paradigm, paradox, participants, particle, passive, pastiche, patient, pattern, peak, pentad, perception, perspective, persuasion, philosophy, phoneme, phrase, plot, politics, positivism, postmodern, poststructuralist, power, pragmatics, preposition, prestige, presupposition, principles, privileged, problem, procedural, pronoun, proposition, protagonist, psychology, purpose
Under construction
(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' .
(Reddy 1979: 310) 'Humanists, those traditionally charged with reconstructing culture and teaching others to reconstruct it, are not necessary in the scheme of the conduit metaphor. All the ideas are "there in the library," and anyone can go in and "get them." In the toolmakers paradigm, on the other hand, humanists themselves are the repositories, and the only real repositories of ideas. In the simplest of terms, the conduit metaphor lets human ideas slip out of human brains, so that, once you have recording technologies, you do not need humans anymore' .
(Ulmer 1994: 48) 'Here is a principle of chorography: do not choose between the different meanings of key terms, but compose by using all the meanings (write the paradigm)' .
(White 1974: 405) 'The fruitfulness of Jakobson's theory lies in its suggestion that the various forms of both poetry and prose, all of which have their counterparts in narrative in general and therefore in historiography too, can be characterized in terms of the dominant trope which serves as the paradigm, provided by language itself, of all significant relationships conceived to exist in the world by anyone wishing to represent those relationships in language' .
Under construction
(Johnson 1990: 43) 'In his three volumes of 1967, Derrida gives rigorous attention to the paradox that the Western tradition ... is filled with writings that privilege speech' .
(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' .
(Burke 1945: 193) 'We have thus arrived at the transcendent realm as a realm of things "in themselves" (that is, with whatever nature they may have intrinsically, not as they are determined by the terms in which we see them). Whereat we might profitable pause to consider the grammar of the intrinsic. It is the puzzle we encountered when discussing the paradox of substance. As soon as one considers things in relation to other things, one is uncomfortably on the way to dissolving them into their context, since their relations lead beyond them. A thing in itself for instance can't be "higher" or "heavier" than something or "inside" or "outside" something, or "derived from" something, etc. For though such descriptions may apply to it, they do not apply to it purely as a thing in itself ; rather, they are contextual references, pointing beyond the thing' .
(Burke 1945: 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"' .
(Gibbs 1987: 565) 'This original definition of mutual knowledge raises a serious paradox. The infinite series of beliefs statements is seen as necessary, although it is highly unlikely that listeners can compute an infinite series of these propositions in a finite period of time' .
(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' .
(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' .
Under construction
(Minsky 1980: 16)
'In any event, the individual statements of a discourse lead to temporary
representations -- which seem to correspond to what contemporary
linguists call "deep structures" -- which are then quickly rearranged or
consumed in elaboration the growing scenario representation. In order of
"scale", among the ingredients of such a structure there might be these
kinds of levels':
surface syntactic frames -- mainly verb and noun
structures;
prepositional and word-order indicator conventions;
surface semantic frames -- action-centered meanings of words;
qualifiers and relations concerning participants, instruments,
trajectories and strategies, goals, consequences and side-effects;
thematic frames -- scenarios concerned with topics, activities, portraits,
setting; outstanding problems and strategies commonly connected with
topics;
narrative frames -- skeleton forms for typical stories,
explanations, and arguments; conventions about foci, protagonists, plot
forms, development, etc., designed to help a listener construct a new,
instantiated thematic frame in his own mind
.
(Longacre 1983: 8) 'Every discourse finds a further principle of unity in terms of participants and/or themes' .
(Longacre 1983: 25-38) Longacre outlines several features of peak as a zone of turbulence: rhetorical underlining, concentration of participants, heightened vividness, change of pace, change of vantage point or orientation, incidence of special particles and of onomatopoeia .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 33-8) Edwards claims that her paper will discuss 'the speech of the female participants in the study'. However, because 'it was arranged that the fieldworker should be the same sex as the friendship group' being studied, there is limitation of the observations to same-sex conversations. Nevertheless, Edwards asserts that 'the validity of these findings ... would have been considerably more limited if the variable of sex had not been carefully controlled' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 30) 'In order to use the notions of face and power to explain women's greater use of standard speech we need four assumptions: 1. participants in an interaction wish to protect their own face; 2. attention to other's face is affected by relative power in relation to other; 3. attention to other's face may involve damage to one's own; 4. women have less relative power than men' .
Under construction
Under construction
(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: 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"' .
Under construction
(Hopper 1987: 144-5) 'It has been noted before that to a very considerable extent everyday language is built up out of combinations of such prefabricated parts. Language is, in other words, to be viewed as a kind of pastiche, pasted together in an improvised way out of ready-made elements. Language is thus to be treated, in Wittgenstein's words, "from outside" (cf. Wittgenstein 1958: para. 120) -- not as governed by internalized mentally represented rules, but by pre-existent material with which discourses can be devised ... Evidently an entirely parallel way of viewing language is to be attributed to Jacques Derrida with his metaphor of language as "graft": new speech acts are "grafted onto" old ones and of course serve in turn as the stock onto which further new speech acts are grafted ... Becker's idea of "prior texts" ... is also crucial here: previous actual utterances form the basis of new utterances. Similar observations have been made by Bolinger, by Andrew Pawley, and others. It is this pre-patterned, pre-fabricated aspect of speech which accounts best for the characteristic of language for which no dualistic, double-tiered theory can provide an intuitively satisfying explanation: in natural discourse we compose and speak simultaneously (Smith 1980:60). There is no room -- no need -- for mediation by mental structures. It is in this sense that, as Bolinger has pointed out (Bolinger 1976), speaking is more similar to remembering procedures and things than it is to following rules. It is a question of possessing a repertoire of strategies for building discourses and reaching into memory in order to improvise and assemble them. Grammar is now not to be seen as the only, or even the major, source of regularity, but instead grammar is what results when formulas are re-arranged, or dismantled and re-assembled, in different ways' .
Under construction
(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"' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 67-8) 'However, it is not the purpose of our Dramatism to abide strictly by any one system of philosophic terms that happens to exemplify the dramatist pattern. Rather, it is our purpose to show that the explicit and systematic use of the dramatist pentad is best designed to bring out the strategic moments of motivational theory. Accordingly, at this point, we are more concerned to illustrate the Grammatical scruples than to select one particular casuistry as our choice among them. Philosophies again and again have got their point of departure precisely by treating as a distinction in kind what other philosophies have treated as a distinction in degree, or v.v.' .
(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: 23) 'But returning to the pun as it figures in the citation from Locke, we might point up the pattern as sharply as possible by observing that the word "substance", used to designate what a thing is , derives from a word designating something that a thing is not . That is, though used to designate something within the thing, intrinsic to it, the word etymologically refers to something outside the thing, extrinsic to it. Or otherwise put: the word in its etymological origins would refer to an attribute of the thing's context , since that which supports or underlies a thing would be a part of the thing's context. And a thing's context, being outside or beyond the thing, would be something that the thing is not' .
