5 TH SEMESTER BA ENGLISH

CALICUT UNIVERSITY

LITERARY THEORY
(2019 Admission)

PREPARED BY
Asha P
Asst Professor
Dept of English
COURSE CODE : ENG5B08
TITLE OF THE COURSE : LITERARY THEORY
SEMESTER IN WHICH THE COURSE IS TO BE TAUGHT 5
NO. OF CREDITS : 4
NO. OF CONTACT HOURS : 90 hrs (5 hrs/ week)
AIM OF THE COURSE

To introduce the students to the history and principles of literary theory and thereby to
enhance the vision of students by introducing them to newest developments in theory.
OBJECTIVES OF THE COURSE
a. To cultivate among the students an understanding of important texts and movements in the
history of literary theory.
b. To enable the learners to critically approach literature and culture in the context of theory.
c. To enrich the students through various perspectives of thinking and critique the major
arguments presented in theory.
d. To promote a pluralistic perspective of culture and literature in a multicultural society.

Module 1 - Liberal Humanism versus Theory

1. Liberal Humanism: Dominant aspects of Liberal humanism with examples
2. Literary Theory: Dominant aspects of literary theory with examples. Linguistic Turn –
Critical turn – Paradigm shift.
Module 2: Structuralism, Poststructuralism and Psychoanalysis
1. Structuralism: Saussure - Sign, Signifier, Signified – Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland
Barthes – Structuralist narratology.
2. 2. Poststructuralism: Derrrida, Logocentrism, Aporia, Decentering
3. Psychoanalytic Theory: Unconscious. Freud – Id, Ego, Superego, Oedipus Complex.
Lacan – Imaginary, Symbolic, Real, Mirror Stage.
Module 3: Marxism, Cultural Studies, Cultural Materialism and New Historicism
1. Marxism: Base, Superstructure, Materialism, ideology. The Frankfurt School – Culture
industry. Antonio Gramsci – The formation of the intellectuals, Subaltern. Louis Althusser –
Ideological State apparatus and Interpellation.
2. Cultural Studies: Culturalism, New Left, CCCS, Raymond Williams’ definition of
Culture, Structure of feeling, Stuart Hall and the ‘popular’, and the two paradigms of Cultural
Studies.
3. Cultural Materialism & New Historicism: Marxist framework of Culture and History,
Historiography, Foucauldian notion of Power, Difference with Old Historicism, Stephen
Greenblatt, Louis Montrose
Module 4: Feminism and Queer Theory
1. Feminism: The three waves in feminism, Gynocriticism, French Feminism - Ecriture
feminine, Sexual Politics, Marxist Feminism, Lesbian Feminism, Backlash, Black Feminism,
Dalit Feminism, Postfeminism, Womanism.
2. Queer Theory: Social constructionism of gender and sexuality, LGBTIQ, Transgender
identity
Module 5: Postmodernism, Postcolonialism, and Ecocriticism
1. Postcolonialism: Eurocentrism, Orientalism, Alterity, Diaspora, Hybridity, Uncanny,
Strategic Essentialism, Subaltern Studies, Postcolonial Critique of Nationalism.
2. Postmodernism: Critique of Enlightenment and Universalism, Habermas’s notion of
Modernity as an Incomplete Project, Lyotard’s concept of incredulity towards metanarratives,
Baudrillard’s ideas of Simulation, Simulacra and hyperreality, Brian McHale’s concept of
Postmodernist literatures.
3. Ecocriticism: Anthropocentrism, Shallow Ecology vs Deep Ecology, Environmental
Imagination, Ecofeminism
MODULE – 1
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF LITERARY THEORY
• It is not easy to define what literature is. There are many elements in literature such as
poetry, prose, drama, novel etc. Also, individual ideas and perception about literature
differs from person to person. Literature can be simply defined as creative or
imaginative writing. Literature is a discourse which is objective, interpretive and
value based. Literature is also a narrative to present human conditions, thoughts,
ideas, emotions and philosophy aesthetically.
• Liberal humanism is a philosophical and literary movement in which man and his
capabilities are the central concerns. It is also a movement that recognizes the value of
life and the human being. It also recognizes the right to dignity, liberty and happiness
of the human beings.
• There are some aspects to liberal humanism that have been made into what is called
the 'ten tenets'. They are:
• Good literature is timeless, transcendent and speaks to what is constant in human
nature
• Literary text contains its own meaning (not in subordinate reference to a socio-
political, literary-historical, or autobiographical context)
• Text therefore studied in isolation without ideological assumptions or political
conditions—goal of close verbal analysis to 'see the object as in itself it really is'
(Matthew Arnold pace Kant)
• Human nature unchanging—continuity valued over innovation
• Individuality as essence securely possessed by each 'transcendent subject' distinct
from forces of society, experience, and language
• Purpose of literature to enhance life in a non-programmatic (non-propagandistic) way
• Form and content fused organically in literature
• 'Sincerity' resides within the language of literature, noted by avoidance of cliché or
inflated style so that the distance/difference between words and things is abolished
• 'Showing' valued over 'telling'—concrete enactment better than expository
explanation
• Criticism should interpret the text unencumbered by theorizing, by preconceived
ideas—must trust instead to direct, empirical, sensory encounter text (Lockean
legacy)
• Literary theory refers to any principles derived from internal analysis of literary texts
or from knowledge external to the text that can be applied in multiple interpretive
situations.
• The phrase linguistic turn actually was coined by the philosopher Gustav Bergman, a
former member of the Vienna circle, who made an effort to reformulate philosophy
with regard to syntax and interpretation and was given new currency by the American
philosopher Richard Rowthy .

