I'm going to be pointing to the board at least in theory I suppose I expect to be pointing to the board a little bit more today than ordinarily so it the the usual function of my my equivalent of PowerPoint isn't quite the same today because I'm taking an interest in some of these diagrammatic matters as well and as I say I will be I will be pointing to them all right so to begin I'm actually going to postpone something that you're probably already wondering about although it will come into this lecture and on a couple of occasions that is to say the full relationship in terms of the influence of both movements between the Russian formalists and so sirs notion of semiology and semiotic s-- until next week when we discuss roman jakob syns essay linguistics and poetics where i think the relationship between the two movements in which he himself was involved will become clearer and will come into focus more naturally than if I tried to if I tried to outline what the connection between the two movements is now so that is an aspect of our sequence of lectures beginning with the last one that will be postponed until next week now semiotic s-- is not in itself a literary theory as we'll learn from Jakob syn next week literature can be understood or what he calls sort of the study of literature poetics can be understood as a subfield of semiotic s-- but semiotic is not in itself a literary theory in other words perhaps to your frustration what you read today has nothing at all in and of itself to tell you about literature this isn't the last time this will happen during the course of the syllabus but then of course our job is to bring out the implications for literature of texts that we read that don't have any direct bearing on literary study the important thing about serve and the the discipline of semiotics is the incredible influence that it has had on virtually every form of subsequent literary theory and that that's what we need to keep in mind semiotics evolves into what is called structuralism which we will be considering next week and that in turn as it were bequeathed its terminology and its set of issues and frameworks for thinking to to deconstruction to Lacanian psychoanalysis to French Marxism to binary theories of race colonization and gender in other words to a great deal that we will be studying subsequently on the syllabus so while again what we read for today is not in itself literary theory it is nevertheless crucially formative for a great many of the developments in literary theory that we'll be studying now just as a I don't know an anecdotal or conjectural aside I've always found it so fascinating I can never resist talking about it the relationship between various texts in our field history of criticism literary theory texts that are considered foundational which curiously enough a la Foucault don't actually have an author as dawdles poetics we know actually not to have been one of the texts written by Aristotle but rather to be a compendium of lecture notes put together by his students and this is one of the reasons why in the Golden Age of Arabic scholarship in the Middle Ages there was so much dispute about the poetics the the manuscripts we find from this period are full of marginal notes where the scholars are chiding each other and saying no no no it can't be that way in other words in a way it's a disputed text and it is not written by it's a foundational text Aristotle is considered the father of criticism and yet he is so as what Foucault would call a founder of discursivity well the odd thing is it's exactly the same with so sir who can be considered the father or patriarch of a certain kind of literary theory as I've just indicated so sirs course in general linguistics is not something written by so sewer but is a compendium of lecture notes written by his students in a series of lectures that he gave from 19 6 to 99 and then gathered together in book form by two of by two of his disciples who were linguists now it's odd that we have that this text does have the same formative function scholars who go to Geneva go for a variety of reasons when they look at the societal archive some of them are predisposed to dislike so sir and to hope that they can somehow discredit him by learning more about things that he thought that aren't actually in the text others like so sir and feel that he needs to be rescued from his compositors and yet others go in an attitude of worship and hope that the archive will yield to them full confirmation of the integrity of the text we call the course in general linguistics so that in a way the set the study of the socio archive given the volatile relationship of that archive with the actual text that we have is a kind of map that if one were to study it one could associate with the history of thinking about literary theory in the 20th century this is really all neither here nor there I just find it interesting that two people who are incontestably skull founders of discursivity in the field that we study are in fact not strictly speaking authors somehow confirming the the insight of Foucault in the essay that we began by reading anyway enough of that we have to try to figure out what Sousa is up to and let's and let's move on to begin to do so semiology what is semiology it's the study of existing conventional communicative systems all of these systems we can call languages and language that is to say the words that we use when we speak to each other is one of those systems other systems the gestures that mimes use semaphores railroad semaphores a stoplight red green yellow is a semiotic system in other words all of them are modes of communication with which we function the intelligibility of which allows us to negotiate the worlds around us semiotic s-- has expanded into every into every imaginable aspect of thought there is a there is a Darwinian semiotic understanding the relationships among species in semiotic terms there is in other words a semiotic of virtually every imaginable thing understood as a language made up of a system of signs signs we'll be getting to in a minute but in the meantime it's important to understand what semiology actually is that's what it is now oh I meant to ask you how many of you did not bring the passages that I sent to you by email last night all right we have them here and they'll be passed around we have about 25 copies so don't take one if you don't need it I'm not going to pause I am going to be turning to the second passage on the sheet in which in which something about the nature of these systems I think can be made clear language says so sewer is not a function of the speaker and here of course he is talking about human language human language is not a function of the speaker it is a product that is passively assimilated by the individual now what does this mean the fact that human language is not my language that is to say the fact that it doesn't originate in me the fact that it's not for in other words my private language is of course a certain loss because it means that when I speak when I use language in speech I'm using something that is not strictly my own it's conventional that is to say it belongs in the public sphere to all of us and as it perhaps a certain sort of romantic loss in that wouldn't it be nice if language in some sense were my own but the incredible gain which makes language something like at the object of science that so seer is hoping to secure this is one of the things obviously that he has in common with the formalists the incredible gain is that if language is not private if it's not my own if it's not something that I can make up as I go along if in other words it is conventional belonging to all of us that's precisely what allows it to be communicative it is a system of signs in other words that we can make use of that we recognize as signs precisely because they exist among us as something that can be shared in common and so this then is the object of so sirs attention as a linguist ah and as a semiotician now what's implied in this idea is that language is something that we use I don't I mean the the best way to say it and the quickest way to say it is that I don't speak language language is something that exists as an aggregate all at once arguably and this is something that's going to come up again as and again as we come back to these coordinates that we'll be touching on from time to time today also arguably language is something virtual you remember that Freud said we have to infer the unconscious from the erratic behavior of consciousness I mean there's got to be something back there so we're going to call it the unconscious and we're going to try to describe very much the same with language long as so Sewer calls it it's something I mean what we do is speak and when we speak of course we say correctly that we use language but we still need to know what language is and we need to understand the relationship between language and speech now we can understand language as a kind of aggregate of everything that's in the lexicon in the dictionary together with everything that would be in some sort of ideal or utterly systematized rule set of rules of grammar and syntax but there is no real a grid of the aggregate of that kind in other words it exists it's there to be put together partly as a matter of experiment and partly as a matter of conjecture by the linguists but as as a composite thing existing in a spatial simultaneity synchronically language is something that in a very real sense as is the case with Freud we infer from speech now speech is what we do speech is the way in which we appropriate deploy and make use of language and so sewer calls that parole parole is the unfolding in time of a set of possibilities given in space that set of possibilities being sort of being what social calls long language is a system of signs what is a sign so sirs famous diagrams make it clear enough we have above the line a concept and we have below the line a sound image in other words I think of something and that thinking or aura and that thinking of something corresponds to a sound image that I have ready to hand for it and that can be understood in terms of thinking of the concept tree that's why this is in quotation marks and I speak Latin and fun and and and and knowing that the the sound image correlative to the concept tree is our boar right or I can think of something like that something in some way resembling that and by the same token I still speak Latin the sound image corresponding to it is our boar now I'm going to I may or may not get back to this today but in this question mark is the secret of deconstruction all right just just you know just just just to just to keep you poised in on tenterhooks but in the meantime what Susur is doing with this relationship above and below the line is he's saying that there is an arbitrary relationship between the concept and the sound image the concept he calls a signified and the sound image he calls a signifier a sign in other words is made up of two sides in a as it were a thought moment through a relationship between that which is signified and that which signifies it at its end it's to be understood that we have to think of them together they're not divisible their relationship is necessary but as will arbitrary and each sign is like that and the way in which we put signs together is to take these bundles these binary relationships between a concept and a sound image and adjust them in an unfolding sequence that's how we speak that's how we make a sentence alright so in a way the idea that a signifier a sound that I make our borer refers to a concept and by implication by very powerful and strong and necessary implication not to a thing is not in itself new the idea that a word signifies an idea and not an object is already fully developed in John Locke's essay on human understanding and is more or less commonly agreed on ever afterwards and is as I say in itself a conventional thought that so seer adapts and makes use of but what is new and so sewer and what really is foundational in the in semiotic as a science is two things that so sewer then goes on to say about the sign the first thing he has to say is that the signified signifier relationship as I said is arbitrary and the second thing he has to say as the way is that the way in which we know one sign from another either studying it