[ Literary
Criticism / Internet
Assisted Courses / English Department
]
議題討論
Issues and Discussion
Key words for Structualist and Semiotic approaches:
I. Following language as a model
II. Disclosing the deep/basic structure of a text,
which is a (combination or selection) system of meaning composed
of basic elements such as:
-- binaries, or semiotic rectangles,
-- roles/actant and functions, or narrateme,
-- story and discourse,
-- narrator- narratee,
-- metaphor and metonymy,
-- grammatic parts of speech, or lexemes,
-- signs or signification on different levels (signifier and signified).
Questions:
-
How different is this approach to other kinds of criticism you are familiar
with?
-
Is the structualist impulse part of a general critical impulse to reduce
individual elements to thematic constants? Or is the approach to reductive?
-
Is there a critical position we can take that leaves us outside the semiotic
system that we are analyzing? In other words, can we resist the influence
of the prevailing signs around us? If so, how?
-
Structuralists have been accused of endangering literature by "decentering"
the text, by insisting that a text*s language, not its author, produces
meanings, not meaning. What do you think?
-
Do we really think in terms of binaries?
-
How is our social existence modeled after language as a system of relations?
-
From work to text (textuality);
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From identity to system of relations;
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From myth to ideology;
-
“Myth -- the complex system of images and beliefs which a society constructs
in order to sustain and authenticate its sense of being.”
-
From structuralism/semiotics to marxism
(Cf. Coursebook pp. 72, 84; Literary Theory in Praxis 194)
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