Showing papers in "Style in 2004"

Defining Reality: Definitions and the Politics of Meaning

Abstract: Edward Schiappa, Defining Reality: Definitions and the Politics of Meaning Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003 xvi + 213 pp $6000 cloth; $2500 paper Every author who writes about definitions faces the temptation to refer to Alice's conversation with Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass "The question is," says Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things" "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master-that's all" While Edward Schiappa does not refer to this passage in his book, it is clear that he stands foursquare with Humpty Dumpty Defining Reality brings social-constructivist theory to bear on the process of defining terms After introducing his own constructivist and pragmatist theory of definition, Schiappa proceeds to analyze the history of several legal controversies that hinge on definition These include "legal death," "rape," "wetlands," "art," and "human person" Then he proceeds to examine how controversies about definitions set technical, personal, and public meanings at odds with each other His conclusion argues for a social constructivist and pragmatist definition of definition, one that will escape what he sees as a "metaphysical absolutism" that "implies a potentially dangerous ideology" (178) Schiappa begins his introduction by distinguishing two kinds of definitions: the "fact of essence" which purports to state what something is and a "fact of usage" which describes how a word is used-this being the lexical or "dictionary" definition (5) Schiappa immediately dismisses both forms of definitions precisely because each claims to state a fact, that is, a proposition that describes a state of affairs from a neutral or objective standpoint Schiappa, on the contrary, argues that definitions should be considered as "ought propositions" rather than as "is propositions" (10) Definitions, he says, are "rhetorically induced" (29) The author then describes how meaning is acquired and defining is learned While Schiappa cites several modern linguists as his sources, this section (and some others) seems to borrow from the old general semantics developed by Alfred Korzybski and popularized by S I Hayakawa in his Language in Thought and Action, now in its fifth, and much revised, edition Many of Schiappa's metaphors derive from general semantics: the ladder of abstraction, reality as a territory of which language is a map, etc He concludes this part of the book by claiming that formal and informal definitions "can be understood as persuasion aimed at shared understanding and denotative conformity" (31) Schiappa then turns to his case studies to illustrate his constructivist view of definitions Schiappa says that definitions become problematic in the context of some controversy A definitional gap occurs when one encounters an unfamiliar word Checking the word in a dictionary usually resolves the matter A definitional rupture, on the other hand, occurs when the very process of defining becomes problematic (8-10) Schiappa's first example of a definitional rupture is "death" Schiappa analyzes how "brain death" is dissociated from the conventional meaning of death, cardiorespiratory failure Schiappa points out that defining "death" did not become a problem until the development of medical procedures for organ transplants "Brain death," or irreversible coma, is a desirable definition because it allows the "harvesting" of organs that are still viable Cardiorespiratory failure usually renders other organs unusable for transplants Schiappa says that the argument for a practical and useful definition ought to be conducted ethically, but he rules out of court any argument from ethics When a person's organs can be harvested is ultimately a case of "practical utility," Schiappa only says the discussion should be ethical, that is, it should not be about real definitions because they, according to Schiappa, are "ethically suspect" (48) …

Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media

Abstract: Marie-Laure Ryan Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001 xiii + 399 $2395 paper Narrative as Virtual Reality offers the reader an impressive and multifarious panorama of theory, cultural history, and textual analysis While the state of the art of electronic narrative is one of the book's concerns, its historical breadth of vision and the multiplicity of narrative (and other) media that it investigates sharply distinguish it from other recent publications focusing more exclusively upon electronic media in the context of contemporary culture and postmodernism "Virtual reality" in the context of Ryan's study refers to the domain of art itself-be it Baroque architecture, the classic realist novel, or the interactive movie-all genres which receive discussion Ryan traces the changing narrative strategies that have characterized the development of art and the key shifts in its forms of engagement with the minds of audiences Ryan concludes that two major forms of response-immersion and interactivity-have fueled key paradigm changes in the history of narrative and human culture In immersion, the reader is completely absorbed in the domain evoked by the work of art and becomes oblivious to the here and now; the reader's consciousness is thus recentered in the fictional world Texts that promote an immersive response in the reader have a transparent textual interface: in order to experience the text as world, the textual level of mediation becomes a window onto another world By contrast, in interactive texts, the recipient engages playfully with the work of art and becomes conscious of the artistic discourse as textual surface: the work of art loses its transparent world-creating capacity and offers itself as a game As Ryan shows, in some of their manifestations, immersion and interactivity can be seen as opposing aesthetic forces-for example when we contrast the realist novel with postmodernist experimental fiction However, it is one of the most insightful and instructive contributions of Ryan's wide-ranging consideration of artistic forms and narrative genres that she shows how in fact these two different urges have powered art in many different ways, both complementary and contradictory Narrative as Virtual Reality offers a wide-ranging theoretical discussion in connection with a pluralistic and exciting range of textual examples Its account of cultural and literary history modulates between densely erudite theoretical discourse and Ryan's own explorations of a number of narrative texts which well illustrate the interplay of interactivity and immersion These discursive shifts are particularly successful due to the book's overall structure: its ten chapters are interspersed with seven "interludes" that describe individual works of literature At strategic points the reader is thus given the chance to enjoy readings of immersion and interactivity in practice in texts as diverse as the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, the interactive movie I'm Your Man, and Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler The central framework of Ryan's investigation is set out in two key theoretical sections that describe a poetics of immersion and interactivity As a prelude to this, an initial section discusses a further key concept, which, as Ryan shows, has been subject to a dizzying spectrum of semantic variations: the virtual Ryan's illumination of the many metamorphoses of the virtual is characteristic of her combined theoretical rigor, historical depth, and cultural breadth The virtual is traced from its Latin etymology through to more recent significations such as the concept of the "virtual machine" from the formative days of computer technology, and its contemporary semantic overlap with the concept of cyberspace in the popular imagination (Ryan also clears up this overlap by showing how virtual reality is a world-creating technology which simulates spatial environments, whereas the cyberspace of the internet is a network of links and jumps in "nonspace …

Unreliable Narration and the Historical Variability of Values and Norms: The Vicar of Wakefield as a Test Case of a Cultural-Historical Narratology

Abstract: "The history of unreliable narrators from Gargantua to Lolita is in fact full of traps for the unsuspecting reader." This statement by Wayne Booth has certainly proved to be an accurate prediction (239). In fact, such a large number of theories concerning unreliable narrators have been propagated since Booth's statement in 1961 that to date no one has dared to initiate a historical overview spanning the period from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. But Booth's statement is also relevant in another respect, because the history of the reception of the individual unreliable narrators is not only a minefield for critics but for the unsuspecting reader as well. Moreover, the various attempts to define Booth's concept of unreliable narration clearly reveal that the phenomenon also involves a whole series of traps for the narratologist. In the following, I will focus on one of these traps that has hitherto received little attention, namely on the interdependence between narratological analyses of "unreliability" and processes of historical and cultural change. 1. The Importance of the Historical Change of Values and Norms for the Theory and Analysis of Unreliable Narration The relationship between unreliable narration and the norms established in a text has from the outset been an integral part of Booth's definition of unreliability: "I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work [. . .] unreliable when he does not" (158-59). Later in Booth's explanation it becomes clear that the concept of unreliable narration refers to narrators who are "morally and intellectually deficient" (7) and who can be detected as such by readers based on their "mature moral judgment" (307). The significance of unreliable narration is therefore located at the point where narratological and ethical categories intersect: a decision as to whether a narrator is to be considered unreliable or not always entails a judgment as to what is considered "normal," that is, what the reader's world view and his or her ethical convictions are based on. The readers' concept of what it means to be human is of particular importance for judgments about the unreliable narrator because it is their image of humanity that determines which characteristics are considered "plausible" and what they consider a deviation from "normal behavior." Judgments about character, according to Herbert Grabes, are determined by a complex "referred to by psychologists working on interpersonal perception as 'implied personality theory'" (26). This implied personality theory is defined not only by individual experience: [A]lthough our individual experiences undoubtedly exert influence on our "implied personality theory," this theory is largely determined by culture-bound social stereotypes, pre-fabricated linkings of physical, psychic and mental qualities with each other and with age, gender, social roles, class and so forth. Personality theories in various cultures can differ significantly. Hence, the variables that determine whether a character is categorized as an unreliable narrator can change over time. In addition, two further considerations are important. On the one hand, a narrator may be categorized as unreliable because the story has internal inconsistencies or diverges from the reader's knowledge of the world. Ethical convictions, on the other hand, can also play an important role: "Unreliable narrators are those whose perspective is in contradiction to the value and norm system of the whole text or to that of the reader" (Ansgar Nunning 87). This "value and norm system" encompasses many things, including the reader's model of the world, which determines what is "natural," "normal," or counts as "psychologically plausible," as well as his or her ethical values, which determine, for example, if someone should be categorized as a "sadist." We must keep in mind, however, that different readers of one and the same text can "detect" different value systems. …

