How does Elaine Showalter use Ardener’s Diagram to redefine the relationship between the “dominant group” and “muted group in her essay 'Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness'?”

Women have been left out of culture and history because history is considered to be a male centered term. Again there are some places where men cannot enter. In defining female culture, historians make a clear distinction between the male considered appropriate roles, activities, tastes, behaviors for women and the reality of women’s lives. Women’s sphere is defined and maintained by men. By this, women constitute a muted group.

To redefine the relationship between the “dominant group” and “muted group” Showalter takes help from Ardener’s Diagram. By the term “muted” Edwin Ardener suggests problems both of language and power. Both muted and dominant group (male) unconsciously generates beliefs but the dominant group controls the forms or structures which make the muted group bound to express their beliefs through the allowable forms of dominant structure. Ardener shows a diagram on the relationship of the dominant and muted group.

In the diagram, much of the muted circle “Y” falls within the boundaries of dominant circle “X”, there is also a crescent of ‘Y” which is outside the dominant boundary and is called “wild”. This wild zone is considered as women’s culture specially which means literary no man’s land, a place forbidden to men. The opposite thing happens to man’s “X” zone. Experimentally, it stands for the aspects of the female lifestyle which are outside of men. “X” zone of male alien to women. But metaphysically it has no corresponding male zone because all of male consciousness is within the circle of dominant structure and female knows all about male. Here from the male point of view, the wild “Y” is always imaginary. In terms of cultural anthropology, women know what the male crescent is like but men do not know what is in the wild.

In some feminist criticism, the wild zone becomes the place for the women-centered criticism, theory and art. It makes the invisible visible, the silent speak. French feminist critics would like to make the wild zone the theoretical base of women’s difference. In their texts, the wild zone becomes the place for the revolutionary women’s language, the language of everything that is repressed. Many forms of American radical feminism also romantically assert that women are closer to nature or environment. So, they should build the place fully independent from the control and influence of “male dominated” institutions- the news media, the health, education legal systems, art, theatre and literary worlds.

But we must admit that no writing is possible without dominant structure. No writing, no criticism, no publication is fully independent from the economic and political pressures of the male dominated society. The most important implication of this model is that women’s fiction can be read as a double voiced discourse containing a ‘dominant” and “a muted story.”

The concept of a woman’s text in the wild zone is a playful abstraction. Women’s writing is a “double voiced discourse” that always embodies the social, literary, and cultural heritages of both the muted and the dominant.  Every step that feminist criticism takes toward defining women’s writing is a step toward self- understanding as well. Women writing are not then inside and outside of the male tradition, they are inside two tradition. Indeed, the female territory might well be envisioned as one long order, not as a separate country, but as open access to the sea.

The more important aspect of Ardener’s model is that there are muted groups other than women such as the blacks in America. In America the blacks belong to the muted group and the white dominant group. The dominant structure may determine many muted structures. For example a black America woman poet may be affected by both racial and sexual politics. So, cultural situation should not determine women’s writing, but women’s writing should be considered in the background of cultural pattern.

This reminds Alien Showlter about the duty and responsibility of female writers. A female writer who writes under the influence of the male dominated culture is more or less influenced by that culture. Now the duty of gynocriticism is to precisely map out the cultural field of women and prevent the influences of the dominant look on the muted group.

Regarding the major literary movements, Elaine Showlter says, in the history of literature women also have no place. The movement Renaissance was not a movement for women. The Romantic Movement was also not for women. Now it is the duty of “gynocriticism” to provide women with a respective place in the history of literature.

In order to make the rule of muted group more clear Alien Showlter says, from female perspective a text is not only mothered but also parented. A women’s text confronts both paternal and maternal forerunner and must deal with the problems and advantages of both lines of inheritance.

Thus, women’s text is rich in the experience of both muted group and dominant group. In this way, she uses Ardener’s model to show the condition as well as the possibility of women.

Why does Barthes Want to Liberate the Text from Authorial Control in The Death of the Author?

