Structuralist
It is an extension of “Formalism” that started in France. They focused on the literary form rather than social or historical content. Their study of literature was objective and scientific. It is simply the study of sign-system of structuralism. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’ ideas supported structuralism. In 1915 he published a book entitled Course in General Linguistics. He was not interested in the meaning of the text, but on the way, it was delivered. He was concerned with the description of structures and general laws. Saussure believed that there is no relation between the signifier and the signified. “The signs are arbitrary and each unit of meaning lacks meaning if it stands by itself. These units gain meaning when they are related together, the words, the grammar, and other components.” ( Afrev, 2012, pp.7) All readers know that the text and the words reflect the writer’s feelings and thoughts and tell truths to them. However, structuralisms tried to persuade readers that the text tells no truth. Structuralism thinks as Roland Barthes says, ‘the writer is dead’ and the reader is sent away from the text because the readers’
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The woman in the Victorian era was considered weak and inferior to men. In her essay, “Kristeva and Feminism”, Kelly Oliver states that: “The female body has been always related to the weak woman, the feminine and to the immoral and unclean behavior. That is why the theories of the body are crucial for feminists.” Kristeva explained the relation between mind and body, culture and nature, psyche and soma, matter and representation, by emphasizing the idea that the bodily drives are discharged in representation and this is associated with the maternal body. She is now famous for the distinction between what she calls the "semiotic" and the
Being a novice reader myself, I felt compelled to seek information from different sources for precise explanations about what is a routine, an archetype, a convention or ‘the grammar of literature’ even though they were crucial to understand the text. Only after a class discussion and a small research on the internet, I was able to define these terms. For this reason, I consider his terminology to be weakly constructed. Moreover, Foster did not follow a logical line while organising his writing; he opened the text by mentioning the Faustian bargain as a pattern, analyzed the symbolism on Hansberry’s ‘A Raisin In The Sun’, yet he started to mention the literary symbols after the first half of the article. In my opinion, the author’s reason for arranging the text in a disorderly way is to create an intimate atmosphere for the reader.
H In the context of society, constructing the ideals of femininity depends on the depiction of women's emotions and their identities in both texts and film. Emma (1806) and Clueless (1996) are both examples of women being misrepresented in society by disparagingly displaying women as primarily revolving around and serving men, emphasising the significance of physical appearance and how it validates men. Furthermore, through the representation of women being “entitled” and “clueless” in both texts, women are depicted as being less capable than males both physically and emotionally. Atypical views on marriage and the responsibilities surrounding it are expressed throughout both texts, establishing absurd beliefs regarding what marriage signifies
This common interest of postmodern feminists about women’s bodies and how it serves as a “feminine language” to define identity continues to represent explorations, discovery and opinions of the traditional mind and body dualism, the role of sexual analysis in the development of gender and the self as well as the analytical modes of exploration of the body which all in all defines what it means to discuss about postmodern feminist issues in this twenty-first century. For example, in Mislina Mustaffa’s opinion, the female body directly reflects an artistic subjection to what is considered a norm to women in society today. Nevertheless, the artist disagrees with such manner. The entire discovery of what makes a woman a woman in fact lies in the matter other than the body itself. One route of inquiry along these lines concerns reevaluation of the senses and the conservative materials that are fashioned into forms or ideas that define the identities of women today.
This sentence style shows the author’s thinking process at the moment, rather than tells a story. Besides fragmented sentences, sections are also unchronological and seem irrelative to each other, attracting readers to read
One of the many characteristic features of the Victorian culture was its patriarchal ideas about women. This culture looked upon sexual activity as a negative matter amongst women. The theme of sexuality is very significant
Not only does the text itself have levels in meaning and context, but can be related to may forms and people of
As with all theories, this feminist approach to Louise Halfe’s “Body Politics” does not come without its flaws. While it can be argued that this poem criticizes the performativity of feminine gender roles in a patriarchal society, this cannot be proven definitively without knowing the author’s original intentions. Furthermore, the poem does not give its readers enough information to conclude that the society the women live in is in fact a patriarchal society. This becomes evident, as there is no reference to any masculine figure – so any assumptions about the masculine-dominant culture are purely speculative. It is possible that Halfe wrote this poem in an attempt to challenge the gender binary, however one stands to question how successfully she is in doing so.
In the 19th century, a group of people launched the suffrage movement, and they cared about women’s political rights, their property and their body liberty. Born in that age, Kate Chopin was aware of the importance of setting an example for those who were taken in by the reality and poor women to be an inspiration. So we call her a forerunner of the feminist author for every effort she put in advocating women’s sexuality, their self-identity and women’s own strength. When people were ashamed of talking about sexuality, Kate Chopin stood out and call for women’s sexual autonomy.
According to Mary Urbanski, “Margaret Fuller is the most important woman of the 19th century” and author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which was the intellectual foundation of the feminist movement (3). By including Transcendentalist thought in her arguments, which have their basis with her feminist predecessors, Fuller brought the issue of women’s rights beyond the social sphere to the inner self as the focus that would change society and its institutions rather than revolution or political action. Cole argues that Margaret Fuller’s contribution to the feminist tradition deserves more recognition because she expanded upon arguments and appeals made by her predecessors, but I argue that its her unique rhetorical style combined with her
Exposing Foundations: Psychoanalysis and Gender in Mulvey and Butler Woman… stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the image of woman still tied in her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning. 6 In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), Laura Mulvey points out that psychoanalytic theory can “advance our understanding of the status quo, of the patriarchal order in which we are caught” (2). To understand why woman is only “the bearer of meaning, not the maker of meaning” in this order, I will turn to a very small fraction of Lacan’s psychoanalytic philosophy. Here we find that
It may skew her thinking and at times be subjective. The intended audience is someone who is studying literature and interested in how women are portrayed in novels in the 19th century. The organization of the article allows anyone to be capable of reading it.
Julia Kristeva is a psychoanalyst and feminist writer who talks about what she calls the “semiotic” and the “symbolic”; for her, all signification is made up of these two elements. On the one hand, the semiotic element can be associated with Lacan’s pre-mirror stage, understanding the “mirror-stage” as the moment when the child starts to “see himself, to find himself” in the mirror. So according to Kristeva, the semiotic element comes before this moment, it is associated with the maternal body which is, according to professor Kelly Oliver “the first source of rhythms, tones and movements for every human
Ibsen, in his working notes, observed that “...a woman cannot be herself in today’s society”, since society in the 19th century, particularly in Norway, was exclusively male.
From the outset, literature and all forms of art have been used to express their author’s feelings, opinions, ideas, and believes. Accordingly, many authors have resorted to their writing to express their feminist ideas, but first we must define what feminism is. According to the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, feminism is “the belief that women should be allowed the same rights, power, and opportunities as men and be treated in the same way, or the set of activities intended to achieve this state”. As early as the fifteenth century is possible to find feminist writings. Centuries later, and although she never referred to herself as one, the famous English writer Virginia Woolf became one of the greatest feminist writers of the twentieth
Women’s Body The Figuration of the female body is well described in both Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El-Saadawi and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Both novels show that the women bodies are not their own and controlled by others which it turned into an object in order to survive. In this paper, I would like to argue how the objectification of the female bodies in both novels resulted in their oppression and sufferings. Moreover, what is the definition of the figuration of a body to both Offred and Firdaus? And is there a way out to survive this tragedy in both novels?