Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Other Of The Other: Topology And The Ideogrammatics Of American Imperial Practice, Hector A. Torres

English Language and Literature Faculty Publications

In this essay I trace what I will here call a cultural pathology in American history and historiography. This cultural pathology certainly stems from the Puritan dilemma of colonial, but it might also be said to have no unique location or site of origin. Rather than locate a unique site of origin for this cultural pathology in any period of American history, I shall argue for its location in the subject of discourse. If Hardt and Negri are right when they claim in Empire (2000) that the United States begins to practice a new mode of political sovereignty after the …

Syntactic Change From Old Into Middle English With Special Reference To Ancrene Wisse, Hector A. Torres

English Language and Literature Faculty Publications

In the introduction to their Early Middle English Verse and Prose, Bennett and Smithers make the point that: "To distinguish and characterize the local varieties of English (spoken or written) is not the be-all and end-all of ME studies. It is more important to ascertain the major structural characteristicsof the main varieties of ME, and to understand how and why these characteristics came into being" (emphasis added, 1968, xxiii) .

Since even by the ninth century Old English already alternated between SOV and SVO word order patterns (Bright 93), their point raises at least a couple of questions: (i) …

The Ethnographic Component In Chicano/A Literary Discourse, Hector A. Torres

English Language and Literature Faculty Publications

Postmodern ethnography is the model of the Humanities I trace in order interrelate the inheritance of the erasure mark by contemporary Chicana and Chicano writers. These writers write under erasure because they are aware that too much politics can spoil the story but so can not enough aesthetics. Steering between the exigencies of politics and aesthetics, these contemporary writers are producing a literary discourse that contests Anglo America's narrow understanding of the Chicano/a experience: its attempts to distance itself from the socioeconomic and linguistic reality the Chicano/a experience presents and represents to it, not to mention its historical complicity in …

For A Sociolinguistics Of Literature: The Question Of Style, Hector A. Torres

English Language and Literature Faculty Publications

It is neither my intent in this essay to deconstruct the internal-external distinction so central to generative grammar nor to favor one side of the debate over the other, since in fact I want to favor both sides. My objective is to explore Jacques Derrida' s insistence that the concept of the event be placed in the gap of the competence/performance distinction (Linguistics 53). The event, as Derrida calls it in philosophical language, is the moment of utterance in an exchange between interactants, the content of the illocutions, the illocutionary forces that affect and modify these illocutions, the interactions …

Deconstructing A Grammar: Locality, Minimality, And The Subjective, Hector A. Torres

English Language and Literature Faculty Publications

In this essay I wish to establish a theoretical and empirical ligature between generative grammar and deconstruction. How and why these two branches of knowledge should have such liaisons are of course question of tremendous historical scope. My aim is not so much to present new data but bring a certain perspective to already existing data and theory in the fields of syntax and semantics. The perspective I want to bring aligns Chomsky 's Principle of Full Interpretation with Derridean differ_nce. I take Chomsky 's Principle of Full Interpretation to be a version of the principle of identity and its …

Genre, Gender, And Mestizaje: The Politics Of Aesthetics In The Work Of Gloria Anzaldúa, Hector A. Torres

English Language and Literature Faculty Publications

I take mestizaje as my point of departure for this critical study of Anzaldua's literary production. Through this ideological practice she calls mestizaje or mestiza consciousness, Anzaldua pens a body of work that negotiates the question mark punctuating the politics of identity in multicultural America at least since the political activism of the 1960s.

The Constitution Of Data In Linguistic Theory: Writing, Hector A. Torres

English Language and Literature Faculty Publications

As a form of language, writing bears a troubled relation to linguistic theory. For reasons both historical and theoretical, contemporary linguistic theory has been reluctant to treat the phenomenon of writing as an object of study on par with spoken language. This essay explores this troubled relation between linguistic theory and written language through the grid of deconstruction or post-structuralism. Though short, this essay will require much wandering and wondering in pursuit not so much a hypothesis but a clarification of the question: what does it mean to say that writing is not just a simple secondary object of study …

Mestiza Consciousness And Dialect(Ic)S: Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Hector A. Torres

English Language and Literature Faculty Publications

As represented in Borderlands, the dialectics of Mestiza consciousness contest the promise of security offered by the Western prescription that a term, proposition, or state of affairs must be either true or false, that it cannot be both simultaneously, or that once it holds one value it cannot carry the other. Here, it is worth noting that the premise of the challenge is not that identity and non-contradiction are not useful but that they are too narrow to account for the diversity and heterogeneity of human life experience. From such a point of view, the Western logos is not …