Reference:
Review Excerpts 'For the New Critics, "discourse" marked differences and
established identities....Each "discourse", in itself,... has an identity to be
discovered, defined, and understood; in addition, each discourse
established the limits of a particular genre' (50).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | discourse |
genre |
identity |
'It is the very utility of the discourse that must be seen as functional
and regulative. It hierarchizes not only poetry and prose but, implicitly,
identity and difference, authority and subservience, taste and vulgarity,
and continuity and discontinuity as well' (52).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | difference |
discourse |
identity |
'We can no longer easily ask such questions as, What is discourse"
or, What does discourse mean? ... But why not? Because to ask them
and to force an answer would be, in advance, hopelessly to prejudice the
case against understanding the function of "discourse" either in its
poststructuralist context or in its existence as an institutionalized system
for the production of knowledge in regulated language' (53).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | case | context |
discourse |
function |
knowledge |
language |
poststructuralist |
system |
understanding |
Bove asserts that the questions posed above are commonsense,
that they 'imply a norm of judgment: meaning and essence are better and
more important that a discussion of "how things work" or "where they
come from"' (53).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | judgment |
meaning |
norm |
'The "self-evident" and "commonsensical" are what have the
privilege of unnotices power, and this power produces instruments of
control. This matter of control is rather difficult; it does not mean, as it
might in certain Freudian or Marxist theories, control by repression or by
exclusion. It means, rather, control by the power of positive production'
(54).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | power |
'There is a broad political purpose to this project that develops out
of a radical skepticism about "truth" and the correspondence of fact and
concept' (55).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | concept |
purpose |
radical |
truth |
Canguilhem's 'work showed that the history of systems of thought,
of disciplines, and of sciences was not merely the chronology of
concepts, ideas, and individual discoveries.... He outlined the history of
science as the workings of a number of material practices that make up
a society. He traced how some of these practices and sciences
extended-- like "vectors", as it were-- throughout a culture, and he
showed how they opened new species for new forms of knowledge
production' (55).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | culture | history |
knowledge |
science |
thought |
'"Genealogy" complements the critical dimension of
poststructuralism's radical skepticism. It aims to grasp the formative
power of discourses and disciplines' (56).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | genealogy |
power |
radical |
'"Discourse" makes possible disciplines and institutions which, in
turn, sustain and distribute those discourses.... In other words, these
discourses are linked to social institutions which "have power" in the very
ordinary sense we mean when we use that phrase: such institutions can
control bodies and actions. But there is more to them than "having
power" in the sense of being able to dominate others.... Power must not
be thought of as negative, as repression, domination, or inhibition. On
the contrary, it must always be seen as "a making possible", as an
opening up of fields in which cerain kinds of action and production are
brought about.... What Foucault means when he says that power acts
upon actions is precisely that it regulates our forming of ourselves'
(57-8).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | action | discourse |
phrase |
power |
thought |
'Genealogy separates itself within the "will to truth" by trying to
unmask discourses' associations with power and materialities; also, it is
not reductive, that is, it alone allows for a full description of the
completely determined discursive practices it studies' and, finally, it
describes and criticizes these practices with an eye to revealing their
"subjugating" effects in the present-- it means always to resist discipling
and speaking for others in their own struggles' (60).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | description |
genealogy |
power |
truth |
'Foucault grew increasingly interested in what the rise of the
modern disciplines had to do with modern state power-- with what he
called "governability"-- and how it displaced sovereignty as the
hegemonic figure of power and authority.... In disciplinary societies,
self-determination is nearly impossible, and political opposition must
take the form of resistance to the systems of knowledge and their
institutions that regulate the population into "individualities" ... In this
understanding of governability, truth produced by these knowledge
systems blocks the possibility of sapping power; it speaks for-- or...
"represents"-- others' (61).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | figure | form |
knowledge |
power |
state |
truth |
understanding |
'The genealogical analysis of discourse, then, sets out with an eye
on the present to criticize and trace the systems of power which have
come to constitute human being in our world. It does this to stand in
opposition to them and to provide the results of its work to whomever
would like to use them in their struggles against the forms of power they
are trying to resist' (62).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | analysis |
discourse |
power |
world |
'The contemporary use of "discourse" turns literary critics away from
questions of meaning; it also turns us from questions of "method" to the
description of function. It suggests that a new set of questions should
replace the interpretive ones that have come to constitute criticism and
the normal practice of teachers and scholars. We might ask such things
as, How does language work to produce knowledge? How is language
organized in disciplines? Which institutions perform and which regulative
principles direct this organization?' (62).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | criticism |
description |
discourse |
function |
knowledge |
language |
literary |
meaning |
method |
principles |
'When viewed as an element in a historical system of
institutionalized discourse, the traditional idea of the "author," and the
privileged value accorded to it in literary scholarship and criticism, is one
of the two or three key concepts by means of which the critical
disciplines organize their knowledge around questions of subjectivity and
discipline both their practitioners and those they "teach"' (63).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | author | criticism |
discipline |
discourse |
idea |
key |
knowledge |
literary |
privileged |
subjectivity |
system |
value |
'Since ours is a society which increasingly tries to ensure its
political order through discursive systems that discipline our language
and culture, any successful resistance to that order would seem to
require strong weapons aimed to weaken that discipline.... Literary
criticism, presumably always specially sensitive to the functions of
language, and newly sensitive to its relationship to power on the site of
institutionalized disciplines, can turn its tools to the critical examination
of how, in relation to the state and its largest institutions, power operates
in discourse and how discourse disciplines a population.... Discourse
can turn literary studies into a full criticism, one which is skeptical,
critical, oppositional, and-- when appropriate-- sustentative. It can help us
to avoid reduction, either of the historical context of an event or of the
rhetorically complex display of power within a textualized discourse or
institutionalized discipline' (63-4).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | context |
criticism |
culture |
discipline |
discourse |
event |
language |
literary |
power |
reduction |
relation |
state |
'When the tools of opposition, useful to a point and in a specific
local struggle against a particular form of power, lose their negative
edge-- when their critical effect makes no difference and they simply
permit the creation of new texts, new documents recording the
successful placement of the previously "oppositional" within the
considerable unchanged institutional structures of the discipline -- at that
point criticism must turn skeptical again and genealogically recall how
the heretical became orthodox' (64).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | criticism |
difference |
discipline |
effect |
form |
power |
Last Modified:
July-11-96 16:59:27
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