ENGLISH 4420: 20th CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE
FALL 2012
DR. MARY MCGLYNN
DUE DECEMBER 18th AT NOON
QUOTATIONS FOR ESSAY#LAST
"His theater of alienation intended to motivate the viewer to think. Brecht's postulate
of a thinking comportment converges, strangely enough, with the objective
discernment that autonomous artworks presupposes in the viewer, listener, or reader
as being adequate to them. His didactic style, however, is intolerant of the ambiguity
in which thought originates: It is authoritarian. This may have been Brecht's response
to the ineffectuality of his didactic plays: As a virtuoso of manipulative technique, he
wanted to coerce the desired effect just as he once planned to organize his rise to
fame." ( Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1970)
“Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions
of existence… if it is true that the representation of the real conditions of existence of
the individuals occupying the posts of agents of production, exploitation, repression,
ideologization and scientific practice, does in the last analysis arise from the relations
of production, and from relations deriving from the relations of production, we can say
the following: all ideology represents in its necessarily imaginary distortion not the
existing relations of production (and the other relations that derive from them), but
above all the (imaginary) relationship of individuals to the relations of production and
the relations that derive from them. What is represented in ideology is therefore not
the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the
imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live.” (Louis
Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Monthly Review Press 1971)
“A dominant power may legitimate itself by promoting beliefs and values congenial to
it; naturalizing and universalizing such beliefs so as to render them self-evident and
apparently inevitable; denigrating ideas which might challenge it; excluding rival
forms of thought, perhaps by some unspoken but systematic logic; and obscuring social
reality in ways convenient to itself. Such ‘mystification,’ as it is commonly known,
frequently takes the form of masking or suppressing social conflicts, from which arises
the conception of ideology as an imaginary resolution of real contradictions.”(Terry
Eagleton, Ideology, 1991).
“The difference between ‘literary language’ and ordinary language lies not so much in
the means as in the ends; apart from a few inflections, the writer uses the same
language as other users, but he uses it neigther in the same way nor with the same
intention—identical, material, displaced function…Literature has long enough been
regarded as a message without a code for it to become necessary to regard it for a
time as a code without a message” (Girard Genette Figures of Literary Discourse,
reprinted in Modern Criticism and Theory, 1982)
“...gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of
imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of
the imitation itself...what they imitate is a phantasmic ideal of heterosexual
identity...gay identities work neither to copy nor emulate heterosexuality, but rather,
to expose heterosexuality as an incessant and panicked imitation of its own
naturalized idealization. That heterosexuality is always in the act of elaborating itself
is evidence that it is perpetually at risk, that it, that it 'knows' it's own possibility of
becoming undone” (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 1990)