Modulo C

L. e L. Angloamericane / Corso di Lett. Inglese I anno

Parte “Teoria Critica e Interpretazione Testuale”
Laurea Triennale
a.a. 2009/2010

Lo studio degli approcci critici contemporanei all'analisi del testo si basa sulle interpretazioni di The Great Gatsby di Francis Scott Fitzgerald illustrate in Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today (2006), nello specifico: femminismo, psicanalisi, marxismo, reader-response, new criticism, strutturalismo e semiotica, decostruzione, neostoricismo, critica culturale, teoria queer, African-American, postcolonial, teorie critiche della razza. Gli studenti sono invitati ad applicare le teorie critiche oggetto dello studio a una loro interpretazione dei testi di Morrison o Ragusa. Qui di seguito il materiale distribuito a lezione (10 handouts) in cui si specificano anche le regole che consentono ai soli studenti frequentanti di sostituire l'esame orale di questa parte del corso con una tesina scritta.

Dr. Giovanna Covi, L. e L. Angloamericane C / L. Inglese I  LT-2009-10

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 Handouts for Module C are based on the recommended reading: Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today (2006)

Module C is meant to introduce to critical textual analysis. Only students who regularly attend and actively participate in all classroom activities are offered the option of writing a final paper instead of taking an oral exam for this part of the course. Papers must follow the guidelines and directions provided in class.

Definition of Critical Approaches Oulined in Module C:

Psychoanalytic Criticism—How is the text shaped by its (intentional or unintentional) representation of the psychological desires, needs, and conflicts of its characters (or of its author)?

Marxist Criticism—How is the text shaped by its (intentional or unintentional) representation of capitalism and/or classism? Does this representation support or undermine these oppressive socioeconomic ideologies?

Feminist Criticism—How is the text shaped by its (intentional or unintentional) representation of patriarchal norms and values? Does this representation support or undermine these oppressive socioeconomic ideologies?

New Criticism—Is the text a great work of literature? That is, does it have both organic unity and a theme of universal significance?

Reader-Response Criticism—How do readers make meaning as they read the text, and what is the relationship between the meaning they make and the text?

Structuralist Criticism—What is the underlying structural system (archetypal, modal, narratological) by which we make sense of the text? What is the grammar of the text, the functions of its characters and actions?

Deconstructive Criticism—What do we learn about the ideologies operating in the text by analyzing the tcxt’s self-contradictions?

New Historicism—How does the text participate in the interpretation of history? What role does the texdt play in the circulation of discourses prevalent in the culture from which the work emerged?

Cultural Criticism—In regard to the comparison between popular and high culture, what cultural work does the text perform? How does the text transmit and transform the ideologies that support or undermine the socio-political power structure at the time the text was produced and over the course of its reception?

Lesbian/Gay/Queer Criticism—How is the text shaped by its (intentional or unintentional) representation of sexuality? Does it support or undermine heterosexism? How does the text illustrate the inadequacy of our traditional way of thinking about sexuality?

African American Criticism—How is the text shaped by its (intentional or unintentional) representation of race and racial difference? Does this representation support or undermine racist ideologies?

Postcolonial Criticism—How is the text shaped by its (intentional or unintentional) representation of cultural difference (the ways in which race, class, sex, gender, sexual orientation, religion, cultural beliefs, and customs combine to form individual identity)? Does this representation support or undermine colonialist ideologies?
 

Dr. Giovanna Covi, L. e L. Angloamericane C / L. Inglese I  LT-2009-10

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GUIDELINES FOR STUDENTS WISHING TO WRITE A PAPER INSTEAD OF TAKING AN ORAL EXAM FOR MODULE C/PART 3

Option available ONLY for attending and participating students. Option valid ONLY for exam sessions in January and February 2010.

Your paper should be typed, printed and written in English. Length: 4-5 double spaced pages, font size 12. Please hand in (my mailbox in Piazza Venezia) one week before the chosen exam session.

