Frank Collins

Meaning and textuality

Historically there has been a wide gulf between European and Anglo/American thought on the philosophy of language, in part because it is often difficult to find important European works in English translation. Meaning and Textuality represents key elements of the ground-breaking new theory on signs and discourse that has come out of Europe in the last few decades. Meaning and Textuality is an investigation into methods useful to the analysis of language and literature. Rastier seeks ways to better understand signs, with emphasis on their relation to action and culture. He proposes a theoretical framework for the semantic description and typology of texts. Towards this end he establishes a critical debate among various streams of research before arriving at a synthesis of literary semiotics, thematics, and linguistic semantics. The author sees this synthesis as a means by which to reconcile the rigour of linguistic analysis with the complexity of literary interpretation. In the later portion of the book he tests his propositions in a series of detailed investigations of French literary texts by Zola, Maupassant, Mallarme, Apollinaire, and Jodelle. Each study examines a new problem such as narrative ambiguity or referential impression.This book will be welcomed by scholars in any discipline concerned with discourse analysis and the close reading of texts.

Greimas's Narrative Grammar

WHAT IS INTERESTING about Greimass narrative grammar is the way it constructs, degree by degree, the necessary conditions for narrativity, starting from a logical model which is the least complex possible and which, initially, includes no chronological import at all. The question is whether, in the attempt to arrive at the structure of those stories which are in fact produced by oral and written traditions, the author, in the successive additions with which he enriches his initial model, does indeed build upon the specifically narrative characteristics of the initial model or whether his development includes extrinsic presuppositions. Greimas believes that despite these additions to the initial model, an equivalence is maintained, from beginning to end, between that initial model and the final matrix. The validity of this belief must be tested theoretically and practically. Here this will be done at the theoretical level, that is, by following the author step by step as he constructs his final model, without including examples which might verify a posteriori the fruitfulness of the method.

The Veridiction Contract

Traduction de « Le contrat de veridiction » paru dans « Man and World », 1980, 13, pp. 345-355. 1. Plausibilite et veracite. 2. Le contrat social. 3. La verification et sa crise. 4. La manipulation discursive. 5. Verite et certitude. PP. 661-677, D. MADDOX : « Veridiction, Verification, Verifactions : Reflections on Methodology »

The Piece of String

T WAS MARKET DAY, and on all the country roads around Goderville the peasants and their wives were making their way toward the town. The men walked slowly, throwing their whole bodies forward at every step of their long crooked legs. They were deformed from pushing the plow, which makes their left shoulders higher and bends their figures sideways; from reaping the grain, when they have to spread their legs so as to keep on their feet; from all the slow and painful work of country living. Their starched blue smocks, glossy as though varnished, ornamented at collar and cuffs with a little embroidered design and blown out around their bony bodies, looked very much like balloons about to soar, from which protruded a head, two arms, and two feet. Some of these fellows dragged along a cow or a calf at the end of a rope. And just behind the animal followed their wives, beating it over the back with a leaf-covered branch to hasten its pace, and carrying large baskets out of which protruded the heads of chickens or ducks. These women walked more quickly and energetically than the men, with their erect, dried-up figures, adorned with scanty little shawls pinned over their flat bosoms, and their heads wrapped round with a white cloth, enclosing the hair and topped by a bonnet. Now a char a banc passed by, pulled along by ajerky gaited nag and shaking up strangely the two men on the seat, and the woman at the bottom of the cart who held fast to its sides to lessen the hard jolting. On the square of Goderville was a great crowd, a swarm of men and beasts mingled. The horns of cattle, the high, long-napped hats of wealthy peasants, and the headdresses of the women came to the surface of the assembly. And the sharp, shrill, barking voices made a continuous, wild din, while above it occasionally rose a huge burst of laughter from the sturdy lungs of a merry peasant or a prolonged bellow from a cow tied fast to the wall of a house.