A

Quotes: (1)

(Burke 1945: 165) 'I refer to the fact that the Latin word for the Carthaginians is Poeni , while the Latin word for the goddesses of vengeance is Poenae . In the dative and ablative forms, the two would be exactly the same, Poenis . And the word is thus used in Lucretius:
ad confligendum venientibus undique Poenis,
a line which, taken in itself, could be translated, with equal justice, either as "when the Carthaginians were coming to the attack from all sides" or as "when the goddesses of Vengeance were coming to the attack from all sides". There is no doubt that literally the reference is to the Carthaginians. But if we consider it in keeping with such studies of ambiguity as Empson has given us, may we not legitimately hear effects even more resonant than the literal meaning itself?' .

absolute

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Greenblatt 1995

Quotes: (3)

(Burke 1945: 38) Such histories can be imagined in an endless variety of details. What we are suggesting here is that they all embody a grammatical form in accordance with which we should not expect a dualism of motives to be automatically dissolved, as with those apologists of science who believe that in a scientific world ethics become unnecessary. However, to consider these possibilities further, we should move into the areas of Symbolic, involving modes of transubstantiation, rituals of rebirth, whereby the individual identifies himself in terms of the collective motive (an identification by which he both is and is not one with that with which and by which he is identified). At present it is enough to note in a general way how the paradox of the absolute figures grammatically in the dialectic, making for a transcending of none term by its other, and for the reversed ambiguous derivation of the term from its other as ancestral principle' .

(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' .

(Greenblatt 1995: 228-9) 'If culture functions as a structure of limits, it also functions as the regulator and guarantor of movement. Indeed the limits are virtually meaningless without movement; it is only through improvisation, experiment, and exchange that cultural boundaries can be established. Obviously, among different cultures there will be a great diversity in the ratio between mobility and constraint. Some cultures dream of imposing an absolute order, a perfect stasis, but even these, if they are to reproduce themselves from one generation to the next, will have to commit themselves, however tentatively or unwillingly, to some minimal measure of movement; conversely, some cultures dream of an absolute mobility, a perfect freedom, but these too have always been compelled, in the interest of survival, to accept some limits' .

abstract

Definition

See also

See the following for more information:

meaning

References: (7)

Quotes: (13)

(Hopper 1987: 140) 'Critics of "radical pragmatics", and "functional grammar", assume that they and those they oppose share a common view of language, that there is a pairing of autonomous (i.e., decontextualized) grammatical forms with "functions" (whatever they might be in the abstract), and that the only point of disagreement is whether these forms might be eventually derivable from "functions" or whether the forms must be described independently of "functions". I find a certain irony in such a use of the terms "function" and "functionalism", since the very restriction of the investigation to an artificially defined level of "sentences" seems to me to be quintessentially anti-functionalist. Be that as it may, I am concerned in this paper with the more fundamental problem of the assumptions underlying the critique, especially the assumption of an abstract, mentally represented rule system which is somehow implemented when we speak' .

(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' .

(Hopper 1987: 142) 'The notion of Emergent Grammar is meant to suggest that structure, or regularity, comes out of discourse and is shaped by discourse as much as it shapes discourse in an on-going process. Grammar is hence not to be understood as a pre-requisite for discourse, a prior possession attributable in identical form to both speaker and hearer. Its forms are not fixed templates, but are negotiable in face-to-face interaction in ways that reflect the individual speakers' past experience of these forms, and their assessment of the present context, including especially their interlocutors, whose experiences and assessments may be quite different. Moreover, the term Emergent Grammar points to a grammar which is not abstractly formulated and abstractly represented, but always anchored in the specific concrete form of an utterance' .

(Hopper 1987: 154-5) 'There is no question that "grammar" is an infuriatingly elusive notion, and that it is very easy to have a clear idea about what "grammar" is in the sense of being able to give an abstract definition of it, but quite another to apply that definition consistently in practice. This asymmetry suggests that the notion of grammar is intrinsically unstable and indeterminate, relative to the observer, to those involved in the speech situation, and to the particular set of phenomena being focused upon. It suggests also that we need to question the supposition of a mentally representated set of rules, and to set aside as well the idea in Fromkin's statement which I quoted earlier, that speakers possess an abstract linguistic system ready and waiting to be drawn upon -- "accessed"! -- in case they should ever need to speak' .

(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: 34-5) 'The process of transcendence may, of course, be reversed. Then the ultimate abstract Oneness is taken as a source, a "first"; and the steps leading up to it are interpreted as stages emanating from it. Or terms that are contextual to each other (such as Being and Not-Being, Action and Rest, Mechanism and Purpose, The One and the Many) can be treated as familially related (as were Being to be derived from Not-Being, Action from Rest, Mechanism from Purpose, the Many from the One)' .

(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' .

(Booth 1974: 38-9) 'We cannot answer motivism, then, with a polemic that simply reverses the attack. Instead, we should seek a way of cutting through the destructive split on which the depredations of motivism are based: instead of trying to prove that men change their minds or should change their minds only on the basis of abstract ideas and logical proofs- a position easily refuted by even a tenth-rate motivist- we should look for a philosophy of good reasons, a way of discovering how motives become reasons and a way of showing how what we call ideas sometimes can and should affect our choices and sometimes can only fail to do so' .

(Booth 1974: xiii) 'The rhetoric that concerns us here will be the art of probing what men believe they ought to believe, rather than proving what is true according to abstract methods' .

(Booth 1974: 40) 'But I ask you to think a bit, as I turn now from motivism to the remaining four dogmas, about what would happen to your intellectual and moral life if you reversed that formula, cultivating a benign acceptance- perhaps temporary and tentative, but real- of every belief that can pass two tests: you have no particular, concrete grounds to doubt it (as distinct from the abstract principle to doubt what cannot be proved); and you have good reason to think all men who understand the problem share your belief' .

(Booth 1979: 99) 'I must admit that both Crane and Burke sometimes push very close to my own limits of patience, Crane chewing on bones long after I think all marrow has been extracted, Burke juggling Indian clubs that I am not quite sure are even there. Clearly, neither of them had managed to hit the one right ratio of theory to practice that I have always maintained in my own work. The rule is, of course, as follows: my abstract theory is essential, concrete groundwork; his is frequently quixotic indulgence in a perhaps harmless but irrelevant hobby-horse; and M. Jacques Lacan's is lamentable proof that when the Germans conquered France in World War II Hegel came swirling in with them and sent traditional French lucidity forever underground' .

(Lanham 1976: 48) 'If seriousness can acknowledge Socrates as its saint, the rhetorical ideal may claim Ovid as its martyr. He suffered as an exile in Tomis, and in modern commentaries he has suffered yet more. He wrote too much and was too fond of what he wrote, showed sensibility but no principles, no sincerity, no heart. His universe was superficial, his religious sense undeveloped, his grasp of abstract thought shaky at best' .

