Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI), 2015-2016.

Unit 1 Study
Guide

COMENTARIO DE TEXTOS
GRADO
LITERARIOS EN LENGUA INGLESA

UNIT 1 GUIDE | INTRODUCTION TO POSTSTRUCTURALIST THEORIES

2019-2020
Isabel Castelao (Coordinadora) y Dídac Llorens

GRADO EN ESTUDIOS INGLESES:

LENGUA, LITERATURA Y CULTURA

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 CTLLI
STUDY GUIDE-UNIT 1
Introduction to Poststructuralist Theories

Literary text: Dylan Thomas, “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in
London” (full poem, Appendix 2 of Barry’s Beginning Theory).

Introduction to critical and literary theory: chapter 3 of Barry’s Beginning Theory,

“Post-structuralism and deconstruction”.

Critical authors: extracts from Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” and
Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (both in this guide, below).

LITERARY TEXT
Self-assessment exercises: Dylan Thomas

Read Dylan Thomas’ poem, “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in
London” (Barry, Appendix 2). The poem was published in the summer of 1945 just after
the end of World War II – Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) came on 8 May 1945. The
poem recalls the London Blitz, which had ended less than two months before.
In 1952, Dylan published his Collected Poems. 1934-1952. In the “Author’s Note” he
declared: “This book contains most of the poems I have written, and all, up to the
present year, that I wish to preserve” – “A refusal to Mourn” is one of them.
While the ideas expressed in this poem are not difficult, the form in which they are
expressed is challenging. Read the poem once through without looking up any words
– this is just to give you a first impression. (Suggestion: don’t forget to read the title
as well). Now, with the text in front of you, listen to Thomas reciting his poem on this
link: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zzu_G-BWfYk>. Pay attention to where
Thomas makes pauses and to his intonation: Where does his voice go up? Where does
it drop? What words or phrases does he stress?
The acoustic dimension of a poem helps us make sense of it. Read and listen to
Thomas’s poem as many times as you need, looking up words where necessary. This
will give you a firmer overall understanding of the poem.

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1. Write a short summary in prose of what you think this poem is about.
(Suggestion: your summary can be in English or Spanish). Don’t worry if there
are details or aspects you can’t quite grasp yet.
2. You will no doubt have noticed the poem’s complex syntax. You may even have
felt frustrated by it! Look at the first three stanzas (= estrofas). Do you notice
anything strange about the punctuation? Where and what is the first punctuation
mark? What happens to Thomas’s voice when he reaches this point?
3. Transcribe the first three stanzas as a prose paragraph. Can you identify the
subject and main verb? How would you punctuate your transcription in order to
make it easier to understand? (Suggestion: look for subordinate clauses.
Example: “and the still hour is come of the sea tumbling in harness”).

4. How do you react as a reader to the way in which this ‘sentence’ is constructed
and punctuated? How is your comprehension affected?
5. Using a good monolingual English dictionary, look up the following words and
provide synonyms or explanations in English. (Suggestion: take into account
the part of speech the word belongs to, i.e., whether the word is a noun, an
adjective, gerund, etc.):
mourn (title)
fathering l. 3

humbling l. 3
still l. 5
tumbling l. 6
harness l. 6
sackcloth l. 12
grave l. 15
elegy l. 18
robed l. 20
6. What do you think the poem’s speaker means when he uses the metaphors
indicated below? (Suggestion: a metaphor is a certain use of words: “a
comparison or an analogy [implying] that one object is another one, figuratively
speaking” [http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_M.html]; for example, “All the
world’s a stage”, from Shakespeare’s As You Like It).

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 my salt seed (l. 11)

valley of sackcloth (l. 12)

a grave truth (l.15)

7. What is the effect of using so many present participles (fathering, humbling,
tumbling, etc.)?
8. Identify other poetic devices (= techniques).

