MIDTERM EXAM

MIDTERM EXAM

ENGL 2010: Introduction to Literary Theory

Professor Klages

THIS EXAM IS DUE IN CLASS ON MONDAY MARCH 10. THIS IS AN ABOSOLUTE DEADLINE: NO EXCEPTIONS.

This is a take home exam; you should use your notes and the texts, materials on the course web page, and of course, everything you have read/talked about in discussion. The exams will be graded as mini-essays, issues of form, grammar, ect. will be evaluated along with content – the ideas and arguments – of the essay. Like the worksheets, the assessments of the content will be based on how well you understand the theories and how clearly and precisely you express that understanding. Try to be original and creative in your responses; no outside sources are necessary but mere regurgitation of lectures/ worksheets will not be enough for optimum performance on the exam.

Be sure to answer TWO questions and/or quotations in each section, as well as to clearly label your selections. The exam must be typed, double spaced, with reason (1”) margins. We expect exams to be 8-10 pages long, but of course, longer exams are welcome. Good luck!

STRUCTURALISM:

Choose TWO of the following questions to answer or quotations to explain. Identify the theorist and the essay associated with these ideas, and then work to explain clearly and completely how the passage is relevant to the author’s theory as a whole. Your explanations will be worth maximum of 25 points each.

A. “Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only difference without positive terms.”

B. “Thus the specific character of mythological time, which as we have seen is both reversible and non-reversible, synchronic, diachronic, remains unaccounted for. From this springs a new hypothesis, which continues the very core of our argument. The true constituent units of a myth are not isolated relations but bundles of such relations, and it is only as bundles that these relations can be put to use and combined.

C. What are the basic principles and terms of structuralist theory?

D. “Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each terms results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others.”

E. “Language itself can be analyzed into thins which are at the same time similar and yet different. This is precisely what is expressed in Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole, one being the structural side of language, the other the statistical aspect of it, langue belonging to a reversible time, parole being non-reversible.”

2. DECONSTRUCTION:

A. What is “deconstruction” as Derrida defines and practices it? Pick a particular binary opposition (presence/absence, good/evil, masculine/feminine, for example) and “deconstruct” it?

B. “The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not along to the totality (is not part of the totality) the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center. The center is not the center. The concept of centered structure – although represents coherence itself – is contradictorily coherent.”

C. “Play is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element is always a signifying and substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain. Play is always play of absence and presence…”

D. “The bricoleur…is someone who uses the ‘means at hand,’ that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to th operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form an their origin are heterogeneous.” How does Derrida engage in a type of “bricolage” of Saussure, using and/ or rewriting ideas of the signifier and the process of signification?

E. “There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order o the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretations as an exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play, and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being name of the being who, throughout the history of metaphysics…has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play.”

3. PSYCHOANALYSIS:

A. “The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation – and which manufactures, for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic – and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development.”

B. “In girls the Oedipus complex is a secondary formation. The operations of the castration complex precede it and prepare for it. As regards the relation between the Oedipus and castration complexes there is a fundamental contrast between the two sexes. Whereas in boys the Oedipus complex succumbs to the castration complex, in girls it is made possible and led up to by the castration complex.”

C. Compare and contrast Freud and Lacan’s notions of the unconscious.

D. “The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied around it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skillfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive ‘o-o-o-o’. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful ‘da’ [‘there’]. This, then, was the complete game – disappearance and return.”

E. “A little girl behaves differently. She makes her judgment and her decision in a flash. She has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it.”

4. FEMINISM:

A. How do feminist theories use the tools of post structuralism –including the deconstruction of binary opposites and bricolage –to argue for reconsideration of traditional patriarchal perspectives. Give examples of some feminist deconstructions of patriarchal binaries, and discuss how the resulting “play” affections notions of gender, power, and/or writing?

B. How is feminist thought a response to, or a rewriting of, psychoanalytic ideas? Consider feminist responses to Freud and to Lacan; use specific examples from the theorist to support your arguments.

C. “It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and thus is an impossibility that will remains, for the practice can never be theorizes, enclosed, coded – which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. But it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system.”

D. “In patriarchal Western culture, therefore, the text’s author is a father, a progenitor, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative power like his penis.”

E. Discuss how Gilbert and Cixous theorize the signifigance of the male and female body.