Development of the Novel in Romantic Age

Topic: Development of the Novel in Romantic Age

Paper Name: The Romantic Age

Paper No: 5

Name: Bhatt Urvi

Roll no: 32

Submitted to: Department of English Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

·       Introduction of the Romantic Age:-

                          The age of Romanticism [1800-1850] was The second Creative Period of English Literature. The first half of the nineteenth century record the triumph democracy in literature and of democracy in government, and the two movements are so closely associated, in so many nations and in so many periods of history that one must wonder if there be not some relation of cause and effect between them. Just as we understand the tremendous energizing influence of Puritanism is the matter of English literary by remembering that the common people had begun to read, and that their book was the Bible, so we may understand this age is popular government by remembering that the chief subject of romantic literature was the essential nobleness of common man and the value of the individual.

                            It great historic movements become intelligible only when we read what was written in this period, for the French Revolution and the American common wealth, as well as the establishment of a true democracy in England by the Reform Bill, were the inevitable result of ideas which literature had spread rapidly through the civilized world.

·       Historical Summary:-

                                 The period we are considering begins in the latter half of the reign of    George III  and ends with the accession of Victoria in 1837. England herself learned the lesson taught her by America, and became the democracy of which her writers had always dreamed.

·       The French Revolution:-

                                  The storm center of the political unrest was the French Revolution, that frightful uprising which proclaimed the natural right of man and the abolition of class distinctions. Patriotic aubs and societies multiplied in England, all asserting the doctrine of revolutions but her own looked with horror on the realm the two nations into war.

·       Economic Conditions:-

                                  While England increased in wealth and spent vast sums to support her army and subsidize her allies in Europe, and while nobles, landowners, manufactures, and merchants lived in increasing luxury, a multitude of skilled laborers were clamoring for work. Fathers sent their wives and little children into the mines and factories were sixteen hours labor would hardly pay for the daily bread and in every large city were riotous mobs made up chiefly of hungry men and women. It was this unbearable economic condition, and not any political theory, as Burke supposed, which occasioned the danger of another English revolution.

·       Reforms:-

                           The destruction of the African slave trade, the mitigation of horribly unjust laws, which include poor debtors and petty criminals in the same class, the prevention of child labor, the freedom of the press, the extension of manhood suffrage, the abolition of restrictions against Catholics in parliament, the establishment of hundred of popular schools, under the leadership of Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancasta - these are but a few of the reforms which mark the progress of civilization in a single half century, When England in 1833, proclaimed the emancipation of all slaves in all her colonies she unconsciously proclaimed her final emancipation from barbarian.

·       Literary Characteristics of the Age:-

Ø  When the terminology was over and England began her mightily work of reform. Literature suddenly developed a new creative spirit, which shows itself to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats and in the prose of Scott, Jane Austen, Lamb- a wonderful group of writers.

Ø  The essence of Romanticism was, it must be remembered that literature must reflects all that is spontaneous and unaffected in nature and in man, and be free to follow its own fancy in own way.

Ø  Coleridge and Wordsworth, best represent the romantic genius of the age in which they lived, though Scott had a greater literary reputation, and Byron and Shelley had larger audience.

Ø  It was during this period that woman assumed, for the first time, an important place in our literature.

Ø  As all strong emotions tend to extremes, the age produced a new type of novel which seems rather hysterical now, but which in its own day delighted multitudes of readers whose nerves were somewhat excited, and who reeled in “bogey” stories of supernatural terror.

·       Prose Writers of the Romantic period:

                              The early nineteenth century is remarkable for the development of a new and valuable type of critical prose writing. If we except the isolated work of the Dryden and of Addison, it is safe to say that literary criticism, in its modern sense, was hardly known in England until about the year 1825. The later element showed itself in a profound human sympathy, the essence of the Romantic Movement and its importance was  summed up by                             

“Not to sympathy is not to understand”

Ø These new critics, with abundant reverence for past masters, could still lay aside the dogmatism and prejudice which marked Johnson and the magazine editors, and read sympathetically the work of a new author, with the sole idea of finding what he had contributed or tried to contribute, to the magnificent total of our literature.

