macro-structure, male biased, margin, maxim, meaning, medium, memory, men's language, metaphor, metaphysics, method, micro-structure, mind, misreading, mode, monologue, mood, morphology, myth
Under construction
(van Dijk 1977: 4) 'In this paper, we will show that some fundamental problems of cognitive psychology can be accounted for in terms of macro-processing of complex semantic information.... Comprehension (as well as production) probably takes place at several levels, such that lower-level information is organized, reduced, and represented at higher levels. These processes involve the use of macro-rules; the input to the macro-rules is the micro-structure, and the output is the macro-structure. Macro-structures help to explain the ability to summarize discourse, and in general to use information from discourse for other cognitive tasks' .
(van Dijk 1977: 27-30) 'We will briefly state a number of hypotheses regarding ... processing implications....It will be assumed that in discourse comprehension fragments of the morpho-phonological and syntactic surface structure of the sentence sequence are stored only in short-term memory to construct a proposition sequence.... It is assumed that beyond a limited number of propositions, the proposition sequence of the text base is not fully accessible for recall.... Given a sequence of assigned propositions, the reader will make hypotheses about the relevant macro-structure proposition covering the sequence by applying the macro-rules to the sequence.... Macro-structure formation takes place in the course of reading the text, not a posteriori. The same holds true for the assignment of conventional categories to the macro-propositions. Both the assignment of macro-structures and of conventional super-structures is recursive. As soon as a first level becomes too complex. a second level is formed, and so forth. The macro-structure is available when it is necessary to explicitly summarize a text.... The macro-structure is also the basis for recall of the discourse immediately after presentation. The macro-structure is directly available in episodic memory. It then yields, by inverse macro-rule application and recognition, access to lower-level macro-structures and possibly to some text base propositions if the discourse was not too long.... Macro-structures may also constitute "plans for speaking".... Macro-structure formation is a highly complex process, so it can hardly be expected that effective comprehension exactly follows the rules formulated above: expedient strategies are used in the global interpretation of discourse.... Finally, there are strategies based on contextual cues and knowledge of the general communication situation. We may know the speaker so well that we may easily predict the main themes of his discourse, even with very scanty information.... Familiarity with the relevant macro-structures will certainly facilitate the task of global comprehension' .
(van Dijk 1977: 31) 'We have not provided the details to substantiate the speculative remarks of this final section. Out intention is merely to suggest that the notions of macro-structure and macro-rule in discourse processing may be special cases of more general cognitive principles underlying higher-order processing' .
(van Dijk 1977: 8) 'Characteristically, the relation of the macro-structure to the micro-structure involves notions such as importance or relevance: the macro-interpretation defines the most important or essential object or event denoted by a sequence of propositions' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: xix) 'Since no two things or acts or situations are exactly alike, you cannot apply the same term to both of them without thereby introducing a certain margin of ambiguity, an ambiguity as great as the difference between the two subjects that are given the identical title' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 12) 'The maxim, "terrain determines tactics", is a strict localization of the scene-act ratio, with "terrain" as the casuistic equivalent for "scene" in a military calculus of motives, and "tactics" as the corresponding "act"' .
(Hopper 1987: 144) 'Evidently the meanings represented by the English "indefinite article" are not unified under one hyper-abstract function. Instead, an open ended set of small sub-systems has come into being, and the membership of new occurrences of forms with the indefinite article is not specifiable in advance, but is impromptu and negotiable. Even participants in the conversation may not "know" whether a specific new mention or a non-specific indefinite is intended until this has been worked out in the verbal interaction' .
(Johnson 1990: 42) 'The rebus, the anagram, and the letter are clearly all manifestations of writing. They are graphic, articulated, material instantiations of systems of marks that simultaneously obscure and convey meaning' .
(Burke 1945: 165)
'I refer to the fact that the Latin word for the Carthaginians is Poeni
, while the Latin word for the goddesses of vengeance is Poenae .
In the dative and ablative forms, the two would be exactly the same,
Poenis . And the word is thus used in Lucretius:
ad
confligendum venientibus undique Poenis,
a line which, taken in
itself, could be translated, with equal justice, either as "when the
Carthaginians were coming to the attack from all sides" or as "when the
goddesses of Vengeance were coming to the attack from all sides". There
is no doubt that literally the reference is to the Carthaginians. But if we
consider it in keeping with such studies of ambiguity as Empson has given
us, may we not legitimately hear effects even more resonant than the literal
meaning itself?'
.
(Fish 1982: 527) Speaking of the need to declare the more common interpretation of the reference of an utterance as its normal meaning, Fish says 'To admit as much is not to weaken my argument by reinstating the category of the normal, because the category as it appears in that argument is not transcendental but institutional; and while no institution is so universally in force and so perdurable that the meanings it enables will be normal for ever, some institutions or forms of life are so widely lived in that for a great many people the meanings the enable seem "naturally" available and it takes a special effort to see that they are the products of circumstances....The obviousness of the utterance's meaning is not a function of the values its words have in a linguistic system that is independent of context; rather, it is because the words are heard as already embedded in a context that they have a meaning that Hirsch can then cite as obvious.... it is impossible even to think of a sentence independently of a context, and when we are asked to consider a sentence for which no context has been specified, we will automatically hear it in the context in which it has been most often encountered' .
(Fish 1982: 65-6) 'The meaning of an utterance, I repeat, is its experience -- all of it -- and that experience is immediately compromised the moment you say something about it. It follows then that we should not try to analyze language at all. The human mind, however, seems unable to resist the impulse to investigate its own processes; but the least (and probably the most) we can do is proceed in such a way as to permit as little distortion as possible' .
(Fish 1982: 32) The sentence 'is an experience; it occurs, it does something; it makes us do something.... what it does is what is means....there is no direct relationship between the meaning of a sentence (paragraph, novel, poem) and what its words mean....It is the experience of an utterance... that is its meaning. It follows, then, that it is impossible to mean the same thing in two (or more) different ways, although we tend to think that it happens all the time' .
(Fish 1982: 67) Good analysts will be able 'to see the value of considering effects and ... to think of language as an experience rather than as a repository of extractable meaning' .
(Fish 1982: 526) 'The meaning of the utterance would be severely constrained, not after it was heard but in the ways in which it could, in the first place, be heard. An infinite plurality of meanings would be a fear only if sentences existed in a state in which they were not already embedded in and had come into view as a function of, some situation or other' .
(Fish 1982: 25) The sentence 'is no longer an object, a thing-in-itself, but an event, something that happens to, and with the participation of, the reader. And it is this event, this happening -- all of it and not anything that could be said about it or any information one might take away from it -- that is, I would argue, the meaning of the sentence' .
(Fish 1982: 3) 'This equivocation allowed me to retain the text as a stable entity at the same time that I was dislodging it as the privileged container of meaning' .
