Author Archives
Literariness is an open access collection of notes inviting everyone to explore the unfathomable English Language, Literature, and Theory. Feel free to discover and share knowledge.
Contributor: Nasrullah Mambrol
Email: nasrullahmambrol@gmail.com
WhatsApp:+919048050200
-
Key Theories of Wayne C. Booth
Writing just over two decades after the publication of Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), Shlomith Rimmon Kenan ponders the relationship between the actual author of a text and its ‘implied author’ as described by Booth; writing about… Read More ›
-
Key Theories of Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), best known for a text called The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction where the world of mass produced artworks, in particular those of photography and film, are explored. Benjamin is also regarded as an… Read More ›
-
Key Theories of Terry Eagleton
Writing about the impossibility of filming philosophy, Eagleton suggests a dialectical solution: find a scriptwriter interested in ideas (Eagleton) and a director with visual imagination (Derek Jarmen); the resulting unhappy consciousness soon resolves itself with an outstanding film about Ludwig… Read More ›
-
Key Theories of Houston A. Baker, JR
Finding common ground between theory and the ‘founding condition of Afro-American intellectual history’, Houston A. Baker, Jr argues that both seek explanations at a ‘metalevel’. Baker comes to this conclusion because of the way in which his intellectual project is… Read More ›
-
Pauline Johnson and Radical Humanism
Pauline Johnson has sought to re-situate feminism within the humanist tradition. Arguing against the anti-humanism of contemporary feminism, Johnson’s Feminism as Radical Humanism (1994) argues that feminism must see itself as “the interpreter of the cultural ideals of modern humanism.”… Read More ›
-
Michele Barrett and Marxist Feminism
Writing under the influence of Marx and cultural materialism, Michele Barrett in Women ‘s Oppression Today (1988) argues that a feminist analysis of “culture” is imperative today. Barrett’s engagements with aesthetics and subjectivity have proved to be the cutting edge… Read More ›
-
Helene Cixous and Poststructuralist Feminist Theory
Helene Cixous‘ work has been influenced by Derridean deconstruction. Essays such as The Laugh of the Medusa, Sorties, Coming to Writing and Other Essays (1991), Readings and The Newly Born Woman (with Catherine Clement, translation in 1986) are her attempts to discover… Read More ›
-
Luce Irigaray and Psychoanalytic Feminism
In her works like Speculum of the Other Woman (translated 1985) and This Sex Which is Not One (1987), Luce Irigaray has argued that the woman has been constructed as the specular Other of man in all Western discourses. Combining Psychoanalysis,… Read More ›
-
The Political Theory of Carole Pateman
Carole Pateman‘s work has been in the realm of political theory. Pateman argues that for political theory to become more democratic it must develop a truly general theory of the political. This must necessarily avoid the trap of disqualifying certain… Read More ›
-
Key Concepts of Michele Le Doeuff
A philosopher by profession and training Michele Le Doeuff‘s The Philosophical Imaginary (1989) argued that philosophy has a specific imaginary level intrinsic to itself. This imaginary level sets the conditions of what can be constructed as rationality within it. For Le… Read More ›
-
Eli Zaretsky and Socialist Feminism
Eli Zaretsky‘s Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life (1976), along with the work of Juliet Mitchell in Woman’s Estate (1974) and the writings of Zillah Eisenstein, is an important text in the socialist-feminist tradition. A brief sketch of the central concerns… Read More ›
-
Key Ideas of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
Like Showalter, Gilbert and Gubar have analysed the nineteenth century for the position of the woman novelist in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), the 2-volume No Man’s Land (1987-89) and their edition of The Norton Anthology of Literature by… Read More ›
-
Ellen Moers: An Introduction
Ellen Moers‘ Literary Women (1976) was, along with Gilbert and Gubar’s , one of the early attempts to uncover the female literary tradition. Reading a range of authors like George Eliot, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Moers… Read More ›
-
Juliet Mitchell and Psychoanalytic Feminism
Writing in the sixties and seventies, Juliet Mitchell’s work in Woman’s Estate (1971), Mitchell argued that woman’s oppression was linked to FOUR essential social structures: production, reroduction, sexuality and socialization. Mitchell sought to combine a critique of socialist thought and… Read More ›
-
Psychoanalysis of Deleuze and Guattari
Deleuze and Guattari are unusual subjects for the study of Psychoanalysis because their work has attempted to reveal the bourgeois ideology imbedded in the apparent “radicalism” of psychoanalysis. They therefore focus on the institutionalization of psychoanalysis in works like Anti-Oedipus (… Read More ›
-
Nancy Chodorow and Feminist Psychoanalysis
Nancy Chodorow is studied under both Psychoanalysis and Feminism. In two important works The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) and Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (1989), Chodorow combines the object relations theories of Melanie Klein with contemporary gender concerns. (1) Chodorow argues… Read More ›
-
Shoshana Felman and Psychoanalytic Criticism
Shoshana Felman is one of the most important post-Lacaniain psychoanalysts. Felman’s work is situated at the interface of Postmodernism, cultural criticism and Psychoanalysis. The following ideas from Felman’s work are of great import. (1) Adapting the ideas of the speech -act… Read More ›
-
Key Concepts of A.J. Greimas
A.J. Greimas‘ work has been an effort to analyse all forms of discourse. Greimas emphasizes the idea that language is an “assemblage of structures of signification” which implies that the language system cannot be “given” in advance but must be… Read More ›
-
C.S. Peirce and the Semiotics
C.S. Peirce worked on logic and semiotics (this latter term he translated from the Greek), frequently linking the two. He argued that signs are the vehicles for thought as well as the articulation of logical forms. Peirce differs from Saussure… Read More ›
-
Roman Jakobson’s Contribution to Structuralism and Semiotics
One of the most distinguished thinkers in linguistics, philology and aesthetics, Jakobson was responsible for the development of semiotics as a critical practice. Since his work is extremely wide-ranging in scope, Jakobson’s contribution to semiotics and structuralism alone are discussed… Read More ›