COMENTARIO DE TEXTOS LITERARIOS

UNIT 2.
Discourse: is a term associated most closely to Foucault, it refers to the way in
which meaning is formed, expressed and controlled in a culture through its use of
language.
It is through discourse that we constitute our experience, an analysis of discourse
can reveal how we see the world.
As language is the base symbol system through which culture is created and
maintained, it can be said that everything is discourse.
Meaning through language is controlled by the discursive structures of a culture.
New Historicism.
begins its quest to be political by denying that: a) any social world is stable b)
artworks are separated from the power struggles constituting a social reality.
accepts Foucaults insistence that power operates through a myriad capillary
channels, these include not just coercion and governmental action, but also daily
routines and language.
examines how particular texts are addressed to other texts, other discursive orders
in the wider culture. The text is a dynamic interweaving of multiple strands from a
culture which is itself an unstable field of contending forces.
wants to emphasize how history reveals the growth of forms of power that
continuously affect subjects lives.
studies a literary text not as autonomous objects but as material products emerging
out of a specific social, cultural and political contexts.
breaks down the traditional distinction between literary and non-literary texts and
forms.
Unit 3. Introduction to Feminism.
Feminist criticism is a part of the broader feminist political movement that seeks to
rectify sexsist discrimination and inequalities. Has brought revolutionary changes to
literary and cultural studies by expanding the canon, by criquing sexist
representations and values, by stressing the importance of gender and sexuality,
and by proposing institutional and social reforms. Argue that women have a
literature of their own, possesing its own themes, characters, forms, styles and
canons.
Feminist study of literature has generated a commitment to recovering forgotten,
ignored, silenced or disguised past women writers. This recovery of formerly
excluded women-authored texts has led to the re-reading of literary texts by men.
Writing by men is explored by feminist readers by (among other things) the way in
which it incorporates, replicates or otherwise perpetuates patriarchy inflected
relationships between women and men.
American feminists Gilbert and Gubar (The Madwoman in the Attic. 1979) argue
that Jane Austen created the paradigm of the double text which paid lip-service
(express approval of or support for something insincerely) to patriarchal literary
standards, even while it subverted them. Gilbert and Gubar also address (as did
Virginia Woolf before them) the reality of women authors exclusion from the
predominantly male pantheon of literary works (mostly on economic and social
grounds), they argue.
Their reading of Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre famously problematizes the female
stereotypes the female stereotypes of angel (Jane) and monster (Bertha, or the
madwoman)

They challenge such male-centered theories of literary creativity as Harold Blooms

massively influential anxiety of influence by proposing an alternative anxiety of
authorship.
-Patriarchal authority: literary tradition which conflicts with the woman writers
autonomy. In general terms it covers all manifestations of male-centered and maledominated traditions.
Patriarchal texts which seek to deny female autonomy and authority (Emily
Dickinson).
-Anxiety of influence: a term coined by Bloom. Describes the feelings a male
writer experiences when confronting his paternal literary precursors. Anxiety that
he will be unable to liberate himself from, or meet the standards and achievements
of that prior presence. His fear that he is not a creator and that the works of his
predecesors assume essential priority over his own writings. Oedipal struggle: a
man can only become a poet by somehow invalidating his poetical father. A literary
conflict.
-Anxiety of authorship: Gilbert and Gubar, countering Blooms masculinist
anxiety of influence propose an alternative. The battle of the woman writer is not
against her male precursors reading of the world but against his reading of her. She
must seek a female precursor who proves by example that a revolt against
patriarchal literary authority is possible. Depicts the precursor poet as a sister or
mother whose example enables the creativity of the latercomer writer to develop
collaboratively against the confining and sickening backdrop of forbidding male
literary authority.
-criture feminine. The French feminist Cixous advocates a type of writing that
radically challenges certain language patterns expressive of male totalizing
practices and assumptions and advocates a de-emphasising of the gender of the
writer (female) in favour of the writing effect of the text (feminine). Male textual
practice has traditionally favoured (so the argument goes) an abstract, ananlytical
discourse from which women have been excluded on the grounds of their
supposedly inferior capacity for these forms of expression and thought.
French feminists (Cixous, Kristeva) produced a body of critical writings dedicated to
the specifity of feminine discourse as a way of contesting traditional patriarchal
constructs of sexual difference. They have found a way to challenge male
domination in discourse in general and literary discourse in particular.
Canon: a list of literary works considered to be permanently established as being of
the highest quality. Canonical.
ROOSTERS
Be aware that the critical approaches we are studying should not lead us to view a
literary text as being feminist or new historicist beforehand. These critical practices
should enable us to interpret literary texts from various critical viewpoints. We must
bear in mind that the viewpoint resides in the reader, in us.
Bishops poem roosters was written at the beginning of Second World War
A linkage between national and sexual aggression can be observed.
Roosters breaks into two halves, the first suggesting that the national aggression of
war is essentially linked to masculinity.
After the roosters have fought and the body is flung on the ash-heap, the poem
considers a second way to understand a roosters emblematic significance.
Rather than invoking masculine aggression (and feminine passivity as its
complement), their crowing now recalls St. Peter, who was reminded of his denial by
a rooster: Deny, deny, deny. But by introducing the New Testament significance of
roosters in the second movement of the poem, Bishop isnt suggesting that the
roosterscries are not emblematic of masculine aggression; rather, she suggests
that this association is far from essential or unchangeable.

