Feminist Criticism

Feminist Criticism

Feminism is a diverse collection of social theories, political movements, and moral philosophies, largely motivated by or concerning the experiences of women, especially socially, politically, and economically. As a social movement, feminism largely focuses on limiting or eradicating gender inequality and promoting women's rights, interests, and issues in society.Feminism as a self-aware, concerted approach entered literature in 1960’s. However about two centuries of struggle preceeds it. Beginning with Mary Wollsonecrafts – A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), Margaret Fuller (Am)- Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), John Stuart Mill – The Subjection of Women (1869) Today feminist literary criticism closely linked to movement by political feminists for social, economic and cultural freedom and equality.Virginia Woolf novelist, an important precursor feminist criticism, wrote numerous essays on women authors and on the cultural, economic, and educational disabilities within ‘patriarchal’ society that have prevented women from realising their creative possibilities. Her important work: A Room of One’s Own (1929)Simone de Beauvoir (French) in her The Second Sex (1949) presents a critique of cultural identification of women merely as negative object or other to ‘man’ as the defining and dominating ‘subject’ who is assumed to represent humanity in general. She also dealt with great collective myths of women in the works of many male writers. In US modern feminism began with Mary Ellman’s Thinking about Women (1968) through witty discussion of derogatory stereotypes of women in literature written by men. She also presented alternative, subversive points of view in some writings of women.Kale Millets – Sexual Politics (1969)- ‘Politics’ – mechanisms that express and enforce the relations of power in society. She discussed how western social arrangements and institutions as covert ways manipulating power to establish and perpetuate the dominance of men and subordination of women. She attacked the male bias in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and analysed selected passages by D H Lawrence showing how they aggrandise their aggressive phallic selves and degrade selves and degrade women as submissive sexual objects. Since 1969 there has been explosion of feminist writings unparalleled in the previous history of critical innovation as it displays urgency and excitement of a religious awakening. However, there is no unitary theory of procedures in US, England and France and other countries. There is a lot of variety like psychoanalytic, Marxist and diverse post-structuralist with intense debate within them. Various feminism share assumptions and concepts that constitute common ground for the diverse ways that individual critics explore the factor of sexual differences and privilege in the production, the form and content, the reception and critical analysis and evaluation of works of literature. o Subtypes of feminismo Amazon feminismo Anarcha-Feminismo Anti-racist feminismo cultural feminismo ecofeminismo equity feminismo existentialist feminismo French feminismo gender feminismo individualist feminism (also known as libertarian feminism)o lesbian feminismo liberal feminismo male feminism or men's feminismo Marxist feminism (also known as socialist feminism)o material feminismo pop feminismo post-colonial feminismo postmodern feminism which includes queer theoryo pro-sex feminism (also known as sexually liberal feminism, sex-positive feminism)o psychoanalytic feminismo radical feminismo separatist feminismo socialist feminismo spiritual feminismo standpoint feminismo third-world feminismo transnational feminismo transfeminismo womanismo Certain actions, approaches and people can also be described as proto-feminist or post-feminist.Common grounds:1. Western civilisation is pervasively patriarchal – It is male centred, controlled, organised, conducted to subordinate women to men in all cultural domains: familial, religious, political, economic, social, legal, artistic. Hebrew Bible, Greek philosophy to present: female defined by negative reference, to the male as the human norm hence the other, non-man, by her lack of the identifying male organ, of male powers, and of the male characters traits presumed to have achieved the most important inventions and works of civilisations and culture. Women socialised to resign to patriarchal ideology (conscious and unconscious presuppositions and male superiority) and conditioned to derogate their own sex and to cooperate in their own subordination. E.g. NDTV ‘We the People’ Dress code.2. Though sex is determined by anatomy the prevailing concepts of gender- of the traits that constitute what is masculine and what is feminine are largely cultural constructs. Created by the patriarchal biases of the civilisation. Simone de Beauvoir: ‘One is not born, but becomes, a woman … it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature…. which is described as feminine.’Masculine identified as active, dominating, adventurous, rational, creative; the feminine by systematic opposition to such traits, as passive, acquiescent, timid, emotional, and conventional. 3. The patriarchal/masculinist /andro-centric ideology pervades great literary works mostly written by men. Highly regarded classics focus on male protagonists- Oedipus, Ulysses, Hamlet, Tom Jones, Captain Ahab, Huck Finn- embody masculine traits and ways of feeling and pursue masculine interests in masculine fields of action. To them female characters are marginal and subordinate, complementary, opposite to masculine desires and enterprises. They lack female role models, are addressed to male readers. They either make woman alien outsider or make her take the position of the male subject, male values, and ways of perceiving, feeling, and acting. Critical theories, traditional aesthetic categories presumed to be objective, disinterested and universal are fused with masculine assumptions, interests and ways of reasoning. Rankings, critical treatments are gender-based. Feminist critics in English-speaking countries attempt to reconstitute all the ways we deal with literature to do justice to female points of views, concerns and values. They try to alter ways of reading of the past to make her a Resisting Reader (Judith Fetterley, 1978) to resist the author’s intensions and design in order by a ‘revisionary reading’ bringing to light and countering the sexual biases written into a literary work. To find ‘images of women’ in the novels and poems of men. They fall into two antithetic patterns. One side- idealised projection of men’s desires (the Madonna, the Muse of arts, Dante’s Beatrice, the pure and innocent virgin, the ‘Angel in the House’ that was represented by the Victorian poet Coventry Patmore). The other side: demonic projections of men’s sexual resentments and terrors (Eve and Pandora as the sources of all evil, destructive sensual temptresses such as Delilah and Circe, the malign witch, the castrating mother) Though some decry literature written by men for its depiction of women as marginal docile and subservient to men’s interests and emotional needs and fears, male writers like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Samuel Richardson, Henrick Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw have managed to raise above the sexual prejudices of their time sufficiently to understand and present the cultural pressures that have shaped the characters