Saussure's Sign Theory of Language and Its Impact on Literary Criticism, Study Guides, Projects, Research of Literature

Download Saussure's Sign Theory of Language and Its Impact on Literary Criticism and more Study Guides, Projects, Research Literature in PDF only on Docsity! UNIT 1 ROOTS : NEW CRITICISM AND STRUCTURALISM Structure Objectives Introduction New Criticism: A Brief Survey From New Criticism to Structuralism Structuralism: An Introduction 1.4.1 Saussurean Linguistic: 1.4.2 Saussure to Structuralism 1.4.3 Binary Oppositions Literary Structuralism 1.5.1 Linguistics and Literary Structuralism 1.5.1.1 Jakobson's Poetic Analyses 1.5.1.2 Griemas' Semantic Analyses 1.5.1.3 Todorov's Grammar of Decameron 1.5.1.4 Culler's Structuralist Poetics Let Us Sum Up Questions Glossary Suggested Readings 1.0 OBJECTNES We begin this unit with a recapitulation of the basic tenets of N e ~ Criticism, which you read in detail in Block 4. We then move on to familiarize you with the evolution of critical thought between New Criticism and the rise of Postsructuralism. Put together, the two discussions should provide you with the roots of Deconstruction. 1.1 INTRODUCTION The two important critical / theoretical movements, which precede Deconstruction and in a sense provide the soil from which it grows are New Criticism and Structuralism. New Criticism broke off from the conventional historical/biographical approach to reading literature and focused exclusively on the text-+ tendency similar to the close focus on language in Structuralism. New Criticism tried to explain the effect of a poem in terms of images locked in paradox and irony. This, in a sense, fostered the structuralist tendency to break-up the literary text into its supposedly constituent units and analyze its functioning. Thus the basic parameters of the deconstructionist method-close focusing on a text and trying to analyze its structure seem to be prepared for in New Criticism and Structuralism. 1.2 NEW CRITICISM A BRIEF SURVEY In Block 4, you studied New Criticism as practised between 1920 and 1950 in England and America. Let us recapitulate some of the important tenets of this school: 1. New Critics believed literature to be a self-sustaining artifact and hence discussed it only through a "close reading" of texts. They worked without any Deconstruction assumptions about the author's intention, the work's relation to history, society, or the sciences; and did not value any subjective response. A text's meaning was to be found through careful attention to the complex verbal texture present on the page. 2. Within literature, poetry was seen as a special kind of language saying things that could not be paraphrased-therefore a poem was said to possess an organic unity with form and content being inseparable. Further, New Criticism tried to displace content in literary analysis and treat the work's form as its content. Form was treated as a self-contained and autonomous entity deserving all critical attention. This is what is referred to & the formalism of New Criticism. 3. The form of a poem was defined by the New Critics primarily in terms of its images. A clo e reading involved a reader's preliminary identification of key images in a re urring pattern of opposition or tension. Paradox and Irony were posited as the ontrolling figures of tension. A poem operating through this i tension also r solved it. Discovering images locked in tension through paradox or irony and their resolution, thus became a substitute in New Criticism for the conventional project of determining the content of a poem. 4. Paradox and irony were considered important because they were thought to reflect the structures of the human imagination itself. 1.3 FROM NEW CRITICISM TO STRUCTURALISM New Criticism declined in the 1950s. One of the chief causes for its decline was that it concentrated on the isolated literary text and left the broader, structural aspects of literature untouched. This conflicted with the spirit of the then current North American society, which was steadily growing more scientific and managerial in its mode of thought. What was needed was a mix of the formalist bent of New Criticism together with something much more broad-based, to make criticism a good deal more systematic and scientific. The answer arrived in 1957 in the form of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism. Reacting mainly to the limited, 'single-text' perspective of New Criticism, Frye felt that contemporary criticism had become a matter of subjective value judgments and needed the discipline of an objective system. He believed that literature itself was an objective system and worked through certain objective laws. Frye's theory viewed literature as a recurrence of mythic archetypes and unlike New Criticism found in it an alternative history---the history of literature itself. Frye viewed each literary text,as a structure composed of variants of certain fixed mythic archetypes. Literature for Frye, to put it rather simply, became a system of such individual literary structures, Criticism was set the task of identifying and classifying the objective laws of this literary system. I L This view of literature, as you can see, appears more scientific and systematic. But, it was equally subjective and did not have the general validity and consensus which a systematic and scientific discipline merited. Frye . after all, was talking only about mythic archetypes . Meanwhile criticism in this century continued to grow more scientific, objective and self-reflective and in the process, shifted its emphasis from author to text