Forms Of Knowledge A Psychoanalytic Study Of Human Communication: Fill & Download for Free

There are many trends and theories of and on and in literature in effect, some of which are partially working, and some we do not know if working or not, because it is very difficult to know that. Some literary movements of the last century began in the the first half are still going in literatures of the other countries (for example, Surrealism, Imagism, Modernism, Post-modernism, etc.). These trends are dead in the countrues from where they were born, but in some other parts of the world they are still in force. So, it is not with certainty that we can say which theory is present and which is not in which part of the world. Therefore, it would be better to know about them all in nutshell. I do not know if I am successful in my convincing the reader about these theories here."Literary theory" is the body of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of literature. By literary theory we refer not to the meaning of a work of literature but to the theories that reveal what literature can mean. Literary theory is a description of the underlying principles, one might say the tools, by which we attempt to understand literature. All literary interpretation draws on a basis in theory but can serve as a justification for very different kinds of critical activity. It is literary theory that formulates the relationship between author and work; literary theory develops the significance of race, class, and gender for literary study, both from the standpoint of the biography of the author and an analysis of their thematic presence within texts. Literary theory offers varying approaches for understanding the role of historical context in interpretation as well as the relevance of linguistic and unconscious elements of the text. Literary theorists trace the history and evolution of the different genres—narrative, dramatic, lyric—in addition to the more recent emergence of the novel and the short story, while also investigating the importance of formal elements of literary structure. Lastly, literary theory in recent years has sought to explain the degree to which the text is more the product of a culture than an individual author and in turn how those texts help to create the culture.Traditional Literary CriticismFormalism and New CriticismMarxism and Critical TheoryStructuralism and PoststructuralismNew Historicism and Cultural MaterialismEthnic Studies and Postcolonial CriticismGender Studies and Queer Theory"Literary theory," sometimes designated "critical theory," or "theory," and now undergoing a transformation into "cultural theory" within the discipline of literary studies, can be understood as the set of concepts and intellectual assumptions on which rests the work of explaining or interpreting literary texts. Literary theory refers to any principles derived from internal analysis of literary texts or from knowledge external to the text that can be applied in multiple interpretive situations. All critical practice regarding literature depends on an underlying structure of ideas in at least two ways: theory provides a rationale for what constitutes the subject matter of criticism—"the literary"—and the specific aims of critical practice—the act of interpretation itself. For example, to speak of the "unity" of Oedipus the King explicitly invokes Aristotle's theoretical statements on poetics. To argue, as does Chinua Achebe, that Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness fails to grant full humanity to the Africans it depicts is a perspective informed by a postcolonial literary theory that presupposes a history of exploitation and racism. Critics that explain the climactic drowning of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening as a suicide generally call upon a supporting architecture of feminist and gender theory. The structure of ideas that enables criticism of a literary work may or may not be acknowledged by the critic, and the status of literary theory within the academic discipline of literary studies continues to evolve.Literary theory and the formal practice of literary interpretation runs a parallel but less well known course with the history of philosophy and is evident in the historical record at least as far back as Plato. The Cratylus contains a Plato's meditation on the relationship of words and the things to which they refer. Plato’s skepticism about signification, i.e., that words bear no etymological relationship to their meanings but are arbitrarily "imposed," becomes a central concern in the twentieth century to both "Structuralism" and "Poststructuralism." However, a persistent belief in "reference," the notion that words and images refer to an objective reality, has provided epistemological (that is, having to do with theories of knowledge) support for theories of literary representation throughout most of Western history. Until the nineteenth century, Art, in Shakespeare’s phrase, held "a mirror up to nature" and faithfully recorded an objectively real world independent of the observer.Modern literary theory gradually emerges in Europe during the nineteenth century. In one of the earliest developments of literary theory, German "higher criticism" subjected biblical texts to a radical historicizing that broke with traditional scriptural interpretation. "Higher," or "source criticism," analyzed biblical tales in light of comparable narratives from other cultures, an approach that anticipated some of the method and spirit of twentieth century theory, particularly "Structuralism" and "New Historicism." In France, the eminent literary critic Charles Augustin Saint Beuve maintained that a work of literature could be explained entirely in terms of biography, while novelist Marcel Proust devoted his life to refuting Saint Beuve in a massive narrative in which he contended that the details of the life of the artist are utterly transformed in the work of art. (This dispute was taken up anew by the French theorist Roland Barthes in his famous declaration of the "Death of the Author." See "Structuralism" and "Poststructuralism.") Perhaps the greatest nineteenth century influence on literary theory came from the deep epistemological suspicion of Friedrich Nietzsche: that facts are not facts until they have been interpreted. Nietzsche's critique of knowledge has had a profound impact on literary studies and helped usher in an era of intense literary theorizing that has yet to pass.Attention to the etymology of the term "theory," from the Greek "theoria," alerts us to the partial nature of theoretical approaches to literature. "Theoria" indicates a view or perspective of the Greek stage. This is precisely what literary theory offers, though specific theories often claim to present a complete system for understanding literature. The current state of theory is such that there are many overlapping areas of influence, and older schools of theory, though no longer enjoying their previous eminence, continue to exert an influence on the whole. The once widely-held conviction (an implicit theory) that literature is a repository of all that is meaningful and ennobling in the human experience, a view championed by the Leavis School in Britain, may no longer be acknowledged by name but remains an essential justification for the current structure of American universities and liberal arts curricula. The moment of "Deconstruction" may have passed, but its emphasis on the indeterminacy of signs (that we are unable to establish exclusively what a word means when used in a given situation) and thus of texts, remains significant. Many critics may not embrace the label "feminist," but the premise that gender is a social construct, one of theoretical feminisms distinguishing insights, is now axiomatic in a number of theoretical perspectives.While literary theory has always implied or directly expressed a conception of the world outside the text, in the twentieth century three movements—"Marxist theory" of the Frankfurt School, "Feminism," and "Postmodernism"—have opened the field of literary studies into a broader area of inquiry. Marxist approaches to literature require an understanding of the primary economic and social bases of culture since Marxist aesthetic theory sees the work of art as a product, directly or indirectly, of the base structure of society. Feminist thought and practice analyzes the production of literature and literary representation within the framework that includes all social and cultural formations as they pertain to the role of women in history. Postmodern thought consists of both aesthetic and epistemological strands. Postmodernism in art has included a move toward non-referential, non-linear, abstract forms; a heightened degree of self-referentiality; and the collapse of categories and conventions that had traditionally governed art. Postmodern thought has led to the serious questioning of the so-called metanarratives of history, science, philosophy, and economic and sexual reproduction. Under postmodernity, all knowledge comes to be seen as "constructed" within historical self-contained systems of understanding. Marxist, feminist, and postmodern thought have brought about the incorporation of all human discourses (that is, interlocking fields of language and knowledge) as a subject matter for analysis by the literary theorist. Using the various poststructuralist and postmodern theories that often draw on disciplines other than the literary—linguistic, anthropological, psychoanalytic, and philosophical—for their primary insights, literary theory has become an interdisciplinary body of cultural theory. Taking as its premise that human societies and knowledge consist of texts in one form or another, cultural theory (for better or worse) is now applied to the varieties of texts, ambitiously undertaking to become the preeminent model of inquiry into the human condition.Literary theory is a site of theories: some theories, like "Queer Theory," are "in;" other literary theories, like "Deconstruction," are "out" but continue to exert an influence on the field. "Traditional literary criticism," "New Criticism," and "Structuralism" are alike in that they held to the view that the study of literature has an objective body of knowledge under its scrutiny. The other schools of literary theory, to varying degrees, embrace a postmodern view of language and reality that calls into serious question the objective referent of literary studies. The following categories are certainly not exhaustive, nor are they mutually exclusive, but they represent the major trends in literary theory of this century.2. Traditional Literary CriticismAcademic literary criticism prior to the rise of "New Criticism" in the United States tended to practice traditional literary history: tracking influence, establishing the canon of major writers in the literary periods, and clarifying historical context and allusions within the text. Literary biography was and still is an important interpretive method in and out of the academy; versions of moral criticism, not unlike the Leavis School in Britain, and aesthetic (e.g. genre studies) criticism were also generally influential literary practices. Perhaps the key unifying feature of traditional literary criticism was the consensus within the academy as to the both the literary canon (that is, the books all educated persons should read) and the aims and purposes of literature. What literature was, and why we read literature, and what we read, were questions that subsequent movements in literary theory were to raise.3. Formalism and New Criticism"Formalism" is, as the name implies, an interpretive approach that emphasizes literary form and the study of literary devices within the text. The work of the Formalists had a general impact on later developments in "Structuralism" and other theories of narrative. "Formalism," like "Structuralism," sought to place the study of literature on a scientific basis through objective analysis of the motifs, devices, techniques, and other "functions" that comprise the literary work. The Formalists placed great importance on the literariness of texts, those qualities that distinguished the literary from other kinds of writing. Neither author nor context was essential for the Formalists; it was the narrative that spoke, the "hero-function," for example, that had meaning. Form was the content. A plot device or narrative strategy was examined for how it functioned and compared to how it had functioned in other literary works. Of the Russian Formalist critics, Roman Jakobson and Viktor Shklovsky are probably the most well known.The Formalist adage that the purpose of literature was "to make the stones stonier" nicely expresses their notion of literariness. "Formalism" is perhaps best known is Shklovsky's concept of "defamiliarization." The routine of ordinary experience, Shklovsky contended, rendered invisible the uniqueness and particularity of the objects of existence. Literary language, partly by calling attention to itself as language, estranged the reader from the familiar and made fresh the experience of daily life.The "New Criticism," so designated as to indicate a break with traditional methods, was a product of the American university in the 1930s and 40s. "New Criticism" stressed close reading of the text itself, much like the French pedagogical precept "explication du texte." As a strategy of reading, "New Criticism" viewed the work of literature as an aesthetic object independent of historical context and as a unified whole that reflected the unified sensibility of the artist. T.S. Eliot, though not explicitly associated with the movement, expressed a similar critical-aesthetic philosophy in his essays on John Donne and the metaphysical poets, writers who Eliot believed experienced a complete integration of thought and feeling. New Critics like Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and W.K. Wimsatt placed a similar focus on the metaphysical poets and poetry in general, a genre well suited to New Critical practice. "New Criticism" aimed at bringing a greater intellectual rigor to literary studies, confining itself to careful scrutiny of the text alone and the formal structures of paradox, ambiguity, irony, and metaphor, among others. "New Criticism" was fired by the conviction that their readings of poetry would yield a humanizing influence on readers and thus counter the alienating tendencies of modern, industrial life. "New Criticism" in this regard bears an affinity to the Southern Agrarian movement whose manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, contained essays by two New Critics, Ransom and Warren. Perhaps the enduring legacy of "New Criticism" can be found in the college classroom, in which the verbal texture of the poem on the page remains a primary object of literary study.4. Marxism and Critical TheoryMarxist literary theories tend to focus on the representation of class conflict as well as the reinforcement of class distinctions through the medium of literature. Marxist theorists use traditional techniques of literary analysis but subordinate aesthetic concerns to the final social and political meanings of literature. Marxist theorist often champion authors sympathetic to the working classes and authors whose work challenges economic equalities found in capitalist societies. In keeping with the totalizing spirit of Marxism, literary theories arising from the Marxist paradigm have not only sought new ways of understanding the relationship between economic production and literature, but all cultural production as well. Marxist analyses of society and history have had a profound effect on literary theory and practical criticism, most notably in the development of "New Historicism" and "Cultural Materialism."The Hungarian theorist Georg Lukacs contributed to an understanding of the relationship between historical materialism and literary form, in particular with realism and the historical novel. Walter Benjamin broke new ground in his work in his study of aesthetics and the reproduction of