Jonathan Culler:

‘The Linguistic Foundation’:

Other notes:

- ‘According to Culler, the different models (or “stories”) of reading that have been proposed are all organised around three problems’:

o The issue of control:

♣ Does the text control the reader, or visa-versa?

• Controls:

o David Bleich, Norman Holland and Stanley Fish = ‘the reader holds controlling interest’. Readers ‘make’ the text.
o ‘Bleich asserts this point most strongly: the constraints imposed by the words on the page are “trivial”, sicne their meaning can always be altered by “subjective action”.’
o ‘To claim that the text supports this or that reading is only to “moralistically claim… that one’s own objectification is more authoritative than someone else’s”.’
o FEMINISM: ‘Either the text (and, by implication, the author) or the woman reader is responsible for the process of immasculation.’

• Doesn’t control:

o Michael Riffaterre, Georges Poulet, Wolfgang Iser = ‘acknowledge the creative role of the reader, but ultimately take the text to be the dominant force. To read … is to create the text according to its own promptings.’ [text’s italics].
o Poulet = ‘…reading “is a way of giving way not only to a host of alien words, images and ideas, but also to the very alien principle which shutters and shelters them . . . I am on loan to another, and this other thinks, feels, suffers and acts within me”.’

♣ ‘Culler argues persuasively that . . . the prevailing stories of reading generally vacillate between these reader-dominant and text-dominant poles. In fact, those who stress the subjectivity of the reader as against the objectivity of the text ultimately portray the text as determining the responses of the reader. The more active, projective, or creative the reader is, the more she is manipulated by the sentence or by the author.’

o What is ‘in’ the text:

♣ ‘Reading always involves a subject and an object, a reader and a text. But what constitutes the objectivity of the text? What is ‘in’ the text? What is supplied by the reader?’
♣ This question seems to ‘call for a dualistic theory that credits the contributions of both text and reader.’
♣ Culler = ‘Culler argues, a dualistic theory eventually gives way to a monistic theory, in which one or the other pole supplies everything.’
♣ ‘”The author guarantees the unity of the work, requires the reader’s creative participation, and through his text, prestructures the shape of the aesthetic object to be produced by the reader.” At the same time, one can also argue that the “gaps” that structure the reader’s response are not built into the text, but appear (or not) as a result of the particular interpretive strategy employed by the reader.’

o The ending of the story:

♣ ‘”Readers may be manipulated and misled, but when they finish the book their experience turns to knowledge . . . as though finishing the book took them outside the experience of reading and gave them mastery of it.”’
♣ However, Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Culler = ‘find these optimistic endings questionable, and prefer instead stories that stress the impossibility of reading.’
♣ The reader ‘”may be placed in impossible situations where there is no happy issue, but only the possibility of playing out the roles dramatized in the text” (Culler, p. 81).’

Structuralism:

• Used to describe the intellectual sea-change (deep, profound and gentle).

1. Analysis of the structure of thought and culture. (Its shape!)
2. The study of this is not the same of the study of thinking (thought is notht eh same as the process of thinking and the material processes of doing).
3. The only proper analysis of this = the analysis of language.

• Why?:

Culture is formed of language, e.g. body image / language, rules and regulations etc.
Culture and art are relational – everything is viewed in relation to other things.
Confusions in life, e.g. philosophical problems are pseudo-problems, caused by language use.

• e.g. ‘literature’ is causing confusion in itself.

• “Literature forms the limit of our world”. Wittgenstein.

• Language is not “added on”: we are linguistic beings.
• Language is a part of being human! However, we have to learn its patterns.
• Language shapes what we can and cannot know.

• Essays and critics – what are they responding to?

• Sassure = was reacting to social norms.

• It was diachronic = across time.

• Language was studied by philologists in terms of history. Sassure wanted to see how langauge worked, and not what it came from.
• SYNCHRONIC STUDY, NOT DIACHRONIC.

• He wanted to find the difference between langue and parole.

• Parole = one particular language event.
• Langue = deep underlying structure.

In order to understand langue, you must study many examples – parole.

Postmodernism:

- Artists used to ask “How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?”.
- Now, “Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?” (Brian McHale).

- ‘Postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism’ – Frederic Jameson.
- Trees and roots – Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
- Postmodern art and writing:

- It’s much harder to talk about what is contemporary than what has come before.

- Postmodernism = “Incredulity about metanarratives” = Jean-Francois Lyotard.
- Metanarratives:

o Beyond / enframing narratives – explains many smaller stories. A big story explaining many smaller stories. E.g. Bible for Christians, Darwin for scientists.
o Yet most metanarratives conflict!
o Metanarratives can also be flawed.
o Yet, we no longer believe that they have power.

- We are left with micronarratives – lots of little stories used to legitimate life.

o E.g. one life experience within a bigger picture. One life is different from another – we must compromise to find one distinct answer.

