Difference Similarity In language difference and similarity fundamental

Difference & Similarity

In language difference and similarity fundamental principles we only know one sound, word, structure as it is different from others pin/bin, only one phoneme difference, voiced/unvoiced b, p pin is close to needle, but very different from bin we have to select paradigmatic / syntagmatic Minimal difference – asperity – clinamen – Paul Virilio

In literature, also fundamental concepts What is literature? - Derrida have some similarities, some differences différence/différance literature/non-literature - Italo Calvino - Why Read the Classics? Return should we include TV, news reporting, adverts. . . also, genre comedy and tragedy (Aristotle only couples them once, in passim) shopping list / phone message is vs. is not (Derrida. . . aporias – the gift, hospitality, forgiveness, mourning) Henri Lefebvre, Other vs Otherness

Jacques Derrida, Aporias What would such an experience be? The word that also means passage, traversal, endurance, and rite of passage, but can be a traversal without line and without indivisble border. Can it ever concern, precisely (in all the domains where the questions of decision and of responsibility that concern the border – ethics, law, politics, etc. – are posed), surpassing an aporia, crossing an oppositional line or else apprehending, enduring, and putting, in a different way, the experience of the aporia to a test? And is it an issue here of an either/or? Can one speak – and if so, in what sense – of an experience of the aporia? An experience of the aporia as such? Or vice versa: Is an experience possible that would not be an experience of the aproria?

In culture : sameness: one model to which all aspire and against all others can be placed and graded colonialism - monoculturalism, homogeneity, centralising and unity differences: many models to which different people aspire and relate, no overarching model multiculturalism - variety and variation, multiple centres and hybridity (fragmentation) most cultures move between these Again, Paul Virilio – dromology, grey ecology Henri Lefevbre – other vs otherness

David Farrell Krell, “Engorged Philosophy”. . . one of the initial senses of the Latin differe and French différer is that of postponing, temporizing; the establishment of “a detour that suspends the accomplishment or fufillment of ‘desire’ or ‘will, ’ or carried desire or will out in a way that annuls or tempers their effect. ” And one of the essential traits of the sign proves to be “deferred presence. ” Derrida therefore invites us to consider that all operations with signs, all placing and spacing of writing and all timely utterance of verbal signs as well, are displacements of desire. He later defines différance itself as “delaying or. . . diverting the fulfillment of a ‘need’ or ‘desire. ’”

Gillian Overing, Language, Sign and Gender in Beowulf The hero himself is one of the most unsettling forces in the poem and has long been recognized for the kinds of ambiguity he generates – about the value of pagan and Christian ideals or the value of treasure, for example. His power to disturb as a hysteric accrues throughout the poem; when Beowulf. . . finally chooses death fully understanding the terms of his choice, he calls attention to the illusion of choice and the illusion of the power of the subject to make it.

Beowulf Haste is best now, that we should go to look on the lord of the people, then bring our ring-bestower on his road, escort him to the pyre. More than one portion of wealth shall melt with the hero, for there’s a hoard of treasure and gold uncounted; a grim purchase, for in the end it was with his own life that he bought these rings: which the burning shall devour, the fire enfold. No fellow shall wear an arm-ring in his memory; no maiden’s neck shall be enchanced in the beauty by the bearing of these rings.

George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871 -2) CHAPTER XXVII. An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person…

C. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Compromise For the fundamental fact of early Victorian history was this: the decision of the middle classes to employ their new wealth in backing up a sort of aristocratical compromise, and not (like the middle class in the French Revolution) insisting on a clean sweep and a clear democratic programme. It went along with the decision of the aristocracy to recruit itself more freely from the middle class. It was then also that Victorian "prudery" began: the great lords yielded on this as on Free Trade. These two decisions have made the doubtful England of to-day

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Carrion Comfort” Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be. But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear. Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer. Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

Thomas Hardy, The Oxen Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock. “Now they are all on their knees, ” An elder said as we sat in a flock By the embers in hearthside ease. We pictured the meek mild creatures where They dwelt in their strawy pen, Nor did it occur to one of us there To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave In these years! Yet, I feel, If someone said on Christmas Eve, “Come; see the oxen kneel, “In the lonely barton by yonder coomb Our childhood used to know, ” I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so.

"Describing What Never Happened": My point is not to diminish Persuasion's knowing and therefore bittersweet pursuit of Anne's requital, however moderated. It is to stress that the missed opportunity that informs Persuasion, or just as memorably Pride and Prejudice, is primarily a symptom in Austen's writing rather than a device relating primarily to the exigencies of plot. For it is plot, after all, with its temporal momentum forward, that creates the missed opportunity, making it an historical matter in contrast to which any fulfillment in and over time, whether by marriage to Wentworth or even to Fitzwilliam Darcy, is tantamount to letting "the real perish into art" (in Walter Benjamin's apt description) or into the particular probabilism that we call realism.

Jane Austen and the Feminist Tradition In other words, we need to examine female images in Jane Austen's work in relation to the liberationist philosophy of that "feminist tradition" which preceded Jane Austen in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, and which, of course, has blossomed into the feminist revolt of our time. And, in the process, we should be able to answer some of the questions which have been raised about her female roles. Does the focus on marriage as a narrative goal in the novels mean that Jane Austen accepts the conventional notion of woman's "instinctual" needs for sexual "dependency" and childbearing? Is marriage presented as a sacrosanct, self-justifying goal, or does it symbolize the fruition, or failure, of certain human relationships?

… Obviously Jane Austen is not involved with questions of androgynous marriages, so-called "new“ moralities in sex, or with the socioeconomics of equal opportunities. But, nonetheless, her themes are comparable with the eighteenth century feminism of a Mary Wollstonecraft insofar as such feminism questioned certain masculine assumptions in society.