tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36820291622516603362024-02-07T05:42:09.148-08:00Postmodernism ENG603 academic blogHi I'm Harbinder and my Blog is a thinking diary examining postmodernism.I am using this blog as a think tank and am storing secondary resources to use later in my critical analysis of Manuel Puig's ,Kiss of The Spider Woman.
I shall explore and identify different theoretical styles within this blog.Harbinderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13826717276206440475noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3682029162251660336.post-29354020300421370282012-01-19T04:43:00.000-08:002012-01-19T04:43:27.420-08:00Links Judith Butler and Performative gender<!--[if !mso]>
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Judith Butler oral format,Video lectures</div>
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bkFlJfxyF0</div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjFZHfTJRU</span>M<img alt="" src="file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Taj/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/moz-screenshot-5.png" /><img alt="" src="file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Taj/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/moz-screenshot-6.png" />Harbinderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13826717276206440475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3682029162251660336.post-41728329001087197302012-01-19T04:17:00.001-08:002012-01-19T04:17:45.613-08:00Critical Analysis Of Emmanuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">DC00385860</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Assignment 1 Part 2: Critical
Analysis</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">I shall critically analyse ‘The
Kiss of The Spider Woman’ , from the subjective viewpoint of Postmodernism. I
shall investigate how <span> </span>metanarrative and simulation
are used within the text and how this creates a deconstructive narrative. I
shall also explore Judith Butler’s theory on performative gender in relation to
this textual analysis.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Before analysing this text it is
important to understand the political implications of how and when it was
written. It is in direct relevance to Manuel Puig’s novel of ‘The Buenos Aires Affair.’
(1973) This novel critiqued Peron and the government in Argentina which led to the
expulsion of Puig from his native country. As according to Esposito;</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">‘
In 1976, the military deposed Isabel and proceeded to institute one of the most
disastrous, terror-ridden military dictatorships of the twentieth century: a
regime that would make torture and kidnapping into instruments of policy, and
that would reportedly kill 30,000 of its own citizens in just seven years, a
period now known in Argentina as the Dirty War. <span> </span>(Esposito: 2010) Explicitly, ‘The Kiss of The
Spider Woman’ therefore has elements of an autobiographical and political
context, which shall be analyzed in the deconstruction of the text.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span> </span>We are first drawn to two men who have been
exiled like Puig, from mainstream society and share a cell in a jail in Argentina. Equally
as with Puig, they are ostracized from society because of their political and
sexual preference and the fear of torture like the ‘dirty war’ is <span> </span>real; which takes the form of food poisoning
and mutilation of Valentin within the text. Molina is a gay window dresser, who
is in prison for sexual liaisons with a minor and Valentin, who is a political
prisoner, is anti- government. By using intertextuality we can identify Puig’s
real character with Valentin as he is valorizing his political ostracism from
society by Peron and with Molina by showing the marginal’s of a patriarchal society.
It is the friendship which develops between the men which is the core theme of
the story. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span> </span>There is no narrative voice and changes in
voices are highlighted by a</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span> </span>dash (-). Dialogism is used to create the
fluidity of the story and to demonstrate the complex personalities of the individual
characters. Yet Dialogism, also gives the effect of reading the text as a play
which is further enforced by Molina’s ‘stream of consciousness as a monologue’
(Teorey:2010) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">It
is through the hyperreality of film that both men travel to an escapist ideal away
from their cell and it is here that Molina’s monologue takes over.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Molina’s
stories are filled with images of old Hollywood black and white movies, which become
fiction presented within fiction; through intertextuality these become a
metanarrative; as Molina then proceeds to deconstruct the story by embodying
himself within the female stars of Hollywood.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span> </span>As according to Bayona; ‘Puig develops the
idea of the Hollywood films as a metaphorical
displacement for Valentin and Molina as they identify or reject themselves with
the film’s characters. (Bayona:2009) This then also</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">questions
the simulation of the perfect image of Hollywood
movie stars and gender as a performance, which I shall critically analyze next
as a deconstructive text in chapter three.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span> </span>Molina tells the story of French singer Leni
and her moral and political struggle in wartime Europe.
The occupation of the Nazis and freedom fighters is highlighted and creates a
pastiche with Peron and Puig's exile. He introduces gothic melodrama by
creating the ugly character ‘clubfoot’ and creates an air of romantic mystery with
Leni and a German officer. Through intertextuality, Molina is parodied with
Leni as the fallen heroine who betrays her lover, in comparison Molina helps
Valentin by betraying him too, to the prison guard, for information .Occupied France is a historgraphic metafiction that
ironically satires Peron’s dictatorship of Argentina. The soldiers; ‘Totally blond,
marvelous to look at.’ (Puig 1979:48) Puig is deconstructing the narrative, and
is exploring the political fascist ideals of Peron as according to Pigna, Peron
valorized thee ‘perfectly ordered community, true peoples democracy, the true
social democracy. (Pigna (2008) On initial reading it is easily to candidly
view Molina’s film speak as a right wing propaganda film, but the film must be
viewed as a simulation to understand it as a metanarrative.Puig simulates the Nazi
flag and blonde white idealism, as a parody of fascism in Spain and Argentina .The
music hall again suggests the intertextuality of a gothic film.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">‘They’re
all made up black and when they kick they hold onto each other around the waist
and as the camera focuses on them they look like a line of African girls, with
skirts all made out of bananas, and nothing else, but then the cymbals clang
and they turn to the other side, and suddenly they’re blonde, and instead of
bananas they’re wearing little strips.’ (Puig 1979:50)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">This
text works in two ways, firstly it deconstructs the narrative as according to
Barry; it is a ‘way of describing this would be to say deconstructive reading
uncovers the unconscious rather than the conscious dimensions of the text’. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">(Barry
2009:65) On the theory of the unconscious, firstly black and blonde make us
examine binary divisions of race and the hegemonic racism of seeing and
accepting this hypereality as the norm, as the blonde as the dominant hegemonic
race. The scene is built up on the Heisenburg uncertainty principle (Waugh
1996:3) as we are observing through Molina’s eyes and his objectivity creates a
metanarrative within the film. Thus the mere fact that these binaries exist on
one person deconstructs the idea of racial difference and questions the
identity of a supreme race.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">The
camera or picture is already deconstructing the narrative, therefore we are
first drawn to the binary oppositions of race within gender itself and<span> </span>Baudrillard’s<span> </span>idea of simulacra, is further heightened in <span> </span>the blonde white race as a mass media message
of the <span> </span>perfect race of Nazi Germany.
This simulated reality in opposition to the painted faces of African women
would be seen as degenerative, but ironically questions the oppression of women
by patriarchy and opens up the question of homophobia that is also present in
society.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span> </span>Butler
reinforces this oppression; <span> </span><span> </span></span><span> </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">“Bound
to seek recognition of its own existence in categories, terms, and names that
are not of its own making, the subject seeks the sign of its own existence
outside itself, in a discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent. Social
categories signify subordination and existence at once. In other words, within
subjection the price of existence is subordination.” (Butler :subjection)<br />
<br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Fundamentally
this text is not just examining race but also as a metanarrative by examining
the <span> </span>social subordination, of women and <span> </span>Puig’s own sexuality. It has absorbed a
pastiche of styles which is shown when Leni visits <span> </span>the German officer’s <span> </span>apartment. The medieval style architecture of
this scene, further creates a pastiche of a film embellished with another film,
a metanarrative. As according to Waugh it is when a text ‘poses questions about
its relationship to fiction.’ (Waugh 1996:2) By creating a gothic genre in this
scene, the text is questioning this relationship. The scene is totally gothicized
,from the white marble , to the ‘ white chiffon curtain billowing in the wind
like a ghost ,and the candles blow out, the only lighting.’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">(Puig
1980:55)We are given ‘moonlight’ and the framing of Leni as a ‘Greek Amphora.’ suggesting
connotations of fecundity . (Puig 1996:55) This metanarrative is questioning
the relationship between ‘fiction and reality’ .<span> </span>(Waugh 1996:2) The metanarrative views the
scene as Molina as the director of a film, who valorizes Leni as tragic heroine
of gothic fiction. She has an air of mystery<span>
</span>and is with a German officer in Paris
at night; and the grounds around the ‘house seem silvery, black trees against
the gray sky, not blue, because the films in black and white.’(Puig 1996:55) It
is here that the metanarrative again questions what reality is and what fiction
is as we seem to be railroaded by a bad Hollywood B movie which is embellished
by Molina who sees himself as Leni. It is here that as according to Judith Butler;’
gender and sexuality are performative, rather than fixed or determined by
biology or nature: gender identity is performativeley constituted by the very
expressions that are said to be the result.’(Bennet&Royle 2009:223)It is
through the deconstruction of the narrative that Molina becomes performative as
Leni through the hypereality of film. Thus the narrative is driven back to the
cell and Molina talks of his waiter and homosexual love and desire. The importance
of the reality of the cell and Molina talking of his relationship with Valentin
is the initial setting for the footnotes.Valentin feels ‘curiosity’ and ‘I know
very little about people with your inclination .’<span> </span>Puig is educating his reader into the social <span> </span>identity of homosexuality and <span> </span>when Molina says ; ‘That’s…how it is when it
comes to really deep feelings, at least I think so.’ (Puig 1996:59) He is
demonstrating<span> </span>his identity, as a clear
emotion and in his last interview with Ronald Christ ,Puig said ‘It does not
matter who you are but how you are.’(Christ 1977) Thus we are all human but are
driven by <span> </span>a desire for social and
sexual<span> </span>acceptance in society. The
footnotes are deconstructive ways of making the reader analyze homosexuality in
this particular chapter, a researcher; D.J.West explores the<span> </span>assumptions about homosexuality from the
causes, such as hormone imbalance, intersexuality, chromoseomes and finds his
research inconclusive. He analyses that homosexuality<span> </span>and heterosexuality are ‘roles acquired
through psychological conditioning, and not predetermined by endocrinal
factors.’ (Puig 1996:64)These footnotes create a revolutionary text as they
explore the political and social <span> </span>facts
of homosexuality and<span> </span>educate the reader .</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">In
conclusion, the text embodies many key theoretical devices used in
postmodernism. There is a political irony underlying the story as<span> </span>Puig creates ironical pastiche . It is a text
which uses hypereality, by fusing the films into reality and the footnotes
recreate the same principle later. Fundamentally it is a novel, which the
reader has to deconstruct and look closely at the </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">metanarratives
to understand its full meaning. </span></div>Harbinderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13826717276206440475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3682029162251660336.post-2979697571539002782012-01-19T04:14:00.000-08:002012-01-19T04:14:04.069-08:001000 Word Theoretical Analysis<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">DC00385860</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Assignment 1: Part 1<span>
</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Postmodernism,
is directly linked to the social and historical events after World War ll and
to the <span> </span>technological advancements in the
world. Firstly it rejects modernism and the Enlightenment’s theory on the
subject and self. Internet technology has increased the speed of communication
and created a global community. According To Jameson, he gives a ‘Marxist
analysis on postmodernism and is realistically stating that the 'contemporary
world reflects a new economy-post industrial capitalism.’ Jameson emphasizes
that a global economy is governed by ‘multinational corporations beyond
government control; which creates depthlessness, the image/simulacrum; and the weakening
of Historicity.’ (Jameson 1991) Thus technological advancement has created the
need for a new way of thinking; by drawing on these advancements; it rejects
modernist tendencies or creates extreme forms. ‘Postmodernist thought is
characterized by a principled skepticism about language, truth, causality,
history and subjectivity …it rejects New critism, critical theory and
Psychoanalysis.’ (Castle 2007:145) Yet according to<span> </span>Currie ‘Postmodernists maintain a
stance of incredulity with respect to master narratives ,the unifying and
totalizing discourses…Helgian and Marxian teleological narratives … embraces
the unpredictable …binary functions have little or no relevance to Postmodern
techniques…’ (Castle 2007:145) </span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">What
is evident is that the linguistics, and semiotic methods of discourses are
still the same ,but language is being deconstructed and reanalyzed in terms of
intertextuality .As according to Castle ,‘The postmodern is caught up in the
presentation of the unpresentable,that which can be ignored, occluded or
repressed.’(Castle 2007:145) This is directly linked to Globalization, which is
directly linked to finance and technology and the worldwide fluidity of the
transfer of information and shall look at Baudrillard and his theory on
Simulations (1981) and of how mass media and globalization affect our perception
of reality. To begin with Baudrillard is examining how technology has created
multiple images, simulations of the real object. He is arguing that the
simulation of reality has taken over the distinction of the real. It is through
mass media that this simulation is made real and becomes a hyperreality within
culture and society globally. ‘The hypereal is the abolition of the real not by
violent distinction, but by its assumption elevation to the strength of the
model.' (Malpas 2005:93) Thus <span> </span>Baudrillard
argues in his work on ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’(1988)That<span> </span>a human has become so absorbed in information
and communication that they become ‘schizo’, in terms of that they are being
constantly subconsciously influenced by mass media and technology, that they
are unaware of this influence. Therefore they accept this hyperrealist as the norm.
The Precession of Simulacra is evidently referring to the way that a
simulacrum has preceded the real. A prime example of this is his example of how
Disneyland, ‘which exists in order to disguise the fact that it itself the
‘real’ America.’
(Castle 2007:200) Thus Disneyland has preceded
the real object and shows the precession of simulacra. I shall look at
Baudrillard and the hyper reality of films in my critical analysis later but
secondly I shall look at Derrida .Baudrillard is primarily concerned with the
visual concept of hyperreality while Derrida examines language and
deconstruction and how ‘it constitutes meaning through a lay of differences,
the slippage or ‘spacing’ of the signifier.’ (Castle2007:80) </span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">In ‘Jacques
Derrida -Essay "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human
sciences"(1966) Derrida’s essay is questioning the idea of center, in order
makes us examine the concept of centering as a balance in a structured
environment. It is essentially asking the reader to deconstruct the text .This
process is looking for a new dimension in particular at reading texts .Social
and historical events in essence favour this concept as a new way of reading.