(Winograd 1977: 74) 'We can look at schemas as providing a guide for structuring the processes of production and comprehension. In the process of production, a schema ... lists the different parts and properties of a structure which must be decided upon in order to produce it.... In comprehension, the set of stored schemas is actively used in a process of "pattern recognition"' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 17) 'Women use fewer stygmatised forms and more prestige forms in every class; it is no more justified to class this pattern of female usage hypercorrect than it would be to call the usage of the middle class hypercorrect in relation to that of the working class. The notion of women's sensitivity to prestige norms is an explanation that arises from the intrinsic maleness of the norms. Men's behaviour is seen as normal; when women's differs, it has to be explained' .
(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' .
Under construction
(Longacre 1983: 25-38) Longacre outlines several features of peak as a zone of turbulence: rhetorical underlining, concentration of participants, heightened vividness, change of pace, change of vantage point or orientation, incidence of special particles and of onomatopoeia .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 67-8) 'However, it is not the purpose of our Dramatism to abide strictly by any one system of philosophic terms that happens to exemplify the dramatist pattern. Rather, it is our purpose to show that the explicit and systematic use of the dramatist pentad is best designed to bring out the strategic moments of motivational theory. Accordingly, at this point, we are more concerned to illustrate the Grammatical scruples than to select one particular casuistry as our choice among them. Philosophies again and again have got their point of departure precisely by treating as a distinction in kind what other philosophies have treated as a distinction in degree, or v.v.' .
(Burke 1945: 56) 'Men have talked about things in many ways, but the pentad offers a synoptic way to talk about their talk-about. For the resources of the five terms figure in the utterances about motives, throughout all human history' .
(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' .
Under construction
(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' .
(Derrida 1986b: 119) Thus, as Derrida says, 'the graphic image is not seen; and the acoustic image is not heard'. There is, rather, the perception of differences. .
(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' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 65) The perception of women and men as different subcultures is marked. Usually subculture perception involves the use of features that are 'odd' across cultural boundaries. Yet in the case of differences in language use because of sex, men and women often seem to behave in ways that both see as 'quite natural' .
(White 1974: 40x) 'It may be observed that if historians were to recognize the fictive element in their narratives, this would not mean the degradation of historiography to the status of ideology or propaganda. In fact, this recognition would serve as a potent antidote to the tendency of historians to become captive of ideological preconceptions which they do not recognize as such but honor as the "correct" perception of "the way things really are."' .
Under construction
(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' .
(Fish 1982: 341) 'Whenever a critic prefaces an assertion with a phrase like "without doubt" or "there can be no doubt", you can be sure that you are within hailing distance of the interpretive principles which produce the facts that he presents as obvious.... As one obvious and indisputable interpretation supplants another, it brings with it a new set of obvious and indisputable facts. Of course each new reading is elaborated in the name of the poem itself, but the poem itself is always a function of the interpretive perspective from which the critic "discovers" it' .
(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' .
(Booth 1979: 107) 'Taken seriously, this position means that no refutation of Burke that I have seen has any relevance to what he is really doing, because they all employ some version of a scientistic calculus to show either that Burke cannot prove what he says, or that what he says can be refuted from some other perspective, or that all of his proofs are circular. But since all screens will be vulnerable to the same charges, the question becomes, not whether a given perspective can be shown to be distorted -- because it always can be from any other perspective -- but whether it is more or less adequate to the kinds of problems it reveals. The result of such a position is not relativism, although it is not surprising that inattentive readers have confused it with relativism; having cut his moorings from conventional norms of proof, Burke is naturally accused of having no norms at all' .
(Booth 1979: 107) 'If Burke is right here -- an I think he is, provided we understand that to "track down the variant" is in his view never easy -- we have the basis for a special kind of free-wheeling inquiry into other critics' views. Instead of thinking that we can refute a given position by showing that it cannot be experimentally or logically falsified, we are invited by it to one perspective on the world, a perspective that is likely, by the very nature of perspectives, to be self-demonstrating. Every perspective expressed in a symbolic language becomes a "terministic screen" which both reveals some truths -- obviously "demonstrated" to anyone employing the language -- and conceals others' .
(Bathrick 1992: 328) 'The critique of essentialism and universalism has been vital in opening up the study of literature and history to a heterogeneity of theme, perspective, constituency, medium; and of political, national, and sexual identities. At the same time, the emergence of once silenced and still oppressed voices within the critical domain of cultural discourse has politicized and helped position and certify those identities as part of a striving for empowerment.... In the area of ethnic studies, African American, Third World, and Latin American programs have proffered an internal critique of the ethnocentric Occidentalism of much of humanist scholarly and curricular organization in academic institutions or, more modestly, have sought to resituate prevailing discourses and canons in relation to what and who have been excluded by dominant voices' .
(Enkvist 1981: 103) 'If we want to derive predications out of the model too, instead of accepting them as part of the input, we must adopt a device of the third, cognitive, type. In such cognitive models the predications are usually derived out of a cognitive network, again under the control of a text strategy.... But in addition to all this we may also wish to look into the motives and reasons why a certain speaker/writer has opted for one particular text strategy in his particular context of situation. If so, we must once again enlarge our perspective and adopt a model of a fourth type which is sensitive not only to strategies of text composition but also to principles of human interaction. Such models try to explain how human beings communicate as part of their attempts at social cooperation' .
(Foucault 1986a: 146) 'Chomsky in his book on Cartesian grammar "rediscovered" a form of knowledge that had been in use from Cordemoy to Humboldt. It could only be understood from the perspective of generative grammar because this later manifestation held the key to its construction: in effect, a retrospective codification of an historical position' .
(Jameson 1981: 74) 'A social hermeneutic will ... wish to keep faith with its medieval precursor in just this respect, and must necessarily restore a perspective in which the imagery of libidinal revolution and of bodily transfiguration once again becomes a figure for the perfected community' .
(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' .
(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' .
(Ordonez 1989: 79) 'The purpose of this paper will be to explore, from an admittedly personal and selective perspective, salient aspects of the feminist critical intertext as it echoes in the present generation of principally North American critics working with texts that may of may not be North American' .
Under construction
(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' .
(Spellmeyer 1993: 19) 'Not a skill, not an art, persuasion is the struggle, perpetually on shifting terms, to establish a domain of intersubjectivity' .
(Lanham 1976: 13-4) 'We come again and again to a motive essentially neither selfish nor patriotic but simply dramatic.... Kenneth Burke has supplied a phrase for such a motive -- "pure persuasion", the actor's attitude toward his audience' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 171) 'The unadulteratedly idealistic philosophy starts and ends in the featuring of properties belonging to the term, agent' .
(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' .
(Burke 1945: 173) 'Justice in such an over-all sense would obviously serve the ends of unification. And insofar as the law courts would "ideally" serve this same role, in aiming at a kind of justice that mediated among the differing ways of differing classes, we can see how the profuse development of law invites to idealistic philosophy. Materialist "debunkers" of such legal idealism can then interpret the "ideal" in terms of its "betrayal"; for "unification" is not unity, but a compensation for disunity - hence, any term for "ideal" justice can be interpreted as a rhetorical concealment for material injustice , particularly when the actual history of legal decisions over a long period can be shown to have favored class justice in the name of ideal justice' .
(Burke 1945: 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: 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: 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: 140) 'Whenever in philosophy I see two terms, of opposite and equal importance, being merged into a third term that will somehow contain the nature of both, I always ask myself: "Which of the two equal terms was foremost?" For I will expect the genius of this term to weight the third term (as Schelling's third term, "subject-object", supposedly "indifferent" to the two terms "subject" and "object" which it combines, is more "subjective" than "objective", even though he would further complicate matters by distinguishing between a "subjective subject-object" and an "objective subject-object")' .
