A. Robert Lauer
arlauer@ou.edu
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AESTHETIC: "things perceptible by the senses"
APORIA: (gK. "IMPASSABLE PATH"). An impasse or insoluble confliect between rhetoric and thought. Aporia suggests the 'gap' or lacuna between what a text means to say and what it is constrained to mean. Central to Derrida's theory of différance. Blindspots or moments of self contradiction where a text involuntarily betrays the tension between rhetoric and logic, between what it manifestly means to say and what it is nonetheless constrained to mean.
ART EST CELARE ARTEM: (L. 'art is to conceal art'. The implication is that the best art seems spontaenous through in all prabability it is the outcome of extremely hard work. Or 'hard writing makes easy reading'. INSPIRATION. SPONTANEITY.
CANON: A body of writings established as authentic. Bible books as opposed to Apocrypha. Accepted or genuine works of author.
CONNOTATION: implication or suggestion evoked by a word or phrase or a statement over and above what it denotes. A connotation is personal and individual, or general and universal. All words can have a public and private connotation.
CRITICAL THEORY: Frankfurt School of sociological analysis and critique of ideology. Theodor Adorno. Max Horkheimer.
CULTURAL STUDIES:
DECONSTRUCTION: Analysis "to undo". A careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text itself. If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, says Barbara Johnson in The Critical Difference (1981), it is not the text but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive reading is a reading which analyses the specifiity of a text's critical difference from itself. Post strucuralism is a displacement of structuralism. Deconstruction focuses on rhetoric and reflexivity. Jacques Derrida shows that a text can be read as saying something quite different from what it appears to be saying and it may be read as carrying a plurality of significance or as saying many different things which are at variance with, contradictory to, and subversive of what may be or may have been seen by criticism as a single, stable meaning. Hence, a text may betray itself. A deconstructive criticism of a text reveals that there is nothing except the text. One cannot evaluate, criticize, or construe a meaning for a text by reference to anything external to it. A text may possess so many different meanings that it cannot have A MEANING. There is no guaranteed essential meaning. A state of indeterminacy between speech and writing. Supplement. A text may include what is not said, and this constitutes a gap, a lacuna, an absence. A dismanting of a text. Difference: continuous and endless postponement or deferral of meaning. Paul de Man. Jacques Derrida. Language is self reflexive, not referential. Geoffrey Hartman. harold Bloom. Barbara Johnson.
DENOTATION: the most literal and limited meaning of a word, regardless of what one may feel about it or the suggestions and ideas it connotes (dictionary meaning).
DIDACTIC: "that which teaches". Virgil's Georgics. Proverbs. Horace, Boileau. Pope. (allegory, courtesy book, exemplum, propaganda, emblem).
DIFFÉRANCE: A word coined by Jacques Derrida which he uses in opposition to logocentrism. It is intentionally ambiguous (and virtually untranslatable) and derives from the French différer, meaning 'to defer, postpone, delay', and also 'to differ, be different from'. To differ or to differentiate is also to defer, postpone, or withhold. Writing does not copy speech. In his view, the process of deferring applies to the written and spoken word: deferral/différance. Thus, meaning is continuously and (in theory) endlessly deferred since each word leads us on to yet another word in the system of signification. Derrida sees a text as an endless sequence of signifiers which can have no ultimate or determinate meaning.
DISSEMINATION: To 'disseminate' means 'to sow or scatter abroad', ' 'to propagate,' ' to diffuse'; hence the idea of scattering, spreading and impregnating; especially the spreading of seed (L. semen = seed). Dissemination basically suggests that 'plurisignification' or a multiplicity of meanings is not something under control as it is in the New Criticism, where the fact that a text can be interpreted in more than one way is treated as a dimension of its inherent and organic 'greatness'. Dissemination has a deliberately sexual and procreative connotation. It suggests a textual 'free play' which is both joyous, unstable and éxcessive' close in fact to the Nietzschean idea of the Dionysiac in art. For Derrida, dissemination is used in a special way with regard to language. By it he refers to the 'spilling' or 'diffusion' of meaning; the 'surplus' or excess of meaning which is inherent in the use of all language.
