Notes on Foucault's What is an Author – Clare Joseph

In his essay What is an Author, Michel Foucault is not discussing authors and their works, rather, he is talking about the concept of work and the functional role of an author, that is, 'author function'.

He says that when people study concerns of a particular concept, more importance is given to the solid and fundamental role of the author, rather than the concept. Foucault lists the possible conditions under which the author was individualised in the western tradition. Did it happen because of the status given to the author when authenticity and attribution of texts were researched, or by inclusion of the author in systems of valorisation, or did it happen when the traditional stories about heroes gave way to different kinds of writing like an author's biography? However, this traditional notion of individualisation of the author has shifted.

To understand this shift, Foucault uses Samuel Beckett's notion of an author – "What matter who is speaking, someone said, what matter who is speaking." Foucault says that this shift has occurred because of two major themes that emerged:

• First, writing freed itself from the necessity of expression, that is, writing was not merely a result of the author's need to express. The meaning of the text was no longer confined within the writing of the text, but in it's exterior deployment. As a result, writing became an interplay of signs, regulated not by the author (the signified) but by the nature of work or text itself (signifier). Thus, the essential basis of writing was not the emotions under which it was composed or the subject inserted into language, but the creation of an opening where the writing subject disappears.

• Second, the relationship between writing and death. Traditionally, death was a guarantee to immortality (e.g. the Greek narratives where by death, the hero gains immortality. Contemporarily, this notion has been altered, and writing is now linked to sacrifice. The narrator is used to forestall death. Where work had the duty of creating immortality, it now had the right to kill its author. After writing, the author is dead, but through the text, the author lives. The author becomes a victim of his own writing, and through his absence, his presence is guaranteed.

Problematising "work"

Foucault questions the concept of work. He says, if we consider that an individual is not an author (when no individual has authority over the work), what do we make of the things written, said or communicated by an individual? Also, if we are dealing with an author, will his work include everything that he has ever written or said (like notes on someone's address or an appointment). He says we lack a theory to encompass the questions generated by a work and the empirical activity involved in publishing an author's complete works (which is questionable). If there is no understanding of what a work is, there can be unified meaning designated by a work. He argues that the thesis of ecriture makes it possible to continue the presence of an author, as it is not concerned with the act of writing or the authorial intentions and meanings within a text, but it elaborates the conditions of spatial dispersion and temporal deployment of any text. But ecriture has merely transposed the empirical characteristics of an author to a transcendental anonymity. Next, he problematises the use of an author's name. He says that an author's name is not just a proper name, but functional. It has functions other than signification (which a proper name is designated for). An author's name is functional in relation to his or her works as it can be used to classify a set of works and also establish homogeneity, filiation, reciprocal explanation, authentification, or of common utilisation. An author's name also characterises a particular manner of existence, circulation and operations of a discourse.

Foucault defines the four major characteristics of author function as follows:

• Author function is tied to the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine and articulate discourses – an author needs to take responsibility while writing, hence, a particular text is attributed to an author.

• Author function does not operate uniformly in all discourses, at all times, and in any given culture – it is difficult to define an author function uniform across various discourses.

• Author function is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a text to its creator, but through a series of precise and complex procedures.

  Foucault uses Saint Jerome's argument to define author function. St. Jerome says that a text can be attributed to an author if it meets the standard level of quality of other works written by that author; has a coherent idea represented as in other works by the author; has a uniform style of writing and choice of words particular to the author; and those that do not include historical events and figures subsequent to the author's death. Foucault says that St. Jerome's characterisation might not be appropriate for modern critics to attribute authorship of a text, but it helps in defining the author function.

• It does not just refer to an actual individual but gives rise to multiple egos (multiple selves) and a series of subjective positions the individuals of any class may occupy – this arises out of the scission between, and the division and distance of the actual writer from the fictional narrator.

(Discussion on St. Jerome and his role: He is important not just because he translated the Bible to Latin, but because he throws a light on how texts transform demography of the people and what a particular text does to a civilisation. He translated Bible from Hebrew and Greek (Greek was powerful earlier) to Latin (the language spoken at Rome, which ruled Europe when St. Jerome translated Bible to Latin). Similarly, Martin Luther King said that an interpreter is not required and that people need self-interpretation. When he translated Bible from Latin to German (Germany was then powerful in Europe), Latin was overthrown by German, English and other European languages. Religious descent begins the rise of languages. The role of a translator is also functional.