of women and forced upon them their negative or subsidiary social roles. Some feminists are not concerned with woman as reader but gynocriticism. Gynocriticism: Elaine Showalter- criticism concerns itself with developing specifically female framework for dealing with works written by women in terms of production, motivation and analysis, interpretation in all literary forms, including journals and letters. Important books of this mode: Patricia Meyer Spacks: The Female Imagination (1975), on major women novelists and poets in England, America, and France; Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (1977)Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) Stresses the psychodynamics of women writers in the 19th century.The authors propose the ‘anxiety of authorship’ that resulted from the stereotype, that literary creativity is an exclusive male domain, effected in women writers a psychological duplicity that projected a monstrous counter figure to the heroine, typified by Bertha Rochester, the madwoman Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre; such a figure is ‘usually in some sense the author’s double, an image of her own anxiety and rage’.Concerns of gynocritics- 1. to identify distinctively feminine subject matters in literature written by women – The primary issues e.g. the world of domesticity, the special experiences of gestations, giving birth, and nurturing or mother-daughter and woman-woman relations- in which personal and affectional issues, and not external activism is significant. 2. To uncover in literary history a female tradition expressed by a subcommunity of women writers who were aware of, emulated and found support in earlier women writers, and who in turn provide models and emotional support to their own readers and successors.3. To show that there is a distinctive feminine mode of experience or ‘subjectivity’ in thinking feeling, valuing and perceiving oneself and the outer world. 4. To attempt to specify the traits of a ‘woman’s language or distinctively feminine style of speech and writing, in sentence structure, types of relations between the elements of a discourse, and characteristic figures and imagery. Some feminists critically analyse women’s domestic and ‘sentimental’ novels, noted perfunctorily and in derogatory fashion in standard literary histories. These dominated the market for fiction and best sellers in the nineteenth century. Examples seen in Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (1977) on British writers Nina Baym Woman’s fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America 1820-1870 (1978) Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (2 Vols; 1988-89)Often-asserted role of feminist critics is to enlarge and reorder, displace the literary canon- a set of works which by a cumulative consensus have come to be considered ‘major’ as the chief subjects of literary history, criticism, scholarship, and teaching. Feminist studies have brought to forefront many of the sidelined women writers: Anne Finch, George Sand, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, Christina Rossetti, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn Lady, Mary Wortley Montagu, Joanna Baillie, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a number of African-American writers such as Zora Neale Hurston.Some feminists have concentrated on lesbian writers.American and English critics have engaged in empirical and thematic studies of writings by and about women. In France prominent critics have occupied themselves with the ‘theory’ of the role of gender in writing within the poststructuralist frame of reference, Lacan’s reworkings of Freudian psychoanalysis in terms of Saussure’s linguistic theory. English-speaking feminists show demonstrable and specific evidences in which male bias is encoded in our linguistic conventions. E.g. ‘man’, ‘mankind’ for human beings, chairman or spokesman for people of either sex, he and his to refer back to gender neutral nouns like God, human being, child inventor, author, poet.French feminists argue that all western languages are irredeemably male-gendered, male-constituted and male-dominated. According to Lacan Discourse is ‘phallogocentric’- It is centred and organised throughout by implicit recourse to the phallus (symbolic) both as its supposed ‘logos’ or ground, and as its prime signifier and power-source. Phallogocentrism manifests itself in Western discourse not only in its vocabulary and syntax, rigorous rules of logic, proclivity for fixed classifications and oppositions, and its criteria to choose valid evidence and objective knowledge. The basic problem for French theorists is to establish the very possibility of a woman’s language that will not, when a woman writes, automatically be appropriated into this phallogocentric language for such appropriation forces her into complicity with the linguistic features that impose on females a condition of marginality and subservience, or even of linguistic non-entity.To evade this dilemma, Helene Cixous posits the existence of an incipient ‘feminine writing’ with its source in the mother, in that stage of the mother-child relation before the child acquires the male-centred verbal language. Thereafter, this prelinguistic potentiality in the unconscious manifests undermine and subvert the fixed signification, the logic, and the ‘closure’ of our phallocentric language, and open out into a joyous freeplay of meanings. Luce Irigaray posits a ‘woman’s writing’ which evades the male monopoly and the risk of appropriation into the existing system by establishing as its generative principle, in place of monolithic phallus, the diversity, fluidity and multiple possibilities inherent in the structure and erotic functioning of the female sexual organs and in the distinctive nature of female sexual experiences. Julia Kristeva posits a ‘Chora’, or prelinguistic, pre-oedipal, and unsystematized signifying process, centred on the mother, that she labels ‘semiotic’. This process is repressed as we acquire the father-controlled, syntactically ordered, and logical language that she calls ‘symbolic’. The semiotic process can break out in a revolutionary way as in avant-garde poetry, whether written by a women or by men- as a ‘heterogeneous destructive causality’ that disperses the authoritarian ‘subject’ that strikes free of the oppressive order and rationality of our standard discourse which as the product of the ‘law of the Father’ consigns women to a negative and marginal status. In recent years a number of feminists have used poststructuralist positions and techniques to question the founding concepts of feminism itself. They point out the existence of differences and adversarial strands within the supposedly monolithic history of patriarchal discourse, and emphasise the inherent linguistic instability in the basic conceptions of ‘woman’ or ‘the feminine’ as well as the diversities within these supposedly universal and uniform female identities that result from differences in race, class, nationality, and historical situation. The volume of literature both critical and creative as well women’s studies in academia a increasing by the day. The concern with the effects of sexual innovations of the last several decades, the concern with the effects of sexual differences in the writing, interpretation, analysis and assessment of literature seems destined to have the most prominent and enduring effects on literary history, criticism, and academic instruction, as conducted by men as well as women.

