Showing papers by "Marie-Laure Ryan published in 2016"

Fiction as a Logical, Ontological, and Illocutionary Issue

Abstract: In Fictive Discourse and the Structures of Literature, Felix MartinezBonati establishes himself as one of a growing number of literary scholars who scrutinize fictive discourse, in the hope of finding there a key to the understanding of literature in general. (Others include Pratt, Herrnstein-Smith, and Brown and Steinmann.1) Although these scholars are usually aware that not all literature is fiction (Pascal's Pensees), nor all fiction literature (for instance, made-up stories used in advertisements), they hold the fact that the two sets intersect as much more than a mere accident: it is in conjunction with each other that the properties of "literariness" and of "fictionality" reach their purest manifestation. A culture with no fiction but a literature appears as unlikely as a culture with fiction but no literatureno texts consumed for the sake of pleasure. By choosing fiction as an entrance into the house of literature, the critic can benefit from the ground-breaking work of a distinguished line of philosophers who investigated fiction as a logical issue: Frege, Meinong, Russell, Husserl, Austin, and today Searle, Kripke, David Lewis, N. WolstertorfF, J. Woods, T. Parsons, and others. The work of these philosophers centers around three distinct, but interrelated, issues: (1) The logical status of the sentence of and about fiction; (2) The ontological status of fictional characters and of fictional worlds; (3) The illocutionary status of fictional discourse. Though Martinez-Bonati does not explicitly address each of these questions (or rather, does not use the terminology in which I have put them), they provide a convenient way to probe his positions, and to situate his ideas about fiction within the current critical and philosophical scene.

Response to Brian Richardson's Target Essay "Unnatural Narrative Theory"

Abstract: Never afraid of self-promotion, the founding fathers of unnatural narratology (Alber et al., "Unnatural Narratives") wrote in a 2010 manifesto: "In recent years the study of unnatural narratology has developed into one of the most exciting new paradigms in narrative theory" (113). What exactly should one understand by paradigm? Is unnatural narratology (henceforth UN) a field of investigation--a field constituted by the most experimental, innovative narrative forms--or is it a thorough rethinking of narrative theory? From Richardson's article, one can conclude that it has ambitions to be both; the question then becomes: why do experimental forms of narrative call for a revision of narratology, and more precisely, what is it about them that, as Richardson claims, cannot be accounted for by standard narratology? If UN is simply a field of investigation, it could be justified by a scalar conception of narrativity. As I suggested in "Toward a Definition of Narrative," the set of all narratives can be conceived as a fuzzy set that encompasses both prototypical forms, in which the conditions of narrativity are fully realized, and marginal forms, in which some of these conditions are not fulfilled, or where the telling of a story is subordinated to another purpose rather than constituting a focus of attention. UN could then be conceived as the study of the marginal forms, though I doubt that its advocates would subscribe to this view: Richardson makes it clear that for him experimental forms, such as Beckett's novels, are just as narrative as the genre that UN regards as the embodiment of naturalness in narrative, and that serves, consequently, as an implicit standard. Rather than relying on a scalar conception of narrativity, UN rests on a dichotomy between natural and unnatural narratives, (1) and it designates the unnatural as its territory. But in contrast to Monika Fludernik, who has given deep thought to what it means to call a type of narrative natural, and who associates this type with spontaneous, conversational narratives (Towards), UN proponents do not take the time to define, much less to scrutinize, their implicit standard. References to linguistic/discourse analytical approaches to conversational narrative are glaringly absent from their work. Through a process of inference from what our authors label unnatural, I construct this standard as "x telling y that p happened in the real world, in the hope that y will believe that p." This excludes, a priori, all forms of fiction from the domain of the natural, even though the creation of fictional worlds and stories is a universally attested and cognitively fundamental human activity. I infer, furthermore, that in order to optimize believability, the telling of p should be governed by H. Paul Grice's famous maxims of conversation: maxims such as quality (do not say what you do not believe to be true), quantity (avoid prolixity), relevance (your contribution should be related to the current topic of the conversation), and manner (make your contribution orderly). These maxims not only fail to account for literary texts, but they are also often deliberately flouted (as Grice recognizes) in conversational storytelling. Tellability often gets in the way of believability, and it is to the extent that they play freely with the maxims that conversational narrators manage to capture the interest of their audience. If there is a form of narrative that strictly follows Grice's maxims, it would be courtroom testimony, or maybe history writing, but these genres are hardly a natural, spontaneous form of narration. If UN advocates took the time to study the forms of storytelling that they regard as natural, they would discover that these forms are much richer and more sophisticated in their narrative techniques than merely informing an audience that something happened. One could admittedly argue that written forms of narrative, compared to oral ones, present medium-specific narrative devices, while fictional narratives, compared to factual ones, present genre-specific devices. …