The emergence of the “modern” novel in the eighteenth century, with its emphasis on narrative realism and its intimate involvement with the affairs of everyday life, is correlated with a gradual separation between mundane and imaginative fiction, a crucial breaking… Read More ›
Structural linguistics was developed by Ferdinand de Saussure between 1913 and 1915, although his work wasn’t translated into English and popularized until the late 1950s. Before Saussure, language was studied in terms of the history of changes in individual words… Read More ›
Ferdinand de Saussure has been described as the ‘father’ of modern linguistics through his influential Cours de Linguistique Générale (1916). There are three reasons for a belief that linguistics is of very recent origin: Linguistics is a human science, and… Read More ›
UNIVERSITY OF CALICUT V SEMESTER OPEN COURSE APPLIED LANGUAGE SKILLS (EN5D03) OPENPDF OPEN DOC
English is descended from an ancient parent language now called Proto-Indo-European, spoken about 5,000 years ago. There are no written records of this ancient language, but we know that it existed because of the many related languages descended from it…. Read More ›
Throughout his career as a fiction writer, William Dean Howells worked against the sentimentality and idealization that pervaded popular American literature in the nineteenth century. He pleaded for characters, situations, behavior, values, settings, and even speech patterns that were true… Read More ›
Among Frederick Grove’s (February 14, 1879 – September 9, 1948) primary themes, the foremost is the issue of free will. Through his characters, Grove asks how much freedom anyone has in the face of often accidental but usually overwhelming pressures… Read More ›
For a writer with a full-time professional career, Louis Auchincloss (1917-2010) proved astoundingly prolific, producing nearly one book of fiction or nonfiction each year from the 1950’s into the early twenty-first century. Like that of many highly prolific writers, the… Read More ›
Roland Barthes was born at Cherbourg in 1915. Barely a year later, his father died in naval combat in the North Sea, so that the son was brought up by the mother and, periodically, by his grandparents. Before completing his… Read More ›
The Danish linguist and semiotician, Louis Hjelmslev, was born in 1899 and died on 30 May 1965. Hjelmslev, who founded the Copenhagen Linguistic Circle, attempted to render more rigorous and clear Saussure’s general theory of language and semiotics. In particular, Hjelmslev… Read More ›
Before 1960, few people in academic circles or outside had heard the name of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). But after 1968, European intellectual life was a-buzz with references to the father of both linguistics and structuralism. That Saussure was as… Read More ›
In his book on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (Derrida 19871) Jacques Derrida relates how James Joyce (1882–1941) was present in his very first book, the Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry (1962), and present again in a key essay, Plato’s Pharmacy,… Read More ›
Born in Aleppo in 1902, Emile Benveniste was professor of linguistics at the Colle’ge de France from 1937 to 1969, when he was forced to retire due to ill-health, tragically caused by aphasia. He died in 1976. After being educated… Read More ›
Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895–1975) is increasingly being recognized as one of the major literary theorists of the twentieth century. He is perhaps best known for his radical philosophy of language, as well as his theory of the novel, underpinned by… Read More ›
Psycholinguistics is concerned with the relationship between language and the mind. This distinguishes it from sociolinguistics, on the one hand, where the focus is on the social dimension of language, and stylistics, on the other, where it is on the… Read More ›
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) came to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the publication of Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967) and Margins of Philosophy (1972). Derrida’s name is inextricably linked with the term ‘deconstruction‘. Largely because… Read More ›
American linguist, whose work was fundamental to the development of modern approaches to the study of language. In addition to his research in linguistics he has a sustained role in political activism and reflection, and has written copiously from an… Read More ›
Modern Narrative Theory begins with Russian Formalism in the 1920s, specifically with the work of Roman Jakobson, Yury Tynyanov, and Viktor Shklovsky. Tynyanov combined his skills as a historical novelist with Formalism to produce, with Jakobson, Theses on Language (1928),… Read More ›
In her works like Speculum of the Other Woman (translated 1985) and This Sex Which is Not One (1987), Luce Irigaray has argued that the woman has been constructed as the specular Other of man in all Western discourses. Combining Psychoanalysis,… Read More ›
A.J. Greimas‘ work has been an effort to analyse all forms of discourse. Greimas emphasizes the idea that language is an “assemblage of structures of signification” which implies that the language system cannot be “given” in advance but must be… Read More ›
