Note on Translation Introduction by Michael Holquist Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel) The Problem of Speech Genres The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis From Notes Made in 1970-71 Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences Index

Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

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

Preface Introduction: The Role of the Reader I. Open 1. The Poetics of the Open Work 2. The Semantics of Metaphor 3. On the Possibility of Generating Aesthetic Messages in an Edenic Language II. Closed 4. The Myth of Superman 5. Rhetoric and Ideology in Sue's Les Mysteres de Paris 6. Narrative Structures in Fleming III. Open/Closed 7. Peirce and the Semiotic Foundations of Openness: Signs as Texts and Texts as Signs 8. Lector in Fabula: Pragmatic Strategy in a Metanarrative Text Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Bibliography

The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts

A pioneering attempt to relate the theory of literary fiction to a more general theory of fiction, using fictions of apocalypse as a model. This pioneering exploration of the relationship of fiction to age-old conceptions of chaos and crisis offers many new insights into some of the most unyielding philosophical and aesthetic enigmas. Examining the works of a wide range of writers from Plato to William Burroughs, Kermode demonstrates how writers have persistently imposed their \"fictions\" upon the face of eternity and how these have reflected the apocalyptic spirit.

Frank Kermode and the Invented World@@@The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction

This article explores interpersonal meaning in social media photographs, using the representation of motherhood in Instagram images as a case study. It investigates the visual choices that are made in these images to construe relationships between the represented participants, the photographer, and the ambient social media viewer. The author draws upon existing work on the visual systems of point of view and focalization to explore interpersonal meaning in these images, and proposes that an additional system – subjectification – is needed to account for the kinds of relationship between the viewer and the photographer that are instantiated in social photographs, as well as the ways in which subjectivity is signaled in these images. The dataset analyzed is the entire Instagram feed of a single user who posts images of her experience of motherhood and a collection of 500 images using the hashtag #motherhood.

Social media photography: construing subjectivity in Instagram images:

The question of how readers use general everyday knowledge in reading fictional narratives has been the subject of lively debate in narrative and literary theory in recent decades. In this paper, I will look closer at the common claim made in recent cognitive literary studies that the audience's everyday world knowledge is the core mechanism in understanding characters in fiction. More precisely, I will focus on Anthony J. Sanford and Catherine Emmott's treatment of the question of characterization – that is, the representation and making sense of characters in narrative fiction – in their recent work Mind, Brain and Narrative (2012), in order to address the issue of relevant inferences about fictional characters. I will discuss in particular four crucial aspects of understanding characters in fiction that are missing in Sanford and Emmott's model. These aspects concern the reader's knowledge of what kinds of characters may exist in fiction, the role of narrative mediation in fiction, knowledge of genre, and intertextual information. Unlike Sanford and Emmott, who emphasize the writer's rhetorical control over the reader's act of cognition, I consider these aspects to be conventions of reading that both readers and writers apply in narrative understanding.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01077644/document

Everyday knowledge in understanding fictional characters and their worlds

The central question in this paper is the relationship between European modernist traveller's self-fashioning and the representation of Sub-Saharan African cultures, spaces and cross-cultural encounters in the early 20th century. The premise is that the cultural production of identity, including the question of artistic identity and poetics, is most productive where it is most ambivalent and uneasy. High modernist critical narratives pose the question of the phenomenology of travel in terms of textual authority. Authority, in the perception in late colonial European writing, was often simultaneously questioned and affirmed, meaning that Western art, and the modern society, were seen as lacking something significant outside of its margin. At the same time, the idea of the pure exotic emerged as incompatible with modern historical consciousness, and colonial texts anticipate many later theoretical ideas in postcolonial studies. The question is how to portray cross-cultural encounters, and how to fashion the self in the contact zone of travel and sojourn. Modernist travel writing asks what was the writer's self and the recognition of identity and difference in others. The modernist image of Africa carries important implications for the re-evaluation of art and literature and the renewal of artistic or narrative forms.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1062798705000116

The modernist traveller in Africa: Africanism and the European author's self-fashioning