(Fish 1982: 108) 'What philosophical semantics and the philosophy of speech acts are telling us is that ordinary language is extraordinary because at its heart is precisely that realm of values, intentions, and purposes which is often assumed to be the exclusive property of literature' .
(Booth 1974: xiii) 'If philosophy is defined as inquiry into certain truth, then what I pursue here is not philosophy but rhetoric: the art of discovering warrantable beliefs and improving those beliefs in shared discourse. But the differences are not sharply definable, and I of course think of the inquiry as in a larger sense philosophical. To talk of improving beliefs implies that we are seeking truth, since some beliefs are "truer" than others. Besides, many philosophers from Cicero to the present have defined what they do precisely as I would define rhetoric' .
(Booth 1974: xii) 'It is part of my point that modern philosophy - at least until the last two decades - has saddled us with standards of truth under which no man can live' .
(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: 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' .
(Foucault 1986b: 157-8)
'Western thought has seen to it that discourse be permitted as little room
as possible between thought and words. It would appear to have ensured
that to discourse should appear merely as a certain interjection between
speaking and thinking; that it should constitute thought, clad in its signs
and rendered visible by words or, conversely, that the structures of
language themselves should be brought into play, producing a certain
effect of meaning.
'Whether it is the philosophy of a founding
subject, a philosophy of originating experience or a philosophy of
universal mediation, discourse is really only an activity, of writing in the first
case, of reading in the second and exchange in the third. This exchange,
this writing, this reading never involve anything but signs. Discourse thus
nullifies itself, in reality, in placing itself at the disposal of the signifier'
.
(Lanham 1976: 7) Lanham comments upon the philosophy of Plato, saying 'How flattering that we, at whatever brave cost to ourselves, penetrate to the way things are, look, at the end of our quest, upon the true face of beauty'. Then he contributes his own view: 'How humiliating to be all this time only looking in a mirror' .
(Lanham 1976: 20-1) 'Of all the unexamined premises rhetoric took over from serious philosophy, clarity has perplexed the most. Since Aristotle it has figured as a central goal for verbal expression. Theorists, without giving the matter special thought, seem to have considered clarity a property of the text. Yet clarity describes many styles and audiences. Used to describe a particular verbal configuration, clarity cannot mean anything at all....The most intellectual, conceptual, scientific virtue of style turns out to be entirely emotional. If everyone is happy, clarity has arrived.... Clarity is at least partly, and often predominantly, a temporal phenomenon, a problem of period. One century's brightness becomes murk for the next. Clarity no more permits objective standards than custom itself' .
(Lanham 1976: 34-5) 'The task of the critic, as of the cultural or literary historian, is not to choose sides and then ignore the other half. Nor is it to try, however tempted, to adjudicate the dispute, decide who is right and then simplify....We must ... rehearse again the quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric. And this time around, we must do more than use philosophy to debunk rhetoric, as the scientific world view has done.... Seeing Western literature correctly depends on controlling these two contradictory theories of knowledge, of self, of style.... Upon seeing Western literature aright depends our ability to hold together the two different ways of knowing which together make us human' .
(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' .
(Bakhtin 1986: 666) 'Once rhetorical discourse is brought into the study with all its living diversity, it cannot fail to have a deeply revolutionizing influence on linguistics and on the philosophy of language. It is precisely those aspects of any discourse (the internally dialogic quality of discourse, and the phenomena related to it), not yet sufficiently taken into account and fathomed in all the enormous weight they carry in the life of language, that are revealed with great external precision in rhetorical forms, provided a correct and unprejudiced approach to those forms is used. Such is the general methodological and heuristic significance of rhetorical forms for linguistics and for the philosophy of language' .
(Bakhtin 1986: 665) 'Stylistics and the philosophy of discourse indeed confront a dilemma: either to acknowledge tha novel (and consequently all artistic prose tending in that direction) an unartistic or quasi-artistic genre, or to radically reconsider that conception of poetic discourse in which traditional stylistics is grounded and which determines all its categories' .
(Bakhtin 1986: 668) 'Linguistics, stylistics and the philosophy of language that were born and shaped by the current of centralizing tendencies in the life of language have ignored this dialogized heteroglossia, in which is embodied the centrifugal forces in the life of language' .
(Ijsseling 1976: 116) 'Many outhors adopt the position whereby a redical separation is made between a metaphorical, figurative and transferential use of language, and an exact, adequate, literal and non-metaphorical use. Science and philosophy essentially exclude any metaphorical use of language' .
(Ijsseling 1976: 125) 'Philosophers who conceive of philosophy as philosophy of language -- both objective and subjective genitive -- are convinced that something can only be delineated by language signs' .
(Ijsseling 1976: 5-6) 'Today one can still speak of a conflict between rhetoric and philosophy.... To gain some insight into this topical conflict, we will undertake an historical and systematic survey of the various facets of this already ancient conflict. In each chapter we shall concentrate on the past, thus enabling us, in a constant circular movement, to shed light on the network of problems confrinting contemporary thought. The question continually before us in such a circular movement is: what is actually happening whenever something is said or written?' .
Under construction
(Derrida 1986b: 118) Derrida quotes Hjelmslev positing that 'in the oldest of these approaches, going back to Baudouin de Courtenay and still surviving, the phoneme is a sound imagined or intended, opposed to the emitted sound as a "psychophonetic" phenomenon to the "physiophonetic" fact. It is the psychic equivalent of an exteriorized sound' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 9) 'The logic of the scene-agent ratio has often served as an embarrassment to the naturalistic novelist. He may choose to "indict" some scene (such as bad working conditions under capitalism) by showing that it has a "brutalizing" effect upon the people who are indigenous to this scene. But the scene-agent ratio, if strictly observed here, would require that the "brutalizing" situation contain "brutalized" characters as its dialectical counterpart. And thereby, in his humanitarian zeal to save mankind, the novelist portrays characters which, in being as brutal as their scene, are not worth saving. We could phrase this dilemma in another way: our novelist points up his thesis by too narrow a conception of scene as the motive-force behind his characters; and this restricting of the scene calls in turn for a corresponding restriction upon personality, or role' .
(Fish 1982: 341) 'Whenever a critic prefaces an assertion with a phrase like "without doubt" or "there can be no doubt", you can be sure that you are within hailing distance of the interpretive principles which produce the facts that he presents as obvious.... As one obvious and indisputable interpretation supplants another, it brings with it a new set of obvious and indisputable facts. Of course each new reading is elaborated in the name of the poem itself, but the poem itself is always a function of the interpretive perspective from which the critic "discovers" it' .
(Booth 1974: 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' .
(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' .
(Lanham 1976: 13-4) 'We come again and again to a motive essentially neither selfish nor patriotic but simply dramatic.... Kenneth Burke has supplied a phrase for such a motive -- "pure persuasion", the actor's attitude toward his audience' .
(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' .
(van Dijk 1977: 5) 'The phrase the book has an intensional meaning, namely the individual concept of a book, which may take various extensions, i.e. actual books referred to, in particular situations. Both intensional and extensional interpretations are necessary in an account of the semantic structures of discourse' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 11) Cameron uses the phrase 'closer to the standard' .
