MA course in language and literature
Lecture handouts from Tamás Bényei
Autumn term 2009
The Linguistic turn in literary criticism and philosophy
Russian Formalism
1. The history of Russian Formalism
Petersburg: OPOJAZ; Moscow Linguistic Circle
Viktor Shklovsky (Tristram Shandy and the Theory of the Novel; How Don Quijote Was Made), Osip Brik, Boris Eichenbaum (Az irodalmi elemzés), Yury Tinyanov (Az irodalmi tény), Boris Tomashevsky, Viktor Zhirmunsky (Irodalom, poétika; Roman Jakobson (Hang – jel – vers, 1972; A költészet grammatikája, 1982); Vladimir Propp (A népmese morfológiája, 1995)
Symbolism: Potyebnya; Futurism: Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky
2. The Subject of Literary Scholarship
Eichenbaum: “The basis of our position was and is that the object of literary science, as such, must be the study of those specifics which distinguish it fromany other material”
Jakobson: “The object of the science of literature is not literature, but literariness – that is, that which makes a given work a work of literature”
The immanence of literature – The liberation of the word
zaum - “meaning beyond reason” (suprarational meaning)
3. Content and form
Shklovsky: “ ‘Artistic’ perception is that perception in which we experience form – perhaps not form alone, but certainly form.”
4. Device or technique (priyom)
Defamiliarisation (ostranenie)
Shklovsky: “art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make them difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulnessof an object; the object is not important.”
Narrative devices: fabula and sjuzet
Tomashevsky: “the fabula is the aggregate of motifs in their logical, causal-chronological order; the sjuzet is the aggregate of those same motifs but having the relevance and the order which they had in the original work ... [T]he aesthetic function of the sjuzet is precisely this bringing of an arrangement of motifs to the attention of the reader. Real incidents, not fictionalised by an author, may make a fabula. A sjuzet is wholly an artistic creation.”
5. System, function
Tinyanov: “The work of art is not a closed symmetrical whole, but the unfolding of a dynamic unity; what we have between its elements is not the static sign of equality and correlation, but the dynamic sign of interrelation and integration.”
“Each work of art is an unbalanced system, where the stucturing principle is not dissolved in the material; the two do not exactly ‘agree with’ each other, their relationship is excentric: the structuring principle becomes visible through the material.”
motivation
6. Interpretation
Boris Eichenbaum “How Gogol’s The Overcoat Was Made”
American New Criticism
Forerunners: T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards (Principles of Literary Criticism, 1924; Practical Criticism)
1919. Nashville, Tennessee: The Fugitives
Names: John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren (Agrarians)
Cleanth Brooks, W. K. Wimsatt; René Wellek, Murray Krieger
(Related names: Yvor Winters, Kenneth Burke)
Journals: Southern Review (Brooks and Warren, 1935-42)
Kenyon Review (Ransom, 1939- )
Textbooks: Brooks and Warren: Understanding Poetry (1938), Understanding Fiction (1941)
Key Books: Ransom: The New Criticism (1941); Brooks: The Well-Wrought Urn (1949); Wimsatt: The Verbal Icon (1958); Tate: Essays of Four Decades (1968); Krieger: The New Apologists for Poetry (1956); Wimsatt and Brooks: Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957); Wellek and Austin Warren: Theory of Literature (1949)
W.K.Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley: “The Intentional Fallacy”
„Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work. It is only because an artifact works that we infer the intention of the artificer. ‘A poem should not mean but be.’ A poem can only be through its meaning - since its medium is words - yet it is, simply is, in the sense that we have no excuse for inquiring what part is intended or meant... Poetry succeeds because all or most of what is said or implied is relevant; what is irrelevant has been excluded, like lumps from puddings and 'bugs' from machinery. In this respect poetry differs from practical messages, which are succesful if and only if we correctly infer the intention.”
A poem is not the author’s: “it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it.”
Wimsatt and Beardsley: “The Affective Fallacy”
Brooks: “The Heresy of Paraphrase”
structure: “The structure meant is a structure of meanings, evaluations, and interpretations; and the principle of unity which informs it seems to be one of balancing and harmonizing connotations, attitudes, and meanings.”
Wimsatt: in a good metaphor, “two clearly and substantially named objects... are brought into such a context that they face each other with fullest relevance and illumination.”