To look beyond the text is inevitably asking us to embrace intertextuality and the
metanarrative.Thus what this process does as according to Barry; it produces
'textual harassment' or 'oppositional reading'. in 'pursuance of its aims ,the
deconstruction process will often fix on a detail of the text which looks
incidental -the presence of a particular metaphor ,for instance and then
use it as the key to the whole text, so that everything is read through
it....The deconstructionist looks for evidence of gaps and discontinuities of
all kinds. '(Barry 2009:71) I shall investigate the three stages of
deconstructive practice later in my analysis and it will be in direct reference
to metafiction.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">‘Metafiction
novels tend to be constructed on the principle of a fundamental and sustained opposition:
the construction of a fictional illusion and the laying bare of that illusion.
In other words, the lowest common denominator of metafiction is simultaneously
to create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction.
The two processes are held together in a formal tension which breaks down the
distinction between 'creation' and 'criticism' and merges them into the
concepts of 'interpretations 'and 'deconstruction.' (Waugh 1996:6)Therefore
what this process is doing is making us look at postmodern narrative and how it
reflects on itself as a fictional text. In Puig’s novel it will become evident
that this process is making us examine the metadiscourse of what the underlying
statement of the text is about; here Puig’s fight is political and sexual
oppression. This is also directly linked to Judith Butlers work on ‘Gender as a
Performance.’ The performance in the text is absorbed in the hypereality of the
film clips in, The Kiss of a Spider Woman. In her paper Gender Trouble (1990:25)
she is arguing that: 'There is no gender identity behind the expressions of
gender; ... identity is performatively constituted by the very
"expressions" that are said to be its results.' (Butler 1990:25) Thus
she is arguing that gender is a performance which is essentially dictated by
the rules of society and how we should perform as the male and female sex in a
patriarchal hegemonic society. Butler argues that we all perform gender roles
and therefore reinforce this identity and she is asking us challenge this
identity .In Puig’s novel it shall be evident that this gender role is
challenged by Molina and ultimate the conversion of Valentin’s hard edged male identity.
I shall explore these theoretical concepts next in an analysis of Manuel Puig’s
novel, Kiss Of The Spider Woman.</span></div>Harbinderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13826717276206440475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3682029162251660336.post-27838835968604299752012-01-19T04:08:00.001-08:002012-01-19T04:08:21.238-08:00Reference List<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">DC00385860</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">ENG 603</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Referencing </span></u></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">1. Barry, P. ( 2009) Beginning Theory: An introduction
to literary and cultural theory.3<sup>rd</sup> ed.Manchester University
Press.U.K</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">2. Bennet, A &Royle, N. (2009) An Introduction to Literature,
Criticism and Theory.4<sup>th</sup> ed.Pearson Longman.U.K</span><b><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">3. Butler,
J (1997<i>) The</i> Psychic Life of Power:
Theories in Subjection. Stanford
University Press.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">4. Castle, G. (2007) The Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory.
Blackwell Publishing. Australia.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">5. Christ. (1991) A Last Interview With Manuel Puig.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">(2003)Companion to Contemporary World Literature.Vol 1.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Twayne Publishers.N.Y.<span>
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">6. Curium.(1995) Metafiction.Longman Group Ltd.N.Y.</span></div>
<h3>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">7. Denby,M.(2011)
Postmodernism, Historical and Critical Contexts.</span></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">8.
Malpas, S. (2005) The Postmodern: The Critical Idiom.Routledge.London.</span></div>
<h3>
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">9. Puig,M(1980) Kiss of the Spider
Woman.Knopf.N.Y</span></h3>
<h3>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">10. Waugh,
P. (1989) Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the postmodern.Routledge.U.K.</span></h3>
<h3>
<u><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-weight: normal;">Internet Sources</span></u></h3>
<h3>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">12. Bayona,
G, M, L. (2009)</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;"> The Displacement of identities
by a kiss in Puig's Kiss of The Spider Woman.<cite><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">spasmodicleotard.wordpress.com.</span></cite><span style="display: none;">You +1'd this publicly. <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=bayona+2009+puig&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a">Undo</a></span></span></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">13. Butler, J. (1990) Gender
Trouble </span><span lang="FR"><a href="http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-butl.htm"><span lang="EN-US">http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-butl.htm</span></a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">14. Christ, R. (1991)SOURCE: “A
Last Interview with Manuel Puig,” in <i>World Literature Today,</i> Vol. 65,
No. 4, Autumn, 1991, pp. 571-80.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<h3>
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;">15. Episito,S. (2010)<a href="http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Reviews-Essays/The-Buenos-Aires-Affair/ba-p/3175"><span style="text-decoration: none;">The Buenos Aires Affair - The
Barnes & Noble Review</span></a></span></h3>
<cite><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Reviews-Essays/The.../ba.../3175</span></cite><span class="vshid"><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"> -</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 12pt;">
<span lang="FR" style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">16. Pigna, F. (2008) Los mitos de la
historia argentina 4.Buenos Aires.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 12pt;">
<span lang="FR" style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Editorial Planeta.ISBN
978-950-49_1980-3.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">17.Teorey,M.
(2010) Spinning a bigendered lie in Silkos and Puig’s Kiss of a Spider Woman. Source:
Comparative literature studies 47 no2010. pages 1- </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<cite><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">www.drhanan.com/macomp/silko&<b>puig</b>.pdf</span></cite><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"></span></div>
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<u><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Bibliography
</span></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">18.
Dunne, Michael. <em><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Dialogism in
Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman.</span></em> South
Atlantic Review, Vol. 60 No. 2 (May 1995). South
Atlantic Modern Language Association. 08/01/2009
21:16
<
<a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/3201304">http://www.jstor.org/stable/3201304
</a>>.</span></div>
<h3>
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-weight: normal;">19. <a href="http://www.ap.krakow.pl/nkja/literature/theory/post-structuralism.htm">Post-structuralism</a></span></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<cite><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">www.ap.krakow.pl/nkja/literature/theory/post-structuralism.htm</span></cite><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 12pt;">
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<br /></div>Harbinderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13826717276206440475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3682029162251660336.post-24854743074453409352012-01-18T10:55:00.000-08:002012-01-18T10:55:52.449-08:00Conclusion<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">blog analysis </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The idea of this blog was to create an online secondary source base ,where I could build ideas and collect information for Assessment 1. This assessment outlined that I needed to understand the concept of postmodernism and to investigate theoretical sources about the subject.These were then to be applied to a close analysis of a set text. I chose to analyse Manuel Puig's The Kiss of The Spider Woman.I have tried to present the blog as a thinking diary and as a blog reader ,you can read the development of ideas and look at information within the blog itself. </span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">I have looked at the learning outcomes and have interpreted what information is required in my final 2 assessments.I have analysed information from texts as well as using on line theoretical sources. I have also learnt that there is an abundance of theoretical information on postmodernism,but what is evidently important is ,using information that shall be relevant to the textual analysis of the Kiss of the Spider Woman.These are the main theoretical ideas I shall be using;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">1.The concept of Modernism and what Postmodernism represents and why. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">2.Baudrillard-Simulation and hyperreality and in particular the effect of mass media and its simulation of an ideal hegemonic society. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">3.Baudrillard and counterarguments .I have looked at the work of Baudrillard and also his comparatives , Fukuyama and Derrida.I wanted to understand the ideology of Fukuyama as an opposition to Baudrillard and what is evident there is no real right or wrong in the deconstruction of a text only interpretation.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">4.Derrida ;I have learnt Derrida's idea of centering is in essence about decentrering and looking at a text deconstructively instead of from a centered viewpoint.In other words a text needs to be deconstructed to understand the underlying meaning.This could be taken in the form of a metanarrative and even intertextuality. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">5.Metafiction:This was an essential piece of theory as it helped me to understand ,the text and how deconstructed narratives ,highlight it as a piece of fiction as the writer is questioning the reality of his own work.Metanarrative and hyperreality become the fusion point in Puig's novel .</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">6.Judith Butler : The idea of gender as a performance as suggested by Butler ,makes me as a reader examine how much of this behaviour is underlined by patriarchy and the need to confirm.It shall also be investigated and applied to the final analysis.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">7.Dialogism: This was an important pieces of reading, as it was evident in Puig's novel that it works to some extent like a play.As there is no narrative voice ,the reader has to rely on the speakers dialogue to understand and interpret events,which are reflected on by the reader.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">8.Bayona's essay on The Kiss of The Spider Woman:This essay 'The Displacement of identities helped me understand Gender Performance and how I could analyse it from my own perspective using the text. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">9.</span>Theoretical analysis of 4 postmodern thinkers .(1000 word) Analysis and the social and historical understanding of postmodernism.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">10.References -all books and journal articles used. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">11. 1500 word textual analysis of the Kiss of the Spider woman.This is my critical analysis</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">of Chapter three of the text.I have used the theoretical concepts discussed in my blog and applied them to analysis as a secondary source.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">I hope you enjoy this blog.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> </span>Harbinderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13826717276206440475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3682029162251660336.post-41136268949175175532012-01-14T04:26:00.001-08:002012-01-14T04:26:57.434-08:00Dialogism<div class="banner">
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Dialogism in Manuel Puig's "Kiss of the Spider Woman"</div>
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<cite>South Atlantic Review</cite> © 1995 <a href="http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=samla">South Atlantic Modern Language Association</a>Harbinderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13826717276206440475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3682029162251660336.post-66808162991275630452012-01-14T04:13:00.001-08:002012-01-14T04:24:10.483-08:00Essay on The kiss of The Spider Woman is love interest. Aside from attracting attention to the effects of media on the middle and lower class society, Manuel Puig as the plot maker, uses this opportunity to create some sort of unifying force for the two otherwise disparate characters. Through their constructive conversation on films, Valentin and Molina have found a connection even though they experience different realities and express different views on it. 1 dialogical—of relating to, or characterized by dialogue (Merriam-Webster). To set the story straight, both characters are born with a complete set of male anatomical parts. Luis Molina is a middle-aged homosexual who is jailed for sexually corrupting a minor. Valentin Arregui, on the other hand, is a young activist who is jailed for publicly demonstrating his opposition on the current government of Argentina. Aside from individual public (or private) denouncement of male ego and lack thereof, both characters also have different worldly views. Molina is the male homosexual who feels he is a woman and along with that feeling comes a need for self-expression through his favorite films. Valentin is the heterosexual leftist who expresses himself in rhetoric of Marxist ideology. Meanwhile, Puig used the prison cell as the setting for Kiss of the Spider Woman because it reflects the oppression in Argentine culture and the duo’s powerlessness against it (Tuss 3). The moment Molina and Valentin were confined in this tiny cell, they are isolated from the other inmates and from the prying eyes of social scrutiny. Puig develops the idea of the Hollywood films as a metaphorical displacement for Valentin and Molina as they identify or reject themselves with the film’s characters. In a way, the retelling of the movies has become a medium for exposing 2 somnambulism—an abnormal condition of sleep in which motor acts (as walking) are performed (Merriam-Webster). their selves to each other. To note, revealing their innermost feelings is something they would not do otherwise if they were not in that situation of isolation from the rest of the world. With this, Molina is seen as the heroine and Valentin as the male love interest. This identification process is mainly regarded through the readers’ point of view depending on the reader’s own identity. Barbara P. Fulks in the Reference Guide to World Literature (3rd Edition) accepts this notion and generalizes that the reader only sympathizes with the character he can understand clearly or someone whom he can relate to. Furthermore, that character elicits the reader’s sympathy mostly because of his or her gender and the reader’s ideology. But what if the reader is neither homosexual like Molina, nor heterosexual like Valentin? Would the reader still sympathize with any of the characters? The fact that Puig used a pair from the list of marginalized dichotomies as his protagonists creates the flaw in Fulks’ generalization. On Puig’s Style and Structure Robert Coover finds the way the novel is accomplished “not very innovative.” (Coover 15) Although the novel touches on the themes of repression and liberation, beauty versus goodness, strange or unusual women, somnambulism2, heroism, love, fear, change and “desire for Hollywood endings,” according to Coover, the homosexual is simply an old movie buff and that there is not much substance other than the film synopsis of Molina’s telling. Coover also criticizes the novel’s translation into English by Thomas Colchie. He finds the rendition fairly adequate yet seems stiff and hasty and, therefore, calls for a more relaxed revision