Democracy and Other Forms of Government
Let us begin our discussion on democracy and the different
forms of government by looking at these types of government
from the position of anarchy. Anarchy is a state of affairs
wherein there is no existing government in a group
organization or nation that takes charge in implementing laws
and administering the affairs of its members.
Aristocracy
Aristocracy isna form of government wherein the people are
ruled by members of the nobility or those eho belong to the
upper class of society. These rulers who come from "high
families" are the wealthy and educated members of society.
Capitalism
Capitalism is a form of government wherein the people are
allowed to own properties or businesses for purposes of profit
insofar as these owners pay taxes to the government. The
United States is an example of a capitalist nation.
Communism
Communism is a form of government wherein the idea is to
arrivr at a classes society through the equal sharing of goods by
the peope. In a communist government, private ownership
capital or property is prohibited and the affairs of the State are
governed by a single ruling party.
Constitutional Monarchy
Constitutional Monarchy is a form of government wherein a
democratic government exists side by side with a monarchy
and the responsibilities in ruling are divided between two
heads.
Democracy
Democracy is a form of government wherein the power to
ruler resides on the people. Plato considered democracy as a
deg raded version of oligarchy. Meanwhile, for Aristotle,
among the three degenerate forms of government namely,
democracy, oligarchy and tyranny, democracy is what he
considered most tolerable. Many countries around the world
today have adopted a democractic form of government
including the Philippines.
Despotism
Despotism is a form of government wherein the people are
government by a single individual who treats the people as
slaves.
Dictatorship
Dictatorship is a form of governemnt wherein the people are
governed by an individual who has absolute governing power
and assumes the roles of the three branches of the
government, executive, legislative, and judiciary. Nazi Germany
under Hitler is an example of a dictarship.
Federalism
Federalism is a form of government wherein thr governing
power is shared between a central government and a group of
regional or local governments. The United States is an
example of Federalism.
Monarchy
Monarchy is a form of government wherein the people are
ruled by a Monarch and this power to rule is passed on as
inheritancr to the Monarch's children. A monarch who has
managed to expand one's kingdom to an empire is called
Emperor or Empress.
Oligarchy
Oligarchy is a form of government wherein the people are
ruled by the few. These few may be wealthy or powerful, which
gives them the power to rule.
Regional or Local
A regional or local government wherein people i specific locale
are ruled by a small group of leaders whose rulling power are
only limited within the confines of the locales they serve.
Republic
A republic is a form of government wherein the people is not
ruled by a monarch but an elected president, in most cases.
The government of the Philippines is an example of republic.
Revolutionary
A revolutionary is a form of government that results in a
situation wherein the existing government is forcibly
overthrown by revolutionary forces.
Socialism
Socialism is a form of government wherein businesses that are
involved in the production and didpstribution of goods and
basic utilities such a electricity and water are administered by
the government and not by capitalists.
Timocracy
Timocracy is a form of government wherein the leader are
chosen on the basis of honourableness.
Totalitarian
A totalitarian government is a form of government wherein
only a single political party is recognized, which controls the
affairs of the state and imposes limits in the citizens in terms of
what they should believe, thr values they should uphold and
the attitudes they should espouse, among others.
Transitional
A transitional government is a form of government that exists
when a country is undergoing the process of shifting from one
form of government to another.
Tyranny
Tyranny is a form of government wherein the people are ruled
by a wealthh person who weilded the power to rule by
overthrowing those who are in power through means that are
not precribed by the law.
FORMALIST CRITICISM
A formalist approach studies a text as only a text,
considering its features—for example, rhymes,
cadences, literary devices—in an isolated way, not
attempting to apply their own say as to what the text
means. In general, formalists are focused on the facts
of a text, because they want to study the text, not what
others say about it.
BIOGRAPHICAL CRITICISM
Biographical criticism is a form of literary
criticism which analyzes a writer's biography to show
the relationship between the author's life and their
works of literature.[2][3] Biographical criticism is often
associated with historical-biographical criticism,[4] a
critical method that "sees a literary work chiefly, if not
exclusively, as a reflection of its author's life and times"

Biographical Approach
As early as the nineteenth century, scholars considered
literary texts against the background of the author’s
biography. The aim was to find references to the author’s life,
education and socio-cultural environment in a literary work.
Ever since the French critic Roland Barthes announced the
“death of the author” in 1968, the biographical approach has
lost its appeal for many scholars. Barthes and critics following
him have argued that an author’s biography is irrelevant since
the meaning of a text only emerges in the reading process and
the reader thus becomes the real ‘author’ of the text. One
could argue against this radical viewpoint that there are texts
where knowledge of an author’s biography can sometimes
help us understand the text better because otherwise we
would not be able to decipher certain allusions or
references. D.H. Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers (1913),
for example, draws heavily on Lawrence’s own family
background. Bearing this knowledge in mind, it is then
interesting to see where the literary text deviates from
references to the author’s real life.
