Introduction to Literature and Culture Handouts 2010

“Thus with the yearSeasons return, but not to mee returnsDay, or the sweet approach of Ev’n or Morn,Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summers Rose,Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine” (John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book Three, lines 40-44)

Why read literature? Humanist (and Romantic) view (ideology) Why study literature? literature as a school subject

Answers given by Renaissance Man Bill Rago told to teach ‘Double D’s (dumb as dogshit) basic comprehension literary language “Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off” simile, metaphor, oxymoron): language skills (understanding complex texts)(2) understanding human situations (therapy context) Melvyn reading his letter, Benitez reciting Henry V, Hobbs reading Othello in prison Why Shakespeare? Prof. Quiller-Couch (1917): letting Shakespeare “have his own way with the young plant just letting him drop like the gentle rain from heaven, and soak in” Laurence Olivier’s 1945 film of Henry V

THE STORY OF “ENGLISH” OR “ENG. LIT.” AS A SCHOOL SUBJECT(why called “magyar” and “English”?) First chair of Eng. Lit.: 1828 (London); in Oxford: 1904; after WW1: “EngLit.” with its present function Before “English”: what did it replace? a, The ‘nice’ aspect of EngLit: the humanist and humanising subjectEng. Lit.: its function is not the passing on of knowledge but “the cultivation of the mind, the training of the imagination, the quickening of the whole spiritual nature” (Prof. Moorman, Leeds, 1914) “England is sick and … English literature must save it. The Churches having failed, and social remedies being slow, English literature has now a triple function; still, I suppose, to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the state” (Prof. George Gordon, Oxford)lit. makes you different - e.g. Dead Poets’ Society (“Lit.” even as a subject is “outside the system”) “convincing every child that he or she is a valuable person” (Alan Sinfield); trying to go against our usual social experience (being insignificant, disposable units) universal human values (what is ‘universal’?) BUT also other values (e.g. national): things that “everyone should know”

b, The darker aspect Element of authority, power in the educational context

Interpretation: power situation „All pupils need the civilizing experience of contact with great lit., and can respond to its universality. They will depend heavily on the skill of the teacher as an interpreter” (Newson Report, 1963) „Vajon érted-é, amit olvasol? Mi módon érthetném, hacsak valaki meg nem magyarázza nékem?” (Ap. Csel. 8.31)(„Understandest thou what thou readest? How can I, except some man should guide me?”)Lit: a powerful way of transmitting certain (universal, national etc.) values national identity (e.g. identifying enemies)gender identity, class identity, religious identity, ethnic identity etc.

Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? Polonius: By the mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed.H: Methinks it is like a weasel.P: It is backed like a weasel.H: Or like a whale?P: Very like a whale.

The Taming of the Shrew:Petruchio: Good lord, how bright and goodly shines the moon!Katharina: The moon! the sun: it is not moonlight now.P: I say it is the moon that shines so bright.K: I know it is the sun that shines so bright.P: Now, by my mother’s son, and that’s myself,It shall be moon, or star, or what I list,Or ere I journey to your father’s house.K: Forward, I pray, since we have come so far,And be it moon, or sun, or what you please.

The darker side of “Eng.Lit”Colonies; the mission of civilizing the natives (“savages”) 1835: English Education Act (India)In Britain: educating the working classes: giving them “culture” ‘humanising’ = standardising?Curriculum – the classics – the canonCanon: religious context: texts with authenticity, authority, and value. These features are retained in a secular context. CANON related to “cannon” and “cane”A shared knowledge of what to read and a shared knowledge of how to read them properlyliterature as an institution, part of “culture”

CULTURE Hermann Göring (or Hans Johst): “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun”Cyril Connolly (English writer): “When I hear the word ‘gun’ I reach for my culture”

George Steiner: “Knowledge of Goethe, a delight in the poetry of Rilke, seemed no bar to personal and institutionalised sadism. Literary values and the utmost of hideous inhumanity could coexist in the same community, in the same individual sensibility”

Binary oppositions (binarities, dichotomies)

1. Etymology and original meaning Cultura, cultivatio colere: to inhabit - colony, cultivate - couture, protect, worship - cult) cultura animi By the 18th century: growth of man Culture: sg. “added” to nature

2. Traditional meaning (culture as a value-laden term) from 18th cent. “culture” vs. “barbarity” A, culture (positive) barbarity/

natureB, culture (positive)

civilization barbarity/n.

C, cult. (pos)

mass cult.

Civilization barbarity/n.