seeing as Puig’s translated work fails to capture the author’s easy colloquial flow and the voices of the two very different protagonists are not distinguished. But based on a personal approach, Robert Coover is disagreeable on two accounts. The first is his denouncement of Puig’s employment of film in his subplots as “not very innovative.” The use of movies as a motif for his novels has become his trademark style and the very core of his fiction. Therefore the implementation of movies as the general theme is clearly distinct and something original. In the first chapter Coming Attractions, Jonathan Tittler analyzes how Puig changes his writing style from the traditional narrative of modern issues. Unlike Coover, he finds the use of mass-entertainment products as “innovative” since it eliminates the hierarchy of the narrative. This way, it also attacks the society and its power structures. Also, in chapter four titled Odd Coupling, Tittler contrasts homosexuality as a social practice and revolution as a political activity while film as a culture and writing itself. Dialogism in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman analyzes the use of text and ideas in the novel. Here Michael Dunne defines the basic plot situation as “undeniably dialogic” while highlighting the symbolism of seemingly ordinary objects in the novel (Dunne 1). In doing so, he reveals the literal and figurative meanings of the materials to promote the overall thematic of Manuel Puig’s drama. In light of Holquist’s remarks, the author Puig can be seen to dialogically engage in political power like his characters (qtd. in Dunne 1). The main stylistic strategies of the novel consist of: overcoming boundaries of both the socio-political and aesthetic, meeting the other person as subjectivity equal to one’s own. In a school review, Teresa Ana San Pedro of Montclair State College comments that Puig’s style allows his readers to respond in an intellectual and creative manner (San Pedro 74). This comment is not efficient since the level of response in readers vary indelibly. How the audiences react to the play is dependent on their capacity to take in what the characters talk about. For instance, if the readers cannot relate to the subject matter because their exposure to such is limited, their reactions toward the play cannot be considered intellectual or creative in nature. Furthermore, there might not be room for an intellectual or creative response (as San Pedro puts it) to take place since Puig’s manner of writing seems confusing to begin with. Indeed Puig is a master of narrative craftsmanship, but Clara Claiborne Park reiterates that Kiss of the Spider Woman is no mere concoction. She points out that there is no exposition at all and that the dialogue must work hard not only to develop the characters but also to tell the story. On the overall plot of the story, Park concludes that “The relationship which has made Valentin more of a woman has made Molina more of a man, and we recognize both these changes as a gain” (Park 576). True, there is no exposition but Puig makes up for the details of an exposition by interweaving fabrics of Molina’s and Valentin’s identities into their conversations. The dialogue is efficient yet somewhat confusing still, especially if the reader is not familiar with the films that Molina mentions. This may be what Park refers to as she stresses that the dialogue needs improvement. Michael Wood shares that Kiss of the Spider Woman is an example of Latin American fiction with a new stance, angle, tone, twist, and mode of narrative. “Movies are not true to its dreams of glamour it is usually associated with but to the emptiness and solitude the dreams are supposed to disguise” (Wood 43). Mr. Wood finds it a slightly more cheerful work compared to The Buenos Aires Affair because it concentrates more on the hidden truths rather than the acts of hiding that the main character in the other novel did. Puig is especially interested in the notion that homosexuals imitate the defects of heterosexuality. On another note, the plots are actually deeper than what they appear to be. As Valentin begins to appreciate the stories of the heroines and villains in the movies that Molina fabricate, he finds himself not only enjoying them as Molina does he gradually comes to see the rags of humanity in these tales—something that his extremist Marxism could not have taught him. In the end, after Molina and Valentin shares the kiss, Puig manages to reel away the story from becoming one of Molina’s romantic movies. The author avoids too much sentimentality by concocting something unpredictable and ends it that way. On Novel Content Raymond Williams finds a connection between Kiss of the Spider Woman and Manuel Puig’s other novel, Pubis Angelical, which is in both cases his characters deal with the sexuality of politics and the politics of sex (Williams 70). William Herrick exploits that Manuel Puig is a Marxist as he is Freudian: “Young people who embrace Marxism often find within it their means to deny the necessity for any further exploration of their psyche” (Herrick 1). The values that Valentin has learned in Marxist ideology have somewhat encapsulated his thoughts. Puig is an artist, though, and his portrait of two men grappling with their suffering is “exceedingly moving” and “brilliantly done”. In a review Allen Josephs finds that Kiss of the Spider Woman as in the previous experiments that Manuel Puig made in his other novels, things are not as simple as they first seem. The mutual fantasies and dreams begin to create a subconscious bridge between the unlikely psychic castaways Mr. Ramirez and Larry in Puig’s Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages. This ability to connect polar personalities with a mutual means is also seen in Kiss of the Spider Woman. Josephs adds that Puig’s characteristic ‘virtuosity’ has not failed him and because of this, devotees of psychological fiction will no doubt appreciate his work (Josephs 9). However, the novels reliance on psychology and too much dialogue are more reminiscent of the theater of the absurd than of his earlier passionately Latin ones. Like the characters in Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages, the fates that Valentin and Molina eventually met reveal the sad truth about life in Argentina. As Gilbert Sorrentino views it, Kiss of the Spider Woman is developed almost entirely as a splintered colloquy3 between two unlikely companions. It is also a “structural failure,” very much like his previous novel, and pretty much for the same reason: the conclusion comments on and ‘explains’ the otherwise mysterious text. In doing, Sorrentino believes that Manuel Puig has sabotaged the richly ambivalent nature that the author has strung up until that point altogether dispersing the aura of distinction that had stirred up in the dialogical plot. It is as if, as Sorrentino puts it, Puig had lost his nerve and decided to serve his general audience what they have had before. In this case, he gives them a book that “before it is read by anyone…been read by everyone” (Sorrentino 1). This critique also admits that “it’s too bad” since Puig does have something to show and tell from his wonderful sense that the essential element of life is its serious “things.” But most of these are already considered as impartial ingredients of the daily forms of drama such as soap opera, sitcoms, and B-movies. Thus, his novels fail because Puig holds his content or the core substance of his stories simply as it were, a set of ideas. Eroticism and its Environment In A Last Interview with Manuel Puig, Ronald Christ assimilates one of the main topics of the novel which is: “Can people change their eroticism after a certain age?” Manuel Puig believes it is impossible, saying “those sexual fantasies have crystallized during our adolescence and imprison you forever.” (Christ 850). In that cell, there are two men but Christ finds that it “is just a plaque on the surface.” What the characters are, therefore, are two men and two women. Quoting Theodore Roszack, “the woman most desperately in need of liberation is the woman every man has locked up in the dungeons of his own psyche.” This applies greatly to the stoic Valentin who at first does not feel comfortable with the idea of a discourse on his sexual identity. Molina, on the other hand, uses the melodramatic possibilities offered to him by the new times. He takes the opportunity to become the underground heroine in real life. Molina’s homosexuality is a product of the revolutionary. It is during this new age that everything feels more liberated but still confined, though subtly, within social norms and expectations. The general regard on sexuality is greatly influenced by social gender than biological sex. The first one is viewed as the way people see it as a daily norm that guides how males and females should particularly act or behave as opposed to the latter where they are just given what they are naturally born with. In other words a man is a man because he acts like one and not that he is born with a physical anatomy of a man. But gender is not simply the natural consequence of anatomy as nature planned. It is a large social construction of patterns “we adopt, scripts we read, movie roles we imitate” (Zimmerman 3). Shari Zimmerman shares that Kiss of the Spider Woman is something that invites us to imagine identity in a new perspective, to ‘escape the web of gender.’ Great Latin American literature enlists Manuel Puig along the pages with José Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Severo Sarduy, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Although Puig’s fiction is greatly simulated by political and social tensions in Latin America, he and his contemporaries show commonalities: experimentation with the literary form, concern with unconscious and irrational forces of human life and lastly, portraying the lower classes of Latin America. Manuel Puig’s works are mostly narrative but some of his contemporary works reveal a dialogic medium. This tactic allows individuals to supplant emotions with their film counterparts, providing the room for readers to relate with the characters in retail fiction. However bold his ideas are, Puig’s plots (as in Kiss of the Spider Woman) cannot help but resemble clichéd serials and detective stories. On one hand, most critics do find Puig’s treatment of complex issues like politics, sexual power, homosexuality, and violence as superficial. But generally, his works are regarded as insightful and moving (CLC: Vol. XXVIII 369). Character Dichotomies Kiss of the Spider Woman creatively illustrates the ways in which the customs of authority and the socially-induced modes of thinking shape and inhibit individual experiences. In this novel, the author Puig focuses on the restricted psychosexual identities of the two men. Shari Zimmerman of Hofstra University incorporates the scripted piece as a means through which the two men, Molina and Valentin, “read each other, reveal themselves, become friends, and finally lovers.” (Zimmerman 3) Aside from this, Zimmerman considers the work as an exploration of traditional male behavior and customs. The novel also provides a critique of male and female patterns that challenge biological sex and gender issues. Critics David Bost and Jonathan Tittler concluded that Puig’s purpose in creating his most famous work Kiss of the Spider Woman is to give voice and mainstream for the acceptance of the previously marginalized groups (Drozdo 1). Despite the fact that Manuel Puig particularly chose a homosexual and a political revolutionary as his main protagonists, his goal is much more universal. Puig simply uses the two as representatives of the other unprivileged groups. The most prevalent dichotomies of Western civilization: man/woman, good/evil, heterosexual/homosexual etc. One half of the dichotomy necessarily relies in the other for its definition. According to Derrida, “they are distinguished simply as the two faces of one and the same leaf.” Therefore, there is no difference between the signified and the signifier (Derrida 23). According to critics Maria Mercedes Velasco, Elias Miguel Muñoz, and Fernando Reati, there is a strong binary system incorporated in Kiss of the Spider Woman (Drozdo 1). Both characters, Molina and Valentin, have different ideologies that they developed individually. With this in mind, Maria Mercedes Velasco argues that the characters of Molina and Valentin show a “projection of Marianism and masculinity” (Velasco) by directing their identities through stereotyping Woman. She proposes the existence of a dichotomy of man and woman within the novel. She believes that the acceptance of this binary system, wherein masculinity and femininity is defined and entwined, provides a sense of wholeness or completeness within the novel. Meanwhile, Elias Miguel Muñoz proposes that Manuel Puig entertains the idea of dual-centered ideology: “by the end of the novel, Valentin has liberated the ‘woman’ whom he carries inside of him.” This ideology presents the possibility of Puig’s Utopian liberation wherein the possibility of a new sexual being is entertained. However, Steffany Drozdo disagrees with these two critics saying, “it is precisely these two binary ideological structures that Puig destroys in Kiss of the Spider Woman.” The two critics say that Puig uses the dichotomies to create a totality that harmonizes, incorporates, and equalizes both parties. However, in Deconstruction of Binary Ideological Structures in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, Steffany Drozdo argues that it is precisely this structure that Puig destroys in his novel. In Kiss of the Spider Woman, both Molina and Valentin accept the ‘inadequate’ meaning of the other’s ideology. Valentin, a heterosexual, enters into a homosexual union with Molina without ‘becoming’ a homosexual. Molina, although uninterested in political subversion, agrees to take part in Valentin’s political activity without actually subscribing to his particular ideology. This is one ambiguity present with regard to all violent hierarchies: the actions of both men contradict their personal identities and beliefs. (Drozdo 6) Homosexuality and heterosexuality, being a popular and prevalent dichotomy in society, both depend on each other for their definition. Generally, one is defined by using the other. This is similar to the character Valentin as he reveals his inner self in order present a sexual identity that contrasts that of Molina’s. In a sense, it is by defining Molina’s homosexuality that Valentin’s heterosexuality is contrasted and then revealed. The analysis of social dichotomies is where the aforementioned Freudian views on sexuality are blurred. In a sense, the characterization of man defines the woman and consequently, the homosexual to the heterosexual. Puig did not implement a specific date for the setting of Kiss of the Spider Woman because this way allows the reader to expound on the “universality” of the novel—that it can happen anywhere or any time since it also reflects similar events and situations worldwide. It also creates an atmosphere of a possibility of it happening to people outside Argentina (Drozdo 4). “In fact, the ultimate coupling of Molina and Valentin and the aftermath of their union symbolically destroy each of these dichotomies” (Drozdo 4). Their unity and oneness in the end is the catalyst that Puig used in order to “destroy” the limitations conditioned by each of their social norms. This very act of defiance is the main basis that Steffany Drozdo expounded on for her argument in Deconstruction of Binary Ideological Structures. Valentin and Molina represent different hierarchies that their individual environments have formed them to take part in. Ultimately, their union is an act of defiance to the society that shaped what they were before the aftermath of the kiss. “In the end it is impossible to discern not only that which is homosexual or heterosexual, but also that which is masculine and feminine, as gender becomes confused and as the merger of Molina and Marta (the woman) creates a new sexual being” (Drozdo 6). This is very much connected to the aforementioned thesis statement: the Freudian view on sexuality is so roughly described that no definition can fully capture the essence of the new sexuality that has merged. ) Furthermore, reality and fantasy become so intertwined that it becomes impossible to delineate and, consequently, define either one. The film or movie aspect that Puig implemented in his writing style resurfaces in the ending as Valentin had a dream of Molina carrying Marta inside him (qtd. in World Literature 798). “Puig proposes that the irrational state is a closer approximation of reality than the rational state, because binary systems falsely perpetuate oppressive dichotomies. Ambiguity…enables the reader to find and consider a new dialectic” (Drozdo 7). It is not by placing one half of the dichotomy to a position of superiority and the other half below it, rather by deconstructing each of the elements of the dichotomy. In doing so, Puig dissects the inner substance of an unprivileged, marginalized group to help the reader redefine the group. Consequently, the identity that the group has taken place is not affiliated with the dichotomy it is arranged with as Velasco argues. Norman Lavers (1988) attests that Puig’s greatest artistic achievement in Kiss of the Spider Woman is shown in the structure of the novel and that the conversations between the two protagonists contain much of the bulk of the narrative (Tuss 1). The vagueness of the stand on homosexuality contributes to the inability of most to define and differentiate it with other sexes. Furthermore, the lovemaking scene is the part where they “exchange” selves. The scene also paves the way for the characters’ transcendence into what Valentin describes as an “existence without oppression” (qtd. in World Literature 775). This becomes another act of social defiance to achieve liberation from their individual identity. In a sense, to fully understand the multi-faceted characters in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, one must involve in a deconstruction of their identities. Essentially, Manuel Puig has a desire to deconstruct the culture that enforces its conceptions on everything from political dissent to sexual conduct to conventional gender roles. In doing so, he manages to displace the identities of his characters rather than ratify them in the binary system of dichotomies that the critic Velasco presents. Finally, this desire was accomplished with the aid of his writing styles in a non-narrative form with dialogical content and the allegorical reference to Hollywood movies into his plot—a stratagem which he ultimately sealed with a kiss. WORKS CITED An Encyclopedia of Gay Histories and Cultures. NY: Garland Publishing, Inc. 2000: 69-71 Encyclopedia of Latin American History. NY: Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc.1968: 22-25, 260-263 New Encyclopedia Britannica Vol.9:791 Allen, Bruce. The Hudson Review Vol. XXVII, No. 1. The Hudson Review, Inc. Spring, 1974. Alter, Robert. The New York Times Book Review. New York Times Company. 