name, narrative, nation, nature, network, nonliterary, norm, notion, noun, nucleus
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 214-5)
'All told, throughout these pages we have been considering five major
aspects of science:
'(1) high development of technological
specialization
'(2) involvement with rationale of money
(accountancy)
'(3) progressive departure from natural conditions,
usually saluted in the name of "naturalism"
'(4) reduction of scenic
circumference to empirical limits (the reason why the technological powers
that take us farthest from natural conditions have been called "naturalistic")
'(5) stress upon the "problem of knowledge" as the point of
departure for philosophic speculation'
.
(Burke 1945: 98) 'A scientist might happen to believe in a personal God, and might even pray to God for the success of his experiments. In such an act of prayer, of course, he would be treating God as a variable . Yet, when his prayer was finished, and he began his experiments, he would now, qua scientist, treat "God" as an invariant term, as being at most but the over-all name for the ultimate ground of all experience and all experiments, and not a name for the particularities of local context with which the scientific study of conditions, or correlations, is concerned' .
(Burke 1945: 173) 'Justice in such an over-all sense would obviously serve the ends of unification. And insofar as the law courts would "ideally" serve this same role, in aiming at a kind of justice that mediated among the differing ways of differing classes, we can see how the profuse development of law invites to idealistic philosophy. Materialist "debunkers" of such legal idealism can then interpret the "ideal" in terms of its "betrayal"; for "unification" is not unity, but a compensation for disunity - hence, any term for "ideal" justice can be interpreted as a rhetorical concealment for material injustice , particularly when the actual history of legal decisions over a long period can be shown to have favored class justice in the name of ideal justice' .
(Burke 1945: xv) 'We shall use five terms as generating principle of our investigation. They are: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose. In a rounded statement about motives, you must have some word that names the act (names what took place, in thought or deed), and another that names the scene (the background of the act, the situation in which it occurred); also, you must indicate what person or kind of person ( agent ) performed the act, what means or instruments he used ( agency ), and the purpose . Men may violently disagree about the purposes behind a given act, or about the character of the person who did it, or how he did it, or in what kind of situation he acted; or they may even insist upon totally different words to name the act itself. But be that as it may, any complete statement about motives will offer some kind of answers to these five questions: what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose)' .
(Burke 1945: 43-4) 'All gods are "substances", and as such are names for motives or combinations of motives. Polytheistic divinities, besides their personalistic aspects, often represent decidedly geometric, or scenic, kinds of motivation. Indeed, we may even think of local divinities as theological prototypes of contemporary environmentalist, or geographic motives. For to say that a river is a different "god" than a mountain is to say, within the rules of a polytheistic nomenclature, that a river calls for a different set of human actions than a mountain. Whereas the "enlightened" have too often been content to dismiss the pagan gods merely as instances of animistic superstition, the fact is that the complex of social behavior centering about a given "god" was often quite correct, in the most realistically biological sense. Thus, insofar as adequate modes of planting and harvesting and distribution are connected with the rites of a given divinity, its name would be the title for a correct summation of motives. However, such concepts of motivation are usually developed to the point where their original reference is obscured, being replaced by motivational concepts peculiar to a specialized priesthood and to the needs of class domination' .
(Burke 1945: 96) 'Integral to the concept of scope is the concept of reduction . In a sense, every circumference, no matter how far-reaching its reference, is a reduction. A cosmology, for instance, is a reduction of the world to the dimensions of words; it is the world in terms of words. The reductive factor becomes quite obvious when we pause to realize that any terminology of motives reduces the vast complexity of life by reduction to principles, laws, sequences, classifications, correlations, in brief, abstractions or generalizations of one sort or another. And any generalization is necessarily a reduction in that it selects a group of things and gives them a property which makes it possible to consider them as a single entity . Thus, the general concept of "man" neglects an infinite number of particular differences in order to stress certain properties which many distinct individual entities have in common. Indeed, any characterization of any sort is a reduction. To give a proper name to one person, or to name a thing, is to recognize some principle of identity or continuity running through the discontinuities that, of themselves, would make the world sheer chaos. To note any order whatever is to "reduce". To divide experience into hungry and sated moments, into the pleasant and unpleasant, into the before and after, into here and there - even distinctions as broad as these translate the world's infinite particulars into terms that are a reduction of the world; in fact, as per the equating of infinity and zero, terms of such broad scope are perhaps the most drastically reductive of all' .
(Burke 1945: 54) 'Such tactics of entitling are as legitimate as any other, once the irony has been made explicit. Indeed, philosophies are never quite "consistent" in this sense. All thought tends to name things not because they are precisely as named, but because they are not quite as named, and the name is designated as a somewhat hortatory device, to take up the slack' .
(Burke 1945: 54) 'From such ambiguity is derived that irony of historical development whereby the very strength in the affirming of a given term may the better enable men to make a world that departs from it. For the affirming of the term as their god-term enables men to go far afield without sensing a loss of orientation. And by the time the extent of their departure is enough to become generally obvious, the stability of the new order they have built in the name of the old order gives them the strength to abandon their old god-term and adopt another' .
(Fish 1982: 341) 'Whenever a critic prefaces an assertion with a phrase like "without doubt" or "there can be no doubt", you can be sure that you are within hailing distance of the interpretive principles which produce the facts that he presents as obvious.... As one obvious and indisputable interpretation supplants another, it brings with it a new set of obvious and indisputable facts. Of course each new reading is elaborated in the name of the poem itself, but the poem itself is always a function of the interpretive perspective from which the critic "discovers" it' .
