Riffaterra Cognita
A Late Contribution to the Formalism Debate
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4387000 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Anne Freadman (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1984 |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 31 |
| Publication date | 1984-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | SubStance (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0049-2426 • E-ISSN: 1527-2095 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3684103 |
| OpenAlex | W2323716556 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 3 |
Formalism are at loggerheads, it seems. We can no longer subscribe to an inductive empiricism which claims to find meaning hidden in the structures of a text, waiting to be revealed by the correct analytical procedures, for these structures these meanings are the product of our interpreting strategies. The dichotomy of description/interpretation, which derives from the discovery that formalism cannot automatically account for the interpretation of a text, has, in its turn, given rise to the notion of undecidability: the text exceeds, signs exceed, plurality is of the essence, indefinitely determined is indeterminate,' . . . and so, as a result, we either do deconstructii, that formalism of the signifier that takes as its object not the containment--the content-of language, but its excess; or we become anxious insecure as practitioners of literary criticism, interpreting texts at our peril speaking, with more or less elegance wit, our defenses against self-slaughter. Semiotics is neither a word nor a project that can of itself resolve this debate, since the Peirce/Saussure encounter has much the same delineations: structuralist semiotics is formalist in its orientation, whereas Peircian semiotics is interpretive .2 Professor Riffaterre's project of a semiotics of poetry is avowedly Peircian in its strategic use of Peircian texts to provide its theoretical rationale, yet it also argues strongly in favor of submission to the authority of the text as the royal road to decidability.3 I can only applaud the fact that the question of the readability of Rimbaud has been raised in a journal with as wide a readership as New Literary History,4 that this question has been considered on the basis of the general premises of semiotics, defined as the claim that there can be no meaning save in the relationship between a sign a complex of other signs, or in the integration of a sign system into another sign system.s But notwithstanding my sympathy with Professor Riffaterre's intentions and, indeed, my conviction that his construals of features of two notoriously hermetic texts of Rimbaud are undoubtedly correct,6 I am com
Art · Epistemology · Formalism (music) · Literature · Physics · Theoretical physics · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy
| Citations per year | 0.05 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1988 - 1989 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |