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Literary Theories - Coggle Diagram

- - - - All signs are arbitrary
      - Signs consist of two parts: sound image and concept
      - Signs exist in time and space in linear form.
    - - Binary Pairs- opposites- white/black, one term is favored and one term is disfavored.
      - New level of inquiry, examines language as a structure
    - - Derrida
        
        States that the center is the most crucial part of any structure
      - Bricolage is the way we recognize a system is flawed.
      - When we deconstruct a system, we look for ways to rebuild it better than it was and then create our rules on how the system functions
      - Truths
        
        Epistemological System
        
        Derrida says that there is no “god-term” or center that holds a signifier in place with a signified to create stable meaning.
        
        "truth" is impossible because absolute meaning in language is impossible
      - "Deconstructing a System"
        
        a. We point out its inconsistencies, by showing where there is play in a structure, or where the center cannot hold, Derrida says you have two options. One, is to stop attributing “truth value” to a structure or system. Two, you can just simply throw out the whole system and start again from the ground up until it meets Derrida’s requirements so to speak.
    - - focuses on mismatches between sex, gender, and desire and works to understand how categories of normal and deviant are constructed, operate, enforced, in order to change or end them.
      - associate with lesbian and gay, but includes cross-dressing, hermaphroditeism, gender ambiguity, and gender corrective surgery.
      - sex/gender system works to support the binary opposition to heterosexual/homosexual
      - Foucault states there was no sexuality until the mid-nineteenth century, that sexuality is an identity category.
      - Butler argues the one "does" one's body, gender is an act that is both intentional and performative.
      - describes gestures and analytical models, relating to chromosomal sex, gender, and sexual desire.
        
        Phenomenology
        
        constructive and constructed
    - - postcolonialism designates the time after colonial rule, began to rise in the 1960s when former colonies began to create their own form of knowledge, discourses to counter the discourses of colonialism.
      - Orientalism (Said) used to label the east as a place of mystery and exoticism and is the binary opposite of East/West.
        
        Ethnic homelands
      - Hybridity (Bhabha) is a way to add labels to people of different cultures, genders, ethnicities, or religions who combine them for whatever reason.
      - Subaltern (Spivak) the colonized subject within a power structure to achieve selfhood- never fully granted thought. It is a hybrid position is that you can never fully be one or the other and are always considered an outsider.
    - - Morrison- literary blackness defines literary whiteness as a black frame surrounding a white picture holds it together. The frame is not the focus but it holds together the piece completing it.
      - Gates- "The Signifying Monkey" an African story where a monkey uses language to moderate the animals of the jungle. It is also a way to take back a racist idea of inferiority and gives the person verbal and social power.
        
        sygnifying- tropes- comes from an African/African Amerian tradition of loud talking, testifying, calling out rapping- rituals of insult and put-downs.
        
        Anzaldúa's work explores three categories of alienation
    - - Feminist theories examine how gender is socially constructed, rather than being natural, innate, or essential.
        
        Feminist theories provide an analysis of how these inequalities evolved, how they operate, and how they could and should be changed in order to eliminate gender bias.
        
        Theories examining gender existed long before poststructuralist thought.
      - Gender is another element that determines subject position.
        
        The definition of "feminist" is someone who is interested in studying and understanding gender as a system of cultural signs and meanings assigned to sexually dimorphic bodies, and having a direct effect on how we live our individual lives.
        
        "l'ecriture feminine"
        
        writing about their own bodies, using language.
        
        Direct connections between unconscious and the body.
        
        symbolic order
        
        Political dimension
      - The “feminine” position creates a “rupture” in the Derridean sense, where fixed meaning becomes destabilized.
    - - Freud
        
        Access level of unconsciousness through dreams, parapraxes, and jokes
        
        Psychoanalytical criticism often fits better with the humanist models of literary production than with other models
        
        The project of psychanalytical theory is to describe how the gender and sexual subject is formed
        
        Oedipus Complex- explains how desires get repressed, repressed desires form the unconscious, how girls and boys learn to desire objects outside their families, learn how to desire the opposite sex, how the superego- "conscience" gets formed.
        
        Feminist Critics have a lot to say about Freud and his ideas of gender
        
        thinks we should all be normal, or the true self should be found, and fixed, in the perverse
      - Lacan
        
        Could never be a true uncovered self. The unconscious is always stronger than the conscious, and this causes unstableness that he believes should be embraced and not fixed
        
        believes in the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic
        
        thinks we cannot find a stable self and he is not bothered with fixing it in humans
        
        says that ego can never take the state of the unconsciousness because the unconscious is a stream of signifiers.
        
        The unconscious -wishes, desires, images- all form signifiers and these signifiers form a "signifying chain" - one signifier has meaning only because it si not some other signification * there are no signified or nothing that one ultimately refers to.
        
        the real is a place where there is original unity- because of that there is no absence or loss or lack.
        
        The Center is also the Other, or the Phallus
        
        Phallus is not penis- penis belongs to individuals; Phallus belongs to the structure itself the center it governs the whole structure.