*

15.12.06

The merde hits the semicolon

Ha ha ha. Roland Barthes, S/Z:
(…) doesn’t a sentence, whatever meaning it releases, subsequent to its utterance, it would seem, appear to be telling us simple, literal, primitive: something true, in relation to which all the rest (which comes afterwards, on top) is literature? [emphasis added]
And this is the end of the following... "sentence":
Ideologically, finally, this game has the advantage of affording the classic text a certain innocence: of the two systems, denotative and connotative, one turns back on itself and indicates its own existence: the system of denotation; denotation is not the first meaning, but pretends to be so; under this illusion, it is ultimately no more than the last of the connotations (the one which seems both to establish and to close the reading), the superior myth by which the text pretends to return to the nature of language, to language as nature: doesn’t a sentence, whatever meaning it releases, subsequent to its utterance, it would seem, appear to be telling us simple, literal, primitive: something true, in relation to which all the rest (which comes afterwards, on top) is literature?
I wouldn't even know how to begin to diagram that sentence. For those of you keeping score at home, that sentence contains 3 colons, 2 semicolons, 14 commas
and 2 sets of parentheses.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Haha ... if that second example is a "return to the nature of language," then there's something unnatural going on. It's definitely worth diagramming, though!

February 07, 2007 11:41 pm  
Blogger mrtn said...

It sure is! You go first.

February 07, 2007 11:43 pm  

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