• The cultural turn builds further on the criticism of the Linguistic turn. The difference
between the cultural turn and the Linguistic turn is that the linguistic turn is focused
on language and language as action, Where the cultural turn is focused on culture
and society as a whole.

MODULE – 2

STRUCTURALISM, POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

Structuralism
• Structuralism and poststructuralism originated in France in the 1950s. Language and
philosophy are the major concerns of these two approaches, rather than history or
author.
• Structuralism, in a broader sense, is a way of perceiving the world in terms of
structures. First seen in the work of the Claude Levi-Strauss and the literary
critic Roland Barthes, the essence of Structuralism is the belief that “things cannot be
understood in isolation, they have to be seen in the context of larger structures they
are part of”, The contexts of larger structures do not exist by themselves, but are
formed by our way of perceiving the world.
• The first argument of Structuralism is that language has a structure. If it were not so,
if language was not bound by grammatical rules, it is difficult to see how speakers
could give a common meaning to words and sentences.
• The master of structuralist linguistics is the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Most of the
theoretical premises of Structuralism is built upon Saussure’s theories.
 • Roman Jakobson who developed the structuralist theory on Phonology and Noam Chomsky
for developing structuralist theory in grammar.

Ferdinand de Saussure

• The first argument of Structuralism is that language has a structure. Structuralists

propose that meaning requires structure.
• Saussure distinguished between language and speaking. Which is in French known as the
difference between Langue and Parole.
• Parole is a single meaningful utterance, spoken or written. The Langue is the implicit
system of elements, of distinctions and oppositions, and of principles of combinations,
which make it possible, within a language community, for a speaker to produce and the
auditor to understand a particular Parole.
• Language changes over time. Saussure says that a linguist should undertake a synchronic
study of langue instead of diachronic.
• Diachronic study of language would look at the changes in a language over a span of
time. What a word meant back in the day and how it evolved over time and what it
means today. Synchronic linguistics would study the “systematic interrelations of the
components of a single language at a particular time.”
• Language is a system of signs. Each sign (single word) consists of two parts a signifier
(the speech sounds or written marks composing the sign) and signified (the conceptual
meaning of the sign). Saussure insists that the world’s different languages teach us that
there is no necessary relation between signifier and signified. The relation between a
sound and a concept is purely “conventional” based on a history of accepted usage and
consensus, neither of which have any natural basis.