9. In questions 2, 3, 4 and 5, you’ve had the chance to consider Thomas’s text both
as a poem and a piece of prose. What formal differences are there, in other
words, what specifically makes this text a poem and not a piece of prose?
(Suggestion: this question is also related to the previous one. Don’t be afraid
to state the obvious, i.e. “it’s written in verses or stanzas” or “it repeats certain
words or structures”).
10. Is the meaning of the poem affected by the form in which it is expressed? Would
the meaning be altered if Thomas had chosen to express it, say, through an
essay or a letter to the editor of a newspaper?

CRITICAL AND LITERARY THEORY

Self-assessment exercises

Read chapter 3 of Barry’s Beginning Theory, “Post-structuralism and deconstruction”

(59-77). (Note: both “poststructuralism” and “post-structuralism” are valid
spellings).

1. Now re-read the section / box “What post-structuralist critics do”. Paraphrase his
arguments, substituting each point with your own words.
Example: Post-structuralists look for hidden meanings in a text which may
contradict the surface or apparent meaning.
2. Read carefully Barry’s post-structuralist interpretation of Dylan Thomas’ poem,
“Deconstruction: An Example”. Barry identifies three stages in the
deconstructive process: the verbal, the textual and the linguistic. Summarize
each stage.

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 3. Barry’s analysis pays attention to the poem’s paradoxes and contradictions,
its breaks, discontinuities and omissions. Identify some of these
inconsistencies and try to say how your reading is affected by them.

4. Barry also asks you to look for examples of a specific type of figurative
language – metaphors. He asks you to think about the use of ‘mother’ and
‘daughter’ and the “nature of the metaphorical ‘family’” implied by those
words. Can you find examples in addition to those mentioned in question 4?

Critical Authors

ROLAND BARTHES (1915-1968). From “The Death of the Author” (1968).

The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as […] it discovered the
prestige of the individual […], the ‘human person.’ It is thus logical that in literature it
should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of *capitalist ideology, which has
attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author. The author still reigns
in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines, as in the very
consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their person and their work through
diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is
tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while
criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of
Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice. The explanation
of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in
the end, through the more or less transparent *allegory of the fiction, the voice of a
single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us. […] Mallarmé’s1 entire poetics consists in
suppressing the author in the interests of writing (which is, as will be seen, to restore the
place of the reader). Valéry2 […] considerably diluted Mallarmé’s theory but […] he never
stopped calling into question and deriding the Author; he stressed the linguistic […]
nature of his activity, and throughout his prose works he militated in favour of the
essentially verbal condition of literature, in the face of which all recourse to the writer’s
interiority seemed to him pure superstition. […]
The removal of the Author […] utterly transforms the modern text (or – which is the same
thing – the text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author
is absent). The temporality is different. The Author, when believed in, is always conceived
of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line
divided into a before and after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say
that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence
to his work as a father to his child. In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born
simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding
the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; […]
[…] a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’
of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of
them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the
innumerable centres of culture. […] the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always

1 STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ (1842-1898), French poet [NATCnote].

2
PAUL VALÉRY (1871-1945), French poet and critic [NATC note].
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anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the
others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them. Did he wish to express himself,
he ought at least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he thinks to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready-
formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely;
[…] Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours,
feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws […] To
give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final *signified,
to close the writing […] [However] writing refus[es] to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate
meaning, to the text […], liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an
activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse
God […] we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth:
the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
SOURCE: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001) 1466-1470. Hereafter,
NATC.

Self-assessment exercises
**REMEMBER: unless otherwise indicated, all your answers should be in
English. Where appropriate, your answers should also take note of the context
to which the questions refer. ANSWERS to most of the following questions are
provided in an accompanying document.

1. Read the above extract carefully.

2. Look up and give definitions of the words marked with an *asterisk.

Suggestions: a) Consult the Glossary in the curso virtual and/or the dictionaries
of literary terms by Chris Baldick and J. A. Cuddon included in the “Bibliografía
complementaria”. For words not included in these resources, use any
philosophical dictionary or good monolingual dictionary; b) when looking up
*signified, try looking up sign first.
3. What do you think Barthes means when he refers to “the ‘person’ of the
author” (par. 1)?

