Structuralism: Houseboy by Ferdinand Oyono

STRUCTURALISM:

In literary theory, structuralist criticism relates literary texts to a larger structure, which may be a particular genre, a range of intertextual connections, a model of a universal narrative structure, or a system of recurrent patterns or motifs. Structuralism argues that there must be a structure in every text, which explains why it is easier for experienced readers than for non-experienced readers to interpret a text. Hence, everything that is written seems to be governed by specific rules, or a "grammar of literature", that one learns in educational institutions and that are to be unmasked.

A potential problem of structuralist interpretation is that it can be highly reductive, as scholar Catherine Belsey puts it: "the structuralist danger of collapsing all difference." An example of such a reading might be if a student concludes the authors of West Side Story did not write anything "really" new, because their work has the same structure as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In both texts a girl and a boy fall in love (a "formula" with a symbolic operator between them would be "Boy + Girl") despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other ("Boy's Group- Girl's Group" or "Opposing forces") and conflict is resolved by their death. Structuralist readings focus on how the structures of the single text resolve inherent narrative tensions. If a structuralist reading focuses on multiple texts, there must be some way in which those texts unify themselves into a coherent system. The versatility of structuralism is such that a literary critic could make the same claim about a story of two friendly families ("Boy's Family + Girl's Family") that arrange a marriage between their children despite the fact that the children hate each other ("Boy - Girl") and then the children commit suicide to escape the arranged marriage; the justification is that the second story's structure is an 'inversion' of the first story's structure: the relationship between the values of love and the two pairs of parties involved have been reversed.

Structuralistic literary criticism argues that the "literary banter of a text" can lie only in new structure, rather than in the specifics of character development and voice in which that structure is expressed. Literary structuralism often follows the lead of Vladimir Propp, Algirdas Julien Greimas, and Claude Lévi-Strauss in seeking out basic deep elements in stories, myths, and more recently, anecdotes, which are combined in various ways to produce the many versions of the ur-story or ur-myth.

There is considerable similarity between structural literary theory and Northrop Frye's archetypal criticism, which is also indebted to the anthropological study of myths. Some critics have also tried to apply the theory to individual works, but the effort to find unique structures in individual literary works runs counter to the structuralist program and has an affinity with New Criticism.

SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism

A theory of literature that focuses on the codes and conventions that undergird all discourse and on the system of language as a functioning totality. This system Ferdinand de Saussure calls langue, "the whole set of linguistic habits which allow an individual to understand and to be understood." Anticausal and antiphilological, structuralism deliberately ignores the historical origins of the various elements of language, the external context of linguistic acts, the agents who use language, and the individual speech acts themselves (parole). Structuralism sees language as a system of differences without any positive terms, embraces the arbitrariness and conventionality of the sign, brackets any consideration of the referent, and generates a vocabulary of oppositions, all of which are more or less synonymous: langue and parole, synchrony and diachrony, system and event, signifier and signified, code and message, metaphor and metonymy, paradigm and syntagm, selection and combination, substitution and context, similarity and contiguity. In each case the first term is privileged.

SOURCE: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/glossary/Structuralism.html

SYNOPSIS:

The story starts in Spanish Guinea with a Frenchman on vacation, who finds a man named Toundi. He has been injured and soon dies. The Frenchman finds his diary, which is called an "exercise book" by Toundi. The rest of the story is of the diary (exercise book) that the Frenchman is supposedly reading. There is no further discussion of the Frenchman after this point.

The first "exercise book" starts with Toundi living with his family. His father beats him constantly, and one day he runs away from his home. He runs to the rescue of Father Gilbert, a priest who lives nearby. His father comes back for him, telling Toundi that everything will be alright if he comes back. He denies his father's offer and after this point he no longer acknowledges his birth parents.

Toundi treats Father Gilbert as his new father. Father Gilbert teaches Toundi to read and write, and he teaches Toundi about Catholicism. Toundi believes in Catholicism, but as the story progresses he drifts from his beliefs until the end, when he does not believe in God.

Father Gilbert dies in a motorcycle accident a few months after meeting Toundi. Toundi is eventually taken to live with the Commandant, the man in charge of the surrounding colony. He serves as the houseboy for the Commandant, and later Madame, the Commandant's wife. It becomes very clear that the events that go on in the house are more important to Toundi than his own life.

After about six months since Toundi comes to live with the Commandant, Madame, the Commandant's wife arrives from France. She initially is a warm and caring woman, who is very beautiful. She catches the eye of almost every man in town, much to the Commandant's dismay.

Soon after Madame arrives the Commandant leaves to go on tour again. Toundi is left with Madame to take care of the house. As time goes on, Madame becomes more and more hostile and disrespectful towards Toundi. When the Commandant returns, she is portrayed as a ruthless woman. While the Commandant was still on tour, it becomes obvious that she is bored with her life. She begins to have an affair with M. Moreau, the man in charge of the prison. M. Moreau is perceived to be ruthless against the Africans. One of Toundi's first experiences with M. Moreau had him whipping two other Africans nearly to death.

The Second Exercise book begins.

The Commandant returns from touring, and it is later discovered that he knew about his wife's affair and returns because of it. The Commandant has a terrible argument with her, but after a few days they are getting along again.

Madame becomes very disrespectful towards Toundi, partly because she does not like being there anymore, but mostly because she knows that he knew about her affair. Sophie, the lover of the water engineer is accused of stealing his workers' salaries with the help of Toundi. He is taken to prison where he is tortured in order to confess a crime he had not committed.

Toundi is held in a hut near the police headquarters. Fortunately he has a friend who works there named Mendim, who is described as a very muscular man. He is feared by most other people but he soon comes to be known as Toundi's ally. M. Moreau orders Mendim to beat up Toundi, but Mendim throws ox's blood on him to make it look like he is injured. They spend the rest of the day playing cards.

Toundi becomes sick and Mendim takes Toundi to the hospital. They have to wait a very long time to see a doctor because the black doctor is the only doctor there, the other white doctor was promoted to captain. The doctor finds out that Toundi's ribs are broken and have punctured his bronchi.

While still at the hospital, while Toundi is in a dazed state, M. Moreau returns with the white doctor. He talks about punishing Toundi some more. At this point, after M. Moreau has left, Toundi escapes the hospital, and heads to Spanish Guinea, which is where he was first introduced in the beginning of the novel.

SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houseboy_(novel)

ANALYSIS:

The story is all about the life and sufferings of Toundi written on his diary. The entire text has unity. At first we can see that he is a battered child. His father beats him everyday that's why he ran away. Then met Father Gilbert who loved him so much but later die. Then, he found himself working with the Commandant and discovered how injustice his wife is. As a whole, the narrative depicts the tragedy of cultural colonialism. At other points we can also see colonial injustice, abuse and torture and exploitation.

Existentialism: The Double: A Petersburg Poem by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

EXISTENTIALISM:

Existentialism involves the attempt to make meaning in a chaotic world. Sartre argued, "man makes himself." As a form of literary criticism, existentialism seeks to analyze literary works, with special emphasis on the struggle to define meaning and identity in the face of alienation and isolation.

SOURCE: http://classiclit.about.com/od/existentialism/Existentialism_Literary_Theory.html

SYNOPSIS:

The Double is a novella written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It was first published on January 30, 1846 in the Fatherland Notes. The Double centers on a government clerk who goes mad, obsessed by the idea that a fellow clerk has usurped his identity. It deals with the internal psychological struggle of its main character, Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, who repeatedly encounters someone who is his exact double in appearance but confident, aggressive, and extroverted, characteristics that are the polar opposites to those of the toadying "pushover" protagonist. The motif of the novella is a doppelgänger (Russian "dvoynik"), known throughout the world in various guises such as the fetch.

The Double is the most Gogolesque of Dostoyevsky's works; its subtitle "A Petersburg Poem" echoes that of Gogol's Dead Souls. Vladimir Nabokov called it aparody of "The Overcoat". The story is told in great detail with a style intensely saturated by phonetic and rhythmical expressiveness. D.S. Mirsky characterized the story as a "painful, almost intolerable reading".

The cruelty of the story is marked by Nikolay Mikhaylovsky and his madness. Dostoyevsky depicts the sufferings of Mr. Golyadkin's humiliated human dignity. Closely related to The Double is "the still stranger and madder" (as D.S. Mirsky termed it) Mr. Prokharchin (1846), also by Dostoyevsky. The story, in places deliberately obscure and unintelligible, is about the death of a miser who accumulated a fortune while living in the abject filth of a wretched slum.

In The Double, the narrative tone depicts a man whose life is on the verge of destruction due to the sudden appearance of a literal facsimile of his self. This double attempts to destroy the protagonist's good name and claim the position of both his public life in the Russian bureaucracy and within the social circle inhabited by "Golyadkin" Senior (the author's "original Golyadkin, our hero").

The novella may, however, be viewed simply as the documentation of a schizophrenic break from reality with the realistic description of symptomatic mental degenerations, including broken speech patterns and free association. The most obvious example is the hallucination where the hero of the story sees himself everywhere he goes, especially in socially awkward situations. The man's quick downfall is characteristic of the disease

SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Double_(Fyodor_Dostoyevsky_novel)

ANALYSIS:

It deals with the psychological of Golyadkin, a government clerk, who goes mad and obsessed by knowing that his fellow clerk usurped his identity. He encounters someone exactly double in appearance but having polar opposites and characteristics. The story depicts the verge of destruction of a man to a sudden literal facsimile of himself.

Reader Response: Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes

READER RESPONSE:

Reader-response criticism encompasses various approaches to literature that explore and seek to explain the diversity (and often divergence) of readers' responses to literary works.

Source: http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/poetry/critical_define/crit_reader.html

Reader-Response Criticism is really a collective term used to describe a number of critical theories that have emerged since the 1960's, all of which focus on the response of the reader to the text rather than the text itself as the source of meaning in a literary work. In Reader-Response criticism a text is viewed as a process that goes on in the mind of the reader rather than as a stable entity with a single "correct meaning". In this sense the reader actually participates in creating the text.Regardless of their particular perspectives, all reader-response critics agree that since, in varying degrees, the individual reader creates the meanings of a text, there is no one correct meaning for a text. However, these critics offer differing opinions regarding how readers do in fact "read". Questions prominent to the studies of reader-response theorists are: What are the specific factors that influence the readers response? What meaning, if any, is inherent in the text? What power does the author or the text have in shaping the responses of the reader.

Source: http://home.earthlink.net/~potterama/Michele/projects/hyper/reader.html




What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up 
like a raisin in the sun?  Or fester like a sore--  And then run?  Does it stink like rotten meat?  Or crust and sugar over--  like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags  like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

ANALYSIS:

Being the reader, I comprehend the poem in a way that we have dreams which are not always achieved. Sometimes they are postponed fr some reasons. by understanding the entire text, we would see that not everything ends in a good way. There are times that things would go bad but it is not yet the end. The world doesn't end there. instead, we should dream something anew and do everything to make it come true. 

Humanism: Flowers of Algernon by Daniel Kayes

HUMANISM:

The intellectual and social movement which historians call humanism is what lies at the base of the period we call the Renaissance. Humanism and its ideals came to pervade the art, literature, learning, law, and civic life, first in Italy, then in all of Europe. But what is humanism? Scholars are still debating this issue, but there is a consensus on a basic definition. Simply put, humanism is a rediscovery and re-evaluation of the aspects of classical civilization (ancient Greece and Rome) and the application of these aspects to intellectual and social culture. It is also in many ways a reaction against scholasticism, the dominant intellectual school of the Middle Ages. Scholasticism, while a vital and dynamic method in its early days in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, had, in the eyes of its detractors, by the fourteenth century become little more than organized quibbling over minor points of philosophy and theology.

SOURCE: http://www.comp.dit.ie/dgordon/lectures/hum1/031203/031203hum.htm

• Humanism, more precisely secular humanism, can be defined as "a way of life that is pursued without reference to God or religion." More specifically, it is "any philosophy which recognizes the value or dignity of man and 'makes him the measure of all things'."




• Humanism is a broad concept under which fall secularism, atheism, naturalism, materialism, and modernism.

SOURCE:  http://suscopts.org/resources/literature/554/humanism/

SYNOPSIS:

Short story

The story is told through a series of journal entries written by the story's protagonist, Charlie Gordon, a man with an IQ of 68 who works a menial job as a janitor in a factory. He is selected to undergo an experimental surgical technique to increase his intelligence. The technique had already been successfully tested on Algernon, a laboratory mouse. The surgery on Charlie is also a success and his IQ triples.

Charlie falls in love with his former teacher, Miss Kinnian, but as his intelligence increases, he surpasses her intellectually and they become unable to relate to each other. He also realizes that his co-workers at the factory whom he thought were his friends, only liked him to be around so that they could make fun of him. His new intelligence scares his co-workers at his job; they start a petition to have him fired but when Charlie finds out about the petition, he quits. As Charlie's intelligence peaks, Algernon suddenly declines — losing his increased intelligence and dying shortly afterward, to be buried in a cheese box in Charlie's backyard. Charlie discovers that his intelligence increase is also only temporary. He starts to experiment to find out the cause of the flaw in the experiment, which he calls the "Algernon-Gordon Effect". Just when he finishes his experiments, his intelligence begins to degenerate, to such an extent that he becomes equally as unintelligent as he was before the experiment. Charlie is aware of, and pained by, what is happening to him as he loses his knowledge and his ability to read and write. He tries to get his old job as a janitor back, and tries to revert back to normal but he cannot stand the pity from his co-workers, landlady, and Ms. Kinnian. Charlie states he plans to "go away" from New York and move to a new place. His last wish is that someone put flowers on Algernon's grave.

Novel

The novel opens with an epigraph discouraging people from laughing at those who are perplexed or weak of vision. The epigraph is taken from Plato's The Republic, part of which reads:

“

Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eye are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye.

”

Charlie Gordon, 37 years of age, suffers from phenylketonuria and has an IQ of 68. He holds a menial job at a bakery which his uncle had secured for him so that Charlie would not have to be sent to a State institution. Wanting to improve himself, Charlie attends reading and writing classes at the Beekman College Center for Retarded Adults; his teacher is Alice Kinnian, a young, attractive woman. Two researchers at Beekman are looking for a human test subject on whom to try a new surgical technique intended to increase intelligence. They have already performed the surgery on a mouse named Algernon, dramatically improving his mental performance. Based on Alice's recommendation and his own peerless motivation to improve, Charlie is chosen over smarter pupils to undergo the procedure.

The operation is a success, and within the next three months Charlie's IQ reaches an astonishing 185. However, as his intelligence, education, and understanding of the world around him increases, his relationships with people deteriorate. His coworkers at the bakery, who used to amuse themselves at his expense, are now scared and resentful of his increased intelligence and persuade his boss to fire him. One night at a cocktail party, a drunken Charlie angrily confronts his scientific mentors about their condescending attitude toward him. Charlie also embarks on a troubled romance with Alice. Unable to become intimate with the object of his affection, Charlie later starts a purely sexual relationship with Fay Lillman, a vivacious and promiscuous artist in the neighboring apartment.

When he's not drinking at night, Charlie spends intense weeks continuing his mentors' research on his own and writing reports which include observations of Algernon who he keeps at his apartment. Charlie's research discovers a flaw in the theory behind Nemur's and Strauss's intelligence-enhancing procedure, one that will eventually cause him to revert to his original mental state. His conclusions prove true when Algernon starts behaving erratically, loses his own enhanced intelligence, and dies.

Charlie tries to mend the long-broken relationships with his parents but without success. He remembered that as a boy his mother had insisted on his institutionalization, overruling his father's wish to keep him in the household. Charlie returns after many years to his family's Brooklyn home, and finds his mother now suffers from dementia and, although she recognizes him, is mentally confused. Charlie's father, who had broken off contact with the family many years before, does not recognize him when visited at his worksite. Charlie is only able to reconnect with his now-friendly younger sister, who had hated him for his mental disability when they were growing up, and who is now caring for their mother in their now-depressed neighborhood. Charlie promises to send her money.

As Charlie regresses intellectually, Fay becomes scared by the change and stops talking to him. However, Charlie finally attains sufficient emotional maturity to have a brief but fulfilling relationship with Alice, who cohabits with him until the extent of his mental deterioration causes him to finally order her to leave. Despite regressing to his former self, he still remembers that he was once a genius. He cannot bear to have his friends and co-workers feel sorry for him. Consequently, he decides to go away to live at the State-sponsored Warren Home School where nobody knows about the operation. In a final postscript to his writings, ostensibly addressed to Alice Kinnian, he requests that she put some flowers on Algernon's grave in Charlie's former back yard.

ANALYSIS:

The story shows Charlie Gordon being a rational man. It endows his high intellect and free will. At first he isn't that but due to the success of the operation, everything has changed. It portrays his greatness being a unique creation of God. The text is all about him and his intelligence which made him known. 

Territorialism: Every Breath You Take by Ann Rule

TERRITORIALISM:

Territoriality is a social theory of “proprietary psychological space.” If we are what we own, then we are also what we define ourselves to be, our psychic space. This self-definition is our territory. “Its sole function is to manage and defend the self’s acquired identities and their properties”.

“Infringements of rights and privileges in the social and symbolic worlds in which humans live are the equivalent of encroachments on territory among animals, and moral outrage can be understood as the human expression of what we perceive as territorial behavior in animals”.

The “self” constructs its own identity based on desire for things, people, happiness, contentment, etc. “Society constructs the objects of desire; the self spends a lifetime trying to acquire—but never totally achieving—its desires”

Primary Identities:

Individual: Unique constellation; properties of attachment (books, clothes, mental and physical prowess)

Relational: Properties acquired via personalized bonds (friends, spouse, and children)

Collective: Properties acquired from large-group associations (workplace, school, and military)

WHAT IS TERRITORIALISM?

“A literary perspective that uses human territoriality to explore the artistically imagined relationship between ownership (tangible and intangible “properties”) and constructions of the self”.

SYNOPSIS:

If anything ever happens to me, promise me that you will see that there is an investigation....And find Ann Rule and ask her to write my story," Sheila Blackthorne Bellush told her sister after she divorced multimillionaire Allen Blackthorne. Now, in perhaps the first book ever written at a victim's request, America's Number One bestselling true-crime writer, Ann Rule, untangles a horrific web of lies that culminated in Sheila's savage murder more than ten years after she left Blackthorne.

When beautiful, blond Sheila married the charming, handsome Blackthorne, she was convinced she had found her perfect soul mate, and helped him reach his goal of living the privileged life of the country club set. But behind Allen's smooth facade, she discovered a violent, controlling sociopath -- a liar, a scam artist, a sexual deviant. When she finally fled with their two young daughters, she was skeletally thin, bruised, and beaten.

Although Sheila recovered, remarried, and was starting a new life and family, she still felt she was doomed. Joyously pregnant, she and her new husband expecting quadruplets, Sheila still feared Blackthorne, who had sworn to her he would monitor her every move and "every breath you take." And, in fact, Blackthorne inevitably tracked her down, as did her killer, who left her in a pool of blood marked by the tiny footprints of her two-year-old toddlers. The questions remained: Could the authorities ever link Sheila's murder to Blackthorne himself? Was his true obsession high-stakes golf and his extravagant pink mansion -- or was it to destroy Sheila?

Following a trail of deception from Oregon and Hawaii to Texas and Florida, Ann Rule gained complete access to Sheila's family, friends, and neighbors, as well as to the detectives and prosecutors on the case. With Every Breath You Take, Ann Rule has written a heart-pounding account of obsession, revenge, and murder that will enthrall readers from beginning to end.

SOURCE: http://books.google.com.ph/books/about/Every_Breath_You_Take.html?id=Ix8OZJeMQicC&redir_esc=y

ANALYSIS:

Obsession is the main idea in the text. Every Breath Yo Take depicts how Allen Blackthorne tries to get Sheila back to his hands. his possessions towards the girl brought extreme pain and suffering to the latter. He has done anything just to get contact with her. He watches every moves of Sheila which frightened her a lot. Until the last part, Sheila died because of Blackthorne's fault.

Deconstruction: So Much Water So Close To Home by Raymond Carver

DECONSTRUCTION:

Deconstruction is a philosophy applied to literary criticism, as well as to criticism of the other arts, which began to gain popularity in the 1980s. The field of deconstruction arose partially in reaction to the literary theories of structuralism. Structuralism posited that when words could be understood within the context of a society of readers, then one could point to the specific meaning of a text.

Deconstruction eschewed the concept of one possible meaning for a text, and instead suggested that meanings of a text are multiple and contradictory. Underlying a text is the subtext, a set of values that must be evaluated to see if the text is really contrary in nature and hence somewhat without meaning. Deconstruction also evaluates the way in which texts in the traditional literary canon are taught to students, suggesting that traditional “readings” of a text often ignore underlying value structures in direct opposition to what is taught.

SOURCE: http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-deconstruction.html

Deconstruction, in linguistics, philosophy, and literary theory, the exposure and undermining of the metaphysical assumptions involved in systematic attempts to ground knowledge, especially in academic disciplines such as structuralism and semiotics. The term "deconstruction" was coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1960s. In general, deconstruction is a philosophy of meaning, which deals with the ways that meaning is constructed by writers, texts, and readers.

Extending the philosophical excursions of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Derrida criticized the entire tradition of Western philosophy's search to discover the essential structure of knowledge and reality, ultimately confronting the limits of human thought. As an extension of his theory of logocentrism, Derrida posited that all texts are based on hierarchical dualisms (e.g., being/nonbeing, reality/appearance, male/female), where the first element is regarded as stronger and thus essentially true and that all systems of thought have an assumed center, or Archimedean point, upon which they are based. In a deconstructionist reading, this unconscious and unarticulated point is revealed, and in this revelation the binary structure upon which the text rests is imploded. Thus what appears stable and logical is revealed to be illogical and paradoxical, and interpretation is by its very nature misinterpretation.

To a deconstructionist, meaning includes what is left out of the text or ignored or silenced by it. Because deconstruction is an attack on the very existence of theories and conceptual systems, its exposition by Derrida and others purposely resists logical definitions and explanations, opting instead for alinear presentations based on extensive wordplay and puns. Deconstructionists tend to concentrate on close readings of particular texts, focusing on how these texts refer to other texts. Certain scholars have severely criticized this movement on this basic point.

Nevertheless, deconstruction, especially as articulated in Derrida's writings and as promoted by Paul de Man and others, has had a profound effect on many fields of knowledge in American universities, particularly during the 1970s and 80s. In addition to philosophy and literary theory, the techniques and ideas of deconstruction have been employed by scholars in history, sociology, educational theory, linguistics, art, and architecture. While the theory has lost much of its intellectual currency, the general acceptance and popularity of interdisciplinary scholarship in the 1980s and 90s are regarded by many as an outgrowth of deconstruction.

SOURCE: http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Deconstruction+(literature)

SYNOPSIS:

In the story "So Much Water So Close To Home" a young girl is raped, killed and found in a river where four men are fishing. What makes this story interesting is that after discovering the body they did not report it until after they left, three days later. When one of the men who discovered her, the husband of the narrator, Stuart returns home he doesn't tell his wife about the incident until the following morning. Because of this, Claire believes that all men are responsible for the murder of the girl. Due to these facts she acts irrationally, suspiciously, and with distrust not only towards her husband, but also to all men in general. 

Claire's thought process though out the story shows her suspicion. This suspicion causes Claire to notice minuet details, which would usually be overlooked by the common person. At the dinner table she watches his every move, "he seems tired, edgy.... He looks at me and looks away again"(Carver, 278). These are usually the mannerisms of some one who has done something wrong, acting out of the norm and having shifty eyes is an unconscious way of showing guilt, but in this instance it could be Claire imagining these things. When someone needs to believe something so drastically, they can make things up to justify their thoughts. It is quite possible that Stuart was acting fine but Claire's suspicion took hold of her perspective causing her to see these characteristic ways of a guilty person. While on a drive with Stuart Claire thinks "so much water so close to home, why did he have to go miles away to fish?" (282) She believes the men went to the lake so far away so that no one would see them murder the girl. Even the husband notices his wife's suspicion, saying "don't look at me like that. Be careful now. I mean it. Take it easy, Claire"(280). Stuart says this because he can feel the distrust Claire has in him. Yet again, this is another instance that Claire is acting in suspicion. 

Through out the story Claire acts very irrational, especially towards men. These irrational acts are caused by the fact that she believes that men are the reason for this girl's death and the murder of women in general, and she shows this by the way she reacts to what Stuart says and towards the men in the story. When unable to deal with what her husband tells her about what happened to the girl, she reacts by "[Raking her] arm across the drain board and sending the dishes and glasses smashing and scattering across the floor"(278). No person in the right state of mind would randomly smash glasses and break dishes for no reason. It is evident that the actions Claire takes are in relation to the fact she feels her husband is some how responsible for the murder of the girl. While at the gas station she is very rude to the man trying to help her, not letting him check her tiers to make sure her trip to the girls funeral is safe "I said no. No! They look fine to me. I have to go now"(287). This portrays how she doesn't trust any man she meets, even men who are clearly not involved with the girls murder or the death of any other girl. Even though the man is trying to do Claire a favor all she can do is act irrationally and refuse the help. This is the first time the reader sees not only her clear distrust towards her husband but in all men in general. On the way through the mountains a man in a green truck offers to follow her to make sure she drives safely. When he offers she refuses to roll down her window for him and says "please, I have to go" (288). This is another example of how Claire not only has suspicions about her husband but all men in general. Another man has offered to do something kind for Claire and she yet again refuses to accept it. It is clear that no matter what the circumstances are, due to the murder of the girl, Claire has lost all trust in the male race. Her irrational behavior continues in the story when she decides to sleep on the couch instead of with her husband "‘I need to be by myself tonight' [she says] ‘I need time to think'"(285). It is easy to see that Claire does not trust her husband enough to sleep with him in the same bed because he is a man. 

Claire focuses on her husband's hands a lot during this story because she is convinced that these hands are capable of killing a woman, just as any other mans hands are. "(He) rubbed his hands up and down my back, the same hands he'd left with two days before, I thought" (280). His hands are an issue because she connects them to the hands of the man who killed the girl at the lake. "...Stuart comes up behind me and touches my arm. His fingers burn" (284). Usually evil is associated with a burning touch. She can't deal with the idea of being touched by him, especially in a sexual manner. When he goes to unbutton her blouse she explodes, "‘Stop, stop, stop,' [she says]. I stamp on his toes."(290). She reacts like this because since they are the hands of a man, they are just like the hands that killed the girl at the lake. These points directly correspond to the fact that Claire is constantly in suspicion of her husband, since even in the smallest instances, such as him touching her, all she can do is think about how he being a man makes him responsible for the girls death. 

Claire's thinking also becomes very irrational when she connects the murder of the girl with one that happened near her hometown when she was in high school. While riding in the car with Stuart she says, with out any provocation "they said they were innocent"(282). She goes on to explain how men who killed her cut off her head and threw her in the river, but claimed they were innocent. She makes this connection because in both murders men were responsible. The connection she made is important because it shows that she believes no man is innocent. She believes that every man, in one way or another is responsible for the murder of women. Her thoughts translate into the idea that every man has "blood" on their hands. 

Claire believes that all men are responsible for the murder of the girl, which causes her to act irrationally, suspiciously, and with distrust to all men regardless of how they have affected her in her past. Through out the story Claire constantly tries to find ways to prove her husbands guilt, like imagining suspicious behavior and over analyzing situations, like questioning the reason behind the trip to the lake, not taking into account that the men have gone to that same lake year after year. She also acts in anger towards all the men that she meets, despite the good intentions they have. Her husbands' hands play a key roll in the story, representing how she feels every man is capable of killing a woman with their hands. Finally, she makes the connection between the Maddox brothers' murder and the one at the lake, representing how even though men can say that they are innocent of the murder, they are still somehow guilty. These points not only show Claire's distrust and suspicion in men, but also the fact she feels all men are responsible for the murder of women.

SOURCE: http://www.123helpme.com/so-much-water-so-close-to-home-by-raymond-carver-view.asp?id=162298

ANALYSIS:

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The story is about Claire, wife of Stuart, who is attempting to find out why exactly her husband and his friends tethered the dead body of a young girl to the shore of Naches river and reported just it to the authorities after several days. Through the doubts of Claire we also asks why? What exactly happened? So Much Water So Close To Home foregrounds expectations of what it really means. 

Psychoanalytic: Psychopath by Christopher R. Kennedy

Psychoanalytic:

Psychoanalytic criticism originated in the work of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who pioneered the technique of psychoanalysis. Freud developed a language that described, a model that explained, and a theory that encompassed human psychology. His theories are directly and indirectly concerned with the nature of the unconscious mind.

The psychoanalytic approach to literature not only rests on the theories of Freud; it may even be said to have begun with Freud, who wrote literary criticism as well as psychoanalytic theory. Probably because of Freud’s characterization of the artist’s mind as “one urged on by instincts that are too clamorous,” psychoanalytic criticism written before 1950 tended to psychoanalyze the individual author. Literary works were read—sometimes unconvincingly—as fantasies that allowed authors to indulge repressed wishes, to protect themselves from deep-seated anxieties, or both.

 After 1950, psychoanalytic critics began to emphasize the ways in which authors create works that appeal to readers’ repressed wishes and fantasies. Consequently, they shifted their focus away from the author’s psyche toward the psychology of the reader and the text. Norman Holland’s theories, concerned more with the reader than with the text, helped to establish reader-response criticism. Critics influenced by D.W. Winnicott, an object-relations theorist, have questioned the tendency to see the reader/text as an either/or construct; instead, they have seen reader and text (or audience and play) in terms of a relationship taking place in what Winnicott calls a “transitional” or “potential space”—space in which binary oppositions like real/illusory and objective/subjective have little or no meaning.

 Jacques Lacan, another post-Freudian psychoanalytic theorist, focused on language and language-related issues. Lacan treats the unconscious as a language; consequently, he views the dream not as Freud did (that is, as a form and symptom of repression) but rather as a form of discourse. Thus we may study dreams psychoanalytically in order to learn about literature, even as we may study literature in order to learn more about the unconscious. Lacan also revised Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex—the childhood wish to displace the parent of one’s own sex and take his or her place in the affections of the parent of the opposite sex—by relating it to the issue of language. He argues that the pre-oedipal stage is also a preverbal or “mirror stage,” a stage he associates with theimaginary order. He associates the subsequent oedipal stage—which roughly coincides with the child’s entry into language—with what he calls the symbolic order, in which words are not the things they stand for but substitutes for those things. The imaginary order and the symbolic order are two of Lacan’s three orders of subjectivity, the third being the real, which involves intractable and substantial things or states that cannot be imagined, symbolized, or known directly (such as death). 

SOURCE: http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/poetry/critical_define/crit_psycho.html

Psychopath

Wouldn’t it be strange to meet a psychopath

Stand three feet from his demonic skull

And stare into his sunken eyes which

You know must crinkle with warmth

Every time he harvests human life? 

What would it be like to watch him brush his teeth

For two silent minutes under a flickering florescent light

Would he perhaps swish differently than the rest of us

Does he count his brushstrokes

How does he look at himself in the mirror? 

What sitcoms does he watch late in the evening

Can he smile at the jokes as the blue light

And radio waves wash over his face

Does he ever slip a midnight snack between his crooked teeth

Dose he worry about his weight? 

How horrible to meet a psychopath face-to-terrible face

Maybe from the perspective of his nondescript victims

To have a little of his twisted soul waft into your

Head as you make eye contact

To perhaps recognize a little psychopath within yourself

ANALYSIS:

Maybe the author personally wants to know how exactly psychopaths move, live, talk. As shown in the texts above, it is noticeable how the author thinks and looks toward a psychopathic person. Maybe he likes to discover the difference of a normal person with a special one.

