CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A.
Background
“Literary
theory” is the body of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of
literature. By literary theory we refer not to the meaning of a work of
literature but to the theories that reveal what literature can mean. Literary
theory is a description of the underlying principles, one might say the tools,
by which we attempt to understand literature. All literary interpretation draws
on a basis in theory but can serve as a justification for very different kinds
of critical activity. It is literary theory that formulates the relationship
between author and work; literary theory develops the significance of race,
class, and gender for literary study, both from the standpoint of the biography
of the author and an analysis of their thematic presence within texts. Literary
theory offers varying approaches for understanding the role of historical
context in interpretation as well as the relevance of linguistic and
unconscious elements of the text. Literary theorists trace the history and
evolution of the different genres—narrative, dramatic, lyric—in addition to the
more recent emergence of the novel and the short story, while also
investigating the importance of formal elements of literary structure. Lastly,
literary theory in recent years has sought to explain the degree to which the
text is more the product of a culture than an individual author and in turn how
those texts help to create the culture.
“Literary theory,” sometimes
designated “critical theory,” or “theory,” and now undergoing a transformation
into “cultural theory” within the discipline of literary studies, can be
understood as the set of concepts and intellectual assumptions on which rests
the work of explaining or interpreting literary texts. Literary theory refers
to any principles derived from internal analysis of literary texts or from
knowledge external to the text that can be applied in multiple interpretive
situations. All critical practice regarding literature depends on an underlying
structure of ideas in at least two ways: theory provides a rationale for what
constitutes the subject matter of criticism—”the literary”—and the specific
aims of critical practice—the act of interpretation itself. For example, to
speak of the “unity” of Oedipus the King explicitly invokes
Aristotle’s theoretical statements on poetics. To argue, as does Chinua Achebe,
that Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness fails to grant full
humanity to the Africans it depicts is a perspective informed by a postcolonial
literary theory that presupposes a history of exploitation and racism. Critics
that explain the climactic drowning of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening
as a suicide generally call upon a supporting architecture of feminist and
gender theory. The structure of ideas that enables criticism of a literary work
may or may not be acknowledged by the critic, and the status of literary theory
within the academic discipline of literary studies continues to evolve.
Literary theory and the formal
practice of literary interpretation runs a parallel but less well known course
with the history of philosophy and is evident in the historical record at least
as far back as Plato. The Cratylus contains a Plato’s meditation on
the relationship of words and the things to which they refer. Plato’s
skepticism about signification, i.e., that words bear no etymological
relationship to their meanings but are arbitrarily “imposed,” becomes a central
concern in the twentieth century to both “Structuralism” and
“Poststructuralism.” However, a persistent belief in “reference,” the notion
that words and images refer to an objective reality, has provided
epistemological (that is, having to do with theories of knowledge) support for
theories of literary representation throughout most of Western history. Until
the nineteenth century, Art, in Shakespeare’s phrase, held “a mirror up to
nature” and faithfully recorded an objectively real world independent of the
observer.
B.
Problem
Statements
Based on the
background above the writer would like to formulate the problem statement of
this study as follows:
ü Relation
between ethnic, post-colonial, and international studies.
CHAPTER
II
DISCUSSION
a.
Ethnic,
Post-Colonial, and International Studies
In this section the emphasis shifts, however, from gender or
sexuality to ethnicity, race and the post-colonial subject. According to Ellis
Cashmore in Dictionary of Race and Ethnic Relations, ethnic and ethnicity
refer to a group possessing some degree of coherence and solidarity composed
of people who are … aware of having common origins and interests. There is
some confusion between ethnicity or ethnic group, and race.
