Schols 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 on aims of Formalist

"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 on words and literature

"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 on the community of the sign

"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 on literature in Marxism

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

Geroge Bisztray on social facts

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

David Lisman on Marxist aims

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

A.T. Nuyen on aim of deconstruction

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

Jeffery T. Nealon

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

Holden on the museum

“Everything always stayed right where it was…The only thing that would be different would be you."

Holden on being a catcher

"I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff… I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all."

Holden's hat

"I took my red hunting hat out of my pocket and put it on - I didn't give a damn how I looked."

Holden on an audience

"All I need's an audience. I'm an exhibitionist."

Holden on age

"Sometimes I act a lot older than I am - I really do - but people never notice it."

Phoebe on Holden's hat

"She…took out my red hunting hat and put it on my head."

Spenser on life

"Life is a game, boy."

Holden on stasis

"Certain things they should stay the way they are."

Holden on phonies

"I was surrounded by phonies… they were coming in the godamn window."

James Bryan on responses in The Catcher in the Rye

"Polarizes childlike and adult responses."

Donald Costello on Holden's language

"Holden's language is autherntic teen speech."

Clinton Trowbridge on Holden's vision

"As a result of a frighteningly clear vision of the disparity between what is and what ought to be… he attemps to escape into a series of ideal worlds, fails."

Eva on motherhood

"'Motherhood,' I condensed in the park. 'Now that is a foreign country.'"

Loretta Greenleaf on blame

"You can blame your mother, and she can blame hers. Leastways sooner or later it is the fault of somebody who's dead."

Eva on love

"If only out of desperation or even laziness I love my son."

Eva on pregnancy

"The whole time I was pregnant with Kevin I was battling the idea of Kevin."

Eva on punishment

"You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good."

Eva on sheltering children

"Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive, it's a vanity."

Eva on America

"In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable."

Eva on children giving purpose

"Yet is there's not reason to live without a child, how could there be with one?"

Eva on teachers

"Dual role of scapegoat and savior."

Loretta Greenleaf on fault

"'It's always the mother's fault ain't it?"

Riders to the Sea stage directions

"The door which Nora half closed is blown open by the wind."

Maurya on age

"In this place it is the young men do be leaving things for them that do be old."

Young Priest on God

"The Almighty god won't leave her destitute."

Cathleen on young men

"Its like the life of a young man to be going to sea."

Yi-Fu Tuan on place and space

"From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space and vice-versa."

Seamus Heaney on place in Ireland

"We have talked much more about [place] in this country because of the peculiar fractures in our history."

Synge on objects of the islands

"Every article on the islands has an almost personal character… a natural link between the people and the world that is about them."

Synge on isolation on the islands

"The absence of the heavy boot of Europe has perserved to these people the agile walk of the wild animal."

Joy Kennedy on the ocean in Riders to the Sea

"Both dividing and unifying. It isolates the world of Maurya, but this isolation… has also helped perserve Irish folk customs and language."

Joy Kennedy on nature in Riders to the Sea

"Synge's use of nature… is a blend of uniquely Irish ambiguities towards place."

Joy Kennedy on props in Riders to the Sea

"The play's props…reveal the connections, both physical and spiritual, between characters and land."

Mabel on foreignness

"I didn't think it would be so… foreign."

Mary on Mabel's home

"This can never be your home… they are not civilized, Mabel."

Mary on Hugh

"Hugh is different - Hugh was educated in England."

O'Neill on the Irish wildness

"To 'come in' as they so coyly phrase it, as in to come out of the wilderness, the Gaelic wilderness."

O'Neill on waiting

"All I have to do is… just sit - and - wait."

O'Neill on choice

"Either way I make an enemy… which choice would history approve?"

O'Neill on Sydney

" 'Those Irishmen who live like subjects play but as the fox which when you have him on a chain will seem tame; but if he ever gets loose, he will be wild again.' … And then he laughed. And everybody joined in."