Link to Foucault's essay: While we discuss what is an author and our changing relationship with text, we look at the shift in views over a period of time and how these texts (economic, political, religious texts) shape our society).

Two types of positions of an author:

• Transdiscursive position – Foucault says that even within the realm of a discourse, "a person can be the author of not only a book, but of a theory, tradition or a discipline within which new books and authors can proliferate" Such authors occupy a transdiscursive position (e.g. Homer, Aristotle, church fathers). These kind of authors are as old as our civilisation.

• Initiators of discursive practices – 19^th century Europe produced a singular kind of author, different from transdiscursive authors. They not only produced their own work, but they laid down the possibility and rules of forming other texts. They provided ground not only for analogies to be adopted by future texts, but also made possible differences – they created a space for differing views within the field of discourse they initiated. This, he says, is different from founding of any scientific endeavor.

Foucault however says that the distinction between initiation of discursive practices and founding of sciences is not readily identifiable, and there is no proof that these two procedures are mutually exclusive. His purpose behind bringing out this distinction was to show that "author-function" might be complex when we analyse each book or even a series of texts bearing a definite signature, but when we consider larger entities like groups of works or entire disciplines, author-function can be understood.

Author-function, according to Foucault, is one possible specifications of the subject and, it appears that the form, the complexity and even the existence of author-function is not permanent. The author as a centre was constructed to establish a unified meaning from the text, but now, text itself becomes meaning. The author does not have the authority over meaning – author or the unified subject is displaced from the centre, but not removed entirely. A text needs to be related through larger groups of texts or discourse.

References

Pinto, Anil and Vijayaganesh A.. "Michel Foucault's What is an Author – summary". Christ university. Bangalore. 10 January 2014. Lecture.

Foucault, Michel. "What is an Author.

What is an Author?

class notes prepared by Chitra Tracy Johnson

What is an Author?

Michel Foucault

 

January 7, 2014

Michel Foucault is an author who drew ideas and assumptions from all areas like Marxism, structuralism, sociology, history and so on. He is a post-structuralist author with affinities with to the theories we studied earlier.

Foucault begins his essay "What is an Author" by discussing the criticism he had on his previous work The Order of Things. In this work Foucault make an investigation into the condition of possibility under which human beings become an object of knowledge in some of the disciplines (Social Sciences). "For Foucault discourse is a body of thought and writing that is united by having a common object of study, a common methodology and a set of common term and ideas". This idea of Foucault allows him to talk elaborately on variety of texts irrespective of countries, historical periods, disciplines and genres. This is the reason why while discussing several naturalist without considering the periods in which they belonged he discussed Bulton and Darquin who belonged to the 18 and 19 centuries respectively and also to different nationalities. For him they were following "the functional condition of specific discursive practices" (Text para 3).  They belonged to the same discourse family.

            Critics questioned this association. He responds to this by asking why we are not concerned with the idea of authors at all than seeing discourse as the grouping of texts and ideas. Foucault quotes Samuel Beckett who says "What matter who's speaking" and says that this indifference is fundamental ethical principle of contemporary writing. For him writing is a play of language than an expression. So it is creating an opening where the writing subject entirely disagrees.  

Another important idea Foucault brings in the relation of writing and death.  The Greek narration and epics were designed to guarantee the immortality of the hero. So the Greek hero accepted an early death. But coming to modern times texts like Arabian Nights tries to reverse this equation and try to keep death away from the circle of existence. This concept of writing as a protection against death has been transferred to other cultures where writing is now linked to sacrifice and sacrifice of the life itself. It takes place in the everyday life of writer. The work which has the duty of creating immortality has now turned into a right to kill, kill the author himself. The link between writing and death is manifested in the total removal of the individual characterisation of the writer. The consequence of the removal of the authors is not fully explored.

So when he is saying that the author is dead he is saying that author is deconstructed shown that only a part of the structure a subject position and not the centre. By declaring the death of the author Foucault is deconstructing the idea that the author is the origin of something original and replay it with the idea that the author is the product of function of writing of the text.

Reference:

Lecture by Asst.Prof. Vijayaganesh, Christ University, Bangalore on7 January 2014.

Foucault, Michel. What is an Author? Print.

Notes prepared by Chitra Tracy Johnson

 

What is an Author? Michel Foucault ( Christina Alex)

What is an Author?