Roland Barthes, a critic and an advocate of structuralism and post structuralism, proclaims that “the birth of the reader must be at the most of the death of the author”. It is his point of turning towards post structuralism. It is such an assert that struck at the very heart of traditional literary studies and that has remained one of the most controversial tenets of post- structuralism.

Barthes most important work of literary criticism is probably S/Z (1970), an exhaustive commentary on a Balzac short story “Sarasine.” Barthes aims to show how they carry many different meanings simultaneously on different levels. In S/Z, this demonstration is linked to a distinction between the         “Lisible”            or readerly classic text and the “Seriptible” or “writerly” modern text. Readerly classic text makes its readers passive consumers, writerly modern text invites its readers to an active participation in the production of meanings that are infinite and inexhaustible.

As Barthes, writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral composite, oblique space where subject disappears, and where all identity is lost. The author enters into his death and writing begins.

Actually, the idea of giving a text to the authority of an author is a long term process. It has been related to Middle Ages, English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation. All these revolutions give credit to the “human person” an individual for a text. The author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines. Thus the image of literature centers round the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his ideas and criticism also is directed to that end. The explanation of a work is usually sought in the man or woman who produced it. Thus the author becomes creator, God.

Though the sway of the author remains powerful, it goes without saying that certain writers have long since attempted to loosen it. Stéphane Malarme, French symbolist poet, felt the necessity to substitute language itself for the person. For him, it is language, which speaks, not the author. Only language acts and performs. His entire poetics consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing. It is seen to restore the place of the reader.

Proust himself was visibly concerned with the relation between the writer and his characters. Proust gave modern writing its epic. By a radical reversal, he made of his very life a work for which his own book was the model.

The removal of the author is not merely a historical fact or an act of writing. It utterly transforms the modern texts. The text is hence-forth made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent. The temporality is different. When we believe that author is present, we conceive him as the past of his own book. Book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and after. The author is thought to nourish the book as a father of his child.

In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text. The scriptor exists to produce but not to explain the work. Here is no linear relation, no preceding or exceeding, no subject or predicate. The modern scriptor has no other origin than the language itself. The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others in such a way as ever rest on anyone of them. Succeeding the author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humors, feelings and impression but rather this immense dictionary the source of writing. Thus the modern scriptor buries the author and traces a field without origin. 

To attribute an author to a text is to impose a limit on that text. When the author has been found, beneath his work, the text is explained. A text is made up of multiple writings drawn from many cultures. But its multiplicity is focused & that place is the reader not the author. The reader is the space where all quotations making up the text are inscribed without any of them being lost. The author is dead here at the cost of the readers birth. However the reader is without history, biography, psychology. He is not personal; rather he is “someone” who holds the traces together in a single field by which the text is constituted.

Barthes rightly says that a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. The destination is the reader where the author is absent completely. Classic critics has never paid attention to the reader, & always emphasized on the author. Barthes argues that we should now come out of the arrogant antiphrastical so called society & give writing its future overthrowing the myth, “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.”

Discuss the critical ideas of Ronald Barthes as expressed in The Death of Author

Ronald Barthes, French literary critic and theorist of structuralism and post-structuralism announces the death of the author in order to have birth of the reader. Barthes prolific output is consistently innovative and inventive to make him one of the most important and influential critics of the twentieth century. It is as assertion that struck at the very heart of traditional literary studies and that has remained one of the most controversial tenets of post-structuralism. He was a writer who disconcerted his disciples as well as his opponents by continually rejecting one kind of discourse in favor of another, and to this extent lived the assertion simultaneously with the text.

 As for Bathes, writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. It is neutral, composite and oblique space where subject disappears and where all identity is lost. As soon as a fact is narrated with a view to acting no longer directly but intransitively on reality, the disconnection between the author and the writing occurs. The voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, and writing begins.

