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G

gender, genealogy, genre, global, gloss, government, grammar, ground


gender

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (6)

M. Pratt 1987

Culler 1992

Bathrick 1992

Coates and Cameron 1988

Jehlen 1990

Ordonez 1989

Quotes: (8)

(M. Pratt 1987: 61) Pratt advocates 'a linguistics of contact, a linguistics that placed at its centre the workings of language across rather than within lines of social differentiation, of class, race, gender, age. As my example suggests, it is as a critical project that I am discussing this linguistics here, that is, as a project intended to inform a critical scholarly praxis' .

(Culler 1992: 203) 'The genre of theory includes works of anthropology, art history, gender studies, linguistics, philosophy political theory, psychoanalysis, social and intellectual history, and sociology. Its works are tied to argument in these fields, but they become theory because their visions or arguments have been suggestive or productive for people not working primarily or professionally in those disciplines' .

(Bathrick 1992: 337) 'In his anthology, Nation and Narration, Homi K. Bhabha raises fundamental issues about the future of cultural studies in relation to national identity: What forms of narrative express the ideology of the modern nation? How do questions of race and gender, class and colonialism change the boundaries of national identity? How is national identity itself the construction of a particular historical imaginary?' .

(Coates and Cameron 1988: 91) Gender is not the only relevant variable in the speech styles of men and women .

(Jehlen 1990: 265) 'In proposing gender as a basic problem and an essential category in cultural and historical analysis, feminists have recast the issue of women's relative identity as equally an issue for men, who, upon ceasing to be mankind, become, precisely, men. Thus gender has emerged as a problem that is always implicit in any work. It is a quality of the literary voice hitherto masked by the static of common assumptions. And as a critical category gender is an additional lens, or a way of lifting the curtain to an unseen recess of the self and of society. Simply put, the perspective of gender enhances the critical senses; let us try to see how' .

(Jehlen 1990: 273) 'Because an ideology of gender is basic to virtually all thought while, by most thinkers, unrecognized as such, gender criticism often has a confrontational edge. One has to read for gender; unless it figures explicitly in story or poem, it will seldom read for itself. On the other hand "interpretation" is an ambiguous word meaning both to translate and to explain. Literary interpretation does both inextricably ... They also interpret who only think to explicate. Literary criticism involves action as much as reflection, and reading for gender makes the deed explicit.... The term "gender" in literary criticism refers to a set of concerns and also to a vocabulary ... that contributes its own meanings to everything that is said or written' .

(Jehlen 1990: 272) 'Gender is both an embedded assumption and functions as a touchstone for others.... From the perspective of gender, ... a critic sees both deeper and more broadly. Both the views may also appear more obstructed, exactly the enhancement of critical vision seeming to hinder it, or to interpose a mew obstacle between critic and text' .

(Ordonez 1989: 81) 'Anthropologists looking at gender relations found that in every human culture women are in some way subordinate to men' .


genealogy

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (4)

Hopper 1987

Foucault 1986b

Lanham 1976

Bove 1990

Quotes: (5)

(Hopper 1987: 142) 'The notion of emergence is a pregnant one. It is not intended to be a standard sense of origins or genealogy, not a historical question of "how" the grammar came to be the way it "is", but instead it takes the adjective emergent seriously as a continual movement towards structure, a postponement or "deferral" of structure, a view of structure as always provisional, always negotiable, and in fact as epiphenomenal, that is, as least as much an effect as a cause' .

(Foucault 1986b: 161) 'Criticism analyses the processes of rarefaction, consolidation and unification in discourse; genealogy studies their formation, at once scattered, discontinuous and regular' .

(Lanham 1976: 60) 'It was not that Ovid was a bad plotter. The rhetorical view denies that plot is possible. It was not that Ovid "had no taste for heroes and certainly, no capacity for creating them", as Brooks Otis charges. He did not believe in heroes, or the self they were based on. He was not bad at transitions; he wanted to lose the reader. He was not incapable of tracing a coherent genealogy for Rome; he did not believe in the Virgilian conception of history upon which such descent was based. He was not too dense to master a suitable repertoire of Augustan philosophical clichÈs; he denied the theory of knowledge from which they grew. Too skeptical to think the whole truth contained in a single myth, he thought the epic genre a fraud, an obvious pretense that the world makes more sense than it does' .

(Bove 1990: 56) '"Genealogy" complements the critical dimension of poststructuralism's radical skepticism. It aims to grasp the formative power of discourses and disciplines' .

