How to Do Things With Words

In the first two volumes of this work, Paul Ricoeur examined the relations between time and narrative in historical writing, fiction, and theories of literature. This final volume, a comprehensive reexamination and synthesis of the ideas developed in volumes 1 and 2, stands as Ricoeur's most complete and satisfying presentation of his own philosophy.

Time and Narrative

After virtue, a study in moral theory

Discourse in the Novel

Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction

Aural Worldmaking: Introduction

The term “dialogue,” which etymologically means a “literary work consisting of a conversation between two or more persons,” was extended around 1400 to simply denote a “conversation” (Online Etymology Dictionary). In literary studies, the term has undergone further metaphorical extensions and is used, for example, to refer to the ways in which (A) authors “communicate” with their readers, (B) readers engage with literary texts, or (C) the texts themselves relate to other texts. In the present volume, Roger D. Sell conceptualizes “literature as dialogue” as a form of communication between authors and readers, whereby authors offer “invitations” to readers and readers accept or, rather, “negotiate” them: “At its best, literary activity consists of writer-audience interchanges that are reciprocally even-handed” (Sell 2). Moreover, these “bi-directional and bicontextual modes of communication . . . tend to make or consolidate a community” (5). Similarly, Carmen Popescu, in her contribution on the Christian Orthodox poetry by Scott Cairns and Cristian Popescu, talks about an “ongoing conversation between writers across centuries, locations and traditions” (215). The question arises what is gained by this metaphorical manner of speaking. After all, communication between authors and readers can hardly be “reciprocal” and “bi-directional” in a literal sense unless one imagines them to exchange letters or to speak face to face. And how can authors and readers (or authors and other authors) who are separated by time and space be said to form a “community,” except on the level of ideas or their respective “imaginaries” (Iser)? The problem with differentiation becomes most visible in David Fishelov’s contribution, where “dialogue” and “dialogicity” are used to cover the “dialogical form” (23) of actual dialogues, the use of “dual voices” (24) or a kind of ventriloquism in novels (Bakhtin’s dialogism and polyphony), the “dialogical function” that rests on an invitation to readers to “ponder and deliberate upon two competing ideas” (24–25), but also the “inner, tense dialogue” (31) a reader experiences when reading Swift’s A Modest Proposal and, finally, an intrinsic human quality since “we all carry within ourselves layers of different voices and positions” (39). The heuristic value of such pan-dialogism remains questionable. Furthermore, the “idea of dialogue” (Thomas) that underlies Sell’s concept of “communicational criticism” is precisely one that sees dialogue as intrinsically democratic and as fostering a sharing of ideas among equals. However, there is a certain inconsistency in arguing that a mediating critic, “without in any sense urging the audiences of literary works to surrender their own standpoint and criteria, can try to encourage better understanding and a more empathetic response” (13; italics mine). In his own contribution, “In Dialogue with the Ageing Wordsworth,” Sell again claims that “a critic can exactly pinpoint genuine communication in the way writers actually direct their words towards their addressees” (162). One wonders whether the critics’ hermeneutic agendas suffice

Literature as Dialogue: Invitations Offered and Negotiated ed. by Roger D. Sell (review)

Katharina Fürholzer: Das Ethos des Pathographen: Literatur- und medizinethische Dimensionen von Krankenbiographien

Dialogic interactions on radio: Studs Terkel’s literary interviews

In June 2006, the Sunday Times featured an article entitled ‘“Ladette” Scots take it out on their men’ (Macaskill, 2006). The thrust of this article was that female Scottish students were particularly prone to assaulting their boyfriends, which the author attributed to ‘rising alcohol and drug use as well as the growth of the “ladette” culture’. Drawing upon research conducted with university students worldwide, the article drew the conclusion that female-on-male violence was as common as male-on-female violence and that feminist researchers had been wrong in pointing out the prevalence of men hitting women. As I will show below, the article quite glaringly misconstrues the Tacts’ it presents in order to profit from the controversies surrounding intimate partner violence by further dividing opinions and thus gaining topicality. What this article and also others like it do, however, is to invest issues such as intimate partner violence with symbolic meaning for society at large and offer the discursive space in and through which such meaning can be inscribed in ‘popular imagination’; that is ‘shared (awareness of) concepts and phenomena in particular populations’ (Petterson, 2002, p. 34). The ramifications of such practices are as huge as they are damaging since people’s knowledge about partner violence is distorted and false stereotypes are reinforced. In order to show how this may also affect the attitudes of people who professionally have to deal with domestic abuse, I complement my discussion of the Sunday Times article with an analysis of an interview narrative from my sample of 20 interviews with general practitioners conducted in Aberdeen in 2000 (Mildorf, 2007). The narrative, admittedly one of the more extreme examples from my corpus because it is biased, depicts a doctor’s personal story of a friend’s experience with violence perpetrated on him by his wife.

Jarmila Mildorf

Papers

Aural Worldmaking: Introduction

Literature as Dialogue: Invitations Offered and Negotiated ed. by Roger D. Sell (review)

Katharina Fürholzer: Das Ethos des Pathographen: Literatur- und medizinethische Dimensionen von Krankenbiographien

Dialogic interactions on radio: Studs Terkel’s literary interviews

Female-On-Male Violence: Medical Responses and Popular Imagination