Showing papers in "Journal of Literary Semantics in 2011"
TL;DR: The authors argue that politically subversive texts written in allegorical form attain their significance because they are conceptual blends, since readers are naturally driven to find new values that fit an allegory's fixed roles, often yielding new meaning for texts in different contexts.
Abstract: I argue that politically subversive texts written in allegorical form attain their significance because they are conceptual blends. Political allegories allow writers to criticise regimes indirectly since writers can count on readers to mentally contruct appropriate blends. Readers are naturally driven to find new values that fit an allegory's fixed roles, often yielding new meaning for texts in different contexts. Unfortunately, politically subversive allegories may be censored when censors run the same blends. The three main texts discussed here ― Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog, Orwell's Animal Farm, and Miller's The Crucible ― are often interpreted as political allegories. I turn to conceptual blending theory to show in some detail how those readings arise. When it comes to allegory and censorship, I suggest that conceptual blending theory can offer us new insights into these timeless topics.
35 citations
TL;DR: This paper argued that there is no need, theoretical or pragmatic, to postulate a fictional narrator for every fictional narrative, and that there are good reasons against this position, while important arguments that seem to speak in favor of it can be shown to be ultimately untenable.
Abstract: Most narratologists today maintain that all fictional narratives have a fictional narrator that is to be distinguished from its author. Call this a "pan-narrator theory" (PN). In this essay, we argue that there are good reasons against this position, while important arguments that seem to speak in favor of it can be shown to be ultimately untenable. We start by offering a brief sketch of a theory of fiction that serves as the basis of our considerations and then defend the view that there is no need, theoretical or pragmatic, to postulate a fictional narrator for every fictional narrative.
28 citations
TL;DR: The principle of suspension of modal claims was introduced by as mentioned in this paper as an explanation for the impossibility of total fiction that would undermine all assumptions based on our actual world, where readers reconstrue the fictional world as being the closest possible to the reality we know.
Abstract: Abstract As has been argued in various theories of fiction, there can be no such thing as a totally fictional world. This paper seeks to examine the principle of minimal departure, defined by David Lewis and Marie-Laure Ryan, as an explanation for the impossibility of total fiction that would undermine all assumptions based on our actual world. The principle says that readers reconstrue the fictional world as being the closest possible to the reality we know, unless otherwise indicated. By drawing examples from the ontologically fluid worlds in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, I suggest new areas in narrative analysis where the principle could be applied and point out some limitations in earlier definitions of this notion. On the one hand, we can examine those narrative and literary devices that directly play upon the principle of mimimal departure and allow fiction to enlarge the scope of the world that must be explained. On the other hand, I argue that questions of modality in fiction may be relatively immune to this principle. I thus introduce the rule of suspension of modal claims, indicating the need to refrain from making assumptions, in any strong sense, about what may be possible, necessary, or contingent in a fictional world. The principle of suspension of modal claims emphasizes the way fiction may encourage epistemological and ontological doubt rather than mimetic or antimimetic expectations (i.e. principles of minimal and maximal departure), compelling our judgement of the possibility and reality of fiction to hesitate, to linger over a range of possibilities.
10 citations
TL;DR: This article argued that the dissimilarities within similes reveal much, particularly with respect to ideological meanings on the one hand, and the expression of certainty and uncertainty on the other. But they did not consider the role of similes in articulating the experience of the unknown and the new in narrations of travel.
Abstract: Abstract Simile is generally explained as an explicit comparison between two things, which presupposes they have features or qualities in common – but equally, there must be essential differences too. This paper pursues these differences, and explores ideas of dissimilarity in simile, here considered as a separate device from metaphor. It then looks at implications for text analysis, in particular the role of simile in articulating the experience of the unknown and the new in narrations of travel. Drawing on texts by three 19th-century explorers (Livingstone, Stanley, Kingsley) and contrasting them with fiction (Conrad), I argue that the dissimilarities within similes reveal much, particularly with respect to ideological meanings on the one hand, and the expression of certainty and uncertainty on the other.
7 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the first journal published in The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (Kukil, 2000) in order to determine the potential that second person narration can have for the linguistic representation of mental states.
Abstract: This paper looks at instances of second person narration in the first journal published in The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (Kukil, 2000) in order to determine the potential that second person narration can have for the linguistic representation of mental states. The contributions of different disciplines (narratology, linguistics, psychology) to the study of second person narration are considered and their findings are re-applied to a non-fictional text. In a corpus-informed comparative analysis, the paper takes into consideration both perspectives from narratology and developments in the understanding of language use in the field of psychology to provide an interdisciplinary, but cognitively inclined perspective on the phenomenon. Appearances of second person narration are chronologically tracked through the data and compared to biographical developments in Sylvia Plath's life; entries written in the first- and second person are compared to each other to determine linguistic differences using corpus methods; the results of the two analyses are then interpreted in the light of traditional functions attributed to second person narration in narratology, and in the light of research in narrative psychology. The paper aims to demonstrate that second person narration can project a sense of emotional depth and inner conflict as well as of emotional balance. However, the temporal orientation of a given text will influence which of these effects predominates.
5 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose to understand "narrator" as an inner-textual speech position from which the current narrative discourse as a whole originates, and from which references to the entities, actions and events that this discourse is about are being made.
