warrant, western, will-to-knowledge, women's language, word, word-order, world, worldview, writer, writing
Under construction
Under construction
(Johnson 1990: 43) 'In his three volumes of 1967, Derrida gives rigorous attention to the paradox that the Western tradition ... is filled with writings that privilege speech' .
(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
.
(Johnson 1990: 48) 'What enslaves is not writing per se but control of writing, and writing as control. What is needed is not less writing but more consciousness of how it works. If, as Derrida claims, the importance of writing has been "repressed" by the dominant culture of the Western tradition, it is because writing can always pass into the hands of the "other"... What is at stake in writing is the very structure of authority itself' .
(Burke 1945: 190) 'But look where we now are. We have described intellectual synthesis as "active". Yet what kind of "act" is this? The empirical scene has derived its character from the nature of the agent; but though we have called this action of the mind "spontaneous" and "original", we might just as well have called it "inevitable". It is compulsory , lacking the elements of freedom necessary for action. The mind cannot see otherwise than in terms of the categories. To observe is an act, in that one can choose either to observe it or not to observe it. But to observe in terms of the categories is not an act in this sense, since we must consider it in such terms, whether we choose to observe it or not. Conversely, though the sensibility is "passive", we find space and time called the "forms" of sensibility. And in the tradition from which Western philosophy stems, "form" is the act word par excellence. So the "passive" begins to look as active as the avowedly active' .
(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'
.
(Lanham 1993: xiii) 'Unlike most humanists discussion technology, I argue an optimistic thesis. I think electronic expression has come not to destroy the Western arts and letters, but to fulfill them. And I think too that the instructional practices built upon the electronic word will not repudiate the deepest and most fundamental currents of Western education in discourse but redeem them' .
(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: 8) 'Perhaps we can see now why the Western paideia has always been a mixed one. The Sophists cannot have grounded it alone, nor the philosophers. The best education has always put the two views of life into profound and fruitful collision. Divorce and domination present equal dangers' .
(Lanham 1976: 34-5) 'The task of the critic, as of the cultural or literary historian, is not to choose sides and then ignore the other half. Nor is it to try, however tempted, to adjudicate the dispute, decide who is right and then simplify....We must ... rehearse again the quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric. And this time around, we must do more than use philosophy to debunk rhetoric, as the scientific world view has done.... Seeing Western literature correctly depends on controlling these two contradictory theories of knowledge, of self, of style.... Upon seeing Western literature aright depends our ability to hold together the two different ways of knowing which together make us human' .
(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' .
Under construction
(Leitch [n.d.]: 155) 'What is knowledge? A disguise rather than a foundation for truth. Dangerous and destructive, the will-to-knowledge suppresses freedom and produces control' .
Under construction
(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: 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: 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' .
(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: 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: xv) 'We shall use five terms as generating principle of our investigation. They are: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose. In a rounded statement about motives, you must have some word that names the act (names what took place, in thought or deed), and another that names the scene (the background of the act, the situation in which it occurred); also, you must indicate what person or kind of person ( agent ) performed the act, what means or instruments he used ( agency ), and the purpose . Men may violently disagree about the purposes behind a given act, or about the character of the person who did it, or how he did it, or in what kind of situation he acted; or they may even insist upon totally different words to name the act itself. But be that as it may, any complete statement about motives will offer some kind of answers to these five questions: what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose)' .
(Burke 1945: 190) 'But look where we now are. We have described intellectual synthesis as "active". Yet what kind of "act" is this? The empirical scene has derived its character from the nature of the agent; but though we have called this action of the mind "spontaneous" and "original", we might just as well have called it "inevitable". It is compulsory , lacking the elements of freedom necessary for action. The mind cannot see otherwise than in terms of the categories. To observe is an act, in that one can choose either to observe it or not to observe it. But to observe in terms of the categories is not an act in this sense, since we must consider it in such terms, whether we choose to observe it or not. Conversely, though the sensibility is "passive", we find space and time called the "forms" of sensibility. And in the tradition from which Western philosophy stems, "form" is the act word par excellence. So the "passive" begins to look as active as the avowedly active' .
(Burke 1945: xxii-xxiii) 'The titular word for our own method is "dramatism", since it invites one to consider the matter of motives in a perspective that, being developed from the analysis of drama, treats language and thought primarily as modes of action. The method is synoptic, though not in the historical sense. A purely historical survey would require no less that a universal history of human culture; for every judgment, exhortation, or admonition, every view of natural or supernatural reality, every intention or expectation involves assumptions about motive, or cause. Our work must be synoptic in a different sense: in the sense that it offers a system of placement, and should enable us, by the systematic manipulations of the terms, to "generate" or "anticipate" the various classes of motivational theory. And a treatment in these terms, we hope to show, reduces the subject synoptically while still permitting us to appreciate its scope and complexity' .
