Philosophy and Literary Theory

The author refers to a paradoxical aspect. What is that aspect?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.

Comparative Literature is a young discipline at the universities and colleges of West Germany: chairs have only been established since the Second World War. For a long time the subject was rejected by historians of literature for reasons not unworthy of consideration, and still today there are representatives of the traditional literary-philosophical departments who consider it superfluous in the sphere of universitas litteratum. But the opposition to Comparative Studies has a paradoxical aspect: most established literature departments are in their very being themselves comparative. Even the names of separate disciplines indicate that literature as a whole, which the comparatists regard as one and indivisible, was only split up from considerations of expedience—a consequence of the fundamentally justified connection between language and literature, but also a carry-over of the dangerous and outmoded nationalistic assumptions of the 19^th and 20^th centuries on to the supernational phenomenon literature.
And the name too, ‘Comparative Literature’, is not very meaningful. It is modeled on the no happier French designation: ‘Litterature comparee’. We keep it simply because we have found no better, for ‘Literary Studies’ would be too vague, and ‘Study of World Literature’ too presumptuous. Yet almost inevitably it gives the impression that the aims of Comparative Literature are limited to comparing German with French literature. Such a proceeding would not promise much success: a general comparison between several national literatures would remain far too vague to produce scientifically relevant results, and a comparison between two authors would reveal more characteristics dividing them than they have in common. Mere parallels seem even more dubious, derived from similarities of structure. As individual creations, works of art are not comparable—and the comparatist knows this as well as anybody else. His goal is no different from that of the nationally defined literary disciplines: it consists of understanding the literary work of art, from as many sides as possible. The difference lies in the conception of literature itself and in the methods.
Although by ‘literature’ we usually mean the established work of art, nevertheless the words of any author who has been able to bring his subject into an appropriate form may claim to count as a work of art—not only poetry but prose as well, not only the drama but also the novel, not only the short story but also the essay, the philosophical tract, the biography, history, specialized writing, and so forth—but only when the form is appropriate to the content. Appropriateness is as hard to grasp as most aesthetic categories: it remains dependent on the critic’s taste, and thus to a certain degree subjective. On the other hand taste is to be formed on the models of the masters, and here lies the necessity for a canon of aesthetically exemplary ‘classical’ authors, established by the consensus of connoisseurs, although at the same time always subject to revision.
The classical author sets to taste in prose and verse the limits of the possible. To know these limits we read the classics—not only Horace’s odes, however, but also the Art of Poetry, not only Dante’s Commedia but also the Vita nuova and De Vulgari Eloquentia, not only Goethe’s poems, plays and novels, but also the scientific and critical prose, the letters and conversations. We extend the realm of the literary beyond linguistic boundaries, and at the same time beyond the boundaries of the merely fictitious, the strictly ‘imaginative’; but we also raise our qualitative demands through an aesthetic criterion, so as not to risk being suffocated under the mass of what has been written. The history of literature is no telephone book for us, in which the subscribers are all listed together, no General Assembly of the United Nations in which the voices of the Great Powers count for no more than those of the smallest political provinces; it is the liber aureus of the aesthetically successful and historically effective works of literature. Only this limitation, which of course does not exclude individual penetration in depth, makes the meaningful study of Comparative Literature possible.

Which of the following sums up the essence of the passage?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.