and reader. In the early years of the century, biographical 1 historical criticism focused on the author and hisher age; later, New Criticism focused exclusively on the text. Frye's Anatomy also concentrated on the text but was concerned only with its subjective- mythical structure. The call of the hour was to go beyond it. And it seemed to be values: gwyrrd & glas which combine the English green with blue and an undesignated color above green in Hjelmslev's figure. So, when we speak of green or glas as concepts we should be aware that these are actually values constructed within the English and Welsh linguistic systems --constructed by their difference from other elements in the system, not, by any positive content which they independently possess. Their identity lies in their difference from others. We can verify the absence of their positive content deductively. If they had any, it would have asserted its influence in the operation of other linguistic systems. Green or glas, on the contrary simply disappear in some linguistic systems. Let us discuss an example Saussure himself cites. Division of time into the present, past and the future, so familiar to us in English, are unknown in certain languages. Hebrew does not recognize even the fundamental distinction between the past, present and the future. Proto-Germanic has no special form for the 'future'. This implies that the flux of time is cut up differently into one, two or three sets in Hebrew, Proto-Germanic and English. So, instead of pre-existing ideas about the division of time, we find in all the foregoing examples different modes of cutting up the flux of time. That is to say, the parts into which time is divided are values particular to a system. The future is a value particular to the English lpguage in that is created within that linguistic system .As we have seen, Proto-Germanic has nothing called the future. It is these values which are referred to as concepts or signifieds and are constructed within the system - constructed by the difference from other elements in the system and not by any positive content whiCh they possess. Like in the early example, we can only deduce the absence of its positive content. If the concept 'future' had any positive content, it would have asserted itself in other linguistic systems too. Language was thus understood as a system of signs in which the meaning of each sign was determined by its difference from others. This view of language had certain revolutionary implications. It challenged the commonsensical belief that language1 words had any direct link with the worldlobject they named .The essential status of . the colour green is thus brought under question. What we can be sure about is the system under which we produce an identity for a range-nothing beyond that. This de-linking of the word from the world has, as we shall see, important consequences for the interpretation of literary texts. 1.4.2 Saussure to Structuralism We have seen that Saussure's structural analysis of language attempts to examine the conditions that allow language and meaning to function, seeking to know how meaning is made possible. Saussure hoped that his linguistic theory would be applied to other social and cultural phenomena as well. Through his linguistic theory, Saussure claimed to have inaugurated "Serniology:": a science that studies the life of signs [linguistic or otherwise] within society". Saussure's linguistic theory was reconstructed by his friends and colleagues on the basis of his notes and lectures delivered between 1907-191 1 at the University of Geneva. However, it was only in the 1950s that some thinkers started applying his linguistic theory to other disciplines. Chief among them were Claude Levis Strauss and Roland Barthes working in the fields of anthropology and culture respectively. After a gap of about four decades, semiology, as Saussure had envisaged, had finally taken off. And Structuralism was another term used to designate the basic premises of its operations. Roots : New Criticism And Structuralism Thus, Barthes defined Structuralism as a mode of analysis of cultural artifacts, which originates in the method of contemporary linguistics. "I have been engaged in a series of structural analyses which all aim at defining a number of non-linguistic languages" Deconstruction 10 writes Barthes in his early days. Structuralism slowly spread into other fields to the extent that in the 1960s and 70s, it permeated almost every sphere of human thought. This all-pervasiveness is evident in the definition of a theorist like Frederic Jameson: Structuralism is an attempt "to rethink everything in terms of linguistics". But why should the method of linguistics be used for an analysis of social and cultural phenomena? Jonathan Culler in his book Structuralist Poetics offers two fundamental insights by way of suggesting an answer: (a) because social and cultural phenomena are also signs of a different signifying system just as words are signs of the linguistic system; (b) like linguistic signs they do not have essences but are defined by a network of relations. So, when one studies the meaning of a cultural artifact or social event, one discovers that like a linguistic sign, its defining qualities are the features which distinguish it from others and enable it to bear meaning within the system. 