TEXT AND SIGN
CAMELIA ELIAS
Dept of Culture and Identity, English Program
Theory is a mode of:
 Analyzing
 analysis  structuralism  text  text, narratives, no distinction
between literary and non literary works
 Interpreting
 interpretation  hermeneutics
 Reading
 text  reader-response  deconstruction  canon
 Contextualizing
 contextualization  Marxism  cultural phenomena  realist
canon
 Evaluating
 criticism  new criticism  work  poetry, modernism
Theory is:
 interdisciplinary
 analytical and speculative: an attempt to
work out what is involved in what we call
language, or writing, or meaning
 a critique of common-sense, of concepts
taken as natural
 reflexive;
thinking about thinking;
inquires into the categories we use in making
sense of things
Theory questions:
 the conception that the meaning of an
utterance or text is what the speaker ‘had
in mind’
 the idea that writing is an expression
whose truth lies elsewhere, in an
experience or a state of affairs which it
expresses
 the notion that reality is what is ‘present’ at
a given moment
what is literature?
 language
lit. foregrounds language: rhyme patterns,
sounds patterns, grammar
 ideology
lit. follows conventions or resists interpretation
 secrets
lit. is self-reflexive / intertextual / mysterious
On literature
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In reading, one should notice and fondle details.
There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of
generalization when it comes after the sunny
trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If
one begins with a readymade generalization, one
begins at the wrong end and travels away from the
book before one has started to understand it.
Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the
author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary,
with the preconceived notion that it is a
denunciation of the bourgeoisie. We should
always remember that the work of art is invariably
the creation of a new world, so that the first thing
we should do is to study that new world as closely
as possible, approaching it as something brand
new, having no obvious connection with the
worlds we already know. When this new world has
been closely studied, then and only then let us
examine its links with other worlds, other branches
of knowledge.
 Good Readers and Good Writers
Vladimir Nabokov
(1899-1977)
initiators of structuralism
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1960 
Ferdinand de Saussure
Roland Barthes
Claude Levi-Strauss
Michel Foucault
Louis Althusser
Jacques Lacan
Algirdas Greimas
claims
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all documents can be studied as texts –
history, sociology can be analyzed in the
same way as literature
all culture can be studied as text
belief systems, religions can be studied
textually
position and concerns
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insistence on method
insistence on scientific rigor
beyond humanism and phenomenology
language is a self-authenticating system
language is a system of differences
ALL TEXTS CAN BE STUDIED AS
LANGUAGE SYSTEMS
focus (Barthes)
 signs
convey meaning
relate to the people who use them
are constructed
 that which the signs refer to
codes and organization of signs
communication
 (the users of the signs)
Levi Strauss - culture
 To be in a culture means to be in
preexisting but constantly changing signsystems
 Being in a culture means being able to
know how to read a text
background
 linguistic – Saussure
 anthropological – Levi-Strauss
 literary – Russian Formalism (Vladimir
Propp)
Ferdinand de Saussure
(1857-1913)
 Language consists of:
‘langue’ (an abstract underlying system of
rules conventions which pre-exits actual
speech)
‘parole’ (language ‘in use’)
 Original conception: symbol = thing
 Saussure’s conception: symbol ≠ thing
 “the linguistic sign unites not a name and a
thing, but a concept and a sound image”
Saussure’s sign system
signifier (signifiant)
 sign =
signified (signifié)
signified
signifier
signs are arbitrary
 “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.”
 “Language is a system of signs which are
arbitrary and differential.”
