One of the best things about the north bedroom is the large window next to the bed. Unfortunately it’s made out of a sliding door and is fixed in place. Finally decided to solve that problem by installing some hinges and extending a small deck outside. The frame was originally made to handle being slid on a track so it handled the hinges no problem. All the lumber and hardware was found on-site save the nuts and bolts. Total cost of the addition: 60 cents.

We also have several other small home improvement projects in progress at the moment. First, the front porch area is being completed with concrete board and tiles. Second, the north fence is going to be extended to the property line. More to come.

We’ve found several hundred steel straps lying in the bushes and are now experimenting with possible polyhedron structures to build. One option is to make it a chicken tracker, which is different from a chicken coop in that it’s mobile; the chickens clear the grass and fertilize the ground for farming. Other options are to include an elevated platform and make it an inhabitable structure. Yet another option is to put it in a tree, cover it in nylon, put a light in the middle and make it a giant moon-like lantern which you can crawl into. There still are certain structural considerations that need to be worked out.

GBR Opening Extended - Option 1

GBR Opening Extended - Option 2

This just in from Sally Suzuki:

Beholdmyswarthyface and I are currently compiling our own Encyclopedia of Modern Japan (so far it’s just a list), and we are looking for people to contribute. The project is turning out to be bigger than expected.

Unlike Louis Frédéric’s Japan Encyclopedia, ours will not include the pre-modern periods, nor will it include place names, cultural artifacts, historical sites, etc. Rather, it will be limited to a) major writers, artists, historians and intellectuals from Tokugawa to present (with a focus on Meiji/Taishō/Shōwa), b) literary magazines and publishing houses from Meiji to present, c) genres of the novel (e.g., ero shōsetsu, honkaku shōsetsu, etc), d) literary debates (i.e., bungaku ronsō), e) literary coteries, f) major literary awards, and g) major film and anime directors. By limiting ourselves in this way, we hope to produce a literary and cultural encylopedia of modern Japan that is more comprehensive and informative than any published to date.

If anyone is interested in participating in this project, please contact us, and we will add your name to the list of online editors.

- Sally Suzuki, Beholdmyswarthyface Media Director

A few surfing videos.

With Roxanne visiting from New York and Chelsey bringing flowers, the place has never felt so homey.

As far as work, we cleaned out the house and made some furniture but all in all it’s been a relaxing week.

Next week: Farm!

Roxanne & Chelsey preparing dinner

Dylan's desk actually dinner-table like. Remarkable.

Deep in thought

Dear Mom,

Remember how you always wanted to take a crash course in critical theory? Well, here’s your chance. I’ve compiled the most comprehensive hyperlinked glossary of modern and postmodern literary theory terms ever assembled. Consider it an early birthday present. (Non-Mother others, feel free to use as well.)

Before we start, you’ll want to read through this very short but concise introduction to the major schools of critical theory (courtesy of Purdue University). Now as I walk you through this, I want you to keep in mind that a) my system of classification is somewhat arbitrary, as many of these categories overlap, and b) I’ve used Wikipedia only when absolutely necessary.

OK. Here we go. I’ve classified the critical orientations into the following ten clusters:

Cluster 1: Marxist, Marxian, New Historicist and Postcolonial Theories
Cluster 2: Formalists, Conservatives, and Anti-Structuralists
Cluster 3: Structuralists and Semiotics
Cluster 4: Post-structuralists and Deconstruction
Cluster 5: Reception Theory
Cluster 6: Narratology
Cluster 7: Pschoanalytic Criticism
Cluster 8: Postmodernism
Cluster 9: Feminism and Gender
Cluster 10: Miscellany

Remember, I’m not here to explain things in any detail; the linked sources will take care of that. Think of me as a kind of Virgil leading you, Dante, through the fiery rings of hell.

Cluster 1: Marxist, Marxian, New Historicist and Postcolonial Theories

Let’s start with Marxism and its key terms: historical materialism, alienation, commodity fetishism, reification, base and superstructure, mediation, praxis, literary mode of production (Terry Eagleton’s term), cultural materialism (Raymond Williams’s term), dialectics, and commodity.

Next, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and his notion of hegemony.

Then there’s the Frankfurt School (1930-1960s), which began in Germany before the war and was absorbed into the American New Left in the 1960s. Its chief task was to apply Marx’s economic theories to the realm of culture: from this we get “cultural Marxism.” Key members included Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Jurgen Habermas and Leo Lowenthal. The school contributed to the rise of cultural studies and the sociology of literature.

Among German-born Adorno’s important notions are the culture industry, authoritarian personality, and negative dialectics.

Next we have the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács, who expanded upon Marx’s notion of reification, and helped to develop the Soviet theory of montage.

You’ll also want to take a look at French Marxist Pierre Macherey’s writings on “ideological horizons” and absence.

Next is French philosopher Louis Althusser, whose key terms include “structure in dominance,” overdetermination (originally Freud’s term), ideology and apparatus, problematic, interpellation (subject, subjectivity of ideology), ideological state apparatus (in contrast to repressive state apparatus), and “symptomatic reading.”

We’ll also want to review the aesthetic theories of socialist realism, and the “epic theater” and “distancing [or alienation] effect” (Verfremdungseffekt) of Bertold Brecht:

Now before we move to New Historicism, we’ll want to quickly review the “old historicism” of Hegel, Marx, and Franz Boas. We’ll also want to look at Karl Popper’s critique of historicism.

Also key to understanding New Historicism is American anthropologist Clifford Geertz and his notion of “thick description,” which the New Historicists would later borrow.

Chief among the New Historicists is Stephen Greenblatt, whose key concepts include: [the circulation of] social energy, subversion and containment, negotiations, and the anecdote.

There’s also New Historicist Louis Montrose, who developed the idea of “historicity.”

Next, there are the postcolonial critics. They argue that our notions about the “Orient,” or, more broadly, about the non-Western world, are largely constructions of the Western imperial imagination. Edward Said uses the term “Orientalism” to refer to the discourse employed by Western scholars to explain the non-Western world. Because postcolonial critics argue that this discourse arose out of particular material, social and historical conditions (e.g., Western imperialism, economic and technological domination, etc.), I’ve placed postcolonial theories in this cluster alongside Marxian theories. Aside from Said, other key proponents of this school include Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha.

You’ll also want to review some of the key terms of postcolonialism, including abrogation and appropriation, hybridity, primitivism, the noble savage, slave narratives, and Spivak’s writings on the “subaltern.”

Also see this general glossary of Spivak’s terms, and this summary of Spivak’s seminal essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

Cluster 2: Formalists, Conservatives and Anti-Structuralists

What binds together the varied schools of this cluster is their underlying “formalism,” i.e., a critical orientation toward the text itself, rather than toward the world, author or reader. By my count, the earliest formalists (excepting Aristotle, of course) were the Russian formalists (1914-1930s), whose key members included Roman Jakobson, Victor Shklovsky and Mikhail Bakhtin, each of whom was associated with the Moscow linguistic circle (active from 1915-1924). Key concepts developed by this group include: skaz, heteroglossia, foregrounding, thematology, literariness, defamiliarization, fabula (story) and sjuzhet (plot), and deviation (from normal speech).

Bakhtin, the most influential critic of this group, developed the following key concepts: dialogic/dialogism, polyphony, assimilation, microdialogue (i.e., internal dialogue), utterance, popular culture, polyglossia, polyphonic, Menippean satire, monoglossia (heteroglossia), and embedding. Make sure you read each of those articles carefully, Mother.

The American version of the Russian Formalists— the New Critics, who reigned from the early 1920s through the 1960s— emphasized close reading, unity, intrinsic criticism, explication, analytical criticism, impersonality, organicism, and irony. Two of the school’s key proponents, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, warned us not to fall prey to the intentional fallacy. Also associated with this school were F.R. Leavis (his followers are called Leavisites), Cleanth Brooks, and I.A. Richards.

Brooks is remembered for his work The Well-Wrought Urn, in which he explains the importance of paradox.

I.A. Richards is remembered for, among things, his advocacy of practical criticism, and for his division of the metaphor into two parts: tenor (eg, world) and vehicle (eg, stage).

We should also keep in mind that it was proto-New Critic Irving Babbitt who revived the liberal humanist tradition of Matthew Arnold, sparking the movement that came to be known was as New Humanism. The works of Lionel Trilling and F.R. Leavis can be seen as extensions of this earlier movement.

As mentioned, Aristotle was a sort of proto-Formalist. His division of the elements of tragedy into mythos (plot), peripateia (reversal), anagnorisis (recognition), hamartia (tragic flaw), catharsis (purification), mimesis (imitation), and subplot served as a sort of rulebook for dramatists during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. However, in the 19th century the Romantics began to question some of his assumptions, and by the 20th century many modernist writers came to reject two of Aristotle’s key concepts, plot and mimesis. Formed in the mid-1930s, the Chicago School of Critics sought to revive Aristotle’s reputation and re-implement his theories.

