GRADO

GUA DE ESTUDIO: COMENTARIO DE TEXTOS LITERARIOS EN LENGUA INGLESA

UNIT 1 | INTRODUCTION TO POSTSTRUCTURALIST THEORIES

2013-2014 Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI)

Isabel Castelao, Jess Cora, Ddac Llorens

GRADO EN ESTUDIOS LITERATURA Y CULTURA

INGLESES

LENGUA,

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TEXTS AND AUTHORS Literary author: Dylan Thomas, A refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London (full poem, Barry 321-322). Introduction to critical and literary theory: Peter Barry, Ch. 3, Post-structuralism Ch. 4, and deconstruction (61-77); Michael PostRyan, Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction,

Modernism (62-70). Critical authors: Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author (extract); Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (extract).

TEXTUAL COMMENTARY AND CRITICAL PRACTICE

Self-assessment exercises: Dylan Thomas Read Dylan Thomas poem, A refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London (Barry, Appendix 2: pp. 321-322), published in the summer of 1945 just after the end of World War II (Victory in Europe Day VE Day came on 8 May 1945). The poem recalls the London Blitz, which had ended less than two months before. In 1952, Dylan published his Collected Poems. 1934-1952. In the Authors Note he declares: This book contains most of the poems I have written, and all, up to the present year, that I wish to preserve. A refusal to mourn is among them on page 94. While the ideas expressed in this poem are not difficult, the form in which they are expressed is challenging. Read the poem once through without looking up any words: this is just to give you a first impression. (Suggestion: dont forget to read the title as well). Now, with the text in front of you, listen to Thomas reciting his poem on this link: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetI d=7091 (Note: there is also an MP3 file you can also download. See the Unit 1 documents). Pay attention to where Thomas makes pauses and to his intonation: where does his voice go up? Where does it drop? What words or phrases does he stress? The acoustic dimension of a poem helps us make sense of it. Read
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and listen to A refusal to mourn as many times as you need, looking up words where necessary. This will give you a firmer overall understanding of the poem. 1. Write a short summary in prose of what you think this poem is about. (Suggestion: your summary can be in English or Spanish). Dont worry if there are details or aspects you cant quite grasp yet. 2. You will no doubt have noticed the poems complex syntax. You may even have felt frustrated by it! Look at the first three stanzas (= estrofas). Do you notice anything strange about the punctuation? Where and what is the first punctuation mark? What happens to Thomas voice when he reaches this point? 3. Transcribe the first three stanzas as a prose paragraph. Can you identify the subject and main verb? How would you punctuate your transcription in order to make it easier to understand? (Suggestion: look for subordinate clauses. Example: and the still hour is come of the sea tumbling in harness). 4. How do you react as a reader to the way in which this sentence is constructed and punctuated? How is your comprehension affected? 5. Using a good monolingual English dictionary, look up the following words and provide synonyms or explanations in English. (Suggestion: take into account the part of speech the word belongs to, i.e., whether the word is a noun, an adjective, gerund, etc.): mourn fathering l. 3 humbling still tumbling harness l. 6 l. 6 l. 3 l. 5 (title)

sackcloth l. 12 grave elegy robed 1. 15 l. 18 l. 20

6. What do you think the poems speaker means when he uses the metaphors indicated below? (Suggestion: a metaphor is
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a certain use of words: a comparison or an analogy [implying] that one object is another one, figuratively speaking [http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_M.html], for example: All the worlds a stage, from Shakespeares As You Like It): my salt seed l. 11

valley of sackcloth l. 12 a grave truth l. 15

7. What is the effect of using so many present participles (fathering, humbling, tumbling, etc.)? 8. Identify other poetic devices (= techniques). 9. In questions 2, 3, 4 and 5, youve had the chance to consider Thomas text both as a poem and a piece of prose. What formal differences are there, in other words, what specifically makes this text a poem and not a piece of prose? (Suggestion: this question is also related to the previous one. Dont be afraid to state the obvious, i.e. its written in verses or stanzas [= estrofas] or it repeats certain words or structures). 10. Is the meaning of the poem affected by the form in which it is expressed? Would the meaning be altered if Thomas had chosen to express it, say, through an essay or a letter to the editor of a newspaper?

INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL AND LITERARY THEORY Self-assessment exercises Read Barry, Chapter 3, Post-structuralism and deconstruction (59-77) and Ryan, Chapter 4, Post-structuralism, deconstruction, Post-Modernism (62-70). (Note: both poststructuralism and post-structuralism are accepted versions of the term). 1. Now re-read: What post-structuralist critics do (Barry, pp. 70-71). Paraphrase his arguments, substituting each point with your own words. Example: Post-structuralists look for hidden meanings in a text which may contradict the surface or apparent meaning. 2. Read carefully Barrys post-structuralist interpretation of Dylan Thomas poem, Deconstruction: an example (pp. 71-74). Barry identifies three stages in the deconstructive process: the verbal, the textual and the linguistic. Summarize each stage.
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3. Barrys analysis pays attention to the poems paradoxes and contradictions, its breaks, discontinuities and omissions. Identify some of these inconsistencies and try to say how your reading is affected by them. 4. Barry also asks you to look for examples of a specific type of figurative language metaphors. He asks you to think about the use of mother and daughter and the nature of the metaphorical family implied by those words. Can you find examples in addition to those mentioned in question 4? Critical Authors ROLAND BARTHES (1915-1968). From The Death of the Author (1968). The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as [] it discovered the prestige of the individual [], the human person. It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of *capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the person of the author. The author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines, as in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their person and their work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaires work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Goghs his madness, Tchaikovskys his vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent *allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author confiding in us. [] Mallarms1 entire poetics consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing (which is, as will be seen, to restore the place of the reader). Valry2 [] considerably diluted Mallarms theory but [] he never stopped calling into question and deriding the Author; he stressed the linguistic [] nature of his activity, and throughout his prose works he militated in favour of the essentially verbal condition of literature, in the face of which all recourse to the writers interiority seemed to him pure superstition. [] The removal of the Author [] utterly transforms the modern text (or which is the same thing the text is henceforth
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STPHANE MALLARM (1842-1898), French poet [NATC note]. PAUL VALRY (1871-1945), French poet and critic [NATC note].

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made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent). The temporality is different. The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; [] [] a text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. [] the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them. Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner thing he thinks to translate is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely; [] Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws [] To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final *signified, to close the writing [] [However] writing refus[es] to assign a secret, an ultimate meaning, to the text [], liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God [] we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. SOURCE: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001) 1466-1470. Hereafter, NATC. Self-assessment exercises **REMEMBER: unless otherwise indicated, all your answers should be in English. Where appropriate, your answers should also take note of the context to which the questions refer. ANSWERS to most of the following questions are provided in an accompanying document. 1. Read the above extract carefully. 2. Look up and give definitions of the words marked with an *asterisk.
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Suggestions: a) consult the Glossary in the curso virtual and/or the dictionaries of literary terms by Chris Baldick and J.A. Cuddon included in the Bibliografa complementaria. For words not included in these resources, use any philosophical dictionary or good monolingual dictionary; b) when looking up *signified, try looking up sign first. 3. What do you think Barthes means when he refers to the person of the author (par. 1)? 4. The following terms are contrasted by Barthes: ordinary culture (par. 1) Author (par. 1) Mallarm and Valry (par. 1)

modern scriptor (par. 2) reader (par. 3)

Author (par. 1)

What distinction(s) does Barthes draw between them? 5. Barthes repeatedly uses the vocabulary of religious belief (Author-God par. 3, theological par. 3, antitheological par. 3, to refuse God par. 3, etc.) in association with literature, text and meaning. Why do you think he uses these terms? What do you think he is trying to say? Suggestion: See Barrys comments regarding the death of the Author on pp. 63-64. 6. Summarize the text, taking into account your answers to the above questions. Suggestion: To summarize means to cover the main points of something succinctly, that is, in fewer words than the original.

JACQUES DERRIDA (1930-2004). From Of Grammatology (1967). [T]he writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely. He uses them only by letting himself [] be governed by the system. And the reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses. This relationship is [] a signifying structure that critical reading should produce. What does produce mean here? In my attempt to explain that, I would initiate a justification of my principles of reading. []
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To produce this signifying structure obviously cannot consist of reproducing, by the effaced and respectful doubling of commentary, the conscious, voluntary, intentional relationship that the writer institutes in his exchanges with the history to which he belongs thanks to the element of language. This [] doubling commentary should no doubt have its place in a critical reading. [] Yet if reading must not be content with doubling the text, it cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it[self], toward a referent (a reality that is metaphysical, historical, psychobiographical, etc.) or toward a *signified outside the text whose content could take place, could have taken place outside of language, that is to say, [] outside of writing in general. [] [We propose] the absence of the *referent or the *transcendental signified. There is nothing outside of the text [there is no outside-text; il ny a pas de hors-texte]. [] [T]here has never been anything but writing; [] Although it is not commentary, our reading must be intrinsic and remain within the text. [Yet there are] interpretation[s] that take[] us outside of the writing toward a psychobiographical signified, or even toward a general psychological structure that could [] be separated from the *signifier []. [I]t seems to us in principle impossible to separate, through interpretation or commentary, the signified from the signifier []. Here we must take into account the history of the text in general. When we speak of the writer and of the encompassing power of language to which he is subject, we are not only thinking of the writer in literature. [We are thinking of] the philosopher, the chronicler, the theoretician in general, and [] everyone writing []. But, in each case, the person writing is inscribed in a determined textual system. [] [T]he philosophical text, although it is in fact always written includes, precisely as its philosophical specificity, the project of effacing itself in the face of the signified content which it transports and in general teaches. Reading should be aware of this project []. The entire history of texts, and within it the history of literary forms in the West, should be studied from this point of view. [] [L]iterary writing has, almost always and almost everywhere, according to some fashions and across very diverse ages, lent itself to this transcendent reading, in that search for the signified which we here put in question, not to annul it but to understand it within a system to which such a reading is blind. SOURCE: NATC (2001) 1825-1827. Self-assessment exercises

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1. Read the above extract carefully, several times necessary. It will become gradually less opaque.

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2. Look up and give definitions of the works marked with an *asterisk. 3. What do you think Derrida means when he speaks of the relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language he uses (par. 1)? Suggestion: see Barry, pp. 66-67. 4. In this text, Derrida talks about writing and reading. Reread the nine lines Yet if reading must not be contentremain within the text (par. 2). Try to paraphrase Derridas comments. Suggestion: Barry addresses this point on pp. 66-67. (Note: to paraphrase means to restate a text, passage, or work giving the meaning in another form. Merriam Websters Dictionary and Thesaurus). 5. What do you think Derrida means when he writes there is nothing outside of the text (par. 2)? Suggestion: see Barry, p. 67. 6. Summarize the extract, taking into account your answers to the above questions.

Further resources: http://www.dylanthomas.com/ http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetI d=7091 (An excellent online poetry resource with links to Thomas own reading of A refusal to mourn. His introduction alone is worth listening to. Transcriptions accompany both introduction and poem). http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/arts/sites/themes/books/dylan_thoma s.shtml http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B2c4b23r3k (Another online recording of Thomas reciting A refusal to mourn. Not as good as the Poetry Archive version). http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/3357.html
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http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/lookup.html (This is the British National Corpus, a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide crosssection of British English from the later part of the 20th century, both spoken and written). Note: should any of these links be broken, do let us know and we will provide you with alternative ones.

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