S/HE: A Final Examination of Gender in Text
Structuralist CriticismLinguistic Roots
The structuralist school emerges from theories of language and linguistics, and it looks for underlying elements in culture and literature that can be connected so that critics can develop general conclusions about the individual works and the systems from which they emerge. In fact, structuralism maintains that "...practically everything we do that is specifically human is expressed in language" (Richter 809). Structuralists believe that these language symbols extend far beyond written or oral communication. For example, codes that represent all sorts of things permeate everything we do: "the performance of music requires complex notation...our economic life rests upon the exchange of labor and goods for symbols, such as cash, checks, stock, and certificates...social life depends on the meaningful gestures and signals of 'body language' and revolves around the exchange of small, symbolic favors: drinks, parties, dinners" (Richter 809). Patterns and Experience Structuralists assert that, since language exists in patterns, certain underlying elements are common to all human experiences. Structuralists believe we can observe these experiences through patterns: "...if you examine the physical structures of all buildings built in urban America in 1850 to discover the underlying principles that govern their composition, for example, principles of mechanical construction or of artistic form..." you are using a structuralist lens (Tyson 197). Moreover, "you are also engaged in structuralist activity if you examine the structure of a single building to discover how its composition demonstrates underlying principles of a structural system. In the first example...you're generating a structural system of classification; in the second, you're demonstrating that an individual item belongs to a particular structural class" (Tyson 197). Structuralism in Literary Theory Structuralism is used in literary theory, for example, "...if you examine the structure of a large number of short stories to discover the underlying principles that govern their composition...principles of narrative progression...or of characterization...you are also engaged in structuralist activity if you describe the structure of a single literary work to discover how its composition demonstrates the underlying principles of a given structural system" (Tyson 197-198). Northrop Frye, however, takes a different approach to structuralism by exploring ways in which genres of Western literature fall into his four mythoi (also see Jungian criticism in the Freudian Literary Criticism resource):
Essential Questions:
Sample Criticism (on Okonkwo)
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Feminist CriticismFeminist criticism is concerned with "...the ways in which literature (and other cultural productions) reinforce or undermine the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of women" (Tyson). This school of theory looks at how aspects of our culture are inherently patriarchal (male dominated) and "...this critique strives to expose the explicit and implicit misogyny in male writing about women" (Richter 1346). This misogyny, Tyson reminds us, can extend into diverse areas of our culture: "Perhaps the most chilling example...is found in the world of modern medicine, where drugs prescribed for both sexes often have been tested on male subjects only" (83).
Feminist criticism is also concerned with less obvious forms of marginalization such as the exclusion of women writers from the traditional literary canon: "...unless the critical or historical point of view is feminist, there is a tendency to under-represent the contribution of women writers" (Tyson 82-83). Common Space in Feminist Theories Though a number of different approaches exist in feminist criticism, there exist some areas of commonality. This list is excerpted from Tyson:
Essential Questions:
Sample Criticism
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How to Begin/Questions to Consider:
- The idea of the tragic hero can be seen across genres. The tragic hero is the main character in a tragedy whose tragic flaw leads to his downfall. Is Okonkwo a tragic hero? If so, explain how his story evokes both pity and fear. Analyze Okonkwo’s tragic fall and subsequent downfall using specific examples from the text. Pull in characters from the other texts and examine these same questions. Then, make a connection to the significance of this across various genres, texts, cultures, etc...
- The role of women in Things Fall Apart is often submissive to that of the men, but there are also some instances in which women hold tremendous power. Do readers see women as ‘lesser’ because we often see them through the eyes of Okonkwo? Does Okonkwo treat different women differently? Is his understanding of femininity the same as the Igbo culture’s? Pull in characters from the other texts and examine these same questions. Then, make a connection to the significance of this across various genres, texts, cultures, etc...
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Your Task:
Choose either a structuralist or feminist perspective from which to analyze the text.
If you choose structuralist, you are looking a text "structures" and "patterns." In other words, you will be examining the role of the tragic hero within the texts. If you choose feminist, you will be examining the complex roles of women within the texts. From either perspective, you must select characters, make a decision about their role within the text, and generate a thesis which argues to the point of your chosen perspective.