(Bakhtin 1986: 667) 'A common unitary language is a system of linguistic norms. But these norms do not constitute an abstract imperative; they are rather the generative forces of linguistic life, forces that struggle to overcome the heteroglossia of language, forces that unite and centralize verbal-ideological thought... What we have in mind here is not an abstract linguistic minimum of a common language, in the sense of a system of elementary forms (linguistic symbols) guaranteeing a minimum level of comprehension in practical communication. We are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life. Thus a unitary language gives expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization, which develop in vital connection with the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization' .

act

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (11)

Sperber and Wilson 1988

Quotes: (38)

(Burke 1945: 35) 'Hence , Pure Personality would be the same as No Personality: and the derivation of the personal principle from God as pure person would amount to its derivation from an impersonal principle. Similarly, a point that Hegel made much of, Pure Being would be the same as Not-Being; and in Aristotle, God can be defined either as "Pure Act" or as complete repose, a rest that is "eternal, unchangeable, immovable". And Leibniz was able to propose something pretty much like unconscious ideas in his doctrine of the "virtual innateness of ideas". (We might point up the oxymoron here by translating "unconscious ideas" as "unaware awarenesses")' .

(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: 45-6) 'The socialist revolution is designed first to reverse the state (during the "dictatorship of the proletariat") and next to abolish it, or let it "wither away". But our grammar would lead us to doubt whether a "state" can ever really "wither away", and least of all in a complex industrial society. Though it may take strategically new forms, we expect the logic of the actus-status pair to continue manifesting itself. The selection of the proletariat as the vessel of the new act that transcends the bourgeois state may or may not be correct as a casuistry, but it violates no law of "grammar". The belief in the withering away of the state, however, does seem to violate a law of grammar. For no continuity of social act is possible without a corresponding social status; and the many different kinds of act required in an industrial state, with its high degree of specialization, make for corresponding classifications of status' .

(Burke 1945: 14) 'As for "act", any verb, no matter how specific or how general, that has connotations of consciousness or purpose falls under this category. If one happened to stumble over an obstruction, that would be not an act, but a mere motion. However, one could convert even this sheer accident into something of an act if, in the course of falling, one suddenly willed his fall (as a rebuke, for instance, to the negligence of the person who had left the obstruction in the way)' .

(Burke 1945: 64) 'In sum: we are discussing the Creation not as a temporal event, but as the logical prototype of an act. Indeed, even if one believed it literally, one would hardly be justified in treating it as a temporal event, since it was itself the positing of time; it was the act that set up the conditions of temporal development; hence a terminology that reduced it to terms of time would lack sufficient scope. Thus, even a literal believer would have to treat it in terms that placed it, rather, at an intersection of time and the timeless- a point at which we place ourselves when we discuss it in terms of those non-temporal firsts called "principles"' .

(Burke 1945: 210-1) 'So we offer such a tentative restatement of the Marxist doctrine, as formed about the act of class struggle. We are following no particular text, but are trying to restate the Marxist position in general, as it appears when translated into the terms of characterization employed in this book. We freely grant, however, that such a mode of summarization, characterization, and placement is almost ludicrously inapposite, when considered from the Rhetorical point of view. For though we manipulate our terms in keeping with all the important Marxist emphasis upon class antagonism as the locus of motives, our vocabulary necessarily lacks the partisan vigor that infuses the Marxist rhetoric, and makes the Communist Manifesto a masterpiece of challenge' .

(Burke 1945: 38) 'Stated broadly the dialectical (agonistic) approach to knowledge is through the act of assertion, whereby one "suffers" the kind of knowledge that is the reciprocal of his act' .

(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: 128-9) 'For the featuring of scene , the corresponding philosophic terminology is materialism .
For the featuring of agent , the corresponding terminology is idealism .
For the featuring of agency , the corresponding terminology is pragmatism .
For the featuring of purpose , the corresponding terminology is mysticism .
For the featuring of act , the corresponding terminology is realism .
Nominalism and rationalism increase the kinds of terminology to seven. But since we have used up all our terms, we must account for them indirectly' .

(Burke 1945: 77) 'When "defining by location", one may place the object of one's definition in contexts of varying scope. And our remarks on the scene-act ratio, for instance, suggest that the choice of circumference for the scene in terms of which a given act is to be located will have a corresponding effect upon the interpretation of the act itself. Similarly, the logic of the scene-agent ratio will figure in our definition of the individual, insofar as principles of dramatic consistency are maintained' .

(Burke 1945: 9) 'The principles of consistency binding scene, act, and agent also lead to reverse applications. That is, the scene-act ratio either calls for acts in keeping with scenes or scenes in keeping with acts- and similarly with the scene-agent ratio' .

(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: 12) 'The maxim, "terrain determines tactics", is a strict localization of the scene-act ratio, with "terrain" as the casuistic equivalent for "scene" in a military calculus of motives, and "tactics" as the corresponding "act"' .

(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: 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: 210) 'Let us, then, put the matter this way: So far as our dramatistic terminology is concerned, the Marxist philosophy began by grounding agent in scene , but by reason of its poignant concern with the ethical, it requires the systematic featuring of act . On the Symbolic level, it does feature act implicitly but intensely, in having so dramatic a pattern. On the Rhetorical level, its scientist and anti-scholastic vocabulary is needed for purposes of political dynamism (for the use of an ethical terminology would fail to differentiate the doctrine sufficiently from non-secular ways of salvation). But if, as an experiment, you try a systematic development of terms generated from act , the entire system falls quickly into place' .

(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: 40) 'But to consider an act in terms of its grounds is to consider it in terms of what it is not, namely, in terms of motives that, in acting upon the active, would make it a passive, We could state the paradox another way by saying that the concept of activation implies a kind of passive-behind-the-passive; for an agent who is "motivated by his passions" would be "moved by his being-movedness", or "acted upon by his state of being acted upon"' .

(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' .

(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' .

(Foucault 1986b: 152) 'I suspect one could find a kind of gradation between different types of discourse within most societies: discourse "uttered" in the course of the day and in casual meetings, and which disappears with the very act which gave rise to it; and those forms of discourse that lie at the origins of a certain number of new verbal acts, which are reiterated, transformed or discussed; in short, discourse which is spoken and remains spoken, indefinitely, beyond its formulation, and which remains to be spoken' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 15) 'To enhance the comparative value of my descriptions of the approaches, I have decided to orient my sample analysis around two phenomena: (a) questions (and the sequences they initiated) to be analyzed in terms of speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, and ethnography of communication; (b) referring expressions (in referring sequences) to be analyzed in terms of pragmatics, conversation analysis, and variation analysis. We see not only that the different approaches provide different answers to some of the same questions, but that they highlight different facets of both questions and referring expressions' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 90-1) 'The essential insight of speech act theory is that language performs communicative acts. ... Speech act theory, then, is basically concerned with what people "do" with language -- with the functions of language. ... The conditions underlying and defining speech acts are central to speech act theory: they are the basis for the way we recognize and classify speech acts ... and for the way a single utterance can have more than one function ... In sum, by focusing upon the meaning of utterances as acts, speech act theory offers an approach to discourse analysis in which what is said is chunked (or segmented) into units that have communicative functions that can be identifies and labelled. Although we can describe such acts in different ways ... the import of such acts for discourse is that they both initiate and respond to other acts' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 5) 'The goals of this book are to describe and compare several different approaches to the linguistic analysis of discourse: speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, pragmatics, conversation analysis, and variation analysis. My aim is not to reduce the vastness of discourse analysis: I believe that at relatively early stages of an endeavor, reduction just for the sake of simplification can too drastically limit the range of interesting questions that can and should be asked' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 19) 'As I will make clear in chapter 12, the order of chapters, and thus the type of inquiry for each area of empirical focus, is not random: they reflect a transition ... from a focus upon the individual (whether the actions, knowledge, or intentions of a self) to a focus upon interaction (how self and other together construct what is said, meant, and done) to a focus upon the semiotic systems shared and used by self and other during their interaction (language, society, and culture). An ability to build such transitions ... into one's theory, and to allow and account for them in one's practice, is a crucial part of a discourse analysis that seeks to integrate what speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, pragmatics, conversation analysis, and variation analysis can offer, both individually and together, to the analysis of utterances' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 6) 'Two philosophers, John Austin and John Searle, developed speech act theory from the basic insight that language is used not just to describe the world, but to perform a range of other actions that can be indicated in the performance of the utterance itself' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 7) 'Although speech act theory was not first developed as a means of analyzing discourse, particular issues in speech act theory ... lead to discourse analysis. Speech act theory also provides a means by which to segment texts, and thus a framework for defining units that could then be combined into larger structures' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 50) 'The main thesis of this book is that an act of ostension carries a guarantee of relevance, and that this fact -- which we will call the principle of relevance -- makes manifest the intention behind the ostension. We believe that it is this principle of relevance that is needed to make the inferential model of communication explanatory' .

