Crash Course

Reader Response, Post Colonial and Queer and Gender Theory

Reader Response

• Attention to reading process emerged during 1930s as a reaction against the growing tendency to reject the reader’s role in creating meaning

Reader Response

• Focuses on readers’ responses to literary texts.

• Leading proponents:– Stanley Fish– Wayne Booth– Louise Rosenblatt

Reader Response

• 2 basic beliefs of RR:– The role of the reader cannot be omitted from

our understanding of literature.– Readers do not passively consume the

meaning presented to them by an objective literary text; rather, they actively make the meaning they find in literature.

Reader Response

• 2 contrasting emphases:– the means by which

the text controls the reader.

– the way in which the reader creates or recreates the text.

• Reader is necessary third party in the relationship that constitutes the literary work.

• Reality is to be found not in the external world itself, but rather in the mental perception of externals.

• Text guides the reader.

• Text + Reader = Meaning

Reader Response

• Each individual reads literary work for himself/herself– Draws on past experiences– Molds new experiences from new text

• Even same reader reading same text on two different occasions will probably produce different meanings because of so many variables contributing to our experience of text.– Why second reading of text produces greater insights.

Efferent vs. Aesthetic Reading

• Efferent– Reading for information

• Telephone book• History text

• Aesthetic– Reading for pleasure– Emotional focus

• Literature

2 types of Meaning (Iser)

• 2 kinds of meaning every text offers:– Determinate

• Facts of text– Certain events in plot or physical descriptions clearly

provided by words on page.

– Indeterminate• “gaps” in text such as actions that are not clearly

explained or have multiple explanations– Allow and invite reader to create own interpretations

Consider the Poem..Blues

• The poem or can change with every event: meaning/interpretation changes with every reading

• “upon first reading, I don’t understand this at all”

• “next reading, it seems to me that…”

Post Colonial Criticism

• By 19th Century: British Empire emerged as largest imperial power

• By 20th Century: British Empire ruled ¼ of the earth’s surface

• India• Australia• New Zealand• Canada• Ireland• Significant holdings in:

– Africa– West Indies– South America– Middle East– Southeast Asia

Colonial Africa

British Empire Domination

• Domination continued until the end of WWII– India gained

independence in 1947– By 1980, Britain had

lost all but a few of its colonial holdings

– Hong Kong in 1997– Australia in1999

Post Colonial Criticism

• Defines formerly colonized peoples as– “any population that has been subjected to

the political domination of another population.”

• Analyzes literature produced by cultures that developed in response to colonial domination, from the first point of colonial contact to the present.– Formerly known as “commonwealth literature”

Prominent Authors

• Some literature written by colonizers.– Rudyard Kipling

- Joseph Conrad– Alan Paton

• Much more written by colonized and formerly colonized people.– Chinua Achebe– Wole Soyinka

Cultural Colonization

• The inculcation of a British system of government and education, British culture, and British values that denigrate the culture, morals, and even physical appearance of formerly subjugated peoples.

De-Colonizing• DECOLONIZATION

– colonizers retreated and left the lands they had invaded

• often has been confined largely to the removal of British military forces and government officials

• Ex-colonials were left with… – a psychological “inheritance” of a negative

self-image – alienation from their own indigenous cultures,

which had been forbidden or devalued for so long that much pre-colonial culture has been lost.

Colonist Ideology

• Believed their own Anglo-European culture was civilized, sophisticated, or metropolitan.

• Based on the colonizers’ assumption of their own superiority, which they contrasted with the alleged inferiority of native (indigenous) peoples, the original inhabitants of the lands they invaded.

• Native people defined as savage, backward, underdeveloped.

• Colonizers believed their whole culture was more highly advanced because their technology was more highly developed.

• They ignored or swept aside the religions, customs, and codes of behavior of the people they subjugated.

Colonist Ideology

• Resulted in “colonial subjects” (colonized people who did not resist colonial subjugation because they believed in British superiority and, therefore, in their own inferiority.)

• Many tried to imitate the colonizers (mimicry)– Dress - Behavior– Speech - Lifestyle

Postcolonial Criticism

• Postcolonial criticism can be used to interpret literature in the Western literary canon; therefore, some theorists are concerned that it will become just one more way to read the same canonized authors read for years, rather than a method that brings the works of 3rd-and 4th-World writers to the front.

Themes in Postcolonial Literature

• Initial encounter with the colonizer and the disruption of indigenous culture

• Journey of the European outsider through an unfamiliar wilderness with a native guide

• Othering and colonial oppression• Struggle for individual and collective cultural identity and

related themes of – Alienation– Unhomeliness– Double consciousness– Hybridity

Queer and Gender Theory

• Gender studies and queer theory explore issues of sexuality, power, and marginalized populations (woman as other) in literature and culture.

• Much of the work in gender studies and queer theory, while influenced by feminist criticism, emerges from post-structural interest in fragmented, de-centered knowledge building (Nietzsche, Derrida, Foucault), language (the breakdown of sign-signifier), and psychoanalysis (Lacan).

• A primary concern in gender studies and queer theory is the manner in which gender and sexuality is discussed:

• Therefore, a critic working in gender studies and queer theory might even be uncomfortable with the binary established by many feminist scholars between masculine and feminine: "Cixous (following Derrida in Of Grammatology) sets up a series of binary oppositions (active/passive, sun/moon...father/mother, logos/pathos).

• Each pair can be analyzed as a hierarchy in which the former term represents the positive and masculine and the latter the negative and feminine principle" (Richter 1433-1434).

Questions• What elements of the text can be perceived as being masculine (active,

powerful) and feminine (passive, marginalized) and how do the characters support these traditional roles?

• What sort of support (if any) is given to elements or characters who question the masculine/feminine binary? What happens to those elements/characters?

• What elements in the text exist in the middle, between the perceived masculine/feminine binary? In other words, what elements exhibit traits of both (bisexual)?

• What does the work contribute to our knowledge of queer, gay, or lesbian experience and history, including literary history?

• How is queer, gay, or lesbian experience coded in texts that are by writers who are apparently homosexual?

• What does the work reveal about the operations (socially, politically, psychologically) homophobic?

• How does the literary text illustrate the problematics of sexuality and sexual "identity," that is the ways in which human sexuality does not fall neatly into the separate categories defined by the words homosexual and heterosexual?

Fin!!!!