R

Bove 1990

Derrida 1986b

Quotes: (5)

(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: 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' .

(Bove 1990: 55) 'There is a broad political purpose to this project that develops out of a radical skepticism about "truth" and the correspondence of fact and concept' .

(Bove 1990: 56) '"Genealogy" complements the critical dimension of poststructuralism's radical skepticism. It aims to grasp the formative power of discourses and disciplines' .

(Derrida 1986b: 104) 'The thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign ... must forbid a radical distinction between the linguistic and the graphic sign' .

range

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (5)

Foucault 1986b

Schiffrin 1994

Lanham 1976

Winograd 1977

Quotes: (6)

(Foucault 1986b: 154) 'For a proposition to belong to botany or pathology, it must fulfil certain conditions, in a stricter and more complex sense than that of pure and simple truth: at any rate, other conditions. The proposition must refer to a specific range of objects' .

(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: 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' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 59-60) 'When the communicator's informative intention involves making a particular assumption strongly manifest, then that assumption is strongly communicated. When the communicator's intention is to marginally increase the manifestness of a wide range of assumptions, then each of them is weakly communicated. There is, of course, a continuum of cases in between. In the case of strong communication, the communicator can have fairly precise expectations about some of the thoughts that the audience will actually entertain. With weaker forms of communication, the communicator cam merely expect to stir the thoughts of the audience in a certain direction. Often, in human interaction, weak communication is found sufficient or even preferable to the stronger forms' .

(Lanham 1976: 27) 'The rhetorical stylist has no central self to be true to.... He feels at home in his roles and to live must play them. When he poses, he is being himself. The more artistic his performance, the more authentically representative it is. Rhetorical man is an actor and insincerity is the actor's mode of being. The wider his range of impersonations, the fuller his self. The more smoothly he can manage a sudden role-change, the more genuine the effect and the effort' .

(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' .

ratio

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (3)

Greenblatt 1995

Quotes: (8)

(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' .

(Burke 1945: 79) 'We cherish the behaviorist experiment precisely because it illustrates the relation between the circumference and the circumscribed in mechanistic terms; and because the sharpest instance of the way in which the altering of the scenic scope affects the interpretation of the act is to be found in the shift from teleological to mechanistic philosophies. Christian theology, in stressing the rational, personal, and purposive aspects of the Creation as the embodiment of the Creator's pervasive will, had treated such principles as scenic, That is, they were not merely traits of human beings, but extended to the outer circumference of the ultimate ground. Hence, by the logic of the scene-act ratio, they were taken as basic to the constitution of human motives, and could be "deduced" from the nature of God as an objective, extrinsic principle defining the nature of human acts. But when the circumference was narrowed to naturalistic limits, the "Creator" was left out or account, and only the "Creation" remained (remained not as an "act", however, but as a concatenation of motions)' .

(Burke 1945: 77) 'When "defining by location", one may place the object of one's definition in contexts of varying scope. And our remarks on the scene-act ratio, for instance, suggest that the choice of circumference for the scene in terms of which a given act is to be located will have a corresponding effect upon the interpretation of the act itself. Similarly, the logic of the scene-agent ratio will figure in our definition of the individual, insofar as principles of dramatic consistency are maintained' .

(Burke 1945: 9) 'The principles of consistency binding scene, act, and agent also lead to reverse applications. That is, the scene-act ratio either calls for acts in keeping with scenes or scenes in keeping with acts- and similarly with the scene-agent ratio' .

(Burke 1945: 12) 'The maxim, "terrain determines tactics", is a strict localization of the scene-act ratio, with "terrain" as the casuistic equivalent for "scene" in a military calculus of motives, and "tactics" as the corresponding "act"' .

(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' .

(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' .

(Greenblatt 1995: 228-9) 'If culture functions as a structure of limits, it also functions as the regulator and guarantor of movement. Indeed the limits are virtually meaningless without movement; it is only through improvisation, experiment, and exchange that cultural boundaries can be established. Obviously, among different cultures there will be a great diversity in the ratio between mobility and constraint. Some cultures dream of imposing an absolute order, a perfect stasis, but even these, if they are to reproduce themselves from one generation to the next, will have to commit themselves, however tentatively or unwillingly, to some minimal measure of movement; conversely, some cultures dream of an absolute mobility, a perfect freedom, but these too have always been compelled, in the interest of survival, to accept some limits' .

reader

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (8)

Fish 1982

Lanham 1976

Quotes: (11)

(Fish 1982: 25) The sentence 'is no longer an object, a thing-in-itself, but an event, something that happens to, and with the participation of, the reader. And it is this event, this happening -- all of it and not anything that could be said about it or any information one might take away from it -- that is, I would argue, the meaning of the sentence' .

(Fish 1982: 42) 'The method, then, is applicable to larger units and its chief characteristics remain the same: (1) it refuses to answer or even ask the question, what is this work about; (2) it yields an analysis not of formal features but of the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time; (3) the result will be a description of the structure of response which hay have an oblique or even ... a contrasting relationship to the structure of the work as a thing in itself' .

(Fish 1982: 528) No one ' is free to confer on an utterance any meaning he likes. Indeed, "confer" is exactly the wrong word because it implies a two stage procedure in which a reader or hearer first scrutinizes an utterance and then gives it a meaning. The argument of the preceding pages can be reduced to the assertion that there is no such first stage, that one hears an utterance within, and not as preliminary to determining, a knowledge of its purposes and concerns, and that to so hear it is already to have assigned it a shape and given it a meaning' .

