Readings_Intertextuality

READINGS & TEXTUAL INTEGRITY While we should conduct the analysis of the whole of the speech on its own terms, we need to be aware that we are linking our observations to the notion of the conceptual framework of Module. Module B is Critical Study of Texts, and involves the idea of close analysis, Readings and Textual Integrity. Readings Our first port of call in analysing a speech (as opposed to a poem, play or novel) must be through rhetorical analysis, because, if we recall the three provinces of speech-making identified by Aristotle - namely the Judicial, Deliberative, and Epideictic - that is what a speech is primarily designed to do: to persuade. If, having made this analysis, or in the process of making this analysis, we find ourselves gaining a deeper or further insight into the composition of the speech, its aetiology, its contextual factors, its underlying socio-historical paradigms that it unwittingly communicates, any theories of interpretation that would seem apt, or any universal ideas or even Platonic absolutes that it touches upon, then we can proceed to look more deeply at these underlying ideas that are contained within its words and between the lines, and apply that reading to our text. I emphasise to you that this should not be done until a through rhetorical analysis has been made, or is at the very least solidly underway. Readings need to connect closely to, and now smoothly from, close analysis of the actual text. Textual Integrity The final question with regard to textual interpretation is that of defining a piece of jargon that is often cited: textual integrity. Many students ask: "What is textual integrity'" "When does a text have textual integrity, and when not'" The Board's own definition of textual integrity is somewhat arcane, but hints at the idea of a text's ability to exhibit coherence with itself. This is why they stress that the student needs to study the text in its entirety to understand 'questions of textual integrity, significance and value' that surround the text: The syllabus defines textual integrity as: The unity of a text; its coherent use of form and language to produce an integrated whole in terms of meaning and value. You would be within your rights to argue that this definition also applies to a bus ticket, which has textual unity, has a coherent form and language, and produces an integrated whole in terms of meaning (e.g. your destination) and value (how much the ticket costs.) The definition is however furthered: Evaluating a text in terms of its textual integrity requires the students to consider the features and elements of a text and the extent to which it may possess an overall unity, integrated structure and unifying concept. Students' close analysis helps them to evaluate how these features and elements function in different ways, leading to the consideration of the text's overall coherence and complexity. Although this goes a little further, we still haven't really got much beyond a bus ticket, which also has features and elements that function in different ways, and displays coherence and some degree of complexity, albeit a complexity that might only be found if you were to do a semiotic analysis of how the bus ticket's design articulates its socio-cultural meanings. However, they continue, stating that students: In this way, [...] arrive at a sense of the text's distinctiveness and enduring, or potentially enduring, value. This is better, although a collector of antique bus tickets may argue that her collection of early 1900's bus and tram tickets has a distinctiveness and enduring value, even though they are no longer valid. So let's look at textual integrity another way. Another look at textual integrity Offered here is a less technical and more direct definition: A text with textual integrity is a text which is a canonical text, i.e. a valued text. If this sounds a bit too easy to be true, or simply a circular statement, then let's examine how this is so. A text with textual integrity is a canonical text that has been stripped of the notion of elitism that the term 'canonical text' potentially implies. For a post-modernist, the idea of a canonical text or even a canon itself is forbidden, because all texts are equal. A canon implies tradition, an author rather than a composer, and implies that some texts are better than others. So in order to avoid the vexed term 'canonical text' (which might possibly be seen as elitist), we now use the term 'text with textual integrity', or ‘valued text’. In fact the notion of value, and a 'valued text' comes to more or less the same thing as a 'canonical text'. Essentially these texts (whatever you want to call them: canonical texts, texts with textual integrity or valued texts) are ones that have stood the test of time, i.e. have been shown to last beyond one time and one place, tap into universal ideas, are able to be interpreted through multiple lenses or perspectives and therefore are reducible to none of those perspectives. The quality of these texts deems them to have textual integrity. The idea of a text having integrity is not that far removed from the idea of a person having integrity. A person with integrity means someone who is not swayed by the passing fashions of public opinion of condemnation or praise, and does not alter themselves to become a different person for every new situation, but holds to their own values and character. They have "staying power", or integrity. Similarly, a text with integrity has staying power: it stands the test of time, it is not able to be reduced to a passing phase of fashion or genre, but contains values that go beyond the passing moment, expressing universal ideas in, a way that take its meaning beyond the context in which it was 'composed', even as it becomes open to different interpretations. The term "text with textual integrity" therefore implies a more neutral sense than "a canonical text by a famous author". But the terms 'canonical text' and 'famous author', and 'text with