Reference:Abrams, MH. A Glossary of Literary Terms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism

I FEP One-act Play Reports

Suggestion regarding written submissions

- Font size 12; Fonts: Times New Roman, Garamond, Book Antiqua; 1½ line space; paper A4 size; matter on one side of the paper.

- Name, register no, class and college, one below the other on the right-hand top corner of the page. No covering page.

- Title of the submission in the centre. Title could be in capital letters, underlined, made bold, italicized. But it should be one of these and not mixture of more than one.

- First paragraph should specify the name of the play, the date of the show, venue and the role of the student. The succeeding paragraphs should narrate the contribution of the student to the practice and performance of the play, what you have learnt from the play, given a chance how would you do it differently/ better, suggestion for the department to imporve upon the One-act Play Festival.

For any clarifications please email me.
Anil Pinto, Dept of Media Studies; http://anilpinto.blogspot.com

What Postmodern Means by Lawrence Cahoone

• Difficult to summaries postmodernism
– a. Disagreement among writers
– b. Postmodernists deny having any doctrine
• Idea of summary antithetical to Pm
• To understand - list
• Imp Ideas in pm works
• Different claims postmodernists make
• Issues dividing pms

Five prominent postmodern themes
Presence or presentation (vs representation or construction)
Origin (vs phenomenon)
Unity (vs plurality)
Transcendence or norms (vs their immanence)
Constitutive otherness

Presence
• =quality of immediate experience
• + the objects thereby immediately represented
• Traditionally presence contrasted with
– a, representation - sphere of linguistic signs
– b. construction – the products of human invention (hence whatever mediated by human factor)
• E.g.: Perception/sensation sense data – passage to reality, more reliable than mental contents subsequently modified, represented and altered by thought or language.
• Pm questions and denies it.
• Pm denies that anything is ‘immediately present’ hence independent of signs, language, interpretation, disagreement etc.
• Also presence presupposes representation
• Derrida- No thing as perception – immediate transparent reception of the given

• Postmodernists deny presence and analysis of representation
• Study The thing
• E.g. using intelligence systems in schools
• Postmodernists analyze use of term ‘intelligence’ by the tests proponents – implying the object or referent of the term never present
• It’s the history and political representations and their political use which is at issue
• We encounter the real world referents through texts, representations, mediation.
• We can never say what is independent of all sayings.


Origin
• = notion of the source of whatever under consideration
• A return to which is often considered the aim of rational enquiry.-
– An attempt to see beyond phenomena to their ultimate foundation.
• Modern philosophies of the self – existentialism, psycho-analysis, phenomenology, Marxism- attempt to discover self road to authenticity.
• Postmodernist argue – it’s not possible to have an access to self completely, it’s never available to us.
• No possibility of returning to, recapturing, representing the origin, source, deeper reality behind phenomena
• Casts doubts and denies existence
• Postmodernism is intentionally superficial. Surface of things, phenomenon don’t require any deeper reference.
• Author is dead - denies origin
• Because no meaning of text can be ‘authoritatively’ revealed through authorial intervention.
• They are not imp, have not privilege over other factors.

Unity
• Unity, single entity is plural
• Everything constituted by other elements
• Constitutive are plural
• Therefore individual plural
• Therefore no analysis is final
• E.g. Texts meaning are never complete/final
• Human self multiplicity of forces or elements.
• Not single unity, hierarchically composed, solid, self-controlled
• We have selves than self

Transcendence of norms X
• Norms- truth, goodness, beauty, rationality- not independent of the processes they serve to govern or judge
• They’re products of and immanent in those processes.
• Social justice product of social relations it serves to govern
• i.e. the idea was created at a certain time and place to serve certain interests and is dependent on certain intellectual and social contexts.
• Rejection of idealism
• Concept of ‘good’ and the act of calling something good not independent of the things we want to call ‘good’
• Therefore postmodernists show processes of thought, writing, negotiation and power which produced those normative claims