the work of art. The Frankfurt School of philosophers, including most notably Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse—after their emigration to the United States—played a key role in introducing Marxist assessments of culture into the mainstream of American academic life. These thinkers became associated with what is known as "Critical theory," one of the constituent components of which was a critique of the instrumental use of reason in advanced capitalist culture. "Critical theory" held to a distinction between the high cultural heritage of Europe and the mass culture produced by capitalist societies as an instrument of domination. "Critical theory" sees in the structure of mass cultural forms—jazz, Hollywood film, advertising—a replication of the structure of the factory and the workplace. Creativity and cultural production in advanced capitalist societies were always already co-opted by the entertainment needs of an economic system that requires sensory stimulation and recognizable cliché and suppressed the tendency for sustained deliberation.The major Marxist influences on literary theory since the Frankfurt School have been Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton in Great Britain and Frank Lentricchia and Fredric Jameson in the United States. Williams is associated with the New Left political movement in Great Britain and the development of "Cultural Materialism" and the Cultural Studies Movement, originating in the 1960s at Birmingham University's Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Eagleton is known both as a Marxist theorist and as a popularizer of theory by means of his widely read overview, Literary Theory. Lentricchia likewise became influential through his account of trends in theory, After the New Criticism. Jameson is a more diverse theorist, known both for his impact on Marxist theories of culture and for his position as one of the leading figures in theoretical postmodernism. Jameson’s work on consumer culture, architecture, film, literature and other areas, typifies the collapse of disciplinary boundaries taking place in the realm of Marxist and postmodern cultural theory. Jameson’s work investigates the way the structural features of late capitalism—particularly the transformation of all culture into commodity form—are now deeply embedded in all of our ways of communicating.5. Structuralism and PoststructuralismLike the "New Criticism," "Structuralism" sought to bring to literary studies a set of objective criteria for analysis and a new intellectual rigor. "Structuralism" can be viewed as an extension of "Formalism" in that that both "Structuralism" and "Formalism" devoted their attention to matters of literary form (i.e. structure) rather than social or historical content; and that both bodies of thought were intended to put the study of literature on a scientific, objective basis. "Structuralism" relied initially on the ideas of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure. Like Plato, Saussure regarded the signifier (words, marks, symbols) as arbitrary and unrelated to the concept, the signified, to which it referred. Within the way a particular society uses language and signs, meaning was constituted by a system of "differences" between units of the language. Particular meanings were of less interest than the underlying structures of signification that made meaning itself possible, often expressed as an emphasis on "langue" rather than "parole." "Structuralism" was to be a metalanguage, a language about languages, used to decode actual languages, or systems of signification. The work of the "Formalist" Roman Jakobson contributed to "Structuralist" thought, and the more prominent Structuralists included Claude Levi-Strauss in anthropology, Tzvetan Todorov, A.J. Greimas, Gerard Genette, and Barthes.The philosopher Roland Barthes proved to be a key figure on the divide between "Structuralism" and "Poststructuralism." "Poststructuralism" is less unified as a theoretical movement than its precursor; indeed, the work of its advocates known by the term "Deconstruction" calls into question the possibility of the coherence of discourse, or the capacity for language to communicate. "Deconstruction," Semiotic theory (a study of signs with close connections to "Structuralism," "Reader response theory" in America ("Reception theory" in Europe), and "Gender theory" informed by the psychoanalysts Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva are areas of inquiry that can be located under the banner of "Poststructuralism." If signifier and signified are both cultural concepts, as they are in "Poststructuralism," reference to an empirically certifiable reality is no longer guaranteed by language. "Deconstruction" argues that this loss of reference causes an endless deferral of meaning, a system of differences between units of language that has no resting place or final signifier that would enable the other signifiers to hold their meaning. The most important theorist of "Deconstruction," Jacques Derrida, has asserted, "There is no getting outside text," indicating a kind of free play of signification in which no fixed, stable meaning is possible. "Poststructuralism" in America was originally identified with a group of Yale academics, the Yale School of "Deconstruction:" J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartmann, and Paul de Man. Other tendencies in the moment after "Deconstruction" that share some of the intellectual tendencies of "Poststructuralism" would included the "Reader response" theories of Stanley Fish, Jane Tompkins, and Wolfgang Iser.Lacanian psychoanalysis, an updating of the work of Sigmund Freud, extends "Postructuralism" to the human subject with further consequences for literary theory. According to Lacan, the fixed, stable self is a Romantic fiction; like the text in "Deconstruction," the self is a decentered mass of traces left by our encounter with signs, visual symbols, language, etc. For Lacan, the self is constituted by language, a language that is never one's own, always another’s, always already in use. Barthes applies these currents of thought in his famous declaration of the "death" of the Author: "writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin" while also applying a similar "Poststructuralist" view to the Reader: "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."Michel Foucault is another philosopher, like Barthes, whose ideas inform much of poststructuralist literary theory. Foucault played a critical role in the development of the postmodern perspective that knowledge is constructed in concrete historical situations in the form of discourse; knowledge is not communicated by discourse but is discourse itself, can only be encountered textually. Following Nietzsche, Foucault performs what he calls "genealogies," attempts at deconstructing the unacknowledged operation of power and knowledge to reveal the ideologies that make domination of one group by another seem "natural." Foucaldian investigations of discourse and power were to provide much of the intellectual impetus for a new way of looking at history and doing textual studies that came to be known as the "New Historicism."6. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism"New Historicism," a term coined by Stephen Greenblatt, designates a body of theoretical and interpretive practices that began largely with the study of early modern literature in the United States. "New Historicism" in America had been somewhat anticipated by the theorists of "Cultural Materialism" in Britain, which, in the words of their leading advocate, Raymond Williams describes "the analysis of all forms of signification, including quite centrally writing, within the actual means and conditions of their production." Both "New Historicism" and "Cultural Materialism" seek to understand literary texts historically and reject the formalizing influence of previous literary studies, including "New Criticism," "Structuralism" and "Deconstruction," all of which in varying ways privilege the literary text and place only secondary emphasis on historical and social context. According to "New Historicism," the circulation of literary and non-literary texts produces relations of social power within a culture. New Historicist thought differs from traditional historicism in literary studies in several crucial ways. Rejecting traditional historicism's premise of neutral inquiry, "New Historicism" accepts the necessity of making historical value judgments. According to "New Historicism," we can only know the textual history of the past because it is "embedded," a key term, in the textuality of the present and its concerns. Text and context are less clearly distinct in New Historicist practice. Traditional separations of literary and non-literary texts, "great" literature and popular literature, are also fundamentally challenged. For the "New Historicist," all acts of expression are embedded in the material conditions of a culture. Texts are examined with an eye for how they reveal the economic and social realities, especially as they produce ideology and represent power or subversion. Like much of the emergent European social history of the 1980s, "New Historicism" takes particular interest in representations of marginal/marginalized groups and non-normative behaviors—witchcraft, cross-dressing, peasant revolts, and exorcisms—as exemplary of the need for power to represent subversive alternatives, the Other, to legitimize itself.Louis Montrose, another major innovator and exponent of "New Historicism," describes a fundamental axiom of the movement as an intellectual belief in "the textuality of history and the historicity of texts." "New Historicism" draws on the work of Levi-Strauss, in particular his notion of culture as a "self-regulating system." The Foucaldian premise that power is ubiquitous and cannot be equated with state or economic power and Gramsci's conception of "hegemony," i.e., that domination is often achieved through culturally-orchestrated consent rather than force, are critical underpinnings to the "New Historicist" perspective. The translation of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin on carnival coincided with the rise of the "New Historicism" and "Cultural Materialism" and left a legacy in work of other theorists of influence like Peter Stallybrass and Jonathan Dollimore. In its period of ascendancy during the 1980s, "New Historicism" drew criticism from the political left for its depiction of counter-cultural expression as always co-opted by the dominant discourses. Equally, "New Historicism’s" lack of emphasis on "literariness" and formal literary concerns brought disdain from traditional literary scholars. However, "New Historicism" continues to exercise a major influence in the humanities and in the extended conception of literary studies.7. Ethnic Studies and Postcolonial Criticism"Ethnic Studies," sometimes referred to as "Minority Studies," has an obvious historical relationship with "Postcolonial Criticism" in that Euro-American imperialism and colonization in the last four centuries, whether external (empire) or internal (slavery) has been directed at recognizable ethnic groups: African and African-American, Chinese, the subaltern peoples of India, Irish, Latino, Native American, and Philipino, among others. "Ethnic Studies" concerns itself generally with art and literature produced by identifiable ethnic groups either marginalized or in a subordinate position to a dominant culture. "Postcolonial Criticism" investigates the relationships between colonizers and colonized in the period post-colonization. Though the two fields are increasingly finding points of intersection—the work of bell hooks, for example—and are both activist intellectual enterprises, "Ethnic Studies and "Postcolonial Criticism" have significant differences in their history and ideas."Ethnic Studies" has had a considerable impact on literary studies in the United States and Britain. In W.E.B. Dubois, we find an early attempt to theorize the position of African-Americans within dominant white culture through his concept of "double consciousness," a dual identity including both "American" and "Negro." Dubois and theorists after him seek an understanding of how that double experience both creates identity and reveals itself in culture. Afro-Caribbean and African writers—Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe—have made significant early contributions to the theory and practice of ethnic criticism that explores the traditions, sometimes suppressed or underground, of ethnic literary activity while providing a critique of representations of ethnic identity as found within the majority culture. Ethnic and minority literary theory emphasizes the relationship of cultural identity to individual identity in historical circumstances of overt racial oppression. More recently, scholars and writers such as Henry Louis Gates, Toni Morrison, and Kwame Anthony Appiah have brought attention to the problems inherent in applying theoretical models derived from Euro-centric paradigms (that is, structures of thought) to minority works of literature while at the same time exploring new interpretive strategies for understanding the vernacular (common speech) traditions of racial groups that have been historically marginalized by dominant cultures.Though not the first writer to explore the historical condition of postcolonialism, the Palestinian literary theorist Edward Said's book Orientalism is generally regarded as having inaugurated the field of explicitly "Postcolonial Criticism" in the West. Said argues that the concept of "the Orient" was produced by the "imaginative geography" of Western scholarship and has been instrumental in the colonization and domination of non-Western societies. "Postcolonial" theory reverses the historical center/margin direction of cultural inquiry: critiques of the metropolis and capital now emanate from the former colonies. Moreover, theorists like Homi K. Bhabha have questioned the binary thought that produces the dichotomies—center/margin, white/black, and colonizer/colonized—by which colonial practices are justified. The work of Gayatri C. Spivak has focused attention on the question of who speaks for the colonial "Other" and the relation of the ownership of discourse and representation to the development of the postcolonial subjectivity. Like feminist and ethnic theory, "Postcolonial Criticism" pursues not merely the inclusion of the marginalized literature of colonial peoples into the dominant canon and discourse. "Postcolonial Criticism" offers a fundamental critique of the ideology of colonial domination and at the same time seeks to undo the "imaginative geography" of Orientalist thought that produced conceptual as well as economic divides between West and East, civilized and uncivilized, First and Third Worlds. In this respect, "Postcolonial Criticism" is activist and adversarial in its basic aims. Postcolonial theory has brought fresh perspectives to the role of colonial peoples—their wealth, labor, and culture—in the development of modern European nation states. While "Postcolonial Criticism" emerged in the historical moment following the collapse of the modern colonial empires, the increasing globalization of culture, including the neo-colonialism of multinational capitalism, suggests a continued relevance for this field of inquiry.8. Gender Studies and Queer TheoryGender theory came to the forefront of the theoretical scene first as feminist theory but has subsequently come to include the investigation of all gender and sexual categories and identities. Feminist gender theory followed slightly behind the reemergence of political feminism in the United States and Western Europe during the 1960s. Political feminism of the so-called "second wave" had as its emphasis practical concerns with the rights of women in contemporary societies, women's identity, and the representation of women in media and culture. These causes converged with early literary feminist practice, characterized by Elaine Showalter