For example:
Despite historic, gender, and cultural variances, Hester, Victor, Marlow, Hamlet, and Okonkwo each present a representation of the tragic hero befitting the context of the story. Hester's fall from grace was symbolized in her moral impropriety, while Victor and Marlow became victims of their own social desires, and Hamlet and Okonkwo each suffer the effect of hubris. Despite these progressive differences, each story follows a traditional arch of the tragic hero, leaving the reader to scrutinize the tragic endings they foretell.
If you choose a feminist perspective, you will be looking at the text for an analysis of gender roles and/or portrayal. Choose several characters and texts to fit your thesis, which should be molded around the notion of gender roles and identity. What are you going to argue and what is the significance?
If you choose structuralist, you are looking a text "structures" and "patterns." In other words, you will be examining the role of the tragic hero within the texts. If you choose feminist, you will be examining the complex roles of women within the texts. From either perspective, you must select characters, make a decision about their role within the text, and generate a thesis which argues to the point of your chosen perspective.
For example:
Despite historic, gender, and cultural variances, Hester, Victor, Marlow, Hamlet, and Okonkwo each present a representation of the tragic hero befitting the context of the story. Hester's fall from grace was symbolized in her moral impropriety, while Victor and Marlow became victims of their own social desires, and Hamlet and Okonkwo each suffer the effect of hubris. Despite these progressive differences, each story follows a traditional arch of the tragic hero, leaving the reader to scrutinize the tragic endings they foretell.
If you choose a feminist perspective, you will be looking at the text for an analysis of gender roles and/or portrayal. Choose several characters and texts to fit your thesis, which should be molded around the notion of gender roles and identity. What are you going to argue and what is the significance?
Specifics:
- Choose from 3 of the 5 major texts we have studied: Scarlet Letter, Frankenstein, Heart of Darkness, Macbeth OR Hamlet, and Things Fall Apart.
- Use the eText versions of each text provided here:
Scarlet Letter Heart of Darkness Frankenstein Hamlet Things Fall Apart Macbeth
- 5-7 pages, MLA Format
- A works cited page
- Extensive in-text support (quotes, summary, paraphrase)
- Explain explicit and implied meaning
- Answer the question to the fullest extent
- Follow a clear and well organized structure/development
- Engaging introduction and conclusion
- Develop and argue a debatable, academic thesis
- proper grammar/proofreading
Important Dates
*May 28: in class thesis workshop. Have a copy of your thesis and a brief, bulleted list of SPECIFIC ideas to support (by specific I mean relevant to each text... look at history is not specific. An example of Hamlet's hubris is!)
May 29-30: LAB DAYS (2 copies of Rough Draft for Friday)
1/2 day May 31: peer editing #1
1/2 day *May 31: peer editing #2/revision time
June 3: Final due via Edmodo (11:59p/close of day)
*Information to follow. Schedule subject to change based on need/progress
May 29-30: LAB DAYS (2 copies of Rough Draft for Friday)
1/2 day May 31: peer editing #1
1/2 day *May 31: peer editing #2/revision time
June 3: Final due via Edmodo (11:59p/close of day)
*Information to follow. Schedule subject to change based on need/progress
More on Structuralist Criticism...Structuralism is a theory of humankind in which all elements of human culture, including literature, are thought to be parts of a system of signs. Critic Robert Scholes has described structuralism as a reaction to "’modernist’ alienation and despair."