(Bove 1990: 60) 'Genealogy separates itself within the "will to truth" by trying to unmask discourses' associations with power and materialities; also, it is not reductive, that is, it alone allows for a full description of the completely determined discursive practices it studies' and, finally, it describes and criticizes these practices with an eye to revealing their "subjugating" effects in the present-- it means always to resist discipling and speaking for others in their own struggles' .


genre

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (7)

Lanham 1976

Bove 1990

Culler 1992

van Dijk 1977

Bakhtin 1986

Jameson 1981

A. Pratt 1981

Quotes: (10)

(Lanham 1976: 60) 'It was not that Ovid was a bad plotter. The rhetorical view denies that plot is possible. It was not that Ovid "had no taste for heroes and certainly, no capacity for creating them", as Brooks Otis charges. He did not believe in heroes, or the self they were based on. He was not bad at transitions; he wanted to lose the reader. He was not incapable of tracing a coherent genealogy for Rome; he did not believe in the Virgilian conception of history upon which such descent was based. He was not too dense to master a suitable repertoire of Augustan philosophical clichÈs; he denied the theory of knowledge from which they grew. Too skeptical to think the whole truth contained in a single myth, he thought the epic genre a fraud, an obvious pretense that the world makes more sense than it does' .

(Bove 1990: 50) 'For the New Critics, "discourse" marked differences and established identities....Each "discourse", in itself,... has an identity to be discovered, defined, and understood; in addition, each discourse established the limits of a particular genre' .

(Culler 1992: 203) 'The genre of theory includes works of anthropology, art history, gender studies, linguistics, philosophy political theory, psychoanalysis, social and intellectual history, and sociology. Its works are tied to argument in these fields, but they become theory because their visions or arguments have been suggestive or productive for people not working primarily or professionally in those disciplines' .

(van Dijk 1977: 18) 'Super-structures are organizing principles of discourse. The have a hierarchical character, roughly defining the "global syntax" of the text. By contrast, the macro-structures define the "content" of the text. In certain kinds of narrative, such as folktales, this content may be conventional ... What has been said about the conventional "genre" of narratives also holds ... for other discourse types, e.g., arguments, advertisements, newspaper reports, propaganda, and psychological papers. In all cases the constraints operate globally, both on the global syntax of the macro-structures and on their specific content' .

(Bakhtin 1986: 665) 'Stylistics and the philosophy of discourse indeed confront a dilemma: either to acknowledge tha novel (and consequently all artistic prose tending in that direction) an unartistic or quasi-artistic genre, or to radically reconsider that conception of poetic discourse in which traditional stylistics is grounded and which determines all its categories' .

(Bakhtin 1986: 666) 'The novel is an artistic genre. Novelistic discourse is poetic discourse, but one that does not fit within the frame provided by the concept of poetic discourse as it now exists. The concept has certain underlying presuppositions that limit it' .

(Jameson 1981: 140-1) 'To limit ourselves to generic problems, what this model implies is that in its emergent, strong form a genre is essentially a socio-symbolic message, or in other terms, that form is immanently and intrinsically an ideology in its own right' .

(Jameson 1981: 105) 'The strategic value of generic concepts for Marxism clearly lies in the mediatory function of the notion of a genre, which allows the coordination of immanent formal analysis of the individual text with the twin diachronic perspective of the history of forms and the evolution of social life' .

(A. Pratt 1981: 36) 'In the women's novel of development (exclusive of the science fiction genre) ... the hero does not choose a life to one side of society after conscious deliberation on the subject; rather she is radically alienated by gender-role norms from the very outset' .

(A. Pratt 1981: 14) 'In this most conservative branch of the woman's bildungsroman, then we find a genre that pursues the opposite of its generic intent-- it provides models for "growing down" rather than "growing up"' .


global

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (2)

Spellmeyer 1993

van Dijk 1977

Quotes: (5)

(Spellmeyer 1993: 13) 'A rhetoric divested of every specific connection to human purposes and experience would be more than elusive, ... it would be unteachable, or nearly so, and irrelevant as well, since it would help not at all in resolving the issues no one can afford to neglect -- whether the Congress should reduce the national debt by cutting social services ... or whether the global climate has begun warming up' .