You are not required to use any other sources in addition to your required readings. Base your argument on information in the Heath Anthology, and the handouts distributed in class.  Provide close readings of the three novels in the program. The Great Gatsby should only provide your comparative measure. The Bluest Eye is to be treated as a second comparative text but you may draw more examples from it. Mostly, focus your analysis on The Skin Between Us.

Your paper should NOT be descriptive. You are supposed to write an argumentative statement about Ragusa’s novel compared with Morrison’s by using critical material illustrated in class through examples from Fitzgerald’s novel.

To write your paper you must have an argument (“pollution is bad for the environment” is a statement, “50% of Government budget should be spent on limiting pollution” is an argument) . Reveal your perspective in the first paragraph by formulating a clear thesis statement. If your statement answers only the question WHAT, you may not have an argument. Make sure you entertain HOW and WHY questions as well.

Remember that a good argument makes progress: present one idea at a time and provide connections. Organize your writing into paragraphs.

Your paper must be persuasive: your argument requires proof. Analyze the texts, compare them, evaluate them and interpret them. When you present premises and findings do not omit your evaluation.

Your argument should declare which critical theory it is based on. Declare your purpose and your methodology.

In your conclusion make sure your voice is heard within the context of the critical debate you are addressing.

AND DO NOT FORGET TO GIVE A TITLE TO YOUR PAPER! A good title encapsulated your thesis statement, your argument.

Accurately edit and proofread before printing. Use a good monolingual dictionary, a thesaurus and a grammar.

Dr. Giovanna Covi, L. e L. Angloamericane C / L. Inglese I  LT-2009-10

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Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby: Psychoanalytic Criticism

The novel portrays romantic relationships. Gatsby’s love for Daisy is romantic. From a psychoanalytic point of vies the interest of Gatsby’s love for Daisy is not in its uniqueness but in the fact that it mirrors the other relationships in the novel: Tom and Daisy, Tom and Myrtle, Myrtle and George, Nick and Jordan. It reveals a pervasive pattern of psychological behaviour: the characters are afraid of intimacy.

Tom has many affairs with other women to protect himself from becoming intimate with either woman. Daisy represents social superiority for him; Myrtle reinforces his sense of masculine identity and superiority (he introduces her to his male acquaintances). Daisy is also afraid of intimacy. She never loved Tom but married him to keep herself from loving Gatsby. Yet three months after her wedding she seems in love with her husband even though she has good reasons to believe that he is pursuing other women whenever he is not with her, including the time she is giving birth to Pammy. Yet rather than hate she feels love for Tom. Psychoanalytically, if she is afraid of intimacy there is nothing better for her than to love someone who does not love her completely, like Tom. Usually fear of intimacy with others is fear of intimacy with oneself, with some aspects of one’s identity that one does not wish to face. For both Tom and Daisy fear of intimacy is related to low self-esteem. If Tom were as emotionally secure as his wealth and size make him appear, he wouldn’t work as hard as he does to impress others with his money and power as he does. He brags about his house; he flaunts Myrtle before his male friends,; he degrades those who do not belong to the “dominant race”; he chooses mistresses form the lower classes. Daisy’s affected behaviour displays her insecurity all the time.  Tom’s and Daisy’s insecurity is also visible in their incapacity to relate to others; to Pammy who is being raised by her nurse; to Nick and Jordan whom they avoid bonding with; they constantly change places in which they live to avoid getting close to anyone.

Tom’s relationship with Myrtle lacks intimacy; she is merely the means by which he avoids getting close to Daisy; he only calls her when it suits him; he lies to her; he is violent (breaks her nose). Myrtle’s lack of concern for Tom is the counterpart: he is only her way out of George’s garage. She is not looking for emotional relationship, only for economic advancement. When she learns that the good suit in which George was dressed when he married her was borrowed, she cried and started looking for someone else. There is no intimacy, only social display. Nick and Jordan too fear intimacy. Nick describes both Daisy and Jordan  “as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire” (Chapter 1). After Myrtle’s death, he gets away from Jordan to keep himself emotional insulated. His fear of intimacy is also characteristic of his previous two romances back home in Wisconsin and New York City: as soon as his affairs become serious he avoids them and denies them. Jordan too want to remain emotionally insulated: her sporty life provides a glossy image to shield her form others. She avoids relationships and all she lets us know about herself is that she is a golf champion.

