war poetry in 20 th centuary
ELAINE SHOWALTER :- TOWARDS A FEMINIST POETICS PDF
Elaine Showalter: Towards A Feminist Poetics: The Summary
Elaine Showalter: Towards A Feminist Poetics
About the author: Elaine Showalter (born January 21, 1941) is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She is one of the founders of feminist literary criticism in United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics.
She is well known and respected in both academic and popular cultural fields. She has written and edited numerous books and articles focused on a variety of subjects, from feminist literary criticism to fashion, sometimes sparking widespread controversy, especially with her work on illnesses. Showalter has been a television critic for People magazine and a commentator on BBC radio and television.
Showalter is a specialist in Victorian literature and the Fin-de-Siecle (turn of the 19th century). Her most innovative work in this field is in madness and hysteria in literature, specifically in women’s writing and in the portrayal of female characters.
Showalter's best known works are Toward a Feminist Poetics (1979), The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture (1830–1980) (1985), Sexual Anarchy: Gender at Culture at the Fin de Siecle (1990), Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997), and Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (2001). In 2007 Showalter was chair of the judges for the prestigious British literary award, the Man Booker International Prize.
Showalter's book Inventing Herself (2001), a survey of feminist icons, seems to be the culmination of a long-time interest in communicating the importance of understanding feminist tradition. Showalter’s early essays and editorial work in the late 1970s and the 1980s survey the history of the feminist tradition within the “wilderness” of literary theory and criticism. Working in the field of feminist literary theory and criticism, which was just emerging as a serious scholarly pursuit in universities in the 1970s, Showalter's writing reflects a conscious effort to convey the importance of mapping her discipline’s past in order to both ground it in substantive theory, and amass a knowledge base that will be able to inform a path for future feminist academic pursuit
Showalter is concerned by stereotypes of feminism that see feminist critics as being ‘obsessed with the phallus’ and ‘obsessed with destroying male artists’. Showalter wonders if such stereotypes emerge from the fact that feminism lacks a fully articulated theory.
Another problem for Showalter is the way in which feminists turn away from theory as a result of the attitudes of some male academics: theory is their property. Showalter writes: ‘From this perspective, the academic demand for theory can only be heard as a threat to the feminist need for authenticity, and the visitor looking for a formula that he or she can take away without personal encounter is not welcome’. In response, Showalter wants to outline a poetics of feminist criticism.
In Toward a Feminist Poetics Showalter divides feminist criticism into two sections:
•The Woman as Reader or Feminist Critique : ‘the way in which a female reader changes our apprehension of a given text, awakening it to the significance of its sexual codes’; historically grounded inquiry which probes the ideological assumptions of literary phenomena’; ‘subjects include the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions of and misconceptions about women in criticism, and the fissures in male–constructed literary history’; ‘concerned with the exploitation and manipulation of the female audience, especially in popular culture and film, and with the analysis of woman–as–sign in semiotic systems’; ‘political and polemical’; like the Old Testament looking for the errors of the past.
One of the problems of the feminist critique is that it is male–orientated. If we study stereotypes of women, the sexism of male critics, and the limited roles women play in literary history, we are not learning what women have felt and experienced, but only what men thought women should be. […] The critique also has a tendency to naturalize women’s victimization by making it the inevitable and obsessive topic of discussion.
•The Woman as Writer or Gynocritics (la gynocritique) :
Showalter coined the term 'gynocritics' to describe literary criticism based in a feminine perspective. Probably the best description Showalter gives of gynocritics is in Towards a Feminist Poetics:
In contrast to [an] angry or loving fixation on male literature, the program of gynocritics is to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt male models and theories. Gynocritics begins at the point when we free ourselves from the linear absolutes of male literary history, stop trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition, and focus instead on the newly visible world of female culture.
This does not mean that the goal of gynocritics is to erase the differences between male and female writing; gynocritics is not “on a pilgrimage to the promised land in which gender would lose its power, in which all texts would be sexless and equal, like angels”. Rather gynocritics aims to understand the specificity of women’s writing not as a product of sexism but as a fundamental aspect of female reality. Its prime concern is to see ‘woman as producer of textual meaning, with the history themes, genres, and structures of literature by women’. Its ‘subjects include the psychodynamics of female creativity. It studies linguistics and the problem of a female language in literary text. It reviews the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career. It proposes ‘to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on women’s experience’. Its study ‘focuses on the newly visible world of female culture’; ‘hypotheses of a female sub–culture’; ‘the occupations, interactions, and consciousness of women’. It projects how ‘feminine values penetrate and undermine the masculine systems that contain them’. And at its extreme, it is ‘engaged in the myth of the Amazons, and the fantasies of a separate female society’.
