Criticism In Literary Criticism

In literary criticism, the last fifty years have been particularly fruitful. Starting with the rise of New Criticism in the 1950s, there has emerged a variety of critical methods which have brought to literary works diverse perspectives. While they have opened up possibilities for new readings and meanings, there remains at the core of contemporary literary criticism the widely shared attention to language and text.
Under the basic principle that there is no access to knowledge of the external world except by way of language, literary critics paid attention to how language represents the world in the text. However, whereas the New Critics1 and the Structuralists sought a structure of the text that governs the operation of language, Jacques

. . . over and above the functioning of the various organs, there exists a more general faculty governing signs, which may be regarded as the linguistic faculty par excellence. (CGL 10-11)
Therefore, he insists that linguistics be a part of the more general science of semiology, that is, “a science which studies the role o f signs as part o f social life”
(CGL 15; italics original). From this view, the task of the linguist is to find out what the laws of semiology are. Yet, Saussure considers that linguistic signs have a privileged status in semiology, because they are supposed to provide a certain detachment to the seeming naturalness of social and cultural conventions. For example, in the case of non-linguistic signs such as funeral customs and religious rituals, their meaning can appear natural to those who use them. But in the case of linguistic signs, it is obviously revealed that their signifying function and meaning are arbitrary. For this reason, Saussure thinks that linguistics can be a model for the
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2 6 other semiological categories. By being established as a model for the sciences

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2 7 signifier or a signified, and the answer leads us to a very important principle: both signifier and signified are purely relational or differential entities. Because they are arbitrary they are relational” (Ferdinand de Saussure 33). Saussure claims that before we learn language, nothing is distinct. According to him, before we learn language our consciousness is psychologically in a chaotic state in which thought and sound are mixed. Learning language introduces to this chaotic state classifications, a certain order. Saussure offers the analogy of waves in order to account for the mechanism that classifications take place in the thought-sound mass.
Changes in atmospheric pressure break up the surface of the water into series of divisions, waves. In this case, the contact between them gives rise to a form, not a substance (CGL 111). Similarly, learning language provides the mass with certain divisions, as the air does to the surface of the water. Then, the divisions in the thought-sound mass emerge as signifier and signified. Each language divides the continuum of the thought-sound mass in particular ways, producing different sets