Actually, the idea of giving a text to the authority of an author is a long term process. Barthes argues that the traditional notion of the author is a product of the rationalist and empiricist thought of the Middle Ages that ascribes a central importance to the individual human being- for a text. It is the person of the author that is more important than the text. So, we see the author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines etc. We also see in men of letters as anxiousness to unite their person and their work through diaries and memories. Thus the image of literature centers round the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his ideas and criticism also is directed to that end. It is usually thought that the “explanation” of the text is found in the man or woman who has written it. Thus the author becomes the creator, God, and thus a theological entity who knows only about his creation, his work.

Though the influence of the author remains powerful, many pre modern writers have tried to challenge the centrality of the author. In France, Stephen Mallerme was undoubtedly the first whose poetry reaches the point at which language can be said to be “speaking itself” through an impersonal writing. For him, it is language which speaks, not he author. It ceases to be either a psychological expression of the poet’s subjectivity or a representation of something external to its own workings. Mallermie’s entire poetics consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing. Despite the supposed acuity of his psychological analyses, Proust has, according to Barthes, written the epic of modern writing. Surrealism and linguistic ideas also tried to remove the author from the fixed and ever-occupying place.

The removal of the author is more than an historical fact or an act of writing. But it means to transform the modern text in such a level that it seems the Author is totally absent. Here the temporality is different. When we believe that the Author is present, we conceive him as the past of his own book; book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after. Here the author is father, the book is his child, thought, and nourished by his father. But the idea of the modern scriptor of is different. The modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text but no linear relation, no preceding or exceeding, no “here and now” with the immediate enunciation of it. It follows that “writing does not mean an operation of recording, notation, representation and depiction.” But it is a “performative”, a rare verbal form in which the enunciation has no other content than the act by which it is uttered. Thus the modern scriptor buries the Author and traces a field without origin- or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.

Thus a text is not a line of words with a single theological meaning or the message of the Author- God but a multi- dimensional space in which a variety of non- original writings blends and clash.(Like Collase). The text is a combination quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture. The writer actually can not writer, but to mix writings, to place the ones with the others, as never to rest on any one of them.  He should know that his “wish to express himself” is a grotesque one because the “inner thing” that he wishes to translate is only a ready-formed dictionary; its words have man synonyms and can express indefinitely his thinking through those words. So, the modern scriptor, succeeding the Author, has no passions, humors, feelings, impressions but rather this immense dictionary (is) the source of his writing. To Barthes, life is only the imitation of the book which itself is only a tissue of signs infinitely deferred.

 According to Barthes, to give a text an Author opens the path of victory for the critic and a critic may easily explain the text. Thus the critic finding out the Author “explained” the text. But modern idea wants to suppress the critic along with the Author. When the author is removed, the claim to decipher a text is futile. So in the crowd of writings, nothing is to be “deciphered” but to be “disentangled”. The space of writing is to be ranged over; writing ceaselessly posits meaning. In precisely this way literature, by refusing to assign an ultimate meaning to the text, liberates what may be called an anti theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary, because it refuses to fix the meaning in God and his hypostases- reason, science and law.

According to Barthes, a text is made up of multiple writings drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogues, parody, contestation. But there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up writing are inscribed without any of them being, lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. But this destination can not be personal. The reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted. Classic criticism has never paid an attention to the reader, for it, the writer is the only person in literature. To give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth. In short, the death of the Author signals the liberation of the reader by the by the very assertion that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”

'Author is a Modern Figure' Ronald Barthes

Regarding the origin of the author Ronald Barthes says that the author is the product of Modern Ages. To Barthes, the things that contributed to the emergence of the author include English Imperialism, French Rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation. Now the author connotes authority or the prestige of an individual. Thus, Barthes finds the authority of the author in all branches of literature such as history of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines etc. The image of any of this braches of literature is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life, his taste and his passions. So, by this comment Barthes wants to remind us about the position of author in modern literature and also subverts the relations of an author with his text.

