Semiology and Rhetoric

Abstract

To judge from various recent publications, spirit of times is not blowing in direction of formalist and intrinsic criticism. We may no longer be hearing too much about relevance but we keep hearing a great deal about reference, about non-verbal outside to which language refers, by which it is conditioned and upon which it acts. The stress falls not so much on fictional status of literature a property now perhaps somewhat too easily taken for granted but on interplay between these fictions and categories that are said to partake of reality, such as self, man, society, the artist, his culture and human community, as one critic puts it. Hence emphasis on hybrid texts considered to be partly literary and partly referential, on popular fictions deliberately aimed towards social and psychological gratification, on literary autobiography as a key to understanding of self, and so on. We speak as if, with problems of literary form resolved once and forever, and with techniques of structural analysis refined to near-perfection, we could now move beyond formalism towards questions that really interest us and reap, at last, fruits of ascetic concentration on techniques that prepared us for this decisive step. With internal law and order of literature well policed, we can now confidently devote ourselves to foreign affairs, external politics of literature. Not only do we feel able to do so, but we owe it to ourselves to take this step: our moral conscience would not allow us to do otherwise. Behind assurance that valid interpretation is possible, behind recent interest in writing and reading as potentially effective public speech acts, stands a highly respectable moral imperative that strives to reconcile internal, formal, private structures of literary language with their external, referential and public effects.

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