vagueness, validity, value, variant, variation, verb, verbal, verification, vocabulary
Under construction
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 56) 'The distortions and misperceptions introduced by the explicit communication model are also found in the study of verbal communication itself. Some essential aspects of implicit verbal communication are overlooked. ... What is implicitly conveyed by an utterance is generally much vaguer than what is explicitly expressed, and that when the implicit import of an utterance is explicitly spelled out, it tends to be distorted by the elimination of this often intentional vagueness. The distortion is even greater in the case of metaphor and other figures of speech, whose poetic effects are generally destroyed by being explicitly spelled out' .
Under construction
(Fish 1982: 532) 'On one level this counterargument is unassailable, but on another level it is finally beside the point. It is unassailable as a general and theoretical conclusion: the positing of context- or institution-specific norms surely rules out the possibility of a norm whose validity would be recognized by everyone, no matter what his situation. But it is beside the point for any particular individual, for since everyone is situated somewhere, there is no one for whom the absence of an asituational norm would be of any practical consequence, in the sense that his performance or his confidence in his ability to perform would be impaired. So that while it is generally true that to have many standards is to have none at all, it is not true for anyone in particular ... In other words, while relativism is a position one can entertain, it is not a position one can occupy.... The point is that there is never a moment when one believes nothing, when consciousness is innocent of any and all categories of thought, and whatever categories of thought are operative at a given moment will serve as an undoubted ground' .
(Booth 1974: xiii) 'My business is largely with what they left out- with what might be called the origin, likelihoods, and extent of human convictions, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent- an argument for the intellectual validity of a subject which, abandoned by philosophers, has too often fallen into the hands of quacks: preachers of "plain style", of "winning friends and influencing [other?] people", of "writing that sells", to say nothing of various "scientific" modes of changing men's minds' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 33-8) Edwards claims that her paper will discuss 'the speech of the female participants in the study'. However, because 'it was arranged that the fieldworker should be the same sex as the friendship group' being studied, there is limitation of the observations to same-sex conversations. Nevertheless, Edwards asserts that 'the validity of these findings ... would have been considerably more limited if the variable of sex had not been carefully controlled' .
(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 .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 48) 'One of the most common fallacies in the attempt to determine the intrinsic is the equating of the intrinsic with the unique. We recall an instance of this nominalist extreme in an essay by a literary critic who exhorted his fellows to discern the quality of a given poet's lines by finding in exactly what way they were distinct from the lines of every other poet (somewhat as advertisements recommending rival brands of the same product play up some one "talking point" that is said to distinguish this brand from all its competitors). Yet the intrinsic value of a poet's lines must also reside, to a very great degree, in attributes that his work shares with many other poets. We cannot define by differentia alone; the differentiated also has significant attributes as members of its class' .
(Fish 1982: 67) Good analysts will be able 'to see the value of considering effects and ... to think of language as an experience rather than as a repository of extractable meaning' .
(Fish 1982: 101-2) 'The trivialization of ordinary language is accomplished as soon as one excludes from its precincts matters of purpose, value, intention, obligation, and so on -- everything that can be characterized as human. What, then, is left to it? The answers to this question are various. For some, the defining constituent of ordinary language, or language, is its capacity to carry messages; for others, the structure of language is more or less equated with the structure of logic ... Still others hold instrumental views: language is used to refer either to objects in the real world or to ideas in the mind ... But whatever the definition, two things remain constant: (1) the content of language is an entity that can be specified independently of human values... and (2) a need is therefore created for another entity or system in the context of which human values can claim pride of place.... Once you've taken the human values out of the language, and yet designated what remains as the norm, the separated values become valueless, because they have been removed from the normative center' .
(Fish 1982: 107) 'Philosophical, psychological, and moral concepts ... are built into the language we use... The significance of this is that the language system is not characterized apart for the realm of value and intention but begins and ends with that realm' .
(Fish 1982: 351) 'It is assumed that the truth about a work will be what penetrates to the essence of its literary value' .