                                       Now let us discuss the major Novelists of the Romanic Age.

v Sir Walter Scott:

·        His life:-

                        Scott was born in Edinburgh, of an ancient stock of Border freebooters. At the age of eighteen month he was crippled for life by a childish ailment, and though he grew up to be a man of great physical robustness he never lost his lameness. As a pleader he had little success, for he was much more interested in the lore and antiquities of the country.

·        His poetry:-

                              Scott’s earliest poetical efforts were translations from the German. As a narrative poet Scott’s reputation has depreciate, though as his lyrical qualities have more recently been acclaimed, Of his narratives it may be said that his faults, like his merits, are all on the surface: he lacks the finer political virtues, such as reflection, melody and delicate sympathy, he is deficient in humor, he records crude physical action simply portrayed.

·        His prose:-

                           In 1814 Scott returned to a fragment of a Jacobite prose romance that he had started and left unfinished in 1805. He left the opening chapters as they stood, and on to them tacked a rapid and brilliant narrative dealing with the forty-five. This made the novel Waverley, which was issued anonymously in 1814. After Waverley Scott went on from strength to strength: Guy Mannering[1815], The Black Dwarf[1816], The Monastery[1820], The Betrothed[1825] and Talisman[1825].

·        Features of his novels:-

A] Rapidity of production, Scott’s great success as a novelist led to some positive evils, the greatest of which was a too great haste in the composition of his stories.      

       B] His contribution to the novel is very great indeed , To the historical novel he brought a knowledge that was not pedantically exact, but manageable, wide, and bountiful.                                                                                                                                     C] His Shakespearian Qualities, Scott has often been called the prose Shakespeare, ans in several respects the comparison is fairy just, He resembles Shakespeare in the free manner in which he ranges high and low, right and left, in his search for material.

v Jane Austen:

·        Her Life:-

                   Jane Austen’s life was unexciting, being little more than a series of Pilgrimages to different places of residence, including the fashionable resort of Bath [1801]. Her first publication works were issued anonymously, and she died in middle age, before her merits had received anything like adequate recognition.

·        Her Novels:-

                      Her first novel was ‘Pride and Prejudice’ [1796-97]. ‘Sense and Sensibility’ [1797-98] was her second novel, and it followed the same general lines as its predecessor. Her other three great novels, ‘Mansfield park’, ‘Emma’ and ‘Persuasion’.

·        Features of the novels:-

A]      Her plots. Her skillfully constructed plots are severely unromantic. Her first work, beginning as a burlesque of the horrible in fiction, finishes by being as an excellent example of her ideal novel. As her art develops, even the slight casualties of common life such an incident, for example, as the elopement that appears in Pride and Prejudice-become rarer, with the result that the later novels, such as Emma, are the pictures of everyday existence.

B]    Her characters are developed with minuteness and accuracy. They are ordinary people, but are convincingly alive. Her characters are not types, but individuals. Her method of portrayal is based upon acute observation and a quiet but incisive irony. Her male characters have a certain softness of threw and temper, but her female characters are almost unexceptionable in perfection of finish.

C ]    Her place. In the history of fiction is remarkable. Her qualities are of a kind that is slow to be recognized, for there is nothing load or garish to catch the casual glance.

v Other Novelists and Their works:-

A] Maria Edgeworth[1767-1849] :

1.    The Parent’s Assistant

2.   Castle Rockrent

3.   Ormond

B] John Galt[1779-1839] :

1.    The Annals of the Parish

2.   The Provost

3.   The Entaili or, the Lairds of Grippy

C] William Harrison Ainsworth [1805-82] :

1.    The Tower of London

2.   The star Chamber

3.   The Constable of the Tower

D] George P.R.James [1801-60] :