Michel Foucault

Date: 9 January 2014

·         In this essay, Foucault is concerned with the author and the work. It was looked upon as a single entity.

·         The task of criticism is to establish the link between the author and the work.

·         The understanding of language is extended to literary theory through structuralist approaches.

Author	Work/ Text
Signified	Signifier
Unified subject	Language
Reference point

·         Foucault discusses the relationship between writing and the necessity of expression.

·         Traditional/ Classic writers believed in the concept of inspiration: the idea of a muse.

·         Writers like Coleridge and Wordsworth have talked about the compulsion that a writer experiences to put down thoughts into words.

·         An example is The Rime of The Ancient Mariner where the narrator is compelled to tell his tale to a passer-by.

·         This can be regarded as a continuation of the story-telling tradition.

·         Secondly, Foucault talks about the concept of writing and death.

·         A writer lives through his work or in other words, attains immortality with his work.

·         Foucault
suggests
that
his
examples,
that
the
idea
of
perpetuating
or


·         postponing
death
in
the
case
of
the
Greek
epic
and
the
Arabian
tales
 were
metaphosed
by
the
Western
society

·         The idea of the power of the narrator to forestall death through story-telling.

·         This further problematises the notion of the author as an unimportant part of the work.

·         Waiting for Godot is an example of a text where there is no unified meaning in the text and hence it requires us to look for the author in the text.

·         New Critics, Formalists, Structuralists, etc looked for a meaning in the text even after doing away with the concept of the author.

·         These tendencies were prominent in the 20^th century.

·         Writing was removed from expression.

·         Hence, the author disappears and there occurs a removal of the unified subject.

·         Here the question of what happens when you remove a reference point comes up.

·         Writing is a signifying system; meaning is relational and based on difference.

·         It reflects the notion of a simple and self-contained identity; circularity of meaning as opposed to a linear one.

·         Text does not indicate the intention of the author; author expresses through a unified language which reader interprets.

·         This linear trend has changed recently.

·         The author as a transcendental anonymity.

·         The focus shifted to the text/discourse. Foucault states that everything is a discourse.

·         The author still exists, even after having claimed to have disappeared. He is still behind the text because we want a unified meaning from a text.

·         The author's name is not just a name, it is functional as it performs a function.

·         Foucault
points
out
that
the author's
proper
name
equals
a
description. He uses the example of Aristotle to conclude that hearing a particular name leads to associating that name to that person's famous works.

·         The way Foucault describes the author is very restricted/ limited.

Reference:

Lecture by Asst.Prof. Vijayaganesh, Christ University, Bangalore on 9 January 2014.

Foucault, Michel. What is an Author? Print.

Notes prepared by Christina Alex.

From Work to Text and Death of the Author

1324118

Annie Isabel Jaison

13/12/2013, Friday

From Work to Text and Death of the Author

·         From Work to Text and Death of the Author are two of Roland Barthes' most important works. A text is an 'object of study' according to Barthes.

·          A text is called so because it is woven from the material available, i.e. words. In a text, the words are being stitched and unstitched constantly.  In the essay 'From Work to Text', Barthes juxtaposes the making of a text to the making of a work. Work has an author and text has a scribe. (The word 'scribe' emerged from 'script' which emerged from 'scripture'. 'Scribe' means 'one who writes).

·         Barthes is of the opinion that an author's words are never his own. His work is inspired by a muse.

·         He gives us an idea of the movement of a text to a work - there is no place for the author, in his place the reader is born. We never know what the author meant while creating his 'work', we only know what various readers have interpreted.

·         Here, Barthes is not denying the existence of the author. He is saying that it is not just the author that is creating a work- the language is not his, the ideas are not his- he is just stitching the ideas and words together.

·          In a way he is just a mediator who merges ideas and language together presents it before the readers. This is where the concept of 'Death of the Author' emerges.

·          As text started travelling out of the culture it was written for, it was interpreted even more vividly by a vast number if readers, thus backing the idea of 'Death of the Author'.

References:

1.      Roland Barthes, Death of the Author (1968)

2.      Roland Barthes, From Work to Text (1971)

Shift From Structuralism to Poststructuralism by Anuradha Acharjee (1324119)

There is seen to be an ''exact'' shift from structuralism to poststructuralism. The basis of Structuralism is Linguistics and Structuralism puts emphasis on 'how to look at language'. The notion is same between the structuralists and poststructuralists but there was a change or shift in the attitude of the Poststructuralists which made them different. From 1973, one can see the pressure of the text on yhe writers and the readers. Barthes Structuralist perspective changed and became Poststructuralist.