5 September 1976. Christ, Ronald. A Last Interview With Manuel Puig (1991). Companion to Contemporary World Literature, Vol. 1. NY: Twayne Publishers, 2003: 846-849. —-. Fact and Fiction. Review 73. Center for Inter-American Relations, Inc. 1972. Fall, 1973: 49-54. Common Complaint. The Times Literary Supplement. USA: The Times Newspaper Ltd. 31 Aug. 1973: 1007. Clemons, Walter. Rev. of Kiss of the Spider Woman, by Manuel Puig. Newsweek, Inc., 1971. 25 Oct. 1971 Coover, Robert. Old, New, Borrowed, Blue. New York Times Book Review. April 22, 1979: 15-31. De Feo, Ronald. Laying the Evidence. National Review. NY: National Review, Inc. Vol. XXVII, No. 41. 29 October 1976: 1194-1195. Drozdo, Steffany. The Deconstruction of Binary Ideological Structures in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. University of Kent. Dunne, Michael. Dialogism in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. South Atlantic Review, Vol. 60 No. 2 (May 1995). South Atlantic Modern Language Association. 08/01/2009 21:16 < http://www.jstor.org/stable/3201304 >. Fulks, Barbara P. Kiss of the Spider Woman (El beso de la mujer araña) Novel by Manuel Puig, 1976. Reference Guide to World Literature Vol. 2. USA: Thomson and Gale 2003: 1341. Gallagher, David P. in Modern Latin American Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. —-. New York Times Book Review. NY: New York Times Book Review, 1973. 16 Dec 1973: 14-15. Herrick, William. Alienated Within and Without. The New Leader © 1982 by the American Labor Conference on International Affairs Inc., Vol. LXV, No. 13. June 28, 1982: 19-20. Levine, Suzanne Jill. Manuel Among the Stars (Exit Laughing) (1991). A Companion to Contemporary World Literature, Vol. 1. NY: Twayne Publishers, 2003: 856. Mendelson, Phyllis Carmel and Riley, Carolyn., ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism Volume 5. Michigan: Gale Research CO., 1976: 354-356. Merrim, Stephanie. For a New (Psychological) Novel in the Works of Manuel Puig. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 12 No. 2 (Winter, 1984) pp. 141-157. Novel Corp., Brown University. 08/01/2009 21:22 . Mirsky, Mark Jay. Three to Tango. Book World—the Washington Post. 25 November 1973: 1. Park, Sarah Claiborne. A Review of “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” in the Hudson Review Vol. XXXII No. 4. NY: Hudson Review, Inc. (Winter 1979-1980): 575-577. Riley, Carolyn., ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 3. Michigan: Gale Research Co., 1974: 407-408. San Pedro, Teresa Ana. On Manuel Puig by Jonathan Tittler. Hispania Vol. 77 No.1 (March 1994): 74-75. Sorrentino, Gilbert. South American Fantasy, Obsession, and Soap Opera: ‘Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages’. Book World: The Washington Post, August 1989. American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. pp. 1-2. 08/01/2009 21:24 . Tuss, Alex. Deconstructing and Reconstructing Masculinity in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. Men’s Studies Press. 22 March 2000 01/2009 . Williams, Raymond L. PUIG, Manuel. Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century Vol. 3: L-R. St. James Press, 1999: 610-611. Williams, Raymond L. A Review of “Pubis Angelical”. World Literature Today Vol. 55 No.1, Winter 1981: 70. Wood, Michael. “The Claims of Mischief”. The New York Review of Books Vol. XXVI Nos. 21 and 22. January 24, 2009: 43-47. Zimmerman, Shari. Kiss of the Spider Woman and the Web of Gender. Pacific Coast Philology, Vol. 23 No. ½ (Nov. 1988). Pacific Coast Ancient and Modern Language Association. 08/01/2009 21:19 < http://www.jstor.org/stable/1316690>. WORKS CONSULTED Borinsky, Alicia. Castration: Artifices, Notes on the Writing of Manuel Pug. The Georgia Review. ( ©1975 University of Georgia) Spring, 1975: 95-114. Byfonski, Dedria., ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 10. Michigan: Gale Research Co., 1974: 420. Filer, Malva. Manuel Puig: Cae la Noche Tropical. Companion to Contemporary World Literature, Vol. 2. 1990: a Selection of Book Reviews, 1977-2001. NY: Twayne Publishers, 2003: 1599. Krisman, Claire, ed. Contemporary Authors Volumes 45-48. Detroit, Michigan: Gale Research Company, 1974. 435. Stine, Jean ,. Gale Res<br />
<strong>THE DISPLACEMENT OF IDENTITIES BY A KISS IN PUIG’S <em>SPIDER WOMAN</em></strong><br />
<b><i> </i></b><b><i> </i></b>
<br />
<div align="center">
By Leslie Marie G. Bayona, EN12 R17<br />
Argumentative Research Paper No. 1, February 9, 2009</div>
Manuel Puig showcases the dialogical<sup>1 </sup>conflict between Molina’s sexual tensions and Valentin’s political desires in <i>Kiss of the Spider Woman</i>
to reflect the brutality of Argentine military regimes in that era in
light of questions regarding homosexuality and the stand between
individualism and the state.<br />
The intrusion of films into Molina and Valentin’s conversations
permeates through various literary levels. Firstly, it reflects Manuel
Puig’s style of writing—he liberally sprinkles his plays with profuse
references to mass entertainment products: these symbolize Molina’s
obsession with fiction; his means of escaping the boredom of reality.
Throughout the play, Molina shares his fantasy by narrating to Valentin
the movie plots and describing the characters. In the process of doing
so, his imagination flows freely, making up some of the details while
adding his own characters. As they discuss the film, Molina envisions
himself as the heroine in one of those cinemas and Valentin as his love
interest. Aside from attracting attention to the effects of media on the
middle and lower class society, Manuel Puig as the plot maker, uses
this opportunity to create some sort of unifying force for the two
otherwise disparate characters. Through their constructive conversation
on films, Valentin and Molina have found a connection even though they
experience different realities and express different views on it.<br />
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><blockquote>
<sup>1</sup> dialogical—of relating to, or characterized by dialogue (Merriam-Webster).</blockquote>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
To set the story straight, both characters are born with a complete
set of male anatomical parts. Luis Molina is a middle-aged homosexual
who is jailed for sexually corrupting a minor. Valentin Arregui, on the
other hand, is a young activist who is jailed for publicly demonstrating
his opposition on the current government of Argentina. Aside from
individual public (or private) denouncement of male ego and lack
thereof, both characters also have different worldly views. Molina is
the male homosexual who feels he is a woman and along with that feeling
comes a need for self-expression through his favorite films. Valentin is
the heterosexual leftist who expresses himself in rhetoric of Marxist
ideology. Meanwhile, Puig used the prison cell as the setting for <i>Kiss of the Spider Woman </i>because
it reflects the oppression in Argentine culture and the duo’s
powerlessness against it (Tuss 3). The moment Molina and Valentin were
confined in this tiny cell, they are isolated from the other inmates and
from the prying eyes of social scrutiny.<br />
Puig develops the idea of the Hollywood films as a metaphorical
displacement for Valentin and Molina as they identify or reject
themselves with the film’s characters. In a way, the retelling of the
movies has become a medium for exposing<br />
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><blockquote>
<sup>2 </sup>somnambulism—an abnormal condition of sleep in which motor acts (as walking) are performed (Merriam-Webster).</blockquote>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
their selves to each other. To note, revealing their innermost
feelings is something they would not do otherwise if they were not in
that situation of isolation from the rest of the world. With this,
Molina is seen as the heroine and Valentin as the male love interest.
This identification process is mainly regarded through the readers’
point of view depending on the reader’s own identity. Barbara P. Fulks
in <i>the Reference Guide to World Literature (3<sup>rd</sup> Edition)</i>
accepts this notion and generalizes that the reader only sympathizes
with the character he can understand clearly or someone whom he can
relate to. Furthermore, that character elicits the reader’s sympathy
mostly because of his or her gender and the reader’s ideology. But what
if the reader is neither homosexual like Molina, nor heterosexual like
Valentin? Would the reader still sympathize with any of the characters?
The fact that Puig used a pair from the list of marginalized dichotomies
as his protagonists creates the flaw in Fulks’ generalization.<br />
<b><i>On Puig’s Style and Structure </i></b><br />
Robert Coover finds the way the novel is accomplished “not very
innovative.” (Coover 15) Although the novel touches on the themes of
repression and liberation, beauty versus goodness, strange or unusual
women, somnambulism<sup>2</sup>, heroism, love, fear, change and “desire
for Hollywood endings,” according to Coover, the homosexual is simply
an old movie buff and that there is not much substance other than the
film synopsis of Molina’s telling. Coover also criticizes the novel’s
translation into English by Thomas Colchie. He finds the rendition
fairly adequate yet seems stiff and hasty and, therefore, calls for a
more relaxed revision seeing as Puig’s translated work fails to capture
the author’s easy colloquial flow and the voices of the two very
different protagonists are not distinguished. But based on a personal
approach, Robert Coover is disagreeable on two accounts. The first is
his denouncement of Puig’s employment of film in his subplots as “not
very innovative.” The use of movies as a motif for his novels has become
his trademark style and the very core of his fiction. Therefore the
implementation of movies as the general theme is clearly distinct and
something original. In the first chapter <i>Coming Attractions</i>,
Jonathan Tittler analyzes how Puig changes his writing style from the
traditional narrative of modern issues. Unlike Coover, he finds the use
of mass-entertainment products as “innovative” since it eliminates the
hierarchy of the narrative. This way, it also attacks the society and
its power structures. Also, in chapter four titled <i>Odd Coupling, </i>Tittler
contrasts homosexuality as a social practice and revolution as a
political activity while film as a culture and writing itself. <i> </i><br />
<i>Dialogism in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman</i> analyzes
the use of text and ideas in the novel. Here Michael Dunne defines the
basic plot situation as “undeniably dialogic” while highlighting the
symbolism of seemingly ordinary objects in the novel (Dunne 1). In doing
so, he reveals the literal and figurative meanings of the materials to
promote the overall thematic of Manuel Puig’s drama. In light of
Holquist’s remarks, the author Puig can be seen to dialogically engage
in political power like his characters (qtd. in Dunne 1). The main
stylistic strategies of the novel consist of: overcoming boundaries of
both the socio-political and aesthetic, meeting the other person as
subjectivity equal to one’s own.<br />
In a school review, Teresa Ana San Pedro of Montclair State College
comments that Puig’s style allows his readers to respond in an
intellectual and creative manner (San Pedro 74). This comment is not
efficient since the level of response in readers vary indelibly. How the
audiences react to the play is dependent on their capacity to take in
what the characters talk about. For instance, if the readers cannot
relate to the subject matter because their exposure to such is limited,
their reactions toward the play cannot be considered intellectual or
creative in nature. Furthermore, there might not be room for an
intellectual or creative response (as San Pedro puts it) to take place
since Puig’s manner of writing seems confusing to begin with.<br />
Indeed Puig is a master of narrative craftsmanship, but Clara Claiborne Park reiterates that <i>Kiss of the Spider Woman</i>
is no mere concoction. She points out that there is no exposition at
all and that the dialogue must work hard not only to develop the
characters but also to tell the story. On the overall plot of the story,
Park concludes that “The relationship which has made Valentin more of a
woman has made Molina more of a man, and we recognize both these
changes as a gain” (Park 576). True, there is no exposition but Puig
makes up for the details of an exposition by interweaving fabrics of
Molina’s and Valentin’s identities into their conversations. The
dialogue is efficient yet somewhat confusing still, especially if the
reader is not familiar with the films that Molina mentions. This may be
what Park refers to as she stresses that the dialogue needs improvement.<br />
Michael Wood shares that <i>Kiss of the Spider Woman</i> is an
example of Latin American fiction with a new stance, angle, tone, twist,
and mode of narrative. “Movies are not true to its dreams of glamour it
is usually associated with but to the emptiness and solitude the dreams
are supposed to disguise” (Wood 43). Mr. Wood finds it a slightly more
cheerful work compared to The <i>Buenos Aires Affair</i> because it
concentrates more on the hidden truths rather than the acts of hiding
that the main character in the other novel did. Puig is especially
interested in the notion that homosexuals imitate the defects of
heterosexuality. On another note, the plots are actually deeper than
what they appear to be. As Valentin begins to appreciate the stories of
the heroines and villains in the movies that Molina fabricate, he finds
himself not only enjoying them as Molina does he gradually comes to see
the rags of humanity in these tales—something that his extremist Marxism
could not have taught him. In the end, after Molina and Valentin shares
the kiss, Puig manages to reel away the story from becoming one of
Molina’s romantic movies. The author avoids too much sentimentality by
concocting something unpredictable and ends it that way.<br />
<b><i> On Novel Content </i></b><br />
Raymond Williams finds a connection between Kiss <i>of the Spider Woman</i> and Manuel Puig’s other novel, <i>Pubis Angelical</i>,
which is in both cases his characters deal with the sexuality of
politics and the politics of sex (Williams 70). William Herrick exploits
that Manuel Puig is a Marxist as he is Freudian: “Young people who
embrace Marxism often find within it their means to deny the necessity
for any further exploration of their psyche” (Herrick 1). The values
that Valentin has learned in Marxist ideology have somewhat encapsulated
his thoughts. Puig is an artist, though, and his portrait of two men
grappling with their suffering is “exceedingly moving” and “brilliantly
done”.<br />
In a review Allen Josephs finds that <i>Kiss of the Spider Woman</i>
as in the previous experiments that Manuel Puig made in his other
novels, things are not as simple as they first seem. The mutual
fantasies and dreams begin to create a subconscious bridge between the
unlikely psychic castaways Mr. Ramirez and Larry in Puig’s <i>Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages.</i> This ability to connect polar personalities with a mutual means is also seen in <i>Kiss of the Spider Woman</i>.