key concepts
 system
 sign
arbitrary
differential
the signifier exists in TIME
language operates in linear fashion
what creates difference is VALUE
paradigmatic/syntagmatic
relations
 Paradigm: a sign that forms a member of
the same category  patterns, motifs
 Syntagm: a relationship of choice 
selection and combination
 Metaphor: un unfamiliar concept is
expressed through a familiar concept
 Metonymy: the invocation of an object
using an associative idea
language is:
 arbitrary:
ex: mouse/house
 relational:
I trap the mouse
I move the mouse
 constitutive
I leave in September
Claude Levi Strauss
 extended Saussure’s theory of language as a
structural system to cover all cultural processes
(kinship system, myths, legends, dressing,
cooking etc) to an extended sign definition
 studied ‘primitive’ cultures and found underlying
structures for human practices  myth
 cultural patterns were studied like language
 patterns reflect structures of the human mind
 the most basic structure: binary oppositions
Vladimir Propp
 found an underlying system and 31
‘functions’ (events or actions) in Russian
folktales (Morphology of the Russian folk
tale, 1928)
There is a ‘grammar’ of the folktale
A. J. Greimas
 A. J. Greimas (Semantique Structurale, 1966)
reduced Propp’s list and made his own model of
actants
All narratives follow a ‘narrative grammar’
theory
 All ‘texts’ (mythical narratives, literary texts, advertisements, fashion
etc) are signifying structures that work according to an underlying
system
 The underlying system is synchronic not diachronic
 The text does not have any truth-value – it is not a ‘reflection’ of
reality but a construct that works according to conventions and
codes
 The death of the author: the author is not an ‘origin’ because he is
himself the product of the working of the linguistic system
 The reader is central, but not as a feeling conscious individual – he
reads according to conventions, codes, expectation
THE TEXT IS:
A LANGUAGE SYSTEM,
A STRUCTURE,
A DIFFERENCE
initiators of poststructuralism
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1966 
Jacques Derrida
Roland Barthes
J. Hillis Miller
Geoffrey Hartman
Paul de Man
Harold Bloom
what is ‘post’ about
poststructuralism?
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the fuller working out of structuralism
reaction to structuralism
position and concerns
 lost belief in the scientific pretensions of
structuralism
 a move from Saussure’s langue to
discourse
 lost belief in the belief of a metalanguage
 claim: there is no final truth and no
objective knowledge
 focus on the decentering of the subject
kinds of poststructuralist
theories
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psychoanalytic theories
deconstruction
new historicism and cultural materialism
postcolonial and Diaspora criticism
cyber theory
deconstruction
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)
 French philosopher
 “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse
of the Human Sciences” (Johns Hopkins
University, 1966)
 The Structuralist Controversy (1972)
questioning of “the structurality of structure”
theory
 western philosophy must be ‘deconstructed’ because it is
‘logocentric’, that is, based on a theory of ‘presence’
which represses absence and difference
 there is an ontological center and everything can be explained in
terms of it
 it is a self-present word constituted not by difference but by
presence (consciousness, subjectivity, God, reason)
 Saussure: signifiers and signifieds are defined in terms
of what they are not, that is, in terms of difference. There
are binary oppositions
 Derrida: in each binary opposition one element is
privileged and one is suppressed
 differance
The subject is not
an autonomous entity
CONTEXT
TEXT
READER
AUTHOR
CODE
theory
 Deconstructing the hierarchy
Note the hierarchy in the binary oppositions
Overturn it by allowing the suppressed or
marginalized term to subvert the privileged or
dominant term
Resist the assertion of a new hierarchy by
displacing the second term from a position of
superiority
theory
 deconstruction gives up any search for
origin(s)/ground(s)
any structure/system/text is unfounded
it has no ultimate reason
 “… deconstruction is, above all perhaps, a
questioning of the ‘is’, a concern with what remains
to be thought, with what cannot be thought within
the present.” (Nicholas Royle, 2000)
 “Instead of a simple ‘either/or’ structure,
deconstruction attempts to elaborate a discourse
that says neither ‘either/or’, nor ‘both/and’ nor even
‘neither/nor’, while at the same time not totally
abandoning these logics either. The very word
deconstruction is meant to undermine the either/or
logic of opposition ‘construction/destruction’”
(Barbara Johnson, 1987)
focus 1
Deconstructive reading:
 focuses on the displaced, in the
background or marginalized aspects of the
text
 focuses on the moment when the text
transgresses the laws it appears to have
set up for itself
 understands the text to be heterogeneous
and ‘self-deconstructive’
focus 2
 “As a critique of a certain Western conception of the nature of
signification, deconstruction focuses on the functioning of claimmaking and claim-subverting structures within texts.”
 “A deconstructive reading is an attempt to show how the
conspicuously foregrounded statements in a text are systematically
related to discordant signifying elements that the text has thrown
into its shadows or margins, an attempt to recover what is lost and
to analyze what happens when a text is read solely in function of
intentionality, meaningfulness, and representativity.”