(Burke 1945: 56) 'Contemporary scientific theory, in proposing to abandon the categories of substance and causality, has done speculation a good turn. For it has made clear wherein the difference between philosophic and scientific terminologies of motivation resides. Philosophy, like common sense, must think of human motivation dramatistically, in terms of action and its ends. But a science is freed of philosophic taints only insofar as it confines itself to terms of motion and arrested motion (figure, structure). This convention, almost Puritanical in its severity (surely we should not be far wrong in calling it a secularized variant of Puritanism) has brought about such magnification of human powers that any "objection" to it would have about as much force as an attempt to "refute" Niagara Falls. But such results, however spectacular, do not justify an attempt to abide by the same terminological conventions when treating of human motives. For one could confine the study of action within the terms of motion only by resigning oneself to gross misrepresentations of life as we normally experience it. Though we here lay great stress upon the puns and other word play in men's ideas of motivation, we do not thereby conclude that such linguistic tactics are "nothing but" puns and word play' .
(Burke 1945: 23) 'But returning to the pun as it figures in the citation from Locke, we might point up the pattern as sharply as possible by observing that the word "substance", used to designate what a thing is , derives from a word designating something that a thing is not . That is, though used to designate something within the thing, intrinsic to it, the word etymologically refers to something outside the thing, extrinsic to it. Or otherwise put: the word in its etymological origins would refer to an attribute of the thing's context , since that which supports or underlies a thing would be a part of the thing's context. And a thing's context, being outside or beyond the thing, would be something that the thing is not' .
(Burke 1945: 21-2) 'First we should note that there is, etymologically, a pun lurking behind the Latin roots. The word is often used to designate what some thing or agent intrinsically is , as per these meanings in Webster's: "the most important element in any existence; the characteristic and essential components of anything; the main part; essential import; purport". Yet etymologically "substance" is a scenic word. Literally, a person's or a thing's sub-stance would be something that stands beneath or supports the person or thing' .
(Fish 1982: 340) Remarking on Raine's and Hirsch's use of the word forest from Blake's The Tyger to defend opposing interpretations, Fish says that 'what we have here than are two critics with opposing interpretations, each of whom claims the same word as internal and confirming evidence. Clearly they cannot both be right, but just as clearly there is no basis for deciding between them. One cannot appeal to the text, because the text has become an extension of the interpretive disagreement that divides them' .
(Fish 1982: 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' .
(Booth 1974: 22) 'The dogmas we turn to now tend to travel together, reinforcing each other to constitute the almost overwhelmingly persuasive worldview of modernism. But it will be useful to think of them as falling into five kinds. There are dogmas about (a) the methods or means for producing change; (b) the nature of the thing being changed- the mind or soul or self or person or organism (though I have talked only of "changing minds", I intend the word mind in the broadest possible sense); (c) the scene of change- the world in which that thing changed, the "mind", finds itself; (d) the principles or basic assumptions about truth and its testing- the ground and nature of change; and (e) the purpose of change. Every effort to change a mind will appear differently depending on our view of what does the changing, what is changed, how it relates to the whole nature of things, whether or in what sense the change is tested or justified in basic principles, and the purpose of the change' .
(Booth 1974: 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' .
(Booth 1974: 10-1) 'I choose, then, to talk about the whole thing as in part a rhetorical failure, but I should make clear that I don't mean by that simply what people usually mean by a "failure of communication". That phrase seems to suggest that if we could get our words right, all would be well. By using the traditional word rhetoric I want to suggest a whole philosophy of how men succeed or fail in discovering together, in discourse, new levels of truth (or at least agreement) that neither side suspected before.... Rhetoric has almost always had a bad press, and it more often than not still carries a sense of trickery or bombastic disguise for a weak case: making the word appear the better cause. But I am groping toward something far more important, though obviously far too grandiose to be achieved in four lectures: a view of rhetoric as the whole art of discovering and sharing warrantable assertion' .
(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' .
(Booth 1974: 33) 'Every idea -- unless of course it is "scientific" -- expresses a need or a secret wish; nothing need be taken seriously as a possible contribution to the truth. The very word truth has for many been ruled out of court, and with it the notion that one determinant of what is said can be a respect for reasons' .
(Booth 1979: 108) 'Obviously such talk is nonsense to anyone who insists on a literal meaning for phrases like "the same as" and "amounts to". Burke seldom uses such words in a sense that would satisfy someone like Crane as strictly literal; even the word "literal" is not quite literal; thinking about the concept as Burke might, we would no doubt extend my questioning of Crane's usage in chapter 2 [of this work]. Indeed, a major part of his persistent program is to remind literalists that behind their claims to precision lurk confusions that can be acknowledged and lived with only by qualifying every copulative verb with some sense of ambiguity. It is not just that the words need semantic scouring. What something is is always too rich and complex for any one statement. Thus Burke can, without violating his own canons, say at one point that literary form as the gratification of needs is the appeal in poetry and, in other contexts, say that literary form is a disguise for the true appeal; and he can really mean both statements' .