           1. A Tale of France

          2. De I’Orme

          3. The Gipsey

E] Charles Lever[1806-72] :

              1. The Knight of Gwynne

             2. The O’Donoghue

             3. The Dodd Family Abroad

F] Frederick Marryat[1792-1848] :

                  1. Jacob Faithful

                  2. Peter Simple

                  3. Search of a Father

G] Michael Scott[1789-1835] :

                     1. Tom Cringle’s Log

                     2. The Cruise of the Midge

                       3. Backsword’s Magazine

H] Thomas Love Peacock[1785-1866] :

                      1. The Genius of the Thames

                      2. Maid Marian

                      3. Nightmare Abbey

I] Washington Irving[1783-1859] :

                        1. History of the New York

                       2. Tales of a Traveler

                       3. The Conquest of Granda

J] James Fennimore Cooper[1789-1851] :

                      1. The Spy

                      2. The Pilot

          3. The Red Rover

v Conclusion:-

                    This period extends from the war with the colonies, following the Declaration of Independence, in 1776, to the accession of Victorian in 1837, both limits being very indefinite, as will be seen by a glance at the Chronology following. The agitation for popular library, which at one time threatened a revolution, went steadily forward till it resulted in the final triumph of democracy in the Reform Bill of 1832. The literature of the age is largely political inform and almost entirely romantic in spirit.

               

An overview of American Multiculturalism in cultural studies

Topic:  An Overview of American Multiculturalism in Cultural studies....

Paper Name: Cultural Studies

Paper no: 8

Name: Bhatt Urvi

Roll no: 32

Submitted to: department of English maharaja krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar university  

·       The Beginning of the word Culture:

       ‘Culture’ comes from ‘cultura’ and ‘colore’. It’s meaning is ‘to cultivate’. By the 19^th century in Europe it’s meaning was different. It meant the habits, customs and tastes of the upper classes.

·       What is culture?

“Culture is the full range of a learned human behavior. Culture includes arts, beliefs, customs, inventions, language, technology and traditions.” 

“The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively is culture.”

“ The quality in a person or society that arises from a concern for what is regarded as excellent in arts, letters, manners, scholarly pursuits etc means Culture.”

                         ‘Culture’ is the mode that generates meanings and  ideas. This ‘mode’ is a negotion over which meanings are valid meanings governed by power relations. Elite culture controls meanings because it control the term of the debate. Nonelite views on life and art are rejected as ‘tasteless’, ‘useless’ or even stupid by the elite. The meaning is that certain components of culture get more visibility and significance.

·       Cultural Studies:

                          Cultural studies designates a cross-disciplinary enterprise for analyzing the conditions that affects the production, reception and cultural significance of all type of institutions, practices, and products, among these, literature is accounted as merely, one of many forms  of cultural ‘signifying practices’.

                          A prominent endeavor in cultural studies is to subvert the distinctions in traditional criticism between “high literature” and “high art” and what were considered the lower forms that appeal to a much larger body of consumers cultural studies pay less attention to work in the established literary canon than to popular fiction best-selling romances, journalism, and advertising, together with other arts that have mass apeal such as, cartoon comics, Film, T.V. ‘soap operas’ and rock and rap music. Radical exponents of cultural studies subordinate literary studies and criticism to political activism, they orient their writings and teaching towards the explict end of reforming existing power structures and relations, which they consider to be dominated by a privileged gender, race or class. many cultural studies are devoted to the analysis and interpretation of objects and social practices outside the other arts. The tone of early vision of cultural studies was set by students of the British New Left, especially Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams. Cultural studies adapts methods of analysis from various disciples: Media studies, Cultural anthropology, discourse analysis, Popular culture studies and audience studies. Cultural studies says that one cannot ‘read’ culture artifacts only within the aesthetic realm.

