hearer, hegemony, hermeneutic, heteroglossia, heuristic, hierarchy, history, holistic, hortatory, hypercorrect, hypothesis
Under construction
(Fish 1982: 528) No one ' is free to confer on an utterance any meaning he likes. Indeed, "confer" is exactly the wrong word because it implies a two stage procedure in which a reader or hearer first scrutinizes an utterance and then gives it a meaning. The argument of the preceding pages can be reduced to the assertion that there is no such first stage, that one hears an utterance within, and not as preliminary to determining, a knowledge of its purposes and concerns, and that to so hear it is already to have assigned it a shape and given it a meaning' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 60) 'One of the advantages of verbal communication is that it gives rise to the strongest possible form of communication; it enables the hearer to pin down to speaker's intentions about the explicit content of her utterance to a single strongly manifest candidate, with no alternative worth considering at all' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 9-10) 'It is not legitimate to ignore the differences between the semantic representations of sentences and the thoughts that utterances are used to convey.... The semantic representation of a sentence deals with a sort of common core of meaning shared by every utterance of it.... The grammar can say nothing about how the hearer, using non-linguistic information, determines on a particular occasion what the time of utterance actually is, who the speaker is, which Bill or Betsy the speaker has in mind, etc., and hence which thought is actually being expressed. These aspects of interpretation involve an interaction between linguistic structure and non-linguistic information, only the former being dealt with by the grammar' .
(Winograd 1977: 75)
Winograd speaks of 'the schemas that form part of the cognitive structure
of speaker and hearer' saying that 'the schemas can be grouped into
three major areas:
1. the objects, events, and abstractions being
discussed
2. the communication situation
3. the standard
patterns of discourse in the language'
.
Under construction
(Said 1986: 616) 'If a filial relationship was held together by natural bonds and natural forms of authority-- involving obedience, fear, love, respect, and instinctual conflict-- the new affiliative relationship changes these bonds into what seem to be transpersonal forms-- such as guild consciousness, consensus, collegiality, professional respect, class, and the hegemony of a dominant culture. The filiative scheme belongs to the realms of nature and of "life", whereas affiliation belongs exclusively to culture and society' .
(Said 1986: 609) 'In this book I shall use the word culture to suggest and environment, process, and hegemony in which individuals (in their private circumstances) and their works are embedded, as well as overseen at the top by a superstructure and at the base by a whole series of methodological attitudes' .
(Said 1986: 611) 'The dialectic of self-fortification and self-confirmation by which culture achieves its hegemony over society and the State is based on a constantly practiced differentiation of self from what it believes to be not itself' .
Under construction
(Spellmeyer 1993: 27) 'Hermeneutic and "philosophical", our reformed metaempiricists would start from the conviction that no one simply "behaves", manipulated and ventriloquized by psychological imperatives, but that we all consciously act in response to experience and reflection, even if the historical sources of this action, no less than its subconscious motives and ultimate consequences, fall outside our immediate circle of awareness' .
(Spellmeyer 1993: 28) To survey every language as we need to now, from the broader, hermeneutic perspective, is not to emulate the "social sciences" of a generation past, when the stress fell on the second term, still less would our practice take its cue from somewhat harder versions of research, such as linguistics or psychology. Composition on the terms I have argued for here would more closely resemble what Turner calls processual anthropology. As a form of engaged, politicized inquiry into speech and writing, a processual composition would continually struggle to recall the larger, always changing dimension of public life. 'Through this struggle of recollection, our field might discharge its institutional task -- teaching students how to write -- while at the same time affirming the possibility of a knowledge without domination and a commonality without coercion' .
(Jameson 1981: 74) 'A social hermeneutic will ... wish to keep faith with its medieval precursor in just this respect, and must necessarily restore a perspective in which the imagery of libidinal revolution and of bodily transfiguration once again becomes a figure for the perfected community' .