(Spellmeyer 1993: 27) 'Hermeneutic and "philosophical", our reformed metaempiricists would start from the conviction that no one simply "behaves", manipulated and ventriloquized by psychological imperatives, but that we all consciously act in response to experience and reflection, even if the historical sources of this action, no less than its subconscious motives and ultimate consequences, fall outside our immediate circle of awareness' .

(Spellmeyer 1993: 19) Spellmeyer conceives of 'language as a way of deliberately seeing and acting on a world that is recast through seeing and acting themselves. While no one invents language ex nihilo, while no one speaks without institutional constraints -- and while, in addition, the speaking self is to some degree a linguistic "construction" -- the act of speaking or writing always exposes past knowledge to the ordeal of the present, exposes the general to the burden of the particular, and the conventional to the test of the extraconventional. Precisely because writing reconceives the given, it involves still another activity overlooked by the proponents of objective assessment -- I mean, of course persuasion. Beginning with difference, and proceeding through difference, writing constantly seeks to overcome difference retrospectively by presenting the writer's insights to an audience whose assent must be secured' .

(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' .

(Ricoeur 1982: 146) 'The book divides the act of writing and the act of reading into two sides, between which there is no communication' .

(Lanham 1976: 61) 'Ovid saw the fraud implicit in any act of writing and wanted to declare it. What strikes us is the force of Ovid's sincerity. Formal pleasure represents a fundamental ingredient in any reconstruction of the past. It is not declared, the poet is not truly engaged. He has become a propagandist. Ovid's strategy in the Metamorphoses seems plain. He builds a mythic reality and then plays sophisticated games with it' .

(Lanham 1976: 56) 'The only element common to both is Ovid's deplorable, superficial, excessive, glib show-off style. It is true that without his style Ovid would be nothing. The Ars's two parts are held together by poetic virtuosity. The same couplet can compass the high style and the low. For the Ars was intended, we must remember, to be a showcase of Ovid's talents. He makes a point of playing every note on the organ, mimicking every effect. The couplet was indeed ... Ovid's criticism of life. It represented an allegory of control. The two worlds could be held together by a virtuoso act of style. Such a style had to be opaque, hold us at a distance, prevent entrance into either orchestration unreservedly' .

(Foucault 1986a: 144-5) 'In a novel narrated in the first person, neither the first person pronoun, the present indicative tense, nor, for that matter, its signs of localization refer directly to the writer, either to the time when he wrote, or to the specific act of writing; rather, they stand for a "second self" whose similarity to the author is never fixed and undergoes considerable alteration within the course of a single book. It would be as false to seek the author in relation to the actual writer as to the fictional narrator; the "author-function" arises out of their scission-- in the division and distance of the two. One might object that this phenomenon only applies to novels or poetry, to a context of "quasi-discourse," but, in fact, all discourse that supports this "author-function" is characterized by this plurality of egos. In a mathematical treatise, the ego who indicates the circumstances of composition in the preface is not identical, either in terms of his position or his function, to the "I" who concludes a demonstration within the body of the text. The former implies a unique individual who, at a given time and place, succeeded in completing a project, whereas the latter indicates an instance and plan of demonstration that anyone could perform provided the same set of axioms, preliminary operations, and an identical set of symbols were used. It is also possible to locate a third ego: one who speaks of the goals of his investigation, the obstacles encountered, its results, and the problems yet to be solved and this "I" would function in a field of existing or future mathematical discourses. We are not dealing with a system of dependencies where a first and essential use of the "I" is reduplicated, as a kind of fiction, by the other two. On the contrary, the "author-function" in such discourses operates so as to effect the simultaneous dispersion of the three egos' .

(A. Pratt 1981: 24) Pratt writes of 'a destructive element that seems to accompany women heroes whenever they experience truly satisfying Eros. The embodied lover is sometimes embodied in real men during erotic epiphanies in women's fiction, but such experiences are momentary and fleeting, giving way to events that act as punishments.... When women heroes do seek erotic freedom, which we define simply as the right to make love when and with whom they wish, they meet all the opposition of the patriarchy' .

action

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (12)

Ijsseling 1976

Jehlen 1990

Quotes: (30)

(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: xxii-xxiii) 'The titular word for our own method is "dramatism", since it invites one to consider the matter of motives in a perspective that, being developed from the analysis of drama, treats language and thought primarily as modes of action. The method is synoptic, though not in the historical sense. A purely historical survey would require no less that a universal history of human culture; for every judgment, exhortation, or admonition, every view of natural or supernatural reality, every intention or expectation involves assumptions about motive, or cause. Our work must be synoptic in a different sense: in the sense that it offers a system of placement, and should enable us, by the systematic manipulations of the terms, to "generate" or "anticipate" the various classes of motivational theory. And a treatment in these terms, we hope to show, reduces the subject synoptically while still permitting us to appreciate its scope and complexity' .

(Burke 1945: 56) 'Contemporary scientific theory, in proposing to abandon the categories of substance and causality, has done speculation a good turn. For it has made clear wherein the difference between philosophic and scientific terminologies of motivation resides. Philosophy, like common sense, must think of human motivation dramatistically, in terms of action and its ends. But a science is freed of philosophic taints only insofar as it confines itself to terms of motion and arrested motion (figure, structure). This convention, almost Puritanical in its severity (surely we should not be far wrong in calling it a secularized variant of Puritanism) has brought about such magnification of human powers that any "objection" to it would have about as much force as an attempt to "refute" Niagara Falls. But such results, however spectacular, do not justify an attempt to abide by the same terminological conventions when treating of human motives. For one could confine the study of action within the terms of motion only by resigning oneself to gross misrepresentations of life as we normally experience it. Though we here lay great stress upon the puns and other word play in men's ideas of motivation, we do not thereby conclude that such linguistic tactics are "nothing but" puns and word play' .

(Burke 1945: 195) 'If this realm of the things-in-themselves can be thought though not known , this limitation upon our claims to knowledge about them applies in reverse to science. Science compels us to admit that things-in-themselves can't be known; but in putting them outside the area of scientific knowledge , by the same token we put them outside the area of scientific refutation or denial . The sources of morality thus lie beyond the reach of the terms proper to the physical sciences (which is but another way of saying that, in this terminology, action cannot be reduced to motion)' .