(Fish 1982: 65) 'Meaning is a (partial) product of the utterance-object, but not to be identified with it' .
(Fish 1982: 525-6) 'My colleague was not hesitating between two (or more) possible meanings of the utterance; rather, he immediately apprehended what seemed to be an inescapable meaning, given his prestructured understanding of the situation, and then he immediately apprehended another inescapable meaning when that understanding was altered' .
(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' .
(Fish 1982: 531) 'The point of my analysis has been to show that while "Is there a text in this class?" does not have a determinate meaning, a meaning that survives the sea change of situations, in any situation we might imagine the meaning of the utterance is either perfectly clear or capable, in the course of time, of being clarified. What is it that makes this possible, if it is not the "possibilities and norms" already encoded in the language? How does communication ever occur if not by reference to a public and stable norm? The answer, implicit in everything I have already said, is that communication occurs within situations and that to be in a situation is already to be in possession of (or to be possessed by) a structure of assumptions, of practices understood to be relevant in relation to purposes and goals that are already in place; and it is within the assumption of these purposes and goals that any utterance is immediately heard.... What I have been arguing is that meanings come already calculated, not because of norms embedded in the language but because language is always perceived, from the very first, within a structure of norms. That structure, however, is not abstract and independent but social; and there fore it is not a single structure with a privileged relationship to the process of communication as it occurs in any situation but a structure that changes when one situation, with its assumed background of practices, purposes, and goals, has given way to another' .
(Fish 1982: 3) 'The reader's response is not to the meaning; it is the meaning, or at least the medium in which what I wanted to call the meaning comes into being' .
(Foucault 1986b: 157-8)
'Western thought has seen to it that discourse be permitted as little room
as possible between thought and words. It would appear to have ensured
that to discourse should appear merely as a certain interjection between
speaking and thinking; that it should constitute thought, clad in its signs
and rendered visible by words or, conversely, that the structures of
language themselves should be brought into play, producing a certain
effect of meaning.
'Whether it is the philosophy of a founding
subject, a philosophy of originating experience or a philosophy of
universal mediation, discourse is really only an activity, of writing in the first
case, of reading in the second and exchange in the third. This exchange,
this writing, this reading never involve anything but signs. Discourse thus
nullifies itself, in reality, in placing itself at the disposal of the signifier'
.
(Foucault 1986b: 162) 'And now, let those who are weak on vocabulary, let those with little comprehension of theory call all this-- if its appeal is stronger than its meaning for them-- structuralism' .
(Foucault 1986b: 162) 'At all events, one thing at least must be emphasised here: that the analysis of discourse thus understood, does not reveal the universality of a meaning, but brings to light the action of imposed rarity, with a fundamental power of affirmation. Rarity and affirmation; rarity, in the last resort of affirmation -- certainly not any continuous outpouring of meaning, and certainly not any monarchy of the signifier' .
(Foucault 1986b: 158) 'I believe we must resolve ourselves to accept three decisions which our current thinking rather tends to resist, and which belong to the three groups of function I have just mentioned: to question our will to truth; to restore to discourse its character as an event; to abolish the sovereignty of the signifier.... One can straight away distinguish some of the methodological demands they imply. A principle of reversal, first of all.... Next, then, the principle of discontinuity .... Discourse must be treated as a discontinuous activity, its different manifestations sometimes coming together, but just as easily unaware of, or excluding each other. The principle of specificity declares that a particular discourse cannot be resolved by a prior system of significations...We must conceive discourse as a violence that we do to things, or, at all events, as a practice we impose upon them; it is in this practice that the events of discourse find the principle of their regularity. The fourth principle, that of exteriority, holds that we are not to burrow to the hidden core of discourse, to the heart of the thought or meaning manifested in it; instead, taking the discourse itself, its appearance and its regularity, that we should look for its external conditions of existence, for that which gives rise to the chance series of these events and fixes its limits' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 9) 'What hearers do is supplement the literal meaning of utterances with an assumption of human rationality and cooperation' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 9) 'Grice proposed distinctions between different types of meaning and argued that general maxims of cooperation provide inferential routes to a speaker's communicative intention. Pragmatics is most concerned with analyzing speaker meaning at the level of utterances and this often amounts to a sentence, rather than text, sized unit of language use. But since an utterance is, by definition, situated in a context (including a linguistic context, i.e. a text), pragmatics often ends up including discourse analyses and providing means of analyzing discourse along the way' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 13) 'The origin of an approach provides different theoretical and metatheoretical premises that continue to influence assumptions, concepts, and methods. For example, different origins may be responsible for different assumptions and beliefs about language -- assumptions about the stability of linguistic meaning, the role of speaker intentionality, the degree to which language is designed for communicative purposes, and the contribution of linguistic meaning to interactive meaning' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 90-1) 'The essential insight of speech act theory is that language performs communicative acts. ... Speech act theory, then, is basically concerned with what people "do" with language -- with the functions of language. ... The conditions underlying and defining speech acts are central to speech act theory: they are the basis for the way we recognize and classify speech acts ... and for the way a single utterance can have more than one function ... In sum, by focusing upon the meaning of utterances as acts, speech act theory offers an approach to discourse analysis in which what is said is chunked (or segmented) into units that have communicative functions that can be identifies and labelled. Although we can describe such acts in different ways ... the import of such acts for discourse is that they both initiate and respond to other acts' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 134) 'Interactional sociolinguistics views discourse as a social interaction in which the emergent construction and negotiation of meaning is facilitated by the use of language. Although the interactional approach is basically a functional approach to language, its focus on function is balanced in important ways. The work of Goffman forces structural attention to the contexts in which language is used: situations, occasions, encounters, participation frameworks, and so on, have forms and meanings that are partially created and/or sustained by language. Similarly, language is patterned in ways that reflect those contexts of use. Put another way, language and context co-constitute one another: language contextualizes and is contextualized, such that language does not just function "in" context, language also forms and provides context. One particular context is social interaction. Language, culture, and society are grounded in interaction: they stand in a reflexive relationship with the self, the other, and the self-other relationship, and it is out of these mutually constitutive relationships that discourse is created' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 7) 'Some interactional approaches ... focus on how people from different cultures may share grammatical knowledge of a language, but differently contextualize what is said such that very different messages are produces. Other interactional approaches ... focus on how language is situated in particular circumstances of social life, and on how it adds (or reflects) different types of meaning ... and structure ... to those circumstances' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 57) 'No one has any clear idea how inference might operate over non-propositional objects: say, over images, impressions or emotions.... We see it as a major challenge for any account of human communication to give a precise description and explanation of its vaguer effects. Distinguishing meaning from communication, accepting that something can be communicated without being strictly speaking meant by the communicator or the communicator's behaviour, is a first essential step' .
(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' .
