The Fateful Discourse of Worldly Things (review)

Abstract

??? COHPAnATIST Reading Eco includes specimens of this critical paradox, but it also offers telling examples ofovercoming it, as when Hutcheon perspicaciously evades the theoretical trap by considering irony as a relation ofsameness/difference between Eco's theory and fiction: "Without irony, Eco's novel [Foucault's Pendulum] would be an exemplar ofhermetic semiosis; with irony, it becomes simultaneously a critique as well as an exemplar" (3 1 7). Tejera insightfully distinguishes Eco's novels from his theoretical semiotics: the former "remain true to the creative spirit of expressive art," while the latter bears the traces of"Cartesian or neopositivist approaches " (150; see also 158, 415 n.15). Several contributors offer impressive demonstrations that Eco's theory is a tool for analyzing artistic texts that are not necessarily like the ones he wrote: Riffaterre elaborates an effective Peircean (and Ecoic) approach to intertextuality, and Rauch does the same with linguistics. Other authors prove that Eco's texts can be interpreted by theories which are not his: Kevelson explores Peirce and Eco through drama, and Perron and Debbeche analyze an Eco text through Greimas. Bondanella's and Capozzi's books are timely indications ofthe fruitfulness of perceiving Eco as the same in his metamorphoses. They also testify to a certain price that Eco and his readers must/may pay for the enormous pleasure and intellectual stimulus ofbeing Eco and being with Eco. Nikita NankovIndiana University DAVID HALLIBURTON. TheFatefulDiscourse ofWorldly Things. Stanford : Stanford UP, 1997. ix + 415 pp. In the age ofdeconstruction, David Halliburton is interested in reconstruction. How is the discourse ofphenomena constructed? What social, political, economic, and cultural elements contribute to its shape and fullness? In turn, the answer to these questions becomes a means for interpreting the things. Taking his cue from Kenneth Burke's A Grammar ofMotives and A Rhetoric ofMotives, he proposes a grammar ofphenomena that attempts to explore and open the various elements that mediate the critical discourse. In a further elaboration ofBurke, he hopes to follow this book with a companion volume exploring the rhetoric and politics ofthings. Halliburton's title comes from Joachim du Bellay's discoursfatal des choses mondaines , and focuses on thefatefulness, as opposed to the fatalness ofdiscourse, that is its moment, fullness, or Dewyean "consummation." The book has a magisterial scope, roaming widely over Western philosophy and literature, with special attention to Hannah Arendt and to the American pragmatists CS. Peirce, John Dewey, and William James. Halliburton, Professor ofEnglish, Comparative Literature, and Modem Thought and Literature at Stanford University, and author ofa number of books, including Poetic Thinking: An Approach to Heidegger (198 1), and The Color ofthe Sky: A Study ofStephen Crane (1989), is eminently qualified for the task. The book is divided into five parts: Reconstructing, Constituting, Discoursing, Incorporating, and Experiencing, the activities that trace the stages in the construction ofthe discourse ofphenomena ofthings, giving them their fullness. Jumping off from Dewey and Emerson, "Reconstructing" argues that "practice" precedes "theory," providing the ground for it. From this Halliburton suggests how theories create systems, comparing the civil models that emerge from Hobbes and Locke with that reconstructed by Pater in The Renaissance and Marius the Epicurean. Vol'. 23 (1999): 167 REVIEWS "Constituting" takes the next step, asking how the world we know is constructed and coheres. Focusing on Peirce and Husserl, he looks at the functions ofendowing , enabling, and entitling in the process of"world making." To illustrate this, Halliburton traces the construction ofManifest Destiny from the discourse ofJefferson through Walt Whitman and Robert Frost. "Discoursing" considers various modes ofrepresentation and how they shape our experience ofphenomena, how experience becomes an experience. Specifically, he looks at the analytical mode of Descartes, the figurai and historical modes ofVico, and the consequential mode of representation of Peirce and Dewey. "Incorporating" examines corporeality and how phenomena are concertized. Halliburton plays Merleau-Ponty's concept of "flesh" offofGalileo's reduction ofthe physical world to secondary qualities. He then examines this tension between the physical and ideal by an extended exegesis ofYeats and Hopkins with Peruvian poet César Vallejo. The final part ofHalliburton 's discussion, "Experiencing," looks at modes ofexperience, both as something one does and something one undergoes. His comments on the theater ofBrecht...