Roland Barthes
• Barthes’ concept of myth has a tridimensional pattern where the signified of the first
order signification becomes the signifier of the second order signification, through the
operation of differance.
• Barthes deviates from Saussure’s idea that the relation between the signifier and the
signified is arbitrary and argues that the connection between the two is a process that
gets naturalised over a period of time.
• Barthes in “From Work to Text” differentiates between the “work” and the “text”,
arguing that the “text” is not stable and fixed, but fluid, multilayered and
interdisciplinary.
• Text manifests endless postponement of the signified, which is revealed through
disconnections, overlappings and variations. Thus, the text is metonymic, decentred,
open to endless investigation, comprised of differance, emanating from disjoint
heterogeneous perspectives and held in intertextuality. Such a text is termed as the
writerly text.
• The readerly text gives pleasure in the comfort and security of reading, then the
writerly text gives ecstatic ‘enjoyment.

Claude Levi-Strauss
 • Claude Levi-Strauss (1908 – 2009) is widely regarded as the father of structural
anthropology.
• Levi-Strauss proposed a methodological means of discovering these rules—through the identification
of binary oppositions. The structuralist paradigm in anthropology suggests that the structure of human
thought processes is the same in all cultures, and that these mental processes exist in the form of
binary oppositions.
Narratology

• Narratology, in literary theory is the study of narrative structure.

• Originally established by Tzevan Todorov, narratology is defined (by him) as the
theory of the structures of narrative.

Poststructuralism

• Poststructuralism, movement in literary criticism and philosophy begun in France in the late 1960s.
• Roland Barthes (in his later phase of thought), Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and
Julia Kristeva are the prominent poststructuralist thinkers.

Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction

• Jacques Derrida, who coined the term deconstruction, argues that in Western culture,
people tend to think and express their thoughts in terms of binary oppositions .
• Differance is a pun on “difference” and “deferment”, and is that attribute of language, by which
meaning is generated because of a word’s difference from other words in a signifying system, and at
the same time, meaning is inevitably and infinitely deferred or postponed, is constantly under erasure
and can be glimpsed only through “aporias” or deadlocks in understanding.
• Aporia plays a big part in the work of deconstruction. Derrida, who use the term to describe a text's
most doubtful or contradictory moment. It's the point at which the text has hit a brick wall when it
comes to meaning. It has contradicted itself one too many times, and now it's at an impasse.
• Derrida’s formulation of “ecriture” emerges from his criticism of the most significant binaries of
speech and writing. in an attempt to reorient the established hierarchy of speech over writing, (what he
called logocentrism), Derrida conceptualised ecriture as any system that is characterised by differance
and absence.
Psychoanalytic Theory
 • Psychoanalysis is defined as a set of psychological theories and therapeutic methods which have their
origin in the work and theories of Sigmund Freud.
• The primary assumption of psychoanalysis is the belief that all people possess unconscious thoughts,
feelings, desires, and memories.
Sigmund Freud and the Unconscious

• Psychoanalysis is the study of unconscious.

• Three levels of human psyche – id, ego and superego.
• Id – repository of our basic instincts which is dark and chaotic.
Ego – structured level of logic and reason.
Super ego – surface level of our consciousness.
• Oedipus complex – the desire of the infant to the parent of the opposite sex.
Carl Gustav Jung

• Founder of analytical psychology.