(Booth 1974: 31) 'By now it has almost scriptural force: in the beginning was not the word but the causal chain, and his name was sometimes Chemistry and sometimes Drive or Desire, but never Lift or even Pull. And it came to pass that Error was born, and his chosen name was Reason, but his real name was Rationalization. And Rationalization and his wicked prophets did undertake to undermine Push, claiming that reasoning about values, about purposes, could alter Push's unalterable path. But the true prophets were able to unmask the wicked prophets, showing that their vaunted reasonings were themselves clearly dictated by Push. And, lo, there was nothing that anyone could say about anything that could not be unmasked and shown to be truly another manifestation of Push's eternal power. And when men did engage in debate about their deepest concerns, they found that each man could say unto his brother, Racca, thou fool' .
(Derrida 1986a: 93) 'There are two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology -- in other words, throughout his entire history -- has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play' .
(Bathrick 1992: 323) 'Given, then, the protean, anti-institutional, and, finally, heuristic suggestiveness of the term cultural studies, I should like to proceed by focusing precisely on its nodal points of contradiction, on the programmatic debates and innovations that have emerged under its banner to challenge existing theory and institutional formations in the name of a more relevant and broadened humanistic study' .
(Foucault 1986a: 142) 'An author's name is not simply an element of speech... Its presence is functional in that it serves as a means of classification. A name can group together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others.... The author's name characterizes a particular manner of existence of discourse'. The culture in which a discourse circulates regulates its status and manner of reception .
(Jardine 1986: 564) 'To designate that process, I have suggested a new name, what I hope to be a believable neologism: gynesis-- the putting into discourse of "woman" as that process beyond the Cartesian Subject, the Dialectics of Representation, or Man's Truth. The object produced by this process is neither a person nor a thing, but a horizon, that towards which the process is tending: a gynema. This gynema is a reading effect, a woman-in-effect, never stable, without identity' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 23) 'The same structure is present in the corresponding Greek word, hypostasis , literally, a standing under: hence anything set under, such as stand, base bottom, prop, support, stay; hence metaphorically, that which lies at the bottom of a thing, as the groundwork, subject-matter, argument of a narrative, speech, poem; a starting point, a beginning. And then come the metaphysical meanings (we are consulting Liddell and Scott): subsistence, reality, real being (as applied to mere appearance), nature, essence. In ecclesiastical Greek, the word corresponds to the Latin Persona , a Person of the Trinity (which leads us back into the old argument between the homoousians and the homoiousians, as to whether the three persons were of the same or similar substance). Medically, the word can designate a suppression, as of humours that ought to come to the surface; also matter deposited in the urine; and of liquids generally, the sediment, lees, dregs, grounds. When we are examining, from the standpoint of Symbolic, metaphysical tracts that would deal with "fundamentals" and get to the "bottom" of things, this last set of meanings can admonish us to be on the look-out for what Freud might call "cloacal" motives, furtively interwoven with speculations that may on the surface seem wholly abstract. An "acceptance" of the universe on this plane may also be a roundabout way of "making peace with the faeces"' .
(Burke 1945: 6-7) 'From the motivational point of view, there is implicit in the quality of a scene the quality of the action that is to take place within it. This would be another way of saying that the act will be consistent with the scene. Thus, when the curtain rises to disclose a given stage-set, this stage-set contains, simultaneously, implicitly, all that the narrative is to draw out as a sequence, explicitly. Or, of you will, the stage-set contains the action ambiguously (as regards the norms of action)- and in the course of the play's development this ambiguity is converted into a corresponding articulacy . The proportion would be: scene is to act as implicit is to explicit' .
(Minsky 1980: 16)
'In any event, the individual statements of a discourse lead to temporary
representations -- which seem to correspond to what contemporary
linguists call "deep structures" -- which are then quickly rearranged or
consumed in elaboration the growing scenario representation. In order of
"scale", among the ingredients of such a structure there might be these
kinds of levels':
surface syntactic frames -- mainly verb and noun
structures;
prepositional and word-order indicator conventions;
surface semantic frames -- action-centered meanings of words;
qualifiers and relations concerning participants, instruments,
trajectories and strategies, goals, consequences and side-effects;
thematic frames -- scenarios concerned with topics, activities, portraits,
setting; outstanding problems and strategies commonly connected with
topics;
narrative frames -- skeleton forms for typical stories,
explanations, and arguments; conventions about foci, protagonists, plot
forms, development, etc., designed to help a listener construct a new,
instantiated thematic frame in his own mind
.
(Longacre 1983: 3) 'To begin with, we can classify all possible discourses according to two basic parameters: contingent temporal succession and agent orientation.... Narrative discourse ... is plus in respect to both parameters. Procedural discourse ... is plus in respect to contingent succession ... but minus in respect to the agent orientation ... Behavioral discourse is minus in regard to contingent succession but plus in regard to agent orientation ... Expository discourse is minus in respect to both parameters' .
(Longacre 1983: 20) 'I here get to the main point of this chapter...Something like plot characterizes forms of discourse other than narrative....Plot is the notional structure of narrative discourse' .
(van Dijk 1977: 3) 'In linguistics, macro-structures have been postulated in order to account for the "global meaning" of discourse such as it is intuitively assigned in terms of the "topic" or "theme" of a discourse or conversation. The assumption is that these notions cannot be accounted for in terms of current logical, linguistic, and cognitive semantics for isolated sentences or sequences of sentences. In disciplines such as rhetorics and narrative theory, macro-structures may constitute the semantic basis for specific categories and rules' .
(van Dijk 1977: 18) 'Super-structures are organizing principles of discourse. The have a hierarchical character, roughly defining the "global syntax" of the text. By contrast, the macro-structures define the "content" of the text. In certain kinds of narrative, such as folktales, this content may be conventional ... What has been said about the conventional "genre" of narratives also holds ... for other discourse types, e.g., arguments, advertisements, newspaper reports, propaganda, and psychological papers. In all cases the constraints operate globally, both on the global syntax of the macro-structures and on their specific content' .