·       The types of cultural studies:

                 There are five types of cultural studies:

A)   British culture Materialism

B)    New Historicism

C)    American Multiculturalism

D)   Post-modernism and popular culture

E)    Post colonial studies

A) British culture Materialism:

              It is also known as ‘ Cultural Materialism’ in Britain. In late 19^th century, Matthew Arnold redefined the ‘givens’ of British culture. Edward Burnett Taylor’s ‘primitive culture’ argues that :

“culture or civilization, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is a complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities.”

                       Williams memorably states:

                                “There are no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses”

                                         In modern Britain two trajectories for “culture” developed one led back to past and the feudal hierarchies that ordered community in past here, culture acted in its sacred function as preserver utopia that would annual the distinction between labor and leisure classes and make transformation of status, not fixity, the norms.

                                        Cultural materialism began in earnest in the 1950s with the work of F.R.Leavis, heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold’s analysis of bourgeois culture. Leavis sought to use the educational system to distribute literary knowledge and appreciation more widely,Leavisites promots the “Great tradition” of Shakespeare and Milton to improve the moral sensibilities of a wider range of readers than just the elite.Ironically the threat to their project was mass culture.

B)  New Historicism:

                   Laputa-“ the whore”.what did Jonathan swift mean when he gave that name to the flying island in the third voyage of Gulliver’s Travels? It is a question that has tantalized readers since the 18^th century.The science fiction aspect f that island still amuses us,but why”the whore”?there may be an answer and as we will show later,new historicism is the right approach to answer  this question.

                  New historicism/old historicism: Says Porter,saw history as”world views magisterially unfolding as a series of tableaux in a film called progress” ,as though all Elizabethans,for example,held views in common.The new historicism rejects this periodization of history in favour of ordering history only through the interplay of forms of power.

C)  American multiculturalism:

                  It is about American culture ,America has many cultures:

·       African American writers

·       Latina/0 writers

·       American Indian Literatures

·       Asian American writers

D) Post- modernism  and Popular culture:

               Postmodernism celebrates the very act of dismembering tradition.It question radicalism.There are four main types of popular culture.They are:

1 -Production analysis

2-Textual analysis      

3-Audience analysis         Popular Culture

4-Historical analysis

                      Modernist literature rejected the Victorian aesthetic of prescriptive morality and using new techniques drawn from psychology, experimented with point of view, time space and stream of consciousness writing.

·       Post-colonial studies:

                             Post colonialism refers to a historical phase undergone by Third world countries after the decline of colonialism. Said’s concept of oriental was an important touchstone to post colonial studies, as he described the stereotypical discourse about the East as constructed by the West. Said sharply critiques the Western image of the oriental. Frantz Fanon, a French Caribbean Marxist, drew upon his own horrific experiences French Algeria to deconstruct emerging national regimes. Homi K. Bhabha’s post colonial theory involves with poststructuralist ideas of identity and indeterminacy, defining post colonial identities as shifting, hybrid construction.

                               Among the most important figures in post colonial feminism is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who examines the effects of political independence upon “Subaltern” or sub proletarian women in the Third World.

                               Now I explain American Multiculturalism in detail…………

                 

·       American Multiculturalism:

                                In 1965 the Watts race riots drew worldwide  attention. The civil Rights Act has passed in 1964. There were murders and other atrocities attended the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, President Johnson Signed voting rights act. The Black Panther party come to existence, All African American students in the South attended segregated schools and discrimination was still illegal in many states, ‘race’ problem was challenged.

                                   In the new century, if interracial trends continue, Americans will be puzzled by race distinctions from the past since children of multiracial backgrounds may be the norm rather than the exception. And given the huge influx of Mexican Americans into the United States over the last fifty years, immigration pattern indicate that by the year 2050 Anglo-Americans will no longer be the majority, nor English necessarily the most widely spoken language.

                                    “Every American should understand Mexico from the point of view of the observer of the conquest and of the history before the conquest… No American should graduate from college without a framework of knowledge that includes at least some construct of Asian history, of Latin-American history of African history.’’

1.   African American writers :-

                            In ‘Shadow and Act’[1964] novelist Ralph Evison argues that “any viable theory of Negro American culture obligates us to fashion a more adequate theory of American culture as a whole”.