Brooks: Irony is “the most general term that we have for the kind of qualification which the various elements in a context receive from the context.” The result is “a unification of attitudes into a hierarchy subordinated to a total and governing attitude.”
The structure does not unite the conflicting elements “by the simple process of allowing one connotation to cancel out another, nor does it reduce the contradictory attitudes to harmony by a process of subtraction. The unity is not a unity of the sort to be achieved by the reduction and simplification appropriate to an algebraic formula. It is a positive unity, not a negative; it represents not a residue but an achieved harmony.” (Brooks)
Tate: poetry “is a way of knowing something: if the poem is a real creation, it is a kind of knowledge that we did not possess before. It is not knowledge ‘about’ something else; the poem is the fullness of that knowledge.”
Structuralism and semiotics
1. Structuralist linguistics. Ferdinand de Saussure: Course in General Linguistics (1916)
diachronic — synchronic study of language
langue — parole
Langue: “It is a fund accumulated by the members of the community through the practice of speech, a grammatical system existing potentially in every brain, or more exactly in the brains of a group of individuals; for the language is never complete in any single individual, but exists perfectly only in the collectivity” (Saussure)
Noam Chomsky: (transformational) generative linguistics
deep structure — surface structure
competence — performance
two axes of language: syntagmatic — paradigmatic
The double nature of language:
a, Language as a system of differences. Phonological model
“In the language itself, there are only differences. Even more important than that is the fact that, although in general a difference presupposes positive terms between which the difference holds, in a language there are only differences, and no positive terms. Whether we take the signifier or the signified, the language includes neither ideas nor sounds existing prior to the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonetic differences arising out of that system. In a sign, what matters more than any idea or sound associated with it is what other signs surround it.” (Saussure)
phoneme – broken down into “distinctive features” (Jakobson)
b, semiotic nature (the ability of lang. To refer to the world)
Sign: signifier — signified (+ referent)
Arbitrariness; graphic vs. conceptual aspect
2. Structural anthropology
Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Elementary Structures of Kinship; The Savage Mind; Structural Anthropology
“‘Kinship systems’, like ‘phonetic systems’, are built by the mind on the level of unconscious thought.” (Struct. Anthr.) Myth
3. Semiotics as the study of culture (Roland Barthes’s Fashion as a System and Mythologies) “as soon as there is society, every usage is converted into a sign of that usage”
history (Michel Foucault); psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan); psychology (Jean Piaget); film theory (Christian Metz)
4. Structuralist poetics and criticism
Czech and Polish structuralism: Jan Mukařovsky, Roman Ingarden (The Literary Work of Art, 1937)
Tzvetan Todorov (The Grammar of Decameron [1969], The Poetics of Prose [1971]), Algirdas Greimas (Structural Semantics [1966]), Julia Kristeva (her early work) Gérard Genette (Figures 1-3 [1966-72]), Michael Riffaterre (The Semiotics of Poetry, 1978), Umberto Eco, Seymour Chatman (Story and Discourse [1978]), Jonathan Culler (his early work, esp. Structuralist Poetics, 1975)
a, linguistic criticism (Roman Jakobson)
definition of “literariness”
b, literature as a second-order semiotic system (Yuri Lotman); literary competence
Barthes: What interests structuralist poetics “will be the variations of meaning generated and, as it were, capable of being generated by works; it will not interpret symbols but describe their polyvalency. In short, its objects will not be the full meanings of the work but on the contrary the empty meaning which supports them all” (Critique et vérité)
c, narratology, narrative grammar; Vladimir Propp: The Morphology of Folktales (1928)
7 roles and 31 functions
Structuralist reading:
- surface – depth
- eliminating referentiality (Barthes: “Narrative does not portray or imitate anything; … In a narrative, nothing happens from a referential point of view. What happens (ce qui arrive) is language itself, the adventure of language”
- eliminating the subject as source of meaning (Lévi-Strauss: “We are not, therefore, claiming to show how men think in the myths, but rather how the myths think themselves out in men and without men’s knowledge”)
- freezing narrative, eliminating temporality, historicity and context (parole)
Manfred Frank: “Following structuralism, understanding a text would amount to the uncovering of the principles of its construction”
Fictionality
Two ways of looking at literariness:
1. Formal, linguistic criteria
2. Fictionality („thematic”)
Aristotle: poiesis (the poet is a maker of stories, representing action)
mimesis can be translated as „fiction”
Genette: intransitivity (pseudereference)
Fiction – fingere (dheigh ~ dough)
Is The Lord of the Rings more fictional than Goriot?