(Virtanen 1992: 306) 'Narratives, for example, can be used for argumentation, or descriptions for instruction. Such an apparent mismatch of discourse type and text type may be accounted for in terms of the suggested two levels. Any discourse type may surface in the form of a narrative: Narratives may be used to instruct ... explain things ... describe activities or circumstances ... The ease of the indirect or secondary usage manifested by this type of text, and its potential to realize the widest array of discourse types may, indeed, be regarded as arguments for the "basic" status of narrative among the different types of text' .
(Virtanen 1992: 293-4) 'I shall deal with some of the criteria that have been used in the study of language to group texts for various purposes. I shall then briefly touch upon the notion of prototype, before proceeding to a discussion of a two-level typology of texts. To round off, I shall consider the status of narrative among the different types of text' .
(Ordonez 1991: 103) 'The work of Annis Pratt emerges as a useful key to the perception and assessment of myth and archetype in narrative by women' .
(Kinneavy 1971: 36) Kinneavy postulates 'categories like: a narrative, a series of classifications, a criticism or evaluation, and a description. Actually, these four classes of kinds of referents are the modes of discourse considered here' .
(Bathrick 1992: 337) 'In his anthology, Nation and Narration, Homi K. Bhabha raises fundamental issues about the future of cultural studies in relation to national identity: What forms of narrative express the ideology of the modern nation? How do questions of race and gender, class and colonialism change the boundaries of national identity? How is national identity itself the construction of a particular historical imaginary?' .
(Jameson 1981: 115) 'An ideologeme, that is, a historically determinate conceptual or semic complex which can project itself variously in the form of a "value system" or "philosophical concept," or in the form of a protonarrative, a private of collective narrative fantasy' .
(A. Pratt 1981: 25) 'The pursuit narrative in mythology often involved a green-world locale, an island, "well," or grotto, invaded by men who rape the beneficent women residents-- followed by an account of the destruction and theft of the area's natural value.... Such traumas characterize the plot structure of gothic novels where women heroes experience adventures in quest of true chivalry in combination with the horror of pursuit and victimization by male villains' .
(White 1974: 402) 'Levi-Strauss concludes: "In spite of worthy and indispensable efforts to bring another moment in history alive and to possess it, a clairvoyant history should admit that it never completely escapes from the nature of myth." It is this mediative function that permits us to speak of a historical narrative as an extended metaphor' .
(White 1974: 405) 'The fruitfulness of Jakobson's theory lies in its suggestion that the various forms of both poetry and prose, all of which have their counterparts in narrative in general and therefore in historiography too, can be characterized in terms of the dominant trope which serves as the paradigm, provided by language itself, of all significant relationships conceived to exist in the world by anyone wishing to represent those relationships in language' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 37) 'In theological and metaphysical works, we can recognize the paradox of the absolute readily enough. Often, in fact, it is explicitly discussed. But in historicist writings it more easily goes unnoticed. Yet the paradox may be implicit in any term for a collective motivation, such as a concept of class, nation, the "general will," and the like. Technically, it becomes a "pure" motive when matched against some individual locus of motivation. And it may thus be the negation of an individual motive.... What we are here considering formally, as a paradox of substance, can be illustrated quickly enough by example. A soldier may be nationally motivated to kill the enemies of his country, whereas individually he is motivated by a horror of killing his own enemies. Or conversely, as a patriot he may act by the motive of sacrifice in behalf of his country, but as an individual he may want to profit' .
(Bakhtin 1986: 668) 'Heteroglossia, as organized in these low genres, was not merely heteroglossia vis-·-vis the accepted literary language (in all its various generic expressions), that is, vis-·-vis the linguistic center of the verbal-ideological life of the nation and the epoch, but was a heteroglossia consciously opposed to this literary language. It was parodic, and aimed sharply and polemically against the official languages of its given time. It was heteroglossia that had been dialogized' .
(Bathrick 1992: 337) 'In his anthology, Nation and Narration, Homi K. Bhabha raises fundamental issues about the future of cultural studies in relation to national identity: What forms of narrative express the ideology of the modern nation? How do questions of race and gender, class and colonialism change the boundaries of national identity? How is national identity itself the construction of a particular historical imaginary?' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 319) 'This work (which would have as its motto Ad Bellum Purificandum , or Towards the Purification of War) is constructed on the belief that, whereas an attitude of humanistic contemplation is in itself more important by far than any method , only by method could it be given the body necessary for its existence even as an attitude. We would thus hold at least that an elaborate analysis of linguistic foibles is justified "in principle". Indeed, the study of linguistic action is but beginning. And we must be on our guard lest the great need for an attitude of linguistic skepticism allow us to be content with too hasty a "policy" as regards the nature of language itself. This is too serious a matter for such "dissipatory" approaches to the subject as we find among the contemporary "debunkers". And even serious approaches are invalidated when formed in keeping with the ideals of an uncriticized scientism, which is too evasive of the dramatistic to make even an adequate preparatory description of linguistic forms' .
(Burke 1945: 187) 'By utilizing a function of our term agent , we can transform this problem into a solution. Namely: we can say that people interpret natural sequences in terms of cause and effect not because of something in the natural scene requiring this interpretation, but because they are the sort of agents that see things in terms of necessary relations . In this view we do not derive our ideas of cause and effect from experience; all that we can derive from experience is the observation that certain happenings seem likely to follow certain happenings. But our ideas of cause and effect are derived from the nature of the mind' .
(Burke 1945: xv) 'What is involved when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it? An answer to that question is the subject of this book. The book is concerned with the basic forms of thought which, in accordance with the nature of the world as all men necessarily experience it, are exemplified in the attributing of motives' .
(Burke 1945: 77-8) 'Now, it seems undeniable, by the very nature of the case, that in definition, or systematic placement, one must see things "in terms of..." And implicit in the terms chosen, there are "circumferences" of varying scope. Motivationally, they involve such relationships as are revealed in the analysis of the scene-act and scene-agent ratios whereby the quality of the context in which a subject is placed will affect the quality of the subject placed in that context' .