(Lanham 1993: xi) 'One of the computer screen's routine marvels is manipulation of scale, and such manipulation stands at the center of postmodern art. As we shall see in chapter 2, wherever you touch twentieth-century visual art and architecture, it seems both to foreshadow electronic expression and to provide and aesthetic ready-made for it. as I point out in chapter 1, the composition, notation, and performance of music have been transformed by digital expression. Because word, image, and sound are expressed in a common digital code, the arts take on a new and radical convertibility that threatens both their present compartmentalization and its academic departmental embodiment. So, too, poststructuralist literary theory, which has precipitated the current streetfight between Left and Right, turns out to be just such another proleptic aesthetic; poststructuralism and the common digital code seem part of the same event. As I suggest here, the whole Aristotelian basis of literary criticism is undermined by electronic expression, and so pre structuralist literary theory is similarly transformed' .
(Lanham 1993: 56) 'The most obvious area of rhetoric's revival -- literary theory -- is so familiar as hardly to need elaboration. The "architectonic" view of rhetoric that Kenneth Burke developed from the 1930s onward has underwritten the Derridean explosion -- there is no other word for it -- of literary theory since the Hopkins symposium in 1966 put it on the map. Although, incredibly, Derrida appears not to have known Burke's work, deconstruction's enfranchising hypothesis that rhetorical analysis can be used on nonliterary texts and on the conventions of social life itself is the pivotal insight of Burkean dramatism. And if Burke's work does not fall in our period, certainly the realization of its importance does' .
(Lanham 1993: xiii) 'Unlike most humanists discussion technology, I argue an optimistic thesis. I think electronic expression has come not to destroy the Western arts and letters, but to fulfill them. And I think too that the instructional practices built upon the electronic word will not repudiate the deepest and most fundamental currents of Western education in discourse but redeem them' .
(Lanham 1993: 8-9) 'We have for a long time misread and mistranslated the Greek and Latin classics according to the philosophical coordinates of print rather than their native rhetorical orality. The electronic word is hastening this long-overdue revaluation. Literary history, that is, like literature and literary criticism, is being changed both forward and backward' .
(Derrida 1986b: 97) 'Has it ever been doubted that writing was the clothing of speech? For Saussure it is even a garment of perversion and debauchery, a dress of corruption and disguise, a festival mask that must be exorcised, that is to say warded off, by the good word' .
(Bakhtin 1986: 668) 'The centripetal forces of the life of language, embodied in a "unitary language", operate in the midst of heteroglossia. At any give moment of its evolution, language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word ... but also-- and for us this is the essential point-- into languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, "professional" and "generic" languages, languages of generations and so forth. From this point of view, literary language itself is only one of these heteroglot languages-- and in its turn is also stratified into languages... And this stratification and heteroglossia, once realized, is not only a static invariant of linguistic life, but also what insures its dynamics: stratification and heteroglossia widen and deepen as long as language is alive and developing. Alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of language carry on their uninterupted work; alongside verbal-ideological centralization and unification, the uninterrupted processes of decentralization and disunification go forward' .
(Ijsseling 1976: 14) 'Plato is aware of the fundamental ambiguity of the word, which may guide a man, but also can lead him astray and deceive him'. Therefore, Plato is suspicious of speech and prefers dialectic .
(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' .
(Said 1986: 621) 'Were I to use one word consistently along with criticism ... it would be oppositional....its identity is its difference from other cultural activities and from systems of thought or of method' .
(Said 1986: 609) 'In this book I shall use the word culture to suggest and environment, process, and hegemony in which individuals (in their private circumstances) and their works are embedded, as well as overseen at the top by a superstructure and at the base by a whole series of methodological attitudes' .
Under construction
(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' .
(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
.
Under construction
(Burke 1945: xv) 'What is involved when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it? An answer to that question is the subject of this book. The book is concerned with the basic forms of thought which, in accordance with the nature of the world as all men necessarily experience it, are exemplified in the attributing of motives' .
(Burke 1945: xvii) 'In our original plans for this project, we had no notion of writing a "Grammar" at all. We began with a theory of comedy, applies to a treatise on human relations. Feeling that competitive ambition is a drastically over-developed motive in the modern world, we thought this motive might be transcended if men devoted themselves not so much to "excoriating" it as to "appreciating" it. Accordingly, we began taking notes on the foibles and antics of what we tended to think of as "the Human Barnyard"' .
(Burke 1945: 87) 'It may often be the works of wider circumference that give us the faultiest interpretation of a particular motivational cluster. People tend to think that when they speak of "the Universe", they are actually speaking of the Universe - yet "world views" can easily be the narrowest of all in circumference, possibly ... in accordance with a law of formal logic whereby "concepts become poorer in contents or intension in proportion as their extension increases, so that the content zero must correspond to the extension infinity"' .
