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2013-2014

Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua

Inglesa (CTLLI)

Isabel Castelao, Jesús Cora, Dídac Llorens

GRADO EN ESTUDIOS INGLESES : LENGUA,

LITERATURA Y CULTURA

GRADO

GUÍA DE ESTUDIO: COMENTARIO DE

TEXTOS LITERARIOS EN LENGUA

INGLESA UNIT 1 | INTRODUCTION TO POSTSTRUCTURALIST THEORIES

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TEXTS AND AUTHORS

Literary author: Dylan Thomas, “A refusal to mourn the death,

by fire, of a child in London” (full poem, Barry 321-322).

Introduction to critical and literary theory: Peter Barry, Ch.

3, “Post-structuralism and deconstruction (61-77)”; Michael

Ryan, Ch. 4, “Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction, Post-

Modernism (62-70)”.

Critical authors: Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”

(extract); Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (extract).

TEXTUAL COMMENTARY AND CRITICAL PRACTICE

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: pp. 321-322),

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 declares: “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 among them

on page 94.

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:

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetI

d=7091 (Note: there is also an MP3 file you can also download.

See the Unit 1 documents). 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

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and listen to “A refusal to mourn…” as many times as you need,

looking up words where necessary. This will give you a firmer

overall understanding of the poem.

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’ 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 1. 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

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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):

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’ 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 [= estrofas] 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?

INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL AND LITERARY THEORY

Self-assessment exercises

Read Barry, Chapter 3, “Post-structuralism and deconstruction”

(59-77) and Ryan, Chapter 4, “Post-structuralism,

deconstruction, Post-Modernism (62-70). (Note: both

“poststructuralism” and “post-structuralism” are accepted

versions of the term).

1. Now re-read: “What post-structuralist critics do” (Barry,

pp. 70-71). 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” (pp.

71-74). 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

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

2 PAUL VALÉRY (1871-1945), French poet and critic [NATC note].

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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 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.

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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’ on pp. 63-64.

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

[…]

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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.

Self-assessment exercises

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1. Read the above extract carefully, several times if

necessary. It will become gradually less opaque.

2. Look up and give definitions of the works 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, pp. 66-67.

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: Barry addresses this point on pp. 66-67.

(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, p. 67.

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

Further resources:

http://www.dylanthomas.com/

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetI

d=7091

(An excellent online poetry resource with links to Thomas’ own

reading of “A refusal to mourn…”. His introduction alone is

worth listening to. Transcriptions accompany both introduction

and poem).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/arts/sites/themes/books/dylan_thoma

s.shtml

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B2c4b23r3k

(Another online recording of Thomas reciting “A refusal to

mourn…”. Not as good as the Poetry Archive version).

http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/3357.html

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http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/lookup.html

(This is the British National Corpus, “a 100 million word

collection of samples of written and spoken language from a

wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-

section of British English from the later part of the 20th

century, both spoken and written”).

Note: should any of these links be broken, do let us know and

we will provide you with alternative ones.