Whereas race stands for the attributions of one group, ethnic group
stands for the collective response of a people who somehow feel marginal to the
mainstream of society. The confusion may be clarified in terms of positive and
negative group experience: race reflects the positive tendencies of
identification and inclusion while ethnicity reflects the negative
tendencies of dislocation and exclusion. Stuart Hall has noted a revisioning or
splitting of the term ethnicity, between the dominant notion which connects
it to nation and ‘race’ and … a recognition that we all speak from a
particular place, out of a particular history, out of a particular experience,
a particular culture … We are all, in this sense, ethnically located.
Hall’s linkage of particularity to commonality (“we all speak from a particular
place”, etc.) enfolds ethnicities such as Englishness which have traditionally
survived “by marginalizing, dispossessing, displacing and forgetting other
ethnicities. The totalizing project of Englishness in colonies under British
imperial rule, and its questioning by intellectuals and critics of the second
half of the 20th century, lie at the heart of what has come to be known as
post-colonial criticism. Within a poststructuralist environment and drawing on
its methodology, post-colonial critics analyze the repercussions of European
cultural and territorial expansion from its beginnings to the present day. They
examine the mutually reinforcing enterprise of colonialism and the cultures of
the colonizers, as well as the interaction between colonizers and colonized.
Post-colonial aims at recovering the marginalized excluded or otherwise
silenced voices of colonial or subaltern voices. Finally, post-colonial
studies explore and theorize identity as determined by colonial and
post-colonial experience, national affiliation and a globalised world.
The field emerged in the second half of the 20th century after WW II, when the colonial enterprise started breaking down and European colonial powers such as France and England granted independence to many of its colonies. Internal colonial situations such as those suffered by African Americans in the United States and the black majority in South Africa faced significant and mounting challenges to racist practices and abuse. Colonial hegemony had been enforced by the imposition of the colonizers’ language and cultures, and attention in the post-colonial studies turned to the role of literature which, as Michael Ryan notes, came to be seen as a privileged site for understanding the social structures, cultural codes, and psychological tropes of cross-cultural and inter-ethnic understanding and misunderstanding. Race and ethnicity interest us for the ways in which they are represented, mediated or otherwise signify through literary texts. Ryan reminds us that culturally constructed racial or ethnic identities bear a specific relationship to literature. Much of the most influential post-colonial criticism has been generated by authors who were born in formerly colonized nations. The Nigerian author and critic Chinua Achebe’s essay An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a foundational text of post-colonial criticism. It exposes the racism that lies at the heart of Heart of Darkness, a racism in which Western culture is accomplice given the privileged status of Conrad’s text in Western canon. Palestinian-born American critic Edward Said’s Orientalism is one of the foremost landmarks credited with having laid the groundwork for the field. Interacting with the emerging poststructuralist theory, he was one of Michel Foucault’s most distinguished disciples, drawing on his studies of discourse and power, or discourse as power, to elucidate the function of cultural representations on the construction and maintenance of First / Third World relations. Said takes on the challenge of the post-colonial, to elucidate how knowledge that is non-dominative and non-coercive can be produced in a setting that is deeply inscribed with the politics, the considerations, the positions and the strategies of power (Orientalism Reconsidered). He put into circulation the term the other to describe the enduring stereotypes and thinking about the Orient generated by European imperialism.
