Abstract
In speaking here for language and literature (and I do speak, not »on« or »about,« but precisely for them: on their behalf and in their name) I face an impossible task. It is not just the vastness of the topic; there is also the enormous body of scholarship, either itself systems-theoretical or of a sort congenial to systems theory, dating back in Saussure and the Russian Formalists to the earliest decades of this century. Ideally I would present some kind of report summarizing views, methods, and findings, delineating common assumptions and problems, and hinting at profitable lines for future research. Yet given the dimensions of this paper, any such inevitably shorthand report is out of the question. I must take a quite different tack I shall of course name some of the most important names and say something of what they stand for. But my general method will be suggestive rather than descriptive, less a conventional exposé than a series of what Wittgenstein would call thinking-points. I shall present a thesis of sorts, grounded in the interpretation of a certain story; and the fact that I ground my remarks in the analysis of a particular literary text already tells you something about how we do things in my neck of the woods. But this thesis is meant to serve merely as an occasion, a place for thought; the actual work must come later, in your own subsequent musings on the points it raises.
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Notes and References
William of Ockham, Ordinatio Ockham, D. II, Q. viii, prima redactio; as cited in Philosophical Writings, ed. and tr. P. Boehner, London: Nelson, 1957, p. 41.
R. Barthes, Essais critiques, Paris: Seuil, 1964, p. 15.
J. Culler, Apostrophe, in The Pursuit of Signs, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1981.
See R. Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture, Paris: Seuil, 1953.
F. de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, critical edition by T. de Mauro, Paris: Payot, 1982.
T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
B. Eichenbaum, The Theory of the Formal Method, in L.T. Lemon, M.J. Reis (eds., tr.), Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1965; Bison Book paper edition, p. 136.
R. Jakobson, Concluding Statement: Linguistics and Poetics, in TA. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language, Cambridge, Massachusetts, New York: The Technology Press, M.I.T. and John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1960, p. 350–377.
This is, by the bye, an invariant principle of literary evolution. See V. Shklovsky, Art as Technique , in Lemon, Reis (eds., tr.), op. cit.,1965, note 8; R. Jakobson, Du réalisme artistique , in T. Todorov (ed., tr.), Théorie de la littérature,Paris: Seuil, 1965; R. Barthes, op. cit.,1970, note 3.
A. Chekhov, At Christmas Time , in A. Yarmolinsky (ed.), The Portable Chekhov, New York: Viking-Penguin, 1977, p. 434–440. All subsequent references are given in the text.
Another feature of the shift from structuralism to post-structuralism bears precisely on the contribution of the reader,yielding, for example, the Rezeptionstheorie or Rezeptionsästhetik of Iser and Jauss (by way of Gadamer), and current American reader-response criticism. For a helpful introduction, see S.R. Suleiman, I. Crosman (eds.), The Reader in the Test: Essays on Audience and Interpretation,Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980.
See J. Derrida, La différance, in Marges de la philosophie, Paris: Minuit, 1972.
This points to a pervasive theme in Derrida, for whom writing destroys ( deconstructs ) what he considers the central myth of our logocentric Western culture: that of an Origin from which phenomena derive all essential reality and truth. See, for example, signature événement contexte, in op. cit., 1972, note 14 and, for a general historical and theoretical discussion, De la grammatologie, Paris: Minuit, 1967.
See, for example, I.J. Gelb, A Study of Writing, revised edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.
See J. Derrida, Freud et la scène de l’écriture, in L’écriture et la différence, Paris: Seuil, 1967.
For a useful introductory overview to these problems, see W.J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London: Methuen, 1982.
E.A. Havelock, Preface to Plato,Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1963, ch. IV.
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Braider, C.S. (1990). Chekhov’s Letter: Linguistic System and its Discontents. In: Krohn, W., Küppers, G., Nowotny, H. (eds) Selforganization. Sociology of the Sciences, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2975-8_10
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