(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 clich�s; 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' .

(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 30) 'Comprehension is a joint function of textual aspects and of the reader's knowledge where both textual features and reader knowledge exist at various levels of abstractness....In the present paper we examine "scriptal" relatedness, which is one of the many intersentence relationships described by linguists. The paper consists of three parts. The first part discusses the script construct in the context of other constructs and illustrates how scripts provide connectivity between sentences. The second treats the role of scripts in the retention of texts, and the third addresses the role of scripts in reading comprehension' .

(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' .

(Ordonez 1991: 104) 'The title of Os habla Electra alerts the reader that this novel has referents in the world of myth and archetype' .

(Kristeva 1986: 472) 'The reader will find in the following pages, first, an attempt to situate the problematic of women in Europe within an inquiry on time: that time which the feminist movement both inherits and modifies. Second, I will attempt to distinguish two phases or two generations of women which, while immediately universalist and cosmopolitan in their demands, can nonetheless be differentiated by the fact that the first generation is more determined by the implications of a national problematic ..., while the second, more determined by its place within the "symbolic denominator", is European and trans-European. Finally, I will try, both through the problems approached and through the type of analysis I propose, to present what I consider a viable stance for a European-- or at least a European woman-- within a domain which is henceforth worldwide in scope' .

(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' .

reading

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (12)

Quotes: (17)

(Johnson 1990: 47) 'The possibility of reading materiality, silence, space, and conflict within texts has opened up extremely productive ways of studying the politics of language.
'The writings of Western male authorities have often encoded the silence, denigration, or idealization not only of women but also of other "others"', thus, excluding them .

(Fish 1982: 341) 'Whenever a critic prefaces an assertion with a phrase like "without doubt" or "there can be no doubt", you can be sure that you are within hailing distance of the interpretive principles which produce the facts that he presents as obvious.... As one obvious and indisputable interpretation supplants another, it brings with it a new set of obvious and indisputable facts. Of course each new reading is elaborated in the name of the poem itself, but the poem itself is always a function of the interpretive perspective from which the critic "discovers" 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' .

(Reddy 1979: 290) 'Our examples thus far have been drawn from the four categories which constitute the "major framework" of the conduit metaphor. The core expressions in these categories imply, respectively, that: (1) language functions like a conduit, transferring thoughts bodily from one person to another; (2) in writing and speaking, people insert their thoughts or feelings in the words; (3) words accomplish the transfer by containing the thoughts or feelings and conveying them to others; and (4) in listening or reading, people extract the thoughts and feelings once again from the words' .

(Lanham 1993: 8) 'But if you are going to read books any more, or are going to read them in different ways, you must decide what it is that happens when you do read them. You must know this if you are to recreate that ineffable something in another medium. You must decide what business you are really in. You can conclude, of course, that that ineffable something cannot be transplanted, that the business you are really in is Reading Books. Many areas of endeavor in America pressured by technological change have already had to decide what business they were really in, and those making the narrow choice have usually not fared well. The railroads had to decide whether they were in the transportation business or the railroad business; they chose the latter and gradual extinction. Newspapers had to decide whether they were in the information business or only the newspaper business; most who chose the newspaper business are no longer in it. A fascinating instance of the choice is now taking place in the piano industry. Steinway used to own the market, and it has decided to stay in the piano business. Yamaha decided it was in the keyboard business- acoustic and electronic- and has, with Roland, Korg, and other manufacturers, redefined the instrument. Time has yet to tell who will win, financially or musically. For all its fastidious self-distancing from the world of affairs, literary study faces the same kind of decision. If we are not in the codex book business, what business are we really in?' .

(Ricoeur 1982: 146) 'The book divides the act of writing and the act of reading into two sides, between which there is no communication' .

(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: 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' .

(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 36) 'Scripts are assumed to provide privileged access to information in memory wherever it is located and to facilitate comprehension if subsequent sentences (Schank 1978). The mechanism for privileged access in reading comprehension is "spreading activation"' .

(Greenblatt 1995: ?227) 'Here we can make our first tentative move toward the use of culture for the study of literature... to recover a sense of the stakes that once gave readers pleasure and pain. An awareness of culture as a complex whole can help us to recover that sense by leading us to reconstruct the boundaries upon whose existence the works were predicated.... What kinds of behavior, what models of practice, does this work seem to enforce? Why might readers at a particular time and place find this work compelling? Are there differences between my values and the values implicit in the work I am reading? Upon what social understandings does the work depend? Whose freedom of thought or movement might be constrained implicitly or explicitly by this work? What are the larger social structures with which these particular acts of praise or blame might be connected?' .

(Greenblatt 1995: 232) Referring to Shakespeare's The Tempest, Greenblatt advances that 'If it is the task of cultural criticism to decipher the power of Prospero, it is also its task to hear the accents of Caliban'. The critic's job is to notice that contradictory elements of the author's world are being juxtaposed in the author's work to bring to light significant conflict and make statements about the world. In this kind of reading, Prospero represents the imperialism of European exploration of the New World and Caliban represents the right of the people of the New World to self-determination. .

(Jardine 1986: 564) 'To designate that process, I have suggested a new name, what I hope to be a believable neologism: gynesis-- the putting into discourse of "woman" as that process beyond the Cartesian Subject, the Dialectics of Representation, or Man's Truth. The object produced by this process is neither a person nor a thing, but a horizon, that towards which the process is tending: a gynema. This gynema is a reading effect, a woman-in-effect, never stable, without identity' .

