128303 AR Theory (MA) (2015S)

This course will consider poststructuralist theory & deconstruction and consider how these can be applied to an interpretation of literature and film.
We will direct our special focus on how terms ideal, cultural icon/iconicity and the Other/the abject/abjection are defined in groundbreaking Literary & CS-theories and explore how these terms are used as tools to explain for cultural practices in diverse socio-historical contexts. We will examine in detail how these terms are defined in various interdisciplinary fields of poststructuralism i.e. theoretical frameworks of: psychoanalysis, discursive theory & semiotics, philosophy, gender/queer theories, postcolonial theories and the deconstructive techniques each of these approaches offer.
CS-theories on iconicity reveal an icon represents some aspects of values and ideals that are not only perceived to be inherent in a culture, but also often perceived to represent universal concepts, emotions, and meanings (Sturken).

Taking a Foucaultdian perspective, we will however see that precisely that which is regarded as inherent in a culture is mostly set up by cultural master power-discourses and often bears strong normative functions. Icons, in being universally understood to be natural, rather than culturally constructed can be deconstructed as representations generated within a specific culture, time, and place supporting repressive universalized identity-concepts (such as of gender, race, class, nation, desire, the body, humanity, sanity etc).
In this context, we will position our discussion of cultural constructions of the Other/the abject.

Literary and Cultural theories and criticisms show that gender, sex and race, and marginalized groups in general are culturally constructed as the Other: i.e. conceived as an inferior pole of an idealized /iconic subject position (in a Western patriarchal white culture = woman & coloured peoples) and are naturalized in this position.

We will take our start with S de Beauvoir who is NOT a poststructuratlist but her theory on the Other was highly influential for many poststructuralist theories: so a consideration of excerpts from SS is crucial for getting access to deconstructive methods.
The concept of the Other is kept and elaborated in poststructuralist theories (in many ways) AND another term is developed there: THE ABJECT.
In a poststructuralist view, the abject poses a threat to our identity and stability as subjects which derives from the unity and stability of the representations/objects to which we attach ourselves such as e.g. to icons. Julia Kristeva explains that the abject is neither subject nor object; rather, it is something that [operates throughout our lives and] disturbs identities, systems, orders something that does not respect limits, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the mixed up, the uncanny. As major examples Kristeva cites tabooed spaces, the corpse, the mother's body.
Considering the cultural function of the abject as scapegoat we will see that the abject likewise plays a vital role in literary and CS fields of analysis of e.g. gender-power-relations, racial constructions, dystopias of clones & cyborgs, homo-and-transgender identities, constructions of the madwoman, the nerd, the savage etc.
Following also Judith Butler, we will see how subjects are constructed within particular networks where the abject functions the constitutive outside: as the locus of all that is excluded so that normative bodies & identities may emerge, but also as the zone of excess which puts these constantly into question.