Comparative Literature is a young discipline at the universities and colleges of West Germany: chairs have only been established since the Second World War. For a long time the subject was rejected by historians of literature for reasons not unworthy of consideration, and still today there are representatives of the traditional literary-philosophical departments who consider it superfluous in the sphere of universitas litteratum. But the opposition to Comparative Studies has a paradoxical aspect: most established literature departments are in their very being themselves comparative. Even the names of separate disciplines indicate that literature as a whole, which the comparatists regard as one and indivisible, was only split up from considerations of expedience—a consequence of the fundamentally justified connection between language and literature, but also a carry-over of the dangerous and outmoded nationalistic assumptions of the 19^th and 20^th centuries on to the supernational phenomenon literature.
And the name too, ‘Comparative Literature’, is not very meaningful. It is modeled on the no happier French designation: ‘Litterature comparee’. We keep it simply because we have found no better, for ‘Literary Studies’ would be too vague, and ‘Study of World Literature’ too presumptuous. Yet almost inevitably it gives the impression that the aims of Comparative Literature are limited to comparing German with French literature. Such a proceeding would not promise much success: a general comparison between several national literatures would remain far too vague to produce scientifically relevant results, and a comparison between two authors would reveal more characteristics dividing them than they have in common. Mere parallels seem even more dubious, derived from similarities of structure. As individual creations, works of art are not comparable—and the comparatist knows this as well as anybody else. His goal is no different from that of the nationally defined literary disciplines: it consists of understanding the literary work of art, from as many sides as possible. The difference lies in the conception of literature itself and in the methods.
Although by ‘literature’ we usually mean the established work of art, nevertheless the words of any author who has been able to bring his subject into an appropriate form may claim to count as a work of art—not only poetry but prose as well, not only the drama but also the novel, not only the short story but also the essay, the philosophical tract, the biography, history, specialized writing, and so forth—but only when the form is appropriate to the content. Appropriateness is as hard to grasp as most aesthetic categories: it remains dependent on the critic’s taste, and thus to a certain degree subjective. On the other hand taste is to be formed on the models of the masters, and here lies the necessity for a canon of aesthetically exemplary ‘classical’ authors, established by the consensus of connoisseurs, although at the same time always subject to revision.
The classical author sets to taste in prose and verse the limits of the possible. To know these limits we read the classics—not only Horace’s odes, however, but also the Art of Poetry, not only Dante’s Commedia but also the Vita nuova and De Vulgari Eloquentia, not only Goethe’s poems, plays and novels, but also the scientific and critical prose, the letters and conversations. We extend the realm of the literary beyond linguistic boundaries, and at the same time beyond the boundaries of the merely fictitious, the strictly ‘imaginative’; but we also raise our qualitative demands through an aesthetic criterion, so as not to risk being suffocated under the mass of what has been written. The history of literature is no telephone book for us, in which the subscribers are all listed together, no General Assembly of the United Nations in which the voices of the Great Powers count for no more than those of the smallest political provinces; it is the liber aureus of the aesthetically successful and historically effective works of literature. Only this limitation, which of course does not exclude individual penetration in depth, makes the meaningful study of Comparative Literature possible.

According to the passage the goal of the comparatist is

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.

Comparative Literature is a young discipline at the universities and colleges of West Germany: chairs have only been established since the Second World War. For a long time the subject was rejected by historians of literature for reasons not unworthy of consideration, and still today there are representatives of the traditional literary-philosophical departments who consider it superfluous in the sphere of universitas litteratum. But the opposition to Comparative Studies has a paradoxical aspect: most established literature departments are in their very being themselves comparative. Even the names of separate disciplines indicate that literature as a whole, which the comparatists regard as one and indivisible, was only split up from considerations of expedience—a consequence of the fundamentally justified connection between language and literature, but also a carry-over of the dangerous and outmoded nationalistic assumptions of the 19^th and 20^th centuries on to the supernational phenomenon literature.
And the name too, ‘Comparative Literature’, is not very meaningful. It is modeled on the no happier French designation: ‘Litterature comparee’. We keep it simply because we have found no better, for ‘Literary Studies’ would be too vague, and ‘Study of World Literature’ too presumptuous. Yet almost inevitably it gives the impression that the aims of Comparative Literature are limited to comparing German with French literature. Such a proceeding would not promise much success: a general comparison between several national literatures would remain far too vague to produce scientifically relevant results, and a comparison between two authors would reveal more characteristics dividing them than they have in common. Mere parallels seem even more dubious, derived from similarities of structure. As individual creations, works of art are not comparable—and the comparatist knows this as well as anybody else. His goal is no different from that of the nationally defined literary disciplines: it consists of understanding the literary work of art, from as many sides as possible. The difference lies in the conception of literature itself and in the methods.
Although by ‘literature’ we usually mean the established work of art, nevertheless the words of any author who has been able to bring his subject into an appropriate form may claim to count as a work of art—not only poetry but prose as well, not only the drama but also the novel, not only the short story but also the essay, the philosophical tract, the biography, history, specialized writing, and so forth—but only when the form is appropriate to the content. Appropriateness is as hard to grasp as most aesthetic categories: it remains dependent on the critic’s taste, and thus to a certain degree subjective. On the other hand taste is to be formed on the models of the masters, and here lies the necessity for a canon of aesthetically exemplary ‘classical’ authors, established by the consensus of connoisseurs, although at the same time always subject to revision.
The classical author sets to taste in prose and verse the limits of the possible. To know these limits we read the classics—not only Horace’s odes, however, but also the Art of Poetry, not only Dante’s Commedia but also the Vita nuova and De Vulgari Eloquentia, not only Goethe’s poems, plays and novels, but also the scientific and critical prose, the letters and conversations. We extend the realm of the literary beyond linguistic boundaries, and at the same time beyond the boundaries of the merely fictitious, the strictly ‘imaginative’; but we also raise our qualitative demands through an aesthetic criterion, so as not to risk being suffocated under the mass of what has been written. The history of literature is no telephone book for us, in which the subscribers are all listed together, no General Assembly of the United Nations in which the voices of the Great Powers count for no more than those of the smallest political provinces; it is the liber aureus of the aesthetically successful and historically effective works of literature. Only this limitation, which of course does not exclude individual penetration in depth, makes the meaningful study of Comparative Literature possible.