Gatsby and Daisy’s love is dysfunctional because it too symbolizes FEAR OF INTIMACY. Her desire for Gatsby disappears when she learns that he is not from the right social class (Chapter 7). Daisy uses Gatsby to cope with Tom’s extramarital life. Daisy’s marriage is painful and Gatsby provides a distraction, a psychological defense. As such it underscores the psychological importance of her dysfunctional marriage: the continued unconscious importance of her marriage finally makes Daisy feel safe enough to be with Gatsby again. As long as she remains psychologically involved with Tom, she need not fear that she will develop the kind of attachment she had to Gatsby before her marriage. Myrtle and Gatsby are psychological tokens in Daisy’s and Tom’s marriage. Daisy kills Myrtle with Gatsby’s car; Tom sends armed George to Gatsby’s house.

But how can we speak of fear of intimacy in Gatsby, who spends his live in love with Daisy? His goal is the possession of Daisy but Daisy is only the key to the goal not the goal itself. Gatsby started life as Jimmy Gatz and in a Benjamin Franklin way improved himself into Jay Gatsby, planning a life of rags-to-riches like Rockefeller and Carnegie. His planned desire to move up socially makes his reject his parents completely (Chapter 9). His past is repressed; his psychological desire is based on a defense  mechanism of denial, which replaces his real origin with an invented family (Chapter 4). When he meets Daisy he feels for the first time he can be part of his self-made identity (Chapter 8). Daisy is not a real woman, but only an emblem of the emotional insulation from himself, from Jimmy Gatz, from his parents and from intimacy with others. Thus he idealizes Daisy as the perfect woman. As an ideal, the objecy of his obsession, she is not one he can intimately love. Daisy and Gatsby experienced emotions in their Long Island affair, but they never grew intimate feelings between themselves. What prevents the development of an intimate relationship is on the one had a dysfunctional marriage on the other a repressed youth. Gatsby’s lonely pursuit of Daisy represents the loneliness of his youth. He is an outsider in his mansion as much as he felt an outsider in his own family.

The Great Gatsby shows how romantic relationships can facilitate the repression of psychological wounds and “carry ceaselessly into the past” (Chapter 9).

Dr. Giovanna Covi, L. e L. Angloamericane C / L. Inglese I  LT-2009-10

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Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby: Marxist Criticism

TGG = 1925, a chronicle of the American Dream; 1925 when a dollar’s worth of stocks could be purchased for 10 cents. Gatsby meteoric rise embodies the infinite possibility of the Am dream.

TGG does not embody the capitalist culture it portrays. It stands as a scathing critique of Am capitalist culture and ideology. A Marxist perspective shows how the novel fails to push such critique far enough.

TGG shows the debilitating effects of capitalism even on those who are successful through its representation of commodification (the act of relating persons in terms of their exchange value). Tom embodies commodification by relating to the world only through his money. Especially in his relations to women, all is translated into dollars. Also in how he describes his house to Nick. But he is insecure because he comes from the Midwest: in 1920s in the eyes of the Easterners coming from the Modwest meant being a latecomer. He tries to gain credits by associating woth the white race (that procuces civilization, he claims).

Daisy is not merely an innocent victim of her husband’s commodification: she accepts the 350,000 $ pearls, the marriage and all. Her affair with Gatsby is based on commodification too (Chapter 8)

Myrtle and George represent the lower classes but the only way out of the lower classes for them is in a coffin. Gatsby in rags-to-riches style has risen from poverty but his dream is corrupt. His material possessions are only valuable as exchange items: his image not his pleasure. The library is full of uncut books (Chapter 9) is plain surface. The mansion is an imitation of Hotel de Ville. Daisy isa commodity to possess. “He took what he could get ravenously and unscrupulously” (Chapter 8). The American dream does not offer a moral alternative  to Tom’s world and Daisy’s inherited wealth.

