Who-What-Whom-What

Overture

[This—that may be interchangeably called an article or an essay—is an attempt of its author to critically ponder over literary texts in general and poetic ones in particular. Appearing with a rather whimsically and somewhat jocosely chosen title, this article of mine is intended to reflect the very process, if not principle, of language: ‘who says what to whom in what conditions’. The same process or principle may be equally interestingly applied to the reading of all forms of literature, or, at least, this is what this author believes, though, with a sort of utter disregard of what the Canadian myth-critic Northrop Frye¹ says in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957) something to the effect that ‘to be an “author”, with “authority” over one’s own meanings is a myth’. The given article is also an authorial attempt to help its readers rid of what may be called the ‘humanist fallacy’: the naive notion that a literary text is just a kind of transcript of the living voice of a real man or woman addressing us.]

Procedural

Before we try to plunge deep into the topic, let’s embark with the very definition of the ‘text’ itself. A text may be roughly defined as ‘a piece of speech or writing’. Technically speaking, a text may be defined as the highest linguistic unit as can be seen below:

TEXT

SENTENCE

CLAUSE

PHRASE

WORD

MORPHEME

PHONEME

If seen in this way, in this phoneme-to-text vertical scale, text occupies the highest place and enjoys a sort of majestic grandeur in the realm of the linguistic units. Though, to some, text may appear like a combination of sentences, or a sort of paragraph, it is not really that simple. Etymologically speaking, the term ‘text’ is said to have been derived from the Latin ‘textus’ meaning: woven cloth; or web. So, it has also something to do with the texture of the work. Formally speaking, text may be also called ‘discourse’, and also ‘utterance’, particularly when spoken. So, anything spoken, written, printed, or recorded— by any means or by any convention—is a text. A poem is a text, a short story is a text, or, say, the whole domain of literature is the domain of texts. The kind of what we usually call a non-pragmatic text—the kind of text one may expect to find in literature is what we call a ‘literary’ text; and, thus being, the kind of text one may encounter in a poem is a ‘poetic’ text; and the like.

If we are to revisit our title, we may be duly reminiscent of A. J. Greimas², who, in his Semantique Structurale (1966), brings forth his concept of an actant, which is neither a specific narrative even, nor a character but a structural unit. His six actants are:

Subject   and    Object

Sender    and    Receiver

Helper    and    Opponent.

In my [our?] title, ‘who’ is ‘subject’; the first ‘what’ is ‘object’; ‘whom’ is ‘receiver’; and the last in our order-the second ‘what’ is the whole ‘situation’ they all are in.

Here, one may be also reminiscent of Tzvetan Todorov³, who attempts a similar ‘grammatical’ analysis of Boccaccio’s⁴ “Decameron”⁵, in which characters are seen as nouns, their attributes as adjectives, and their actions as verbs. Here, I am also tempted to offer a sort of metonymic association of my title with four of the cases in the [English] grammatical case-system. My ‘who’ is ‘nominative’; first ‘what’ is ‘accusative’; ‘whom’ ‘dative’; and the last in our order-the second ‘what’ ‘locative’.

If one is conceited enough, here as I am, to stretch this argument even further, one may also relate it to the [English] grammatical pronominal person-system. ‘Who’ is the ‘speaker’: the first person; the first ‘what’ is the ‘topic’: the third person; ‘whom’ is the ‘addressee’: the second person; and the last in our order-the second ‘what’ is the ‘situation’ or locus-in quo, in which the whole narrative occurs.

I think and think I think rightly that the whole phenomenon of reading a literary, or, say, poetic text, is a matter of applying or fitting this aforesaid ‘who-what –whom-what’ principle or process [to a given text]. As poetic readers, if we find ourselves in a position of having devised answers to these [four] questions of ‘who-what-whom-what’, we are perhaps entitled to feel in a way that we have more or less understood some, if not whole, aspect of the given text we are trying to decipher.

