Introductory Overview

Brady--Spring 1998

ENGL 383--OPENING NOTES/LECTURE

Let's begin by viewing Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1957) so that we have a common text to use as a working example as we begin.

 After viewing:

What "genre" is this? Why? How do you "read" this text? What other information would you like about the text?
Some quick ( & oversimplified) possibilities for readings

General Introduction to Critical Literary Theory

NOTE: All page references are to Davis & Schleifer's Contemporary Literary Criticism, 3rd edition (Longman, 1994). See especially pages 1-22, 83-92.

 Distinction between "criticism" and "theory"
 
 

  1. W. K. Wimsatt (1949; p. 83) defined "theory" as an attempt to replace the aesthetic focus on art with a new focus on the relationship between literary meaning and interested writers and readers.
  2. More recently, J. Hillis Miller (1986; p. 84) defines theory as "the displacement in literary studies from a focus on the meaning of texts to a focus on the ways meaning is conveyed."
  3. Edward Said (1983; p. 84) sees theory in "political terms" as "the activism of engagement of a fully politicized `cultural studies'" in contrast to "the old aesthetic traditionalism."
  4. For Gerald Graff (1987; p. 82), the distinction between criticism and theory might be seen as a tension between methodological and conceptual aims on the one hand, and ideological or political confrontations on the other. He sees the following issues at stake:
A good illustration of how hotly contested these issues can be, is the exchange between George Will (who accuses "tenured radicals" of encouraging "collective amnesia" by expanding the canon and teaching politicized interpretations) and Stephen Greenblatt (who responds by noting that a "politicized" version of say, The Tempest, restores cultural context and history rather than erasing it).

Graff, Said, Miller, and Wimsatt all share a sense of theory as critique: a process of challenging and testing that goes beyond aesthetic wholeness. If theory, then, is "critique"--it is criticism, but a criticism that looks at both text and context. Understanding the semantic distinction that some people may make between "criticism" and "theory" depends on professional, historical, critical context.

The problems posed by terms and contexts are part of the reason why criticism is often seen as "difficult" reading.

Difficulties for readers

SOURCE: Davis and Schleifer pp 12-13, citing George Steiner.
 
 
  1. Contingent difficulty: words or references unknown to the reader. (Relatively simple solution: consult a reference book)
  2. Modal difficulty: an unfamiliar form or perspective. For some, this might be like watching MTV or reading Joyce's Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. For others, it's reading criticism or theory, which has, often, its own language, its own allusions, its own challenges to conventions. The solution: "deep translation."
  3. Tactical difficulty: The deliberate "tactic" on the part of a writer to render the familiar as strange. The process (or effect) is often called "defamiliarization." l'ecriture feminine might be seen as an example within criticism.
  4. Ontological difficulty: more than confusion or reorientation; the attempt to see and feel the world from a perspective other than your own. (l'ecriture feminine again?)

Central questions

  1. Why we read
  2. What we read
  3. How we read

Background Concepts and Terms

FORMALISM

A Formalistic approach looks at words (sounds, meanings, connotations) and structures and patterns (or inter-relationships among words, lines, etc.) The components might be thought of in terms of: Together, the inter-relationships reveal a form, by which all subordinate patterns can be understood.

NEW CRITICISM (1919-57, esp. 1938-57)

The "new criticism" grew out of formalism. It placed an emphasis on art as an organic form with consistency and internal logic. Art was seen as an object (of appreciation, of study, etc.) The antecedents to the organic tradition can be found in Aristotle's Poetics, with its emphasis on the "orderly arrangement of parts"; in Coleridge's sense of "imagination" as a "shaping" power; in Henry James's statement from the "Art of Fiction" where he claims that: "Form alone takes, and holds and preserves, substance--saves it from the welter of helpless verbiage that we swim in as in a sea of tasteless, tepid pudding" (qtd. in Guernin, et al, 71).

 In addition to the organic tradition and a strict adherence to form, the new criticism is also associated with conservation of "classical" values and ideals of order.

 The origins of the "New Criticism" are generally attributed to a group of scholars at Vanderbilt, immediately after World War I. Names generally associated with the "New Criticism" include: John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and T.S. Eliot.

The NEW CRITICISM insisted that the text alone contained everything necessary for analysis and refused as superfluous any consideration of matters outside the text itself, such as the life of the author, the history of the time, the text's social, political, or economic implications.

Two terms relevant to this focus on the text alone are:

     
  1. the intentional fallacy (the mistake looking to the author for meaning)
  2. the affective fallacy (the mistake of judging a work by its effect on the reader or viewer)
Negatives associated with this critical approach: The new criticism tended to ignore or dismiss some poetry and other genres that did not respond to a formalistic approach; it was seen as narrow; elite; and it viewed literature as an object, as autonomous.