Myrtle and George fail to draw attention.

Nick is seduced by the American Dream Gatsby represents.

The lush language used to describe the wealthy makes them attractive. Nick romanticizes Gatsby.  He shows him in a good light. TGG criticizes capitalism but also repackages its ideology in a double movement.

ANALYSIS OF CHAPTER 1

Dr. Giovanna Covi, L. e L. Angloamericane C / L. Inglese I  LT-2009-10

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Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby: New Criticism

New Criticism occupied literary studies in the USA from 1940s to 1960 and is no longer practices now; however it has left a lasting imprint on the way we read literature. It is based on the assumption that a text has a timeless meaning and that readers do not create meanings.

The quality of images in TGG evokes the lyricism of poet John Keats and informs characterization in the novel in three ways: 1. As nostalgia for a lost past; 2. As dreams of future fulfilment; 3. As undefined longing

1.       Is visible in descriptions of Daisy’s and Jordan’s girlhood in Louisville depicted in romantic terms with white dresses, ringing telephones and handsome officers (see Chapter 4). Also in Nick’s description of the Midwest’s untouched beautiful nature as he was in college and returned home at Christmas to a world that he remembers as more real and genuine than NYC (Ch 9). Gatsby and Tom too remember their past life elsewhere with romantic nostalgia. The most nostalgic scene is in Ch 9 where Nick remembers “for the last time in history” the past and includes a historical scope to mention the past of America(Dutch sailors).

2.       Nick dreams of his future as successful bond businessman (Ch 1). In Ch 4 as Nick and Gatsby drive to NYC for lunch, they pass through “the valley of ashes” where Myrtle is longing for a better future; when T>om and Nick pull into George’s garage “a damp gleam of hope prang into his light blue eyes” (Ch 2). Gatsby dreams of his future and idealizes it as he looks at Daisy’s house (Ch 8) and as he walks down a street (Ch 6). Often Gatsby stands on the beach and his had points towards tha green light into the future.

3.       The novel is also pervaded by undefined longing in characters who are mostly vulgar but are seen in settings where there is harmony, refinement  and plenitude. See Gastby’s parties. We must remember that Nick is our narrator so most of the unfulfilled and undefined longing is his.

Unfulfilled longing is at the core of the human condition and at the center of this novel.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby: Reader-Response Criticism

Contrary to New Criticism, it pays attention to the process of reading and the meaning created by readers.

What we believe about Gatsby continually shifts as the reading proceeds. We react to him in ways similar to his parties’ guests. The final outcome of our reactions is a speculation based on our own set of values. Gatsby is there to be interpreted by other characters and by readers alike. Nick interprets Gatsby through his own projections as well and creates a pattern of sympathy and criticism for us to follow. The “Gatsby” in Ch 1 becomes “Mr Gatsby in Ch 9” because then Nick did not know him yet. Often Nick wonders whether Gatsby’s appearance is the truth about him, he keeps shifing between positive and negative evaluation: for example, Ch 4 Nick and Gatsby and Wolfsheim at lunch=negative; Ch 4 Jordan tells Nick about Gatsby and Daisy=positive.

There is a high level of indeterminacy in this novel and readers must take sides. Most lit critics interpret Gatsby as a romantic hero, a heroic personification of the American hero representing self-reliance, energy, infinite possibilities. Most of the readings that idealize Gatsby also idealize the American dream grounded on uncorrupted past. Richard Chase sees Gatsby as a pastoral ideal of innocence and pure conduct, a frontier pioneer in the Jazz Age.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby: Structuralist Criticism

Examines the general structure of a number of texts to discover the underlying principles that govern their composition; it also examines the structure of a single text to discover how its composition demonstrates the underlying principles of a given system. Structuralist frameworks—such as Frye and Scholes for genre; Greimas, Todorov or Genette’s for narrative; Culler’s for competence—reveal how the text operates.

