LINGUISTIC METAPHOR AND THE LANGUAGE OF CRITICISM.

摘要

Despite the volume of recent literature on the topic, many questions yet remain about the relation of linguistics (and ordinary language philosophy) to literary criticism. Of particular interest are two related matters: How does the outline of a language theory change as it becomes a metaphor for criticism? And, conversely, what unresolved problems attaching to linguistic models in the original discipline affect the outcome of the critical theory that imports it? The literary programs of Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukarovsky (Prague School structuralists), are, for example, plagued by problems deriving from procedural ambiguity in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, from whom they adopt the notions "system," "langue" (versus "parole"), and "law"; the result is, first, uncertainty as to whether explanatory laws are generalizations of data or interpretive norms, and, second, an unexamined reliance on a general conformity of aesthetic experience. Similarly, John R. Searle's discussion of "constitutive rules" for speech acts often fails to distinguish institutions like "promising" from individual speech acts (single promises), thereby producing in the borrowing literary reading theories additional confusion as to what such rules describe--possible critical readings, reading strategies, heuristic devices, or generic conventions. This problem (in addition to some metaphorical misapplications of the attendant notions "felicity" and "grammaticality") is further complicated by the influence on such critics (the earlier work of Jonathan Culler and Stanley Fish) of Noam Chomsky, whose mentalistic language model is improperly interpreted as a theory of textual processing. Finally, Jacques Derrida suggestively reworks and reinterprets the Saussurean "system," "sign," and "phoneme," but in order to announce his new project imputes to Saussure a kind of psychologism he is not demonstrated to possess. Thus this suggests that other theories and theorists--as well as linguistic concepts--ultimately assume metaphorical status in the works that cite them.