studying language in the aggregate whereby clusters of signs exist in associational relation to each other or studying it in speech acts in speech whereby signs exist next to each other in a sequence the way in which we understand what a sign is is differential so that what's new in so sir is thinking about the relationship between signified and signifier is the sign tied up in this relationship is both arbitrary and differential okay this is a first walk through some essential ideas I want to go back to the distinction between language and speech and refer you to the first passage which now all of you have it on your sheet because like the Russian formalists so sir is chiefly concerned in outlining what he means by semiology to establish the semiological project as a science and like the russian formalist in in a way like the new critics talking about their academic colleagues so sir is vexed by the messiness and lack of system in the study of linguistics and this is what he says in this first passage says if we study speech from several viewpoints simultaneously the object of linguistics appears to us as a confused mass of heterogeneous and unrelated things this is speech I you know I'm a linguist and so what do I do I study speech I study speeches and if I do so and if I keep thinking about it in a variety of ways all sorts of frameworks jostle for attention so sure continues this procedure opens the door to several Sciences psychology anthropology normative grammar philology and so on which are distinct from linguistics but which might claim speech in view of the faulty method of linguistics as one of their objects as I see it there is only one solution to all the foregoing difficulties from the very outset and this is her own peculiar mixed metaphor from the very outset we must put both feet on the ground of language and use language as the norm of all the other manifestations of speech what's it's as if he's trying to hold language down you know stay there stay there we put both feet on the grounds of language so that we have it so that we have it so intelligible to us as a system as something that can be understood precisely differentially that can be understood in the variety of ways in which language organizes signs it might be worth pausing over the variety of ways in which we can think of signs in language all of which have to do with the way in which a given sign might be chosen to go into a speech sentence I don't know take the word take the word ship ship is very closely related in sound to certain other words we won't specify them for fear of a Freudian slip but that but but that is one cluster that is one associational matrix or a network that one can think of in the arrangement of that sign in language but there are also synonyms for ship bark boat bateau AB great many other synonyms sailboat whatever and they to exist in a cluster steamship ocean liner in other words words that don't sound at all the same but they're contiguous in sin and immature they cluster in that way and then furthermore ship is also the opposite of certain things I mean and that so that it would also enter into a relationship with train car truck mule modes of transportation right and in all of these ways ship is clustered associational II in language in ways that make it available to be chosen available to be chosen as appropriate for a certain semantic context that we try to develop when we speak so that's the way that's that that's the way a sign works in language I mean this is this is the tip of the iceberg for any given sign but it gives you such and and by the way and what I'm saying I over simplified by supposing that the basic constituent of unit of language is a word the linguists know that that's not at all necessarily the case linguists can work at different levels of abstraction with language I mean sometimes the basic unit is the phrase but some other times but but the basic unit is the phoneme that is to say the single sound unit or if one studying languages the system of writing it might be the syllable it could be the letter understood either graphically or audibly and the variety of ways in which one can choose a basic unit in the study of linguistics means that you need a special word for that unit which is characteristically that tag Meem in other words whatever you whatever you're thinking of as your systematizing your understanding of language as the basic constituent unit the word being probably one of the less popular choices even though that's the one I've just used it is probably the blanket term for that is the tag meme and so you cannot you can understand the associate the associational nature of signs also as tag mimic then of course since there's a certain amount of somatic pay off let's say if you're talking about a phoneme especially because because of the the as so sir will say and as I'll get back to misleading onomatopoetic drift of language perhaps a certain sound has certain connotations meaning the sound may cluster as sort of in in an associational Network but depending on the unit chosen then the associational networks will differ but they will still exist as a matrix in other words it is always probably I mean how else else could we have any sense of systematicity and language it is always probably the case that when I speak I won't choose just any word ie Cummings actually boldly experimented with this principle and and he attracted the attention of the linguists particularly a linguist named Dell Hymes Yamaka Cummings wrote sentences like he danced his did where did is obviously not a word you would have supposed to be in any way involved in an associational cluster in language you know I mean he danced his did that is in every sense a misfire as the as as the as one school of thinking about language would call it and yet at the same time Cummings thumbs his nose at us and deliberately uses that word almost as though he were issuing a critique of semiotics but at the same time such that semiotic would probably have available to it it's it's it's it's its ways and means of refutation a certain amount of ingenuity is that's all that's required to notice that duh reiterates the D the death sound in danced and that there are all sorts of combinatory pressures on his consciousness to choose did as opposed to some other seemingly irrelevant word but in any case so in any case you can still even with these egregious examples understood understand language even in its in a variety nevertheless as associational and as clustering it's available signs in ways that make them more readily to hand for choice than they might be all other things being equal well in any case so language is a system that signs the signs are both arbitrary and differential now what does this mean this is actually the second thing maybe that we learn under the influence of what we call literary theory and the thinking that surrounds it about the nature of perception if the sign is both arbitrary and differential that is to say if there is no such thing as a natural sign something that is linked by nature by the nature of the thing and the word together with a thing if on one side of the of the border as so sort of puts it we look at a cow and say ox and if on the other side of the border we look at a cow and say boof and if we cross a considerable body of water and we look at a cow and say cow plainly the relationship between the thing and the sign you know the the the matrix signifier signified just doesn't exist so signs are arbitrary and they're also differential I have to be able to distinguish between all the signs I use in any communicative sequence and how do I do it by putting in signs which are not other signs the sign is not linked to the natural world by any natural means and the sign is not linked to other signs by any natural means I don't know a unit of language we're I used to commute communicate with you positively I know it negatively I know it only because it is not everything else in in the terms of its direct relationship with the thing that's most adjacent to it somehow either through similarity or dissimilarity it's not that other thing but generally speaking the point about a sign is that it's not any other thing this is true even of homonyms this is true even of of seemingly identical signs because each has its use value and is only intelligible as it's that which it which it exists to mean in a certain context so it is always the case that I can only know what I know if it's a question of being communicated with having something rendered intelligible for me negatively I can't know it because it just is either that sign or that is I don't know it positively I'm about to give I'm about to give an example of this which I hope which which I hope will flesh out what I'm trying to get across in the meantime a couple of passages in so sir that may make the point now not on this version of your sheet but on the version the not on the version of the sheet that I passed out today but on the version that I sent electronically last night there's a fifth passage and that passage is actually a combination of formulations of so seer that are on two separate that are in two separate parts of your text the first one is on page 844 can this possibly be correct Isis I hope it can no it is not correct its page 845 the lower left-hand column where Sosua says language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others as in the diagram just below it in other words the value of a term I I say something the value of the term I utter a sound the value of that sound cannot be determined except by its context I can't know it except by the way in which it differs from everything that surrounds it and he goes on to say this is on page 847 about halfway down the left-hand column he goes on to say a segment of language can never in the final analysis be based on anything except its non coincidence with the rest arbitrary and differential are two correlative qualities now why don't and then and then again another passage on page 846 the right-hand column halfway down concepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but negatively by their relations with other terms of the system now probably this is hard to accept intuitively we feel as we process the world around us that we know things for and as what they are we fit you know I look at something and I know what it is forgetting that possibly I only know what it is because of a context in which indeed it is not those other things that are linked to it now I want to take as I want to take an example I could use any example but I'm going to use something which plainly does move move around various semiotic systems it's it's a piece of language but it also belongs to other sorts of semiotic system as will immediately see I want to use the example of the red light now in a stoplight which is probably just about the simplest semiotic system that we have it only has three one is tempted to say variables plainly differing from each other red yellow and green we have two ways of thinking about the red light if we think that our knowledge is positive we say red in a red light means stop it is spontaneous to us to say red light means stop now if all we have to go on is just this semiotic system it's going to be kind of hard to put up resistance to that sort of thinking because by the same token we'll say yellow means pause green means go these do these three lights with their respective colors just do positively mean these things everybody knows it and I'm certainly not thinking when I approach an intersection that when I when the red light goes on I'm not saying to myself not yellow not green you know it's by my mind my mind just doesn't work that way all right but still it's a red light right and our hypothesis is that the red light has positive value in the sense that it means a certain thing it means we say stop well suppose the red light appeared on or as the nose of a reindeer in that case the red light would be a beacon which means forward go follow me damn the torpedoes right we've got to get these presents to screw distributed no time no time to waste you know and we race off you know who perhaps risking an accident who knows we we race off under the compulsion of the meaning of the red light which is go right now by the way there's an anecdote the truth of which I've never been able to ascertain that