Constitutive otherness
• Complex application of the four themes
• Use of constitutive otherness in analyzing any cultural entity
• Cultural entities-human beings, words, meanings, ideas, philosophical systems, social organizations are maintained in their unity through active process of exclusion, opposition, opposition, and hierarchisation
• Other phenomena or units must be represented as foreign or ‘other’ representing hierarchical dualism in which a unit is ‘privileged’ or favoured and the other devalued in some way.
• Postmodernists find – privileged groups must actively produce and maintain their position by representing or picturing themselves- in thought, literature, in law, in art – as not having the properties ascribed to the underprivileged group
• Must represent those groups those groups as lacking the properties of the privileged groups.
• The self may feel compelled to represent itself as excluding sexual or aggressive feelings. They cannot be obliterated. So must be ascribed to chance situations E.g. “ I was not myself that day”
• Margins constitute texts
• Unities are constituted by repressing their dependency on and relations to others.
• Postmodernists analyse the excluded or ‘marginalised’ elements of a system or text.
• Pm in literature turn attention away from well known themes in text toward seldom mentioned, virtually absent, implicitly or explicitly devalued
• Presence constituted by absence.
• Real by appearance
• Ideal by mundane
• This apart from theme also applies to style.
• Postmodernist read metaphors with keen interest
• Process of exclusion false, unstable, immoral
• False= It’s a lie
• Unstable- Must be admitted some day
• Immoral- when becomes social oppression
• Repression in text when read carefully undermines its own message.
• Constitutive otherness shows the dependence of the privileged theme on the marginalized element.
• Social disenfranchisement, marginalization of sexual and racial group is moral and political case of this pattern.
• Some pm wish to remove such repressions, others admit no escape
• Render repressive forces more diverse and fluid- so none becomes monopolistic.

Types of postmodernism
• Three-part classification, overlapping
• Indicative of aims
– Methodological postmodernism
– Positive postmodernism

Methodological postmodernsim
• Rejects the possibility of establishing foundations, thus of ultimate reliability of knowledge.
• Shows that traditional philosophical distinctions b/w real and ideal, objective and subjective, reality and appearance fact and theory are problematic
• It problemetaises
– A. by criticizing the traditional theories of knowledge and linguistic meaning
– b. human interests evident in the construction of these distinctions
• It’s antirealist – claims knowledge is made valid not by its relation to its objects, but by its relation to our pragmatic interests, communal perspectives, needs, rhetoric
• Undercuts the philosophical attempt to justify realism
• Sometime undermines rational inquiry itself by subjecting notions of truth, rationality and meaning to critique.
• M pm is negative – claims or shows inadequacy or problematic nature of other forms of writing and talking and theorizing but offers no explicit alternative.

Positive pm
• Positive reinterpretation of any phenomenon
• It may reconceive the self or God or nature or knowledge or society or art given the critique of unity, origin, presence
• Refers to writing that applies general postmodern themes to particular subject matters in order to offer new vision or understanding.
• Offers alterative

Issues dividing postmodernist
• First
• Recognize whether pm is
– a. merely making a historical claim that modern ideas and methods are being superseded or abandoned in the present age
– b. questioning the validity of modern methods without making any explicit claims about their falsity or suggesting that they be abandoned
– c. claiming the inadequacy of the modern methods and inviting us to abandon them in favour of something else.
• Some postmodernists are wrongly accused of rejecting modern philosophy and society when they only question them.
• E.g. Derrida interpreted as undermining western thought.
• But he says there’s no alternative to ‘logo centrism’ or traditional foundationalism of West: It can’t be abandoned
• Result - tension b/w methodological and positive application of pm
• Most extreme case - Some postmodernists use elements of pm critique to reformulate fundamental conceptions of God and the universe
• This is in principle anathema to post-structuralism and antifounatinalism
• Second
• Pm may seem antithetical to recapturing any past. – not always true.
• While pm philosophers don’t have anything to do with those who wish to recreate past, such a return central to architectural pm.
• Pm architect incorporates ornamentation, banished by modernism.
• But its not premodernism pure, but pluralism.
• Uses premodern element in something that is completely modern
• Synthesizing, juxtaposing and ironically commenting on traditions is not traditional.
• To be traditionalist or premodernist is to be faithful to one tradition, not to all.
• E.g. pm= premodern, monogamy=many sex partners
• Pm and premodern share same enemy

• Third
• Question of political implication of pm.
• Its well-known political manifestation is the attempt to make contemporary culture acknowledge and respond to ‘difference’ or ‘otherness’ under the names of feminism very influential intellectual movement, multiculturalism, a phenomenon in the field of education.
• Both movements overlap with pm.
• Some feminists, multiculturalists are pm some are not
• Most poststructuralist, feminists and multiculturalists are associated with the left. Some others are not
• E.g. Richard Rorty- calls himself ‘postmodernist bourgeois liberal
• Leftists criticize pm opening reactionary forces blocking leftist political reforms.
• Habermas
• Political usefulness of pm is in criticizing any established authority.

Reference

Cahoone, Lawrence. What Postmodernism Means. Modernism to Postmodernism an Anthology

Anil Pinto, Dept of Media Studies; http://anilpinto.blogspot.com

To 'Sum Up ' Postmodernism

To Sum up Postmodernism ……

According to Lyotard Postmodernism has to do with scepticism about Grand Narrative; it is about heterogeneity.

According to Jameson, it must involve a way of mapping the new and confusing contours of our late capitalistic times.

According to Baudrillard, postmodernism is a flow of ultra-technological images in a consumerist hyperreality across a mediascape or mindscreen to which we can only passively surrender.

According to cyberpunk it is a world dominated by multinational corporations and the data they control. Yet cyberpunks advocate a hacker ethic, tapping into and using such data for personal ends.