(van Dijk 1977: 3) 'In linguistics, macro-structures have been postulated in order to account for the "global meaning" of discourse such as it is intuitively assigned in terms of the "topic" or "theme" of a discourse or conversation. The assumption is that these notions cannot be accounted for in terms of current logical, linguistic, and cognitive semantics for isolated sentences or sequences of sentences. In disciplines such as rhetorics and narrative theory, macro-structures may constitute the semantic basis for specific categories and rules' .

(van Dijk 1977: 27-30) 'We will briefly state a number of hypotheses regarding ... processing implications....It will be assumed that in discourse comprehension fragments of the morpho-phonological and syntactic surface structure of the sentence sequence are stored only in short-term memory to construct a proposition sequence.... It is assumed that beyond a limited number of propositions, the proposition sequence of the text base is not fully accessible for recall.... Given a sequence of assigned propositions, the reader will make hypotheses about the relevant macro-structure proposition covering the sequence by applying the macro-rules to the sequence.... Macro-structure formation takes place in the course of reading the text, not a posteriori. The same holds true for the assignment of conventional categories to the macro-propositions. Both the assignment of macro-structures and of conventional super-structures is recursive. As soon as a first level becomes too complex. a second level is formed, and so forth. The macro-structure is available when it is necessary to explicitly summarize a text.... The macro-structure is also the basis for recall of the discourse immediately after presentation. The macro-structure is directly available in episodic memory. It then yields, by inverse macro-rule application and recognition, access to lower-level macro-structures and possibly to some text base propositions if the discourse was not too long.... Macro-structures may also constitute "plans for speaking".... Macro-structure formation is a highly complex process, so it can hardly be expected that effective comprehension exactly follows the rules formulated above: expedient strategies are used in the global interpretation of discourse.... Finally, there are strategies based on contextual cues and knowledge of the general communication situation. We may know the speaker so well that we may easily predict the main themes of his discourse, even with very scanty information.... Familiarity with the relevant macro-structures will certainly facilitate the task of global comprehension' .

(van Dijk 1977: 22) 'Frames and macro-structures are closely related but entirely different notions. Both organize complex semantic information. Frames, however, are conventional and general. Most members of a society or culture have approximately the same set of frames. Macro-structures do not have this character. Instead, they are ad hoc information, i.e., the particular global content of a particular discourse' .

(van Dijk 1977: 18) 'Super-structures are organizing principles of discourse. The have a hierarchical character, roughly defining the "global syntax" of the text. By contrast, the macro-structures define the "content" of the text. In certain kinds of narrative, such as folktales, this content may be conventional ... What has been said about the conventional "genre" of narratives also holds ... for other discourse types, e.g., arguments, advertisements, newspaper reports, propaganda, and psychological papers. In all cases the constraints operate globally, both on the global syntax of the macro-structures and on their specific content' .


gloss

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (0)

Quotes: (0)


government

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (0)

Quotes: (0)


grammar

Definition
See also

References: (8)

Hopper 1987

Burke 1945

Schiffrin 1994

Sperber and Wilson 1988

Booth 1979

Marshall 1992

Enkvist 1981

Foucault 1986a

Quotes: (26)

(Hopper 1987: 140) 'Critics of "radical pragmatics", and "functional grammar", assume that they and those they oppose share a common view of language, that there is a pairing of autonomous (i.e., decontextualized) grammatical forms with "functions" (whatever they might be in the abstract), and that the only point of disagreement is whether these forms might be eventually derivable from "functions" or whether the forms must be described independently of "functions". I find a certain irony in such a use of the terms "function" and "functionalism", since the very restriction of the investigation to an artificially defined level of "sentences" seems to me to be quintessentially anti-functionalist. Be that as it may, I am concerned in this paper with the more fundamental problem of the assumptions underlying the critique, especially the assumption of an abstract, mentally represented rule system which is somehow implemented when we speak' .

(Hopper 1987: 141) 'The assumption, in other words, is that "grammar" (in the sense of the rules, constraints, and categories of the language attributed to the speaker) must be an object apart from the speaker and separated from the uses which the speaker may make of it. That kind of grammar is conventionally understood to consist of sets of rules which operate on fixed categories like nouns and verbs, specify the forms of additive categories like those of case, tense, transitivity, etc., and restrict the possible orders in which words can occur in a sentence. Discourse, the actual use of language, is held to be in some sense an "implementation" of these structures, or the way in which the abstract mental system possessed in its entirety by the speaker is realized in particular utterances' .

