DOCSLIB.ORG

The Vicissitudes of Text

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Vicissitudes of Text The Vicissitudes of Text Jonathan CULLER The concept of text, which has been central to literary studies, has undergone many mutations, as it has traveled from the work of classical philologists, for whom it was and is the object of a powerful disciplinary formation, to postmodern theorists of the text, for whom, the concept might be summed up by the title of a fine book by John Mowatt: Text: the Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object. Of course, the interesting thing about a travelling concept is not that it travels — travelers, tales about their travels can be quite boring and wholly unprofitable — but what it reveals through its travels. One very striking point in the itinerary of "text," though — unparalleled, to my knowledge in the travels of other concepts, is that in Oswald Ducrot's and Tzvetan Todorov's Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences du langage of 1972, texte has two contradictory entries. In the main body of the dictionary it is defined as an organization of the utterance beyond the sentence: "le texte peut coincider avec une phrase comme avec un livre entier; il se définit par son autonomie et par sa clôture (même si, en un sens, certains textes ne sont pas 'clos')." (375) But then the appendix, which seeks to take account of recent developments that had challenged the idea of a "science du langage," also contains an entry for texte — the only concept thus honored — under the heading "le texte comme productivité." Citing the recent work of Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva among others, this entry tells us that "par opposition à tout usage communicatif et représentatif — donc re-productif — du langage, le texte y est défini essentiellement comme productivité." Texte involves the "mise en place d'une procédure qui fasse jouer à plein son pouvoir génératif. Le texte a toujours fonctionné comme un champ de transgression au regard du système selon lequel sont organisées notre perception, notre grammaire, notre métaphysique, et jusqu'à notre science : système selon lequel un sujet, situé au centre d'un monde qui lui fournit comme un horizon, apprend à déchiffrer le sens supposé préalable, voire originaire, au regard de l'expérience qu'il en fait." (443)1 The double inscription of text, as a key concept in the reorganization of the human sciences around the linguistic model and in the almost immediate and gleeful critique of the possibility of a scientific model, is a measure of the importance, of the pivotal nature of this concept. Today one no longer sees as many books as one once did with text or textual in their title, and "textualism," as it has come to be called, is often considered a sin, or at least an insult. I don't think, though, that stopping talking about text and textuality is going to solve any of the problems of literary and cultural study. If we don't engage with the problems clustered around the notion of text, we are going to be programmed by our own unexamined assumptions, for the problem of the text is always with us. Let me briefly sketch what I take to be the principal travels of text as a way of taking up major issues we approach through it. In philology the notion of the text — as in the idea of "the establishment of the text — is already dual. Textual critics or textual editors contrasted the object before them, a text, with the text in the putatively perfect state in which it left the author's hands and to which the editor aspired to restore it. The text is thus both the pure origin, the manifestation of the final intention of the author, and an object marked by a history of material practices of transmission, which bring corruption. Textual scholarship was and indeed still is a process of reconstruction, based on methods which themselves are much open to debate, but it is only recently that the idea of the text as the corrupted material form in which the original intentions must be divined has been challenged. Modern textual scholars such as Jerome McGann have sought to reconceive the text as social act and to focus on the materiality of the social practices of transmission and publication, from inks and papers to book prices and editorial practices, and to think of these things as socially significant. (12) McGann thus tries to move away from the idea that the material practices involving texts are above all so many possible forms of corruption that may befall the final authorial intention, of which the text ought to be the materialization. 1 This entry for texte in the appendix sounds as though it were written by Julia Kristeva (at least it presents idiosyncratic concepts of hers as normative) and for anyone interested in this topic is well worth reading. Through these recent developments, the idea of text in textual scholarship may come to intersect, here and there, in its travels, with other modern ideas of text, but we have yet to see, I believe, how far this may go or how much of a rapprochement there will turn out to be. What I would like to stress here, then, is that in the idea of text in traditional textual scholarship we see a duality that will reappear in different forms. The notion of text is that of a material object but also of the very form of the work, in its original, ideal state. Thus the term text gestures towards matter, manifestation, indeed, the colloquial notion of text is this: the text is the writing that you see before you, "the text of this law," for instance. But texts are of interest above all because of that which is or ought to be carried by