O'Neill on Irishness and England

"I have attempted to hold together a harassed and a confused people by trying to keep them in touch with the life they knew before they were overrun… at the same time I have tried to open these people to the strange new ways of Europe."

Yvonne Lysandrou on linking Irish History

"The most basic quality or facet of [Irish] history, a facet that links Ireland's colonial past not only with the Ireland of 1988 when Making History was written but with the Ireland of today, is that of entrapment in circular motion."

Hiram Morgan on identity in Irish history

"We were involved in a wider debate about Irish history - in a sense we were all Hugh O'Neill's, sturuggling to find our place."

Hiram Morgan on the Irish man

"The archetypal Irishman: an individual who as a result of political circumstance is wholly conversant with English culture but cannot be fully accepted within it, and who by the dint of Anglicization has lost a vital part of his Irishness."

Description of Chaucer

“Father of English Poetry”

Patience Agbabi on Chaucer

“Chaucer’s tales were an unfinished business”

Patience Agbabi on her characters

“Multicultural motley crew, I wanted to reflect the demographics of contemporary Britain via Chaucer’s poetics.”

Ernest Hemingway on retellings

“The only kind of writing is rewriting.”

Linda Hutcheon on translation

“May keep the work alive, giving it an afterlife it may not have had otherwise.”

Derek Brewer on retellings

“Most tales whether in prose or verse are retellings.”

Hans J. Vermeer’s Skopos Theory

“The word skopos, a technical term for the aim or purpose of a translation.”

Betty Hearne on retellings

“An organic shaping and reshaping around a core of basic elements in response to historical and cultural influences.”

Ashley Polasek on Sherlock’s makeover

“2009’s Sherlock Holmes was the first time that Sherlock was given a modern techonology-savy makeover.”

Ann McClellan on mobile texts

“Explicit use of mobile texts as Text to reinforce and challenge the show’s connection to - and separation from - Doyle’s original stories.”

Ann McClellan on Doyle’s authority

“Reinforce Doyle’s authority as the ultimate “author” of Sherlock Holmes.”

Ashley Polasek on the Sherlock’s new comforts

“Offers a totally new Sherlock Holmes - one at home among the technology and sensibilities of the twenty-first century.”

Ann McClellan on “A Scandal in Belgravia”

“Many of the plot elements of season two’s “A Scandal in Belgravia” seem to be based on the character Gabrielle Valladon in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.”

Ann McClellan on on screen text

“Sherlock uses various methods of text on screen to remind the audience of the show’s affiliation with the original text and with a larger network of adaptations.”

Montag’s hand

“It was the hand that started it all… his hands had been infected.”

Beatty on individuality

“We must all be alike. Not everyone can be born free and equal…everyone made equal. A book is a loaded gun.”

Beatty on fire

“Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences… antibiotic, aesthetic, practical.”

Beatty on firemen

“[Firemen] were given a new job, as custodians of our peace of mind… offical censors, judges, and executors.”

Montag on the sacrificial woman

“There must be something in the books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house.”

Montag on effect of books

“Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes!”

Granger on generations to come

“We’ll pass the books on to our children, by word of mouth…you can’t make people listen. They have to come around in their own time.”

Hospital operator on suicides

“We get these cases nine or ten a night. Got so many, starting a few years ago, we had the special machines build.”

Montag on dissatisfaction

“We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy. Something’s missing…I thought books might help.”

Bradbury on the reality of Farenheit 451

“When I wrote my novel…we were very close to panic and wholesale book burning.”

Brabury on television

“Television is useless, it stuffs you with so much useless information, you feel full.”

Brian Baker on fire and firemen in Farenheit 451

“Fire and the fireman-state are metaphors for the growing conformity of American society in the 1950s.”

M. Keith Booker and Anne-Marie Thomas on society in Farenheit 451

“Thoroughly commercialized consumer culture stripped of all spirituality.”

Brian Baker on language in Farenheit 451

“Centrality of language and linguistic play to both Farenheit 451 and the dystopian form itself.”