Structuralists look at language as a sign system which is natural and has no essence. Each woed is a sign and gives a particular meaning. The nature of meaning is relational and arbitrary. Structuralists basically look for a stable meaning in everything or various concepts they come across. The new version, still being stable, gives a better understanding of the reality. In Poststructuralism, there are no signifieds, only signifiers. E.g. When the word tree is uttered, everybody does not get the same concept or meaning in their minds.

So th basic differences one may find in Poststructuralism is that there are a chain of signifiers, no signifieds. The concept of having a fixed or constant meaning is nullified. All this leads to anxiety about language and Poststructuralists cannot believe that language is reliable to communicate at the first place. They believe that texts also communicate certain meaning.

The time frame of Structuralim and Poststructuralism is demarcated as such, from 1930s to 1940s structuralism existed appoximately and from 1960s onwards, it was Poststructuralism in the scenario. It happened in france first and then in England.

Earlier, there used to be a God centred society. There was a gap between language and reality. It was later found out that reality is just a construct and there was no one to one correspondence. Poststructuralism however, widened this gap. According to Poststructuralism, there is nothing like unified eternal reality in the world. Reality itself is textual and everything is a construct. Then during REnaissance Humanism when man was made the centre of the society, all these absolute facts were subverted. This can even be proven by Literature. Also, rationality and reasoning power or man was developed and Science was born.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, there was a war between religion and science. This can be best understood by reading Mathew Arnold's works, how man was caught between the two worlds. The First World War eradicated the notion of moving forward to a perfectly perfect, materialistic life. Also, European countries were emerging at that time. After the Second World War, faith was lost in everything.

Fragmentation in writing can be seen very clearly in T.S. Eliot's works. There is a fragmented and disordered structure. The shift had continued till thousands of years, undoing of whatever you have learnt so far.

There is no fixed meaning in the text. Feminism also incorporated some of these ideas. Male language per se was replaced with feminine viewpoints. Gynocriticism emerged where woman becomes the centre of the society and everything is for women. Classical feminism is seen to be replacing the centre and it all emerged against a male dominated society.

Structuralism was a step by step process, based on methodology and linguistics whereas Poststructuralism had a sceptical nature and was based on philosophy. Structuralists had a coherent and structured style of writing but Poststructuralists wrote with a lot of puns, allusions, metaphors, multiple interpretations. Their writing was basically constituted with a play of words.

Poststructuralists believe that language or reality is a construct. The Structuralists know this but they live with it without questioning anything. They do not want to look at the uncertainity and totality of meanings. Reality id textual for Poststructuralists. The writers do not follow a linear mode of narration.

References :
1.class taken on 20th December' 2013 by Mr. VijayaGanesh.
2. A basic reading of 'The Death of the Author' by Roland Barthes and some other preceeding texts.

Notes prepared by Anuradha Acharjee (1324119)

Roland Barthes: The Death of the Author (Ayushi Malhotra 1324121)

Text as said by Roland Barthes is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning but a multi-dimensions space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. It is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. A text is woven and draws to what we have as text and juxtaposes work with the text. Work is completed by the author whereas text by the scribe. The author has an ownership and a copyright and it together associates the idea of "author" which coincides with the birth of the capitalist.

Barthe gives us a shift from work to text where he says that there is no author. In place of author "reader" is born. Reading creates meaning and then author becomes the source of that meaning. Once the author is removed reference is given to the writer. If we take out the author the scripter remains. The word "author" like other words "father" "mother" etc. only performs a function. These notions have a meaning attached to it. Once the author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes futile. If there is no author then there is no meaning of the text. The reign of the author has been the reign of the critic. A critic's role was to discover what was originally intended by the author and consequently the death of the author is the death of the critic as well. In the multiplicity of writing, everything has to be disentangled and not deciphered. In precisely this way literature, by refusing to assign a "secret" or an ultimate meaning to text, liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary as it refuses god for science law and religion.

