Showing papers in "Journal of Literary Theory in 2014"

Between Story and Narrated World: Reflections on the Difference between Homoand Heterodiegesis [Abstract]

Abstract:  Full-length article in: JLT 8/2 (2014), 368–396. In describing the position of the narrator, research in literary studies generally follows Gerard Genette’s pioneering theory of narrative in distinguishing between the homo- and heterodiegetic type of narrator. This categorization is not sufficient to allow the position of the narrator to be described properly. The different ways in which the terms are used in literary studies reveal a shortcoming in the distinction behind them. Even in Genette’s work, there is a contradiction between the definition and the names of the two categories: Genette defines homo- and heterodiegesis with reference to the narrator’s presence in the narrated story, whereas he elsewhere states that the diegesis (in the sense of French diegese) is »auniverse rather than a train of events (a story)«: it »is therefore not the story but the universe in which the story takes place« (Genette 1988, 17; italics in original). The definition and the names do not match up in Genette’s theory of narrative; the expressions ›homo-‹ and ›heterodiegesis‹ would appear to rest on an understanding that is different from what Genette sets out explicitly. Once Genette has described ›diegesis‹ in terms of the universe of the story, the only possible interpretation of the terms ›homo-‹ and ›heterodiegetic‹ is that they are to be understood in relation to the narrated world. This in turn means that a homodiegetic narrator does not, as in Genette’s original definition, have to be part of the story: what is now essential is belonging to »the universe in which the story takes place«. Distinguishing between diegesis as universe and as story is significant because it reveals two different criteria for describing the position of the narrator: (i) the ontological status of the narratorial instance, which depends on whether it is part of the spatio-temporal universe of the narrative (the narrated world), and (ii) the degree to which the narratorial instance is involved in the story. The former criterion is clearly a question of ontology; the latter alternates between ontological and thematic criteria. As these two possible definitions of homo- and heterodiegesis are often not distinguished, the various writers who use the terms do so to refer to aspects of narrative that are not necessarily the same. Analytic practice in narrative theory would benefit considerably from keeping them apart. There is therefore a case to be made for using both possible aspects in the analysis of narrative texts while also keeping them separate by definition. The present article aims to do just that, starting from a theoretical standpoint. Thus, the different types of narrator that are possible are sketched in outline, and then explained with the help of examples. I begin by exposing the problems that result from using the terms in Genette’s manner (1), in order then to develop a list of possible narratorial standpoints based on the one hand on the involvement of the narratorial instance in the narrated world and on the other on its involvement in the story. By establishing separation of the two aspects as a ground rule in this way, a number of misunderstandings that are due to the varied ways in which the terminology has been used to date can be overcome.

Against Empathy: Levinas and Ethical Criticism in the 21st Century

Abstract: »So – ethical criticism is back«, declares Marshall W. Gregory in his contribution to the debate initiated by the Journal of Literary Theory concerning the long-term relations between literature and ethics (Gregory 2010, 282). Gregory argues that ethical criticism has received a »second chance« after being »killed, crushed, annihilated« throughout the 20th century (ibid., 274). To avoid squandering this opportunity, he suggests, it is crucial to identify »what’s at stake in ethical criticism« (ibid., 282). In this article, we join Gregory and subsequent contributors in the effort to rethink the role of ethical criticism in the context of contemporary literary scholarship (Rabinowitz 2010; Groeben 2011; Titzmann 2012). We wish to turn attention to an issue that has thus far been largely ignored in this debate: the role of postmodern criticism in shaping the new face of ethical criticism. In particular, we challenge the concept of empathy and the assumption that empathy is a fundamental element of ethical reading.

