GLOSSARY

Allegory: A narrative or series of images which stands in a relation of symbolising resemblance, but also difference, from an original referent. A classic example would be George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), a barnyard tale where events and characters stand in a one-to-one relation to the Russian revolution. Paul de Man used the term allegory more broadly to signal any use of literary or poetic language that presented itself as standing in for some outside world.

Aphorisms: Witty phrases or observations that are self-sufficient or freestanding rather than being part of an argument or connected series of propositions.

Aporia: A gap or point of indeterminacy in a text.

Bildung: The modern German word for formation, which also refers to individual formation or education but which also has artistic resonance, deriving from the word Bild for picture.

Constative: A speech-act that, unlike the performative, does not produce or create a relation but names or designates something already existing.

Context: One way of determining the meaning of a text, phrase or sentence is by appeal to context, or the particular situation, conventions and expectations that surround language. Philosophers in the twentieth century, particularly those who followed the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, argued that there were no such things as meanings or mental entities that lie behind words. Rather, meaning is just how a word works or is exchanged in a context. Philosophers who stressed the importance of context were associated with ‘ordinary language philosophy’, which examined the uses of words, rather than supposedly eternal meanings.

Cosmic or tragic irony: Where the expectations of a character or community are thwarted by life’s events, events which often seem to pass judgement on life or that seem to be the outcome of fate.

Death of the Subject: A movement in twentieth century French thought, usually associated with Roland Barthes (1915–8 0) and Michel Foucault (1926–8 4), which argues that language, texts and knowledge ought to be analysed without the assumption of a grounding author, intention or individual subject.

Deconstruction: The philosophy of Jacques Derrida (1930–) and his followers, including the twentieth-century literary critics of the Yale school. Deconstruction focuses on an opposition, such as the opposition between speech and writing, where one term (speech) is usually taken to be the origin of the other. Deconstruction then demonstrates that the accidental or supposedly secondary term is necessary for the first. One could not speak if there were not already an organised, repeatable and general system of marks that went beyond any individual speaker.

Dialectic/dialectical: A method that achieves truth by presenting the conflicts and contradictions of various positions and voices and then produces the true and reasoned position as the resulting resolution of such differences.

Différance: If a language or system is a set of differences then this is only because there is a process of différance. For Jacques Derrida, any term in a system has to be marked out from other terms and identified and repeated through time; we have to anticipate future uses of a term as the same. The differences of a system are therefore never fully present but always deferred through time, and marked by spatial traces.

Discourse: When one speaks one does not just use a system of signs or language, one also relies on discourse, which includes all the specific conventions, conditions, oppositions and relations of a particular political and historical moment. One can speak about a self in the discourse of literary criticism, or the discourse of biography, or the discourse of personal evaluation. Discourses have varying conditions and locales. It was once legitimate to use biography and personal response in literary criticism, and the discourse of literary criticism was also once, in the eighteenth century, located in popular magazines rather than universities. One could also argue that there was no discourse of literary criticism before the eighteenth century, and so discourse creates the objects and knowledges of which it speaks.

Dramatic irony: If the audience sees or knows more than a character, or if a character’s speech is undermined by subsequent action, then we can say that there is a dramatic irony, an irony that plays on a disjunction between character and audience point of view.

Immanence: The opposite of transcendence, where transcendence refers to some point outside or above experience, such as God, truth, or being, that could provide an ultimate referent point for experience. Philosophies of immanence refuse to posit a position, value or ultimate voice outside life and experience.

Linguisticism: Usually used as a pejorative, linguisticism refers to positions that overplay the power of language or that fail to recognise a real world or truth outside language.

Logocentrism: Western thought has been defined as logocentric because it assumes some ultimate point of truth or presence, a founding word or logos, from which various positions and voices might be judged.

Meta-narrative/meta-position: According to the French theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard, postmodernity displays an incredulity towards meta-narrative. Any story, such as Marxism, humanism or theories of scientific progress, that provides an account and explanation for other stories and cultures is a meta-narrative. By setting themselves in a position above and before other stories, meta-narratives disavow their status as narratives.

Metaphysics: The tradition of Western philosophy that considers those truths, such as the truths of logic, meaning or reason, which cannot be explained physically or in terms of natural objects.

Mimesis/mimetic: Any sign, image or text which copies or reproduces its object. Associated with realism.

Parody: The use of a particular voice or style in order to display its peculiarities and blindness. Parody therefore tends to suggest a proper or rational way of speaking against which the parodied voice is set. The contemporary American Marxist Fredric Jameson argued that parody was opposed to pastiche, which was strictly postmodern.

Pastiche: A collection, series or juxtaposition of style and voices with no sense of an underlying normality from which they depart.

Phallogocentrism: If logocentrism is the commitment to some ultimate point of truth and presence, phallogocentrism is the sexual imaginary through which this logic is effected. One imagines some ultimate inchoate and undifferentiated origin, which requires the active, forming and inseminating power of reason to bring it to life and self-presence. The silent origin is imagined as a feminised body that requires the universal voice of man, who is man only through the phallus or the body part that is other than the lack of the origin.