Josephs adds that Puig’s characteristic ‘virtuosity’ has not failed him
and because of this, devotees of psychological fiction will no doubt
appreciate his work (Josephs 9). However, the novels reliance on
psychology and too much dialogue are more reminiscent of the theater of
the absurd than of his earlier passionately Latin ones. Like the
characters in <i>Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages</i>, the fates that Valentin and Molina eventually met reveal the sad truth about life in Argentina.<br />
As Gilbert Sorrentino views it, <i>Kiss of the Spider Woman</i> is developed almost entirely as a splintered colloquy<sup>3</sup>
between two unlikely companions. It is also a “structural failure,”
very much like his previous novel, and pretty much for the same reason:
the conclusion comments on and ‘explains’ the otherwise mysterious text.
In doing, Sorrentino believes that Manuel Puig has sabotaged the richly
ambivalent nature that the author has strung up until that point
altogether dispersing the aura of distinction that had stirred up in the
dialogical plot. It is as if, as Sorrentino puts it, Puig had lost his
nerve and decided to serve his general audience what they have had
before. In this case, he gives them a book that “before it is read by
anyone…been read by everyone” (Sorrentino 1). This critique also admits
that “it’s too bad” since Puig does have something to show and tell from
his wonderful sense that the essential element of life is its serious
“things.” But most of these are already considered as impartial
ingredients of the daily forms of drama such as soap opera, sitcoms, and
B-movies. Thus, his novels fail because Puig holds his content or the
core substance of his stories simply as it were, a set of ideas.<br />
<b><i>Eroticism and its Environment</i></b><br />
In <i>A Last Interview with Manuel Puig, </i>Ronald Christ
assimilates one of the main topics of the novel which is: “Can people
change their eroticism after a certain age?” Manuel Puig believes it is
impossible, saying “those sexual fantasies have crystallized during our
adolescence and imprison you forever.” (Christ 850). In that cell, there
are two men but Christ finds that it “is just a plaque on the surface.”
What the characters are, therefore, are two men and two women. Quoting
Theodore Roszack, “the woman most desperately in need of liberation is
the woman every man has locked up in the dungeons of his own psyche.”
This applies greatly to the stoic Valentin who at first does not feel
comfortable with the idea of a discourse on his sexual identity. Molina,
on the other hand, uses the melodramatic possibilities offered to him
by the new times. He takes the opportunity to become the underground
heroine in real life. Molina’s homosexuality is a product of the
revolutionary. It is during this new age that everything feels more
liberated but still confined, though subtly, within social norms and
expectations.<br />
The general regard on sexuality is greatly influenced by social
gender than biological sex. The first one is viewed as the way people
see it as a daily norm that guides how males and females should
particularly act or behave as opposed to the latter where they are just
given what they are naturally born with. In other words a man is a man
because he acts like one and not that he is born with a physical anatomy
of a man. But gender is not simply the natural consequence of anatomy
as nature planned. It is a large social construction of patterns “we
adopt, scripts we read, movie roles we imitate” (Zimmerman 3). Shari
Zimmerman shares that Kiss of the Spider Woman is something that invites
us to imagine identity in a new perspective, to ‘escape the web of
gender.’<br />
Great Latin American literature enlists Manuel Puig along the pages
with José Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Severo Sarduy, Mario Vargas Llosa, and
Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Although Puig’s fiction is greatly simulated by
political and social tensions in Latin America, he and his
contemporaries show commonalities: experimentation with the literary
form, concern with unconscious and irrational forces of human life and
lastly, portraying the lower classes of Latin America. Manuel Puig’s
works are mostly narrative but some of his contemporary works reveal a
dialogic medium. This tactic allows individuals to supplant emotions
with their film counterparts, providing the room for readers to relate
with the characters in retail fiction. However bold his ideas are,
Puig’s plots (as in <i>Kiss of the Spider Woman</i>) cannot help but
resemble clichéd serials and detective stories. On one hand, most
critics do find Puig’s treatment of complex issues like politics, sexual
power, homosexuality, and violence as superficial. But generally, his
works are regarded as insightful and moving (CLC: Vol. XXVIII 369).<br />
<b><i>Character Dichotomies</i></b><br />
<i>Kiss of the Spider</i> <i>Woman </i>creatively illustrates the
ways in which the customs of authority and the socially-induced modes
of thinking shape and inhibit individual experiences. In this novel, the
author Puig focuses on the restricted psychosexual identities of the
two men. Shari Zimmerman of Hofstra University incorporates the scripted
piece as a means through which the two men, Molina and Valentin, “read
each other, reveal themselves, become friends, and finally lovers.”
(Zimmerman 3) Aside from this, Zimmerman considers the work as an
exploration of traditional male behavior and customs. The novel also
provides a critique of male and female patterns that challenge
biological sex and gender issues.<br />
Critics David Bost and Jonathan Tittler concluded that Puig’s purpose in creating his most famous work <i>Kiss of the Spider Woman</i>
is to give voice and mainstream for the acceptance of the previously
marginalized groups (Drozdo 1). Despite the fact that Manuel Puig
particularly chose a homosexual and a political revolutionary as his
main protagonists, his goal is much more universal. Puig simply uses the
two as representatives of the other unprivileged groups. The most
prevalent dichotomies of Western civilization: man/woman, good/evil,
heterosexual/homosexual etc. One half of the dichotomy necessarily
relies in the other for its definition. According to Derrida, “they are
distinguished simply as the two faces of one and the same leaf.”
Therefore, there is no difference between the signified and the
signifier (Derrida 23).<br />
According to critics Maria Mercedes Velasco, Elias Miguel Muñoz, and
Fernando Reati, there is a strong binary system incorporated in Kiss<i> of the Spider Woman</i>
(Drozdo 1). Both characters, Molina and Valentin, have different
ideologies that they developed individually. With this in mind, Maria
Mercedes Velasco argues that the characters of Molina and Valentin show a
“projection of Marianism and masculinity” (Velasco) by directing their
identities through stereotyping Woman. She proposes the existence of a
dichotomy of man and woman within the novel. She believes that the
acceptance of this binary system, wherein masculinity and femininity is
defined and entwined, provides a sense of wholeness or completeness
within the novel.<br />
Meanwhile, Elias Miguel Muñoz proposes that Manuel Puig entertains
the idea of dual-centered ideology: “by the end of the novel, Valentin
has liberated the ‘woman’ whom he carries inside of him.” This ideology
presents the possibility of Puig’s Utopian liberation wherein the
possibility of a new sexual being is entertained. However, Steffany
Drozdo disagrees with these two critics saying, “it is precisely these
two binary ideological structures that Puig destroys in <i>Kiss of the Spider Woman</i>.”<br />
The two critics say that Puig uses the dichotomies to create a
totality that harmonizes, incorporates, and equalizes both parties.
However, in <i>Deconstruction of Binary Ideological Structures in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman,</i> Steffany Drozdo argues that it is precisely this structure that Puig destroys in his novel.<br />
In <i>Kiss of the Spider Woman, </i>both Molina and Valentin accept
the ‘inadequate’ meaning of the other’s ideology. Valentin, a
heterosexual, enters into a homosexual union with Molina without
‘becoming’ a homosexual. Molina, although uninterested in political
subversion, agrees to take part in Valentin’s political activity without
actually subscribing to his particular ideology. This is one ambiguity
present with regard to all violent hierarchies: the actions of both men
contradict their personal identities and beliefs. (Drozdo 6)<br />
Homosexuality and heterosexuality, being a popular and prevalent
dichotomy in society, both depend on each other for their definition.
Generally, one is defined by using the other. This is similar to the
character Valentin as he reveals his inner self in order present a
sexual identity that contrasts that of Molina’s. In a sense, it is by
defining Molina’s homosexuality that Valentin’s heterosexuality is
contrasted and then revealed. The analysis of social dichotomies is
where the aforementioned Freudian views on sexuality are blurred. In a
sense, the characterization of man defines the woman and consequently,
the homosexual to the heterosexual.<br />
Puig did not implement a specific date for the setting of <i>Kiss of the Spider Woman</i>
because this way allows the reader to expound on the “universality” of
the novel—that it can happen anywhere or any time since it also reflects
similar events and situations worldwide. It also creates an atmosphere
of a possibility of it happening to people outside Argentina (Drozdo 4).
“In fact, the ultimate coupling of Molina and Valentin and the
aftermath of their union symbolically destroy each of these dichotomies”
(Drozdo 4). Their unity and oneness in the end is the catalyst that
Puig used in order to “destroy” the limitations conditioned by each of
their social norms. This very act of defiance is the main basis that
Steffany Drozdo expounded on for her argument in <i>Deconstruction of Binary Ideological Structures</i>.<br />
Valentin and Molina represent different hierarchies that their
individual environments have formed them to take part in. Ultimately,
their union is an act of defiance to the society that shaped what they
were before the aftermath of the kiss. “In the end it is impossible to
discern not only that which is homosexual or heterosexual, but also that
which is masculine and feminine, as gender becomes confused and as the
merger of Molina and Marta (the woman) creates a new sexual being”
(Drozdo 6). This is very much connected to the aforementioned thesis
statement: the Freudian view on sexuality is so roughly described that
no definition can fully capture the essence of the new sexuality that
has merged. ) Furthermore, reality and fantasy become so intertwined
that it becomes impossible to delineate and, consequently, define either
one. The film or movie aspect that Puig implemented in his writing
style resurfaces in the ending as Valentin had a dream of Molina
carrying Marta inside him (qtd. in World Literature 798).<br />
“Puig proposes that the irrational state is a closer approximation of
reality than the rational state, because binary systems falsely
perpetuate oppressive dichotomies. Ambiguity…enables the reader to find
and consider a new dialectic” (Drozdo 7). It is not by placing one half
of the dichotomy to a position of superiority and the other half below
it, rather by deconstructing each of the elements of the dichotomy. In
doing so, Puig dissects the inner substance of an unprivileged,
marginalized group to help the reader redefine the group. Consequently,
the identity that the group has taken place is not affiliated with the
dichotomy it is arranged with as Velasco argues.<br />
Norman Lavers (1988) attests that Puig’s greatest artistic
achievement in Kiss of the Spider Woman is shown in the structure of the
novel and that the conversations between the two protagonists contain
much of the bulk of the narrative (Tuss 1). The vagueness of the stand
on homosexuality contributes to the inability of most to define and
differentiate it with other sexes. Furthermore, the lovemaking scene is
the part where they “exchange” selves. The scene also paves the way for
the characters’ transcendence into what Valentin describes as an
“existence without oppression” (qtd. in World Literature 775). This
becomes another act of social defiance to achieve liberation from their
individual identity.<br />
In a sense, to fully understand the multi-faceted characters in Manuel Puig’s <i>Kiss of the Spider Woman,</i>
one must involve in a deconstruction of their identities. Essentially,
Manuel Puig has a desire to deconstruct the culture that enforces its
conceptions on everything from political dissent to sexual conduct to
conventional gender roles. In doing so, he manages to displace the
identities of his characters rather than ratify them in the binary
system of dichotomies that the critic Velasco presents. Finally, this
desire was accomplished with the aid of his writing styles in a
non-narrative form with dialogical content and the allegorical reference
to Hollywood movies into his plot—a stratagem which he ultimately
sealed with a<i> kiss</i>.<br />
<div align="center">
WORKS CITED</div>
An Encyclopedia of Gay Histories and Cultures. NY: Garland Publishing, Inc. 2000: 69-71<br />
Encyclopedia of Latin American History. NY: Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc.1968: 22-25, 260-263<br />
New Encyclopedia Britannica Vol.9:791<br />
Allen, Bruce. The Hudson Review Vol. XXVII, No. 1. The Hudson Review, Inc. Spring, 1974.<br />
Alter, Robert. The New York Times Book Review. New York Times Company. 5 September 1976.<br />
Christ, Ronald. <i>A Last Interview With Manuel Puig (1991). </i>Companion to Contemporary World Literature, Vol. 1. NY: Twayne Publishers, 2003: 846-849.<br />
—-. <i>Fact and Fiction. </i>Review 73. Center for Inter-American Relations, Inc. 1972. Fall, 1973: 49-54.<br />
<i>Common Complaint.</i> The Times Literary Supplement. USA: The Times Newspaper Ltd. 31 Aug. 1973: 1007.<br />
Clemons, Walter. Rev. of <i>Kiss of the Spider Woman</i>, by Manuel Puig. Newsweek, Inc., 1971. 25 Oct. 1971<br />
Coover, Robert. <i>Old, New, Borrowed, Blue</i>. New York Times Book Review. April 22, 1979: 15-31.<br />
De Feo, Ronald. <i>Laying the Evidence.</i> National Review. NY: National Review, Inc. Vol. XXVII, No. 41. 29 October 1976: 1194-1195.<br />
Drozdo, Steffany. <i>The Deconstruction of Binary Ideological Structures in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman.</i> University of Kent.<br />
Dunne, Michael. <i>Dialogism in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman.</i>
South Atlantic Review, Vol. 60 No. 2 (May 1995). South Atlantic Modern
Language Association. 08/01/2009 21:16
< <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/3201304%2008/01/2009">http://www.jstor.org/stable/3201304 </a>>.<br />
Fulks, Barbara P. <i>Kiss of the Spider Woman (El beso de la mujer araña) Novel by Manuel Puig, 1976.</i> Reference Guide to World Literature Vol. 2. USA: Thomson and Gale 2003: 1341.<br />
Gallagher, David P. in Modern Latin American Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973.<br />
—-. New York Times Book Review. NY: New York Times Book Review, 1973. 16 Dec 1973: 14-15.<br />
Herrick, William. <i>Alienated Within and Without. </i>The New Leader © 1982 by the American Labor Conference on International Affairs Inc., Vol. LXV, No. 13. June 28, 1982: 19-20.<br />
Levine, Suzanne Jill. <i>Manuel Among the Stars (Exit Laughing) (1991</i><span style="text-decoration: underline;">)</span>. A Companion to Contemporary World Literature, Vol. 1. NY: Twayne Publishers, 2003: 856.<br />
Mendelson, Phyllis Carmel and Riley, Carolyn., ed. Contemporary
Literary Criticism Volume 5. Michigan: Gale Research CO., 1976: 354-356.<br />
Merrim, Stephanie. <i>For a New (Psychological) Novel in the Works of Manuel Puig. </i>NOVEL:
A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 12 No. 2 (Winter, 1984) pp. 141-157. Novel
Corp., Brown University. 08/01/2009 21:22
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/1435015>.<br />
Mirsky, Mark Jay. <i>Three to Tango.</i> Book World—the Washington Post. 25 November 1973: 1.<br />
Park, Sarah Claiborne. <i>A Review of “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” </i>in the Hudson Review Vol. XXXII No. 4. NY: Hudson Review, Inc. (Winter 1979-1980): 575-577.<br />
Riley, Carolyn., ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 3. Michigan: Gale Research Co., 1974: 407-408.<br />
San Pedro, Teresa Ana. <i>On Manuel Puig by Jonathan Tittler. </i>Hispania Vol. 77 No.1 (March 1994): 74-75.<br />
Sorrentino, Gilbert. <i>South American Fantasy, Obsession, and Soap Opera: ‘Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages’</i>.