Truth, meaning, reference
„Sachez-le: ce drame n’est ni une fiction, ni un roman. All is true.” (Balzac: Père Goriot)
„It was Napoleon who had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working around the clock.”
Historical – imaginary – supernatural entities
„All happy families are more or less disimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less similar”. (Nabokov: Ada)
Reference and fictionality
Searle: fiction is pretended reference
Strawson: fiction is neither true nor false
Nelson Goodman: description-of-Pickwick
Thomas Pavel: the truth of literary texts „is not recursively definable from the truth of the individual sentences that constitute them”.
segregationalists – integrationalists
Meinong: object = list of propositions (Borges: „Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”)
statements about the past
Pragmatic views of fictionality
(Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, John Dewey, Richard Rorty, Nelson Goodman)
„narrative truth” is that which works (Arthur Danto, psychoanalysis)
Anthropological views
Wolfgang Iser: real – fictive (fictionalising act) – imaginary
Fictitionality and literary criticism
John Searle: there is „a priori no textual property, syntactical or semantic, that will identify a text as a work of fiction”
Gregory Currie: „facts about style, narrative form, and plot structure may count as evidence that the work is fiction, but these are not the things that make it so”
Jakobson: poetic function ≈ fictionality
Textual markers of fictionality
„Once upon a time”; „Hol volt, hol nem volt”
citation, intertextuality, parody (Don Quijote)
salient structures
„Under the branch hung eighteen great homemaker nuts. Hollowed out they were, and cemented into place with cement distilled from the acetoyle plant. .. From the thick foliage nearby came a dumbler, flying to the girl’s shoulder. The tumbler rotated, a fleecy umbrella, whose separate spokes controlled its direction. … Under the leaf, a tarppersnapper had moved into position, sensing the presence of prey through the single layer of foliage.” (Brian Aldiss: Hothouse)
„This new world weighs a yatto-gram. But everything is trial-size; tread-on-me tiny or blurred-out-of-focus huge. There are leaves that have grown as big as cities, and there are birds that nest in cockleshells. On the white sand there are long-toed clawprints deep as nightmares, and there are rock pools in hand-hollows finned by invisible fish.” (Winterson: The Stone Gods)
Realism, verisimilitude and fictional truth
Michel Riffaterre
„One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weyon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot.” (The Mayor of Casterbridge)
„Strether’s first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive til evening he was not wholly disconcerted.” (Henry James: The Ambassadors)
„Ten more glorious days without horses! So thought Second-Lieutenant Andrew Chase-White, recently commissioned in the distinguished regiment of King Edward’s Horse, as he pottered contentedly in a garden on the outskirts of Dublin on a sunny Sunday afternoon in April nineteen sixteen.” (Iris Murdoch: The Red and the Green)
„I am alone here now, under cover. Outside it is raining, outside you walk through the rain with your head down, shielding your eyes with one hand while you stare ahead nevertheless, a few yards ahead, at a few yards of wet asphalt; outside it is cold, the wind blows between the bare black branches… Outside the sun is shining, there is no tree, no bush to cast a shadow, and you walk under the sun shielding your eyes with one hand while you stare ahead, only a few yards in front of you, at a few yards of dusty asphalt where the wind makes patterns of parallel lines, forks, and spirals.”
Roland Barthes: the „reality effect”
„an old piano supported, under a barometer, a pyramidal heap of boxes and cartons” (Flaubert: Un coeur simple)
Bakhtin: the novelistic word
Transgression in language and literature
„Language is a fascist” (Roland Barthes)
„The law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no transgression” (Rom 4.14)
„A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit; how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward […] words are very rascals” (Feste in Twelfth Night, III.1)
1. The anthropological perspective
law vs. desire, sacred vs. profane, transgression vs. transcendence
the dynamics of transgression: waste, excess, non-productive expenditure (potlatch)
„any act of expressive behaviour which inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion presents an alternative to commonly held cultural codes, values and norms, be they linguistic, literary or artistic, religious, social and political”; „not just the infraction of binary structures, but movement into an absolutely negative space beyond the structure of significance itself” (Barbara Babcock; Peter Stallybrass and Allon White: The Politics and Poetics of Transgression)