ÉPISTÈME:
EPISTEMOLOGY (17th c.): Beginning of science, Galileo, empiricism of Francis Bacon, John Locke, rationalism of Rene Descartes. Objective and subjective distinctions. Primary and secondary realms of knowledge. Knowledge prior to problem of being. Hume, Kant
EXPRESSIVE TYPES OF THEORY (ROMANTIC): the poet bringing to externality the inner being of self. Impressions of individuals in isolation.
FEMINIST THEORY:
FILM STUDIES:
FRANKFURT SCHOOL:
FREGE, GOTTLOB (1848-1925):
University of Jena (where Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling taught).
Mathematical logic. Modern symbolic logic. He developed a remarkable
expressive formalism for representing logical propositions and judgments.
Critique of Edmund Husserl's Philosophy of Arithmetic. Cognitive
and perceptual intention. He presumes that anything cognizible (including
cognition) must appear to consciousness as present. He rejects transcendental
metaphysics and nominalist and formalist accounts OF LOGIC AND MATHEMATICS.
He clarified the importance of language and logic for all philosophical
issues. SENSE (SINN) & MEANING (BEDEUTING) are bound with modes
of representation and expression. Problem of language and meaning.
EXPRESSIONS WITH SENSE BUT NOT MEANING ARE REPRESENTATIONS.
FREUDIAN CRITICISM/PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM:
GAY STUDIES:
GENEVA SCHOOL OF CRITICS:
GRAMMATOLOGY: For Derrida, a 'science' of the written sign, expounded in Of Grammatology (1967) and Writing and Difference (1967). Grammatology is not semiology. Semiology is replaced by grammatology which takes the form of a question rather than of a new science of writing. For Derrida a text and its meaning are not one and the same thing. There can be no science of writing for Derrida since the whole idea of différance is that there is a permanent instability of reference (uhnlike for the structuralists). The 'deferred' or 'deferring' nature of writing makes it impossible for a text and meaning to have a total and simultaneous identity and co existence. Moreover, a text cannot have a final and ultimate meaning. In the theory of grammatology Derrida conceives of writing as something that has its own reality; something that is sui generis; writing in its own right, and different from any description or reproduction of reality. Derrida is concerned with writing itself and not writing as any kind of substitute or replacement for voice, or as the transparent medium through which meaning is communicated. The possibilities are evident in ideogrammatic characters used in Chinese. Derrida's theory is that writing has always been excluded, degraded, distrusted ever since Plato. Writing has been seen as inferior to speech. Derrida does not seek to redress or correct this imbalance all words of which he would be suspicious but his point is that there is nothing outside writing. Writing is not to be evaluated as a medium for something else, as a 'carrier' or 'bearer' of meaning, but as the only place in which the différance in language is exposed.
HERMENEUTICS: hermeneus "an interpreter". In Christian theology, hermeneutics is the finding and interpretation of the spiritual truth in the Bible. Hence, the truths of the Gospels, for instance, may be interpreted andreinterpreted from generation to generation and thus made relevant in different eras. Hermeneutics is concerned with human action through institutions (political, cultural, economic, kinship). As far as literature is concerned, it has to do with the way textual meaning is communicated. Hermeneutic theory dates from the work of German Porotestant theologians of the 17th . who developed methods of understanding the Bible to support their theological views. Friedrich Schleiermacher in Romantic period: the "hermeneutical circle": The circe is the movement from a guess at a 'whole' meaning of a work to an analysis of its parts in relation to the whole, followed by a return to a modified understanding of the 'whole' of the work. It embodies the belief that part and whole are interdependent and have some necessary organic relationship. The historical gap separates literary work from critic or reader and this is negative. One oscillates between historical reconstruction on the one hand and divinatory acts of empathy on the part of the critic or reader. Wilhelm Dilthey: concerned with essential meaning and essence, and thus with understanding. Interpretation. Extracting meaning from texts. A reader is involved in the creation of meaning. A text may have totally different meanings for different readers at diffeent times. What readers bring to a text (knowledge, assumptions, cultural background, experience, insight, etc.) affets their interpretations. A reader is in a position to create the meaning of a text. Influenced phenomenology, reader response theory, and reception theory: Wolfgang Iser, Hans Georg GAdamer, E. D. Hirsch, STanley Fish.
INTERPRETATION:
INTERTEXTUALITY: A Kristeva term. Interdependence of a literary text with other texts before it.
LESBIAN STUDIES:
LINGUISTIC: The scientific study of language: descriptive linguistics classifies the characteristics; historical or comparative deals with its growth and development. Principal branches: etymology, semantics, phonetics, morphology, syntax.
LITERARY CRITICISM:
LOGIC:
LOGOCENTRISM: For Derrida, logocentrism means literally 'centred on the word,' but in Derrida's ussage logocentrism implies all forms of thought based on a desire for truth. For him, logocentrism has been characteristic of Western thought and philosophy since Plato. Derrida's principal sub category of logocentrism is 'phonocentrism' ('sound centring'; hence phonocentric, 'centred on sound/speech). Phonocentrism describes the precedence of speech over writing, again typified by most Western thought since Plato, which decreed that writing has a tendency to 'contaminate' the purity of the spoken word. Derrida argues against the privileged position of speech. He contends that this 'violent hierachy', as he puts it, is not reversible but that it is possible to displace by the idea of différance, which is a vital part of his theories of deconstruction. Différance does not correct or reverse an imbalance (that would be contrary to his view of deconstruction); it can only displace (i.e., make the question of hierarchy obsolete).
MARXIST CRITICISM:
The concern with economic, political and philosophical issues, supposedly
present, even by absence, in literary works, especially the novel.
Karl Marx (1818 1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820 1895). They did
not develop an aesthetic of culture or literature, which they believed
to be relatively autonomous from the class struggle. Marxist critics
are primarily interested in content, in which the class struggle is fundamental,
and less in aesthetic form, technique, ingenuity, or innovation.
Earlier Marxist critics tried to reconstruct the past on the basis of historical
evidence to find out to what extent a text gives a true and accurate representation
of social reality at any given time. Socialist realism, popular in
the early Soviet Union required that literature be progressive, realistic,
optimistic, and accessible to the general understanding of the masses.
Modernism was deemed to be decadent because it was subjective, introverted,
introspective and fragmentary in its vision of the world. 19th c.
authors were extolled.
Marxist critics: Georg Lukács, Hungarian (1885 1971):
Literary works reflect a system gradually unfolding. Vs. the avant
garde novel, Modernism, formalism. For the realist novel. Bertolt
Brecht: v effect and epic theater, different from mimetic or Aristotelian,
emotional theater. Narrative, thinking, non emotional, non
identificatory, alienated theater, so that we would be foreced to think
about that situation instead of bonding with familiar characters and getting
a catharsis, which would impede action by its purgation effect. The
Frankfurt School of Marxist aesthetics, at the Institute of Social Research
(1923) in Frankfurt, after 1933 in New York, and back to Frankfurt in 1949.
The main initial figures were Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert
Marcuse, who rejected realism and developed what is called Critical Theory.
Adorno believed that literature does not have direct contact with reality
and favored modernism in literature because it was distanced from the reality
it describes, and thus enhances its critical reality. Knowledge of
reality is achieved indirectly or obliquely. "Art is the negative
knowledge of the actual world." Horkheimer favored the avant garde
and modernism because they are hostile to passivity and submission to the
political status quo and hence to any kind of ideology. For Marcuse,
the autonomous work of art negates a repressive society. Walter Benjamin,
interested in mass culture and technological media, which, by its capacity
to reproduce art indefinitely and on a mass scale (cinema, photography,
theradio and the gramophone), makes art available to the popular masses
rather than to just an élite bourgeoisie. Thsi gives the works
of art political freedom, for it eliminates the ritualistic elitism of
the bourgeoisie. Lucien Goldmann (Rumanian), Towards a Sociology
of the Novel (1964): Theory of homologies. Literary texts in
his view are not the work of individual geniuses but are based on "trans
individual mental structures" which belong to groups or classes.