Corpus

Yes, I say ‘corpus’, because what follows may not be an organic whole; but it is likely to be a body or collection of writings on the topical issue of a literary or poetic text—as to how to read and haply even write it, as to how to analyse it, evaluate it, interpret it, outerpret ⁶ it, display⁷ it, demonstrate⁸ it, and decipher it. I am a strong adherent of the structuralist belief that ‘the most intriguing texts for criticism are not those which can be read, but those which are writable (scriptable)—texts which encourage the critic to carve them up, transpose them into different discourses, produce his or her semi-arbitrary play of meaning athwart the work itself. The reader or critic shifts from the role of consumer to that of producer. The ‘writable’ text, usually a modernist one, has no determinate meaning, no settled signifieds, but is plural and diffuse, an inexhaustible tissue or galaxy of signifiers, a seamless weave of codes and fragments of codes, through which the critic may cut his own errant path. There are no beginnings and no ends, no sequences which cannot be reversed, no hierarchy of textual ‘levels’ to tell you what is more or less significant’.

All literary texts are woven out of other literary texts, as, confessedly, I am doing here. But, while we weave, we weave not in the conventional sense that they bear the traces of ‘influence’ [a very interesting word, originally, meaning something like: flowing-in] but in the more radical sense that every word, phrase or segment is a reworking or recreating of other writings which precede or surround the individual work. As T. S. Eliot⁹ says something to the effect that we cannot totally break away from the ‘tradition’ in the name of ‘individual talent’ [or, experiment?]; and nor can we subdue our individual talent in the name of our ardent adherence to the tradition. When we think we write, we do not write; and when we think we create, we do not create; what, in fact, we are doing is we are “rewriting” and “recreating”. There is no such thing as literary ‘originality’, no such thing as the ‘first’ literary work: all literature is ‘intertextual’—or, say, mutatis mutandis¹⁰.

Meaning, as told by [post]structuralists, is scattered or dispersed along the whole chain of signifiers, it cannot be easily nailed down, it is never fully present in any one sign alone, but is rather a kind of constant flickering of presence and absence together. So, reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace. There is also another sense in which we can never quite close our fists over meaning, which arises from the fact that language is a temporal process. When I [we] read a sentence, the meaning of it is somehow suspended, something deferred or still to come: one signifier relays me [us] to another, and that to another, earlier meanings are modified by the latter ones, and although the sentence may come to the end, the process of language itself does not. There is always more meaning where that came from.

A poetic text is to be read and read again. It is not something that offers us meaning in one, single reading as with the case of most pragmatic texts. So, one is always advised to offer to a poetic text as many readings as possible; but this is not the “labour lost”, for with each reading it offers you a new kind of pleasure, a new kind of delight and a new nuance of meaning. If we are to create an analogy, here, a poetic text is more like a “pond of water”; and the reader is more like a “diver”. When the diver-become- reader plunges into the pond-become-text, waves- become-meanings [of the text] get displaced, and they [waves-become-meanings] deviate from the centre. So, very strangely, when we are inside the text, the meaning is not there; and for not being unable to grasp any meaning, we come out of it very forlorn and desperate saying: “I cannot understand it—or, it is very difficult; or, it is void of meaning; or, even I hate it, as in the manner of Marianne Moore¹¹, who says: ‘I, too, dislike it [poetry]’ ’’. BUT, if we remain inside the pond for some well-appreciable amount of time [within it] —say—for some fifteen minutes, or half an hour, or so—the waves of meanings tend to return back to the centre so that you may pluck them [as you pluck flowers!] with a sense jocundity and euphoria. So, we usually speak of two kinds of meanings in a poetic text—centripetal and centrifugal meanings—respectively, meanings tending towards the centre, and those deviating from the centre. So, the whole crux of this analogy is that we should always offer as many readings as possible to a given poetic text.