Three stages: a, culture vs. primitives, savages, barbarians barbarity (“culture” means sg. like “civilisation”)

b, culture vs. civilisation 19th cent. Germany (Herder) “culture” vs. “civilisation”material (“new barbarity”) vs. spiritual (German origin; negative connotations of “Kultur” in WW1)Matthew Arnold (19th-century English poet, teacher, essayist): Culture is “the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world” (1865)culture is “a study of perfection, and of harmonious perfection, and perfection which consists in becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit. . . .The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light”. … (Culture and Anarchy, 1869). F. R. Leavis (English critic): “The minority capable not only of appreciating Dante, Shakespeare, etc. but of recognising that their latest successors constitute the consciousness of the race at a given time. . . .Upon this minority depends our power of profiting by the finest human experience of the past; they keep alive the subtlest and most perishable parts of tradition. Upon them depend the implicit standards that order the finer living of an age. . .” (1933)Culture and elite (classics and classes)

c, culture as “high culture” vs. “mass culture” (new barbarity)

3. The anthropological meaning

- broadening of meaning; - culture as a neutral (value-free) term; - a plurality of cultures (English culture, youth culture, hip-hop culture etc.); - reintroduction of the culture – nature dichotomy Anthropology and ethnography (from mid- C19) Two conclusions of anthropology: 1. “primitive culture” is not really “primitive” (complex social structures, e.g. myth, kinship)E. B. Tylor (Victorian anthropologist): we should appreciate “the real culture which better acquaintance always shows among the rudest tribes of man” 2. similarities bw. cultures (technologies, myths, etc.) - Cultures are all different but the fact of having a culture is a universal human feature Ethnocentrism Inuit/Eskimo; Baka/Pigmy; Magyar/Ungar; Dine/Apache; Roma/TsiganR. B. Tylor: culture is “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (1871)T.S. Eliot: culture in the widest sense “includes all the characteristic activities and interersts of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar” (1944)Raymond Williams (English Marxist critic): “Culture is ordinary. …Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of society is the finding of common meanings and directions” (1958)Arnold Gehlen, Norbert Elias (German athropologists): Human being: unable to survive in nature → puts culture between himself and nature culture = second nature The boy contracting his eyelids: nervous twitch (biological) or wink (cultural)?“thick description” (Clifford Geertz, (American anthropologist) In culture, everything is meaningful Geertz: culture is “webs of meaning and signification woven by us” (1973)Threshold: taboo on cannibalism and incest cultural texts – cultural practices culturalism: coherence of a culture, organic unity, details expressing the whole Slavoj Žižek (Slovenian philosopher) on European lavatories: German, French, English: three strategies/styles of dealing with human excrement (that is: how does a given culture treat disgusting material?)Cultural facts: use + symbolic meanings e.g. wearing jeans Identity, seld-definition: largely defined in cultural terms

CULTURE, POLITICS, IDEOLOGY Culture, economy, politics and power relationsculture is part of economy (but economy is studied by anthropology): production, marketing and consumption of ideas, identities

IDEOLOGYnarrow sense: ideas shared by a group (e.g. a party)

wider sense: a system of ideas that has become so habitual that it is accepted unquestioningly as “natural” (Lukács György: „hamis tudat”) Ideology works through texts, images, practices, institutions: each offers us a view of the world and of ourselves: addressing us in a certain way: we are addressed (produced) Product of ideology: the subject who recognizes himself in a certain way, inserted by institutions (the Church, education, family) into symbolic identities Louis Althusser (French Marxist thinker, 1960s): Ideology is “the imaginary relationship of individuals with their real conditions”

Culture is effective as an ideological weapon precisely because it seems apolitical Walt Disney; the politics of Mickey Mouse „Mickey Egér a valaha felmutatott leghitványabb eszménykép; … minden önállóan gondolkodó fiatalembernek és tiszteletre méltó ifjúnak azt kell hogy súgják egészséges érzései, hogy ez az ocsmány és koszos élősdi, az állatvilág ezen legnagyobb bacilushordozója nem lehet az eszményi állat. Ne hagyjuk, hogy a zsidók tovább aljasítsák az emberiséget! Le Mickey Egérrel! Viseljen mindenki horogkeresztet!” (Nazi German article, 1930s) “Mickey Mouse is the most atrocious ideal that has ever been offered to mankind … The healthy sentiments of every independent-minded young man worthy of respect must suggest that this ugly and dirty parasite, this greatest bacillus host of the animal kingdom cannot be the ideal animal. We must not allow Jews to degrade humanity! Down with Mickey Mouse! Let everybody wear the swastika!”

