tactic, tag question, teaching, teleology, temporal, tense, term, terminology, text, theme, theory, thesis, thing-in-itself, thinking, thought, topic, transitivity, translation, trope, truth, two-frame
Under construction
Under construction
(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' .
(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' .
(Lanham 1993: xii) 'Those who feel that the end of the book is the end of the world assume, and less often argue, that books equal culture. To call that assumption into question, as electronic text does, takes us to the central crisis of the humanities today, our cultural accountability. Can we really argue that the arts and letters make us better? If not, how do we justify the public expenditures now made on them? How, for the matter of that, do we justify the time we spend teaching and cultivating them? I call this question the "Q" question and confront it in chapter 7' .
Under construction
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 64) 'In sum: we are discussing the Creation not as a temporal event, but as the logical prototype of an act. Indeed, even if one believed it literally, one would hardly be justified in treating it as a temporal event, since it was itself the positing of time; it was the act that set up the conditions of temporal development; hence a terminology that reduced it to terms of time would lack sufficient scope. Thus, even a literal believer would have to treat it in terms that placed it, rather, at an intersection of time and the timeless- a point at which we place ourselves when we discuss it in terms of those non-temporal firsts called "principles"' .
(Burke 1945: 15-6) 'Both act and agent require scenes that "contain" them. Hence the scene-act and scene-agent ratios are in the fullest sense positive (or "positional"). But the relation between act and agent is not quite the same. The agent does not "contain" the act, though its results might be said to "pre-exist virtually" within him. And the act does not "synecdochically share" in the agent, though certain ways of acting may be said to induce corresponding moods or traits of character. To this writer, at least, the act-agent ratio more strongly suggests a temporal or sequential relationship than a purely positional or geometric one. The agent is an author of his actis, which are descended from him, being good progeny of he is good, or bad progeny if he is bad, wise progeny if he is wise, silly progeny of he is silly. And, conversely, his acts can make him or remake him in accordance with their nature' .
(Burke 1945: 127) 'We noted that the areas covered by our five terms overlap upon one another. And because of this overlap, it is possible for a thinker to make his way continuously from any one of them to any of the others. Or he may use terms in which several of the areas are merged. For any of the terms may be seen in terms of any of the others. And we may even treat all five in terms of one, by "reducing" them all to the one or (what amounts to the same thing) "deducing" them all from the one as their common terminal ancestor. This relation we could express in temporal terms by saying that the term selected as ancestor "came first"; and in timeless or logical terms we could say that the term selected is the "essential", "basic", "logically prior" or "ultimate" term, or the "term of terms", etc.' .
(Longacre 1983: 3) 'To begin with, we can classify all possible discourses according to two basic parameters: contingent temporal succession and agent orientation.... Narrative discourse ... is plus in respect to both parameters. Procedural discourse ... is plus in respect to contingent succession ... but minus in respect to the agent orientation ... Behavioral discourse is minus in regard to contingent succession but plus in regard to agent orientation ... Expository discourse is minus in respect to both parameters' .
(Lanham 1976: 20-1) 'Of all the unexamined premises rhetoric took over from serious philosophy, clarity has perplexed the most. Since Aristotle it has figured as a central goal for verbal expression. Theorists, without giving the matter special thought, seem to have considered clarity a property of the text. Yet clarity describes many styles and audiences. Used to describe a particular verbal configuration, clarity cannot mean anything at all....The most intellectual, conceptual, scientific virtue of style turns out to be entirely emotional. If everyone is happy, clarity has arrived.... Clarity is at least partly, and often predominantly, a temporal phenomenon, a problem of period. One century's brightness becomes murk for the next. Clarity no more permits objective standards than custom itself' .
(Enkvist 1981: 102) 'I have spoken about text strategies and must therefore digress to explain the background of this concept....It is practical as well as theoretically defensible to classify text models into four major categories. The first category of models is sentence-based. A sentence-based model uses ready-made sentences as its input and cannot therefore manipulate sentence boundaries. It can only explain how features within and between sentences, such as anaphoric and cataphoric references and theme-rheme-focus structures, link sentences to one another.... The second type of model is predication-based. Here the input consists of a set of predications of some kind together with their temporal, causal or spatial, and perhaps social, relations, and a strategy which controls their textualization and linearization into sentences through grouping, conjunction, and embedding' .
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' .
(Foucault 1986a: 144-5) 'In a novel narrated in the first person, neither the first person pronoun, the present indicative tense, nor, for that matter, its signs of localization refer directly to the writer, either to the time when he wrote, or to the specific act of writing; rather, they stand for a "second self" whose similarity to the author is never fixed and undergoes considerable alteration within the course of a single book. It would be as false to seek the author in relation to the actual writer as to the fictional narrator; the "author-function" arises out of their scission-- in the division and distance of the two. One might object that this phenomenon only applies to novels or poetry, to a context of "quasi-discourse," but, in fact, all discourse that supports this "author-function" is characterized by this plurality of egos. In a mathematical treatise, the ego who indicates the circumstances of composition in the preface is not identical, either in terms of his position or his function, to the "I" who concludes a demonstration within the body of the text. The former implies a unique individual who, at a given time and place, succeeded in completing a project, whereas the latter indicates an instance and plan of demonstration that anyone could perform provided the same set of axioms, preliminary operations, and an identical set of symbols were used. It is also possible to locate a third ego: one who speaks of the goals of his investigation, the obstacles encountered, its results, and the problems yet to be solved and this "I" would function in a field of existing or future mathematical discourses. We are not dealing with a system of dependencies where a first and essential use of the "I" is reduplicated, as a kind of fiction, by the other two. On the contrary, the "author-function" in such discourses operates so as to effect the simultaneous dispersion of the three egos' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 98) 'A scientist might happen to believe in a personal God, and might even pray to God for the success of his experiments. In such an act of prayer, of course, he would be treating God as a variable . Yet, when his prayer was finished, and he began his experiments, he would now, qua scientist, treat "God" as an invariant term, as being at most but the over-all name for the ultimate ground of all experience and all experiments, and not a name for the particularities of local context with which the scientific study of conditions, or correlations, is concerned' .
(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: 171) 'The unadulteratedly idealistic philosophy starts and ends in the featuring of properties belonging to the term, agent' .
(Burke 1945: 38) Such histories can be imagined in an endless variety of details. What we are suggesting here is that they all embody a grammatical form in accordance with which we should not expect a dualism of motives to be automatically dissolved, as with those apologists of science who believe that in a scientific world ethics become unnecessary. However, to consider these possibilities further, we should move into the areas of Symbolic, involving modes of transubstantiation, rituals of rebirth, whereby the individual identifies himself in terms of the collective motive (an identification by which he both is and is not one with that with which and by which he is identified). At present it is enough to note in a general way how the paradox of the absolute figures grammatically in the dialectic, making for a transcending of none term by its other, and for the reversed ambiguous derivation of the term from its other as ancestral principle' .