Theories of Context, Theorizing Context

Abstract: Abstract Theories of meaning, even outspokenly textualist ones, have always dealt with the question of relevant context as well, to some extent at least. In many fields of research, the idea of an encompassing theory of context has surfaced now and then, and there have also been actual attempts at such a theory, some of which are discussed in this article. At the same time the very concept of context is difficult in many ways. The term has been said to be one of the most widely used and widely abused terms in the humanities and social sciences. Brenda Dervin claims that »there is no term that is more often used, less often defined, and when defined defined so variously as context« (Dervin 1997, 13–14). More specifically, its analytical force suffers from the fact that it encompasses such a vast array of different elements. The many concepts that clearly deal with the relationship between text and context, however in a more limited or specific way, are one proof of this. The focus in the article is on the project character of ›explicit‹ theories of context – that is, theories which are framed and named as such, and where the concept of context is the key term or one of the key terms. The questions are: what kinds of projects are theories of context? What can they offer and can they surpass the limitations of their starting-points, not the least the very distinction between text and context? What kinds of models of context do these theories rely on? On what levels of analysis (ontology, epistemology, ethics…) are the theories operating and having consequences on? And what is the role of texts in theories of context? The theories discussed in more detail are the ›contextualism‹ of Murray Krieger, Teun van Dijk’s discourse analytic theory of context, radical contextualism represented by Lawrence Grossberg and others, and the contextualist world-hypothesis as described by philosopher Stephen C. Pepper. Theories of context provide us with different solutions to the dichotomy problem. Krieger’s solution is to bring in some aspects of the context e. g. by way of accounts of reading. A theorist of context may also resort to subsuming both text and context to a wider frame, for instance theory of action (Stierle), or introducing a mediating factor, for instance social cognition (van Dijk). A more radical solution to the problem is to conceptualize both texts and contexts as parts of networks with no obvious centre (Bennett, Hall, Grossberg). In such a configuration, the interpreting subject is also presented not as something apart but as part of a network. In the latter case especially, the concept of context gets heavily redefined. Even though the text-context distinction is increasingly questioned, it is also obvious that one cannot just do away with the distinction altogether, even by means of alternative conceptualisations. Interpretation is always interpretation of something, and dualism is hard to evade. This has been the problematic point for many scholars advocating a non-dualist approach to meaning. Giving up dualism means giving up some of the answers and perspectives it made possible. This idea of the inherent transitivity of interpretation is very probably deeply rooted in our general modes of perception and supported by both language and our everyday practices, as Stephen C. Pepper pointed out, so that our notions of meaning and interpretation, too, basically follow this assumption. And there is the additional fact that our tacit knowledge of the world lends ample support to this idea. Why should we keep theorizing context, in spite of the many conceptual problems? First, as Lawrence Grossberg has pointed out, contexts are not »out there« to be picked up – instead, context is both starting point and end of analysis at the same time. Contexts are as much in need of conceptualization as texts. This is a good guiding principle regardless of one’s discipline. Second, contexts are often invisible, especially when they are familiar contexts! They must be teased out, made visible, and this is facilitated by a theoretical contextualist framework. Third, even if we do not aim at and believe in the possibility of an overarching theory of context, we nevertheless cannot avoid dealing with tacit notions of context. These range from notions supported by language and our everyday perceptions and practices to taken-for-granted assumptions often supported by our institutions. This is the reason some scholars, for instance Ansgar Nünning, emphasize the need to theorize context: context theories are always »there«, and if we do not tackle them, they may and will have the kinds of influence on us that we would not like it to have. What is the role of the text in different theories of context? For Murray Krieger, text is the definite centre. Textualism may be out of date ontologically, but the ›power of the text‹ that Krieger is interested in is something to be paid attention to by theories of context as well. Besides, another reason to keep text in the picture is that, after all, as Pepper and radical contextualists point out, text is context for its contexts! And even in a contextualist framework, bracketing a context has its value: in some cases it may be more fruitful to bypass the most obvious and salient contexts and take up counterintuitive ones, as for instance New Historicists prefer to do. Is there still need and use for theory of context? Without necessarily aiming at an overarching, systematic grand theory, it is useful to think, with Stuart Hall, that a theory of context as such is not a goal, but to understand meaning-making, we must keep on theorizing context and contextuality.

Is There a Context-Free Way of Understanding Texts? The Case of Structuralist Narratology [Abstract]

Abstract: Abstract This paper investigates the question of whether it is possible to talk about aspects of the meaning of literary texts in a context-free manner. Its starting point is a detected discrepancy between the assumption that some (not purely formal or quantitative) approaches to literature operate in a context-independent manner, and the thought that processes of understanding are necessarily interpretive and/or context-dependent. The exemplary field of investigation is (structuralist) narratology, which is often said to be a »context-free« approach to literature. To determine whether narratology actually is context-independent, I first offer an explicative definition of ›context‹ applicable to the field of literary studies, based on aspects of the meaning of ›context‹ in everyday use. According to this definition, ›context‹ in literary studies is to be understood as a sum of additional extra-textual facts that may be consulted in order to foster the understanding of a text. This definition implies that neither the text itself nor any of its parts may be properly regarded as possible contexts for a given text; consequently, neither the sentences which a text consists of nor the propositions these sentences express are possible contexts of that text. A more general upshot is that any reference to the propositions expressed by the sentences of a text qualifies as a context-free approach if said propositions can be accessed without drawing upon contexts. The question of whether this is possible is subsequently investigated with the help of a three-stage model of grasping linguistic meaning, fit to analyze the processes which are involved when understanding linguistic utterances. As it turns out, linguistic meaning is indeed accessible without drawing upon contexts in many, but not all cases. The next step of the investigation involves a close examination of the application conditions of two types of narratological categories: categories for the analysis of the discours of a narrative, i. e. the presentation of a story, and categories for the analysis of the histoire, i. e. the elements of the story itself. Two major results emerge from this investigation. First, as it turns out, the question of whether an approach to literature requires reference to contexts should be distinguished from, on the one hand, the question of whether an approach is interpretive, and, on the other, the question of whether an approach puts forward a theory of »work meaning«. For while questions about whether an approach is contextual are determined by whether additional »input material« is used in order to foster the understanding of a text, whether the approach is interpretive concerns what type of inference method is used to understand a text. Whenever non-necessary inference methods are used, i. e. inference methods that, in contrast to deduction, can produce more than one legitimate result from the same input material, an approach is interpretive in a broad sense of the word. Similarly, whether the approach puts forward a theory of work meaning concerns whether specific input material is mandatory for fostering the correct understanding of a text. This mandatory input material may be of contextual nature, but it can also consist of (parts of) the text itself. Consequently, processes of understanding a text that involve non-necessary inference and aim at discovering »the one correct meaning« of a text are to be qualified as interpretive in a narrower sense of the word. Second, in addition to the knowledge of which kinds of textual features a narratological category aims to grasp and the process of subsuming a specific textual feature under a category, the application of both discours- and histoire-categories requires the understanding of the linguistic meaning of parts of the text. Since both the reconstruction of linguistic meaning (in many cases) and the process of subsuming a textual feature under a category (in every case) involve non-necessary inference, narratological categorization always is interpretive in the broader sense. Now, concerning the question of whether narratological categorization requires the inclusion of contexts, we have different answers for the two types of categories. While both require the inclusion of contexts in some cases, simply in virtue of the fact that linguistic understanding sometimes requires the inclusion of (extra-textual) contexts, histoire-categories depend on contexts in far more cases than discours-categories. This is because, in comparison to discours-categories, the application of histoire-categories generally presupposes many additional processes (like the (re)construction of the fictional world), which in turn requires the integration of common world knowledge (and sometimes other types of knowledge as well). So while both types of categories can in theory be applied without drawing upon contexts, the proportion of cases in which discours-categories can be used context-independently is much higher than for histoire-categories.

