Showing papers in "Substance in 1988"

Abstract: Note on Translation Introduction by Michael Holquist Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel) The Problem of Speech Genres The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis From Notes Made in 1970-71 Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences Index

Abstract: Since its first publication in English in 1985, Mieke Bal's Narratology has become the international classic and comprehensive introduction to the theory of narrative texts. Narratology is a systematic account of narrative techniques, methods, their transmission, and reception, in which Bal distills years of study of the ways in which we understand both literary and non-literary works. In this third edition, Bal updates the book to include more analysis of film narratives while also sharpening and tightening her language to make it the most readable and student-friendly edition to date. Bal also introduces new sections that treat and clarify several modernist texts that pose narratological challenges. With changes prompted by ten years of feedback from scholars and teachers, Narratology remains the most important contribution to the study of the way narratives work, are formed, and are received.

Abstract: This volume represents the first sustained effort to relate Derrida's work to the Western philosophical tradition from Plato to Heidegger. Bringing together twelve essays by twelve leading Derridean philosophers and an important paper by Derrida previously unpublished in English, the collection retrieves the significance of deconstruction for philosophy.

Abstract: Perhaps more than any other contemporary critical theorist, Michel Serres is aware of how extensive is the shift now taking place in the ground of representation. In physics its epicenter is the emerging interdisciplinary research front known as the science of chaos; in mathematics, fractal geometry; in literary theory, deconstruction.' Although these projects are all very different, they share the belief that chaos is not simply the opposite of order, but its precursor, partner, and (for deconstruction) supplanter. From this changed perception of the relation between order and disorder flow multiple implications. The most important for Serres's project derives from formal results within information theory that demonstrated noise in a communication channel need not always destructively interfere with the message, but rather could itself become part of the message. To explain how noise could be seen as a positive rather than a negative quantity, I will need to review briefly Claude Shannon's theory of in

Abstract: Rubrication is an essential part of the textual apparatus of a medieval manuscript book. Composed by copyists, rubrics serve an important function of mediation between the text and its readers: they may identify author and title, mark episodic divisions of narrative texts, or provide a moral commentary.' Insofar as the rubric addresses the reader directly, from outside the fictional world, it resembles a narrator's intervention; but since it is a voice from outside the narrative framework, it can be compared even more appropriately to a gloss. Rubrics differ from glosses in that they are most often placed between segments of text, in sequential arrangement, rather than existing in simultaneous juxtaposition with the text as does a marginal or interlinear gloss. But like a gloss, the rubrication surrounds and invades the text, interacting with it and yet remaining apart; its difference is clearly marked by the red ink in which it is written.

Abstract: There has been no lack of general theorizing about games and their possible relationship to literature from Huizinga, to Fink, to Caillois. From the very beginnings of mathematical game theory in 1944 or earlier, it seemed likely that a system applicable to real decision-making and hypothetical scenariosnotably in the domain of nuclear strategy-might have application to fictional, literary decision-making and scenarios as well. In a landmark number of the Yale French Studies Jacques Ehrmann wrote that any theory of communicationand hence of literature-must necessarily imply "a theory of play... and a game theory." Literary researchers, he concluded, would one day surely open a dialogue with "our colleagues in the sciences." Moreover, any such rapprochement of literary research and the sciences would likely complement other systems that seek rigorously to describe narration. In particular, it might well relate to narrative semiotics-as a recent article by A. J. Greimas, reprinted in SubStance, implicitly suggests.' Despite such theorizing however-and despite a number of applications of such writers as Caillois to literary works, there has been little application of mathematical game theory and related concepts to specific texts. More literally than is usually the case with such statements, the application of mathematical game theory to literature is a "neglected field." The major and perhaps unique exception to this is a 1980 book by Steven J. Brams, Biblical Games (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980). In Biblical Games Brams states that to the best of his knowledge "there has not previously been a book-length treatment of a humanistic or literary work that makes serious use of game theory"-a statement my own search would seem to confirm. Despite its remarkable originality, Brams' work has apparently attracted little attention among students of critical methodology. Although favorably reviewed in The New York Times, it has not been reviewed in SubStance or, apparently, in any comparable journal. The PMLA Bibliography does not list it. Yet Brams' pioneering method has application in a wide variety of literary studies. His emphases, his "blindness and insight," so to speak, invite constructive comparison with those of game-oriented analysis.