In a poetic text, meaning is thus never identical with itself. For example, ‘cat’ may mean a furry four-legged creature, a malicious person, a knotted whip, an American, a horizontal beam for raising a ship’s anchor, a six-legged tripod, a short tappered stick, and so on. There is a continual flickering, spilling and defusing of meaning—what Derrida¹² calls ‘dissemination of meaning’. For example, Barthes’¹³ method in his book S/Z is to divide the Balzac¹⁴ story of Sarrasine into a number of small units or ‘lexes’, and to apply to them five codes:

• the ‘proiaretic code’: narrative code;
• a ‘hermeneutic code’: concerned with the tale’s unfolding enigmas;
• a ‘cultural code’: examining the stock social knowledge on which the work draws;
• a ‘semic code’: dealing with the connotations of person, places and objects; and
• a ‘symbolic code’: charting the sexual and psychoanalytical relations set up in the text.

According to Barthes, the Balzac novella concerns a crisis in literary representation, sexual relations, and economic exchange. There is no clear division for a post-structuralist like Barthes between ‘criticism’ and ‘creation’: both modes are subsumed into ‘writing’ as such. In his masterly early essay Writing Degree Zero (1953), Barthes maps something of the historical development by which writing for the French nineteenth- century symbolist poets becomes an “intransitive act”: not writing for a particular purpose on a specific topic, as in the age of ‘Classical’ literature, but writing as an end and a passion in itself.

Practical criticism, one of the major luminaries of which is F. R. Leavis¹⁵, means to look at the text as it is—going through word after word—or, say, reading between the lines— or, if we are to speak in the Leavisite terms “close reading”; and, therefore, it is what we sometimes call “lemon-squeezing style of analysis”, and not “reading three words in average per line” as is the case with some conventional criticism. We are sometimes told that literary appreciation is not something we “do”, but [it is] something we must “let happen”. As told by an American hermeneuticist E. D. Hirsch Jr.¹⁶, in his Validity in Interpretation (1967), ‘significances vary throughout history, whereas meanings remain constant; authors put in meanings, whereas readers assign significances. …’ A literary work may mean different things to different people at different times. For Hirsch, an author’s meaning is his own, and should not be stolen or trespassed upon by the reader. The meaning of the text is not to be socialized, made the public property of its various readers; it belongs solely to the author, who should have the exclusive rights over its disposal long after he or she is dead.

Hirsch’s arguments are, however, not totally irrefutable. They are prone to be refuted, at least, on the following two grounds:

1. That meaning is unchangeable. => What, on earth, it means! Meanings keep on changing as our thoughts keep on changing. Somebody has told very beautifully and interestingly that ‘a literary work can mean one thing on Monday and another on Friday’.
2. That the author’s meaning is his own. => It is again rife with debate and equally refutable. Literary texts do not [survivingly] exist on bookshelves; they are processes of significance materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital [and, central] as the author.

For Stanley Fish¹⁷, one of the American exponents of ‘reception theory’ or ‘reception aesthetics’, reading is not a matter of discovering what the text means, but a process of experiencing what it does to you. But, what a text ‘does’ to us is actually a matter of what we do to it. The claim that we can make a literary text mean whatever we like is [in] one sense justified. When we analyse literature, we are speaking of literature; when we evaluate it we are speaking of ourselves. …Literary works are made out of other literary works, not out of any material external to the literary system itself.

It’s, again, Northrop Frye, who, in the shape of his mighty ‘totalization’ of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism (1957), says something to the effect that ‘at the root of all literature lay four “narrative categories”, the comic, romantic, tragic and ironic, which could be seen to correspond respectively to the four mythoi of spring, summer, autumn and winter. A theory of literary ‘modes’ could be outlined, whereby in myth the hero is superior in kind to others, in romantic superior in degree, in the ‘high mimetic’ modes of tragedy and epic superior in degree to others but not to his environment; in the ‘low mimetic’ modes of comedy and realism equal to the rest of us, and in satire and irony inferior.