(White 1974: 402) 'The hackneyed phrase "My love, a rose" is not obviously, intended to be understood as suggestion that the loved one is actually a rose' .
Under construction
(Minsky 1980: 16)
'In any event, the individual statements of a discourse lead to temporary
representations -- which seem to correspond to what contemporary
linguists call "deep structures" -- which are then quickly rearranged or
consumed in elaboration the growing scenario representation. In order of
"scale", among the ingredients of such a structure there might be these
kinds of levels':
surface syntactic frames -- mainly verb and noun
structures;
prepositional and word-order indicator conventions;
surface semantic frames -- action-centered meanings of words;
qualifiers and relations concerning participants, instruments,
trajectories and strategies, goals, consequences and side-effects;
thematic frames -- scenarios concerned with topics, activities, portraits,
setting; outstanding problems and strategies commonly connected with
topics;
narrative frames -- skeleton forms for typical stories,
explanations, and arguments; conventions about foci, protagonists, plot
forms, development, etc., designed to help a listener construct a new,
instantiated thematic frame in his own mind
.
(Longacre 1983: 20) 'I here get to the main point of this chapter...Something like plot characterizes forms of discourse other than narrative....Plot is the notional structure of narrative discourse' .
(Lanham 1993: 14) 'What will emerge finally is a new rhetoric of the arts, an unblushing and unfiltered attempt to plot all the ranges of formal expressivity now possible, however realized and created by whom- (or what-) ever. This rhetoric will make no invidious distinctions between high and low culture, commercial and pure usage, talented or chance creation, visual or auditory stimulus, iconic or alphabetic information. And rather than outlaw self-consciousness, it will plot the degree of it in an artistic occasion. As a start, we might think of a new locational matrix for the arts, one based on the bi-stable decorum I have been discussion rather than on a stable, unselfconscious transparency. It might look like this: [show table]' .
(Lanham 1976: 60) 'It was not that Ovid was a bad plotter. The rhetorical view denies that plot is possible. It was not that Ovid "had no taste for heroes and certainly, no capacity for creating them", as Brooks Otis charges. He did not believe in heroes, or the self they were based on. He was not bad at transitions; he wanted to lose the reader. He was not incapable of tracing a coherent genealogy for Rome; he did not believe in the Virgilian conception of history upon which such descent was based. He was not too dense to master a suitable repertoire of Augustan philosophical clichÈs; he denied the theory of knowledge from which they grew. Too skeptical to think the whole truth contained in a single myth, he thought the epic genre a fraud, an obvious pretense that the world makes more sense than it does' .
(Lanham 1976: 19) 'Any truly comprehensive critical theory will have to plot a continuum of reality from rhetorical to serious' .
(Frye 1957: 186) 'The essential element of plot in romance is adventure, which means that romance in naturally a sequential and processional form' .
(A. Pratt 1981: 25) 'The pursuit narrative in mythology often involved a green-world locale, an island, "well," or grotto, invaded by men who rape the beneficent women residents-- followed by an account of the destruction and theft of the area's natural value.... Such traumas characterize the plot structure of gothic novels where women heroes experience adventures in quest of true chivalry in combination with the horror of pursuit and victimization by male villains' .
Under construction
(Hopper 1987: 141-2) 'This is, then, roughly the context in which the term Emergent Grammar is being proposed. The term "emergent" itself I take from an essay by the cultural anthropologist James Clifford, but I have transferred it from its original context of "culture" to that of "grammar". Clifford remarks that "Culture is temporal, emergent, and disputed" (Clifford 1986:19). I believe the same is true of grammar, which like speech itself must be viewed as a real-time, social phenomenon, and therefore is temporal; its structure is always deferred, always in a process but never arriving, and therefore emergent; and since I can only choose a tiny fraction of data to describe, any decision I make about limiting my field of inquiry (for example in regard to the selection of texts, or the privileging of the usage of a particular ethnic, class, age, or gender group) is very likely to be a political decision, to be against someone else's interests, and therefore disputed' .
(Johnson 1990: 47)
'The possibility of reading materiality, silence, space, and conflict within
texts has opened up extremely productive ways of studying the politics of
language.
'The writings of Western male authorities have often
encoded the silence, denigration, or idealization not only of women but
also of other "others"', thus, excluding them
.
(Culler 1992: 219) 'The fourth topic of debate ...involves a number of questions: What is the relation between critiques of essentialist conceptions of identity (of a person or group) and the psychic and political demands for identity? How de the urgencies of emancipatory politics conflict with or engage psychoanalytic and poststructuralist critiques of the subject's identity? In what terms should critics and theorists seek to define women's writing or Chicano literature, for example?' .
Under construction
(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' .
(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' .
Under construction
(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' .
Under construction
(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' .
(Bove 1990: 53) 'We can no longer easily ask such questions as, What is discourse" or, What does discourse mean? ... But why not? Because to ask them and to force an answer would be, in advance, hopelessly to prejudice the case against understanding the function of "discourse" either in its poststructuralist context or in its existence as an institutionalized system for the production of knowledge in regulated language' .
(Culler 1992: 219) 'The fourth topic of debate ...involves a number of questions: What is the relation between critiques of essentialist conceptions of identity (of a person or group) and the psychic and political demands for identity? How de the urgencies of emancipatory politics conflict with or engage psychoanalytic and poststructuralist critiques of the subject's identity? In what terms should critics and theorists seek to define women's writing or Chicano literature, for example?' .
(Culler 1992: 213) 'One of the continuing contentions of the sorts of theory styled "poststructuralist" -- possibly the only claim by which poststructuralism can be identified and distinguished -- has been that theories are caught up in and affected by the phenomena they claim to theorize' .
(Leitch [n.d.]: 143-4) 'Foucault typically emphasizes accidents, not universal rules; surfaces, not depths; multiplicities, not unities; flaws, not foundations; and differences, not identities. Nevertheless, these distinctions become exceedingly hard to maintain when one is lost in the intricacies of a Foucault text. The impression prevails that he seeks depths, rules, and foundations. Ultimately, Foucault produces forms of order as disorder-- not instances of disorder as order. But the considerable time spent in articulating "forms of order" creates an enduring impression of structuralism-- even though all orders undergo final subversion. Foucault, as we shall see, appears a most structuralist poststructuralist in his constructions of history' .
(Leitch [n.d.]: 142-3) 'Next to Foucault's poststructuralist theory of history, predicated on the "death of the subject," Bloom's odd version of the "great man theory," based on the Satanic strength and vitality of the subjected poet, remains within the ancient humanist tradition-- but near its end' .
(Burke 1945: 118) 'According to Aristotle, Thales believed that "all things are full of Gods". For our purposes this could be interpreted as a recognition of the fact that in everything there is a power, or motive, of some sort. That is, we would interpret it in a broader sense than the notion that "soul is intermingled in the whole universe", though Aristotle in his De Anima says this is what Thales "probably" meant' .
(Fish 1982: 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' .