(Burke 1945: 189) 'If then, you would talk profoundly and intelligently about the conditions of the possibility of the knowledge of nothing, what do you have that you can talk about? You have the knower . You can say, for instance, "Whatever an object in general may or may not look like, you can be sure that when you do come across one you are going to have to encounter it in terms of space and/or time". And since you can't here be talking about an object (if you are, what is it?) what you must be talking about is the nature of your own mind' .
(Burke 1945: 23) 'The same structure is present in the corresponding Greek word, hypostasis , literally, a standing under: hence anything set under, such as stand, base bottom, prop, support, stay; hence metaphorically, that which lies at the bottom of a thing, as the groundwork, subject-matter, argument of a narrative, speech, poem; a starting point, a beginning. And then come the metaphysical meanings (we are consulting Liddell and Scott): subsistence, reality, real being (as applied to mere appearance), nature, essence. In ecclesiastical Greek, the word corresponds to the Latin Persona , a Person of the Trinity (which leads us back into the old argument between the homoousians and the homoiousians, as to whether the three persons were of the same or similar substance). Medically, the word can designate a suppression, as of humours that ought to come to the surface; also matter deposited in the urine; and of liquids generally, the sediment, lees, dregs, grounds. When we are examining, from the standpoint of Symbolic, metaphysical tracts that would deal with "fundamentals" and get to the "bottom" of things, this last set of meanings can admonish us to be on the look-out for what Freud might call "cloacal" motives, furtively interwoven with speculations that may on the surface seem wholly abstract. An "acceptance" of the universe on this plane may also be a roundabout way of "making peace with the faeces"' .
(Burke 1945: 79) 'We cherish the behaviorist experiment precisely because it illustrates the relation between the circumference and the circumscribed in mechanistic terms; and because the sharpest instance of the way in which the altering of the scenic scope affects the interpretation of the act is to be found in the shift from teleological to mechanistic philosophies. Christian theology, in stressing the rational, personal, and purposive aspects of the Creation as the embodiment of the Creator's pervasive will, had treated such principles as scenic, That is, they were not merely traits of human beings, but extended to the outer circumference of the ultimate ground. Hence, by the logic of the scene-act ratio, they were taken as basic to the constitution of human motives, and could be "deduced" from the nature of God as an objective, extrinsic principle defining the nature of human acts. But when the circumference was narrowed to naturalistic limits, the "Creator" was left out or account, and only the "Creation" remained (remained not as an "act", however, but as a concatenation of motions)' .
(Burke 1945: 90) 'So far as we can see, this matter of circumference is imbedded in the very nature of terms, and men are continually performing "new acts", in that they are continually making judgments as to the scope of the context which they implicitly or explicitly impute in their interpretations of motives. To select a set of terms is, by the same token, to select a circumference' .
(Burke 1945: 58) 'The design on a piece of primitive pottery may be wholly symbolic or allegorical. But a drawing that accurately reproduces this design in a scientific treatise would be not symbolic or allegorical, but realistic. And similarly, even when statements about the nature of the world are abstractly metaphysical, statements about the nature of these statements can be as empirical as the statement, "This is Mr. Smith", made when introducing Mr. Smith in the accepted manner' .
(Burke 1945: 190) 'But look where we now are. We have described intellectual synthesis as "active". Yet what kind of "act" is this? The empirical scene has derived its character from the nature of the agent; but though we have called this action of the mind "spontaneous" and "original", we might just as well have called it "inevitable". It is compulsory , lacking the elements of freedom necessary for action. The mind cannot see otherwise than in terms of the categories. To observe is an act, in that one can choose either to observe it or not to observe it. But to observe in terms of the categories is not an act in this sense, since we must consider it in such terms, whether we choose to observe it or not. Conversely, though the sensibility is "passive", we find space and time called the "forms" of sensibility. And in the tradition from which Western philosophy stems, "form" is the act word par excellence. So the "passive" begins to look as active as the avowedly active' .
(Burke 1945: 193) 'We have thus arrived at the transcendent realm as a realm of things "in themselves" (that is, with whatever nature they may have intrinsically, not as they are determined by the terms in which we see them). Whereat we might profitable pause to consider the grammar of the intrinsic. It is the puzzle we encountered when discussing the paradox of substance. As soon as one considers things in relation to other things, one is uncomfortably on the way to dissolving them into their context, since their relations lead beyond them. A thing in itself for instance can't be "higher" or "heavier" than something or "inside" or "outside" something, or "derived from" something, etc. For though such descriptions may apply to it, they do not apply to it purely as a thing in itself ; rather, they are contextual references, pointing beyond the thing' .
(Burke 1945: 66) 'We are reasoning as follows: we are saying that, to study the nature of the term, act , one must select a prototype, or paradigm of action. This prototype we find in the conception of a perfect or total act, such as the act of "the Creation". Examining this concept, we find that it is "magic", for it produces something out of nothing. This enables us to equate magic with novelty - and leads us to look for a modicum of magic in every act to the extent that the act possesses a modicum of novelty. This consideration also admonishes us, however, to make a distinction between "true" and "false" magic. "False" magic is a quasi-scientific ideal that would suspend the laws of motion , as in the attempt to coerce natural forces by purely ritualistic means. "True" magic is an aspect not of motion but of action' .
(Burke 1945: 15-6) 'Both act and agent require scenes that "contain" them. Hence the scene-act and scene-agent ratios are in the fullest sense positive (or "positional"). But the relation between act and agent is not quite the same. The agent does not "contain" the act, though its results might be said to "pre-exist virtually" within him. And the act does not "synecdochically share" in the agent, though certain ways of acting may be said to induce corresponding moods or traits of character. To this writer, at least, the act-agent ratio more strongly suggests a temporal or sequential relationship than a purely positional or geometric one. The agent is an author of his actis, which are descended from him, being good progeny of he is good, or bad progeny if he is bad, wise progeny if he is wise, silly progeny of he is silly. And, conversely, his acts can make him or remake him in accordance with their nature' .