Book World: The Washington Post, August 1989. American Association of
Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. pp. 1-2. 08/01/2009 21:24 <<a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/344442%2008/01/2009">http://www.jstor.org/stable/344442 </a>>.<br />
Tuss, Alex. <i>Deconstructing and Reconstructing Masculinity in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman.</i> Men’s Studies Press. 22 March 2000 01/2009 <http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-610636_ITM>.<br />
Williams, Raymond L. <i>PUIG, Manuel. </i>Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20<sup>th</sup> Century Vol. 3: L-R. St. James Press, 1999: 610-611.<br />
Williams, Raymond L. <i>A Review of “Pubis Angelical”. </i>World Literature Today Vol. 55 No.1, Winter 1981: 70.<br />
Wood, Michael. “<i>The Claims of Mischief”. </i>The New York Review of Books Vol. XXVI Nos. 21 and 22. January 24, 2009: 43-47.<i> </i><br />
Zimmerman, Shari. <i>Kiss of the Spider Woman and the Web of Gender.</i>
Pacific Coast Philology, Vol. 23 No. ½ (Nov. 1988). Pacific Coast
Ancient and Modern Language Association. 08/01/2009 21:19 <
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1316690>.<br />
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</div>
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WORKS CONSULTED</div>
Borinsky, Alicia. <i>Castration: Artifices, Notes on the Writing of Manuel Pug. </i>The Georgia Review. ( ©1975 University of Georgia) Spring, 1975: 95-114.<br />
Byfonski, Dedria., ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 10. Michigan: Gale Research Co., 1974: 420.<br />
Filer, Malva. <i>Manuel Puig: Cae la Noche Tropical. </i>Companion
to Contemporary World Literature, Vol. 2. 1990: a Selection of Book
Reviews, 1977-2001. NY: Twayne Publishers, 2003: 1599.<br />
Krisman, Claire, ed.<i> </i>Contemporary Authors Volumes 45-48. Detroit, Michigan: Gale Research Company, 1974. 435. <i> </i><br />
Stine, Jean C., ed. Contemporary Literature Criticism Vol. 28,. Gale Research Company, 1984: 369-375.<br />
<i>Provincial People.</i> The Times Literary Supplement. London: Times Newspapers Ltd. 6 November 1970: 1306.Harbinderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13826717276206440475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3682029162251660336.post-61353126086856419072011-12-26T05:04:00.000-08:002012-01-05T02:25:25.094-08:00Links and threads Fukuma-Baudrillard-Derrida<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
I'm thinking of my argument for my final analysis and I can first ascertain that there are many viewpoints on what postmodernism actually is.Yet what is evident is the force of meta narrative to deconstruct and redefine what we think we think is reality.</div>
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Ive been reading up on Francis Fukuyama in Malpas .In particular at his argument in The End of History and the Last Man.He is essentially taking Hegel's approach of absolute idealism as 'a movement towards the realisation of universal freedom. He is arguing that in mans ideological struggles are largely ending,but this is viewed with hindsight as he is looking at the end of the cold war .Thus the ideal of a liberal democracy and in particular at the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 ,reinforces his political opinion.But this argument of the 'west is reaching the end of history rests on 2 arguments drawn from natural science and a reading of Hegel's idea of freedom as a struggle for recognising.The first he claims makes necessary "a universal evolution in the direction of</div>
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capitalism (1991:19) </div>
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'Technology makes possible the limitless accumulation of wealth ,and thus the satisfaction of an ever expanding set of human desires.This process guarantees an increasing homogenisation of all human societies ,regardless of their origins or cultural inheritances.'. (Malpas 2005:90) Thus he is looking at technological innovation as a progression and globalisation of 'trade that technological development permits erases the differences between cult's as their citizen's strive to purchase the same international brands.Because for Fukuyma ,capitalism is best able to provide the conditions for this development ..'(Malpas 2005:91)Thus Fukuyma is looking at a direct link between capitalism,globalisation and democracy as natural development and globalisation of culture makes each culture come into contact with the 'same international brands'.(Malpas 2005:91) Thus sense a capitalist democracy which challenges Baudrillard's perception as a 'perverse literalisation of Hegel's argument about the relation between the actual and the rational which he calls the hyper real.'(Malpas 2005:93) Baudrillard is essentially arguing that this rate or speed of technological advance has caused us to become a hypereal society ,where information is not necessary digested ,but has become a a society where the original is no longer the method of identity.In essence globalisation has created global images of duplicate identification which has preceded the original .'The real is hyper realised.Neither realised nor idealised :but hyperealised.The hypereal is the abolition of the real not by violent distinction ,but by its assumption elevation to the strength of the model .' (1983:83-4)(Malpas 2005:93)</div>
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The second thread to Fukuyma argument is that of Derrida. He looked at the concept of the promised land of liberal democracy. And Derrida is arguing that Fukumas argument is flawed as it is based on a 'empirically observable event.'.So we are looking at the world from a western perspective and in terms of deconstruction ,Derrida is arguing that Fukuma is not looking at the bigger picture that not all people are Democratic and his argument is split between the 'idealisation of a liberal democracy and the free market and the impossibility of demonstrating such a system exist.'(Malpas 2005:93)So essentially Derrida is deconstructing Fukuma ,by trying to show that the ideal is actually fragmented within itself ,further generating more problems.</div>Harbinderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13826717276206440475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3682029162251660336.post-12866024527960183622011-12-22T08:06:00.000-08:002012-01-05T05:36:34.577-08:00Poststructuralism and Derrida<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
Distinct definitions</div>
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1.A critique of 'the idea that human societies and their traditions can be understood according to universal and unchanging structures that are replicated in texts,art works etc.'(Castle 2008:154)</div>
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2.Challenges Ferdinand De Saussure's linguistic and Claude Levi-Strauss structural anthropology.</div>
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Jacques Derrida -Essay "Structure,sign and play in the Discourse of the Human sciences"(1966)</div>
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The idea behind this essay is questioning the idea of center.In essence it makes us examine the concept of centering as a balance in a structured environment.</div>
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'In the poststructuralist critique of structure,the center is deconstructed ,exposed as contradictory,incoherent a "mythology of presence"."The center is at the center of totality".Derrida claims ,and yet,since the center does not belong to totality,...it has its center elsewhere.</div>
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'Derridas ..deconstructive methods have been borrowed by literary critics and used in the reading of literary works.Deconstructive reading...tends to make emblems of the decentered universe we have been discussing.Texts previously regarded as unified artistic artifacts are shown to be fragmented,self -divided and centre less.They always turn out to be representations of the 'monstrous births' predicted at the end of 'Structure,sign and play.'(Barry 2009:65)</div>
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'Deconstruction ,which can be roughly defined as' reading against the grain' or 'reading against the text itself'</div>
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with the purpose of knowing the text as it cannot know itself.(These are Terry Eagletons definitions ) A way of describing this would be to say deconstructive reading uncovers the unconcious rather than the concious dimensions of the text.(Barry 2009:65)</div>
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This process is looking for a new dimension in particular at reading texts .Social and historical events in essence favour this concept as a new way of reading.To look beyond the text is inevitably asking us to embrace the metanarrative .</div>
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'Derridas own description of deconstructive reading has the same purport .A deconstructive reading.</div>
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must always aim at a certain relationship ,unperceived by the writer ,between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of language that he uses ...[It] attempts to make the not-seen accessible to sight' .(Of Grammatology p.p 158 and 163) (Barry 2009:69)</div>
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Thus what this process does as in Barry it produces 'textual harrassemnt' or 'oppostionl reading'. in 'pursuance of its aims ,the deconstruction process will often fix on a detail of the text which looks incidental -the presence of a particular metaphor ,for instance and then use it as the key to the whole text,so that everything is read through it....The deconstructionist looks for evidence of gaps and discontinuities of all kinds. '</div>
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(Barry 2009:71)</div>
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The structuralist post structuralist</div>
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Parallels/Echoes Contradictions/Paradox's</div>
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Balances Shifts/Brakes in Tone:</div>
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Viewpoint</div>
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Tense</div>
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Time </div>
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Person</div>
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Attitude</div>
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Reflections/repetitions Conflicts</div>
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Contrasts Linguistic Quirks</div>
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Patterns Aporia</div>
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Effect :to show textual unity and coherence Effect:to show textual disunity</div>
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(Barry 2009:70)</div>
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From this chart it is obvious that the text must be viewed for its inner meaning,we must look beyond the words and find conflicts and paradox's and viewpoints which make the text contradictory.Fixing upon words and metaphors are directly linked to how the text itself must be read.And in the case of the kiss of the spider women it is evident that passages carry a multiplicity of meanings as the blurb becomes fused with the text itself in parts.The shifts and breaks which occur are directly linked to Molina subverting into the fantasy world of film,where he becomes the heroine.</div>
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<u>Three stages of deconstructive practice </u></div>
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Verbal</div>
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Look at the paradox's and contradictions at a verbal level ,which is the written text itself and if it contradicts its own ideas.</div>
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<u>Textual</u></div>
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This looks at the overhaul text and looks for a lack of construction,the deconstructive nature of the text </div>
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<u>Linguistic</u></div>
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'the linguistic stage involves looking for moments in the poem when the adequacy of language itself as a medium of communication is called into question.'(Barry 2009:73)...In Piug this is the moment when the subtext of the films merge themselves into the subtext. </div>
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<br />Harbinderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13826717276206440475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3682029162251660336.post-17806979971245745672011-12-17T05:31:00.000-08:002012-01-05T05:35:39.989-08:00Metafiction<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
I am going to explore metafiction and narrative in this section to gain an understanding of its relation to the Kiss of the Spider women and how to apply it to my 1500 word analysis.</div>
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'Metafiction</div>
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A quality of Postmodern fiction whereby narrative reflects upon its own status as fictional .It can take the form of structural self-reflection or a "laying bare" of the devices by which novelists traditionally achieve their effects.A related term is Robert Scholes fabulation,which refers to the complex patterns and arrangements of language and image often found in Postmodern and Contemporary fiction'.(Castle (2008:316) </div>
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<u>metafiction</u></div>
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'reflexive awareness of the conditions of meaning construction,any typological definition of metafiction rooted in objective characteristics or essences will contradict the linguistic philosophy that it attempts to describe.Above all metafiction is committed to the idea of constructed meaning's rather than the representable essences'.(Currie(1995:15)</div>
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'Metafiction is a term given to the fictional writing which self consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationships between fiction and reality.In providing a critique of their own methods of construction ,such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction ,they also explore the fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text.</div>
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Novelists ...their novels have tended to embody dimensions of self reflexivity and formal uncertainty...they all explore the theory of fiction through the practice of writing fiction'.(Waugh 1996:2).</div>
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Terms definition</div>
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<u>William .H.Gass (1970) -originator of the term metafiction</u></div>
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Meta-terms 'metafiction rests on a version of the Heisenbergian uncertainty principle :an awareness that 'for the smallest building blocks of matter ,every process of observation causes a major disturbance '(Hesiensburg 1972:126) ,and that it is impossible to describe an objective world because the observer always changes the observed..In literary fiction it is ,in fact ,possibly only to represent discourse of the world'.</div>
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(Waugh (1996:3) Language generates its own meaning.</div>
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'Metafiction novels tend to be constructed on the principle of a fundamental and sustained opposition :the construction of a fictional illusion and the laying bare of that illusion.In other words ,the lowest common denominator of metafiction is simultaneously to create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction.The two processes are held together in a formal tension which breaks down the distinction between 'creation' and 'crtiticsm' and merges them into the concepts of 'interpretations 'and 'deconstruction.'</div>
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(Waugh 1996:6)</div>
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'Contemporary meta fictional writing is both a response and a contribution to an even more thoroughgoing sense that reality or history are provisional :no longer a world of eternal verities but a series of</div>
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constructions ,artifices ,imperilment structures .The materialist ,positivist and empiricist world view on which realist fiction is premised no longer exists'.(Waugh 1996:7) </div>
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The Literature of Exhaustion (John Barth)</div>
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'You who listen give me in a manner of speaking. I won't hold you responsible .My first words weren't my first words.I wish I'd begun differently.(Lost in the funhouse ,John Barth)</div>
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Fictionality of identity -Stories within stories -disturbs us metaphysically ,when the character in a work of fiction become readers or authors of fiction they are in.Where reminded of the fictitious aspect of our own existence.(Mirrors -Doubling)</div>
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Having read Barth's literature of exhaustion ,it is evident that he is challenging the concept of the way he regards that texts have been 'pedestrianised ' ,as in literary techniques have been used before ,notably the subject /metaphor topics. Thus I suppose in a way texts and' happenings' as in stage plays are following the traditional idea of the artist and he is in essence challenging this norm.he argues that in the west we culturally define the omniscient narrate as the accepted norm 'of older fiction ,but the very idea of the controlling artist has been condemned as politically reactionary,even fascist.(Currie 1995:163)</div>
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'Metafictional strategies ,therefore ,are more than simply narcissistic,or at least they should be,for presenting the unrepresentable ,is an act of liberation.For Hutcheon,the metafiction aims to revolutionise literature as well as the society that produces it by forcing readers to look at language and texts in new ways:"the narcissistic novel as incitement to revolutionary activity would be the ultimate defence of self conscious fiction against claims of self preening introversion ". (Castle 1995:146)</div>
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<u>Conclusion</u></div>
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What is evident is that lit texts are influenced by social and historical change and meta narratives to some extent are a basis of challenging the norm.In essence as Barth's puts it pedestrianised text,yet it makes us look deeper and examine the text outside its predestined box and reality and fiction become submerged.But this submergence is in particular in reference to Puig a tool of making us look deeper beyond the text,almost at a subconscious level.</div>
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</div>Harbinderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13826717276206440475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3682029162251660336.post-738044715032528462011-12-06T04:15:00.001-08:002012-01-04T10:27:29.790-08:00Derrida and Deconstrcution<br />
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">On the one hand, we must
traverse a phase of overturning. To do justice to this necessity is to
recognize that in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with
the peaceful coexistence of a vis-a-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy.