(Booth 1979: 104) 'What has annoyed many people besides Crane is not simply Burke's frequent pursuit of scatology or his free-wheeling delivery.... What is troublesome, surely, is precisely Burke's claim to make connections in what appears disparate -- the claim, for example, to connect bodily functions to surroundings hitherto seen as "poetic". The trouble, in short, is not that turds are flung at us but that they come labeled as truth. Burke seems to be claiming to know better that Keats himself something of what the poem "means", and the meaning he finds is antithetical not just to the poet's intentions but to any intentions Keats might conceivably have entertained' .
(Booth 1979: 108) 'But we must not be un-Burkean in what we mean by a phrase like "really mean". We are not -- it should be clear by now -- in pursuit of a meaning that is knowledge in a scientific sense of fixed concepts proved by tests of certainty or levels of probability. We are pursuing a truth-of-action, a meaning that is more probed than proved -- a way of knowing, a knowing that is itself a kind of action' .
(Booth 1979: 108) 'Obviously such talk is nonsense to anyone who insists on a literal meaning for phrases like "the same as" and "amounts to". Burke seldom uses such words in a sense that would satisfy someone like Crane as strictly literal; even the word "literal" is not quite literal; thinking about the concept as Burke might, we would no doubt extend my questioning of Crane's usage in chapter 2 [of this work]. Indeed, a major part of his persistent program is to remind literalists that behind their claims to precision lurk confusions that can be acknowledged and lived with only by qualifying every copulative verb with some sense of ambiguity. It is not just that the words need semantic scouring. What something is is always too rich and complex for any one statement. Thus Burke can, without violating his own canons, say at one point that literary form as the gratification of needs is the appeal in poetry and, in other contexts, say that literary form is a disguise for the true appeal; and he can really mean both statements' .
(Ricoeur 1982: 159) 'Initially the text had only a sense, that is, internal relations or a structure; now it has a meaning, that is, a realisation in the discourse of the reading subject' .
(Lanham 1976: 62) 'The moral is clear. Nothing has only one meaning, context, justification. When all the world is made to converge on and yield up a single entity-- people, place, or city -- watch out' .
(Bove 1990: 53) Bove asserts that the questions posed above are commonsense, that they 'imply a norm of judgment: meaning and essence are better and more important that a discussion of "how things work" or "where they come from"' .
(Bove 1990: 62) 'The contemporary use of "discourse" turns literary critics away from questions of meaning; it also turns us from questions of "method" to the description of function. It suggests that a new set of questions should replace the interpretive ones that have come to constitute criticism and the normal practice of teachers and scholars. We might ask such things as, How does language work to produce knowledge? How is language organized in disciplines? Which institutions perform and which regulative principles direct this organization?' .
(Marshall 1992: 161) 'In the description I propose, these [basic] components [of interpretation] are text, interpreter, the audience to whom interpretation is directed, meaning, and the resources that help achieve understanding' .
(Marshall 1992: 170) 'Interpretation ...presupposes that a text does not speak its meaning for itself. It holds itself back from us in some ways' .
(Marshall 1992: 175) 'The idea that a text must have a single clear meaning and that interpretation should aim to state it is highly questionable, but it has deep roots in our culture' .
(Derrida 1986b: 108) 'From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs. Which amounts to ruining the notion of the sign at the very moment when, as in Nietzsche, its exigency is recognized in the absoluteness of its right' .
(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 32) 'Anderson [1981] distinguishes between concepts, propositions, and schemata, with the latter including scripts. A concept is the "unanalyzable building block or primitive" of semantic memory.... Propositions are formed by relating concepts through predicates. They are the smallest units of meaning, assertions about the world which can be judged true or false. A schema is a set of related propositions and a script is a stereotyped sequence of propositions involving concepts, namely people or roles, objects or props, and settings. The script was conceived to be a very flexible mechanism' .
(van Dijk 1977: 3) 'In linguistics, macro-structures have been postulated in order to account for the "global meaning" of discourse such as it is intuitively assigned in terms of the "topic" or "theme" of a discourse or conversation. The assumption is that these notions cannot be accounted for in terms of current logical, linguistic, and cognitive semantics for isolated sentences or sequences of sentences. In disciplines such as rhetorics and narrative theory, macro-structures may constitute the semantic basis for specific categories and rules' .
(van Dijk 1977: 6) 'Discourse coherence is not primarily a matter of meaning, but of reference' .
(van Dijk 1977: 5) 'The phrase the book has an intensional meaning, namely the individual concept of a book, which may take various extensions, i.e. actual books referred to, in particular situations. Both intensional and extensional interpretations are necessary in an account of the semantic structures of discourse' .
(Winograd 1977: 66) It is obvious that Winograd assumes the basic conduit model of communication when he says that there is a 'need to transmit meaning through a sequential medium'. Apparently the arrangement is not a particularly happy one for 'the message is forced into a linearized channel in order to be conveyed by speaking' .
(Greenblatt 1995: 228) '"Culture" is a term that is repeatedly used without meaning much of anything at all, a vague gesture toward a dimly perceived ethos' .
(Harris 1990: 49) 'For purposes of an integrational analysis, however, the concept of meaning may be dispensed with and replaced by that of communicational function. The crucial difference is that the communicational function of a sign is always contextually determined and derives from the network of integrational relations which obtain in a particular situation' .
(Bathrick 1992: 321) 'Central to cultural studies from the outset has been a debate about the organization of knowledge and the role of the intellectual in the process of cultural change. This essay focuses on this latter meaning of the term cultural studies' .
(Bathrick 1992: 320) 'The designation cultural studies has tended to stake out an area of conflict concerning the very meaning and relation of text and context, representation and the represented, cultural production and the world in which such production takes place....Cultural studies has sought to problematize the borders of textuality itself and, in so doing, to interrogate the ways in which fields of knowledge are constituted and organized' .
(Geertz 1973: 5) 'The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning' .
(Jehlen 1990: 273) 'Because an ideology of gender is basic to virtually all thought while, by most thinkers, unrecognized as such, gender criticism often has a confrontational edge. One has to read for gender; unless it figures explicitly in story or poem, it will seldom read for itself. On the other hand "interpretation" is an ambiguous word meaning both to translate and to explain. Literary interpretation does both inextricably ... They also interpret who only think to explicate. Literary criticism involves action as much as reflection, and reading for gender makes the deed explicit.... The term "gender" in literary criticism refers to a set of concerns and also to a vocabulary ... that contributes its own meanings to everything that is said or written' .
(Leitch [n.d.]: 151) 'When it studies discourse, archeology does not seek a hidden or overt "intention," "will," or "meaning" in or behind the discourse ... Its object of analysis is not the author, the linguistic code, the reader, or the individual text. but the limited set of texts constituting the regulated discourse of a discipline' .