(Burke 1945: 140) 'Whenever in philosophy I see two terms, of opposite and equal importance, being merged into a third term that will somehow contain the nature of both, I always ask myself: "Which of the two equal terms was foremost?" For I will expect the genius of this term to weight the third term (as Schelling's third term, "subject-object", supposedly "indifferent" to the two terms "subject" and "object" which it combines, is more "subjective" than "objective", even though he would further complicate matters by distinguishing between a "subjective subject-object" and an "objective subject-object")' .
(Burke 1945: xviii) 'Theological, metaphysical, and juridical doctrines offer the best illustration of the concerns we place under the heading of Grammar; the forms and methods of art best illustrate the concerns of Symbolic; and the ideal material to reveal the nature of Rhetoric comprises observations on parliamentary and diplomatic devices, editorial bias, sales methods and incidents of social sparring. However, the three fields overlap considerably. And we shall note, in passing, how the Rhetoric and the Symbolic hover about the edges of our central theme, the Grammar' .
(Burke 1945: 44-5) 'But we would also recognize that monotheisms (in which we would include any secular title for a universal spring of action, such as "nature" or "the profit motive") can prevail only insofar as they are "incipiently" polytheistic, containing motivational terms ("saints") that break down the universality of the motive into narrower reference' .
(Burke 1945: 76-7) 'We might sum up the matter thus: Theologically , nature has attributes derived from its origin in an act of God (the Creation), but God is more than nature. Dramatistically , motion involves action, but action is more than motion. Hence theologically and/or dramatistically, nature (in the sense of God's Creation) is to nature (in the sense of naturalistic science) as action is to motion, since God's Creation is an enactment , whereas nature as conceived in terms of naturalistic science is a sheer concatenation of motions. But inasmuch as the theological ration between God (Creator) and Nature (Creation) is the same as the dramatistic ration between action and motion, the pantheistic equating of God and Nature would be paralleled by the equating of action and motion. And since action is a personal principle while motion is an impersonal principle, the pantheistic equation leads into the naturalistic position which reduces personalistic concepts to depersonalized terms' .
(Burke 1945: 3) 'It is a principle of drama that the nature of acts and agents should be consistent with the nature of the scene' .
(Burke 1945: 74-5) 'There are two primary generalizations that characterize the quality of motives: freedom and necessity. And whenever they appear, we may know that we are in the presence of "God-terms", or names for the ultimates of motivation. Doctrines wherein Creator and Creation are not ontologically collapsed into a unity give us a kind of double genesis for motives. Consideration in terms of the Creation leads to "necessity" when, in accordance with the logic of geometric substance, all the parts of nature are treated as necessarily related to one another in their necessary relationship to the whole. For "necessity" names the extrinsic conditions that determine a motion and must be taken into account when one is planning an action. And consideration in terms of the Creator leads to "freedom" when, in accordance with the logic of tribal substance, men "substantially" derive freedom (or self-movement) from God as its ancestral source. This double genesis allows for free will and determinism simultaneously, rather than requiring a flat choice between them' .
(Booth 1974: 22) 'The dogmas we turn to now tend to travel together, reinforcing each other to constitute the almost overwhelmingly persuasive worldview of modernism. But it will be useful to think of them as falling into five kinds. There are dogmas about (a) the methods or means for producing change; (b) the nature of the thing being changed- the mind or soul or self or person or organism (though I have talked only of "changing minds", I intend the word mind in the broadest possible sense); (c) the scene of change- the world in which that thing changed, the "mind", finds itself; (d) the principles or basic assumptions about truth and its testing- the ground and nature of change; and (e) the purpose of change. Every effort to change a mind will appear differently depending on our view of what does the changing, what is changed, how it relates to the whole nature of things, whether or in what sense the change is tested or justified in basic principles, and the purpose of the change' .
(Foucault 1986b: 151) 'True discourse, liberated by the nature of its form from desire and power, is incapable of recognising the will to truth which pervades it; and the will to truth, having imposed itself upon us for so long, is such that the truth it seeks to reveal cannot fail to mask it' .
(Spellmeyer 1993: 22) According to Spellmeyer, constructionists would have us believe: 'Each community has its own distinctive mode of cognition, its own characteristic "flow chart" for problem solving. Psychologists do not think first and then practice psychology: strictly speaking, the discipline of psychology preordains the nature of thought for its practitioners. Whatever we perceive, then, is a construct, something constructed by communities, and whatever we have learned derives not from experience but from a process of initiation into those rituals of community life that create both selves and worlds' .
(Booth 1979: 107) 'If Burke is right here -- an I think he is, provided we understand that to "track down the variant" is in his view never easy -- we have the basis for a special kind of free-wheeling inquiry into other critics' views. Instead of thinking that we can refute a given position by showing that it cannot be experimentally or logically falsified, we are invited by it to one perspective on the world, a perspective that is likely, by the very nature of perspectives, to be self-demonstrating. Every perspective expressed in a symbolic language becomes a "terministic screen" which both reveals some truths -- obviously "demonstrated" to anyone employing the language -- and conceals others' .
(Lanham 1993: x) 'We failed to notice that the personal computer had presented itself as an alternative to the printed book, and the electronic screen as an alternative to the printed page. Furthermore, in the last three of four years, that alternative page has been enhanced so that it can present and manipulate images and sounds almost as easily as words. And it can do all this in 16.7 million colors. The long reign of black-and-white textual truth has ended. The nature and status of textual discourse have been altered. This movement from book to screen promises a metamorphosis comparable in magnitude, if not in hype, to broadcast TV' .