The field emerged in the second half of the 20th century after WW II, when the colonial enterprise started breaking down and European colonial powers such as France and England granted independence to many of its colonies. Internal colonial situations such as those suffered by African Americans in the United States and the black majority in South Africa faced significant and mounting challenges to racist practices and abuse. Colonial hegemony had been enforced by the imposition of the colonizers’ language and cultures, and attention in the post-colonial studies turned to the role of literature which, as Michael Ryan notes, came to be seen as a privileged site for understanding the social structures, cultural codes, and psychological tropes of cross-cultural and inter-ethnic understanding and misunderstanding. Race and ethnicity interest us for the ways in which they are represented, mediated or otherwise signify through literary texts. Ryan reminds us that culturally constructed racial or ethnic identities bear a specific relationship to literature. Much of the most influential post-colonial criticism has been generated by authors who were born in formerly colonized nations. The Nigerian author and critic Chinua Achebe’s essay An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a foundational text of post-colonial criticism. It exposes the racism that lies at the heart of Heart of Darkness, a racism in which Western culture is accomplice given the privileged status of Conrad’s text in Western canon. Palestinian-born American critic Edward Said’s Orientalism is one of the foremost landmarks credited with having laid the groundwork for the field. Interacting with the emerging poststructuralist theory, he was one of Michel Foucault’s most distinguished disciples, drawing on his studies of discourse and power, or discourse as power, to elucidate the function of cultural representations on the construction and maintenance of First / Third World relations. Said takes on the challenge of the post-colonial, to elucidate how knowledge that is non-dominative and non-coercive can be produced in a setting that is deeply inscribed with the politics, the considerations, the positions and the strategies of power (Orientalism Reconsidered). He put into circulation the term the other to describe the enduring stereotypes and thinking about the Orient generated by European imperialism.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha, (Spivak is
Bengali, Bhabha is Indian), have driven post-colonial criticism further down
the route of imaginative interaction between theory and politics, analytical
discourse and the anti-imperialist cause. Said and Spivak explore the
structures of imperial domination and their material impact on the lives of the
colonized subject construed as the Other or the Subaltern. Bhabha
engages with deconstructive practice in order to critique certain violent
hierarchies: the West and the Orient, the center and the
periphery, the empire and the colonized, the oppressor and the
oppressed, and the self and the other. Dismantling these binaries
that conceptualize national cultures as stable, fixed and monologic, Bhabha
argues that nationalities, ethnicities, and identities are dialogic,
indeterminate, and characterized by hybridity. The lexicon he deploys,
cross-reference, in-between, Third Space, dialogic, translation, negotiation,
hybrid, point to a conceptualization of the subject as fluid, decentered and
continually in-the-making.
One of the most influential African-American critics of
recent decades, Henry Louis Gates Jr. has produced pioneering work in the field
of race studies. Drawing on poststructuralism, he argues for a
culturally-specific intertextual literary tradition in which African-American
texts talk black to, or signify upon, one another. The dialogic intertextuality
of African-American writing is not limited to black-on-black writing but
includes black-on-white. The problematics of identity are also explored. Gates
views race and identity as linguistically and culturally produced,
rather than a matter of essential or pre-constituted qualities.
b. Postcolonial Studies and Race and Ethnicity Studies
Postcolonial
studies examines the global impact of European colonialism, from its beginnings
in the 15th up to the present. Its aims are: to describe the mechanisms of
colonial power, to recover excluded or marginalized subaltern voices,
and to theorize the complexities of colonial and postcolonial identity,
national belonging, and globalization. One major issue concerns the nature of
representation. Following Edward Said’s Orientalism, postcolonial
critics have examined the ways in which Western representations of third world
countries serve the political interests of their makers. Postcolonial critics
problematize “objective” perception, pointing out the unbalanced power
relations that typically shape the production of knowledge. The West has
constructed the third world as an Other. Such ideological projections
typically become the negative terms of binary oppositions in which the positive
terms are normative representations of the West. These damaging stereotypes
circulate through anthropological, historical, and literary texts, as well as
mass media such as newspapers, television, and cinemas. A related line of
inquiry in postcolonial theory studies how institutions of Western education
function in the spread of imperialism. Historical documents such as Thomas
Babington Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education show that education,
including the study of English literature and the English language, plays a
strategic part in ruling over colonized peoples. As it inculcates Western
Eurocentric values, literary education supports a kind of cultural
colonization, creating a class of colonial subjects often burdened by a
double consciousness and by divided loyalties. It helps Western colonizers rule
by consent rather than by violence.