(Hopper 1987: 141-2) 'This is, then, roughly the context in which the term Emergent Grammar is being proposed. The term "emergent" itself I take from an essay by the cultural anthropologist James Clifford, but I have transferred it from its original context of "culture" to that of "grammar". Clifford remarks that "Culture is temporal, emergent, and disputed" (Clifford 1986:19). I believe the same is true of grammar, which like speech itself must be viewed as a real-time, social phenomenon, and therefore is temporal; its structure is always deferred, always in a process but never arriving, and therefore emergent; and since I can only choose a tiny fraction of data to describe, any decision I make about limiting my field of inquiry (for example in regard to the selection of texts, or the privileging of the usage of a particular ethnic, class, age, or gender group) is very likely to be a political decision, to be against someone else's interests, and therefore disputed' .

(Hopper 1987: 142) 'The notion of Emergent Grammar is meant to suggest that structure, or regularity, comes out of discourse and is shaped by discourse as much as it shapes discourse in an on-going process. Grammar is hence not to be understood as a pre-requisite for discourse, a prior possession attributable in identical form to both speaker and hearer. Its forms are not fixed templates, but are negotiable in face-to-face interaction in ways that reflect the individual speakers' past experience of these forms, and their assessment of the present context, including especially their interlocutors, whose experiences and assessments may be quite different. Moreover, the term Emergent Grammar points to a grammar which is not abstractly formulated and abstractly represented, but always anchored in the specific concrete form of an utterance' .

(Hopper 1987: 144) 'The point about the retention of archaisms in proverbial language has of course often been made. But it has less often been noted that proverbial language is only an extreme case of repetition in discourse, at the other end of which are the morphological and syntactic repetitions some of which are called grammar; this point is made cogently by Lambrecht 1984. In other words, real live discourse abounds in all sorts of repetitions which have nothing to do with grammar as this is usually understood: for instance, idioms, proverbs, clichÈs, formulas, specialist phrases, transitions, openings, closures, favored clause types, and so on. There is no consistent level at which these regularities are statable. They are not necessarily "sentences", or "clauses", with recurrent internal structure, but they are often used holistically. Their boundaries may or may not coincide with the constituent boundaries of our grammatical descriptions: subject and predicate, noun phrase, prepositional phrase. Moreover, what is a formulaic expression in one context may not be in another' .

(Hopper 1987: 144-5) 'It has been noted before that to a very considerable extent everyday language is built up out of combinations of such prefabricated parts. Language is, in other words, to be viewed as a kind of pastiche, pasted together in an improvised way out of ready-made elements. Language is thus to be treated, in Wittgenstein's words, "from outside" (cf. Wittgenstein 1958: para. 120) -- not as governed by internalized mentally represented rules, but by pre-existent material with which discourses can be devised ... Evidently an entirely parallel way of viewing language is to be attributed to Jacques Derrida with his metaphor of language as "graft": new speech acts are "grafted onto" old ones and of course serve in turn as the stock onto which further new speech acts are grafted ... Becker's idea of "prior texts" ... is also crucial here: previous actual utterances form the basis of new utterances. Similar observations have been made by Bolinger, by Andrew Pawley, and others. It is this pre-patterned, pre-fabricated aspect of speech which accounts best for the characteristic of language for which no dualistic, double-tiered theory can provide an intuitively satisfying explanation: in natural discourse we compose and speak simultaneously (Smith 1980:60). There is no room -- no need -- for mediation by mental structures. It is in this sense that, as Bolinger has pointed out (Bolinger 1976), speaking is more similar to remembering procedures and things than it is to following rules. It is a question of possessing a repertoire of strategies for building discourses and reaching into memory in order to improvise and assemble them. Grammar is now not to be seen as the only, or even the major, source of regularity, but instead grammar is what results when formulas are re-arranged, or dismantled and re-assembled, in different ways' .

(Hopper 1987: 147) 'The systematicity which linguists have come to expect in language still exists, of course, but in a more complex way. The linguistic system is now not to be seen as something complete and homogeneous, in which, "exceptional" phenomena must be set aside as inconvenient irregularities, but as a growing together of disparate forms. This convergence takes place through lateral associations of real utterances. Similarities spread outwards from individual formulas, in ways that are motivated by a variety of factors ... They do not, however, merge into the kind of uniform grammar which would lead one to posit a uniform mental representation to subtend them' .