(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: 37) 'In theological and metaphysical works, we can recognize the paradox of the absolute readily enough. Often, in fact, it is explicitly discussed. But in historicist writings it more easily goes unnoticed. Yet the paradox may be implicit in any term for a collective motivation, such as a concept of class, nation, the "general will," and the like. Technically, it becomes a "pure" motive when matched against some individual locus of motivation. And it may thus be the negation of an individual motive.... What we are here considering formally, as a paradox of substance, can be illustrated quickly enough by example. A soldier may be nationally motivated to kill the enemies of his country, whereas individually he is motivated by a horror of killing his own enemies. Or conversely, as a patriot he may act by the motive of sacrifice in behalf of his country, but as an individual he may want to profit' .
(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: 21) 'The most prominent philosophic member of this family is "substance". Or at least it used to be, before John Locke greatly impaired its prestige, so that many thinkers today explicitly banish the term from their vocabularies. But there is cause to believe that, in banishing the term , far from banishing its functions one merely conceals them. Hence, from the dramatistic point of view, we are admonished to dwell upon the word, considering its embarrassments and its potentialities of transformation, so that we may detect its covert influence even in cases where it is overtly absent. Its relation to our five terms will become apparent as we proceed' .
(Burke 1945: 66) 'We are reasoning as follows: we are saying that, to study the nature of the term, act , one must select a prototype, or paradigm of action. This prototype we find in the conception of a perfect or total act, such as the act of "the Creation". Examining this concept, we find that it is "magic", for it produces something out of nothing. This enables us to equate magic with novelty - and leads us to look for a modicum of magic in every act to the extent that the act possesses a modicum of novelty. This consideration also admonishes us, however, to make a distinction between "true" and "false" magic. "False" magic is a quasi-scientific ideal that would suspend the laws of motion , as in the attempt to coerce natural forces by purely ritualistic means. "True" magic is an aspect not of motion but of action' .
(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' .
(Burke 1945: 140) 'Whenever in philosophy I see two terms, of opposite and equal importance, being merged into a third term that will somehow contain the nature of both, I always ask myself: "Which of the two equal terms was foremost?" For I will expect the genius of this term to weight the third term (as Schelling's third term, "subject-object", supposedly "indifferent" to the two terms "subject" and "object" which it combines, is more "subjective" than "objective", even though he would further complicate matters by distinguishing between a "subjective subject-object" and an "objective subject-object")' .
(Burke 1945: 127) 'We noted that the areas covered by our five terms overlap upon one another. And because of this overlap, it is possible for a thinker to make his way continuously from any one of them to any of the others. Or he may use terms in which several of the areas are merged. For any of the terms may be seen in terms of any of the others. And we may even treat all five in terms of one, by "reducing" them all to the one or (what amounts to the same thing) "deducing" them all from the one as their common terminal ancestor. This relation we could express in temporal terms by saying that the term selected as ancestor "came first"; and in timeless or logical terms we could say that the term selected is the "essential", "basic", "logically prior" or "ultimate" term, or the "term of terms", etc.' .
(Burke 1945: 54) 'From such ambiguity is derived that irony of historical development whereby the very strength in the affirming of a given term may the better enable men to make a world that departs from it. For the affirming of the term as their god-term enables men to go far afield without sensing a loss of orientation. And by the time the extent of their departure is enough to become generally obvious, the stability of the new order they have built in the name of the old order gives them the strength to abandon their old god-term and adopt another' .
(Burke 1945: 173) 'Dialectically, any conflict between two concepts of justice can be removed by the adoption of a remoter term broad enough to encompass both, as a distinction between farmhouse and palace can be resolved in classing them both as "dwellings"' .
(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' .
(Marshall 1992: 162) 'The term text ...encompasses the continuous substance of all human signifying activities and allows us to point to something very general, namely, to whatever seems to invite interpretation or to whatever the interpreter sets up as an object for interpreting' .
(Winograd 1977: 63)
'While the field is not yet at a stage where it is possible to lay out a precise
unifying theory, this paper attempts to provide a beginning framework for
studying discourse.... Its four sections attempt to:
1. Delimit the
range of problems covered by the term "discourse".
2. Characterize
the basic structure of natural language based on a notion of
communication.
3. Propose a general approach to formalisms for
describing the phenomena and building theories about them.
4. Lay
out an outline of the different schemas involved in generating and
comprehending language'
.
(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' .
(Burke 1979: 129) 'Owing to the fact that words can resemble one another tonally even when their literal meanings may be miles apart, various kinds of trick affinities can develop between them. Though I affirm absolutely that anyone who doesn't agree with this proposition lacks a feel for the sound of words, there is still plenty of room for disagreement as to its application in particular cases. The issue becomes especially risky when (thinking along psychoanalytic lines) one tinkers with the possibility that a term on its face sublime may secretly resonate with a term quite ridiculous; and thereby the kinds of "body-thinking" explicitly manifest in, say, writers like Aristophanes or Swift can figure implicitly in solemn works (particularly when one is dealing with such images as a funeral urn' .
(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: 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' .
(Enkvist 1981: 97-8) 'Rhetoricians used to be the people who worried most about the complex of problems which I shall discuss under a somewhat ponderous term, Experiential Iconicism....The traditional labels under which these problems used to enter into rhetoric and grammar were ordo naturalis and ordo artificialis....In natural order ... text and discourse have the same arrangement as things in the universe of discourse' .
(Enkvist 1981: 109) 'Information dynamics and experiential iconicism ... conspire without being identical. In addition, we cannot discard iconicism as but another manifestation of salience in the usual sense of that term ... Salience is a result of a set of universal psychological principles which people use when translating their experiences into language' .
(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.]: 157) 'To the extent that the ordinary term "context" suggests a position outside textuality, it is misleading' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 96) 'Next, within the verbal, there is the reduction of one terminology to another. Any word or concept is a reduction in this sense. One reduces this to that by discussing this in terms of that' .
(Burke 1945: 64) 'In sum: we are discussing the Creation not as a temporal event, but as the logical prototype of an act. Indeed, even if one believed it literally, one would hardly be justified in treating it as a temporal event, since it was itself the positing of time; it was the act that set up the conditions of temporal development; hence a terminology that reduced it to terms of time would lack sufficient scope. Thus, even a literal believer would have to treat it in terms that placed it, rather, at an intersection of time and the timeless- a point at which we place ourselves when we discuss it in terms of those non-temporal firsts called "principles"' .
(Burke 1945: 85-6) 'Though we have stressed the contrast between theology and behaviorism because it so readily illustrates the "circumferential logic" (that is, the effect of scope in a given terminology of motives), we should note that a writer's vocabulary is usually set somewhere between these two extremes. His aims are usually less thoroughgoing, more "monographic", as with the selection of some "thesis"' .
(Burke 1945: 128-9)
'For the featuring of scene , the corresponding philosophic
terminology is materialism .
For the featuring of agent
, the corresponding terminology is idealism .
For the
featuring of agency , the corresponding terminology is
pragmatism .
For the featuring of purpose , the
corresponding terminology is mysticism .
For the featuring
of act , the corresponding terminology is realism .
Nominalism and rationalism increase the kinds of
terminology to seven. But since we have used up all our terms, we must
account for them indirectly'
.
(Burke 1945: 210) 'Let us, then, put the matter this way: So far as our dramatistic terminology is concerned, the Marxist philosophy began by grounding agent in scene , but by reason of its poignant concern with the ethical, it requires the systematic featuring of act . On the Symbolic level, it does feature act implicitly but intensely, in having so dramatic a pattern. On the Rhetorical level, its scientist and anti-scholastic vocabulary is needed for purposes of political dynamism (for the use of an ethical terminology would fail to differentiate the doctrine sufficiently from non-secular ways of salvation). But if, as an experiment, you try a systematic development of terms generated from act , the entire system falls quickly into place' .
(Burke 1945: 195) 'If this realm of the things-in-themselves can be thought though not known , this limitation upon our claims to knowledge about them applies in reverse to science. Science compels us to admit that things-in-themselves can't be known; but in putting them outside the area of scientific knowledge , by the same token we put them outside the area of scientific refutation or denial . The sources of morality thus lie beyond the reach of the terms proper to the physical sciences (which is but another way of saying that, in this terminology, action cannot be reduced to motion)' .
(Burke 1945: 96) 'Integral to the concept of scope is the concept of reduction . In a sense, every circumference, no matter how far-reaching its reference, is a reduction. A cosmology, for instance, is a reduction of the world to the dimensions of words; it is the world in terms of words. The reductive factor becomes quite obvious when we pause to realize that any terminology of motives reduces the vast complexity of life by reduction to principles, laws, sequences, classifications, correlations, in brief, abstractions or generalizations of one sort or another. And any generalization is necessarily a reduction in that it selects a group of things and gives them a property which makes it possible to consider them as a single entity . Thus, the general concept of "man" neglects an infinite number of particular differences in order to stress certain properties which many distinct individual entities have in common. Indeed, any characterization of any sort is a reduction. To give a proper name to one person, or to name a thing, is to recognize some principle of identity or continuity running through the discontinuities that, of themselves, would make the world sheer chaos. To note any order whatever is to "reduce". To divide experience into hungry and sated moments, into the pleasant and unpleasant, into the before and after, into here and there - even distinctions as broad as these translate the world's infinite particulars into terms that are a reduction of the world; in fact, as per the equating of infinity and zero, terms of such broad scope are perhaps the most drastically reductive of all' .
(Jardine 1986: 561-2) 'First I will attempt to clarify what I mean by the "anti-feminism" of contemporary French thought and, in so doing, explicate my own title. Then I will complicate things further by outlining briefly what I see as the three major topographies of that French thought ... Ultimately, the question I would want to put into circulation here would be this: are feminism and modernity oxymoronic in their terms and terminology?' .
(Hopper 1987: 141-2) 'This is, then, roughly the context in which the term Emergent Grammar is being proposed. The term "emergent" itself I take from an essay by the cultural anthropologist James Clifford, but I have transferred it from its original context of "culture" to that of "grammar". Clifford remarks that "Culture is temporal, emergent, and disputed" (Clifford 1986:19). I believe the same is true of grammar, which like speech itself must be viewed as a real-time, social phenomenon, and therefore is temporal; its structure is always deferred, always in a process but never arriving, and therefore emergent; and since I can only choose a tiny fraction of data to describe, any decision I make about limiting my field of inquiry (for example in regard to the selection of texts, or the privileging of the usage of a particular ethnic, class, age, or gender group) is very likely to be a political decision, to be against someone else's interests, and therefore disputed' .
(Johnson 1990: 46) According to Johnson, 'Derrida sees signifying force in the gaps, margins, figures, echoes, digressions, discontinuities, contradictions, and ambiguities of a text' .
(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' .
(Fish 1982: 342-3) 'While there is no core of agreement in the text, there is a core of agreement ... concerning the ways of producing the text. Nowhere is this set of acceptable ways written down, but it is a part of everyone's knowledge of what it means to be operating within the literary institution as it is now constituted.... This does not mean that these rules and the practices they authorize are either monolithic or stable' .
(Fish 1982: 346-7) A given interpretation will be unacceptable, Fish says, if 'there is at present no interpretive strategy for producing it.... [Thus,] while there are always mechanisms for ruling out readings, their source is not the text but the presently recognized interpretive strategies for producing the text' .
(Fish 1982: 342) 'A pluralist is committed to saying that there is something in the text which rules out some readings and allows others ... His best evidence is that in practice "we all in fact" do reject unacceptable readings and that more often than not we agree on the readings that are to be rejected....but if, as I have argued, the text is always a function of interpretation, then the text cannot be the location of the core of agreement by means of which we reject interpretations' .
(Fish 1982: 354-5) 'Strictly speaking, getting "back-to-the-text" is not a move one can perform, because the text one gets back to will be the text demanded by some other interpretation and that interpretation will be presiding over its production. This is not to say, however, that the "back-to-the-text" move is ineffectual, The fact that it is not something one can do in no way diminishes the effectiveness of claiming to do it. As a rhetorical ploy, the announcement that one is returning to the text will be powerful so long as the assumption that criticism is secondary to the text and must not be allowed to overwhelm it remains unchallenged.... A wholesale challenge would be impossible because there would be no terms in which it could be made; that is, in order to be wholesale, it would have to be made in terms wholly outside the institution; but if that were the case, it would be unintelligible because it is only within the institution that the facts of literary study -- texts, authors, periods, genres -- become available' .
(Fish 1982: 340) Remarking on Raine's and Hirsch's use of the word forest from Blake's The Tyger to defend opposing interpretations, Fish says that 'what we have here than are two critics with opposing interpretations, each of whom claims the same word as internal and confirming evidence. Clearly they cannot both be right, but just as clearly there is no basis for deciding between them. One cannot appeal to the text, because the text has become an extension of the interpretive disagreement that divides them' .
(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: 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: 353) 'The basic gesture, then, is to disavow interpretation in favor of simply presenting the text; but it is actually a gesture in which one set of interpretive principles is replaced by another that happens to claim for itself the virtue of not being an interpretation at all' .
(Foucault 1986b: 153) 'I believe there is another principle of rarefaction, complementary to the first: the author. Not, of course, the author in the sense of the individual who delivered the speech or wrote the text in question, but the author as the unifying principle in a particular group of writings or statements, lying at the origins of their significance, as the seat of their coherence' .
(Foucault 1986b: 153) 'Of course, it would be ridiculous to deny the existence of individuals who write, and invent. But I think that, for some time, at least, the individual who sits down to write a text, at the edge of which lurks a possible ¯uvre, resumes the functions of the author. What he writes and does not write, what he sketches out, even preliminary sketches for the work, and what he drops as simple mundane remarks, all this interplay of differences is prescribed by the author-function. It is from his new position, as an author, that he will fashion-- from all he might have said, from all he says daily, at any time-- the still shaky profile of his ¯uvre' .
(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: 18) 'All approaches take a stand (albeit often implicitly) on the relationship between structure and function, text and context, and discourse and communication, simply because these conceptual distinctions are all variants of the dichotomy between what is considered part of language and what is not' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 41-2) 'I began this chapter with a brief description of two different paradigms underlying our conception of language.... After comparing two different definitions of discourse stemming from these two paradigms -- discourse as language above the sentence or clause, ... discourse as language use ... -- I proposed a third definition that sits at the intersection of structure and function -- discourse as utterances ...Actual analyses of discourse reveal an interdependence between structure and function ... The distinction between structure and function also bears on two other issues that I discuss later. One is the relationship between text and context: structural definitions focus upon text and functional definitions upon context ... Another is the way linguists view communication: structural definitions take a narrower view of communication than do functional definitions, and place a higher priority on the role of the code (cf. text) in communication' .
(Lanham 1993: x) 'The changes brought by electronic text, including the very redefinition of what a "text" is, touch upon practically every central question on the current humanist agenda' .
(Lanham 1993: xii) 'Electronic text creates not only a new writing space but a new educational space as well. Not only the humanities curriculum, but school and university structures, administrative and physical, are affected at every point, as of course is the whole cultural repository and information system we call a library. In the university world, it is disciplinarity and its departmental shadow that will be most transformed' .
(Lanham 1993: xii) 'Those who feel that the end of the book is the end of the world assume, and less often argue, that books equal culture. To call that assumption into question, as electronic text does, takes us to the central crisis of the humanities today, our cultural accountability. Can we really argue that the arts and letters make us better? If not, how do we justify the public expenditures now made on them? How, for the matter of that, do we justify the time we spend teaching and cultivating them? I call this question the "Q" question and confront it in chapter 7' .
(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 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' .
(Ricoeur 1982: 145) 'I should like to pause at a preliminary question which in fact dominates the whole of our investigation. The question is this: what is a text?... Let us say that a text is any discourse fixed by writing' .
(Ricoeur 1982: 147) 'I propose to show that the concept of the text, such as we have formulated it in the first part of this essay, demands a renewal of the two notions of explanation and interpretation and, in virtue of this renewal, a less contradictory conception of their interrelation' .
(Ricoeur 1982: 147-54) 'We explain the text in terms of its internal relations, its structure. On the other hand, we can lift the suspense and fulfil the text in speech, restoring it to living communication; in this case, we interpret the text.... Reading is the dialectic of these two attitudes' .
(Ricoeur 1982: 158) 'To read is, on any hypothesis, to conjoin a new discourse to the discourse of the text' .
(Ricoeur 1982: 158) 'Interpretation retains the feature of appropriation ... By "appropriation", I understand this: that the interpretation of a text culminates in the self-interpretation of a subject who thenceforth understands himself better' .
(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' .
(Ricoeur 1982: 161-2) 'To explain is to bring out the structure, that is, the internal relations of dependence which constitute the statics of the text, to interpret is to follow the path of thought opened up by the text, to place oneself en route towards the orient of the text' .
(Lanham 1976: 20-1) 'Of all the unexamined premises rhetoric took over from serious philosophy, clarity has perplexed the most. Since Aristotle it has figured as a central goal for verbal expression. Theorists, without giving the matter special thought, seem to have considered clarity a property of the text. Yet clarity describes many styles and audiences. Used to describe a particular verbal configuration, clarity cannot mean anything at all....The most intellectual, conceptual, scientific virtue of style turns out to be entirely emotional. If everyone is happy, clarity has arrived.... Clarity is at least partly, and often predominantly, a temporal phenomenon, a problem of period. One century's brightness becomes murk for the next. Clarity no more permits objective standards than custom itself' .
(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: 162) 'The term text ...encompasses the continuous substance of all human signifying activities and allows us to point to something very general, namely, to whatever seems to invite interpretation or to whatever the interpreter sets up as an object for interpreting' .
(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' .
(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: ) 'A text is rarely based on a single script, rather it is based on several scripts' .
(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 44) 'We think that the critical contribution of script theory was to focus attention of the role of events and on reader knowledge of events in reading comprehension. The script concept will probably change as a result of future research, but the underlying theme of reader knowledge of events will remain an important part of theories of text comprehension' .
(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: 15) 'The macro-rule of construction is perhaps most characteristic of all macro-rules. It organizes micro-information by combining sequences of propositions that function as one unit at some macro-level; it reduces information without simply deleting it; and it introduces information at the macro-level that is "new" in the sense of not being part of the text base or entailed by individual propositions of the text base' .
(van Dijk 1977: 18) 'Super-structures are organizing principles of discourse. The have a hierarchical character, roughly defining the "global syntax" of the text. By contrast, the macro-structures define the "content" of the text. In certain kinds of narrative, such as folktales, this content may be conventional ... What has been said about the conventional "genre" of narratives also holds ... for other discourse types, e.g., arguments, advertisements, newspaper reports, propaganda, and psychological papers. In all cases the constraints operate globally, both on the global syntax of the macro-structures and on their specific content' .
(Winograd 1977: 64) 'This paper approaches the problem of studying discourse as one of understanding the cognitive structures and processes of language users. There are alternative approaches, such as text-based studies ... This paper ... proposes instead to focus on the cognitive processes of language production and comprehension. From this point of view, the text is a concrete trace of the processes, and its structure needs to be understood in terms of the processing structure ... There are clear advantages to having a framework which emphasizes the psychological processes, rather than the traces they leave, since any psycholinguistic model must deal first and foremost with the cognitive processing' .
(Winograd 1977: 66) After considering the polar distinctions of inter-sentential versus intra-sentential, context-dependent versus context-independent, dialog versus text, and spoken versus written and dismissing them as useful because of overlap of features and considerations, Winograd asserts that 'having eliminated these simple distinctions as candidates for defining "discourse", we are left without a clear criterion for our area of study. As the rest of this paper will illustrate, there is a good deal of diversity, and a clear definition will be possible only after a larger body of theory and techniques has been developed' .
(Virtanen 1992: 302-3) 'The two-level typology outlined in Section 3 suggests that text types can be ranged on a scale according to the ease with which they may serve different types of discourse' .
(Virtanen 1992: 294-5) 'The present article is concerned with text types that are characterizable with the help of text-internal criteria. Such criteria are connected with the form or content of texts' .
(Virtanen 1992: 296) 'Taken too far, an attempt to find discrete categories may result in every text requiring a category of its own' .
(Virtanen 1992: 306) 'Narratives, for example, can be used for argumentation, or descriptions for instruction. Such an apparent mismatch of discourse type and text type may be accounted for in terms of the suggested two levels. Any discourse type may surface in the form of a narrative: Narratives may be used to instruct ... explain things ... describe activities or circumstances ... The ease of the indirect or secondary usage manifested by this type of text, and its potential to realize the widest array of discourse types may, indeed, be regarded as arguments for the "basic" status of narrative among the different types of text' .
(Virtanen 1992: 293-4) 'I shall deal with some of the criteria that have been used in the study of language to group texts for various purposes. I shall then briefly touch upon the notion of prototype, before proceeding to a discussion of a two-level typology of texts. To round off, I shall consider the status of narrative among the different types of text' .
(Virtanen 1992: 298) 'The resulting multi-level model has to be viewed in terms of recursive choices at its various levels....Decision processes probably work in much the same fashion irrespective of what kinds of parameters are inserted in them and at what level of text production' .
(Greenblatt 1995: 227) 'Cultural analysis has much to learn from scrupulous formal analysis of literary texts because those texts are not merely cultural by virtue of reference to the world beyond themselves; they are cultural by virtue of social values and contexts that they have themselves successfully absorbed....Cultural analysis must be opposed on principle to the rigid distinction between that which is within a text and that which lies outside' .
(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' .
(Bathrick 1992: 327) 'The critique heard most often of both Foucault and the new historicists, by feminists and Marxists alike, concerns precisely their forfeiture of any position-- their own as critic; that of an autonomous text or a definable context-- from which and on which to generate contingent readings, meanings, or value judgments' .
(Enkvist 1981: 97-8) 'Rhetoricians used to be the people who worried most about the complex of problems which I shall discuss under a somewhat ponderous term, Experiential Iconicism....The traditional labels under which these problems used to enter into rhetoric and grammar were ordo naturalis and ordo artificialis....In natural order ... text and discourse have the same arrangement as things in the universe of discourse' .
(Enkvist 1981: 102) 'I have spoken about text strategies and must therefore digress to explain the background of this concept....It is practical as well as theoretically defensible to classify text models into four major categories. The first category of models is sentence-based. A sentence-based model uses ready-made sentences as its input and cannot therefore manipulate sentence boundaries. It can only explain how features within and between sentences, such as anaphoric and cataphoric references and theme-rheme-focus structures, link sentences to one another.... The second type of model is predication-based. Here the input consists of a set of predications of some kind together with their temporal, causal or spatial, and perhaps social, relations, and a strategy which controls their textualization and linearization into sentences through grouping, conjunction, and embedding' .
(Enkvist 1981: 104) 'If we wish to relate instances of experiential iconicism in text generation or in text interpretation and comprehension to our general knowledge of the world (as we must), a cognitive model becomes necessary. And we must cite principles of human interaction if we can to detect the motives for the preference of one text strategy to another. In brief, we shall need the whole gamut of models if we wish to explain why somebody opts for an iconic arrangement of his text and how he carries out his iconic strategy through text patterning and, ultimately, syntax. This is simply another way of saying that experiential iconicism can be discussed in terms of examples brought from various levels: syntax, text patterning, cognition, interaction' .
(Enkvist 1981: 103) 'If we want to derive predications out of the model too, instead of accepting them as part of the input, we must adopt a device of the third, cognitive, type. In such cognitive models the predications are usually derived out of a cognitive network, again under the control of a text strategy.... But in addition to all this we may also wish to look into the motives and reasons why a certain speaker/writer has opted for one particular text strategy in his particular context of situation. If so, we must once again enlarge our perspective and adopt a model of a fourth type which is sensitive not only to strategies of text composition but also to principles of human interaction. Such models try to explain how human beings communicate as part of their attempts at social cooperation' .
(Enkvist 1981: 107-8) 'How, then, does experiential iconicism relate to some other major text-strategic principles, at sentence level most notably information dynamics and saliency? ... Information dynamics is concerned with the distribution of old and new information, or more precisely, of information which the speaker/writer assumes or knows is familiar to the receptor and information he assumes or knows will be new. Should we wish to regard such assumptions, and hence the distribution of old and new information in the text, as part of the universe of discourse, information dynamics might merge with experiential iconicism'. But if we maintain a distinction between the text and the world it describes, such a merger will not take place' .
(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' .
(Foucault 1986a: 139-40) At one time, writing immortalized the author; now, the author sacrifices for the text and actually is killed by writing .
(Foucault 1986a: 139) Foucault asserts the validity of viewing the author as an individual but sets that aside to study the way a text points to its author .
(Foucault 1986a: 144-5) 'In a novel narrated in the first person, neither the first person pronoun, the present indicative tense, nor, for that matter, its signs of localization refer directly to the writer, either to the time when he wrote, or to the specific act of writing; rather, they stand for a "second self" whose similarity to the author is never fixed and undergoes considerable alteration within the course of a single book. It would be as false to seek the author in relation to the actual writer as to the fictional narrator; the "author-function" arises out of their scission-- in the division and distance of the two. One might object that this phenomenon only applies to novels or poetry, to a context of "quasi-discourse," but, in fact, all discourse that supports this "author-function" is characterized by this plurality of egos. In a mathematical treatise, the ego who indicates the circumstances of composition in the preface is not identical, either in terms of his position or his function, to the "I" who concludes a demonstration within the body of the text. The former implies a unique individual who, at a given time and place, succeeded in completing a project, whereas the latter indicates an instance and plan of demonstration that anyone could perform provided the same set of axioms, preliminary operations, and an identical set of symbols were used. It is also possible to locate a third ego: one who speaks of the goals of his investigation, the obstacles encountered, its results, and the problems yet to be solved and this "I" would function in a field of existing or future mathematical discourses. We are not dealing with a system of dependencies where a first and essential use of the "I" is reduplicated, as a kind of fiction, by the other two. On the contrary, the "author-function" in such discourses operates so as to effect the simultaneous dispersion of the three egos' .
(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: 76) 'Both the individual text and its ideologemes know a final transformation, and must be read in terms of what I will call the ideology of form, that is, the symbolic messages transmitted to us by the coexistence of various sign systems which are themselves traces or anticipations of modes of production' .
(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' .
(Jehlen 1990: 272) 'Gender is both an embedded assumption and functions as a touchstone for others.... From the perspective of gender, ... a critic sees both deeper and more broadly. Both the views may also appear more obstructed, exactly the enhancement of critical vision seeming to hinder it, or to interpose a mew obstacle between critic and text' .
(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.]: 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' .
(White 1974: 398) 'Unless you have some idea of the generic attributes of tragic, comic, romantic, or ironic situations, you will be unable to recognize them as such when you come upon them in a literary text' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: xviii) 'Theological, metaphysical, and juridical doctrines offer the best illustration of the concerns we place under the heading of Grammar; the forms and methods of art best illustrate the concerns of Symbolic; and the ideal material to reveal the nature of Rhetoric comprises observations on parliamentary and diplomatic devices, editorial bias, sales methods and incidents of social sparring. However, the three fields overlap considerably. And we shall note, in passing, how the Rhetoric and the Symbolic hover about the edges of our central theme, the Grammar' .
(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 44) 'We think that the critical contribution of script theory was to focus attention of the role of events and on reader knowledge of events in reading comprehension. The script concept will probably change as a result of future research, but the underlying theme of reader knowledge of events will remain an important part of theories of text comprehension' .
(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' .
(Frye 1957: 189) 'The central form of quest-romance is the dragon-killing theme exemplified in the stories of St. George and Perseus' .
(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' .
(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' .
(Hopper 1987: 154) 'It will be seen that "grammar" begins life on page 2 [of Radford 1981] in its theoretically correct style, as a "model" of the native speaker's "linguistic competence". But notice that by page 3, "grammar" is suddenly no longer a linguists construct, a formal characterization of the abilities presumed to underlie the speaker's behavior, but the knowledge itself. It has gone from a linguist's theory to something the speaker possesses. One would not blame Radford, were it not that formal grammarians are quick to castigate discourse linguists for alleged "confusion" over the notion of "grammar", and often accuse them of not understanding this supposedly elementary concept' .
(Burke 1945: xvii) 'In our original plans for this project, we had no notion of writing a "Grammar" at all. We began with a theory of comedy, applies to a treatise on human relations. Feeling that competitive ambition is a drastically over-developed motive in the modern world, we thought this motive might be transcended if men devoted themselves not so much to "excoriating" it as to "appreciating" it. Accordingly, we began taking notes on the foibles and antics of what we tended to think of as "the Human Barnyard"' .
(Burke 1945: 67-8) 'However, it is not the purpose of our Dramatism to abide strictly by any one system of philosophic terms that happens to exemplify the dramatist pattern. Rather, it is our purpose to show that the explicit and systematic use of the dramatist pentad is best designed to bring out the strategic moments of motivational theory. Accordingly, at this point, we are more concerned to illustrate the Grammatical scruples than to select one particular casuistry as our choice among them. Philosophies again and again have got their point of departure precisely by treating as a distinction in kind what other philosophies have treated as a distinction in degree, or v.v.' .
(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' .
(Burke 1945: 56) 'Contemporary scientific theory, in proposing to abandon the categories of substance and causality, has done speculation a good turn. For it has made clear wherein the difference between philosophic and scientific terminologies of motivation resides. Philosophy, like common sense, must think of human motivation dramatistically, in terms of action and its ends. But a science is freed of philosophic taints only insofar as it confines itself to terms of motion and arrested motion (figure, structure). This convention, almost Puritanical in its severity (surely we should not be far wrong in calling it a secularized variant of Puritanism) has brought about such magnification of human powers that any "objection" to it would have about as much force as an attempt to "refute" Niagara Falls. But such results, however spectacular, do not justify an attempt to abide by the same terminological conventions when treating of human motives. For one could confine the study of action within the terms of motion only by resigning oneself to gross misrepresentations of life as we normally experience it. Though we here lay great stress upon the puns and other word play in men's ideas of motivation, we do not thereby conclude that such linguistic tactics are "nothing but" puns and word play' .
(Gibbs 1987: 569) 'My main contention, then, is that Sperber and Wilson are "sneaking" mutual knowledge in the backdoor of their theory of conversational inference by appealing to the idea of mutual cognitive environments which can be manifest but not known. At a psychological level, it appears that Sperber and Wilson have adopted a framework for describing verbal communication which crucially depends on the very concept that they wish to abandon' .
(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: 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' .
(Fish 1982: 108) 'If deviation theories trivialize the norm and therefore trivialize everything else, a theory which restores human content to language also restores legitimate status to literature by reuniting it with a norm that is no longer trivialized' .
(Fish 1982: 111) 'The attempt to specify once and for all the properties of literature and locate the boundaries of style should be either abandoned ... or recognized for what it is: not a disinterested investigation but the reflection of an ideology; not a progress toward a theory but the product of one; not a question but an answer' .
(Fish 1982: 105-6) 'When Roman Jakobson declares that the chief task of literary theory is to discover "what makes a verbal message a work of art", whether he knows it or not he has delivered himself of an answer masquerading as a question. What makes a verbal message a work of art? Whatever it is, it will presumably not be what makes it a verbal message' .
(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' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 15) 'To enhance the comparative value of my descriptions of the approaches, I have decided to orient my sample analysis around two phenomena: (a) questions (and the sequences they initiated) to be analyzed in terms of speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, and ethnography of communication; (b) referring expressions (in referring sequences) to be analyzed in terms of pragmatics, conversation analysis, and variation analysis. We see not only that the different approaches provide different answers to some of the same questions, but that they highlight different facets of both questions and referring expressions' .
(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: 5) 'The goals of this book are to describe and compare several different approaches to the linguistic analysis of discourse: speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, pragmatics, conversation analysis, and variation analysis. My aim is not to reduce the vastness of discourse analysis: I believe that at relatively early stages of an endeavor, reduction just for the sake of simplification can too drastically limit the range of interesting questions that can and should be asked' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 19) 'As I will make clear in chapter 12, the order of chapters, and thus the type of inquiry for each area of empirical focus, is not random: they reflect a transition ... from a focus upon the individual (whether the actions, knowledge, or intentions of a self) to a focus upon interaction (how self and other together construct what is said, meant, and done) to a focus upon the semiotic systems shared and used by self and other during their interaction (language, society, and culture). An ability to build such transitions ... into one's theory, and to allow and account for them in one's practice, is a crucial part of a discourse analysis that seeks to integrate what speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, pragmatics, conversation analysis, and variation analysis can offer, both individually and together, to the analysis of utterances' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 6) 'Two philosophers, John Austin and John Searle, developed speech act theory from the basic insight that language is used not just to describe the world, but to perform a range of other actions that can be indicated in the performance of the utterance itself' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 7) 'Although speech act theory was not first developed as a means of analyzing discourse, particular issues in speech act theory ... lead to discourse analysis. Speech act theory also provides a means by which to segment texts, and thus a framework for defining units that could then be combined into larger structures' .
(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: 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' .
(Minsky 1980: 12) This would lead to 'a qualitative theory of "grammatical": if the top levels are satisfied but some lower terminals are not we have a meaningless sentence; if the top is weak but the bottom solid, we can have an ungrammatical but meaningful utterance' .
(Booth 1979: 99) 'I must admit that both Crane and Burke sometimes push very close to my own limits of patience, Crane chewing on bones long after I think all marrow has been extracted, Burke juggling Indian clubs that I am not quite sure are even there. Clearly, neither of them had managed to hit the one right ratio of theory to practice that I have always maintained in my own work. The rule is, of course, as follows: my abstract theory is essential, concrete groundwork; his is frequently quixotic indulgence in a perhaps harmless but irrelevant hobby-horse; and M. Jacques Lacan's is lamentable proof that when the Germans conquered France in World War II Hegel came swirling in with them and sent traditional French lucidity forever underground' .
(Lanham 1993: xi) 'One of the computer screen's routine marvels is manipulation of scale, and such manipulation stands at the center of postmodern art. As we shall see in chapter 2, wherever you touch twentieth-century visual art and architecture, it seems both to foreshadow electronic expression and to provide and aesthetic ready-made for it. as I point out in chapter 1, the composition, notation, and performance of music have been transformed by digital expression. Because word, image, and sound are expressed in a common digital code, the arts take on a new and radical convertibility that threatens both their present compartmentalization and its academic departmental embodiment. So, too, poststructuralist literary theory, which has precipitated the current streetfight between Left and Right, turns out to be just such another proleptic aesthetic; poststructuralism and the common digital code seem part of the same event. As I suggest here, the whole Aristotelian basis of literary criticism is undermined by electronic expression, and so pre structuralist literary theory is similarly transformed' .
(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' .
(Lanham 1993: 9) 'We have become, I might parenthetically remark, more self-conscious about prose itself. So used are we to thinking black-and-white, continuous printed prose the norm of conceptual utterance, that it has taken a series of theoretical attacks and technological metamorphoses to make us see it for what it is: an act of extraordinary stylization, of remarkable, expressive self-denial. The lesson has been taught from Marinetti to Burke and Derrida, and by personal computers which restore to the reader ranges of expressivity- graphics, fonts, typography, layout, color- that the prose stylist has abjured. Obviously these pressures will not destroy prose, but they may change its underlying decorum. And perhaps engender, at long last, a theory of prose style as radical artifice rather than native transparency' .
(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: 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: 19) 'Any truly comprehensive critical theory will have to plot a continuum of reality from rhetorical to serious' .
(Lanham 1976: 4-5) 'The rhetorical view of life ... begins with the centrality of language. It conceives reality as fundamentally dramatic, man as fundamentally a role player. It synthesizes an essentially bifurcated, self-serving theory of motive. We play for advantage, but we play for pleasure, too.... Homo rhetoricus cannot, to sum up, be serious.... And if he relinquishes the luxury of a central self, a soul, he gains the tolerance, and usually the sense of humor, that comes from knowing he -- and others -- not only may think differently, but may be differently' .
(Culler 1992: 222) 'Fifth, a good deal of the most interesting work in theory has focused on structures common to literary and nonliterary discourses' .
(Culler 1992: 212) 'Attacks on relativism, frequent in popular condemnations of theory, invoke the sort of imaginary argument we used to call "straw men," such as the supposed belief that all thoughts, ideas, and texts are of equal value -- missing the point that value is, specifically, relative to purposes and circumstances, which may be very general and widespread, as well as local and particular' .
(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' .
(Culler 1992: 223) 'Finally, an issue in recent theory is the nature and function of the aesthetic' .
(Culler 1992: 213) 'One of the continuing contentions of the sorts of theory styled "poststructuralist" -- possibly the only claim by which poststructuralism can be identified and distinguished -- has been that theories are caught up in and affected by the phenomena they claim to theorize' .
(Culler 1992: 226) 'With its open horizon of questioning, theory can lead you anywhere, so it is perhaps all the more important to ask where you are and what theoretical questions organize the particular region of discourses you are principally engaged with' .
(Culler 1992: 213) Responding to Knapp and Michaels, who maintain that 'Beliefs cannot be grounded in some deeper condition of knowledge' (1982.Against theory. Critical inquiry 8: 738), Culler posits, 'this might be true for such things as religious beliefs, but the various beliefs that function as principles, criteria, and premises in people's work on literature most probably belong to a structure of knowledge and argumentation' .
(Culler 1992: 216) 'The best way to describe the scene of contemporary theory may not be as a set of competing schools or methods but as discussions of problems or issues that people are striving to cope with or resolve. This has the disadvantage of making criticism seem less quarrelsome than it is, but we too easily assume that theorists disagree because one is a "Marxist" and the other a "psychoanalytic critic." Bypassing these labels forces us to look more closely at the extent to which critics are saying similar things in different vocabularies and the extent to which they genuinely disagree. I take up six issues that seem particularly important' .
(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 44) 'We think that the critical contribution of script theory was to focus attention of the role of events and on reader knowledge of events in reading comprehension. The script concept will probably change as a result of future research, but the underlying theme of reader knowledge of events will remain an important part of theories of text comprehension' .
(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' .
(Winograd 1977: 63)
'While the field is not yet at a stage where it is possible to lay out a precise
unifying theory, this paper attempts to provide a beginning framework for
studying discourse.... Its four sections attempt to:
1. Delimit the
range of problems covered by the term "discourse".
2. Characterize
the basic structure of natural language based on a notion of
communication.
3. Propose a general approach to formalisms for
describing the phenomena and building theories about them.
4. Lay
out an outline of the different schemas involved in generating and
comprehending language'
.
(Winograd 1977: 66) After considering the polar distinctions of inter-sentential versus intra-sentential, context-dependent versus context-independent, dialog versus text, and spoken versus written and dismissing them as useful because of overlap of features and considerations, Winograd asserts that 'having eliminated these simple distinctions as candidates for defining "discourse", we are left without a clear criterion for our area of study. As the rest of this paper will illustrate, there is a good deal of diversity, and a clear definition will be possible only after a larger body of theory and techniques has been developed' .
(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' .
(Bathrick 1992: 324) 'Central to the strategic evolution of cultural criticism has been a programmatic effort to challenge what it sees as the claim to universalism at the heart ... of existing literary theory.... Although the emergence of cultural studies clearly results from a breakdown of one kind of theoretical generality, the proposed countermodel-- while accepting, and sometimes welcoming, the impossibility of theoretical unanimity-- has sought to establish common ground around expanded notions of literature, rhetoric, textuality, theory, culture, discursive practice, or interdisciplinarity. And it is at this point, of course, that the fireworks begin' .
(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' .
(White 1974: 405) 'The fruitfulness of Jakobson's theory lies in its suggestion that the various forms of both poetry and prose, all of which have their counterparts in narrative in general and therefore in historiography too, can be characterized in terms of the dominant trope which serves as the paradigm, provided by language itself, of all significant relationships conceived to exist in the world by anyone wishing to represent those relationships in language' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 85-6) 'Though we have stressed the contrast between theology and behaviorism because it so readily illustrates the "circumferential logic" (that is, the effect of scope in a given terminology of motives), we should note that a writer's vocabulary is usually set somewhere between these two extremes. His aims are usually less thoroughgoing, more "monographic", as with the selection of some "thesis"' .
(Burke 1945: 9) 'The logic of the scene-agent ratio has often served as an embarrassment to the naturalistic novelist. He may choose to "indict" some scene (such as bad working conditions under capitalism) by showing that it has a "brutalizing" effect upon the people who are indigenous to this scene. But the scene-agent ratio, if strictly observed here, would require that the "brutalizing" situation contain "brutalized" characters as its dialectical counterpart. And thereby, in his humanitarian zeal to save mankind, the novelist portrays characters which, in being as brutal as their scene, are not worth saving. We could phrase this dilemma in another way: our novelist points up his thesis by too narrow a conception of scene as the motive-force behind his characters; and this restricting of the scene calls in turn for a corresponding restriction upon personality, or role' .
(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' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 50) 'The main thesis of this book is that an act of ostension carries a guarantee of relevance, and that this fact -- which we will call the principle of relevance -- makes manifest the intention behind the ostension. We believe that it is this principle of relevance that is needed to make the inferential model of communication explanatory' .
(Lanham 1993: xiii) 'Unlike most humanists discussion technology, I argue an optimistic thesis. I think electronic expression has come not to destroy the Western arts and letters, but to fulfill them. And I think too that the instructional practices built upon the electronic word will not repudiate the deepest and most fundamental currents of Western education in discourse but redeem them' .
(Derrida 1986b: 104) 'The thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign ... must forbid a radical distinction between the linguistic and the graphic sign' .
(Harris 1990: 22) 'The basic contention of the present paper is that the fundamental error in contemporary linguistics is still the fundamental error of Saussure's original thesis. It involves a crude process of abstraction by which certain phenomena are segregated from the continuum of human communication, and these segregated phenomena are then, rather capriciously, set up for academic purposes as constituting the linguistic part of communication' .
Under construction
(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' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 118-9) 'And we should infer that the original conception of the powers of motives in things is not exactly animistic. The evidences of animism which nineteenth-century anthropologists found so profusely among primitive tribes are, to our way of thinking, mainly indications of how thoroughly most of such anthropologists were imbued with the terms typical of nineteenth-century idealist philosophy, so that they saw things in these terms. We should expect, rather, that the basic perception of motives is a perception of things not as possessing the souls and personalities of agents , but as being essentially active. That is, they were not felt to be people ; they were felt to be actions' .
(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' .
(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: 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' .
(Booth 1979: 107) 'If Burke is right here -- an I think he is, provided we understand that to "track down the variant" is in his view never easy -- we have the basis for a special kind of free-wheeling inquiry into other critics' views. Instead of thinking that we can refute a given position by showing that it cannot be experimentally or logically falsified, we are invited by it to one perspective on the world, a perspective that is likely, by the very nature of perspectives, to be self-demonstrating. Every perspective expressed in a symbolic language becomes a "terministic screen" which both reveals some truths -- obviously "demonstrated" to anyone employing the language -- and conceals others' .
(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' .
(Lanham 1993: 9) 'We have become, I might parenthetically remark, more self-conscious about prose itself. So used are we to thinking black-and-white, continuous printed prose the norm of conceptual utterance, that it has taken a series of theoretical attacks and technological metamorphoses to make us see it for what it is: an act of extraordinary stylization, of remarkable, expressive self-denial. The lesson has been taught from Marinetti to Burke and Derrida, and by personal computers which restore to the reader ranges of expressivity- graphics, fonts, typography, layout, color- that the prose stylist has abjured. Obviously these pressures will not destroy prose, but they may change its underlying decorum. And perhaps engender, at long last, a theory of prose style as radical artifice rather than native transparency' .
(Burke 1979: 129) 'Owing to the fact that words can resemble one another tonally even when their literal meanings may be miles apart, various kinds of trick affinities can develop between them. Though I affirm absolutely that anyone who doesn't agree with this proposition lacks a feel for the sound of words, there is still plenty of room for disagreement as to its application in particular cases. The issue becomes especially risky when (thinking along psychoanalytic lines) one tinkers with the possibility that a term on its face sublime may secretly resonate with a term quite ridiculous; and thereby the kinds of "body-thinking" explicitly manifest in, say, writers like Aristophanes or Swift can figure implicitly in solemn works (particularly when one is dealing with such images as a funeral urn' .
(Kinneavy 1971: ) 'There are different kinds of thinking relevant to different uses of language' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: xxi) 'Pragmatists would probably have referred the motivation back to a source in agency . They would have noted that our hero escaped by using an instrument , the file by which he severed his bonds; then in this same line of thought, they would have observed that the hand holding the file was also an instrument; and by the same token the brain that guided the hand would be an instrument, and so likewise the educational system that taught the methods and shaped the values involved in the incident. True, if you reduce the terms to any one of them, you will find them branching out again; for no one of them is enough' .
(Burke 1945: xv) 'What is involved when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it? An answer to that question is the subject of this book. The book is concerned with the basic forms of thought which, in accordance with the nature of the world as all men necessarily experience it, are exemplified in the attributing of motives' .
(Burke 1945: 317) 'Our five terms are "transcendental" rather than formal (and are to this extent Kantian) in being categories which human thought necessarily exemplifies. Instead of calling them the necessary "forms of experience", however, we should call them the necessary "forms of talk about experience". For our concern is primarily with the analysis of language rather than with the analysis of " reality"' .
(Burke 1945: xvii) 'In our original plans for this project, we had no notion of writing a "Grammar" at all. We began with a theory of comedy, applies to a treatise on human relations. Feeling that competitive ambition is a drastically over-developed motive in the modern world, we thought this motive might be transcended if men devoted themselves not so much to "excoriating" it as to "appreciating" it. Accordingly, we began taking notes on the foibles and antics of what we tended to think of as "the Human Barnyard"' .
(Burke 1945: 192) 'The great departures in human thought can be eventually reduced to a moment where the thinker treats as o pposite, key terms formerly considered a pposite, or v.v. So we are admonished to be on the look-out for those moments when strategic synonymizings or desynonymizings occur. And, in accordance with the logic of our ratios, when they do occur, we are further admonished to be on the look-out for a shift in the source of derivation, as terms formally derived from different sources are now derived from a common source, or v.v.' .
(Burke 1945: 195-6) 'To grant that these unknowns can be thought of, however, is further to allow for a very ingenious verbalism. If they can be thought of, of we can employ our intelligence on them, let us call them the "intelligible". Whereupon, lo! whereas empiricism took its start in equating the intelligible with the sensible, the intelligible is now so named precisely because it can't be sensed. Beginning in empiricism, making a line-up that will permit the pursuit of each empirical science in its own terms, we have nonetheless managed to so wangle things that we make allowance for terms beyond the scope of empirical science' .
(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: xv) 'We shall use five terms as generating principle of our investigation. They are: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose. In a rounded statement about motives, you must have some word that names the act (names what took place, in thought or deed), and another that names the scene (the background of the act, the situation in which it occurred); also, you must indicate what person or kind of person ( agent ) performed the act, what means or instruments he used ( agency ), and the purpose . Men may violently disagree about the purposes behind a given act, or about the character of the person who did it, or how he did it, or in what kind of situation he acted; or they may even insist upon totally different words to name the act itself. But be that as it may, any complete statement about motives will offer some kind of answers to these five questions: what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose)' .
(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' .
(Burke 1945: 195) 'If this realm of the things-in-themselves can be thought though not known , this limitation upon our claims to knowledge about them applies in reverse to science. Science compels us to admit that things-in-themselves can't be known; but in putting them outside the area of scientific knowledge , by the same token we put them outside the area of scientific refutation or denial . The sources of morality thus lie beyond the reach of the terms proper to the physical sciences (which is but another way of saying that, in this terminology, action cannot be reduced to motion)' .
(Burke 1945: 54) 'Such tactics of entitling are as legitimate as any ot