According to the passage, Derrida believes that

Each of the two passages given below is followed by a set of four questions.  Choose the best answer to each question.

PASSAGE I
While complex in the extreme, Derrida’s work has proven to be a particularly influential approach to the analysis of the ways in which language structures our understandings of ourselves and the world we inhabit, an approach he termed deconstruction.  In its simplest formulation, deconstruction can be taken to refer to a methodological strategy which seeks to uncover layers of hidden meaning in a text that have been denied or suppressed. The term ‘text’, in this respect, does not refer simply to a written form of communication, however. Rather, texts are something we all produce and reproduce constantly in our everyday social relations, be they spoken, written or embedded in the construction of material artifacts. At the heart of Derrida’s deconstructive approach is his critique of what he perceives to be the totalitarian impulse of the Enlightenment pursuit to bring all the exists in the world under the domain of a representative language a pursuit he refers to as logocentrism. Logocentrism is the search for a rational language that is able to know and represent the world and all its aspects perfectly and accurately.  Its totalitarian dimension, for Derrida at least, lies primarily in its tendency to marginalize or dismiss all that does not neatly comply with its particular linguistic representations, a tendency that, throughout history, has all too frequently been manifested in the form of authoritarian institutions.  Thus logocentrism has, in its search for the truth of absolute representation.  Subsumed difference and oppressed that which it designates as its alien ‘other’. For Derrida, western civilization has been built upon such a systematic assault on alien cultures and ways of life, typically in the name of reason and progress.

In response to logocentrism, deconstruction posits the idea that the mechanism by which this process of marginalization and the ordering of truth occurs is through establishing systems of binary opposition.  Oppositional linguistic dualisms, such as rational/irrational, culture/nature and good/bad are not, however, constructed as equal partners as they are in, say, the semiological structuralism of Saussure. Rather, they exist, for Derrida, in series of hierarchical relationships with the first term normally occupying a superior position.  Derrida defines the relationship between such oppositional terms using the neologism difference.  This refers to the realization that in any statement, oppositional terms using the neologism difference. This refers to the realization that in any statement, oppositional terms differ from each other (for instance, the difference between rationally and irrationality is constructed through oppositional usage), and at the same time, hierarchical relationship is maintained by the deference of one term to the other (in the positing of rationality over irrationality, for instance). It is this latter point which is perhaps the key to understanding Derrida’s approach to deconstruction.

For the fact that at any given time one term must defer to its oppositional ‘other’, means that the two terms are constantly in a state of interdependence. The presence of one is dependent upon the absence or ‘absent-presence’ of the ‘other’, such as in the case of good and evil, whereby to understand the nature of one, we must constantly relate it to the absent term in order to grasp its meaning. That is, to do good, we must understand that our act is not evil for without that comparison the term becomes meaningless. Put simply, deconstruction represents an attempt to demonstrate the absent – presence of this oppositional ‘other’, to show that what we say or write is in itself not expressive simply of what is present, but also of what is absent. Thus, deconstruction seeks to reveal the interdependence of apparently dichotomous terms and their meanings relative to their textual context; that is, within the linguistic power relations which structure dichotomous terms hierarchically. In Derrida’s own words, a deconstructive 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 a language that he uses …[It] attempts to make the not – seen accessible to sight”.