(Booth 1974: 31) 'By now it has almost scriptural force: in the beginning was not the word but the causal chain, and his name was sometimes Chemistry and sometimes Drive or Desire, but never Lift or even Pull. And it came to pass that Error was born, and his chosen name was Reason, but his real name was Rationalization. And Rationalization and his wicked prophets did undertake to undermine Push, claiming that reasoning about values, about purposes, could alter Push's unalterable path. But the true prophets were able to unmask the wicked prophets, showing that their vaunted reasonings were themselves clearly dictated by Push. And, lo, there was nothing that anyone could say about anything that could not be unmasked and shown to be truly another manifestation of Push's eternal power. And when men did engage in debate about their deepest concerns, they found that each man could say unto his brother, Racca, thou fool' .
(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' .
(Foucault 1986b: 151) 'True discourse, liberated by the nature of its form from desire and power, is incapable of recognising the will to truth which pervades it; and the will to truth, having imposed itself upon us for so long, is such that the truth it seeks to reveal cannot fail to mask it' .
(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' .
(Bove 1990: 54) 'The "self-evident" and "commonsensical" are what have the privilege of unnotices power, and this power produces instruments of control. This matter of control is rather difficult; it does not mean, as it might in certain Freudian or Marxist theories, control by repression or by exclusion. It means, rather, control by the power of positive production' .
(Bove 1990: 63-4) 'Since ours is a society which increasingly tries to ensure its political order through discursive systems that discipline our language and culture, any successful resistance to that order would seem to require strong weapons aimed to weaken that discipline.... Literary criticism, presumably always specially sensitive to the functions of language, and newly sensitive to its relationship to power on the site of institutionalized disciplines, can turn its tools to the critical examination of how, in relation to the state and its largest institutions, power operates in discourse and how discourse disciplines a population.... Discourse can turn literary studies into a full criticism, one which is skeptical, critical, oppositional, and-- when appropriate-- sustentative. It can help us to avoid reduction, either of the historical context of an event or of the rhetorically complex display of power within a textualized discourse or institutionalized discipline' .
(Bove 1990: 64) 'When the tools of opposition, useful to a point and in a specific local struggle against a particular form of power, lose their negative edge-- when their critical effect makes no difference and they simply permit the creation of new texts, new documents recording the successful placement of the previously "oppositional" within the considerable unchanged institutional structures of the discipline -- at that point criticism must turn skeptical again and genealogically recall how the heretical became orthodox' .
(Bove 1990: 61) 'Foucault grew increasingly interested in what the rise of the modern disciplines had to do with modern state power-- with what he called "governability"-- and how it displaced sovereignty as the hegemonic figure of power and authority.... In disciplinary societies, self-determination is nearly impossible, and political opposition must take the form of resistance to the systems of knowledge and their institutions that regulate the population into "individualities" ... In this understanding of governability, truth produced by these knowledge systems blocks the possibility of sapping power; it speaks for-- or... "represents"-- others' .
(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' .
(Bove 1990: 56) '"Genealogy" complements the critical dimension of poststructuralism's radical skepticism. It aims to grasp the formative power of discourses and disciplines' .
(Bove 1990: 60) 'Genealogy separates itself within the "will to truth" by trying to unmask discourses' associations with power and materialities; also, it is not reductive, that is, it alone allows for a full description of the completely determined discursive practices it studies' and, finally, it describes and criticizes these practices with an eye to revealing their "subjugating" effects in the present-- it means always to resist discipling and speaking for others in their own struggles' .
(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: 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' .
(Greenblatt 1995: 230-1) 'Great works of art are not neutral relay stations in the circulation of cultural materials. Something happens to objects, beliefs and practices when they are represented, reimagined, and performed in literary texts, something often unpredictable and disturbing. That "something" is the sign both of the power of art and of the embeddedness of culture in the contingencies of history' .
(Greenblatt 1995: 232) Referring to Shakespeare's The Tempest, Greenblatt advances that 'If it is the task of cultural criticism to decipher the power of Prospero, it is also its task to hear the accents of Caliban'. The critic's job is to notice that contradictory elements of the author's world are being juxtaposed in the author's work to bring to light significant conflict and make statements about the world. In this kind of reading, Prospero represents the imperialism of European exploration of the New World and Caliban represents the right of the people of the New World to self-determination. .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 69) Could Wood's study lead to the conclusion that 'floor time' and other language behavior that is often considered 'power' language is not a significant factor in promotions? The woman in higher status does not need to dominate her male subordinate. We could conclude that language dominance is irrelevant to status in the women's behavior .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 27) Deuchar seems to assume a single strategy for women everywhere. 'Women tend to produce speech closer to the standard in pronunciation than that of men. The main explanations advanced for this phenomenon are in terms of sociological factors external to language such as status consciousness or solidarity. I shall show that neither of these explanations is entirely satisfactory, but that the phenomenon can be explained in terms of pragmatic, interactional notions internal to language use. The notions I shall make use of are those of face and power as used by Brown and Levinson (1978) in their model of politeness' .
(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' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 66) Power > difference, not deficit .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 30) 'In order to use the notions of face and power to explain women's greater use of standard speech we need four assumptions: 1. participants in an interaction wish to protect their own face; 2. attention to other's face is affected by relative power in relation to other; 3. attention to other's face may involve damage to one's own; 4. women have less relative power than men' .
(Leitch [n.d.]: 154) 'Foucault demonstrates that archival discourse expands, divides, and deploys knowledge and power in the interest of social control' .
(Ordonez 1989: 81) 'More recently, historian, Gerda Lerner, broadens and further universalizes this disconcerting yet undeniable assymetry [sic] between the sexes: "There is not a single society known where women-as-a-group have decision-making power over men or where they define the rules of sexual conduct or control marriage exchanges" (Lerner, [1986,] Creation [of patriarchy:] 30)' .
(Ordonez [n.d.]: 62) 'The recent writings of Chicana poet Alma Villanueva are aptly read and interpreted in light of these current European and American theories of feminine textuality. Villanueva has consistently affirmed the natural and physical power of woman in her work' .
(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' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 9) 'Grice proposed distinctions between different types of meaning and argued that general maxims of cooperation provide inferential routes to a speaker's communicative intention. Pragmatics is most concerned with analyzing speaker meaning at the level of utterances and this often amounts to a sentence, rather than text, sized unit of language use. But since an utterance is, by definition, situated in a context (including a linguistic context, i.e. a text), pragmatics often ends up including discourse analyses and providing means of analyzing discourse along the way' .
(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: 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' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 21) 'The most prominent philosophic member of this family is "substance". Or at least it used to be, before John Locke greatly impaired its prestige, so that many thinkers today explicitly banish the term from their vocabularies. But there is cause to believe that, in banishing the term , far from banishing its functions one merely conceals them. Hence, from the dramatistic point of view, we are admonished to dwell upon the word, considering its embarrassments and its potentialities of transformation, so that we may detect its covert influence even in cases where it is overtly absent. Its relation to our five terms will become apparent as we proceed' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 31) Duechar claims that the use of standard speech connotes prestige .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 17) 'Women use fewer stygmatised forms and more prestige forms in every class; it is no more justified to class this pattern of female usage hypercorrect than it would be to call the usage of the middle class hypercorrect in relation to that of the working class. The notion of women's sensitivity to prestige norms is an explanation that arises from the intrinsic maleness of the norms. Men's behaviour is seen as normal; when women's differs, it has to be explained' .