 “Deconstruction thus confers a new kind of readability on those
elements in a text that readers have been trained to disregard,
overcome, explain away, or edit out – contradictions, obscurities,
ambiguities, incoherences, discontinuities, ellipses, interruptions,
repetitions, and plays of the signifier.”
 “In this sense it involves a reversal of values, a revaluation of the
signifying function of everything that, in a signified-based theory of
meaning, would constitute ’noise’.” (Barbara Johnson, 1987)
focus 3
 Deconstructive reading is not interpretation
 “There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of
structure, of sign, of play.”
 “The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a
truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of
the sign, and which lives the necessity of
interpretation as an exile.”
 “The other, which is no longer turned toward the
origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and
humanism, the name of man being the name of that
being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or
of ontotheology – in other words, throughout the
entire history – has dreamed of full presence, the
reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play.”
(Derrida, 1966)
focus 4
 Deconstructive reading displaces the hierarchical
relationship between literature and criticism
 ”Literature as well as criticism – the difference
between them being delusive – is condemned (or
privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and,
consequently, the most unreliable language in terms
of which man names and transforms himself” (Paul de
Man, 1979)
 ”All that ’philosophy’ as a name for a sector of culture
means is ’talk about Plato, Augustine, Descartes,
Kant, Hegel, Frege, Russell … and that lot’.
Philosophy is best seen as a kind of writing. It is
delimited, as any literary genre, not by form or matter,
but by tradition – a family romance involving, e.g.,
Father Parmenides, honest Uncle Kant, and bad
brother Derrida.” (Richard Rorty, 1982)
 How to do deconstruction / Derrida on deconstruction
The Purloined letter
in structuralist reading
1.
The queen via P -- letter -- The queen
The Prefect -------- Dupin ------ D_____
2.
the prefect -------- revenge ------- Dupin
the letter ------------ Dupin --------- D____
narrative form:
 status quo  status quo is
threatened  status quo is
restored
function of the characters:
 the good detective must be
rational, and act in the name of
order
 the villain must be punished, or
gain nothing from his acts
 he must participate in the
restoration of the order
binary opposites:
 D____ vs. Dupin vs. (poet vs.
better poet; disorder vs. order)
 the queen vs the king (weakness
vs. power)
 the queen vs D____ (helplessness
vs. cunning)
 the queen vs Dupin (passive vs.
active)
structuralist reading
Consolidates a traditional frame
 re-establishment of power relations
 assertion of the culprit as independent
 implementation of reason to restore the
status quo
 the story institutes and reinforces the
ideological formation of the detective
genre
The Purloined letter
in poststructuralist reading
 paradoxes
 Dupin is in a relationship of dependency to D___
 sites of disturbances
 the criminal’s mind is both rational and poetic displacements
 power is always out of reach
 ‘inspired reasoning’
 reason is constantly inspired or disturbed by ‘other’ reason
(defined as unreason)
 identical identities/doubles
 detective/criminal
 identification of the detective with the criminal
 the ideological conservatism of the detective genre is
undermined by ambiguities
 the story deconstructs itself
The chain of signification: symbolization or mythologizing?
Signifier 1
(letter)
Signified 1
(paper)
Signified 2
(love)
Signified 2.1
love letter =
compromising the woman in
love
Signified 3
(power)
Signified 2.2
love letter = woman weak & vain
Signified 3.1
letter = corruption
Signified 2.3
love letter =
emotion
Signified 3.2
letter = man dangerous and
calculated
Signified 3.3
letter = reason
contrasts
structuralism
 depth:
 the prefect’s search is
described as thorough;
 he searches for a letter that
suggests authority
 in the prefect’s eyes the
letter is hidden
 language and signs are
fixed in or constrained to
conventions
 mathematicians’
language
 unity
poststructuralism:
 surface:
 the letter lies open on the
surface though its
appearance is altered
 in Dupin’s eyes the letter
seems to be hidden, but is
not
 language and signs float
 puns, play on words
and signs: Dupin/du pain
(bread)
 poets’ language
 disunity