Modes Week2 Shklovsky Saussure - University of Warwick · Modes_Week2_Shklovsky_Saussure Created...
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Modes of Reading Week 2: Saussure and Shklovsky Prof Dan Katz (and Dr Myka Tucker-Abramson)
Transcript of Modes Week2 Shklovsky Saussure - University of Warwick · Modes_Week2_Shklovsky_Saussure Created...
Modes of Reading Week 2:Saussure and Shklovsky
Prof Dan Katz (and Dr Myka Tucker-Abramson)
Part 1: Shklovsky and Ostranenie
“A thing passes us as if packaged; we know of its existence by the space it takes up, but we only see its surface […] This is how life becomes nothing and disappears. Automatization eats things, clothes, furniture, your wife, and the fear of war” (Shklovsky162-3)
Glenn Ligon “Untitled: Four Etchings” (1992)
“And so this thing we call art exists in order to restore the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make the stone stony” (162)
Part 2: Saussure and Linguistics
“Langue” “Language”
“Langage” “human speech,” but generally all forms of deployedlanguage use
“Parole” actual talking; the act of an individual who is talking
“Language is not a function of the speaker; it is a product that is passively assimilated by the individual” (14) Language is “the social side of speech, outside the individual who can never create or modify it by himself ” (14)“Language is a social institution” (15)
“‘Dear Dick,’ she wrote, ‘I guess in a sense I’ve killed you. You’ve become Dear Diary….’” (74)
• Signifier/sound-image• Signified/concept• Sign• Referent
“John walked into the room and sat down at the table.”
“I love Dick.”
• CAT• BAT• CAD• CUT
“Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it.” (120).
“...and this for several reasons, particularly because in speaking of a piece of meat ready to be served on the table, English uses mutton and not sheep[whereas French uses the same word for both—mouton]. The difference in value between sheep and mouton is due to the fact that sheep has beside it a second term while the French word does not. (115-16)