She asks her roosters What are you projecting? but her poem makes us aware of
what we project into roosters: as emblems the birds mean what we make them
mean, and we are not doomed to war because of masculinity.
At the end of the poem, when the sun rises faithful as enemy, or friend, Bishop
emphasizes the multiple significance of anything to which we grant emblematic
meaning
James Longenbuch Bishops Social Conscience
Another approach to Bishops poem emphasizes its dualism and contrasts.
The roosters can be read under two different views:
-As figures of militarization, denial and masculinity.
- As emblems of forgiveness and hope.
A transition is undergone throughout the poem. A shift in mood and chromatic focus
takes place. The theme of forgiveness which spans stanzas 30 to 39 prepares us for
this shift. In these stanzas the speaker signals an alternative masculinity.
The poem has undergone a progressive feminization from the overmasculine to the
lines of pink cloud in the sky
Ambiguity is part of this poem, the poem ends leaving uncertainty.
Strong anti-patriarchal and anti-militaristic tone.
UNIT 4
Lesbian critism aims:
- in part to challenge the erasure of lesbian existence from so much of scholarly
feminist literature.
- an erasure not just anti-lesbian, but anti-feminist.
- to encourage heterosexual feminists to examine heterosexuality as a political
institution which disempowers women
- women identification and women bonding.
- this would become a politically activating impulse.
Adrienne Richs main purpose is to consider the extent to which heterosexual
desire and identity are fundamental to womens oppression.
- Heterosexuality is compulsory because only partners of the opposite sex are
deemed appropriate. It is not natural but social.
- Institutions by which women have traditionally been controlled: patriarchal
motherhood, economic exploitation, the nuclear family.
- Patriarchal society is threatened by womens independent action.
- The lesbian, unless in disguise, faces discrimination, harassment and violence.
- Rich argues that the issue feminists have to address is not simple gender
inequality.
Compulsory heterosexuality is central to creating and preserving the inequality
between men and women as it systematically ensures the power of men over
women.
Rich creates woman-identified language to replace the stigmatized and clinical term
lesbianism: lesbian experience for the historical and and contemporary presence
of lesbian creation, and lesbian continuum to include the entire range of womanidentified experience.
Lesbian experience: refers to the actual presence of lesbians, past and present. It
is simultaneously a challenge to heterosexuality, to the inclusion within a male
homosexuality, to male access to women.
It is a reassertion of the female in all its empowering dimensions. It comprises
both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life.
- Rich creates woman-identified language to replace the stigmatized and clinical
term lesbianism: lesbian experience.

- Lesbian continuum: refers to all experiences shared by women experiences

that strengthen bonds among themselves and against male oppression. The erotic
and the spiritual, the physical and the emotional;in short, the full range of womanidentified experience.
- Barry (on page136) designates a wide variety of female behaviour, spanning
from informal mutual help networks, supportive female friendships, sisterhood; and,
finally, to sexual relationships. Interconnections among the various ways in which
women bond together.
-

Patriarchal society pressure on women

-Heterosoxuality: social not natural
Feminists MUST address compulsory sexuality
Feminists MUST accept lesbian possibility
Woman identification is a source of energy. To deny it is a loss to womens power.
do not get stuck in false dichotomies but accept choices too.

Compared to Richs comparively conciliatory agenda, Smith is radical in her black

lesbians lesbians only stance. Rich adopts a more anti-essentialis approach, while
Smith vigorously argues in favour of sexual and ethnic exclusivity.
Barbara Smith. A black feminist approach to literature that embodies the
realization that the politics of sex as well as the politics of race and class are
crucially interlocking factors.
Primary commitment to exploring how both sexual and racial politics AND black and
female identity are inextricable elements in Black womens wrtitings.
A black feminist critic should:
- explore sexual and racial politics in black womens writing
- assume an identifiable literary tradition
- examine its specific black female language
- demonstrate a tradition that doesnt get ideas from white/male literary thought
upon black womens art
- be innovative and daring
- link all that and the lit. work to the black womens situation
When black woimens works are dealt:
by black literature: dont see sexual politics implications
by white women: dont see racial implications
so a black feminist movement would see the interlocking sex+race+class
Other terms realted to this unit:
Queer: traditionally a term of abuse designating homosexuals, was reclaimed by
gay and lesbiian militants as a self-referential term or token of pride to describe
their (marginal) positionality with regard to the dominant heterosexist culture.
Essentialism: Barry p.129. The feminist view that there is some natural, given
essence of the feminine, that is universal and unchangeable.

UNIT 5 INTRODUCTION TO ETHNIC AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

Postcolonial critics analyse the repercusions of European cultural and territoria
expansion from its beginnings to the present day.
Postocolonialism engages in strategies aimed at recovering the marginalized,
excluded or otherwise silenced colonial voices.
The postoclonial does not only refer to those literary authors who write back from
the former colonies but also to the movement of social and political contestation
that seeks to challenge and destabilise the ideological and anthopological
foundations of imperialism.

One of the main aims of the critics was to do away with the stereotypes the
coloniser had purposefully utilised in order to dehumanise the colonised.
Stereotypes became a fundamental strategy to present an oversimplified and, on
most occasions, caricaturesque vision of the natives, who were repeatedly
downgraded and even compared to animals.

*CHINUA ACHEBE AND JOSEPH CONRADS HEART OF DARKNESS

Achebe: "the real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this
age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster. And the question is whether
a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which despersonalizes a portion of
the human race, can be called a great work of art". Norton p.2040
-Achebe published influential criticism exposing colonialist biase in English fiction
and arguing for an indigenous African literature. Indicting the view of Africa in Joseph
Conrads classic Heart of Darkness, as a reflection of European racist assumptions
of the "darkness" or inferiority of Africans.
However critical of the European imperialist mission, presents Africans as savage,
subhuman, and incapable of speech. Achebe condemns these views as "offensive
and deplorable". He focuses much of his attack not on Conrad but on the critical
position of Conrads text in the Western canon as a master piece, a position largely
forgiving of or blind to its racism. Thus its critical perception -up to the present dayunthinkingly perpetuates racist stereotypes.
Achebe presupposes a social theory pf art, holding that art reflects and propagates
social views and values.
-Achebes analysis of the Wests imagination of Africa as a negative projection of
itself draws on a psychoanalytic model of colonialism which argues that Europen
depictions of colonies as the "Other" are symptomatic of the Wests own cultural
neuroses.
Interview Achebe
In "Home and Exile" you discuss how British authors like Josep`h Conrad
have negatively portrayed African for hundreds of years. Why do you think
is that?
The argument that I make is that there was a reason for it. Nothing goes on for that
long if its not meeting some desire. There is an almost deliberate effort to portray
these people as other than human. This was at the peak of the slave trade. The
evidence is very, very clear. The people who were writing said what they were
doing. Thats the reason it coincided with and served the Atlantic slave trade.
Why do you think Westerns continue to present Africans to the world the
way they do?
Well, thats what I should be asking you (laughs). I can only guess. One of the most
charitable possibilities is that people get used to something. Whatever the reasons,
the important thing is to recognise this and deal with it, because we really cannot
afford the problem, it has created.
Recently The New Yorker (in its March 26, 2001 issue) published the
journal of a European traveling in Africa, and the events and places the
writer described werent particularly positive.
My quarrel with that fiction is not that its not positive. Africa is full of problems. I
dont deny that. But if you are African or go to Africa with an open mind youll still
see that these are people. They are not less than human as suggested by much of
this literature. You are not surprised to find, as Marlow is surprised to find in Heart of
Darkness, that these are people like himself. But Im not saying, "Dont criticize us",
or "Dont find fault with us or what we do". David Livingston was asked, "What do

you think about Africa?", and he said, "Oh, they are capable of terrible deeds, but
they are also capable of extraordinary and good actions". In other words, like people
anywhere else (laughs).
What is the effect of this media coverage?
Thats really the issue. It makes it impossible for us to understand one another.
People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so thay
fail to see what is there in front of them. This is what people have come to expect. It
s not viewed as a serious continent. Its a place of strange, bizarre and illogical
things, where people dont do what common sense demands.