- “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”. Fredric Jameson.
- Our current state is just the most recent step in capitalism –postmodernism is merely one form of capitalism.
- Reification – the turning of objects (or worse people) into things. One becomes alienated from oneself. Commodification.
- Jameson’s symptoms:

o Depthlessness, e.g. cathedral used to = symbolism and faith, not merely tourism. Folk music once bound communities, and now is just music.
o Weakening of historicity: History had shape, distinction and meaning.

♣ Sound shaped a shared temporality, e.g. factory sirens, church bells, call to prayer.
♣ Separate people have completely different times, and so different worlds. Groups are formed with unified times.

o “Intensities” – one experience is developed in a context.
o Technology – turns the whole world into something that can be used, e.g. trees = planks.

- Deleuze and Guattari:

o The world is made of differences.
o Thing generally comes first, then the comparison to form difference.
o We are not only nouns, but we are VERBS – doing words!
o Things are defined by difference first!
o Knowledge is like a tree – there supposedly is one key idea – yet Deleuze said there is no central core – one bit can break and the rest can survive, changed, but still whole and important.

- Postmodern Texts:

o Textuality – surfaces, not windows. Not interested in what you can see though the text, but on the surface – we are aware it is a text.
o Expecting what will happen – knows what the steps of a novel are, e.g. the troll in Enchanted has the dresses of previous princesses surrounding him.

- Self-referential (mimesis of product, to mimesis of process).
- Emphasis on interpretation (and so against closure).
- Heteroglossic – different voices, ways of being understood.
- Genres, hybridity, pastiche (high and low cultures, different cultures, different aspects).

- Baudrillard: Stages:

o What is real, replaced by what is fake, or perhaps layered by it.

♣ Reflection of a basic reality.
♣ Masks and prevents a basic reality.
♣ Masks the absence of a basic reality.
♣ It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

o Was there a reality that came before the existence of e.g. God?
o If something acts as a microcosm of society, it shows how it doesn’t exist as a society in the first place, as there are always individuals ignored.
o Emptiness at the heart of everything – e.g. Christmas, do people try to find meaning in the materiality / ideology of fakeness – but there was nothing there in the first place…!
o Modernism = sad disullusionment.
o Post-modernism = happy disillusionment, with the Nietzchean idea of play… Just like Humpty Dumpty – there was a broken egg, but one could always make an omelette!

R: The ‘linguistic turn’

Literary Theory textbook: Part 1: Chapter 1: Introduction: The Implied Order: Structuralism (Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan).

• ‘Utterances are merely the manifestation of the rules of the system that lend order to the heterogeneity of language.’
• There is a notion of ‘implied order’.
• ‘Levi-Strauss began to see that culture, like language, is a system characterized by an internal order of interconnected parts that obey certain rules of operation.’
• It is the ‘principle of stability and coherence’.
• ‘Levi-Strauss began to think about culture as a form of communication like language.’
• ‘Levi-Strauss went on to conduct famous studies of myths that noticed, in the same manner as Russian critic Vladimir Propp’s path-breaking work on folk tales, that such myths, despite their heterogenieity and multiplicity, told the same kernel narratives.’
• Saussure: ‘Words… are signs, and linguistics rightly belongs to another discipline called semiology, which would study the way signs, including words, operate. Words are signs in that they consist of two faces or sides – the signifier, which is the phonic component, and the signified, which is the ideational component.’
• ‘A work of literature, Barthes noted, is, after all, nothing but an assemblage of signs that function in certain ways to create meaning.’

• ‘…narrative as the common element of organisation among diverse examples.’
• The study of narrative is key to the Structuralist argument.

• ‘Words provide us with maps for assigning order to nature and to society. Foucault notices that what counts as knowledge changes with time, and with each change, the place of language in knowledge is also modified.’
• ‘Foucault’s work draws attention to the fact that many assumptions in a culture are maintained by language practices that comprise a common tool both for knowing the world and for constructing it.’ (e.g. ‘freedom’ in the USA).
• ‘What Foucault noted was that the world we live in is shaped as much by language as by knowledge or perception. Indeed, according to him, knowledge and perception always occur through the medium of language. We would not be able to know anything if we were not able to order the world linguistically in certain ways.’

Literary Theory textbook: Part 1: Chapter 2: The Linguistic Foundation (Jonothan Culler)

• Culler here ‘poses an analogy between the structuralist description of how language operates and the rules and conventions that make up human culture.’

• Social and cultural phenomena are:
        • ‘…not simply material objects or events but objects and events with meaning.’
        • ‘…they do not have essences but are defined by a network of relations, both internal and external.’

• Structuralism is ‘based… on the realization that if human actions or productions have a meaning there must be an underlying system of distinctions and conventions which makes this meaning possible.’
• ‘Phonology was important for structuralists because it showed the systematic nature of the most familiar phenomena, distinguished between the system and its realization and concentrated not on the substantive characteristics of individual phenomena but on abstract differential features which could be defined in relational terms.’

