discursiv

figura

Norris proposes – through an appealto the commonsensical assurance that inequality, oppression, unemploy-ment, urban decay, destruction and death in war are manifestly real formsof social experience

nihilisti

hyperreality

consumption over production and of the signifier over the signified,

explored the parodic but still critical mode that postmodernist literature canadopt in this broad textual or narrative universe:

Open, discontinuous, improvisational, indeterminate, or aleatorystructures

Anti-elitism, anti-authoritarianism.

‘dehumanization of Ar

superseded.

subsumed

For many, the best solution is to employthe term ‘postmodern’ or ‘postmodernity’ for general developments in theperiod of the later twentieth century, and to reserve the term ‘post-modernism’ for developments in culture and the arts – although this toocan seem to suggest an over-simple distinction between

which here designates the philo-sophical, social and political values of reason, equality and justice derivedfrom the Enlightenment

Woolf is not interested in a ‘balance’ between masculine and femininetypes but in a complete displacement of fixed gender identities, and that she dismantles essentialist notions of gender by dispersing fixed points of viewin her modernist fictions. Woolf, Moi argues, rejected only that type of feminism which was simply an inverted male chauvinism, and also showedgreat awareness of the distinctness of women’s writing.

wanting her femininity to be unconscious so that she might ‘escape from the confrontation with femaleness or maleness’ (A Room of One’s Own),she appropriated the Bloomsbury sexual ethic of ‘androgyny’ and hoped to achieve a balance between a ‘male’ self-realization and ‘female’ self-annihilation.

shealso argues that women’s writing should explore female experience in itsown right and not form a comparative assessment of women’s experience inrelation to men’s.

he is the ‘One’, she the ‘Other’. Man’sdominance has secured an ideological climate of compliance: ‘legislators,priests, philosophers, writers and scientists have striven to show that thesubordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous onearth’, and, à laVirginia Woolf, the assumption of woman as ‘Other’ is fur-ther internalized by women themselves

trivial’, the frivolous, the unserious, and stresses personalemotional responses.

reate a separate,specifically ‘feminine’ discourse

reverses male-dominated ways of seeing by suggesting that we might pre-fer to regard the ovum as daring, independent and individualistic (ratherthan ‘apathetic’) and the sperm as conforming and sheeplike (rather than‘enthusiastic’).

women’s conscious struggle to resist patriarchy goes much further back)

men’s domination of discourse has trapped women insidea male ‘truth’

sex and gender

‘feminin

masculine

because they were different psychologically from men but because their socialpositioning was different.

imprisoned and constrained by the dominantideologies of womanhood.

androgyn

socialand economic obstacles

iterary ambitions,

gender identity is socially constructed and can be challenged and transformed

Three Guineas

A Room of One’s Own

emphasized the different ‘mater-iality’ of being a woman and has engendered (in two senses) both moralsolidarities

Women’s Suffragemovements

Barthes speaks of criticism as 'cover[ing the text] as completely as possible by its own language'; in Critique et verite (1966), critical discourse is seen as a 'second language' which 'floats above the primary language of the work'

effaces

Writing Degree Zero

here is no clear division for post-structuralism between 'criticism' and 'creation': both are subsumed into 'writing' as such.

It is a shift from seeing the poem or novel as a closed entity, equipped with definite meanings which it is the critic's task to· decipher, to seeing it as irreducibly plural, an endless play of signifiers which can never be finally nailed down to a single centre, essence or meanini

polysemic

intertextual

The 'writable' text, usually fnodemist one, has no determinate meaning, no settled signifieds, but is and diffuse, an inexhaustible tissue or galaxy of signifiers, a seamless of codes and fragments of codes, through which the critic may cut his errant path.

e reader or critic shifts from the role of consumer that of producer. It is not exactly as though 'anything goes' in interpreta-fo

The most intriguing texts for criticism not those which can be read, but those which are 'writable' (scriptible)-which encourage the critic to carve them up, transpose them into discourses, produce his or her semi-arbitrary play of meaning the work itself.

acan, as we ave seen m Th. . not only because it works by scwus as structured like a_Iangual agbe. !S '~·ke language itselffor the post-d t ymy-It 1s so ecause, 1 f metaphor an me on . . f . t ble meanings -than o I. · · omposed less o szgns -s a th. structura tsts, It IS c . . . ediately obvious what IS -dream of a horse It IS not IIDID f signi

may ave certain unc · d . or dare not find practical ~::~~~us esir~s which will not be denied, its way in from the uncons . heither' m this sttuatwn, the desire of this internal confli.ct cwuhs, t e ego blocks~it off defensively, and ISW atwecallneu · Th . lde1relc>p symptoms which in co . . rosi .

erato . ' . not on y an organ of c gemc zon

prematurely

at has d . d h n ' m IS ntroductory Lectures ommate uman histo t d . and for Freud that harsh . ry 0 ate IS the need to necessity means that w tendencies to pleasure and gr a·fi . e must repress some . a canon If we we II d m order to survive we . h . . .