It’s hard to believe that 13 weeks have flown by so fast! I have been thinking about the beginning of term and not having any idea how the Literary Theory class would go – but after these 13 weeks I feel I have got to grips more with critical thinkers, and encountered some new ones I will be able to draw on for my other graduate classes and my thesis. I have actually already been showing off my knowledge or Literary Theory in other classes, and it does make understanding concepts easier when you have some background in theory.

I enjoyed our week on film theory, for me that was the most interesting and I am excited to write the second assignment! I have also enjoyed other theories though, don’t get me wrong. I really liked the reading on Williams the other week for instance; I had never considered Jane Austen’s work to have much attachment to colonialism but it was interesting when Williams compared Austen to Cobbett as they were both writing at the same time, but from opposite ends of the spectrum.

I think it has been good for me to learn about Derrida and Foucault, Lacan and Freud etc, all of the big thinkers! As I knew of them before but didn’t really know much about them!!!

Also I have really liked having the blog – this has been my first blog on anything ever, and I think it is good to have something to tap away at consistently each week. Though if I were to continue blogging I’m not sure what I would write about. I’m sure people don’t want to see pictures of my dinner or listen to me rant about running, they can go on Facebook for that 🙂

Overall the class has been fun! I have really loved getting to know everyone, and I feel like the group dynamic is very welcoming and supportive. It’s been lovely studying with everyone!

I did the readings in a funny order this week, usually I just go through them as they are outlined in the syllabus from top to bottom, but I decided to attack the big ones first this week, so tackled Williams, Foucault and Fiske. It was only when I read Horkheimer and Adorno that everything sort of tied itself together. In reading Horkheimer and Adorno I was able to relate to Foucault, and his ideas about power and knowledge. It was quite scary to read of the Panopticon and think of the efficiency of power that this image implies, along with his ideas about discipline and the various methods which can be used to control the body. It seems to me that Foucault is leaning towards the idea that observation and gaze are the key instruments of power, an idea which I feel ties in with Horkheimer and Adorno’s notions that all products, or commodities, are essentially the same, it is just the way that we as consumers in our different groups are marketed to. So the notion of observation, that consumers are always being watched and observed, our needs and desires being continually assessed so that we may be more easily lead by the propaganda which comes our way, lead me to consider that the idea of the Panopticon was not just present during the 18^th century but that it has been carried through into the society in which we live today. A quote which struck me was “something is provided for all so that none may escape” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1243), which I think illustrates the idea of the modern-day Panopticon that is the technology/media-controlled society in which we live. Technology, it seems, has become the underlying structure for maintaining this cycle: as technology improves individuals feel the need to buy into this thinking they are improving themselves. This has been going on for many years, as Williams seems to suggest in his writing. Not only ‘things’ but individuals have also become mass-produced, if you think of the music industry there are so many pop icons who are gunning to be the next Britney or Rhianna. Again going back to technology, we think we are being individual in our choice or colour of iphone, or maybe the different screen cover we put on it, but everyone has fallen prey to the same propaganda which those in ‘power’ have used to influence our buying habits because of the knowledge they possess about our likes and dislikes, or what we may/may not be able to afford. I think this links back to Foucault’s notion that knowledge and power go hand in hand.

This week the reading by Thiong’o really struck me. It also made me feel sort of helpless when I thought about the way that we as academics approach the subject. I am sure I will never know or experience the hardship he went through at school; of being forced to speak the language of the colonisers and then being treated differently according to the level of mastery of the language. I am sure none of my 101 students would enjoy it if I placed every one of them in a hierarchy according to their French! I am pretty sure there would be some serious uproar as well. Yet this is what children have been subjected to in Africa where imperialism continues to control.

My feelings of helplessness arise because in reading the various texts for the week I became aware that the only way that I will ever know or be made familiar with the struggles of the writers who have decided to speak out and seize back their culture and history is by sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of tea only imagining how bad it could have been for them. I have to say that I do feel a sense of guilt and shame in this approach. I guess it’s like a sort of boiled-down version of chapter two of Thiong’o’s text where they sat around at the conference discussing what African literature was or could be. There’s lots of hypothesizing and discussion, but where is the action and involvement?

I admire the way Thiong’o writes and agree with him when he talks about language as culture, in that it is the product of a particular history, he states that “culture is a product of the history which it in turn reflects” (1134). In connection with this I also enjoyed the way he wrote about hearing stories in his mother tongue and how they “learnt the music of [their] language” (1131), this really emphasized the pleasure and enjoyment he derived from his mother tongue Gikiyu, and made it all the more heartbreaking to hear that “the language of my education was no longer the language of my culture” (1131). I think the points he brings up about how cultural invasion is related to language are very important, and while it was tough to read it was also insightful for me to consider the things he writes about, albeit from a distance.