The nature of
this enterprise has led some such as Ngugi wă Thiong’o and others to call for
the dismantling of institutions of Western education in the third world. The
realization of the extent to which the cultures of colonizers and colonized
interact has prompted reflections on the hybrid nature of culture. No culture
is ever pure. This is evident in our era of globalised post-industrial
capitalism. The nationalism that claims notions of pure culture is questioned
by the international flows of commodities, money, information, technology, and
workers. These dynamics of globalization, hybridization, and nationalism
preoccupy scholars of postcolonial studies. Postcolonial literary criticism
focuses on literatures produced by subjects in the context of colonial
domination, most notably in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Building on
knowledge of the institutions of Western education and the hybrid nature of
culture, the analysis of postcolonial literature explores the complex
interactions and antagonisms between native, indigenous, pre-colonial
cultures and the imperial cultures imposed on them. The concerns of
postcolonial literary studies overlap with those of race and ethnicity studies,
a broad field that examines a wide array of topics (including literature)
related to minority ethnic groups.
In North America
these would include African, Asian, Hispanic, and Native peoples, among others.
African Americans’ history has included deportation, slavery, oppression, and
struggle. Some scholars argue that the black community in the United States has
evolved a distinctive and separate way of life, neither Anglo-Saxon nor
African. The character of African American arts is communal rather than
individualistic, their psychology is repudiative rather than accommodative of
racism, and their tradition is oral-musical rather than textual. They possess
their own values, styles, customs, themes, techniques, and genres. In the past,
mainstream white critics have found the black arts to be grotesque, humorous,
variously; sometimes adopting white values and forms, or rejecting them
outright, or blending them into a hybrid. Literary critics engaged in race and
ethnicity studies analyze the nature and dynamics of minority literatures,
focusing on one literature but occasionally examining as well the context of dominant
cultures (thereby overlapping with postcolonial studies).
Ethnic,
Postcolonial and International Studies (Ryan)
The last half of the 20th century witnessed the end of the colonial domination. Most previously colonized countries achieved independence. Ethnic minorities (Africans in the USA) struggled to end practices of racist mistreatment and to achieve equality with local ethnic majorities. In this geo-political situation, attention turned to the differences in culture and literature between the various ethnic groups around the world, to the way literature engages such issues as inter-ethnic relations, racial identity, homeland, exile, diaspora, nationhood and the like. In severe racial oppression like the USA and South Africa, literature was seen as a privileged site for understanding the social structures, cultural codes and psychological tropes of cross-cultural and inter-ethnic understanding and misunderstanding. While science doubts human spices divides into ethnicities and races, race and ethnicity remain powerful cultural and social categories. And while external traits such as skin colour can express internal ethnic essences or separable genetic identities, they are the visual language of human difference and human community. They are why people band together or fall apart, even if the racial identities they represent have no existence apart from the differences in legible traits. History speaks a different language from science, and to read a work of literature in English by someone of colour is to read something marked by a history of mistreatment, disenfranchisement, and dispossession. Race and ethnicity are not erasable marks, rather effective and compelling determinants of cultural difference and of literary specificity. Literary criticism that takes race and ethnicity as its concern has helped foreground the importance of racial identification in society and question the hitherto unquestioned ethnic norms of racially unmarked literary study. Ethnic criticism displaced the notion that universality spoke a white dialect, and it focused attention on the bleaching out of other non-dominant ethnic experiences by the privilege, always implicit and sometimes explicit, given whiteness in Eurocentric and North American literary study. Two major consequences: recognition of the importance of ignored ethnic experiences and literatures and the reconsideration of the history of white discourse from an interracial perspective. The new ethnic criticism explores ethnic identities whose cultures have been marginalized during the era of white normativity, and by exploring the history of the various ethnicities and of their lives together, it destabilizes the moral self-assurance of white European-descended culture. Ethnic studies obliges the canon (mainly white and male) to review its imbrication with the violent subordination of others. We have to consider questions such as: how might a work have helped foster and maintain negative and harmful racialist attitudes and stereotypes? How might the entire canon be reconsidered with this question in mind? How might the introduction of literature to the canon by or about people of colour mitigate the harmful effects of such cultural imperialism?