Barthes essay deals with the addresses the power of the author in reading and analysing writing. The total existence of writing is focused on the reader and not the writer. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up the writing are inscribed without any of them being lost. The reader holds more responsibility to the text than the author. The complexity of different connotations and experiences that come from the author to the text are flattened by the time it reaches the reader. The reader comes empty handed and is impersonalized with the text. Barthe makes a point that the origin of the work may lie with the author but its destination is with the reader.

Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; writer is only person in literature. Barthe concludes by saying that the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.

 

References:

Class notes by Anil Pinto taken on 19^th December 2013

Roland Barthe: The Death of the Author

The Death of the Author: critical summary: Roland Barthes

Notes prepared by Ayushi Malhotra

The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes (Anushka Chowdhury 1324120)

 

Barthes's 'The Death of the Author' illustrates the movement from work to text. According to him in the place of author the reader is born as only reading enables the textual understanding of meaning and reality. He gives importance to the plurality of meaning, thereby establishing the concept of multiple texts.

While Barthes begins the essay with an example taken from Balzac's novella Sarrasine, from the second paragraph, he starts discussing the importance of language and marginalizes the author. Barthes argues that for effective and productive reading of a text one has to suspend the preconceived ideas about the author and even about human psychology. Associating the author with the text limits the scope of his work. The author, in modern times, takes up the role of a mediator or a medium for the transfer of meaning through language. According to Barthes, it is not a conscious decision but his role is to assemble all the available resources and tell the tale. He also points out that the idea of an individual author is a modern one and a societal construct "…emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation..."

In the next section, Barthes highlights how different authors project the author. Though the sway of the author remains to be powerful, some writers have attempted to loosen it, challenging the centrality of author. Mallarmé recognized that it is "language which speaks, not the author." Valéry stressed the "essentially verbal condition" of literature. Proust distorts the relation between the writer and his characters. And surrealism, "contributed to the desacralization of the image of the Author" by stressing the disappointment of expectations of meaning. Whereas, Linguistics has shown that diction is an empty process as "…the author is never more than the instance writing…language knows a 'subject', not a 'person', and this subject empty out- side of the very enunciation which defines it."

Barthes also discusses how the removal of the author transforms the modern text. According to him, there is no author but only an idea of the author, much alike the idea of a teacher-whoever performs the function of teaching can become a teacher. The concept of the scriptor has replaced the author, who neither precedes nor 'fathers' the text. A scriptor is rather born simultaneously with the text. In writing, the modern scriptor traces a field with no origin, or at least one which has "no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins". Therefore, it benefits someone economically to be called a scriptor to avoid labeling. It is liberating for a writer as it does not carry the burden of the author. However, the question still continues to bother that whether it is so easy to deny the role of the individual who crystallizes it all and gives it a definite shape.

 

References:

·         Original text: The Death of the Author

·         Classroom discussions and the lecture

·          M.A.R. Habib's "A History of Literary Criticism—From Plato to the Present"

·         The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism

·         http://www.rlwclarke.net/courses/LITS3304/2004-2005/09ABarthesDeathoftheAuthor.pdf

(Notes of the lecture delivered on 18 December 2013 by Dr.Anil Pinto. Prepared by Anushka Chowdhury)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Post Structuralism

Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of mid-20th-century French and continental philosophers and critical theorists who came to international prominence in the 1960s and '70s. A major theme of post structuralism is instability in the human sciences, due to the complexity of humans themselves and the impossibility of fully escaping structures in order to study them.

Post-structuralism is a response to structuralism. Structuralism is an intellectual movement developed in Europe from the early to mid-20th century. It argued that human culture may be understood by means of a structure modeled on language (i.e., structural linguistics) that differs from concrete reality and from abstract ideas a "third order" that mediates between the two. Post-Structuralists authors all present different critiques of structuralism, but common themes include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of the structures that structuralism posits and an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute those structures. Writers whose work is often characterized as post-Structuralists include Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, and Julia Kristeva, although many theorists who have been called "post-Structuralists" have rejected the label.

 

Structuralism accuse the post-structuralism for not following through the implications of the views on language on which their intellectual systems are based. Structuralism holds that the language not really reflects and records the world but it shapes.Post structuralism opposes this view saying that we are entering into a world of absolute uncertainty because man has no access to anything that is beyond linguistic processing and theorist standard to measure anything. The fixed intellectual reference points are permanently renewed by properly taking on board what structuralism said about language. So post Structuralists anxiety over language is important to know  their concern. They say that the urge for language leads to go beyond in our traction and may cause confusion. It can express things we did not intent. The filler words like " I mean " etc. shows that the linguistic urge is not in our control always. To understand post-structuralism basic knowledge of structuralism and language (deviation towards structuralism) they criticize Structuralists conviction. Language is a system of rules but not applied to any other systems. Structuralists believe in common stable meaning.post structuralism do not deviates  from this. Sign stand its own. Meaning is arbitrary, language is not natural fixed signifier- structuralism . Post structuralism subvert the notion of structuralism.

References

·          Classroom discussions and the lecture

(Notes of the lecture delivered on 10 December 2013 by Ass.Prof.Vijayaganesh prepared by Ani Mariam Philip)

·         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structuralism

 

‘Structuralism and Literary Criticism’ - Gerard Genette

Structuralism is a way to examines a literary text to arrive at their meaning, rather than the actual meanings of the text themselves. It is a study of structure wherever they occur. In the essay Genette analyses content, logics, grammars and semiotics. He is considering structuralism as a method to study literary criticism. In the beginning of the essay Genette is establishing difference between Bricoleur and Engineer, Art critic and Literary critic and a Writer and a Critic.                                                                                                                      Later on Genette moves to structuralism in literature and how it should engage with literature. He explains the importance of structuralism as follows:

·         Establishes the relation between the form and the message. It is concerned with the message too i.e, the bone structure.

·         Semantic phenomenon i.e, it attacks the meanings.

·         Larger unities of discourse i.e, system f Forms – code & System of meanings – meaning.

·         Study of structures wherever they occur.

Genette goes on to say that, Structuralism is not necessarily an intrinsic fact of nature but rather is a way of thinking and it tries to conceive structures rather than perceive them. In other words they are discovering, but are actually inventing. Criticism studies content, where as structuralism deals with language and its form. It is the explanation of texts or events in their own terms, not in relation to external causes. This is very clear from the example of Oedipus Rex. When one deals with text as an object, he reads biography and sociology structurally where they abandon psychological, sociological and explanations.                                                                                                                               He then moves on to how structuralism differs from others. Structuralism is not thematic analysis and it is in structures. New criticism is a structural methodology, even though it is not structuralism. In structural analysis of theme, it would be seen in relation of themes as a network of social meanings which constitute culture. Structuralist analysis is different from Marxism or psychoanalysis. According to Merleau-Ponty structuralism is related to ethnology. It is a way of thinking and requires us to transform ourselves.

Genette says when there is hermeneutics and when the text is available to us in that immediate way, then structural reading fades; but whenever we have to look more objectively, when we are transversing barriers of time, culture or interest, then the structural method. Genette goes on to suggest that the difference between hermeneutic and structural reading is a matter of the critical position of the critic. Genette suggests that topics is an area of study that structuralism can bring us to  the traditional subjects and forms of the culture. Creativity is in a sense structural, as it depends on our expectation, which it plays upon. As literature is a system, no work of literature is an autonomous whole; similarly, literature itself is not autonomous but is part of the larger structures of signification of the culture. Structuralism studies literature historically by studying it as it were in cross-section at different times, by seeing in what way literature divides up the traditional topics of the cultural imagination. A structural analysis of the construction of cultural meaning can thence replace the meaning of the individual instance, the particular work, while the meaning of the individual work is illumined and rendered more fully significant by being read in the context of its full systemic, cultural meaning.

 

References:

·         Original text of Gerard Genette's essay "Structuralism and Literary Criticism"

·          Classroom discussions and the lecture

(Notes of the lecture delivered on 10 December 2013 by Dr. Anil Joseph Pinto; prepared by Angel Joy)

notes on Gerard Genette

Myth Today -Roland Barthes

The second section of Roland Barthes' "Mythologies", titled "Myth Today", is a theoretical discussion of Barthes' program for myth analysis which is demonstrated in the first section of Mythologies. What Barthes terms as "myth" is in fact the manner in which a culture signifies and grants meaning to the world around it. According to Barthes, anything can be a myth, and he follows this approach throughout the examples in Mythologies. Barthes picks Saussure's theory and popular culture and develops the idea of semiotics further.

