Literary Theory

Ella, 21, Aus.                                                                                                             This is a tumblr for my Reading Journal for HEN301! It contains bits and pieces from the different theoretical concepts studied over the semester, along with some nice quotes and pictures that hopefully capture the essence of an undergrad sytuding Literary Theory.

[ella-the-feministkilljoy]

An incredible semester! I’ve made so many friends through English, and it will always be something that I am so grateful for 🌸

[different-landscapes]

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How to do a Posthumanist Reading:

How to do a posthumanist reading:

1. Forget we are human – imagine ourselves as an alien who is reading a novel for the first time about humans/earth

2. Identify how the human is constructed

3. Look for binaries

4. Identify where binaries are unstable, fragile and where they intersect

- Destabilise the purity of the category

5. Expose the ‘human’ as a cultural construct

[butteryplanet]

my cinemagraphs on instagram

[ella-the-feministkilljoy]

What is Queer Ecology?

Queer voices help expand the conversation, not just indigenous as challenging the heteronormative, western, white voice

Human animal split engenders violence – intersection of indigenous and queerness

Can make our sciences more multicultural and inclusive

Oppressed indigenous peoples share this with non-normative sexuality and gender – and have a shared desire to change the human/nonhuman binary and understand how this binary engenders violence

Came out of ecofeminism

Aims to disrupt prevailing heterosexist discursive and institutional articulations of sexuality and nature, and also to reimagine evolutionary processes, ecological interactions, and environmental politics in light of queer theory

Natural a politicised term, a red flag. Carries ideas of what the status quo is or what the norm should be. No nature outside of culture and no culture out of nature

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Charlee, the most beautiful cat in the world

I would die for her

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What is Animal Studies?

A new discipline that is cross disciplinary

1970s – animal liberation movement, welfare of animals, equality

Literature: Black Beauty – changed the way people thought about horses and animals (1877)

Humans being the voice for animals because they can’t talk

Connections between disciplines can only go so far, we always have to extrapolate on what we think animals might want

Prioritising one species over another, species membership has no moral significance

Feeling ‘seen’ by an animal 

Derrida interrogating binaries: the human/animal binary and what’s captured by the word ‘animal’

Intersectional theories to talk about animals

Theme of interrogating the boundary between the human and the animal, in regards to suffering and human intent

Animal agency: domestic animals – agency has been deconstructed, humans shaped by language and we shape that world, animals might also have agency in certain historical processes, human intention in agency 

[butteryplanet]

[ella-the-feministkilljoy]

Anthropocentrism

The Anthropocene and Anthropocentrism:

Stories of human impact 

Identify human acknowledgement – the privilege of being a human

Maximum impact: profound impact of humans on the planet

Start dates debated: Industrial revolution, agricultural revolution, bombing of Hiroshima (1945), colonialism (invasion of the Americas), the invention of plastics (consumerism more broadly), capitalism after WWII

The human now wields a geological force

How texts can be read and reread from different ecocritical perspectives

“In effect, the Anthropocene here names a necessarily vague but insidious border at which what used to be clear human goods begin to flip over into sources of degradation and environmental harm” (Timothy Clark 48).

Desires and anxieties – identifying the nonhuman creates anxieties – deconstructive reading

Identify hierarchies = human constructs  

[lovelysucculentss]

[octopocalyptic]

Ultimately, preservation of the non-human is a very personal crusade, a rejection of the homogenization of the world that threatens to diminish all, including the self. There is no such thing as an individual, only an individual-in-context, individual as a component of place, defined by place.

(my hero) Neil Evernden, “Beyond Ecology” (via octopocalyptic)

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What is Ecocriticism?

Mary Klages on ecocriticism:

“Ecocriticism asks: why do we privilege humans over nature? Can we really determine where nature ends and culture begins?” (141)

“Ecocriticism is a movement that is propelled more by ideology than methodology” (142)

“To better understand the prevailing ideology in ecocriticism, we can think in terms of centers” (142)

“Ecocritics have changed Western civilization with taking anthropocentrism as its center” (142).

“Ecocritics claim that anthropocentrism is often an implicit guiding force that dictates and guides how we think and how we act” (142).

[britneyshakespeare]

[ithelpstodream]

[ella-the-feministkilljoy]

What is Heteronormativity?

Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner Sex in Public 1996

“By heteronormativity we mean the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent – that is, organized as a sexuality – but also as privileged”

Heteronormativity has a close relationship with capitalism (reproduction and unpaid labour)

Heteronormativity is colonialist

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Judith Butler

Poststructuralist philosopher

Believes that feminism needs to work with ‘woman’ as a site of permanent political contestation

Identity is about doing, rather than being

Identity emerges through actions

Repeated actions create the “truth effect” of a stable gender identity

“Acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires, create the illusion of an interior and organized gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive sexuality” 

Gender is a performance that we believe in

Gender is socially produced: not natural, but we repeat them so much that they become natural. This repetition is expressing an interior essence that’s an illusion

Normative manifestation of masculinity and femininity and how that maintains notions of heterosexuality and its place in our culture

[zephyrvos]

Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble” explained through cats.