are born literary, some achieve literariness, and some have literariness thrust upon them” (pg 8-9).
NOTE- I have made no lecture notes for pages 10, 11, 12, 13
n- Ideology: there is no randomness (Pg 14) (In India, when we began to include texts by Indian authors in Lit sylabbus, we included Ananthamurthy, RK Laxman. They all happen to be upper class, Hindu, males while most students of Lit were women. Power is maintained and exercised.)
o- Lit is constituted of value judgments. There can be no absolute definition of it, and only definitions that are “according to xyz” (Pg 15)


NOTE/ DISCLAIMER- My notes are by no means comprehensive of Eagleton’s original text. I have only included the information given by Mr Pinto during his lectures and some broad arguements covered in the essay. And out of my lecture notes, only that which is (seemingly?) relevant has been put up here. You still have to break your own head over the essay:).

Friday, January 07, 2011

STRUCTURALISM- FERDINAND SAUSSURE (Mr. Pinto's lectures in II CEP)

13th December 2010
STRUCTURALISM
FERDINAND SAUSSURE

Main concepts:
1.       Signifier and Signified
2.       Sign
3.       Signifying system
4.       Sign is arbitrary
5.       Diachronic, synchronic
6.       Langue, Parole
7.       Time
8.       Value, Difference

The relation between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.
Diachronic means across time. Studies how language was and has evolved across the centuries.
Synchronic: studies language of the present. Not interested in studying how it used to be and how it should be, but how it is at this given point of time.
Language:
1.       Surface Structure  or Parole
2.       Deep Structure or Langue               

Noam Chomsky
When a child learns a language, it does not learn the surface structure but the deep structure and hence produces words that it has never heard or learnt before.
Saussure called the surface structure as “Parole” and the deep structure as “Langue”.
Chomsky said that every language has a deep structure, but not the same deep structure.

Saussure did not use the word semiotics but the word Semiology.
Semiotics-Charles Sanders Pierce. Saussure and Pierce worked around the same time on similar concepts but they did not know each other.
A signifier is always expressed in time. Only one word is written at a time.

Thoughts and Language:
You have access to thoughts through language and your thoughts are structured in language.
There is no thought beyond language.
HEGEL-gave the concept of dialectic (for more information on this topic: http://www.crossroad.to/articles2/05/dialectic.htm )
Each history has a spirit of its time and one cannot view it beyond its spirit.

Naming process- calling the object into your world.
The origin of the word in not important to structuralits.
Deleuze- Psychoanalyst, Zizek believed that the origin of a word was perpetually not to be answered.
Only fundamentalists go back to origins.
Origin-no point in arguing how or why it exists. The fact is that it exists.
Language does not require humans to exist. It is independent but it cannot exist despite us. We cannot explain why certain languages are spoken in two completely unrelated places.
“Language of the Gods” (book by B. John Zavrel) maps the history of Sanskrit.
 3rd and 4th century- Sanskrit spread to the west without any conquests or trade. Language requires only one person to exist.

18th December 2010
One signifier in the system has value because it is not any of the other signifiers in the system.
Language cannot have synonyms because each word has a different value.
E.g: ” bachelor” is different from “unmarried man”
Performance studies- speech act. Study speech as an act.

20th December 2010
1.       Syntagm
2.       Paradigm/ associative.
“Student”= one who studies. No flexibility.
Meaning = value and difference.

A word gets its meaning because of the relationship between syntagm and paradigm in a science system.
Horizontal or Syntagmatic relations- One cannot replace the other. E.g: MENU: Starters, Main course, Desserts- starters cannot be replaced by desserts.
Vertical or Associative relations-  One can be replaced by the other. E.g: MENU: Starters>Soup, momos, fries etc;

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Am. Lit- 2CEP- June 5th-7th

June 5, 2010

TRANSLATION

William Jones- translated Kalidasa to English

Lord Cornwallis- translated Manusmriti and Mahabharat to English

Goethe

Chaucer

Beowulf- translated from Italian to English

Novel came to English through Spanish translation

WHY STUDY AMERICAN LITERATURE?

1. Multi-cultural similarities between India and USA

2. History of translation

3. Super power status of USA

4. USA is a large English speaking nation, and as long as we study English Literature, we ought to study it from wherever it originates

5. Since English Literature travelled from UK to USA, studying American Literature provides a comprehensive and coherent study

6. Democratic spirit of USA

7. Post war Literature was predominantly American and very influential

8. Exploration and conquests

9. Globalisation and role of USA in world politics

10. Anything that is dominant must be engaged with

WHY SHOULD WE NOT STUDY AMERICAN LITERATURE?

1. English has been a tool of oppression- Lord Macaulay, Masks of Conquest

2. English Literature as a discipline was taught in India much before England.

Courses in India were started by those on fellowship from US.

Indian Literature as a discipline, taught in 1980’s, much after American Literature was introduced

3. FBI policy to set up scholarships and fellowships. US defence, government and education are closely connected- MIT was control room for WW2 and inventor of major defence ideas. US set up library in Hyderabad.

4. Rule by the oppressor cannot be gun-rule, must be ideological- Musharrif

5. Is the sheer magnitude a good enough reason to study it?

Urdu- highest number of primary schools in Karnataka

Should one not learn one’s own culture first?

6. Tokenism, Co-opting

7. We are influenced more by Japanese(Haiku), Latin America, UK, French and Russian literature, than American

8. American Literature is not as progressive as we think- It mainly studies white male writers.

Therefore, did we get sucked into West Anglo Saxon Protestant Politics of American Literature?- Most American Literature is from North American, not the Catholics from the South.

9. US’s primary export is culture

NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

· Obama didn’t mention the Red Indians in his first presidential address. But every hill in the US was named by the Indians. Present names of various places in US have aboriginal roots.

· Avatar- movie- talks about colonialistic personality of US

· Columbus- landed in 1492. Funded by Queen Isabella of Spain. (Now its race for moon. Explorer had to take notes and return and would not be credited until another person followed the same route and found the same place)

June 7, 2010

Psychologists-Indians

Freud

Bible

Buildings on graves

EUROPE- 14, 1, 16 Century AND THEIR JOURNEY TO AMERICA

· Eureopeans were looking for Promised Land. They considered travel to America their Exodus.

· All of Shakespeare’s tragedies were about collapse of monarchy, restoration and hope. People were neurotic with the fear of the collapse.

· When society changes, fundamentalism is first result- Northern Ireland, South USA, Pakistan, Afganistan, Gaza

· New money was coming to Europe.

This led to a changing of class and social structres.

These insecurities expressed through religion, that too an idea religion.

Ideal religion emphasizes on past, rejects the present, and is based on texts.

Rejection of past makes them take their arguments elsewhere, hence colonialism.

Thus, Europeans travelled to America.

· New World was made similar to old- New England

· They identified with Adam and Eve-

· Genesis command to ‘go and rule over the world’ was the excuse to colonise. Hebrew word for the same is ‘raada’ meaning, to take care of

· US has breached every treaty with the Red Indians

· 1776- Independent from England

· 1880- Civil war. North and South split