Abstract: For (at least) literary narratives I propose to understand "narrator" as follows: An inner-textual speech position from which the current narrative discourse as a whole originates, and from which references to the entities, actions and events that this discourse is about are being made. Through a dual process of metonymic transfer and anthropomorphisation the term "narrator" is then employed to designate a presumed occupant of this position, the hypothesized producer of the current discourse. A narrator is a linguistically indicated, textually projected and readerly identified position whose occupant needs to be thought of primarily in terms of a communicative role, distinct from any actual-world flesh-and-blood (or computer) producer of the text. The paper describes in brief eight different kinds of general considerations (linguistic, philosophical, methodological and general literary-theoretical) which can motivate a narratologist to judge the narrator category/instance as an indispensable or as a merely optional element of his general model of literary narrative. The article concludes with two recent theoretical moves which tend to circumvent the need for such a choice by either re-drawing the narratologist's domain of objects or by redefining the status of the narrator category itself.
5 citations
TL;DR: A corpus of Jane Austen's fanfic is constructed from sequels published in print and on line; it is then compared with a corpus of Austen own writing, as well as one of contemporary romance fiction as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: A corpus of Jane Austen's fanfic is constructed from sequels published in print and on line; it is then compared with a corpus of Austen's own writing, as well as one of contemporary romance fiction. Through analysis of the corpora, the "vertical intertextuality "of Austen's text and the fanfic corpus, and the "horizontal intertextuality " of contemporary romance fiction corpora and the fanfic corpus are articulated. The results illustrate that, although claiming to emulate her writing faithfully, Austen's fans reconstruct a modern Austen who is writing contemporary romance fiction through the "old" characters such as Elizabeth and Darcy. The different "Austens" emerging from this corpus research and other scholars' reading of Austen suggest that the death of the "Author" is only part of the story: we see not only the Author's death and the birth of the Reader, but a ghostly projection of a new "Author" in the reader's cultural context.
3 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, an allegorical reading of the conclusion of Don DeLillo's sprawling novel, Underworld, is presented, which maps a character's interaction with the links and nodes of the World Wide Web onto interpretation.
Abstract: Abstract This article offers an allegorical reading of the conclusion of Don DeLillo's sprawling novel, Underworld. In my view, this passage blends together Internet browsing and the reader's making sense of the novel itself. I use Fauconnier and Turner's blending theory to tease out the complex conceptual operations that readers are asked to perform while reading this passage, which maps a character's interaction with the links and nodes of the World Wide Web onto interpretation. On a more theoretical note, DeLillo's allegory seems to suggest that the spatial framework adopted by cognitive linguists and poeticians could be extended to interpretation – defined, along the lines of Peter Lamarque's philosophy of literature, as the extraction of the relevance or “human interest” of a work. The metaphor of the “interpretive space,” I conclude, captures neatly the way interpretation mediates between a text and the reader's worldview, providing a backdrop for constructs such as mental spaces and blends.
3 citations
TL;DR: The journal of the Internationale Gesellschaft für Empirische Literaturwissenschaft (IGEL) as discussed by the authors is the most widely used journal for systematic studies of literature.
Abstract: We welcome another new journal to the field of systematic studies of literature. Volume 1 Number 1 – that pure beginning to which there is no return! – of Scientific Study of Literature has just appeared. This is the official journal of IGEL (Internationale Gesellschaft für Empirische Literaturwissenschaft), an association which has held a series of interesting conferences in recent years (the next one, July 2012, will be in Montreal). The journal is published by John Benjamins and edited by Professor Willie van Peer of Munich University, together with three associate editors based in North America: Max Louwerse, Raymond Mar, and Joan Peskin. A special mention of Professor van Peer is in order: the journal is clearly his creation and a fitting one, as he has been a passionate tireless champion of empirical research on literature for thirty years and more. The first issue is a special issue, with a theme that interrogates what it says on the tin, so to speak: ‘The Future of Scientific Studies in Literature’. It comprises twenty short position papers, from a wonderfully diverse range of academics, each outlining in five or six pages what they see, from their neck of the literary-science woods, as the crucial or most interesting research questions of the immediate future. Contributors include Douglas Biber, Art Graesser, Peter Dixon and Marisa Bortolussi, Richard Gerrig, Ray Gibbs, Peter Vorderer, Jemeljian Hakemulder, Keith Oatley, Patrick Hogan, and many more. There are abundant thought-provoking ideas and stimulating suggestions here for programmes of research work: a rich hunting-ground for any graduate student wanting to get a sense of the kinds of things that are currently prominent on the agenda of empirical literary research. The journal promises it “will publish empirical studies that apply scientific stringency to cast light on the structure and function of literary phenomena” and emphasises that it is open to contributions from many disciplines (although a weighting towards the psychological is detectable). We wish it every success.
2 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the typical should be seen as a relation between the social milieu of the authorial experience on the one hand and the figure-ground construction of character on the other.
Abstract: Abstract This article situates the semantics of fictional characters within a broader framework of authorial communication. It argues that theories of character in the novel will be deficient to the extent that characters are not conceptualised as motivated creations of an author. The influential approach of Georg Lukács effectively excluded the point of view of the author in favour of a direct relationship between the fictional work and processes of history, as an instance of the particular related to the universal. But here it is argued that the notion of the typical should rather be seen as a relation between the social milieu of the authorial experience on the one hand and the figure-ground construction of character on the other. This constitutes part of a project to examine the question of realism on a renewed basis, particularly in terms of the authorial presence within the fictional world, and the case is argued with specific reference to a novel by John Fowles.
2 citations