Tragedy and comedy may be subdivided into high mimetic, low mimetic and ironic; tragedy is about human isolation, comedy about human integration. Three recurrent patterns of symbolism—apocalyptic, demonic and analogical—are identified. The whole system can then be put into motion as a cyclic theory of literary history: Literature passes from myth to irony and then reverts to myth, and in 1957, we were evidently somewhere in the ironic phase with signs of an impending return to the mythic.

Yuri Lotman¹⁸, a leading Soviet semiotician of the so-called school of Tartu, in his works The Structure of the Artistic Text (1970) and The Analysis of the Poetic Text (1972), sees the poetic text as a stratified system in which meaning only exists contextually, governed by sets of similarities and oppositions. …A poetic text is ‘semantically saturated’, condensing more ‘information’ than any other discourse; but whereas for modern communication theory in general an increase in ‘information’ leads to a decrease in ‘communication’ [since one cannot ‘take in’ all that one is so intensely told], this is not so in poetry because of its unique kind of internal organization. Poetry has a minimum of ‘redundancy’— …Poems are bad when they do not carry sufficient information, for, as Lotman remarks, ‘information is beauty’.

The Poetic text for Lotman is [thus] a ‘system of systems’, a ‘relation of relations’…A poem, in fact, can only be re-read, not read; since some of its structures can only be perceived retrospectively. Poetry activates the full body of the signifier, presses the word to work to its utmost under the intense pressure of surrounding words, and so to release its richest potential. Whatever we perceive in the text is perceived only by contrast and difference.

To understand a poem means grasping its language as being ‘oriented’ towards the reader from a certain range of positions: in reading, we build up a sense of what kind of effects this language is trying to achieve (‘intention’); what sorts of rhetoric it considers appropriate to use, what assumptions govern the kinds of poetic tactics it employs, what attitudes towards reality these imply.

From the structuralist point of view, the ideal reader or ‘super-reader’ would need to be fully equipped with all the technical knowledge essential for deciphering the work, to be faultless in applying this knowledge, and free of any hampering restrictions. If this model was pressed to an extreme, he or she would have to be stateless, classless, ungendered, free of ethnic characteristics and without limiting cultural assumptions—though it is true that one does not tend to meet many readers who fill this bill entirely satisfactorily. The concept of ideal or ‘super-reader’ owed much to the American linguist Noam Chomsky’s¹⁹ notion of linguistic ‘competence’, by which was meant the innate capacities which allowed us to master the underlying rules of language. But not even Levi- Strauss²⁰ was able to read texts as would the Almighty himself.

Epilogue

In talking about the conventional critics and their rather intolerant attitude towards new-fangled theories and ideas, Terry Eagleton²¹ very beautifully and jocosely tells that ‘anything unlikely to prove distasteful in the middle-class suburbs is supplied with a work permit; less well-heeled ideas are packed back on the next boat’. ‘Conventional critics’, he says, ‘operate rather like intellectual immigration officers: their job is to stand at Dover²² as the new-fangled ideas are unloaded from Paris [or, from elsewhere], examine them for the bits and pieces which seem more or less reconcilable with traditional critical techniques, wave these goods genially on and keep out of the country the rather more explosive items of equipment (Marxism, feminism, Freudianism) which have arrived with them.

Literary criticism can become a kind of metacriticism: its role is not primarily to make interpretative or evaluative statements but to hold back and examine the logic of such statements, to analyse what we are up to, what codes and models we are applying, when we make them. ‘To engage in the study of literature’, Jonathan Culler²³ has argued, ‘is not to produce yet another interpretation of King Lear²⁴ but to advance one’s understanding of the conventions and operations of an institution, a mode of discourse…

The competent reader is one who can apply to the text certain rules; but what are the rules for applying rules?… But, there are no same rules and sure rules. What are or are not rules or non-rules is very difficult to tell. I [we] can only settle the argument by appealing to the authority of the literary institution, saying: ‘This is what we mean by this or that’. If asked why we should follow this particular rule in the first place, I [we] can only once more appeal to the authority of the literary institution and say: ‘This is the kind of thing we do’. To which you [one] can always reply: ‘Well, [in that case] do something else’.