One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has
the upper hand.<br />
To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a
given moment. To overlook this phase of overturning is to forget the
conflictual and subordinating structure of opposition.</span><br />
<div align="right" style="text-align: right;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">—
<cite><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">"Interview with
Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in “Positions” pp.42<sup id="cite_ref-Jacques_Derrida_1981_pp._42_17-1"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida#cite_note-Jacques_Derrida_1981_pp._42-17">[18]</a></sup></span></cite></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Derrida's work centered on
challenging unquestioned assumptions of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_philosophical_tradition" title="Western philosophical tradition">Western philosophical tradition</a> and
also more broadly to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_culture" title="Western culture">Western culture</a> as a whole.<sup id="cite_ref-NationObituaries_13-1"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida#cite_note-NationObituaries-13">[14]</a></sup>
By questioning the fundamental norms and premises of the dominant discourses,
and trying to modify them, he attempted to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratize" title="Democratize">democratize</a>
the university scene and to politicize it.<sup id="cite_ref-CambridgeInterviewOct92_44-1"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida#cite_note-CambridgeInterviewOct92-44">[45]</a></sup>
During the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_1980s_culture_wars" title="American 1980s culture wars">American 1980s culture wars</a>, this would
attract the anger of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politically_conservative" title="Politically conservative">politically conservative</a> and right-wing
intellectuals who were trying to defend the status quo.<sup id="cite_ref-Culler08_3-1"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida#cite_note-Culler08-3">[4]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida#cite_note-NationObituaries-13">[14]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida#cite_note-CambridgeInterviewOct92-44">[45]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida#cite_note-Afterword88P147-62">[63]</a></sup></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Derrida called his challenge to
the assumptions of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_culture" title="Western culture">Western culture</a> "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction" title="Deconstruction">deconstruction</a>".<sup id="cite_ref-NationObituaries_13-3"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida#cite_note-NationObituaries-13">[14]</a></sup>
On some occasions, Derrida referred to deconstruction as a radicalization of a
certain spirit of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism" title="Marxism">Marxism</a>.<sup id="cite_ref-63"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida#cite_note-63">[64]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida#cite_note-64">[65]</a></sup></span><br />
<h3>
<span class="mw-headline"><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Deconstruction</span></span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">A major theory associated with
Structuralism was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_opposition" title="Binary opposition">binary opposition</a>. This theory proposed that
there are certain theoretical and conceptual opposites, often arranged in a
hierarchy, which human logic has given to text. Such binary pairs could include
Enlightenment/Romantic, male/female, speech/writing, rational/emotional,
signifier/signified, symbolic/imaginary.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Post-structuralism rejects the
notion of the essential quality of the dominant relation in the hierarchy,
choosing rather to expose these relations and the dependency of the dominant
term on its apparently subservient counterpart. The only way to properly
understand these meanings is to deconstruct the assumptions and knowledge
systems which produce the illusion of singular meaning. This act of
deconstruction illuminates how male can become female, how speech can become
writing, and how rational can become emotional.</span><br />
<h2>
<span class="editsection"><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Post-structuralism&action=edit&section=6" title="Edit section: Structuralism vs. Post-structuralism">edit</a>]</span></span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"> <span class="mw-headline"><span id="Structuralism_vs._Post-structuralism">Structuralism vs. Post-structuralism</span></span></span></h2>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Structuralists
also seek to understand the historical interpretation of cultural concepts, but
focus their efforts on understanding how those concepts were understood by the
author in his or her own time, rather than how they may be understood by the
reader in the present.</span></div>
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<span class="mw-headline"><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Derrida's
lecture at Johns Hopkins</span></span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">The occasional designation of
post-structuralism as a movement can be tied to the fact that mounting
criticism of structuralism became evident at approximately the same time that
structuralism became a topic of interest in universities in the United States.
This interest led to a 1966 conference at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johns_Hopkins_University" title="Johns Hopkins University">Johns Hopkins University</a> that invited
scholars who were thought to be prominent post-structuralists, including
Derrida, Barthes, and Lacan.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Derrida's lecture at that
conference, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences," often
appears in collections as a manifesto against structuralism. Derrida's essay
was one of the earliest to propose some theoretical limitations to
structuralism, and to attempt to theorize on terms that were clearly no longer
structuralist.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">The element of "play"
in the title of Derrida's essay is often erroneously taken to be
"play" in a linguistic sense, based on a general tendency towards
puns and humour, while <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism" title="Social constructionism">social constructionism</a> as developed in the
later work of Michel Foucault is said to create a sense of strategic agency by
laying bare the levers of historical change. The importance of Foucault's work
is seen by many to be in its synthesis of this social/historical account of the
operations of power (see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governmentality" title="Governmentality">governmentality</a>).</span><br />
<h3>
<span class="editsection"><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Post-structuralism&action=edit&section=13" title="Edit section: Judith Butler and Gender Trouble">edit</a>]</span></span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"> <span class="mw-headline"><span id="Judith_Butler_and_Gender_Trouble">Judith Butler and Gender Trouble</span></span></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-size: 12pt;">A major American
thinker associated with post structuralist thought is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Butler" title="Judith Butler">Judith
Butler</a>. Trained in Continental philosophy and published on Hegel, Butler is better known
for her engagement with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_theory" title="Feminist theory">feminist theory</a> and as the 'mother' (along with
English literature scholar <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_Sedgwick" title="Eve Sedgwick">Eve Sedgwick</a>) of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_Theory" title="Queer Theory">Queer
Theory</a>. In <i>Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity</i>, Butler explored the
persistence of biological sex in feminist theory as the source and cause of the
unequal social treatment and status of women. Using ideas about power and
subjectification first broached by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault" title="Michel Foucault">Michel
Foucault</a> in Discipline and Punish<sup id="cite_ref-15"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structuralism#cite_note-15">[16]</a></sup>,
and the linguistic theories of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._L._Austin" title="J. L. Austin">J. L.
Austin</a>, Butler argued that sex was an effect rather than the cause of
social gender difference, and that the fiction of a stable core gender identity
was maintained through socially coerced performances of gender. Butler's ideas depend
greatly on the notion of "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performativity" title="Performativity">performativity</a>"
and she is widely credited with introducing the term into <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_studies" title="Gender studies">gender
studies</a>. Austin
described performative words as those which both describe and produce a thing.
The classic example is a minister's statement, "I now pronounce you
husband and wife," which both describes and produces two people as
married. Similarly, Butler
argued that repetitive socially coerced gender performances, which aspire to
replicate a normative gender ideal, actually produce the sexed body and gender
identity. In <i>Gender Trouble</i>, Butler
also relied on deconstructionist language theory and Freudian psychoanalysis to
argue that heterosexuality is structured in an ongoing series of losses
stemming from a repudiation of homosexuality; as such homosexuality can be seen
as constitutive of heterosexuality, necessitating its repeated repudiations. Butler embraced the
Foucauldian notion that there is no "outside" to culture, and
therefore resistance--even consciousness, volition, the self--to forms of
oppression is always already structured in terms of that oppression. Therefore,
resistance can only take the form of failed imitations of social norms, whose
very failure reveals the structures of power that often masquerade as natural or the inevitable. </span>Harbinderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13826717276206440475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3682029162251660336.post-37819104517599611782011-12-06T04:14:00.001-08:002012-01-05T05:38:56.211-08:00Judith Butler comparative to Baudrillard<b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 18pt;"><br />
Judith Butler</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
This page gives an introduction to Judith Butler and the arguments put forward
in her 1990 book <i>Gender Trouble</i>. Her subsequent publications (see <a href="http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-butl.htm#biblio">bibliography</a> at the
bottom of this page) are covered here less. There are also <a href="http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-butl.htm#links">links</a> to a good student
essay on Butler,
and some interview extracts (both on this site), as well as web resources on
other sites. Our <a href="http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-quee.htm">queer theory</a>
pages have also <span style="color: #ff3300;">expanded</span> -- now featuring
reviews and discussion of criticisms of queer theory.</span><br />
<b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">Who is Judith Butler?</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;"> </span><br />
<img align="right" height="255" hspace="4" src="file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Taj/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msohtml1/01/clip_image001.jpg" vspace="5" width="125" /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">Judith Butler (1956-) is Professor
of Comparative Literature and Rhetoric at the University
of California, Berkeley, and is well known as a theorist of
power, gender, sexuality and identity. Indeed, she is described in alt.culture
as "one of the superstars of '90s academia, with a devoted following of
grad students nationwide". (A fanzine, <i>Judy!</i>, was published in
1993). </span><br />
<b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">What has she said?</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;"> </span><br />
<img align="left" height="158" hspace="3" src="file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Taj/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msohtml1/01/clip_image002.gif" vspace="3" width="102" /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">In her most influential book <i>Gender
Trouble</i> (1990), Butler
argued that feminism had made a mistake by trying to assert that 'women' were a
group with common characteristics and interests. That approach, Butler said,
performed 'an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations' --
reinforcing a binary view of gender relations in which human beings are divided
into two clear-cut groups, women and men. Rather than opening up possibilities
for a person to form and choose their own individual identity, therefore,
feminism had closed the options down. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">Butler notes that feminists
rejected the idea that biology is destiny, but then developed an account of
patriarchal culture which assumed that masculine and feminine genders would
inevitably be built, by culture, upon 'male' and 'female' bodies, making the
same destiny just as inescapable. That argument allows no room for choice,
difference or resistance. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">Butler</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;"> prefers 'those historical and
anthropological positions that understand gender as a relation among socially
constituted subjects in specifiable contexts'. In other words, rather than
being a fixed attribute in a person, gender should be seen as a fluid variable
which shifts and changes in different contexts and at different times. </span><br />
<img align="right" height="240" hspace="8" src="file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/Taj/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msohtml1/01/clip_image003.jpg" vspace="4" width="125" /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">The very fact that women and men can
say that they feel more or less 'like a woman' or 'like a man' shows, Butler
points out, that 'the experience of a gendered... cultural identity is
considered an achievement.' </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">Butler</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;"> argues that sex (male, female) is
seen to cause gender (masculine, feminine) which is seen to cause desire
(towards the other gender). This is seen as a kind of continuum. Butler's
approach -- inspired in part by <a href="http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-fouc.htm">Foucault</a>
-- is basically to smash the supposed links between these, so that gender and
desire are flexible, free-floating and not 'caused' by other stable factors. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">Butler</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;"> says: 'There is no gender identity
behind the expressions of gender; ... identity is performatively constituted by
the very "expressions" that are said to be its results.' (<i>Gender
Trouble</i>, p. 25). In other words, gender is a performance; it's what you <i>do</i>
at particular times, rather than a universal <i>who you are</i>. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">Butler</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;"> suggests that certain cultural
configurations of gender have seized a hegemonic hold (i.e. they have come to
seem natural in our culture as it presently is) -- but, she suggests, it
doesn't have to be that way. Rather than proposing some utopian vision, with no
idea of how we might get to such a state, Butler calls for subversive action in
the present: 'gender trouble' -- the mobilization, subversive confusion, and
proliferation of genders -- and therefore identity. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">Butler</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;"> argues that we all put on a gender
performance, whether traditional or not, anyway, and so it is not a question of
whether to <i>do</i> a gender performance, but what form that performance will
take. By choosing to be different about it, we might work to change gender
norms and the binary understanding of masculinity and femininity. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">This idea of identity as
free-floating, as not connected to an 'essence', but instead a performance, is
one of the key ideas in <a href="http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-quee.htm">queer
theory</a>. Seen in this way, our identities, gendered and otherwise, do not
express some authentic inner "core" self but are the dramatic <i>effect</i>
(rather than the cause) of our performances. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">David Halperin has said,
'Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate,
the dominant. <i>There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers</i>.