Ronald Barthes's Definition of a Text as a Multi-dimensional Space

In his Death of the Author Ronald Barthes defines a text from post-structuralist point of view. Like the structuralists he does not believe that a text has a definite center and pre-defined logos.

According to Ronald Barthes a text is a multi-dimensional space. He contrasts an ordinary text with a theological text. The theological text has only single meaning. But unlike a theological text, a normal text can have a variety of meanings. For this reason Ronald Barthes calls a text as the multi- dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. He also compares text with a piece of cloth which is woven with quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of cultures. This remark is the central theme of post- structuralism. According to post-structuralism the meaning of a text is unstable or uncertain. Here, Ronald Barthes expounds this view. The meaning of a text depends on the readers not the authors. The readers will look from different perspectives and thus get different impressions about the text.

How does Showalter use Ardener’s Diagram to redefine the relationship between the “dominant group” and “muted group?”

Women have been left out of culture and history because history is considered to be a male centered term. Again there are some places where men cannot enter. In defining female culture, historians make a clear distinction between the male considered appropriate roles, activities, tastes, behaviors for women and the reality of women’s lives. Women’s sphere is defined and maintained by men. By this, women constitute a muted group.

To redefine the relationship between the “dominant group” and “muted group” Showalter takes help from Ardener’s Diagram. By the term “muted” Edwin Ardener suggests problems both of language and power. Both muted and dominant group (male) unconsciously generates beliefs but the dominant group controls the forms or structures which make the muted group bound to express their beliefs through the allowable forms of dominant structure. Ardener shows a diagram on the relationship of the dominant and muted group.

In the diagram, much of the muted circle “Y” falls within the boundaries of dominant circle “X”, there is also a crescent of ‘Y” which is outside the dominant boundary and is called “wild”. This wild zone is considered as women’s culture specially which means literary no man’s land, a place forbidden to men. The opposite thing happens to man’s “X” zone. Experimentally, it stands for the aspects of the female lifestyle which are outside of men. “X” zone of male alien to women. But metaphysically it has no corresponding male zone because all of male consciousness is within the circle of dominant structure and female knows all about male. Here from the male point of view, the wild “Y” is always imaginary. In terms of cultural anthropology, women know what the male crescent is like but men do not know what is in the wild.

In some feminist criticism, the wild zone becomes the place for the women-centered criticism, theory and art. It makes the invisible visible, the silent speak. French feminist critics would like to make the wild zone the theoretical base of women’s difference. In their texts, the wild zone becomes the place for the revolutionary women’s language, the language of everything that is repressed. Many forms of American radical feminism also romantically assert that women are closer to nature or environment. So, they should build the place fully independent from the control and influence of “male dominated” institutions- the news media, the health, education legal systems, art, theatre and literary worlds.

But we must admit that no writing is possible without dominant structure. No writing, no criticism, no publication is fully independent from the economic and political pressures of the male dominated society. The most important implication of this model is that women’s fiction can be read as a double voiced discourse containing a ‘dominant” and “a muted story.”

The concept of a woman’s text in the wild zone is a playful abstraction. Women’s writing is a “double voiced discourse” that always embodies the social, literary, and cultural heritages of both the muted and the dominant. Every step that feminist criticism takes toward defining women’s writing is a step toward self- understanding as well. Women writing are not then inside and outside of the male tradition, they are inside two tradition. Indeed, the female territory might well be envisioned as one long order, not as a separate country, but as open access to the sea.

The more important aspect of Ardener’s model is that there are muted groups other than women such as the blacks in America. In America the blacks belong to the muted group and the white dominant group. The dominant structure may determine many muted structures. For example a black America woman poet may be affected by both racial and sexual politics. So, cultural situation should not determine women’s writing, but women’s writing should be considered in the background of cultural pattern.

This reminds Alien Showlter about the duty and responsibility of female writers. A female writer who writes under the influence of the male dominated culture is more or less influenced by that culture. Now the duty of gynocriticism is to precisely map out the cultural field of women and prevent the influences of the dominant look on the muted group.