Lastly,

I end my ‘Who-What-Whom-What’ essay, here, with due regard to the statement sometimes heard in the realm of hermeneutics that ‘the more information the work [text] provides the more indeterminate it becomes’.  With a pre-supposed leave of my audience, I say, as long as literature is there, ‘Who-What-Whom-What’ principle will be there in the course of literary appreciation irrespective of theories—political, social, cultural, critical, literary, poetic, or whatsoever—one may find himself or herself in luxuriant indulgence.

O
Who what whom what
Hail to thee, blithe spirit²⁵!
For
When thou hast done, thou hast [not] done
For I have [no] more²⁶.
Long-live ‘Who-What-Whom-What’!!!

(Mr. Pokhrel is a reader in the Department of English at Tri Chandra College, Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu.  His major areas of interest include philosophy both oriental and occidental, literary and poetic criticism, and the like. He has to his credit some books by the names ‘A Brief Introduction to English Language and Literature (1999); and ‘Ityadi’ (2013)’; a Readers Commentary on Reading and Writing across the Disciplines(2024). He has also written and published, in various local academic and literary journals, articles and some works of fiction on a wide variety of topics both in English and Nepali. In particular, his special area of interest is poetry, both English, American, and the others.)

ENDNOTES

1. Frye, Northrop: [Full name: Herman Northrop “Norrie” Frye: July 14, 1912—January 23, 1991]: A Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, he is regarded as one of the most influential figures of the 20^th century English literary criticism. He is said to belong to the school of archetypal literary criticism and Romanticism. In particular, he shewed his interests in ‘imagination, archetype, myth, and the Bible’. Some of his major works are: Fearful Symmetry (1947); Anatomy of Criticism (1957); The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (1971).  1

2. Greimas, A. J. : [Algirdas Julien/Julius Greimas: 9 March 1917 Tula, Imperial Russia—27 February 1992 Paris, France]: A Lithuanian born, he is said to be the most prominent of the French semioticians, along with Roland Barthes. Some of his notable ideas were: ‘semiotic square, [also known as the Greimas Square, a tool used in the structural analysis of the relationships between semiotic signs, operating particularly on four terms: S₁₌ positive seme; S₂= negative seme; S= complex axis; and ~S= neutral axis], narrative grammar, semiotics and discourse theory’. Some of his major works are: Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method (1966); On Meaning (1970); Maupassant: The Semiotics of Text (1976); The Social Sciences: A Semantic View (1976/1989). 3

3. Todorov, Tzvetan : [born March 1, 1939 Sofia, Bulgaria: Residence— Paris, France]: A Bulgarian-French literary, cultural theorist and thought historian, he is chiefly remembered for study of ‘fantasy’. Some of his widely-read books are: The Poetics of Prose (1971); Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle (1984); Hope and Memory (2000); The Conquest of America (1982); Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (1991). 3

4. Boccaccio, Giovanni: [1313—21 December 1375]: An Italian Renaissance humanist, author and poet, a friend, student and correspondent of Petrarch, he is particularly renowned for his such works as Decameron (1349-52/ 1370-71), On Famous Women, and also for his poetry in Italian vernacular. 3

5. Decameron, The: Also known as the Book of Prince Galehaut, is a fourteenth-century medieval allegory by Giovanni Boccaccio, told as a frame story encompassing 100 tales by ten young people. Literally and etymologically, Decameron is a term derived from Greek, meaning: “ten-day [event]”; and stories in it range from the ‘erotic’ to the ‘tragic’. Tales of wit, practical jokes, and life lessons contribute to the mosaic. In addition to its literary import, it portrays life in 14^th – century Italy.  3

