Linguistics…oy vey

Mr. Saussure packed a lot of information in this excerpt from “Course in General Linguistics.”  One of my roommates is a Communications Disorders major, and I remember sitting down with her on the couch while she was doing homework.  It wasn’t all that different from the content of Saussure’s essay.  I remember telling my roommate good luck, and that I was glad I wasn’t in that major.  Anyway, enough bitching.  Since there was a lot of information to handle in one sitting, and since some of the vocabulary was a little overwhelming for someone with no background in linguistics, I’m choosing to focus on a little piece of the essay that piqued my interest.  Oh, first, let me say that I enjoyed the diagrams and schematics he threw in.  Broke up the reading a little bit, and sometimes I need visuals to help me comprehend difficult concepts.  He also gave several creative examples which, as you all know, I rely on (maybe a little too heavily) to get me through readings like this.  So kudos to you, Saussure, for acknowledging your audience. 

In language, he says, there are only differences.  Words, thoughts, visuals, sounds–all separate.  “Language,” he says, “can also be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor throught from sound…” (967)  (Are you allowed to use a colon and two semi-colons in a sentence? But I digress…)  That’s a pretty vivid image, and I got it right away.  I actually sat there and tried to counter him, thinking, I’ve thought without words and sound before.  But I was thinking of when I feel things, and about emotions–feelings and emotions are not thoughts, although sometimes it’s hard to pry the two apart and differentiate between them.  And when you think, you talk to yourself, literally using words and recognizing the way they would sound if you were to speak them aloud.  And when you remember things, you think of a situation, and a setting, and what people were saying, and all the sensory images that go along with that.  Later on, Saussure says that “their [sound and thought] combination produces a form, not a substance” (967).  I want to know what that form is, and what is conveyed through it.

First Time I’ve Read Something Frustrating and Liked It

Out of the two essays, I found “Introduction: Rhizome” by Deleuze and Guattari more intriguing and so much more fun to suffer through than Williams’ “Marxism and Literature,” even though I had a harder time understanding what the authors were trying to say.  I noticed in both pieces that the authors say literature has nothing to do with ideology–the method in which ideas come about and the beliefs that guide social movements along.  (A little help from dictionary.com for clarification.)  Williams, though, talks about the shift of literature from an indication of how well-educated someone was to a tool of imagination and whose quality, as Williams puts it, is based on “taste” and “sensibility.”  The points of view on the definition of literature, he says, are based on class differences, which would refute what he says about ideology and sociology not relating to literature.  They are “mere hardened outer shells compared with the living experience of literature” (1568).  That was something that tripped me up about this piece; another was the excessive amount of words in quotations.  Not actual quotes, just words.  I think the reader’s smart enough to understand that in this type of essay, you’re discussing and developing several concepts on what literature actually is–we don’t need the word literature embedded in quotation marsk every time it shows up in the essay.

Deleuze’s and Guattari’s essay confused and frustrated me–and I loved it.  They used several images and concrete examples, which, when it comes to theory, are crucial for my understanding of the material.  They write, “The world has become chaos, but the book remains the image of the world” (1604).  Therefore, the book itself, to be an accurate lens in which to see life, needs to be chaotic and nonlinear.  I love and fully endorse the rejection of the linear method of writing in favor of a cyclical one. And it’s not a new concept, just a more obscure one.  Native American stories usually follow a circular pattern, reflecting their belief that time does not unfold in a straight path–from what happened to the events of the present to what is to come–but that it wraps around to meet itself.   I think what Deleuze and Guattari are trying to say is that what you have to say is not nearly as important as how you say it–or, at least, form is an extension of content, as Charles Olson said.  I love manipulating form when I write poems.  I have so much fun because the form, to me, is like a whole other tool, a separate art form aside from the language.  The authors lost me when they mentioned “multiples” and the whole “n-1″ bit.  But I admire how they integrated math and English, which I tend to place at opposite ends of the academic spectrum.  I only wish the authors had written the essay in a cyclical or radial manner, with everything spreading out from the middle.

“Discourse in the Novel”

There was a lot for me to take in and digest while reading Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel.” I found the advice I’d read earlier this week to be useful–I focused on a narrow section of the reading and tried to break it down into understandable terms.  Although I’m still not entirely clear on what stylistic unities are and how there can be “separate” unities, it helped when Bakhtin outlined the stylisticss typically included in novels.  I noticed that most of them involved speech of some sort–whether it’s the style of the character’s speech, the style of the author’s “extra-artistic” speech, which I assume to mean what the author says concerning her novel or about the contexts surrounding it, and the stylization of oral storytelling.  This list helped me understand Bakhtin’s point about how critics should not just zero in on one of these styles–it takes all of them to comprise the whole novel.  I felt like I would have more fully understood the theory of many styles comprising one style if Bakhtin had provided examples.  Maybe it’s because I’ve just been introduced to literary theory, but it’s harder for me to grasp abstract ideas without concrete examples.  If he had applied all five stylistic unities of the novel to, say, The Barbarians or Song of Solomon–I don’t even care if it’s one I’ve read before–I, as his audience, would have been better able to connect with his thought process and his theory. 

Barry’s “Stop and Think”

I wanted to study English for the reasons many people probably do–I loved using writing as a tool of communication and expression.  I like how many authors create literature as a testament of the human condition, and the tools and techniques they use to express these trials and sufferings and triumphs intrigued me.  I want to creatively and accurately manipulate words as a form of expression.  I feel like I’m improving with each course I take, as they’re all pretty diverse and help me see different points of view and different styles and techniques I can use when I write.  This is probably my favorite thing about my courses; every one is different and does not necessarily stick to the canon as we used to know it.  In high school, the canon was the bulk of our curricula. I liked to think of it as WASP literature–Dickens, Faulkner, Shakespeare, and Chaucer to name a few.  Many of them I found a bit dry and lacking in true knowledge of human emotions.  When I got to college, the literature I was reading was like a full one-eighty from high school.  I studied writers who would have been at one time or another marginalized, like Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Rich, and Leslie Marmon Silko.  I loved their work so much that I wished I had known about them earlier, and I hope that high schools start to assimilate these authors into their syllabi.  What the “canon” literature taught me was that there was only one point of view that was accepted years ago (and actually, not even that many years ago), and that was the white man’s. There was almost like a formula to these works; the stereotypical hero goes on a quest for honor and glory, and is willing to sacrifice himself and others for that cause.  Not until college did I find a diverse depiction of humanity in literature.