From the readings this week I realised the importance of the change in what determines audience approval. At the very start of cinema, spectators were amazed and intrigued purely by the apparatus that permitted images to move across a screen, whereas nowadays we expect films to project an image of reality so real that we may become lost in it. As Williams mentions, “it seems to be that case that the success of these genres is often measured by the degree to which the audience sensation mimics what is seen on screen” (605), that is, if we are watching a ‘chick flick’ or a “weepie” (605) as Williams calls it, we expect it to make us cry, and we expect a horror to scare us or make us jump, and that is the bar by which films are now judged, I feel, by how close they are to reality.

I found it interesting reading Gunning’s point about how “the usually small scale of trompe l’oeil paintings and the desire to reach out and touch them contrast sharply with the “grandeur naturale” of the Lumière train film and the viewer’s impulse to rear back before it, as well as with the spectator’s physical distance from the illusions of the magic theatre.” (740). It seems to demonstrate a shift in audience participation from one of active to passive. I ask myself whether this is to our detriment. Bazin states that “photography is clearly the most important event in the history of plastic arts” (163) because it enables us to represent reality exactly, as “no matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to an inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a human hand intervened cast a shadow of doubt over the image (161)”, with which I entirely disagree. What about the discovery of linear perspective in the Renaissance? Or the sheer effort it took to make paints and pigments? During the Renaissance an artist’s studio would have been more like a science lab than the stereotypical well-lit room strewn with easels and sheets we see today. The subjectivity present in a work of art produced by a human hand is what makes it a work of art, I feel. It seems that the invention of the photograph has indeed enabled us to present an exact copy of reality, but in doing so we have also lost the ability to capture the viewer’s engagement, making them less likely to want to reach out and ‘touch’ a photograph, and also making it harder to impress an audience and elicit the desired response.

No one would deny that the painter has nothing to do with things that are not visible. The painter is concerned solely with representing what can be seen.

—Leon Battista Alberti, 1435

Halberstam argues that masculinity itself cannot be fully understood unless female masculinity is taken into account. I find this idea intriguing as we have grown up in a society that has found it difficult to acknowledge gender uncertainty and has been very ready to either ignore it, or acknowledge it in using pejorative terms such as ‘tomboy’ or ‘butch’. Empowering models of female masculinity have been neglected or misunderstood because of a cultural intolerance towards the gender ambiguity that the masculine woman represents. I agree when Halberstam says “that as a society we have little trouble in supporting the versions of masculinity that we enjoy and trust” (935) (think, Diet Coke ad all those years ago) yet a hint of “male femininity” (953) would be detrimental to the brand’s perception, I am sure.

Our perception of what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ when talking about gender ambiguity I think comes down to our social conditioning. Halberstam addresses the issue of tomboy-ism, which is perfectly acceptable whilst a girl is still pre-pubescent, she maintains, yet any continued foray into the world of the tomboy and the child will more than likely find herself defeated or ushered to the sidelines of peer groups.

I think Halberstam is right to address the notion that female masculinity has been widely ignored by society, perhaps because it is considered a ‘taboo’ subject within sexuality as Foucault might claim.

Certain questions that have been bothering me revolve around the idea of when a woman is considered to be masculine (either by herself or by society)? What are the boundaries? Also is there anything wrong with female masculinity? Has it been repressed because males see it as a threat to their species? I think the media is largely to blame for negativity surrounding female masculinity, but I also feel like it can encourage female empowerment with things like the ever-growing popularity of CrossFit. Images are published of ‘strong’, that is, athletically capable women, lifting more weights than men, covered in sweat yet are still able to fulfill their ‘feminine’ duties; of procreation and nurturing a child. Though, as Halberstam mentions, “when female masculinity conjoins with possibly queer identities, it is far less likely to meet with approval” (954), and I entirely agree. Yes, it is inspiring to be confronted with the image of female empowerment, but what has society done to us that when confronted with this idea of female empowerment and homosexuality that we shy away and go back to admiring Bond’s Rolex Submariner and wondering “how he is going to get out of this one?”