(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: 20-1) 'There have been countless ... demonstrations that objective scholarship is not and cannot be objective in the sense of being free of value judgments.... Noam Chomsky's famous essay "Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship" partially undermines itself with this failure. Chomsky shows easily and conclusively that "liberal scholars", most notably Gabriel Jackson in his study on study on Spain in the 30s, discover what their value commitments allow them to discover, and they overlook what their values lead them to overlook. But Chomsky them writes as of he has earned, with this restoration of values into historical study, the right to impose his own values on history -- and without even as much effort to grapple with opposing views as was made by Jackson.... Chomsky often talks as if all attempts to write honest history are really and always mere disguises for value commitments and that therefore he has a right to push his value button- "down with the 'liberal' defense of capitalism"- and see what is churned out. His obligation, I would have thought, was to give his readers good reasons why his version of the war is in some historical sense better than Jackson's, and not just one more passionate voice to be measured in decibels' .
(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: 39-40) 'None of us in this room really believes that all of his own commitments are equally indefensible in the eyes of other men. Everyone, no matter how thoroughly committed to motivism he may claim to be, always exempts at least a part of himself and his values from the dogmas. For the motivist, for example, the commitment to motivism and the command to respect its conclusions as truth are found and supported "rationally", not simply by following blind drives. One "ought" to conduct one's mental life in their light, even though to say so is to assert a value. There seems something fishy about this one exemption, surely. What if the whole edifice were plainly, destructively, and tragically wrong- not wrong in the sense that there are no good reasons for respecting it on some occasions for some purposes, but in the snesen that it is totally misleading when applied indiscriminately to the whole of life' .
(Booth 1974: 13) 'What is most interesting here is the automatic reliance on the distinction between facts and values, and the quality of the reply one often receives if he questions that distinction. If the word dogma is applicable to any general notion that cannot, for the believer, be brought into question, the belief that you cannot and indeed should not allow your values to intrude upon your cognitive life- that thought and knowledge and fact are on one side and affirmations of value on the other- has been until recently a dogma for all right-thinking moderns' .
(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' .
(Bove 1990: 63) 'When viewed as an element in a historical system of institutionalized discourse, the traditional idea of the "author," and the privileged value accorded to it in literary scholarship and criticism, is one of the two or three key concepts by means of which the critical disciplines organize their knowledge around questions of subjectivity and discipline both their practitioners and those they "teach"' .
(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' .
(Derrida 1986a: 88) 'Levi-Strauss will always remain faithful to this double intention: to preserve as an instrument something whose truth value he criticizes'. Derrida says that Levi-Strauss advocates the use of bricolage, a strategy of using whatever is at hand, to analyze .
(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' .
(Jameson 1981: 115) 'An ideologeme, that is, a historically determinate conceptual or semic complex which can project itself variously in the form of a "value system" or "philosophical concept," or in the form of a protonarrative, a private of collective narrative fantasy' .
(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' .
(A. Pratt 1981: 25) 'The pursuit narrative in mythology often involved a green-world locale, an island, "well," or grotto, invaded by men who rape the beneficent women residents-- followed by an account of the destruction and theft of the area's natural value.... Such traumas characterize the plot structure of gothic novels where women heroes experience adventures in quest of true chivalry in combination with the horror of pursuit and victimization by male villains' .
Under construction
(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' .
(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' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 59) Thomas studied speakers of a Welsh community where [E:] in certain words is beginning to be lost in favor of a shift to [A:]. She observed that women who use the feature more tend to attend a chapel on the end of town where the dialect is more prevalent. Though most of those who retain this feature in their language also live at that end of the community, there are some who do not live in the east end of the town, but attend church there. 'To summarize, use of the [E:] variant is confined to older women, whose social networks are more community-based that those of their male contemporaries and younger villagers of both sexes' .
Under construction
(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: 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: 10-1) 'A variationist approach to discourse ... stems from studies of linguistic variation and change....Fundamental assumptions of variationist studies are that linguistic variation ... is patterned both socially and linguistically, and that such patterns can be discovered only through systematic investigation of a speech community' .
(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' .
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' .
(Burke 1945: 14) 'As for "act", any verb, no matter how specific or how general, that has connotations of consciousness or purpose falls under this category. If one happened to stumble over an obstruction, that would be not an act, but a mere motion. However, one could convert even this sheer accident into something of an act if, in the course of falling, one suddenly willed his fall (as a rebuke, for instance, to the negligence of the person who had left the obstruction in the way)' .