EDWARD SAID AND ORIENTALISM

Saids Orientalism is a study of how the Western colonial powers of Britain and
France represented North African and Middle Eastern lands in the late 19 th and early
20th centuries.
The Orient is the collective noun Said uses to refer to these places. Orientalism
refers to the sum of the Wests representations of the Orient.
The machinery of colonialism does not simply dissapear as soon as the colonies
become independent. Indeed, Said shows how the modes of representation common
to colonialism have continued after decolonisation and are still very much a part of
the contemporary world.
Beginnig Postcolonialis. John McLeod. Manchester University Press pp 39-40.

Palestinian-born Amercan critic Edward Said (1935-2003) is one of the foremost

representatives of postcolonial critical practice and his landmark Orientalism (1978)
is frequently credited with having laid the groundwork for the field. Said was to
become one of Michael Foucaults most distinguished discipoles, drawing on his
studies of discourse and power, to elucidate the function of cultural representations
in the construction and maintenace of First/Third World relations.
Said is credited with putting into circulation the tem the Other to describe the
enduring stereotypes and thinking about the Orient generated by European
imperialism.
Gua Comentario de Textos Ingleses 2004. UNED. P.46
In this work, Sadi explores the way literature and other socio-cultural constructs
presented a distorted image of the colonised, turning him/her into hte Other and,
thus, the antagonist of the European citizen. Otherness becomes one of the
central arguments in Saids Orientalism , enabling him to explore the way Western
nations approach the Orien and how their lack of knowledge leads them to create
inconsistent stereotypes that downgrade the image of the region. Said alludes to the
most recurrent clichs generated by these partial, Eurocentric standpoints and
which are based on negation instead of on reaffirmation. The Orient is described
according to what is not rather than to what it is, contributing, thus, to perpetuate
the inferiority of the Oriental people. Said, furthermore, points out that the
stereotypes that are more frequently associated with the Orient could be:
timelessness, strangeness, race, gender, feminine.
Gua de Nueva Literaturas en Lengua Inglesa UNED pp.35-36

NTRODUCTION TO ETHNIC AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

The Bluest Eye

- Pecola, Claudia and Pauline are defined by how they respond to ideals of white
female beauty.
- Paulines strategy of gauging her self-worth according to white screen legends is
inherited and intensified by her daughter Pecola, with even more devastating
personal results. Pecolas craving for blue eyes, and her own strategies for acquiring
them, from drinking milk out of a blue-and-white Shirley Temple cup to asking
Soaphead Church to cast a spell to change the colour of her eyes, provide much of
the narrative backbone of Morrisons novel.
-Note that both Pauline and Pecola are described by the narrator as being physically
unattractive.
The narrator wonders why she and her children are so ugly, including Pecola, were
so ugly.
The source of that feeling of ugliness, the narrator realizes, lies less in empirical fact
than in a deeply held belief.
The dominant white ideology has been internalized by Pauline and Pecola, and the
black community at large.
Note that when Mr. Henry, the MacTeer roomer, first appears in the family, he teases
the young Claudia and Frieda by addressing the as Greta Garbo and Ginger Rogers.
The girls giggle and their father smiles, indicating that a certain ethnically
marked white- standard of beauty has become naturalized to the point that it has
been internalized by the black community.
But not uniformly, so Claudia sets the terms of the debate when she describes her
response on being given a white, blue-eyed doll for Christmas:
I could not love the doll. But I could examine it to see what it was tajt all the
world said was lovable. Break off the tiny fingers, bend the flat feet, loosen the hair,
twist the head around, and the thing made one sound Mama, Remove the
cold and stupid eyeball, it would bleat still.. take off the head, shake out the
sawdust, crack the back against the brass bed rail, it would bleat still The gauze
back would split, and I could see the disk with six holes, the secret of the sound. A
mere metal roundness
The crescendo in violence stands in representation of what the narrative itself
perfoms: it uncovers the nuts and bolts of a white supremacist ideology, revealing it
to be a mere construct- a mere metal roundness- that can be as easily
deconstructed as it is constituted/arrange/assembled in the first place. This is what
Claudia does before our very eyes. She realizes that race constructs are less about
race than they are about power: we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not
free, merely licensed.
Note how the entire text revolves around colour. Morrisons palette foregrounds
blue, certainly (as in the title, first and foremost), but also, and emphatically, black
and white.