GDC

Robert Terrill

We have a new meme quote. :)

I want to just go to his office hours and hear his entire schtick about why he dislikes the B school. He always makes those side comments, and he doesn’t give a fuck if there are business students in the class. He just says it because he’s right.

This is actually quite similar to what Robin posted before. We’re studying Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in my children’s lit class. Today the professor brought up this line and then lectured about the complicated but nonetheless inherent differences between saying what is meant and meaning what is said. He talked about having an idea in the mind and then voicing it through language and how what was intended to be said is not necessarily the same as what was actually said. Finally, I deemed it the appropriate time to chime in with “The Conduit Metaphor.” I had a strong hunch that this English professor was studied vastly in linguistics and rhetoric as well as literature that he surely knew what I meant by this. He most certainly did and requested that I explain it in further detail for the whole class.

He then introduced some new intricacies to this concept of communication that we didn’t explicitly study in C205. He told us how the act of speech includes three sub-acts. There’s the locution (expressing ideas into language), illocution (the language being delivered), and perlocution (the language being received and interpreted back into ideas). The “errors” of communication can take place at all three levels of speech. In the case of C205, we tended to focus more on illocution as the medium through which communication is a process of creation rather than a process of transfer. However, “errors” occur in their own ways during the locution and perlocution acts.

In the case of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the term “error” is substituted as “nonsense.” We see nonsense in locution (“Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe”) but also in perlocution (when Alice cannot comprehend the puns the Gryffon and Mock-Turtle use) and illocution (in the multiple, self-aware allegorical passages that require the reader to be conscious of the change that occurs during communication in order to contextualize the allegory and understand its meaning). In this way, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland can act as a sort of exploration of linguistic and communicative nonsense. In the same way that we learned that the imperfectibility of communication is the reason why we have human culture, Carroll’s works of nonsense literature represent the complicated but fantastic realm provided by non-conduit communication.

(via thenerdchild)