According to Charles Jencks all these thinkers are describing late capitalism or late modernism. According to him authentic postmodernism involves double coding the artistic representation of modernism with something else, some Other.

All postmodern thinkers agree the world is shrinking. There is no one dominant worldview. Pluralism rules: traditional, modern, late modern and postmodern all rub elbows in the same culture.

Encroachment by the other upon what had once been our private space is central here.: The Other may be individuals, Other groups, Other species, Other races, the Other of “male,” the Other of “the West,” the Other of “Europe,” the Other of the conscious mind, the Other of the rational mind, the Other of modernism, the Other of modernisms, the Other of “ourselves” or in “ourselves”.

Through double coding, postmodern architecture, art and literature represent the other and thus present heterogeneity; by looking backward to the past, or sideways to a local culture. Thus while using modernist techniques they include the Other, humorously, ironically and playfully, rather than excluding it.

Post-modern (with hyphen) for Jencks, because postmodern has hybrid identities. Some supermyth or messiah uniting everybody under one umbrella no more exists.

Postmodern people resist grand narratives. That god is Yahweh or Allah or the goddess, that moon is made of such and such mass, that western medicine better than oriental herbal, that feminine equals sugar and spice and everything nice or that the Caucasian race is the master race – all these are man-made notions. They are social constructs / inventions. There is no one way of explaining things.

The grand narratives are replaced by hodge-podge of little narratives. Postmodern people therefore instead of believing that world will be united one day under Marxism or Christianity or Science are more interested in seeing the world as a kind of carnival of cultures- a tribal gathering.

The shining sun of universal truth and meaning is eclipsed by the colourful display of little dances, little stories, that don’t project a utopia.

Postmodern audience don’t demand that all the heterogeneous stories add up to some grand global, universal total sense, instead they celebrate the fact that it’s ok to stop making so much sense. Because of explosion of cultural messages we are beginning to understand that not only through stories but also our rituals, religious dogmas, myths, gender roles, self concepts, beliefs histories, and theories are cultural, social inventions.

We enjoy the man-made symbols but don’t want to be its slaves. We are quasi fundamentalist Christian, Muslim. We go to temples, mosques despite the doubts.

We may participate in more than one grand narrative- Buddhist Christian
It has liberated the concerns of the other. E.g. unlike Conrad who thought you could speak for the other.

Postmodernisms emphasis on the other has allowed formerly silenced Others such as women, gays, blacks, Orientals, etc to express their own stories in their own voices.

Just as postmodern societies reject grand narratives there is also an attempt to create them through cults and sects.

As the grand narratives of Christianity, Islam and Judaism have a difficult time dealing with differences, there are two major traditions-Buddhism and Hinduism. Buddhism is democratic, cool, practical, inexpensive, and also politically correct. (Because Chinese occupation of Tibet).

Vedic tradition of India- Hinduism- also accommodates differences, which tolerates a great variety of forms of worship and ways of attaining enlightenment.

Reference:
Powell, Jim. Postmodernism for Beginners. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1998.
Anil Pinto, Dept of Media Studies; http://anilpinto.blogspot.com

Modernism and Postmodernism

Following are the notes of my lectures on the essay by MH Abrams on 'Modernism and postmodernism'.

Modernism
• Term used to identify new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts and styles of literature and the other arts in the early decades of the last century (20th) esp. after WWI(1914-1918)
• Features: Involves a deliberate and radical break with some of the traditional bases not only of Western art but of Western culture in general.
• Important Precursors: Friedrich Nietzsche (1890-1915) Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, James G. Frazer. (His Golden Bough stressed the correspondence between central Christian tenets and pagan, often barbaric myths and rituals.
• Location: Some locate it in 1890’s. High modernism came after WWI.
• 1922 appearance of modernist innovations – James Joyce’s Ulysses, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Virginia Wolf’s Jacob’s Room + other experimental works.
• Reason: War had shaken faith in the continuity of Western civilization and raised doubts about the adequacy of traditional literary modes to represent the harsh and dissonant realities of the postwar world. ‘The inherited mode of ordering a literary work, which assumed a relatively coherent and stable social order could not accord the “immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”
• Eliot experimented with new forms and a new style that would render contemporary disorder, often contrasting with the lost order and integration that had been based on the religion and myths of the cultural past.
• In The Waste Land (1922) Eliot replaced the standard flow of poetic language by fragmented utterances and substituted for the traditional coherence of poetic structure a deliberate dislocation of parts in which very diverse components are related by connections that are left to the reader to discover or invent.
• Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) & more radical Finnegans Wake (1939) subvert the basic conventions of earlier prose fiction by breaking up the narrative continuity, departing from the standard ways of representing characters and violating the traditional continuity, departing from the standard ways of representing characters and violating the traditional syntax and coherence of narrative language by the use of stream of consciousness and other innovative modes of narration.
• Gertrude Stein –experimented with writing that achieved its effects by violating the norms of Standard English syntax and sentence structure.
• Parallel experiments in Literature : Expressionism and surrealism
• Modernist paintings and sculpture: Cubism, Futurism and Abstract Expressionism
• Music: Violations of standard conventions of melody, harmony and rhythm by the modernist musical composers Stravinsky and Schoenberg et al.
• Prominent feature of modernism – avant-garde- a small self-conscious group of artists and authors who deliberately undertake, in Ezra Pound’s phrase, to “make it new”.
• By violating the accepted conventions and proprieties, not only of art but of social discourse, they set out to crate ever-new forbidden, subject matters. Frequently avant-garde artists represent themselves as “alienated" from the established order, against which they assert their own autonomy; a prominent aim is to shock the sensibilities of the conversional reader and to challenge the norms and pieties of the dominant bourgeois culture.