TGG is symmetrical: it revolves around Gatsby’s pursuit, attainment and loss of Daisy. Every failure in G’s pursuit corresponds to a revelation about his negative past. When G and D reunite in Ch 5—central of 9 chs—it is June and G will die in September. The narration moves from the world of wealth (CH1) to the world of poverty (Ch 2) to both (Ch 3) to Nick hearing about G’s and D’s past (Ch 4), then Nick hearing about G’s D’s past at his house (Ch 5), appearance of the triangle Tom, D and G (Ch6); explosion of triangle T, D, and G (Ch7), appearance and explosion of triangle with three connected disasters (Myrtle’s death, G’s death, George’s death); Nick’s meditation closes the story.

Tzvetan Todorov suggests that a pattern of relations among actions (=verbs), attributes (=adjectives) and characters (=nouns) structure the grammar of the text. TGG can be reduced to 3 verbs: to seek, to find, to lose. The 3 verbs produce 2 narrative patters: 1. Seeks, finds and loses, 2. Seeks but doesn’t find. The narrative formula is the same:

Attribute: X lacks Y; Action: X seeks Y; Attribute: X doesn’t find Y or X finds but then loses Y. This formula structures the text as a whole. Seek-find-lose grammar  is a rejection of the traditional seek-and-find quest formula: TGG is a modernist text and reflects a worldview of determined by lost innocence. This grammar offers an application of Northrop Frye’s theory of mythoi because the narrative embeds the mythos of summer (Gatsby’s romance) within the mythos of winter (Nick’s irony). The structure of irony  provides a commentary of the structure of romance that is exemplary of the modernist novel: Nick is forced to realize that romance is no longer possible in the modern world. Gatsby as hero of the romantic quest must fail.  The Jazz Age of the American 1920s hosted the rise of G as the incarnation of the American Dream; Gatsby keeps looking for the past Golden Age (his courtship of Daisy in Louisville). As the novel proceeds the characters keep the same attributes. The only exception is Nick who is transformed by NYC and becomes disillusioned. Redemption looks unlikely in the seek-find-lose grammar  of the modern novel analogously we might characterize the postmodern novel as a grammar of the don’t bother to seek, see Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, for example).

Dr. Giovanna Covi, L. e L. Angloamericane C / L. Inglese I  LT-2009-10

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Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby: Deconstructive Criticism

The  poststructural practice of deconstruction asks the text the question about the undecidability of meaning: how the text does NOT answer certain questions, how conflicting interpretations leave issues undecidable and what is left out by the ideology embraced by the text.

TGG’s overt ideological project is to condemn the decadence of the 1920s during which the American dream was smashed. Nick’s and Gatsby’s painful disillusionment as they face the harsh reality of NYC bring them to look with nostalgia into their past, idealized as the site of American innocence. Nevrtheless the text’s ambivalence deconstructs the binary opposition between past and present, and thus between innocence and decadence, as well as the West and the East.

There is little to redeem the modern world in TGG: Tom and Meyer are predators consumed by self-interest; the Buchanans are forever drifting; Jordan is always on the move; George too thinks he can solve his problems by simply moving West. No character has lasting friends. They are all alienated. The main concern is social status and entertainment. Female characters are shallow, selfish and mostly drunken.  The only black character Nick sees on his way to NY (Ch 4) are as superficial as the other characters, only capable of “rolling their eyes” at the luxury that passes by. Nick starts out optimistic and by the end of summer is disillusioned by the corrupt world around Gatsby. Gatsby has all the makings of the American romantic hero but such qualities do not semm useful in the modern world in which his “gift for hope” cannot survive.

When the novel looks into the past instead of innocence we find lies and corruption as well as in modernity, so the juxtaposition does not hold.

The problem therefore is with the concept of INNOCENCE itself: Nick is initially fascinated by decadence because he is innocent (inexperienced, naïve); when he condemns decadence he falls prey because he is innocent (ognorant). His problem seems to be in including inexperience and ignorance. This makes him vulnerable.; indeed it is innocence of this ambiguous type that created decadence. The text in any case seems to find decadence much more interesting than innocence. The West and the past are associated with innocence, but in the figure of DAN CODY it is the past and the West that are decandent and thus it is the WEST that corrupts the EAST.