                             American arts, fashion, music and so much besides is based upon African American culture from Oprah to Usher. African American writing displays a ‘double consciousness’, as W.E.B. Eilison requested Black writers to have faith in their own experiences and definitions of reality. It seems as if they did so. Toni Morison’s ‘Bluest Eye’, Gwendolin Brooks’s ‘We Real Cool’ and many others wrote about their culture and their efforts of long struggle.

                    “Black people had before they knew there was such a thing as art”

-         Ellison                                                                                                                              

                                              Hurston, Hughes, Countee Cullen were the center of literary life and black culture. African American writing continued to enter the main stream with the protest novels of the 1940s. The 1960s brought Black power and the Black Arts Movement. There was struggle between Black and White literature.

2.   Latina/o writers :-

                         They are Mexican American. This term indicates a broad sense of ethnicity among Spanish-Speaking and most influential group of Latina/o ethnicities in the United States.

                                              The history of the indigenous cultures of the new world is punctuated by Indian Nations, European countries, especially Spain, Portugal, France and England then by the United states. Mexican American literature was the combination of Spanish art and their culture. They create new Folk culture and literature. According to Juan Flores and George Yudice:

“The search for ‘America’ the inclusive multicultural society of the continent, has to do with nothing less than the imaginative those of remapping and renaming in the service not only of Lalinos but of all climates.”

3.   American Indian Literature:-

                             For American Indians, stories are a source of strength in the face of centuries of silencing by Euro-Americans. A term ‘Native American’ is preferred by most academics and many tribal, members, who find the term ‘Indian’ a misnomer and stereotype- as in “cowboys and Indians” or “Indian giver” that helped whites wrest the sentiment away from indigenous people. Their  identities are Tribal.

                                 Traditional literature was and is oral, because the Indian tribes did not have written languages, European newcomers assumed they had no literature. In fact American Indians were the creator of the first American literature, Traditional Indian literature is not especially accessible for the average reader, and it is not easy to translate from Cherokee into English. Their myth and stories are designed to perpetuate their heritage and instruct young, Cure illness ensure victor in battle or ‘Secure fertile’ fields. It is practical literature.

                                      The American authors are Samson Occam, William Apess, Yellow Bird   [ John Rollin Ridge], Simon Pokagon, Sra Winnemucca Hopkins,  McNickle and Mourning Dove. These writer dealt with native rights the duplicities of U.S. government and military leaders creation myths, trickster humor and tribute constancy.

4.   Asian American writers:-

                                                              Asian American literature is written by people of Asian descent in the United states. Asian immigrates were denied citizenship as late as the 1950s, Edward Said wrote ‘oriental’s’ Asian American writers include Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Polynesian and many other people of Asia, the pacific. These cultures present a bewildering array of languages, religions, social structures and skin color, and hence the category is even more broad and artificial than Latina/o or American Indian.

                                                             Asian American literature can be said to have begun around the turn of the twentieth century. Increasing attention in Asian American studies has been focused on writers from Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines including. Asian American writing is quiet among Americans as well as other countries.

                        America has multiculturalism Bernard Bell reviews some primary features of American writing and compares value systems :

“Traditional white American values emanate from a providential vision of history and of Euro-Americans as a chosen people a vision that sanctions their individual and collective freedom in the pursuit of profit, and happiness Radical freedom Protestantism, constitutional democracy and industrial capitalism are the white American trinity of values”                             

v  Conclusion:-

                              American Multiculturalism has worldwide attention. It is a mixture of all the cultures of the world. It deals with racial problems. It deals with modern literature too. America has people from all over the world. The folk and traditional American culture is interesting. The work of American writer discussed Modernity, Myth, Slavery and many other problems. Basically American literature was not written but it was an oral form as American and Indian literature. After the colonial settlement it started to be written.