(Lanham 1976: 58) 'Anthropological understanding of myth began when scholars ceased to force scientific coordinates on it, stopped trying to "make sense of it" and let it make its own kind of sense. Ovid's Metamorphoses could not be plainer about the kind of invitation it extends. a poem about changes, it insists on dynamic rhetorical premises, not static serious ones. Identity is, by nature in this poem, as fluid as the other categories of life. The underlying assumption here is unity of life, not aristocratic domination of one species by another' .
(Culler 1992: 218) 'A third major issue in critical and theoretical discussions has been the nature of representation' .
(Culler 1992: 223) 'Finally, an issue in recent theory is the nature and function of the aesthetic' .
(Frye 1957: 203) 'One important detail in poetic symbolism remains to be considered. This is the symbolic presentation of the point at which the undisplaced apocalyptic world and the cyclical world of nature come into alignment, and which we propose to call the point of epiphany' .
(Frye 1957: 196) 'The characters who elude the moral antithesis of heroism and villainy generally are or suggest spirits of nature' .
(Enkvist 1981: 110) 'So far I have concentrated on empirically verifiable patterns of order in the worlds of nature and of society. But iconicism can be used to evoke orders of a less readily verifiable kind -- processes of association in an individual's mind..., and imaginary patterns in imaginary universes and fantasies. Thus the very ordering of a text can turn into a semiotic subsystem, or perhaps rather into a potential hierarchy of such subsystems because there can be simultaneous iconicism at various macro- and microlevels of text structure. Indeed iconicism is potentially conceivable at every level where the structure of the text and of language allows a choice between different patterns of linearization' .
(A. Pratt 1981: 21) 'Women find solace, companionship, and independence in nature' .
(A. Pratt 1981: 18) 'In regional, or local-color, fiction ... women often master the green world, even to the extent that some farm it for produce ... The regionalist writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in both England and America, are thus apt to make the hero's lifelong devotion to nature the center, rather than merely an initiatory phase, of development' .
(A. Pratt 1981: 16-7) 'The adolescent girl, writes Simone de Beauvoir, will devote a special love to Nature... she worships it.... Later, the mature woman hero tends to look back to moments of naturistic epiphany as touchstones in a quest for her lost selfhood so that when she readies herself for her midlife rebirth journey, images of the green world remembered once more come to the fore.... Although most authors depict the green world of the woman hero as a place from which she sets forth and a memory to which she returns for renewal, there are a significant number of novels in which nature is the protagonist's entire world' .
(Said 1986: 616) 'If a filial relationship was held together by natural bonds and natural forms of authority-- involving obedience, fear, love, respect, and instinctual conflict-- the new affiliative relationship changes these bonds into what seem to be transpersonal forms-- such as guild consciousness, consensus, collegiality, professional respect, class, and the hegemony of a dominant culture. The filiative scheme belongs to the realms of nature and of "life", whereas affiliation belongs exclusively to culture and society' .
(White 1974: 402) 'Levi-Strauss concludes: "In spite of worthy and indispensable efforts to bring another moment in history alive and to possess it, a clairvoyant history should admit that it never completely escapes from the nature of myth." It is this mediative function that permits us to speak of a historical narrative as an extended metaphor' .
(Harris 1990: 49) 'For purposes of an integrational analysis, however, the concept of meaning may be dispensed with and replaced by that of communicational function. The crucial difference is that the communicational function of a sign is always contextually determined and derives from the network of integrational relations which obtain in a particular situation' .
(Enkvist 1981: 103) 'If we want to derive predications out of the model too, instead of accepting them as part of the input, we must adopt a device of the third, cognitive, type. In such cognitive models the predications are usually derived out of a cognitive network, again under the control of a text strategy.... But in addition to all this we may also wish to look into the motives and reasons why a certain speaker/writer has opted for one particular text strategy in his particular context of situation. If so, we must once again enlarge our perspective and adopt a model of a fourth type which is sensitive not only to strategies of text composition but also to principles of human interaction. Such models try to explain how human beings communicate as part of their attempts at social cooperation' .
(Ijsseling 1976: 133) 'Intertextuality ... conceives all that one says as a fabric woven into a much wider network of interrelated texts with references to each other. The speaker or writer is also woven into this fabric. He is not the origin or centre, but is entirely carried along by the network of words in circulation' .
(Ijsseling 1976: 5-6) 'Today one can still speak of a conflict between rhetoric and philosophy.... To gain some insight into this topical conflict, we will undertake an historical and systematic survey of the various facets of this already ancient conflict. In each chapter we shall concentrate on the past, thus enabling us, in a constant circular movement, to shed light on the network of problems confrinting contemporary thought. The question continually before us in such a circular movement is: what is actually happening whenever something is said or written?' .
(Schor 1992: 263) 'Two chief axioms of feminist criticism state that all acts of language area grounded in the dense network of partial positions (e.g., sexual, class, racial) occupied by speaking subjects and that to claim to speak for all (women, feminists, literary critics) is to speak from a position of assumed mastery and false universality. This position is precisely the one we as feminists seek to interrogate and dismantle, even though, as many of us have discovered, assumed mastery and false universality constantly reassert themselves' .
Under construction
(Fish 1982: 99) 'The linguist says, I have done the job of describing the language; you take it from here. The critic replies, I have no use for what you have done; you've given me at once too little and too much. Superficially, then, the two positions are firmly opposed, but only slightly beneath the surface one finds a crucial area of agreement: in their concern to characterize the properties of literary language, Schwartz [a critic] and Saporta [a linguist] simply assume a characterization of nonliterary or ordinary language, and that characterization is also a judgment' .
(Lanham 1993: 56) 'The most obvious area of rhetoric's revival -- literary theory -- is so familiar as hardly to need elaboration. The "architectonic" view of rhetoric that Kenneth Burke developed from the 1930s onward has underwritten the Derridean explosion -- there is no other word for it -- of literary theory since the Hopkins symposium in 1966 put it on the map. Although, incredibly, Derrida appears not to have known Burke's work, deconstruction's enfranchising hypothesis that rhetorical analysis can be used on nonliterary texts and on the conventions of social life itself is the pivotal insight of Burkean dramatism. And if Burke's work does not fall in our period, certainly the realization of its importance does' .
