including Deconstruction The Play of Meaning(s): Reader-Response Criticism, Dialogics, and Structuralism and Poststructuralism

Reader-Response Criticism Reader-response critics feel that readers have been ignored in discussions of the reader process, when they should have been the central concern. A text does not even exist until it is read by some reader. The book cover of Reader- Response Criticism, edited by Jane P. Tompkins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980.

Reader-response critics are saying that in effect, if a text does not have a reader, it does not exist– or at least, it has no meaning. Davis,Todd F. Formalist Criticism and Reader-Response Theory. N.Y: Palgrave, 2002.

Yet another kind of reader-oriented criticism is reception theory. Such criticism depends heavily on reviews in newspapers, magazines, and journals and on personal letters for evidence of public reception. Wolfgang Iser, the writer of The Act of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.

Dialogics Dialogics is Bakhtin’s key term used to describe the narrative theory. Dialogics refers to the inherent “addressivity” of all language. Mikhail Bakhtin’s constant focus is on the many voices in a novel.

Just as the public ritual of carnival inverts values in order to question them, so the novel may call closed meanings into question. Carnivalization Bakhtin, Mikhail. Speech Genres & Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Texas, Austin: U of Texas P, 1986.

Bakhtin claims that the novel carnivalizes through diversities of speech and voice reflected in its structure. Emerson, Caryl. The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin. New Jersey, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997.

Grotesque Bakhtin’s notion of carnival is connected with that of the grotesque. The collectivity partaking in the carnival is aware of its unity in time as well as its historic immortality, associated with its continual death and renewal. Fall of the Rebel Angels by Brueghel

Grotesque According to Bakhtin, the body is in need of a type of clock if it is to be aware of its timelessness. The grotesque is the term used by Bakhtin to describe the emphasis on bodily changes through eating, evacuation, and sex: it is used as a measuring device. eatingtion, and as

Georges Bataille French writer Georges Bataille’s work influenced Foucault and Derrida. One of the characteristics of his work is its use of grotesque detail. His novella, Story of the Eye, initially read as pure pornography, is now regarded as one of the most significant works of the time.

Structuralism: Context and Definition Ferdinand de Saussure represented meaning in terms of this diagram. It depicts how an abstract mental concept is expressed in material form through a "sound- image" (i.e., an utterance, a written word, a picture).

The two elements are irreducibly united, each evoking the recollection of the other. The mental concept is called the signified, and the material sound-image is better known as the signifier. Meaning, then, is instantiated in the process of signification. Saussure, who spoke French, called the sound pattern signifiant, and the concept signifié. These words have been translated in lots of different ways.

Vladimir Propp studied Russian folktales as structural units that together contained a limited number of types of characters and actions; Propp called these actants and functions. Russian Formalism: Extending Saussure Vladimir Propp.

Victor Shklovsky pointed out literature’s constant tendency toward estrangement and defamiliarization, away from habitual responses to ordinary experience and/or ordinary language. Ex. Poetry. Victor Shklovsky Mayakovsky and Viktor Shklovsky, Germany, 1923

Story and Plot Story is the elementary narrative that seeks relatively easy recognition, whereas plot estranges, prolongs, or complicates perception as in, say, one of Henry James’s fictions. Vladimir Propp

Lévi-Strauss Lévi-Strauss concentrated on the paradigmatic approach– that is, on the deep or imbedded structures of discourse. Lévi-Strauss. 蔡康永兩代電力公司的靈感來源？

Structural Anthropology In Structural Anthropology, Levi-Strauss considers culture a system of symbolic communication, to be investigated with methods that others have used more narrowly in the discussion of novels, political speeches, sports, and movies. The culinary triangle, diagramming a structural analysis of symbolism within cuisine. Adapted from The Raw and the Cooked.

French Structuralism Instead of the Russian formalists’ distinction between story and plot, the French structuralists use the terms histoire and discours. The well known French (post)Structuralist Roland Barthes.

Form and History Barthes determines in Writing Degree Zero (1953) that language and style are both matters that appeal to conventions, and are thus not purely creative. Rather, form, or what Barthes calls ‘writing’, the specific way an individual chooses to manipulate conventions of style for a desired effect, is the unique and creative act.

Form and History One’s form is vulnerable to become a convention once it has been made available to the public. This means that being creative is an ongoing process of continual change and reaction.

Form and History In Michelet, a critical look at the work of French historian Jules Michelet, Barthes continues to develop these notions and apply them to broader fields.Jules Michelet He explains that Michelet’s views of history and society are obviously flawed, but that in studying his works one should not seek to learn from Michelet’s claims.

Form and History Rather, one should maintain a critical distance and learn from his errors. Understanding how and why his thinking is flawed will show more about his period of history than his own observations.

Avante-garde Literature Similarly, Barthes felt avant-garde writing should be praised for maintaining just such a distance between its audience and its work.avant-garde By maintaining an obvious artificiality rather than making claims to great subjective truths, avant-garde writers assure their audiences maintain an objective perspective in reading their works.

In this sense, Barthes believed that art should be critical to interrogate the world rather than seek to explain it like Michelet would.

Poststructuralism: Deconstruction Whereas structuralism finds order and meaning in the text as in the sentence, deconstruction finds disorder and a constant tendency of the language to refute its apparent sense. Michel Foucault. Known for trying to erase the traditional boundaries between science, history, philosophy, and science.

Foucault In his first major book, he studied the meaning of madness in history and his time. He argues that madness is also a way society uses to exclude some unwelcome members. In Foucault's view, the treatment of madness amounted to repeated brutality until the pattern of judgment and punishment was internalized by the patient.internalized

Instead of discovering one ultimate meaning for the text, deconstruction describes the text as always in a state of change, furnishing only provisional meanings. Jacques Derrida. He deconstructs Saussure and Rousseau to illustrate Western society's logocentrism and phoncentrism, or focus on the "metaphysics of presence."

Limitations The most notorious characteristic of deconstructionist and post-modernist theories is their obscurity. Noam Chomsky has expressed the view that Derrida uses "pretentious rhetoric" to obscure the simplicity of his ideas.Noam Chomsky Some, however, argue that it is Derrida and Foucault’s intention to create this obscurity so that their ideas will not be too readily internalized.

Limitations As Barthes points out, one’s form is vulnerable to become a convention once it has been made available to the public. So for post-modernism the same vulnerable exists when the post-modernists who set out to deconstruct the canon and paradigms, they become canon themselves. How to express without becoming a convention? That’s the limitation.