as "gynocriticism," which emphasized the study and canonical inclusion of works by female authors as well as the depiction of women in male-authored canonical texts.Feminist gender theory is postmodern in that it challenges the paradigms and intellectual premises of western thought, but also takes an activist stance by proposing frequent interventions and alternative epistemological positions meant to change the social order. In the context of postmodernism, gender theorists, led by the work of Judith Butler, initially viewed the category of "gender" as a human construct enacted by a vast repetition of social performance. The biological distinction between man and woman eventually came under the same scrutiny by theorists who reached a similar conclusion: the sexual categories are products of culture and as such help create social reality rather than simply reflect it. Gender theory achieved a wide readership and acquired much its initial theoretical rigor through the work of a group of French feminist theorists that included Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and Julia Kristeva, who while Bulgarian rather than French, made her mark writing in French. French feminist thought is based on the assumption that the Western philosophical tradition represses the experience of women in the structure of its ideas. As an important consequence of this systematic intellectual repression and exclusion, women's lives and bodies in historical societies are subject to repression as well. In the creative/critical work of Cixous, we find the history of Western thought depicted as binary oppositions: "speech/writing; Nature/Art, Nature/History, Nature/Mind, Passion/Action." For Cixous, and for Irigaray as well, these binaries are less a function of any objective reality they describe than the male-dominated discourse of the Western tradition that produced them. Their work beyond the descriptive stage becomes an intervention in the history of theoretical discourse, an attempt to alter the existing categories and systems of thought that found Western rationality. French feminism, and perhaps all feminism after Beauvoir, has been in conversation with the psychoanalytic revision of Freud in the work of Jacques Lacan. Kristeva’s work draws heavily on Lacan. Two concepts from Kristeva—the "semiotic" and "abjection"—have had a significant influence on literary theory. Kristeva’s "semiotic" refers to the gaps, silences, spaces, and bodily presence within the language/symbol system of a culture in which there might be a space for a women’s language, different in kind as it would be from male-dominated discourse.Masculine gender theory as a separate enterprise has focused largely on social, literary, and historical accounts of the construction of male gender identities. Such work generally lacks feminisms' activist stance and tends to serve primarily as an indictment rather than a validation of male gender practices and masculinity. The so-called "Men’s Movement," inspired by the work of Robert Bly among others, was more practical than theoretical and has had only limited impact on gender discourse. The impetus for the "Men’s Movement" came largely as a response to the critique of masculinity and male domination that runs throughout feminism and the upheaval of the 1960s, a period of crisis in American social ideology that has required a reconsideration of gender roles. Having long served as the de facto "subject" of Western thought, male identity and masculine gender theory awaits serious investigation as a particular, and no longer universally representative, field of inquiry.Much of what theoretical energy of masculine gender theory currently possesses comes from its ambiguous relationship with the field of "Queer theory." "Queer theory" is not synonymous with gender theory, nor even with the overlapping fields of gay and lesbian studies, but does share many of their concerns with normative definitions of man, woman, and sexuality. "Queer theory" questions the fixed categories of sexual identity and the cognitive paradigms generated by normative (that is, what is considered "normal") sexual ideology. To "queer" becomes an act by which stable boundaries of sexual identity are transgressed, reversed, mimicked, or otherwise critiqued. "Queering" can be enacted on behalf of all non-normative sexualities and identities as well, all that is considered by the dominant paradigms of culture to be alien, strange, unfamiliar, transgressive, odd—in short, queer. Michel Foucault's work on sexuality anticipates and informs the Queer theoretical movement in a role similar to the way his writing on power and discourse prepared the ground for "New Historicism." Judith Butler contends that heterosexual identity long held to be a normative ground of sexuality is actually produced by the suppression of homoerotic possibility. Eve Sedgwick is another pioneering theorist of "Queer theory," and like Butler, Sedgwick maintains that the dominance of heterosexual culture conceals the extensive presence of homosocial relations. For Sedgwick, the standard histories of western societies are presented in exclusively in terms of heterosexual identity: "Inheritance, Marriage, Dynasty, Family, Domesticity, Population," and thus conceiving of homosexual identity within this framework is already problematic.9. Cultural StudiesMuch of the intellectual legacy of "New Historicism" and "Cultural Materialism" can now be felt in the "Cultural Studies" movement in departments of literature, a movement not identifiable in terms of a single theoretical school, but one that embraces a wide array of perspectives—media studies, social criticism, anthropology, and literary theory—as they apply to the general study of culture. "Cultural Studies" arose quite self-consciously in the 80s to provide a means of analysis of the rapidly expanding global culture industry that includes entertainment, advertising, publishing, television, film, computers and the Internet. "Cultural Studies" brings scrutiny not only to these varied categories of culture, and not only to the decreasing margins of difference between these realms of expression, but just as importantly to the politics and ideology that make contemporary culture possible. "Cultural Studies" became notorious in the 90s for its emphasis on pop music icons and music video in place of canonical literature, and extends the ideas of the Frankfurt School on the transition from a truly popular culture to mass culture in late capitalist societies, emphasizing the significance of the patterns of consumption of cultural artifacts. "Cultural Studies" has been interdisciplinary, even antidisciplinary, from its inception; indeed, "Cultural Studies" can be understood as a set of sometimes conflicting methods and approaches applied to a questioning of current cultural categories. Stuart Hall, Meaghan Morris, Tony Bennett and Simon During are some of the important advocates of a "Cultural Studies" that seeks to displace the traditional model of literary studies.◆◆ READ THE FOLLOWING IMPORTANT BOOKS TO KNOW FURTHER ON THE MATTER ◆◆Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.During, Simon. Ed. The Cultural Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1999.Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.Moore-Gilbert, Bart, Stanton, Gareth, and Maley, Willy. Eds. Postcolonial Criticism. New York: Addison, Wesley, Longman, 1997.Rice, Philip and Waugh, Patricia. Eds. Modern Literary Theory: A Reader. 4th edition.Richter, David H. Ed. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. 2nd Ed. Bedford Books: Boston, 1998.Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael. Eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1998.b. Literary and Cultural TheoryAdorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Ed. J. M. Bernstein. London: Routledge, 2001.Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy: And Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans.Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953.Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981.Barthes, Roland. Image—Music—Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Tr. H.M. Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1953.Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1988.Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Harcourt, 1947.Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976.Dubois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903.Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1. An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1981.Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973.Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.hooks, bell. Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press, 1981.Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985.Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. London: Routledge, 2001.Lemon Lee T. and Reis, Marion J. Eds. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1965.Lukacs, Georg. The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1962.Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1969.Plato. The Collected Dialogues. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961.Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York: Vintage, 1982.Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men. Between Men: English literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky Epistemology of the Closet. London: Penguin, 1994.Showalter, Elaine. Ed. The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory. London: Virago, 1986.Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: the Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.Wellek, Rene and Warren, Austin. Theory of Literature. 3rd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956.Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING AS CLOSELY AS POSSIBLE:Literary theory is the body of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of literature. By literary theory we refer not to the meaning of a work of literature but to the theories that reveal what literature can mean. Literary theory is a description of the underlying principles, one might say the tools, by which we attempt to understand literature. All literary interpretation draws on a basis in theory but can serve as a justification for very different kinds of critical activity. It is literary theory that formulates the relationship between author and work; literary theory develops the significance of race, class, and gender for literary study, both from the standpoint of the biography of the author and an analysis of their thematic presence within texts. Literary theory offers varying approaches for understanding the role of historical context in interpretation as well as the relevance of linguistic and unconscious elements of the text. Literary theorists trace the history and evolution of the different genres—narrative, dramatic, lyric—in addition to the more recent emergence of the novel and the short story, while also investigating the importance of formal elements of literary structure. Lastly, literary theory in recent years has sought to explain the degree to which the text is more the product of a culture than an individual author and in turn how those texts help to create the culture."Literary theory," sometimes designated "critical theory," or "theory," and now undergoing a transformation into "cultural theory" within the discipline of literary studies, can be understood as the set of concepts and intellectual assumptions on which rests the work of explaining or interpreting literary texts. Literary theory refers to any principles derived from internal analysis of literary texts or from knowledge external to the text that can be applied in multiple interpretive situations. All critical practice regarding literature depends on an underlying structure of ideas in at least two ways: theory provides a rationale for what constitutes the subject matter of criticism—"the literary"—and the specific aims of critical practice—the act of interpretation itself. For example, to speak of the "unity" of Oedipus the Kingexplicitly invokes Aristotle's theoretical statements on poetics. To argue, as does Chinua Achebe, that Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness fails to grant full humanity to the Africans it depicts is a perspective informed by a postcolonial literary theory that presupposes a history of exploitation and racism. Critics that explain the climactic drowning of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening as a suicide generally call upon a supporting architecture of feminist and gender theory. The structure of ideas that enables criticism of a literary work may or may not be acknowledged by the critic, and the status of literary theory within the academic discipline of literary studies continues to evolve.Literary theory and the formal practice of literary interpretation runs a parallel but less well known course with the history of philosophy and is evident in the historical record at least as far back as Plato. The Cratylus contains a Plato's meditation on the relationship of words and the things to which they refer. Plato’s skepticism about signification, i.e., that words bear no etymological relationship to their meanings but are arbitrarily "imposed," becomes a central concern in the twentieth century to both "Structuralism" and "Poststructuralism." However, a persistent belief in "reference," the notion that words and images refer to an objective reality, has provided epistemological (that is, having to do with theories of knowledge) support for theories of literary representation throughout most of Western history. Until the nineteenth century, Art, in Shakespeare’s phrase, held "a mirror up to nature" and faithfully recorded an objectively real world independent of the observer.Modern literary theory gradually emerges in Europe during the nineteenth century. In one of the earliest developments of literary theory, German "higher criticism" subjected biblical texts to a radical historicizing that broke with traditional scriptural interpretation. "Higher," or "source criticism," analyzed biblical tales in light of comparable narratives from other cultures, an approach that anticipated some of the method and spirit of twentieth century theory, particularly "Structuralism" and "New Historicism." In France, the eminent literary critic Charles AugustinSaint Beuve maintained that a work of literature could be explained entirely in terms of biography, while novelist Marcel Proust devoted his life to refuting Saint Beuve in a massive narrative in which he contended that the details of the life of the artist are utterly transformed in the work of art. (This dispute was taken up anew by the French theorist Roland Barthes in his famous declaration of the "Death of the Author." See "Structuralism" and "Poststructuralism.") Perhaps the greatest nineteenth century influence on literary theory came from the deep epistemological suspicion of Friedrich Nietzsche: that facts are not facts until they have been interpreted. Nietzsche's critique of knowledge has had a profound impact on literary studies and helped usher in an era of intense literary theorizing that has yet to pass.Attention to the etymology of the term "theory," from the Greek "theoria," alerts us to the partial nature of theoretical approaches to literature. "Theoria" indicates a view or perspective of the Greek stage. This is precisely what literary theory offers, though specific theories often claim to present a complete system for understanding literature. The current state of theory is such that there are many overlapping areas of influence, and older schools of theory, though no longer enjoying their previous eminence, continue to exert an influence on the whole. The once widely-held conviction (an implicit theory) that literature is a repository of all that is meaningful and ennobling in the human experience, a view championed by the Leavis School in Britain, may no longer be acknowledged by name but remains an essential