I agree with Audre Lorde when she asserts that “it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes” (854). It is incredibly rarely that you encounter a straight man speaking out about gay rights, or a mother speaking out for Fathers for Justice! The role of the oppressor is incredibly passive in this sense, which reminds me of Cixous’ argument that maleness is associated with activity, and femaleness is associated with passivity. If the oppressor is guilty of being passive, surely the female is also guilty of the same charge? The readings this week have lead me to think about the relation of activity and passivity, and of writing and how it relates to feminist considerations. The act of writing is in itself active, and historically it has been incredibly hard for the female voice to be heard and listened to. It is funny to think about how many women writers have chosen to write under a male name, for example Mary Anne Evans writing as George Eliot, yet I wonder how many male writers have written as women? As I say, the act of writing is in this sense active, yet does publishing under a male name mean Evans was passive in her approach? In publishing under a male pseudonym ensured her work was taken seriously, but did she have a duty to feminism to insist upon a position in the literary world? It continues today – I think I mentioned in a previous blog post about how J.K Rowling has recently published under a male pseudonym of Robert Galbraith. I wonder what her motivation was for renouncing any association with feminine authorship. Gilbert and Gubar mention how “until quite recently the woman writer has had (if only unconsciously) to define herself as a mysterious creature who resides behind the angel or monster” (812), yet obviously the woman writer is still hiding behind something. The issue of self-definition is clearly not resolved, then, I would argue.

One final point I would like to pick up on is that, as Lorde points out, it is not our differences that separate us, but “our refusal to recognize those differences” (855). Differences in society, not just gender relations, can only be resolved if the participants are able to accept difference and work through it. Lorde also talks about “a fear of lesbians, or of being accused of being a lesbian” (858), and in a similar way, Cixous also talks about the inversion of the same fear in men who are “terrified of homosexuality” (352) and that man “fear[s] being a woman” (352). From this point of view then, perhaps we should also be talking about not the things that separate us, but the things (fears) that unite us.

Bakhtin’s Discourse in the Novel has been an interesting read, and has highlighted some aspects of the discourse we use in everyday life that I had not previously considered. I suppose I have already ‘unconsciously’ illustrated Žižek’s philosophy in accepting everything so unquestioningly!

Bakhtin’s notion of the hybrid nature of language; its intertextuality and the relation between each word really demonstrates the power and influence language can have. It can be used to educate or bring down entire systems, purely “through the medium of their specific concrete instancing” (675). The ‘stratification’ of language I think is very important when we think of relations and hierarchies within a society; each social group tends towards their own language, and thus each interpretation, utterance and meaning of an individual word will always be different.

Bakhtin has personified language for me; he speaks of it as having the ability “to infect with its own intention” (675) different semantic meanings. Also that “these languages live a real life” (676); “it exists in people’s mouths” (677) and it tastes of the context in which it has lived. These suggestions seem to point to language as some form of disease – which I don’t enjoy associating it with for one moment, but I suppose we could refer to it as such. It is resilient, and always evolving into new strands of other ‘language’ so as to ensure its survival. Each word we say has previously been someone else’s and we take it and ‘mutate’ it into our own; giving it our own meaning. Language is also “overpopulated” (677) with the intentions of others, therefore it is imperative that we make it our own so as to ensure our utterances bear some significance. Language also faces a constant struggle as it is fighting past social groups and stratification which continually evolve and form new dialogues surrounding their own specific belief systems. Furthermore the novelist must contend with this barrage of numerous systems and stratifications of language, and in turn create his own language, often resorting to “heteroglossia” (679) (which in itself sounds like something you wouldn’t want to catch!); incorporating “another’s speech in another’s language”, as Bakhtin explains. So the novel brings into the conscious mind the diversity and abundance of different social speech types. Also within this cacophony of other voices scrambling for the reader’s attention, the reader must contend with his own voice, which will again take on a whole different utterance and meaning, and so affecting his own interpretation of the novel and the language which lives within it.

I just have one issue with Bakhtin; he talks about “authoritative discourse”, which always remains a “dead quotation” (684) as it is a thing in its own right – I interpreted this to allude to ‘innate’ truths, such as (some may argue) the existence of God, as “its authority was already acknowledged in the past” (683). Bakhtin then goes on to talk about “internally persuasive discourse” (685) which I took to mean something that has been taken, developed, worked on, churned up and spat out in some sense, by our own and other’s interaction with discourse, but surely at one point all discourse has been internally persuasive? So I would like to know when authoritative discourse stopped being internally persuasive and got its promotion in the linguistic realm?

