TEXT AND SIGN

CAMELIA ELIAS

Dept of Culture and Identity, English Program

Theory is a mode of:

Analyzing analysis structuralism text text, narratives, no distinction

between literary and non literary works Interpreting

interpretation hermeneutics Reading

text reader-response deconstruction canon Contextualizing

contextualization Marxism cultural phenomena realist canon

Evaluating criticism new criticism work poetry, modernism

Theory is:

interdisciplinary analytical and speculative: an attempt to work

out what is involved in what we call language, or writing, or meaning

a critique of common-sense, of concepts taken as natural

reflexive;thinking about thinking; inquires into the categories we use in making sense

of things

Theory questions:

the conception that the meaning of an utterance or text is what the speaker ‘had in mind’

the idea that writing is an expression whose truth lies elsewhere, in an experience or a state of affairs which it expresses

the notion that reality is what is ‘present’ at a given moment

NOTE: it is different from criticism

what is literature?

language lit. foregrounds language: rhyme patterns,

sounds patterns, grammar

ideologylit. follows conventions or resists interpretation

secretslit. is self-reflexive / intertextual / mysterious

On literature In reading, one should notice and fondle details.

There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge. 

Good Readers and Good Writers

Vladimir Nabokov

(1899-1977)

initiators of structuralism

1960 Ferdinand de Saussure Roland Barthes Claude Levi-Strauss Michel Foucault Louis Althusser Jacques Lacan Algirdas Greimas

claims

all documents can be studied as texts – history, sociology can be analyzed in the same way as literature

all culture can be studied as text belief systems, religions can be studied

textually

position and concerns

insistence on method insistence on scientific rigor beyond humanism and phenomenology language is a self-authenticating system language is a system of differences ALL TEXTS CAN BE STUDIED AS

LANGUAGE SYSTEMS

focus (Barthes)

signsconvey meaningrelate to the people who use themare constructed

that which the signs refer tocodes and organization of signscommunication

(the users of the signs)

Levi Strauss - culture

To be in a culture means to be in preexisting but constantly changing sign-systems

Being in a culture means being able to know how to read a text

background

linguistic – Saussure anthropological – Levi-Strauss literary – Russian Formalism (Vladimir

Propp)

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)

Language consists of:‘langue’ (an abstract underlying system of

rules conventions which pre-exits actual speech)

‘parole’ (language ‘in use’) Original conception: symbol = thing Saussure’s conception: symbol ≠ thing “the linguistic sign unites not a name and a

thing, but a concept and a sound image”

Saussure’s sign system

signifier (signifiant)

sign =     signified (signifié)

signified

signifier

signs are arbitrary

“Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in language there are only differences.”

“Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms.”

“Language is a system of signs which are arbitrary and differential.”

key concepts

system sign

arbitrarydifferential

the signifier exists in TIMElanguage operates in linear fashionwhat creates difference is VALUE

paradigmatic/syntagmatic relations

Paradigm: a sign that forms a member of the same category patterns, motifs

Syntagm: a relationship of choice selection and combination

Metaphor: un unfamiliar concept is expressed through a familiar concept

Metonymy: the invocation of an object using an associative idea

language is:

arbitrary:ex: mouse/house

relational:I trap the mouseI move the mouse

constitutiveI leave in September

Claude Levi Strauss

extended Saussure’s theory of language as a structural system to cover all cultural processes (kinship system, myths, legends, dressing, cooking etc) to an extended sign definition

studied ‘primitive’ cultures and found underlying structures for human practices myth

cultural patterns were studied like language patterns reflect structures of the human mind

the most basic structure: binary oppositions

Vladimir Propp

found an underlying system and 31 ‘functions’ (events or actions) in Russian folktales (Morphology of the Russian folk tale, 1928)

There is a ‘grammar’ of the folktale

A. J. Greimas

A. J. Greimas (Semantique Structurale, 1966) reduced Propp’s list and made his own model of actants

All narratives follow a ‘narrative grammar’

theory

All ‘texts’ (mythical narratives, literary texts, advertisements, fashion etc) are signifying structures that work according to an underlying system

The underlying system is synchronic not diachronic The text does not have any truth-value – it is not a ‘reflection’ of

reality but a construct that works according to conventions and codes

The death of the author: the author is not an ‘origin’ because he is himself the product of the working of the linguistic system

The reader is central, but not as a feeling conscious individual – he reads according to conventions, codes, expectation

THE TEXT IS: A LANGUAGE SYSTEM,

A STRUCTURE, A DIFFERENCE

initiators of poststructuralism

1966 Jacques Derrida Roland Barthes J. Hillis Miller Geoffrey Hartman Paul de Man Harold Bloom

what is ‘post’ about poststructuralism?

the fuller working out of structuralism reaction to structuralism

position and concerns

lost belief in the scientific pretensions of structuralism

a move from Saussure’s langue to discourse

lost belief in the belief of a metalanguage claim: there is no final truth and no

objective knowledge focus on the decentering of the subject

kinds of poststructuralist theories

psychoanalytic theories deconstruction new historicism and cultural materialism postcolonial and Diaspora criticism cyber theory

deconstruction

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

French philosopher “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse

of the Human Sciences” (Johns Hopkins University, 1966)