justification for the current structure of American universities and liberal arts curricula. The moment of "Deconstruction" may have passed, but its emphasis on the indeterminacy of signs (that we are unable to establish exclusively what a word means when used in a given situation) and thus of texts, remains significant. Many critics may not embrace the label "feminist," but the premise that gender is a social construct, one of theoretical feminisms distinguishing insights, is now axiomatic in a number of theoretical perspectives.While literary theory has always implied or directly expressed a conception of the world outside the text, in the twentieth century three movements—"Marxist theory" of the Frankfurt School, "Feminism," and "Postmodernism"—have opened the field of literary studies into a broader area of inquiry. Marxist approaches to literature require an understanding of the primary economic and social bases of culture since Marxist aesthetic theory sees the work of art as a product, directly or indirectly, of the base structure of society. Feminist thought and practice analyzes the production of literature and literary representation within the framework that includes all social and cultural formations as they pertain to the role of women in history. Postmodern thought consists of both aesthetic and epistemological strands. Postmodernism in art has included a move toward non-referential, non-linear, abstract forms; a heightened degree of self-referentiality; and the collapse of categories and conventions that had traditionally governed art. Postmodern thought has led to the serious questioning of the so-called metanarratives of history, science, philosophy, and economic and sexual reproduction. Under postmodernity, all knowledge comes to be seen as "constructed" within historical self-contained systems of understanding. Marxist, feminist, and postmodern thought have brought about the incorporation of all human discourses (that is, interlocking fields of language and knowledge) as a subject matter for analysis by the literary theorist. Using the various poststructuralist and postmodern theories that often draw on disciplines other than the literary—linguistic, anthropological, psychoanalytic, and philosophical—for their primary insights, literary theory has become an interdisciplinary body of cultural theory. Taking as its premise that human societies and knowledge consist of texts in one form or another, cultural theory (for better or worse) is now applied to the varieties of texts, ambitiously undertaking to become the preeminent model of inquiry into the human condition.Literary theory is a site of theories: some theories, like "Queer Theory," are "in;" other literary theories, like "Deconstruction," are "out" but continue to exert an influence on the field. "Traditional literary criticism," "New Criticism," and "Structuralism" are alike in that they held to the view that the study of literature has an objective body of knowledge under its scrutiny. The other schools of literary theory, to varying degrees, embrace a postmodern view of language and reality that calls into serious question the objective referent of literary studies. The following categories are certainly not exhaustive, nor are they mutually exclusive, but they represent the major trends in literary theory of this century.2. Traditional Literary CriticismAcademic literary criticism prior to the rise of "New Criticism" in the United States tended to practice traditional literary history: tracking influence, establishing the canon of major writers in the literary periods, and clarifying historical context and allusions within the text. Literary biography was and still is an important interpretive method in and out of the academy; versions of moral criticism, not unlike the Leavis School in Britain, and aesthetic (e.g. genre studies) criticism were also generally influential literary practices. Perhaps the key unifying feature of traditional literary criticism was the consensus within the academy as to the both the literary canon (that is, the books all educated persons should read) and the aims and purposes of literature. What literature was, and why we read literature, and what we read, were questions that subsequent movements in literary theory were to raise.3. Formalism and New Criticism"Formalism" is, as the name implies, an interpretive approach that emphasizes literary form and the study of literary devices within the text. The work of the Formalists had a general impact on later developments in "Structuralism" and other theories of narrative. "Formalism," like "Structuralism," sought to place the study of literature on a scientific basis through objective analysis of the motifs, devices, techniques, and other "functions" that comprise the literary work. The Formalists placed great importance on the literariness of texts, those qualities that distinguished the literary from other kinds of writing. Neither author nor context was essential for the Formalists; it was the narrative that spoke, the "hero-function," for example, that had meaning. Form was the content. A plot device or narrative strategy was examined for how it functioned and compared to how it had functioned in other literary works. Of the Russian Formalist critics, Roman Jakobson and Viktor Shklovsky are probably the most well known.The Formalist adage that the purpose of literature was "to make the stones stonier" nicely expresses their notion of literariness. "Formalism" is perhaps best known is Shklovsky's concept of "defamiliarization." The routine of ordinary experience, Shklovsky contended, rendered invisible the uniqueness and particularity of the objects of existence. Literary language, partly by calling attention to itself as language, estranged the reader from the familiar and made fresh the experience of daily life.The "New Criticism," so designated as to indicate a break with traditional methods, was a product of the American university in the 1930s and 40s. "New Criticism" stressed close reading of the text itself, much like the French pedagogical precept "explication du texte." As a strategy of reading, "New Criticism" viewed the work of literature as an aesthetic object independent of historical context and as a unified whole that reflected the unified sensibility of the artist. T.S. Eliot, though not explicitly associated with the movement, expressed a similar critical-aesthetic philosophy in his essays on John Donne and the metaphysical poets, writers who Eliot believed experienced a complete integration of thought and feeling. New Critics like Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and W.K. Wimsatt placed a similar focus on the metaphysical poets and poetry in general, a genre well suited to New Critical practice. "New Criticism" aimed at bringing a greater intellectual rigor to literary studies, confining itself to careful scrutiny of the text alone and the formal structures of paradox, ambiguity, irony, and metaphor, among others. "New Criticism" was fired by the conviction that their readings of poetry would yield a humanizing influence on readers and thus counter the alienating tendencies of modern, industrial life. "New Criticism" in this regard bears an affinity to the Southern Agrarian movement whose manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, contained essays by two New Critics, Ransom and Warren. Perhaps the enduring legacy of "New Criticism" can be found in the college classroom, in which the verbal texture of the poem on the page remains a primary object of literary study.4. Marxism and Critical TheoryMarxist literary theories tend to focus on the representation of class conflict as well as the reinforcement of class distinctions through the medium of literature. Marxist theorists use traditional techniques of literary analysis but subordinate aesthetic concerns to the final social and political meanings of literature. Marxist theorist often champion authors sympathetic to the working classes and authors whose work challenges economic equalities found in capitalist societies. In keeping with the totalizing spirit of Marxism, literary theories arising from the Marxist paradigm have not only sought new ways of understanding the relationship between economic production and literature, but all cultural production as well. Marxist analyses of society and history have had a profound effect on literary theory and practical criticism, most notably in the development of "New Historicism" and "Cultural Materialism."The Hungarian theorist Georg Lukacs contributed to an understanding of the relationship between historical materialism and literary form, in particular with realism and the historical novel. Walter Benjamin broke new ground in his work in his study of aesthetics and the reproduction of the work of art. The Frankfurt School of philosophers, including most notably Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse—after their emigration to the United States—played a key role in introducing Marxist assessments of culture into the mainstream of American academic life. These thinkers became associated with what is known as "Critical theory," one of the constituent components of which was a critique of the instrumental use of reason in advanced capitalist culture. "Critical theory" held to a distinction between the high cultural heritage of Europe and the mass culture produced by capitalist societies as an instrument of domination. "Critical theory" sees in the structure of mass cultural forms—jazz, Hollywood film, advertising—a replication of the structure of the factory and the workplace. Creativity and cultural production in advanced capitalist societies were always already co-opted by the entertainment needs of an economic system that requires sensory stimulation and recognizable cliché and suppressed the tendency for sustained deliberation.The major Marxist influences on literary theory since the Frankfurt School have been Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton in Great Britain and Frank Lentricchia and Fredric Jameson in the United States. Williams is associated with the New Left political movement in Great Britain and the development of "Cultural Materialism" and the Cultural Studies Movement, originating in the 1960s at Birmingham University's Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Eagleton is known both as a Marxist theorist and as a popularizer of theory by means of his widely read overview, Literary Theory. Lentricchia likewise became influential through his account of trends in theory, After the New Criticism. Jameson is a more diverse theorist, known both for his impact on Marxist theories of culture and for his position as one of the leading figures in theoretical postmodernism. Jameson’s work on consumer culture, architecture, film, literature and other areas, typifies the collapse of disciplinary boundaries taking place in the realm of Marxist and postmodern cultural theory. Jameson’s work investigates the way the structural features of late capitalism—particularly the transformation of all culture into commodity form—are now deeply embedded in all of our ways of communicating.5. Structuralism and PoststructuralismLike the "New Criticism," "Structuralism" sought to bring to literary studies a set of objective criteria for analysis and a new intellectual rigor. "Structuralism" can be viewed as an extension of "Formalism" in that that both "Structuralism" and "Formalism" devoted their attention to matters of literary form (i.e. structure) rather than social or historical content; and that both bodies of thought were intended to put the study of literature on a scientific, objective basis. "Structuralism" relied initially on the ideas of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure. Like Plato, Saussure regarded the signifier (words, marks, symbols) as arbitrary and unrelated to the concept, the signified, to which it referred. Within the way a particular society uses language and signs, meaning was constituted by a system of "differences" between units of the language. Particular meanings were of less interest than the underlying structures of signification that made meaning itself possible, often expressed as an emphasis on "langue" rather than "parole." "Structuralism" was to be a metalanguage, a language about languages, used to decode actual languages, or systems of signification. The work of the "Formalist" Roman Jakobson contributed to "Structuralist" thought, and the more prominent Structuralists included Claude Levi-Strauss in anthropology, Tzvetan Todorov, A.J. Greimas, Gerard Genette, and Barthes.The philosopher Roland Barthes proved to be a key figure on the divide between "Structuralism" and "Poststructuralism." "Poststructuralism" is less unified as a theoretical movement than its precursor; indeed, the work of its advocates known by the term "Deconstruction" calls into question the possibility of the coherence of discourse, or the capacity for language to communicate. "Deconstruction," Semiotic theory (a study of signs with close connections to "Structuralism," "Reader response theory" in America ("Reception theory" in Europe), and "Gender theory" informed by the psychoanalysts Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva are areas of inquiry that can be located under the banner of "Poststructuralism." If signifier and signified are both cultural concepts, as they are in "Poststructuralism," reference to an empirically certifiable reality is no longer guaranteed by language. "Deconstruction" argues that this loss of reference causes an endless deferral of meaning, a system of differences between units of language that has no resting place or final signifier that would enable the other signifiers to hold their meaning. The most important theorist of "Deconstruction," Jacques Derrida, has asserted, "There is no getting outside text," indicating a kind of free play of signification in which no fixed, stable meaning is possible. "Poststructuralism" in America was originally identified with a group of Yale academics, the Yale School of "Deconstruction:" J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartmann, and Paul de Man. Other tendencies in the moment after "Deconstruction" that share some of the intellectual tendencies of "Poststructuralism" would included the "Reader response" theories of Stanley Fish, Jane Tompkins, and Wolfgang Iser.Lacanian psychoanalysis, an updating of the work of Sigmund Freud, extends "Postructuralism" to the human subject with further consequences for literary theory. According to Lacan, the fixed, stable self is a Romantic fiction; like the text in "Deconstruction," the self is a decentered mass of traces left by our encounter with signs, visual symbols, language, etc. For Lacan, the self is constituted by language, a language that is never one's own, always another’s, always already in use. Barthes applies these currents of thought in his famous declaration of the "death" of the Author: "writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin" while also applying a similar "Poststructuralist" view to the Reader: "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."Michel Foucault is another philosopher, like Barthes, whose ideas inform much of poststructuralist literary theory. Foucault played a critical role in the development of the postmodern perspective that knowledge is constructed in concrete historical situations in the form of discourse; knowledge is not communicated by discourse but is discourse itself, can only be encountered textually. Following Nietzsche, Foucault performs what he calls "genealogies," attempts at deconstructing the unacknowledged operation of power and knowledge to reveal the ideologies that make domination of one group by another seem "natural." Foucaldian investigations of discourse and power were to provide much of the intellectual impetus for a new way of looking at history and doing textual studies that came to be known as the "New Historicism."6. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism"New Historicism," a term coined by Stephen Greenblatt, designates a body of theoretical and interpretive practices that began largely with the study of early modern literature in the United States. "New Historicism" in America had been somewhat anticipated by the theorists of "Cultural Materialism" in Britain, which, in the words of their leading advocate, Raymond Williams describes "the analysis of all forms of signification, including quite centrally writing, within the actual means and conditions of their production." Both "New Historicism" and "Cultural Materialism" seek to understand literary texts historically and reject the formalizing influence of previous literary studies, including "New Criticism," "Structuralism" and "Deconstruction," all of which in varying ways privilege the literary text and place only secondary emphasis on historical and social context. According to "New Historicism," the circulation of literary and non-literary texts produces relations of social power within a culture. New Historicist thought differs from traditional historicism in literary studies in several crucial ways. Rejecting traditional historicism's premise of neutral inquiry, "New Historicism" accepts the necessity of making historical value judgments. According to "New Historicism," we can only know the textual history of the past because it is "embedded," a key term, in the textuality of the present and its concerns. Text and context are less clearly distinct in New Historicist practice. Traditional separations of literary and non-literary texts, "great" literature and popular literature, are also fundamentally challenged. For the "New Historicist," all acts of expression are embedded in the material conditions of a culture. Texts are examined with an eye for how they reveal the economic and social realities, especially as they produce ideology and represent power or subversion. Like much of the emergent European social history of the 1980s, "New Historicism" takes particular interest in representations of marginal/marginalized groups and non-normative behaviors—witchcraft, cross-dressing, peasant revolts, and exorcisms—as exemplary of the need for power to represent subversive alternatives, the Other, to legitimize itself.Louis Montrose, another major innovator and exponent of "New Historicism," describes a fundamental axiom of the movement as an intellectual belief in "the textuality of history and the historicity of texts." "New Historicism" draws on the work of Levi-Strauss, in particular his notion of culture as a "self-regulating system." The Foucaldian premise that power is ubiquitous and cannot be equated with state or economic power and Gramsci's conception of "hegemony," i.e., that domination is often achieved through culturally-orchestrated consent rather than force, are critical underpinnings to the "New Historicist" perspective. The translation of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin on carnival coincided with the rise of the "New Historicism" and "Cultural Materialism" and left a legacy in work of other theorists of influence like Peter Stallybrass and Jonathan Dollimore. In its period of ascendancy during the 1980s, "New Historicism" drew criticism from the political left for its depiction of counter-cultural expression as always co-opted by the dominant discourses. Equally, "New Historicism’s" lack of emphasis on "literariness" and formal literary concerns brought disdain from traditional literary scholars. However, "New Historicism" continues to exercise a major influence in the humanities and in the extended conception of literary studies.7. Ethnic Studies and Postcolonial Criticism"Ethnic Studies," sometimes referred to as "Minority Studies," has an obvious historical relationship with "Postcolonial Criticism" in that Euro-American imperialism and colonization in the last four centuries, whether external (empire) or internal (slavery) has been directed at recognizable ethnic groups: African and African-American, Chinese, the subaltern peoples of India, Irish, Latino, Native American, and Philipino, among others. "Ethnic Studies" concerns itself generally with art and literature produced by identifiable ethnic groups either marginalized or in a subordinate position to a dominant culture. "Postcolonial Criticism" investigates the relationships between colonizers and colonized in the period post-colonization. Though the two fields are increasingly finding points of intersection—the work of bell hooks, for example—and are both activist intellectual enterprises, "Ethnic Studies and "Postcolonial Criticism" have significant differences in their history and ideas."Ethnic Studies" has had a considerable impact on literary studies in the United States and Britain. In W.E.B. Dubois, we find an early attempt to theorize the position of African-Americans within dominant white culture through his concept of "double consciousness," a dual identity including both "American" and "Negro." Dubois and theorists after him seek an understanding of how that double experience both creates identity and reveals itself in culture. Afro-Caribbean and African writers—Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe—have made significant early contributions to the theory and practice of ethnic criticism that explores the traditions, sometimes suppressed or underground, of ethnic literary activity while providing a critique of representations of ethnic identity as found within the majority culture. Ethnic and minority literary theory emphasizes the relationship of cultural identity to individual identity in historical circumstances of overt racial oppression. More recently, scholars and writers such as Henry Louis Gates, Toni Morrison, and Kwame Anthony Appiah have brought attention to the problems inherent in applying theoretical models derived from Euro-centric paradigms (that is, structures of thought) to minority works of literature while at the same time exploring new interpretive strategies for understanding the vernacular (common speech) traditions of racial groups that have been historically marginalized by dominant cultures.Though not the first writer to explore the historical condition of postcolonialism, the Palestinian literary theorist Edward Said's book Orientalism is generally regarded as having inaugurated the field of explicitly "Postcolonial Criticism" in the West. Said argues that the concept of "the Orient" was produced by the "imaginative geography" of Western scholarship and has been instrumental in the colonization and domination of non-Western societies. "Postcolonial" theory reverses the historical center/margin direction of cultural inquiry: critiques of the metropolis and capital now emanate from the former colonies. Moreover, theorists like Homi K. Bhabha have questioned the binary thought that produces the dichotomies—center/margin, white/black, and colonizer/colonized—by which colonial practices are justified. The work of Gayatri C. Spivak has focused attention on the question of who speaks for the colonial "Other" and the relation of the ownership of discourse and representation to the development of the postcolonial subjectivity. Like feminist and ethnic theory, "Postcolonial Criticism" pursues not merely the inclusion of the marginalized literature of colonial peoples into the dominant canon and discourse. "Postcolonial Criticism" offers a fundamental critique of the ideology of colonial domination and at the same time seeks to undo the "imaginative geography" of Orientalist thought that produced conceptual as well as economic divides between West and East, civilized and uncivilized, First and Third Worlds. In this respect, "Postcolonial Criticism" is activist and adversarial in its basic aims. Postcolonial theory has brought fresh perspectives to the role of colonial peoples—their wealth, labor, and culture—in the development of modern European nation states. While "Postcolonial Criticism" emerged in the historical moment following the collapse of the modern colonial empires, the increasing globalization of culture, including the neo-colonialism of multinational capitalism, suggests a continued relevance for this field of inquiry.8. Gender Studies and Queer TheoryGender theory came to the forefront of the theoretical scene first as feminist theory but has subsequently come to include the investigation of all gender and sexual categories and identities. Feminist gender theory followed slightly behind the reemergence of political feminism in the United States and Western Europe during the 1960s. Political feminism of the so-called "second wave" had as its emphasis practical concerns with the rights of women in contemporary societies, women's identity, and the representation of women in media and culture. These causes converged with early literary feminist practice, characterized by Elaine Showalter as "gynocriticism," which emphasized the study and canonical inclusion of works by female authors as well as the depiction of women in male-authored canonical texts.Feminist gender theory is postmodern in that it challenges the paradigms and intellectual premises of western thought, but also takes an activist stance by proposing frequent interventions and alternative epistemological positions meant to change the social order. In the context of postmodernism, gender theorists, led by the work of Judith Butler, initially viewed the category of "gender" as a human construct enacted by a vast repetition of social performance. The biological distinction between man and woman eventually came under the same scrutiny by theorists who reached a similar conclusion: the sexual categories are products of culture and as such help create social reality rather than simply reflect it. Gender theory achieved a wide readership and acquired much its initial theoretical rigor through the work of a group of French feminist theorists that included Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and Julia Kristeva, who while Bulgarian rather than French, made her mark writing in French. French feminist thought is based on the assumption that the Western philosophical tradition represses the experience of women in the structure of its ideas. As an important consequence of this systematic intellectual repression and exclusion, women's lives and bodies in historical societies are subject to repression as well. In the creative/critical work of Cixous, we find the history of Western thought depicted as binary oppositions: "speech/writing; Nature/Art, Nature/History, Nature/Mind, Passion/Action." For Cixous, and for Irigaray as well, these binaries are less a function of any objective reality they describe than the male-dominated discourse of the Western tradition that produced them. Their work beyond the descriptive stage becomes an intervention in the history of theoretical discourse, an attempt to alter the existing categories and systems of thought that found Western rationality. French feminism, and perhaps all feminism after Beauvoir, has been in conversation with the psychoanalytic revision of Freud in the work of Jacques Lacan. Kristeva’s work draws heavily on Lacan. Two concepts from Kristeva—the "semiotic" and "abjection"—have had a significant influence on literary theory. Kristeva’s "semiotic" refers to the gaps, silences, spaces, and bodily presence within the language/symbol system of a culture in which there might be a space for a women’s language, different in kind as it would be from male-dominated discourse.Masculine gender theory as a separate enterprise has focused largely on social, literary, and historical accounts of the construction of male gender identities. Such work generally lacks feminisms' activist stance and tends to serve primarily as an indictment rather than a validation of male gender practices and masculinity. The so-called "Men’s Movement," inspired by the work of Robert Bly among others, was more practical than theoretical and has had only limited impact on gender discourse. The impetus for the "Men’s Movement" came largely as a response to the critique of masculinity and male domination that runs throughout feminism and the upheaval of the 1960s, a period of crisis in American social ideology that has required a reconsideration of gender roles. Having long served as the de facto "subject" of Western thought, male identity and masculine gender theory awaits serious investigation as a particular, and no longer universally representative, field of inquiry.Much of what theoretical energy of masculine gender theory currently possesses comes from its ambiguous relationship with the field of "Queer theory." "Queer theory" is not synonymous with gender theory, nor even with the overlapping fields of gay and lesbian studies, but does share many of their concerns with normative definitions of man, woman, and sexuality. "Queer theory" questions the fixed categories of sexual identity and the cognitive paradigms generated by normative (that is, what is considered "normal") sexual ideology. To "queer" becomes an act by which stable boundaries of sexual identity are transgressed, reversed, mimicked, or otherwise critiqued. "Queering" can be enacted on behalf of all non-normative sexualities and identities as well, all that is considered by the dominant paradigms of culture to be alien, strange, unfamiliar, transgressive, odd—in short, queer. Michel Foucault's work on sexuality anticipates and informs the Queer theoretical movement in a role similar to the way his writing on power and discourse prepared the ground for "New Historicism." Judith Butler contends that heterosexual identity long held to be a normative ground of sexuality is actually produced by the suppression of homoerotic possibility. Eve Sedgwick is another pioneering theorist of "Queer theory," and like Butler, Sedgwick maintains that the dominance of heterosexual culture conceals the extensive presence of homosocial relations. For Sedgwick, the standard histories of western societies are presented in exclusively in terms of heterosexual identity: "Inheritance, Marriage, Dynasty, Family, Domesticity, Population," and thus conceiving of homosexual identity within this framework is already problematic.9. Cultural StudiesMuch of the intellectual legacy of "New Historicism" and "Cultural Materialism" can now be felt in the "Cultural Studies" movement in departments of literature, a movement not identifiable in terms of a single theoretical school, but one that embraces a wide array of perspectives—media studies, social criticism, anthropology, and literary theory—as they apply to the general study of culture. "Cultural Studies" arose quite self-consciously in the 80s to provide a means of analysis of the rapidly expanding global culture industry that includes entertainment, advertising, publishing, television, film, computers and the Internet. "Cultural Studies" brings scrutiny not only to these varied categories of culture, and not only to the decreasing margins of difference between these realms of expression, but just as importantly to the politics and ideology that make contemporary culture possible. "Cultural Studies" became notorious in the 90s for its emphasis on pop music icons and music video in place of canonical literature, and extends the ideas of the Frankfurt School on the transition from a truly popular culture to mass culture in late capitalist societies, emphasizing the significance of the patterns of consumption of cultural artifacts. "Cultural Studies" has been interdisciplinary, even antidisciplinary, from its inception; indeed, "Cultural Studies" can be understood as a set of sometimes conflicting methods and approaches applied to a questioning of current cultural categories. Stuart Hall, Meaghan Morris, Tony Bennett and Simon During are some of the important advocates of a "Cultural Studies" that seeks to displace the traditional model of literary studies.