or manifested in the material text, and thus seldom identified unreservedly with what appears on paper. In Anglo-American New Criticism, the notion of "the text itself" comes into its own in its most useful form — in an opposition. The text itself, the aesthetic object of literary study, as opposed to what is it said to mean or reflect or manifest: as opposed to history, biography. Students were enjoined to pay attention to the text itself, to cite evidence from the text itself, to set aside what is said about it, or about the author. They are urged to focus on what the text says or better, does, as opposed to what it is supposed to say. "The text itself" — the emphatic pronoun so often accompanies it — is a complicated positivity: words on the page. But despite the banning of the intentional fallacy (confusing what something means with what someone is supposed to have meant by it), and the rule that arguments about meaning are not settled by consulting the oracle (i.e., asking the author, directly or indirectly) (Wimsatt 18), the new critical notion of the text is not wholly divorced from authorial intention, which takes the form of a powerful posited teleology. The text is the words on the page, yes, but these words are presumed to be organized as a complex whole — otherwise we wouldn't speak of the text but just of writing. Michael Riffaterre, who despite his theorization of intertextuality inherits and articulates this concept of the text, writes, "By textuality I mean the complex of formal and semantic features that characterize a self-sufficient, coherent, unified text, and legitimize its forms, however aberrant they may be, by removing any hint of the gratuitous." (1) The textuality of a text (its essence as text) is the complex internal organization that sets it off from any context. If aesthetic objects are, in Kant's phrase, purposive wholes without purpose, it is the artistic intention embodied in the text that warrants our expecting that the parts will be related to each other, that obscurities will have their reasons, and that everything will contribute to the effect of the whole. Having said this, we have to stress that the work itself reveals that artistic intention in ways that no information about the writer and his or her plans or intentions can, so that the text itself, though subtended by an artistic purpose, is separate from any other kinds of information, which can all be regarded as ancillary and set aside by oppositions. It was in the inherited context of this idea of the text — an autotelic whole governed by a powerful aesthetic teleology — that Derrida's lapidary formula, "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" was interpreted to mean something like "everything outside the actual text or texts we are considering is irrelevant and doesn't really exist," whereas in fact, it means something like the opposite, that there is only text, since you can't get outside of text. But I am getting ahead of myself and my text. The structuralist revolution, which is the turning point in the interdisciplinary fortunes of the text and thus the source of the interest of the notion for us today, consisted first of all in considering human activities as so many languages, sign systems whose functioning needs to be explained — how is it that their products have the meanings they do. Just as the task of the linguist is to describe the system of rules, conventions and practices that enable human beings to produce and understand sentences, so it is the task of the structuralist or semiotician to reconstruct the other sign systems through which culture takes place.2 The result is that the products of numerous semiotic activities are considered in similar ways, as products of systems of signification and thus as texts.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Semiotics of Tourism Own Provincial Expectations
    From: Framing The Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions © University of Oklahoma Press, 1990 The Semiotics of Tourism own provincial expectations. The French chanteuse singing English with a French accent seems more charmingly French JONATHAN CULLER than one who simply sings in French.1 Tourism is a practice of considerable cultural and economic There are perhaps interesting reasons why this should be so, importance and, unlike a good many manifestations of but Boorstin does not stop to inquire. ‘Tourist “attractions” offer contemporary culture, is well known in some guise to every an elaborately contrived indirect experience, an artificial product literary or cultural critic. Some may claim ignorance of to be consumed in the very places where the real thing is free as television or rock music or fashion, but all have been tourists and air’. What could be more foolish than a tourist paying through have observed tourists. Yet despite the pervasiveness of tourism the nose for an artificial substitute when the real thing, all around and its centrality to our conception of the contemporary world him, is as free as the air? (for most of us, the world is more imperiously an array of places This discussion is not untypical of what passes for cultural one might visit than it is a configuration of political or economic criticism: complaints about the tawdriness or artificiality of forces), tourism has been neglected by students of culture. modern culture which do not attempt to account for the curious Unlike the cinema, popular romance, or even video, tourism has facts they rail against and offer little explanation of the cultural scarcely figured in the theoretical discussions and debates about mechanisms that might be responsible for them.
    [Show full text]
  • Narrations of Ambiguity: Contemporary
    NARRATIONS OF AMBIGUITY: CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES TO TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE THEORY by MATTHEW TODD WOMBLE Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON May 2015 Copyright © by Matthew Todd Womble 2015 All Rights Reserved ii Acknowledgements I want to acknowledge the invaluable help and guidance I received from my supervising committee. I am indebted to my chair, Dr. Jim Warren, for multiple reasons, not the least of which is his willingness three years ago to work with a literature student like me. His guidance during my year of comprehensive exams steered me to the topics I take up in this dissertation, and our ongoing conversations have continually helped frame my analyses. I am similarly thankful of Drs. Tim Morris and Ken Roemer for their astute feedback and seemingly never-ending breadth of knowledge. Without their time and effort, this dissertation would be lacking in terms of scope, depth, and diversity of texts. On a personal level, I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to have worked with each of these three professors and to have had the chance to “pick their brains” over the last two years. They are each experts in their own respective fields, and my own scholarship undoubtedly benefits from their expertise and their guidance. I would also like to say thanks to Half Price Books (Flagship Location, Northwest Highway, Dallas), whose large reading room served as the setting for much of the writing below; to the Avett Brothers, Local Natives, and Tennis, whose music served as the soundtrack to my daily writing; and to Diet Coke, without which none of this could have been accomplished.
    [Show full text]
  • From Post-Structuralism to Systems Theory
    CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Purdue E-Pubs CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 2 (2000) Issue 2 Article 1 On Literariness: From Post-Structuralism to Systems Theory Marko Juvan University of Ljubljana Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <[email protected]> Recommended Citation Juvan, Marko. "On Literariness: From Post-Structuralism to Systems Theory." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 2.2 (2000): <https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1068> This text has been double-blind peer reviewed by 2+1 experts in the field.
    [Show full text]
  • Jonathan Culler Discusses Cultural Studies Feb. 24
    University of New Hampshire University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository Media Relations UNH Publications and Documents 2-21-2006 Jonathan Culler Discusses Cultural Studies Feb. 24 Erika Mantz Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/news Recommended Citation Mantz, Erika, "Jonathan Culler Discusses Cultural Studies Feb. 24" (2006). UNH Today. 1037. https://scholars.unh.edu/news/1037 This News Article is brought to you for free and open access by the UNH Publications and Documents at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Media Relations by an authorized administrator of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Jonathan Culler Discusses Cultural Studies Feb. 24 9/13/17, 1251 PM Jonathan Culler Discusses Cultural Studies Feb. 24 Contact: Erika Mantz 603-862-1567 UNH Media Relations Feb. 21, 2006 DURHAM, N.H. -- Jonathan Culler, chair of the English Department at Cornell University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, will present “Doing Cultural Studies” Friday, Feb. 24, 2006, from noon-1 p.m. in Hamilton Smith 101 at the University of New Hampshire. The talk, sponsored by the English Department’s First Fridays series, is free and open to the public. Culler’s talk will consider how the term "cultural studies" has the potential to unify various strains of scholarship within a general interdisciplinary discourse on the nature of knowledge itself. In particular, it will consider the relationship between cultural studies and literary theory. Culler is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell.
    [Show full text]
  • From Freud to Jacques Lacan and the Textual Unconscious
    CHAPTER 1 From Freud to Jacques Lacan and the Textual Unconscious [T]he unconscious is the condition for language [. .] language is the condition for the unconscious. —Jacques Lacan, “Preface byJacques Lacan,” xiii Everything can now be a text. —Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, 77 rom Freud, that which takes us toward Jacques Lacan is an embedded concept of ‘textuality.’ Necessary for analysis, textual- Fity, as an instance of a “vanishing mediator,” may simply be assumed or safely disappear in analytic praxis. Concurrent with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, textuality emerged as a pervasive ideo- logical concept by the 1970s. Fredric Jameson defined it then as “a methodological hypothesis whereby the objects of study of the human sciences [. .] are considered to constitute so many texts that we deci- pher and interpret, as distinguished from the older views of those objects as realities or existents or substances that we in one way or another attempt to know” (“Ideology of the Text” 18). As we trace a path from Freud through such adjectival notions of the unconscious as Jung’s “collective,” Walter Benjamin’s “optical,” and Jameson’s own “political,” we realize that from the start any available unconscious is a textual one. Lacan does not use the term textual unconscious. The term, if not the concept itself, seems to have originated in the work of a French critic—Jean Bellemin-Noel—indebted to Lacan. Bellemin-Noel says he used a term—l’inconscient du texte “the unconscious of the text”—as early as 1970, in a book to be titled Vers l’inconscient du texte (“Towards the Unconscious of the Text”).