This week I am having trouble getting to grips with Freud’s take on things. WHY does everything have to revert back to sex, or childhood, or parents? I found it almost funny reading about the woman who had a dream about the beetles and being shocked when she was told it was OBVIOUSLY because she is concerned about relations with her husband. I think the fact that she had seen a drowning moth just before she had been to sleep was a more plausible explanation of animal suffering in her dream. Or maybe she had recently read Kafka, and the image of the beetle had stayed with her. I think there could be hundreds of possible interpretations and Freud should have commented on these instead of referring her dream instantly to sex.

It was quite unnerving to read Baudrillard I found, especially his notion of the “hyperreal” (366) which would lend itself well to explorations of films such as The Matrix. Baudrillard claims that symbols and signs have come to replace reality and meaning within our current society, and that human experience is now a ‘simulation’ of reality. I find his claims resonate entirely with a film I saw by Chris Marker entitled Sans Soleil. The film addresses issues concerning memory and what our memories actually consist of and whether the death of ‘real’ memory has come about because of the invention of new technologies such as film and the photograph. In the film, the narrator recounts:

“Brooding at the end of the world on my island of Sal in the company of my prancing dogs I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather I remember the images I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for my memory. They are my memory. I wonder how people remember things who don’t film, don’t photograph, don’t tape. How has mankind managed to remember? I know: it wrote the Bible. The new Bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time that will have to reread itself constantly just to know it existed.”

I think Baudrillard’s ideas relate entirely to the reader of the twenty-first century as we live in a society where so much emphasis is placed upon the importance of the aesthetic, and we tend to live so vicariously through film or image that our perception of the boundaries of our own reality can often become blurred and we find ourselves living a sort ‘simulation’ of ‘real’ life via a montage of borrowed realities from the media. We “consume signs of status” (365) such as cars and the latest technologies. Baudrillard’s idea of the automobile as the single gadget of solitude (360) also reminds me of another film; Weekend by Jean-Luc Godard, which is about a road trip undertaken by a couple who, on the way experience never ending traffic jams and car accidents. The road is often strewn with wreckages and bodies which they merely pass by, unnoticed and unfazed by the sight.  At one point one of the protagonists asks another driver if this is a film or real life, and when he replies that it is a film, he doesn’t believe him. This illuminates the idea that the media of the twenty first century has constructed a perceived reality and distorted the consumer’s perception of it.

I would like to finish with another line from Sans Soleil, which also always chills me as I think it reflects how intrusive and powerful the media has become, perhaps even without society realizing. The narrator is talking of the comic book heroes painted on the walls in Japan: “And the giant faces with eyes that weigh down on the comic book readers, pictures bigger than people, voyeurizing the voyeurs.”

I found this week’s reading to be challenging, mainly as I disagree heavily with Barthes’ idea of ‘’The death of the Author’’. I do agree that the meaning of a text depends on the reader as we will probably all take away something different from our reading experience, perhaps due to Bourdieu’s idea of different ‘’tastes’’ which relate to one’s social position.

I disagree however that writing and its creator and unrelated. The author has created the work; therefore the author has formulated the words, the dialogue and the narrative according to his or her own tastes.

The reader is ‘born’ to interpret the writing. Yet this seems a rather unfair relationship as it is not reciprocated as Barthes does not permit the author to interpret the reader. Barthes implies that the reader will judge the text and respond to it, thus themselves becoming a critic, yet in reality the writer also passes judgement on the reader. A piece of writing exists because the author had a specific intent, and likely taken into consideration when writing would be the reader’s response. An artist cannot surely be disconnected from his masterpiece? Spectators may choose view and interpret a work of art separately and out of context of the artist who produced it, yet the artist is still omniscient within the work.

Talking about the death of the author also implies a previous existence; therefore there has been historically an author. The suggestion that writing is now dispossessed implies that it was ‘’possessed’’ in the first place. Yet it seems as if Barthes is implying that there has never been an authorial presence.

On a separate point I found the reading on Bourdieu to be very interesting where he talks about the fact that language is used as a mechanism of power. Also that the way in which we choose to present our social space to the world demonstrates our perceived notion of our place in society is highly intriguing. Bourdieu talks about ‘’the practical ‘attributive judgement’ whereby one puts someone in a class by speaking to him in a certain way (thereby putting oneself in a class at the same time)’’ (242) which demonstrates the ‘’power’’ of language and how it can be used positively or negatively. The idea that we are all ‘’potential object[s] of categorization’’ (245) I think is rather dangerous as one will either consider oneself inferior to or greater than the person or group to which one compares oneself.