(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: 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: 53) 'Then this clever, subtle, sensitive but divided man does an amazing thing. Russell I has said he ought to be a behaviorust but can't quite make it. Russell II has worried about the effects of popular behaviorism on mass man. Now Russell III, the man of action, retreats from the whole problem by recommending as his practical solution that ordinary men (whose misreading of the ethical consequences of behaviorism he fears) should be "taught logic": they should be taught logic so that they will learn not to reason. "For, if they reason, they will almost certainly reason wrongly" (p.98)- that is, they will conclude that if man is a machine, certain ethical consequences follow!' .

(Booth 1974: 52) 'The view of man, the puny, neaningless insect, prevailed, then- except of course whenever Russell felt impelled to defend values to which he was himself deeply committed, values like that of scientific inquiry or of integrity in its pursuit. Then we meet the two other Russells, the vital, idealistic, even Utopian prophet of reason and the passionate mystic and man of action who became famous among nonprofessionals. Russell I still dominated in the sense of setting the definitions, distinctions, and terms in which argument and action take place. But Russell II, the courageous partisan of truth, and Russell III, the savior of the world, never allowed themselves to be silenced by the cold logician for long. They knew that man's life could not be lived without values, and they feared that the scientific world picture which Russell I preached would, when popularized, produce impoverished dehumanized man' .

(Foucault 1986b: 155) 'Disciplines constitute a system of control in the production of discourse, fixing its limits through the action of an identity taking the form of a permanent reactivation of the rules' .

(Foucault 1986b: 162) 'At all events, one thing at least must be emphasised here: that the analysis of discourse thus understood, does not reveal the universality of a meaning, but brings to light the action of imposed rarity, with a fundamental power of affirmation. Rarity and affirmation; rarity, in the last resort of affirmation -- certainly not any continuous outpouring of meaning, and certainly not any monarchy of the signifier' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 8) '"Communication" cannot be assumed to be constant across cultures. Cultural conceptions of communication are deeply intertwined with conceptions of person, cultural values, and world knowledge -- such that instances of communication behavior are never free of the cultural belief and action systems in which they occur' .

(Minsky 1980: 14) 'Almost any event, action, change, flow of material, or even flow of information can be represented to a first approximation by a two-frame generalized event' .

(Booth 1979: 107) 'He [Burke] in fact rejects more than conventional norms, His dialectic of similarities and differences is so deliberately flexible and so aggressively opposed to neatly fixed meanings that in a sense all literal proof is made suspect. In the opening pages of A Grammar of Motives we find a series of claims that any action or statement can be considered as evidence for or against almost any concept. In defining any substance, for example, we necessarily place it in its context, its scene , which is to define it in terms of what it is not , leading to the "paradox of substance": "every positive is negative". Before we know it, Burke has moved through statements like "any tendency to do something is ...a tendency not to do it" (32) to a series of paradoxes and oxymorons and "ambiguities of substance" that stagger the literal-minded' .

(Booth 1979: 101-2) 'Crane's pluralism might lead us to "do justice" to Burke. His dramatism is one of the possible modes: his subject, language as action; his method, an assimilative dialectic; his principles, comprehensive and operational; and his purpose, actional or "rhetorical". To use his own words, he attempts "to cure" himself and society by doing verbal "therapy". His initial choice of mode enables him to answer certain questions and prevents his answering other questions. When we judge his answers as "relative to" that initial choice, we can both judge his effectiveness within his chosen mode and avoid the kind of dogmatism that would rule out his mode as illegitimate in the first place. Anyone who knows Burke at all knows that he will refuse to stay pinned and wriggling on anyone else's wall chart' .

(Booth 1979: 112-3) 'We shall therefore always look, in every human situation, for the elements of drama, the five most obvious being the action itself, the agent doing the action, the agency or means by which he performs it, the scene in which it is performed, and the purpose it is intended to achieve. Sometimes we may want to add others, like time as a distinguishable part of the scene and attitude as a subdivision of agency, but usually the dramatistic pentad will do our job. We shall use these elements, however, not as some use Aristotle's four causes -- unvarying, frozen, literal categories -- but as fluid reagents, applicable in different "ratios" for different problems. What is one agent's action is another agent's scene. A given agent can be of someone else's agency -- a tool to other ends -- or he can be, again, a part of someone's scene' .

(Booth 1979: 108) 'But we must not be un-Burkean in what we mean by a phrase like "really mean". We are not -- it should be clear by now -- in pursuit of a meaning that is knowledge in a scientific sense of fixed concepts proved by tests of certainty or levels of probability. We are pursuing a truth-of-action, a meaning that is more probed than proved -- a way of knowing, a knowing that is itself a kind of action' .

(Booth 1979: 108) 'Consider more closely the beginning of A Grammar of Motives . Like Burke's other books, it depends on a conceptual beginning in "dramatism": if man-as-symbol-user, then action (in the sense of symbolically motivated choices between various yeses and noes -- the opposite, in short, of mere motion); : if action, then conflict; if conflict, then drama. And if drama, then surely you must want to find a critical language that deals dramatically with the great symbolic drama of the whole of man's life. But not how he says the project began, as distinct from how the finished book begins' .

(Bove 1990: 57-8) '"Discourse" makes possible disciplines and institutions which, in turn, sustain and distribute those discourses.... In other words, these discourses are linked to social institutions which "have power" in the very ordinary sense we mean when we use that phrase: such institutions can control bodies and actions. But there is more to them than "having power" in the sense of being able to dominate others.... Power must not be thought of as negative, as repression, domination, or inhibition. On the contrary, it must always be seen as "a making possible", as an opening up of fields in which cerain kinds of action and production are brought about.... What Foucault means when he says that power acts upon actions is precisely that it regulates our forming of ourselves' .

(Frye 1957: 214) 'In irony, as distinct from tragedy, the wheel of time completely encloses the action, and there is no sense of an original contact with a relatively timeless world' .

(Frye 1957: 188) 'We have distinguished myth from romance by the hero's power of action: in the myth proper he is divine, in the romance proper he is human' .

(Frye 1957: 192) 'The four mythoi that we are dealing with, comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony, may now be seen as four aspects of a central unifying myth....conflict is the basis or archetypal theme of romance ...catastrophe ... is the archetypal theme of tragedy....the sense that heroism and effective action are absent, disorganized or foredoomed to defeat, and that confusion and anarchy reign over the world, is the archetypal theme of irony and satire....recognition of a newborn society rising in triumph around a still somewhat mysterious hero and his bride, is the archetypal theme of comedy' .

(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' .

(Ijsseling 1976: 19) 'Isocrates states that the logos directs ... all thought and action.... An orator is one who, on the basis of long study and constant practice gains complete control over the logos and has a perfect command of his language' .

