Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]
Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 166 views

    This Strange Institution Called Literature

    Uploaded by

    Quinn
    1) Jacques Derrida discusses his view of literature as a "strange institution" that allows authors to say everything while being protected from censorship. 2) He reflects on how reading certain authors as a teenager made him feel family and society were ending, allowing him to say "Families, I hate you." 3) While interested in analyzing writing, Derrida says he never enjoyed novels beyond that and feels no interest in the act of telling stories. He sees literature as both a historical institution with rules and a place where everything can be said.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    This Strange Institution Called Literature

    Uploaded by

    Quinn
    166 views2 pages
    1) Jacques Derrida discusses his view of literature as a "strange institution" that allows authors to say everything while being protected from censorship. 2) He reflects on how reading certain authors as a teenager made him feel family and society were ending, allowing him to say "Families, I hate you." 3) While interested in analyzing writing, Derrida says he never enjoyed novels beyond that and feels no interest in the act of telling stories. He sees literature as both a historical institution with rules and a place where everything can be said.

    Original Description:

    Original Title

    This Strange Institution called literature

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    1) Jacques Derrida discusses his view of literature as a "strange institution" that allows authors to say everything while being protected from censorship. 2) He reflects on how reading certain authors as a teenager made him feel family and society were ending, allowing him to say "Families, I hate you." 3) While interested in analyzing writing, Derrida says he never enjoyed novels beyond that and feels no interest in the act of telling stories. He sees literature as both a historical institution with rules and a place where everything can be said.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    166 views2 pages

    This Strange Institution Called Literature

    Uploaded by

    Quinn
    1) Jacques Derrida discusses his view of literature as a "strange institution" that allows authors to say everything while being protected from censorship. 2) He reflects on how reading certain authors as a teenager made him feel family and society were ending, allowing him to say "Families, I hate you." 3) While interested in analyzing writing, Derrida says he never enjoyed novels beyond that and feels no interest in the act of telling stories. He sees literature as both a historical institution with rules and a place where everything can be said.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 2

    Teoria do Texto Literário 23/11/2020

    Ficha de Leitura

    “This Strange Institution Called Literature”


    - Jack Derrida

    Made by: Bruno Rafael Pereira Sousa Teixeira, pg39442


    Master: Língua, Literatura e Cultura Inglesas

    Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher who was born in 1930 in El Biar
    and died in 2004 in Paris (France). He is one of the major post-structuralism philosophers and
    he is responsible for using in Phenomenology the method of deconstruction, a semiotic
    analysis’s method he developed in numerous works. Derrida also gave lessons in many
    universities, such as Sorbonne Université and Harvard University.
    “This Strange Institution Called Literature” is an interview with Jacques in Laguna Beach in
    1989. The interviewer, based on an alleged Derrida’s statement about his own interest being
    directed towards literature, starts by asking Derrida about the relationship between his
    primary interest in literature and his philosophical works. Jacques answered that is primary
    interest was not about literature rather than philosophy and that what interests him the most
    in writing is neither literature nor philosophy. For him, it was an “autobiographical desire”, a
    desire to “inscribe merely a memory or two”. He also refers to Rosseau, Guide and Nietzsche’s
    texts and the fact that their texts are confessions rather than literature/philosophy.
    He points that literature’s space is also fictive institution (not only an instituted fiction)
    that allows somebody to say everything. In addition to that, for the philosopher, to say
    everything is “to gather, by translating, all figures into one another; to totalize by formalizing”.
    Although this, to say everything is also “to break out of prohibitions”. When talking about the
    question “What is literature?”, he sees literature as a historical institution filled with rules and
    conventions and as an institution of fiction that gives writer the power to say everything and
    break the rules.
    When asked if he could talk about his view of the literature as “a strange institution which
    allows one to say everything”, Jacques Derrida asserts that literature implies giving permission
    to the author to “say everything he wants to or everything he can”, but that author has to be
    safe from religious/political censorship. There is a duty of irresponsibility in literature and it
    takes a refusal to “reply for one’s thought or writing to constituted powers”. That duty
    represents, for Derrida, the highest form of responsibility.
    Teoria do Texto Literário 23/11/2020

    The Algerian-born French philosopher talks about his teenage years, a difficult period
    when it was necessary to say forbidden things and to be interested in periods when writers say
    forbidden things. He felt that the writers he read during that time meant the end of the family
    and “of the society it represented”. By reading all those authors, he felt like saying “Families, I
    hate you”. Furthermore, he felt that literature could be an experience of a dissatisfaction, an
    impatience or even an impotence. Despite being interested by the possibility, he nerver
    enjoyed reading novels beyond the pleasure of analysing the play of writing. He loves to see
    the practice of fiction, but he feels no interest for the act of telling/inventing stories.
    After being asked about the difference between “literature” and “poetry”/”belles-
    lettres”, he states that the name “literature” is a recent invention. He also states that the
    principle of being able to say everything had not much importance in Graeco-Latin and non-
    Western cultures, although the fact that the West did not respect so much that principle.
    When asked about authors like Mallarmé, Blanchot and Joyce and their use of language,
    Jacques Derrida points that they commonly put in their experience of literature questions like
    “What is literature?” and “Where does literature come from?”. For him, those questions were
    a kind of “turning back on the literary institution” and there is also a paradox in literary
    structure. That paradox is that its beginning is its end. Furthermore, when we question its
    origin, we end up questioning its end.
    In the end, Derrida thinks that, sometimes, the “economy of literature” seems to be
    “more powerful than that of other types of discourse”. For “other types of discourse”, the
    philosopher means, for example, historical and philosophical discourses. For him, it also can
    depend on singularities and contexts. As Derrida’s final words say: “Literature would be
    potentially more potent”.

    You might also like