Under construction
(Bakhtin 1986: 668) 'The centripetal forces of the life of language, embodied in a "unitary language", operate in the midst of heteroglossia. At any give moment of its evolution, language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word ... but also-- and for us this is the essential point-- into languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, "professional" and "generic" languages, languages of generations and so forth. From this point of view, literary language itself is only one of these heteroglot languages-- and in its turn is also stratified into languages... And this stratification and heteroglossia, once realized, is not only a static invariant of linguistic life, but also what insures its dynamics: stratification and heteroglossia widen and deepen as long as language is alive and developing. Alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of language carry on their uninterupted work; alongside verbal-ideological centralization and unification, the uninterrupted processes of decentralization and disunification go forward' .
(Bakhtin 1986: 668) 'Linguistics, stylistics and the philosophy of language that were born and shaped by the current of centralizing tendencies in the life of language have ignored this dialogized heteroglossia, in which is embodied the centrifugal forces in the life of language' .
(Bakhtin 1986: 667) 'A common unitary language is a system of linguistic norms. But these norms do not constitute an abstract imperative; they are rather the generative forces of linguistic life, forces that struggle to overcome the heteroglossia of language, forces that unite and centralize verbal-ideological thought... What we have in mind here is not an abstract linguistic minimum of a common language, in the sense of a system of elementary forms (linguistic symbols) guaranteeing a minimum level of comprehension in practical communication. We are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life. Thus a unitary language gives expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization, which develop in vital connection with the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization' .
(Bakhtin 1986: 668) 'Heteroglossia, as organized in these low genres, was not merely heteroglossia vis-·-vis the accepted literary language (in all its various generic expressions), that is, vis-·-vis the linguistic center of the verbal-ideological life of the nation and the epoch, but was a heteroglossia consciously opposed to this literary language. It was parodic, and aimed sharply and polemically against the official languages of its given time. It was heteroglossia that had been dialogized' .
Under construction
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 45) 'We assume, then, that communication is governed by a less-than-perfect heuristic. On this approach, failures in communication are to be expected: what is mysterious and requires explanation is not failure but success' .
(Booth 1979: 105-6) 'We can at least begin with Burke's own kind of defense when under attack. Having seen man's world as a drama of symbolic actions, convinced that man's "symbolicity" is disastrous whenever any symbolic direction is followed to some kind of logical "perfection", he has consistently sought ways of mitigating, or undermining, the rage for perfection that each monistic mode of thought exhibits. We can see what this means in his fairly recent defense of his excremental talk about Keats. We must think of him as seeking always to modulate the excesses both of eulogistic languages, which would treat man as a creature or pure mind or spirit, and of "dislogistic" languages, which would reduce him to mere body, never acting but only reacting. In that light, what he calls his "joycing" of Keats can indeed be seen, in his words, as "but heuristic, suggestive, though it may put us in search of corroborative observations. And any such bathos, lurking behind the poem's pathos, is so alien to the formal pretenses of the work, if such indecorous transliterating of the poem's decorum had occurred to Keats, in all likelihood he would have phrased his formula differently, to avoid this turn"' .
(Bakhtin 1986: 666) 'Once rhetorical discourse is brought into the study with all its living diversity, it cannot fail to have a deeply revolutionizing influence on linguistics and on the philosophy of language. It is precisely those aspects of any discourse (the internally dialogic quality of discourse, and the phenomena related to it), not yet sufficiently taken into account and fathomed in all the enormous weight they carry in the life of language, that are revealed with great external precision in rhetorical forms, provided a correct and unprejudiced approach to those forms is used. Such is the general methodological and heuristic significance of rhetorical forms for linguistics and for the philosophy of language' .
(Bathrick 1992: 323) 'Given, then, the protean, anti-institutional, and, finally, heuristic suggestiveness of the term cultural studies, I should like to proceed by focusing precisely on its nodal points of contradiction, on the programmatic debates and innovations that have emerged under its banner to challenge existing theory and institutional formations in the name of a more relevant and broadened humanistic study' .
