Parallels

I've just ordered an old, secondhand copy of "Transformational Syntax - a Student's Guide to Chomsky's Extended Standard Theory", my former, and now sadly deceased, professor's first book, which I've alluded to before [blog posts passim]. Somewhere in this house lies the original self-produced copy of this first opus by Andrew Radford; which he wrote, typed and Roneo-ed [an obsolete method of ink-based reproduction of documents, for the uninitiated: much cheaper at the time than using a photocopier, and a year or three before the availability of affordable computers and printers] over the summer break before taking up the chair in Linguistics at University College, North Wales [now Bangor University] at the tender age of thirty-four: both of which achievements speak volumes as to the man's ability. It is not out of any sympathy with or belief in Chomsky's syntactical theory that I've purchased the thing - I'd already come to the conclusion that he was already barking up the wrong tree back in those days: even before I'd left my postgrad course to pursue another life - but more out of nostalgia and that sense of wanting to add contrary viewpoints to my library for the sake of completeness.

What prompted this post is a slight return of the ghost of my similarly contrarian views on the work of Roland Barthes contained within my final year undergraduate thesis: a piece that turned up on the Academia.edu site by Johannes Meinhardt titled "Illusionism in Painting and the punctum of Photography", which I'm just reading in a very poor translation from the original German. The point, I guess, is that just as I quickly realised that Chomsky's Extended Standard Theory of Syntax was essentially hogwash, I'd previously challenged Barthes' views on the indexical nature of photography pretty instantaneously on reading his essay "The Rhetoric of The Image". Both of these views were entirely based on gut feelings; however both standpoints are essentially now the consensus of most in either field. Even if my then articulation of the arguments against either were at best sketchy, common sense and gut-logic proved right in both cases...