Feminist literary criticism

In her book, “A Poetics of Postmodernism”, Linda Hutcheon identifies the term postmodernism, when used in fiction, to describe fiction that is at once metafictional and historical in the way it presents the texts and contexts of the past (Hutcheon, 40). This is what she calls historiographic metafiction. Most of the historiographic novels emphasize self-reflexivity and our paradoxical relations to past events. Historiographic metafiction somehow acknowledges the paradox of the past, that is to…

of many tragic events. In Shakespeare's play, The Tempest, the idea of the abuse of power is a reoccurring theme that emerges throughout the play. While reading The Tempest, one notices that Shakespeare often uses literary theory to reveal the theme much more. By looking at many literary theories, one specifically being postcolonial theory, one can see the harsh abuse of power, which most readers don’t see; this is important because it shows not only what was happening then but what is happening…

The speeches in Thucydides are critical to the narrative of his History as they provide another perspective on the general context and reveal both the characters of the key protagonists and their intentions. The Sicilian books demonstrate their particular importance where they become a powerful influence on the outcome of the war, notably the two speeches of Alcibiades. Thucydides himself explains: ’of the various speeches made either when war was imminent or in the course of the war itself, it…

In “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading”, Eve Sedgwick, attempts to evaluate the current modes of interpretation, not to criticize the methodologies, but instead illuminate the actualities of monopolistic forms of interpretation and its imposing effect on the utilization of an equally valid alternative. That form of interpretation is called paranoid reading. Eve Sedgwick begins the essay with a personal story of her casual experience with paranoid reading. Through that experience, Sedgwick…

To interpret a passage responsibly and reflectively, one must study the literary context around the passage. By literary context I mean how the context shapes the meaning of the text. If we know it or not, each time we come to a text, we are already implying our presuppositions about what we know. More than often, our presuppositions are incorrect because we receive them from our present day in age and not that of the day the text was written. We need to throw these out, and study the text…

The author in “Why Literature Matters” is saying that recently people have stopped literature. And the author states this in paragraph two. Also the author in order to backup her claim uses a lot of Ethos, Logos, and Pathos In the first half of “Why Literature Matters” the author uses logos to support her claim that people have stopped reading literature. Like when she says “According to the 2002 survey of public participation for the arts.” She got facts from them to help make her argument…

Gender Theory is a lens that can be applied to a novel by analyzing male and female characters. It involves analyzing gender roles, stereotypes, etc. In the novel In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez, there are different roles assigned to women and men. In the time that the novel took place in, women had the role to be obedient wives and good mothers. Men had the role to wear the pants in the relationship. Some characters in the novel conform to the roles that are given to them, but…

that others are incorrect and/or irrelevant limits the value that can be interpreted from the piece. Here the intentional fallacy comes into play, the idea that a work is a separate entity from the creator and their own ideas and so assessments of literary works by readers are more important than those by the author. The original intent is discounted or restricted and instead the audience is at liberty…

1.1 A Postcolonial Aesthetic? This thesis seeks to contribute to the dialogue on the postcolonial aesthetic, by using concepts raised in Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (1975) as a frame, through which to interrogate the ostensibly thorny issue of aesthetics in postcolonial writing. The idea behind this thesis stems from a reading of Elleke Boehmer’s essay “A Postcolonial Aesthetic” (2010), in which she questions the viability of approaching postcolonial fiction through its “aesthetic,…

In his article “The Resistance of Theory,” Paul de Man argues that literary theory is fundamentally resistant by exploring ideas around history, philosophy science, and aesthetics. He also uses the functions of language, both grammatically and semantically, to support his claim. Unlike previous theorists, de Man’s argument is more generally concerned with the reading of literary theory, rather than a theory that can be applied to a piece of literature. Despite his divergence from convention, de…