 

According to Barthes, myth is a form of signification. However myth is different from ordinary speech and language. Barthes follows Saussure's discussion regarding the nature of the linguistic sign and he characterizes myth a second class of signification. What was the sign in the first order of language (for example the signifier "cigarette" and the signified of an object made of paper and tobacco) turns into a signifier in the second order (signifying lung cancer). In other words, myth for Barthes is a realm of second class signification which could be seen as a cultural association, to distinguish from denotation.  With myth being a secondary system of signification in which the sign becomes a signifier, that process of signification takes the meaning of symbols in the myth to the realm of association, not denotation.

 

According to Barthes myth, as a form of speech, is not limited to lingual signs and other types of representation (visual, musical etc.) can also take part in a myth because they convey secondary meanings that surpass their referential denotation. Barthes gives the example of a magazine cover portraying a African child in uniform saluting the French flag. The first level of signification is the denotation one – the child saluting the flag. But in the second level of signification, that of myth and connotation, the sign becomes a signifier and the child hails France as a great empire.

 

Since myths do not convey their meaning directly but in a covert manner, Barthes calls his semiology of myths "a science of forms". In the picture, Barthes analyzes everything works together- the child, uniform, flag, salutation etc. to produce the desired meaning and to establish the myth.

 

 

Characteristics of myth

1. Myth is a type of speech

2. Relation between the form of the myth (the black soldier saluting) and concept(French imperialism) is unequal.

3. Form is poorer than the concept. (On the cover, the black soldier becomes simply a form for communication of the idea. Thus, the individual is robbed of his history and loses his individuality.)

References:

·                    Original text of Roland Barthe's essay, "Myth Today"

·                    Classroom discussions and the lecture

(Notes of the lecture delivered on 6 December 2013 by Dr. Anil Joseph Pinto; prepared by Anjali Menon)

 

Gerard Genette’s Structuralism and Literary Criticism

Gerard Genette's Structuralism and Literary Criticism

Before trying to attend on the above mentioned essay it is necessary to understand the very term Paratext. None of the students in class could come up with a clear- cut definition and to this Prof. Pinto replies that Paratext refers to that which is not a main text. To make it more simple; contexts, index, reviews, footnotes etc. are paratexts. Therefore, what Gerard Genette is known for is of his attempt to theorize Paratext for the first time. Hence, texts like prologue, epilogue, forward etc. are paratexts.

When Prof. Pinto began with the essay he made it very essential to point out that a reader must literally feel the text and says "if you can read it, touch it." For example if one is asked to write an essay/ paragraph on M A English, one might come up with good number of ideas, but what makes the essay unique in itself is the way how each paragraph is tied up together with coherence. It should be channelized in such a way that it becomes a thesis statement.

As the reading session began, Prof. Pinto made it clear that students must try to sum up or come up with the main idea of each paragraph. To start with, Genette in his first few lines introduces the reader to the word bricolage- "a kind of intellectual bricolage." Bricolage is something made or put together using whatever material is available. Prof. Pinto simplifies it by comparing it with the word collage which is to make an intellectual use of things which is viewed as unuseful or simply waste. Genette describes how literature uses the same material which it studies. It explains the nature of literary criticism and how it is a metalanguage and metaliterature in which discourses uses the discourses or literature uses the literature itself. Prof. Pinto also enlightens his students with an important note that one should always question about what the paragraph is all about- "if you can answer that then you know to read paragraphs."

The second paragraph distinguishes the distinction between a writer and a critic i.e. what a sign (work) is to writer becomes meaning (object of critical discourse) for a critic. The third and fourth paragraph purely defines of structuralism as a method and how it can be compressed into literary criticism, the entire history of literary criticism and how it has handled code and message so far. The fifth paragraph demonstrates how meaning is understood through structuralist study i.e. structural analysis connects the system of form and the system of meanings. In the sixth paragraph focus is on how structuralism is not just confined to smaller elements of language but also its meaning, to make it easier it prepares us to learn how structuralism can be used in literature. Thus, structuralism is a study of 'large units' like narrative, description and other major forms of literary expression i.e. it can be used for higher levels of discourses  as well and as a student of literature one must always try learning and researching such ideas.

References:

·                    Original text of Gerard Genette's essay "Structuralism and Literary Criticism"

·                    Classroom discussions and the lecture

(Notes of the lecture delivered on 09 December 2013 by Dr. Anil Joseph Pinto; prepared by Anagha Asok)

Gerard Genette’s Structuralism and Literary Criticism

Claude Levi-Strauss’ “The Structural Study of Myth” (cont.)