    [Show full text]
  • Jonathan Culler, English, Arts & Sciences Jonathan Culler Came to Cornell in 1977 and in 1982 Succeeded M
    Jonathan Culler, English, Arts & Sciences Jonathan Culler came to Cornell in 1977 and in 1982 succeeded M. H. Abrams as Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature. A 1966 graduate of Harvard, he won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford where he took a B. Phil in Comparative Literature and a D. Phil. in Modern Languages. He was subsequently Fellow in French at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and then University Lecturer in French and Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, before moving to Cornell. He teaches courses on literary theory and criticism, French literature, and English poetry. Numerous books on literary theory and criticism, especially Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature and On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, have established his reputation as a lucid analyst and expositor of complex ideas. In addition to a book on the novels of Gustave Flaubert and brief introductions to linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and to theorist Roland Barthes, Culler has published three collections of essays, most recently The Literary in Theory. His Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction has been translated into some 20 languages, including Tamil, Latvian, and Kurdish, and was reissued in an expanded edition in 2011. Culler has at various times chaired the departments of English, Comparative Literature, and Romance Studies at Cornell, and served as Director of the Society for the Humanities (1984-93) and Senior Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences (2000-2003). He has been President of both the American Semiotic Society and the American Comparative Literature Association and currently serves on the Board of the American Council of Learned Societies and the New York State Council for the Humanities.
    [Show full text]
  • Linguistic Isolation: Ferdinand De Saussure's Linguistic Theory and the Implications for Historiography
    Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History Volume 9 | Issue 1 Article 7 4-1-2019 Linguistic Isolation: Ferdinand de Saussure’s Linguistic Theory and the Implications for Historiography Luke Neilson University of Calgary Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/aujh Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Neilson, Luke (2019) "Linguistic Isolation: Ferdinand de Saussure’s Linguistic Theory and the Implications for Historiography," Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History: Vol. 9 : Iss. 1 , Article 7. DOI: 10.20429/aujh.2019.090107 Available at: https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/aujh/vol9/iss1/7 This article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Digital Commons@Georgia Southern. It has been accepted for inclusion in Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons@Georgia Southern. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Neilson: Linguistic Isolation Linguistic Isolation Ferdinand de Saussure’s Linguistic Theory and the Implications for Historiography Luke Neilson University of Calgary (Alberta, Canada) Introduction In a 1987 New York Times article, Mark C. Taylor described the twentieth-century intellectual attitude toward language and meaning. He said, “Heidegger argued that the totalistic thinking of modern philosophy leads to a form of totalitarianism that represses all difference and also to a system of technology which, in its quest to control the whole earth, threatens annihilation in a nuclear holocaust…Western philosophy represents so many efforts to domesticate every type of difference and master all forms of otherness.”1 Statements such as these depend on the assumption that those who claim that their language games are externally- referential of a common world (in this case, western philosophers) are not motivated by factuality or objectivity but by the repression of difference and, presumably, the need for dominance.
    [Show full text]
  • On Literariness: from Post-Structuralism to Systems Theory
    CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 2 (2000) Issue 2 Article 1 On Literariness: From Post-Structuralism to Systems Theory Marko Juvan University of Ljubljana Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <[email protected]> Recommended Citation Juvan, Marko. "On Literariness: From Post-Structuralism to Systems Theory." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 2.2 (2000): <https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1068> This text has been double-blind peer reviewed by 2+1 experts in the field. The above text, published by Purdue University Press ©Purdue University, has been downloaded 4719 times as of 11/ 07/19.