(Jehlen 1990: 273) 'Because an ideology of gender is basic to virtually all thought while, by most thinkers, unrecognized as such, gender criticism often has a confrontational edge. One has to read for gender; unless it figures explicitly in story or poem, it will seldom read for itself. On the other hand "interpretation" is an ambiguous word meaning both to translate and to explain. Literary interpretation does both inextricably ... They also interpret who only think to explicate. Literary criticism involves action as much as reflection, and reading for gender makes the deed explicit.... The term "gender" in literary criticism refers to a set of concerns and also to a vocabulary ... that contributes its own meanings to everything that is said or written' .

active

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Frye 1957

Quotes: (4)

(Burke 1945: 118-9) 'And we should infer that the original conception of the powers of motives in things is not exactly animistic. The evidences of animism which nineteenth-century anthropologists found so profusely among primitive tribes are, to our way of thinking, mainly indications of how thoroughly most of such anthropologists were imbued with the terms typical of nineteenth-century idealist philosophy, so that they saw things in these terms. We should expect, rather, that the basic perception of motives is a perception of things not as possessing the souls and personalities of agents , but as being essentially active. That is, they were not felt to be people ; they were felt to be actions' .

(Frye 1957: 198-202) 'Romance, like comedy, has six isolatable phases': 1) '...the myth of the birth of the hero'; 2) '...the innocent youth of the hero'; 3) '...the normal quest theme'; 4) '...the maintaining of the integrity of the innocent world against the assault of experience'; 5) '...a reflective, idyllic view of experience from above'; and 6) '...the end of a movement from active to contemplative adventure' .

actor

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Quotes: (2)

(Burke 1945: 20) 'This group of concerns will be examined in due course. Meanwhile, we should be reminded that the term agent embraces not only all words general or specific for person, actor, character, individual, hero, villain, father, doctor, engineer, but also any words, moral or functional, for patient, and words for the motivational properties or agents, such as "drives", "instincts", "states of mind"' .

(Lanham 1976: 27) 'The rhetorical stylist has no central self to be true to.... He feels at home in his roles and to live must play them. When he poses, he is being himself. The more artistic his performance, the more authentically representative it is. Rhetorical man is an actor and insincerity is the actor's mode of being. The wider his range of impersonations, the fuller his self. The more smoothly he can manage a sudden role-change, the more genuine the effect and the effort' .

ad hoc

Definition

See also

References: (0)

Quotes: (0)

addressee

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Quotes: (1)

adjective

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Booth 1974

Quotes: (1)

(Booth 1974: 16-7) 'One can easily construct a long column of opposed terms that roughly match the original and entirely misleading split between fact and value: objective versus subjective, matter versus mind, mechanism versus vitalism, scientific reason versus faith or "the heart" or "the wisdom of the body"- and so on. The giveaway in such matters is that the column can be turned into two double columns, all of the terms made useful to either scientismist or irrationalist, just by adding proper adjectives to the opponent's terms. Often one needs no better adjective than a mere mere : my side obtains knowledge of facts, yours asserts mere value. Or: my side respects values, yours deals with mere facts. My side works with reason, yours with mere, or blind, faith' .

adverb

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (0)

Quotes: (0)

aesthetic

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Lanham 1993

Culler 1992

Quotes: (2)

(Lanham 1993: xi) 'One of the computer screen's routine marvels is manipulation of scale, and such manipulation stands at the center of postmodern art. As we shall see in chapter 2, wherever you touch twentieth-century visual art and architecture, it seems both to foreshadow electronic expression and to provide and aesthetic ready-made for it. as I point out in chapter 1, the composition, notation, and performance of music have been transformed by digital expression. Because word, image, and sound are expressed in a common digital code, the arts take on a new and radical convertibility that threatens both their present compartmentalization and its academic departmental embodiment. So, too, poststructuralist literary theory, which has precipitated the current streetfight between Left and Right, turns out to be just such another proleptic aesthetic; poststructuralism and the common digital code seem part of the same event. As I suggest here, the whole Aristotelian basis of literary criticism is undermined by electronic expression, and so pre structuralist literary theory is similarly transformed' .

(Culler 1992: 223) 'Finally, an issue in recent theory is the nature and function of the aesthetic' .

affirmation

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Foucault 1986b

Quotes: (2)

(Foucault 1986b: 162) 'The critical side of the analysis deals with the systems enveloping discourse; attempting to mark out and distinguish the principles of ordering, exclusion and rarity in discourse. We might, to play with our words, say it practises a kind of studied casualness. The genealogical side of discourse, by way of contrast, deals with series of effective formation of discourse: it attempts to grasp it in its power of affirmation, by which I do not mean a power opposed to that of negation, but the power of constituting domains of objects, in relation to which one can affirm or deny true or false propositions. Let us call these domains of objects positivist and , to play on words yet again, let us say that, if the critical style is one of studied casualness, then the genealogical mood is one of felicitous positivism' .

agency

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Booth 1979

Quotes: (4)

(Burke 1945: xxi) 'Pragmatists would probably have referred the motivation back to a source in agency . They would have noted that our hero escaped by using an instrument , the file by which he severed his bonds; then in this same line of thought, they would have observed that the hand holding the file was also an instrument; and by the same token the brain that guided the hand would be an instrument, and so likewise the educational system that taught the methods and shaped the values involved in the incident. True, if you reduce the terms to any one of them, you will find them branching out again; for no one of them is enough' .

agent

Definition

See also

References: (4)

Quotes: (18)

(Hopper 1987: 153) 'What I have wanted to stress here is the need to understand not only the formal process but the way in which that formal process emerges from a discourse context, in other words, is anchored in particular, concrete utterances. It is this "prior textuality" of the construction which explains why it has retained properties of a separate, external clause. What we see emerging, then, is a new strategy for permitting a lexical agent to be incorporated into a nuclear clause under certain contextual conditions, presumable involving differences of topic continuity' .

(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: 171) 'The unadulteratedly idealistic philosophy starts and ends in the featuring of properties belonging to the term, agent' .

(Burke 1945: 179) 'We here sum up briefly a position for which Berkeley argues with considerable thoroughness. One must consult the original if he would do justice to the various steps in the exposition. But whether or not one is convinced by Berkeley's arguments, one must agree that they are statements saying what can be said about "matter" (that is, scene ) when considered in terms of "ideas" (that is, agent )' .

(Burke 1945: 189) 'I believe the true mettle of a philosopher is shown in what he can say about nothing. Any tyro can talk about something. But it takes a really profound thinker to say profound things about nothing. And I hasten to admit that my own five terms are all about nothing, since they designate not this scene, or that agent, etc. but scene, agent, etc. in general)' .

(Burke 1945: 158) 'I am suggesting that "variability" allows for two quite different meanings, as with the two meanings for "fillability", one referring to a cause ab extra and the other to some internal principle of motion. It stands pliantly at the point where scene overlaps upon agent' .

(Burke 1945: 16) 'Ordinarily, the scene-act and scene-agent ratios can be extended to cover such cases. Thus, the office of the Presidency may be treated as a "situation" affecting the agent who occupies it' .

(Burke 1945: 21-2) 'First we should note that there is, etymologically, a pun lurking behind the Latin roots. The word is often used to designate what some thing or agent intrinsically is , as per these meanings in Webster's: "the most important element in any existence; the characteristic and essential components of anything; the main part; essential import; purport". Yet etymologically "substance" is a scenic word. Literally, a person's or a thing's sub-stance would be something that stands beneath or supports the person or thing' .

