Page 154 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
approaches to the literary (e.g., Richards 1929). This was specifically middle-class and individualistic. It found the emphasis on form in Jakobson's poetics compatible with its own tendency to treat the aesthetic text in isolation from questions of social or historical context.
The 1958 conference also connected with different developments in North American semiotics, and marked a period of high enthusiasm for a new kind of interdisciplinarity in the humanities which drew on linguistics, literary theory, psychology, and cultural anthropology.
1.3 British Stylistics
In the 1960s, transformational linguistics began to have an influence in Britain. But it was the theories of the British linguist Michael Halliday (1978, 1985), theories that are functionalist, systemic, Marxist, and semiotic in orientation and belong to the Neo-Firthian tradition in linguistics and anthropology, which became the dominant linguistic force in British Styl- istics. Halliday's was a fundamentally structuralist approach to the linguistic analysis of literary texts (Halliday 1980). This approach was, however, mediated by versions of Halliday's theory of language as social semiotic. This is a constructivist theory which sees language as constructing the social, rather than simply representing a social order that pre-exists language. It is associated with a theory of the semiotics of context which theorizes the ways in which texts are both realizations of their producing contexts and constructive of the speaking subjects and the social realities that constitute those contexts. In this intel- lectual environment, Jakobson's and other formalist and Prague school analyses of the literary were appro- priate and compatible influences, and were not subject to the recontextualizations that affected them else- where. British stylistics has always been underpinned by a specific concern with the semiotics of text-context relations, as well as with the structural analysis of texts themselves.
British stylistics and linguistic criticism reached its most influential point at the end of the 1970s, with the publication of Kress and Hodge, Language as Ideology (1979), Fowler, et al. Language and Control (1979), Aers, et al. Literature,Language and Society in England 1580-1680 (1981). All three books used both transformational and systemic linguistics, and an overtly structuralist and Marxist theoretical approach to the analysis of literary texts. All three were also more concerned with locating literature in a wider social context, and in its relations to other texts, to institutions and power, than had ever been the case in early or even later structuralist work on the literary within this context (Hasan 1985).
1.4 Social Semiotics in Britain and Australia
One book stands out as signaling new directions in British stylistics, and marking its transition to some-
thing that might properly be called 'social semiotics.' Its difference was in its preparedness to deal with French theory, and in the important new directions that made possible. The book is Roger Fowler's Literature as Social Discourse: The Practice of Linguis- tic Criticism (1981). Its most important contribution is its bringing together of the British work outlined above with that of Roland Barthes, Bakhtin, and others from the European traditions. This made poss- ible an explicitly theorized move from an intrinsic structuralist linguistic criticism which focused on the production or writing of the text, and on its formal linguistic properties, to a literary and textual semiotics which foregrounded the role of the socially and linguistically constructed reading subject, and allowed an account of that reader's ability to decode (in Bar- thes' sense of code as used in S/Z, or Eco's 1977 use of the term) the patterns such an intrinsic criticism might discover. The decoding was theorized as a form of intertextuality: the reader was making sense of this text in terms of codes that were familiar from other texts.
This marked the beginnings of many attempts under the heading of 'social semiotics' to bring French and poststructuralist theoretical positions into contact with the British stylistics and Hallidayan traditions (see, for example, Birch and O'Toole 1988).
There was also a new interest in British stylistics in the 1970s, in the larger structures of texts, and in the networks of relations within which they circulate. Theories of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics were used to relate the form of a text to its patterns of use, and to the social contexts in which it operates. Much of this work has recourse to Hal- lidayan linguistics, and to register and genre theory as adumbrated within that tradition and others. Ronald Carter's (1982) and Roger Fowler's (1986) work is typical. The continued vitality of this work in the 1990s was marked by the appearance of two new
journals: Language and Literature, which appeared in Britain in 1992, and Social Semiotics, first published in Australia in 1991.
7.5 Umberto Eco and Italian Semiotics
All the traditions discussed so far derive linguistically from Saussure in Geneva at the beginning of this century. Nearly all were further influenced by the Prague Linguistic Circle, particularly Jakobson and Trubetskoy. The Danish linguist Hjelmslev (1961) sur- faced as an important influence at about the same time in the semiotics of Roland Barthes (1974) and Eco (1977). There are many other kinds of linguistics which have served as models or metaphors for the literary text, or as actual methods of doing the analy- sis.
In his Theory of Semiotics (1977), Eco brings all of these and the work of C. S. Peirce into a coherent relationship. His rewriting of Saussurean linguistics in
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