Meaning, then, is never fixed or stable, whatever the intention of the author of a text. For Derrida, language is a system of relations that are dynamic, in that all meanings we ascribe to the world are dependent not only on what we believe to be present but also on what is absent.  Thus, any act of interpretation must refer not only to what the author of a text intends, but also to what is absent from his or her intention. This insight leads, once again, to Derrida’s further rejection of the idea of the definitive authority of the intentional agent or subject. The subject is decentred; it is conceived as the outcome of relations of difference. As author of its own biography, the subject thus becomes the ideological fiction of modernity and its logocentric philosophy, one that depends upon the formation of hierarchical dualisms, which repress and deny the presence of the absent ‘other’. No meaning can, therefore, ever be definitive, but is merely an outcome of a particular interpretation.

According to the passage, Derrida believes that the system of binary opposition

Each of the two passages given below is followed by a set of four questions.  Choose the best answer to each question.

PASSAGE I
While complex in the extreme, Derrida’s work has proven to be a particularly influential approach to the analysis of the ways in which language structures our understandings of ourselves and the world we inhabit, an approach he termed deconstruction.  In its simplest formulation, deconstruction can be taken to refer to a methodological strategy which seeks to uncover layers of hidden meaning in a text that have been denied or suppressed. The term ‘text’, in this respect, does not refer simply to a written form of communication, however. Rather, texts are something we all produce and reproduce constantly in our everyday social relations, be they spoken, written or embedded in the construction of material artifacts. At the heart of Derrida’s deconstructive approach is his critique of what he perceives to be the totalitarian impulse of the Enlightenment pursuit to bring all the exists in the world under the domain of a representative language a pursuit he refers to as logocentrism. Logocentrism is the search for a rational language that is able to know and represent the world and all its aspects perfectly and accurately.  Its totalitarian dimension, for Derrida at least, lies primarily in its tendency to marginalize or dismiss all that does not neatly comply with its particular linguistic representations, a tendency that, throughout history, has all too frequently been manifested in the form of authoritarian institutions.  Thus logocentrism has, in its search for the truth of absolute representation.  Subsumed difference and oppressed that which it designates as its alien ‘other’. For Derrida, western civilization has been built upon such a systematic assault on alien cultures and ways of life, typically in the name of reason and progress.

In response to logocentrism, deconstruction posits the idea that the mechanism by which this process of marginalization and the ordering of truth occurs is through establishing systems of binary opposition.  Oppositional linguistic dualisms, such as rational/irrational, culture/nature and good/bad are not, however, constructed as equal partners as they are in, say, the semiological structuralism of Saussure. Rather, they exist, for Derrida, in series of hierarchical relationships with the first term normally occupying a superior position.  Derrida defines the relationship between such oppositional terms using the neologism difference.  This refers to the realization that in any statement, oppositional terms using the neologism difference. This refers to the realization that in any statement, oppositional terms differ from each other (for instance, the difference between rationally and irrationality is constructed through oppositional usage), and at the same time, hierarchical relationship is maintained by the deference of one term to the other (in the positing of rationality over irrationality, for instance). It is this latter point which is perhaps the key to understanding Derrida’s approach to deconstruction.

For the fact that at any given time one term must defer to its oppositional ‘other’, means that the two terms are constantly in a state of interdependence. The presence of one is dependent upon the absence or ‘absent-presence’ of the ‘other’, such as in the case of good and evil, whereby to understand the nature of one, we must constantly relate it to the absent term in order to grasp its meaning. That is, to do good, we must understand that our act is not evil for without that comparison the term becomes meaningless. Put simply, deconstruction represents an attempt to demonstrate the absent – presence of this oppositional ‘other’, to show that what we say or write is in itself not expressive simply of what is present, but also of what is absent. Thus, deconstruction seeks to reveal the interdependence of apparently dichotomous terms and their meanings relative to their textual context; that is, within the linguistic power relations which structure dichotomous terms hierarchically. In Derrida’s own words, a deconstructive 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 a language that he uses …[It] attempts to make the not – seen accessible to sight”.

Meaning, then, is never fixed or stable, whatever the intention of the author of a text. For Derrida, language is a system of relations that are dynamic, in that all meanings we ascribe to the world are dependent not only on what we believe to be present but also on what is absent.  Thus, any act of interpretation must refer not only to what the author of a text intends, but also to what is absent from his or her intention. This insight leads, once again, to Derrida’s further rejection of the idea of the definitive authority of the intentional agent or subject. The subject is decentred; it is conceived as the outcome of relations of difference. As author of its own biography, the subject thus becomes the ideological fiction of modernity and its logocentric philosophy, one that depends upon the formation of hierarchical dualisms, which repress and deny the presence of the absent ‘other’. No meaning can, therefore, ever be definitive, but is merely an outcome of a particular interpretation.

