Universal Grammar and Narrative Form

Sound and Meaning: The Roman Jakobson Series in Linguistics and Poetics

by David Herman, C.H. Van Schooneveld (Editor)

In a major rethinking of the functions, methods, and aims of narrative poetics, David Herman exposes important links between modernist and postmodernist literary experimentation and contemporary language theory. Ultimately a search for new tools for narrative theory, his work clarifies complex connections between science and art, theory and culture, and philosophical analysis and narrative discourse.
Following an extensive historical overview of theories about universal grammar, Herman examines Joyce’s Ulysses , Kafka’s The Trial , and Woolf’s Between the Acts as case studies of modernist literary narratives that encode grammatical principles which were (re)fashioned in logic, linguistics, and philosophy during the same period. Herman then uses the interpretation of universal grammar developed via these modernist texts to explore later twentieth-century cultural phenomena. The problem of citation in the discourses of postmodernism, for example, is discussed with reference to syntactic theory. An analysis of Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover raises the question of cinematic meaning and draws on semantic theory. In each case, Herman shows how postmodern narratives encode ideas at work in current theories about the nature and function of language.
Outlining new directions for the study of language in literature, Universal Grammar and Narrative Form provides a wealth of information about key literary, linguistic, and philosophical trends in the twentieth century.

296 pages, Paperback

First published September 27, 1995

About the author

David Herman is Professor of the Engaged Humanities, Department of English Studies, Durham University (United Kingdom).

Reviews

[JT · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting critical methods and exhaustive research signifying too little. The discussion of Kafka and semantic framing is quite good, and as close as Herman ever gets to risking a discernible argument. As for the rest:

"Conceived as a secondary grammar, postmodernism itself marks just this framework or horizon of inferential tolerance. After all, facing what other horizon, standing in what other framework, could I cite so many bits of text over so short a period of time and not be dismissed out of hand before reaching so inconclusive a conclusion?"

[Mesut Bostancı · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was so jazzed to read this book thinking it would be carrying out the task set for it in the title, but somehow everything about it felt like a letdown. I got about three helpful notes, no duh pragmatics are necessary for untangling represented discourse in narrative.