Gatsby is the most pervasive ambiguity in the novel: the romantic knight of ages past seems lost in his dream for the future. He is successful in a world of predators. But he was always corrupt, even in his falling in love with Daisy: we read that HE TOOK DAISY RAVENOUSLY AND UNSCRUPULOUSLY..

Indeed, nostalgia for the past is too innocent to be uncorrupt, the novel suggests. By showing us that corruption is the condition of the past as well as the present, TGG opens up the undecidability about the world of the novel. Deconstruction in fact, maintains that the text is not a representation of the world as it really is, but as we perceive it to be, which is the only world knowable.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby: New Historical and Cultural Criticism

This critical approach asks how the text may help us map the historical period it refers to and that produced it.

A dominant discourse at the time of Gatsby was the discourse of the self-made man. TGG participates in the circulation of this discourse and it embodies one of its major contradictions: while the discourse of the self-made man claims to open the annals of American history, it is permeated by the desire to escape history and transcend the reality of time, place and human limitation.

Gatsby draws on Benjamin Franklin; he lives at a time (1890-1922) when “success manuals” flourished. He never wasted his time, not even by attending college (unlike Tom and Nick). His life is comparable to that of Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller. The novel also serves as a commentary on the discourse of the self-made man as a discourse permeated by the desire to escape history through the sentimentalization of existence, which is portrayed as larger than life.

Today Gatsby remains the icon of America’s romanticization of the self-made man. Indeed without the cultural circulation of such discourse TGG would not be possible. Through the discourse circulated in our culture, our identities are formed, linked to one another, shaped and also re-cast in alternative fashion. Gatsby drew his identity entirely from the dominant discourse of his time.

Dr. Giovanna Covi, L. e L. Angloamericane C / L. Inglese I  LT-2009-10

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1. Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby: Feminist Criticism

Asks the text: what questions it raises about patriarchy, and about intersections between gender, race, class and other cultural factors. It also questions how the work is gendered—i.e., how it defines masculinity and femininity and ehther the text seems to accept or reject mainstream definitions of gender roles.

2. Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby: Queer Criticism

Asks the text: what are the politics (the ideological agenda) and the poetics (literary strategies) of the thematic treatment of sexuality? How does the story contribute to our knowledge of non heterosexual identities? What does the story reveal about the social, political, psychological operations of heterosexism—does it celebrate or critique it?

3. Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby: African-American Criticism

Asks the text: what does the story tell us about African heritage in America? What racial politics does it embrace? Does the work draw on African-American poetics and participate in African-American literary tradition, or does it ignore it? Does the work reflect on the construction of race, on white privilege, on black marginalization? Does the story construct equal portrayals of different racial groups?

WORKSHOP

1. TGG is set at the time when women were given the right to vote. They could now be seen drinking and smoking  and walking the streets without chaperons. They were called “New Women”. Rejection of their traditional roles was interpreted as the destruction of the family and moral decline of society. Many minor female characters incarnate the New Woman: does Nick’s description of them incarnate the novel’s ideology about women in general? Do you find Daisy, Myrtle and Jordan likeable? Is sexual transgression performed by women regarded equally in the nolevl’s economy as sexual transgression performed by men? Does the novel embrace a patriarchal agenda? Does the novel condemn female characters for their gender more than for their class identity?

2. Certainly the plot of TGG is overtly heterosexual and undoubtedly it develops by virtue of sexual transgression. Nevertheless, might we argue that the heterosexual plot is shadowed by a homosexual subtext? Are there any signs at parties that may indicate the presence of gay and lesbian couples? IN Ch 2 Nick meets Mr. McKee “a pale, feminine man”: what do you make if this encounter? How does Nick depict Gatsby’s pink suit in ch 7 and 8? And what about Jordan, the sporty woman whose name is both male and female and who has a body “like a young cadet” (Ch 1)? Can we be sure whether Nick is conscious about his homoerotic attraction? Or is he innocently the detached moralistic narrator he wishes to be? In any case, does Nick’s fear to come out reveal the homophobia of a text that is primarily about sexual transgression?