6. outerpret: Though seemingly absurd and much conceited, it is part of my [the author of this essay’s] neological experiment. This word is intended to mean precisely the reverse of interpret. If ‘interpret’ is customarily employed to mean something like “going deep into the text so as to analyse, and evaluate it, why not ‘outerpret’ may be employed, or, say, deployed to mean something like “going outside the text so as to offer new kind of <outerpretation?> laden with the value-judgments of the reader himself??? 3

7. display: Sometimes we are told, and, I think, we are rightly told that the movement from “structuralism” to “post-structuralism” is the one from “work” to “text”. If, to a structuralist, work was his locus-classicus, it was text to a post-structuralist. The distinction between work and text is also reminiscent of the one between Reality and Real as proposed by Jacques Lacan, a very prominent modern French Psychoanalyst and psychiatrist — that the former is to be displayed, and the latter to be demonstrated. 3

8. demonstrate: [see: endnotes—7] 3

9. Eliot, T (homas) S (tearns): [September 26, 1888—January 4, 1965]: A very influential American-born-British poet, critic and dramatist, he is particularly renowned for his very allusive kind of writing. Some of his major poetic and dramatic achievements are: Prufrock and Other Observations, The Wasteland, Four Quartets, Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, The Cocktail Party, and The Elder Statesman. And, Selected Essays and On Poetry and Poets are his major critical works. 4

10. mutatis mutandis: It’s a Latin phrase meaning “changing [only] those things which need to be changed” or more simply “[only] the necessary changes have been made”. The word has been derived from the Latin verb muto meaning: change. This phrase may be also replaced in English by “with the necessary modifications”. 4

11. Moore, Marianne: [November 15, 1887—February 5, 1972]: She is a modern American poet[ess] chiefly remembered for irony and wit in her writing. Some of her major poetic contributions are: Poems (1921); Observations (1924); Nevertheless (1944) ; Poetry and Criticism (1965). 5

12. Derrida, Jacques: [July 15, 1930—October 8, 2004]: an Algerian-born-French philosopher, he developed a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction Derrida. His work was labeled as post-structuralism and associated with post-modern philosophy. He is said to belong to the school of Continental Philosophy, and his notable ideas are those of Deconstruction, Difference, Phallogocentrism, Free Play, Archi-writing, Metaphysics of Presence, and the like. Some of his major works include “ Speech and Phenomena” and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (1973); Of Grammatology; Writing and Difference; Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles; The Archaeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac (1980); and La Structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines (trans. Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences)—a lecture presented at Johns Hopkins University on 21 October, 1966; the lecture was then published in 1967 as a chapter of L’ ecriture et la difference (trans. Writing and Difference). 5

13. Barthes, Roland Barthes, Roland: (November 12, 1915—March 25, 1980): a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician particularly renowned for S/Z, published in 1970, a structuralist analysis of “Sarrasine”, a short story by Honore de Balzac. Barthes’ study had a major impact on literary criticism and is historically located at the crossroads of structuralism and post-structuralism. Some of his other notable works are: The Fashion System (1967), Elements of Semiology (1968), The Death of the Author (1968), Writing Degree Zero (1968), The Pleasure of the Text (1975), Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1977).   5

14. Balzac, Honore de: [20 May, 1799—18 August, 1850]: A very noted French novelist and playwright, he, with his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, is usually regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature, and he is also renowned for his multifaceted characters with a sort of moral ambiguity. Some of his major works are: Sarrasine (1830); La Peau de chagrin (1831); Eugenie Grander (1833); Pamela Giraud (1842); Cromwell (1819).  5

15. Leavis, F (rank) R (aymond): [14 July, 1895—14 April, 1978]: He is usually regarded as a very influential British literary critic of early-to-mid-twentieth century. He is chiefly remembered for his critical contribution with the founding [along with the help of his formerly student and latterly wife Queenie Roth] of a quarterly literary periodical widely celebrated as Scrutiny and also narrowly satirized as Thumbscrew. Some of his notable works are: New Bearings in English Poetry (1932); Revaluation (1936); The Great Tradition (1948); H. Lawrence, Novelist (1955). P.6