Postmodernism

• Term applied to the literature and art after WW II (1939-45)
• Effects on Western morale of the first war were greatly exacerbated by the experience of Nazi totalitarianism and mass extermination, the threat of total destruction by the atomic bomb the progressive devastation of the natural environment and the ominous fact of overpopulation.
• Postmodernism: 1. Experiments of extreme modernism 2. Diverse attempts to break away form modernist forms which had become conventional, 3. Overthrow elitism of modernist “high art” by recourse to the models of “mass culture” in films, television, newspaper cartoon and popular music.
• Postmodern literatures by Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, Roland Barthes blend literary genres, cultural and stylistic levels, the serious and the playful that they resist classification according to traditional literary rubrics.
• Parallels in art: pop art, op art, musical compositions of John Cage and the films of Jean-Luc Godard
• Purpose : At times to subvert the foundations of our accepted modes of thought and experience so as to reveal the “meaninglessness” of existence and the underlying “abyss” or “void “ or “nothingness” on which any supposed security is conceived to be precariously suspended.
• Parallel in linguistics and literary theory- post structuralism
• Poststructuralists undertake to subvert the foundations of language in order to show that its seeming meaningfulness dissipates, for a rigorous inquirer into a play of conflicting indeterminacies, or else to show that all forms of cultural discourse are manifestations of the ideology or of the relations and constructions of power in contemporary society.


Reference
• Abrams, MH. A Glossary of Literary Terms, VI Ed. Bangalore: Prism Books, 1993, pp 118-121.

Anil Pinto, Dept of Media Studies; http://anilpinto.blogspot.com

Dr William Robert Da Silva: Born in Mangalore taught at Mangalore University, Goa University, University of Hamburg, and Osnabruck, Germany, Manipal Institute of Communication, Manipal. His academic and research work spans over Theology, Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, Literature, Linguistics, Gender Studies, Translation, Communication and Media. He has written and translated over 24 books. The Konkanni Bible translated from original Hebrew and Greek is his magnum opus. It happens to be the only Bible translated from original tongues in Konkanni language. He has a rare distinction of working in many languages. Currently he is the Director of Sandesha Bharati, School of Konkanni Studies, Mangalore, Senior Professor, Dept of Communication (PG), Christ College, Bangalore, and Visiting Professor, Osnabruck University, Germany.

Semiotics Syllabus/Course Plan

DEPARTMENT OF MEDIA STUDIES

Christ College, Bangalore 560029

CERTIFICATE COURSE IN SEMIOTICS

Course convenor: Dr. William R. Da Silva

Course co-ordinator:Anil Pinto

60 hours, weekly 2.5 hours

3 credits

Time: Thursdays, 16-18.30

Place: Room No. 109, Main Block

Minimum: 10

INTRODUCTION

This course will be useful for all working in communication, theatre and media studies; language, literature and media. In media it will be useful for analysis of subtexts, myths and ideologies in communication (ads, films, photo-magazines, television, internet etc.)

MODULES

01. What is semiotics or semiology? The transition: comparative philology to semiology; philosophy of language and historical and social linguistics to linguistics.

02. Ferdinand de Saussure: Semiology; sign, system, structure; the science of the system of signs in society (semiologie).

03. Charles S. Peirce: Philosophy of sign; communicative sign; index, icon and symbol; unlimited semiosis.

04. Claude Levi-Strauss: Structuralism and cultural anthropology (Structural linguistics, Marxism and psychoanalysis).

05. Vladimir V. Propp: Functional semiotics or morphology of a folktale.

06. Roman Jakobson: Structuralism and models of communication.

07. Structural linguistics: Robert Gleason, Noam A. Chomsky.

08. Marxism and Structuralism: Louis Althusser.

09. Structuralism and Psychoanalysis: Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault.

10. Post-structuralism: Roland Barthes; post-modernism: Jean Beaudrillard.

11. Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida.

12. Philosophy of semiotics: Umberto Eco.

WORKSHOP & PRACTICUM

Applied semiotics: (structuralism, post-structuralism, post-modernism, deconstruction) language, discourse, oral and literary narratives; folk rituals, religious and political-cultural rituals, theatre and other performances; advertisements, illustrated magazines, photo printing, films, television, Internet.

Every participant in the Course is required to apply the semiotics method (alone or in combination with other methods, explained above, or with post-modernism of Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Beaudrillard) to any area of communication and media and prepare a research paper of 8-10 (A4 size) pages in three stages: research proposal, first draft and final paper.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Daniel Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners, London: Routledge, 1995. (The book is available online with rich hypertext references, and may be downloaded. This text will be made available to participants in the college on CD as desired). A paperback edition too is available with Routledge, London. (In India agents in Chennai; in Bangalore: Foundation Books.)

Chandler has an exhaustive bibliography on semiotics and related topics. Other books will be introduced in the active sessions of the course.