Abstract: By the word "paratext," I mean all of the marginal or supplementary data around the text. It comprises what one could call various thresholds: authorial and editorial (i.e., titles, insertions, dedications, epigraphs, prefaces and notes); media related (i.e., interviews with the author, official summaries) and private (i.e., correspondence, calculated or non-calculated disclosures), as well as those related to the material means of production and reception, such as groupings, segments, etc. Less a well-defined category than a flexible space, without exterior boundaries or precise and consistent interiors, the paratext consists, as this ambiguous prefix suggest, of all those things which we are never certain belong to the text of a work but which contribute to present-or to "presentify"--the text by making it into a book. It not only marks a zone of transition between text and non-text ("hors-texte"), but also a zone of transaction, a space that is essentially pragmatic and strategic-and here I am referring deliberately to Leon-Pierre Quint's work devoted to Proust's literary strategy. This term, however, is not to be taken in the usual, let us say (unfairly) Balzacian sense of quest for success, power, fortune or glory. For, in regard to the work with which I will be dealing exclusively here, A La Recherche du temps perdu, the Proustian strategy has as its essential objectives first, the publication of the work-itself not a small matter, as experience clearly demonstrated--and then, given the conditions particular to its publication, a pedagogical objective, namely, the instruction of the public so as to guard against eventual misunderstanding and to orient the reader to the kind of reading which Proust considered the most faithful and the most pertinent. It is above all this second objective which relates to the paratext and which therefore we will consider here. As an amateur "Proustian," without pretentions of revealing anything new to the specialist, I would like to offer, first, a succinct and non-exhaustive inventory of the paratext of the Recherche and, then, indicate what (to me) appear to be its principal critical and perhaps even theoretical lessons.

Abstract: Miami Vice has attracted a great deal of attention recently, and most of that attention seems to have focused on the style of the show. Indeed, Miami Vice is arguably the most stylish show ever to have appeared on television (or, at least, on American television). But the stylishness of Miami Vice is not limited to the profusion of continental designer fashions seen in the show. From the bright colors and art deco lettering of the title, to the so-called "music video" sequences, to the locations, set design, lighting, and camera technique, Miami Vice displays an attention to style which, compared to the rest of TV, seems luxurious, extravagant. Some might even say "criminal," feeling that such an expenditure of style must, in some way, hide an attempt to defraud, to cover some bankruptcy of substance. Such a verdict presumes a law and an economy in which the circulation of signifiers that makes up style is grounded in some "real" value. A style that draws attention to itself (stylishness) breaks this law by substituting itself in the place of value. Stylishness becomes, therefore, a kind of counterfeiting; it introduces an element of fraud, a possibility of deceit, into circulation. Given this presumed fraudulence, it seems only appropriate that we discuss stylishness in terms of vice, or to be more specific, in terms of Vice in Miami. In Miami Vice, the city of Miami becomes, much like the Los Angeles offilm noir, a world where appearances are deceiving. On its surface, the city is presented as a paradise, a point which is made quite evident not only in the opening and closing credits-where the signifiers of luxury, tropicality and leisure abound-'but also in explicit statements by the characters. Yet the show also trades on Miami's reputation as a center for international drug trafficking and its position as the nation's leader in violent crime. Indeed, the majority of cases on Miami Vice involve some kind of trafficking, usually either in automatic weapons or drugs (almost always cocaine). What emerges in the Miami of Miami Vice is an image of paradise corrupted, a fallen world where the trafficking of vice tends to merge with the circulation of stylishness. Cocaine, fast cars, luxury yachts, expensive clothes, and submachine guns-all become signifiers