C.S. Peirce worked on logic and semiotics (this latter term he translated from the Greek), frequently linking the two. He argued that signs are the vehicles for thought as well as the articulation of logical forms. Peirce differs from Saussure… Read More ›
One of the most distinguished thinkers in linguistics, philology and aesthetics, Jakobson was responsible for the development of semiotics as a critical practice. Since his work is extremely wide-ranging in scope, Jakobson’s contribution to semiotics and structuralism alone are discussed… Read More ›
The most important of the structural narratologists, Gerard Genette, has argued for the autonomous nature of the literary text. Genette’s work has been of particular use to literary critics for his attempts to develop models of reading texts in a… Read More ›
Eco proceeds from the Peircean assumption of “unlimited semiosis.” Though unlimited semiosis indicates that signs always refer to other signs (and that a text is open to infinite interpretations), Eco seeks a middle ground between univocal meaning and infinite meanings. For… Read More ›
Hartman advocates the use of incomplete references, and seeks a critical language that is highly figurative and critical at the same time. His is a rich in eccentric style of writing that is self-conscious and constantly calls attention to the… Read More ›
One of the most important members of the Yale School of deconstruction, de Man developed a rigorous critical practice of reading texts, which may be termed “rhetorical reading.” (1) For de Man language is always figurative and not referential and… Read More ›
In stark contrast to affective stylistics and to all forms of transactional reader response theory, subjective reader-response theory does not call for the analysis of textual cues. For subjective reader-response critics, led by the work of David Bleich, readers’ responses… Read More ›
Affective stylistics is derived from analyzing further the notion that a literary text is an event that occurs in time—that comes into being as it is read—rather than an object that exists in space. The text is examined closely, often… Read More ›
Often associated with the work of Louise Rosenblatt, who formulated many of its premises, transactional reader-response theory analyzes the transaction between text and reader. Rosenblatt doesn’t reject the importance of the text in favor of the reader; rather she claims… Read More ›
A critical approach developed in the 1980s in the writings of Stephen Greenblatt, New Historicism is characterised by a parallel reading of a text with its socio-cultural and historical conditions, which form the co-text. New Historians rejected the fundamental tenets… Read More ›
Claiming that “Identity is performatively constituted”, Judith Butler in her path breaking Gender Trouble (1990) formulated a postmodernist notion of gender, in line with the deconstructive ethos and contradictory to the traditional notion’ , that genders are fixed categories. Butler… Read More ›
Postcolonialism is characterized by the rejection of Western universalism and political imperialism, soon after independence gained by Asian and African countries, and an awareness that the colonizer’s language is permanently tainted and to write in it involves a subjugation to… Read More ›
In the wake on Postmodernist critique of modernism and liberal humanism, and with the vogue of Derridean deconstruction and decentering of the subject/centre, the Western canon of “great” books, not only in literature but in all areas of humanistic study,… Read More ›
A term popularised by Julia Kristeva in her analysis of Bakhtin’s concepts Dialogism and Carnival, intertextuality is a concept that informs structuralist poststructuralist deliberations in its contention that individual texts are inescapably related to other texts in a matrix of… Read More ›
The Yale School is the name given to an influential group of literary critics, theorists, and philosophers of literature who were influenced by Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction. Many of the theorists were affiliated with Yale University in the late… Read More ›
The word “aporia” originally came from Greek which, in philosophy, meant a philosophical puzzle or state of being in puzzle, and a rhetorically useful expression of doubt. In contemporary theoretical parlance, the term has more been associated with deconstructive criticism,… Read More ›
Deconstruction involves the close reading of texts in order to demonstrate that any given text has irreconcilably contradictory meanings, rather than being a unified, logical whole. As J. Hillis Miller, the preeminent American deconstructionist, has explained in an essay entitled Stevens’… Read More ›
Upholding the notion of decentering, Derrida asserts that a “fixed” structure is a myth, and that all structures desire “immobility” beyond free play, which is impossible. The assumption of a centre expresses the desire for a “reassuring certitude” which stands… Read More ›
Derrida’s formulation of “ecriture” emerges from his criticism of the most significant binaries of speech and writing. Discussing these binaries in his essay Signature Event Context (1972), in an attempt to reorient the established hierarchy of speech over wrifing, (what he… Read More ›
With the death of the author as theorised by Barthes, the text gets liberated and revels in an endless free !ay of meanings, and escapes from all forms of textual authoriy. As words/ signs erupt into multitudes of signifiers that differ and… Read More ›
A concept introduced by Derrida, differance is a pun on “difference” and “deferment”, and is that attribute of language, by which meaning is generated because of a word’s difference from other words in a signifying system, and at the same… Read More ›
Decentering in poststructuralism is a consequence of Derrida’s critique of binary oppositions, especially of speech/writing, where he accused Saussure of privileging speech over writing, owing to the presence, and authority of the speaker. Terming it as phonocentrism, which is a manifestation… Read More ›
Derrida’s concept of deconstruction displaced structuralism and undertook to decentre or subvert the traditional claims for the existence of all foundations such as knowledge, meaning, truth and the subject. Derrida identifies in all of Western philosophic traditions, a logocentrism or… Read More ›
The second half of the twentieth century, with its torturous experiences of the World Wars, Holocaust and the advent of new technologies, witnessed revolutionary developments in literary theory that were to undermine several of the established notions of Western literary… Read More ›
Espoused by Tzvetan Todorov and Roland Barthes, Structuralist narratology illustrates how a story’s meaning develops from its overall structure (the langue) rather than from each individual story’s isolated theme (the parole). According to Aristotle, all narratives develop longitudinally, from beginning to… Read More ›
In The Savage Mind (1962), the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss used the word bricolage to describe the characteristic patterns of mythological thought. Bricolage is the skill of using whatever is at hand and recombining them to create something new. Levi-Strauss… Read More ›
Applying Saussurean, principles to the realm of anthropology, Claude Levi. Strauss in his Structuralist Anthropology (1958) analysed cultural phenomena includinig mythology, kinship and food preparation. Employing the concepts of langue and parole in his search for the fundamental structures of the human… Read More ›
Differing from the Saussurean view that the connection between the signifier and signified is arbitrary, Barthes argued that this connection, which is an act of signification, is the result of collective contract, and over a period of time, the connection… Read More ›
Barthes’ analysis of Balzac’s Sarassin in S/Z (1970) has led to some major development in poststructuralist theory. Barthes identifies two main types of literature, roughly corresponding to the 19th century realist novel and the twentieth century experimental modernist novel. Traditionally, the realist… Read More ›
One of the seminal contributions of Roland Barthes, a versatile literary and cultural critic and semiologist, was the poststructuralist distinction between two main types of texts roughly corresponding to nineteenth century realism and twentieth century experimental modernism. In his 1970… Read More ›
Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author (1968) plays a pioneering role in contemporary theory as it encapsulates certain key ideas of poststructuralist theory and also marks Barthes’ transition from structuralism to poststructuralism. The title itself, in a rhetorical way announces… Read More ›
Embodying a transformation from structuralism to poststructuralism, Roland Barthes, though initially characterised by a Marxist perspective, extended structural analysis and semiology to broad cultural phenomena, and promulgated and popularised the poststructuralist notions of “the death of the author”, of the… Read More ›
A highly influential branch of study, Semiotics or the study of signs, can be considered the foundation for literary theory. Many of the revolutionary theories of the twentieth century, such as Structuralism and Poststructuralism, Structural Anthropology (Levi-Strauss), Psychoanalysis (Lacan), Cultural… Read More ›
Announcing a revolutionary change in the study of language, which had been hitherto philological, Saussure with his Course in General Linguistics (1916), introduced Structural Linguistics, which considers language as a system of signs constructed by cultural conventions. Constituting of a… Read More ›
The advent of critical theory in the post-war period, which comprised various complex disciplines like linguistics, literary criticism, Psychoanalytic criticism, structuralism, postcolonialism etc., proved hostile to the liberal consensus which reigned the realm of criticism between the 1930s and `50s. Among… Read More ›
The Chicago School of critics or the Neo Aristotelians included professors of the departments of Humanities, University of Chicago, who were engaged in bringing about a radical transformation in an attempt to revive Humanities and make them institutionally more competitive… Read More ›