1970s: Comic Book Art Specifications Ducktales: Ducksburg, Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck;

The Lion King (1994)

cultural divisions social/political divisions (élite; origin of “classic”: highest taxation category in Rome)Hungarian film Hippolyt

CULTURE AND POLITICSCulture (leisure activities): a battlefield of conflicts between forces of regulation (discipline, control) and resistance Renaissance Man: the uses of “Shakespeare”

POPULAR CULTURE“MASS CULTURE” vs. “POPULAR CULTURE” mass (crowd) vs. “the people” (populus)

A, Negative view: the mass culture hypothesisTheodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, 19471. mass culture: an industry 2. sameness (Adorno: “all mass culture is identical”); clichés 3. not coming from the people, not authentic

“Mass culture is imposed from above. It is fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen; its audience are passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between buying and not buying” (Dwight Macdonald)4. passing, ephemeral interest 5. escapist - “packaged dreams” “If it is the crime of popular culture that it has taken our dreams and packaged them and sold them back to us, it is also the achievement of popular culture that it has brought us more and more varied dreams that we could otherwise never have known” (Richard Maltby) addiction (drug) 6. conformity: passive, identical consumers, cretinization “At worst, mass culture threatens not merely to cretinize our taste, but to brutalize our sense while paving the way to totalitarianism” (Bernard Rosenberg) e.g. ancient Rome: panem et circenses

Positive views 1 . carnival view of popular culture (Mikhail Bakhtin)8 features of the carnival 2. Positive view of pop culture focusing on its consumersbricolage, DIY: a “creative” act of producing meaning

the logic of fandom rap and hiphop culture

Fields of contemporary cultureInstead of a dichotomy of high and low: a spectrum of fields and subcultures Subcultures: excluded groups: Afro-American, working-class, etc youth cultures: radical, oppositional values (origin of jazz, blues)underground culturescounterculture (“ellenkultúra”; i.e. against the dominant/official culture): combination of subcultural energies and avantgarde art forms, political overtonesWhere is mainstream/dominant culture today?

ART AND LITERATUREWhat is literature? “How do I recognise a poem when I see one?” (Stanley Fish, US critic)

a, Literature as context (cultural practice)Örkény’s tram ticket („Mi mindent kell tudnunk”); John Cage’s music (“4’33”); ready-mades (Marcel Duchamp: “Fountain”); pop art (Andy Warhol’s prints); happening, “actionism” (Rudolf Schwarzkogler) “I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family.”“I was born in the city of Bombay … once upon a time.” (Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children)Terry Eagleton (English critic): “Anything can be literature”; “One can think of literature less as some inherent quality or set of qualities displayed by certain kinds of writing all the way from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, than as a number of ways in which people relate themselves to writing”

b, Literature as one of the artsArt: “skill” (Greek technē, Latin ars) Poetry was sg. different, a divine madness (mania), inspired by the Muses Artes liberales (grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astrology, music) artes vulgares (e.g. sculpture)

AESTHETICS(1750, Alexander Baumgarten)branch of philosophy (like logic, metaphysics, ethics) aisthesis (sensory experience)true/good/beautiful thinking/willing and acting/feeling

The principal concerns of aesthetics:a, What is beauty? (aesthetic value)Natural beauty, beautiful acts (morality), mathematics, sports

b, What is the nature of man-made beauty (art)? Why is a sculpture beautiful (e.g. a nude)? 1. because its model is beautiful 2. Mimetic view, ART AS MIMESIS: because the imitation is perfect (technē) - story of the painters’ contest (Apelles)3. ART AS POIESIS: because it creates beautiful patterns – Art: the creation of something new cult of the genius (Romanticism)

c, What is the nature of aesthetic experience?Art and playing (Friedrich Schiller)Dulce et utile (Horace: sweet and useful); delectare et prodesse; Bill Rago’s teaching methodsLautréamont: “Beauty is the encounter of an umbrella and a sewing-machine on an operating table”Another function: art disturbs us, it is not pleasingKitsch (from 1870s): inauthentic, “bad” art or non-art, mass-produced gadgetry“homely”, reassuring “art”; garden gnomes (Hyppolit, Amélie)Real art: experience of dislocation, disturbance and pleasureAdorno: It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s homeCatharsis: purification of emotions through pity and fear (Aristotle)

LITERATURE litera: letter ‘literature’: book learning, ‘literacy’ (until C 18 ) “irodalom” appeared in the 1830s1, Great books only 2, Lit. as imaginative writing (“imagined”) Aristotle: history vs. literature

3. Literature as a special use of language

What happens to language in literature?Paul Valéry: Walking vs. dancing everyday language is a tool for “use”; it is transparent, disappearing when it has served its purpose. Poetry is not for “use”; it is opaque (opacity) window - stained glass window