 Lasting effect: techniques or tools of explication and analysis

STRUCTURALISM AND SAUSSURE (see also pp. 233-72 in Davis and Schleifer)

Most generally, structuralism and semiotics might be thought of as a way of examining the conditions that allow language and meaning to arise (in contrast to criticism that looks only at autonomous elements or only at the rhetorical effect of language). Saussure's linguistic theories (published in 1916, three years after his death) directly inform structuralism; some of his terms and concepts--as well as the literary theories that derived most directly from his work--continue to be important base points for understanding later literary theory.

1. Relational viewpoint and 2. arbitrary values:

 Saussure argued that linguistic elements are relational, and it is viewpoint that creates the object of linguistic study. Because so much depends on viewpoint, the nature of the linguistic sign is necessarily arbitrary. That is, language takes whatever material is at hand to create its meanings and communications. The sign itself is not substance, but the correlation of difference. (More below)

 3. Synchronicity and 4. double nature of language

 Up until Saussure, most studies of language took a "diachronic" approach that emphasized, for instance, a "cause/effect" or sequential view of meaning and communication. Saussure used a synchronic method of study that looked at simultaneous relationships. One result of the synchronic method was Saussure's insistence on the double nature of language and linguistic elements.
 
 

SEMIOTICS

The Saussurean linguistic method was termed "semiology" to denote "a science that studies the life of signs within society." It was from the work of American philosopher Charles Peirce that we got the term "semiotics." In many ways similar to Saussure's work, Peircian "semiotics" named a linguistic method designed to understand the conditions governing meaning in society. Peirce's semiotics went beyond Saussure's in the sense that it recognized that language is never "pure" sign. It is tied to materiality (what Peirce would consider the linguistic "ground.). "Semiotics" has come to mean a systematic analysis of texts or objects as "signs." Once you think of language in contextual terms, you can think of instances when the signifier does not always engender sense; it can sometimes trigger desire, emotions, memory. Think of the associative "signification" of water, of a bat hitting a ball, etc.

It might be helpful to think of three different strands of semiotics so you can see the origin and influence of this theoretical approach:
 
 

  1. Logocentric (Saussure)


    2.  This strand--usually associated with early Sausserean semiotics-- privileged the linguistic sign--the spoken word. It tried to impose linguistic methods on everything non-linguistic: images, objects, behaviors and so forth were each treated as if it were language, creating content (or "the signified").
     
     

  2. Semiology, signification & meaning production (Barthes)


    3.  Although this second strand can perhaps be traced to Charles Peirce, it is most associated with Roland Barthes. In 1954, Barthes published Writing Degree Zero; in 1957, he published Mythologies. Both focus on seeing the function of semantic organization and on the production (or "signification") of meaning.
     
     

  3. Deconstruction/Cultural Critique


    4.  In opposition to the focus on the production of meaning, new attention (or simultaneous attention) focused on the ways in which concepts, themes, or "signifieds" might by undone. This often includes analysis of processes underlying representation, and communication.

Together, the three strands enable readings not only for what language is saying (its content, its cause, its philosophy, its "signified"), but also what it is doing (its material deployment; the social intervention of its "signifiers").

 The general emphasis in semiotics is, however, on the study of signs as signifiers (as recognition markers) rather than on signs as signifieds (content). It's not so much what signs mean, but how they mean.

The power of signs lies in making us believe that they (the signs) can be transparent, free of any determinations save those of the object they designate. (For instance, a transparent reading of the U.S. flag might assert that the colors red and white signify stripes and the colors blue and white signify stars; or that the red and white stripes signify the 13 original colonies and that the 50 stars signify the 50 states; or that the flag as a whole signifies the country as a whole. Such simple readings would exclude larger contexts and associations.) Semiotics forces away the transparency.

Let's try to get the terms and the different strands of semiotics straight by working through an example.

 EXAMPLE: "ABSOLUT CITRON" Ad

[SHOW ABSOLUT CITRON IMAGE--WITHOUT WORDS]

 What do you see? (colors combine to create image)

 Strand #1: Logocentric semiotic reading
 
 

  1. Signifier: acoustic unit or graphemes (a, b, s, o), combine to create a (incomplete) word: "ABSOLUT"
  2. Signified: concept of "ABSOLUT" as a vodka name, as sense of completeness, purity (e.g., the phrase "absolute alcohol" refers to ethyl alcohol containing no more than 1 percent water), perfection, as "ultimate"
  3. Sign = both Absolut (vodka)/Absolute (English word)


    4.  Note that even this reading is already polysemous; there are already tensions.

Strand #2: Signification reading (both visual and verbal) Strand #3: Deconstruction/Cultural Critique

Text and Context

Return to opening text: Vertigo

Formalist?

 Reader Response? (Affective reaction? Rhetorical analysis of audience, purpose, persona, effect?)

 Historical? (Post-cartesian mind/body split)

 Semiotic? (Signifiers? Signified? Sign?)

 Feminist?

 Marxist?

Author: L. Brady
Date: 28 January 1998
Return to ENGL 383 home page