Abstract: Since 1839, Western culture has conditioned its constituents to see in terms of photographic images. That conditioning, however, has not been homogeneous. One has only to examine the discourses that permeate photography to become aware of the fissures continually disrupting its practice. Thus, one of the principal dichotomies that continues to influence the historical, practical, and critical debate on the nature of photography involves its 'objective' vs. its 'subjective' foundations. Is photography to be considered a scientific or an artistic tool? Are photographs factual or are they particularly complex fictions? As the history of these debates reveals, the answers to these questions are relative to the practical uses and the discursive formations instrumental to photographic activity. There is, however, another position which can be adopted in relation to photography's historico-epistemological identity that has not yet been surveyed. This position can be identified through an exploration of an alternative culture delineated with reference to photography's modes of production. A culture of photography does not necessarily have to be defined in terms of the images that have come to embody much of its current historical and social value. Photography's historico-epistemological identity can also be defined in terms of the cultural dimensions of its process of production-after all, photographs do not simply appear; they are produced by a complex transformational process which might also be impregnated with symbolic value. In the following discussion, an alternative postphotographic practice will be described, and its strategic and practical consequences will be considered. This photographic 'counter-practice' will be introduced by an examination of a correspondence between a visual classification system and the cultural priorities expressed by the Judaeo-Christian myth of origins as presented in the first ten verses of Genesis. This correspondence will then provide a point of departure for exposing the authorial and deterministic foundations of all photographic images. The remainder of the paper will be devoted to developing a critique of the principal historical priority sustaining a culture of photographic images-a historico-epistemologicalfixation on the photograph as the most valued product

Abstract: What is true death? And someone will say that the ever courageous gift, presence of mind, belongs to the one who, without being overcome by the spell of death, is capable, even while gazing straight at it, to name it, to "understand" it and, in this knowledge, to pronouce the Lazare veniforas through which death will become a principle, the dreadful power in which the life that carries it must maintain itself in order to master it and to find therein the accomplishment of its mastery (EI 49-50).

Abstract: Interdisciplinary study, whether the most promising or the most perilous trend in the universities today, may be credited with ushering in a renaissance of the large scale analogy. With the old divisions between fields dissolving and even structuralist oppositions slipping their poles, psychology, music, literature, linguistics, anthropology and mathematics are all united under one "metadiscipline," and may all be interpreted as coherent and mutually illuminating signs out of a single great code or fluid grammar. The task of the literary scholar, at such a pass, is less to plot differences than, like Valery's Leonardo, to forge resemblances, often between ideas hitherto thought irreconcilable. Recent developments in deconstruction offer a case in point, inviting us to ponder by what poetic principle those scholars nourished by Nietzschean skepticism should now reopen a debate framed in terms more willing to belief than Nietzschean negativity is used to-the Hellenism versus Hebraism debate. Of course, since the early seventies, when the first efforts of critics like Hartman, Bloom and Miller to push criticism "beyond formalism" gained wide recognition in Derrida's defrocking of the logos, Hellenism, at least in its benign Arnoldian guise of "sweetness and light," has been on the decline. We might be surprised, though, that what are traditionally perceived as the rather stiffer requirements of the Hebraic mode have not likewise been eschewed. On the contrary, deconstructionist heirs of Nietzsche's negativity have embraced Hebraism, if not precisely the Hebraism of Arnold's, or even more recent critics', understanding.

Abstract: What is Flaubert doing in parentheses? A careful reader of Flaubert's Education sentimentale can hardly overlook their frequent use in the text-some seventy times in the course of the novel. Indeed it is somewhat curious that this manner of slashing into the text has remained invisible to critics of Flaubert. Scholars have generally concentrated on revealing the hidden seams which give to Flaubert's style the appearance of a uniform, continuous, tightly woven fabric. But while one of the goals of textual analysis is to describe and analyze the hidden stitches and joints that give the text its apparent unity, it is also important to understand such clearly marked tears in the fabric as parentheses, that which Jacqueline Authier-Revuz has called the "rhetoric of displayed breaks and apparent stitches."2 While parentheses might at first appear to be no more than irrelevant textual minutiae, on closer analysis, they can be seen to constitute a distinct place of discourse. I will argue that this isotopic quality of parenthetical discourse allows the reader to grasp better how Flaubert is grounding what seems to be a constantly-shifting narrative. No doubt parenthetical discourse plays a somewhat ambiguous role. More integrated into the text than other "paratextual" materials, it nevertheless is clearly, graphically, set off from the rest. Parentheses constitute an irruption into the text, which frees the encapsulated discourse from the constraints imposed by the text's established syntax and voice. A moment of freedom, then, but also a moment of power: the text is broken into. In this privileged place of authorial intrusion, a "marked" discourse stresses the inonciation, often, as will be seen, over the 6nonce, it is an act of narration rather than an act of the tale [histoire]. In a text where the author works constantly to conceal himself, paren