(Burke 1945: 38) Such histories can be imagined in an endless variety of details. What we are suggesting here is that they all embody a grammatical form in accordance with which we should not expect a dualism of motives to be automatically dissolved, as with those apologists of science who believe that in a scientific world ethics become unnecessary. However, to consider these possibilities further, we should move into the areas of Symbolic, involving modes of transubstantiation, rituals of rebirth, whereby the individual identifies himself in terms of the collective motive (an identification by which he both is and is not one with that with which and by which he is identified). At present it is enough to note in a general way how the paradox of the absolute figures grammatically in the dialectic, making for a transcending of none term by its other, and for the reversed ambiguous derivation of the term from its other as ancestral principle' .
(Burke 1945: 58) 'The design on a piece of primitive pottery may be wholly symbolic or allegorical. But a drawing that accurately reproduces this design in a scientific treatise would be not symbolic or allegorical, but realistic. And similarly, even when statements about the nature of the world are abstractly metaphysical, statements about the nature of these statements can be as empirical as the statement, "This is Mr. Smith", made when introducing Mr. Smith in the accepted manner' .
(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' .
(Burke 1945: 54) 'From such ambiguity is derived that irony of historical development whereby the very strength in the affirming of a given term may the better enable men to make a world that departs from it. For the affirming of the term as their god-term enables men to go far afield without sensing a loss of orientation. And by the time the extent of their departure is enough to become generally obvious, the stability of the new order they have built in the name of the old order gives them the strength to abandon their old god-term and adopt another' .
(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' .
(Booth 1974: 22) 'The dogmas we turn to now tend to travel together, reinforcing each other to constitute the almost overwhelmingly persuasive worldview of modernism. But it will be useful to think of them as falling into five kinds. There are dogmas about (a) the methods or means for producing change; (b) the nature of the thing being changed- the mind or soul or self or person or organism (though I have talked only of "changing minds", I intend the word mind in the broadest possible sense); (c) the scene of change- the world in which that thing changed, the "mind", finds itself; (d) the principles or basic assumptions about truth and its testing- the ground and nature of change; and (e) the purpose of change. Every effort to change a mind will appear differently depending on our view of what does the changing, what is changed, how it relates to the whole nature of things, whether or in what sense the change is tested or justified in basic principles, and the purpose of the change' .
(Booth 1974: xii) 'As soon as I ask "When should I change my mind?" or "What is a good reason?" I become an intellectual imperialist, and I risk becoming vacuous for the sake of covering the world' .
(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' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 8) '"Communication" cannot be assumed to be constant across cultures. Cultural conceptions of communication are deeply intertwined with conceptions of person, cultural values, and world knowledge -- such that instances of communication behavior are never free of the cultural belief and action systems in which they occur' .
(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' .
(Spellmeyer 1993: 19) Spellmeyer conceives of 'language as a way of deliberately seeing and acting on a world that is recast through seeing and acting themselves. While no one invents language ex nihilo, while no one speaks without institutional constraints -- and while, in addition, the speaking self is to some degree a linguistic "construction" -- the act of speaking or writing always exposes past knowledge to the ordeal of the present, exposes the general to the burden of the particular, and the conventional to the test of the extraconventional. Precisely because writing reconceives the given, it involves still another activity overlooked by the proponents of objective assessment -- I mean, of course persuasion. Beginning with difference, and proceeding through difference, writing constantly seeks to overcome difference retrospectively by presenting the writer's insights to an audience whose assent must be secured' .
(Spellmeyer 1993: 20) '[The] attempt to get behind culture and language presupposed the existence of an invariant "real world" writing situation -- rather than writing for business, or for history class, or for one's mother -- as well as a standard definition of success' .
(Booth 1979: 107) 'If Burke is right here -- an I think he is, provided we understand that to "track down the variant" is in his view never easy -- we have the basis for a special kind of free-wheeling inquiry into other critics' views. Instead of thinking that we can refute a given position by showing that it cannot be experimentally or logically falsified, we are invited by it to one perspective on the world, a perspective that is likely, by the very nature of perspectives, to be self-demonstrating. Every perspective expressed in a symbolic language becomes a "terministic screen" which both reveals some truths -- obviously "demonstrated" to anyone employing the language -- and conceals others' .
(Booth 1979: 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' .
(Booth 1979: 104) 'I must emphasize how strongly the surface of Burke's writing seems to violate two of Crane's criteria for good criticism, even though to do so may initially seem like the experience of crawling backward into a world of exuberant dancers. He often seems blithely indifferent to Crane's insistence on coherence and common-sensical correspondence with what is "really there". His paths are seldom straight and clear; his allusions are often obscure; his arguments often seem to depend on puns or questionable etymologies or on conjectures so wild that he does not even try to defend them. Whatever the accepted canons are for organizing a proof seem as often violated as honored. His notorious translation of Keats's last line into "Body is turd, turd body", is only one of thousands of what have seemed debasements -- or, at best, irrelevant private translations -- of what "everyone knows" about the works he discusses' .