The Structuralist Controversy (1972)questioning of “the structurality of structure”

theory western philosophy must be ‘deconstructed’ because it is

‘logocentric’, that is, based on a theory of ‘presence’ which represses absence and difference there is an ontological center and everything can be explained in

terms of it it is a self-present word constituted not by difference but by

presence (consciousness, subjectivity, God, reason) Saussure: signifiers and signifieds are defined in terms

of what they are not, that is, in terms of difference. There are binary oppositions

Derrida: in each binary opposition one element is privileged and one is suppressed differance

The subject is not an autonomous entity

TEXT

READER

AUTHOR

CODE

CONTEXT

theory

Deconstructing the hierarchyNote the hierarchy in the binary oppositionsOverturn it by allowing the suppressed or

marginalized term to subvert the privileged or dominant term

Resist the assertion of a new hierarchy by displacing the second term from a position of superiority

theory deconstruction gives up any search for

origin(s)/ground(s)any structure/system/text is unfoundedit has no ultimate reason

“… deconstruction is, above all perhaps, a questioning of the ‘is’, a concern with what remains to be thought, with what cannot be thought within the present.” (Nicholas Royle, 2000)

“Instead of a simple ‘either/or’ structure, deconstruction attempts to elaborate a discourse that says neither ‘either/or’, nor ‘both/and’ nor even ‘neither/nor’, while at the same time not totally abandoning these logics either. The very word deconstruction is meant to undermine the either/or logic of opposition ‘construction/destruction’” (Barbara Johnson, 1987)

focus 1

Deconstructive reading: focuses on the displaced, in the background

or marginalized aspects of the text focuses on the moment when the text

transgresses the laws it appears to have set up for itself

understands the text to be heterogeneous and ‘self-deconstructive’

focus 2 “As a critique of a certain Western conception of the nature of

signification, deconstruction focuses on the functioning of claim-making and claim-subverting structures within texts.”

“A deconstructive reading is an attempt to show how the conspicuously foregrounded statements in a text are systematically related to discordant signifying elements that the text has thrown into its shadows or margins, an attempt to recover what is lost and to analyze what happens when a text is read solely in function of intentionality, meaningfulness, and representativity.”

“Deconstruction thus confers a new kind of readability on those elements in a text that readers have been trained to disregard, overcome, explain away, or edit out – contradictions, obscurities, ambiguities, incoherences, discontinuities, ellipses, interruptions, repetitions, and plays of the signifier.”

“In this sense it involves a reversal of values, a revaluation of the signifying function of everything that, in a signified-based theory of meaning, would constitute ’noise’.” (Barbara Johnson, 1987)

focus 3 Deconstructive reading is not interpretation

“There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play.”

“The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile.”

“The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology – in other words, throughout the entire history – has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play.” (Derrida, 1966)

focus 4 Deconstructive reading displaces the hierarchical

relationship between literature and criticism ”Literature as well as criticism – the difference

between them being delusive – is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most unreliable language in terms of which man names and transforms himself” (Paul de Man, 1979)

”All that ’philosophy’ as a name for a sector of culture means is ’talk about Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Frege, Russell … and that lot’. Philosophy is best seen as a kind of writing. It is delimited, as any literary genre, not by form or matter, but by tradition – a family romance involving, e.g., Father Parmenides, honest Uncle Kant, and bad brother Derrida.” (Richard Rorty, 1982)

How to do deconstruction / Derrida on deconstruction

The Purloined letter in structuralist reading

narrative form: status quo status quo is

threatened status quo is restored

function of the characters: the good detective must be

rational, and act in the name of order

the villain must be punished, or gain nothing from his acts

he must participate in the restoration of the order

binary opposites: D____ vs. Dupin vs. (poet vs.

better poet; disorder vs. order) the queen vs the king (weakness

vs. power) the queen vs D____ (helplessness

vs. cunning) the queen vs Dupin (passive vs.

active)

1.

The queen via P -- letter -- The queen

The Prefect -------- Dupin ------ D_____

2.

the prefect -------- revenge ------- Dupin

the letter ------------ Dupin --------- D____

structuralist reading

Consolidates a traditional frame re-establishment of power relations assertion of the culprit as independent implementation of reason to restore the

status quo the story institutes and reinforces the

ideological formation of the detective genre

The Purloined letter in poststructuralist reading

paradoxes Dupin is in a relationship of dependency to D___

sites of disturbances the criminal’s mind is both rational and poetic displacements power is always out of reach

‘inspired reasoning’ reason is constantly inspired or disturbed by ‘other’ reason

(defined as unreason) identical identities/doubles

detective/criminal identification of the detective with the criminal

the ideological conservatism of the detective genre is undermined by ambiguities the story deconstructs itself

The chain of signification: symbolization or mythologizing?

Signifier 1

(letter)

Signified 1

(paper)

Signified 2

(love)

Signified 2.1

love letter =compromising the woman in love

Signified 3

(power)

Signified 2.2

love letter = woman weak & vain

Signified 3.1

letter = corruption

Signified 2.3

love letter = emotion

Signified 3.2

letter = man dangerous and calculated

Signified 3.3

letter = reason

contrasts

structuralism depth:

the prefect’s search is described as thorough;

he searches for a letter that suggests authority

in the prefect’s eyes the letter is hidden

language and signs are fixed in or constrained to conventions

mathematicians’ language

unity

poststructuralism: surface:

the letter lies open on the surface though its appearance is altered

in Dupin’s eyes the letter seems to be hidden, but is not

language and signs float puns, play on words and signs: Dupin/du pain (bread)

poets’ language disunity