(Ordonez 1989: 90) 'Since each one of us intersects with texts and their cultural contexts at subtly different points, it is our responsibility, as critics, to assess the meaning of those points of convergence.... The text will also make its own claims and demands. It, too, occupies a space and partakes in a moment. We thus owe it to the text to confront and assess its location with all the pertinent historical and cultural information we can muster' .
(Ulmer 1994: 48) 'Here is a principle of chorography: do not choose between the different meanings of key terms, but compose by using all the meanings (write the paradigm)' .
(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
(Fish 1982: 3) 'The reader's response is not to the meaning; it is the meaning, or at least the medium in which what I wanted to call the meaning comes into being' .
(Foucault 1986b: 149) 'This should not be very surprising, for psychoanalysis has already shown us that speech is not merely the medium which manifests-- or dissembles-- desire; it is also the object of desire. Similarly, historians have constantly impressed upon us that speech is no mere verbalisation of conflicts and systems of domination, but that it is the very object of man's conflicts. But our society possesses yet another principle of exclusion; not another prohibition, but a division and a rejection. I have in mind the opposition: reason and folly' .
(Lanham 1993: xi-xii) 'The main intellectual debate of our time, I argue in chapter 3, is best understood as a resurrection of the ancient quarrel between the philosophers and the rhetoricians. This fundamental polarity depends heavily, it turns out, on the mode of presentation. Print- if I may telescope an argument presented more fully later- is a "philosophic" medium, the electronic screen a deeply "rhetorical" one. Once again, the quarrel, the item on the intellectual agenda, preceded the means of expression it so badly needs in order to sort itself out. Technology is following the main "operating system" disagreement in our time, not driving it' .
(Lanham 1993: ix) 'The response to the machine was as significant as the machine itself. A new expressive medium had emerged- the personal computer- but the demand for the medium had preceded the medium itself. Technology was not creating a demand but fulfilling one that already existed' .
(Lanham 1993: 8) 'But if you are going to read books any more, or are going to read them in different ways, you must decide what it is that happens when you do read them. You must know this if you are to recreate that ineffable something in another medium. You must decide what business you are really in. You can conclude, of course, that that ineffable something cannot be transplanted, that the business you are really in is Reading Books. Many areas of endeavor in America pressured by technological change have already had to decide what business they were really in, and those making the narrow choice have usually not fared well. The railroads had to decide whether they were in the transportation business or the railroad business; they chose the latter and gradual extinction. Newspapers had to decide whether they were in the information business or only the newspaper business; most who chose the newspaper business are no longer in it. A fascinating instance of the choice is now taking place in the piano industry. Steinway used to own the market, and it has decided to stay in the piano business. Yamaha decided it was in the keyboard business- acoustic and electronic- and has, with Roland, Korg, and other manufacturers, redefined the instrument. Time has yet to tell who will win, financially or musically. For all its fastidious self-distancing from the world of affairs, literary study faces the same kind of decision. If we are not in the codex book business, what business are we really in?' .
(Lanham 1993: 129-30) 'The late, and now much disputed, literary theorist Paul de Man spent a lot of time glossing the great American rhetorician Kenneth Burke's apothegm that "every way of seeing is a way of not seeing". Electronic text allows us to see that this version of "blindness" and "insight" is often a matter of scaling-choice. That choice we can now manipulate ourselves; we can dial in a different scale of difficulty, of "readability". That will often defuse, if not solve, the difficulty. If scaling won't work, and we come to an irreducible aporia, we can include both alternatives in a toggle switch and move on. Problem solved. Electronic text is intrinsically a bi-stable medium, one made to accommodate exactly this difficulty. Texts, Derrida argued, are not "a store of ready-made 'concepts' but an activity resistant to any such reductive ploy". No need to argue that for electronic text- it is manifestly true. The same popular commentary on deconstruction defines it this way: "Deconstruction is therefore an activity performed by texts which in the end have to acknowledge their own partial complicity with what they denounce" Kenneth Burke said the same thing in 1935, but without the political spin of "denunciation" and "complicity": "Even when one attempts to criticize the structure, one must leave some parts of it intact in order to have a point of reference for his criticism. However, for all the self-perpetuating qualities of an orientation, it contains the germs of its dissolution". Electronic text, by its very manipulability, builds in a maximum of the textual self-consciousness such declarations point to. Add all this reflection together (and a lot more one could do), and it is hard not to think that, at the end of the day, electronic text will seem the natural fulfillment of much current literary theory, and resolve many of its questions' .
(Lanham 1976: 43) 'Plato would not have been troubled by the old charge that he was rigging his dialogues. He would have admitted it cheerfully. Why not? The world was not being constituted but reconstituted, illustrated in a hopelessly inferior medium. What was obnoxious about the Sophists was not that their arguments were ornamental, but that the Sophists thought they were not; they pretended to constitute rather than reconstitute the world' .
(Winograd 1977: 66) It is obvious that Winograd assumes the basic conduit model of communication when he says that there is a 'need to transmit meaning through a sequential medium'. Apparently the arrangement is not a particularly happy one for 'the message is forced into a linearized channel in order to be conveyed by speaking' .
(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' .
Under construction
(Hopper 1987: 144-5) 'It has been noted before that to a very considerable extent everyday language is built up out of combinations of such prefabricated parts. Language is, in other words, to be viewed as a kind of pastiche, pasted together in an improvised way out of ready-made elements. Language is thus to be treated, in Wittgenstein's words, "from outside" (cf. Wittgenstein 1958: para. 120) -- not as governed by internalized mentally represented rules, but by pre-existent material with which discourses can be devised ... Evidently an entirely parallel way of viewing language is to be attributed to Jacques Derrida with his metaphor of language as "graft": new speech acts are "grafted onto" old ones and of course serve in turn as the stock onto which further new speech acts are grafted ... Becker's idea of "prior texts" ... is also crucial here: previous actual utterances form the basis of new utterances. Similar observations have been made by Bolinger, by Andrew Pawley, and others. It is this pre-patterned, pre-fabricated aspect of speech which accounts best for the characteristic of language for which no dualistic, double-tiered theory can provide an intuitively satisfying explanation: in natural discourse we compose and speak simultaneously (Smith 1980:60). There is no room -- no need -- for mediation by mental structures. It is in this sense that, as Bolinger has pointed out (Bolinger 1976), speaking is more similar to remembering procedures and things than it is to following rules. It is a question of possessing a repertoire of strategies for building discourses and reaching into memory in order to improvise and assemble them. Grammar is now not to be seen as the only, or even the major, source of regularity, but instead grammar is what results when formulas are re-arranged, or dismantled and re-assembled, in different ways' .
(Minsky 1980: 16) 'We can now imagine the memory system as driven by two complementary needs. On one side are items demanding to be properly represented by being embedded into larger frames; on the other side are incompletely-filled frames demanding terminal assignments' .