Under construction
Under construction
(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: 15) 'Though we have inspected two ratios, the five terms would allow for ten (scene-act, scene-agent, scene-agency, scene-purpose, act-purpose, act-agent, act-agency, agent-purpose, agent-agency, agency-purpose). The ratios are principles of determination' .
(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: 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: 96) 'Integral to the concept of scope is the concept of reduction . In a sense, every circumference, no matter how far-reaching its reference, is a reduction. A cosmology, for instance, is a reduction of the world to the dimensions of words; it is the world in terms of words. The reductive factor becomes quite obvious when we pause to realize that any terminology of motives reduces the vast complexity of life by reduction to principles, laws, sequences, classifications, correlations, in brief, abstractions or generalizations of one sort or another. And any generalization is necessarily a reduction in that it selects a group of things and gives them a property which makes it possible to consider them as a single entity . Thus, the general concept of "man" neglects an infinite number of particular differences in order to stress certain properties which many distinct individual entities have in common. Indeed, any characterization of any sort is a reduction. To give a proper name to one person, or to name a thing, is to recognize some principle of identity or continuity running through the discontinuities that, of themselves, would make the world sheer chaos. To note any order whatever is to "reduce". To divide experience into hungry and sated moments, into the pleasant and unpleasant, into the before and after, into here and there - even distinctions as broad as these translate the world's infinite particulars into terms that are a reduction of the world; in fact, as per the equating of infinity and zero, terms of such broad scope are perhaps the most drastically reductive of all' .
(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: 341) 'Whenever a critic prefaces an assertion with a phrase like "without doubt" or "there can be no doubt", you can be sure that you are within hailing distance of the interpretive principles which produce the facts that he presents as obvious.... As one obvious and indisputable interpretation supplants another, it brings with it a new set of obvious and indisputable facts. Of course each new reading is elaborated in the name of the poem itself, but the poem itself is always a function of the interpretive perspective from which the critic "discovers" it' .
(Fish 1982: 353) 'The basic gesture, then, is to disavow interpretation in favor of simply presenting the text; but it is actually a gesture in which one set of interpretive principles is replaced by another that happens to claim for itself the virtue of not being an interpretation at all' .
(Booth 1974: 22) 'The dogmas we turn to now tend to travel together, reinforcing each other to constitute the almost overwhelmingly persuasive worldview of modernism. But it will be useful to think of them as falling into five kinds. There are dogmas about (a) the methods or means for producing change; (b) the nature of the thing being changed- the mind or soul or self or person or organism (though I have talked only of "changing minds", I intend the word mind in the broadest possible sense); (c) the scene of change- the world in which that thing changed, the "mind", finds itself; (d) the principles or basic assumptions about truth and its testing- the ground and nature of change; and (e) the purpose of change. Every effort to change a mind will appear differently depending on our view of what does the changing, what is changed, how it relates to the whole nature of things, whether or in what sense the change is tested or justified in basic principles, and the purpose of the change' .
(Foucault 1986b: 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' .
(Foucault 1986b: 152) 'I believe we can isolate another group: internal rules, where discourse exercises its own control; rules concerned with the principles of classification, ordering and distribution. It is as though we were now involved in the mastery of another dimension of discourse: that of events and chance' .
(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: 126) 'For proponents of certain kinds of rigor, to defend Burke in my way would no doubt seem a kind of dismissal, even a refutation: he has a self-proving, self-validating system, a method that invents problems that are essentially beyond solution and then claims to solve them by using principles that can be assumed only as part of his invention. His whole enterprise is impossibly, outrageously, shockingly ambitious, yet it finally frustrates intellectual ambition by undermining all solutions' .
(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' .
(Bove 1990: 62) 'The contemporary use of "discourse" turns literary critics away from questions of meaning; it also turns us from questions of "method" to the description of function. It suggests that a new set of questions should replace the interpretive ones that have come to constitute criticism and the normal practice of teachers and scholars. We might ask such things as, How does language work to produce knowledge? How is language organized in disciplines? Which institutions perform and which regulative principles direct this organization?' .
(Culler 1992: 213) Responding to Knapp and Michaels, who maintain that 'Beliefs cannot be grounded in some deeper condition of knowledge' (1982.Against theory. Critical inquiry 8: 738), Culler posits, 'this might be true for such things as religious beliefs, but the various beliefs that function as principles, criteria, and premises in people's work on literature most probably belong to a structure of knowledge and argumentation' .
(van Dijk 1977: 31) 'We have not provided the details to substantiate the speculative remarks of this final section. Out intention is merely to suggest that the notions of macro-structure and macro-rule in discourse processing may be special cases of more general cognitive principles underlying higher-order processing' .
(van Dijk 1977: 18) 'Super-structures are organizing principles of discourse. The have a hierarchical character, roughly defining the "global syntax" of the text. By contrast, the macro-structures define the "content" of the text. In certain kinds of narrative, such as folktales, this content may be conventional ... What has been said about the conventional "genre" of narratives also holds ... for other discourse types, e.g., arguments, advertisements, newspaper reports, propaganda, and psychological papers. In all cases the constraints operate globally, both on the global syntax of the macro-structures and on their specific content' .
(Enkvist 1981: 109) 'Information dynamics and experiential iconicism ... conspire without being identical. In addition, we cannot discard iconicism as but another manifestation of salience in the usual sense of that term ... Salience is a result of a set of universal psychological principles which people use when translating their experiences into language' .
(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' .
(Enkvist 1981: 103) 'If we want to derive predications out of the model too, instead of accepting them as part of the input, we must adopt a device of the third, cognitive, type. In such cognitive models the predications are usually derived out of a cognitive network, again under the control of a text strategy.... But in addition to all this we may also wish to look into the motives and reasons why a certain speaker/writer has opted for one particular text strategy in his particular context of situation. If so, we must once again enlarge our perspective and adopt a model of a fourth type which is sensitive not only to strategies of text composition but also to principles of human interaction. Such models try to explain how human beings communicate as part of their attempts at social cooperation' .
(Enkvist 1981: 107-8) 'How, then, does experiential iconicism relate to some other major text-strategic principles, at sentence level most notably information dynamics and saliency? ... Information dynamics is concerned with the distribution of old and new information, or more precisely, of information which the speaker/writer assumes or knows is familiar to the receptor and information he assumes or knows will be new. Should we wish to regard such assumptions, and hence the distribution of old and new information in the text, as part of the universe of discourse, information dynamics might merge with experiential iconicism'. But if we maintain a distinction between the text and the world it describes, such a merger will not take place' .
Under construction
(Fish 1982: 3) 'This equivocation allowed me to retain the text as a stable entity at the same time that I was dislodging it as the privileged container of meaning' .
(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' .
(Bove 1990: 63) 'When viewed as an element in a historical system of institutionalized discourse, the traditional idea of the "author," and the privileged value accorded to it in literary scholarship and criticism, is one of the two or three key concepts by means of which the critical disciplines organize their knowledge around questions of subjectivity and discipline both their practitioners and those they "teach"' .
