School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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Itemlntertextuality and ontology(Manchester University Press, 1990)The concept of intertextuality requires that we understand the concept of text not as a self-contained structure but as differential and historical. Texts are shaped not by an immanent time but by the play of divergent temporalities. Texts are therefore not structures of presence but traces and tracings of otherness. They are shaped by the repetition and the transformation of other textual structures. These absent textual structures at once constrain the text and are represented by and within it; they are at once preconditions and moments of the text.
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ItemRecovering memory( 1996)To speak of memory as tekhne, to deny that it has an unmediated relation to experience, is to say that the logic of textuality by which memory is structured has technological and institutional conditions of existence. Let me illustrate the enabling conditions of the ‘textual’ logic of memory by reference to the controversy over recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse.
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ItemLiterature, culture, mirrors( 1997)John Frow responds to Simon During Simon During proposes – as I read it – six sets of reasons for the shift within departments of English from traditional literary studies towards cultural studies. The first is the academic appropriation of a tradition of Romantic anti-academicism stretching from Wordsworth to Dada. The second is a new mode of subject formation by which students are trained as consumers of cultural goods. The third is the valorization of social identities perceived as marginal within a traditional academic framework. The fourth is the development of new regimes of student choice, reflected in changed patterns of enrolment. The fifth is the emergence of a policy framework designed to enhance national economic competitiveness. The sixth is a regime of training which prepares students for jobs in the cultural sector.
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ItemMarxism and literary history(Harvard University Press, 1986)In this book I try to theorize the concepts of system and history for a Marxist theory of literary discourse. This theorization is conceived as part of a semiotically oriented intervention in cultural politics. I am not interested in producing a general Marxist theory of literature or in contributing to an aesthetics; and I do not attempt a philosophical purification of these categories. They are difficult categories and I seek to make them more so; but the point is to make them fit tools for critical and political uses. I use the concept of system in the sense of a nontotalized formation which sets epistemological and practical limits to discourse, and which is thereby productive of discourse; it does not have here its speculative or its systems-theoretical sense of a closed and self-regulating totality. In addition, I seek consistently to deploy the concept in counterpoint to its ongoing deconstruction. In the same way, the concept of history does not carry the sense of an enfolding narrative continuum or of the given ground of human action. It is used to theorize the discontinuous, nonteleological dynamic of the literary system and the multiple temporalities of texts within complex sets of intertextual relations. The theoretical framework and intent of the book is a nondogmatic and nonorthodox Marxism which I hope will require no apology. I work within an antihumanist, antihistoricist, and anti-Hegelian tradition, but am also intellectually close to the post-structuralism of Foucault and Derrida. The interplay and sometimes the strain between these traditions will be evident (I hope fruitfully) throughout the book.
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ItemSystem and history: a critique of Russian formalism( 1980)The theoretical development of Russian Formalism, and of its structuralist successors in Prague, is the record of an exemplary attempt to fuse an immanent approach to the literary text to the literary system, which would locate significance in the structure of textual relations and not in genetic or mimetic features, with an awareness of the essential historicity of these relations. Implicit in the concept of literary evolution is a theory of the mechanism of change – that is, of the connection between literary history and history between the text and the social formation; but this theory was never adequately elaborated, both because of a refusal to postulate a direct causal connection between historical change and the apparently autonomous development of the literary system, and because of the Formalists’ almost constant separation of aesthetic from extra aesthetic functions (a separation which confirms the hiatus between the literary series and the social system in which it is inserted).
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ItemDiscourse and Power( 1985)The paper argues for the possibility of reworking the concept of ideology in such a way as to depend neither on a problematic of truth and error, nor on a division of the world into two parts one of which is more real than the other, nor on an expressive relation of subjects to meaning. The political force of the concept can be retained if ideology is thought as a provisional state of discourse (a function of its appropriation and use) rather than as a content or an inherent structure. Any discursive system produces a particular configuration of subject-positions which are the conditions of entry of individuals into discourse; but these acquire political significance only through the (historically variable) codification of discourse in terms of a play of relations of power, and the positions available can be refused or undermined. Some implications of this argument for models of the social and for discourse theory are discussed.
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ItemDiscipline and Discipleship( 1988)The transfer of knowledges is almost always mediated by institutions and by authorized persons. I set up some metaphors in this paper to try to examine these mediating processes by which knowledges are both reproduced and transformed. In particular, I take psychoanalytic andreligious training as metaphors for the transmission of a discipline, and then I briefly extend the figure of discipleship to talk about literary pedagogy and the training of graduate students.
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ItemAccounting for tastes: some problems in Bourdieu's sociology of culture( 1987)Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste completes what is perhaps the strongest case we have about the social functions of cultural artefacts; but it is a case that is deeply flawed. In this article I try to isolate some of the theoretical presuppositions and implications of its central concepts, and to clarify their political limitations.
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ItemA note on legal semiotics( 1995)It has become a commonplace to think of the law as a textual practice, and analysis of the linguistic specificity of legal discourse would seem a logical way to explore the textual or discursive construction of the juridical real. There are major difficulties, however, with most of the currently employed forms of linguistic analysis of the law.
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ItemTimeshift: technologies of reproduction and intellectual property( 1994)In recent years two factors have significantly affected the underlying conditions for the public circulation of ideas and information. On the one hand, the development of technologies for the electronic reproduction and dissemination of information has in principle made information limitlessly available; on the other hand, the process of legal regulation has, in all Western countries, constructed or affirmed property rights restricting and channelling the use of information. This paper analyses one of the most important recent American cases in intellectual property law, the 1984 Supreme Court majority and minority decisions in Sony vs Universal City Studios. It argues that, in allowing home video recording of off-air programmes and extending or at least upholding the doctrine of fair use, the Court’s decision nevertheless fails to challenge the philosophical contradictions in intellectual property doctrine which have allowed the progressive encroachment of private property rights on the public domain.
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