Unit 3:  Speaking with Others

Dr. Christina Britzolakis

Term 2 

Week 1:            Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop

Week 2:            Freud, ‘On Dreamwork’

Week 3:            Bakhtin, from Rabelais and his World  

Week 4:            Gilbert and Gubar, from The Madwoman in the Attic

Within the context of literary theory and literary criticism, we often encounter the term ‘other’ (or ‘otherness’). This terminology has been linked with the discourses of psychoanalysis, feminism, poststructuralism (especially in the field of linguistics) and postcolonialism. What we classify under the concept of "otherness" is connected to certain mechanisms of exclusion through which the construction of the self takes place. Otherness, then, can be conceptualized as present within the self, as psychic conflict; a way of talking about the operation of desire, the unconscious, desire and fantasy. At the same time, the term ‘otherness’ is attached to particular bodies that get labelled and marked as “the Other.”  In this latter context, otherness is defined by difference, typically marked by outward signs like race and gender. Historically, otherness has been associated predominantly with marginalized or subordinate groups: those who have been defined as different by a dominant group. 

Difference, then, is not an ontological given but necessary for ethical and social relations; it is another way of talking about relationality and conflict, within pre-existing power structures. The dynamics of otherness can be seen as part and parcel of the construction of the subject. 

To what extent can literary texts help us to imagine otherness? Can reading be seen as an encounter with the otherness of our own culture(s)? Are there particular genres, or formal or aesthetic strategies, which can open up a dialogue with what culture excludes or censors as ‘other?

In this unit, the term "otherness" will therefore be used as a convenient means of yoking together a set of related discussions about the operation of difference within literature. It will be applied to the process of psychic formation, as a dialogue between symbolic discourse and its "other"; to the relation between men and women; and to the interaction between different social languages in the literary text.

We start with Angela Carter’s novel, the Magic Toyshop and see how Carter employs a range of ideas about femininity, fantasy, intertextuality, myth, ‘demythologizing’, performance, the relationship between parents and children, Englishness / Irishness etc., in order to foreground the knotty problems of conceiving of and relationship with ‘others’.  Psychoanalysis teaches us that, owing to repression, much of the activity of the mind is unconscious. In the second lecture, we go to Sigmund Freud’s model of this process as found in dream narrative and its mechanisms of dreamwork.  We ask whether literary criticism can learn anything from Freud’s model of dream interpretation and discuss Freud’s theory of the uncanny, and its impact on literary criticism.

For the linguist Bakhtin, we all become foreign to ourselves when we enter language. He analyzes literary discourse as an intersubjective process of creating socially and culturally significant meanings. In reading, we enter into a complex web of interrelations between utterances which he calls dialogic and which for him distinguishes the novel as a genre.  Bakhtin is also interested in the way that literature both reflects and is able to circumvent the social and religious regulation of the body, and he develops the concept of ‘grotesque realism’ to explore this process.   This is the content of our third lecture.

Finally, we look at the impact of feminism on literary interpretation. Feminist critical theory tries to unravel the relationships between gender and the construction of identity. Feminist criticism applies these insights to the formation of literary canons and the politics of aesthetic evaluation, e.g. via the notion of ‘the resisting reader’. The course extracts by Gilbert and Gubar are discussed as an influential example of the project of rereading male-authored ‘images of women’.