                     

     

Discuss Structure, sign and Play elaborating Derrida's view

Topic:- Discuss Structure, Sign and Play elaborating Derrida’s                                     view

Paper Name: Literary Theory and criticism

Paper no.: 7

Name: Bhatt Urvi

Roll no.: 32

Submitted to: Department of English Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Introduction:-

                             Jacques Derrida was Algerian born French Philosopher. In the area of philosophy and literary criticism alone, Derrida has been cited more than 14000 times in Journal articles over the past two decades. Derrida’s deconstructionist works are integrally related to post-modernism. He taught philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1960 to 1964. One values Derrida’s writings and the philosophical position and intellectual positions from which he proceeds, it would be wrong handed to think of him as an occupant of some ‘Ivory Tower’.

v Structure, Sign and Play Elaborating Derrida’s view:-

                  “Structure, Sign and Play” shows how philosophy and science understand ‘Structure’. Derrida discusses with structuralism, a type of analysis which understand individual elements of language and culture as embedded in larger structures. The archetypal example of structuralism is discussed by Ferdinand de Saussure.

                        Derrida also directly dealt with Saussure in a related book title Grammatology. In Grammatology the relationship between elements of cultural systems like mythology is analyzed.

                             The New York Times pointed out in its obituary for Derrida that “Structure, Sign and Play” offered professors of literature a philosophical movement they could legitimately consider their own.

           

“Structure, Sign and Play” was first published in 1970. Derrida admirers the reflexivity and abstract analysis of structuralism, but argues that these discourses have still not gone far enough in treating structures as free floating or ‘playing’ sets of relationships. He accuses structuralism discourses of holding on a ‘center’: a privileged term anchoring the structure and does not play. Derrida suggests that this model of structure will end-is ending and that a never and freer thinking about structures will emerge.

                       The essay begins by speculating, “perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an ‘event’, if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural-structuralist – thought to reduce or suspect.” The ‘center’ is that element of a structure which appears given or fixed, thereby anchoring the rest of the structure and allowing it to play.

                                 In the history of metaphysics, this function is fulfilled by different term like

        “eidos, arche, telos, energia, ousia [essence, existence, substance subject] aleteia,         transcendentality, consciousness or conscience, God, man, and so forth.”

                                      Whichever term is at the center of the structure, argues Derrida, the overall pattern remains similar. This central term ironically escapes structurality, the main character of structuralism by which all meaning is defined relationally, with the help of other structure.                                  

                              The question to be discussed is the opening of the structure which became inevitable ”when the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought” and the contradictory role of the center exposed. The result of the event, according to Derrida, must be the full version of structural “free play”, a mode in which all terms are truly subject promised by structuralism.

                                             According to Derrida, just as philosophers use metaphysical term used and concept to critique metaphysics, the ethnologist “accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he is employed in denouncing them”.

                                           Derrida further discusses, Levi-Strauss use of the term ‘bricolage’. Brecolage becomes a metaphor for philosophical and literary critiques, exemplifying Derrida’s argument about the necessity of using the language available. The bricoleur’s foil is the engineer, who creates out of whole cloth without the need for bricolage.

Derrida says:-

                                     “Structural discourse on myths-mythological discourse on myths-mythological discourse-must itself is mythopomorphic.”

                                    Derrida also criticizes Levi-Strauss for his inability to explain historical changes-for describing historical changes-for describing structural transformation as the result of mysterious outside forces. Derrida concludes by reaffirming the existence of a transformation within structuralism, suggesting that it espouses this affirmative view of unlimited free and presenting it as unpredictable yet inevitable.

v Define Deconstruction:-

                         Deconstruction, as applied in the criticism of literature, designates a theory and practice of reading which questions and claims to “subvert” or “undermine” the assumption that the system of language provides groups that are adequate to establish the boundaries, the coherence or unity, and the determinate meanings of a literary text.