(Hopper 1987: 154) 'It will be seen that "grammar" begins life on page 2 [of Radford 1981] in its theoretically correct style, as a "model" of the native speaker's "linguistic competence". But notice that by page 3, "grammar" is suddenly no longer a linguists construct, a formal characterization of the abilities presumed to underlie the speaker's behavior, but the knowledge itself. It has gone from a linguist's theory to something the speaker possesses. One would not blame Radford, were it not that formal grammarians are quick to castigate discourse linguists for alleged "confusion" over the notion of "grammar", and often accuse them of not understanding this supposedly elementary concept' .

(Hopper 1987: 148) 'Any decision to limit the domain of grammar to just those phenomena which are relatively fixed and stable seems arbitrary' .

(Hopper 1987: 150) 'A major pustulate, or working hypothesis, of Emergent Grammar is that the more useful a construction is, the more it will tend to become structuralized, in the sense of achieving cross-textual consistency, and serving as a basis for variation and extension' .

(Hopper 1987: 147) 'What I've been saying up to now has had the purpose of re-contextualizing the notion of grammar -- not to abolish it, but rather to suspend it with a view to isolating those regularities in discourse which we will agree to call emergent grammatical regularities. But as we have seen, the doctrine of Emergent Grammar assignes an entirely different status to grammar from what might be called A Priori Grammar' .

(Hopper 1987: 154-5) 'There is no question that "grammar" is an infuriatingly elusive notion, and that it is very easy to have a clear idea about what "grammar" is in the sense of being able to give an abstract definition of it, but quite another to apply that definition consistently in practice. This asymmetry suggests that the notion of grammar is intrinsically unstable and indeterminate, relative to the observer, to those involved in the speech situation, and to the particular set of phenomena being focused upon. It suggests also that we need to question the supposition of a mentally representated set of rules, and to set aside as well the idea in Fromkin's statement which I quoted earlier, that speakers possess an abstract linguistic system ready and waiting to be drawn upon -- "accessed"! -- in case they should ever need to speak' .

(Burke 1945: 45-6) 'The socialist revolution is designed first to reverse the state (during the "dictatorship of the proletariat") and next to abolish it, or let it "wither away". But our grammar would lead us to doubt whether a "state" can ever really "wither away", and least of all in a complex industrial society. Though it may take strategically new forms, we expect the logic of the actus-status pair to continue manifesting itself. The selection of the proletariat as the vessel of the new act that transcends the bourgeois state may or may not be correct as a casuistry, but it violates no law of "grammar". The belief in the withering away of the state, however, does seem to violate a law of grammar. For no continuity of social act is possible without a corresponding social status; and the many different kinds of act required in an industrial state, with its high degree of specialization, make for corresponding classifications of status' .

(Burke 1945: xvii) 'In our original plans for this project, we had no notion of writing a "Grammar" at all. We began with a theory of comedy, applies to a treatise on human relations. Feeling that competitive ambition is a drastically over-developed motive in the modern world, we thought this motive might be transcended if men devoted themselves not so much to "excoriating" it as to "appreciating" it. Accordingly, we began taking notes on the foibles and antics of what we tended to think of as "the Human Barnyard"' .

(Burke 1945: xvii-xviii) 'We had made still further observations, which we at first strove uneasily to class under one or the other of these two heads, but which we were eventually able to distinguish as the makings of a Grammar. For we found in the course of writing that our project needed a grounding in formal considerations logically prior to both the rhetorical and the psychological. And as we proceeded with this introductory groundwork, it kept extending its claims until it had spun itself from an intended few hundred words into nearly 200,000 of which the present book is revision and abridgment' .

(Burke 1945: 193) 'We have thus arrived at the transcendent realm as a realm of things "in themselves" (that is, with whatever nature they may have intrinsically, not as they are determined by the terms in which we see them). Whereat we might profitable pause to consider the grammar of the intrinsic. It is the puzzle we encountered when discussing the paradox of substance. As soon as one considers things in relation to other things, one is uncomfortably on the way to dissolving them into their context, since their relations lead beyond them. A thing in itself for instance can't be "higher" or "heavier" than something or "inside" or "outside" something, or "derived from" something, etc. For though such descriptions may apply to it, they do not apply to it purely as a thing in itself ; rather, they are contextual references, pointing beyond the thing' .

