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."

Raphael on humanity's freedom

"Because we freely love, as in our will to love or not..."

Satan on the sun

"O sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams, that bring to remembrance from what state I fell."

Satan tempting Eve

"Why then was this forbid? Why but to awe…"

Satan on Heaven

"Empire"

God on Man's fall

"Whose fault? Whose but his own?"

God on grace

"Some I have chosen of peculiar grace Elect above the rest: so is my will."

Adam blaming Eve

"She gave me of the tree, and I did eat."

Adam on justice

"His doom is fair, that dust I am, and shall to dust return."

Eve on restoration

"Though all by me is lost… by me the promis'd seed shall all restore."

Satan on the mind

"The mind is its own place, and in belief can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."

Satan on God

"Conqueror"

Joan Webber on Milton's depiction of God

God is subjected to the "limitations of those which make men heroes."

Arnold Williams on Satan's heroisism

Satan is "of heroic proportions, for a weak or trivial Satan, like Marlowe's Mephistopheles, would have failed to provide the antagonism necessary in a poem of epic proportion."

Old Man to Faustus

"O gentle Faustus, leave this damned art."

Faustus on his damnation

"But Faustus' offense can ne'er be pardoned." & "What are thou, Faustus, but a man condemned to die."

Faustus signing

"Do give body and soul to Lucifer."

Mephastophiles on Hell

"This is hell." & "Hell hath no limits."

R.M. Dawkins on the Renaissance man in Doctor Faustus

Faustus is a "Renaissance man who had to pay the price for being one."

Palmer on Faustus' choice

"He chooses damnation and persists in his choice… Faustus commits this one sin which puts him beyond God's grace."

Bellington and Rasmussen on Faustus' failure to repent

"His failure to repent is his extreme act folly."

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.”