Under construction
(Enkvist 1981: 110) 'So far I have concentrated on empirically verifiable patterns of order in the worlds of nature and of society. But iconicism can be used to evoke orders of a less readily verifiable kind -- processes of association in an individual's mind..., and imaginary patterns in imaginary universes and fantasies. Thus the very ordering of a text can turn into a semiotic subsystem, or perhaps rather into a potential hierarchy of such subsystems because there can be simultaneous iconicism at various macro- and microlevels of text structure. Indeed iconicism is potentially conceivable at every level where the structure of the text and of language allows a choice between different patterns of linearization' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 173) 'Justice in such an over-all sense would obviously serve the ends of unification. And insofar as the law courts would "ideally" serve this same role, in aiming at a kind of justice that mediated among the differing ways of differing classes, we can see how the profuse development of law invites to idealistic philosophy. Materialist "debunkers" of such legal idealism can then interpret the "ideal" in terms of its "betrayal"; for "unification" is not unity, but a compensation for disunity - hence, any term for "ideal" justice can be interpreted as a rhetorical concealment for material injustice , particularly when the actual history of legal decisions over a long period can be shown to have favored class justice in the name of ideal justice' .
(Burke 1945: 56) 'Men have talked about things in many ways, but the pentad offers a synoptic way to talk about their talk-about. For the resources of the five terms figure in the utterances about motives, throughout all human history' .
(Burke 1945: xxii-xxiii) 'The titular word for our own method is "dramatism", since it invites one to consider the matter of motives in a perspective that, being developed from the analysis of drama, treats language and thought primarily as modes of action. The method is synoptic, though not in the historical sense. A purely historical survey would require no less that a universal history of human culture; for every judgment, exhortation, or admonition, every view of natural or supernatural reality, every intention or expectation involves assumptions about motive, or cause. Our work must be synoptic in a different sense: in the sense that it offers a system of placement, and should enable us, by the systematic manipulations of the terms, to "generate" or "anticipate" the various classes of motivational theory. And a treatment in these terms, we hope to show, reduces the subject synoptically while still permitting us to appreciate its scope and complexity' .
(Booth 1974: 20-1) 'There have been countless ... demonstrations that objective scholarship is not and cannot be objective in the sense of being free of value judgments.... Noam Chomsky's famous essay "Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship" partially undermines itself with this failure. Chomsky shows easily and conclusively that "liberal scholars", most notably Gabriel Jackson in his study on study on Spain in the 30s, discover what their value commitments allow them to discover, and they overlook what their values lead them to overlook. But Chomsky them writes as of he has earned, with this restoration of values into historical study, the right to impose his own values on history -- and without even as much effort to grapple with opposing views as was made by Jackson.... Chomsky often talks as if all attempts to write honest history are really and always mere disguises for value commitments and that therefore he has a right to push his value button- "down with the 'liberal' defense of capitalism"- and see what is churned out. His obligation, I would have thought, was to give his readers good reasons why his version of the war is in some historical sense better than Jackson's, and not just one more passionate voice to be measured in decibels' .
(Foucault 1986b: 154) 'Botany and medicine, like other disciplines, consist of errors as well as truths, errors that are in no way residuals, of foreign bodies, but having their own positive functions and their own valid history, such that their roles are often indissociable from that of the truths' .
(Foucault 1986b: 159-60) 'In the sense that this slender wedge I intend to slip into the history of ideas consists not in dealing with meanings possibly lying behind this or that discourse, but with discourse as regular series and distinct events, I fear I recognise in this wedge a tiny (odious, too, perhaps) device permitting the introduction, into the very roots of thought, of notions of chance, discontinuity and materiality' .
(Foucault 1986b: 159) 'What is significant is that history does not consider an event without defining the series to which it belongs, without seeking out the regularity of phenomena and the probable limits of their occurrence, without enquiring about variations, inflexions and the slope of the curve, without desiring to know the conditions on which these depend. History has long since abandoned its attempts to understand events in terms of cause and effect in the formless unity of some great evolutionary process, whether vaguely homogeneous or rigidly hierarchised' .
