Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI), 2015-2016.

Unit 1 Study
Guide

GUA DE ESTUDIO: COMENTARIO DE

GRADO
TEXTOS LITERARIOS EN LENGUA
INGLESA
UNIT 1 | INTRODUCTION TO POSTSTRUCTURALIST THEORIES

2016-2017
Comentario de Textos Literarios en
Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI)

Isabel Castelao (Coordinadora), Jess Cora y Ddac Llorens

GRADO EN ESTUDIOS INGLESES : LENGUA,
LITERATURA Y CULTURA

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 CTLLI
STUDY GUIDE-UNIT 1
Introduction To Poststructuralist Theories

Literary text: Dylan Thomas, A refusal to mourn the death,

by fire, of a child in London (full poem, Barry 321-322).

Introduction to critical and literary theory: Peter Barry, Ch.

3, Post-structuralism and deconstruction (61-77).

Critical authors: Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author

(extract); Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (extract).

LITERARY TEXT
Self-assessment exercises: Dylan Thomas

Read Dylan Thomas poem, A refusal to mourn the death, by

fire, of a child in London (Barry, Appendix 2: pp. 321-322),
published in the summer of 1945 just after the end of World
War II (Victory in Europe Day VE Day came on 8 May 1945).
The poem recalls the London Blitz, which had ended less than
two months before.
In 1952, Dylan published his Collected Poems. 1934-1952. In
the Authors Note he declares: This book contains most of
the poems I have written, and all, up to the present year,
that I wish to preserve. A refusal to mourn is among them
on page 94.
While the ideas expressed in this poem are not difficult, the
form in which they are expressed is challenging. Read the poem
once through without looking up any words: this is just to
give you a first impression. (Suggestion: dont forget to read
the title as well). Now, with the text in front of you, listen
to Thomas reciting his poem on this link:
http://www.poetryarchive.org/search/site/Dylan%20Thomas. Pay
attention to where Thomas makes pauses and to his intonation:
where does his voice go up? Where does it drop? What
words or phrases does he stress? The acoustic dimension of a
poem helps us make sense of it. Read and listen to A
refusal to mourn as many times as you need, looking up
words where necessary. This will give you a firmer overall
understanding of the poem.
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1. Write a short summary in prose of what you think this poem
is about. (Suggestion: your summary can be in English or
Spanish). Dont worry if there are details or aspects you
cant quite grasp yet.
2. You will no doubt have noticed the poems complex syntax.
You may even have felt frustrated by it! Look at the
first three stanzas (= estrofas). Do you notice anything
strange about the punctuation? Where and what is the
first punctuation mark? What happens to Thomas voice
when he reaches this point?
3. Transcribe the first three stanzas as a prose paragraph.
Can you identify the subject and main verb? How would you
punctuate your transcription in order to make it easier
to understand? (Suggestion: look for subordinate clauses.
Example: and the still hour is come of the sea tumbling
in harness).
4. How do you react as a reader to the way in which this
sentence is constructed and punctuated? How is your
comprehension affected?
5. Using a good monolingual English dictionary, look up the
following words and provide synonyms or explanations in
English. (Suggestion: take into account the part of speech
the word belongs to, i.e., whether the word is a noun, an
adjective, gerund, etc.):
mourn (title)
fathering l. 3
humbling l. 3
still l. 5
tumbling l. 6
harness l. 6
sackcloth l. 12
grave 1. 15
elegy l. 18
robed l. 20
6. What do you think the poems speaker means when he uses
the metaphors indicated below? (Suggestion: a metaphor is
a certain use of words: a comparison or an analogy
[implying] that one object is another one, figuratively

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 speaking [http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_M.html],
for example: All the worlds a stage, from
Shakespeares As You Like It):
my salt seed l. 11
valley of sackcloth l. 12
a grave truth l. 15
7. What is the effect of using so many present participles
(fathering, humbling, tumbling, etc.)?
8. Identify other poetic devices (= techniques).

9. In questions 2, 3, 4 and 5, youve had the chance to

consider Thomas text both as a poem and a piece of
prose. What formal differences are there, in other words,
what specifically makes this text a poem and not a piece
of prose? (Suggestion: this question is also related to
the previous one. Dont be afraid to state the obvious,
i.e. its written in verses or stanzas [= estrofas] or
it repeats certain words or structures).
10. Is the meaning of the poem affected by the form in
which it is expressed? Would the meaning be altered if
Thomas had chosen to express it, say, through an essay or
a letter to the editor of a newspaper?

