cricket [email] said at 7:44 PM 02-08-2003: great. i do. they blame it on existential philosophers. i just really wanna know what fem. sym. is. try and do a search for it. it's impossible to find a definition, which i guess is the point.
Geoff said at 8:40 PM 02-08-2003: After a semi-exhaustive search (without two main crit texts I own) I have concluded that the feminist symbolic is a mythic ideal.
Best I can figure is that the feminist symbolic is an example of the ultimate self-awareness of a female literary character. The symbolic is based upon someone who knows or is comfortable with their own self.
Geoff said at 9:00 PM 02-08-2003: Postmodernism: How it came to be.
PM basically came into the limelight because of its rejection of modernism. Why did it take on so quickly amongst academia? For one the free nature of its subject matter allowed for full review of many disciplines. PM theory could be applied to math, art, social science with great ease. Many emerging theories grasped on to PM' base (feminism being one.) MAny would argue that PM tends to be a lot of symbolic language that has little or no value to the work it is applied to. For example Physicist Alan Sokal wrote an article for a journal specializing in PM thought that discussed the nature of gravity in PM terminology. After the publication it was widely viewed as proof that PM can be applied to anything. That is until Sokal came out and admitted it was all a hoax and he had studied PM thought and terms, then applied them to his 'work'. This sent shockwaves through academia as many prominent people were roped into this and had publically stated Sokal's work as a success. The defunct magazine Lingua Franca had a wonderful article on the exposure of this hoax and its effect on the PM scholars community.
The best way to summarize PM is that it tends to attract those who can no longer create anything new. They therefore use a system of highly polished vocabulary words to define their new theory or examination of a work. It tends to be bullshit basically as nothing remotely useful has come from PM thought.
kiche [email] said at 6:25 PM 02-09-2003: granted pm criticism has attracted an incredible amount of bullshit, and there is a major "emperor's new clothes" effect to pm literature; but i think that was pre-existing and the literary/vocabulary bullshit of pm sort of is a natural extention of what was already happening in academia. the social sciences had come up with their own terminology to describe things which there were already terms to describe. pick up a sociology text.
i think you are throwing out the baby with the bath water. the concept of "intertextuallism" i wouldn't say didn't exist before pm; but it wasn't common (although i think a lot of academics take intertextualism too far). and comparing works across mediums, forget about it?
sure pm has made the jingoistic garbage of academia worse but it already existed.
postmodernism... of grammatology, is a good example. i mean, it's pretty impenetrable, and that's just plain ridiculous. why can't derrida lay out his points in language anyone can understand, it draws away from his arguement. but derrida does have a point. you pick up linguistic books before him and the author spends all this time explaining why they didn't include writing into their thought. that was ridiculous. and then many would try to excuse why they had left out all noneuropean languages, (i think this is the first time "ethnocentric" was used as a term). i mean all the academic bullshit speech, is ridiculous, but the point still stands.
and this caused many students to question basic tennants of the fields they were in.
Geoff said at 6:51 PM 02-09-2003: You're right about me being unfair.
But my problem with PM is that it is too exclusive instead of being inclusive. Much of the Pm critical theory is meant for Masters and PhD students while many undergrads can barely reach past any of the layers.
It shouldn't take 30 minutes of discourse to reach the conclusion that Foucault's History of Sexuality is basically a treatise on power in gender roles. Wading through the muck tends to take away the meaning of the work and in effect killing off anyone who might find a work interesting. This is coming from a man who loves Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.
I respect your convictions Mr. Kiche, in fact I enjoy your responses.
shit now there is choc. chip cookie dough on my keyboard.
kiche [email] said at 7:04 PM 02-09-2003: i actually agree with you. i think the impenetrable writing style is ridiculous.
and beyond allowing lots of hucksters to write a bunch of bs that will be published in respected journals and lauded over, it's bad writing. we've taken texts that are extremely poorly written and held them up as examples great writing. this is my main problem with post modernism/deconstructionism/post structuralism.
Geoff said at 7:07 PM 02-09-2003: I wonder if there is a web translator that takes simple sentences and makes them Postmodernized. That would be a nebulous Zeitgeist!
Geoff said at 10:33 PM 02-09-2003: Cricket,
If they have it in your University Liberry Jean-Francois Lyotard's Post-Modernism Explained is a neat book. Kinda annoying language wise, but it gives a decent explaination.
cricket [email] said at 7:31 PM 02-10-2003: absolutely not not tnotntntrkjhldjvr i will not not notnsrkthuirhh read anymore postmodern hogwash hooplah hoitytoity tidlywink takehomepaper pigstye poontang licckin trickbagofsticks pricks crap. it is for the birds. it was a rhetorical question!!! i know how they came to rule the world- through rhetoric and tricks and bruteforce! damn the postmoderns! damn the poststructuralists! i will not be decentered! damn copernicus! damn killoggs! damn rice krispy treats! damn always pads with wings! i will not read your stupid pooh-filled books! never nevern never with a capital never!
Joseph said at 1:33 AM 02-13-2003: The "feminist symbolic" is related to feminist readings of the French psychoanalysist Jacques Lacan. In his work, he reread Freud through the lens of Structuralism. For him, the unconscious is like a language. Children go through three formative periods on their way to being properly oedipalized: the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. While I can't remember what the real includes, the symbolic is when we enter into language/discourse. At this point the child (or the subject) learns to use language and is symbolicly ripped from the imaginary of the mother in order to come under the symbolic (linguistic) law of the father. (According to feminist thought, language is often considered a patriarchal form that needs to be subverted, hence, such literary forms as Ecriture feminine) I would imagine that the "feminist" symbolic refers to an attempt to reconceptualize this formative stage outside of the patriarchal language of the father/domination. If I remember correctly, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray deal with this issue in some of their articles. I hope that this helps.