I FEP One Act Plays

Department of Media Studies

Christ College, Bangalore

I FEP

One-Act Plays

Reg Nos	Lecturers in-charge	Play
06D2201 - 215	Soloman Rees	Refund: Fritz Karinthy
06D2216 - 230	Felix	The Monkey's Paw: WW Jacobs
06D2231 - 245	Deepa	The Stone Idols: KS Sreenath
06D2246 - 260	Padma Kumar	Before the Flood: AA Milne
06D2261 - 276	Anil Pinto	Lithuania: Rupert Brooke

Guidelines:

Ø You should direct, act, produce and get the audience for your play. The role of the lectures concerned will be that of observers and evaluators. However, you may approach them for any guidance or clarification.

Ø Practice for the play should happen either before or after the class hours.

Ø You are free to edit the plays.

Ø Use minimum stage property and keep the expenses minimal. All the expenses towards the play are to be borne by the respective groups.

Ø Do not take any help from people other than your group members during the production. However, for music you may seek the help of your friends in other sections of the College.

Ø All the plays should be staged on 17, 18, and 19 of July 2006 for the department for scrutiny.

Ø The final production of the play will be from 24 July to 28 July 2006 in the Mini Auditorium (tentative) in the Main Block after 4 pm. The order in which the plays are to be staged will be announced in the third week of July.

Ø The process of the production of the play is more important than the final production. Hence, you will be evaluated based on your commitment and contribution to the group, involvement, and creativity. You will be assessed out of 20 marks as part of Continuous Internal Assessment 2a and class work.

Ø Each group is requested to maintain a diary of the progress on daily basis and show it to the lecturers concerned regularly.

Ø For any clarification please feel free to approach your teachers-in-charge, Felix or me, either personally or through email.

Ø All the best

27 June 2006 Anil Pinto

ajpinto42 at yahoo dot co dot in

III PSEng, FEP, PSEng V Semester Course Plan 2006

Department of Media Studies

Christ College, Bangalore

III PSEng, FEP, PSEng V Semester Course Plan 2006

Optional English

Names of the Teachers : Anil Pinto

Semester : V

Total No of hours : 24

Subject : Optional English

Paper : European and Non-European Writing: An Introduction and The Literatures of India: An Introduction

1. Modernism; postmodernism; What Postmodernism Means

Reference: The Scream Edward Munch (1893), Guernica Picasso (1937), Modern Times Chaplin, Metropolis Fritz Lang (1927), Waste Land, A Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock TS Eliot; The Fontana Post-modern Reader, Walter Truett Anderson; Postmodernism for Beginners Jim Powell; Art for Beginners Dani Cavallaro

No of Hours: 13

Dates: June and July

2. Feminism

Reference: Fire: Meera Nair; Dweepa: Girish Kasaravalli; Father, Son and Holy War: Anand Patwardhan

No of Hours: five

Dates: August

3. Marxist Criticism

Reference: Marxist Literary Criticism: Terry Eagleton

No of Hours: Three

Dates: September: Week I, II

4. Women Writing in India: 600 BC to the Present

No of Hours: Two

Dates: September Week III

5. The Politics of Failure

No of Hours: one

Dates: September Week IV

I FEP I Sem Course Plan 2006

Names of the Teachers : Anil Pinto and Felix
Semester : I
Total No of hours : 54
Subject : Functional English
Paper : II (Applied Phonetics and Communication Skills)

1.Spelling and Pronunciation; English Consonants and Vowels No of Hours; 5; Dates: June 23 – June 30

2.The Syllable; Word Accent; Morphemes; Assimilation and Elision; Rhythm, Intonation; Accents, US, UK and Australian, English in India; No of Hours; 8; Dates: July 1 – July 17; Class test: 17 July

3.Choral Behaviour and Group Think; The English Empire and the Politics of World Englishes; No of Hours; 2; Dates: July 21, 22

4.Public Speaking; Types of Speeches; Platform Speeches, Platform Roles; No of Hours; 15; Dates: 24 July – 14 Aug; One-act Plays to be staged in the fourth week

5.Intellectual Assemblies and Artists Assemblies; Bilingualism, Multilingualism, Code Switching; No of Hours; 4; Dates: 25 Aug – 28 Aug

6.Telephonic Conversation, GD, Situational Conversations, Interviewing, Effective Listening; No of Hours; 10; Dates: 1 Sept - 16 Sept

7.News Reading for Radio, TV; Speech in Theatre, Radio, TV and Cinema; No of Hours; 10; Dates: 18 Sept - 29 Sept

8.Review/Feedback; Date : 29 Sept

One-Act Play Production:
You will be divided into five groups of 15. Each group will direct, act and produce a given play in the Fourth week of July. The practice will have to be done after or before the class hours or during free time. The entire exercise carries 20 marks based on your involvement in and contribution towards the play.

Methodology:
Almost all the classes will be practice oriented and exercise based, with only necessary theoretical inputs.