The ideas which exist in these structures are discovered and then re created
in literary form by outstanding writers. The French Louis Althusser:
relative autonomy of different levels in a work of art. At any point
one level may be dominant and that level is determined in the last instance
by the economic level. Literaty works do not express an ideology,
in his opinion. For Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production
(1966), a literary text, by virtue of its form and its fiction, distances
itself from its ideology and also by its silences or gaps in the text,
by what is not said. These silences/gaps not only conceal but also
expose ideological contradictions. They are suppressions of its own
unconscious. There is a conflict between the text and its ideological
content. The Marxist critic exposes the text's unconscious content,
its sub text. Terry Eagleton (UK). Fredric Jameson (US), The
Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981).
He makes eclectic use of structuralism, deconstruction, archetypal criticism
(allegorical interpreataion), and psychoanalysis (Lacanian). He deals
with the political unconscious, the unspoken, the concealed, the suppressed.
Thus a Marxist interpretation looks for levels of meaning in the mode of
allegory.
METAPHYSICS:
MIMESIS: mime (imitation). Representation. Aristotle's Poetics. Tragedy is an imitation of an action. Verisimilitude. Erich Auerbach's Mimesis (1957).
MIMETIC TYPES OF THEORY (PLATO, ARISTOTLE):
MODERNISM:
NARRATOLOGY:
NEW CRITICISM: Vs. postivism and history.
NEW HISTORICISM/METAHISTORY/HAYDEN WHITE:
NOMINALISM:
OBJECTIVE TYPES OF THEORY (MODERNISTS): purposiveness without purpose. Internal purposiveness
ONTOLOGY (Greek medieval): Problem of being. Mimesis. Didacticism. Literature a handmaiden to philosophy and theology.
OPPOSITIONAL THEORY:
PEIRCE, CHARLES SANDERS
(1839-1914):
Foudner of pragmatism: A way of conceiving objects according to their
effects (this view changed emphasis from object to symbol). For William
James, pragmatism was was interpreted psychologically. Perice treated
it logically and semiotically and in fact COINED THE WORD SEMIOTICS before
de Saussure predicted the emergence of semiology as the general study of
signs. Like Freg, Peirce was interested in the foundations of logic;
he developed a representational formalism. Did not write a single
book. Peirce's interest in signs, and classical problems of nominalism,
realism, and representation.
The concept of BEING has no content. (th 'is' of predication).
Substance is not applicable to a predicate; being is not applicable to
a subject. The conception of being depends on the formation of a
proposition, linking subject and predicate. The highest reality belongs
to the SIGN or SYMBOL. He links the categoreis of firstness, secondness
and thirdness to his theory of signs as consisting of icons, indices, and
symbols.
PHALLOCENTRIC: Centred on the phallus. It denotes a system which privileges the phallus as the symbol and source of power. A patriarchal society is phalocentric. The term has frequently been used in feminist criticism (Kristeva & Cixous) in attempts to dismantle such binary oppositions as male'female, masculine/feminine, etc.
PHALLOGOCENTRIC: A term invented by Derrida. It is a conflation of phallocentric (phallus centred) and logocentric (word centred; epistemologically 'truth centred'). Terry Eagleton has translated it as 'cock sure'. Applied to society, it denotes one which controls or attempts to control by means of sexual/social influence and power. Thus, a patriarchal society would be predominantly logocentric as well as phallocentric. Post structuralists would describe modern Western society as phallogocentric. In literature, the terms is applied to novels in which the male characters have the upper hand and the female characters are sex objects.
PHENOMENOLOGY: ontological. Consciousness is always consciousness of something. Edmund Husserl. Intersubjectivity. Roman Ingarden. Gr phenomena "things appearing" + logos "knowledge". A method which stresses the perceiver's central role in determining meaning. Edmund Husserl (1859 1938). The individual human mind is the center and origin of meaning. Ahistorical and atemporal. Study of nature and essence of a work of literature under scrutiny and thus a kind of access to the author's consciousness. Exploration of a unique personality behind a work of art. Critic gets rid of preconceptions and presuppositions about the author or text he is supposed to study. In this receptive state, critic shares mode of consciousness of the author. Consciousness of the consciousness of another. Martin Heidegger. Maurice Merleu Ponty. Hans Georg Gadamer. Roman Ingarden. Wolfgang Iser. Hans Robert Jauss. Geneva School of critics.
