Another critque here is by acknowleging we could have any number of finite descrptions in an infite universe of possibilities then we wind up with a Zeno’s paradox situation where the hare never catches the tortise or the arrow is never actually in a location. We have to pick something, no matter how arbitary,.

Saussure makes the distinction between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’, where parole is a part of the larger langue. The oedipus myth fits here in that the play itself is the parole but the whole cycle of plays connected to Thebes is the langue in which we find larger, greater context. Patterns emerge, motifs, contrasts, etc.

Another example of how arbitary this is, is, for example, colors. We have 7 primry colors, but why not 14?Why only 4 seasons instead of 8? Langauge, then reflects the way we see the world, but is not objective reality itself. Of course, there is a definite moment of spring during the equinox, so these moments do exist.

As far as language constitutes our world, meaning is attirbuited to the object or idea by our mind. Luke Skywalker is either a hero freedom fighter, or a terrorist. Margert Thatcher’s plan is either a poll tax, or a community charge. There are three versions to every story, yours, mine, and the truth.

Saussure’s train analogy is good at illustrating what he’s getting at: What gives a train its identity? Every day the cars are different, the engine is different, the passangers are different, it leaves and arrives at different times, and in an emergency might be a bus to the next station. “A train doesn’t have to be a train.”

Saussure also explained how words a relational. Context is derived from adjoining words related to it, such as “hovel, shed, hut, house, mansion, palace.” We know what a hut is because we understand how it relates to other types of dwelling/storage places, but it has little/less meaning without that context.

Saussure says that langauge is (basically) arbitrary and is a system which sands apart from that which it attempts to define. The word ‘hut’ is not the same as a thing you can live in, it’s just part of the sign system used to identify verbally that thing people are living in. (even onomatopoeia is arbitrary)

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist and helped develop modern language study by studying “patterns and functions of lnguage in [current] use … with the emphasi on how meanings are maintained and establisehed,”

Structuralism’s approach takes us “further away from the text, and into large and comparatively abstract questions of genre, history, and philosophy, rather than closer to [the text]. Donne’s ‘Good Morrow’ is best understood in context of it subverting the genre it paradoies, for example.

Structurealism began in France in the 1950s via Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. The (very) basic idea is that “things cannot be understood in isolation” – context is key and the more context, the better.

F.R.Leavis picks up the ideas of Arnold: “if you have read the best, and can identify its qualities, then you can be confident in looking at new writing and reacing a new judgment on it.” The author here relates this to a very Protestant mode.

Basically what Eliot is saying as far as ‘originality’ is concerend is that poetry is not a “pouring out of personal emotion,”but rather, “transcending of the individual by a sense of tradition”, and that the poet’s “predecessors can be most clearly heard speaking through him.” Nothing new under Eliot’s sun

Eliot mjor criticl ideas can be broken down into 3 parts: Dissociation of sensibility, impersonality (individual talent essay), and objective correlative. His ideas are rather controversial and my essay on Baraka and Eliot goes into detail on this.

Matthew Arnold came up with the idea of literary ‘touchstones’ which suggests using literature of the past to measure the the quality of the present literature. He believes we need to keep the masters in mind, which is what T.S.Eliot was saying we always do anyway in his essay (individual Talent)

Matthew Arnold feared that the decline in religion would lead to a fractured society with no common beliefs to hold it together and saw literature as a replacement for the middle class to latch onto, however they would need critics to interpert this canon and show the masses its value.

Practical criticism leads through Samuel Johnson and T.S. Eliot and centers upon the close analysis and the ‘close reading’. Idea criticism deals with how the work is structured, how does it affect the audience, how does literature realte to contemporary matters, philosophy, and other ‘ideas’.