(Minsky 1980: 11) 'Frames are probably never stored in long-term memory with unassigned terminal values. Instead, what really happens is that frames are stored with weakly-bound default assignments at every terminal! These manifest themselves as often-useful but sometimes counter-productive stereotypes' .
(Ricoeur 1982: 147) 'Writing preserves discourse and makes it an archive available for individual and collective memory' .
(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 36) 'Scripts are assumed to provide privileged access to information in memory wherever it is located and to facilitate comprehension if subsequent sentences (Schank 1978). The mechanism for privileged access in reading comprehension is "spreading activation"' .
(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 36) 'Scripts are no longer viewed as "data structures that are available in one piece in some part of memory" (Schank 1980:264). Rather a script is a set of pointers to those memory structures tied to the particular script' .
(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 32) 'Anderson [1981] distinguishes between concepts, propositions, and schemata, with the latter including scripts. A concept is the "unanalyzable building block or primitive" of semantic memory.... Propositions are formed by relating concepts through predicates. They are the smallest units of meaning, assertions about the world which can be judged true or false. A schema is a set of related propositions and a script is a stereotyped sequence of propositions involving concepts, namely people or roles, objects or props, and settings. The script was conceived to be a very flexible mechanism' .
(van Dijk 1977: 27-30) 'We will briefly state a number of hypotheses regarding ... processing implications....It will be assumed that in discourse comprehension fragments of the morpho-phonological and syntactic surface structure of the sentence sequence are stored only in short-term memory to construct a proposition sequence.... It is assumed that beyond a limited number of propositions, the proposition sequence of the text base is not fully accessible for recall.... Given a sequence of assigned propositions, the reader will make hypotheses about the relevant macro-structure proposition covering the sequence by applying the macro-rules to the sequence.... Macro-structure formation takes place in the course of reading the text, not a posteriori. The same holds true for the assignment of conventional categories to the macro-propositions. Both the assignment of macro-structures and of conventional super-structures is recursive. As soon as a first level becomes too complex. a second level is formed, and so forth. The macro-structure is available when it is necessary to explicitly summarize a text.... The macro-structure is also the basis for recall of the discourse immediately after presentation. The macro-structure is directly available in episodic memory. It then yields, by inverse macro-rule application and recognition, access to lower-level macro-structures and possibly to some text base propositions if the discourse was not too long.... Macro-structures may also constitute "plans for speaking".... Macro-structure formation is a highly complex process, so it can hardly be expected that effective comprehension exactly follows the rules formulated above: expedient strategies are used in the global interpretation of discourse.... Finally, there are strategies based on contextual cues and knowledge of the general communication situation. We may know the speaker so well that we may easily predict the main themes of his discourse, even with very scanty information.... Familiarity with the relevant macro-structures will certainly facilitate the task of global comprehension' .
(A. Pratt 1981: 16-7) 'The adolescent girl, writes Simone de Beauvoir, will devote a special love to Nature... she worships it.... Later, the mature woman hero tends to look back to moments of naturistic epiphany as touchstones in a quest for her lost selfhood so that when she readies herself for her midlife rebirth journey, images of the green world remembered once more come to the fore.... Although most authors depict the green world of the woman hero as a place from which she sets forth and a memory to which she returns for renewal, there are a significant number of novels in which nature is the protagonist's entire world' .
A relation between two symbols, which may be simple juxtaposition (literal metaphor), a rhetorical statement of likeness or similarity (descriptive metaphor), an analogy of proportion among four terms (formal metaphor), an identity of an individual with its class (concrete universal or archetypal metaphor), or statement of hypothetical identity (anagogic metaphor).
(Hopper 1987: 149) 'It is not a question of an invariant hyperform from which different clauses are derived by processes of deletion and movement. Instead it seems that constructions spread outwards from a small nucleus and in turn form new nuclei (something like the metastasis of malignant cells, to coopt a metaphor of Bolinger's), and the resultant array of clauses are in "family resemblance" relationships to one another' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 56) 'The distortions and misperceptions introduced by the explicit communication model are also found in the study of verbal communication itself. Some essential aspects of implicit verbal communication are overlooked. ... What is implicitly conveyed by an utterance is generally much vaguer than what is explicitly expressed, and that when the implicit import of an utterance is explicitly spelled out, it tends to be distorted by the elimination of this often intentional vagueness. The distortion is even greater in the case of metaphor and other figures of speech, whose poetic effects are generally destroyed by being explicitly spelled out' .
(Reddy 1979: 310) 'Humanists, those traditionally charged with reconstructing culture and teaching others to reconstruct it, are not necessary in the scheme of the conduit metaphor. All the ideas are "there in the library," and anyone can go in and "get them." In the toolmakers paradigm, on the other hand, humanists themselves are the repositories, and the only real repositories of ideas. In the simplest of terms, the conduit metaphor lets human ideas slip out of human brains, so that, once you have recording technologies, you do not need humans anymore' .
(Reddy 1979: 290) 'Our examples thus far have been drawn from the four categories which constitute the "major framework" of the conduit metaphor. The core expressions in these categories imply, respectively, that: (1) language functions like a conduit, transferring thoughts bodily from one person to another; (2) in writing and speaking, people insert their thoughts or feelings in the words; (3) words accomplish the transfer by containing the thoughts or feelings and conveying them to others; and (4) in listening or reading, people extract the thoughts and feelings once again from the words' .
(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' .
Under construction
(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' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 319) 'This work (which would have as its motto Ad Bellum Purificandum , or Towards the Purification of War) is constructed on the belief that, whereas an attitude of humanistic contemplation is in itself more important by far than any method , only by method could it be given the body necessary for its existence even as an attitude. We would thus hold at least that an elaborate analysis of linguistic foibles is justified "in principle". Indeed, the study of linguistic action is but beginning. And we must be on our guard lest the great need for an attitude of linguistic skepticism allow us to be content with too hasty a "policy" as regards the nature of language itself. This is too serious a matter for such "dissipatory" approaches to the subject as we find among the contemporary "debunkers". And even serious approaches are invalidated when formed in keeping with the ideals of an uncriticized scientism, which is too evasive of the dramatistic to make even an adequate preparatory description of linguistic forms' .
(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' .
(Fish 1982: 42) 'The method, then, is applicable to larger units and its chief characteristics remain the same: (1) it refuses to answer or even ask the question, what is this work about; (2) it yields an analysis not of formal features but of the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time; (3) the result will be a description of the structure of response which hay have an oblique or even ... a contrasting relationship to the structure of the work as a thing in itself' .
(Fish 1982: 66) 'Becoming good at the method means asking the question "what does that ------ do?" with more and more awareness of the probable (and hidden) complexity of the answer, that is, with a mind more and more sensitized to the workings of language. In a peculiar and unsettling (to theorists) way, it is a method which processes its own user, who is also its only instrument. It is self-sharpening and what it sharpens is you. It does not organize materials, but transforms minds' .
