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In literary theory, textuality comprises all of the attributes that distinguish the communicative content under analysis as an object of study. It is associated with structuralism and post-structuralism.
Textuality is not just about the written word; it also comprises the placement of the words and the reader’s interpretation[citation needed]. There is not a set formula to describe a text’s textuality; it is not a simple procedure. This summary is true even though the interpretation that a reader develops from that text may decide the identity and the definitive meanings of that text. Textuality, as a literary theory, is that which constitutes a text in a particular way. The text is an undecidable (there is an inexistence of an effective or "strict" method of writing or structure).
Being textual includes innumerable elements and aspects. Each and every form of text and text in that form of literature embraces and consists of its own individual and personal characteristics; these may include its personality, the individuality of that personality, the popularity, and so on. The textualities of the text define its characteristics. However, the characteristics are also closely associated with the structure of the text (Structuralism). Peter Barry's discussion of textuality notes that "its essence is the belief that things cannot be understood in isolation – they have to be seen in the context of the larger structures they are part of". [1] To form an opinion, criticise, or completely interpret a text one would first have to read the complete literary work as a whole; this enables the reader to make supported judgements on the personality and individuality of the text. The text is always hiding something. Although the reading may define and the interpretation may decide, the text does not define or decide. The text rests as operationally and fundamentally indecidable. Roger Webster frequently uses metaphors of ‘weaving’, ‘tissue’, ‘texture’, ‘strands’, and ‘filiation’ when talking about the structure of texts. [2] He also agrees that "instead, the text is a surface over which the reader can range in any number of ways that the text permits."
Textuality is a practice. Through a text’s textuality, it makes itself mean, makes itself be, and makes itself come about in a particular way. Through its textuality, the text relinquishes its status as identity and affirms its condition as pure difference. In indifference, the text "dedefines" itself, etches itself in a texture or network of meaning, which is not limited to the text itself. Barry describes this as a "structuralist approach to literature, there is a constant movement away from the interpretation of the individual literary work and a parallel drive towards understanding the larger, abstract structures which contain them". [1]
A different view of textuality has been put forward by Rein Raud, according to whom textualities are "ordered sets of texts of different status that are related to each other and come with pre-arranged modes of interpretation". [3] A textuality consists of base-texts, "those that define a textual community and form a part of the necessary cultural competence of its members", [4] result-texts, "bids that have just been accepted and entered circulation, as well as those that have done so some time ago but are still being considered recent arrivals by their recipients", [5] mediated by an operational memory, "a shared (and internally contradictory) mental space of the cultural community and its various subgroups where texts are produced and processed", [6] which contains different kinds of knowledge, standards and codes shared to different extent by the carriers of the culture. According to Raud, this model is complementary to a model of cultural practices, in which the production, distribution and transmission of meaning is regarded in the context of individual participation and activity, while a textuality is necessarily shared and perceived by its carriers to be an objective, albeit constructed, reality.
The word text arose within structuralism as a replacement for the older idea in literary criticism of the "work", which is always complete and deliberately authored. [7] A text must necessarily be thought of as incomplete, indeed as missing something crucial that provides the mechanics of understanding. The text is always partially hidden; one word for the hidden part in literary theory is the subtext . [7]
The concept of the text in structuralism requires a relatively simple relationship between language and writing. Jacques Derrida, a leading post-structuralist, questions this relationship, aiming his critique primarily at Ferdinand de Saussure, who, he claims, does not recognize in the relationship between speech and writing "more than a narrow and derivative function". [8] For Derrida, this approach requires putting too much emphasis on speech:
Barry says that "one of structuralism's characteristic views is the notion that language doesn’t just reflect or record the world: rather, it shapes it, so that how we see is what we see". [1] This is closely linked to "post-structuralism" which is in fact, closely linked also to textuality. And Barry believes that the "post-structuralist maintains that the consequences of this belief are that we enter a universe of radical uncertainty…". [1] Derrida further states:
In short, textuality is an individual and uncertain skill that will always be read and interpreted in texts in different ways, by different people, and at different times. It is a literary tool that can never be defined like an exact science and that will always be influenced by the writer's life, such as, their upbringing, education, culture, age, religion, gender, and multiple other persuading factors.[ citation needed ]
Textuality can be seen, heard, read, and interacted with. [9]
Each of the three forms of medium – oral, print, and electronic – has a different form of textuality that reflects the way the sensory modalities are stimulated.
In philosophy, deconstruction is a loosely-defined set of approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. The concept of deconstruction was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who described it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms and essences which are valued above appearances.
Postmodernism is a term used to refer to a variety of artistic, cultural, and philosophical movements that claim to mark a break with modernism. What they have in common is the conviction that it is no longer possible to rely upon previous ways of representing reality. Still, there is disagreement among experts about its more precise meaning even within narrow contexts.