MAKING STRANGE (DEFAMILIARISATION) and LITERARINESS Russian Formalists (a group of literary critics, early C20): lit. transforms, violates ordinary language. Literariness

Mark Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) “I see everything. That is why I don’t like new places. If I am in a place I know, like home, or school, or the bus, or the street, I have seen almost everything in it beforehand and all I have to do is to look at the things that have changed or moved. But most people are lazy. They never look at everything. They do what is called glancing. And the information in their head is really simple. For example, if they are in the countryside, it might be 1. I am standing in a field that is full of grass. 2. There are some cows in the fields. 3. It is sunny with a few clouds. 4. There are some flowers in the grass. 5. There is a village in the distance. And then they would stop noticing anything. But if I am standing in a field in the countryside I notice everything. For example, I remember standing in a field on Wednesday 15th June 1994 because Father and Mother and I were driving to Dover to get a ferry to France and I had to stop to go for a wee, and I went into a field with cows in and after I’d had a wee I stopped and looked at the field and noticed these things. 1. There are 19 cows in the field, 15 of which are black and white and 4 of which are brown and white. 2. There is a village in the distance which has 31 visible houses and a church with a square tower and not a spire. 3. There is an old plastic bag from Asda in the hedge, and a squashed Coca-Cola can with a snail on, and a long piece of orange string. 4. I can see two different types of grass and two colours of flowers in the grass. And there were 31 more things in this list of things I noticed but Siobhan said I didn’t need to write them all down. And it means that it is very tiring if I am in a new place because I see all these things, and if someone asked me afterwards what the cows looked like, I could ask which one, and I could do a drawing of them at home.”.

George Eliot (19th-cent. British writer): “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart-beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it i8s, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.” (Middlemarch)

DEFAMILIARISATION (MAKING STRANGE)Viktor Shklovsky: “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony...The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception.”

Devices of defamiliarization: e.g. the work of the camera rhythm, rhyme, point of view, etc. (art if form, formation, deformation)a, “Good Hamlet, cast they nighted colour off,And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.”(“Jó Hamlet, ezt az éjszint dobd le már,S a dán királyra vess nyájasb szemet.”)

b, “In the coat-pocket of the Great Man-Mountain we found … a globe, half silver, and half of some transparent metal: for on the transparent side we saw certain strange figures circularly drawn, and thought we could touch them, till we found our fingers stopped with that lucid substance. He put his engine to our ears, which made an incessant noise like that of a water-mill. And we conjecture it is either some unknown animal, or the god that he worships.”

c, “Dwayne’s waitress at the Burger Chef was a seventeen-year-old white girl named Patty Keene. Her hair was yellow. Her eyes were blue. She was very old for a mammal. Most mammals were senile or dead by the time they were seventeen. But Patty was a sort of mammal which developed very slowly, so the body she rode around in was only now mature.” (Kurt Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions)

d, David Ignatow: “The Sky Is Blue”

Put things in their place,My mother shouts. I am looking Out the window, my plastic soldierAt my feet. The sky is blueAnd empty. In it floatsThe roof across the street.What place, I ask her.

SIGNS AND SEMIOTICS Umberto Eco: “a sign is what can be used to lie” 1. The structure of the sign Saussure: “The sign is the union of a form which signifies and an idea that is signified” (Saussure). Meaning: the relationship between Signifier and Signified - Referent2. Kinds of signs Icon – index – symbol; arbitrariness 3. How do signs signify? Meaning as difference (bill – pill – bull – pit) 4. Denotation and connotation “farkas” vs. “wolf”; “tree”; the sign of pi “The idea was to show other inhabited planets, in case they were listening, how intelligent we were. We had tortured circles until they coughed up this symbol of their secret lives: ” (Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions)LANGUAGE AS A PROBLEM A human universal (vs. the language of the bees)

Saussure: LANGUE vs. PAROLE (the aggregate of individual speech acts or utterances)

1. The crisis of referentiality

Ted Hughes: “Crow Goes Hunting”CrowDecided to try words.He imagined some words for the job, a lovely packClear-eyed, resounding, well-trained,With strong teeth.You could not find a better bred lot.He pointed out the hare and away went the wordsResounding.Crow was Crow without fail, but what is a hare?It converted itself to a concrete bunker.The words circled protesting, resounding.Crow turned the words into bombsthey blasted the bunker.The bits of bunker flew upa flock of starlings.Crow turned the words into shotguns, they shot down the starlings.The falling starlings turned to a cloudburst.Crow turned the words into a reservoir, collecting the water.The water turned into an earthquake, swallowing the reservoir.The earthquake turned into a hare and leaped for the hillHaving eaten Crow’s words.Crow gazed after the bounding hareSpeechless with admiration.