(Burke 1945: xviii) 'Theological, metaphysical, and juridical doctrines offer the best illustration of the concerns we place under the heading of Grammar; the forms and methods of art best illustrate the concerns of Symbolic; and the ideal material to reveal the nature of Rhetoric comprises observations on parliamentary and diplomatic devices, editorial bias, sales methods and incidents of social sparring. However, the three fields overlap considerably. And we shall note, in passing, how the Rhetoric and the Symbolic hover about the edges of our central theme, the Grammar' .

(Schiffrin 1994: 8) In the ethnography of communication approach, Dell Hymes proposed 'that scholarship focus on communicative competence: the tacit social, psychological, cultural, and linguistic knowledge governing appropriate use of language (including, but not limited to, grammar). Communicative competence includes knowledge of how to engage in everyday conversation as well as other culturally constructed speech events' .

(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 9-10) 'It is not legitimate to ignore the differences between the semantic representations of sentences and the thoughts that utterances are used to convey.... The semantic representation of a sentence deals with a sort of common core of meaning shared by every utterance of it.... The grammar can say nothing about how the hearer, using non-linguistic information, determines on a particular occasion what the time of utterance actually is, who the speaker is, which Bill or Betsy the speaker has in mind, etc., and hence which thought is actually being expressed. These aspects of interpretation involve an interaction between linguistic structure and non-linguistic information, only the former being dealt with by the grammar' .

(Booth 1979: 107) 'He [Burke] in fact rejects more than conventional norms, His dialectic of similarities and differences is so deliberately flexible and so aggressively opposed to neatly fixed meanings that in a sense all literal proof is made suspect. In the opening pages of A Grammar of Motives we find a series of claims that any action or statement can be considered as evidence for or against almost any concept. In defining any substance, for example, we necessarily place it in its context, its scene , which is to define it in terms of what it is not , leading to the "paradox of substance": "every positive is negative". Before we know it, Burke has moved through statements like "any tendency to do something is ...a tendency not to do it" (32) to a series of paradoxes and oxymorons and "ambiguities of substance" that stagger the literal-minded' .

(Booth 1979: 108) 'Consider more closely the beginning of A Grammar of Motives . Like Burke's other books, it depends on a conceptual beginning in "dramatism": if man-as-symbol-user, then action (in the sense of symbolically motivated choices between various yeses and noes -- the opposite, in short, of mere motion); : if action, then conflict; if conflict, then drama. And if drama, then surely you must want to find a critical language that deals dramatically with the great symbolic drama of the whole of man's life. But not how he says the project began, as distinct from how the finished book begins' .

(Booth 1979: 109) Burke 'found himself trying to construct a rhetoric, symbolic, and grammar of human motives, a three-in-one inquiry that would potentially accommodate all particular doctrines and provide for their meeting without mutual destruction. In short, he set out, like certain others, to build a pluralism that would save himself and the world by reducing meaningless and destructive symbolic encounter. The further one goes in Burke, the clearer it becomes that every consideration is subordinated to this master program' .

(Marshall 1992: 168) 'In the deconstructive critic Paul de Man's terms, a text's "grammar" -- the syntactic structures of its language -- contradicts its "rhetoric", its figurality and the metaphoricity it aims to project' .

(Enkvist 1981: 97-8) 'Rhetoricians used to be the people who worried most about the complex of problems which I shall discuss under a somewhat ponderous term, Experiential Iconicism....The traditional labels under which these problems used to enter into rhetoric and grammar were ordo naturalis and ordo artificialis....In natural order ... text and discourse have the same arrangement as things in the universe of discourse' .

(Foucault 1986a: 146) 'Chomsky in his book on Cartesian grammar "rediscovered" a form of knowledge that had been in use from Cordemoy to Humboldt. It could only be understood from the perspective of generative grammar because this later manifestation held the key to its construction: in effect, a retrospective codification of an historical position' .

(Foucault 1986a: 146) 'Saussure made possible a generative grammar radically different from his own structural analysis' .


ground

Definition

Under construction

See also

References: (7)

Burke 1945

Fish 1982

Booth 1974

Derrida 1986b

Bathrick 1992

Cixous 1986

Leitch [n.d.]

Quotes: (9)

(Burke 1945: 98) 'A scientist might happen to believe in a personal God, and might even pray to God for the success of his experiments. In such an act of prayer, of course, he would be treating God as a variable . Yet, when his prayer was finished, and he began his experiments, he would now, qua scientist, treat "God" as an invariant term, as being at most but the over-all name for the ultimate ground of all experience and all experiments, and not a name for the particularities of local context with which the scientific study of conditions, or correlations, is concerned' .