The last half of the 20th century witnessed the end of the colonial domination. Most previously colonized countries achieved independence. Ethnic minorities (Africans in the USA) struggled to end practices of racist mistreatment and to achieve equality with local ethnic majorities. In this geo-political situation, attention turned to the differences in culture and literature between the various ethnic groups around the world, to the way literature engages such issues as inter-ethnic relations, racial identity, homeland, exile, diaspora, nationhood and the like. In severe racial oppression like the USA and South Africa, literature was seen as a privileged site for understanding the social structures, cultural codes and psychological tropes of cross-cultural and inter-ethnic understanding and misunderstanding. While science doubts human spices divides into ethnicities and races, race and ethnicity remain powerful cultural and social categories. And while external traits such as skin colour can express internal ethnic essences or separable genetic identities, they are the visual language of human difference and human community. They are why people band together or fall apart, even if the racial identities they represent have no existence apart from the differences in legible traits. History speaks a different language from science, and to read a work of literature in English by someone of colour is to read something marked by a history of mistreatment, disenfranchisement, and dispossession. Race and ethnicity are not erasable marks, rather effective and compelling determinants of cultural difference and of literary specificity. Literary criticism that takes race and ethnicity as its concern has helped foreground the importance of racial identification in society and question the hitherto unquestioned ethnic norms of racially unmarked literary study. Ethnic criticism displaced the notion that universality spoke a white dialect, and it focused attention on the bleaching out of other non-dominant ethnic experiences by the privilege, always implicit and sometimes explicit, given whiteness in Eurocentric and North American literary study. Two major consequences: recognition of the importance of ignored ethnic experiences and literatures and the reconsideration of the history of white discourse from an interracial perspective. The new ethnic criticism explores ethnic identities whose cultures have been marginalized during the era of white normativity, and by exploring the history of the various ethnicities and of their lives together, it destabilizes the moral self-assurance of white European-descended culture. Ethnic studies obliges the canon (mainly white and male) to review its imbrication with the violent subordination of others. We have to consider questions such as: how might a work have helped foster and maintain negative and harmful racialist attitudes and stereotypes? How might the entire canon be reconsidered with this question in mind? How might the introduction of literature to the canon by or about people of colour mitigate the harmful effects of such cultural imperialism?
CHAPTER III
CLOSSING
A.
CONCLUSSION
“Literary
theory” is the body of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of
literature. By literary theory we refer not to the meaning of a work of
literature but to the theories that reveal what literature can mean. Literary
theory is a description of the underlying principles, one might say the tools,
by which we attempt to understand literature. All literary interpretation draws
on a basis in theory but can serve as a justification for very different kinds
of critical activity. It is literary theory that formulates the relationship
between author and work; literary theory develops the significance of race,
class, and gender for literary study, both from the standpoint of the biography
of the author and an analysis of their thematic presence within texts. Literary
theory offers varying approaches for understanding the role of historical
context in interpretation as well as the relevance of linguistic and
unconscious elements of the text. Literary theorists trace the history and
evolution of the different genres—narrative, dramatic, lyric—in addition to the
more recent emergence of the novel and the short story, while also
investigating the importance of formal elements of literary structure. Lastly,
literary theory in recent years has sought to explain the degree to which the
text is more the product of a culture than an individual author and in turn how
those texts help to create the culture.
B.
SUGGESTION
1.
The writer released that so many mistakes
which had been done in this paper so that the writer suggests to the next paper
who want to take the some object with my study to more focus to their thesis.
2.
The writer hope to next paper in other to be able
to do paper on varian of sociolinguistic that can give contribution to readers.
3.
In writing this paper the writer realized also
that this paper is not perfect, there are many weaknesses, so the writer will
accept any critic on this paper in other to achieve its completion and for the
save of learner who wants to study sociolinguistic.
C.
REFERENCES
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar