Binary opposition

Abstract: Mary Poovey's "The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer" has become a standard text in feminist literary discourse. In "Uneven Developments" Poovey turns to broader historical concerns in an analysis of how notions of gender shape ideology. Asserting that the organization of sexual difference is a social, not natural, phenomenon, Poovey shows how representations of gender took the form of a binary opposition in mid-Victorian culture. She then reveals the role of this opposition in various discourses and institutions-medical, legal, moral, and literary. The resulting oppositions, partly because they depended on the subordination of one term to another, were always unstable. Poovey contends that this instability helps explain why various institutional versions of binary logic developed unevenly. This unevenness, in turn, helped to account for the emergence in the 1850s of a genuine oppositional voice: the voice of an organized, politicized feminist movement. Drawing on a wide range of sources-parliamentary debates, novels, medical lectures, feminist analyses of work, middle-class periodicals on demesticity-Poovey examines various controversies that provide glimpses of the ways in which representations of gender were simultaneously constructed, deployed, and contested. These include debates about the use of chloroform in childbirth, the first divorce law, the professional status of writers, the plight of governesses, and the nature of the nursing corps. "Uneven Developments" is a contribution to the feminist analysis of culture and ideology that challenges the isolation of literary texts from other kinds of writing and the isolation of women's issues from economic and political histories.

Abstract: "An indispensable work of reference". (Times Literary Supplement). The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory is firmly established as a key work of reference in the complex and varied field of literary criticism. Now in its fifth edition, it remains the most comprehensive and accessible work of its kind, and is invaluable for students, teachers and general readers alike. It gives definitions of technical terms (hamartia, iamb, zeugma) and critical jargon (aporia, binary opposition, intertextuality). It explores literary movements (neoclassism, romanticism, vorticism) and schools of literary theory. It covers genres (elegy, fabliau, pastoral) and literary forms (haiku, ottava rima, sonnet).

Abstract: In assembling the following notes on Fredric Jameson's "Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital,"* I find myself in an awkward position. If I were to name the one literary critic/theorist writing in the US today whose work I generally hold in the highest regard, it would surely be Fredric Jameson. The plea that generates most of the passion in his text-that the teaching of literature in the US academy be informed by a sense not only of "western" literature but of "world literature"; that the so-called literary canon be based not upon the exclusionary pleasures of dominant taste but upon an inclusive and opulent sense of heterogeneity-is of course entirely salutary. And, I wholly admire the knowledge, the range of sympathies, he brings to the reading of texts produced in distant lands. Yet this plea for syllabus reform-even his marvelously erudite reading of Lu Xun and Ousmane-is conflated with, indeed superseded by, a much more ambitious undertaking which pervades the entire text but which is explicitly announced only in the last sentence of the last footnote: the construction of "a theory of the cognitive aesthetics of third-world literature." This "cognitive aesthetics" rests, in turn, upon a suppression of the multiplicity of significant difference among and within both the advanced capitalist countries and the imperialised formations. We have, instead, a binary opposition of what Jameson calls the "first" and the "third" worlds. It is in this passage from a plea for syllabus reform to the enunciation of a "cognitive aesthetics" that most of the text's troubles lie. These troubles are, I might add, quite

Abstract: Acknowledgments.Introduction: Imagination Underfoot.Chapter One: A Tool Kit for Learning. Story, Metaphor, Binary opposites, Rhyme, rhythm, and pattern, Jokes and humor, Mental imagery, Gossip, Play, Mystery, Embryonic tools of literacy.Chapter One and a Half: Examples in Everyday Classrooms.Chapter Two: A Tool Kit for Literacy. Sense of reality, Extremes of experience and limits of reality, Association with heroes, Sense of wonder, Collections and hobbies, Knowledge and human meaning, Narrative understanding, Revolt and idealism, Changing the context, Literate eye, Embryonic tools of theoretic thinking.Chapter Two and a Half: Examples in Everyday Classrooms.Chapter Three: A Tool Kit for Theoretic Thinking. Sense of abstract reality, Sense of agency, Grasp of general ideas and their anomalies, Search for authority and truth, Meta-narrative understanding.Chapter Three and a Half: Examples in Everyday Classrooms.Conclusion: Imagination Every Day.Glossary.Appendix A: Mythic Framework.Appendix B: Romantic Framework.Appendix C: Philosophic Framework.Bibliography.The Author.Index.