#jonathan culler

✨~Just English Major Things~✨

Some of the books I'll need for the next academic year came in from ThriftBooks today. As dry as they likely will be, I'm really excited to grow my collection of literary books and get some new knowledge and perspectives. I'm also excited to read in advance because I'm excited for the next school year and actually feeling optimistic about my future.

alan munton, ‘quotation’ in wyndham lewis and the cultures of modernity

"Hébert [an activist of the French Revolution who edited a newssheet] never began a number of Le Père Duchêne without sprinkling it with fuck and bugger. These obscenities had no meaning but they had significance. How? They signified a whole revolutionary situation. Here is an example of a mode of writing whose function is no longer only communication or expression but the imposition of something beyond language, which is both history and the stand we take in it."

roland barthes, Le Degré zéro, p. 9/1

"A stripped-down language is not natural or neutral or transparent but a deliberate engagement with the institution of literature; its apparent rejection of literariness will itself become a new mode of literary writing, a recognizable écriture, as Barthes calls it. An author's language is something he inherits, and his style is a personal, perhaps subconscious network of verbal habits and obsessions, but his mode of writing, or écriture, is something he chooses, from the possibilities historically available. It is ‘a way of conceiving literature’, ‘a social use of literary form’.

Barthes argues that from the 17th century to the mid-19th century French literature employed a single écriture classique, characterized primarily by confidence in the representational function of language. When Madame de Lafayette writes that Le Comte de Tende, on learning that his wife was pregnant by another man, ‘thought everything it was natural to think in such circumstances’, she shows the same sense of the function of writing as does Balzac nearly two centuries later when he writes that Eugène de Rastignac was ‘one of those young men moulded for work by misfortune’, or that Baron Hulot was ‘one of those men whose eyes light up at the sight of a pretty woman’. This écriture classique is based on the assumption of a familiar, ordered, intelligible world to which literature refers. Here, writing is political by the way it connotes universality and intelligibility.

[...]

‘no writing can be lastingly revolutionary’, since each violation of the conventions of language and literature can ultimately be recuperated as a new mode of literature.

[...]

This brief foray into literary history does three things. First, it asserts the ‘political and historical engagement of literary language’. The political significance of writing is not simply a matter of political content or of an author's overt political commitment but also of the work's engagement with a culture's literary ordering of the world. Barthes does not, unfortunately, show in detailed analyses how one might determine the political implications of experimental writing, but he suggests that literature's exploration of language and critique of inherited codes releases a valuable utopian and interrogative impulse. What he shows most convincingly is that since even political tracts work by indirection, it is no simple matter to evaluate the political significance of writing"