Zalta on Encoding Fictional Properties

Abstract: Abstract Theories which take fictional objects to be a kind of abstract object are faced with the obvious problem of how to explain the seeming truth of sentences ascribing internal properties. Abstract objects cannot be cynical, be magicians or smoke pipe. Call this the problem of the wrong kind of object. There are a number of well-known strategies which abstractists have employed to evade the problem. In this paper, I discuss whether Edward Zalta’s distinction between two kinds of predication, exemplifying and encoding, can help us solve the problem. I start out in section 2 by reviewing the general debate between realists and antirealists concerning fictional objects. Realists think that fictional objects exist, while antirealists deny this. It is however useful to remember that participants in the debate differ in their interpretation of »exists« and »fictional«. Remembering this helps to locate Zalta’s account in the realist camp. Section 3 introduces the problem of the wrong kind of object, namely of how we can simultaneously take fictional objects to be abstract objects and understand sentences like »Rick Blaine is cynical« as straightforwardly true. I distinguish five strategies of dealing with this problem. Abstractists can (a) assume that fictional names are ambiguous, (b) distinguish between two kinds of properties, (c) understand such sentences as being governed by a fiction operator, (d) distinguish between two kinds of predication, or (e) take the predicate to be evaluated in some special way (which needs to be specified). I shortly comment on (a) and (b), then a problem for strategy (c) is discussed: It seems to commit us to the view that fictions prescribe recipients to imagine de re of some fictional objects that they have properties which they actually cannot have. I argue that this is not what fictions actually prescribe. Section 4 introduces strategy (d), Zalta’s distinction between exemplifying and encoding. The distinction turns out to be a remedy against the problem of the wrong kind of object. Unfortunately it reintroduces the problem identified for strategy (c). I explore a radical way of evading the problem by understanding fictional objects to be representations. Although the idea can be found in Zalta’s writings, it leads to internal tensions in his account, cannot solve the problem at hand, and seems to generate additional problems. Additionally, Zalta’s assumption that fictional objects have their individuation conditions via the properties they encode is shown to be problematic on independent grounds. Section 5 discusses whether Zalta’s distinction between exemplifying and encoding is compatible with an artefactualist account of fictional characters. Assuming that most artefactualists would not want to understand existence as a discriminating predicate, I argue that combining this idea with the exemplifying/encoding distinction goes at least against the spirit of the artefactualist account. Section 6 introduces the idea of different evaluations of predicates without simultaneously being committed to Zalta’s strong assumptions. While this seems to be possible, such accounts also need to find a way of answering the argument given at the end of section 3.