4. The following terms are contrasted by Barthes:

ordinary culture (par. 1)  Mallarmé and Valéry (par. 1)
Author (par. 1)  modern scriptor (par.2)

Author (par. 1)  reader (par. 3)

What distinction(s) does Barthes draw between them?

5. Barthes repeatedly uses the vocabulary of religious belief (Author-God –
par. 3, theological – par. 3, anti- theological – par. 3, to refuse God – par.
3, etc.) in association with literature, text and meaning. Why do you think he
uses these terms? What do you think he is trying to say?
Suggestion: See Barry’s comments regarding “the death of the Author” in
the section “Post-structuralism – life on a decentred planet”.
6. Summarize the text, taking into account your answers to the above
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 questions.
Suggestion: To ‘summarize’ means to cover the main points of something
succinctly, that is, in fewer words than the original.

JACQUES DERRIDA (1930-2004). From Of Grammatology (1967).

[T]he writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his
discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely. He uses them only by letting himself
[…] be governed by the system. And the reading must always aim at a certain
relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what
he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses. This relationship is
[…] a signifying structure that critical reading should produce.
What does produce mean here? In my attempt to explain that, I would initiate a
justification of my principles of reading. […]
To produce this signifying structure obviously cannot consist of reproducing, by the
effaced and respectful doubling of commentary, the conscious, voluntary, intentional
relationship that the writer institutes in his exchanges with the history to which he belongs
thanks to the element of language. This […] doubling commentary should no doubt have
its place in a critical reading. […] Yet if reading must not be content with doubling the
text, it cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it[self], toward
a referent (a reality that is metaphysical, historical, psychobiographical, etc.) or toward a
*signified outside the text whose content could take place, could have taken place
outside of language, that is to say, […] outside of writing in general. […] [We propose]
the absence of the *referent or the *transcendental signified. There is nothing outside
of the text [there is no outside-text; il n’y a pas de hors-texte]. […] [T]here has never been
anything but writing; […]
Although it is not commentary, our reading must be intrinsic and remain within the text.
[Yet there are] interpretation[s] that take[] us outside of the writing toward a psycho-
biographical signified, or even toward a general psychological structure that could […]
be separated from the *signifier […].
[I]t seems to us in principle impossible to separate, through interpretation or commentary,
the signified from the signifier […]. Here we must take into account the history of the text
in general. When we speak of the writer and of the encompassing power of language to
which he is subject, we are not only thinking of the writer in literature. [We are thinking
of] the philosopher, the chronicler, the theoretician in general, and […] everyone writing
[…]. But, in each case, the person writing is inscribed in a determined textual system.
[…] [T]he philosophical text, although it is in fact always written includes, precisely as its
philosophical specificity, the project of effacing itself in the face of the signified content
which it transports and in general teaches. Reading should be aware of this project […].
The entire history of texts, and within it the history of literary forms in the West, should
be studied from this point of view. […] [L]iterary writing has, almost always and almost
everywhere, according to some fashions and across very diverse ages, lent itself to this
transcendent reading, in that search for the signified which we here put in question,
not to annul it but to understand it within a system to which such a reading is blind.
SOURCE: NATC (2001) 1825-1827.

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Self-assessment exercises

1. Read the above extract carefully, several times if necessary. It will become
gradually less opaque.
2. Look up and give definitions of the words marked with an *asterisk.
3. What do you think Derrida means when he speaks of the “relationship,
unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does
not command of the patterns of the language he uses” (par. 1)?

Suggestion: see Barry, chapter 3, “Stop and Think”.

4. In this text, Derrida talks about writing and reading. Re- read the nine lines “Yet
if reading must not be content … remain within the text” (par. 2). Try to
paraphrase Derrida’s comments.

Suggestion: (Note: ‘to paraphrase’ means “to restate a text, passage, or work
giving the meaning in another form”, Merriam Webster’s Dictionary and
Thesaurus).
5. What do you think Derrida means when he writes “there is nothing outside of
the text” (par. 2)?

Suggestion: see Barry, chapter 3, “Stop and Think”.

6. Summarize the extract, taking into account your answers to the above
questions.