To Derrida, 'logocentrism' does not imply:

Each of the two passages given below is followed by a set of four questions.  Choose the best answer to each question.

PASSAGE I
While complex in the extreme, Derrida’s work has proven to be a particularly influential approach to the analysis of the ways in which language structures our understandings of ourselves and the world we inhabit, an approach he termed deconstruction.  In its simplest formulation, deconstruction can be taken to refer to a methodological strategy which seeks to uncover layers of hidden meaning in a text that have been denied or suppressed. The term ‘text’, in this respect, does not refer simply to a written form of communication, however. Rather, texts are something we all produce and reproduce constantly in our everyday social relations, be they spoken, written or embedded in the construction of material artifacts. At the heart of Derrida’s deconstructive approach is his critique of what he perceives to be the totalitarian impulse of the Enlightenment pursuit to bring all the exists in the world under the domain of a representative language a pursuit he refers to as logocentrism. Logocentrism is the search for a rational language that is able to know and represent the world and all its aspects perfectly and accurately.  Its totalitarian dimension, for Derrida at least, lies primarily in its tendency to marginalize or dismiss all that does not neatly comply with its particular linguistic representations, a tendency that, throughout history, has all too frequently been manifested in the form of authoritarian institutions.  Thus logocentrism has, in its search for the truth of absolute representation.  Subsumed difference and oppressed that which it designates as its alien ‘other’. For Derrida, western civilization has been built upon such a systematic assault on alien cultures and ways of life, typically in the name of reason and progress.

In response to logocentrism, deconstruction posits the idea that the mechanism by which this process of marginalization and the ordering of truth occurs is through establishing systems of binary opposition.  Oppositional linguistic dualisms, such as rational/irrational, culture/nature and good/bad are not, however, constructed as equal partners as they are in, say, the semiological structuralism of Saussure. Rather, they exist, for Derrida, in series of hierarchical relationships with the first term normally occupying a superior position.  Derrida defines the relationship between such oppositional terms using the neologism difference.  This refers to the realization that in any statement, oppositional terms using the neologism difference. This refers to the realization that in any statement, oppositional terms differ from each other (for instance, the difference between rationally and irrationality is constructed through oppositional usage), and at the same time, hierarchical relationship is maintained by the deference of one term to the other (in the positing of rationality over irrationality, for instance). It is this latter point which is perhaps the key to understanding Derrida’s approach to deconstruction.

For the fact that at any given time one term must defer to its oppositional ‘other’, means that the two terms are constantly in a state of interdependence. The presence of one is dependent upon the absence or ‘absent-presence’ of the ‘other’, such as in the case of good and evil, whereby to understand the nature of one, we must constantly relate it to the absent term in order to grasp its meaning. That is, to do good, we must understand that our act is not evil for without that comparison the term becomes meaningless. Put simply, deconstruction represents an attempt to demonstrate the absent – presence of this oppositional ‘other’, to show that what we say or write is in itself not expressive simply of what is present, but also of what is absent. Thus, deconstruction seeks to reveal the interdependence of apparently dichotomous terms and their meanings relative to their textual context; that is, within the linguistic power relations which structure dichotomous terms hierarchically. In Derrida’s own words, a deconstructive 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 a language that he uses …[It] attempts to make the not – seen accessible to sight”.

Meaning, then, is never fixed or stable, whatever the intention of the author of a text. For Derrida, language is a system of relations that are dynamic, in that all meanings we ascribe to the world are dependent not only on what we believe to be present but also on what is absent.  Thus, any act of interpretation must refer not only to what the author of a text intends, but also to what is absent from his or her intention. This insight leads, once again, to Derrida’s further rejection of the idea of the definitive authority of the intentional agent or subject. The subject is decentred; it is conceived as the outcome of relations of difference. As author of its own biography, the subject thus becomes the ideological fiction of modernity and its logocentric philosophy, one that depends upon the formation of hierarchical dualisms, which repress and deny the presence of the absent ‘other’. No meaning can, therefore, ever be definitive, but is merely an outcome of a particular interpretation.