It is an identity without an essence.' </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">It's not (necessarily) just
a view on sexuality, or gender. It also suggests that the confines of any
identity can potentially be reinvented by its owner... </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">And finally -- <b>what has
this got to do with media and communications studies?</b> Well, the call for
gender trouble has obvious media implications, since the mass media is the
primary means for alternative images to be disseminated. The media is therefore
the site upon which this 'semiotic war' (a war of symbols, of how things are
represented) would take place. <a href="http://www.theory.org.uk/madonna.htm">Madonna</a>
is one media icon who can be seen to have brought queer theory to the masses. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 7.5pt;">This text summarising <i>Gender Trouble</i> is
copyright © <a href="http://www.theory.org.uk/david">David Gauntlett</a>, 1998.
I say that just in case I want to use any of it in a book one day. Quotes from <i>Gender
Trouble</i> copyright © Judith Butler / Routledge, 1990. </span><br />
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<br /></div>Harbinderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13826717276206440475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3682029162251660336.post-64592165811698967412011-12-03T03:48:00.001-08:002012-01-05T02:23:09.092-08:00Baudrillard and counter arguments<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<u><span style="font-size: large;">Baudrillard and Counter arguments to his theory of Simulcra </span></u></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">t is the obscenity of what no longer has any secret ,of what dissolves completely in information and communication...The schizo is bereft of every scene ,open to everything in spite of himself ,living in the greatest confusion ...He is himself obscene ,the obscene prey of the worlds obscenity...He is now only a pure screen ,a switching centre for all the networks of influence'.(Baudrillard 'The ecstasy of Communication ' in Foster (1985) Postmodern Culture. </span></span><br />
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On reading this extract ,I am actually examining how unaware as a consumer of information ,how much information is absorbed sub-consciously.For example have we really looked closely at the information we absorb from seeing a shop logo e.g Top Shop.Where is the original as a consumer we merely absorb the copies,situated in each town, like global icons of the place to shop ,creating a hybridity of</div>
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simulation ,occurring in the mass marketing of hundreds and thousands of copies ,no longer with an original.Yet does this not again reproduce itself in the human identity of people wearing the same copied product thus become a sea of identical people creating the same fluidity among humans, in essence become almost bad copies of each other.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">'This would be the successive phases of the image:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">It is the reflection of a basic reality</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">It masks and perverts a basic reality</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">It masks the absence of a basic reality</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">It bears no relation to any reality whatsoever ;it is its own pure simulacrum.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">(Baudrillard ,The evil of images and precession of simulacra in Docherty(ed)(1993,Postmodernism ;A reader)</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The Precession of Simulcra</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">This evidently refers to the way that simulcra has preceded the real.A modern example of this is the map of the gulf war preceded the real war. </span></div>
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The first point I am going to make is that there are many negative connotations to the way Baudrillard thinks and this is due to the fact that he believes that society ,in particular western,control 'human liberation' as they are suffocating the individual out of free thought by bombarding them with mass media messaging.Yet this is in retrospect one main theoretical observations which is a counter action to modernism.I'm next going to look at theorists who are positive thinkers about post modernism.</div>
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1. </div>
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According to Norris ,Baudrillard does not look at the bigger picture of social living and despair,but seems to lock himself in cycle of looking at everything as a multiple of signs-which do not look at reality ,but simulated reality.</div>
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(Norris (1990)Whats wrong with Postmodernism;Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy)</div>
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2.According to Lyotard he sees postmodernism as a 'incredulity towards metanarratives'. Thus the genre is fusing together reality and truth and creating meta narratives.I shall look at these meta narratives in relationship to the Kiss Of The Spider Woman.Yet Lyotard wants to reject these meta narratives 'the local specific ,the provisional'. Thus a reverting to modernity a safe ,calm realist option.</div>
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(Lyotard (1979) Postmodernism,or The Cultural Logic of Late-Capitalism )</div>
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3.According To Jameson ,he gives a Marxist analysis on postmodernism and is realistically stating that the 'contemporary world reflects a new economy-post industrial capitalism.Key characteristics :multinational corporations beyond government control;depthlessness,the image/simulacrum ;weakening of historically ;new technologies ,globalisation </div>
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In conclusion,</div>
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post modernity is deconstructing our perception of the world and how it was perceived from a modernist perspective and it is evident that literature is effected by social and historical events.In particualr I shall look at metanarratives next. Yet it is also relevant to remember that these are only conceptual view points as according to Jenkins we are looking at ways history has been historicised post modernism.Thus the need for logical and coherent narrative has changed ,making or creating a metanarrative ,full of conflicting ideas and contradictions.(Malpas 2005:91) </div>Harbinderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13826717276206440475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3682029162251660336.post-8911939387902917132011-12-03T01:48:00.001-08:002012-01-19T04:00:27.890-08:00Simulations<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><u>Baudrillard (1981)Simulations</u></span></div>
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'mechanised reproduction has divided us from original/authentic objects: <b>simulacra </b>refers to the copy without an original.The persuasive influence of images from T.V ,film ,advertising ,technology etc has eroded the distinction between real and imagined ,reality and illusion ,surface and depth.<b>Simulation</b> refers to collapse of this distinction between the real (original ,innate,substantive and simulated (constructed; imaginary) The result is a society/culture of hyperreality ;our reality is a construct /illusion.(Denby Postmodernism :Historical and contexts)</div>
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I'm going to look at this in terms of <b>Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup cans</b>. Firstly we are seeing <b>simulacra</b> or more than one plain,we are dealing with the actual image of the soup can as a</div>
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copy ,multiproduced,therefore it becomes a copy without an original.Yet also we are seeing the mechanisation of the whole process from the actual production of the can to the mass production of the prints.I have purposely picked these 2 prints as each image is from a different timeline ,therefore ,what we perceive to see are 2 different perspectives socially and historically. </div>
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The first image also represents the clean cut repetitive image of technology which fuses a hyperreality into our consciousness and this is because of consumerism and how it effects the exchange value of that item.A can of soup ,has elements of food and nurture ,the brand selling a class value or ideal.Thus again we are subject to<b> artificial simulation </b>when as a consumer we accept the artificial as the norm.</div>
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<tr style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><td style="text-align: center;">the last image is a later image and I will look at it later in terms of deconstruction and Derrida.</td></tr>
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<span id="goog_47457886"></span><span id="goog_47457887"></span>Harbinderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13826717276206440475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3682029162251660336.post-91163724715102940642011-12-02T03:22:00.001-08:002012-01-19T04:01:33.108-08:00Learning Outcomes and Postmodernism<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="background-color: #cc0000;"><span style="background-color: magenta;">Learning outcome 4 explain and evaluate the relationship between postmodern and or/contemporary lit and its socio-historical ,political and intellectual contexts.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #cc0000;"><span style="background-color: magenta;">postmodernism and the crisis of humanism</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #cc0000;"><span style="background-color: magenta;"><span style="background-color: white;">'18th century origins of postmodernism manifest in counter-enlightenment philosophers and founders of</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"> anti -rationalism and romanticism</span>(Hamman,Herder)Denby Postmodernism:Historical and critical contexts.</div>
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It is essential that the social and historical context is included in the 4 summeries,therefore I am going to use this blog page to understand the development of postmodernism.</div>
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Late 20thcentury 1960s/70s/80s/areas of development of POMO-philosophy-politics-sociology</div>
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Must look at Derrida ,Foucault, Deleuze (Denby pomo)</div>
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<span style="background-color: magenta;">Poststructuralism</span></div>
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Well the first question is what is it actually about?</div>
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<span style="background-color: magenta;"><span style="background-color: magenta;">It is essence a oppos</span>ition to structuralism-which is about how words and meanings are ordered centered within 'a close linguistic system'.Thus poststructralism is challenging these assumptions and in particular 'western philosophy'.</span></div>
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So in definition poststructuralism is challenging humanism and essentialism.</div>
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Defintion : so whats it doing?<br />
<u> Modernism Post-Modernism </u></div>
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humanism/essentialism post-structure</div>
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deferral a fluidity(decentred-fragmented)</div>
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fixed (a fixed ideal or understanding) inate</div>
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reality identity </div>
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What is happening is a process of deconstruction,which in essence is breaking down the process of which we identify and makes us look as if underneath the paintwork of a picture.</div>
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Chief Theory</div>
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what has caused all this seemed to be linked to Globalisation -which affects the 'rate flow and direction of finance,information and individuals ,has amplified ,albeit problematically ,the theorising of fluid identity ...</div>
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thus disrupting boundries human/machine and human/animal ,further problematise notions of integral identity.'</div>
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(Denby POMO historical and critical contexts).</div>
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In my next blog I shall start to explore the theorists that I have chosen and how there notions influence the way we deconstruct our world.</div>Harbinderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13826717276206440475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3682029162251660336.post-17169702055995273482011-12-01T05:13:00.000-08:002011-12-06T04:26:43.258-08:00The concept of postmodernismI'm going to start by trying to understand first the concept of postmodernism and then look at the theoretical context of it through Adorno, ,Derrida and Foucalt and Baudrillard.Yet my first aim is to understand the concept of modernism and its relation to post modernism,and in reality why it came about. <br />
I intend to concentrate on these theorist first as when studying the module, I realised how much of what we see and understand about postmodernism is influenced by their conceptions of it.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><u>'Postmodernism :a mode of thought ,strategy or aesthetic </u></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><u>style ,which is the 'cultural dominant'(Jameson) of the late 20th century.E.g kitsch in TV soap operas,Hollywood B films...anti-linear ,metafictional ,hybrid and self conscious art forms'.(Dr.M.DenbyPostmodernism:Historical and Critical Contexts 29/9/11) </u></span><br />
What can be ascertained from this quote is that we are dealing with a subculture which has come about due to social and historical change,which has in essence influenced the creation of this ideal.Thus it is evident that postmodernism is fulfilling what modernism cannot.As according to Venturi/Jencks architects ,<b>it was seen as a challenge to modernism's universal /a historical aesthetics and it's aesthetic and social uniformity'.</b><br />
<b>(Denby :Postmodernism:Historical and critical contexts 29/11/11)</b> Thus in this instance architects are challenging the 'human experience', by mixing 'pre-modern traditions as well as elitist and popular art forms.<br />
I think it is important to understand that this art form is encompassing the whole of the arts,thus creating a melting pot of new experiences.<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>As according to Bell (sociologist) :the term post modern used to describe a historical era and sociocultural conditions.Drawing on structuralism,postmodernism rejects the Enlightenment's autonomous ,coherent subject/self (Descartes 'I think therefore I am' ) '. </b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>(</b></span>Denby:Postmodernism :historical and critical contexts 29/11/11) <br />
This is evidently showing that postmodernism therefore affects the natural reasoned concept of looking at things and makes us think in<b> </b><u><b>opposition to reality or our view of reasoning</b>.</u>Yet what it also evident that the concept of postmodernism and the crisis of 'humanism' ,is subjective to philosophical thinking a concept I shall explore in my next blog post.Harbinderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13826717276206440475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3682029162251660336.post-26248498651060928292011-12-01T02:13:00.000-08:002012-01-19T04:04:22.899-08:00Assessment<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
I'm going to start this blog ,firstly by writing down exactly what I need to do and what my learning outcomes</div>
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are ,as this will enable me to be able to double check that I am answering the brief of the assessment.</div>
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<u>1.Construct an academic on line blog.</u></div>
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<u>2.Must have a minimum of 4 critical and academic entries.This is designed to record your secondary academic research,your engagement with postmodern and contemporary lit,culture and society.</u></div>
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<u>3. First 3 entries summery and evaluation of key concepts or theories relating to POMO and contemporary lit,culture and society.And will be based on (non literary )writings by seminal cultural commentators.</u></div>
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<u>4.In the entries we must seek out potential interconnections and intersections between diff (comparable or oppositional )theories and approaches.</u></div>
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<u>(Learning outcome 1 Explain the theoretical and critical concept of post modernism ,using correct terminology and criticism.</u></div>
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<u>Learning outcome 4 Explain and evaluate the relationship between postmodernism and or contemporary lit and its socio-historical ,political and intellectual contexts. (2500 words)</u></div>
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<u>5</u><u>.The critical essay part of the blog</u></div>
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<u>Critical analysis 1500 words -close reading of one of the texts studied on the module from the period marked by the emergence of postmoderism literary forms ,applying a minimum of 2 of the theories outlined and explored in the reading diary .</u></div>
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<u>Learning outcome 2. Identify ,analyse and evaluate the key formal and thematic characteristics of postmodern and contemporary lit.</u></div>
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<u>Learning outcome 3. Apply theoretical approaches and critical concepts in postmodernism and</u></div>
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<u>contemp/lit/cultural theory to the analysis and evaluation of postmodern and contemp lit.</u></div>
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<u>Learning outcome 4.Explain and evaluate the relationships between postmodern/and or contemp lit.</u></div>
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<u>Learning outcome 5. Critically examine the ways in which cultural,political ,social and intellectual concerns/issues are explored at a thematic and formal level in postmodern/contemp/lit</u></div>Harbinderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13826717276206440475noreply@blogger.com0