Page 153 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

late 1960s, and this coincided with the point at which Paris structuralism moved in the direction of post- structuralism, a body of theory which still belongs within the ambit of what is here being called literary structuralism and semiotics. Bakhtin's ideas were par- ticularly 'readable' in a context where many of the basic tenets of earlier structuralist and semiotic para- digms were being questioned and rethought. The semi- nal texts of this new poststructuralist moment would include: those of Bakhtin himself; Roland Barthes, Elements ofSemiology (1967b); S/Z (1974); Julia Kri- steva, Revolution in Poetic Language (1984); Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1976); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1974), The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), and The History of Sexuality (1984). The standard chronology of these events belies the similarities between what was done in the name of formalism, semiotics, and structuralism and what counts as 'post-' both structuralism and semiotics— such literary/linguistic or poetics enterprises as are characterized by the names poststructuralism, decon- struction, and feminism.
The above account of the provenance of literary structuralism and semiotics ignores a number of important schools and traditions which have con- tributed to the analysis and understanding of struc- turalist poetics and semiotics of the literary. Four should be mentioned. All are related to the traditions discussed above, and to the work of Jakobson and Eco which are treated below.
/./ The United States and Canada
The traditions of North American semiotics associ- ated with Thomas Sebeok and Paul Bouissac came to semiotics from quite different directions, although they share a background in the history that runs from formalism to Paris structuralism and beyond. The differences have been in the influence of C. S. Peirce (1986) and A. J. Greimas. Sebeok's (1979) work, and semiotics in the US in general, have been strongly influenced by a Peircean pragmatism which does not mesh easily with the European and French traditions. The work is characterized by the contributions to the journal Semiotica. This school has not been primarily interested in literary structuralism and semiotics, and is therefore not treated in depth here.
In Canada, the Greimas school, and links with other French theory and poststructuralism as well as femin- ism, British Marxist stylistics and cultural studies, and linguistic pragmatics and discourse analysis, have pro- duced a semiotics which differs from both its US and European counterparts, and which has found the scientific pretensions of the US version problematic (Bouissac 1981). The work is illustrated by the pre- dominantly text-based, literary theoretical, and semi- otic orientations of the publications in the journal of the Toronto Semiotic Association, RSSI: Recherches SemiotiquesISemiotic Inquiry.
Literary Structuralism and Semiotics 1.2 RomanJakobson
Jakobson provided the impetus for a different devel- opment in stylistics in 1958, when, at the conference whose proceedings were later published as Style in Language (Sebeok 1979), he presented the 'concluding statement' paper. This paper contained his arguments about the poetic function of language, arguments which revitalized many aspects of his and others' earl- ier work (in Russia and Prague in the 1920s and 1930s) on literary language and the poetics of literature. This work was functionalist, structuralist-semiotic, and essentially Marxist in its orientations. It was Marxist in the sense that, despite the debates in Russia in the 1920s about the excesses of 'vulgar' sociological Marxism in literary studies, it involved literary analy- sis which related literary texts to the social and cultural conditions of their production, and to the material bases of the societies which produced them. In Jakob- son's 1958 paper, the relation of the functions of language to a contextualized theory of the com- munication situation, the concern with the relations of the word to the world, and the location of a poetics which deals with verbal structure within the realm of general semiotics, are all issues that are implicitly materialist and sociological.
Jakobson was influenced by Husserl's phenom- enology as well as by Saussure's focus on the system that was language, and was interested in the first instance in what it was that constituted 'literariness.' He was interested in literature only insofar as it con- stituted another kind of evolving and changing system, like language (Steiner 1984). In a paper first published in Czech in 1933-34 and in English in 1976, Jakobson responded to criticisms of formalism that it 'fails to grasp the relationship of art to real life,' that it calls for an 'art for art's sake approach,' that 'it is following in the footsteps of Kantian aesthetics' (1981:749). His response is worth quoting in full here:
Neither Tynjanov nor Mukar/lovsky nor Sklovskij nor I—none of us has ever proclaimed the self-sufficiency of art. What we have been trying to show is that art is an integral part of the social structure, a component that interacts with all the others and is itself mutable since both the domain of art and its relationship to the other constituents of the social structure are in constant dia- lectical flux. What we stand for is not the separatism of art but the autonomy of the aesthetic function.
(Jakobson 1981:749-50)
Jakobson's literary work was very different in its implications from the largely unpoliticized and decon- textualized work of Chomsky, and from the generative linguistics which was his other main area of influence and interest in the US at the time of the 1958 paper on the poetic function of language. However, his work on the literariness of the literary was coopted in unpre- dictable ways, in this new historical context, in both America and Britain, by a very different aesthetic that derived from new criticism and other text-based
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