Claude Levi-Strauss attempts to demonstrate certain misinterpretations of mythical thought, such as Carl Gustav Jung's proposition that a given mythological archetype possesses certain meaning in itself.  He argues this to be an error comparable to early linguists' notion that a sound may possess affinity with a meaning—an idea which was discredited by the more scientific Saussurean principle of the arbitrary character of linguistic signs.  Nevertheless, though Jung's approach does not hold water from a structuralist standpoint, it is, in its own right, both interesting and useful.  (This is one manner in which theories in the social sciences differ from scientific theories—the latter, once disproved, are no longer considered valid.)

 

Staying with Saussurean principles, Levi-Strauss goes on to demonstrate how, while the particulars of a myth describing events having taken place long ago may continue to shift and evolve (like content words in language), certain underlying patterns remain timeless (like structure words).  At this point, it would be useful to refer to the tabular analysis in the post dated 7 December 2013.  In a similar fashion, if the fairy tales of Cinderella and Snow White were to be broken down "horizontally", one would discover the emergence of "vertical" relations between the two.  Likewise, a structural analysis of the Oedipus myth would necessitate consideration of all its constituent variants/versions over time.

 

In this context, it is pertinent to understand that the myths of many cultures essentially attempt to address, albeit in a far-fetched manner, complex questions concerning the basic origin of human life.  The word "human" comes from the Latin word humanus, thought to be a hybrid relative of homo, meaning "man", and humus, meaning "earth", suggesting the notion that man is firmly rooted to the earth.  An analogy is sometimes drawn with vegetables, which spring from the earth, decay, and then return to where they come from.  This is reflected in the Judeo-Christian creation story, in which God creates the first man Adam out of clay.  However, as per Greek mythology, humans did not emerge from the earth, unlike monsters and dragons.  Even in Hindu mythology, suras or deities are seen as benevolent supernatural beings and asuras or demons/power-seeking deities are viewed as naturalists.

 

Levi-Strauss believes that the Oedipus myth has to do with the inability of a culture which holds the belief that mankind is autochthonous to find a satisfactory transition to the knowledge that human beings are actually born from the union of man and woman.  The myth, he says, attempts to relate the original problem (was man born from one or born from two?) to the derivative problem (born from different or born from same?).  While Column III of the aforementioned tabular analysis provides instances of monsters overcome by men, thereby denying the origin of humans from the earth, Column IV indicates humans springing from earth with difficulty in walking straight and standing upright, thereby affirming the individual origin in the earth.  (The naming of characters based on their physical attributes or personality traits, as seen in Column IV, is not specific to Greek literature; it can also be seen, for instance, in Hindu mythology and Panchatantra tales.)

 

Let us also briefly examine the story of Adam and Eve from this perspective.  If Eve was created out of Adam's rib, should she be looked at as either his sister or daughter, thus meaning that their offspring come from an incestuous relationship?  Even Sigmund Freud's concept of the Oedipus complex, where a child is trying to overvalue one parent against the other, is regarded as the latest version of the same myth grappling with the original problem.  Hence, every version belongs to the myth—there is no single true version of which all the others are but copies or distortions.  It can therefore be said that even Levi-Strauss' essay/analysis is a version of the myth trying to make sense of the problem of origin.

 

Eventually, it is noted that a myth is an aspect of human expression which is less concerned with delivering the message than dramatising the intractable questions about the meaning of human life.  It is similar to theatrical performances, where conflict is dramatised and the eventual message or tying-up of loose ends, though necessary, generally appears tedious and does not hold the audiences' attention.  The last scene in Shakespeare's Othello and the spectacular depiction of Shiva's devotees vis-a-vis Vishnu's concluding message in Yakshagana performances are cases in point.

 

Levi-Strauss concludes by stating that the function of repetition of the same sequence in a myth is to render its structure apparent.  So while its growth is a continuous process, its structure remains discontinuous.  Consequently, the kind of logic in mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modern science.

 

References:

·                    Original text of Claude Levi-Strauss' essay "The Structural Study of Myth"

·                    M.A.R. Habib's "A History of Literary Criticism—From Plato to the Present" (United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005)

·                    Classroom discussions and slides used during the lecture

(Notes of the lecture delivered on 3 December 2013 by Dr. Anil Joseph Pinto; prepared by Vishal R. Choradiya)