Aesthetic Illusion as an Effect of Fiction

Abstract: 1. Introduction: Aesthetic Illusion as Reception Phenomenon and as a Problem for Narratology "THE CORRECTIONS is the whole package ... You will laugh, wince, groan, weep [...] and be reminded of why you read serious fiction in the first place." This is one of the blurb advertisements of Jonathan Franzen's bestseller The Corrections (2001), praise which is basically an elaboration of the frequently-used publicity formula "a moving fiction." We are all familiar with both such promises of "pleasures that [...] fiction affords" (cover of The Corrections) and with the pleasures themselves, indeed so familiar that we rarely enquire into the state of mind that renders such responses to fiction possible. Such reactions indicate a deep emotional involvement--usually an empathy with central characters--and, unless we suffer from a delusion, they presuppose aesthetic illusion: a feeling of being recentered in a possible world as if it were (a slice of) life, a feeling that prevails in spite of the fact, and our latent awareness of it, that this impression is triggered by a "mere" artefact. Aesthetic illusion is an attractive effect of the reading process and a common reception phenomenon. In contemporary culture it can be encountered as a response to a plethora of traditional as well as new media, such as the visual arts, the theater, opera, comics, radio drama, film and computer-created virtual realities (provided the recipient maintains some distance), and one must not forget fiction, which continues to have an important share in the illusion-creating media. Curiously, while the cultural presence of aesthetic illusion is quite massive, it has received only modest attention in recent research. The most influential and best study in English is still Ernst Gombrich's Art and lllusion (1960), while the first major collective volume in English dedicated to literary illusionism consists of the proceedings of a conference held fifteen years ago (Burwick and Pape). One should also mention the possible-worlds research of Marie-Laure Ryan (Possible Worlds), who, instead of "aesthetic illusion," speaks of "recentering" (21) and "immersion" (22). German narratology has produced several pioneering studies on aesthetic illusion as an effect of fiction. Werner Strube's unpublished dissertation deserves to be mentioned here, as well as the book publications by Eckhard Lobsien and Manfred Smuda. (1) In my own monograph Asthetische lllusion I was able to draw upon all of these studies. This book and the critical response it has elicited, as well as my other studies on aesthetic illusionism in Shakespeare, lyric poetry, and twentieth-century fiction form the basis of the present essay. On closer inspection, the hesitation of contemporary literary scholars in engaging in a discussion of aesthetic illusion is understandable, for it is a particularly elusive and hence problematic phenomenon: strictly speaking, it is a reception phenomenon located in the recipient's mind, and what goes on there is actually beyond the scope of philology. Therefore there are serious methodological limitations to any purely philological theory of aesthetic illusion--including the present one. Yet this does not mean that literary theorists must have recourse to mere speculation. Apart from introspection--which may, of course, be highly flawed, but can at least provide some clues as to which devices trigger asthetic illusion and to what degree--the principal means are reception testimonies by others. These include evidence from aestheticians and their theories from Aristotle's Poetics onwards, besides comments on reception experiences by the general recipient, and last, but not least, clues deducible from the texts themselves. Such clues are particularly relevant if they play with the expectation of aesthetic illusion and undermine it, notably through self-reflexive metadevices. Although neither textual clues nor readers' testimonies can yield reliable and detailed information on mental processes, such evidence can at least indicate the presence or absence of aesthetic illusion in certain cases; besides, in contrast to the findings of neuropsychology, cognition research, and empirical literary studies, it can also shed light on the past. …

