English 100
September 17, 1998
Some Study Questions for the Upcoming Exam:
(1) The historical epoch of "modernity" (roughly from 1517 to 1974) is characterized by
a general understanding of the human subject as a rational, autonomous individual,
capable of making rational choices to improve his or her condition and that of society at
large and capable of controlling his or her own political and economic destiny. In an
essay discuss some of the ways this "modern" subject relates to political, economic,
social, religious, educational, cultural or other institutions and practices as they existed
during this period, and/or to historical events of the period. You need not cover the
entire period of modernism--for instance, you could focus primarily on changing
conditions during the early modern period (1517-1700), the "enlightenment" (17001800), the Romantic period (1800-1850), or the period of high modernism (1880-1945).
(Note: you may find it useful to refer to Jane Flax's list of "modernist" beliefs, quoted by
Faigley at the top of p. 8 of Faigley's Fragments of Rationality).
(2) Consider the following definitions of literature as typical of different theoretical and
historical paradigms of meaning. Link one or more of the definitions of literature with a
particular paradigm, and discuss the ways in which the definition relates to (supports, is
influenced by, etc.) one or more particular paradigm.
(A) Literature is writing that pleases many and pleases long.
(B) Literature is the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions, recollected in
tranquility.
(C) In literature, information equals beauty.
(D) Literature is whatever gets taught in the schools and universities.
(E) Literature is misleading, and so should be suppressed.
(3) At the end of chapter 5 ("Ideologies of the Self in Writing Evaluation") of Fragments
of Rationality, Lester Faigley writes:
Those teachers of writing who define good writing as truth-telling assume that
truth comes from within and can be conveyed transparently through language.
The teacher as receiver of truth takes the position of bearer of authority who can
certify truth--as do several of the commentaries in the Coles and Vopat anthology
that speak of good writing as "that kind of writing that elicits in the reader a
universal human response" (86). The authority to determine which truths are
universal places the teacher in a position of privilege because the teacher is
outside of the petty interests of history but within the boundaries of universal
truth. (131)
In Faigley's conclusion, this passage describes teaching and evaluation practices based on
several "modernist" assumptions. Identify some of those assumptions and discuss how
they relate to the practices described in the passage.
(4) In Chapter 3 ("Structuralism") of Literary Theory Terry Eagleton details both the
modernist tendencies and the anticipation of postmodernism in structuralist theory. On
the one hand, he points out the high modernist appeal of Northrop Frye's theories:
Frye's work emphasizes as it does the utopian root of literature because it is
marked by a deep fear of the actual social world, a distaste for history itself. In
literature, and in literature alone, one can shake off the sordid "externalities" of
referential language and discover a spiritual home. The mythoi of the theory are,
significantly, pre-urban images of the natural cycles, nostalgic memories of a
history before industrialism. Actual history is for Frye bondage and determinism,
and literature remains the one place where we can be free. It is worth asking what
kind of history we have been living through for this theory to be even remotely
convincing. The beauty of the approach is that it deftly combines an extreme
aestheticism with an efficiently classifying "scientificity," and so maintains
literature as an imaginary alternative to modern society while rendering criticism
respectable in that society's terms. (81)
On the other hand, Eagleton enumerates among the "gains" of structuralism some of its
postmodern implications:
The structuralist emphasis on the "constructedness" of meaning represented a
major advance. Meaning was neither a private experience nor a divinely ordained
occurrence: it was the product of certain shared systems of signification. The
confident bourgeois belief that the isolated individual subject was the fount and
origin of all meaning took a sharp knock: language pre-dated the individual and
was much less his or her product than he or she was the product of it. Meaning
was not "natural," a question of just looking and seeing, or something eternally
settled; the way you interpreted your world was a function of the languages you
had at your disposal, and there was evidently nothing immutable about these.
(93)
Discuss one or more of these features related to the shift from modernism to
postmodernism in more detail, drawing on our class discussions, lectures and readings,
where possible.