Abstract This paper poses the question of how the beginning of a narrative may (or may not) imply a generic frame. More precisely, the objective is to examine the way in which the given narrative mood (perspective, type of discourse) and the initial narrating instance (or narrative situation) relate to generic expectations. Specific attention is given to cues of realism in the openings of nineteenth-century European novels. The discussion critically assesses F. K. Stanzel’s (A Theory of Narrative) and Philippe Hamon’s (“Un discours contraint”) assumptions about the way in which initial narrative choices might identify the genre of the text. Both Stanzel and Hamon, in their differing ways, over-emphasise the generic implications of the narrative mode. The crucial point of distinction for Stanzel in this regard is the reflector mode. More specifically, he argues that an initial figural narrative situation could be considered conspicuously fictional. Hamon, in turn, highlights the question of novelistic conventions in realistic discourse, one generic marker of which is what he calls the “narrative concretization (alibi) of the performance of the discourse,” such as the strategy of delegating the narration to a narrator-character at the beginning of the novel. It is maintained in this paper that although novelistic beginnings cannot determine the text’s fictionality or genre by their narrative mode alone, the narrative perspective and situation in the opening can evoke, in connection with other potential markers, such as perspective, personal pronouns, verb tense, peritexts, and their combined rhetorical function, generic expectations that shape the reader’s understanding of the text. Paul Valéry’s famous mock-novelistic beginning “The marquise went out at 5 o’clock” is used as a point of reference in the discussion, and representative examples of “realistic” beginnings are drawn from Charles Dickens, Émile Zola and contemporary literature.

“The marquise went out at 5 o’clock”: Novel beginnings and realistic expectations

The Impossible Equation of Text Analysis and Personal Reading Experience

This article examines Peter J Rabinowitz’s notions of “authorial audience” and “narrative audience” in terms of their relevance as pedagogical tools in the univer¬sity classroom Rabinowitz’s rhetorical theory of hypothetical audiences, which has remained relatively unknown in Finnish literary studies, attempts to bridge the gap between the demands of detailed text analysis, knowledge of the author’s expectations, and the reader’s personal involvement in reading The focus in the article is on the difficulty of knowing just how much of the cultural and historical background of a given text, the basic reader competencies, or the reader’s personal involvement in reading, should be brought into the classroom discussion The emphasis on the reader’s reaction to the hypothetical roles he or she could join is pertinent in the light of recent empirical research that has found that personal involvement in narrative discourse is important for the learning of textual analysis This research has shown that more student-centered approaches have achieved better results in teaching sophisticated text analysis and, further, have reported that the students thus remain more favorable orientated to literature (than in courses concentrating solely on textual features) At the same time, however, the focus on the reader’s personal involvement may overestimate the importance of familiar literary conventions and involve uncritical equation of the reader’s personal politics and ethics with those of the author and his or her time

The article then moves on to a brief analysis of James Joyce’s short story “An Encounter”, from Dubliners, attempting to show how (inductive) analysis of this narra¬tive may move toward broader claims about hypothetical audiences and thus potentially bridge the gap between the demands of text analysis, knowledge of literary conventions and expectations, and personal involvement in reading The many references to actual locations in Dublin, or to historical names and events in Joyce’s story, along with the political, educational and religious views that it voices and reflects, pose the difficult question of their relevance for (what may be thought of as) an intelligent interpretation of the story Simultaneously, “An Encounter” investigates hypothetical audiences in its own right, portraying and identifying different types of readers who are deeply involved in the fictions that they read It is, then, suggested in this analysis that the students’ ability to connect the places and names to actual places and historical contexts may be less significant than their capacity to pretend to join the narrative audience, that is, to test out different imaginative audiences who pretend to believe the story as true Further, it is argued that the reader’s ability to get more involved in the fictional world of “An Encounter” might help the understanding of the characters’ minds, behavior, speech and their evolving complex relations As members of the narrative audience, readers may be able to identify particularly relevant questions about the characters and their fictional world, from imaginary perspectives and roles that the fiction offers them

/pdf/tekstianalyysin-ja-lukukokemuksen-mahdoton-yhtalo-2d4o6lxu7y.pdf

Tekstianalyysin ja lukukokemuksen mahdoton yhtälö


 This article discusses the literary character's plot function as an element of the author's rhetorical strategy, and in relation to the reader's active role in responding to that strategy. The main focus will be on characterological instances in narrative fiction that facilitate the development of the novel's plot by way of the character's movement, perspective, or moving perspective. These considerations will be brought to bear on James Phelan's rhetorical approach to the fictional character's basic functions, also known as the mimetic-thematic-synthetic model (MTS model). More precisely, this article will look harder at Phelan's so-called synthetic component of character, that is, those aspects that foreground the character as a construct (rather than as a possible person or a theme), to argue that much more work can be done with this category. In the course of this discussion, Henry James's notion of a ficelle and Vladimir Nabokov's term perry will serve as complementary ideas and as a counterpoint to Phelan's synthetic component. Hence this article will ask: how can we (re)integrate the plot-helper function into the rhetorical character theory?

Kai Mikkonen

Papers

Everyday knowledge in understanding fictional characters and their worlds

The modernist traveller in Africa: Africanism and the European author's self-fashioning

“The marquise went out at 5 o’clock”: Novel beginnings and realistic expectations

Tekstianalyysin ja lukukokemuksen mahdoton yhtälö

The Rhetorics of Plot Function: Henry James's ficelle, Vladimir Nabokov's “Perry,” and James Phelan's “Synthetic Function” Reconsidered