(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' .

agreement

Definition

See also

References: (3)

Fish 1982

Booth 1974

Quotes: (6)

(Fish 1982: 338-9) 'The fact of agreement, rather than being a proof of the stability of objects, is a testimony to the power of an interpretive community to constitute the objects upon which its members ... can then agree.... Disagreements are not settled by the facts, but are the means by which the facts are settled. Of course, no such settling is final, and in the (almost certain) event that the dispute is opened again, the category of the facts "as they really are" will be reconstituted in still another shape. Nowhere is this process more conveniently on display than in literary criticism, where everyone's claim is that his interpretation more perfectly accords with the facts, but where everyone's purpose is to persuade the rest of us to the version of the facts he espouses by persuading us to the interpretive principles in the light of which those facts will seem indisputable' .

(Fish 1982: 342-3) 'While there is no core of agreement in the text, there is a core of agreement ... concerning the ways of producing the text. Nowhere is this set of acceptable ways written down, but it is a part of everyone's knowledge of what it means to be operating within the literary institution as it is now constituted.... This does not mean that these rules and the practices they authorize are either monolithic or stable' .

(Fish 1982: 342) 'A pluralist is committed to saying that there is something in the text which rules out some readings and allows others ... His best evidence is that in practice "we all in fact" do reject unacceptable readings and that more often than not we agree on the readings that are to be rejected....but if, as I have argued, the text is always a function of interpretation, then the text cannot be the location of the core of agreement by means of which we reject interpretations' .

(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' .

(Booth 1974: 10-1) 'I choose, then, to talk about the whole thing as in part a rhetorical failure, but I should make clear that I don't mean by that simply what people usually mean by a "failure of communication". That phrase seems to suggest that if we could get our words right, all would be well. By using the traditional word rhetoric I want to suggest a whole philosophy of how men succeed or fail in discovering together, in discourse, new levels of truth (or at least agreement) that neither side suspected before.... Rhetoric has almost always had a bad press, and it more often than not still carries a sense of trickery or bombastic disguise for a weak case: making the word appear the better cause. But I am groping toward something far more important, though obviously far too grandiose to be achieved in four lectures: a view of rhetoric as the whole art of discovering and sharing warrantable assertion' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 70) Minimum response said to be agreement in male speech .

allegory

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Quotes: (1)

ambiguity

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (3)

Booth 1979

Ijsseling 1976

Quotes: (8)

(Burke 1945: 52) 'We may even go a step further and note that one may say "it is substantially true" precisely at a time when on the basis of the evidence, it would be much more accurate to say, "it is not true"....What handier linguistic resource could a rhetorician want than an ambiguity whereby he can say "The state of affairs is substantially such-and-such," instead of having to say "The state of affairs is and/or is not such-and-such"?' .

(Burke 1945: xviii) 'A perfectionist might seek to evolve terms free of ambiguity and inconsistency (as with the terministic ideals of symbolic logic and logical positivism). But we have a different purpose in view, one that probably retains traces of its "comic" origin. We take it for granted that, insofar as men cannot themselves create the universe, there must remain something essentially enigmatic about the problem of motives, and that this underlying enigma will manifest itself in inevitable ambiguities and inconsistencies among the terms for motives. Accordingly, what we want is not terms that avoid ambiguity, but terms that clearly reveal the strategic spots at which ambiguities necessarily arise' .

(Burke 1945: xix) 'Since no two things or acts or situations are exactly alike, you cannot apply the same term to both of them without thereby introducing a certain margin of ambiguity, an ambiguity as great as the difference between the two subjects that are given the identical title' .

(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' .

(Booth 1979: 108) 'Obviously such talk is nonsense to anyone who insists on a literal meaning for phrases like "the same as" and "amounts to". Burke seldom uses such words in a sense that would satisfy someone like Crane as strictly literal; even the word "literal" is not quite literal; thinking about the concept as Burke might, we would no doubt extend my questioning of Crane's usage in chapter 2 [of this work]. Indeed, a major part of his persistent program is to remind literalists that behind their claims to precision lurk confusions that can be acknowledged and lived with only by qualifying every copulative verb with some sense of ambiguity. It is not just that the words need semantic scouring. What something is is always too rich and complex for any one statement. Thus Burke can, without violating his own canons, say at one point that literary form as the gratification of needs is the appeal in poetry and, in other contexts, say that literary form is a disguise for the true appeal; and he can really mean both statements' .

(Ijsseling 1976: 14) 'Plato is aware of the fundamental ambiguity of the word, which may guide a man, but also can lead him astray and deceive him'. Therefore, Plato is suspicious of speech and prefers dialectic .

analysis

Definition

See also

References: (19)

Quotes: (32)

(Burke 1945: 317) 'Our five terms are "transcendental" rather than formal (and are to this extent Kantian) in being categories which human thought necessarily exemplifies. Instead of calling them the necessary "forms of experience", however, we should call them the necessary "forms of talk about experience". For our concern is primarily with the analysis of language rather than with the analysis of " reality"' .

(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' .

(Fish 1982: 42) 'The method, then, is applicable to larger units and its chief characteristics remain the same: (1) it refuses to answer or even ask the question, what is this work about; (2) it yields an analysis not of formal features but of the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time; (3) the result will be a description of the structure of response which hay have an oblique or even ... a contrasting relationship to the structure of the work as a thing in itself' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 11-2) 'The examples in this section revealed some important features of the approaches to be discussed in this book: what count as data, what problems and questions motivate analysis, how to address or resolve a problem' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 10) 'Conversational analysis ... differs from other branches of sociology because rather than analyzing social order per se, it seeks to discover the methods by which members of a society produce an sense of social order' .

(Longacre 1983: 1) 'This chapter deals with broad concerns of monologue discourse and leaves the matter of the relations of monologue and dialogue to the introduction to the next chapter. One initial concern in the analysis of monologue discourse is discourse typology. Characteristics of individual discourses can be neither described, predicted, nor analyzed without resort to a classification of discourse types' .

(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' .

(Ricoeur 1982: 154) 'The working hypothesis of any structural analysis of texts is this: in spite of the fact that writing is on the same side as speech in relation to language -- namely, on the side of discourse -- the specificity of writing in relation to speech is based on structural features which can be treated as analogues of language in discourse' .

(Bove 1990: 62) 'The genealogical analysis of discourse, then, sets out with an eye on the present to criticize and trace the systems of power which have come to constitute human being in our world. It does this to stand in opposition to them and to provide the results of its work to whomever would like to use them in their struggles against the forms of power they are trying to resist' .

(Winograd 1977: 84-6) 'The concepts presented in the sections above have been developed by researchers working at three different sorts of tasks: data exploration (primarily by linguists); model building (primarily in artificial intelligence); and model verification (primarily by psychologists).... Current research tends to lie in clusters along these separate lines. There is little work which combines the linguist's sophistication in recognizing the complexity of the data with the computer system builder's concern with the properties of the system as a whole, and the psychologist's demand that the resulting analysis be verifiable through experiments. If we are ever to really understand natural discourse, we have to develop methodologies which span these approaches, providing both scope and rigor in their theories' .

(Greenblatt 1995: 227) 'Cultural analysis has much to learn from scrupulous formal analysis of literary texts because those texts are not merely cultural by virtue of reference to the world beyond themselves; they are cultural by virtue of social values and contexts that they have themselves successfully absorbed....Cultural analysis must be opposed on principle to the rigid distinction between that which is within a text and that which lies outside' .