• According to Jung, the ego represents the conscious mind as it comprises the
thoughts, memories, and emotions a person is aware of. The ego is largely responsible
for feelings of identity and continuity.
• The collective unconscious is a universal version of the personal unconscious, holding
mental patterns, or memory traces, which are shared with other members of human
species. These ancestral memories, which Jung called archetypes, are represented by
universal themes in various cultures, as expressed through literature, art, and dreams.
Jacques Lacan

• central pillar of Lacan's psychoanalytic theory is that “the unconscious is structured like a language”.
• In the 1950s, Lacan developed the idea of the “symbolic register,” that part of human
existence that includes language, culture, laws, traditions, rituals, and religion.
• He developed three stages in the development of human psyche. Theyt are :
The Mirror Stage / Imaginary stage

• According to Lacan, when the infant stumbles upon a mirror (see Mirror), she is suddenly bombarded
with an image of herself as whole – whereas she previously experienced existence as a fragmented
entity with libidinal needs. The image itself in the mirror is described by Lacan as the "Ideal-I"
Symbolic stage

• The symbolic involves the formation of signifiers and language and is considered to
be the "determining order of the subject". Seeing the entire system of the
 unconscious/conscious as manifesting in an endless web of signifiers/ieds and
associations.
The Real

• in Lacanian theory the real becomes that which resists representation, what is pre-
mirror, pre-imaginary, pre-symbolic – what cannot be symbolized – what loses it’s
"reality" once it is symbolized (made conscious) through language. It is "the aspect
where words fail" .
MODULE – 3
Marxism, Cultural Studies, Cultural Materialism and New Historicism
Marxism

• Marxism is a social, political, and economic theory originated by Karl Marx, which
focuses on the struggle between capitalists and the working class.
• Marx wrote that the power relationships between capitalists and workers were
inherently exploitative and would inevitably create class conflict.

Frankfurt School of Marxism

• The Frankfurt School, also known as the Institute of Social Research (Institut für
Sozialforschung),, is a social and political philosophical movement of thought located in
Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
• Some of the most prominent figures of the first generation of Critical Theorists are Max
Horkheimer (1895-1973), Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979),
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Friedrich Pollock (1894-1970), Leo Lowenthal (1900-1993),
Eric Fromm (1900-1980)
• Theodor Adorno recalls that Max Horkheimer and he first coined the term "culture
industry" in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972; first published in
Amsterdam in 1947). The specific reference is to an essay entitled "The Culture
Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception."
• Horkheimer and Adorno used the term to describe a commodified and industrialized
culture, managed from above and essentially produced for the sake of making profits.
 Antonio Gramsci

• Italian intellectual and founder of the Italian Communist Party.

• A hegemonic class is one that is able to attain the consent of other social forces,
and the retention of this consent is an ongoing project.
• Gramsci's theory of hegemony is tied to his conception of the capitalist state. ...
Gramsci proffers that under modern capitalism the bourgeoisie can maintain its
economic control by allowing certain demands made by trade unions and mass
political parties within civil society to be met by the political sphere.
• Subaltern, meaning “of inferior rank”, is a term adopted by Antonio Gramsci to
refer to those working-class people in Soviet Union who are subject to the
hegemony of the ruling classes. Subaltern classes may include peasants, workers
and other groups denied access to hegemonic power.
• For him, the history of the subaltern social groups is necessarily fragmented and
episodic, since they are always subject to the activity of the ruling groups, even
when they rebel.

Louis Althusser

• One central concept in Althusser’s writings is ideology. Early on, Althusser had
argued that ideology is a “system of representations” governed by rules that serve
political ends. Ideology, in Althusser’s view at this time, was a matter of the
unconscious, inescapable even by the dominant class.
• Althusser implies that there is no inherent meaning in the individual. There are no
individuals: only subjects, who come into being when they are hailed or interpellated
by ideology.
• This act of hailing the subject is effected by what Althusser terms “Ideological State
Apparatuses” (ISAs). While Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs), such as the police
force and military, function primarily by repression, ISAs are churches, schools,
families, religion, and other entities in the private domain and function primarily by
ideology. RSAs show themselves rarely; ISAs are commonly accepted features of a
society. ISAs reinforce the hegemonic rule of the dominant class by replicating its
dominant ideology. According to Althusser, schools are a particularly important ISA
 because teachers hold captive the undivided attention of their students in what is
supposedly a neutral environment, thus rendering the content taught “obvious.”

