Posts tagged Semiotics
The Acacian
Art Is The View From Somewhere Else, Nothing More, Nothing Less
10/21/2011: Theory: I Was an Under-Age Semiotician - NYTimes
Embracing semiotics came with certain costs. In my own case, I spent most of my mid-20s detangling my prose style. (It got younger as I got older.) I now spend more time learning from the insights of science than deconstructing its truth claims. I slowly killed off the desire to impress with willful obscurity. During my grad school years, I took a seminar on Derrida to which Derrida himself paid a surprise visit, modestly answering our questions with none of the drama I had imagined reading his written words on the page. He seemed, amazingly, to be saying something, rather than just saying something about the impossibility of saying anything. In one cringe-inducing moment, a peer of mine asked a rambling, self-referential question that began by putting “under erasure” the very nature of an answer. I remember breaking into a broad smile when Derrida responded, after a long pause, “I am sorry, but I do not understand the question.” It seemed like the end of an era: Derrida himself was asking for more clarity. - Steven Johnson
10/13/2011: Books: Interview: Jeffrey Eugenides - Slate
Slate: The novel seems to gently mock the study of semiotics, but at the same time it has a sense of reverence for it. What was your take on it at the time? Eugenides: I’m ambivalent. My intention wasn’t just to mock it because I found a lot of value in many of the theorists that I read, and I continue to wrestle with and against their pronouncements. It still has a meaning for me. On the other hand I do remember the way people took to theory as if it were some kind of creed. Almost took it up as a religion. That seemed comic to me and excessive even at the time. It seems more comic to me now that the grip of French theory seems to have loosened.
(Read the rest of the interview HERE)
I know this is kind of a lot of Eugenides posts but whatever. He says interesting shit.
10/12/2011: Jeffrey Eugenides & Adam Thirlwell: A Conversation - The Guardian
JE: ”I sometimes tell my students that, when you write, you should pretend that you’re writing the best letter you’ve ever written to the smartest person you know. That way, you won’t pander at all. You won’t put on a false face because your smart friend would spot that in a minute. Also, with this method, you naturally gain an intimacy, even a shorthand with which to communicate. The voice for The Marriage Plot, though less acrobatic, allowed me to get out of the way a bit more, to concentrate on the person whose problems and desires I was attempting to describe. You may be right that it’s not “traditional”, or that the term “traditional” belies the complexity of standard novelistic technique. But it’s certainly less self-referential and I felt, in writing it, a gain of honesty and a deepening – for me, at least – in psychological description.” AT: ”I’m still not sure you’ve answered my question. Maybe I can be you – and put it like this. By using this marriage plot – this triangle between Mitchell, Madeleine and Leonard – you end up exploring the whole wildness of psychology: not just everyday consciousness but desire, in Madeleine, manic depression, in Leonard, and mystical experience, in Mitchell (and Leonard, in a way, too). But you also encompass the methods people have come up with to describe these various interior states: the chemical language of psychiatry, the coded language of literary theory, the mystical language of religious tracts. Yet all of them are bathed in your own medium: novelistic consciousness. And so the important word of yours is “honesty”. It reminds me of a fleeting central moment in your novel – when Mitchell reads a text by St Teresa, and thinks about descriptions of mystical visions: “You could tell the difference between someone making things up and someone using metaphorical language to describe an ineffable, but real, experience.” When I read that, I felt like this was a smuggled bit of Eugenides, a secret sentence. So – I’m trying to answer my own question here: in going back to the traditional methods of tracking characters’ consciousnesses, you’re trying to talk honestly about all interior conditions: not just thought processes, but desire, and madness, and mystical visions. In other words, the old Henry James problem of point of view suddenly gets aligned with the even older problem of mystical visions. Am I making sense?” JE: ”Mystical visions are, by their very nature, indescribable. That doesn’t keep people from trying to describe them, however. St Teresa found a fictional idea that allowed her to express something inexpressible. Which is what you have to do to write a novel, especially one about desire and madness.” AT: “But do you ever worry that words can’t be mapped on to the interior? Or even: that this talk of interiors, this language of depth, doesn’t work? There’s something Nabokov says somewhere about Joyce: that Ulyssesis a new world invented by Joyce where people think by means of words. Whereas, says Nabokov, in fact people also think in terms of pictures …” JE: ”I’m one of those terrible literary people who doesn’t feel as if I have a thought if it’s not formed in words. So I guess I’m not sure that Nabokov is right there. Or at least I don’t share his sense that people think in pictures.” (Read the rest of the conversation HERE) That’s some heavy shit. But good shit.