·       Deconstruction:

                  In the criticism of literature, Deconstruction is a theory and practice of reading which questions and claims to ‘subvert’ and ‘undermine’. The attention was shifted from the writer to the work of literary text, consequently textual analysis become more important than extra textual information. In this process the important of the reader and his understanding increased, and the Reader Response or Reception Theory came into being. Derrida gives the same process a further and final push according to which what matters is the reading and not the writing of the text. The readers rules the supreme and the validity of his reading cannot be challenged. However the structure of each reading has to be coherent and convincing.

·       Decentering the centre:-

                             Derrida deconstructs the metaphysics of presence. He seeks to prove that the structurality of the structure does not indicate a presence above its free play of signs. This presence was earlier supposed to be the centre of the structure which was paradoxically thought to be within, and outside this structure, it was truth and within, it was intangibility. But Derrida contends that, ‘the centre could not be thought in the form of a begging presence’. The textuality is the free play of signifiers. There is no signifier that is not itself a signifier. Derrida seeks to undermine “a prevailing and generally unconscious ‘idealism’, which asserts that language does not create meanings but reveals them, thereby implying that meanings, pre-exists their expression.”

                                      This for Derrida is nonsense. For him there can be no meaning which is not formulated, we cannot reach outside language.

·       Supplementarity:-

                       A text is a work of language and language as such according to Derrida, is like time, ever in a state of flux. Just as time has no origin, so also the origin of language is inconceivable.

v Derrida quotes and approve Levi-Strauss who writes:

“Whatever may have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance in the scale of animal life, language could only have been born in one full swoop.”

It is always gaining in new elements and loosing the older ones.

“The totality of the myths of a people”

Derrida quotes Levi-Strauss:-

“is of the order of the discourse. Provided that these people do not become physically or morally extinct, this totally is never extinct.”

                 The language paradoxically comes into being as a quest of imaginary truth apart from language and continues to realize the lack of truth in the words that it employs. The absence of centre of a origin is the movement of Supplementarity. The process of Supplementarity has no end. Because positive and concrete definition is impossible for any term, every term necessarily requires a supplement or supplements, something or some things which helps it exist and understood.                     The truth of the text which in fact only language, and create in our quest another text through our criticism to supplement the lack of the original text. Original text-reading is reactivating the expressivity of the text with help of its indicative signs. But in the words of John Sturrock,

“The meanings that are read into it may or may not coincide with the meanings which the author believes he or she has invested it with.”

                          Derrida demonstrated how the history of thought contradicted itself and in so doing imploded the foundation of western philosophy. There is scant little chance of denying that Derrida himself holds some special place in this development: if not as its father than at least as its catalyst.

                             Derrida emphasizes that to deconstruct is not to discovery, that his task is to “dismantle the metaphysical and rhetorical structures” operative in a texts “not in order to reject or discard them, but to reconstitute them in another way”, that he puts into question the “search for the signified not annual it, but to understand it within a system to which such a reading is blind.”

v Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences:-

                   In his famous essay, ‘structure, sign and play in the Discourse of the Human science s’ which was read at the John Hapkins International colloquium on “The Language of Criticism and the sciences of Man” in         October 1966. Derrida demonstrates how structuralism as represented by the anthropologist  Claude Levi-Strauss which sets out as a criticism or  rejection of science and metaphysics can be read as embodying precisely those aspects of science and metaphysics which it seeks to challenge. The essay concludes by saying:

“There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of free play, the one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from free play and from the order of the sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation.”

                      Thus, we have two diametrically opposite interpretations of structuralism, and we are unable to decide which the ‘right’ one is. Thus ‘aporia’ between two interpretations is due to the force of ‘difference’ intrinsic to the structure of language. Characteristically, Derrida in this essay notes that ‘language bears within itself, the necessity of its own critique’. The essay considered as inauguration of ‘post structuralism’ as a theoretical movement.

v Conclusion:

                                                            Derrida concludes by reaffirming the existence of a transformation within structuralism, suggesting that it espouses this affirmative view of unlimited free and presenting it as unpredictable yet inevitable.