Date: Tue, 22 Jul 1997 12:36:22 -0400 (EDT)
From: Howard Hastings <hhasting-AT-osf1.gmu.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Re: PLC Fish, Hook, Line, and Sinker


On 22 Jul 1997, Eric Yost wrote:

> 
> I've often wondered why some critics appropriate just enough of someone else's
> ideas to make them sound original, but not enough to make them sound like
> disciples.  For example, didn't Bloom appropriate just enough of Kristeva's
> "intertextuality" to make it Bloomian without making him Kristevan?  And don't
> most of the semiotic-minded critics (e.g.,Reception-Theory) owe an enormous,
> usually-unacknowledged debt to Kenneth Burke's Language As Symbolic Action?  

In a word--no.  Reception theory does not, to me, immediately imply a
semiotic approach, and it seems to me that what is now called semiotics
owes its primary debt to the tradition of de Saussure and saussurian 
linguistics.  Reception theory is indebted primarily to a long traditon
of German hermeneutics. Until the '80s (so far as I have been able to
tell) there was little mixture of these two strands anywhere but in
comp. lit. depts. in the United States.  Anyone who read's Burke can
see similarities between his concerns and methods and those of many
contemporary cultural critics.  But if Burke had never written, it is not
clear to me that semiotics would be much different from what it presently
is.  Had Saussure and Jakobson et. al. never written, it is hard to
imagine the Barthes, Kristeve, Greimas, Eco, Lotman etc. that we are
presently famliar with. (What about Peirce? someone will object. It seems
to me the great interest which has developed in Peirce over the last
twenty years is not evidence that he has long been a significant influence
on U.S. philosophy, linguistics, and literary criticism. Much of the
interest in Peirce, and perhaps even in Burke, has actually been awakened
by the engagement of many Americans with French Theory.  This is not to
say that Peirce and Burke are not important thinkers.  My only point is
that they were not accorded much recognition until the more recent
theoretical turn in the humanities.)

Howard Hastings.