Continuous Internal Assessment:
CIA II a: One-act Play Production (Fourth week of July)
CIA II b: Class test (17 July)
CIA III: A 600 word write up on recent trends in
a) Platform speeches and platform roles; or
b) Any one of the intellectual assemblies

Guidelines for Submission:
·The written assignment should be based on your field research. The typed assignment should adhere to the following specifications: A4 size paper, 12 font size, 11/2 line space, font: Times New Roman, Book Antiqua, or Garamond
·Assignment details - your name, reg. no, class, batch, assignment code, name of the College, name of the teacher in-charge and date of submission- should be mentioned on the top right-hand side of the first page
·You are free to take the assignment beyond the expected criteria. Such efforts will be appreciated
·Those who are going to be out of town can submit the assignment online
·No late submission is entertained
·Plagiarism may amount to rejection of assignment
·Remember to give the reference at the end of your assignment of the books, articles and websites that you have referred to. The following pattern may be followed: Author’s name with the last name first, a period, name of the book underlined, a period, Place of Publication, colon, name of publication, year of publication, page no
oE.g.: Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, My Experiments with Truth, New Delhi: Penguin, 1998.
oIn case of a website give the complete URL of the site referred to along with the above details
oIf you are directly lifting some lines quote them. If you are using some idea write it in your words but acknowledge it

Mid-semester Practical Exam
1.Listening to words and transcribing – 10 words given
2.Reading sentences - 10 sentences to be given

Evaluation Criteria: knowledge of phonemes and desired pronunciation of sounds, knowledge and use of stress, rhythm and intonation.

End-semester Practical Exam
1.Group discussion (Evaluation Criteria: Communicative skills and knowledge of the subject)
2.Staging programme on a given situation (Evaluation Criteria: Organisation skills, communication skills, crisis management, teamwork)
Note:
ØAttendance is compulsory for all the sessions. Please be punctual
ØAll the sessions will be of two hours
ØListen to local, national, and international TV or Radio news channels regularly to widen your knowledge as well as for the language exposure. Do attend plays in English and other languages around the city to be exposed to the theatre culture
ØPlease feel free to clarify your doubts, ask questions or give feedback in the class, department or through email.
ØWhile emailing please mention your name, class and batch
ØVisit the blog for notices and announcements regularly
ØAll the best. Let us grow together

Anil Pinto,
Email: ajpinto42@yahoo.co.in
Blog: http://anilpinto.blogspot.com

Felix
Email: joseph_felix@rediffmail.com

Cyber culture workshop - concept note

Workshop on Cyberculture
6, 7, 8 April 2006

Concept Note

(Don't be scarred by this abstract note, the workshop is going to be more concrete and fun )

Cybercultures is a term that lends itself too easily to a superficial understanding of a set of practices which are associated with the words techie, geek, gadgets and gizmos. However, cybercultures is not necessarily only about the people who produce it. Looked upon as a site upon which forces of economic and cultural globalization, political governance and geographical boundaries are actively interacting with each other, cybercultures needs to be understood as the ethos of our times within which all of us, directly or indirectly, through inclusion or exclusion, through presence or absence, are implicated within. The three day workshop in cybercultures looks at three main concerns of identity, community and culture and how the new technological proliferation of cyberspace shapes our understanding of these three domains. Spread across three days, for a period of four hours each, the cybercultures workshop, through discussions, exercises and presentations, seeks to question how each one of us becomes a cyborg and how it changes our notions of who we are, where we belong and what we do.

Workshop on Cyber culture

Department of Media Studies
Christ College, Bangalore

Announces

Workshop on Cyberculture

By
Nishant Shah
(CSCS, ex-cultural consultant, Yahoo

Dates : 6, 7, 8 April 2006
(Thursday- Saturday

Time : 02.00-06.00
Venue : Christ College
Fee : Christites: Rs 100, Others Rs 150

Vacancies: 25

For more Details Contact: Anil Pinto, Dept of Media Studies, 9886627416

BBM question paper pattern

HI guys
I have not been able to meet Mr Sudhamshu. The moment I am able to get in touch with him I shall post the question paper pattern on the blog.

All the best!

I BBM ‘A’ CIA 2 Assignment

I BBM ‘A’ CIA 2 Assignment

Group Presentation Topics

Group I 05D1201-08 : Christ College hangouts

Group II 209-16 : Forum

Group III 217-24 : Eva Moll

Group IV 225-32 : Garuda Mall

Group V 233- 40: Bollywood

Group VI 241-48 : Plurality at Christ College

Group VII 249-56 : Newspapers in Bangalore

Group VIII 257-64 : Advertisements

Group I 265-74 : Life at Night in Bangalore

Evaluation Criteria: Based on individual contribution to the group, team work, research done, creativity.
Presentation date: 8 march 2006

Applied Phonetics II - Mid - Sem Practicals

Dept of Media Studies
Christ College, Bangalore
BA, II Semester
Communicative English Paper III - Applied Phonetics
Mid-semester Practical Examination

Practical Examination Pattern

Date of the examinination : 27 Feb 2006
Time : 9 to 11 am
Schedule : 9 to 9.30 am - Orientation
9.30 to 10.45 am - Part I
10.45 to 11 am - Part II
Venue: I will put up on the dept notice board on Monday morning.

Part A: 10 marks
Five sentences with proper stress and intonation to be read.
Note: The sentences will be either in regular English orthography or in IPA.

Part B: 10 marks
Students participate in any of the situational conversations given. The tasks can be either group or pair work
E.g. Meting your classmate after your II semester vacation.
Planning class picnic

Please note:
Be in the examination hall by 8.45 am
If you have any queries please direct them to Iffath who in turn will contact me.
Do prepare for both Part A and Part B.



24 Feb 2006 Anil Pinto