felis_ultharus (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
felis_ultharus) wrote2005-09-10 01:29 pm
felis_ultharus) wrote2005-09-10 01:29 pm
Entry tags:
Postmodern ramblings
Readings into nearly-impenetrable-and-always-nonsensical postmodern linguistics continues. Bakhtin seems mildly more sane than most, though Julia Kristeva's re-interpretation of his work is just silly.
In their effort to do away with the possibility of originality in writing -- in their desperation to prove that creativity does not exist, and that writers just repeat one another's words -- these bizarre philosophers have created a paradox they never address: where do new words come from? If all language is just a paraphrase or a quotation of somebody else's works, if nothing is original, then new words should not exist. For every word in existance, there is a first person who used it.
For that matter, how can Kristeva make these arguments about no language being original, while inventing new words herself. And does she have to invent new words for things we already have words for? Isn't her jargon thick enough already?
Saussure seems to claim (at least in this book) that language is transcendent to the point where mere individuals cannot change or alter it, cannot create anything new. Then how does language change over time?
I suspect that most of these people are just failed writers, and 90% of their arguments are just sour grapes. Most critics have serious inferiority complexes when it comes to the writers they write about, and for some that turns into a desire to lash out. It's easiest to kill the author or declare them unoriginal than to admit that one lacks the creative spark oneself.
I'm not quite at the section on Roland Barthes yet, though I've taken a little of his stuff before. He's the one who declared the author dead -- apparently only the book exists, an its readers, and (naturally) its critics. All I'm saying is that if he wants to kill the author, he's in for a fight.
It depresses me that a child of ten could see the stupidity of all these arguments, if a child of ten could penetrate the insane layers of jargon. Perhaps that's the reason for the jargon. Why can't the best minds of English literature figure out what a child of ten could? Or am I answering my own question?
If the emperor had clothes, they've long since been deconstructed. Where are the critics who admit they're no longer there.
And more importantly, why am I in a subject which takes that vibrant heart of society -- the weavings of its words, its stories, its songs -- and sacrifices them on the bloody altar of Logic and Reason?
In their effort to do away with the possibility of originality in writing -- in their desperation to prove that creativity does not exist, and that writers just repeat one another's words -- these bizarre philosophers have created a paradox they never address: where do new words come from? If all language is just a paraphrase or a quotation of somebody else's works, if nothing is original, then new words should not exist. For every word in existance, there is a first person who used it.
For that matter, how can Kristeva make these arguments about no language being original, while inventing new words herself. And does she have to invent new words for things we already have words for? Isn't her jargon thick enough already?
Saussure seems to claim (at least in this book) that language is transcendent to the point where mere individuals cannot change or alter it, cannot create anything new. Then how does language change over time?
I suspect that most of these people are just failed writers, and 90% of their arguments are just sour grapes. Most critics have serious inferiority complexes when it comes to the writers they write about, and for some that turns into a desire to lash out. It's easiest to kill the author or declare them unoriginal than to admit that one lacks the creative spark oneself.
I'm not quite at the section on Roland Barthes yet, though I've taken a little of his stuff before. He's the one who declared the author dead -- apparently only the book exists, an its readers, and (naturally) its critics. All I'm saying is that if he wants to kill the author, he's in for a fight.
It depresses me that a child of ten could see the stupidity of all these arguments, if a child of ten could penetrate the insane layers of jargon. Perhaps that's the reason for the jargon. Why can't the best minds of English literature figure out what a child of ten could? Or am I answering my own question?
If the emperor had clothes, they've long since been deconstructed. Where are the critics who admit they're no longer there.
And more importantly, why am I in a subject which takes that vibrant heart of society -- the weavings of its words, its stories, its songs -- and sacrifices them on the bloody altar of Logic and Reason?