(Booth 1979: 105-6) 'We can at least begin with Burke's own kind of defense when under attack. Having seen man's world as a drama of symbolic actions, convinced that man's "symbolicity" is disastrous whenever any symbolic direction is followed to some kind of logical "perfection", he has consistently sought ways of mitigating, or undermining, the rage for perfection that each monistic mode of thought exhibits. We can see what this means in his fairly recent defense of his excremental talk about Keats. We must think of him as seeking always to modulate the excesses both of eulogistic languages, which would treat man as a creature or pure mind or spirit, and of "dislogistic" languages, which would reduce him to mere body, never acting but only reacting. In that light, what he calls his "joycing" of Keats can indeed be seen, in his words, as "but heuristic, suggestive, though it may put us in search of corroborative observations. And any such bathos, lurking behind the poem's pathos, is so alien to the formal pretenses of the work, if such indecorous transliterating of the poem's decorum had occurred to Keats, in all likelihood he would have phrased his formula differently, to avoid this turn"' .
(Booth 1979: 109) Burke 'found himself trying to construct a rhetoric, symbolic, and grammar of human motives, a three-in-one inquiry that would potentially accommodate all particular doctrines and provide for their meeting without mutual destruction. In short, he set out, like certain others, to build a pluralism that would save himself and the world by reducing meaningless and destructive symbolic encounter. The further one goes in Burke, the clearer it becomes that every consideration is subordinated to this master program' .
(Lanham 1993: 126-7) 'The final -- or semifinal, since in this world there is no finality -- the semifinal result will be a motival mixture of game, play, and purpose completely different from the print mixture. The electronic classroom has a different motivational mix from the print classroom. And it has a different sense of "finality" too. How can this not affect, for example, how teachers will grade students, or how students will feel about the boundaries of a class, until now firmly fixed by opening day and final exam?' .
(Lanham 1993: xii) 'Electronic text creates not only a new writing space but a new educational space as well. Not only the humanities curriculum, but school and university structures, administrative and physical, are affected at every point, as of course is the whole cultural repository and information system we call a library. In the university world, it is disciplinarity and its departmental shadow that will be most transformed' .
(Lanham 1993: 8) 'But if you are going to read books any more, or are going to read them in different ways, you must decide what it is that happens when you do read them. You must know this if you are to recreate that ineffable something in another medium. You must decide what business you are really in. You can conclude, of course, that that ineffable something cannot be transplanted, that the business you are really in is Reading Books. Many areas of endeavor in America pressured by technological change have already had to decide what business they were really in, and those making the narrow choice have usually not fared well. The railroads had to decide whether they were in the transportation business or the railroad business; they chose the latter and gradual extinction. Newspapers had to decide whether they were in the information business or only the newspaper business; most who chose the newspaper business are no longer in it. A fascinating instance of the choice is now taking place in the piano industry. Steinway used to own the market, and it has decided to stay in the piano business. Yamaha decided it was in the keyboard business- acoustic and electronic- and has, with Roland, Korg, and other manufacturers, redefined the instrument. Time has yet to tell who will win, financially or musically. For all its fastidious self-distancing from the world of affairs, literary study faces the same kind of decision. If we are not in the codex book business, what business are we really in?' .
(Lanham 1993: xii) 'Those who feel that the end of the book is the end of the world assume, and less often argue, that books equal culture. To call that assumption into question, as electronic text does, takes us to the central crisis of the humanities today, our cultural accountability. Can we really argue that the arts and letters make us better? If not, how do we justify the public expenditures now made on them? How, for the matter of that, do we justify the time we spend teaching and cultivating them? I call this question the "Q" question and confront it in chapter 7' .
(Lanham 1976: 60) 'It was not that Ovid was a bad plotter. The rhetorical view denies that plot is possible. It was not that Ovid "had no taste for heroes and certainly, no capacity for creating them", as Brooks Otis charges. He did not believe in heroes, or the self they were based on. He was not bad at transitions; he wanted to lose the reader. He was not incapable of tracing a coherent genealogy for Rome; he did not believe in the Virgilian conception of history upon which such descent was based. He was not too dense to master a suitable repertoire of Augustan philosophical clichÈs; he denied the theory of knowledge from which they grew. Too skeptical to think the whole truth contained in a single myth, he thought the epic genre a fraud, an obvious pretense that the world makes more sense than it does' .
(Lanham 1976: 62) 'The moral is clear. Nothing has only one meaning, context, justification. When all the world is made to converge on and yield up a single entity-- people, place, or city -- watch out' .
(Lanham 1976: 43) 'Plato would not have been troubled by the old charge that he was rigging his dialogues. He would have admitted it cheerfully. Why not? The world was not being constituted but reconstituted, illustrated in a hopelessly inferior medium. What was obnoxious about the Sophists was not that their arguments were ornamental, but that the Sophists thought they were not; they pretended to constitute rather than reconstitute the world' .