4.TGG is set in NYC in 1920s, F. S. Fitzgerald coined the phrase Jazz Age for this period and place. How does TGG represent Harlem and African Americans in the Jazz Age? How are the musicians playing jazz at Gatsby’s parties depicted? How are African Americans seen by Nick in the novel? How do you interpret Fitzgerald’s racial politics in TGG?

Dr. Giovanna Covi, L. e L. Angloamericane C / L. Inglese I  LT-2009-10

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Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

CRITICAL QUESTIONS

Psychoanalytic Criticism: Does the novel reveal debilitating psychological effects of racism? Are these internalized by the victim? Are the Breedloves convinced that they are ugly simply because they have African features? Why is Mrs Breedlove more devoted to the white family she serves than to her own? Do you detect self-hatred in the black boys who pick on Pecola for having black skin? Why is Maureen Peal assumed  to be superior? What does Geraldine do in order not to look like a “nigger”? Does internalized racism result in self-contempt on the part of black characters? Is Pecola’s desire for blue eyes an illustration of the psychological destructiveness of racism? Does psychoanalysis help us understand the roots of dysfunctional family in Pauline and Cholly’s youthful experiences of abandonment, isolation and betrayal?

Marxist Criticism: Does the novel display a Marxist agenda in revealing the ways in which religion and the entertainment industry encourage the poor to ignore the harsh realities of their social conditions and thus organize and collectively fight for their share of rights? Does capitalism in the 1940s affect the racist world of the novel?

New Criticism: when Pecola believes that her brown eyes are blue, can we declare that TBE is based on irony?

Reader-Response Criticism: Analyze how your race, gender, class affect your reading of TBE.

Structuralist Criticism: Which narrative elements structure TBE? Are structural similarities related to thematic similarities? Is there a narrative grammar that informs the various stories and TBE’s production of meaning?

Deconstructive Criticism: How does TBE construct and deconstruct African-American identity? Is the notion of undecidability in place in relation to issues of collective identity?

New Historical and Cultural Criticism: Compare culture in the USA in the 1940s (time of the novel), 1960s (time of publication) and now (time of reading) and show how concepts of race, gender and class have changed.

Feminist Criticism: Does TBE criticize patraiarchy? Does Cholly’s hatred of Darlene exemplify the displacement of men’s pain on women? Is the appreciation of strong women (Aunt Jimmy, M’Dear, Mrs. MacTeer) a feminist trait of TBE? Is sisterhood held as a value in TBE?

Queer Criticism: does TBE reveal the inadequacy of hetero- and homosexual categories? How would you describe the relationship among the three prostitutes?

African-American Criticism: Analyze TBE’s antiracist politics (compare Pecola with “Black is Beautiful”), and the quality of its poetics (orality of Mrs Breedlove, Mrs McTeer and Miss Marie, folk motifs).

Dr. Giovanna Covi, L. e L. Angloamericane C / L. Inglese I  LT-2009-10

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STRUCTURE

Structural linguistics (F. de Saussure) looks for the ways in which the rules of language function, the way in which words are in relation to one another; words are not simply referential; they are also signs (signifier+signified) and their relationship is arbitrary. We would have a different image of snow if we spoke Inuit. Language structures human experience.

C. Lèvi-Strauss created structural anthropology seeking to show the structural similarities among apparently different myths in different cultures.

Semiotics applies structuralist insights to sign systems—linguistic and non-linguistic. Semiotics expands the signifier to include objects, sounds, images, etc. Of three kinds of signs (index, icon and symbol) only the symbol is object of interpretation.

Clearly structuralism has wide applications in literature. The narrative dimension of literary texts is object of structuralist analysis.

Structure of literary genres: Northrop Frye’s theory of myths looking for archetypes and related classification of fiction into modes (myth, romance, mimesis, irony).

