In the entry on meaning in the Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible (Baker), Jorge Gracia responds to the view that textual meaning has no limits with this: It is true that “texts are understood by different persons, or even by the same person at different times, to mean different and even contradictory things, and no determination can be reached concerning which is the correct meaning of the text on all occasions.” But this is not true for all... Read more
Joel Garver writes, in response to several posts from Raymond Tallis’s Not Saussure : “Most post-structuralist authors I’ve read aren’t dealing with things such as cups or trees or rocks, but rather things such as rationality, madness, criminality, virtue, etc. Foucault, for instance, seems to take bodies as ontologically basic, even if every body is always already an inscribed surface of events. “And when I was taught varieties of post-structuralist theory in graduate school the point was repeatedly made that... Read more
Fisch yet again: After reviewing the influence of the Old Testament, especially the Psalms, on prose writing in the seventeenth century, he adds: “it is worth bearing in mind that this is not only a matter of the seventeenth century. It is found earlier in the antiphonal plain-song of the Middle Ages, and later, in the writings of William Blake and Walt Whitman, the freedom of whose loose-limbed parallelistic verse has an obvious, and acknowledged Biblical background. In all such... Read more
Fisch again: Hebraic prose is different from the grand style of the sixteenth century, and different too from the pared-down plain style shared by many Puritans and all Baconians. It is a rhetoric, not an anti-rhetoric, but it is a rhetoric purified by Puritanism, Senecanism, and scientism. It is biblical in imitating biblical rhythms and parallelism, and in its frequent use of biblical phrasings. But it’s also Hebraic in its intensity: “this style is inseparable from Hebraic earnestness and sublimity.... Read more
In his 1964 book, Jerusalem and Albion: The Hebraic Factor in Seventeenth-Century Literature , Harold Fisch argues that Blake provides a more insightful and broader account of the seventeenth century’s “dissociation of sensibility” than Eliot, who coined the phrase. For Blake, the great crisis of England was the dissociation of Albion from Jerusalem, the latter being the “city of peace” that “came to mean the undivided unity of flesh and spirit, reason and imagination, fact and symbol, corresponding to an... Read more
William Deresiewicz has an excellent review of a new biography of Joseph Conrad in the June 11 issue of TNR . One thread of the review has to do with Conrad’s phantasmagorical vision of European imperialism and his related concern for the moral dangers of isolation from well-known social habits and standards. Conrad’s exposure to empire came from his experience as a seaman. (more…) Read more
In an effort to maintain his distinction of meaning and significance, interpretation and critical assessment, E. D. Hirsch examines Welleck’s treatment of Marvell’s phrase “vegetable love.” He notes that “Welleck could not even make his point unless he could distinguish between what ‘vegetable’ probably means as used in the text and what it commonly means to us.” That’s true enough, but it doesn’t require, as Hirsch thinks, a “fixed” meaning in the text. It merely requires an ability to occupy,... Read more
Tallis yet again: He argues that confusion of langue and parole : leads to “conflation of the idea of a world as a value or set of values within the system with the meaning of a word used on a particular occasion, that by virtue of which verbal meaning is specified with verbal meaning itself, or, indeed, meaning per se .” Do evangelical uses of Saussure (Barr, Silva, Carson) partake of the same confusion? Read more
Tallis thinks that one of the basic confusions of post-Saussurean criticism is a confusion of the levels of parole and langue . Signifiers and signifieds are, for Saussure, purely differential; but words are not signifiers or signifieds, but types of signs, which are combinations of the two. Signifier and signified does not, as Terry Eagleton implies in a badly garbled statement, equivalent to signs and referents. Words, actual verbal tokens in a language, don’t belong to langue but to parole... Read more
Does language take cues from reality? Tallis says Yes; at least, that’s one kind of relation language has to reality. His charming evidence: He notes that it’s more common to add “barking” to “dog” than to add other verbs. If language doesn’t take its cues from reality, “we must surely be at a loss to explain why the transition from ‘dog’ to ‘-is barking’ has a high frequency in observed speech while those from ‘dog’ to ‘-is quacking’ or from... Read more
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