(Culler 1992: 222) 'Fifth, a good deal of the most interesting work in theory has focused on structures common to literary and nonliterary discourses' .
(Fish 1982: 532) 'On one level this counterargument is unassailable, but on another level it is finally beside the point. It is unassailable as a general and theoretical conclusion: the positing of context- or institution-specific norms surely rules out the possibility of a norm whose validity would be recognized by everyone, no matter what his situation. But it is beside the point for any particular individual, for since everyone is situated somewhere, there is no one for whom the absence of an asituational norm would be of any practical consequence, in the sense that his performance or his confidence in his ability to perform would be impaired. So that while it is generally true that to have many standards is to have none at all, it is not true for anyone in particular ... In other words, while relativism is a position one can entertain, it is not a position one can occupy.... The point is that there is never a moment when one believes nothing, when consciousness is innocent of any and all categories of thought, and whatever categories of thought are operative at a given moment will serve as an undoubted ground' .
(Fish 1982: 108) 'If deviation theories trivialize the norm and therefore trivialize everything else, a theory which restores human content to language also restores legitimate status to literature by reuniting it with a norm that is no longer trivialized' .
(Fish 1982: 109) 'Literary language may be the norm, and message-bearing language a device we carve out to perform the special, but certainly not normative, task of imparting information' .
(Fish 1982: 101-2) 'The trivialization of ordinary language is accomplished as soon as one excludes from its precincts matters of purpose, value, intention, obligation, and so on -- everything that can be characterized as human. What, then, is left to it? The answers to this question are various. For some, the defining constituent of ordinary language, or language, is its capacity to carry messages; for others, the structure of language is more or less equated with the structure of logic ... Still others hold instrumental views: language is used to refer either to objects in the real world or to ideas in the mind ... But whatever the definition, two things remain constant: (1) the content of language is an entity that can be specified independently of human values... and (2) a need is therefore created for another entity or system in the context of which human values can claim pride of place.... Once you've taken the human values out of the language, and yet designated what remains as the norm, the separated values become valueless, because they have been removed from the normative center' .
(Fish 1982: 531) 'The point of my analysis has been to show that while "Is there a text in this class?" does not have a determinate meaning, a meaning that survives the sea change of situations, in any situation we might imagine the meaning of the utterance is either perfectly clear or capable, in the course of time, of being clarified. What is it that makes this possible, if it is not the "possibilities and norms" already encoded in the language? How does communication ever occur if not by reference to a public and stable norm? The answer, implicit in everything I have already said, is that communication occurs within situations and that to be in a situation is already to be in possession of (or to be possessed by) a structure of assumptions, of practices understood to be relevant in relation to purposes and goals that are already in place; and it is within the assumption of these purposes and goals that any utterance is immediately heard.... What I have been arguing is that meanings come already calculated, not because of norms embedded in the language but because language is always perceived, from the very first, within a structure of norms. That structure, however, is not abstract and independent but social; and there fore it is not a single structure with a privileged relationship to the process of communication as it occurs in any situation but a structure that changes when one situation, with its assumed background of practices, purposes, and goals, has given way to another' .
(Fish 1982: 104) 'Here again we see the moral force of the norm of ordinary language, its inevitable legislation of the ideal of logical clarity, even in context which are defined in opposition to that ideal' .
(Lanham 1993: 9) 'We have become, I might parenthetically remark, more self-conscious about prose itself. So used are we to thinking black-and-white, continuous printed prose the norm of conceptual utterance, that it has taken a series of theoretical attacks and technological metamorphoses to make us see it for what it is: an act of extraordinary stylization, of remarkable, expressive self-denial. The lesson has been taught from Marinetti to Burke and Derrida, and by personal computers which restore to the reader ranges of expressivity- graphics, fonts, typography, layout, color- that the prose stylist has abjured. Obviously these pressures will not destroy prose, but they may change its underlying decorum. And perhaps engender, at long last, a theory of prose style as radical artifice rather than native transparency' .
(Bove 1990: 53) Bove asserts that the questions posed above are commonsense, that they 'imply a norm of judgment: meaning and essence are better and more important that a discussion of "how things work" or "where they come from"' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: xvii) 'In our original plans for this project, we had no notion of writing a "Grammar" at all. We began with a theory of comedy, applies to a treatise on human relations. Feeling that competitive ambition is a drastically over-developed motive in the modern world, we thought this motive might be transcended if men devoted themselves not so much to "excoriating" it as to "appreciating" it. Accordingly, we began taking notes on the foibles and antics of what we tended to think of as "the Human Barnyard"' .
(Burke 1945: 118) 'According to Aristotle, Thales believed that "all things are full of Gods". For our purposes this could be interpreted as a recognition of the fact that in everything there is a power, or motive, of some sort. That is, we would interpret it in a broader sense than the notion that "soul is intermingled in the whole universe", though Aristotle in his De Anima says this is what Thales "probably" meant' .
(Fish 1982: 101) 'By accepting the positivist assumption that ordinary language is available to a purely formal description, both sides assure that their investigations of literary language will be fruitless and arid; for if one begins with an impoverished notion of ordinary language, something that is then defined as a deviation from ordinary language will be doubly impoverished. Indeed, it is my contention that the very act of distinguishing between ordinary and literary language, because of what it assumes, leads necessarily to an inadequate account of both' .
(Fish 1982: 529) Speaking of a colleague's figuring out a puzzling reference by one of Fish's students, Fish remarks that 'by a route that is neither entirely unmarked nor wholly determined, he comes to me and to the notion "one of Fish's victims" and to a new construing of what his student has been saying' .