(Kinneavy 1971: 24) 'The justification for the autonomy of textual study is the same as the justification for any scientific abstraction: by focusing on one aspect of a reality, science can set up tools for isolated analysis which is possible only within this particular vacuum. Then the object of investigation can be reinserted into the stream of life, more intelligible for its academic isolation.' .

(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' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 13) 'Sociolinguistics has dealt, therefore, with the what of sex differences, but has it dealt so well with the why? Do the conventional explanations given in sociolinguistic analysis stand up to scrutiny? That is the question we want to address' .

(Foucault 1986a: 146) 'Saussure made possible a generative grammar radically different from his own structural analysis' .

(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"' .

(Geertz 1973: 5) 'The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning' .

(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' .

(Jehlen 1990: 265) 'In proposing gender as a basic problem and an essential category in cultural and historical analysis, feminists have recast the issue of women's relative identity as equally an issue for men, who, upon ceasing to be mankind, become, precisely, men. Thus gender has emerged as a problem that is always implicit in any work. It is a quality of the literary voice hitherto masked by the static of common assumptions. And as a critical category gender is an additional lens, or a way of lifting the curtain to an unseen recess of the self and of society. Simply put, the perspective of gender enhances the critical senses; let us try to see how' .

(Kristeva 1986: 472) 'The reader will find in the following pages, first, an attempt to situate the problematic of women in Europe within an inquiry on time: that time which the feminist movement both inherits and modifies. Second, I will attempt to distinguish two phases or two generations of women which, while immediately universalist and cosmopolitan in their demands, can nonetheless be differentiated by the fact that the first generation is more determined by the implications of a national problematic ..., while the second, more determined by its place within the "symbolic denominator", is European and trans-European. Finally, I will try, both through the problems approached and through the type of analysis I propose, to present what I consider a viable stance for a European-- or at least a European woman-- within a domain which is henceforth worldwide in scope' .

(Leitch [n.d.]: 151) 'When it studies discourse, archeology does not seek a hidden or overt "intention," "will," or "meaning" in or behind the discourse ... Its object of analysis is not the author, the linguistic code, the reader, or the individual text. but the limited set of texts constituting the regulated discourse of a discipline' .

(Leitch [n.d.]: 152) 'Deploying discontinuity as a methodological wedge, archaeology shows one aspect of its negative operation....In short, it begets excessive fragmentation in both the object and method of analysis....Archaeology regards discontinuity as a positive element rather than some external threat or failure requiring reduction or erasure. Thus archaeology actively courts discontinuity ... As archaeologist, Foucault attempts to restore to the stable ground of Western culture its rifts, instabilities, and flaws' .

anaphora

Definition

See also

References: (0)

Quotes: (0)

animism

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Quotes: (1)

anthropology

Definition

See also

References: (2)

Spellmeyer 1993

Culler 1992

Quotes: (2)

(Spellmeyer 1993: 28) To survey every language as we need to now, from the broader, hermeneutic perspective, is not to emulate the "social sciences" of a generation past, when the stress fell on the second term, still less would our practice take its cue from somewhat harder versions of research, such as linguistics or psychology. Composition on the terms I have argued for here would more closely resemble what Turner calls processual anthropology. As a form of engaged, politicized inquiry into speech and writing, a processual composition would continually struggle to recall the larger, always changing dimension of public life. 'Through this struggle of recollection, our field might discharge its institutional task -- teaching students how to write -- while at the same time affirming the possibility of a knowledge without domination and a commonality without coercion' .

(Culler 1992: 203) 'The genre of theory includes works of anthropology, art history, gender studies, linguistics, philosophy political theory, psychoanalysis, social and intellectual history, and sociology. Its works are tied to argument in these fields, but they become theory because their visions or arguments have been suggestive or productive for people not working primarily or professionally in those disciplines' .

antithesis

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Frye 1957

Quotes: (1)

(Frye 1957: 196) 'The characters who elude the moral antithesis of heroism and villainy generally are or suggest spirits of nature' .

apothegm

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Lanham 1993

Quotes: (1)

(Lanham 1993: 129-30) 'The late, and now much disputed, literary theorist Paul de Man spent a lot of time glossing the great American rhetorician Kenneth Burke's apothegm that "every way of seeing is a way of not seeing". Electronic text allows us to see that this version of "blindness" and "insight" is often a matter of scaling-choice. That choice we can now manipulate ourselves; we can dial in a different scale of difficulty, of "readability". That will often defuse, if not solve, the difficulty. If scaling won't work, and we come to an irreducible aporia, we can include both alternatives in a toggle switch and move on. Problem solved. Electronic text is intrinsically a bi-stable medium, one made to accommodate exactly this difficulty. Texts, Derrida argued, are not "a store of ready-made 'concepts' but an activity resistant to any such reductive ploy". No need to argue that for electronic text- it is manifestly true. The same popular commentary on deconstruction defines it this way: "Deconstruction is therefore an activity performed by texts which in the end have to acknowledge their own partial complicity with what they denounce" Kenneth Burke said the same thing in 1935, but without the political spin of "denunciation" and "complicity": "Even when one attempts to criticize the structure, one must leave some parts of it intact in order to have a point of reference for his criticism. However, for all the self-perpetuating qualities of an orientation, it contains the germs of its dissolution". Electronic text, by its very manipulability, builds in a maximum of the textual self-consciousness such declarations point to. Add all this reflection together (and a lot more one could do), and it is hard not to think that, at the end of the day, electronic text will seem the natural fulfillment of much current literary theory, and resolve many of its questions' .

archetype

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Ordonez 1991

Quotes: (2)

(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' .

(Ordonez 1991: 104) 'The title of Os habla Electra alerts the reader that this novel has referents in the world of myth and archetype' .

argument

Definition

See also

References: (6)

Quotes: (9)

(Fish 1982: 527) Speaking of the need to declare the more common interpretation of the reference of an utterance as its normal meaning, Fish says 'To admit as much is not to weaken my argument by reinstating the category of the normal, because the category as it appears in that argument is not transcendental but institutional; and while no institution is so universally in force and so perdurable that the meanings it enables will be normal for ever, some institutions or forms of life are so widely lived in that for a great many people the meanings the enable seem "naturally" available and it takes a special effort to see that they are the products of circumstances....The obviousness of the utterance's meaning is not a function of the values its words have in a linguistic system that is independent of context; rather, it is because the words are heard as already embedded in a context that they have a meaning that Hirsch can then cite as obvious.... it is impossible even to think of a sentence independently of a context, and when we are asked to consider a sentence for which no context has been specified, we will automatically hear it in the context in which it has been most often encountered' .

(Fish 1982: 528) No one ' is free to confer on an utterance any meaning he likes. Indeed, "confer" is exactly the wrong word because it implies a two stage procedure in which a reader or hearer first scrutinizes an utterance and then gives it a meaning. The argument of the preceding pages can be reduced to the assertion that there is no such first stage, that one hears an utterance within, and not as preliminary to determining, a knowledge of its purposes and concerns, and that to so hear it is already to have assigned it a shape and given it a meaning' .

(Booth 1974: xiii) 'My business is largely with what they left out- with what might be called the origin, likelihoods, and extent of human convictions, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent- an argument for the intellectual validity of a subject which, abandoned by philosophers, has too often fallen into the hands of quacks: preachers of "plain style", of "winning friends and influencing [other?] people", of "writing that sells", to say nothing of various "scientific" modes of changing men's minds' .