Regarding the major literary movements, Elaine Showlter says, in the history of literature women also have no place. The movement Renaissance was not a movement for women. The Romantic Movement was also not for women. Now it is the duty of “gynocriticism” to provide women with a respective place in the history of literature.

In order to make the rule of muted group more clear Alien Showlter says, from female perspective a text is not only mothered but also parented. A women’s text confronts both paternal and maternal forerunner and must deal with the problems and advantages of both lines of inheritance.

Thus women’s text is rich in the experience of both muted group and dominant group. In this way, she uses Ardener’s model to show the condition as well as the possibility of women.

In Preface to Shakespeare, how does Dr. Samuel Johnson Defend Shakespeare's Mixing of Comic and Tragic Elements?

Johnson in the Preface to Shakespeare holds that the mingled dramas of Shakespeare are not only effective but also fulfill the proper function of drama much better than pure comedy or tragedy. Shakespeare, in Arnold’s view, incurred the biggest censure “by mixing comic and tragic scenes in all his works. And this very faculty of Shakespeare made him-

“Even nobler than both the Greek and the Roman dramatists”

Referring to the charge that Shakespeare has mixed the comic and tragic scenes, Johnson points out that the Shakespeare’s play are not in a “rigorous sense,” either tragedies or comedies, but composition of a distinct kind. Shakespeare’s plays exhibit the real state of earthly life which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled in various degrees and endless combination. Shakespeare says Johnson has united the power of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in one mind but in one composition. In other words, Shakespeare was equally at home in writing tragic and comic plays and he could combine comic and tragic elements in one and the same play. Almost all his plays are divided between serious and Ludicrous characters and they sometimes produce sorrow and sometimes laughter.

This was a practice contrary to “the rules of criticism”. But Johnson says that there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature. The object of literature is to give instruction by pleasing. A play in which the comic and the tragic have been mingled, is capable of conveying all the instructions that tragedy or comedy aims at because such a play is closer to the reality of life than either pure tragedy or comedy. The mingling of tragic and comic scenes does diminish or weaken the vicissitudes of passion that the dramatist aims at. There are many people who welcome comic relief after a scene producing the feeling of melancholy.

Now we should look at the historical background of the matter. It is true that, on the whole, the ancient classical dramatists had kept tragedy and comedy strictly apart from each other. Neo-classical drama of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Italy, France and even England tried to observe the line of demarcation between tragedy and comedy. But Shakespeare was a romantic, not a neo classical dramatist. The free use of tragedy and comedy in the same play is one of the most striking and familiar features in the work of Shakespeare and other romantic playwrights of his time. Romantic drama reveals in variety of effect, while tragic comedy or the mixed play was, according to Addison, one of the most monstrous inventions that ever entered into a poets thoughts.

Neo-classic criticism showed a curious tendency to out Greek the Greeks in strictness. Aristotle indeed says that tragedy represents an action which is serious: and Greek tragedy in practice has little comic relief; yet it has some. We find some comic elements in Homer himself. Homer’s gods are sometimes used for a comic purpose, as well as men like Thersites or Irus. For the middle Ages, the mixture of tragic and comic was as natural as breathing, and it produced their best dramatic work. The greatest Elizabethan tragedies were half the child of comedy, not only because Polonius in Hamlet, the Porter in Macbeth, and the fool in Lear produce some of their most striking scenes. Johnson, it must be pointed out, justifies tragic-comedy on conflicting grounds.

In the twentieth century, T.S.Eliot has argued that, though human nature may permanently crave for comic relief, it does not follow that this craving should e gratified. Eliot upholds the doctrine of ‘the unity of sentiments,’ T. S. Eliot also said that the desire for comic relief springs from a lack of the capacity for concentration.