textual integrity' and ‘valued composer’ are really one and the same. The newer term ‘valued text’ and 'text with textual integrity' simply lays more emphasis on its justification for being so. Background to the idea of Textual Integrity To give you some idea of the background of the debate about what to call a valued text, we should realise that this challenge to the idea of the author (that is, a creative person who originates meaning in texts) began in 1963 with French structuralist philosopher and linguist Roland Barthes' anti-bourgeois essay 'Death of the Author', in which he attacked French bourgeois notions of a creative artist behind a text. In this essay, and using an example from the French nineteenth century early realist novelist Honoré de Balzac, Roland Barthes denied the existence of an author, stating that texts are composed of borrowed meanings from other texts, and argued that there is in fact no original meaning in a creative text (a play, novel, poem) at all, only borrowing. The idea of creativity was replaced by the engagement with the texture and fabric of other borrowed texts, which essentially killed any place for an author. Authorship was replaced by composition. After Barthes' death, his ideas trickled slowly down through the universities and into our School Curricula with the concept of ‘the composer’. The term 'composer' (as distinct from someone who composes music) attempts to mirror Barthes' theory that there are no authors of original meaning, only composers who borrow and reconstitute (or 'compose') other people's meanings. As the term 'composer' implies, the artistic and creative part becomes first and foremost the placing and rearranging (or 'composing') of other's meanings in different arrangements, and the author thereby becomes an appropriator and not an originator of meaning. While there is a certain measure of truth to this idea, it is not the whole truth. If we adopt the one size fits all policy, that all texts are equal and there are no authors but only composers (appropriators of other people's meaning, and not originators of their own thought or meaning), then we cannot have canonical texts, because all texts are equal, since there are no authors only composers, who are alt equally borrowing other people's equally borrowed meanings. But therein lies the problem. There clearly are texts that are 'better' than others, in the sense that they are able to define deeper levels of meaning, or make a more perceptive analysis of reality and its contradictions, or question accepted patterns of thought, or envision a world of possibility that mass market texts later copy, or originate new meaning, or skilfully question their very means of production - language itself. To solve this problem, we now call these texts 'valued texts', noting that they have 'textual integrity', and the authors of these texts we now call 'valued composers'. We should not be confused by technical jargon though. Textual integrity is simply the quality that a valued text has that makes it a valued text - a text that transcends its time. Primarily, a valued text has the quality that allows it to transcend context - one time and place and hence one definition and one meaning - indexing universal ideas that surround the human condition, or taking on a philosophical significance that engender multiple interpretations and meanings, under many different perspectives, beyond its context. This is the point of Module B: studying texts that invite multiple interpretations. -------------------------------------------- [ 1 ]. We should make sure that any readings we apply to the speeches we are focusing on are plausible, are derived from our own understanding, and do not replace the text we are studying but serve to add to or expand our understanding further. We should not apply readings to the speeches for their own sake – it is essential that they are relevant and add some insight to the content of the speech, and to ways of interpreting the broader as well as deeper meaning of a speech. [ 2 ]. Otherwise you run the risk of blithely applying to the text of the speeches paradigms of interpretation that may be triet, superficial, irrelevant, or worse, simply wrong. This will result in a poorly argued and unconvincing essay (or other text type response) in the exam, which is not a pathway to a high mark. [ 3 ]. BOS, HSC English (Advanced) Course, Module B, Critical Study of Texts: Support Document [ 4 ]. Ibid. referencing np143 (italics as in the original) [ 5 ]. Ibid. [ 6 ]. I’m sure that someone has written a PhD on such a subject. [ 7 ]. Sadly, texture and fabric played a key role in Barthes' own death, as he was run over and killed in a Paris street by a laundry van some years later. [ 8 ]. Interesting that we celebrate our top sportspeople as "elite athletes", but to call an artist or writer "elite" is to invite the charge of "elitism" and thus is not politically correct. A further irony is added when we consider that, with some exceptions, a good proportion of famous writers and artists only became so after their deaths, and lived lives that would be described as the opposite of what would be called 'elitist'. Meanwhile, mass market texts such as billboard, TV and internet advertisements are termed 'not elitist' even while their composers earn healthy 6 figure salaries. [ 9 ]. it certainly holds good for a large proportion of mass media and mass market texts, which are churned out at a high turn-around speed with little thought of deeper meanings, only to the adoption of surface styles and tricks for a specific functional effect {e.g. sell a new brand of laundry powder, fill up column 7 on page 32 with a feel-good lost-and-found dog story, complete a feel-good family CGI film for international release just prior to Christmas, etc.) [ 10 ]. A case in point here is the influence of Surrealist art on advertising. Virtually no ad gets made these days without the use of surrealist juxtaposition, but this concept originated in 1930s European Surrealism.