(Spellmeyer 1993: 23) However, Spellmeyer posits: 'Were it not for differences between individuals, and for miscarriages in practical application, knowledge might indeed be communal and self-referential just as the constructionists believe. But regardless of how carefully we draw the boundaries of a community, regardless of how like-minded its members may seem, these members will sometimes find themselves at odds over fundamental issues.... The history of any discipline is a history of just such discordant moments because knowledge can never entirely escape its historical and institutional blindnesses, and our own everyday practice takes those blindnesses into account' .
(Spellmeyer 1993: 20) '[The] attempt to get behind culture and language presupposed the existence of an invariant "real world" writing situation -- rather than writing for business, or for history class, or for one's mother -- as well as a standard definition of success' .
(Lanham 1993: 8-9) 'We have for a long time misread and mistranslated the Greek and Latin classics according to the philosophical coordinates of print rather than their native rhetorical orality. The electronic word is hastening this long-overdue revaluation. Literary history, that is, like literature and literary criticism, is being changed both forward and backward' .
(Lanham 1976: 60) 'It was not that Ovid was a bad plotter. The rhetorical view denies that plot is possible. It was not that Ovid "had no taste for heroes and certainly, no capacity for creating them", as Brooks Otis charges. He did not believe in heroes, or the self they were based on. He was not bad at transitions; he wanted to lose the reader. He was not incapable of tracing a coherent genealogy for Rome; he did not believe in the Virgilian conception of history upon which such descent was based. He was not too dense to master a suitable repertoire of Augustan philosophical clichÈs; he denied the theory of knowledge from which they grew. Too skeptical to think the whole truth contained in a single myth, he thought the epic genre a fraud, an obvious pretense that the world makes more sense than it does' .
(Lanham 1976: 12) 'Context ... is crucial in rhetorical literary documents. What seems a sublime, if superficial, interruption may be a profound comic corrective. Only a sense of context can show how the best history builds into itself a dialogue between the two ways of knowing' .
(Bove 1990: 55) Canguilhem's 'work showed that the history of systems of thought, of disciplines, and of sciences was not merely the chronology of concepts, ideas, and individual discoveries.... He outlined the history of science as the workings of a number of material practices that make up a society. He traced how some of these practices and sciences extended-- like "vectors", as it were-- throughout a culture, and he showed how they opened new species for new forms of knowledge production' .
(Culler 1992: 203) 'The genre of theory includes works of anthropology, art history, gender studies, linguistics, philosophy political theory, psychoanalysis, social and intellectual history, and sociology. Its works are tied to argument in these fields, but they become theory because their visions or arguments have been suggestive or productive for people not working primarily or professionally in those disciplines' .
(Derrida 1986a: 93) 'There are 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 his entire history -- has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play' .
(Greenblatt 1995: 230-1) 'Great works of art are not neutral relay stations in the circulation of cultural materials. Something happens to objects, beliefs and practices when they are represented, reimagined, and performed in literary texts, something often unpredictable and disturbing. That "something" is the sign both of the power of art and of the embeddedness of culture in the contingencies of history' .
(Bathrick 1992: 328) 'The critique of essentialism and universalism has been vital in opening up the study of literature and history to a heterogeneity of theme, perspective, constituency, medium; and of political, national, and sexual identities. At the same time, the emergence of once silenced and still oppressed voices within the critical domain of cultural discourse has politicized and helped position and certify those identities as part of a striving for empowerment.... In the area of ethnic studies, African American, Third World, and Latin American programs have proffered an internal critique of the ethnocentric Occidentalism of much of humanist scholarly and curricular organization in academic institutions or, more modestly, have sought to resituate prevailing discourses and canons in relation to what and who have been excluded by dominant voices' .
(Jameson 1981: 75) 'Semantic enrichment and enlargement of the inert givens and materials of a particular text must take place within three concentric frameworks, ... political history, ... tension and struggle between social classes ... and ... the sequence of modes of production and the succession and destiny of the various human social formations' .
(Jameson 1981: 105) 'The strategic value of generic concepts for Marxism clearly lies in the mediatory function of the notion of a genre, which allows the coordination of immanent formal analysis of the individual text with the twin diachronic perspective of the history of forms and the evolution of social life' .
(Leitch [n.d.]: 143-4) 'Foucault typically emphasizes accidents, not universal rules; surfaces, not depths; multiplicities, not unities; flaws, not foundations; and differences, not identities. Nevertheless, these distinctions become exceedingly hard to maintain when one is lost in the intricacies of a Foucault text. The impression prevails that he seeks depths, rules, and foundations. Ultimately, Foucault produces forms of order as disorder-- not instances of disorder as order. But the considerable time spent in articulating "forms of order" creates an enduring impression of structuralism-- even though all orders undergo final subversion. Foucault, as we shall see, appears a most structuralist poststructuralist in his constructions of history' .
(Leitch [n.d.]: 142-3) 'Next to Foucault's poststructuralist theory of history, predicated on the "death of the subject," Bloom's odd version of the "great man theory," based on the Satanic strength and vitality of the subjected poet, remains within the ancient humanist tradition-- but near its end' .
(Ordonez 1989: 84) 'Showalter replaced traditional literary periods with three stages in women's literary history, stages marked by an increasing growth of feminist consciousness: the first or feminine is characterized by an imitation of prevailing modes of the dominant tradition; the second or feminist protests against these standards and values and advocates minority rights and values; the female turns inward toward a search for identity and self-discovery' .
(White 1974: 404) 'In any field of study which, like history, has not yet become disciplinized to the point of constructing a formal terminological system for describing its objects, in the way that physics and chemistry have, it is the types of figurative discourse that dictate the fundamental forms of the data to be studied' .
(White 1974: 395) 'It is difficult to get an objective history of a scholarly discipline, because if the historian is himself a practitioner of it, he is likely to be a devotee of one or another of its sects and hence biased; and if he is not a practitioner, he is unlikely to have the expertise necessary to distinguish between the significant and the insignificant events of the field's development' .
(White 1974: 402) 'Levi-Strauss concludes: "In spite of worthy and indispensable efforts to bring another moment in history alive and to possess it, a clairvoyant history should admit that it never completely escapes from the nature of myth." It is this mediative function that permits us to speak of a historical narrative as an extended metaphor' .
(White 1974: 406) 'The older distinction between fiction and history, in which fiction is conceived as the representation of the imaginable and history as the representation of the actual, must five place to the recognition that we can only know the actual by contrasting it with or likening it to the imaginable' .
(White 1974: 399) When characterizing psychological therapy, White says that, 'the problem is to get the parent to "reemplot" his whole life history in such a way as to change the meaning of those events for him and their significance for the economy of the whole set of events that make up his life' .
Under construction
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 54) 'Such tactics of entitling are as legitimate as any other, once the irony has been made explicit. Indeed, philosophies are never quite "consistent" in this sense. All thought tends to name things not because they are precisely as named, but because they are not quite as named, and the name is designated as a somewhat hortatory device, to take up the slack' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 17) 'Women use fewer stygmatised forms and more prestige forms in every class; it is no more justified to class this pattern of female usage hypercorrect than it would be to call the usage of the middle class hypercorrect in relation to that of the working class. The notion of women's sensitivity to prestige norms is an explanation that arises from the intrinsic maleness of the norms. Men's behaviour is seen as normal; when women's differs, it has to be explained' .
Under construction
(Gibbs 1987: 562) 'My purpose in this article is to assess the role of mutual knowledge and beliefs in a psychological theory of conversation inference. I will attempt to support what I call the mutual knowledge hypothesis, which assumes that listeners use the knowledge and beliefs they share with speakers in the process of interpreting utterances in conversation' .
(Gibbs 1987: 569-70) 'The first task facing a listener in understanding an utterance, according to Sperber and Wilson's relevance hypothesis is to identify its propositional form.... They assume that the initial parse of a sentence begins in some sort of input module ... which results in its literal, context-free, representation' .