Poiesis: The ancient Greek term from which the modern concept of poetry is derived. Poeisis referred to a form of creation that produced an external or detachable object.

Polis: The ancient Greek word from which the modern concept of the political is derived. The polis originally referred to a community of individuals that was larger than easily managed tribal collectives, but smaller than imperial states. The polis is often contrasted with modern society precisely because the polis includes the moral and philosophical reflection that is now considered to be apolitical.

Postmodern: A notoriously difficult and contested term that, for its opponents, signals the twentieth century’s abandonment of truth and reason in favour of a world that is known only through images, signs or copies. For its defenders the postmodern is a liberating attitude that remains suspicious of any single foundation or ultimate position of truth.

Post-structuralism: Whereas structuralism argues that in order to understand any sign or event one needs to consider the system of terms or differences within which it is located, post-structuralists question how structures emerge (their genesis), and how the study of structures must always rely on one term (such as the terms structure, language or culture) which cannot be explained from within the structure itself.

Pragmatism: A tradition originating with the American philosophers William James and Charles Sanders Peirce who argued that the only criteria we have for judging a particular position or belief is whether it improves or enables life. Truth is defined as what produces success or agreement.

Praxis: Action or activity that is not necessarily subjected to a systematic set of rules (Techne); nor does praxis have to have a separate and detachable produced object (Poiesis) or criterion.

Rhetoric: The art of using speech or writing to persuade or influence.

Romantic irony: Usually associated with German Romanticism of the early nineteenth century, Romantic irony argues that life is a process of creation, flux and becoming and that any perception or representation we have of life must be partial and at odds with the absolutely fluid nature of life. Language is therefore at odds with or in conflict with life, and so one can only write with a sense of the inevitable disjunction between the word and the world.

Satire: According to Elliot (1960), satires have their origin in ancient fertility rituals and sacrifice, where those who were ungenerous become the object of invective. Satire can therefore be traced back to an attack upon those who are life denying or anti-social. In Roman times, and with the figures of Horace and Juvenal, satire takes on certain formal qualities. In general satire takes the form of an attack by way of ridicule, irony or parody.

Signifier/signification: A signifier has meaning only through its position in a lawful and arbitrary system of exchange. The signifiers ‘blue’ and ‘grey’ organise the colour spectrum; the signifiers ‘empathy’ and ‘sympathy’ structure the way we think about the emotions; the signifiers ‘man’ and ‘woman’ organise human bodies. On the model of signification, these words only have sense within some lawful system of divisions; they do not have a direct representational relation to things themselves.

Sophistry: The sophists were originally those who in Ancient Greece sold their skills and services as effective speakers. In general, sophistry is a belief that the most forceful or artfully presented argument is the superior argument, rather than an argument that is true.

Speech-act: The twentieth century philosopher J.L.Austin (1911–6 0) formulated speech-act theory in his landmark book, How to do Things with Words (1962). Here, language was considered not so much as a vehicle for information as an action. Promises, for example, create relations of obligation; naming ceremonies produce identities; and marriages use the words ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’ to create a marriage. For speech-act theorists, including J.L.Austin’s principle philosophical heir, John Searle, if we want to understand language we should look at how it works in a context, and not try to find timeless conceptual meanings. In this sense, language is performative: it produces and acts, rather than represents.

Strategic essentialism: One adopts a voice as representative of one’s essence or identity, such as the voice of woman, but does so only to work against or transform the logic that produces persons as essentially determined. The term is usually associated with the contemporary post-colonial feminist critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Subject/subjectivity: Whereas individuals or humans are selves with a specific identity and are perceivable as part of the world, the subject is the condition or process of consciousness from which the world or self is constituted. Subjectivity is therefore different from the social, embodied and specific individual; the subject is the point from which society and self is viewed and effected, but not itself an effect.

Techne: The Ancient Greek word from which the modern concept of technology is derived. Techne referred to any skill or practice, such as medicine or musicianship, which had a regular and repeatable set of procedures.

Textuality: Textuality should not be confused with texts, books or the marks of language in a narrow sense. Textuality is the process of positive difference whereby what something is is achieved through a process of differencing and distancing. Textual differences have to repeat and re-mark themselves through time and space. The marks and sounds of a language have their identity only by bearing the possibility to be repeated, but one could see all difference this way. There is no essential human self, only an ongoing repetition and mutation of voices from which we discern ‘the human’.

Transcendent: That which lies outside experience, whether that be some notion of an ultimately real world, or some eternal origin such as God or truth.

Transcendental: A movement in philosophy usually associated with Immanuel Kant who sought to provide ultimate conditions for all possible experience.

Trope: Any figure of speech, any use of language which departs from literal or direct usage to indirect or connotative usage; tropes include metaphors, similes, irony and other instances where a word has an implied other meaning.

Will to power: According to the German philologist Friedrich Nietzsche, we should reverse the standard relation between those in positions of power (masters and slaves) and the forces of power. Instead of arguing that some selves are stronger than others and therefore become masters, Nietzsche argued that life in general was a field of forces or power which then created positions and selves; the master is the effect of active forces, the slave of reactive forces. We need to see language, history and beliefs in terms of forces and powers rather than the individuals or subjects who are produced by power.

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