Screw Authority! Introduction to Literary Theory

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Power

“Omnipresence of power: not at all because it regroups everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced at every instant, at every point, or moreover in every relation between one point and another. Power is everywhere: not that it engulfs everything, but that it comes from everywhere (Foucault, 1976)”

This quote was important to me because it relates what gives meaning to elements with something that is intangible but always present. Often meaning is tied to something that can be seen or experienced however power is different in that it can only be felt, and it is always in flux. Power is something that relates 2 things, it is meaningless if it does not act on anything.

-Chintan

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Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?

“What would critique do if it could be associated with more, not with less, with multiplication, not subtraction. Critical theory died away long ago; can we become critical again, in the sense here offered by Turing? That is, generating more ideas than we have received, inheriting from a prestigious critical tradition but not letting it die away, or “dropping into quiescence” like a piano no longer struck. This would require that all entities, including computers, cease to be objects defined simply by their inputs and outputs and become again things, mediating, assembling, gathering many more folds than the “united four.” If this were possible then we could let the critics come ever closer to the matters of concern we cherish, and then at last we could tell them: “Yes, please, touch them, explain them, deploy them.”

- Shivani

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Resistance to Theory - De Man

The only teaching worth of the name is scholarly, not personal; analogies between teaching and various aspects of show business or guidance counseling are more often than not excuses for having abdicated the task. Scholarship has, in principle, to be eminently teachable . In the case of literature, such scholarship involves at least two complementary areas: historical and philological facts as the preparatory condition for understanding. and methods of reading or interpretation.

- Ian

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Deconstruction and The Death of the Author

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual. We never encounter a state where man is separated from language, which he then elaborates in order to 'express' what is happening to him: it is language which teaches the definition of man, not the contrary.

- Ian

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Master of Suspicion - The Communist Manifesto

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

- Ian

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Cathedral

“So we kept on with it. His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now. Then he said, “I think that’s it. I think you got it,” he said. “Take a look. What do you think?” But I had my eyes closed. I thought I’d keep them that way for a little longer. I thought it was something I ought to do. “Well?” he said. “Are you looking?” My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything. “It’s really something,” I said.”

- Ian 

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Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

“Initially Menard’s method was to be relatively simple: Learn Spanish, return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor or Turk, forget the history of Europe from 1602 to 1918- be Miguel De Cervantes.  Pierre Menard weighed that course... but he discarded it as too easy.  Too impossible, rather!, the reader will say. Quite so but the undertaking was impossible from the outset, and of all the impossible ways of bringing it about, this was the least interesting.”

- Ian

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Death, Evil, and Non-Being

“The other face of evil appears exactly the opposite. This kind of evil wants to destroy non-being rather than create it. It sees non-being as slimy, impure, and insidious, a nameless threat to one's integrity of selfhood. This dreadful infiltration of one's identity has no palpable form in itself, and thus provokes paranoia in its supposed victims. It is everywhere and nowhere” (Eagleton 217).

- Shivani

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Death as a socially inept/discourteous friend.

“Death may not be exactly a friend, but neither is it entirely an enemy. Like a friend it can enlighten me about myself, though like an enemy it does so in ways I would on the whole rather not hear. It can remind me of my creatureliness and finitude, of the fragile, ephemeral nature of my existence, of my own neediness and the vulnerability of others. By learning from this, we can turn facts into values... death can become less daunting.... [Death] is indeed out to tear us apart; but in the process it can intimate to us something of how to live” (Eagleton 211). 

-Dan

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Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam

“I want to show that while the Enlightenment profited largely from the disposition of a very powerful descriptive tool, that of matters of fact, which were excellent for debunking quite a lot of beliefs, powers, and illusions, it found itself totally disarmed once matters of fact, in turn, were eaten up by the same debunking impetus.”

-Tim

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“After Theory” -Terry Eagleton

“It is the very fact that we cannot live in the present-- that the present for us is always part of an unfinished project-- which converts our lives from chronicles to narratives”

-Gabrielle Smith

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“After Theory”-Terry Eagleton

“Death is both alien and intimate to us, neither wholly strange nor purely one’s own. To this extent, one’s relationship to it resembles one’s relationship to other people, who are likewise both fellows and strangers. Death may not be exactly a friend, but neither it is entirely an enemy.” (211)

-Ramona

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There are, you intimate, those who can't face their sexual desires (or, correlatively, the relation between those desires and their views of sex), and those who know that such a relation exists and who are presumably unafraid of their own sexual impulses. Rather, I'm interested in something else, something both camps have in common, which may be a certain aversion, an aversion that is not the same thing as repression and that can coexist quite comfortably with, say, the most enthusiastic endorsement of polysexuality with multiple sex partners.

Shivani 

I find the “aversion” Bersani brings attention to interesting as he uses aversion to introduce a sort of connection between two seemingly opposing views of sex.      

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Death, Evil and Non-being

“If we were able to live on the spot, our existence would no doubt be a good deal less agitated that it is. But to bite the present moment to the core, in the words of the poet Edward Thomas, would be to experience a kind of eternity. As Wittgenstein saw, eternity, if it is anywhere, must be here and now. And eternity is not for us. With humans, there is always more being where that came from. We are not-yet rather than a now. Our life is one of desire, which hollows our existence to the core.” (109)

I feel as though this “life of desire” could be lives that both the frelks and spacers live. Frelks living the life the of sexual desire, whereas the spacers live a life to desire to have an understanding, something more intellectual and emotional. And this idea of “eternity” is both the frelks and spacers having that desire never be fulfilled. 

-Jay

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Is the Rectum a Grave?

“What a morbid, even horrendous, yet perhaps sensible suggestion: only when the ‘general public’ is threatened can whatever the opposite of a general public is hope to get adequate attention and treatment” (203)

This reminds me of a case of the Subject versus the Other.

-Caitlin

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Is the Rectum a Grave

“To deliver such opinions and arguments is of course not the same thing as pointing a gun at your son's head, but since, as it has often been said, the failure to guarantee confidentiality will discourage people from taking the test and thereby make it more difficult to control the spread of the virus, the only conclusion we can draw is that Secretary Otis R.” (201)

Although present day America is more open to supporting homosexuals, unfortunately, there are still people out there that would deliver such arguments and say such terrible things that it would be like pointing a gun to someones head.

- Amanda

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The "gaze" has always been political in my life. Imagine the terror felt by the child who has come to understand through repeated punishments that one's gaze can be dangerous. The child who has learned so well to look the  other way when necessary. Yet when punished, the child is told by parents, "Look at me when I talk to you". Only, the child is afraid to look. Afraid to look, but fascinated by the gaze.

Bell Hooks 

It is interesting to consider here that “the oppositional gaze” is something taught and learned to develop within a person. In that case, the “oppositional gaze” could be one’s own gaze.  

Shivani