Is All Discourse Official? On the Poetics of Gifting and Gossiping
This essay discusses gift-giving and gossiping in a canonical American novel (John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, 1939) by way of the two texts which sealed the fate of dominant literary scholarship after WWII: Marcel Mauss’s essay The Gift and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Introduction to the Work of Mar...
সংরক্ষণ করুন:
| প্রকাশিত: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ejas, |
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| প্রধান লেখক: | |
| বিন্যাস: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| ভাষা: | Anglais |
| প্রকাশিত: |
European journal of American studies
2021
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| বিষয়গুলি: | |
| অনলাইন ব্যবহার করুন: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| সংক্ষিপ্ত: | This essay discusses gift-giving and gossiping in a canonical American novel (John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, 1939) by way of the two texts which sealed the fate of dominant literary scholarship after WWII: Marcel Mauss’s essay The Gift and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. Steinbeck’s use of informal discourse and Marcel Mauss’s descriptions of tacit compulsory reciprocation present the opportunity to dispute central assumptions in literary theory that pertain to literary meaning, interpretation, and referentiality. This essay argues that literary language is conventional precisely because its conventionality fulfills a social function; the conventional nature of literary language is in itself meaningful socially. This, in turn, suggests that the interpretation of literary texts remains dependent on a correct understanding of the material and symbolic economies they participate in. |
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