The most prominent critics of the Chicago school were Ronald Crane and Wayne Booth. In his The Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth develops some of his key concepts regarding rhetorical criticism, including his notions of pluralism and the unreliable and naïve narrators.

Finally, I should point out that, unlike their Russian counterparts, the American Formalists (i.e., New Critics, Chicago School critics) emphasized pragmatic and practical criticism over theoretical criticism.

Cluster 3: Structuralism and Semiotics

Now on to Structuralism, which began with the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. A member of the Geneva School of Structural Linguistics, Saussure’s ideas about signified and signifier, referrer and referent, langue (linguistic system) and parole (verbal utterance), and diachronic and synchronic relations revolutionized the way we view language. It might even be said that all subsequent developments have been but extensions of his theories.

One American semiotician particularly under the influence of Saussure was Charles Peirce, who developed his own theories about the index, icon and symbol.

Founded in 1929 and disbanded in 1938, the Prague linguistic circle included Russian émigrés Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, as well as Czech literary scholars Rene Wellek and Jan Mukarovsky.

For now, you’ll want to focus on Jakobson’s key ideas about poetic function, metaphor and metonymy (aka, synecdoche; metaphor being typical of romantic and symbolist writers, metonymy of realist writers), and contiguity.

Finally, there’s French critic Roland Barthes, who’s a little harder to pin down. Some say he’s more post-structuralist than structuralist, others say he’s equally both. I’ll put him right here on the border: at the end of the structuralist cluster and the beginning of the post-structuralists (continued in my next post). For now, Mother, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with his work, S/Z, as well as with some of his more important terms such as doxa, demythologizing, death of author, play, text, ecriture, readerly text vs. writerly text, closure (closed text vs. open text), writing degree zero (or, zero degree of writing), narratology, ecrivant, and lexia (i.e., arbitrary excerpts).

In the next post, Mother, we’ll continue with Clusters 4, 5, and 6.

Your dutiful son,
Beholdmyswarthyface

Cluster 4: Post-structuralists and Deconstruction

OK, Mother, here’s the next installment. I’m running out of time, though, so there’ll be even less explaining here than in the previous post. Also, keep in mind that some of the links might not exactly match up with the terms.

Last week we discussed the first three clusters. Today we’ll do the next three, starting with post-structuralism and deconstruction. You’ll recall from last week that structuralism— post-structuralism’s predecessor— and semiotics overlap in many regards. Just to review, take a quick look at this explanation of semiotics.

Sometimes used synonymously, post-structuralism and deconstruction fit under the larger heading of antihumanism. Some of its key figures are Jacque Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Julia Kristeva. Derrida’s key concepts of deconstruction are presence/absence, supplement, alterity, decentering, play (aka ludism), binary opposition, logocentrism, and margin. Also look into Derrida’s notion of white mythology and sous rature (or under erasure, in English).

Next you’ll want to check out Franco-Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov and his theories of literature-as-palimpsest, fantasy and the fantastic, and the uncanny.

Then there are the Yale critics, most notably Paul de Man and Harold Bloom. You’ll want to look into Paul de Man’s notion of “rhetorical reading” and his distrust of formalism. Some of Bloom’s key terms are revisionism, the anxiety of influence, strong poets vs. weak poets, creative misprision, the canon, and agon.

Also look into J. Hillis Miller’s notion of the linguistic moment, and Jean Baudrillard’s silmulacrum.

You’ll also want review J.L. Austin and John Searle’s ideas about speech act, performatives, discourse analysis, and illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. Keep in mind that their theories were heavily influenced by the logical positivism of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Cluster 5: Reception Theory

Cluster 5 is concerned with Reception Theory and three of its major theoreticians: Hans Robert Jauss, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Norman Holland.German scholar Jauss is best known for his reception theory and reader response criticism, and for his notion of the horizons of expectation. German philosopher Gadamer is known for his horizons of meaning, the informed reader, and oppositional reading. Finally, there’s American critic Norman Holland, who’s also made significant contributions to reader response theory. Also try to remember these basic terms of reader response theory.

Cluster 6: Narratology

For this cluster, we’ll start with Russian formalist Vladimir Propp and his key terms: folklore, protagonist, morphology of the folk tale, and his conception of narratology.

Next is French theorist Gerard Genette, another major theorist of narratology. You’ll want to pay extra attention to his terms focalization and zero focalization (i.e., omniscient narrator), mood and interpolation, paralipsis and apophasis, anachrony (i.e., prolepsis, or narrator’s anticipation) and analepsis (i.e., narrator’s recollection), and verisimilitude. Also have a look at his notion of the focalizer. You’ll also need to learn the various kinds of rhetorical tropes (eg, irony, metonymy, metaphor, synechdote).

I’m really running out time so we’re going to have to rush through the rest of the terms: analepsis (flashback) and prolepsis (flashforward), and mimesis and diagesis.

Also have a look at this introduction to genre theory, and some of its terms, including discourse and story, and free indirect discourse (aka, the Uncle Charles principle).

Also, scenic method (dramatic method) and syncretism.

Lastly, you’ll want to get acquainted with Lithuanian linguist Algirdas Julien Greimas and his theory of narratology, and his notion of the actant.

Next week we’ll continue with clusters 7, 8, 9 and 10.

Your dutiful son,
Beholdmyswarthyface

Cluster 7: Psychoanalytic Criticism

Mother,

OK, in this last installment we’ll be covering clusters 7, 8 and 9. Just in case you’d like to review, here are the first and second installments. I’m in a hurry, so we’re going to have to make this quick.

Cluster 7 is concerned with Freudian literary criticism. Key terms include displacement, projection and introjections, the uncanny, the unconscious, psychological repression, Oedipus complex, condensation, sublimation, and the arche. I’m sure you’re familiar with some of these terms from your New Age psychobabble self-help books. Just be careful not to confuse Freudianism with the more popular “vulgar Freudianism.”

And if we’re going to talk about Freud, we’ll also have to spend some time on Carl Jung and his analytical psychology and notion of the collective unconscious. Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye borrowed Jung’s collective unconscious and applied it to literature, producing what is now known as archetypal literary criticism. Some key terms of his include the four mythoi (romance, tragedy, comedy and satire) and menippean satire.

Next is Michel Foucault. Key terms: sexuality, archaeology of knowledge, panopticon, episteme (2), and transgression strategy. Again, some of the links might not exactly match up, so you may have to do a little sifting.

Thanks to Slavok Zizek, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has been revived in recent years. His key ideas: structure of the psyche (the real, the imaginary, the symbolic), imaginary/symbolic/real, other, name-of-the-father, the gaze, and desire/lack. Also see Slavok Zizek’s “How to Read Lacan,” which is available on this most excellent site.

There’s also Bulgarian-French philosopher and critic Julia Kristeva, whose key terms include: the semiotic and symbolic, phenotext and genotext, and abjection. You’ll also want to look into Melanie Klein’s object-relations theory.

Cluster 8: Postmodernism

Now on to postmodernism. Because postmodernism is more of a historical condition than a particular theory of philosophy or art, I’ve included only two names in this cluster. The first is late French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard, who famously said postmodernism is characterized by a general skepticism toward metanarratives and totalization. The other is American Marxist Frederic Jameson. Here’s a summary of his works; some of his key terms: late capitalism, the political unconscious, the postmodern condition, pastiche, strategy of containment, and ideologeme.

Cluster 9: Feminism and Gender

Finally, there’s feminism and gender. I think H. Bloom refers to this as the “school of resentment.” Some of their key terms: sexism, misogyny, homophobia, androgyny, and phallogocentrism. Feminist and gender criticism has its roots in Engels, who was among the first to examine Europe’s patriarchal system. You’ll also want to look at these key terms: patriarchy in feminism, matriarchy, androcentric/gynocentric, and phallocentrism.

Also familiarize yourself with the Bloomsbury group, the Fabian Society (which included E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf), and Kate Millet and the radical feminists. You’ll also want to look into Elain Showalter’s notion of gynocriticism, and critic Toril Moi, and Linda Hutcheon’s narcissistic narrative.

Oh, and don’t leave out A.D. Nutall’s notion of transparent criticism (eg, Aristotle’s formal descriptions) vs. opaque criticism (eg, Derrida’s criticism), and Judith Butler on performativity. And while you’re on Butler you might want to take a look at her writings on Zionism.

Also look at Belgian feminist Luce Irigaray and her logic of the same, and Ecriture feminine. Also: Judith Fetterley’s notion of resistant reading, and interrogation.

Lastly, we’ll finish this cluster off with a little gay and lesbian criticism, looking at American critic Eve Sedgwick and her notions of homosocial and homodiegetic storytelling.

This concludes our three-part lesson, Mother. You can go back to your New Age self-help books now, hopefully with a new perspective. To review, here are Lessons 1 and 2.
Your dutiful son,
Beholdmyswarthyface