First In-Class Exam Flashcards
(19 cards)
What is critical theory?
Critical theory tries to explain the assumptions and values upon which various forms of literary texts rest.
What are some examples of critical theory?
Some examples of critical theory are Marxism, African-American/Indigenous, Lesbian/Gay/Queer, and Post-Colonial.
What is literary criticism?
Literary criticism tries to explain the literary work to us through its production, meaning, design, and beauty.
What are examples of literary criticism?
Psychoanalytic and Deconstructionism.
What is ideology?
Ideology is a system of thought or “world-view” which an individual acquires from the world around them.
According to Culler, what is the difference between understanding literature as a product of attention and understanding literature as language with particular properties?
Literature as a product of attention refers to the immediate ways in which the medium is interpreted as a holistic view of a particular ideology or central message.
Literature as language with particular properties refers to the focus on its structure and development that later forms a completed piece.
According to Culler, what is the hyper-protected cooperative principle and what is its relevance to literature?
The hyper-protected cooperative principle refers to the basic principle that communication depends on cooperation with another, and what one person says is relevant.
Its relevance to literature pertains to the relationship between the written word and the reader.
How does Culler think we should understand literature (literariness)?
Literariness is often said to lie above the all other elements in the organization of language that make literature itself distinguishable.
What is Sigmund Freud’s, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” about?
In this text, Freud outlines that dreams are rather a representation of the unconscious and are not simply random.
What is Jacques Lacan’s, “The Mirror Stage,” about?
In this text, Lacan outlines the moment in which an infant recognizes themself in the mirror, thus prompting the creation of their sense of self.
What is Tillie Olsen’s, “I Stand Here Ironing,” about?
In this text, Olsen’s story surrounding the regret a mother has for the way she raised her daughter emphasizes the element of the unconscious coming to the forefront of one’s mind.
What is the Id, Ego, and Superego?
Id: One’s primitive desires and instincts. Facilitated with the unconscious.
Ego: The compromise between the Id and Superego, and is aware of reality. Facilitated in the conscious and unconscious.
Superego: One’s feelings of morality. Internalization of cultural taboos. Facilitated in the conscious and unconscious.
What is repression in psychoanalytic theory?
Repression is the expunging of unhappy psychological events from consciousness during childhood.
What are defenses in psychoanalytic theory?
Processes that keep repressed painful experiences repressed in the unconscious.
Examples include selective perception, selective memory, and denial.
What is the Symbolic Order?
The Symbolic Order is the restrictive world of separation from other people and things as a self or subject with a gender.
What is the Imaginary Order?
Imagery Order is the world of images through perception/
What is the Real?
The Real is the uninterpretable dimension of existence that we can neither control or know anything about.
What is the objet petit a?
This concept refers to our preverbal fantasy union with our mother and world that we’ve lost, or anything that puts us in touch with our repressed desire for this lost object.
What does Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” mean?
In this text, Althusser highlights two key aspects; Represive State Apparatus (RSA), and Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). RSA refers to the operation of force and ideology via government, police, etc., to punish those who challenge.
ISAs refer to the methods of ideology that are facilitated for the ruling class to maintain control.