(Minsky 1980: 16)
'In any event, the individual statements of a discourse lead to temporary
representations -- which seem to correspond to what contemporary
linguists call "deep structures" -- which are then quickly rearranged or
consumed in elaboration the growing scenario representation. In order of
"scale", among the ingredients of such a structure there might be these
kinds of levels':
surface syntactic frames -- mainly verb and noun
structures;
prepositional and word-order indicator conventions;
surface semantic frames -- action-centered meanings of words;
qualifiers and relations concerning participants, instruments,
trajectories and strategies, goals, consequences and side-effects;
thematic frames -- scenarios concerned with topics, activities, portraits,
setting; outstanding problems and strategies commonly connected with
topics;
narrative frames -- skeleton forms for typical stories,
explanations, and arguments; conventions about foci, protagonists, plot
forms, development, etc., designed to help a listener construct a new,
instantiated thematic frame in his own mind
.
(Booth 1979: 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' .
Under construction
(Hopper 1987: 144) 'Evidently the meanings represented by the English "indefinite article" are not unified under one hyper-abstract function. Instead, an open ended set of small sub-systems has come into being, and the membership of new occurrences of forms with the indefinite article is not specifiable in advance, but is impromptu and negotiable. Even participants in the conversation may not "know" whether a specific new mention or a non-specific indefinite is intended until this has been worked out in the verbal interaction' .
(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' .
(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' .
(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: 152) 'I suspect one could find a kind of gradation between different types of discourse within most societies: discourse "uttered" in the course of the day and in casual meetings, and which disappears with the very act which gave rise to it; and those forms of discourse that lie at the origins of a certain number of new verbal acts, which are reiterated, transformed or discussed; in short, discourse which is spoken and remains spoken, indefinitely, beyond its formulation, and which remains to be spoken' .
(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: 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' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 60) 'One of the advantages of verbal communication is that it gives rise to the strongest possible form of communication; it enables the hearer to pin down to speaker's intentions about the explicit content of her utterance to a single strongly manifest candidate, with no alternative worth considering at all' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 56) 'The distortions and misperceptions introduced by the explicit communication model are also found in the study of verbal communication itself. Some essential aspects of implicit verbal communication are overlooked. ... What is implicitly conveyed by an utterance is generally much vaguer than what is explicitly expressed, and that when the implicit import of an utterance is explicitly spelled out, it tends to be distorted by the elimination of this often intentional vagueness. The distortion is even greater in the case of metaphor and other figures of speech, whose poetic effects are generally destroyed by being explicitly spelled out' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 63) 'We began this chapter by asking how human beings communicate with one another, Our answer is that they use two quite different modes of communication: coded communication and ostensive-inferential communication. This is how language is used in verbal communication' .
(Booth 1979: 101-2) 'Crane's pluralism might lead us to "do justice" to Burke. His dramatism is one of the possible modes: his subject, language as action; his method, an assimilative dialectic; his principles, comprehensive and operational; and his purpose, actional or "rhetorical". To use his own words, he attempts "to cure" himself and society by doing verbal "therapy". His initial choice of mode enables him to answer certain questions and prevents his answering other questions. When we judge his answers as "relative to" that initial choice, we can both judge his effectiveness within his chosen mode and avoid the kind of dogmatism that would rule out his mode as illegitimate in the first place. Anyone who knows Burke at all knows that he will refuse to stay pinned and wriggling on anyone else's wall chart' .
(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' .
(Bakhtin 1986: 667) 'A common unitary language is a system of linguistic norms. But these norms do not constitute an abstract imperative; they are rather the generative forces of linguistic life, forces that struggle to overcome the heteroglossia of language, forces that unite and centralize verbal-ideological thought... What we have in mind here is not an abstract linguistic minimum of a common language, in the sense of a system of elementary forms (linguistic symbols) guaranteeing a minimum level of comprehension in practical communication. We are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life. Thus a unitary language gives expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization, which develop in vital connection with the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization' .
(White 1974: 396) 'In general there has been a reluctance to consider historical narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences' .
Under construction
(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' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 210-1) 'So we offer such a tentative restatement of the Marxist doctrine, as formed about the act of class struggle. We are following no particular text, but are trying to restate the Marxist position in general, as it appears when translated into the terms of characterization employed in this book. We freely grant, however, that such a mode of summarization, characterization, and placement is almost ludicrously inapposite, when considered from the Rhetorical point of view. For though we manipulate our terms in keeping with all the important Marxist emphasis upon class antagonism as the locus of motives, our vocabulary necessarily lacks the partisan vigor that infuses the Marxist rhetoric, and makes the Communist Manifesto a masterpiece of challenge' .
(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: 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' .
(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' .
(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' .
Last Modified: July-12-96 17:8:15
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