Psychological and Psychoanalytical Approaches
Following Sigmund Freud’s work on the unconscious and the
interpretation of dreams, critics in the 1930s attempted to
interpret literary texts with regard to the author’s
psychological state or the psychology of the text itself. Thus,
one question raised for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, for example,
was whether Hamlet suffered from the Oedipus complex. The
reading process has also been considered from a
psychological point of view. Furthermore, psychoanalytical
approaches have made an inroad
into poststructuralist (Jacques Lacan) and feminist
approaches(Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous).
Contextual Approaches
Contextual approaches go back to the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries where scholars asked to what extent
literary texts were rooted in the historical, political,
economical, philosophical, religious, etc. contexts of their
production. E.M.W. Tillyard’s (1943) study, for example,
investigates instantiations of the Elizabethan world
picture in Shakespeare’s works, and Ian Watt (1957) asks to
what extent Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is related to
Puritanism and the rise of the middle class in the eighteenth
century. Another example is Marxist criticismwhich
regards the production of literary texts at the interface of
material and socio-economic circumstances (Eagleton and
Milne 1996). While after the Second World War contextual
approaches, especially the Marxist tradition, were initially
regarded as outdated, they have had a major comeback over
the last two decades in approaches like new
historicism, cultural materialism and cultural
studies.
Reader-orientated Approaches
The most well-known reader-orientated approaches to
literary texts are reader response theory for Anglo-
American criticism (e.g., Stanley Fish) and reception
theory or reception aesthetics, which mainly originated
in Germany (Wolfgang Iser, Hans Robert Jauß). The
questions reception theorists ask focus mainly on the
relationship between text and reader. Thus, one can
investigate what exactly happens during the reading process
in the reader’s mind, how readers react emotionally to texts
and in what ways the reception of literary texts is influenced
by socio-demographic factors such as age, gender, social
class, education, etc. An important concept in reception
theory is that of textual gaps or blanks which readers have
to fill while reading a text. In filling the gaps, readers also
contribute to the construction of a text’s meaning. Other
reader-orientated approaches take into account the historical
dimensions of text reception and investigate how readings
and interpretations of texts change over time. Thus, one can
ask, for example, how Shakespeare’s contemporaries are
likely to have perceived his plays in comparison with modern
theatre goers.
Text-immanent Approach and New Criticism
In the first half of the twentieth century, a critical approach
emerged which opposed prevailing practices of considering
the biographies of authors, social contexts and literary
history. This new approach, which came to be known under
the name of New Criticism, focused on the literary work
itself as an independent entity. Studies by authors such as
Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren postulated the
method of close reading, i.e., a detailed investigation of the
overall composition of texts with regard to their unifying
principles. At the centre of this approach was the idea that all
the elements of a text ideally formed a coherent whole both
on the formal and the content level. Further questions
addressed the principles whereby literary texts create rich
and varied meanings, which can ultimately lead
to ambiguities.
Structuralist and Semiotic Approaches
Other approaches which deal primarily with the code in the
literary communication model are the so-
called structuralist and semiotic approaches.
Structuralism and semiotics were greatly influenced
by structuralist linguistics, most notably by Ferdinand de
Saussure’s work on linguistic signs and later by Noam
Chomsky’s seminal work on transformational grammar. A
first group of theorists under the title of Russian
Formalismconsidered literary language as deviant from
everyday language and postulated the concept of the poetic
function of literary texts, i.e., the fact that literary texts
always draw attention to their literariness by using language
in unusual or ‘unfamiliar’ ways. This process is
called defamiliarisation. Authors to be mentioned in this
context are Roman Jakobson and Victor Shklovsky. The
structuralist approach also had a great impact
on narratology, i.e., a research area which focuses on
narrative structures, in France (Tzvetan Todorov, A.J.
Greimas, Gérard Genette) as well as in Great Britain and the
USA (Robert Scholes, Jonathan Culler, Seymour Chatman).
Generally speaking, structuralists assume that literary texts
function on the basis of an underlying ‘grammar’ according to
which individual parts of a text are structured. Thus, it is
possible to sift out universal patterns, e.g., with regard to plot
structures or functional roles of characters
(protagonist, antagonist, etc.).
Closely connected with structuralism is semiotics, i.e., the
study of signs and sign systems and the process by which
signs are assigned meaning. Semiotics goes back to
Saussure’s description of the linguistic sign consisting of
a signifier, the sound image (TREE or TABLE), and
a signified, the concept the sound image denotes (the
concept of ‘tree’ or ‘table’). Signifier and signified are
inseparable like the two sides of a coin. According to
Saussure, the relationship between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’ is
arbitrary, and a sign receives its meaning solely from the fact
that it differs from other signs and not because it refers to an
object in the real world, the referent. The ‘reality’ we
perceive is thus only a projection of the meaning inherent in
the linguistic system rather than a transcendental meaning
beyond language. In a literary text, the semiotics of the story-
world as ‘reality’, for example, can be achieved through a
number of ‘signifiers’ such as speech, the characters’ body
language, spatio-temporal frameworks, etc.