2. Language and thought Benjamin Whorf (American linguist): language constructs our worlds/thoughtthe Hopis: no tenses - “it was impossible to learn their language without learning their world” (Jeanette Winterson)

3. Language as communicationVerbal exchanges involves an act of interpretation Wilhelm von Humboldt, 19th-c. German scholar. “There isn’t a single word that is interpreted in the same way by two people. The difference, however small, vibrates in language, like ripples or circles on the water. Therefore, any act of comprehension is also a non-comprehension, every single encounter of thoughts and emotions is also a moving apart” the Tower of Babel YHWH says: “Yes! A single people, a single tongue for all: that is what they begin to do! Come! Let us descend! Let us confuse their tongues, man will no longer understand the lip of his neighbour” J. M. Coetzee: In the Heart of the Country : “He believes that he and she can choose their words and make a private language, with an I and you and here and now of their own. But there can be no private language. Whatever they may say to each other, even in the closest dead of night, they say in common words, unless they gibber like apes.”Ludwig Wittgenstein (20th-cent. Austrian philosopher): language games

François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel, 1532. The Island of Ennasin: “we found none among the inhabitants who was a mother or a father, an uncle or an aunt, a cousin or a nephew . . . except indeed for one tall noseless old man, whom I heard calling a little girl of three or four, ‘Father’, while the little girl called him, ‘Daughter’. … one man called a woman, ‘dear Octopus’, and the woman called him, ‘you old Dolphin’. One man called his girl, ‘Omelette’ to which she answered, ‘My egg’, and they were as much of a piece as an egg and an omelette.”

4, Language and subjectivity (the Humpty Dumpty problem)Hegel: „language is able to express only what is general. Thus, I cannot give voice to what is purely my opinion. In the same way, if I say I, I mean myself as an entityy that excludes everybody else, yet, what I actually say, I, is everybody. I is everybody else, too.” Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland “’When I use a word’, Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,’ it means what I choose it to mean neither more nor less.’‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make your words mean so many different things’‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master that’s all’” Sigmund Freud: “But the dictionaries that we consult tell us nothing new, perhaps only because we ourselves speak a language that is foreign” Haheperreneseb, ancient Egypt. „I wish I had sentences not yet known, unique sayings, brand new words never heard before, free of repetitions, phrases that have not come from my ancestors. I squeeze out my body and all that there is in it, freeing it from all my words. For everything that has been said is but repetition, and nothing is said but that which has already been said” Marguerite Yourcenar: Dear Departed. “The being I refer to as me came into the world on Monday, June 8, 1903, at about eight in the morning, in Brussels” ((compare the opening sentence of Robinson Crusoe)

“I”: a position made possible by language Jacques Lacan: need, demand, desire “I see friends shaking hands / Saying: How do you do? / They are really saying / I love you”(“What a Wonderful World”)language allows me to be born as a subject, to occupy the positions from which I can address others, but deprives me of ever naming my desire.Martin Heidegger: “Language speaks”

SUBJECTIVITY, IDENTITY“renaissance man” Leon Batista Alberti: “A man can do all things if he wants”), centre and master of the worldProtagoras: “Man is the measure of all things” the film Renaissance Man: “This, above all, to thine own self be true” (Polonius) -- “Be all you can be” (Army poster)dummy in the classroom Henry V (connects Sh. and the army) a, in the theatre

“For there is none of you so mean and baseThat hath no noble lustre in your eyes.Follow your spirit; and, upon this chargeCry ‘God for Harry! England and Saint George!’” „Mert köztetek senki sem oly alantas,Hogy nemes fény ne égne a szemében.Úgy álltok, mint pórázon agarak.Előttetek a vad, kiáltsátok oda:‘Harryval Isten, Szent György, Anglia!’”b, Benitez’s recital in the rain “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;For he to-day that sheds his blood with meShall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile This day shall gentle his condition:And gentlemen in England now a-bedShall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaksThat fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.” „Mi kevesek, mi boldog kevesek,Mi testvérbanda mert aki ma vérét Ontja velem, testvérem lesz; akármiAlantas, helyzetét megnemesíti E mai nap; s majd sok úriember, Aki ágyban hever most Angliában, Átoknak érzi, hogy nem volt ma itt,És szégyennek, ha olyan férfi szól,Ki itt harcolt Crispin napján velünk.”(IV.iii, Mészöly Dezső ford.)