Where Historiographic Metafiction and Narratology Meet: Towards an Applied Cultural Narratology

Abstract: 1. Whither Narratology? The histories and respective achievements of structuralist narratology and German contributions to narrative theory (Erzahltheorie) have recently become the subject of a controversy. While David Darby's article "Form and Content: An Essay in the History of Narratology" pits classical narratology against the history of German narrative theory, arguing that narratology should be remodeled into a contextualist theory of interpretation, other narratologists have criticized both his presentation of German narrative theory and his suggestion that such a "contextualist narratology" necessarily requires the ill-defined concept of the implied author. Monika Fludernik has pointed out that German contributions to narrative studies are much broader and more varied than Darby's essay suggests ("History"). Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Muller have taken Darby to task for failing to provide convincing reasons for his claims regarding the purported need for a change in narratology's aims and for widening its research domain ("Narratology"). This controversy and the different accounts the participants have offered of the history of narrative theory are interesting not only from the point of view of the light they shed on the complex developments and international ramifications of narratology. They also metonymically illustrate what is at slake in the current debates about the directions into which narratology is moving. Hardcore structuralist narratologists are very sceptical about several of the so-called "new narratologies" collected in David Herman's recent volume Narratologies, suspecting that they will inevitably lead to a contamination that infects "pure" and "neutral" description with the taint of ideology and relativism. In contrast to the purists who want to make "the world safe for narratology," as John Bender aptly put it ("Making"), practitioners of the various postclassical narratologies intrepidly rush in where structuralists fear to tread. Whether or not they are fools in so doing may be an open question, but their work has arguably opened up productive lines of research. Nonetheless, one cannot rail to notice that the question asked in the title of an illuminating collection of articles edited by Kindt and Muller (What is Narratology?) has recently received quite different and even contradictory answers. There no longer seems to be a consensus about either the main aims or objectives of narratology or about the extension of its research domains. Echoing Christine Brooke-Rose's title "Whatever Happened to Narratology?" one may at this stage well ask "Whither narratology?" Instead of reviewing these debates, providing yet another survey of recent developments in narratology, (1) of trying to act as arbiter of hostilities, the present essay pursues three more modest goals: to sketch out some of the premises and concepts of an applied cultural narratology that puts the analytical toolkit developed by narratology in the service of context-sensitive interpretations of novels, to provide a typological overview of new kinds of historical fiction partly based on narratological categories, and to indicate how the latter may be used in order to tease out the epistemological and ethical implications of what has come to be known as "historiographic metafiction." I hope to show that cultural analyses and interpretations of narratives in general, and research on historiographic metafiction in particular, would stand to gain a lot by actually applying the categories provided by narratology. Using historiographic metafiction as a case study for testing the usefulness of a new kind of cultural narratology, I would like to argue that such dichotomies as the one between "the uncontaminated fields of 'classical' narratology" and the "contextualist dimensions of contemporary 'postclassical' narratological scholarship" (Darby, "Form and Context Revisited" 423) should not be exaggerated. They arguably present us with a set of false choices: between text and context, between form and content as well as form and context, between formalism and contextualism, between bottom-up analysis and top-down synthesis, and between "neutral" description and "ideological" evaluation. …