Cultural Studies

• Cultural studies is a field of theoretically, politically, and empirically engaged cultural

analysis that concentrates upon the political dynamics of contemporary culture, its
historical foundations, defining traits, conflicts, and contingencies.
• It emerged out of a perceived necessity on the part of two of its founding figures, Raymond Williams
and Richard Hoggart. It came to fruition, however, in circumstances that, as its third founding figure
Stuart Hall often acknowledged, contested its legitimacy.
• The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies refers to the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies (CCCS), which was housed at Birmingham University from 1964.
Raymond Williams

• Raymond Henry Williams (August 31, 1921 – January 26, 1988) was a Welsh academic, novelist
and critic.
• Culture is seen as a fixed body of material that we inherit from the past; and the

function of education is simply to pass this on to succeeding generations.

New Left

• New Left, a broad range of left-wing activist movements and intellectual currents that arose in
western Europe and North America in the late 1950s and early ’60s.
• In the United States the New Left grew out of student socialist activism, especially as it intersected
with, and was inspired by, the African American civil rights movement.
Stuart Hall

• Founder of the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies (CCCS)

• Hall derived the concept of encoding-decoding model of communication.
• According to Hall two paradigms within cultural studies are culturalism and structuralism.
• Culturalism believes that the “lived experience” of humam beings determines culture.
• Structuralism believes that humam experience itself is shaped by the underlying structures in the
society.
New Historicism
 • A critical approach developed in the 1980s in the writings of Stephen Greenblatt. It
emphasizes the cultural context in which text is produced, rather than focusing on the
formal structure of the text itself.
• A mode of critical analysis that focuses on the text as a site of power relations.
• Paid attention to the historical, social, economic context of a literary text.
• It believes that power is everywhere and the task of the critic is to reveal the workings
and different forms of power within the texts from the past.
• To understand a literary text, critics need to first understand the author's background
and the cultural context in which the work was produced.
• Stephen Greenblatt is credited with launching New Historicism. He first used the term
’new historicism' in his work, The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (1982).
• Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980)
does a New Historicist reading of Renaissance plays.
• New Historicism is a return to history - the cultural and social context within which
literature are produced.
Cultural materialism

• A term coined by Raymond Williams.

• According to Graham Wilderness cultural materialism is 'apoliticised form of

Historiography’.

• Emphasis on the historical and material conditions of the production and reception of
texts.
• Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield summarize the critical method of the cultural
materialist. Their practice is marked by the following: Historical context, theoretical
method, political commitment and textual analysis.

• Peter Barry, in Beginning Theory observes three areas of difference from new
historicism: in attitude, in theory and in practice.

MODULE – 4
Feminism and Queer Theory
Feminism
 • Feminism is the strong belief and feeling that women should have the same rights and
opportunities as men and also the struggle to achieve this greater goal. Feminism as a
moment became popular in the 1960s. It aimed at liberating women from various
gender-based discrimination and exploitation.
• Feminism is both a political stance and a theory that focuses on gender as a subject of
analysis when reading cultural practices and as a platform to demand equality, rights
and justice. Feminist literary criticism draws a link between: -The representation of
women in art and -The real, material conditions in which they live.
• In her A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) Wollstonecraft rejected the
established view that women are naturally weaker or inferior to men. She was one of
the first thinkers to propose that gender roles are not nature al but social.
• The history of feminism can be categorized into three waves:
• The first wave feminism refers mainly to women’s suffrage movements of the 19th
and early20th century.
• The second wave refers to the ideas and actions associated with the women’s
liberation movements beginning in the 1960s.
• The third wave feminism refers to a continuation of, and a reaction to the perceived
failures of second wave feminism, beginning in the 1990s.
First wave Feminism -Key concerns

• Women’s suffrage

• the right to education

• better working condition
• marriage and property laws
Second Wave Feminism: Key concerns

