Category Archives: Dialogue and Linguistics

Gramsci’s Politics of Language

Posted on by

Gramsci’s Politics of Language – Peter Ives

  • The last section of the prison notebooks it Is dedicated to grammar hey there is substantial evidence that the concept of hegemony it’s fundamentally rooted in Italian linguistics.
  • Gramsci’s approach to language and ‘matter’ does not assume that these two things are inimical nor does it  privilege one at the others expense.
  • Vernacular materialism is a version of linguistic materialism that invokes oxymoron to illustrate the assumed opposition between language and ‘matter’.
  • Gramsci in line with Louis Dupre and Raymond Williams, seeing language as cultural and material product of human activity rather than rarified thought.
  • Do not equate Progressive with consent and regressive with coercion. Coercsion and consent are dialectically related.
  • CHAPTER ONE
  • the manner in which a proposition functions must be placed in broad context, its ‘global signification’.
  • Imminent Grammar – Gramsci’s term for spontaneous grammar in popular use; parole.Normative Grammar – Gramsi’s term for standardized hegemonic language use; langue.
  • For Gramsci, normative grammar cannot be delinked from philosophy. Normative Grammar amounts to the exercise of power and law, it operates molecularly at that which creates the spontanous of imminent grammar. (i.e. The Indexical Order)
  • The normative grammar is the historical product of these pressures and struggles because ‘in language too, there is no parthenogenesis.’
  • Gramsci’s problem of hegemony: it is not a  relationship  between coercion and consent rather it is a question of the formation of consent and the role of coercion. It is impossible to separate those forces which act from above externally as a force from the movements of spontaneous organic formation of collective will.
  • CHAPTER TWO: BAKHTIN CIRCLE
  • Volosinov’s description of language as a site of class struggle analyzed as signs with various possible ‘accents’, meanings, and nuances.

Volosinov’s five basic propositions about language:

  1. language as a stable system of normatively identical forms is merely a scientific abstraction, productive only in connection with certain particular practical and theoretical goals. (common sense)
  2. Language is a continuous generative process implements in the social-verbal interaction of speakers.
  3. The laws of the generative process of language are not at all the laws of individual psychology, but neither can they be divorced from the activity of speakers. The laws of language generation are sociological laws.
  4. Linguistic creativity does not coincide with artistic creativity nor with any other type of specialized ideological creativity. But at the same time, linguistic creativity cannot be understood apart from the ideological meanings and values that fill it.
  5. The structure of the utterance is a purely sociological structure.
  • Bakhtin contra Stalin and centralization = heteroglossia
  • Gramsci contra facism and disorder = national progressive language
  • “A common unitary language is a system of linguistic norms. But these norms do not constitute an abstract imperative; they are rather the generative forces of linguistic life, forces that struggle to overcome the heteroglossia of language, forces that unite and centralize verbal-ideological thought… What we have in mind here is not an abstract linguistic minimum of a common language, in the sense of a system of elementary forms (linguistic symbols) guaranteeing a minimum level of comprehension in practical communication. We are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life. Thus a unitary language gives expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization, which develop in vital connection with the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization”
  • defining heteroglossia as the manifestation of social diversity in language has two advantages 1) does not divorce language from everyday life 2) does not reduce heteroglossia as good democratic and monoglossia as bad and antidemocractic.
  • the sign exists in itself and also reflects (refracts) reality, ‘various classes will use one and the same language’, malleability or multiaccentual aspect of the sign is central to its capacity for further development: “The ruling class strives to impart a supraclass, eternal character to the ideological sign, to extinguish or drive inward the struggle between social value judgments which occurs in it, to make the sign uniaccentual.”
  • The naturalization of language works in the interests of those who wish to maintain a national language—by methods Gramsci rejects— since it makes opposition to this language impossible to imagine.
  • The most significant difference between Gramsci and Bakhtin is that Gramsci believes in the possibility of an actual progressive unified language in which differences are held intact and not obliterated, in which different voices exist. Four Bakhtin, this type of unity and organization is certainly found in the field of literature with the unity of the novel. But it is an open question whether Bakhtin thinks we should place our faith in constructing such an open unity Internation or community of people.

Gramsci on Language and Grammar

  • imminent grammar means the grammar rules which naturally occur in any language regardless of its being regimented (Gramsci Reader 354)
  • normative grammar also functions simultaneously in society through reciprocal monitoring, teaching, and censorship (the indexical order)
  • written normative grammar always entails a political choice (there is no neutral promotion of Fusha that is not at the same time political, every lexical choice in Turkish is political)
  • “the idealist current… involves a return to old rhetorical conceptions, to words which are ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ in and by themselves, conceptions which have been glossed over with a new psuedo-scientific language. What these people are really looking for is an extrinsic justification of normative grammar.” SCW 184-5 (Q29-5)
  • “in reality one is ‘always’ studying grammar (by imitating the model one admires)

Minor characters – Alex Woloch

Posted on by

Character space

Character system

 

By interpreting the character system as a distributed field of attention we make the tension between structure and reference generative of , and integral to, narrative signification.