There is no reason why a tragedy must be absolutely laughter less and there is equally no reason why a tragedy should not be laughter less. Perhaps only one rule remains valid about humor in tragedy, namely that humor must not clash with the tone of the whole. It is extraordinary how seldom this fault is found in Shakespeare. Mercutio and Thersites, Pandarus and Polonius, the Grave diggers and the Porter and Cleopatra’s clown are certainly not out of place in the plays in which Shakespeare had depicted them.

Johnson is undoubtedly a critic of neo-classical school. However in his defence both of Shakespeare’s disregard of the unities of time and place and Shakespeare’s mingling of tragic ad comic elements. Johnson seems to deviate from the rigid stand which neo-classicism adopted. Strictly speaking, neo-classic theory did not permit the mingling of tragic and comic in the same play. But it is possible to argue that Johnson defends such mingling on the fundamentally neo-classic ground that the imitation of general human nature not only permits but demands it. Shakespeare’s plays, combining comedy and tragedy, show real human nature which “partakes of joy and sorrow.”

Dr. Samuel Johnson's Evaluation Shakespeare in 'Preface to Shakespeare': Shakespeare as the Poet of Nature

“Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, and the poet of nature, the poet that holds up his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life.”

“Preface to Shakespeare” Para 8

One of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s most notable services to Shakespearean criticism is that he exposes the central style of Shakespeare’s plays as its universality. He passes the judgment that Shakespeare is a “poet of nature” meaning that through his works he reflects life-the real life and manners.

Shakespeare is a poet of nature who faithfully represents human nature in his plays. He does not falsify reality. Shakespeare is a poet of nature also because his characters are natural; they act and behave think and speak like human beings. His characters are the faithful representations of humanity. He deals with passions and principles which are common to humanity. He does not merely depict the particular manner and customs of any one country or age. His characters are not merely kings and Romans. They are above all human beings. So, his characters have a universal appeal. But this does not mean that they do no have any individual qualities. The speech of one character can not be placed in the mouth of another, and they can easily be differentiated from each other by their speeches. The dialogue he uses “seems to have been gleamed by different selection of common conversation and common occurrences.” They are also true to the age, sex or profession to which they belong. They are also true to type.

In Shakespeare’s characterization we find a realistic and convincing portrayal of human nature. Shakespeare does not depict persons of either fabulous excellence or unexampled depravity. The characters in his plays are not heroes but only human beings who act and think in the way in which the reader himself would act and think under the circumstances. Even where the agency is supernatural, the dialogue accords with real life. In his plays Shakespeare has shown human nature not only as it acts in real solutions but as it would be found in situation which may never arise.

Shakespeare is most original in his portrayal of characters. Johnson says that no writer before him, with the possible exception of Chaucer, has portrayed human character in such a realistic manner. Shakespeare has gathered his knowledge of human nature from this personal observation. This knowledge has enabled him to portray a multiplicity and diversity of character and to reveal subtle distinctions between man and man. In this respect, he has none to intimate, though he himself has been imitated by all writers. Whether life or nature is his subject, he gives evidence of having seen things with his own eyes.

It is because of the universality of his characterization that Shakespeare’s plays are full of practical axioms and domestic wisdom. From them can be formulated a philosophy of life, of great practical value in real life. He is not great only in particular passages but the entire conduct of his action brings out his greatness as a poet of (human) nature.

Shakespeare’s realism, says Johnson is to be seen also in the fact that he does no give undue prominence to the passion of love in his plays. Dramatists in general give an excessive importance to the theme of love and often violate probability and misrepresent life. Shakespeare knows that- “Love is only one of many passions,” and that it has no great influence upon the sum of life.

Johnson defends Shakespeare for his mingling of the tragic and comic elements in his plays on the ground of realism. Such mingling only serves to show us the course of the world in which “the loss of one is the gain of another, at the same time” “the reveler hastening to his wine and the mourner burying his friend.”

Nor does Johnson disapprove of Shakespeare’s violation of the unities of place and time. He defends Shakespeare o the ground of dramatic illusion. Literature is to be appreciated not by the literal sense but by the imagination. The audience’s imagination is kept very active when he watches a play. The audience knows that he is going to watch a fictitious reality. If an audience in a theatre can accept the stage as a locality in the city of Rome, he will also accept the change from Rome to Alexandria. The unity of time may like wise be violated on the same principle.

