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Discourse

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Discourse

Other senses

• Hume: Discourse on Natural Religion

• story/discourse (histoire/discours, fabula/sjuzet)

• ‘discourse’ in linguistics

Michel Foucault (1926-84)

The Archeology of Knowledge;

The Order of Things;

The History of Sexuality

Discipline and Punish

The Birth of the Clinic

Madness and Civilisation

• statement – utterance (enunciation)

• “A statement is always an event that neither the language (langue) nor the meaning can quite exhaust.”

Truth, power, knowledge

• truth: not adequation, correspondence, but a discursive effect

• power: capillary;

• knowledge

- not just repressive/prohibitive but productive;

- subjection

knowledge: effect of power

• Discourse: “a regulated practice that accounts for a number of statements”

Constituting objects of knowledge

• ʻHow is it that a particular object of knowledge appears?’

• Discourse: “practices which systematically form the objects of which they speak”

Discursive objects

• mental illness

• sexuality

• madness

• the East

Edward Said: Orientalism

• Discourse: texts, images, narratives, practices, technologies, institutions

• Scholarly books, travelogues, painting, fiction, legislation, tourist guidebooks, photography, films

• Delimitation of the field

Gerome

Turkish

Bath

Henry Siddons Mowbray: The Harem

Maurice

Vidal

Portman:

„Burko”

Literature as discourse

• circulation (commentary, academic discipline)

• the book and the oeuvre

• the author function

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)

• Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics

• The Dialogic Imagination

• Rabelais and His World

• Speech Genres

slovo (‘word’)

• Sy’s word(s),

• sy’s speech,

• a mode of speech,

• a genre

• Dialogicity

• „the word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it; the word is shaped in dialogic interaction with an alien word that is already in the object”

• Vocativus

Heteroglossia (raznorecie)

• Centripetal and centrifugal pulls in lang.• „Every word gives off the scent of a

profession, a genre, a current, a party, a particular work, a particular man, a generation, an era, a day, and an hour. Every word smells of the contexts in which it has lived its intense social life; all worda and all forms are inhabited by intentions” (intertextuality)

Poliphonic novel• The novel thrives on heteroglossia and

dialogicity (poetry: monological)

• The word represents and is the object of representation

• ”

Three kinds of ‘slovo’

Voices of characters,

non-literary discourses,

Literary discourses

• “Indeed I have little doubt,” said Flora, running on with astonishing speed, and pointing her conversation with nothing but commas, and very few of them, “that you are married to some Chinese lady, being in China so long and being in business and naturally desirous to settle and extend your connexion nothing was more likely than that you should propose to a Chinese lady and nothing was more natural I am sure than that the Chinese lady should accept you and think herself very well off too, I only hope she is not a Pagodian dissenter.” (Little Dorrit, Book I, Ch. 13)

• “The major characteristics discoverable by the stranger in Mr. F’s Aunt, were extreme severity and grim taciturnity; sometimes interrupted by a propensity to offer remarks, in a deep warning voice, which, being totally uncalled for by anything said by anybody, and traceable to no association of ideas, confounded and terrified the mind. Mr. F’s Aunt may have thrown in these observations on some system of her own, and it may have been ingenious, or even subtle; but the key to it was wanted.” (Little Dorrit)

Poliphonic novel

• (2) non-literary genres: diary, newspaper „it seems as if the novel is denied any primary means for verbally appropriating reality, that it has no approach of its own, and therefore requires the help of other genres to re-process reality; the novel has the appearance of being merely a secondary syncretic unification of other seemingly primary verbal genres

Poliphonic novel

• „a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices”

Poliphonic novel

(3) Literary discourses

parody, pastiche, stylisation etc.

„Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel” (Shklovsky)

• Representations of the other’s voice:

• stylisation,

• skaz,

• parody;

• hybridisation

• „The conference was held at four or five o’clock in the afternoon, when all the region of Harley Street, Cavendish Square, was resonant of carriege-wheels and double-knocks. It had reached this point when Mr. Merdle came home, from his daily occupation of causing the British name to be more and more respected in all parts of the civilised globe, capable of the appreciation of world-wide commercial enterprise and gigantic combinations of skill and capital. For though nobody knew with the least precision what Mr. Merdle’s business was, except that it was to coin money, these were the terms in which it was the last new polite reading of the parable of the camel and the needle’s eye to accept without enquiry.” (Little Dorrit, Book I, Ch. 33)

• “As a vast fire will fill the air to a great distance with its roar, so the sacred flame which the mighty Barnacles had fanned caused the air to resound more and more, with the name of Merdle. It was deposited on every lip, and carried into every ear. There never was, there never had been, there never again should be, such a man as Mr. Merdle. Nobody, as aforesaid, knew what he had done; but everybody knew him to be the greatest that had appeared.”

• “Physician had engaged to break the intelligence in Harley Street. Bar could not at once return to his inveiglements of the most enlightened and remarkable jury he had ever seen in that box, with whom, he could tell his learned friend, no shallow sophistry would go down, and no unhappily abused professional tact and skill prevail (this was the way he meant to begin with them); so he said he would go too, and would loiter to and fro near the house while his friend was inside.”