1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910524849403321

Autore

Finlay Marike

Titolo

The Potential of Modern Discourse : Musil, Peirce, and Perturbation / / Marike Finlay

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Indiana University Press, 1990

Bloomington : , : Indiana University Press, , 1990

©1990

ISBN

0-253-05580-6

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (1 online resource xii, 186 pages.)

Collana

Advances in semiotics

Soggetti

Semiotik

Konversationsanalyse

Connaissance, Theorie de la

Analyse du discours

Semiotique

Semiotiek

Discourse analysis

Kennistheorie

Semiotics

Knowledge, Theory of

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Sommario/riassunto

The postmodern response to the century-old crisis of classical discourse (which called into question the possibility of a fixed, objective, and absolute knowledge) has been to declare the death of the subject, and the end or absence of meaning. The Potential of Modern Discourse seeks to recover for contemporary discourse an alternative possibility by returning to the modernist project of linking ethics, politics, and the discourse of knowledge. In the multiple, ironic discourses of Robert Musil, the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, and the physics of Werner Heisenberg, Marike Finlay finds the basis for a



new discourse of knowledge. In her pragmatic, consensualmodel, meaning and truth are not objectively or unilaterally established, but rather "triadically" co-constructed as realtionship among "object," "representamen" (or "sign"), and "interpretant" (the terms are Peirce's), and this triadic realtionship is constantly shifting through time and space. By approaching Musil's The Man without Qualities as discourse, Finlay finds in it a re-presentation of the theory of knowledge implicit in the Peircean triadicity and Heisenber's philosophy of physics. Her reading constitutes one of the first attempts to apply Peircean semiotics to a literary work. in Musil's modernist response to the crisis of representation, Finlway discovers an alternative to the postmodernist complete deconstruction of sense.