PHONEME: A basic sound unit in a language ('t' and 'd' are separate phonems; 'c' and 'k' may be the same or different; 'ph' and 'f' are the same in English).
PHONOCENTRIC: 'Centred on sound/speech', 'sound'centring', 'sound centredness'. Derrida uses the term 'logocentrism' to describe all forms of thought which base themselves on notions of truth. 'Phonocentrism' is a sub category of logocentrism, and consists of privileging speech over writing. The bias working here is that speech is closer to truth than writing [because the one is primary and the other secondary Platonic]. Derrida talks about writing not in terms of speech (the opposite of Plato who gives speech precedence over writing), and counters with the idea of language as a kind of writing what he calls 'archi écriture'. This is his way of emphasizing that philosophy is only a kind of writing. and is a 'quasi science' of language. For Derrida, language is a tissue of what is written and philosophy therefore can make no pretensions to being anything more than 'a kind of writing'.
PHONOCENTRISM: centered on sound, speech; LOGOCENTRISM, on writing.
POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES:
POSTMODERNISM:
POSTSTRUCTURALISM: deconstruction, Derrida, close readings to destabilize them.
PRAGMATIC TYPES OF THEORY (HORACE, MEDIEVAL, RENAISSANCE AND ENLIGHTENMENT CRITICS):
PRAGMATISM:
RADICAL SEX STUDIES:
READERLY/WRITELY: Terms of Roland Barthes (1915 80), a French critic, who distinguishes between two kinds of text: lisible (readerly) and scriptible (writerly) in S/Z (1970), A readerly text is a book (a novel) to which a reader's response is more of less passive, i.e. a realistic novel or a classic text, which shows a recognizable world, characters, and events. The reader accepts the meaning without needing to make much effort. A writerly text makes demands on the reader, who has to work things out, look for and provide meaning. (James Joyce's Ulyssses). A writerly text focuses attention on how it is written, on the mechanics of it, the particular use of language. A writerly text tends to be self conscious, it calls attention to itself as a work of art. It also makes the reader into a producer. Barthes mentions that the writerly text is of value because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text. However, a critic may read a text either writerly or readerly, for such a reading is not inherent in the text but may be part of the reading (death of the author: "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death ofthe author").
READER-RESPONSE THEORY:
REALISM:
RECEPTION THEORY: Hans Robert Jauss
RUSSIAN FORMALISM: Form is the shape, structure, style of a literary work as opposed to its substance or content. Russian Formalism is a literary theory developed in Russia in the 1920's, and finsihed by the 1930's. It was a pejorative term used by Stalin to imply 'limitations'. This theory began at the Moscow Linguistic Circle (1915) and The Society for the Study of Poetic Language (based in St. Petersburg) [1916]. The main figure in Moscow was Roman Jakobson (1896 1982), who helped found the Prague School in 1926. The Russian Formalists studied scientifically the way literary texts achieve their effects. Human content in literature (emotions, ideas, or reality in general) was not significant in defining what was specifically literary about a text. The writer is of negligible importance since the emphasis is on the 'literarines' of the formal devices of a text. OPOJAZ (St. Petersburg circle) even suggested that there are no poets or literary figures, only poetry and literature. Viktor Shklovsky said that literature is: "the sum total of all the stylistic devices employed in it." One of Shklovsky's ideas was the concept of ostranenie or 'making strange', later to be called 'defamiliarization.' The Formalists also developed a theory of narrative, making a distinction between plot (syuzhet) [the order and manner in which events are actually presented in the narrative, i.e., their logical or consequential ordering], and the fabula (the story), i.e., the chronological sequence of events. Boris Tomashevsky: used the term 'motif' to denote the smallest unit of plot and distinguished between 'bound' [absolutely essential to the story] and 'free' [inessential] motifs. Motif is linked to 'motive' and to 'motivation'. Formalists tended to regard a poem's content as subordinate to its formal devices. Motivation is thus a dependence on external 'non literary' assumptions. Sterne's Tristam Shandy is without motivation. In later Formalism, the concept of 'device' gave way to the concept of 'function' in a work of literature, depending on the purpose or mode or genre. The prague School was to unite Russian Formalism with