(Lanham 1976: 34-5) 'The task of the critic, as of the cultural or literary historian, is not to choose sides and then ignore the other half. Nor is it to try, however tempted, to adjudicate the dispute, decide who is right and then simplify....We must ... rehearse again the quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric. And this time around, we must do more than use philosophy to debunk rhetoric, as the scientific world view has done.... Seeing Western literature correctly depends on controlling these two contradictory theories of knowledge, of self, of style.... Upon seeing Western literature aright depends our ability to hold together the two different ways of knowing which together make us human' .
(Lanham 1976: 22) 'The real deceiver is the plain stylist who pretends to put all his cards on the table. Clarity, then, is a cheat, an illusion. To rhetorical man at least, the world is not clear, it is made clear. The clear stylist does it with a conjuring trick. For this trick we return thanks. We are reassured. The world is made like our minds' .
(Bove 1990: 62) 'The genealogical analysis of discourse, then, sets out with an eye on the present to criticize and trace the systems of power which have come to constitute human being in our world. It does this to stand in opposition to them and to provide the results of its work to whomever would like to use them in their struggles against the forms of power they are trying to resist' .
(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 32) 'Anderson [1981] distinguishes between concepts, propositions, and schemata, with the latter including scripts. A concept is the "unanalyzable building block or primitive" of semantic memory.... Propositions are formed by relating concepts through predicates. They are the smallest units of meaning, assertions about the world which can be judged true or false. A schema is a set of related propositions and a script is a stereotyped sequence of propositions involving concepts, namely people or roles, objects or props, and settings. The script was conceived to be a very flexible mechanism' .
(Frye 1957: 214) 'In irony, as distinct from tragedy, the wheel of time completely encloses the action, and there is no sense of an original contact with a relatively timeless world' .
(Frye 1957: 190) 'Now if the leviathan is the whole fallen world of sin and death and tyranny into which Adam fell, it follows that Adam's children are born, live, and die inside his belly' .
(Frye 1957: 203) 'One important detail in poetic symbolism remains to be considered. This is the symbolic presentation of the point at which the undisplaced apocalyptic world and the cyclical world of nature come into alignment, and which we propose to call the point of epiphany' .
(Frye 1957: 198-202) 'Romance, like comedy, has six isolatable phases': 1) '...the myth of the birth of the hero'; 2) '...the innocent youth of the hero'; 3) '...the normal quest theme'; 4) '...the maintaining of the integrity of the innocent world against the assault of experience'; 5) '...a reflective, idyllic view of experience from above'; and 6) '...the end of a movement from active to contemplative adventure' .
(Frye 1957: 192) 'The four mythoi that we are dealing with, comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony, may now be seen as four aspects of a central unifying myth....conflict is the basis or archetypal theme of romance ...catastrophe ... is the archetypal theme of tragedy....the sense that heroism and effective action are absent, disorganized or foredoomed to defeat, and that confusion and anarchy reign over the world, is the archetypal theme of irony and satire....recognition of a newborn society rising in triumph around a still somewhat mysterious hero and his bride, is the archetypal theme of comedy' .
(Ordonez 1991: 104) 'The title of Os habla Electra alerts the reader that this novel has referents in the world of myth and archetype' .
(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' .
(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. .
(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' .
(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' .
(Enkvist 1981: 104) 'If we wish to relate instances of experiential iconicism in text generation or in text interpretation and comprehension to our general knowledge of the world (as we must), a cognitive model becomes necessary. And we must cite principles of human interaction if we can to detect the motives for the preference of one text strategy to another. In brief, we shall need the whole gamut of models if we wish to explain why somebody opts for an iconic arrangement of his text and how he carries out his iconic strategy through text patterning and, ultimately, syntax. This is simply another way of saying that experiential iconicism can be discussed in terms of examples brought from various levels: syntax, text patterning, cognition, interaction' .
(Enkvist 1981: 110) 'Salience involves basic strategies of cognition which are reflected in language rather than such text-strategic alternatives whose task it is to illustrate in iconic terms the structure of the world' .
(Enkvist 1981: 99) 'To begin with I shall for a moment leave the larger patterns of order in the physical world and in society. Instead I shall cite a few examples from a notoriously complex area of English syntax, namely adverbial placement' .
(Enkvist 1981: 107-8) 'How, then, does experiential iconicism relate to some other major text-strategic principles, at sentence level most notably information dynamics and saliency? ... Information dynamics is concerned with the distribution of old and new information, or more precisely, of information which the speaker/writer assumes or knows is familiar to the receptor and information he assumes or knows will be new. Should we wish to regard such assumptions, and hence the distribution of old and new information in the text, as part of the universe of discourse, information dynamics might merge with experiential iconicism'. But if we maintain a distinction between the text and the world it describes, such a merger will not take place' .
(A. Pratt 1981: 22) 'In most women's novels the green world is present in retrospect, something left behind or about to be left behind as one backs into the enclosure-- a state of innocence that becomes most poignant as one is initiated into experience.... In such cases the young woman turns away from "appropriate" males toward fantasies of a figure, projected from within her own personality, more suitable to her needs' .