• raising consciousness about patriarchy and sexism

• raising consciousness about gender-based violence, domestic abuse and marital rape
• inequalities in the work place
• legalizing abortion and birth control
• sexual liberation of women
Third Wave Feminism: Key points:

• Intersectionality
 • The diversity of women is recognized and emphasize is placed on identity, gender,
race, nation, social order and sexual preferences
• Changes on stereotypes, media portrayals and language used to define women
• Sexual identities
Gynocriticism

• Gynocriticism was a term coined by Elaine Show alters (1979) to describe critical
responses that accounted for the women author as a producer of texts and meanings.
She defines gynocriticism as a concern with, "women as writers….the history, styles,
themes, genres and structures of writing by women; the psychodynamics of female
creativity; the trajectory of the individual or collective female career; and the
evolution and laws of a female literary tradition".
• Gynocriticism has sought to uncover particular modes of women's writing by positing
the women's experience as being at the centre of both writing and criticism.
Marxists Feminism and Radical Feminism

• Two of the influential categories of feminism. While the former is trans-historical, the
latter was a product of the second wave feminism.
• Inspired by the writings of Marx and Engels, Marxist feminism investigates the
myriad ways in which women are oppressed through systems of capitalism and
private property.
• According to them, women's liberation can only be achieved by dismantling the
capitalist system in which they live. They claim that it is impossible for women to
achieve true freedom in a class-based capitalist society.
• Radical feminism, on the other hand, saw patriarchal oppression that exists in all
societies as the original reason for the gender injustice in the world.
• Emphasis the patriarchal root of inequality between man and woman. Central issues
engaged by radical Feminism: 1. breaking down the traditional gender roles in private
as well as public sphere. 2. Understanding pornography as an industry and practice
leading to harm women. 3. Understanding rape as an expression of patriarchal power.
4. Understanding prostitution under patriarchy as the oppression of women sexually
and economically.
Postfeminism

• Postfeminism refers to a backlash against the second wave of feminism.

 • Postfeminism proclaims the idea of men as lovers, husbands and fathers.
• Tried to formulate feminist practices inclusive of race, class, gender and sexuality.
Unlike the previous waves this phase did not have a single objective.
Lesbian Feminism

• Lesbian Feminism arose as a resistance to the second wave feminism which

essentialized all women and men as heterosexual.
• A subset of feminism that emerged in the 1979-70.
• They consider same sex relationship legitimate and they challenges the perception of
heterosexuality and male supremacy.
• According to lesbian Feminists, the only true Feminists are lesbians because they
choose women as sexual partners. Heterosexuality, to them, is a firm of sexual as
well as political subordination to patriarchy.
• Some of the slogans of lesbian feminism popularized were "feminism is the
complaint, lesbianism is the solution"; "feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the
practice"; and “an army of lovers cannot fail".
Black Feminism

• Aim to empower black women with a new and critical ways of thinking that cantered
how racism and sexism worked together to create black women's social issues and
inequalities.
• A significant aspect of Black Feminism is intersectionality.
• Anna Julia Cooper's 'A Voice from the South (1892)' is considered as one of the
original texts of black feminism.
• Alice Walker was the first person to use the word ' womenism' in 1979 (a black
feminist theory). Her 'In Search of Our Mother's Garden' proposed a new facet of
black feminism known as 'womenism' which stressed the collective bonding of all
women, irrespective of race, creed and class.
• While Feminism places priority on women, womenism' incorporates 'racial, cultural,
sexual, national, economic and political consideration.
Queer Theory and LGBT Literature

• Came from the critical and cultural context of post structuralism, feminism and Gay
Liberation Movement in the 1970s worked with two main objectives: to resist
 persecution and discrimination against a sexual minority, and to encourage gay
people themselves to develop a pride in their sexual identities.
• It's about trying to understand different kinds of sexual desires and how the cultures
define them.
• Italian feminist and film critic Teresa de Lauretis coined the term queer theory. Main
goal is to deconstruct the existing monolithic social norms.
MODULE 5
Postcolonialism, Postmodernism and Ecocriticism
Postcolonialism

