E33D WEEK 7 SEMINAR QUESTIONS

  1. On what grounds does Barthes proclaim the ‘death of the Author’?  What concept does he substitute in its place?
  2. Discuss the process of intertextuality by which texts signify, according to Barthes.  (Your answer should include a discussion of the various ‘codes’ to which Barthes alludes in "Textual Analysis of M. Valdemar.")
  3. "Rhetoric radically suspends the logic of grammar and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration."  In the light of this quotation, explain De Man’s claim that no matter what a speaker / writer may have intended, the différance intrinsic to langue results in a potential excess or surplus of signification and thus in the indeterminacy of the parole in question.
  4. "Interpretation is a necessarily Procrustean act that involves forcibly arresting the play of difference between signs."  Discuss Fish’s views, given the inevitability of a surplus of meaning, on the role of the listener / reader and the importance of contextualisation in the production of a single meaning.
  5. Discuss the factors which, according to Fish, make an interpretation acceptable.

  6. "Rhetorically the new [critical] position announces itself as a break from the old, but in fact it is radically dependent on the old, because it is only in the context of some differential relationship that it can be perceived as new or, for that matter, perceived at all."  In the light of this quotation, discuss Fish's view that the relationship between successive critical approaches is best conceptualised in terms of 'displacement' and 'deferral,' rather than distinction.

  7. How does Bloom here rethink his earlier largely Freudian views on ‘literary history’ (e.g. in his "The Dialectics of Poetic Tradition" or in The Anxiety of Influence) in the light of both Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Derrida’s notion of différance?
  8. Deconstruction, perhaps because of its focus on the text itself, has frequently been accused of ‘ahistoricism’ and of thus being ‘apolitical.’  What do you understand by this charge?  Is it fair?