Modern Western subjectivity Descartes: “I think therefore I am” “I shall consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses” in-dividual Thomas Reid (Scottish philosopher): “All mankind place their personalitry in something that cannot be divided … A person is something indivisible… My personal identity implies the continued existence of the indivisible thing which I call myself” John Locke: (1) self-reflection (“it is impossible to have a perception without perceiving that we are having a perception”) (2) Continuity in time

From late 19th century: DECENTRING THE SUBJECT 1. Language and Subjectivity 2. PSYCHOANALYSIS (Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan)Internal decentring of the Cartesian subject(St. Augustine: “For what could be closer to me than my own self?”)a, “mental” does not equal “conscious”

b, the structure of the psyche and the story of the subject: The Id – the Ego (structure of the psyche: Id, Ego, Superego)Lacan’s MIRROR STAGE The subject: a, product of the entry into language and symbolic systems; b, implies a split within the self c, implies that the subject exists only in relation to the Other (other people): I need the other to tell me what I am Bakhtin: “It is only when my life is told to another person that I myself become its hero” Marx: “Paul is not born with a mirror, he needs Peter to tell him who he is”- entry into language Lacan: NEED – DEMAND – DESIRE Subjectivity: a position waiting for us when we are born (e.g. our names)

3. Third aspect of decentring the subject: history, power, ideology; identity and identities To be part of the symbolic world, I need to take up positions within this world, to be able to address the others and to be addressed by them; these positions are not “my own”: the “we” precedes the “I”a, I am “made” be these positions We make ourselves on the basis of models Woody Allan’s film Zelig (identity as imitation)b, but texts also “make” us: by creating for us positions of reading/looking Humanist belief in the “REAL ME”, the “I” before the “we” (Bildungsroman)Humanist belief that we are unique, autonomous individuals, not simply products of external forcesSUBJECT: grammatical subject (alany), agent, author, master and origin of its acts but also: sub-jectare: subjected being (alattvalo)IDENTITIES: the positions taken up by the subject (race, class, nation, religion, sex). Persona Subjectivity: a set of identities

Identity:1. always collective (“us”, identification “with”)2. always defined against the “other” (us vs. them, self vs. other)Breyten Breytenbach (S. African white poet): The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist 3. identity is also identity through time e.g. national identity narratives and myths of continuity - the “glue” of imagined communities 4. identity formation is implicated in power and ideology institutions of creating subjects and identities: church, education Patriotic poetry, nature poetry, orLOVE POETRY (Sappho) Sexual identity and gender identity SEX: male/femaleGENDER: masculine/feminineFreud: “Anatomy is destiny”Simone de Beauvoir: “One is not born but rather becomes a woman”

Women: identifying with masculine, patriarchal images of themselvesWomen exist to be looked at Angela Carter: The Magic Toyshop “The summer she was fifteen, Melanie discovered she was made of flesh and blood. O my America, my new found land. She embarked on a tranced voyage, exploring the whole of herself, clambering her own mountain ranges, penetrating the moist richness of her secret valleys, a physiological Cortez, da Gama or Mungo Park. For hours she stared at herself, naked, in the mirror of her wardrobe. … She also posed in attitudes, holding things. Pre-Raphaelite, she combed out her long, black hair to stream straight down from a centre parting and thoughtfully regarded herself as she held a tiger-lily from the garden under her chin, her knees pressed close together. A la Toulouse Lautrec, she dragged her hair sluttishly across her face and sat down in a chair with her legs apart and a bowl of water and a towel at her feet. … Further, she used the net curtain as raw material for a series of nightgowns suitable for her wedding-night which she designed upon herself. She gift-wrapped herself for a phantom bridegroom taking a shower and cleaning his teeth in an extra-dimensional bathroom-of-the-future in honeymoon Cannes. Or Venice. Or Miami Beach.” Spectacle as a possible way of resistance: “The most erogenous part of my body is my belly button. I have the most perfect belly button. When I stick a finger in my belly button I feel a nerve in the centre of my body shoot up my spine. If 100 belly buttons were lined up against a wall I would definitely pick out which one was mine”

REPRESENTATIONOpening of Renaissance Man

Three senses of representation:- to re-present, to make present, portray (photograph) ~ icon- to speak on behalf of (parliamentary repr. – kép-visel) ~ index- to stand for (flag – country) ~ symbol