Poststructuralist Approaches
In reaction to structuralism and
semiotics, poststructuralist approaches deny the
existence of universal principles which create meaning and
coherence. Deconstructive theory, for example, which was
first propagated by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida,
maintains that even within the linguistic system there can be
no ultimate ‘meaning’ because signifiers always refer to
other signifiers and never to a signified. This can be
exemplified by what happens when one tries to look up a
word in a dictionary. What one usually finds is a definition or
explanation of the word which in turn uses words that can be
looked up and so on. Signifiers become traces, and meaning is
constantly deferred. Derrida introduced the
term différance, a combination of the French word for
‘difference’ (différence) and the gerund of the verb denoting
‘defer/ postpone’ (différant), to capture this process. Since
words in a text are always reminiscent of other signifiers, one
can never establish a ‘fixed’ or ‘final’ meaning of words and
thus of texts. This poses questions for literary studies
concerning the validity of interpretations: If there is no finite
meaning, can one speak of texts at all? And can there be
‘wrong’ interpretations at all or do we have to allow for
endless possibilities of reading a text?
While deconstructive theory focuses entirely on written texts,
the so-called poetics of culture regards literature as a
semiotic subsystem in which culture is reflected. The
common underlying assumption is that cultural systems, like
signs, do no consist of fixed binary oppositions. Michel
Foucault’s work, which applies historical discourse
analysis, was pathbreaking in this context. In his analyses of
the history of medicine and of sexuality, for example,
Foucault considers the social discourses about these areas
and demonstrates how these discourses have changed
concepts and ideas about medicine and sexuality over
time. Discourse in Foucault’s sense consists of collections of
statements (both verbal and non-verbal) about a given topic
that are culturally defined by institutions and through
conventions. Discourse thus also becomes an area where
knowledge is created and power is seized and maintained by
leading social groups.
Feminist Approaches and Gender Studies
Feminist approaches emerged along with the women’s
rights movement in the late 1960s and were initially a
reaction against hitherto male-dominated literary studies,
which neglected literature produced by women and which
had perpetuated clichés and stereotypes about women. The
main merit of feminist approaches was that they rediscovered
a number of female authors who had been considered ‘minor’
and allocated them a more central place in literary history. At
the same time, feminist approaches highlight the differences
between ‘male’ and ‘female’ writing in terms of style, topics
and structures. More recently, feminist approaches have
opened up to more general gender studies where gender
roles and gendered perspectives in literary texts come under
closer scrutiny. So-called queer theoryhas started to
address issues concerning literature by and about
homosexuals.
Ethnicity and Postcolonialism
Through the processes of colonialism and migration, an
increasing amount of literatures by ethnic minorities has
emerged in English-speaking cultures all over the world and
has become the focal point for postcolonial theories, which
investigate, for example, aspects of national identities, hybrid
cultures, the significance of indigenous cultures and problems
surrounding their ‘own’ history and language (Edward Said,
Homi Bhaba, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). Concepts of race
and ethnicity and the presentation of cultural suppression are
also investigated in texts by African Americans, Chicano as
well as Asian and Indian minorities.
Cultural Materialism and New Historicism
The common assumption underlying both cultural
materialism and new historicism is that literature does
not form a realm of its own that can be viewed against the
background of socio-historical developments, for example,
but that it is as much part and expression of a culture as
other, non-literary, texts (e.g., travelogues, religious tracts,
historical documents and ‘texts’ in a much wider sense such
as adverts, pop music, TV programmes, film, etc.). Both are
influenced by Marxist criticism. They try to relate problems of
interpretation to cultural-historical problems and are
concerned with the uncovering of power structures
(economic, class, culture) as they become manifest in literary
texts.
Both movements are interdisciplinary in that they draw upon
insights and methods from a number of disciplines, and they
both question the notion of a literary canon, i.e., a set of
‘important’ or ‘major’ literary works agreed upon through
convention that are considered to be of a higher quality than
other texts. By incorporating non-literary expressions of a
culture, cultural materialism and new historicism raise
questions concerning the literariness of texts and the function
of literature in general and thus, ultimately, the validity of
disciplines involved in the study of literature. While some
scholars nowadays wish to include literary studies in a
broader discipline of cultural studies, others point towards
the specifically artistic and aesthetic nature of literary texts,
which requires a set of special, i.e., literary, analytical tools.