CRITICAL AND LITERARY THEORY

Self-assessment exercises

Read Barry, Chapter 3, Post-structuralism and deconstruction

(59-77). (Note: both poststructuralism and post-
structuralism are accepted versions of the term).

1. Now re-read: What post-structuralist critics do (Barry,

pp. 70-71). Paraphrase his arguments, substituting each
point with your own words.
Example: Post-structuralists look for hidden meanings in a
text which may contradict the surface or apparent meaning.
2. Read carefully Barrys post-structuralist interpretation
of Dylan Thomas poem, Deconstruction: an example (pp.
71-74). Barry identifies three stages in the
deconstructive process: the verbal, the textual and the
linguistic. Summarize each stage.

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 3. Barrys analysis pays attention to the poems paradoxes
and contradictions, its breaks, discontinuities and
omissions. Identify some of these inconsistencies and try
to say how your reading is affected by them.
4. Barry also asks you to look for examples of a specific
type of figurative language metaphors. He asks you to
think about the use of mother and daughter and the
nature of the metaphorical family implied by those
words. Can you find examples in addition to those
mentioned in question 4?

Critical Authors

ROLAND BARTHES (1915-1968). From The Death of the Author

(1968).

The author is a modern figure, a product of our society

insofar as [] it discovered the prestige of the individual
[], the human person. It is thus logical that in literature
it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of
*capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest
importance to the person of the author. The author still
reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers,
interviews, magazines, as in the very consciousness of men of
letters anxious to unite their person and their work through
diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be found in
ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his
person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism
still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaires
work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Goghs his
madness, Tchaikovskys his vice. The explanation of a work is
always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it
were always in the end, through the more or less transparent
*allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the
author confiding in us. [] Mallarms1 entire poetics
consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing
(which is, as will be seen, to restore the place of the
reader). Valry2 [] considerably diluted Mallarms theory but
[] he never stopped calling into question and deriding the
Author; he stressed the linguistic [] nature of his activity,
and throughout his prose works he militated in favour of the
essentially verbal condition of literature, in the face of
which all recourse to the writers interiority seemed to him
pure superstition. []

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1
STPHANE MALLARM (1842-1898), French poet [NATC note].
2
PAUL VALRY (1871-1945), French poet and critic [NATC note].

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The removal of the Author [] utterly transforms the modern
text (or which is the same thing the text is henceforth
made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author
is absent). The temporality is different. The Author, when
believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own
book: book and author stand automatically on a single line
divided into a before and after. The Author is thought to
nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it,
thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of
antecedence to his work as a father to his child. In complete
contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the
text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or
exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as
predicate; []
[] a text is not a line of words releasing a single
theological meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a
multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none
of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of
quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. []
the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior,
never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter
the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on
any one of them. Did he wish to express himself, he ought at
least to know that the inner thing he thinks to translate
is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only
explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely; []
Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him
passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this
immense dictionary from which he draws [] To give a text an
Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a
final *signified, to close the writing [] [However] writing
refus[es] to assign a secret, an ultimate meaning, to the
text [], liberates what may be called an anti-theological
activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to
refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God [] we
know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to
overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the
cost of the death of the Author.
SOURCE: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001)
1466-1470. Hereafter, NATC.

Self-assessment exercises
**REMEMBER: unless otherwise indicated, all your answers
should be in English. Where appropriate, your answers should
also take note of the context to which the questions refer.
ANSWERS to most of the following questions are provided in an
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accompanying document.

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 1. Read the above extract carefully.

2. Look up and give definitions of the words marked with an

*asterisk.
Suggestions: a) consult the Glossary in the curso virtual
and/or the dictionaries of literary terms by Chris
Baldick and J.A. Cuddon included in the Bibliografa
complementaria. For words not included in these
resources, use any philosophical dictionary or good
monolingual dictionary; b) when looking up *signified,
try looking up sign first.
3. What do you think Barthes means when he refers to the
person of the author (par. 1)?

4. The following terms are contrasted by Barthes:

ordinary culture (par. 1) Mallarm and Valry (par. 1)
Author (par. 1) modern scriptor (par. 2)
Author (par. 1) reader (par. 3)

What distinction(s) does Barthes draw between them?