Saussurean linguistics and developed a concept of structure. The Prague Linguistic Circle (1926), which remained active through the 1930's consisted of Roman Jakobson, Boris Eikenbaum, Vikton Shklovsy, and Jan Mukar^ovsky' ("Standard Language and Poetic Language"). They developed a theory of phonology in which sounds are analyzed in sets of opposition. Automatism and foregrounding (Czech aktualisace): the use of devices and techniques which push the act of expresiion into the foreground so that language draws attention to itself. Foregrounding occurs especially in poetic language, whose function is not to communicate but to foreground the act of expression, the act of speech itself." Foregrounding is the art which reveals art rather than concealing it. Literary devices call the reader's attention to what he is doing. Writing is not about something, it is that something itself. Hence, the representation of familiar objects evokes 'freshness of sensation'.
SAUSSURE, FERDINAND DE (1857-1913):
Arbitrary nature of the sign (Plato's Cratylus). Implications
for linguistic, anthropological, psychoanalytic, and literary theory.
Provides ground for structuralism. A structure is a system of differences
to be studied independently of what it or its parts might refer to outside
the system. In structuralist linguistics, one studies words regarded
as units solely by virtue of their difference from other words. Thus
a word is known by what it is not more than by what it is; the system is
totally negative. Synchorinic or atemporal; diachronic or historical
linguistics. Langue (the system of language in general) and parole
(any particular ussage within it, e.g., a sentence). A literary text
is a parole. Taught at the University of Geneva. For Lévi
Strauss, the tru units of a myth are bundles or relations or differences.
[CHOMSKY: COMPETENCE & PERFORMANCE]. De Saussure is regarded
as having established linguistics as a science by minimizing the importance
of the concept of reference, to view language as an independent system.
STRUCURALISM: Ferdinand de Saussure. Claude Lévi Strauss. A movement of thought in the human sciences which has affected philosophy, anthropology, history, sociology, and literary criticism. Structuralism is concerned with language, signs, and signification. Strucuralist theory considers all conventions and codes of communication, signals, body language, clothes, artefacts, etc. It has to do with all the means by which human beings convey information to each other. Codes/signs are arbitrary and without them we could not apprehend reality. Structuralism challenges the belief that a work of literature or any other literary text reflects a given reality. A literary text is, rather, constituted of other conventions and texts. F. de Saussure: language as a sign symbol or structure consists of individual components that can be understood only in relation to each other and to a system as a whole rather than to an external 'reality'; distinction between langue (a language as a whole) and parole (utterance, a particular use of individual units of language); distinction between diachronic (historical study of the growth and development of a language through philology) and synchronic (study of a language as a system at any given moment of its life) [Saussure stresses synchronic]; distinction between signifier and signified. Language as a sign system was developed by C. S. Peirce, American founder of semiotics. Saussure's ideas were developed by Charles Bally, Geneva School of phenomenology, the Prague Linguistic Circle, Russian Formalism. Claude Lévi Strauss developed a structural theory in a consideration of myth, ritual, and kinship. Social structure is a model and behavior patterns of kinship and institutions depend on methods of communication characteristic of how the human mind works. Roland Barthes: quest for grammar and syntax of modes of communication (haute cuisine and clothes). Garments are a system (langue) a particular set of garment parole. Noam Chomsky: distinction between surface structures (collection of words and sounds that we articulate in a sentence) and deep structures (abstract underlying structure in language which regulates the meaning of a given sentence). Jonathan Culler: structuralist poetics: the real object of poetics is not the work itself but its intelligibility. One attempts to explain how works can be understood, conventions that enable reader to make sense of works are formulated). Culler focuses on reader rather than text. Structure resides in the system that underlies the reader's interpretation or literary competence rather than in the text. Roman Jakobson: developed a theory based on concept of binary opposition (metaphor/metonymy for realism/symbolism).
