SF MT Literary Theories Exam Quotations

Jakobson on goal-orientation

"Any verbal behavior is goal-oriented, but the aims are different."

Jakobson on the poetic function

"The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination."

Jakobson on poeticity

"Poeticity is present… when words and their composition, their meaning, their external and inner form acquire a weight of value of their own instead of refering indifferently to reality."

Saussure on the sign

"The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image."

Saussure on arbitarity

"The linguistic sign is arbitrary."

Saussure on delimitation

"The linguistic entity… is not accurately defined until it is delimted."

Saussure on difference

"In language there are only differences without positive terms."

Saussure on value

"Interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others."

Saussure on identity and value

"The notion of identity blends with that of value and vice versa."

Marx on value

"Value… transforms every product of labor into a social hieroglyphic."

Marx on language

"The characteristics which objects of utility have of being values is as much men's social product as their language."

Voloshinov on words

"The word is the ideological phenomenon par excellence."

Voloshinov on signs

"Without signs there is no ideology."

Derrida on the science of language

"A science of language must recover the natural - that is, the simple and original - relationships between speech and writing."

Derrida on Saussure

"Logocentricism… prevents Saussure… from determining fully and explicitly that which is called "the integral and concrete object of linguistics."

Derrida on writing

"Writing is at the same time more exterior to speech, not being its "image" or its "symbol," and more interior to speech, which is already in itself a writing."

Derrida on the trace

"The instituted trace, as the possibility common to all systems of signification… "unmotivated" but not capricious."

Derrida on the play of language

"The study of the functioning of language, of its play, presupposes that the substance of meaning and… of sound be placed in parenthesis."

Victor Elrich

"a) its emphasis on the literary work and its component parts and b) its insistence on the autonomy of literary scholarship."

Victor Elrich on literariness

"[The situs of literariness] is in the way the poet uses his medium.”

Fernande M. Dégorge

"Words are literature only when they communicate meaning, and a work is both form and content; there is no dichotomy between the two."

Henry W. Decker

"Language is a collective representation…the sign has no source outside the community."

Henry W. Decker on Jakobson

"Jakobson and other Prague linguists dealt only with the structure form (that is, of signifiers) and ignored the structure of other content (signifieds)."

Stanley Edgar Hyman

"Literature… is a superstructure of social consciousness created on productive relationships."

Geroge Bisztray

"Social facts may provide explanations for literary phenomena and vice versa."

David Lisman

"1) all cultural production is mediated by the substructure; 2) the best literature actively attempts to promote social change."

A.T. Nuyen

"The "analytical" approach…leads soon enough to an untenable position."

Jeffery T. Nealon

"Reading's impossibility… allows reading to be set in motion."