Fiction and Indexinames

Abstract: Abstract In this paper, I will start from considering some theoretical desiderata concerning sentences that directly or indirectly involve fiction: i) the fictional use of language requires a context-shift; ii) one understands a sentence whether it is used fictionally or not; iii) one and the same proper name is, typically at least, used both within a certain work of fiction, i. e., when the sentence containing it is used fictionally, and outside that work of fiction, i. e., when, apparently at least, the sentence containing it is used nonfictionally yet in order to indirectly concern that very fiction; iv) different naming practices are to be mobilized by such different uses (independently of whether the apparently nonfictional use is actually successful as far as the reference of the name is concerned); v) independently of their really having a referent, proper names are always devices of direct reference. I will claim that once one takes proper names as indexicals of a particular sort, indexinames for short, one can account for some tensions that arise from the aforementioned desiderata. According to my proposal, a proper name »N.N.« is an indexical whose character is roughly expressed by the description »the individual called ›N.N.‹ (in context)«, where this description means »the individual one’s interlocutor’s attention is called to by means of ›N.N.‹ (in context)«. This character is a partial function that maps narrow contexts onto referents. Such contexts are enriched narrow contexts that over and above the traditional parameters (agent, space, time and world) also include an ›acquisition‹ parameter, i. e., a parameter filled by a naming practice constituted by an informal act of dubbing (in which the dubber tries to call one’s attention via the name to something), and usually also by a certain transmission chain. By appealing to this context, an indexiname automatically acquires a referent, if there is any (quite similar to the way things work with demonstratives once their narrow contexts are taken to be enriched by a further parameter, typically a ›demonstration‹-parameter). Furthermore, I claim that such a proposal works independently of one’s ontological stance concerning fictional entities, that is, independently of whether one believes either that there are or that there are no such entities. Simply put, individuals of different kinds (actual fictional characters for realists, nonactual individuals for anti-realists) are picked out by indexinames in the relevant narrow contexts. Furthermore, I will argue that such a proposal is advantageous to similar indexicalist proposals such as the one put forward by Tiedke (2011), for that proposal seems unnecessarily ad hoc and it is still too undeveloped. Finally, I will try to show how this proposal can deal with some objections one may raise against an indexicalist treatment of proper names: a) the objection from validity, claiming that if names are indexicals, then one can no longer account for the validity of certain inferences involving them; b) the objection from contexts, claiming that if names are indexicals, then one cannot plausibly account for sentences involving them (in context) to be absolutely true (true in that context).

Das Text-Kontext-Problem in der literaturwissenschaftlichen Praxis: Zugänge und Perspektiven

Abstract: Abstract This article begins by using representative examples to present an overview of the diverse ways in which contextualization is practiced in literary studies. Under the rubric of the terms ›universal‹ (indifferent) and ›complementary‹ (distinkt) contextualism, antihermeneutic and hermeneutic approaches are interrogated with respect to their premisses, methods, and intended insights. ›Universal contextualism‹ refers to those post-structuralist methods that operate with a relational concept of the sign and assume that all texts, indeed all the material artefacts of a culture have the same ontological status. A material manifestation of context, or intertextuality, is not assumed here; the aim is insight into regularities of discourse and into media practices. ›Complementary contextualism‹ is intended in its weak form to refer simply to making an indispensable distinction between a text and its contexts – in this case generally in the form of texts – and in its stronger, more clearly hermeneutic version to refer to making a distinction and setting up a hierarchy between a text and its textual or extratextual environment. The focus of attention is progressively narrowed in the course of the article: the forms and manifestations of universal contextualism are excluded from the remainder of the discussion insofar as the concepts of text and context no longer function as a complementary pair if one ceases to assume a hierarchy, indeed a distinction, between the (literary) text and the connections that explain it. Approaches that go down this path may reveal the practices of discourse in a universe of texts of equal status, but they do not draw on contexts to interpret texts or elucidate the meanings of texts. In the next step, the weak form of complementary contextualism – Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicist approach – is distinguished from stronger versions of complementary contextualism. In abandoning textual autonomy and textual authority and adopting a certain formal-aesthetic indifference, New Historicism dispenses with a strong concept of the text, even if its concentration on canonical authors means that it proceeds in a distinctly literature-centred fashion. Its intended insight, nonetheless, is not the understanding and improved understanding of the literary text in the context in which it originated, but instead ›understanding differently‹ and ›making new voices heard‹: its aim is to reveal the social and cultural conditions of possibility of canonical points of textual reference, with the texts and their generally intertextual contexts mutually conditioning one another in the sense of a ›circulation of social energies‹ and thus unable to be placed in a hierarchy. Stronger forms of complementary contextualism, on the other hand, work with a form- and language-oriented concept of the text that, depending on whether their interest is defined by authors or problems, can refer respectively to a narrow domain of canonical texts or to an extended domain of high literature and commercial literature. These forms of contextualist literary analysis, though, share premisses of understanding and textual meaning, as well as hermeneutic and philological tools with which reference is made to texts and their extra- and intertextual contexts. Here, nonetheless, a wide spectrum unfolds. It reaches from what tend to be narrow, author-centric approaches guided by concepts such as ›intention‹, ›influence‹, ›edition‹, and ›commentary‹ to a line of research that engages in a form of contextual analysis whose perspective goes beyond the individual subject and has been broadened to address cultural history. It distances itself from strong authorial intentionalism on the one hand and the associativeness of New Historicism on the other, and is to be understood as a culturalistic extension of social history. Finally, drawing on a hermeneutically negotiated, context-sensitive cultural historiography of this kind, three possible criteria are suggested for selecting contexts of an inter- and extratextual nature: relevance, representativeness, and usefulness. They serve to limit what is per se an unlimited set of textual environments and have previously been formulated in the literature in a similar manner. At the end of this increasingly focused research review, which draws on the whole range of contemporary approaches to the problem of text and context, before finally foregrounding a contextualism that is philologically grounded and extended to address cultural history, there follows a transition to the three individual articles in the section we have edited. They are concerned with three different possibilities for dealing with contexts of an inter- and primarily extratextual nature, are all located inside the hermeneutic and philological space we have mapped out, and can to this extent be considered an inexhaustive taxonomy of a contextualism that has been extended to address cultural history: society as a context of literature, knowledge as a context of literature, and finally the text-context relation as a bipartite combination of problem and solution. Whereas the first two approaches involve classes of context that are defined by content, the final one works with a formal definition of ›context‹ and is to this extent a more broadly conceived one, because almost all political, social, epistemic, and abstract quantities that are external to the text can be formulated as problems. The article, to conclude, is intended to provide an overview that brings order to a markedly heterogeneous, diverse research landscape, as well as to stake out a grounded position within this heterogeneous field.