Narratology: A. J. Greimas, T. Todorov, G. Genette.

For Greimas the advancement of plot involves the transfer of a quality or an object from one actant to another. The structure of fiction is like the structure of language: subject-verb-object. Plot types vary from stories of quest, of communication or both.

Todorov draws a comparison between the units of narrative (characters, propositions, sequences) and the units of language (nouns, verbs, sentences, paragraphs). The grammar of narrative he proposes is based on the categorization of the propositions identified.

Genette identifies 3 levels that work together: story (events), narrative (words on page), narration (the act of telling the story). They interact by 3 qualities: tense (time), mood (perspective) and voice (narrator).

It is important to remember that the identification of structures is employed by G, T and G to address larger questions about literary meaning.

Jonathan Culler argues that what we call the structure of literature is actually the structure of the system of interpretation we bring to it. Culler identifies the following conventions: Distance and impersonality (what assumptions do we make as we realize we are reading a fictional work?);  Naturalization (what do we assume as we realize we are hearing the voice of the narrator and as we decode certain symbols?); The rule of significance (what do we assume as soon as we identify a specific problem addressed by the text?); The rule of metaphorical coherence (what do we assume in making the two components of a metaphor consistent with the context of the work?); The rule of thematic unity (what expectations do we have in relation to a unified point in the work?). Culler aims to show how the structural system operates within our culture, that our understanding of literature is based on the interpretive strategies we bring to the text. In a poststructuralist mode, Culler invites us not only to see the structures of consciousness that allow us to create meanings about the text and the world, but also to examine interpretation in its own making and ask the question: what is the structure that makes my interpretation possible?

Dr. Giovanna Covi, L. e L. Angloamericane C / L. Inglese I  LT-2009-10

HANDOUT 10

http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/ragusa_kym.php UN of Minnesota review of KR

Kym Ragusa, The Skin Between Us

I don't know where I was conceived, but I was made in Harlem. Its topography is mapped on my body: the borderlines between neighborhoods marked by streets that were forbidden to cross, the borderlines enforced by fear and anger, and transgressed by desire. The streets crossing east to west, north to south, like the web of veins beneath my skin.

Memoir. 1999 journey to Messina,  symbolic of her artistic work about what it means to be multicultural.

Kym Ragusa was born February of 1966 in Manhattan, NY. Ragusa comes from a mixed background: her mother is African American and her father is Italian. Ragusa's ancestors on her mother's side were brought to the United States as African slaves. Ragusa's paternal line is Italian. Ragusa's grandfather Luigi and his wife, Gilda, moved to the United States with their daughter Angela and son from Messina, Italy, settling in Bronx, NY. Ragusa's parents met at Columbia University in Harlem. Their families disapproved of their relationship, on racial and social grounds.

The Bronx has long been a home to immigrants from many cultures. By the 1950's, the Bronx was populated mostly by Hispanic and African American populations as Irish and Italian immigrants moved to suburban areas or different states. Harlem became a center in a movement of Black culture in the 1920's, known as the “Harlem Renaissance.” Ragusa's grandmother, Miriam, experienced many aspects of Harlem,  the heart of social change and political activism for black people in New York City. Harlem of the 1950's was a place of growing popular unrest, of picket lines and boycotts and increasing activism among ordinary black people.

The Skin Between Us explores racial identity, personal belonging, and community. Ragusa recalls the pain of searching for personal identity and belonging in a racially divided family, community, and culture. The confusion of racial identity permeates the most intimate aspects of Ragusa's life and these are the same intimate raw experiences that Ragusa shares with the reader. Storytelling is a source of healing and belonging the stories of the women in her family history are told  with loving detail. Ragusa offers a fresh, unique perspective on what it means to belong to a community and what it means to belong to a multiracial family, in a racially divided America.

Can you classify the text in terms of its narrative structure and genre?

Using Jonathan Culler’s theory, what codes of interpretation must be internalized in order to make sense of TSBU?

What does the text communicate through nonverbal messages and how exactly does it communicate?