(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' .

(Ordonez 1989: 90-1) 'In opting ... for the ongoing, all-embracing process of opening up texts, reading, and experience to as yet uncharted possibilities, we may break beyond the boundaries of the oppressive, the intransigent, and most importantly, the known' .

reality

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (4)

Quotes: (13)

(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: 23) 'The same structure is present in the corresponding Greek word, hypostasis , literally, a standing under: hence anything set under, such as stand, base bottom, prop, support, stay; hence metaphorically, that which lies at the bottom of a thing, as the groundwork, subject-matter, argument of a narrative, speech, poem; a starting point, a beginning. And then come the metaphysical meanings (we are consulting Liddell and Scott): subsistence, reality, real being (as applied to mere appearance), nature, essence. In ecclesiastical Greek, the word corresponds to the Latin Persona , a Person of the Trinity (which leads us back into the old argument between the homoousians and the homoiousians, as to whether the three persons were of the same or similar substance). Medically, the word can designate a suppression, as of humours that ought to come to the surface; also matter deposited in the urine; and of liquids generally, the sediment, lees, dregs, grounds. When we are examining, from the standpoint of Symbolic, metaphysical tracts that would deal with "fundamentals" and get to the "bottom" of things, this last set of meanings can admonish us to be on the look-out for what Freud might call "cloacal" motives, furtively interwoven with speculations that may on the surface seem wholly abstract. An "acceptance" of the universe on this plane may also be a roundabout way of "making peace with the faeces"' .

(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' .

(Foucault 1986b: 153) 'The author is he who implants, into the troublesome language of fiction, its unities, its coherence, its links with reality' .

(Lanham 1976: 52) 'The Ars read in so schoolmasterly a way is not the poem Ovid wrote, but it is part of it and the part we must see first. It provides a clear exposition of rhetorical reality. Critics have often called love, for Ovid, only a pretext. When the think it a pretext for showing off, the are only partly right. Of course he was a show-off. Such posing was endemic to the rhetorical view, it created identity. But beyond this self-conscious cleverness, which runs through everything Ovid wrote, the poem offers a straightforward exposition of love sub specie rhetoricae' .

(Lanham 1976: 48-9) 'Begin with illusion. Reality will dependably follow. Contrive external circumstance. Begin by allegorizing your own behavior. It is the situation which convinces. Arrange the external coordinates carefully and to your liking. The reality you desire will be established by them. They are not superficial embellishments. They are everything' .

(Lanham 1976: 61) 'Ovid saw the fraud implicit in any act of writing and wanted to declare it. What strikes us is the force of Ovid's sincerity. Formal pleasure represents a fundamental ingredient in any reconstruction of the past. It is not declared, the poet is not truly engaged. He has become a propagandist. Ovid's strategy in the Metamorphoses seems plain. He builds a mythic reality and then plays sophisticated games with it' .

(Lanham 1976: 6) 'The recurring attempts to make rhetorical training respectable in serious terms all go astray. The contribution rhetorical reality makes to Western reality as a whole is greatest when it is most uncompromisingly itself, insists most strenuously on its own coordinates' .

(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' .

(Lanham 1976: 18-9) 'If reality is rhetorical, dramatic, then " serious" literature is no longer serious, realistic literature no longer realistic. Lewis Carroll becomes a realist, George Eliot a surreal abstractionist' .

(Kinneavy 1971: 24) 'The justification for the autonomy of textual study is the same as the justification for any scientific abstraction: by focusing on one aspect of a reality, science can set up tools for isolated analysis which is possible only within this particular vacuum. Then the object of investigation can be reinserted into the stream of life, more intelligible for its academic isolation.' .

reason

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (5)

Booth 1974

Foucault 1986b

Frye 1957

Quotes: (16)

(Burke 1945: 214-5) 'All told, throughout these pages we have been considering five major aspects of science:
'(1) high development of technological specialization
'(2) involvement with rationale of money (accountancy)
'(3) progressive departure from natural conditions, usually saluted in the name of "naturalism"
'(4) reduction of scenic circumference to empirical limits (the reason why the technological powers that take us farthest from natural conditions have been called "naturalistic")
'(5) stress upon the "problem of knowledge" as the point of departure for philosophic speculation' .

(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: xxii) 'As we shall see later, it is by reason of the pliancy among our terms that philosophic systems can pull one way and another. The margins of overlap provide opportunities whereby a thinker can go without a leap from any one of the terms to any of its fellows. (We have also likened the terms to the fingers, which in their extremities are distinct from one another, but merge in the palm of the hand' .

(Booth 1974: 16-7) 'One can easily construct a long column of opposed terms that roughly match the original and entirely misleading split between fact and value: objective versus subjective, matter versus mind, mechanism versus vitalism, scientific reason versus faith or "the heart" or "the wisdom of the body"- and so on. The giveaway in such matters is that the column can be turned into two double columns, all of the terms made useful to either scientismist or irrationalist, just by adding proper adjectives to the opponent's terms. Often one needs no better adjective than a mere mere : my side obtains knowledge of facts, yours asserts mere value. Or: my side respects values, yours deals with mere facts. My side works with reason, yours with mere, or blind, faith' .

(Booth 1974: 37-8) 'Attacks on various forms of motivism have been many and forceful; in my view they have often been convincing. And yet motivism thrives. How can that be? Without pretending to have any final answers to such a question, I would suggest that any intellectual habit survives as a habit only so long as it is useful- which is to say, reversing the position of motivists, only so long as it can point to "consequences", whether intellectual or practical successes, that seem to provide good reason for continuing in the habit, regardless of other consequences that may be unpleasant. A given habit will seem useful provided it seems to answer important questions more successfully than any rival habit. And the fact is that though motivism is both internally inconsistent and destructive of much that we cannot live without, it is buttressed by an impressive chain of intellectual successes at what might be called the local level' .

(Booth 1974: 66) 'The notion that we have reason to believe only what has been proved, in the sense of withstanding all possible doubts, cannot be lived with by most of us for even a moment. There is nothing shameful in this, unless logic, mathematics, and physical science, which are also based on "unprovable" assumptions, are shameful. Life would be impossible if it were not so' .

(Booth 1974: 12) 'In these lectures, I am grappling with two very old and very hard questions:
'1. How should men work when they try to change each other's minds, especially about value questions?
'2. When should you and I change our minds? - that is, how do we know a good reason when we see one?' .

(Booth 1974: 53) 'Then this clever, subtle, sensitive but divided man does an amazing thing. Russell I has said he ought to be a behaviorust but can't quite make it. Russell II has worried about the effects of popular behaviorism on mass man. Now Russell III, the man of action, retreats from the whole problem by recommending as his practical solution that ordinary men (whose misreading of the ethical consequences of behaviorism he fears) should be "taught logic": they should be taught logic so that they will learn not to reason. "For, if they reason, they will almost certainly reason wrongly" (p.98)- that is, they will conclude that if man is a machine, certain ethical consequences follow!' .

(Booth 1974: xii) 'As soon as I ask "When should I change my mind?" or "What is a good reason?" I become an intellectual imperialist, and I risk becoming vacuous for the sake of covering the world' .

(Booth 1974: 40) 'But I ask you to think a bit, as I turn now from motivism to the remaining four dogmas, about what would happen to your intellectual and moral life if you reversed that formula, cultivating a benign acceptance- perhaps temporary and tentative, but real- of every belief that can pass two tests: you have no particular, concrete grounds to doubt it (as distinct from the abstract principle to doubt what cannot be proved); and you have good reason to think all men who understand the problem share your belief' .

(Booth 1974: 52) 'The view of man, the puny, neaningless insect, prevailed, then- except of course whenever Russell felt impelled to defend values to which he was himself deeply committed, values like that of scientific inquiry or of integrity in its pursuit. Then we meet the two other Russells, the vital, idealistic, even Utopian prophet of reason and the passionate mystic and man of action who became famous among nonprofessionals. Russell I still dominated in the sense of setting the definitions, distinctions, and terms in which argument and action take place. But Russell II, the courageous partisan of truth, and Russell III, the savior of the world, never allowed themselves to be silenced by the cold logician for long. They knew that man's life could not be lived without values, and they feared that the scientific world picture which Russell I preached would, when popularized, produce impoverished dehumanized man' .

(Booth 1974: 31) 'By now it has almost scriptural force: in the beginning was not the word but the causal chain, and his name was sometimes Chemistry and sometimes Drive or Desire, but never Lift or even Pull. And it came to pass that Error was born, and his chosen name was Reason, but his real name was Rationalization. And Rationalization and his wicked prophets did undertake to undermine Push, claiming that reasoning about values, about purposes, could alter Push's unalterable path. But the true prophets were able to unmask the wicked prophets, showing that their vaunted reasonings were themselves clearly dictated by Push. And, lo, there was nothing that anyone could say about anything that could not be unmasked and shown to be truly another manifestation of Push's eternal power. And when men did engage in debate about their deepest concerns, they found that each man could say unto his brother, Racca, thou fool' .

(Foucault 1986b: 149) 'This should not be very surprising, for psychoanalysis has already shown us that speech is not merely the medium which manifests-- or dissembles-- desire; it is also the object of desire. Similarly, historians have constantly impressed upon us that speech is no mere verbalisation of conflicts and systems of domination, but that it is the very object of man's conflicts. But our society possesses yet another principle of exclusion; not another prohibition, but a division and a rejection. I have in mind the opposition: reason and folly' .

(Foucault 1986b: 151) 'Of the three great systems of exclusion governing discourse -- prohibited words, the division of madness and the will to truth -- I have spoken at greatest length concerning the third. With good reason: for centuries, the former have continually tended toward the latter; because this last has, gradually, been attempting to assimilate the others in order both to modify them and to provide them with a firm foundation. Because, if the two former are continually growing more fragile and less certain to the extent that they are now invaded by the will to truth, the latter, in contrast, daily grows in strength, in depth and implacability' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 21) Sperber and Wilson summarize a basic inference model of communication to be that a speaker means something by an utterance when she intends (1) that her utterance will produce a certain response in the audience, (2) that the audience will recognize her intention, and (3) that the audience's recognition of her intention will function as at least part of the reason for the response .

(Frye 1957: 186) 'The romance is nearest of all literary forms to the wish fulfilment dream, and for that reason it has socially a curiously paradoxical role' .

reasoning

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (3)

Booth 1974

Quotes: (4)

(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' .

(Booth 1974: 26) 'Note the automatic assumption that the real reasons are not the public reasons, that the real reasons have something to do with the subconscious, or with class or racial affiliations that run far beneath the surface. If we were to ask Mailer whether his choosing to study the astronauts was itself defensible with good reasons, he might say- since he tries harder than most authors to apply the same standards to himself that he applies to other men- that his real reasons were also quite other than his conscious reasonings. We have all learned to assume that what determines minds and purposes must be not reasoning but deeper and blinder causes' .

