Language, Subjectivity and Ideology in "A Rose for Emily"

Year 1995, Issue: 2, 49 - 59, 01.10.1995

Semiramis Yağcıoğlu

Abstract

The object and scope of issues such as the way a reader responds to a literary text and the way s/he begins to evaluate it can not be fully grasped unless we understand the subject positions conferred upon the reader by the text itself. That is what Kaja Silverman posits in The Subject of Semiotics by drawing on the connections between semiotics and poststructuralist psychoanalytic film theory. This linking of the question of the constitution of meaning to that of the constitution of the subject locates the problem of interpretation in a theory of discourse. For Roger Fowler, who argues for a need to provide a description of the linguistic properties of a text which prove to be significant in literary discourse, "to treat literature as discourse is to see the text as mediating relationships between language-users. [These are n]ot only relationships of speech, but also of consciousness, ideology, role and class. The text ceases to be an object and becomes an action or process" 80 .

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