5. Barthes repeatedly uses the vocabulary of religious belief
(Author-God par. 3, theological par. 3, anti-
theological par. 3, to refuse God par. 3, etc.) in
association with literature, text and meaning. Why do you
think he uses these terms? What do you think he is trying
to say?
Suggestion: See Barrys comments regarding the death of
the Author on pp. 63-64.
6. Summarize the text, taking into account your answers to
the above questions.
Suggestion: To summarize means to cover the main points
of something succinctly, that is, in fewer words than the
original.

JACQUES DERRIDA (1930-2004). From Of Grammatology (1967).

[T]he writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper

system, laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot
dominate absolutely. He uses them only by letting himself []
be governed by the system. And the reading must always aim at
a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between
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what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns

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of the language that he uses. This relationship is [] a
signifying structure that critical reading should produce.
What does produce mean here? In my attempt to explain that, I
would initiate a justification of my principles of reading.
[]
To produce this signifying structure obviously cannot consist
of reproducing, by the effaced and respectful doubling of
commentary, the conscious, voluntary, intentional relationship
that the writer institutes in his exchanges with the history
to which he belongs thanks to the element of language. This
[] doubling commentary should no doubt have its place in a
critical reading. [] Yet if reading must not be content with
doubling the text, it cannot legitimately transgress the text
toward something other than it[self], toward a referent (a
reality that is metaphysical, historical, psychobiographical,
etc.) or toward a *signified outside the text whose content
could take place, could have taken place outside of language,
that is to say, [] outside of writing in general. [] [We
propose] the absence of the *referent or the *transcendental
signified. There is nothing outside of the text [there is no
outside-text; il ny a pas de hors-texte]. [] [T]here has
never been anything but writing; []
Although it is not commentary, our reading must be intrinsic
and remain within the text. [Yet there are] interpretation[s]
that take[] us outside of the writing toward a psycho-
biographical signified, or even toward a general psychological
structure that could [] be separated from the *signifier [].

[I]t seems to us in principle impossible to separate, through

interpretation or commentary, the signified from the signifier
[]. Here we must take into account the history of the text in
general. When we speak of the writer and of the encompassing
power of language to which he is subject, we are not only
thinking of the writer in literature. [We are thinking of] the
philosopher, the chronicler, the theoretician in general, and
[] everyone writing []. But, in each case, the person
writing is inscribed in a determined textual system. [] [T]he
philosophical text, although it is in fact always written
includes, precisely as its philosophical specificity, the
project of effacing itself in the face of the signified
content which it transports and in general teaches. Reading
should be aware of this project []. The entire history of
texts, and within it the history of literary forms in the
West, should be studied from this point of view. []
[L]iterary writing has, almost always and almost everywhere,
according to some fashions and across very diverse ages, lent
itself to this transcendent reading, in that search for the

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signified which we here put in question, not to annul it but
to understand it within a system to which such a reading is
blind.
SOURCE: NATC (2001) 1825-1827.

Self-assessment exercises

1. Read the above extract carefully, several times if

necessary. It will become gradually less opaque.

2. Look up and give definitions of the words marked with an

*asterisk.
3. What do you think Derrida means when he speaks of the
relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he
commands and what he does not command of the patterns of
the language he uses (par. 1)?
Suggestion: see Barry, pp. 66-67.

4. In this text, Derrida talks about writing and reading. Re-

read the nine lines Yet if reading must not be
contentremain within the text (par. 2). Try to
paraphrase Derridas comments.
Suggestion: Barry addresses this point on pp. 66-67.
(Note: to paraphrase means to restate a text, passage,
or work giving the meaning in another form. Merriam
Websters Dictionary and Thesaurus).
5. What do you think Derrida means when he writes there is
nothing outside of the text (par. 2)?
Suggestion: see Barry, p. 67.

6. Summarize the extract, taking into account your answers to

the above questions.

Further resources:

http://www.dylanthomas.com/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/arts/sites/themes/books/dylan_thoma
s.shtml
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B2c4b23r3k
(Another online recording of Thomas reciting A refusal to
mourn. Not as good as the Poetry Archive version).

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http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/3357.html
http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/lookup.html

(This is the British National Corpus, a 100 million word

collection of samples of written and spoken language from a
wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-
section of British English from the later part of the 20th
century, both spoken and written).

Note: should any of these links be broken, do let us know and

we will provide you with alternative ones.

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