Wertungsübertragung und Kontiguität. Mit zwei Beispielen zur Wertung des Frageversäumnisses im Parzival

Abstract: of: Friedrich Michael Dimpel, Wertungsubertragung und Kontiguitat. Mit zwei Beispielen zur Wertung des Frageversaumnisses im Parzival. In: JLTonline (08.01.2015) Persistent Identifier: urn:nbn:de:0222-003042 Link: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0222-003042

Kontext ›Gesellschaft‹. Literarische Kommunikation – Semantik – Strukturgeschichte

Abstract: Abstract This article is concerned with the question of what we mean by contextualizing a literary text in terms of social history. What are we setting a text in relation to if we assign ›society as a context‹ to it? And what is the nature of this relation? An attempt is made to answer the first question by defining society as communication. The article teases out the forms of communication that can be understood as a ›text‹ and those that can be understood as a social ›context‹. The second question picks up what is known as the Vermittlungsproblem (correlation problem) – that is, the problem, for which a solution is not believed to have been found, of how to theoretically model the relationship between text and context. In the final part of the article, this problem is steered toward a conceptual solution by distinguishing between different kinds of context (communication setting, the problem at stake, cultural knowledge, communication situation). The article begins with a brief historical outline of the field, which takes us back to the origins of the concept of »social history« in the history of scholarship. The characteristic innovation of the sozialgeschichtliche Literaturwissenschaft (sociohistorical literary studies) advocated in the 1970s and 1980s is identified as its attempt to arrive, drawing on contemporary models of structural sociology, at a more complex social theory than had been used by the earlier sociology of literature shaped by Marxism and ideological criticism. This led to two problems that were still to be satisfactorily solved in the 1980s. First, it seemed as though the sociological models could be used to describe only ›literature as social system‹, but not ›literature as symbolic system‹, because the sociological concept of action was unable to capture the special features of literary activity. Second, the starting point for theoretically conceptualizing the relation between literary ›text‹ and social ›context‹ was the special historical case of an autonomous system of art in a society where it was functionally distinct, which meant that the scope of the sociohistorical paradigm was confined to literature from the modern period. Both these problems, the present article suggests, can be solved by applying the model of sociocultural evolution that was developed above all by Niklas Luhmann and following it through to its logical conclusion. The first stage in showing this more clearly is to provide a vertical outline of literary communication, in other words to ask how, out of the totality of social communication events, particular communications can be identified as potentially relevant for the interests of research in literary studies. In a first step, a special type of communication distinct from normal communication is identified. It is marked by a characteristic embedded communication structure which we can describe as objectification or metalinguistic referentialization. An embedded structure of this kind is present if a given communication (e. g. »once upon a time a horse …«) is metalinguistically referred to by other communications (e. g. »tell me the story about the horse«). The basic concept of literature defined in this way is very wide-ranging and does not consider any criteria of the ›literary‹ in the sense of a certain quality of the text; instead, it is based solely on the criterion of ›textuality‹ (as a result of communicative objectification). Any further restriction ›above‹ this basic concept can be carried out only in a historically empirical manner, that is, by analysing the objectified communications themselves and the adjoining communications that are centred around them. That is the second step in narrowing things down. On the basis of the elements that recur in such communication settings, it is possible to identify structures of expectation that have become stably established in communication and together form a particular (e. g. ›literary‹) semantics. By »semantics«, Luhmann, following Reinhart Koselleck, understands a cultural repository of rules for processing meaning. Talking in rhymes, or cultural concepts such as ›novel‹, ›fictionality‹, ›author‹, are examples of such rules for processing meaning in the literary domain. They are, that is, part of various historically specific literary »semantics« or »symbolic systems« of the literary. Such structures have been stably established to a high degree in literary ›genres‹, which have already been described by Wilhelm Voßkamp as »socio-literary institutions« along these very lines. In a third step, the degree to which such developments in literary semantics are separated from other semantics that structure social communication is considered. The article argues against the assumption that there is a system of high literature that has been established as distinct since the transitional time between the early modern and modern periods, and puts forward instead a bottom-up model of literary microsystems, each of which may become stably established, that do not necessarily form part of an overarching social system of ›literature‹ but can enter into historically variable combinations with other communication contexts. As can be seen from the longevity of the old concept of literature in the sense of the totality of learned tradition (historia litteraria), large fields of literary communication in the mid-nineteenth century, for example, are closely intertwined with other social discourses of knowledge in what has, in the sense of this broad concept of literature, been described by Peter Uwe Hohendahl as a literarische Öffentlichkeit (literary public sphere). Whether a particular area of literary communication under consideration can be treated as a communication system that operates as a closed system, can in turn be determined only by analysing its historical and empirical processes of communication. Of crucial importance is the fact that the communication settings involved form such a high level of recursiveness and self-referentiality that they develop an understanding of themselves as distinct from their surroundings. Historically variable processes of system formation of this kind are part of structural change in society as a whole, and a more detailed analysis of such processes of change in the domain of the literary in relation to the rest of social communication could, in the long term, lead to more appropriate periodizations of literary history. After this outline of literary communication, we return to the problem of contextualization in literary studies. If literary communication is, as described, understood as dynamic subfields of social communication, four different concepts of context can be distinguished: ›Context‹, in a basic sense, means the place of literary communication in general social communication, that is, other communication events that are close to it in time. ›Context‹, in the sense of a literary studies that seeks to explain, often means the historical problem at stake, the solution to which is treated as the function of a particular structure of literary communication. In addition, other (non-literary) semantics (cultural knowledge) of the time are often referred to as ›contexts‹. ›(Real) historical context‹, often used synonymously with ›social context‹, encompasses not only the social but also the non-social – that is, for example, physical, biological, or psychological – surroundings of literary communication, and is terminologically accounted for here using the linguistic concept of the communication situation. With the help of this differentiation, the particular kind of contextualization that sociohistorical literary studies aims to provide can be described as follows: sociohistorical literary studies examines the embedding of ›textual‹ acts of communication in larger communication settings that are connected with them in the manner of adjoining communications (context1). It does so in order, first, to determine more precisely the nature of such communication settings (structures, level of stability, self-description) and, second, to identify, through the functional analysis of the semantics they use, relevant problems at stake (context2) and cross-discourse referential structures (context3). The focus in the process lies on socially conditioned problems at stake (economics, politics, culture); non-social aspects of the literary communication situation, which are, moreover, present in context4, lie outside the sociological descriptive remit of this form of literary studies.