(Booth 1974: 66) 'The notion that we have reason to believe only what has been proved, in the sense of withstanding all possible doubts, cannot be lived with by most of us for even a moment. There is nothing shameful in this, unless logic, mathematics, and physical science, which are also based on "unprovable" assumptions, are shameful. Life would be impossible if it were not so' .
(Booth 1974: 13) 'What is most interesting here is the automatic reliance on the distinction between facts and values, and the quality of the reply one often receives if he questions that distinction. If the word dogma is applicable to any general notion that cannot, for the believer, be brought into question, the belief that you cannot and indeed should not allow your values to intrude upon your cognitive life- that thought and knowledge and fact are on one side and affirmations of value on the other- has been until recently a dogma for all right-thinking moderns' .
(Booth 1974: 33) 'Every idea -- unless of course it is "scientific" -- expresses a need or a secret wish; nothing need be taken seriously as a possible contribution to the truth. The very word truth has for many been ruled out of court, and with it the notion that one determinant of what is said can be a respect for reasons' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 40) 'Our notion of what is manifest to an individual is clearly weaker than the notion of what is actually known or assumed. A fact can be manifest without being known' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 41) 'Because "manifest" is weaker than "known" or "assumed", a notion of mutual manifestness can be developed which does not suffer from the same psychological implausibility as "mutual knowledge" or mutual assumptions"' .
(Derrida 1986b: 108) 'From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs. Which amounts to ruining the notion of the sign at the very moment when, as in Nietzsche, its exigency is recognized in the absoluteness of its right' .
(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 31) Haberlandt and Bingham say that Schank developed the notion of script as a '"predetermined, stereotyped sequence of actions that defines a well-known situation" (Schank and Abelson 1977)' .
(Winograd 1977: 63)
'While the field is not yet at a stage where it is possible to lay out a precise
unifying theory, this paper attempts to provide a beginning framework for
studying discourse.... Its four sections attempt to:
1. Delimit the
range of problems covered by the term "discourse".
2. Characterize
the basic structure of natural language based on a notion of
communication.
3. Propose a general approach to formalisms for
describing the phenomena and building theories about them.
4. Lay
out an outline of the different schemas involved in generating and
comprehending language'
.
(Virtanen 1992: 293-4) 'I shall deal with some of the criteria that have been used in the study of language to group texts for various purposes. I shall then briefly touch upon the notion of prototype, before proceeding to a discussion of a two-level typology of texts. To round off, I shall consider the status of narrative among the different types of text' .
(Bathrick 1992: 323) 'Cultural studies has pushed generally toward a multiperspectivism that would challenge the notion of one dominant theoretical model as a "master discourse" at the center of the profession ... that there is one, "scientific" interpretive model valid for all texts and contexts' .
(Bathrick 1992: 322) 'The notion of "literature" today is not an ontological category but one whose historical and institutional evolution will continue to be a legitimizing and transforming dimension of the critical enterprise' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 17) 'Women use fewer stygmatised forms and more prestige forms in every class; it is no more justified to class this pattern of female usage hypercorrect than it would be to call the usage of the middle class hypercorrect in relation to that of the working class. The notion of women's sensitivity to prestige norms is an explanation that arises from the intrinsic maleness of the norms. Men's behaviour is seen as normal; when women's differs, it has to be explained' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 29) 'Brown and Levinson ... define the notion of face as "the public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself". ... Negative face involves the desire for freedom of action and freedom from imposition, while positive face involves the desire for approval. Power ... means that in an interaction, the speaker can be characterised as relatively more or less powerful than the addressee' .
(Geertz 1973: 5-6) 'In understanding what ethnography is, or more exactly what doing ethnography is, that a start can be made toward grasping what anthropological analysis amounts to as a form of knowledge. This, it must immediately be said, is not a matter of methods. From one point of view, that of the textbook, doing ethnography is establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on. But it is not these things, techniques and received procedures, that define the enterprise. What defines it is the kind of intellectual effort it is: an elaborate venture in, to borrow a notion from Gilbert Ryle, "thick description"' .
(Jameson 1981: 105) 'The strategic value of generic concepts for Marxism clearly lies in the mediatory function of the notion of a genre, which allows the coordination of immanent formal analysis of the individual text with the twin diachronic perspective of the history of forms and the evolution of social life' .
Under construction
(Hopper 1987: 141) 'The assumption, in other words, is that "grammar" (in the sense of the rules, constraints, and categories of the language attributed to the speaker) must be an object apart from the speaker and separated from the uses which the speaker may make of it. That kind of grammar is conventionally understood to consist of sets of rules which operate on fixed categories like nouns and verbs, specify the forms of additive categories like those of case, tense, transitivity, etc., and restrict the possible orders in which words can occur in a sentence. Discourse, the actual use of language, is held to be in some sense an "implementation" of these structures, or the way in which the abstract mental system possessed in its entirety by the speaker is realized in particular utterances' .
(Minsky 1980: 16)
'In any event, the individual statements of a discourse lead to temporary
representations -- which seem to correspond to what contemporary
linguists call "deep structures" -- which are then quickly rearranged or
consumed in elaboration the growing scenario representation. In order of
"scale", among the ingredients of such a structure there might be these
kinds of levels':
surface syntactic frames -- mainly verb and noun
structures;
prepositional and word-order indicator conventions;
surface semantic frames -- action-centered meanings of words;
qualifiers and relations concerning participants, instruments,
trajectories and strategies, goals, consequences and side-effects;
thematic frames -- scenarios concerned with topics, activities, portraits,
setting; outstanding problems and strategies commonly connected with
topics;
narrative frames -- skeleton forms for typical stories,
explanations, and arguments; conventions about foci, protagonists, plot
forms, development, etc., designed to help a listener construct a new,
instantiated thematic frame in his own mind
.
Under construction
Last Modified: July-12-96 16:45:30
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