SEMIOTICS/SEMIOLOGY::
semeion " sign". The science of signs. Founded by American
C. S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure. Semiology is the science
of signs and signals in general; semiotics refers to the theory of sign
systems in language. They are both concerned with the means of communication
as conventions, with particular emphasis on language and behaviour (zoosemiotics
(animal behaviour), human bodily communication (kinsemics and proxemics),
communication by olfactory signs, all branches of semiotics. The
temr 'semiology' was used by Saussure and it is the older of the two, it
is used by Greeks. Semiotics is associated with the North Amrican
tradition of sign study, whereas semiology is associated with the European
tradition. In lit. crit., semiotics is concerned with the complete
signifying system of a text and the codes and conventions we need
to understand in order to be able to read it. Peirce made two contributions
to the science: (a) he demonstrated that a sign can never possess or arrive
at a definite meaning; definition has always to ge qualified; (b) he distinguishes
between various signs:
1. The iconic: a sign that resembles its referent (signifier/signified)
as in a road sign for a double bend;
2. The indexical: when a sign is associated with its referent,
e.g., smoke = fire.
3. The symbolic: when sign and referent have an arbitrary relationship.
Language signs are arbitrary, except in ideographic/ideogrammatic signs
(as in Chinese) or in onomatopoeic signs.
Jonathan Culler argues that a semiotics of literature should be concerned
with signifying practices and interpretative conventions which make it
possible for literary texts to communicate with readers.
SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED:
SPEECH ACT THEORY:
STRUCTURALISM:
SUPPLÉMENT: The French word suppléer means 'to take the place of, to substitute' ans well as 'to supplement'. The noun supplément can mean 'substitute' as well as 'addition'. For Derrida, this term denotes the unstable equilibrium and thus a constantly shifting relationship which exists between speech and writing. Each term both replaces and supplements the other. The idea of of 'supplément' is part of Derridan critique of the simple structuralist binary opposition in which a term is defined by the opposite. Derrida uses the idea of the supplement to emphasize that there is no priority in any of these oppositions but only différance. Speech, nature, truth, are themselves supplements, substitutions, and deferrals of traces; they are not stable or logocentric in the way that structuralists use them. In Of Grammatology, Derrida writes: 'It is the strange essence of the supplement not to have essentiality; it may always not have taken place. Moreover, literally, it has never taken place; it is never present, here and now. If it were, it would not be what it is, a supplement, taking and keeping the place of the other'. Derrida notes the emergence of an undecidable concept (the supplement). The effect is to deconstruct nature and culture, showing that culture does not supplement nature but that natXure [sic] is always already a supplemented entity. The point is that since the term 'nature' needs its opposite 'culture' in order to exist, the supplement is always already there. It is not simply that the supplement comes after but that the supposed priority of the termj nature is itself supplementary (i.e., the process of the supplement is an aspect of différance, difference and deferral).
SYMBOLIC LOGIC:
SYNTAGMATIC/PARADIGMATIC:
TRACE: A term used by Derrida to signify his view that there is no simple sense in which linguistic signs are either present or absent. According to Derrida, every sign (e.g., a wrod such as 'dwelling' contains a 'trace' of other signs which differ from itself. But, paradoxically, the 'trace' is not there; it is potentially inherent, or present by virtue of its absence, just as absence denotes the possibility of presence. No sign is complete in itself. One sign leads to another via the 'trace' indefinitely. The wrod/sign 'dwelling' carries with it scores of traces (i.e., connotations) and other signs associated with dwelling. In Positions (1972) he states: "Whether in written or spoken discourse, no element can function as a sign without relating to another element which itself is not simply present. This linkage means that each element phoneme or grapheme is constituted with reference to the trace in it of the other elements of the sequence or system... Nothing, in either the elements or the system, is anywhere ever simply present or absent."
TROPES: "turn"
any rhetorical device