Talking about Hamlet

Abstract: Abstract One argument for fictional realism, the view that there are such things as fictional characters, proceeds by arguing that we need to accept there are fictional characters in order to provide an adequate account of intuitively true and meaningful reports containing fictional names, reports such as »In Hamlet, Hamlet equivocates«. For, granted some plausible assumptions, it seems that the truth and meaningfulness of such reports requires that the names they contain genuinely refer to fictional characters. However I argue that the fictional realist herself faces problems providing an account of certain other forms of intuitively true reports. These are reports that intuitively seem to be about fictional characters but where the apparent reference to the fictional character is achieved, not via a fictional name, but rather descriptively. I consider, in particular, reports involving specific uses of indefinite descriptions, such as the report »In Hamlet, a certain prince equivocates«. The problem facing the realist is that the truth of this report requires the indefinite description »a certain prince« to denote the fictional character Hamlet. And this, in turn, seems to require that the fictional character Hamlet satisfies that description, and hence that the fictional character Hamlet genuinely be a prince. However I argue against the view that fictional characters genuinely have the properties ascribed to them in the fictions where they occur. In the play Hamlet, Hamlet is characterized as being a human and being a prince. But, I argue, even if we accept that there are fictional characters and that Hamlet is one of them, we shouldn’t take the fictional character Hamlet to genuinely be a human or a prince. I then consider and reject various other strategies the fictional realist might adopt to try and provide an account of descriptive reports. I argue that, ultimately, the realist must take such reports to be made within the scope of a make-believe or pretense that there is a world which is as the play Hamlet describes. For, while the realist shouldn’t accept that the fictional character of Hamlet is really a prince, she can nevertheless grant that it counts as one within the scope of the make-believe that Hamlet correctly describes a real world. And she can maintain that the intuitive truth of such reports depends upon whether the sentences they embed count as being true within the scope of the relevant make-believe. However I note that this account is also available to the irrealist who denies there are fictional characters. For, while the irrealist denies that really there is anything corresponding to Hamlet, she nevertheless grants that, within the make-believe, there is such a thing and it is a prince. Moreover it is very natural to extend this strategy to cover the sorts of reports containing fictional names, such as »In Hamlet, Hamlet equivocates«, that were invoked by the argument for fictional realism initially considered. However, if we adopt this strategy, we can explain our intuitions concerning these reports without our having to accept there are fictional objects. And so the argument for fictional realism that we initially considered is undermined. The very apparatus the realist invokes to provide an account of »In Hamlet, a certain prince equivocates« allows the irrealist to provide an account of »In Hamlet, Hamlet equivocates« without invoking fictional objects.