(Booth 1979: 106) Burke 'repudiates many of the canons of demonstration that most traditional scholars would take for granted. Now, when we find a critic not just deliberately flouting but making an overt attack on Occam's razor, when we find him not only "guilty of circular reasoning" but hailing circular reasoning as what every thinker inevitably commits, we can either rule him out of court or we can try to understand what critical purposes are thwarted when we insist that all discourse fit models imported from the sciences' .

recognition

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (8)

Quotes: (10)

(Burke 1945: 118) 'According to Aristotle, Thales believed that "all things are full of Gods". For our purposes this could be interpreted as a recognition of the fact that in everything there is a power, or motive, of some sort. That is, we would interpret it in a broader sense than the notion that "soul is intermingled in the whole universe", though Aristotle in his De Anima says this is what Thales "probably" meant' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 9) 'It is true that a language is a code which pairs phonetic and semantic representations of sentences and the thoughts actually communicated by utterances. This gap is filled not by more coding, but by inference. Moreover, there is an alternative to the code model of communication. Communication has been described as a process of inferential recognition of the communicator's intentions. We will try to show how this description can be improved and made explanatory' .

(Spellmeyer 1993: 25) 'Implicit in Habermas' schema is the recognition that a disciplinary practice, on the part of either individuals or entire communities, does not make sense in itself and cannot be studies exclusively from an insider's point of view. The purpose of medicine, for example, is not the practice of medicine' .

(Minsky 1980: 11) Since a sentence can be assessed as grammatical but nonsensical while another may be both ungrammatical and nonsensical, 'what is involved in the recognition of sentences must be quite different from what is involved in the appreciation of meanings ... The word-order relations ... exploit the (grammatical) convention and rules people usually use to induce others to make assignments to terminals of structures' .

(Winograd 1977: 74) 'We can look at schemas as providing a guide for structuring the processes of production and comprehension. In the process of production, a schema ... lists the different parts and properties of a structure which must be decided upon in order to produce it.... In comprehension, the set of stored schemas is actively used in a process of "pattern recognition"' .

(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' .

(White 1974: 406) 'The older distinction between fiction and history, in which fiction is conceived as the representation of the imaginable and history as the representation of the actual, must five place to the recognition that we can only know the actual by contrasting it with or likening it to the imaginable' .

(White 1974: 40x) 'It may be observed that if historians were to recognize the fictive element in their narratives, this would not mean the degradation of historiography to the status of ideology or propaganda. In fact, this recognition would serve as a potent antidote to the tendency of historians to become captive of ideological preconceptions which they do not recognize as such but honor as the "correct" perception of "the way things really are."' .

recollection

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Spellmeyer 1993

Quotes: (1)

(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' .

recursion

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (0)

Quotes: (0)

reduction

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (5)

Quotes: (9)

(Burke 1945: 97) 'But this brings us to the third sense of reduction, as a lowering, a lessening, a narrowing - the difficult spot today, since purely technical conceptions of lowering, lessening, and narrowing can here easily become confused with moral ones. In most recent years, the most drastic manifestation of reduction in this third sense ... has been the "debunking" movement, which could be said in general to treat "higher" concepts in terms of "lower" ones' .

(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: 96) 'In sum, we have first the reduction of the non-verbal to the verbal' .

(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' .

(Bove 1990: 63-4) 'Since ours is a society which increasingly tries to ensure its political order through discursive systems that discipline our language and culture, any successful resistance to that order would seem to require strong weapons aimed to weaken that discipline.... Literary criticism, presumably always specially sensitive to the functions of language, and newly sensitive to its relationship to power on the site of institutionalized disciplines, can turn its tools to the critical examination of how, in relation to the state and its largest institutions, power operates in discourse and how discourse disciplines a population.... Discourse can turn literary studies into a full criticism, one which is skeptical, critical, oppositional, and-- when appropriate-- sustentative. It can help us to avoid reduction, either of the historical context of an event or of the rhetorically complex display of power within a textualized discourse or institutionalized discipline' .

(Derrida 1986b: 110) 'Without this reduction of phonic matter, the distinction between language and speech, decisive for Saussure, would have no rigor'. Thus, Derrida says, Saussure needs to remove actual sound from language in order to maintain the langue/parole dichotomy. .

(Leitch [n.d.]: 152) 'Deploying discontinuity as a methodological wedge, archaeology shows one aspect of its negative operation....In short, it begets excessive fragmentation in both the object and method of analysis....Archaeology regards discontinuity as a positive element rather than some external threat or failure requiring reduction or erasure. Thus archaeology actively courts discontinuity ... As archaeologist, Foucault attempts to restore to the stable ground of Western culture its rifts, instabilities, and flaws' .

reference

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (6)

Fish 1982

van Dijk 1977

Greenblatt 1995

Quotes: (12)

(Burke 1945: 165) 'I refer to the fact that the Latin word for the Carthaginians is Poeni , while the Latin word for the goddesses of vengeance is Poenae . In the dative and ablative forms, the two would be exactly the same, Poenis . And the word is thus used in Lucretius:
ad confligendum venientibus undique Poenis,
a line which, taken in itself, could be translated, with equal justice, either as "when the Carthaginians were coming to the attack from all sides" or as "when the goddesses of Vengeance were coming to the attack from all sides". There is no doubt that literally the reference is to the Carthaginians. But if we consider it in keeping with such studies of ambiguity as Empson has given us, may we not legitimately hear effects even more resonant than the literal meaning itself?' .

(Burke 1945: 43-4) 'All gods are "substances", and as such are names for motives or combinations of motives. Polytheistic divinities, besides their personalistic aspects, often represent decidedly geometric, or scenic, kinds of motivation. Indeed, we may even think of local divinities as theological prototypes of contemporary environmentalist, or geographic motives. For to say that a river is a different "god" than a mountain is to say, within the rules of a polytheistic nomenclature, that a river calls for a different set of human actions than a mountain. Whereas the "enlightened" have too often been content to dismiss the pagan gods merely as instances of animistic superstition, the fact is that the complex of social behavior centering about a given "god" was often quite correct, in the most realistically biological sense. Thus, insofar as adequate modes of planting and harvesting and distribution are connected with the rites of a given divinity, its name would be the title for a correct summation of motives. However, such concepts of motivation are usually developed to the point where their original reference is obscured, being replaced by motivational concepts peculiar to a specialized priesthood and to the needs of class domination' .

(Burke 1945: 44-5) 'But we would also recognize that monotheisms (in which we would include any secular title for a universal spring of action, such as "nature" or "the profit motive") can prevail only insofar as they are "incipiently" polytheistic, containing motivational terms ("saints") that break down the universality of the motive into narrower reference' .

(Fish 1982: 527) Speaking of the need to declare the more common interpretation of the reference of an utterance as its normal meaning, Fish says 'To admit as much is not to weaken my argument by reinstating the category of the normal, because the category as it appears in that argument is not transcendental but institutional; and while no institution is so universally in force and so perdurable that the meanings it enables will be normal for ever, some institutions or forms of life are so widely lived in that for a great many people the meanings the enable seem "naturally" available and it takes a special effort to see that they are the products of circumstances....The obviousness of the utterance's meaning is not a function of the values its words have in a linguistic system that is independent of context; rather, it is because the words are heard as already embedded in a context that they have a meaning that Hirsch can then cite as obvious.... it is impossible even to think of a sentence independently of a context, and when we are asked to consider a sentence for which no context has been specified, we will automatically hear it in the context in which it has been most often encountered' .

(Fish 1982: 526) 'Norms are not imbedded in the language ... but inhere in an institutional structure within which one hears utterances as already organized with reference to certain assumed purposes and goals' .

(Fish 1982: 529) Speaking of a colleague's figuring out a puzzling reference by one of Fish's students, Fish remarks that 'by a route that is neither entirely unmarked nor wholly determined, he comes to me and to the notion "one of Fish's victims" and to a new construing of what his student has been saying' .

(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' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 12) 'To substantiate the code model of verbal communication, it would have to be shown that every case of reference assignment can be dealt with by rules which automatically integrate properties of the context with semantic properties of the utterance. It would also have to be shown that disambiguation, the recovery of propositional attitudes, figurative interpretations and implicit import can be handled along similar lines' .

(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' .

(van Dijk 1977: 6) 'Discourse coherence is not primarily a matter of meaning, but of reference' .

(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' .

regularity

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Hopper 1987

Foucault 1986b

Quotes: (4)

(Hopper 1987: 142) 'The notion of Emergent Grammar is meant to suggest that structure, or regularity, comes out of discourse and is shaped by discourse as much as it shapes discourse in an on-going process. Grammar is hence not to be understood as a pre-requisite for discourse, a prior possession attributable in identical form to both speaker and hearer. Its forms are not fixed templates, but are negotiable in face-to-face interaction in ways that reflect the individual speakers' past experience of these forms, and their assessment of the present context, including especially their interlocutors, whose experiences and assessments may be quite different. Moreover, the term Emergent Grammar points to a grammar which is not abstractly formulated and abstractly represented, but always anchored in the specific concrete form of an utterance' .

(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' .

(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' .

(Foucault 1986b: 159) 'What is significant is that history does not consider an event without defining the series to which it belongs, without seeking out the regularity of phenomena and the probable limits of their occurrence, without enquiring about variations, inflexions and the slope of the curve, without desiring to know the conditions on which these depend. History has long since abandoned its attempts to understand events in terms of cause and effect in the formless unity of some great evolutionary process, whether vaguely homogeneous or rigidly hierarchised' .

relation

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (11)

Coates and Cameron 1988

Foucault 1986a

White 1974

Quotes: (22)

(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: 193) 'We have thus arrived at the transcendent realm as a realm of things "in themselves" (that is, with whatever nature they may have intrinsically, not as they are determined by the terms in which we see them). Whereat we might profitable pause to consider the grammar of the intrinsic. It is the puzzle we encountered when discussing the paradox of substance. As soon as one considers things in relation to other things, one is uncomfortably on the way to dissolving them into their context, since their relations lead beyond them. A thing in itself for instance can't be "higher" or "heavier" than something or "inside" or "outside" something, or "derived from" something, etc. For though such descriptions may apply to it, they do not apply to it purely as a thing in itself ; rather, they are contextual references, pointing beyond the thing' .

(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.' .

(Fish 1982: 350) 'The discovery of the "real point" is always what is claimed whenever a new interpretation is advanced, but the claim makes sense only in relation to a point (or points) that had previously been considered the real one. This means that the space in which a critic works has been marked out for him by his predecessors, even though he is obliged by the conventions of the institution to dislodge them.... it is only because something has already been said that he can now say something different' .

(Foucault 1986b: 162) 'The critical side of the analysis deals with the systems enveloping discourse; attempting to mark out and distinguish the principles of ordering, exclusion and rarity in discourse. We might, to play with our words, say it practises a kind of studied casualness. The genealogical side of discourse, by way of contrast, deals with series of effective formation of discourse: it attempts to grasp it in its power of affirmation, by which I do not mean a power opposed to that of negation, but the power of constituting domains of objects, in relation to which one can affirm or deny true or false propositions. Let us call these domains of objects positivist and , to play on words yet again, let us say that, if the critical style is one of studied casualness, then the genealogical mood is one of felicitous positivism' .

(Ricoeur 1982: 154) 'The working hypothesis of any structural analysis of texts is this: in spite of the fact that writing is on the same side as speech in relation to language -- namely, on the side of discourse -- the specificity of writing in relation to speech is based on structural features which can be treated as analogues of language in discourse' .

(Culler 1992: 216) 'The first general problem is the relation between psychic (or psychoanalytical), linguistic, and sociohistorical categories. Can one set of terms be mapped onto another, and if so, how? Is one set reducible to another? Which is "more basic"? Or is the language of depth and foundation part of the problem?' .

(Culler 1992: 219) 'The fourth topic of debate ...involves a number of questions: What is the relation between critiques of essentialist conceptions of identity (of a person or group) and the psychic and political demands for identity? How de the urgencies of emancipatory politics conflict with or engage psychoanalytic and poststructuralist critiques of the subject's identity? In what terms should critics and theorists seek to define women's writing or Chicano literature, for example?' .

(van Dijk 1977: 10) The generalization rule: 'a sequence N of propositions may be substituted by a proposition p if p is entailed by each of the members of N. We see that the rule is based on an entailment relation' .

(van Dijk 1977: 8) 'Characteristically, the relation of the macro-structure to the micro-structure involves notions such as importance or relevance: the macro-interpretation defines the most important or essential object or event denoted by a sequence of propositions' .

(Bathrick 1992: 337) 'In his anthology, Nation and Narration, Homi K. Bhabha raises fundamental issues about the future of cultural studies in relation to national identity: What forms of narrative express the ideology of the modern nation? How do questions of race and gender, class and colonialism change the boundaries of national identity? How is national identity itself the construction of a particular historical imaginary?' .

(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' .

(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' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 17) 'Women use fewer stygmatised forms and more prestige forms in every class; it is no more justified to class this pattern of female usage hypercorrect than it would be to call the usage of the middle class hypercorrect in relation to that of the working class. The notion of women's sensitivity to prestige norms is an explanation that arises from the intrinsic maleness of the norms. Men's behaviour is seen as normal; when women's differs, it has to be explained' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 30) 'In order to use the notions of face and power to explain women's greater use of standard speech we need four assumptions: 1. participants in an interaction wish to protect their own face; 2. attention to other's face is affected by relative power in relation to other; 3. attention to other's face may involve damage to one's own; 4. women have less relative power than men' .

(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' .

(White 1974: 400) 'This is what leads me to think that historical narratives are not only models of past events and processes, but also metaphorical statements which suggest a relation of similitude between such events and processes and the story types that we conventionally use to endow the events of our lives with culturally sanctioned meanings' .

relevance

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (4)

Gibbs 1987

van Dijk 1977

Quotes: (8)

(Gibbs 1987: 569-70) 'The first task facing a listener in understanding an utterance, according to Sperber and Wilson's relevance hypothesis is to identify its propositional form.... They assume that the initial parse of a sentence begins in some sort of input module ... which results in its literal, context-free, representation' .

(Gibbs 1987: 574-5) 'Even if one assumes that mutual knowledge is not necessary for comprehension, there is much psychological evidence which is not in accord with many of the basic assumptions underlying the relevance hypothesis. The weight of this evidence suggests that it may be premature to accept the relevance hypothesis as a reasonable model of the psychological processes used in working out conversational inferences' .

(Gibbs 1987: 585) 'My arguments is favor of the mutual knowledge hypothesis and against the relevance hypothesis are grounded in five interrelated observations. First, I have suggested the Sperber and Wilson's proposal that mutual cognitive environments constitute the true context for comprehension is not sufficiently clear and distinguishable from the concept of mutual knowledge. As such, the relevance hypothesis seems to make use of the very idea that it attempts to replace. Second, mutual knowledge is possible to determine in a finite period of time via Clark and Marshall's (1981) mutual knowledge induction scheme without resorting to an infinite set of beliefs statements usually viewed as a consequence of establishing mutual knowledge. Third, it appears that mutual knowledge is indeed a necessary prerequisite for the comprehension of many kinds of utterances in conversation. This is particularly true if listeners are to distinguish between inferences that are ostensively intended or "authorized" by speakers from inferences that are "unauthorized". Conversations are only cooperative to the extent to which speakers specifically intend and listeners specifically recognize "m-intended" messages. Part of my thesis here is that how listeners are able to distinguish "authorized" versus "unauthorized" inferences must be part of a cognitive theory of conversational inferences. Fourth, parts of the processing model underlying the relevance hypothesis are not supported by contemporary psycholinguistic research. Specifically, there is little empirical evidence in favor of the idea that listeners must first decode an utterance into some propositional representation before choosing a context in which that proposition is viewed as most relevant. Finally, there is some recent psycholinguistic evidence demonstrating that speakers formulate their utterances precisely to satisfy the amount of knowledge they share with their listeners. This shared knowledge is also directly utilized by listeners when interpreting utterances in everyday discourse. These findings appear most congruent with the predictions of the mutual knowledge hypothesis' .

(Gibbs 1987: 579) 'Perhaps the most fundamental difference between the mutual knowledge hypothesis and the relevance hypothesis concerns the constraints each places on the kinds of inference generated during utterance interpretation. Consider the following exchange:
'He: Are you going to the party tonight?
'She: I hear Jack's coming.' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 47) 'There is a single property -- relevance -- which makes information worth processing for a human being' .

(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' .

(Booth 1979: 107) 'Taken seriously, this position means that no refutation of Burke that I have seen has any relevance to what he is really doing, because they all employ some version of a scientistic calculus to show either that Burke cannot prove what he says, or that what he says can be refuted from some other perspective, or that all of his proofs are circular. But since all screens will be vulnerable to the same charges, the question becomes, not whether a given perspective can be shown to be distorted -- because it always can be from any other perspective -- but whether it is more or less adequate to the kinds of problems it reveals. The result of such a position is not relativism, although it is not surprising that inattentive readers have confused it with relativism; having cut his moorings from conventional norms of proof, Burke is naturally accused of having no norms at all' .

repetition

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (3)

Hopper 1987

White 1974

Quotes: (3)

(Hopper 1987: 145) 'Looking at language this way involves a serious adjustment for the linguist, since we have developed the habit of seeing utterances in terms of a fixed framework of rules, and especially because we have been raised on the doctrine of the free generability of sentences, and the privileging of novelty over prior texts. Indeed, novelty is a prized virtue in our society altogether, ... and we have many ways, some more subtle than others, of censuring perceived repetitions of others' behavior and an enormous vocabulary dealing with repetition (copying, imitation). Yet when one examines actual specimens of speech from the formulaic point of view the effect is a striking one, perhaps even a memorable one, in that it is then extremely difficult to revert to the old rule-governed syntactic view of discourse' .

(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 39) 'The Same pairs were constructed in accordance with the constraints that priming and target sentences occur in a forward order, that both sentences of a pair begin with the same pronoun, and that there was no repetition of content words' .

(White 1974: 397) 'No given set of casually recorded historical events can in itself constitute a story; the most it might offer to the historian are story elements. The events are made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of them and the highlighting of others, by characterization, motific repetition, variation of tone and point of view, alternative descriptive strategies, and the like-- in short, all of the techniques that we would normally expect to find in the emplotment of a novel or a play' .

representation

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (8)

Gibbs 1987

Quotes: (10)

(Burke 1945: 21) 'There is a set of words comprising what we might call the Stance family, for they all derive from a concept of place, or placement. In the Indo-Germanic languages the root for this family is sta , to stand (Sanscrit, stha ). And out of it there has developed this essential family, comprising such members as: consist, constancy, constitution, contrast. destiny, ecstasy, existence, hypostasize, obstacle, stage, state, status, statute, stead, subsist, and system. In German, an important member of the Stance family is stellen , to place, a root that figures in Vorstellung , a philosopher's and psychologist's word for representation, conception, idea, image' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 9-10) 'It is not legitimate to ignore the differences between the semantic representations of sentences and the thoughts that utterances are used to convey.... The semantic representation of a sentence deals with a sort of common core of meaning shared by every utterance of it.... The grammar can say nothing about how the hearer, using non-linguistic information, determines on a particular occasion what the time of utterance actually is, who the speaker is, which Bill or Betsy the speaker has in mind, etc., and hence which thought is actually being expressed. These aspects of interpretation involve an interaction between linguistic structure and non-linguistic information, only the former being dealt with by the grammar' .

(Minsky 1980: 18) 'It should be emphasized again that we must not expect magic. For difficult, novel problems a new representation structure will have to be constructed, and this will require application of both general and special knowledge' .

(Minsky 1980: 16) 'In any event, the individual statements of a discourse lead to temporary representations -- which seem to correspond to what contemporary linguists call "deep structures" -- which are then quickly rearranged or consumed in elaboration the growing scenario representation. In order of "scale", among the ingredients of such a structure there might be these kinds of levels':
surface syntactic frames -- mainly verb and noun structures;
prepositional and word-order indicator conventions;
surface semantic frames -- action-centered meanings of words;
qualifiers and relations concerning participants, instruments, trajectories and strategies, goals, consequences and side-effects;
thematic frames -- scenarios concerned with topics, activities, portraits, setting; outstanding problems and strategies commonly connected with topics;
narrative frames -- skeleton forms for typical stories, explanations, and arguments; conventions about foci, protagonists, plot forms, development, etc., designed to help a listener construct a new, instantiated thematic frame in his own mind .

(Culler 1992: 218) 'A third major issue in critical and theoretical discussions has been the nature of representation' .

research

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (5)

Gibbs 1987

Spellmeyer 1993

Winograd 1977

Coates and Cameron 1988

Quotes: (5)

(Winograd 1977: 84-6) 'The concepts presented in the sections above have been developed by researchers working at three different sorts of tasks: data exploration (primarily by linguists); model building (primarily in artificial intelligence); and model verification (primarily by psychologists).... Current research tends to lie in clusters along these separate lines. There is little work which combines the linguist's sophistication in recognizing the complexity of the data with the computer system builder's concern with the properties of the system as a whole, and the psychologist's demand that the resulting analysis be verifiable through experiments. If we are ever to really understand natural discourse, we have to develop methodologies which span these approaches, providing both scope and rigor in their theories' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 24) 'As always, there is a need for more empirical research. But this must not be done in a framework which assumes that male behaviour and male norms are prototypical' .

result

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (6)

Fish 1982