(A. Pratt 1981: 18) 'In regional, or local-color, fiction ... women often master the green world, even to the extent that some farm it for produce ... The regionalist writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in both England and America, are thus apt to make the hero's lifelong devotion to nature the center, rather than merely an initiatory phase, of development' .
(A. Pratt 1981: 29) 'The novel of development portrays a world in which the young woman hero is destined for disappointment. The vitality and hopefulness characterizing the adolescent hero's attitude toward her future here meet and conflict with the expectations and dictates of the surrounding society' .
(A. Pratt 1981: 16-7) 'The adolescent girl, writes Simone de Beauvoir, will devote a special love to Nature... she worships it.... Later, the mature woman hero tends to look back to moments of naturistic epiphany as touchstones in a quest for her lost selfhood so that when she readies herself for her midlife rebirth journey, images of the green world remembered once more come to the fore.... Although most authors depict the green world of the woman hero as a place from which she sets forth and a memory to which she returns for renewal, there are a significant number of novels in which nature is the protagonist's entire world' .
(Said 1986: 605) 'We defend the classics, the virtues of a liberal education, and the precious pleasures of literature even as we also show ourselves to be silent (perhaps incompetent) about the historical and social world in which all these things take place' .
(Said 1986: 607) 'My position is that texts are worldly, to some degree they are events, and, even when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted' .
(White 1974: 407) 'To say that we make sense of the real world by imposing upon it the formal coherency that we customarily associate with the products of writers of fiction in no way detracts from the status as knowledge which we ascribe to historiography' .
(White 1974: 405) 'The fruitfulness of Jakobson's theory lies in its suggestion that the various forms of both poetry and prose, all of which have their counterparts in narrative in general and therefore in historiography too, can be characterized in terms of the dominant trope which serves as the paradigm, provided by language itself, of all significant relationships conceived to exist in the world by anyone wishing to represent those relationships in language' .
Under construction
(Booth 1974: 22) 'The dogmas we turn to now tend to travel together, reinforcing each other to constitute the almost overwhelmingly persuasive worldview of modernism. But it will be useful to think of them as falling into five kinds. There are dogmas about (a) the methods or means for producing change; (b) the nature of the thing being changed- the mind or soul or self or person or organism (though I have talked only of "changing minds", I intend the word mind in the broadest possible sense); (c) the scene of change- the world in which that thing changed, the "mind", finds itself; (d) the principles or basic assumptions about truth and its testing- the ground and nature of change; and (e) the purpose of change. Every effort to change a mind will appear differently depending on our view of what does the changing, what is changed, how it relates to the whole nature of things, whether or in what sense the change is tested or justified in basic principles, and the purpose of the change' .
Under construction
(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' .
(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' .
(Ijsseling 1976: 133) 'Intertextuality ... conceives all that one says as a fabric woven into a much wider network of interrelated texts with references to each other. The speaker or writer is also woven into this fabric. He is not the origin or centre, but is entirely carried along by the network of words in circulation' .
(Jameson 1981: 106) 'Genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact' .
Under construction
(Johnson 1990: 42) 'The rebus, the anagram, and the letter are clearly all manifestations of writing. They are graphic, articulated, material instantiations of systems of marks that simultaneously obscure and convey meaning' .
(Johnson 1990: 39) 'A comprehensive treatment of the question of writing is obviously beyond the scope of the present essay. I will therefore concentrate on a particular recent moment of reflection about writing -- the theoretical "revolution" in France in 1967-- which has had a decisive impact upon the shape of literary studies today' .
(Johnson 1990: 48) 'What enslaves is not writing per se but control of writing, and writing as control. What is needed is not less writing but more consciousness of how it works. If, as Derrida claims, the importance of writing has been "repressed" by the dominant culture of the Western tradition, it is because writing can always pass into the hands of the "other"... What is at stake in writing is the very structure of authority itself' .
(Burke 1945: xvii) 'In our original plans for this project, we had no notion of writing a "Grammar" at all. We began with a theory of comedy, applies to a treatise on human relations. Feeling that competitive ambition is a drastically over-developed motive in the modern world, we thought this motive might be transcended if men devoted themselves not so much to "excoriating" it as to "appreciating" it. Accordingly, we began taking notes on the foibles and antics of what we tended to think of as "the Human Barnyard"' .
(Burke 1945: xvii-xviii) 'We had made still further observations, which we at first strove uneasily to class under one or the other of these two heads, but which we were eventually able to distinguish as the makings of a Grammar. For we found in the course of writing that our project needed a grounding in formal considerations logically prior to both the rhetorical and the psychological. And as we proceeded with this introductory groundwork, it kept extending its claims until it had spun itself from an intended few hundred words into nearly 200,000 of which the present book is revision and abridgment' .
(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' .
(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'
.