Shakespeare, says Johnson, is the originator of “the form, the character, the language and the shows” of English drama. He is the first playwright whose tragic as well as the comic plays succeed in providing the dramatic pleasure appropriate to them.

Thus Johnson shows his penetrating power which probes to the very core of Shakespeare’s wit and reveals its deep humanity and its sovereign realism.

A Study of W. J. Mitchell's “Postcolonial Culture, Postcolonial Criticism”

What changes does Mitchell notice in the field of literature and criticism?

W. J. Mitchell in his article “Postcolonial Culture, Postcolonial Criticism” discusses the changes that he had found in the present world’s literary culture. He considers “the process of imperial decline”, decolonization and the transferences and changes that are taking place in the world’s literary culture.

American Empire

Though the idea of empire can not properly apply in the case of America, Mitchell suggests that Americans have to acknowledge their status as an empire. Thereby, they will be able to achieve a clearer understanding of imperial decline and of decolonization. The recent transferences and reconfigurations taking place in the world’s literary culture will help them in this regard.

A critical Transformation

A radical transformation has been occurred in literature. The most significant new literature is emerging from the former colonies, and the most provocative new literary criticism is coming from the imperial centers that once dominated them- the nation of Europe and America. In this context Mitchell cites Horace who long ago understood that the transfer of empire is always accompanied by a transfer of culture and learning. But today the cultural transfer is no longer one way. He undertakes to examine the nature of the transference between the declining imperial powers and their former colonies.

Nobel Prize

This shift in literary culture is evidenced by recent statistics. On Nobel Prize, outside the mainstream of European and American literature, Naguib Mahfouz[ first African to win the prize (1986)] won the prestigious Nobel Prize for literature. Nigerian Wole Soyinka became the first African writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986.

Booker Prize

The shift is also accusing in the field of other prestigious prize namely “Booker Prize.”(Keri Hulme from the remote West- coast of New Zealand.)

In America

The literary map is also undergoing a great change in the American Continent. Some examples of writers like Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Julio Cortazar are enough to suggest a cultural “translatio” from South to North, from Spanish to English, from the “circumference” to the center. Afro- American writers like Toni Morison, Zora Neale, Hurston and Alice Walker are also widely read in and out of the classroom, suggesting a shift in centre-margin relationship. There is also a “translation” from East to West. Milan Kundera, Joseph Brodsky, Jerzy Kozinsky are showing instances from so-called “Evil Empire”, who are reading adopted by the American readers. This also may prove the anti-imperialist self image of America.

Age of criticism

The critic and novelist Randall Jarrell mournfully declared that Europe and United States entered an “age of criticism”. He noticed the victory and influent of criticism on academics, mass media like magazine, journals etc. The critics had become celebrities among the audience. Even the most ordinary academic critic can now aspire to participate in a global network what Edward Said has called “Traveling Theory”. Critics fly between conferences on semiotics, narratology and paradigm change in places like Hong Kong, Camberra and Tel Aviv.

Contemporary criticism tends to subvert the imperial authority. Skepticism, relativism and anti foundationalist modes of thought such as pragmatism and deconstruction come to the Third World from the First. But they lack the authoritative force of traditional imperial culture. On the contrary critical movements such as feminism, black studies, and Western Marxism can hardly be said to speak with the authority of the imperial centre.

Thus, according to Mitchell changes have taken place in the fields of creative literature and criticism. While the former colonies are producing excellent creative, new literature the traditional centers are producing criticism. Though many imaginative writers of the Third World namely, J.M.Coetzee in South Africa, Ian Wedde in New Zealand, Toni Morrison in African America look with cautious fascination on contemporary criticism. They are unsure whether it is a friendly collaborator in the process of decolonization or a threatening competitor for limited resources.