The Play of Meaning(s):

Reader-Response Criticism, Dialogics, and Structuralism and Poststructuralism, including

Deconstruction

Reader-Response Criticism

Reader-response critics feel that readers have been ignored in discussions of the reader process, when they should have been the central concern. A text does not even exist until it is read by some reader.

The book cover of Reader-Response Criticism, edited by Jane P. Tompkins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980.

Reader-response critics are saying that in effect, if a text dos not have a reader, it does not exist– or at least, it has no meaning.

Davis,Todd F. Formalist Criticism and Reader-Response Theory. N.Y: Palgrave, 2002.

Yet another kind of reader-oriented criticism is reception theory. Such criticism depends heavily on reviews in newspapers, magazines, and journals and on personal letters for evidence of public reception.

Wolfgang Iser, the writer of The Act of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.

Dialogics

Dialogics is Bakhtin’s key term used to describe the narrative theory. Dialogics refers to the inherent “addressivity” of all language.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s constant focus is on the many voices in a novel.

Just as the public ritual of carnival inverts values in order to question them, so the novel may call closed meanings into question.

Carnivalization

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Speech Genres & Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Texas, Austin: U of Texas P, 1986.

Bakhtin claims that the novel carnivalizes through diversities of speech and voice reflected in its structure.

Emerson, Caryl. The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin. New Jersey, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997.

Structuralism: Context and Definition

Ferdinand de Saussure represented meaning in terms of this diagram. It depicts how an abstract mental concept is expressed in material form through a "sound-image" (i.e., an utterance, a written word, a picture).

The two elements are irreducibly united, each evoking the recollection of the other. The mental concept is called the signified, and the material sound-image is better known as the signifier. Meaning, then, is instantiated in the process of signification.

Saussure, who spoke French, called the sound pattern signifiant, and the concept signifié. These words have been translated in lots of different ways.

Vladimir Propp studied Russian folktales as structural units that together contained a limited number of types of characters and actions;

Propp called these actants and functions.

Russian Formalism: Extending Saussure

Vladimir Propp.

Victor Shklovsky pointed out literature’s constant tendency toward estrangement and defamiliarization, away from habitual responses to ordinary experience and/or ordinary language. Ex. Poetry.

Victor Shklovsky Mayakovsky and Viktor Shklovsky, Germany, 1923

Story and Plot

Story is the elementary narrative that seeks relatively easy recognition, whereas plot estranges, prolongs, or complicates perception as in, say, one of Henry James’s fictions.

Vladimir Propp

Lévi-Strauss

Lévi-Strauss concentrated on the paradigmatic approach– that is, on the deep or imbedded structures of discourse.

Lévi-Strauss. 蔡康永兩代電力公司的靈感來源？

French Structuralism

Instead of the Russian formalists’ distinction between story and plot, the French structuralists use the terms histoire and discours.The well known French

(post)Structuralist Roland Barthes.

Poststructuralism: Deconstruction

Whereas structuralism finds order and meaning in the text as in the sentence, deconstruction finds disorder and a constant tendency of the language to refute its apparent sense.

Michel Foucault. Known for trying to erase the traditional boundaries between science, history, philosophy, and science.

Instead of discovering one ultimate meaning for the text, deconstruction describes the text as always in a state of change, furnishing only provisional meanings.

Jacques Derrida. He deconstructs Saussure and Rousseau to illustrate Western society's logocentrism and phoncentrism, or focus on the "metaphysics of presence."