(Spellmeyer 1993: 28) 'Whatever else the everything-is-language argument might do, it gives the teacher a new ... alibi for ignoring social differences. Who needs to listen to students when language is always the speaker?' .

(Lanham 1993: xi-xii) 'The main intellectual debate of our time, I argue in chapter 3, is best understood as a resurrection of the ancient quarrel between the philosophers and the rhetoricians. This fundamental polarity depends heavily, it turns out, on the mode of presentation. Print- if I may telescope an argument presented more fully later- is a "philosophic" medium, the electronic screen a deeply "rhetorical" one. Once again, the quarrel, the item on the intellectual agenda, preceded the means of expression it so badly needs in order to sort itself out. Technology is following the main "operating system" disagreement in our time, not driving it' .

(Culler 1992: 212) 'Attacks on relativism, frequent in popular condemnations of theory, invoke the sort of imaginary argument we used to call "straw men," such as the supposed belief that all thoughts, ideas, and texts are of equal value -- missing the point that value is, specifically, relative to purposes and circumstances, which may be very general and widespread, as well as local and particular' .

arrangement

Definition

See also

References: (2)

Winograd 1977

Enkvist 1981

Quotes: (3)

(Winograd 1977: 66) It is obvious that Winograd assumes the basic conduit model of communication when he says that there is a 'need to transmit meaning through a sequential medium'. Apparently the arrangement is not a particularly happy one for 'the message is forced into a linearized channel in order to be conveyed by speaking' .

(Enkvist 1981: 97-8) 'Rhetoricians used to be the people who worried most about the complex of problems which I shall discuss under a somewhat ponderous term, Experiential Iconicism....The traditional labels under which these problems used to enter into rhetoric and grammar were ordo naturalis and ordo artificialis....In natural order ... text and discourse have the same arrangement as things in the universe of discourse' .

(Enkvist 1981: 104) 'If we wish to relate instances of experiential iconicism in text generation or in text interpretation and comprehension to our general knowledge of the world (as we must), a cognitive model becomes necessary. And we must cite principles of human interaction if we can to detect the motives for the preference of one text strategy to another. In brief, we shall need the whole gamut of models if we wish to explain why somebody opts for an iconic arrangement of his text and how he carries out his iconic strategy through text patterning and, ultimately, syntax. This is simply another way of saying that experiential iconicism can be discussed in terms of examples brought from various levels: syntax, text patterning, cognition, interaction' .

asituational

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (1)

Fish 1982

Quotes: (1)

(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' .

aspect

Definition

See also

References: (3)

Kinneavy 1971

Leitch [n.d.]

Quotes: (4)

(Kinneavy 1971: 40) Kinneavy maintains that the 'aims overlap just as the modes of discourse. But abstracting them for individual consideration is the necessary limitation of any aspect of science' .

association

Definition

See also

References: (1)

Enkvist 1981

Quotes: (1)

(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' .

assumption

Definition

See also

References: (13)

Sperber and Wilson 1988

Lanham 1993

Haberlandt and Bingham 1982

van Dijk 1977

Jehlen 1990

Said 1986

Quotes: (17)

(Gibbs 1987: 575) 'Clark and Marshall (1981)... have attempted to show that mutual knowledge can be established in practice by arguing that the apparent paradox of mutual knowledge is base on two incorrect assumptions. The first is the assumption that mutual beliefs must be represented in a mental model as an infinite series of belief statements'. What they propose is that 'if A and B make certain assumptions about each other's rationality, they can use certain states of affairs as a basis for inferring the infinity of conditions all at once' .

(Fish 1982: 110) 'The search for style, like the search for an essentialist definition of literature, proceeds in the context of an assumption that predetermines its shape' .

(Fish 1982: 354-5) 'Strictly speaking, getting "back-to-the-text" is not a move one can perform, because the text one gets back to will be the text demanded by some other interpretation and that interpretation will be presiding over its production. This is not to say, however, that the "back-to-the-text" move is ineffectual, The fact that it is not something one can do in no way diminishes the effectiveness of claiming to do it. As a rhetorical ploy, the announcement that one is returning to the text will be powerful so long as the assumption that criticism is secondary to the text and must not be allowed to overwhelm it remains unchallenged.... A wholesale challenge would be impossible because there would be no terms in which it could be made; that is, in order to be wholesale, it would have to be made in terms wholly outside the institution; but if that were the case, it would be unintelligible because it is only within the institution that the facts of literary study -- texts, authors, periods, genres -- become available' .

(Booth 1974: 26) 'Note the automatic assumption that the real reasons are not the public reasons, that the real reasons have something to do with the subconscious, or with class or racial affiliations that run far beneath the surface. If we were to ask Mailer whether his choosing to study the astronauts was itself defensible with good reasons, he might say- since he tries harder than most authors to apply the same standards to himself that he applies to other men- that his real reasons were also quite other than his conscious reasonings. We have all learned to assume that what determines minds and purposes must be not reasoning but deeper and blinder causes' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 9) 'What hearers do is supplement the literal meaning of utterances with an assumption of human rationality and cooperation' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 59-60) 'When the communicator's informative intention involves making a particular assumption strongly manifest, then that assumption is strongly communicated. When the communicator's intention is to marginally increase the manifestness of a wide range of assumptions, then each of them is weakly communicated. There is, of course, a continuum of cases in between. In the case of strong communication, the communicator can have fairly precise expectations about some of the thoughts that the audience will actually entertain. With weaker forms of communication, the communicator cam merely expect to stir the thoughts of the audience in a certain direction. Often, in human interaction, weak communication is found sufficient or even preferable to the stronger forms' .

(Lanham 1993: xii) 'Those who feel that the end of the book is the end of the world assume, and less often argue, that books equal culture. To call that assumption into question, as electronic text does, takes us to the central crisis of the humanities today, our cultural accountability. Can we really argue that the arts and letters make us better? If not, how do we justify the public expenditures now made on them? How, for the matter of that, do we justify the time we spend teaching and cultivating them? I call this question the "Q" question and confront it in chapter 7' .

(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' .

(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 38) 'The assumption of the present study was that facilitation in script related sentences is achieved through spreading activation' .

(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' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 120-1) There is an assumption of differences between same-sex and mixed conversations .

(Jehlen 1990: 272) 'Gender is both an embedded assumption and functions as a touchstone for others.... From the perspective of gender, ... a critic sees both deeper and more broadly. Both the views may also appear more obstructed, exactly the enhancement of critical vision seeming to hinder it, or to interpose a mew obstacle between critic and text' .

(Said 1986: 617-8) 'What I am criticizing is two particular assumptions. There is first the almost unconsciously held ideological assumption that the Eurocentric model for the humanities actually represents a natural and proper subject matter for the humanistic scholar.... Second is the assumption that the principal relationships in the study of literature-- those I have identified as based on representation-- ought to obliterate the traces of other relationships within literary structures that are based principally upon acquisition and appropriation.... Two alternatives propose themselves for the contemporary critic. One is organic complicity with the pattern I have described.... The second alternative is for the critic to recognize the difference between instinctual filiation and social affiliation, and to show how affiliation sometimes reproduces filiation, sometimes makes its own forms' .

audience

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (4)

Sperber and Wilson 1988

Spellmeyer 1993