Abstract: What one might call the popular French epistemology...has edified us in recent years with a number of works, certain of which have attained great recognition.... The philosophies underlying these.., works are themselves diverse, sometimes even in opposition. But curiously, they all have a common trait: all outrageously glorify chance, noise, 'fluctuation.' All make randomness responsible... for the organization of the world.

Abstract: The art of Samuel Beckett is conceptually framed by the possibilities of the impossible; or, as J.M. Coetzee puts it, "The art of Samuel Beckett has become an art of zero, as we all know. We also know that an art of zero is impossible" (45). Beckett's writing-much of it stylistically composed under erasure, as it were-achieves a coincidence of opposing impulses that for Coetzee "permit[s] a fiction of net zero: the impulse towards conjuration, the impulse towards silence" (45).

Abstract: According to accepted critical standards, a good essay is one which manages both to elucidate and justify its title. I have therefore chosen a rather inexplicit heading in order to have the opportunity for immediate clarification that at the same time will permit me briefly to identify and contextualize the subject-matter of this essay. Anyone who is even somewhat familiar with computer technology knows that numerous hours of practice are required to learn how to use computer software, be it for the manipulation of a text or of a spread-sheet. In many cases this apprenticeship is facilitated by what might be called a para-program: an electronic file called README.DOC. The label has become generic and is found as an introductory file on numerous software diskettes in France and in the United States. This preliminary document should be consulted before actual use begins. README.DOC is in some respects the computer version of the old "Preface," "Publisher's Note," or "Foreword," with which we are so familiar from (our present) book culture. However, it is even better rendered by the phrase "Directions For Use" [Mode d'emploi]. My linking the terms "Preface" with "Directions For Use" might come as a surprise to some since we usually associate "Preface" with a literary work and "Directions For Use" with a common household appliance. And one might legitimately ask what connects a novel of Balzac's with a food processor. On the face of it, nothing. However, recent French experimental literature provides such a connection since it relies on preliminary remarks (or what is now called the "paratext" [paratexte']) that are much closer to "Directions for use" than to the traditional "Preface." It is for just this reason that an apparently straight-forward title, such as "Prefaces," would have been inappropriate for this essay. Until now, the conventional utterances that precede a literary text have appeared in the form of declarative statements designed to direct the reader. Authors or their representatives set up boundaries and landmarks aimed at

Abstract: There has been much discussion in modern criticism (at least of late) of what is now commonly referred to as the paratext, that is, to paraphrase G6rard Genette's Palimpsestes, a number of signals (titles, prefaces, postfaces, footnotes, epigraphs, illustrations, etc.) which form the entourage of the text and, at the same time, constitute a major locus for the conditioning process of potential readers.' In taking the prefaces of the Franciade as my object of study I intend neither to examine the theory of the heroic poem or epic-it has already been the object of much expert analysis2-nor to carry out a historical study that would position Ronsard in the evolving myth of the French people's Trojan origins.3 Instead, choosing texts that are by nature explanatory, normative and prescriptive, I hope to surprise the poet in the act of intentionality. By "intentionality" I mean here not so much the explicitly declared intentions of the author-these should not always be taken at face value-as the implicit confessions capable of being gleaned from specific contradictions in the utterances of the discourse. Since all representation is a doubling of the self and the refashioning of a subject as an object, establishing the characteristic features of this object will allow us to understand better the subject's strategy in so composing it. Far from accepting at face value any advice to the "apprentice reader" (who is encoded as such in the prefatory discourse), I would like to attempt to unearth the semior largely unconscious projective symbolic system of the paratext, and to read, beyond the surface utterances that stage the fiction of the apprentice reader, the ambiguous projection of the Ronsardian theory of imitation.