The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950-2000

Abstract: Head, Dominic. The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 19502000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. viii + 307 pp. $65.00 cloth; $22.00 paper. This well-organized and -written study constitutes an excellent starting place for readers seeking to gain an overview of British fiction written during the second half of the twentieth century. Treating more than 100 novelists and 200 individual works, the book covers both key exemplars of and broad tendencies within postwar British fiction, anchoring its discussion within surrounding sociocultural developments. Indeed, for Dominic Head, who adapts Paul Ricoeur's theory of mimesis as a (multiphased) process of representation rather than imitation, the relation between fictional worlds and social contexts is synergistic, or mutually determinative. Readers draw on aspects of their experience to make sense of fictional texts that, reciprocally, help mold their sense of what is or could be the case in the world at large. In this respect, the dichotomy between "realism" and "experimentalism" is spurious: all texts at once ground themselves within and impinge back upon what interpreters assume to be real. The author asserts, too, that this dialectical relation between fiction and experience affords a framework for understanding the social and historical role of postwar British fiction. Drawing on the philosophical and novelistic work of Iris Murdoch in the final pages of the book to bolster his argument, Head suggests that in an era in which once-dominant religious and political traditions no longer held sway, fiction came to be a powerful vehicle for socioethical reflection. Chapter 1, "The State and the Novel," explores how an increasing sense of social atomization affected representations of political life in the postwar British novel. Here Head argues that, during the period in question, the political novel of public life gave way to novels concentrating on isolated individual lives. Fictions discussed in this chapter range from novels centering around the period immediately following the war, such as Rose Macaulay's The World My Wilderness (1950) and Pamela Hansford Johnson's The Humbler Creation (1959), to novels written during the social revolution of the 1960s and early 70s, such as Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange ( 1962) and Piers Paul Read's A Married Man (1979), to novels intimating full-scale social collapse, such as Hilary Mantel's Every Day is Mother's Day (1985). Chapter 2, "Class and Social Change," discusses tensions between economic and ideological models of class status, exploring how the waning of class consciousness disrupts representations of working-class as well as middle-class experience. The chapter progresses from class-conscious fictions written in the context of what came to be called "The Movement" in the 195Os, such as Kinglsey Amis' s Lucky Jim (1954), to the grittily realistic depictions of working-class life in works by such Angry Young Men as John Braine and Alan Sillitoe, to the portrayal of the equivocal consequences of class mobility in the novels of David Storey, to novels exploring the perpetually disenfranchised underclass that emerged during the 1980s and 90s, such as Li vi Michaels's Under a Thin Moon (1992), to Penelope Lively's premise, in Spiderweb (1998), that the very notion of class has become irrelevant. …

Representing Characters' Speech and Thought in Narrative Fiction: A Study of England England by Julian Barnes

Abstract: In this paper I discuss the choices, patterns and subtle variations in the presentation of characters‟ words and thoughts in an extract from Julian Barnes‟s novel England, England. My main aim is to show how Barnes‟s linguistic choices might affect readers‟ perceptions of, and potential empathy with, the characters involved. The analysis also demonstrates the explanatory potential of a model of speech, writing and thought presentation (SW&TP) that was developed on the basis of the analysis of a corpus of written narratives (Semino and Short 2004). This model accounts for a larger variety of phenomena than was previously the case, including, for example, the presentation of „hypothetical‟ words and thoughts, and the „embedding‟ of SW&TP inside other instances of SW&TP. Both of these phenomena are shown to be particularly central to the extract from Barnes‟s novel. Finally, the results of the analysis of the passage are consistently compared with the results of the analysis of a larger corpus, in order to make more reliable claims about its peculiar characteristics and potential effects.