    [Show full text]
  • Faculty of English the Spirit of Exemplarity
    Faculty of English The Spirit of Exemplarity: The Role of Example in Lyric Studies Christopher Mark Geddes Scott Trinity College University of Cambridge This thesis is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, March 2019 Prefatory Declaration This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except as specified in the text. It is not substantially the same as any that I have submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for a degree or diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution. I further state that no substantial part of my dissertation has already been submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for any such degree, diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution. It does not exceed the prescribed word limit for the relevant Degree Committee, including footnotes, references and appendices but excluding the bibliography and translations, where they have been provided only to aid understanding. All translations are my own, unless otherwise stated. The Spirit of Exemplarity: The Role of Example in Lyric Studies Christopher Scott Abstract Recent work in lyric studies has been dominated by two opposing camps: the historicism of the ‘New Lyric Studies’ and the attempt to defend a trans-historical category of lyric, most notably by Jonathan Culler. This thesis begins by claiming that these two camps have something in common: their practice of exemplification and their attitude towards individual example. Turning to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, I describe an alternative mode of exemplarity which, as Toril Moi attests, is now largely absent from the discipline of literary studies.
    [Show full text]
  • Structuralism and Semiotics
    Structuralism and Semiotics We live in a world of signs, and of signs about signs. A growing awareness of this situation in the last decades of the twentieth century brought a monu- mental change in perspective on the very nature of reality. It forced us to recognise the possibility that ‘reality’ inheres not in things themselves, but in the relationships we perceive between things; not in items but in struc- tures. In exploring and seeking to further these ideas, critics turned to the methods of analysis loosely termed ‘structuralism’ and ‘semiotics’. Their work gave rise to a revolution in critical theory. This classic guide discusses the nature and development of structuralism and semiotics, calling for a new critical awareness of the ways in which we communicate and drawing attention to their implications for our society. Published in 1977 as the first volume in the New Accents series, Structural- ism and Semiotics made crucial debates in critical theory accessible to those with no prior knowledge of the field, thus enacting its own small revolution. Since then a generation of readers has used the book as an entry not only into structuralism and semiotics, but into the wide range of cultural and critical theories underpinned by these approaches. Structuralism and Semiotics remains the clearest introduction to some of the most important topics in modern critical theory. An afterword and fresh suggestions for further reading ensure that this new edition will become, like its predecessor, the essential starting point for anyone new to the field. Terence Hawkes is Emeritus Professor of English at Cardiff University.
    [Show full text]
  • Convention and Meaning: Derrida and Austin Author(S): Jonathan Culler Source: New Literary History, Vol. 13, No. 1, on Convention: I, (Autumn, 1981), Pp
    Convention and Meaning: Derrida and Austin Author(s): Jonathan Culler Source: New Literary History, Vol. 13, No. 1, On Convention: I, (Autumn, 1981), pp. 15-30 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468640 Accessed: 12/08/2008 18:40 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Convention and Meaning: Derrida and Austin* Jonathan Culler IN THESaussurian perspective, meaning is the product of linguistic conventions, the effect of a system of differences.
    [Show full text]
  • Contemporary Schools and Traditions in Literary and Critical Theory
    CHAPTER 28 Contemporary Schools and Traditions in Literary and Critical Theory 1 Theory, Literary Works, and Critical Theory From the perspective opened by Post-Structuralism it is even hard to decide what is today the definite object of critical theory and literary criticism. The very concept of “theory” no longer has the traditional, Platonic meaning1 and the scientific status of knowledge concerning a specific object of a defi- nite field. According to Jonathan Culler , we can say that today theory means a “miscellaneous” genre “which has come to designate works that succeed in challenging and reorienting thinking in fields other than those to which they apparently belong. […] Works regarded as theory have effects beyond their original field.”2 We have already stated this interaction between different fields of knowledge, especially in the Romantic period and then in the last century. In linguistics, critical theory, structuralism , deconstruction, and postmodern, theory has become an open set of works about philosophy, sociology, linguis- tics, poetics, culture, and so on, even if the specific object of the study is a literary work. Sometimes, like in the case of Bloom or Derrida , it happens that it is even difficult to draw a precise line between creative and critical works. For instance, we have seen that critical theory in its original form3 was a kind of political criticism (a “school of suspicion”) with an explicit social com- mitment, which has found in the field of literary criticism a great opportunity for development and a fruitful application. Conversely, we have stated that the strategies elaborated and offered by linguistics and literary criticism are useful and can be applied in order to understand and explain social facts.4 We do not study literary theory only to understand an author or a literary work.
    [Show full text]