Abstract: The object of semiotics is the study of signs. Signs, however, can be studied only in terms of other signs. This is both an empirical fact and a logical necessity. In most cases, the signs used to study other signs are terms from the mother tongue of the studier. And the signs studied are defined in terms of that same mother tongue. The result of semiotic study is, therefore, usually a rearrangement of the mother tongue, a mapping of itself onto itself. There is nothing to stop people from doing this, and each time they do so, it has social effects. But no knowledge is gained thereby, since it is always possible to reorganize the mapping. None has that privilege of necessity associated with knowledge. Modern science is characterized by its use of mathematical notation in the place of the partial metalanguages mentioned above. A science of semiotics could then arise only as a mathematics of signs. This science is generally called symbolic logic. Chomskyan linguistics is another such science. The virtue of mathematical symbolism is that, since it is not drawn directly from the treasure-house of signs of any mother tongue, its rules of combination, of validity, can be made independent of any semantic content. As a consequence, mathematical notation need not be translated from one language to another and would seem to constitute the ideal metalanguage, one that is universally understandable among subjects. Attempts to communicate with beings from other worlds, whether in science fiction or in actual attempts at interstellar communication, are based on this assumption. Lacan has pointed out, however, that this would-be universalism is in fact a formula for total solipsism, for although it is quite possible to develop such systems-the names Boole, Frege, Russell, Goedel, Quine, attest to that fact"nevertheless, the fact remains that they can only be transmitted with the help of language" (Encore 100). There's the rub: you must use some actual mother tongue to explain to another subject, not the semantic content, but the functioning of the mathematical notation, its rules of combination ("operations") and the relations of one symbol to another. Put the other way round, I can read

Abstract: Many of the points I will touch upon are quite well-known: the whole matter of the disappearance of linearity in modern fiction for one. But by going back to such antiquated themes my aim is not so much to come up with striking novelties as to try and connect some of the features of 20th century novel with notions that can be drawn (whether that be legitimate or not is another matter) from contemporary thinking on science. The basic idea will thus be to try and show that in order to understand many of the major aspects of modern literature one needs to construct models drawing on sometimes not too familiar ideas first put forward in a non-literary context by scientists and epistemologists. A more remote aim will be to show how literature can be construed as one of the essential modes at our disposal to understand our surrounding

Abstract: Samuel Beckett demonstrated his sensitivity to language early in his career. In his 1929 essay "Dante... Bruno. Vico..Joyce," his'remarks are not about the content of the works he discusses but about the ways in which language is used.2 Several points emerge from this critical essay. Beckett is sensitive to the materiality of language; i.e., he is aware not only of what language says but also of how language says. About Joyce's Work in Progress he writes: "It is not to be read or rather it is only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.. . the Beauty of Work in Progress is not presented in space alone, since its adequate apprehension depends as much on its visibility as on its audibility" (27-28). Beckett is also impressed with Joyce's ability to tune the language of his text to the content it expresses. "When the sense is asleep the words go to sleep.. . when the sense is dancing, the words dance. Take the passage at the end of Shaun's pastoral... The language is drunk. The very words are tilted and effervescent" (27). Beckett adds that Joyce, Shakespeare, and Dickens treat "words as something more than mere polite symbols." He elaborates as follows:

Abstract: Post-structuralist scholars, better attuned to prose narrative than to verse, appear nevertheless to have discovered in the generically ambiguous prose poem a fertile ground for the dissemination of deconstructive strategies. Barbara Johnson has provided persuasive analyses of texts by Baudelaire and Mallarme.' Richard Terdiman has devoted several chapters in his recent study to the prose poem, which he convincingly treats as a counter-discourse in opposition to the discourse favored by the establishment.2 Far from attempting to impose univocal interpretations on the texts they discuss, these two critics have provided open-ended deconstructive readings in order to develop and justify various theories lying beyond the scope of the present article, which deals exclusively with Mallarme's "Le Demon de l'analogie," also entitled "La Penultie'me."