•The unconscious

•The ego, the id, the superego (like a conscience)

•Repression

•Sublimation

•Manifest and latent content

•Displacement: how something stands in for something else

•Condensation: see how metaphor and metonymy are specifically literary forms of condensation.

•Repetition: see also neurosis, the neurotic subject and text

•Repression: Looking for the non-dit: the not said of the text—whether of characters, subject matter, theme, language use, imagery.

•Psychodramas e.g. Oedipus complex, castration anxiety

•The imago

•The split subject

•Transference

•Symptomatic reading, symptomatologies of the text

•Feminine: the qualities females are supposed to have according to their culture (e.g. passive, nurturing, selfless, masochistic, capricious): hence Beauvoir’s maxim: “One is not born, one becomes a woman”.  (And the same goes for men)

•Feminism: a political position, a political movement for women’s rights.

•The Other

•Gynocriticism: woman-centred criticism

•The writing of sexual difference

•The connection between writing and the body

•Texts interpellating the gendered subject (interpellating = hailing, addressing the reader e.g “Hey you…we’re about to do something sadistic to this female character...but you’re okay about it, right? Of course. Read on.”

•The grotesque (Jennings: Bakhtin)

•Liminality (Jennings: Julia Kristeva)

•The chora (Jennings: Julia Kristeva)

•Abjection (Jennings: Julia Kristeva)

•intersectionality

•Mimicry (Homi K. Bhabha) “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”

•Margins and centres: Paris, London, Berlin, New York vs……..

•Exile: physical, cultural, psychic: see Coetzee.

•The Other: how can the other speak? See Foe

•Hybridity: the blending of cultures and hence texts. Against ‘purity’

•Creole and creolisation: the mixing of two cultures. Originally, slaves born in ‘the New World’, then the settlers born there. And also has a regional meaning: e.g. the region around New Orleans, the Caribbean 

•The subaltern (Spivak: “Can the Subaltern Speak?”): broadly: a member of the colonised population (Mary Klages). For Spivak, the lowest strata of the colonised population e.g. the homeless, peasant women

•Eurocentrism

•Colonised, coloniser, colonial

•The slave

•Orientalism (Edward Said)

•The processes of imperialism, colonisation, decolonisation, neocolonialism, and postcolonialism.  Is Australia postcolonial? For whom? Who are the neo-colonial powers in the contemporary world?

•Decolonising literature

•Marx’s Thesis 11 on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

•Marx: Social being determines consciousness (cf. Williams). Where I am located in the terms of class determines the way in which I think/perceive the world. 

•Pierre Macherey: The text says what it cannot say. Similar to the “non-dit” (the not-said) of Lacanian literary approaches. For Fredric Jameson, this is the text’s “political unconscious.”

•Georg Lukács: literature should/can offer us a knowledge of the social totality (cf. Williams) and the representative figures of history, e.g. Walter Scott’s Waverley series. 

•Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect: literature/drama should work to estrange us (cf. Shklovsky)

•The major debate of the 20thC: what is the politically effective form of literature?: 

  social realism (Lukács) vs ‘modernism/a-effect/avant-garde approaches to literary representation (Adorno)
•Literature as an institution (cf. Eagleton) and as a process (industrial, artisanal, etc.— cf. Williams)

•Literature as revealing and reproducing class-based cultures of taste (cf. Bourdieu)

•Literature as a site of various ideologies

•The material conditions have some determining influence on what literature can be produced. Without time, leisure, and education, it’s hard to become a novelist. 

•The mode of production in the final instance determines the superstructure.

•Literature is historical: in its time of production, in its time of representation (its subject matter), and in its time of reception. Jameson: “Always historicise!”

 

Literary criticism: Arnold, Ransom, Kolodny

 

What is an author: Barthes, Foucault

 

How & why do we read literary texts: Fish, Iser

 

What is literary language: Bakhtin, Shklovksy

 

Where do texts come from: Freud, Barthes, Williams

 

What does it mean to say literature is an institution: Eagleton, Ngũgĩ

 

Does literature have anything to do with politics: Nussbaum, Said, Cixous

•The Canon (think, the Bible….)

•“Great Works”

•The autonomy of the aesthetic

•Taste 

•The aesthetic (disposition) 

•Distinction 

•The pure gaze 

•Literature (vs literature, vs fiction, vs writing)

•Form vs content (so formalism)

•New Criticism

•Second wave feminist criticism

•Disinterestedness

•Professionalism

•Scientific criticism

•Close reading (as a practice)

•Intentional fallacy

•Affective fallacy

•Aesthetic(s)

•Ideology

•Neutrality

•Paradigms

•Seeing the object in itself