The aim of this introduction is to familiarise you with exactly
those special tools and thus to enable you to engage critically
with literary texts.
Prose
Probably most literature that is read today is written in prose,
that is in non-metrical, ‘ordinary’ language. This has not
always been the case. It is only with the growing popularity of
the novel and a corresponding expansion of the market for
literature throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
that prose gained this prominent position as a suitable
language for literature. In this section the focus will be on
narrative prose, that is, prose literature which tells a story
• Story and Discourse
• Story and Plot
• Space
• Character
• Narrative Situation
• Narrative Modes
• Representation of Consciousness
• Time
• Types of Novels
Story and Discourse
Theorists of narrative have long been in agreement that there
are at least two levels in a narrative text: Something happens
and this something is related in a certain way. There is, in other
words, a WHAT (What is told?) to be considered and
a HOW (How is it told?). These two levels have been given
different names by different critics (for an overview of various
terminologies see Korte 1985). The distinction made by a
theory of criticism called structuralism has proved one of the
most influential ones in recent years. In structuralist
terminology the WHAT of the narrative is called story, the
HOW is called discourse (see Chatman 1978: 19, who follows
structuralists like Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Tzvetan
Todorov).
story (What is
told?)
narrative
discourse (How
is it told?)
For analysis, these two levels need to be further subdivided.
Story
The story consists of events (things that happen) and so-
called existents, the characters that make things happen or
have things happen to them and the setting, meaning the place
where things happen. Events can be either brought about
actively, in which case they are called actions (one character
kills another one), or they just happen (someone dies of a For this reason, dramatic texts even look differently
heart-attack). compared to poetic or narrative texts. One distinguishes
actions between the primary text, i.e., the main body of the play
spoken by the characters, and secondary text, i.e., all the
events
text ‘surrounding’ or accompanying the main text:
happening title, dramatis personae, scene descriptions, stage
s directions for acting and speaking, etc.
story
characters Depending on whether one reads a play or watches it on
stage, one has different kinds of access to dramatic texts. As a
narrati existen
reader, one receives first-hand written information (if it is
ve ts
mentioned in the secondary text) on what the characters look
space/sett like, how they act and react in certain situations, how they
ing speak, what sort of setting forms the background to a scene,
discour etc. However, one also has to make a cognitive effort to
se imagine all these features and interpret them for oneself.
Stage performances, on the other hand, are more or less
ready-made instantiations of all these details. In other words:
Each of these elements can be approached with different tools At the theatre one is presented with a version of the play
of analysis (story/plot, character, space). which has already been interpreted by the director, actors,
costume designers, make-up artists and all the other
Discourse members of theatre staff, who bring the play to life. The
difference, then, lies in divergent forms of perception. While
Discourse is the category that comprises various elements of we can actually see and hear actors play certain characters on
transmission. Strictly speaking, it is only discourse that is stage, we first decipher a text about them when reading a play
directly accessible to us, since we only learn about the story via script and then at best ‘see’ them in our mind’s eye and ‘hear’
discourse. Elements of discourse thus determine our their imaginary voices. Put another way, stage performances
perception of the story (what ‘actually’ happened). In the offer a multi-sensory access to plays and they can make use
analysis of discourse one tries to determine how certain effects of multimedia elements such as music, sound effects,
are achieved. lighting, stage props, etc., while reading is limited to the
visual perception and thus draws upon one primary medium:
the play as text. This needs to be kept in mind in discussions
The focus of analysis are questions such as: What is the of dramatic texts, and the following introduction to the
narrative situation? Whose point of view is presented? Which analysis of drama is largely based on the idea that plays are
narrative modes are employed? How are the thoughts of first and foremost written for the stage.
characters transmitted? How is the chronology of events dealt
with? How is style used? These elements are always used to
certain effects. For instance, how it is that the reader tends to The main features one can look at when analysing drama are
identify with one character and not with another? The analysis the following:
of elements of discourse reveals how the reader is • information flow
‘manipulated’ into forming certain views about the story. • overall structure
• space
story • time
• characters
plot • types of utterance in drama
narrative • types of stage
narrative voices (who • dramatic sub-genres
speaks?)
focalisation (who
sees?)
discourse narrative modes
representation
of consciousness
time
style

Each of these elements will be explained in detail under their

respective headings.

Drama
• Text and Theatre
• Information Flow
• Structure
• Space
• Time
• Characters
• Dramatic Language
• Types of Stage
• Dramatic Sub-Genres

Text and Theatre

When one deals with dramatic texts one has to bear in mind
that drama differs considerably from poetry or narrative in
that it is usually written for the purpose of being performed
on stage. Although plays exist which were mainly written for a
reading audience, dramatic texts are generally meant to be
transformed into another mode of presentation or medium:
the theatre.