during the Cultural Revolution in China madam now madam Mao very much disapproved of the fact that red lights meant stop because red is of course the colour of progress it ought to mean go forward and you know and and and everything behind it but needless to say her thoughts on the subject we're never implemented because if one day red light beam stuff and the next day red light means go there might be a few problems and so and and and this by the way is a way of showing the the the fact that um that everything which appears in a semiotic system is conventional right I mean it is it there's an emptying out of positive meaning and the very awareness that after all the red light could mean go I'm about to go on and give more examples it's conventional whatever the convention is within a system of differences that's what makes the sign intelligible all right just some other examples a red light over a street door well that doesn't mean stop that means go in come in right it's and and of course it exists in a semiotic relationship to a white light over a street door which means this is my house if you wish you can ring the bell but I just assumed you stayed out this light is probably on to keep burglars away and so stop right and and and there and the red light is intelligible in other words within that within that semiotic system now over an auditorium door and of course we've already been gazing at that light back there and it's not a good example I wish it didn't say exit but it does say exit because that sort of that kind of weakens my point but but over-many auditorium doors a red light just stands there and obviously it doesn't mean come in in the sense of the red light over a street door it means go out right this is the way out this is the way you get out of here not this is the way you get in here I mean there are a lot of there are a lot of ways in which red light means neither stop nor go but we are sort of confining ourselves so far to the ways in which a red light has something to do with locomotion or the lack thereof and in each new system in each new system you can see it takes on a new meaning always with respect to whatever it is not all right now off well I mean we can continue on a light up Valentine means don't stop go you know it has this it has the same function in other words of negating its own meaning in another semiotic system in this case the semiotic system of the stoplight on an ambulance or a police car admittedly many of these lights are blue these days but let's suppose let's suppose that you know tradition prevailing that they are still red on an ambulance or a street car they mean get out of the way or stop alright in other words in other words they probably bear a distant relation to the santi Adak of the stoplight and that's probably why red was chosen for ambulances and police cars because they put into your head the notion of stop but it's a notion that's complicated in this case by the equally imperative notion get out of the way which doesn't it all necessarily entail stopping but rather accelerating in a different direction and all and all of that somewhat complicates the picture but at the same time I think you can see that there's a connection between those semiotic systems it's it's it's a weak system in terms of color in the case of ambulance in police car it's more a question of brightness as I say red tends to be chosen but then you know if you get lab experiments showing that that particular color of gas blue is somehow or another you know sort of more invasive of your consciousness than red is then you know you move away from the arbitrariness of the choice of red as a color and as I say there's a certain instability which which could never apply in the semiotic of the stoplight because there it's not so much a question of the brightness of the color although that has been experimented with as you know but rather the insistence that the color is just that color and then finally and here is where in a way this is perhaps the most interesting thing because because it forces us to show the complexity to see the complexity of semiotic relationships a red light just to return to the Christian holiday a red light on a Christmas tree now our first thought is oh haha that has no meaning right you know it's not it's no use talking about the negative relationship between a red light and a green light and a yellow white blue whatever whatever the other colors on the Christmas tree are because they all have the same value they're all bright they're all cheerful they all say Merry Christmas etc etc etc so what are you supposed to do with that here you've got a red light which doesn't seem to enter into this sense of the arbitrary and differential well that's because it's actually not a gross constituent unit right bright lights is the gross constituent unit and the variety of those bright bright bright lights which is a matter of aesthetics the variety of those bright lights is ironically enough neutralized by the common signifier governing our understanding of them which is bright lights in this case particularly on a tree or festooning another ornament that has some sort of comparable value and once you get that once you get the value Christmas tree as opposed to red lights red lights being perhaps a part of some Christmas trees then you see that you're back in a semiotic system in a very obvious one because a Christmas tree is a not menorah a not Kwanzaa candles a Christmas tree in other words is a sign that can only be understood intelligently in terms of a certain cultural understanding and we think of course ah you know I mean we know what that is and of course probably we do but we're misled in supposing that that's the key to the understanding of it as a sign because it's very possible to imagine a circumstance in which someone wouldn't know what it was forcing us despite its familiarity to its familiarity to ask us well what is it and how do we know what it is and then we realize once again that we can only know what it is if we under if we come to understand in this case probably it's best to say a cultural system understood as a semiosis a cultural system within which it appears and so this