(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 36) 'Scripts are assumed to provide privileged access to information in memory wherever it is located and to facilitate comprehension if subsequent sentences (Schank 1978). The mechanism for privileged access in reading comprehension is "spreading activation"' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 214-5)
'All told, throughout these pages we have been considering five major
aspects of science:
'(1) high development of technological
specialization
'(2) involvement with rationale of money
(accountancy)
'(3) progressive departure from natural conditions,
usually saluted in the name of "naturalism"
'(4) reduction of scenic
circumference to empirical limits (the reason why the technological powers
that take us farthest from natural conditions have been called "naturalistic")
'(5) stress upon the "problem of knowledge" as the point of
departure for philosophic speculation'
.
(Burke 1945: 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: 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' .
(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: 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' .
(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' .
(Spellmeyer 1993: 22) According to Spellmeyer, constructionists would have us believe: 'Each community has its own distinctive mode of cognition, its own characteristic "flow chart" for problem solving. Psychologists do not think first and then practice psychology: strictly speaking, the discipline of psychology preordains the nature of thought for its practitioners. Whatever we perceive, then, is a construct, something constructed by communities, and whatever we have learned derives not from experience but from a process of initiation into those rituals of community life that create both selves and worlds' .
(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' .
(Lanham 1976: 20-1) 'Of all the unexamined premises rhetoric took over from serious philosophy, clarity has perplexed the most. Since Aristotle it has figured as a central goal for verbal expression. Theorists, without giving the matter special thought, seem to have considered clarity a property of the text. Yet clarity describes many styles and audiences. Used to describe a particular verbal configuration, clarity cannot mean anything at all....The most intellectual, conceptual, scientific virtue of style turns out to be entirely emotional. If everyone is happy, clarity has arrived.... Clarity is at least partly, and often predominantly, a temporal phenomenon, a problem of period. One century's brightness becomes murk for the next. Clarity no more permits objective standards than custom itself' .
(Culler 1992: 216) 'The first general problem is the relation between psychic (or psychoanalytical), linguistic, and sociohistorical categories. Can one set of terms be mapped onto another, and if so, how? Is one set reducible to another? Which is "more basic"? Or is the language of depth and foundation part of the problem?' .
(Winograd 1977: 64) 'This paper approaches the problem of studying discourse as one of understanding the cognitive structures and processes of language users. There are alternative approaches, such as text-based studies ... This paper ... proposes instead to focus on the cognitive processes of language production and comprehension. From this point of view, the text is a concrete trace of the processes, and its structure needs to be understood in terms of the processing structure ... There are clear advantages to having a framework which emphasizes the psychological processes, rather than the traces they leave, since any psycholinguistic model must deal first and foremost with the cognitive processing' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 19) 'Whatever the solution, it can hardly be denied that there is a problem for sociolinguistics in using the traditional model which takes the family as the primary unit of social stratification at a time when our traditional concept of the family ... is breaking down' .
(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' .
(White 1974: 399) When characterizing psychological therapy, White says that, 'the problem is to get the parent to "reemplot" his whole life history in such a way as to change the meaning of those events for him and their significance for the economy of the whole set of events that make up his life' .
Under construction
(Longacre 1983: 3) 'To begin with, we can classify all possible discourses according to two basic parameters: contingent temporal succession and agent orientation.... Narrative discourse ... is plus in respect to both parameters. Procedural discourse ... is plus in respect to contingent succession ... but minus in respect to the agent orientation ... Behavioral discourse is minus in regard to contingent succession but plus in regard to agent orientation ... Expository discourse is minus in respect to both parameters' .
(Longacre 1983: 11) 'An example of this occurred in a news story in the Dallas Morning News ... Its notional intent was to give a first person account of an apartment fire in Dallas, but it is cast in the form of procedural discourse' .
Under construction
(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 39) 'The Same pairs were constructed in accordance with the constraints that priming and target sentences occur in a forward order, that both sentences of a pair begin with the same pronoun, and that there was no repetition of content words' .
(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' .
Under construction
(Gibbs 1987: 585) 'My arguments is favor of the mutual knowledge hypothesis and against the relevance hypothesis are grounded in five interrelated observations. First, I have suggested the Sperber and Wilson's proposal that mutual cognitive environments constitute the true context for comprehension is not sufficiently clear and distinguishable from the concept of mutual knowledge. As such, the relevance hypothesis seems to make use of the very idea that it attempts to replace. Second, mutual knowledge is possible to determine in a finite period of time via Clark and Marshall's (1981) mutual knowledge induction scheme without resorting to an infinite set of beliefs statements usually viewed as a consequence of establishing mutual knowledge. Third, it appears that mutual knowledge is indeed a necessary prerequisite for the comprehension of many kinds of utterances in conversation. This is particularly true if listeners are to distinguish between inferences that are ostensively intended or "authorized" by speakers from inferences that are "unauthorized". Conversations are only cooperative to the extent to which speakers specifically intend and listeners specifically recognize "m-intended" messages. Part of my thesis here is that how listeners are able to distinguish "authorized" versus "unauthorized" inferences must be part of a cognitive theory of conversational inferences. Fourth, parts of the processing model underlying the relevance hypothesis are not supported by contemporary psycholinguistic research. Specifically, there is little empirical evidence in favor of the idea that listeners must first decode an utterance into some propositional representation before choosing a context in which that proposition is viewed as most relevant. Finally, there is some recent psycholinguistic evidence demonstrating that speakers formulate their utterances precisely to satisfy the amount of knowledge they share with their listeners. This shared knowledge is also directly utilized by listeners when interpreting utterances in everyday discourse. These findings appear most congruent with the predictions of the mutual knowledge hypothesis' .
(Foucault 1986b: 154) 'For a proposition to belong to botany or pathology, it must fulfil certain conditions, in a stricter and more complex sense than that of pure and simple truth: at any rate, other conditions. The proposition must refer to a specific range of objects' .
(van Dijk 1977: 11) The irrelevance deletion rule: 'we assume that each proposition expressed by a discourse should be considered as relatively unimportant if it is not a condition for the interpretation of another proposition' .
(van Dijk 1977: 10) The generalization rule: 'a sequence N of propositions may be substituted by a proposition p if p is entailed by each of the members of N. We see that the rule is based on an entailment relation' .
(van Dijk 1977: 27-30) 'We will briefly state a number of hypotheses regarding ... processing implications....It will be assumed that in discourse comprehension fragments of the morpho-phonological and syntactic surface structure of the sentence sequence are stored only in short-term memory to construct a proposition sequence.... It is assumed that beyond a limited number of propositions, the proposition sequence of the text base is not fully accessible for recall.... Given a sequence of assigned propositions, the reader will make hypotheses about the relevant macro-structure proposition covering the sequence by applying the macro-rules to the sequence.... Macro-structure formation takes place in the course of reading the text, not a posteriori. The same holds true for the assignment of conventional categories to the macro-propositions. Both the assignment of macro-structures and of conventional super-structures is recursive. As soon as a first level becomes too complex. a second level is formed, and so forth. The macro-structure is available when it is necessary to explicitly summarize a text.... The macro-structure is also the basis for recall of the discourse immediately after presentation. The macro-structure is directly available in episodic memory. It then yields, by inverse macro-rule application and recognition, access to lower-level macro-structures and possibly to some text base propositions if the discourse was not too long.... Macro-structures may also constitute "plans for speaking".... Macro-structure formation is a highly complex process, so it can hardly be expected that effective comprehension exactly follows the rules formulated above: expedient strategies are used in the global interpretation of discourse.... Finally, there are strategies based on contextual cues and knowledge of the general communication situation. We may know the speaker so well that we may easily predict the main themes of his discourse, even with very scanty information.... Familiarity with the relevant macro-structures will certainly facilitate the task of global comprehension' .
(van Dijk 1977: 14) The construction rule: 'closely linked to integration, and they might be considered variants of each other. The interesting difference is that construction has no input proposition that organizes other propositions. Instead, a sequence of propositions is directly replaced by a macro-proposition, under the same conditions as in integration' .
(van Dijk 1977: 12) The detail deletion rule: 'all detailed information may be deleted which somehow has been integrated into another proposition of the discourse' .
(Burke 1979: 129) 'Owing to the fact that words can resemble one another tonally even when their literal meanings may be miles apart, various kinds of trick affinities can develop between them. Though I affirm absolutely that anyone who doesn't agree with this proposition lacks a feel for the sound of words, there is still plenty of room for disagreement as to its application in particular cases. The issue becomes especially risky when (thinking along psychoanalytic lines) one tinkers with the possibility that a term on its face sublime may secretly resonate with a term quite ridiculous; and thereby the kinds of "body-thinking" explicitly manifest in, say, writers like Aristophanes or Swift can figure implicitly in solemn works (particularly when one is dealing with such images as a funeral urn' .
Under construction
(Frye 1957: 187) 'A quest involving conflict assumes two main characters, a protagonist or hero, and an antagonist or enemy' .
Under construction
(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' .
(Spellmeyer 1993: 22) According to Spellmeyer, constructionists would have us believe: 'Each community has its own distinctive mode of cognition, its own characteristic "flow chart" for problem solving. Psychologists do not think first and then practice psychology: strictly speaking, the discipline of psychology preordains the nature of thought for its practitioners. Whatever we perceive, then, is a construct, something constructed by communities, and whatever we have learned derives not from experience but from a process of initiation into those rituals of community life that create both selves and worlds' .
(van Dijk 1977: 4) 'In this paper, we will show that some fundamental problems of cognitive psychology can be accounted for in terms of macro-processing of complex semantic information.... Comprehension (as well as production) probably takes place at several levels, such that lower-level information is organized, reduced, and represented at higher levels. These processes involve the use of macro-rules; the input to the macro-rules is the micro-structure, and the output is the macro-structure. Macro-structures help to explain the ability to summarize discourse, and in general to use information from discourse for other cognitive tasks' .
Under construction
(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: 67-8) 'However, it is not the purpose of our Dramatism to abide strictly by any one system of philosophic terms that happens to exemplify the dramatist pattern. Rather, it is our purpose to show that the explicit and systematic use of the dramatist pentad is best designed to bring out the strategic moments of motivational theory. Accordingly, at this point, we are more concerned to illustrate the Grammatical scruples than to select one particular casuistry as our choice among them. Philosophies again and again have got their point of departure precisely by treating as a distinction in kind what other philosophies have treated as a distinction in degree, or v.v.' .
(Burke 1945: xxiii) 'It is not our purpose to import dialectical and metaphysical concerns into a subject that might otherwise be free of them. On the contrary, we hope to make clear the ways in which dialectical and metaphysical issues necessarily figure in the subject of motivation. Our speculations, as we interpret them, should show that the subject of motivation is a philosophic one, not ultimately to be solved in terms of empirical science' .
(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: 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: 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: 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)' .
(Gibbs 1987: 562) 'My purpose in this article is to assess the role of mutual knowledge and beliefs in a psychological theory of conversation inference. I will attempt to support what I call the mutual knowledge hypothesis, which assumes that listeners use the knowledge and beliefs they share with speakers in the process of interpreting utterances in conversation' .
(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: 101-2) 'The trivialization of ordinary language is accomplished as soon as one excludes from its precincts matters of purpose, value, intention, obligation, and so on -- everything that can be characterized as human. What, then, is left to it? The answers to this question are various. For some, the defining constituent of ordinary language, or language, is its capacity to carry messages; for others, the structure of language is more or less equated with the structure of logic ... Still others hold instrumental views: language is used to refer either to objects in the real world or to ideas in the mind ... But whatever the definition, two things remain constant: (1) the content of language is an entity that can be specified independently of human values... and (2) a need is therefore created for another entity or system in the context of which human values can claim pride of place.... Once you've taken the human values out of the language, and yet designated what remains as the norm, the separated values become valueless, because they have been removed from the normative center' .
(Booth 1974: 22) 'The dogmas we turn to now tend to travel together, reinforcing each other to constitute the almost overwhelmingly persuasive worldview of modernism. But it will be useful to think of them as falling into five kinds. There are dogmas about (a) the methods or means for producing change; (b) the nature of the thing being changed- the mind or soul or self or person or organism (though I have talked only of "changing minds", I intend the word mind in the broadest possible sense); (c) the scene of change- the world in which that thing changed, the "mind", finds itself; (d) the principles or basic assumptions about truth and its testing- the ground and nature of change; and (e) the purpose of change. Every effort to change a mind will appear differently depending on our view of what does the changing, what is changed, how it relates to the whole nature of things, whether or in what sense the change is tested or justified in basic principles, and the purpose of the change' .
(Spellmeyer 1993: 25) 'Implicit in Habermas' schema is the recognition that a disciplinary practice, on the part of either individuals or entire communities, does not make sense in itself and cannot be studies exclusively from an insider's point of view. The purpose of medicine, for example, is not the practice of medicine' .
(Longacre 1983: 3) 'Our classification needs ... to include both broad classifications and also more narrow specification of surface types. The classification needs, however, to allow for the difference between notional structures ... and surface structures.... In brief, notional structures of discourse relate more clearly to the overall purpose of the discourse, while surface structures have to do more with a discourse's formal characteristics' .
(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' .
(Lanham 1993: 126-7) 'The final -- or semifinal, since in this world there is no finality -- the semifinal result will be a motival mixture of game, play, and purpose completely different from the print mixture. The electronic classroom has a different motivational mix from the print classroom. And it has a different sense of "finality" too. How can this not affect, for example, how teachers will grade students, or how students will feel about the boundaries of a class, until now firmly fixed by opening day and final exam?' .
(Bove 1990: 55) 'There is a broad political purpose to this project that develops out of a radical skepticism about "truth" and the correspondence of fact and concept' .
(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 39) 'The purpose of the present experiment was to evaluate the hypothesis that judgments of target sentences would be faster and more accurate in Same pairs that in Different pairs. Using this technique we made the following two assumptions: that judgment latencies were an estimate of ease of comprehension, and that, in this task, sentences were processed against the background of the preceding sentence, although the sentence judgment task was a single-sentence task as far as our subjects were concerned' .
(Ordonez 1989: 79) 'The purpose of this paper will be to explore, from an admittedly personal and selective perspective, salient aspects of the feminist critical intertext as it echoes in the present generation of principally North American critics working with texts that may of may not be North American' .
(Ordonez [n.d.]: 62) 'Many roads thus lead to the same conclusion: that the traditional split between body and soul is no longer viable and that its pernicious legacy for women is being erased by today's woman, writing affirmatively and with a common purpose across the boundaries of nationality and ethnicity' .
Last Modified: July-12-96 16:47:58
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