European structuralists such as Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes (before his shift toward poststructuralism) attempted to develop a semiology, or semiotics (science of signs). Barthes, among others, sought to recover literature and even language from the isolation in which they had been studied and to show that the laws that govern them govern all signs, from road signs to articles of clothing. Structuralism was heavily influenced by linguistics, especially by the pioneering work of Ferdinand de Saussure. Particularly useful to structuralists was Saussure’s concept of the phoneme (the smallest basic speech sound or unit of pronunciation) and his idea that phonemes exist in two kinds of relationships: diachronic and synchronic. A phoneme has a diachronic, or "horizontal," relationship with those other phonemes that precede and follow it (as the words appear, left to right, on this page) in a particular usage, utterance, or narrative—what Saussure, a linguist, called parole (French for "word"). A phoneme has a synchronic, or "vertical," relationship with the entire system of language within which individual usages, utterances, or narratives have meaning—what Saussure called langue (French for "tongue," as in "native tongue," meaning language). An means what it means in English because those of us who speak the language are plugged into the same system (think of it as a computer network where different individuals can access the same information in the same way at a given time). Following Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist, studied hundreds of myths, breaking them into their smallest meaningful units, which he called "mythemes." Removing each from its diachronic relations with other mythemes in a single myth (such as the myth of Oedipus and his mother), he vertically aligned those mythemes that he found to be homologous (structurally correspondent). He then studied the relationships within as well as between vertically aligned columns, in an attempt to understand scientifically, through ratios and proportions, those thoughts and processes that humankind has shared, both at one particular time and across time. Whether Lévi-Strauss was studying the structure of myths or the structure of villages, he looked for recurring, common elements that transcended the differences within and among cultures. Structuralists followed Saussure in preferring to think about the overridinglangue, or language of myth, in which each mytheme and mytheme-constituted myth fits meaningfully, rather than about isolated individual paroles, or narratives. Structuralists also followed Saussure's lead in believing that sign systems must be understood in terms of binary oppositions (a proposition later disputed by poststructuralist Jacques Derrida). In analyzing myths and texts to find basic structures, structuralists found that opposite terms modulate until they are finally resolved or reconciled by some intermediary third term. Thus a structuralist reading of Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) might show that the war between God and the rebellious angels becomes a rift between God and sinful, fallen man, a rift that is healed by the Son of God, the mediating third term. Although structuralism was largely a European phenomenon in its origin and development, it was influenced by American thinkers as well. Noam Chomsky, for instance, who powerfully influenced structuralism through works such as Reflections on Language (1975), identified and distinguished between "surface structures" and "deep structures" in language and linguistic literatures, including texts. Adapted from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms by Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray. Copyright 1998 by Bedford Books. |
More on Feminist Criticism...Feminist criticism became a dominant force in Western literary studies in the late 1970s, when feminist theory more broadly conceived was applied to linguistic and literary matters. Since the early 1980s, feminist literary criticism has developed and diversified in a number of ways and is now characterized by a global perspective.
French feminist criticism garnered much of its inspiration from Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal book, Lé Deuxiéme Sexe (1949; The Second Sex). Beauvoir argued that associating men with humanity more generally (as many cultures do) relegates women to an inferior position in society. Subsequent French feminist critics writing during the 1970s acknowledged Beauvoir’s critique but focused on language as a tool of male domination, analyzing the ways in which it represents the world from the male point of view and arguing for the development of a feminine language and writing. Although interested in the subject of feminine language and writing, North American feminist critics of the 1970s and early 1980s began by analyzing literary texts—not by abstractly discussing language—via close textual reading and historical scholarship. One group practiced "feminist critique," examining how women characters are portrayed, exposing the patriarchal ideology implicit in the so-called classics, and demonstrating that attitudes and traditions reinforcing systematic masculine dominance are inscribed in the literary canon. Another group practiced what came to be called "gynocriticism," studying writings by women and examining the female literary tradition to find out how women writers across the ages have perceived themselves and imagined reality. While it gradually became customary to refer to an Anglo-American tradition of feminist criticism, British feminist critics of the 1970s and early 1980s objected to the tendency of some North American critics to find universal or "essential" feminine attributes, arguing that differences of race, class, and culture gave rise to crucial differences among women across space and time. British feminist critics regarded their own critical practice as more political than that of North American feminists, emphasizing an engagement with historical process in order to promote social change. By the early 1990s, the French, American, and British approaches had so thoroughly critiqued, influenced, and assimilated one another that nationality no longer automatically signaled a practitioner’s approach. Today’s critics seldom focus on "woman" as a relatively monolithic category; rather, they view "women" as members of different societies with different concerns. Feminists of color, Third World (preferably called postcolonial) feminists, and lesbian feminists have stressed that women are not defined solely by the fact that they are female; other attributes (such as religion, class, and sexual orientation) are also important, making the problems and goals of one group of women different from those of another. Many commentators have argued that feminist criticism is by definition gender criticism because of its focus on the feminine gender. But the relationship between feminist and gender criticism is, in fact, complex; the two approaches are certainly not polar opposites but, rather, exist along a continuum of attitudes toward sex, sexuality, gender, and language. Adapted from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms by Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray. Copyright 1998 by Bedford Books. |
Other Critical Examinations of the Text...
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