is not to say that nonliterate subjects lack the ability to handle quotation
but only that literacy and schooling make the recognition and interpret-
ation of quoted expressions routine.^2
Written texts invite discourse not only about whathe/shemeans but,
more importantly, about whatit means. This distinction between the
speaker’s meaning and textual meaning reflects the fact that the text
is detached from the author in just the way that quotation detaches
expression from the speaker. Linguist Roy Harris (1989, 104) has made
a similar claim, stating that writing opens a conceptual gap between
sentence and utterance, a gap that allows an analysis of sentences as
opposed to utterance. More recently he has added the following:
With the arrival of ‘‘the sentence,’’ a new forum is created for the discussion
of human thinking, and along with that comes the concomitant demand or
expectation that all thinking (reasoning) worth bothering about has to be
presented in sentential form. (This expectation is already realized by the
time of Aristotle, because the sentence is the basis of the Aristotelian
syllogism.)
This new forum, however, is also an intellectual cage or enclosure im
posing its own limitations. It cannot accommodate non sentential modes of
thought. (Harris, forthcoming)Once created, this gap poses problems of interpretation for students and
others who find it difficult to reassign a textual statement to an author,
that is, to translate a sentence back into an utterance, and hence, to
criticize a text (Peskin 2000).
To summarize, quotation strips off the author’s illocutionary force,
leaving a somewhat bare propositional content, an unowned thought.
And it is that denuded propositional content that provides a basis for
logic and philosophy as well as for much of modern literature. It is worth
noting that quotation is a linguistic device; quoted expressions are not
unique to writing but have become central to writing and reading in the
literate contexts I have been describing. The argument is only that writers
may seize upon this resource and expand it to create the forms of expres-
sion we identify as literary. Of course, a great deal of learning sponsored
by the school is required if one is to participate in this literary tradition. So
writing does not cause the development of diverse forms of literacy but of
course they could not develop without writing either. Writing is a neces-
sary condition, not a sufficient one, as Goody frequently pointed out.
A historical process has to intervene; and a good deal of human ingenuity.
- Derrida (1976) was, I believe, the first theorist to take quoted expressions as the basis
of culture and cognition. His concept of the ‘‘free play of the signifiers,’’ the kind of thinking
involved when one ignores the signified, is based on an analysis of the sense rather than
reference of expressions. Derrida examined the nature of writing as if what was written was
enclosed in quotation marks (see Hobson 1998).
398 Epilogue