(Gibbs 1987: 574-5) 'Even if one assumes that mutual knowledge is not necessary for comprehension, there is much psychological evidence which is not in accord with many of the basic assumptions underlying the relevance hypothesis. The weight of this evidence suggests that it may be premature to accept the relevance hypothesis as a reasonable model of the psychological processes used in working out conversational inferences' .
(Gibbs 1987: 585) 'My arguments is favor of the mutual knowledge hypothesis and against the relevance hypothesis are grounded in five interrelated observations. First, I have suggested the Sperber and Wilson's proposal that mutual cognitive environments constitute the true context for comprehension is not sufficiently clear and distinguishable from the concept of mutual knowledge. As such, the relevance hypothesis seems to make use of the very idea that it attempts to replace. Second, mutual knowledge is possible to determine in a finite period of time via Clark and Marshall's (1981) mutual knowledge induction scheme without resorting to an infinite set of beliefs statements usually viewed as a consequence of establishing mutual knowledge. Third, it appears that mutual knowledge is indeed a necessary prerequisite for the comprehension of many kinds of utterances in conversation. This is particularly true if listeners are to distinguish between inferences that are ostensively intended or "authorized" by speakers from inferences that are "unauthorized". Conversations are only cooperative to the extent to which speakers specifically intend and listeners specifically recognize "m-intended" messages. Part of my thesis here is that how listeners are able to distinguish "authorized" versus "unauthorized" inferences must be part of a cognitive theory of conversational inferences. Fourth, parts of the processing model underlying the relevance hypothesis are not supported by contemporary psycholinguistic research. Specifically, there is little empirical evidence in favor of the idea that listeners must first decode an utterance into some propositional representation before choosing a context in which that proposition is viewed as most relevant. Finally, there is some recent psycholinguistic evidence demonstrating that speakers formulate their utterances precisely to satisfy the amount of knowledge they share with their listeners. This shared knowledge is also directly utilized by listeners when interpreting utterances in everyday discourse. These findings appear most congruent with the predictions of the mutual knowledge hypothesis' .
(Gibbs 1987: 579)
'Perhaps the most fundamental difference between the mutual knowledge
hypothesis and the relevance hypothesis concerns the constraints each
places on the kinds of inference generated during utterance interpretation.
Consider the following exchange:
'He: Are you going to the party
tonight?
'She: I hear Jack's coming.'
.
(Booth 1974: 32) 'Belief in the hypothesis leads one to look at other people in a certain way and to find what one looks for' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 21) 'We see the mutual-knowledge hypothesis as untenable. We conclude, therefore, that the code theory must be wrong, and that we had better worry about possible alternatives' .
(Lanham 1993: 56) 'The most obvious area of rhetoric's revival -- literary theory -- is so familiar as hardly to need elaboration. The "architectonic" view of rhetoric that Kenneth Burke developed from the 1930s onward has underwritten the Derridean explosion -- there is no other word for it -- of literary theory since the Hopkins symposium in 1966 put it on the map. Although, incredibly, Derrida appears not to have known Burke's work, deconstruction's enfranchising hypothesis that rhetorical analysis can be used on nonliterary texts and on the conventions of social life itself is the pivotal insight of Burkean dramatism. And if Burke's work does not fall in our period, certainly the realization of its importance does' .
(Ricoeur 1982: 154) 'The working hypothesis of any structural analysis of texts is this: in spite of the fact that writing is on the same side as speech in relation to language -- namely, on the side of discourse -- the specificity of writing in relation to speech is based on structural features which can be treated as analogues of language in discourse' .
(Ricoeur 1982: 158) 'To read is, on any hypothesis, to conjoin a new discourse to the discourse of the text' .
(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 39) 'The purpose of the present experiment was to evaluate the hypothesis that judgments of target sentences would be faster and more accurate in Same pairs that in Different pairs. Using this technique we made the following two assumptions: that judgment latencies were an estimate of ease of comprehension, and that, in this task, sentences were processed against the background of the preceding sentence, although the sentence judgment task was a single-sentence task as far as our subjects were concerned' .
Last Modified: July-12-96 16:33:33
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