Introduction to the Study of Cultures and Literatures in English

- Introduction to the Study of Cultures and Literatures in English
- Előszó
- Contents
- Part 1 What is English Studies?
  - 1. What is a university? A proseminary
  - 2. Paradigms and paradigm shifts
  - 3. What is English Studies? English as a university subject
  - 4. Ideology, criticism, history
  - 5. Registers of Culture
  - 6. Canon formation and alternative reading practices
- Part 2 Fields of English Studies. Language, Literature, Culture, and Critical Approaches
  - 1. Preliminary problems: definitions, scientific expectations
  - 2. Ontological problems: the way literature exists
    - Semiotics
    - Literary communication
    - Language and Critical Thinking
    - The Language of the Sciences and the Language of Literature
  - 3. Methodological problems: the way we understand texts
    - Meaning and context
    - The Process of Interpretation
  - 4. The Theory of Genres
    - Genres and Their Historical Changes
    - Genre-generating Factors and Historical Changes
  - 5. Poetry and Figurative Language
    - Exercise in Interpretation / 1
      - I First level of meaning
      - II Second level of meaning
      - III Third level of meaning
      - IV Fourth level of meaning
  - 6. Narrative Fiction
    - Exercise in Interpretation / 2
      - I First level of meaning
      - II Second level of meaning
      - III Third level of meaning
  - 7. Drama
    - Exercise in Interpretation / 3
      - I First level of meaning
      - II Second level of meaning
  - Self test I
  - 8. Literature, Culture, and the Reading Subject: An Overview of Major Trends in Literary and Cultural Theory
    - I Preliminaries
    - II Formal critical trends: from the authorial intention to the close reading of the text (1st shift)
    - III Contextual aproaches: from text to context
    - The critique of structuralism
  - Self test II
  - 9. Critical Literature Consulted and Recommended
  - 10. Appendix

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# Semiotics

When two people communicate, we might suppose that they exchange meaning about the actual reality they are talking about. In the communication model, this would look like the following:

Speaker (sender) --------- meaning ---------- Listener (receiver)

It seems that meaning is exchanged by the partners in the act of communication: meaning “travels” in the actual empirical reality from one person to another.

However, this idea of the “exchange of meaning” becomes surprisingly problematic when we more closely examine specific acts of communication.

## Task / groupwork

Think about your experiences of unsuccessful communication. Has it ever happened that your intended meaning did not get through to your partner, or it was understood, received in a way different from your intention? What were the reasons for this failure of communication or misunderstanding?

Let’s study now the way communication works through an example. Consider the following situation:

Speaker tells Listener the following sentence: “Come, have a look at my apple.”

We automatically suppose that Speaker intended to speak about a piece of fruit s/he wants to show Listener.

However, when Listener answers: “Oh, thanks, I am not hungry.” – the reply by Speaker can very well be:

“Oh, come on, I did not mean the fruit. I bought a new Macintosh computer. Come have a look, it is very powerful.

or

“OK, I did not mean the fruit, I meant New York, the city I live in. I am very proud of it. Come over, buy a ticket and let’s spend the weekend together.”

or

“OK, but I did not mean the fruit, I meant the little pink rubber apple I used to play with when I was a little child. I just wanted to show you how cute it is.”

So, the same sentence about an “apple” can have so many different “intended meanings.” However, we have just seen that Listener might not necessarily understand the sentence the way Speaker intended it.

What is the reason? Does intention not “travel” with the spoken word from the Speaker to the Listener, from the sender to the receiver? Was the meaning not sent by Speaker to Listener directly?

Semiotics would indeed argue that meaning does not “travel” between the two persons. If meaning could be “objectively” conveyed from one human being to another, we could always communicate with total success, no misunderstanding would ever occur, and the same text would have the same meaning for everybody. However, we do know that this is not the case. What is the reason for miscommunication from a semiotic perspective?

We might start out from the realization that it is apparently not meaning that is exchanged between speakers who communicate. At the same time, we also realize that we use some medium, some “tool” in order to communicate. This tool is language, which is a system of signs, and this system is used for various types of communication, literature included. It follows that we need to understand the way signs operate in order to get closer to an understanding of literary communication.

The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure laid down the foundations of semiotics, a theory of signs (Cours de linguistique générale, University of Geneve, 1906-11). He argued that language is a system of interrelated elements, and these elements, the signs are not simple, monadic units, but complex, compound entities. Here follows a very simplified but helpful outline of the most important semiotic considerations.

According to semiotics, the sign consists of three basic elements.

Signifier (Sr) ----------code (C) ----------- Signified (Sd)

The signified is the mental image that is formed in our consciousness when we think of something. The signifier is the element of the signifying system that has a material basis, it has an objective existence, independent of the human consciousness. The code establishes the relationship between the signifier and the signified, it tells us what to think of, what kind of mental image to formulate in our mind when we encounter a signifier. The element of the empirical, material reality that we might be referring to in communication is called the referent, but it is NOT part of the sign system: the referent is missing from language.

These simple rules have two very important implications:

1. Since signifieds are always locked up in our consciousness, what we exchange in the act of communication is not meaning, not the signified, but the signifier.

2. For successful communication to happen, the communicating partners need to employ the same codes so that they have (more or less) the same signifieds in their respective consciousness. We say “more or less” because we can never totally check whether the other person has the same mental image in his/her consciousness, since human brains cannot be opened up for such scrutiny. In the theory of science, this problem is traced back to the complex thesis that human beings are operationally closed, autopoetic systems, and they cannot establish a direct contact with the outside reality or with other human consciousnesses.

So, it is the signifier (such as the word “apple”) that travels from sender to receiver in the act of communication, and code-sharing is needed for successful communication. If Speaker employs Code A (apple = Macintosh computer) while Listener employs Code B (apple = fruit), the communication will not be successful.

However, this is not a big problem in live communication, because we can always continue to make the communicative act more successful. That is, we can simply continue talking and we use more signifiers to make the code more precise. We can say “I meant a computer, not a fruit, and this computer is a laptop, and it is not silver but black, and it is a 17” Colour Flatron,” etc.

Our problem in the study of literature (just like in any textual practice) is that such further communication is not possible. Understanding literature within the framework of the communication model, we will observe that the Speaker, the Author is not present. We cannot ask questions from Shakespeare about what he actually meant when Hamlet says “There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” In literary communication, the normal communicative interaction is suspended. We only have access to the text, and, from a semiotic perspective, the text includes no meaning, it is not a system of signifieds, but a systematically organized set of signifiers.

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