Just My Imagination? – Creation for Creationists

Abstract: Abstract In the debate on the ontology of fictional entities realists claim that fictional characters exist. Some fictional realists are Platonists. They claim that fictional characters are abstract entities that exist necessarily and are non-spatial and timeless. It seems that the author’s job is just to discover these entities. Other realists claim that fictional characters are abstract artefacts. Obviously these abstract artefacts do not have much in common with platonic entities. »Abstract« means, according to this creationistic account, that these artefacts are non-spatial entities. But as artefacts they are created and thus depend on someone who creates them and on the act of creation. Surprisingly, those realists do not say much about this process of creation. This article proposes an addition to the realist account at this point, focusing on the question of how fictional characters are created. However, my proposal is only concerned with the creation of fictional characters within the framework of fictional stories told by means of linguistic utterances. Therefore my question is: how can authors create fictional entities by telling fictional stories? I will begin by discussing whether an utterance act or a mere mental action, namely someone’s imagining something, is necessary or sufficient for the successful creation of fictional entities. I will distinguish two different interpretations of the claim that a person creates entities by imaging something and I will argue that realists should reject both versions of this claim. Constructively, I will go on to emphasize similarities between fictional entities and social entities like contracts and marriages. This is important because realists in the debate about social entities provide more detailed descriptions of the creation of social entities, details which can be adapted in order to describe the process by which fictional entities are created. I emphasize that this process, namely the fictional story telling, is a social practice. The social character of this practice will be shown in mainly two aspects: Firstly, I will argue that similar to the creation of other social entities for the creation of fictional characters there has to be a collectively recognised institution, namely the institution of fictional story telling. Thus, collective intentionality plays a crucial role in the process of this creation. As such an institution plays a decisive role I will go on to claim that the creation of an abstract artefact requires the performance not only of a mere utterance act, but of a successfully executed illocutionary act. By following Austin and Searle I will finally argue that only utterance tokens which in the specific situation are necessary to realize the illocutionary point or purpose can count as performances of illocutionary acts. In order to perform an illocutionary act successfully, the utterance must bring about an illocutionary uptake in the recipient/hearer, i. e. she must understand the utterance. Therefore, illocutionary acts can in general not be performed successfully without a hearer/recipient. Thus, to understand fictional story telling and the creation of fictional characters as a social practice means that the creative process cannot be explained exclusively in terms of imaginings. This does not mean that imagination does not play any role in producing or reading fiction. But creationists need more than imagination to explain how fictional characters are created. The aim of this paper is to take a step forward towards an explanation of the creation of fictional characters and thus to rendering the creationist’s account more plausible in (1) naming necessary conditions for successfully telling a fictional story, (2) describing it as a social praxis and (3) explaining the role collective intentionality plays in this practice, we have.

Apparent Generalisations about Fictional Characters

Abstract: Abstract This essay will be concerned with an evaluation, modification, and critique of van Inwagen’s famous argument for the existence of fictional characters. In the first section a reconstruction of the original argument will be provided, and three different challenges for this version of the argument will be pointed out. The first challenge concerns van Inwagen’s commitment to first-order predicate logic as a canonical language for the formal representation of truth-conditions of assertoric sentences in natural languages, and the problematic semantic complexity of van Inwagen’s original example sentences of quantifications about fictional objects. The second challenge concerns his commitment to a Quinean conception of ordinary language quantifications that conceives of first-order quantifiers as existentially loaded. The third challenge concerns van Inwagen’s tendency to interpret our ordinary intuitions about the truth-values of specific sentences as intuitions about the truth-values of the literal contents of these sentences. In the second section, a more detailed investigation of these three challenges will be provided; and a modified, and less problematic, alternative version of the argument will be proposed. It will be shown that the truth-conditions of van Inwagen’s original example sentences cannot be adequately represented on the basis of first-order predicate logic. I will propose alternative and less complex example sentences that are sufficient for the required purpose. Additionally, a reformulation of the argument will be proposed that avoids a commitment to a specific sort of formal framework. After that, it will be shown why the assumption of a Quinean conception of quantification unnecessarily increases the burden of proof. A reformulation of the argument will be proposed that avoids the commitment to a Quinean conception of quantification. Furthermore, I will make a third and final adjustment of the argument that allows us to remain neutral concerning the specific status of our truth-value intuitions concerning the proposed example sentences of generalisations about fictional objects. In the third and final section, three possible responses of an irrealist concerning fictional objects will be evaluated. The first option makes use of a recent semantic analysis of the modifying adjective ›fictional‹ proposed by Sainsbury. According to this analysis, a sentence like ›There are fictional mice that talk‹ is semantically equivalent with the claim ›There are fictional works according to which it is the case that at least one mouse talks‹. The second option additionally makes use of Sainsbury’s conception of spotty scope for ordinary language quantifiers and other related sentential operators. It will be shown why both options cannot account for the desired true readings of our example sentences. Finally, a third solution will be proposed and defended. This solution makes use of a substitutional interpretation of specific fictional generalisations based on a negative free logic to undermine the modified argument. It will be shown how this solution allows us to provide a correct analysis of the desired readings of our example sentences of generalisations about fictional characters. After that, two problems of this account will be discussed. The first problem concerns the extension of the proposed strategy to more complicated and sophisticated example sentences. The second problem concerns the independent motivation of a substitutional treatment of at least certain natural language quantificational expressions.