• A critical analysis of the history, culture, literature and modes of discourse on the
Third World countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean Islands and South America,
postcolonialism concerns itself with the study of the colonization, the decolonization,
and the neocolonising process. It critiques cultural hierarchies and the Eurocentrism
of modernity.
• The major theoretical works in postcolonial theory include The Wretched of the Earth
(1961) by Franz Fanon, Orientalism (1978) by Edward Said, In Other Worlds (1987)
by Gayatri Spivak, The Empire Writes Back (1989) by Bill Ashcroft et al, Nation and
Narration (1990) by Homi K Bhabha, and Culture and Imperialism (1993) by Edward
Said.
• The origin of postcolonial criticism can be traced to Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of
the Earth published in French in 1961.
• Robert Young describes Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak as the
Holy Trinity of postcolonial theory.
• Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) can be said to inaugurate real postcolonial
criticism.
• A major element in the post colonial agenda is to destablish Eurocentric norms of
literary and artistic values.
• Homi K. Bhabha, the second influential theorist of postcolonialism uses Lacanian
psychoanalytic principles, Foucault's discourses of power and Derrida's poststructural
theories to describe the ways in which colonized people resisted the empire.
• In the Location of Culture, he formulates the theoretical concepts such as mimicry,
ambivalence and hybridity.
 • One of his central idea hybridity describes the emergence of new cultural forms from
multiculturalism.
• Mimicry - appears when members of a colonized society imitate and take on the
culture of the colonizers. (Imitation of the colonizer by the colonized). Mimicry
demonstrates an ambivalent relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. The
colonized subject mimics the colonizer by adopting the colonizer’s cultural habits,
language, attire, values etc. In doing so, he mocks and parodies the colonizer.
• Gayatri Spivak, another theorist whose work with poststructuralism, feminism and
Marxism has resulted in postcolonial studies.
• Spivak adapts the notion of the subaltern, meaning the oppressed class, from Antonio
Gramsci in order to theorize the condition of the native within colonialism and
women in postcolonial state.
• Spivak's most- quoted essay is her 'Can the Subaltern Speak?'
Postmodernism

• a late 20th-century movement

• The very term Postmodernism implies a relation to Modernism. Modernism was an
earlier aesthetic movement which was in vogue in the early decades of the twentieth
century. It has often been said that Postmodernism is at once a continuation of and a
break away from the Modernist stance.
• Modernism and Postmodernism give voice to the insecurities, disorientation and
fragmentation of the 20th century western world.
• Both Modernism and Postmodernism employ fragmentation, discontinuity and
decentredness in theme and technique.
• The term postmodernism was first used in the 1960s by the critics such as Leslie
Fielder and Ihab Hassan for the change sensibility that occurred during the period.
Arnold Toynbee became the first person to use the term outside the specific literary
critical sense when he announced in 1947 that we were entering the postmodern age.
• Bean Francois Lyotard, one of the most important early theoretician of
postmodernism. He used the word "postmodern" to describe the condition of
knowledge in the most highly developed societies.
• Another important theoretician is Frederic Jameson.
• A keynote feature of postmodernism is the fading of boundaries between genres.
Ecocriticism
• A study of literature and environment.
• Officially heralded by the publication two seminal works, The Ecocriticism : Reader,
edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, and The Environmental Imagination,
by Lawrence Buell.
• Ecocriticism investigates the relation between humans and the natural world in
literature. One of main goals is to study how individuals in society behave and react in
relation to nature and ecological aspects.
• Known by a number of other designations, including "green studies", "ecopoetics",
"and environmental literary criticism".
• Deep ecology and ecofeminism were two important developments.
• These new ideas questioned the notion of "development" and "modernity" and argued
that all Western notions were "anthropocentric" (human-centered) and "androcentric"
(man/male-centered)