last version of the red light introduces interesting complications which I don't think should confuse I think they should actually show us a little bit more about how we can understand the organization of the things around us and within us as systems of signs we know that we've already learned from Heidegger and the hermeneutic tradition that we know them as something but it remains to show how we know them that is to say we don't know them positively I mean how do you raises the interesting fact that we spontaneously recognize something and that makes us and that but that's one of the things which could be dangerous for semiotic because it would make us think or a zoo we know them that we know things positively without thinking in other words I know that that's an exit sign I don't know that it's a white thing with red marks on it I know that it's an exit sign but I can't know that the caesarian argument is without knowing that it is not all the things that it's not if it were all the things that it's not or if it were identical to all the things that somehow or another it's not then I would be in a very different difficult situation because I wouldn't have any means of knowing it in particular the very fact that I need to know it in particular is what makes me need to know it negatively and that is it seems to me in other words we now know two things about how we perceive things from the from the standpoint of this subject matter and I think and it's very useful to put them together the fact that we always know things first but at the same time the fact that it's misleading to think that that our knowing them first means that we know them positively we know them first but we also know them negatively in negation to other things okay so let me just return once again to the way in which sign systems are intelligible because you know I mean lots of there were going to be lots of moments in a course like this in which what we seem to be saying is oh we can't know anything or we don't know what we know or how do we know what we know and maybe we're maybe we're skirting rhetorical questions of that kind but we're really not what we're talking about today is how we do know things right that's I mean if we take if we take semiotic seriously it gives us a rather sophisticated means of understanding precisely how we know things but it insists that we know things because of their conventional nature that is to say because they are conventions existing within a system of conventions insofar as we don't recognize them things sines as existing because if we if we're thinking about a thing we're thinking about that thing as a sign in semi Alex if we don't know that if we don't recognize its existence in a system if we can't think what system it belongs to perhaps to put it in a better way that's tantamount to saying we really don't know what it is and I think the more we think about it the more we realize that we only know what it is if we know the system that it belongs to which is to say all of the things related to it which it is not okay so the intelligibility of sign systems is there conventionality that's why it's impossible for anybody to come along and say oh I don't like the fact that the red light is red it's symbolically the wrong move let's make the red light the symbol of go you know I mean you know with the ecological movement it would be very difficult to make the green light the symbol of stop but in any case all sorts of all sorts of complications would arise right but in the meantime you see that we can't mess with conventional systems by imposing the individuality of our will on them and expecting anything to change a seeming a seeming exception is the fact that sometimes individuals can bite through the exertion of their influence and prestige actually change the way we speak about things this is a seeming exception think about the way Jesse Jackson almost single-handedly convinced us that we should use the expression african-american even though it's a cumbersome polysyllabic expression which you would think somehow or another would be intuitively rejected because it's so hard to say but it worked he convinced us all to say african-american and you say to yourself aha there's an example of somebody taking language by the scruff of the neck and changing it as an individual exerting the individual will over against the conventional nature of language the answer the said that the semioticians answer to this is it never could have happened simply as an act of agency as an act of will it had to be acquiesced in you needed the community that makes use of linguistic conventions to acquiesce in a change of youths remember language exists synchronically it only exists in a moment in a moment of simultaneous imal tonality we study language daya chronically that is to say we study its history we study its unfolding in time now this unfolding is not according to the semiotician and here's another link with the russian formalist is not a question is not a question of studying the way in which language is changed from without that is to say studying the way in which for example an individual can rise up and insist on changing one of the signs but rather a sit a sequence of synchronic cross-sections from moment to moment language changes but if we're to understand it as language we have to honor its simultaneity and in that case we understand it as a sequence of cross-sections rather than something that somehow organically changes through time and at each cross section people are either willing to use a certain sign in a certain way or they're not that's the crucial thing if they're not willing the use of the sign doesn't work which confirms the idea that nothing can be changed simply by individual agency in and of its self alright I need to come back to synchrony and diachrony I'll do so next time and probably in subsequent lectures because we're going to keep using these coordinates we're going to keep using the things that exist in space virtual or not and the things that unfold in time in that relationship with each other as we continue to try to understand these basic principles which shape so much of subsequent literary theory thank you