Showalter acknowledges the difficulty of “[d]efining the unique difference of women’s writing” which she says is “a slippery and demanding task” in “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness”. She says that gynocritics may never succeed in understanding the special differences of women’s writing, or realize a distinct female literary tradition. But, with grounding in theory and historical research, Showalter sees gynocriticism as a way to “learn something solid, enduring, and real about the relation of women to literary culture”.
Showalter then provides an exemplary feminist critique of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge to demonstrate that “one of the problems of the feminist critique is that it is male-oriented,” meaning that, in some sense, every feminist critique, even when criticizing patriarchy, is focused toward the male. As an alternative, Showalter presents gynocritics as a way “to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather that to adapt to male models and theories.”
To begin to trace out this radically female-centered theory, Showalter notes excerpts from feminist historians and sociologists. She then moves on to an engaging discussion of the experiences of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and other female authors to show the need for “completeness” in discussing women authors’ work way in which “it is necessary to leave oneself room to deal with other things besides [women writers'] work, so much has that work been influenced by conditions that have nothing whatever to do with art.”
Three Phases:
From these experiences, Showalter then begins a rough sketch of some of the elements that have characterized women’s writing: awakening, suffering, unhappiness, and matrophobia, among others. She concludes with her classification of women’s writing into three phases that “establish[es] the continuity of the female tradition from decade to decade, rather than from Great Woman to Great Woman.”
Thus, Showalter traces the history of women's literature, suggesting that it can be divided into three phases:
The Feminine phase (1840–1880): Showalter sees the first phases taking place from roughly 1840 to 1880; she calls this “the Feminine phase” and declares that it is characterized by “women [writing] in an effort to equal the intellectual achievements of the male culture… The distinguishing sign of this period is the male pseudonym… [which] exerts an irregular pressure on the narrative, affecting tone, diction, structure, and characterization.”
The Feminist phase (1880–1920): The second, Feminist phase follows from 1880 to 1920, wherein “women are historically enabled to reject the accommodating postures of femininity and to use literature to dramatize the ordeals of wronged womanhood.” This phase is characterized by “Amazon Utopias,” visions of perfect, female-led societies of the future. This phase was characterized by women’s writing that protested against male standards and values, and advocated women’s rights and values, including a demand for autonomy.
The Female phase (1920— ) is one of self-discovery. Showalter says, “women reject both imitation and protest—two forms of dependency—and turn instead to female experience as the source of an autonomous art, extending the feminist analysis of culture to the forms and techniques of literature”. Significantly, Showalter does not offer a characteristic sign or figure for the Female phase, suggesting a welcome diversity of experience that is too broad to be encompassed in a single image.
Rejecting both imitation and protest, Showalter advocates approaching feminist criticism from a cultural perspective in the current Female phase, rather than from perspectives that traditionally come from an androcentric perspective like psychoanalytic and biological theories, for example. Feminists in the past have worked within these traditions by revising and criticizing female representations, or lack thereof, in the male traditions (that is, in the Feminine and Feminist phases). In her essay Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness (1981), Showalter says, "A cultural theory acknowledges that there are important differences between women as writers: class, race nationality, and history are literary determinants as significant as gender. Nonetheless, women’s culture forms a collective experience within the cultural whole, an experience that binds women writers to each other over time and space".
Conclusion: On the whole, we may conclude that her views on feminist poetics are intelligent, largely devoid of rhetorical extremities, and confidently provocative. Showalter speaks with calmly convincing authority, as one who firmly believes in the verity of what she’s saying. She is both earnest, in that she sees change needing to occur immediately, and patient, in that she expects that, given time enough, the wisdom and truth of her cause will prevail.
