Abstract

It has by now become a virtual commonplace that the turn of the century marked, too, a "linguistic turn," a paradigm-shift in which a number of theoretical discourses came to be subsumed under the study of language. In philosophy, Wittgenstein and then the Vienna Circle stressed that philosophical analysis consists largely or even wholly in the parsing of sentences framed in the various special sciences. In literary theory, likewise, the Russian Formalists and then the Prague School found in linguistics the conceptual resources for analyzing literary texts. Less attention has been devoted, however, to the ways in which early twentieth-century literary narratives themselves participate in and help us understand the linguistic turn guiding contemporary theoretical discourse. This dissertation argues that, like the analytic techniques of other early twentieth-century discourses, the narrative techniques of modernist texts by Joyce, Kafka and Woolf thematize or foreground the role of language itself in the constitution of our views about the world. More specifically, the dissertation examines the linguistic turn enacted, in different ways, by Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka's Der Prozess and Woolf's Between the Acts. But furthermore, the dissertation contextualizes both the literary and the theoretical emphasis on language in the age-old tradition of universal or speculative grammars--grammars premised on the view that the structure of language mirrors both the structure of the world and the structure of the mind. Tracing modern incarnations of the ideal of universal grammar in early twentieth-century theoretical discourses such as linguistics, philosophy of language and semiotics, and also in the narrative techniques of Joyce, Kafka and Woolf, the dissertation argues that the way modernist narratives formally encode grammatical principles can help us rethink a number of difficulties facing literary theory today, particularly the text-context relation. A section of "Applications"--on the significance of quotation or citation in postmodernism, on notions of meaning in film, and on the problem of expressibility in Holocaust literature--further clarifies the scope and limits of a grammatical approach to cultural phenomena in general