Literary and Critical Theories
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Among the literary and critical theories that gained currency over the course of the 20th century, two strands of thought in particular resonate: new historicism and aspects of neopsychoanalytic theory that touch on unconscious processes that operate not so much at the individual as at the social level, where experience is shared and unconscious processes are collectively enacted via encounters between and among inmates of the community, to shape human experience. Employing these disciplines to approach literary texts of any period would seem to enrich interpretation not only because it would enable criticism to capture something of the multivaried and not infrequently competitive inputs that characterize discourse of any culturally, politically, and socially complex age but also because--especially to the extent the two disciplines can be said to interpenetrate--they help supply an account of text that identifies meanings and implications relevant to both the context in which it was produced and the context in which its current reader operates. To explore the attraction of each of these methods of encountering text and to suggest possible ways in which they might be applied in practice is the subject of tshis research.New historicism as a theory of textual critique appears to have been a term that its originator, Stephen Greenblatt, came to wish he had more thoughtfully considered and instead elaborated it as "a literary version of cultural anthropology" (Richter 1204). Ev
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st in the artifact.
The concepts of interpretive thickness and of a defiantly unstructured collection of evidentiary bits each carry the idea of criticism that observes the artifact in a way that requires discerning not merely what it is but that its being thus-and-so implies, suggests, or represents something besides itself, as well as its relationship to other somethings. Or again, according to Geertz, the cockfight of Bali is "more than a game," instead an artifact that in a way measures Balinese culture and norms: "In the cockfight, then, the Balinese forms and discovers his temperament and his society's temper at the same time. Or . . . a particular facet of them" (Geertz 1277).
The metaphor of thickness, of "something more," as opposed to structure, is operationalized in Foucault to the extent he shows ways in which an artifact of cultural history that presents a particular situation also discloses the layers of meaning and interpenetration of relationships that constitute social organization. The situation depicted in Velasquez's Las Meninas is one in which painter and child subjects looking out at the subjects' royal parents whose reflection can be seen in the mirror of the painter's studio. The painting incorporates mul
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Stephen Greenblatt, Dreams Freud, Richter Foucault, Medea Rupert's, , Las Meninas, Freud Lacan, Gudrun Hamlet, Gerald Crich, Hamlet Gerald, literary texts, tradition classic texts, texts contemporary trends, contemporary trends 2d, texts contemporary, contemporary trends, 2d ed, trends 2d, tradition classic, ed ed, trends 2d ed, books 1997, bedford books, 2d ed ed, david richter,
Approximate Word count = 2300
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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