Decolonising The Mind by NGugi wa Thiong'o
This essay is a critique on rulers essentailly. He described how African authors wrote in English to reach a wide audience. Over the last five years the Equity Studies Student Union's annual Decolonizing Our Minds conferences have attempted to address the different ways groups practice resistance. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature book download Download Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature . The Kenyan author, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, wrote this book in 1986. Dudley Perkins Georgia Muldrow - Beautiful Mind, RBG Tube is the premier black consciousness video site on the Internet - self sufficient, independent, innovative, All Afrikan, all RBG, and focused. Ngugi Wa Thiongo's “Decolonising the Mind” holds true in the present day as well where we have failed to carve out our own subjectivity that would be perfectly divested of the Western thought of conduct and behaviour. €�We have unfinished business of decolonising the minds of our people by changing the name of Lake Victoria, which was given by the colonialists,” he said. Question: issues of concern in decolonising the mind - Question #371972. Introduction The complete title of this book reads: Decolonizing the Hindu Mind: Ideological Development of Hindu Revivalism. I read Ngui wa Thiong'o's essay for my problem idea. Zuma's 'decolonising minds' reference to violent Frantz Fanon, or non-violent Radical Honesty 'decolonizing minds' definition of Reconciliation, in Review 'Kill Boere' Judgement in Concourt? More specifically the way in which Kenyan's rule and British.
Orientalism. Edward.w.said
On a visit to Beirut during the terrible civil war of 1975 regretfully of the gutted downtown area that “it had once1976 a French journalist wrote seemed to belong to . . . the Orient of Chateaubriand and Nerval.” 1 He was right about the place, of course, especially so far as a European was concerned. The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity ‘a place of romance, exoti c beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences. Now it was disappearing; in a sense it had happened, its time was over. Perhaps it seemed irrelevant that Orientals themselves had something at stake in the process, that even in the time of Chateaubriand and Nerval Orientals had lived there, and that now it was they who were suffering; the main thing for the European visitor was a European representation of the Orient and its contemporary fate, both of which had a privileged communal signi ficance for the journalist and his French readers. Americans will not feel quite the same about the Orient, which for them is much more likely to be associated very differently with the Far East (China and Japan, mainly). Unlike the Americans, the French and the British Italians, and Swiss-- less so the Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orientation a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Wester n experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) 9
as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral of European material civilization and culture. O rientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. In contrast, the American und erstanding of the Orient will seem considerably less dense, although our recent Japanese, Korean, and Indochinese adventures ought now to be creating a more sober, more realistic “Oriental” awareness. Moreover, the vastly expanded American political and ec onomic role in the Near East (the Middle East) makes great claims on our understanding of that Orient. It will be clear to the reader (and will become clearer still throughout the many pages that follow) that by Orientalism I mean several things, all of th em, in my opinion, interdependent. The most ‘read adily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient and this app philologistlies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism. Compared with Oriental studies or area studies, it is true that t he term Orientalism is less preferred by specialists today, both because it is too vague and general and because it connotes the high handed executive attitude of nineteenthEuropean colonialism. Nevertheless books are w century and early twentiethcentury ritten and congresses held with “the Orient” as their main focus, with the Orientalist in his new or old guise as their main authority. The point is that even if it does not survive as it once did, Orientalism lives on academically through its doctrines an d theses about the Orient and the Oriental. Related to this academic tradition, whose fortunes, transmigrations, specializations, and transmissions are in part the subject of this study, is a more general meaning for Orientalism. Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident.” Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperi al administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, epics, social descriptions and political accounts concerning the 10
Orient, its people, customs, “mind,” destiny, and s o on. This Orientalism can accommodate Aeschylus, say, and Victor Hugo, Dante and Karl Marx. A little later in this introduction I shall deal with the methodological problems one encounters in so broadly construed a “field” as this. The inter change betwee n the academic and the more or less imaginative meaning of Orientalism is a constant one, and since the late eighteenth century there has been a considerable, quite disciplined perhaps even regulatedmeanin traffic between the two. Here I come to the third g of Orientalism, which is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other two. Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution f or dealing with the Orientdealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating restructuring, and having authority over t he Orient. I have found it useful here to employ is a Foucault’s notion of a discourse, as described by him in The Archaeology of Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish, to identify Orientalism. My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a disc ourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage and even producethe Orient politically , sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the postEn lightenment period. Moreover, so authoritative a position did Orientalism have that I believe no one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism. In brief, be cause of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action. This is not to say that Orientalism unilaterally determines what can be said about the Orient, but that it is thewhole network of interests inevitably brought to bea r on (and therefore always involved) any occasion when that peculiar entity “the Orient” is in question. How this happens is what this book tries to demonstrate. It also tries to show that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate an even underground self. , Historically and culturally there is a quantitative as well as a qualitative difference between the Franco British involvement in the Orient anduntil the period of American ascenda ncy after 11
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