New Historicism: ''Burnt Books'' by Roger Kamenetz

New Historicism:

The new historicism developed during the 1980s, largely in reaction to the text-only approach pursued by formalist New Critics and the critics who challenged the New Criticism in the 1970s. New historicists, like formalists and their critics, acknowledge the importance of the literary text, but they also analyze the text with an eye to history. In this respect, the new historicism is not "new"; the majority of critics between 1920 and 1950 focused on a work’s historical content and based their interpretations on the interplay between the text and historical contexts (such as the author’s life or intentions in writing the work).

 In other respects, however, the new historicism differs from the historical criticism of the 1930s and 1940s. It is informed by the poststructuralist and reader-response theory of the 1970s, as well as by the thinking of feminist, cultural, and Marxist critics whose work was also "new" in the 1980s. They are less fact- and event-oriented than historical critics used to be, perhaps because they have come to wonder whether the truth about what really happened can ever be purely or objectively known. They are less likely to see history as linear and progressive, as something developing toward the present, and they are also less likely to think of it in terms of specific eras, each with a definite, persistent, and consistent zeitgeist (spirit of the times). Hence they are unlikely to suggest that a literary text has a single or easily identifiable historical context.

 New historicist critics also tend to define the discipline of history more broadly than did their predecessors. They view history as a social science like anthropology and sociology, whereas older historicists tended to view history as literature's "background" and the social sciences as being properly historical. They have erased the line dividing historical and literary materials, showing not only that the production of one of William Shakespeare’s historical plays was both a political act and a historical event, but also that the coronation of Elizabeth I was carried out with the same care for staging and symbol lavished on works of dramatic art.

 New historicists remind us that it is treacherous to reconstruct the past as it really was—rather than as we have been conditioned by our own place and time to believe that it was. And they know that the job is impossible for those who are unaware of that difficulty, insensitive to the bent or bias of their own historical vantage point. Thus, when new historicist critics describe a historical change, they are highly conscious of (and even likely to discuss) the theory of historical change that informs their account.

 Many new historicists have acknowledged a profound indebtedness to the writings of Michel Foucault. A French philosophical historian, Foucault brought together incidents and phenomena from areas normally seen as unconnected, encouraging new historicists and new cultural historicists to redefine the boundaries of historical inquiry. Like the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Foucault refused to see history as an evolutionary process, a continuous development from cause to effect, from past to present toward THE END, a moment of definite closure, a Day of Judgment. No historical event, according to Foucault, has a single cause; rather, each event is tied into a vast web of economic, social, and political factors. Like Karl Marx, Foucault saw history in terms of power, but unlike Marx, he viewed power not simply as a repressive force or a tool of conspiracy but rather as a complex of forces that produces what happens. Not even a tyrannical aristocrat simply wields power, for the aristocrat is himself empowered by discourses and practices that constitute power.

 Not all new historicist critics owe their greatest debt to Foucault. Some, like Stephen Greenblatt, have been most nearly influenced by the British cultural critic Raymond Williams, and others, like Brook Thomas, have been more influenced by German Marxist critic Walter Benjamin. Still others—Jerome McGann, for example—have followed the lead of Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who viewed literary works in terms of polyphonic discourses and dialogues between the official, legitimate voices of society and other, more challenging or critical voices echoing popular culture.

SOURCE: 

http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/poetry/critical_define/crit_newhist.html

SYNOPSIS:

Rodger Kamenetz, acclaimed author of The Jew in the Lotus, has long been fascinated by the mystical tales of the Hasidic master Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. And for many years he has taught a course in Prague on Franz Kafka. The more he thought about their lives and writings, the more aware he became of unexpected connections between them. Kafka was a secular artist fascinated by Jewish mysticism, and Rabbi Nachman was a religious mystic who used storytelling to reach out to secular Jews. Both men died close to age forty of tuberculosis. Both invented new forms of storytelling that explore the search for meaning in an illogical, unjust world. Both gained prominence with the posthumous publication of their writing. And both left strict instructions at the end of their lives that their unpublished books be burnt.

Kamenetz takes his ideas on the road, traveling to Kafka’s birthplace in Prague and participating in the pilgrimage to Uman, the burial site of Rabbi Nachman visited by thousands of Jews every Jewish new year. He discusses the hallucinatory intensity of their visions and offers a rich analysis of Nachman’s and Kafka’s major works, revealing uncanny similarities in the inner lives of these two troubled and beloved figures, whose creative and religious struggles have much to teach us about the significant role played by the imagination in the Jewish spiritual experience.

SOURCE: http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780307379337?&PID=32442

ANALYSIS:

The story locates the hidden social messages of the unpublished books which were intended to be burnt. Kafka became more aware of the connections of the mystical tales he's been into. It reveals the uncanny similarities whose religious struggles have became significant.