(Spellmeyer 1993: 19) Spellmeyer conceives of 'language as a way of deliberately seeing and acting on a world that is recast through seeing and acting themselves. While no one invents language ex nihilo, while no one speaks without institutional constraints -- and while, in addition, the speaking self is to some degree a linguistic "construction" -- the act of speaking or writing always exposes past knowledge to the ordeal of the present, exposes the general to the burden of the particular, and the conventional to the test of the extraconventional. Precisely because writing reconceives the given, it involves still another activity overlooked by the proponents of objective assessment -- I mean, of course persuasion. Beginning with difference, and proceeding through difference, writing constantly seeks to overcome difference retrospectively by presenting the writer's insights to an audience whose assent must be secured' .
(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' .
(Spellmeyer 1993: 20) '[The] attempt to get behind culture and language presupposed the existence of an invariant "real world" writing situation -- rather than writing for business, or for history class, or for one's mother -- as well as a standard definition of success' .
(Reddy 1979: 291) 'The "minor" framework overlooks words as containers and allows ideas and feelings to flow, unfettered and completely disembodied, into a kind of ambient space between human heads.... There are three categories of expressions in the minor framework. The categories imply, respectively, that: (1) thoughts and feelings are ejected by speaking or writing into an external "idea space"; (2) thoughts and feelings are reified in this external space, so that they exist independent of any need for living human beings to think of feel them; (3) these reified thoughts and feelings may, or may not, find their way bank into the heads of living humans' .
(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' .
(Booth 1979: 104) 'I must emphasize how strongly the surface of Burke's writing seems to violate two of Crane's criteria for good criticism, even though to do so may initially seem like the experience of crawling backward into a world of exuberant dancers. He often seems blithely indifferent to Crane's insistence on coherence and common-sensical correspondence with what is "really there". His paths are seldom straight and clear; his allusions are often obscure; his arguments often seem to depend on puns or questionable etymologies or on conjectures so wild that he does not even try to defend them. Whatever the accepted canons are for organizing a proof seem as often violated as honored. His notorious translation of Keats's last line into "Body is turd, turd body", is only one of thousands of what have seemed debasements -- or, at best, irrelevant private translations -- of what "everyone knows" about the works he discusses' .
(Lanham 1993: xii) 'Electronic text creates not only a new writing space but a new educational space as well. Not only the humanities curriculum, but school and university structures, administrative and physical, are affected at every point, as of course is the whole cultural repository and information system we call a library. In the university world, it is disciplinarity and its departmental shadow that will be most transformed' .
(Ricoeur 1982: 145) 'I should like to pause at a preliminary question which in fact dominates the whole of our investigation. The question is this: what is a text?... Let us say that a text is any discourse fixed by writing' .
(Ricoeur 1982: 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) 'Writing preserves discourse and makes it an archive available for individual and collective memory' .
(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' .
(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' .
(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?' .
(Derrida 1986b: 100) 'Why does a project of general linguistics, concerning the internal system in general of language in general, outline the limits of its field by excluding, as exteriority in general, a particular system of writing, however important it might be, even were it to be in fact universal?' .
(Derrida 1986b: 100) Derrida says that for Saussure, 'the introduction of scientific exigencies and the taste for exactitude into ordinary phonetic writing must be avoided. In this case, rationality would bring death, desolation, and monstrousness. That is why common orthography must be kept away from the notations of the linguist and the multiplying of diacritical signs must be avoided' .
(Derrida 1986b: 97) 'Has it ever been doubted that writing was the clothing of speech? For Saussure it is even a garment of perversion and debauchery, a dress of corruption and disguise, a festival mask that must be exorcised, that is to say warded off, by the good word' .
(Derrida 1986b: 114) Derrida quotes Hjelmslev referring to the writing of Bertrand Russell as saying that 'we have no means of deciding whether writing or speech is the older form of human expression' .
(Derrida 1986b: 103) 'Writing is not a sign of a sign, except if one says it of all signs, which would be more profoundly true' .
(Derrida 1986b: 102) Derrida quotes Rousseau as saying that 'the tyranny of writing goes even further. By imposing itself upon the masses, spelling influences and modifies language' .
(Cixous 1986: 309) 'I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do....as there are no grounds for establishing a discourse, but rather an arid millennial ground to break, what I say has at least two sides and two aims: to break up, to destroy; and to foresee the unforeseeable, to project' .
(Derrida 1986c: 121) 'There is no purely and rigorously phonetic writing. So-called phonetic writing, by all rights and in principle, and not only due to an empirical or technical insufficiency, can function only by admitting into its system nonphonetic "signs" (punctuation, spacing, etc.)' .
(Foucault 1986a: 139-40) At one time, writing immortalized the author; now, the author sacrifices for the text and actually is killed by writing .
(Foucault 1986a: 139) He posits writing as an 'interplay of signs' regulated more by the signifier than the content .
(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' .
(Ordonez [n.d.]: 62) 'Many roads thus lead to the same conclusion: that the traditional split between body and soul is no longer viable and that its pernicious legacy for women is being erased by today's woman, writing affirmatively and with a common purpose across the boundaries of nationality and ethnicity' .
Last Modified: July-12-96 17:11:10
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