16. Hirsch, E. D.: Hirsch, E. D. Jr.: (March 22, 1928): an American educator, writer and academic literary critic, some of his works are: Wordsworth and Schelling (1960); Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake (1964); Cultural Literacy: What every American Needs to Know (1987); The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (1988); The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools (2010). 6

17. Fish, Stanley: [Full name: Stanley Eugene Fish: born April 19, 1938]: An American literary theorist, legal scholar, academic and public intellectual—he is often associated with postmodernism, though, at times, to his irritation—for he describes himself as an anti-foundationalist. Some of his major works are: John Skelton’s Poetry (1965); Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967); Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (1972); Professional Correctness: Literary Study and Political Change (1999); The Trouble with principle (1999); How Milton Works (2001). 6

18. Lotman, Yuri: [Full name: Yuri (also, Juri in Estonian) Mikhailovich Lotman: 28 February 1922—28 October 1993]: A prominent Soviet literary scholar, semiotician, and cultural historian—is the founder of Moscow-Tartu school of cultural semiotics and is considered to be the first Soviet structuralist because of his early essay On the Delimitation of Linguistic and Philological Concepts of Structure (1963) and works on structural poetics. Some of his widely-read works are: Analysis of the Poetic Text (1976); Semiotics of Cinema (1976); On the Semiosphere (2005). 7

 

19. Chomsky, Noam: Chomsky, Avram Noam: (born December 7, 1928): An American linguist, cognitive philosopher scientist, logician, historian, political critic and activist, he is an Institute Professor and Professor Emeritus in Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. In 2013, a newly described species of bee has been named after him in his honor: Megachile Chomskyi. He is often said to belong to the schools of Generative Linguistics and Analytic Philosophy. Anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker and English democratic socialist George Orwell were both strong influences on the young Chomsky. Their work convinced him that an anarcho-syndicalist society was both possible and desirable. [an anarcho-syndicalist is the one who believes in anarcho-syndicalism (also referred to as revolutionary syndicalism) which is a branch of anarchism and which views revolutionary industrial unionism or syndicalism as an appropriate vehicle for subjugated class in capitalist society to regain control over the course of their own destiny]. 8

20. Levi-Strauss, Claude: [28 November 1908—30 October 2009]: A Belgian-born- French anthropologist and ethnologist, he has been called, along with James George Frazer and Franz Boas, the father of modern anthropologist. His primary interests diverged in anthropology, society, kinship, and linguistics; and he is particularly renowned for his ideas of structuralism, mythography [the artistic representation of mythical subjects; a collection of myths, often with critical commentary], culinary triangle [a concept involving three types of cooking: boiling (cultural), roasting(natural), and smoking (natural)], and bricolage [the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work created by such a process]. Some of his major works are: Tristes Tropiques (A World on the Wane: 1955); Anthropologie Structurale (Structural Anthropology: 1958); La Pensee Sauvage (The Savage Mind: 1962); La Vole des masques (The Way of the Masks: 1972). 8

21. Eagleton, Terry: [born Terence Francis “Terry” Eagleton: 22 February 1943]: A British literary theorist and critic, he is widely regarded as the most influential living Marxian [Marxist?] literary critic. Currently, he is Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University; Professor of Cultural Theory at the National University of Ireland; and Distinguished Visiting Professor of English at The University of Notre Dame. A student of Raymond Williams —a left-wing Cambridge literary critic— Eagleton has held positions at various periods of time at various highly esteemed universities of the world such as those of Oxford (1992—2001); Manchester (2001—2008); and also at Cornell; Duke; Iowa; Melbourne; The Dublin Trinity; and Yale. Some of his major and widely influential works are: The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990); The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996); Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983); The New Left Church (1966); Why Marx was Right (2011); The Event of Literature (2012).  P.8