Three basic rules of representation1. A representation is never the thing itself“In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single province covered the space of an entire City, and the map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these extensive maps were found wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. … In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar” (Jorge Luis Borges)2. Representations are always constructed - select and order their objectBorges: Chinese encyclopaedia of animals: “In its remote pages it is written that animals are divided into a, belonging to the emperor b, embalmed c, trained d, sucking pigs e, sirens f, fabulous g, unleashed dogs h, included in this classification i, which jump about like lunatics j, innumerable k, drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush l, etcetera m, which have just broken the pitcher n, which look from a distance like flies”Repr. is never simply depiction/imitation; there is no innocent representation.“Les faits son faits” (facts are made)

Egyptian fresco (birth of Hatshepsut) reality shows description, interpretation, persuasion and self-expression Advertisements 3. Representations alo construct the viewing/reading subject (more about this later)

Images and iconoclasm “Man can understand nothing without images” (St. Thomas Aquinas)Idolatry Iconoclasm: distrust and destruction of images“Thou shalt not make any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters beneath the earth” (Deut. 5.8)“Images are dangerous. Images, no matter how discreetly chosen, come loaded with conscious and unconscious memories; no matter how limited their proposed use, they burn lasting outlines into the mind. Often images overwhelm the idea they are supposed to be carrying.” (Thomas Mathews)- immediacy, emotional chargeHans Belting: “Images are always more than the results of sensory perception (a kép mindig több, mint az észlelés terméke). They are produced as the outcome of an individual or collective act of symbolisation. It is in this way that anything that we might glimpse with our outer or inner eyes might be clarified and transformed into an image” (so: images are not simply what we have in front of our eyes: they are crystallisations of personal or collective experience, fixed and meaningful)Images of the human body Belting: “A képek nem hagynak kétséget afelől, mennyire változékony az ember lényege. Így történhet meg, hogy az általa kitalált képeket hamarosan eldobja, amint a világra és önmagára vonatkozó kérdései új irányt vesznek. Az önmagát illető bizonytalanság ébreszti benne a hajlamot, hogy önmagát mint másikat egy képben pillantsa meg.” (“Images leave no doubt about the variability of man’s essence. This is why man may discard the images contrived by himself as soon as his questions concerning himself and the world have taken a new direction. It is his uncertainty about himself that awakens in him the inclination to glimpse himself as another in an image”.)“A test újra és újra szembesül az idő, a tér és a halál állandó tapasztalatával, amelyeket apriori módon, képekben ragadunk meg. Antropológiai szempontból az ember nem képeinek uraként, hanem – s ez egészen más – a testét elfoglaló “képek helyeként” tűnik fel: a saját maga által létrehozott képek kiszolgáltatottja, még akkor is, ha újra és újra uralma alá akarja hajtani azokat.” (“Again and again, the body is confronted with the permanent experience of time, space and death, things that we grasp in an apriori way, through images. From an anthropological perspective, man appears not as the master of his images but and this is very different the “location or site of images” occupying his body: man is exposed to the images created by himself, even if he tries to gain mastery over them again and again.”) Pain and death: both resist representation “Death” and “pain” mean very different things in different representations: they are “constructed” by the images

Images of the Crucifixion: not represented until the 5th century “representing” God (incarnation) EPIPHANY (original meaning): the manifestation of God, God becoming visible What do these images represent? Fra Angelico (1442) Antonello da Messina: Calvary (1475) Jacques-Louis David (1782) El Greco (1596)Mathias Grünewald: The Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-16); Pablo Picasso (1930); Maurice Denis (1916); photograph of Munkácsy on the cross; crucifixion in the Philippines Pieter Paul Rubens: The Erection of the Cross (1609)“Death” and “pain” mean different things in different representations: they are “constructed” by the images

Memento Mori images Hans Baldung Grien: Death and the Maiden (1517); Nicolas Poussin: Shepherds in Arcadia (“Et in Arcadio Ego”), ca. 1660 Arnold Böcklin: The Island of the Dead (1880); representing/capturing the moment of deathDavid: The Death of Marat (1793); David: The Death of Socrates David: The Death of Seneca Edvard Munch: Death in the Sickroom (1893); Rembrandt: The Anatomy Lesson (1632): Dr. Tulp’s “show” in an Amsterdam theatre the body of a thief (Aris Kindt), dissected after the execution (hanging) medical/scientific view of the body – ritual punishment

Representation of pain in advertisingpain relief ads: Darvocet and Vistaril

The technology/medium of representation a, Language vs. image the Laocoon group (Hellenistic, 2nd century B.C.) the same scene from Vergilius: Aeneis“Eközben a hüllőkLáokoónra, azaz két kicsi gyerekére vetődnek,Nyílegyenest, és átfonván testük gyűrűikkel,Szánandó, csöpp tagjaikat tépdesve lemarják; Majd az atyát, ki rohan fegyverrel védeni őketFojtják rémséges hurkokba: a pikkelyes izmok Törzse körül kétszer, kétszer tekerednek a tarkón,Ámde nyakuk s a fejük fent még így is kimagaslik. Gennytől és mocskos méregtől szennyes a papnak Szentelt szallaga, marka pedig tépné a csomókat,Ám rémült ordítással csak bőg az egekre:

Mint sebesült bika bőg, mely rosszul kapta a taglót S oltárától elszabadulva kirázza nyakából”

Ut pictura poesistext vs. image: different systems of representation beauty out of pain; restraint of visual representationb, Painting vs. photography Leonardo da Vinci’s guidelines for war paintings: “The conquered and the defeated must be pale, wearing a frown, their foreheads wrinkled with pain, their mouths open, like people who are wailing … The dead must be fully or partly covered in dust; the blood trickling from the corpse into the dust must be marked by its colour. Others, in their agony, are snarling their teeth, their eyes rolling, their clenched hands close to their bodies, their legs all distorted.”War photographyRobert Capa: Death of a Republican Soldier (1936) Photography and death: postmortem photos, autopsy photos

Third rule of representations: Diego Velázquez: Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour, 1656)

Representations also construct their subject (viewer, reader); representations offer us positions from which they make sense, and thus they construct us as the giver of their meaning Representations of / about representation

Zurbarán: The Crucifixion with Saint Luke Mise en abyme (“put in an abyss”): a novel within a novel, a painting or a mirror within a painting, a play within a play etc. Andy Warhol: Marilyn René Magritte: This Is Not a Pipe (1926); René Magritte: The Two Mysteries (1966); René Magritte: The Uses of Speech René Magritte: The Interpretation of Dreams

Photography vs. paintingWe expect perfect reality, faithfulness of photography (paintings: “made” – photos: “taken”)Forged painting vs. forged photograph: select (“frame”), exclude, manipulate (e.g. National Geographic cover: pyramids squeezed together to fit cover size)

The politics of representation: representation, power and ideology

Lialloon (Paul Foelsche’s anthropometric photograph, 1879); touched up in several ways; charcoalJames Bond: Sean Connery or Roger Moore? (representation of Englishness)

Friday in Robinson Crusoe (1719) : “He was a comely handsome fellow, perfectly well made; with straight strong limbs, not too large; tall and well shaped … He had a very good countenance, not a fierce and surly aspect; but seemed to have something

very manly in his face, and yet he had all the sweetness and softness of an European in his countenance too, especially when he smiled. His hair was long and black, not curled like wool… The colour of his skin was not quite black, but very tawny; and yet not of an ugly yellow nauseous tawny, as in the Brasilians, but of a bright kind of a dun olive colour, that had in it something very agreeable, though not very easy to describe.”Bronislaw Malinowski (English ethnographist, from his New Guinea diary, 1918):“At 5 I went to Kaulaka. A pretty, finely built girl walked ahead of me. I watched the muscles of her back, her figure, her legs, and the beauty of the body so hidden to us, whites, fascinated me. Probably even with my own wife I’ll never have the opportunity to observe the play of back muscles for as long as with this little animal. At moments I was sorry I was not a savage and could not possess this pretty girl. At Kaulaka, looked round, noting things to photograph.”(ethnographic) museums: systems of representation Tervuren in Belgium vs. Leiden in the Netherlands - the Elgin marbles (the Parthenon frieze in the British Museum) Representations are also political practices, sites of conflict and struggle - possibility of resistance If our world is made up of representations, then this world can be “rewritten”, re-presented in different ways: resistance to accepted representations e.g. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (the madwoman in Jane Eyre); J. M. Coetzee’s Foe: rewrites Robinson Crusoe

The power of representations: Simulacrum and hyperreality

Jean Baudrillard: Society of the image/spectacle; which comes first: reality or representation?Science: prosthetic images (telescope, microscope, X-ray) Digital vs. analogous images (“analogous” implies “analogy”, resemblance) The hyperreal Cyberspace: “I looked into one of the video arcades. I could see in the physical intensity of their postures how rapt the kids were…These kids clearly believed in the space games projected. Everyone I know who works with computers seems to develop a belief that there’s some kind of actual space behind the screen, someplace you can’t see but you know is there.” (William Gibson) Simulacrum (simulacra)We treat images as if they were representations Simulacrum: an image without a model, or in fact something modelled on an image without a model (Barbie dolls)- Gulf War, Disneyland, the Tasaday tribe “Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland … Disneyland is presented as imaginary to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation.” (Baudrillard) Braveheart: sculpture of William Wallace