Meaning and Textuality

Rolf Hellebust is a professor of Russian language and literature at the
University of Calgary.

In this translation of his Sens et textualité (1989), Rastier stakes a
claim for linguistics on the traditional territories of poetics,
semiotics, and hermeneutics. For him, words and texts are “objects of
distinct disciplines separated by academic rather than by scientific
boundaries.” Despite the dominance of a “restricted form of
linguistics, centred on morphosyntax,” it is the text, in Rastier’s
view, that constitutes the “real object” of linguistics.

The author opens with a critique of previous versions of textual
linguistics. Although he retains its key concept of isotopy, Rastier
rejects the universalism of Greimassian semiotics (not to mention
Chomsky), rooting his textual analysis in the specific linguistic and
cultural context of a literary work’s readership.

The first part of Meaning and Textuality is devoted to the theoretical
description of a neo-Saussurean interpretative semantics, covering the
realms of thematics (focusing on generic isotopies), dialectics (on the
temporal dimension of a narrative), dialogics (on the modalities of the
textual universe), and tactics (on the linear organization of semantic
units, including the concept of semantic rhythm). This part is also
notable for its acerbic commentary on the “avant-garde hermeneutics”
of poststructuralism, aimed chiefly at Barthes’s Le plaisir du texte.
Rastier insists that his theoretical project be viewed as a work in
progress. Thus, the penetrating essays on French poets (Jodelle,
Mallarm, Apollinaire) and prose writers (Zola, Maupassant) that
constitute the second part of his book not only illustrate his ideas,
but extend them in significant ways. At the same time, one is likely to
appreciate these chapters more in literary-critical terms (although
Rastier is careful to point out that he is not making interpretations,
but merely deriving limits for the range of possible readings) than in
terms of the author’s expansionist project for linguistics. One might
further suspect that a good literary critic could have come up with
similar observations without the aid of such extensive terminological
baggage. And although he provides a glossary, Rastier still makes for a
tough read. He obviously depends on our familiarity with his previous
writings, as well as those of his mentors. (For example, there is no
definition of the crucial concept isotopy, only a reference to the
author’s 1987 Sémantique interprétative.) This laconicism is
unfortunate, since his material is interesting enough that he could
easily have afforded a much thicker book.