1.4.3 Binary Oppositions An interesting insight offered by Structuralism into the operations of human language, cognition and thought was the concept of 'binary oppositions'. Binary means dual or involving pairs, so binary opposition would refer to a pair in which the two terms are in a state of 'opposition. Structuralism argues that human language and discourse can be understood as structured in terms of binary oppositions. For political reasons, these oppositions always function as a hierarchy. Consider the ideology of colonialism for example. It can be seen as structured around the binary opposition white / black. The opposition also functions as a hierarchy and sees white as arbitrarily superior to black and constructs a whole world-view on it. Or consider the Freudian theory of the human mind. It is structured around the binary opposition : unconscious/ conscious and considers the unconscious superior to the conscious. We have grown up accepting these oppositions as valid ways of ordering and understanding all spheres of our life : familial, cultural, or political. Forms of binarism have been present in human thought from the earliest times. Human discourse has always used binary oppositions to mark differences in an otherwise random sequence of features and thus give shape to experience and the universe. Dualisms in philosophy like subjectlobject, Godman, temporalleternal are the very foundation of entire world-views. The structural linguist, Roman Jakobson , about whom you will read in some detail later, showed that we identify a phoneme (the smallest meaningful unit of sound) by consciously using a number of binary oppositions which make it possible to differentiate between otherwise similar sounds. We distinguish "puck" from "buck " because the binary opposition " voicedunvoiced" makes it possible to distinguish between two plosives (/p/ is voiced /b/is unvoiced). Thus, what would otherwise be heard as the same sound is heard differently. So, binary oppositions help us mark differences, and structure our discourses on them. 1.5 LITERARY STRUCTURALISM We have seen that Saussure's linguistic theory reviewed language as : (a) delinked from the real world. (b) a self-sufficient system functioning by its own rules. Some structuralist critics borrow these fundamental theoretical insights from Saussure and interpret literature as language. They say that literature is a self- sufficient system which functions through an inter-relation between the units it is composed of, having little to do with objective reality. Literary Structuralism originates in this impulse. 1.5.1 Linguistics and Literary Structuralism Interpreting literature as language is in practice a complex process. Literary Structuralism does borrow its approach from linguistics but these approaches are varied. Jonathan Culler outlines three distinct ways in which linguistics has I influenced literary structuralism: 1 A. As a scientific discipline, linguistics suggested to critics that a rigorous and I systematic study did not necessarily mean looking for causal i explanations-that is, linking elements in the text to objective cultural/ personal facts through cause and effect. An element in a literary text, like an element in a linguistic system, could be explained by its place in a network of relations rather than in a chain of cause and effect. It therefore justified the desire to abandon historical and biographical criticism. B. Linguistics provided a number of concepts, which could be applied arbitrarily in discussing literary works. Some common examples already encountered, are signifier, signified; langue, parole; diachronic, synchronic 1 etc. These concepts can be employed skilfully or ineptly on the literary text but they do not by virtue of their linguistic origin produce valid insights. However, the use of such terms may help one identify relations of various kinds in a text, which are responsible for the production of meaning. C . Linguistics provides structuralists with a model of how one should go about studying systems of signs. In this case, linguistic concepts are not used arbitrarily but as constituents of a model. This is a stronger claim about the relevance of linguistics and in Cu11Q's opinion characterizes Structuralism proper. A But within the third perspe'ctive, there are different ways of interpreting and applying the linguistic model. To borrow from Culler again, four distinct ways of interpreting can be outlined : 1.5.1.1 Jakobson's Poetic Analyses In the first category are linguists like Jakobson who claim that linguistics provides a discovery procedure which can be applied directly to the language of literature to reveal poetic structures. That is, linguistics can define the structures in a given piece of language that make it poetic. Let us spend some time understanding this claim. Jakobson, the linguist believed that a linguistic utterance fulfilled any one of the six functions - one of which was the. poetic. He also believed that the fundamental aim of linguistics was to study verbal forms in relation to any one of the six functions. That is , which characteristics of a verbal form are performing what function in a text. In the context of poetry, it means -identifying which features make the language poetic. Further, the poetic function is defined as the maximum foregrounding of the text itself, and, not its content. For Jakobson, the principal technique used for foregrounding is the use of highly patterned language - i.e making conspicuous use of words and phrases, using them as much more than message carriers. Roots : New Criticism And Structuralism Put simply, the poetic use of language involves selecting and placing in a sequence items that arephonologically and grammatically related. A linguistic analysis would aim at revealing these patterns formed by the repetition of these related items.