Literary Theory textbook: Part 1: Chapter 3: Course in General Linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure)

• ‘Language is not a function of the speaker; it is a product that is passively assimilated by the induvidual.’
• ‘Speaking, on the contrary, is an induvidual act. It is willful and intellectual.’

• ‘Linguistic signs, though basically psychological, are not abstractions; associations which bear the stamp of collective approval – and which added together constitute language – are realities that have their seat in the brain.’
• ‘Language is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore comparable to a system of writing, the alphabet of deaf-mutes, symbolic rites, polite formulas, military signals, etc. But it is the most important of these systems.’

• Sign, Signified, Signifier:
        • ‘It assumes that ready-made ideas exist before words.’
        • ‘The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image.’

• ‘The choice of signifier… is arbitrary in that it has no natural connection with the signified.’
• Onomatopoeia cannot really argue against this – language development from other words in the past/future have changed them. Also, cultural approximations...

• ‘In linguistics there is the same relationship between the historical facts and a language-state, which is like a projection of the facts at a particular moment.’

• ‘…in language, changes only affect isolated elements.’
• ‘…a move has a repercussion on the whole system…’
• ‘…each move is absolutely distinct from the preceding and subsequent equilibrium. The change effected belongs to neither state: only states matter.

• ‘Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others…’

• ‘The important thing in the word is not the sound alone but the phonic differences that make it possible to distinguish this word from all others, for differences carry signification.’
• Similarly, ‘The signs used in writing are arbitrary; there is no connection, for example,between the letter “t” and the sound that it designates.’
• Furthermore, letters need only be recognisable – they do not need to be exactly the same from person to person.

• However, ‘When we compare signs – positive terms – with each other, we can no longer speak of difference… Between them there is only opposition.’

Literary Theory textbook: Part 1: Chapter 4: Morphology of the Folk-tale (Vladimir Propp)

• ‘Propp is one of the first Structuralists in that he sought to delineate the innate order that existed in a disparate body of texts.’
• ‘Propp studied hundreds of Russian folk-tales or oral stories and came to the conclusion that they all followed the same pattern.’
• ‘…how many functions are known to the tale?’
• ‘This explains the two-fold quality of a tale: its amazing multiformity, picturesqueness, and color, and on the other hand,its no less striking uniformity, its repetition.’
• ‘First of all, definition should in no case depend on the personage who carries out the function. Definition of a function will most often be given in the form of a noun expressing an action (interdiction, interrogation, flight, etc.). Secondly, an action cannot be defined apart from its place in the course of narration, The meaning which a given function has in the course of action must be considered.’
• ‘…identical acts can have different meanings [in different texts], and vice versa.’

1. ‘Functions of characters serve as stable, constant elements in a tale, independent of how and by whom they are fulfilled. They constitute the fundamental components of a tale.’
2. ‘The number of functions known to the fairy tale is limited.’
3. ‘The sequence of functions is always identical…’
4. ‘All fairy tales are of one type in regard to their structure…’

• ‘Veselovskij writes, “The selection and order of tasks and encounters (examples of motifs) already presupposes a certain freedom.” Sklovskij stated this idea in even sharper terms: “It is quite impossible to understand why, in the act of adoption, the ‘accidental’ [Sklovskij’s italics] sequence of motifs must be retained.’

• ‘A tale usually begins with some sort of initial situation…’. [Then...]
        1. One of the members of a family absents himself from home.
        2. An interdiction is addressed to the hero.
        3. The interdiction is violated.
        4. The villain makes an attempt at reconnaissance.
        5. The villain receives information about his victim.
        6. The villain attempts to deceive his victim in order to take possession of him or of his belongings.
        7. The victim unknowingly helps the villain by being deceived or influenced by the villain.
        8. The villain harms a member of the family of a member of the family lacks or desires something.
        9. This lack of misfortune is made known; the hero is given a request or command, and he goes or is sent on a mission/quest.
        10. The seeker (often the hero) plans action against the villain.
        11. The hero leaves home.
        12. The hero is tested, attacked, interrogated, and receives either a magical agent or a helper.
        13. The hero reacts to the actions of the future donor.
        14. The hero uses the magical agent.
        15. The hero is transferred to the general location of the object of his mission/quest.
        16. The hero and villain join in direct combat.
        17. The hero is branded.
        18. The villain is defeated.
        19. The initial misfortune or lack is set right.
        20. The hero returns home.
        21. The hero is pursued.
        22. The hero is rescued from pursuit.
        23. The hero arrives home or elsewhere and is not recognized.
        24. A false hero makes false claims.
        25. A difficult task is set for the hero.
        26. The task is accomplished.
        27. The hero is recognized.
        28. The false hero/villain is exposed.
        29. The false hero is transformed.
        30. The villain is punished.
        31. The hero is married and crowned.’