The tension between representing and allegorizing is one of the focus on one life vs the many

Realist novel – Depth psychology and social expansiveness

The realist novel is destabilized not by too many details but by too many people

Flat minor characters become allegorical

How can human beings enter into a narrative world and not disrupt the distribution of attention?

Minor characters are the proletariat of the novel

Balance between protagonist a minor characters mirrors asymmetric norms of democracy

What we remember about a minor character is how the text forgets them, like a great actor in a bad production

Narratives allow and solicit us to create a story – a distributed pattern of attention- that is at odds with or divergent from the former latter. Of attention in the discourse

19th century realist novel – pull between democratic equality and consequences of social stratification

On Voice – John Brenkman

Posted on by

This creation of an imaginary space of narration is a complex stylization, a kind of rhetorical zone in which the narrator “recounts” events-actions, emotions, thoughts-as though he or she has “observed” them, though no such space of witness exists within or outside the story told. That we accept this rhetoric of recounting and observing, this imaginary space from which someone who is no one addresses us, is at the very least a significant achievement in our modern capacity for alienation.

 

 

 

 

 

Two originators of novel theory, the early Lukhcs and Bakhtin, do not presup- pose an imaginary space of narration. They look at narration from the standpoint of writing. Rather than treating the novel as a type of narrative among others (myth, folktale, film, and so on) as narrative theory and narratology do, the novel theorists consider the novel a specific, though diverse and polyglot, cultural form and social practice.

 

 

The essential reference point of novel theory for Bakhtin is the process of composition; he conceives of the novel as discourse, an act of communication ventured in, and venturing to alter, concrete public spheres. The composition or construction of a novel takes as its raw material a variety of discourses active in society at large and re-voices them. In the terms he developed in the essay “The Problem of Speech Genres,” these pre-existing social discourses are “primary genresw-for example, “the rejoinder in dialogue, everyday stories, letters, dia- ries, minutes, and so forth”-which “secondary, complex genres,” like novels, “play out” (Speech 98). The novel engages the sociality of communication on, as it were, two fronts: on the one hand, it incorporates into its very construction discourses originating in several social contexts, public and private; and, on the other hand, it addresses itself to, intervenes in, an actual public realm.

 

 

Poe’s achievement is immense, and if my hypothesis is correct that it established the conventions of the imaginary space of narration and the structured distinc- tion of narrator and (implied) author, it has had a profound effect on reading habits and criticism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bakhtin thus sees in the flexibility and relativity of “double-voiced” narrations the writer’s leeway to experiment with his or her commitment to the norms and meanings of a particular discourse. Keying on the resources that such “a refract- ing of authorial intentions” affords the comic novel in particular, he stresses the “variety of different distances between distinct aspects of the narrator’s language and the author’s language” (315).Poe’s innovative stylization turns the relativity of double voice to a more regulated, unified purpose. He renders it “monologi- cal” in Bakhtin’s terms or “parsimoniously plural” to borrow Roland Barthes’s term in S/Z.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bakhtin is truer to the history of the novel in seeing it as a continual appropriation of other social discourses, including the whole array of storytelling modes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What makes the novel, however, is its voice. Among Flaubert’s indelible con- tributions to the novel form is free indirect style, with its unlimited flexibility in evoking the subjectivity, the interiority and inner speech, of a character within the objectifying trajectory of third-person narration.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Writing” is on the face of it a literal rather than metaphorical term. And indeed I hold the view, which I associate with the work of Bakhtin and Raymond Williams, that “literature,” broadly defined, is the social practice of writing and therefore inseparable from the social history of literacy. Nevertheless, poststruc- turalism threw a wrench into every purely empirical sense of “writing,” begin- ning with Jacques Derrida’s huge claim in Of Grammatology that Western philosophy conceptualizes speech and writing as opposites and then freights the concept of writing with whatever features of language are deemed errant and recalcitrant to the reigning metaphysical idea of the nature of language. De Man’s Allegories of Reading and Derrida’s own work as a literary critic, especially in the essays on Plato, MallarmC, and Philippe Sollers in La disstmination, revolu- tionized literary studies by showing that mefaphors of writing are so integral to every practice of writing that it is impossible to say what writing is-as artistic activity, social practice, or vocation-without entering the metaphorical or figurative labyrinth of the written text.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Voice” is overtly metaphorical and has acquired connotations ranging from onto-theological presence to the lingusitic technicalities of grammatical mood. Yet, it has distinctive advantages over other widely used terms in novel criticism. Unlike “presiding consciousness,” it does not presuppose what shape the subjec- tivity of writing and reading actually takes, or ought to take, in novels. Unlike “point of view” or “perspective,” it does not import a visual metaphor into the account of a phenomenon of language.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moreover, because novel theory starts from the worldly intersubjectivity of writing and reading, it eliminates the need for dubious categories like “vision” or “focalization” to fit intersubjectivity into novelistic prose, whether the shadowy intersubjectivity of free-indirect third-person narration or the relatively delimited intersubjectivity of unreliable first-person narrations. For Bakhtin, language is in essence intersubjective, lying “on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he approriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention” (293). The novelist’s stylistic achievement of “double voicing,” however master- ful, derives from the existential condition of every speaking being: no one ever truly originates or masters speech.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fictional Dialogue – Bronwen Thomas