(Booth 1979: 101-2) 'Crane's pluralism might lead us to "do justice" to Burke. His dramatism is one of the possible modes: his subject, language as action; his method, an assimilative dialectic; his principles, comprehensive and operational; and his purpose, actional or "rhetorical". To use his own words, he attempts "to cure" himself and society by doing verbal "therapy". His initial choice of mode enables him to answer certain questions and prevents his answering other questions. When we judge his answers as "relative to" that initial choice, we can both judge his effectiveness within his chosen mode and avoid the kind of dogmatism that would rule out his mode as illegitimate in the first place. Anyone who knows Burke at all knows that he will refuse to stay pinned and wriggling on anyone else's wall chart' .
(Booth 1979: 126) 'For proponents of certain kinds of rigor, to defend Burke in my way would no doubt seem a kind of dismissal, even a refutation: he has a self-proving, self-validating system, a method that invents problems that are essentially beyond solution and then claims to solve them by using principles that can be assumed only as part of his invention. His whole enterprise is impossibly, outrageously, shockingly ambitious, yet it finally frustrates intellectual ambition by undermining all solutions' .
(Bove 1990: 62) 'The contemporary use of "discourse" turns literary critics away from questions of meaning; it also turns us from questions of "method" to the description of function. It suggests that a new set of questions should replace the interpretive ones that have come to constitute criticism and the normal practice of teachers and scholars. We might ask such things as, How does language work to produce knowledge? How is language organized in disciplines? Which institutions perform and which regulative principles direct this organization?' .
(Leitch [n.d.]: 152) 'Deploying discontinuity as a methodological wedge, archaeology shows one aspect of its negative operation....In short, it begets excessive fragmentation in both the object and method of analysis....Archaeology regards discontinuity as a positive element rather than some external threat or failure requiring reduction or erasure. Thus archaeology actively courts discontinuity ... As archaeologist, Foucault attempts to restore to the stable ground of Western culture its rifts, instabilities, and flaws' .
(Said 1986: 621) 'Were I to use one word consistently along with criticism ... it would be oppositional....its identity is its difference from other cultural activities and from systems of thought or of method' .
Under construction
(van Dijk 1977: 4) 'In this paper, we will show that some fundamental problems of cognitive psychology can be accounted for in terms of macro-processing of complex semantic information.... Comprehension (as well as production) probably takes place at several levels, such that lower-level information is organized, reduced, and represented at higher levels. These processes involve the use of macro-rules; the input to the macro-rules is the micro-structure, and the output is the macro-structure. Macro-structures help to explain the ability to summarize discourse, and in general to use information from discourse for other cognitive tasks' .
(van Dijk 1977: 8) 'Characteristically, the relation of the macro-structure to the micro-structure involves notions such as importance or relevance: the macro-interpretation defines the most important or essential object or event denoted by a sequence of propositions' .
Under construction
(Hopper 1987: 141) 'The assumption, in other words, is that "grammar" (in the sense of the rules, constraints, and categories of the language attributed to the speaker) must be an object apart from the speaker and separated from the uses which the speaker may make of it. That kind of grammar is conventionally understood to consist of sets of rules which operate on fixed categories like nouns and verbs, specify the forms of additive categories like those of case, tense, transitivity, etc., and restrict the possible orders in which words can occur in a sentence. Discourse, the actual use of language, is held to be in some sense an "implementation" of these structures, or the way in which the abstract mental system possessed in its entirety by the speaker is realized in particular utterances' .
(Hopper 1987: 144-5) 'It has been noted before that to a very considerable extent everyday language is built up out of combinations of such prefabricated parts. Language is, in other words, to be viewed as a kind of pastiche, pasted together in an improvised way out of ready-made elements. Language is thus to be treated, in Wittgenstein's words, "from outside" (cf. Wittgenstein 1958: para. 120) -- not as governed by internalized mentally represented rules, but by pre-existent material with which discourses can be devised ... Evidently an entirely parallel way of viewing language is to be attributed to Jacques Derrida with his metaphor of language as "graft": new speech acts are "grafted onto" old ones and of course serve in turn as the stock onto which further new speech acts are grafted ... Becker's idea of "prior texts" ... is also crucial here: previous actual utterances form the basis of new utterances. Similar observations have been made by Bolinger, by Andrew Pawley, and others. It is this pre-patterned, pre-fabricated aspect of speech which accounts best for the characteristic of language for which no dualistic, double-tiered theory can provide an intuitively satisfying explanation: in natural discourse we compose and speak simultaneously (Smith 1980:60). There is no room -- no need -- for mediation by mental structures. It is in this sense that, as Bolinger has pointed out (Bolinger 1976), speaking is more similar to remembering procedures and things than it is to following rules. It is a question of possessing a repertoire of strategies for building discourses and reaching into memory in order to improvise and assemble them. Grammar is now not to be seen as the only, or even the major, source of regularity, but instead grammar is what results when formulas are re-arranged, or dismantled and re-assembled, in different ways' .
(Hopper 1987: 147) 'The systematicity which linguists have come to expect in language still exists, of course, but in a more complex way. The linguistic system is now not to be seen as something complete and homogeneous, in which, "exceptional" phenomena must be set aside as inconvenient irregularities, but as a growing together of disparate forms. This convergence takes place through lateral associations of real utterances. Similarities spread outwards from individual formulas, in ways that are motivated by a variety of factors ... They do not, however, merge into the kind of uniform grammar which would lead one to posit a uniform mental representation to subtend them' .
(Burke 1945: 187) 'By utilizing a function of our term agent , we can transform this problem into a solution. Namely: we can say that people interpret natural sequences in terms of cause and effect not because of something in the natural scene requiring this interpretation, but because they are the sort of agents that see things in terms of necessary relations . In this view we do not derive our ideas of cause and effect from experience; all that we can derive from experience is the observation that certain happenings seem likely to follow certain happenings. But our ideas of cause and effect are derived from the nature of the mind' .
(Burke 1945: 189) 'If then, you would talk profoundly and intelligently about the conditions of the possibility of the knowledge of nothing, what do you have that you can talk about? You have the knower . You can say, for instance, "Whatever an object in general may or may not look like, you can be sure that when you do come across one you are going to have to encounter it in terms of space and/or time". And since you can't here be talking about an object (if you are, what is it?) what you must be talking about is the nature of your own mind' .
(Burke 1945: 20) 'This group of concerns will be examined in due course. Meanwhile, we should be reminded that the term agent embraces not only all words general or specific for person, actor, character, individual, hero, villain, father, doctor, engineer, but also any words, moral or functional, for patient, and words for the motivational properties or agents, such as "drives", "instincts", "states of mind"' .
(Burke 1945: 195) 'Since we began our enterprise with all respect for the requirements of empirical science, we have defined knowledge by empirical tests. Knowledge by definition, then, is the knowledge of conditions and relations. It is the knowledge of appearances , the knowledge of objects as they necessarily appear when seen in terms of our human categories (the categories of the mind in general). So, by definition, the transcendent realm of the unconditioned things-in-themselves (the scene that contains the possibilities of freedom) cannot be known . Hence, we must restrict the claims we can make about it. But whereas it can't be known , it can be thought about , for we are now thinking about it' .
(Burke 1945: 190) 'But look where we now are. We have described intellectual synthesis as "active". Yet what kind of "act" is this? The empirical scene has derived its character from the nature of the agent; but though we have called this action of the mind "spontaneous" and "original", we might just as well have called it "inevitable". It is compulsory , lacking the elements of freedom necessary for action. The mind cannot see otherwise than in terms of the categories. To observe is an act, in that one can choose either to observe it or not to observe it. But to observe in terms of the categories is not an act in this sense, since we must consider it in such terms, whether we choose to observe it or not. Conversely, though the sensibility is "passive", we find space and time called the "forms" of sensibility. And in the tradition from which Western philosophy stems, "form" is the act word par excellence. So the "passive" begins to look as active as the avowedly active' .
(Fish 1982: 65-6) 'The meaning of an utterance, I repeat, is its experience -- all of it -- and that experience is immediately compromised the moment you say something about it. It follows then that we should not try to analyze language at all. The human mind, however, seems unable to resist the impulse to investigate its own processes; but the least (and probably the most) we can do is proceed in such a way as to permit as little distortion as possible' .
(Fish 1982: 101-2) 'The trivialization of ordinary language is accomplished as soon as one excludes from its precincts matters of purpose, value, intention, obligation, and so on -- everything that can be characterized as human. What, then, is left to it? The answers to this question are various. For some, the defining constituent of ordinary language, or language, is its capacity to carry messages; for others, the structure of language is more or less equated with the structure of logic ... Still others hold instrumental views: language is used to refer either to objects in the real world or to ideas in the mind ... But whatever the definition, two things remain constant: (1) the content of language is an entity that can be specified independently of human values... and (2) a need is therefore created for another entity or system in the context of which human values can claim pride of place.... Once you've taken the human values out of the language, and yet designated what remains as the norm, the separated values become valueless, because they have been removed from the normative center' .
(Fish 1982: 66) 'Becoming good at the method means asking the question "what does that ------ do?" with more and more awareness of the probable (and hidden) complexity of the answer, that is, with a mind more and more sensitized to the workings of language. In a peculiar and unsettling (to theorists) way, it is a method which processes its own user, who is also its only instrument. It is self-sharpening and what it sharpens is you. It does not organize materials, but transforms minds' .
(Booth 1974: 16-7) 'One can easily construct a long column of opposed terms that roughly match the original and entirely misleading split between fact and value: objective versus subjective, matter versus mind, mechanism versus vitalism, scientific reason versus faith or "the heart" or "the wisdom of the body"- and so on. The giveaway in such matters is that the column can be turned into two double columns, all of the terms made useful to either scientismist or irrationalist, just by adding proper adjectives to the opponent's terms. Often one needs no better adjective than a mere mere : my side obtains knowledge of facts, yours asserts mere value. Or: my side respects values, yours deals with mere facts. My side works with reason, yours with mere, or blind, faith' .
(Booth 1974: 22) 'The dogmas we turn to now tend to travel together, reinforcing each other to constitute the almost overwhelmingly persuasive worldview of modernism. But it will be useful to think of them as falling into five kinds. There are dogmas about (a) the methods or means for producing change; (b) the nature of the thing being changed- the mind or soul or self or person or organism (though I have talked only of "changing minds", I intend the word mind in the broadest possible sense); (c) the scene of change- the world in which that thing changed, the "mind", finds itself; (d) the principles or basic assumptions about truth and its testing- the ground and nature of change; and (e) the purpose of change. Every effort to change a mind will appear differently depending on our view of what does the changing, what is changed, how it relates to the whole nature of things, whether or in what sense the change is tested or justified in basic principles, and the purpose of the change' .
(Booth 1974: xii) 'As soon as I ask "When should I change my mind?" or "What is a good reason?" I become an intellectual imperialist, and I risk becoming vacuous for the sake of covering the world' .
(Foucault 1986b: 149) 'This should not be very surprising, for psychoanalysis has already shown us that speech is not merely the medium which manifests-- or dissembles-- desire; it is also the object of desire. Similarly, historians have constantly impressed upon us that speech is no mere verbalisation of conflicts and systems of domination, but that it is the very object of man's conflicts. But our society possesses yet another principle of exclusion; not another prohibition, but a division and a rejection. I have in mind the opposition: reason and folly' .
(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' .
(Minsky 1980: 6-7) 'People have great difficulty keeping track of the faces of a six-colored cube if one makes them roll it around in their mind. If one uses more "intrinsic" relations like next-to and opposite-to, then turning the object on its side disturbs the "image" much less' .
(Minsky 1980: 16)
'In any event, the individual statements of a discourse lead to temporary
representations -- which seem to correspond to what contemporary
linguists call "deep structures" -- which are then quickly rearranged or
consumed in elaboration the growing scenario representation. In order of
"scale", among the ingredients of such a structure there might be these
kinds of levels':
surface syntactic frames -- mainly verb and noun
structures;
prepositional and word-order indicator conventions;
surface semantic frames -- action-centered meanings of words;
qualifiers and relations concerning participants, instruments,
trajectories and strategies, goals, consequences and side-effects;
thematic frames -- scenarios concerned with topics, activities, portraits,
setting; outstanding problems and strategies commonly connected with
topics;
narrative frames -- skeleton forms for typical stories,
explanations, and arguments; conventions about foci, protagonists, plot
forms, development, etc., designed to help a listener construct a new,
instantiated thematic frame in his own mind
.
(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: 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' .
(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' .
(White 1974: 403-4) 'Histories, then, are not only about events but also about the possible sets of relationships that those events can be demonstrated to figure. These sets of relationships are not, however, immanent in the events themselves; they exist only in the mind of the historian reflecting on them' .
Under construction
(Booth 1974: 53) 'Then this clever, subtle, sensitive but divided man does an amazing thing. Russell I has said he ought to be a behaviorust but can't quite make it. Russell II has worried about the effects of popular behaviorism on mass man. Now Russell III, the man of action, retreats from the whole problem by recommending as his practical solution that ordinary men (whose misreading of the ethical consequences of behaviorism he fears) should be "taught logic": they should be taught logic so that they will learn not to reason. "For, if they reason, they will almost certainly reason wrongly" (p.98)- that is, they will conclude that if man is a machine, certain ethical consequences follow!' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 210-1) 'So we offer such a tentative restatement of the Marxist doctrine, as formed about the act of class struggle. We are following no particular text, but are trying to restate the Marxist position in general, as it appears when translated into the terms of characterization employed in this book. We freely grant, however, that such a mode of summarization, characterization, and placement is almost ludicrously inapposite, when considered from the Rhetorical point of view. For though we manipulate our terms in keeping with all the important Marxist emphasis upon class antagonism as the locus of motives, our vocabulary necessarily lacks the partisan vigor that infuses the Marxist rhetoric, and makes the Communist Manifesto a masterpiece of challenge' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 3) 'The code model and the inferential model are not incompatible; they can be combined in various ways.... Both the code model and the inferential model can contribute to the study of verbal communication. However, it is usually assumed that one of the two models must provide the right overall framework for the study of communication in general.... Against these reductionist views, we maintain that communication can be achieved in ways which are as different from one another as walking is from plane flight. In particular, communication can be achieved by coding and decoding messages, and it can be achieved by providing evidence for an intended inference. The code model and the inferential model are each adequate to a different mode of communication; hence upgrading either to the status of a general theory of communication is a mistake....We will propose what we hope is an improved inferential model. However, we do not regard this model as the basis for a general theory of communication' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 27) 'We maintain, then, that there are at least two different modes of communication: the coding-decoding mode and the inferential mode' .
(Spellmeyer 1993: 22) According to Spellmeyer, constructionists would have us believe: 'Each community has its own distinctive mode of cognition, its own characteristic "flow chart" for problem solving. Psychologists do not think first and then practice psychology: strictly speaking, the discipline of psychology preordains the nature of thought for its practitioners. Whatever we perceive, then, is a construct, something constructed by communities, and whatever we have learned derives not from experience but from a process of initiation into those rituals of community life that create both selves and worlds' .
(Booth 1979: 101-2) 'Crane's pluralism might lead us to "do justice" to Burke. His dramatism is one of the possible modes: his subject, language as action; his method, an assimilative dialectic; his principles, comprehensive and operational; and his purpose, actional or "rhetorical". To use his own words, he attempts "to cure" himself and society by doing verbal "therapy". His initial choice of mode enables him to answer certain questions and prevents his answering other questions. When we judge his answers as "relative to" that initial choice, we can both judge his effectiveness within his chosen mode and avoid the kind of dogmatism that would rule out his mode as illegitimate in the first place. Anyone who knows Burke at all knows that he will refuse to stay pinned and wriggling on anyone else's wall chart' .
(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"' .
(Lanham 1993: xi-xii) 'The main intellectual debate of our time, I argue in chapter 3, is best understood as a resurrection of the ancient quarrel between the philosophers and the rhetoricians. This fundamental polarity depends heavily, it turns out, on the mode of presentation. Print- if I may telescope an argument presented more fully later- is a "philosophic" medium, the electronic screen a deeply "rhetorical" one. Once again, the quarrel, the item on the intellectual agenda, preceded the means of expression it so badly needs in order to sort itself out. Technology is following the main "operating system" disagreement in our time, not driving it' .
(Lanham 1976: 27) 'The rhetorical stylist has no central self to be true to.... He feels at home in his roles and to live must play them. When he poses, he is being himself. The more artistic his performance, the more authentically representative it is. Rhetorical man is an actor and insincerity is the actor's mode of being. The wider his range of impersonations, the fuller his self. The more smoothly he can manage a sudden role-change, the more genuine the effect and the effort' .
Under construction
(Longacre 1983: 2) 'It is obvious that not all monologue discourses are of the same sort.... There are, on the other hand, similarities between certain of the types' .
(Longacre 1983: 1) 'This chapter deals with broad concerns of monologue discourse and leaves the matter of the relations of monologue and dialogue to the introduction to the next chapter. One initial concern in the analysis of monologue discourse is discourse typology. Characteristics of individual discourses can be neither described, predicted, nor analyzed without resort to a classification of discourse types' .
(Longacre 1983: 15) 'The previous section has skirted the edge of a further feature of monologue discourse that requires discussion in its own right: the distinction between the main line of development in a discourse and all other material -- which I here lump together under the rubric supportive' .
Under construction
(Foucault 1986b: 162) 'The critical side of the analysis deals with the systems enveloping discourse; attempting to mark out and distinguish the principles of ordering, exclusion and rarity in discourse. We might, to play with our words, say it practises a kind of studied casualness. The genealogical side of discourse, by way of contrast, deals with series of effective formation of discourse: it attempts to grasp it in its power of affirmation, by which I do not mean a power opposed to that of negation, but the power of constituting domains of objects, in relation to which one can affirm or deny true or false propositions. Let us call these domains of objects positivist and , to play on words yet again, let us say that, if the critical style is one of studied casualness, then the genealogical mood is one of felicitous positivism' .
Under construction
Under construction
(Lanham 1976: 58) 'Anthropological understanding of myth began when scholars ceased to force scientific coordinates on it, stopped trying to "make sense of it" and let it make its own kind of sense. Ovid's Metamorphoses could not be plainer about the kind of invitation it extends. a poem about changes, it insists on dynamic rhetorical premises, not static serious ones. Identity is, by nature in this poem, as fluid as the other categories of life. The underlying assumption here is unity of life, not aristocratic domination of one species by another' .
(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' .
(Frye 1957: 188) 'We have distinguished myth from romance by the hero's power of action: in the myth proper he is divine, in the romance proper he is human' .
(Frye 1957: 198-202) 'Romance, like comedy, has six isolatable phases': 1) '...the myth of the birth of the hero'; 2) '...the innocent youth of the hero'; 3) '...the normal quest theme'; 4) '...the maintaining of the integrity of the innocent world against the assault of experience'; 5) '...a reflective, idyllic view of experience from above'; and 6) '...the end of a movement from active to contemplative adventure' .
(Frye 1957: 192) 'The four mythoi that we are dealing with, comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony, may now be seen as four aspects of a central unifying myth....conflict is the basis or archetypal theme of romance ...catastrophe ... is the archetypal theme of tragedy....the sense that heroism and effective action are absent, disorganized or foredoomed to defeat, and that confusion and anarchy reign over the world, is the archetypal theme of irony and satire....recognition of a newborn society rising in triumph around a still somewhat mysterious hero and his bride, is the archetypal theme of comedy' .
(Ordonez 1991: 103) 'The work of Annis Pratt emerges as a useful key to the perception and assessment of myth and archetype in narrative by women' .
(Ordonez 1991: 104) 'The title of Os habla Electra alerts the reader that this novel has referents in the world of myth and archetype' .
(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' .
Last Modified: July-12-96 16:42:57
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