Page 152 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
opmental outline. The practices involved have been chronologically disrupted and disruptive. The major figures have migrated from school to school, country to country, crossing political and ideological bound- aries. As a consequence, theories developed in one political context become transformed and recon- textualized in another where they function as different technologies for understanding the literary. There are many disjunctive traditions involved, deriving from different cultural sources and influences. These spring up in different places and apparently in isolation from each other. They are chronologically overlapping and separate rather than neatly sequential, and they fre- quently arrive at similar conclusions from different perspectives.
The plurality which characterizes the history of twentieth-century literary structuralism and semiotics now constitutes its present. The state of the art at the end of that century is its own disjunctive history. This article attempts to produce an archaeology, in Fou- cault's sense (see Foucault 1972), rather than a history, to map the terrain, to identify the major continuities and discontinuities, and to argue for some rereadings of the taken-for-granted arguments about what lit- erary structuralism and semiotics are supposed to be.
The first section provides a kind of history, arriving at some general statements about the current state of the art. The second gives a brief overview and set of preliminary definitions. It also attempts to signpost some major theoretical shifts in position. The third looks at matters of theory and methodology, and pro- vides an archaeology of the terminology which derives from structuralism and semiotics and is still used in poststructuralism, deconstruction, and feminism.
1. The Complex Evolution of the Field
The twentieth-century field of literary studies has become accustomed to a narrative chronology which locates structuralism as prior to, and later developed by, a semiotics which is in turn superceded by a num- ber of new movements all generally characterized as being 'post-' both structuralism and semiotics. This chronology (Culler 1975) ignores many of the com- plexities of early formalist work in Russia in the 1920s, and of the Prague School in the 1920s and 1930s, each of which was properly both structuralist and semiotic, but historically preceded what is usually identified as 'structuralist' and located in New York in the 1940s and then in Paris from 1950 to 1970 (O'Toole and Shukman 1975-83).
This order of events is further complicated by the ubiquitous presence of Roman Jakobson (1971,1981) in all these places and movements, by the movement of Claude Levi-Strauss (1963) from Czechoslovakia to the United States in 1941, and then to Paris in 1950; and by the effects of the uncertain authorship and
delayed translation of the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and Medvedev (Voloshinov 1973; Bakh- tin 1981, 1984, 1986), whose work in Russia in the 1920s and later, known to the Prague School in the 1930s and 1940s, did not have its effect on Paris struc- turalism and semiotics until it was taken up by Tzvetan Todorov (1984) and Julia Kristeva (1980) in the late 1960s.
In Russia, the inheritance of the formalists (Matejka and Pomorska 1971; Steiner 1984), of Prague School semiotics (Mukafovsky 1977; Matejka and Titunik 1976), and of Bakhtin himself (who con- tinued working in Russia until he died in 1975) has been the Tartu school of semiotics, illustrated in the work of its leader, Yuri Lotman (1977). In Paris a very influential group led by A. J. Greimas developed into a Paris School semiotics (Greimas 1987; Perron and Collins 1989) which in many ways has stood out- side the more poststructuralist and postmodern aspects of French literary theory, and derives from different traditions from the Baithes-Kristeva kinds of semiotics. Both traditions are the products of early formalism, but Barthes and Kristeva take from such work as Jakobson's (1960: 18-51) on the poetic func- tion, Tynjanov's (see Matejka and Pomorska 1971) on literary evolution, Bakhtin's on genre, dialogue, and dialogism, while the Greimas group have been much more strongly influenced by works like Eich- enbaum, The Theory of the Formal Method (see Matejka and Pomorska 1971), Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (1958), and by Levi-Strauss's (1963) cru- cial work on myth. Greimassian semiotics has been primarily a narrative and cognitive semiotics (Greimas 1987). It has preserved the scientificity of an earlier formalism inwayswhichrun counter to contemporary tendencies to critique such scientism (Grosz and de Lepervanche 1988). At the same time it has explored areas that are central to quite different kinds of semi- otics and poststructuralism: the production of mean- ing, the recognition that the apparent presence of meaning in a text is always an illusion, that 'Meaning, in the sense of the forming of meaning, can thus be defined as the possibility of the transformation of meaning' (Jameson, in Greimas 1987:10). Central to it has been Greimas's rewriting of Propp as the famous semiotic square (Greimas 1987), a powerful heuristic
and mediating device which can 'reduce' a narrative to a series of 'cognitive' or ideological positions, or can rewrite a cognitive/scientific or literary text into a narrative process in which contradictory terms attempt a synthesis. Later (Perron and Collins 1989) the work also became much more self-reflexive. In all of these areas, it is impossible to characterize it as structuralist or semiotic without recognizing the links it has with many aspects of poststructuralism as well.
The writingsof Bakhtin and Voloshinov were trans- lated (Kristeva 1969) and took effect in Paris in the
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