Problem und Kontext. Zur Methodologie der literaturwissenschaftlichen Problemgeschichte [Abstract]

Abstract: Abstract Taking as its starting point an example from literary history – Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s invention of hymnic poetry with free rhythms in German – this article argues that the concept of the problem should be the primary context referred to by literary historians in their reconstructions, analogously to authorial intention in the interpretation of individual texts. The task of literary history is, accordingly, to answer with regard to the particular series of texts involved in any given case the following question: what was the problem, or what were the problems, to which responses are presented in the texts involved? In choosing a particular primary context for their reconstructions, literary historians are confronted with a variety of notorious difficulties for literary historiography: the problem of relationship to the real world (Verknüpfungsproblem), the problem of explanation, and above all the problem of text and context: in principle, I can relate a series of texts to a great many different contexts. Choosing the history of problems as an approach provides a rule for determining relevance and thus restricting what is a potentially limitless context. In this respect, it proves helpful to consider whether identifying the problems that are seen as contexts for a given series of texts might not be an arbitrary process. It is shown that this concern cannot be adequately addressed by means of a precise explication of the problem as a concept, for the explication of the concept gives no indication of how it should be empirically materialized in actual use. The concern that the assignment of problems to texts is arbitrary can, though, be adequately addressed by arguing that ›problem‹ should be understood as a methodological category and an ideal for regulating the assignment of meaning that proves itself only in the actual argumentation in each individual case. Nonetheless, a viable explication of the concept of the problem must consider two things. The first is the fact that the concept of the problem is based on a bipartite relation. Problems provoke responses insofar as they represent a challenge when seen against the background of a normal state. The second is that an appropriate explication of the concept must consider the fact that problems emerge from ›competing systems of understanding‹ (Matthias Löwe). The article further discusses the extent to which the concept of the problem should be seen as dialectically related to the concept of the everyday or real-life world. Only when a situation takes hold in the everyday world that cannot be dealt with routinely do we speak of a problem occurring. Where the standard of reconstruction is concerned, the history of problems aims to follow a middle way between discourse history and text-centred literary studies. From the perspective of the historian of problems, the methodological standards for relating text and context are too lax in the case of the former and too strict in certain instances of the latter. It is argued that the history of problems provides a model for literary historiography that is superior to the alternative models of intertextuality studies, social history, and the history of knowledge. In formal terms, the intertext is one of the central types of context, but it is not clear why it should be treated as the primary context in literary historiography, just as it is not clear why society and the social should be given this function, however important they may be as content-related types of context. Knowledge, finally, represents a further central type of context for literary history. Relating series identified in literary history to a history of knowledge (however we understand it), though, runs the risk of producing a rather static picture of literary history, even if the history of knowledge is conceived of as a history of knowledge claims in the manner of Lutz Danneberg. The history of problems, by contrast, considers the dynamic component of movements in literary history. Furthermore, we see the extent to which a perspective based on the history of problems is compatible with models from intertextuality studies as well as with concepts from social history and the history of knowledge, and how it can contribute to a methodological foundation for these approaches. Finally, it is shown why it is theoretically mistaken to operate with oppositions between suprahistorical and historically variable concepts of the problem and between intentional and non-intentional histories of problems. In both cases, the oppositions are illusory and point to a theoretical ›sterility‹ that cannot do justice to the situation on the ground in literary history. The normal case with responses to problems in literary history is neither the timeless presence of unsolved problems nor the continuous evolution of problems and responses – instead, problems and types of response appear and disappear in various forms, different kinds of problem and response coexist, and repeated attempts are made to worry away at similar problems with recurring types of response. Furthermore, ›problem‹ is a concept that has features that are shared by intentions but also ones that intentions do not have. For this reason, it is well-suited to mediating between intentional and non-intentional levels. Finally, a number of terminological suggestions are made for a nuanced language of reconstruction. It proves sensible, first, to understand problems as embedded in problematic situations; second, to assume that problems often appear within larger clusters of problems; third, to take into account the fact that the urgency of the problem can vary from case to case; and fourth, to distinguish different types of problem that are relevant with respect to literary history. The article treats the ›history of problems‹ not as a catchy phrase which would ultimately result in a new line of research, but as a perspective on literary history that is encountered in various kinds of theory that have been developed in literary studies; that thus appears to have a high degree of plausibility for theoreticians of various schools; and that therefore should be pinned down and refined further in methodological terms. Discussions about the concept of the history of problems have become increasingly lively in literary theory in recent years, and this article responds to them.