For Monday: Culler, Chapter 8: "Identity, Identification, and the Subject"

This is the LAST chapter of Culler that we'll read for class, but it's an important one. It's a little tricky, so bear with it, since the better you understand this chapter, the easier you'll see connections (and implications) for your Final Project. 

Answer TWO of the following: 

Q1: Why is the word "subject" in English such a tricky one? How do the various definitions of the word suggesting the theoretical complications of the term? Do you think this is an instance when our language knows more than it lets on? 

Q2: Culler writes that iconic characters in literature like Huck Finn or Jane Eyre carry the "presumption that these characters' problems are exemplary. But exemplary of what? The novels don't tell. It's the critics or theorists who have to take up the question of exemplarity and tell us what group or class of people the characters stand for" (111). Does this mean that books don't mean anything unless they are interpreted by others? Aren't the secrets in the text itself? Or does this merely suggest that each culture has to decide who a book speaks to--or if a book continues to speak to them?

Q3: What does Culler mean, quoting Nancy Armstrong, that novels "produced 'the modern individual' who was first of all a woman" (113)? Why would novels create an identity which was primarily female in nature? And how might that have shaped even male identity for people who read books? In other words, why is the 'modern' self, in some senses, more female than male?

Q4: Lacan, a student of Freud, believed identity is a process of mirroring, of copying various performances which we come to believe are 'normal' or 'ideal.' Yet in doing so, "we do not happily become men or women...[and] always encounter resistance" (114). What "resistance" do we encounter in trying to copying our ideal male and female role models, and why does this ultimately doom are performance to be a "failure"? Why can't we become perfect copies of our models? 

Q5: In postcolonial studies, scholars often debate on how societies who have emerged from colonial ownership can best assert their identity and independence. If, for example, a novelist from post-colonial India writes a novel in English, are they still subject to English identity, even in the novel and its characters are Indian? Does an author have to utterly reject everything remotely sway to English identity to become liberated? Is a novel, by its very European roots, an agent of colonial identity? Is English?