(Burke 1945: 79) 'We cherish the behaviorist experiment precisely because it illustrates the relation between the circumference and the circumscribed in mechanistic terms; and because the sharpest instance of the way in which the altering of the scenic scope affects the interpretation of the act is to be found in the shift from teleological to mechanistic philosophies. Christian theology, in stressing the rational, personal, and purposive aspects of the Creation as the embodiment of the Creator's pervasive will, had treated such principles as scenic, That is, they were not merely traits of human beings, but extended to the outer circumference of the ultimate ground. Hence, by the logic of the scene-act ratio, they were taken as basic to the constitution of human motives, and could be "deduced" from the nature of God as an objective, extrinsic principle defining the nature of human acts. But when the circumference was narrowed to naturalistic limits, the "Creator" was left out or account, and only the "Creation" remained (remained not as an "act", however, but as a concatenation of motions)' .

(Fish 1982: 532) 'On one level this counterargument is unassailable, but on another level it is finally beside the point. It is unassailable as a general and theoretical conclusion: the positing of context- or institution-specific norms surely rules out the possibility of a norm whose validity would be recognized by everyone, no matter what his situation. But it is beside the point for any particular individual, for since everyone is situated somewhere, there is no one for whom the absence of an asituational norm would be of any practical consequence, in the sense that his performance or his confidence in his ability to perform would be impaired. So that while it is generally true that to have many standards is to have none at all, it is not true for anyone in particular ... In other words, while relativism is a position one can entertain, it is not a position one can occupy.... The point is that there is never a moment when one believes nothing, when consciousness is innocent of any and all categories of thought, and whatever categories of thought are operative at a given moment will serve as an undoubted ground' .

(Booth 1974: 22) 'The dogmas we turn to now tend to travel together, reinforcing each other to constitute the almost overwhelmingly persuasive worldview of modernism. But it will be useful to think of them as falling into five kinds. There are dogmas about (a) the methods or means for producing change; (b) the nature of the thing being changed- the mind or soul or self or person or organism (though I have talked only of "changing minds", I intend the word mind in the broadest possible sense); (c) the scene of change- the world in which that thing changed, the "mind", finds itself; (d) the principles or basic assumptions about truth and its testing- the ground and nature of change; and (e) the purpose of change. Every effort to change a mind will appear differently depending on our view of what does the changing, what is changed, how it relates to the whole nature of things, whether or in what sense the change is tested or justified in basic principles, and the purpose of the change' .

(Booth 1974: 5) 'You may even have been taught, as I was, that to be reasonable in such a situation means taking an absolutely neutral ground until solid proof is available- which in fact amounts to making the negative decision, to deny credence. Since nothing has been proved, an educated man will wait for real evidence. It is part of my point in these lectures that we were taught wrong' .

(Derrida 1986b: 106-7) Since Derrida understands Peirce to have affirmed that signs originate from other signs, he says that 'the genetic root-system refers from sign to sign. No ground of nonsignification-- understood as insignificance or an intuition of a present truth -- stretches out to give it foundation under the play and the coming into being of signs' .

(Bathrick 1992: 324) 'Central to the strategic evolution of cultural criticism has been a programmatic effort to challenge what it sees as the claim to universalism at the heart ... of existing literary theory.... Although the emergence of cultural studies clearly results from a breakdown of one kind of theoretical generality, the proposed countermodel-- while accepting, and sometimes welcoming, the impossibility of theoretical unanimity-- has sought to establish common ground around expanded notions of literature, rhetoric, textuality, theory, culture, discursive practice, or interdisciplinarity. And it is at this point, of course, that the fireworks begin' .

(Cixous 1986: 309) 'I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do....as there are no grounds for establishing a discourse, but rather an arid millennial ground to break, what I say has at least two sides and two aims: to break up, to destroy; and to foresee the unforeseeable, to project' .

(Leitch [n.d.]: 152) 'Deploying discontinuity as a methodological wedge, archaeology shows one aspect of its negative operation....In short, it begets excessive fragmentation in both the object and method of analysis....Archaeology regards discontinuity as a positive element rather than some external threat or failure requiring reduction or erasure. Thus archaeology actively courts discontinuity ... As archaeologist, Foucault attempts to restore to the stable ground of Western culture its rifts, instabilities, and flaws' .


Last Modified: July-12-96 16:29:33

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