Posted on by

Thomas, Bronwen. Fictional Dialogue: Speech and Conversation in the Modern and Postmodern Novel. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2012.

 

Gennette “scene” – dialogue practically takes place in real time

Direct discourse fallacy – it’s not mimesis

We don’t have a direct copy but question how it’s been reported to us (Sternberg ‘s quotation theory”

But even this critique relies on an ideological of the real

Realism in dialogue has shifted from not portraying curt speech to it being a requirement

 

The fascination over fictional dialogue has never been about measuring its accuracy or authenticity, but rather about trying to understand why the experience it offers me as a reader is so exhilarating”

 

“Dialogue affords the reader, particularly in offering the sensation of being in the midst of an event, a performance, where boundaries of all kinds are eroded and outcomes uncertain.” (pg. 1-2)

 

Quasi-direct discourse “between the reported speech and the reporting context, dynamic relations of high complexity and tension are in force.”

 

Challenged and exposed the “direct discourse fallacy” – direct speech has a kind of authenticity and immutability denied to other forms of representation.

 

Alan Palmer – Speech and thought have continuing consciousness, novels are full of references to joint or group thinking.

 

Dialogue has a metacommunicative function, reflecting not just on how groups of characters choose to behave toward and interact with one another but also to suggest how those forms of talk are socially situated and become socially sanctioned.

 

dialogue plays a crucial role in helping to create and populate credible fictional worlds and in contributing drama and vitality to the actions and situations located within those worlds.

fictional dialogue is often highly stylized and that what passes for an accurate reflection of “real speech” may be simply the product of a “linguistic hallucination” (Fludernik 1993, 453) in which the reader readily participates.

Meir Sternberg (1981, 237) playfully contends that “the trouble is that, unlike the proverbial old dog, mimesis has been taught so many new tricks and has such an aptitude for learning new ones, that its performance can hardly be reduced to a single univocal bark.”

 

Sternberg argues, any analysis of fictional dialogue must be alert to the fact that “the most potent effects of direct speech . . . turn on various strategies of interference and montage”(1982a, 69)

 

What Monika calls we-narratives, in which (1) action (groups that do things on the plot level); (2) thought or attitude (groups that have a common viewpoint and express a common attitude); and (3) narration (groups that engage in collective storytelling as co-authors and co-narrators)

 

Turning next to the delineation of collective consciousness, one has to observe at the outset that—even in factual narratives—this is a fiction. Collective mindsets are speculative attributions of attitudes and opinions but also of dispositions. They occur pervasively in historiography, everyday conversational narrative, and fiction. In con- trast to the thought process of individual protagonists, a collective consciousness very rarely comes in the form of interior monologue; the standard mode of representation is that of psychonarration, but there are also some examples of free indirect thought (see Houghton 139).

 

Lots of the fallacies over seeing speech as either transcript or as a transparent reflection of consciousness, that which makes dialogue the “handmaid of bourgeois humanistic ideology”  can be avoided by thinking about Gramsci’s theories of language as being socially and politically embedded.

What Is Unnatural about Unnatural Narratology? A Response to Monika Fludernik

Posted on by

Response to ongoing debate 2012-2010

Fludernik defines the term “unnatural narrative” as denoting “the fabulous, the

magical, and the supernatural besides the logically or cognitively impossible” (362).

Furthermore, from her perspective, unnatural narratology combines two different

discourses: “the discourse of fable, romance, before-the-novel narrative; and the

discourse of postmodernist anti-illusionism, transgression and metafiction” (36

Richardson argues elsewhere, “we will be most

effective as narrative theorists if we reject models that, based on models derived from

linguistics or natural narrative, insist on firm distinctions, binary oppositions, fixed

hierarchies, or impermeable categories” (Unnatural Voices 139).

unnatural is ultimately a function of our bodily existence in the world (Alber s position) or whether the unnatural lies beyond the scope of our embodiment (the position of Iversen and Nielsen);