22. Dover: Its name originating with [from?] the River Dour, deriving from the Brythonic [Common Brittonic: the Celtic language anciently spoken in Great Britain: meaning: the language of the indigenous Briton as opposed to Anglo-Saxon or Gael] Dubras [“the waters”], via its Latinised form of Dubris. The cliffs also gave England its ancient name of Albion [“white”] — Dover is a town and major ferry port in the home country of Kent, in South East England. It faces France across the narrowest part of the English Channel, and lies south-east of Canterbury. 8

23. Culler, Jonathan: [born 1944]: A class of 1966 Harvard graduate and Professor of English at Cornell University, his special areas of interest are those of structuralism, literary theory and criticism. Some his major critical contributions are: Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the study of literature (1976); Literary Theory: a Very Short Introduction (published in series); The Literary in Theory (2007). 8

24. King Lear: One of very widely- read and much celebrated Shakespearian tragedies, it was written between 1603 and 1606 and first performed in December 26, 1606. Here, the title character —who is also the protagonist of the drama — gets driven into madness after disposing of his Royal estate between two of his three daughters based on the misjudgment of their flattery, bringing tragic consequences [for all].  P.8

25. Hail to thee, blithe spirit! : Here, I am trying to light-heartedly echo with Percy Bysshe Shelley, who begins with these words his lyric-poem ‘To a Skylark’, a poem he completed in late June,1820, and forwarded to London to be included among the verse accompanying Prometheus Unbound due to be published by Charles and James Collier there in London. The given poem is said to have been inspired by an evening walk in the country-side near Livomo, Italy, with Mary Shelley [his wife], and describes the appearance and song of a skylark they come upon.  9

26. O whowhatwhomwhat…………………….For I have [no] more: Here, I am trying to playfully echo, though with a slight variation in mine, with John Donne, a 17^th century English preacher-poet-become-lawyer, who in one of his confessional sermons pours the heart cry of a man [beyond all reasonable doubt possibly himself] who has stopped to evaluate his life, a man painfully aware of his failures. During a serious illness, in 1623, when he thought he might not live, he wrote a confessional poem called A Hymn to God the Father. On reading/hearing it, one may notice that he was making a play on words, using his own name — Donne, spelled d-o-n-n-e, sounds the same as the verb done, d-o-n-e. For [reading] pleasure, the poem is reproduced here:

                             Wilt thou forgive that sinne where I begunne,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sinne; through which I runne,
And do run still: though still I deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For, I have more.

Wilt thou forgive that sinne which I have wonne
Others to sinne? And, made my sinne their doore?
Wilt thou forgive that sinne which I did shunne
A yeare, or two: but wallowed in, a score?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.

I have a sinne of feare, that when I have spunne
My last thred, I shall perish on the shore;
But swere by thy selfe, that at my death thy sonne
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, Thou hast done,
I feare no more.   P.9
— John Donne

REFERENCES

1. Bronowski, J. (1939). The Poet’s Defence. Cambridge
2. Das, B. & J. M. Mohanty (1985). Literary Criticism: a Reading. Calcutta: Oxford University Press.
3. Eagleton, Terry (1983). Literary Theory: An Introduction. London: Basil Blackwell
4. Enright, D. J. & Ernest D. Chickera (1991). English Critical Texts (Thirteenth Impression). New Delhi: Oxford University Press
5. Frye, Northrop (1957).The Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton
6. Lucy, Sean (1960). S. Eliot and the Idea of Tradition. London
7. Pokhrel, G. R. (2013). Ityadi. Kathmandu: Good Will Publishers & Distributors Pvt. Ltd.
8. Rawlinson, D. H. (1968). The Practice of Criticism. Cambridge
9. Scholes, Robert, et. al. (1997). Elements of Literature (Fourth Edition). Calcutta: Trio Press.
10. Selden, Raman (1989). A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (Second Edition). London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.