Post-structuralism is a philosophical movement that questions the objectivity or stability of the various interpretive structures that are posited by structuralism and considers them to be constituted by broader systems of power. Although post-structuralists all present different critiques of structuralism, common themes among them include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of structuralism, as well as an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute its structures. Accordingly, post-structuralism discards the idea of interpreting media within pre-established, socially constructed structures.
Structuralism is an intellectual current and methodological approach, primarily in the social sciences, that interprets elements of human culture by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structural patterns that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel.
Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social philosophy, and interdisciplinary themes relevant to how people interpret meaning. In the humanities in modern academia, the latter style of literary scholarship is an offshoot of post-structuralism. Consequently, the word theory became an umbrella term for scholarly approaches to reading texts, some of which are informed by strands of semiotics, cultural studies, philosophy of language, and continental philosophy.
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in a number of his texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy although he distanced himself from post-structuralism and disowned the word "postmodernity".
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields and influenced the development of many schools of theory, including structuralism, anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism.
In literary theory and aesthetics, authorial intent refers to an author's intent as it is encoded in their work. Authorial intentionalism is the hermeneutical view that an author's intentions should constrain the ways in which a text is properly interpreted. Opponents, who dispute its hermeneutical importance, have labelled this position the intentional fallacy and count it among the informal fallacies.
"Logocentrism" is a term coined by the German philosopher Ludwig Klages in the early 1900s. It refers to the tradition of Western science and philosophy that regards words and language as a fundamental expression of an external reality. It holds the logos as epistemologically superior and that there is an original, irreducible object which the logos represent. According to logocentrism, the logos is the ideal representation of the Platonic ideal.
A binary opposition is a pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning. Binary opposition is the system of language and/or thought by which two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one another. It is the contrast between two mutually exclusive terms, such as on and off, up and down, left and right. Binary opposition is an important concept of structuralism, which sees such distinctions as fundamental to all language and thought. In structuralism, a binary opposition is seen as a fundamental organizer of human philosophy, culture, and language.
Jonathan Culler is an American literary critic. He was Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His published works are in the fields of structuralism, literary theory and literary criticism.
"Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" was a lecture presented at Johns Hopkins University on 21 October 1966 by philosopher Jacques Derrida. The lecture was then published in 1967 as chapter ten of Writing and Difference.
Difference is a key concept of philosophy, denoting the process or set of properties by which one entity is distinguished from another within a relational field or a given conceptual system. In the Western philosophical system, difference is traditionally viewed as being opposed to identity, following the Principles of Leibniz, and in particular, his Law of the identity of indiscernibles. In structuralist and poststructuralist accounts, however, difference is understood to be constitutive of both meaning and identity. In other words, because identity is viewed in non-essentialist terms as a construct, and because constructs only produce meaning through the interplay of differences, it is the case that for both structuralism and poststructuralism, identity cannot be said to exist without difference.
Barbara Ellen Johnson was an American literary critic and translator, born in Boston. She was a Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University. Her scholarship incorporated a variety of structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives—including deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and feminist theory—into a critical, interdisciplinary study of literature. As a scholar, teacher, and translator, Johnson helped make the theories of French philosopher Jacques Derrida accessible to English-speaking audiences in the United States at a time when they had just begun to gain recognition in France. Accordingly, she is often associated with the "Yale School" of academic literary criticism.
Cybertext as defined by Espen Aarseth in 1997 is a type of ergodic literature where the user traverses the text by doing nontrivial work.
Sous rature is a strategic philosophical device originally developed by Martin Heidegger. Though never used in its contemporary French terminology by Heidegger, it is usually translated as 'under erasure', and involves the crossing out of a word within a text, but allowing it to remain legible and in place. Used extensively by Jacques Derrida, it signifies that a word is "inadequate yet necessary"; that a particular signifier is not wholly suitable for the concept it represents, but must be used as the constraints of our language offer nothing better.
Trace is one of the most important concepts in Derridian deconstruction. In the 1960s, Jacques Derrida used this concept in two of his early books, namely Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology.
Indeterminacy in literature is a situation in which components of a text require the reader to make their own decisions about the text's meaning. This can occur if the text's ending does not provide full closure and there are still questions to be answered, or when "the language is such that the author’s original intention is not known". Baldick further describes the concept as "a principle of uncertainty invoked to deny the existence of any final or determinate meaning that could bring to an end the play of meaning between the elements of a text". Therefore, indeterminacy is the belief that it is not possible to decide entirely what a word means when used in a certain circumstance, so the meaning of the whole text must remain open to interpretation.
Rein Raud is an Estonian academic and author.