Literally

Bisson Freres, The Portal of Saint Ursinus at Bourges, rue du Vieux Poirer, 1854

From: Literary Theory, An Introduction, by Terry Eagleton

"In the early 1920s it was desperately unclear why English was worth studying at all; by the early 1930s it had become a question of why it was worth wasting your time studying anything else. English was not only a subject worth studying, but the supremely civilizing pursuit, the spiritual essence of the social formation. Far from constituting some amateur or impressionistic enterprise, English was an arena in which the most fundamental questions of human existence - what it meant to be a person, to engage in significant relationships with others, to live from the vital centre of the most essentials values -- were thrown into vivid relief and made the object of the most intense scrutiny" (27)

"Society is in crisis [I.A.] Richards argues, because historical change, and scientific discovery in particular, has outstripped and devalued the traditional mythologies by which men and women have lived. The delicate equipoise of the human psyche has therefore been dangerously disturbed; and since religion will no longer serve to retrim it, poetry must do the job instead" (39).

"The process of reading, for reception theory, is always a dynamic one, a complex movement and unfolding through time. The literary work itself exists merely as...a set of 'schemata' or general directions, which the reader must actualize. To do this, the reader will bring to the work certain 'pre-understandings', a dim context of beliefs and expectations within which the work's various features will be assessed. As the reading process proceeds, however, these expectations will themselves be modified by what we learn, and the hermeneutical circle - moving from part to whole and back to part - will begin to revolve. Striving to construct a coherent sense from the text, the reader will select and organize its elements into consistent wholes, excluding some and foregrounding others, 'concretizing' certain items in certain ways; he or she will try to hold different perspectives within the work together, or shift from perspective to perspective in order to build up an integrated 'illusion'. WHat we have learnt on page one will fade and become 'foreshortened' in memory, perhaps to be radically qualified by what we learn later. Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret what comes next, but what comes next may retrospectively transform our original understanding, highlighting some features and backgrounding others. As we read we shed assumptions, revise beliefs, make more and more complex inferences and anticipations; each sentence opens a horizon which is confirmed, challenged or undermined by the next. We read backwards and forwards simultaneously, predicting and recollecting, perhaps aware of other possible realizations of the text which our reading has negated. Moreover, all of this complicated activity is carried out on many levels at once, for the text has 'backgrounds' and 'foregrounds', different narrative viewpoints, alternative layers of meaning between which we are constantly shifting" (67).

"What [Jakobson] contributed in particular to poetics...was the idea that the 'poetic' consisted above all in language's being placed in a certain kind of self-conscious relationship to itself. The poetic functioning of language 'promotes the palpability of signs', draws attention to their material qualities rather than simply using them as counters in communication. In the 'poetic', the sign is dislocated from its object: the usual relation between sign and referent is disturbed, which allows the sign a certain independence as an object of value itself. All communication for Jakobson involves six elements: an addresser, an addressee, a message passed between them, a shared code which makes the message intelligible, a 'contact' or physical medium of communication, and a 'context' to which the message refers. Any one of these elements may dominate in a particular communicative act: language seen from the addresser's viewpoint is 'emotive' or expressive of a state of mind; from the addressee's standpoint, it is 'conative', or trying for an effect; if communication concerns the context it is 'referential', if it is oriented to the code itself it is 'metalinguistic' (as when two individuals discuss whether they are understanding each other), and communication angled towards the contact itself is 'phatic' (e.g., "Well, here we are chatting away at last"). The 'poetic' function is dominant when the communication focuses on the message itself -- when the words themselves, rather than is said by whom for what purpose in what situation, are 'foregrounded' in our attention" (86).

"Genette discerns five central categories of narrative analysis. "Order" refers to the time order of the narrative, how it may operate by prolepsis (anticipation), analepsis (flashback) or anachrony, which refers to discordances between 'story' and 'plot'. "Duration" signifies how the narrative may elide episodes, expand them, summarize, pause a little, and so on, "Frequency" involves questions of whether an event happened once in the 'story' and is narrated once, happened once but is narrated several times, happened several times, happened several times and is narrated several times, or happened several times and is narrated only once. The category of 'mood' can be subdivided into 'distance' and 'perspective'. Distance concerns the relation of the narration to its own materials: is it a matter of recounting the story ('diagesis') or representing it ('mimesis'), is the narrative told in direct of indirect or 'free indirect' speech? 'Perspective' is what might be traditionally be called 'point of view', and can also be variously subdivided: the narrator may know more than the characters, less than them, or more on the same level; the narrative may be 'non-focalized', delivered by an omnisicent narrator outside the action, or 'internally focalized', recounted by one character from a fixed position, from variable positions, of from several character-view-points. A form of 'external focalization' is possible, in which the narrator knows less than the characters do. Finally there is the category of 'voice', which concerns the act of narrating itself , what kind of narrator and narratee are implied. Various combinations are possible between the 'time of the narrative' and the 'narrated time', between the action of recounting the story and the events which you recount: you may tell of the events before, after, or (as in an epistolary novel) while they happen. A narrator may be 'heterodiegetic' (i.e. absent from his own narrative), 'homodiegetic' (inside his narrative as in first-person stories), or 'autodiagetic' (where he is not only insdie the narrative but figures as its principle character)...one important aspect of discourse to which [these distinctions] alert us us the difference between narration - the act and process of telling a story - and narrative - what it is you actually recount. When I tell a story about myself, as in autobiography, the 'I' who does the telling seems in one sense identical with the 'I' whom I describe, and in another sense different from it...." (92).

"The 'healthy' sign, for Barthes, is one which draws attention to its own arbitrariness - which does not try to palm itself off as 'natural' but which, in the very moment of conveying a meaning, communicates something of its own relative, artificial status as well. The impulse behind this belief...is a political one: signs which pass themselves off as natural, which offer themselves as the only conceivable way of viewing the world, are by that token authoritarian and ideological. It is one of the functions of ideology to 'naturalize' social reality, to make is seem as innocent and unchanging as Nature itself. Ideology seeks to convert culture into nature, and the 'natural' sign is one of its weapons" (116).

"The most intriguing texts from criticism are not those which can be read, but those which are 'writable' - texts which encourage the critic to carve them up, transpose them into different discourses, produce his or her semi-arbitrary play of meaning athwart the work itself. The reader or critic shifts from the role of consumer to that of producer...literature is now less an object to which criticism must conform than a free space in which it can sport...A specific piece of writing thus has no clearly defined boundaries: it spills over constantly into the works clustered around it, generating a hundred different perspectives which dwindle to a vanishing point. The work cannot be sprung shut, rendered determinate, by an appeal to the author...the biography of the author is, after all, merely another text, which need not be ascribed any special privilege...It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming, 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself. If there is any place where this seething multiplicty of the text is momentarily focused, it is not the author but the reader" (120).