The popular Japanese comic Attack on Titan is written and illustrated by Hajime Isayama, and has appeared serially in the monthly comic magazine Bessatsu Shōnen Magazine since October 2009.[1] After the production of an animated TV show based on the comic in 2013, it quickly became popular; not only was a two-part live-action film released in 2014 and 2015, a second season of the anime series also began in April 2017. The comic currently has a circulation of more than forty million copies for all time, has already been translated into numerous European and Asian languages, and has risen to worldwide popularity across ages and nationalities. In recent years, after the publisher partnered with the famous comic publisher Marvel Comics, the comic has gained great popularity, especially in the United States (Hirai 91).2Attack on Titan presents a gigantic battle between the humans and the Titans who devote humans that bring about annihilation of human beings. The worldview of Attack on Titan, which envisions a gruesome atmosphere and brutal slaughter, is closely linked to a popular contemporary genre of Japanese fiction called sekaikei, which was particularly popular from the second half of the 1990s through the 2000s. Sekaikei combines self-enclosed and isolated social relationships with the imagination of young people. They prefer to read apocalyptic and mythological fiction that embody the postmodern individual and a desolate society.[2] It has become a social phenomenon that spans different media, including animation, comics, video games, websites, and “light novels,” which are easily read by young people because of the simple style of writing and illustration. Ken Maejima, an analyst of subculture, has pointed out that this phenomenon has its roots in the comic and animation Neon Genesis Evangelion, which gained long-term popularity and inspired a great number of other works.[3] According to Motoko Tanaka, a scholar of modern Japanese literature, sekaikei works are typically framed by an earthly apocalyptic crisis, or even a threat to the entire universe.[4] However, these large-scale conflicts are intertwined with the actions, romantic relationships, and identity crises of the male and female protagonists, without any intermediary community or social organization.[5]3Since it describes a crisis in which humanity faces potential annihilation, the dark apocalyptic fantasy Attack on Titan falls under the genre of sekaikei comics. Isayama himself has confirmed that not only did he once desire to see the world destroyed, he was also fascinated by Evangelion’s view of the robotization of the world and unique mode of expression, in which the characters integrate with huge robots, and fight against strong enemies to save humanity (Isayama, “Interview with Kan Saito,” 121 and 123). However, Attack on Titan is set not on the stage of the modern world, but in Germany in the Middle Ages. It presents a more than century-long battle between the human race and the Titans, whose ruthless hunting and devouring of human beings has forced the last of society into a fortress surrounded by three layers of enormous, high walls (fig. 1 and 2).This illustration expresses the comic’s conception of the confrontation between enormous creature and human beings. The hero Eren fights against a Titan. Eren says, “It’s been five years...” © Hajime Isayama 2010 (AT 1, 140-141).Fig. 2. The enormous wall and hero, Eren. © Hajime Isayama 2010 (AT 1, 2-3).4In this militant work, the motif of the Titans’ cannibalism, one of the greatest cultural taboos, plays a very important role. From the psychoanalytic viewpoint, this cannibalism motif develops into a theme centered on the loss and recovery of the characters’ memories, and the inheritance of collective memory. Regarding this depiction, Isayama has declared that he was inspired by the Japanese adventure romance game Muv-Luv Alternative, which includes many grotesques, shocking depictions of humans being devoured by aliens (Isayama, “Ten Thousand Word Interview.” 161). While no prior sekaikei comics have featured the theme of cannibalism so prominently, this psychoanalytical horror aesthetic has contributed to the originality of this successful comic and helped it gain a large following.[6] The motif of cannibalism—including a hero himself engaging in cannibalism—is an important and commercially successful element of fiction in recent Japanese comics.5This paper studies how Attack on Titan constitutes this psychoanalytical view of cannibalism and presents the reader with a cathartic culmination of violence that they can share as extraordinary fictional experiences. To that end, the paper will analyze the relation between text, image, and thematic rhetoric to clarify the comic’s aesthetic strategy and construction of the reader’s complete absorption in the story’s world. For this purpose, I will use Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory to investigate the two contrasting cannibalisms of the Titans and the hero Eren—barbarous and divine Titans. Lacanian psychoanalysis illuminates the complicated logic behind the human memory of cannibalism buried within the narrative structure.6Lacanian theory has been particularly prominent in scholarly work on Japanese comics, especially since the 1980s. For example, the Japanese psychoanalyst Tamaki Saito and the philosopher Hiroki Azuma both implement Lacan’s theory to interpret Japanese subculture as represented in comics. In particular, Saito made a significant contribution to the analysis of anime and comic characters by clarifying the worldview and narrative structure of many works. He specifically focused on Attack on Titan and provided a detailed interview with the author in a magazine issue. According to the interview, Isayama did not constitute his work from a psychoanalytic theory or viewpoint, but he underlined his persistent concern with the motif of the hero who transforms and becomes strong (Isayama, “Interview with Kan Saito.” 121). Responding to Isayama’s concept of the hero’s development, Saito argues that the author projects his own narcissism in forming the character of the Titan in this popular comic (Ibid. 128). The work of these psychoanalysts reveals that there is still a need to research the structure of this work, the development process of the characters, and their cannibalism in terms of psychological suppression. The motif of cannibalism functions to promote memory retrieval, as it triggers an identity crisis for the characters because of the psychoanalytical and traumatic primal scene and has a cathartic effect on the reader. Thus, it is important to analyze how this comic series develops a chain reaction of violence using its fascinating imagery and rhetoric. As the theme of cannibalism has become a taboo subject for human beings and has been suppressed from human history and memory, this dark fantasy visualizes this taboo and repressed memory using poetic and visual rhetoric. It demonstrates how human beings who are essentially violent, overcome the process of self-preservation at the expense of others.The Titans’ Cannibalism7In Attack on Titan, humanity is on the verge of annihilation. The Titans’ predation has succeeded for hundreds of years, and human beings have lost their peaceful lives, and their range of inhabitation is threatened. Humans have lived in a city surrounded by three walls, the last community in the world, since escaping from the Titans, who have appeared seemingly out of nowhere to ruthlessly devour them. The beginning of the comic depicts the spectacle of the Titans eating the humans; the Titans are portrayed as bloodthirsty, non-communicative creatures with no ability to speak except for animalistic shouting, or as nude monsters displaying no certain cultural identity. F.-A. Ursini has analyzed how the Titans’ characterization connects with the traditional stereotype of the Titan as one who “devours.”[7] In contrast, Noah Patterson regards the Titans as a perfect contemporary representation of the Gothic theory of monsters (Griffis 1-2). Attack on Titan vivifies and expands such traditional horrible images of the Titan as a predator.8For example, as fig. 3 and fig. 4 show, the scenes of cannibalism often emphasize a close-up of a Titan’s face, revealing the spectacle of human dismemberment and the crunching and shattering of human bones. In such brutal sequences, the largeness of these destructive monsters and the smallness of humanity contrast effectively, evoking for reader a juxtaposition of the Titans’ might and the humans’ sense of powerlessness. Through these impressions, the reader is led to empathize with the human victims, delivering the fear, horror, and sympathy required for emotional catharsis. Fig. 3, where the mother of hero Eren is eaten in front of him, particularly evokes these strong emotions. Eren suddenly loses his mother in a cruel way that breaks their mother-child pathos relation. In the psychoanalytical state of “mother complex,” he longs for his dead mother throughout the story. A catharsis is then delivered to the reader when the hero defeats the Titans, eliciting a sadistic emotion and sense of sweet revenge, which is the compensation for the absence of his mother and the legitimation of his violence against the Titans.Fig. 3. When Eren was a child, his mother was killed by a Titan in front of him. © Hajime Isayama 2010 (AT 1, 78).Fig. 4. Eren’s friend Armin is completely shocked stiff by seeing his friends being eaten by Titan. © Hajime Isayama 2010 (AT 1, 80).9The author uses certain layouts and framing techniques to amplify the reader’s fear and horror: in most scenes of cannibalism, the Titans often exceed the large frames, demonstrating the force and dynamism of their predation so as to convey aggression. Additionally, scenes of Titans crunching human bones often use a visual language of onomatopoeias and mimetic words in black, like “パキツ” (“snap”) (fig. 3), that penetrate and cross the frames. This method of using spatial and temporal imagery with visual rhetoric conveys duration,[8] lending a temporal length to the Titans’ cannibalistic acts that heightens the effect of the horror.10The composition of the Titans also renders them barbaric animals. As the Enlightenment-era linguist J.G. Herder defined the animal as instinctual and languageless in his Treatise on the Origin of Language (28-53), the horror fiction of Attack on Titan portrays Titans as grotesque animals that lack any linguistic intelligence and behave according to instinctual desire. The simplified mobility of the Titans also displays this animality; for example, in fig. 5, the Titan simply runs forward intently toward humanity, not considering anything but the humans as food. In comparison, humans show complicated and intellectual mobility, a difference that is particularly evident in humanity’s attacks on the Titans. The language the humans use also illustrates this divide: Eren, the hero, describes the Titans with the Japanese term for animal, 匹: “I will destroy them!!” he claims. “Not one animal will be left in this world!!” (“一匹残らず”) (AT 1, 88). In contrast, the author portrays human beings as intelligent, highly developed creatures who wear clothes and possess great command of language, and thus as a race of cultural creatures with an advanced civilization.Fig. 5. A Titan is running unsteadily aiming at prey, while humanity show complicated movement by flying. © Hajime Isayama 2010 (AT 2, 24).11This oppositional structure has roots in the traditional confrontational European argument, which originated in ancient times and defines the concepts of “civilization” and “barbarism” as exact opposites (Fish 679-759). We can determine how the author composes the violent images in combination with text to highlight this oppositional interaction. The depiction of Titans as ugly, non-communicative creatures lacking language objectifies them as animals. Meanwhile, the text encourages reader’s unconscious states of fictional communication with the characters to extend only to the appealing humans, who use a logical language. Thus, readers emotionally engage with the human community in the narrative structure. Image and visual rhetoric are here significant instruments for evoking readers’ negative emotions toward the disfigured Titans, fostering readers’ hatred of these villains and heightening their desire for vengeance. The author induces the reader’s mind that they creates this sadistic edge on its own through the desire of revenge, and legitimizing humanity’s violence against its mighty foes functions to make the reader unquestioningly tolerate the plot’s violence. By showing the many scenes of the defeat of an enemy in the story, Attack on Titan integrates the culmination of this violence.12Also, the motif of cannibalism within this violent composition, as emphasized by representations of Titans eating human beings, reflects the cultural and historical memory of human cannibalism. In the history of humanity, this act has been recognized as one of the most violent acts performed by humans, and therefore, it has been suppressed from the memory and consciousness of humanity.13Since the sixteenth century, when the Spanish devised the word “cannibal” based on the island “Carib,” whose native people practiced a form of human consumption that was considered inhumane, cannibalism has been used to symbolize fundamentally “barbarous” customs.[9] Meanwhile, advanced countries established many negative discourses on cannibalism to justify the invasion and colonization of countries cast as uncivilized, on the pretext of abolishing savage practices. Until the nineteenth century, cannibalism was recognized in occidental values as a cruel, inhuman practice of uncivilized societies—existing in a native state of primitive consciousness—described by Sigmund Freud in Totem and Taboo as “die magische Wirkung” (magical effect) or “Das Zeremoniell der Menschenopfer” (the ceremony of human sacrifice) (Freud 132 and 206). In short, cannibalism has a long history in human memory of being savage and cruel.14In modern times, while anthropological and psychoanalysis approaches emphasize that cannibalism is a real and ubiquitous phenomenon in the world, there are many attempts to reproduce this shocking eating behavior in the fictional form. Many colonial fictions of the last thirty years have commercially adopted this motif of cannibalism, as in novels, films, TV, and music (Brown 1), making it a literary sensation and visually creating hierarchical differences between the “barbarous” and “civilized.” Also, we can find this “barbarous” definition of cannibalism in Attack on Titan’s many scenes of Titans eating humans, in that these spectacles demonstrate the human cultural dominance. Thus, the story has been developing in favor of the civilized humans on the basis of their ability to justify conquest of the “barbarous” and “uncivilized” Titans.15These carnivorous monsters are ruled by their relentless bloodthirst, as the author Isayama so intentionally designed. Upon the comic’s animation, Isayama specifically told his staff that Titans do nothing but eat (Isayama, “Interview with Araki,” 161). And yet, as volume 22 has suggested, the Titans are humans who are unaware of having been transformed into Titans by a supernatural power. It is therefore necessary to analyze how the author conceived this infantilized, barbarous humanity as a representation of perpetual violence and destruction. In this respect, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory illuminates the violent nature and actions of the Titans, since Lacan’s conceptions of human development through different stages have similarities to the figures in Attack on Titan. As I have already noted, Isayama did not base this work on Lacan’s theory. However, psychoanalysis is used often not only for clarifying the development process of a literary work but also for explaining the socio-psychological processing of fictional persons in the context of language, subject, and unconsciousness (Klawitter and Ostheimer 155). Therefore, using Lacan’s theory as an analytical method enriches the interpretation of the Titans in this comic.16I focus here on the famous theory of “oral drive” which Freud first theorized, and Lacan successfully developed further in his psychoanalysis. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan describes the oral drive in the primitive phase: “Even when you stuff the mouth—the mouth that opens in the register of the drive—it is not the food that satisfies it, it is, as one says, the pleasure of the mouth” (167). According to Lacan, through the function of the pleasure principle, the oral drive is never satisfied with food or objects, but with the act of eating itself. For example, even as an infant suckles the mother’s breast, they cannot obtain the breast itself, but their oral drive gets satisfaction and revolves around the breast.17The Titans exist in an oral phase of development. Because they are driven to desire by pleasure of the mouth, by the satisfaction of eating, they are ruled by the pleasure principle and have no choice but to satisfy their oral drive. The Titans’ manner of eating humans is very primitive and infantile, as they are shown sucking blood or throwing up when full due to their lack of digestive organs (AT 4, 73-74), and such depictions surely bring us feelings of displeasure. Fig. 6 shows the ugliness and infantile mannerisms with which a Titan sucks human blood. They continue to suck all of the blood until their oral desire is satisfied. However, they do not turn their consciousness towards anything else. Additionally, onomatopoeias like the sucking sound “ヂュ” (“slurped”) give the picture a gross vividness and transmit to the reader this fear and unpleasantness. Despite their mature human appearance, the Titans, like children, behave in an animal manner toward their diet, a dissonance that heightens the fictional world’s unusual and uncomfortable nature.Fig. 6. A Titan sucks a victim’s blood. © Hajime Isayama 2011 (AT 4, 16).18However, even when Titans do not eat, their immortality stops them from dying,[10] which relates to Lacan’s studies on the objet petit a. He defines the objet petit a when he writes, “To this breast in its function as object, objet a cause of desire, in the sense that I understand the term—we must give a function that will explain its place in the satisfaction of the drive. The best formula seems to me to be the following—that la pulsion en fait le tour. (The drive moves around the object.)” (Les Quatre 168). The oral drive is never satisfied despite eating, because the subject always lacks the object of desire, the objet petit a, which we can in no way take into ourselves and therefore lack forever. Volume 12 suggests that the Titans are wandering the world on a never-ending quest for the lost original Titan, as though the Titans are seeking out the objet petit a.19Human beings, with their advanced intelligence, regard these murderous Titans as the Other who exists at a primitive stage, and they have recorded their violent nature in official historical documents handed down from generation to generation (AT 1, 55). This collective memory of cannibalism in Attack on Titan has fixated on a known idea of the Titan in a geographically narrow area over a century, and it proves that humanity’s reason for existence is to conquer the Titans through military force, an apparatus of civilized violence. However, this war is not between civilization and barbarism, but between both human and Titan barbarisms. Humans themselves take on the rhetoric regarding “cannibalism,” as when the hero Eren’s inner voice shouts at an army entrance ceremony that he will conquer the Titans:I’ve finally reached here . . . It’s humanity’s turn. This time, we humans . . . eat up Titans!! (AT 1, 92-93)Eren uses the words “eat up” as a metaphor for the declaration of attack against the Titans. The meaning of “eat up” is a struggle for existence and it is a tool to survive. Fig. 7 points to the violent character of humanity as being isomorphic with that of the Titan, illustrating their destructiveness such that the symmetrical structure creates a violent image of both sides. The plot establishes a perfect mirror image of human and Titan, reflecting the Titans’ true identity as former humans.20Fig. 7. Titans are slaughtered by the human hero. © Hajime Isayama 2011 (AT 4, 42).21This panel evinces Lacan’s mirror stage, as he defines it in his Écrits (1966): “It suffices to understand the mirror stage in this context as an identification, in the full sense analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image” (Écrits 76). In other words, the infant children cannot yet recognize the difference between themselves and the people around them, even people such as their mother. However, infant children perceive their own images by looking at the mirror, identifying themselves with that image, and recognizing the difference between themselves and others. The mirror stage reflects the subject through a mirror image in order to build and complete their identification; meanwhile, the infantile children construct their body image by gathering from this split image of their body, this “corpus morcelé,” brought about by this mirror effect (Écrits 77).22It is significant, then, that in Attack on Titan humans and Titans visually reflect each other. As fig. 7 and 8 indicate, both humans and Titans have a collective image of the injured body, a corpus morcelé, as having been maimed and dismembered by the other, although both try to build upon their existence and obtain a complete body. Like a subject fiercely attacking their mirror image, both violent creatures in this comic, in their “mirror stage,” engage in grandiose life-or-death battles for territorial hegemony over “the severe world,” as the soldier Armin mutters to himself: “By nature, this world is hell. The strong defeats the weak. This world is simple, easy to understand” (AT 2, 15).Fig. 8. A female soldier attempts to resuscitate the dismembered corpse of her dead lover. © Hajime Isayama 2010 (AT 2, 20).23Although the larger mystery of origin remains, it is key that the comic depicts ordinary people who transform into Titans, who are also humanity’s mirror images and parts of their identity: they are unconsciously eating one another in this mirror stage. In these crucial moments of human cannibalism, we can discern a devilish cycle in which life must be consumed in order to prolong life—the struggle for survival. This struggle evokes the problem of the Hobbesian “state of nature”, i.e., “war of every one against every one” (Leviathan 67), a 17th-century conception that claims there is an inherent brutality in humanity. This “state of nature” is conveyed by the heroine Mikasa’s memories of her father killing a bird and showing her how to eat it after returning home, which she later remembers in the face of danger. Hunting then seemed cruel to her, like an insect mercilessly killing its prey. However, she noticed that killing the creatures and eating them is part of the ecological food chain and realized that no one on earth can escape from this violent chain:Then . . . I remembered . . . This spectacle . . . until now . . . I saw it repeatedly . . . That’s right . . . This world is . . . severe . . . Now . . . that I am alive, I feel miraculous.At that moment, my body stopped shaking. From that moment on, I have controlled myself perfectly. Fight! Fight! Fight! (AT 2, 60–63, fig. 9 and 10)Fig. 9. Mikasa’s traumatic memory. © Hajime Isayama 2010 (AT 2, 60-61).Fig. 10. Mikasa’s traumatic memory. She stabs a criminal’'s heart with a knife.© Hajime Isayama 2010 (AT 2, 62-63).In fig. 9, the sequence above, the orderly black frame is used to express that Mikasa is emotionally well-preserved, calmly observing herself as a pure and pretty child focused on the predation of a butterfly by a mantis, i.e., a show of slaughter. The left side of fig. 9 illustrates the grace of her father and of Mikasa’s smiling face; they are apparently harmless people, although he pitilessly holds by the head a duck he has shot. Here, both acts, the mantis’ predation and humans hunting are recognized as violent, but humans’ cruelty and lack of reflection—i.e., their disinterest regarding the death of other life—are romanticized: that is, human violence is recognized as aesthetic memories and integrated into everyday life. The author describes the world as realistic and cruel, because death is seen as inevitable, and a survival struggle with other species continues. In fig. 9, this systematically violent world is symbolically described without breaking the frames: This undisturbed, well-organized frame means that Mikasa has quickly and carelessly adapted to this cruel world by repressing her consciousness, demonstrating the inherent human struggle for survival, even though she thought hunting was cruel.2425Fig. 10, portrays how this profound childhood memory compels Mikasa to kill her mother’s murderer with devilish skill. The author breaks up the images of her two significant memories (fig. 9 and 10) with different frames: one is black framed, and the other is white. Her childhood memory with the black frame suggests that her thinking is unrelated to the murder of an animal. She is only passively witnessing and accepting the death that happens everywhere in this cruel world. This black frame expresses her state in which she is not yet awake to becoming a party to kill others, and this includes her father: both the character and her father have not yet begun to kill others. In the other one, with the white frame, she is actively woken up by a voice that she was suppressing unconsciously, retains her clear memory even when personally killing a criminal, providing context and continuity to her present situation, when she, as a soldier, joins the massacring of Titans and demonstrates her violent side (fig. 11). These different episodes and pictures not only demonstrate the human brutality that this comic emphasizes from the beginning, but also the violent nature of humanity’s cultural identity, which is clearly similar to that of the bloodthirsty Titans.26The violence humans instinctually use for self-preservation against other creatures implies that the meaning of life comes with great sacrifice. Humanity’s own barbarous culture of carnivorous eating is repressed, becoming unconscious. In this comic, however, this repression is revealed not through a public document, but a person’s living memory, Mikasa’s recollection. Clearly, this private, traumatic memory parallels the public memory of historical documents regarding Titans. Both function as a catalyst in the chain reaction of self-preservation, and the violence of such is thereby legitimized. Thus, these episodes of Mikasa’s memory and her killing the Titans disclose the logic behind the violent dynamic that orders the world in terms of Darwinian “natural selection” (On the Origin of Species 80), which connects to the tendency of characters throughout Attack on Titan to admire violence, as when Mikasa expresses admiration for this “severe world,” in which “only the winner is allowed to live” (fig. 11).Fig. 11. “Only the winner is allowed to live.” © Hajime Isayama 2010 (AT 2, 70).27For this reason, the Titan’s cannibalism is symmetrical with the barbaric structure of human culture, similarly structurizing Lacan’s definition of mirror stage, which denotes the mutual imitation of identities and the cultural developing through this imitative process. In this structure, we can confirm the comic’s anti-ethical and anti-humanistic viewpoint, which links its numerous depictions of Titans’ and humans’ deaths to the problem of their transformation into mere things, or foodstuffs. It is this comic’s literary strategy to intensify the violence of cannibalism through our memory, in order to upset the literary identity of the reader by disregarding taboo and social boundaries.Eren’s Cannibalism as a Successional Curse28In this section, I consider how Eren’s symbolic, divine cannibalism connects to the admiration of political supremacy and to the maintenance of the community. As previously mentioned, Titans wander in search of the object of desire they forever lack. Although the Titans continuously prey on human beings and eat them, they are not fulfilled forever. As the story develops, it becomes clear that the Titans desire something different, the divine Titan, and not humanity as food. The second volume contains a scene wherein numerous Titans attempt to cannibalize one another (fig. 12). In fact, this Titan is the hero Eren, a human-Titan hybrid. He has the mythical ability to freely enlarge his body, because of his unique “power of Titan” (AT 3, 115 and AT 5, 40, 62, etc., fig. 13).Fig. 12. Titan cannibalism. © Hajime Isayama 2010 (AT 2, 171).Fig. 13. The hero Eren transforms into a Titan. © Hajime Isayama 2010 (AT 3, 152).29As fig. 13 shows, unlike the ordinary Titans, the sharp appearance of the enlarged Eren proves attractive and fascinating. His idealized form, a nine-headed figure, is fulfilled with “the canon,” the antique traditional aesthetic criteria for the beauty of the human body, the aesthetic and symmetric proportion of humanity, as Vitruvius defined in his De architectura (Eco 74-75) With his magnificent, muscular physique and fine, long arms and legs, he looks like a martial arts fighter.[11] In comparison to Eren, the common Titans appear comical, almost surreal, due to their potbellied bodies, relative shortness, or ugly faces, which invites unusual and unpleasant impressions that deviate negatively from the criteria of the beauty of the human body. Obviously, the author modeled the enlarged Eren and common Titan according to the dualistic aesthetic values of beauty and ugliness. In fact, the Titans’ violence and physical features arouse the reader’s hatred and disgust and easily evoke a sadistic desire for destruction and slaughter of one’s opponents. In contrast, readers tend to empathize with and emotionally support the Titanized Eren, with his idealized figure. Because of this visual strategy, Eren’s existence satisfies the reader’s greatest expectation: that of victory and a sense of achievement and exhilaration. His appearance therefore embodies readers’ hero worship and craving for violence. Eren’s human-Titan hybrid nature is significant, as his character ultimately supports the idea that humans are violent and not that far removed from “barbarism.” Subsequently, the readers identify with him because he embodies the duality of “barbarous” and “civilized.”30However, the comic characterizes Eren as both an outsider—due to his exceptional position in the community, regarded as “monster” (AT 5, 26) or “devil” (AT 5, 35)—and as a “savior conducting people to hope” (Ibid.) or a “miracle” (AT 13, 72). Because he is a hero who battles Titans on the side of humanity and because he retains his human intelligence, he embodies an outsider/savior paradigm. On this point, volumes 12 and 13 disclose that this special ability of human-Titan hybridity has been sought by other Titans and called “Zahyou,” which in English most literally means “coordinates” (AT 12, 7, and AT 13, 13-15). In other words, Eren’s power makes him a kind of homing beacon for the Titans. He is therefore always a target. Eren, as an object of desire, is Lacan’s objet petit a. Such a special hybrid does not belong to the Titans, who exist in an unconscious state, or to human beings, who exist in a mirror stage. Rather, Eren figures as a transcendental presence over the other characters because of his intelligence and “power of Titan,” which gives him absolute power. Thus, he exists largely as a symbol. The comic presents a psychoanalytic portrait of living creatures in these three different states, with a dynamic struggle for survival among them.31Eren obtained his power to metamorphose into a Titan by eating his father. Fig. 14 expresses a recurrence of Eren’s repressed memory in a nightmare about killing his father. The black frame represents the discontinuity of this memory from his present time and space. The cruel memory of eating his family member has been sealed away for many years from his consciousness. Of course, this means that the Oedipal patricide has occurred without his knowledge. According to Lacan, the Oedipus complex is an important factor leading to the mirror stage, through which the subject matures and shifts to the world of language (Écrits 229-231). Indicative of this process, after his unconscious patricide Eren lives with his beloved mother, forgets his memory, and grows up without knowing of his past or sealed power. He acquires a masculine sociality and sense of duty, learns to love his girlfriend, unconsciously increases his potential power, and develops his reason to control it.Fig. 14. Eren cannibalizes his father. © Hajime Isayama 2014 (AT 15, 182-183).32In fig. 14, during the death of his father, Eren is drawn like an ugly beast with no sense of reason, as if he were not human. This suggests that his cannibalistic urge is controlled not by Eren’s will but by a supernatural power. This sequence depicts the weakness of a human who cannot bear cannibalism, and have no choice but to be as a wild beast. He commits cannibalism not as a human being, but through a fateful force, thus demonstrating Eren’s innocence as a human. Cannibalism is not beautified at all, but regarded as a dirty animal act to be shunned. By positioning cannibalism as a taboo isolated from modern human culture and behavior, the comic evokes an emotional response of fear that allows for the reader’s catharsis.33By the power of Titan, humans transcend the boundary between the existence of animals and human beings, lose their reason and memory, and carry out cannibalistic acts, which are suppressed under the consciousness. This “power of Titan” can only be possessed by members of the royal family, who pass it down from generation to generation by eating their predecessors (AT 16, 90). In contrast to the Titans’ cannibalism, which is driven by an oral pleasure principle, we can find a clear privilege in this ceremonial and political cannibalism, a ritual identification with power performed by certain people, including Eren. This ritual evokes Jacques Attali’s philosophy of how this cannibalistic tendency in primitive societies began in the form of orderly ceremonies, believed to be the privileged, sacred acts of gods (L’ordre cannibale 11-37). Such ceremonies signified the acquisition of eternal life and the conquest over what is “wrong,” including evil, disease, and death, and so it is regarded as a countermeasure against primitive violence, which Attali defined as the “sign of god” (Ibid. 11-86).34Similar to this sacred act of communion with the gods, Attack on Titan depicts such symbolic and divine cannibalism as a successional curse. Not only did Eren perform this cursed, Oedipal act by killing his father, but his father, who was also a human-Titan hybrid, himself killed Frieda, a daughter of the royal family and heir to the throne. The royal family has performed this crucial ceremony for more than a century in order to maintain their governance over the city at the cost of the previous ruler’s life. This ceremony, in which the person in power must be killed for somebody new to take over, can be regarded as extralegal and beyond ethical boundaries. After succeeding in the ceremony, the person in power has a supernatural and omnipotent body, called 神 (“God”) (AT 16, 54).35Fig. 15 shows the scene where Frieda transforms into a Titan and ritually eats her uncle. However, in fig. 16, just as Frieda inherits the power of Titan, she is illegitimately killed by Eren’s father, who has also transformed into a Titan. In spite of the normal and legitimated process that the family of Frieda must inherit her special power, Eren’s father inhibited the process of the legitimate throne and gained the power of Titan by eating her. In both sequences, as in the case of Eren, those who inherit the power and become a “god” are depicted as cruel and ravenous beasts, more like demons. The cannibalism here is recognized as an unusual act and not as a human act. However, the portrayal of such slaughter symbolically shows how inheritance of power is publicly and politically atrocious, and how individuals can be used as cruel instruments in maintaining the power of a “god.” Elana Gomel describes this power of violence as a “sublime violence” in which sacrifice, physical pain, and torment produce a “sublime body” or sublime self that is brought about by a principle of reigning (xxvii-xxix). Such sublime violence, which those who inherit the power of the Titan accept and provide, further destines successors to serve their communities: it is impossible for them to escape from the cycle of death.Fig. 15. Unconscious Frieda transforms into a Titan and is about to eat her uncle, who prepares to die. © Hajime Isayama 2015 (AT 16, 90).Fig. 16. Frida was eaten by Eren’s father, in where “the power of Titan” was transferred to him. © Hajime Isayama 2015 (AT 15, 122).36This problem of cyclical violence relates to Lacan’s study of the “death of god” in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1986). According to Lacan, a person in power, such as the prophet Moses, commands leadership in order to establish and protect a community and has charisma due to the “hidden God,” the law of parole (Ethics 173). The original murder of the father meant that this “great person” was murdered by his symbolic son, disclosing the “secret malediction” (Ibid. 174). Through the realization of this curse, a monotheistic system was established and its religious messages defined. The origin of law, so Lacan explains, is rooted in a brutal, first drama carried out by an animalistic but omnipotent individual.37Based on this analysis, the divine cannibalism in Attack on Titan can be recognized as a mystical ceremony of regicide necessary for controlling humanity and maintaining the secrecy of the “power of Titan.” Thus, the heir is fated to carry out this extralegal murder, the “death of god,” in which the king’s body must be completely consumed. Here, individuality is sacrificed in a tragic and symbolic ceremony for the preservation of a whole community.38Attack on Titan depicts the metaphysical body as possessive of symbolic authority, like Eren’s. However, such a power becomes perfect through memory or intelligence. This is what the following quotation suggests, wherein Eren partially remembers his acquisition of the “power of Titan” from his father. Eren recalls his conversation with his father who handed over the key to Eren and suggested that there is a secret in the cellar of their house. His father tries to eliminate Eren’s memory by injecting a substance into his son. Below are the words that Eren’s father told Eren:Eren . . . after returning . . . I will show you the basement . . . that I have always hidden from you [. . .] From now on, because of this injection, a memory disorder is to be found in you [. . .] This “power” must be helpful then. The memory that some possess can teach you to use your power. If you want to save Mikasa and Armin . . . and everybody else, you must control this power. (AT 3, 57-62, fig. 17)Fig. 17. Eren partly remembers inheriting the Titan’s power from his father. © Hajime Isayama 2010 (AT 3, 58-59).In almost all cases, including Eren’s, new candidates as the inheritors of the power of Titan are forced into a temporary amnesia when they acquire the “power of Titan.” But after, they also obtain the complete memories of all human beings, which they previously lost unconsciously. Here, the primitive, inherited memory of the person in power is closely related to the supernatural and mythological violence that the memory itself contains. These memories can trigger a new violence; however, it is an individual matter whether or not people use this recollection of victimization for violence, as when Mikasa’s traumatic memory inspires her to kill her mother’s murderer. In comparison with this episode of private violence, the divine individual converts collective memory into an intensive, dynamic power with which to control human beings, thus monopolizing power over human memory and violence.3940Ultimately, the comic reveals that the royal family established this tyrannical political framework using paranormal power. Under this principle of the absolute monopolization of violence, we can find the culmination of power and memory’s dynamic logic in the hierarchy that dominates this severe world, reflected in different characters’ feelings of awe toward those they can never reach. In Attack on Titan, we must consider that Eren’s symbolic, divine cannibalism connects to the admiration of political supremacy that exists above the natural order, under which both humanity and Titan can barely survive. It is thus accurate to say that this comic is not only based on the concept of monotheism inherent in the Titan’s power and memory, which only an extralegal and beyond ethical being can possess.[12] We can also see this fascistic tendency in its many depictions of faith in excessive power and of the gratification of the desire to conquer one’s enemy. Catharsis is produced by the defeat of the weak who were recognized as enemies of such a divine existence. The experience of triumph is preserved as a collective memory, which supports the emotional involvement of the readers into the story.41Finally, it is significant that in Attack on Titan, the original memory of cannibalism that Eren forgets, due to his amnesia, repeatedly appears in his dreams (AT 1, 119-120). The comic uses the literary strategy of flashbacks and dreams to repeat earlier traumatic events, whether they are collective or private. For instance, the second depiction of terror and anger becomes more excessive and combative when Eren, during battle, recalls his mother’s death at the hands of a Titan, at the same time as he remembers shouting “I will destroy them!! Not one animal will be left in this world!!” (AT 1, 78 and 137, fig. 18). In comparison with fig. 3, where only Eren’s shock is emphasized, fig. 18 highlights his enormous anger and thirst for vengeance. The author effectively creates these recollection scenes by reusing images. Comic researcher Thierry Groensteen defines the spatial combination of these frames as a “network” and sees certain meanings forming within it (276). In this comic system, Attack on Titan’s scenes of recollection appear in the form of flashbacks to evoke readers’ hatred and pull at their heartstrings. In the story structure, the situation is configured so that whenever humanity remember these times of tragedy, they is driven to fight to their deaths. The use of memory in this work thus amplifies the sense of death and destruction that fills the world of Attack on Titan.Fig.18. Eren recalls the scene of his mother’s death. © Hajime Isayama 2010 (AT 1, 137).42The formation of memory is not only closely related to the traumatic event but also, from the psychoanalytical approach, it is deeply involved with the dream. Lacan regarded the dream as an important site and describes it as follows: “If the function of the dream is to prolong sleep, if the dream, after all, may come so near to the reality that causes it, can we not say that it might correspond to this reality without emerging from sleep? After all, there is such a thing as somnambulistic activity” (Les Quatre 57). According to Lacan, a subject touches reality, although this is also the cause of the subject’s fragmentation. Eren, who exists on a symbolic level, suffers not only from the real memory of his beastly patricide, but also from the destabilization of his self-identity through this traumatic act. Thus, this dream compels him to awaken his inner Titan and use this power against the enemy. In both memories, then—the one of the brutal, divine ceremony that appears in Eren’s dream, and the other, communal memory of the Titans’ cannibalism of humans—we can recognize a “Pandora’s box” that leads to an escalation of violence.43However, as volume 16 suggests, Eren decides to use the last of his humanity, and not the power of Titan: he chooses to give his life as a sacrifice because he discovers hope for escaping Pandora’s box. Eren will overcome the memory of the past and save humanity if cannibalized by his female companion, Historia, the true heir to the throne, although he remains ignorant of his father’s true intention:How many people really died, since my father and I stole the Titan’s power, which should be in its rightful place [. . .] Hey . . . therefore, at least . . . Let me leave my life in your hands. Historia . . . by eating me, save humanity. (AT 16, 131-135, fig. 19)Fig. 19. Eren urges Historia to cannibalize him. © Hajime Isayama 2015 (AT 16, 135).Readers will surely be enlightened in future books that have not yet been published as to if and how Eren creates a peaceful world and restores humanity’s hope in its future, in which they can escape beastly violence. However, this can only be achieved by denaturalizing the dark world, the naturalized chain of violence.44Conclusion45The first section of this essay clarified that the depiction of the Titans’ cannibalism is described cruelly using visual language; however, their barbarous action is shaped in a mirror image relationship with the food culture of humans. In this view, both Titans and Humans are divided into the two contrasting categories of “savage” and “civilization” in order to conceptually express the differences of cultural relativity in an exclusionary form. The two conflicting categories arouses the fear of the readers and gives them a cathartic effect. However, the act of “eating”—the theme of the primary stage in both the giant and the human being—is illustrated not only in the binomial confrontation structure on the surface but also in the deep layer concept of this story. This structured relevance reflects the symbolized barbarism of the act of eating and the historical facts that have suppressed it, and therefore, the reader needs to understand this concept of “eating” and “cannibalism” in order to understand the development of the story.46The second section analyzed the monopolizing of supernatural Titan power that the transcendental human being or the hybrid noble person holds and bequeaths to the next generation by performing divine ceremonial cannibalism. The structured ceremonial man-eating behavior is conceptualized in the real history of humanity. This comic illustrates the hierarchy system among humans, as well as between a human and a Titan, through the divine cannibalism of such an exceptional person as a god. Additionally, the primitive natural environment of humanity is revealed in the barbarous behavior of the hero and its privileged class. In this political and legal cannibalism, violence is used as a means of controlling others by influencing the inheritance of power.47Using philosophy and psychoanalysis, this paper studied the way cannibalism, regarded as taboo in human history, and the violence behind it appears in Attack on Titan. This analysis makes it possible to reconfirm and objectivize the violence which forms the literary fascination with this comic and adds to its commercial appeal. While the acts of man-eating are forgotten in the modern age, fiction cannot avoid dealing with such a traumatic memory of human beings, in which their cultural taboo is re-contextualized as horror material and reproduced on a self-identical basis of humanity who forget and suppress this taboo in their history. In a sense, it is an expansion of the narcissism of the reader who project on the comic by excavating human memory. Considering the great reception of Attack on Titan beyond global cultural differences, applying an analytic approach to this shocking and horrifying cannibalism elucidates the fear created in this plot and clarifies the phenomenon of the reader’s absorption into that subject. This comic has a great impact on the reader, with its violent content and many cathartic elements. Normally, the reader would not care about why they are fascinated by this comic, or about the impact of this comic, or how deeply their minds and feelings are involved. Therefore, it is necessary to understand how this comic is based on violent structure and content and objectivize the fear and catharsis in order to comprehend the narrative structure and objectively read the comic. Indeed, the discourse within the fiction is inseparable from human history and memory.48