Current Conversations in the Teaching of College-Level Literature

Abstract: Literary scholars consider themselves to be expert in writing about literature or teaching literature but not necessarily in writing about the teaching of literature. The latter field is likely to be thin, in both senses--less productive of scholarship than the fields of rhetoric and language and less conceptually developed. (John Guillory) Socrates himself begins [...] when he says, on behalf of Hippocrates, who wants to "study professionally" with the eminent Protagoras: "he would be glad to be told what effect it will have on him" [...]. What effect will it have? How will he be changed? By his teacher? Specifically. What strikes me about this question is how obvious and basic a one it seems to be for a teacher to be asking. And how rarely it is asked. What effect will it have? Important particularly in the part of our work that prepares others to become professionals at what we do. For such a question places the pedagogical transaction at the center of the problematic. (Paul Kameen) It is the question that is wrong because it assumes that we are responsible for the effects of our teaching whereas, in fact, we are responsible only for its appropriate performance. That is, we are responsible for the selection of texts, the preparation of a syllabus, the sequence of assignments and exams, the framing and grading of a term paper, and so on. [...] There are just too many intervening variables, too many uncontrolled factors that mediate the relationship between what goes on in a classroom or even in a succession of classrooms and the shape of what is finally a life. (Stanley Fish, "Aim") So set 'em up Joe; I've got a little story you oughtta know. (Frank Sinatra) 1 In a recent PMLA note, Ruth-Ellen Boetcher-Joeres, the editor of Signs, spoke about both the difficulties and exhilaration of doing interdisciplinary work. She argued that both "feminism and interdisciplinarity alike [for example] stress collaboration," but that such joint ventures were often limited because the "metalanguage of disciplinarity assert[ed] itself, controlling and limiting what interests us" (319). I will argue in this essay that much the same could be said about our own internal division between ourselves as teachers of literature and as literary scholars and critics (Cuban 76, Kameen 168-70). Those who insist, not without some merit, that the two should be synergistic often substitute what should be for what (all too often) is in a world of merely semiperineable boundaries (Nelsen and Watt 285). We all want to be good teachers and good scholars, but we have found relatively few models for learning how to do both well (Levine, Foreword xii; McGann 157; Showalter 39). Fortunately, the times, they are a-changing as many look anew at the joys of classroom transactions (Guillory; McGann; Scholes, Crafty; Showalter). Teaching as a Belle-Lettres research topic is refreshingly in the air at the turn of the new millennium, but thus far, that literary generation previously focused on theory sometimes seems to be rediscovering the pedagogical wheel. Even so, rediscovery can be a good thing that may often lead us back to the reasons why we teach the humanities at all (Charles Anderson 86, Nell). Although at least some recovery of the obvious might seem necessary to those who have only recently come to literary pedagogical consciousness, much has happened in the educational world during the last twenty-five to thirty years that has gone far beyond the lecture-paper-final examination model that once dominated literature classrooms. After flower-power temporarily shook up the often-staid practices of the previous generation, many have extolled the virtues of the newer, pedagogically more interpersonal reader-response alternatives to the earlier paradigmata, but these too have undergone rethinking (Rabinowitz and Smith). Indeed, almost a decade ago, thinkers in one scholarly essay had even developed a rather loose sort of plot-line: "The profession has moved from raising questions about texts, to raising questions about readers, to raising questions about the conditions of possibility for any reading, to raising questions about how we teach students to read" (Downing et al. …

A New Paradigm for Literary Studies, Or: The Teething Troubles of Cognitive Poetics

Abstract: A New Paradigm for Literary Studies, or: The Teething Troubles of Cognitive Poetics Peter Stockwell. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2002. x + 193 pp. $80.00 cloth; $25.95 paper. Joanna Gavins and Gerard Steen, eds. Cognitive Poetics in Practice. New York: Routledge, 2003. xii + 188 pp. $90.00 cloth; $28.95 paper. Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper, eds. Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2002. xvi + 333 pp. $95.00 cloth; $32.95 paper. The basic premise in cognitive linguistics that there is no direct mapping between words and the world, that each situation can be "construed" in different ways depending on such experiential aspects as perspective, profiling (or foregrounding), cognitive and cultural models, and conceptual metaphors has been of great interest to many stylisticians working in these areas. It has led to the development of a new paradigm-cognitive poetics or Stylistics, which has come of age with the publication of the three books under review, published within a period of less than a year (between June 2002 and February 2003). Most of the practitioners prefer to give a fairly broad definition of the field: Peter Stockwell, in Cognitive Poetics, sees it as "essentially a way of thinking about literature rather than a framework in itself (6). It involves "the study of literary reading" (165), both in its individual and social aspects. It focuses on both the "stylistic texture of the literary work" and "the felt experience of the reader," thus affording a "holistic picture of literary cognition" (167). In the foreword to their edited volume, Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper present an equally nuanced view of cognitive Stylistics as combining "the kind of explicit, rigorous and detailed linguistic analysis of literary texts that is typical of the Stylistics tradition with a systematic and theoretically informed consideration of the cognitive structures and processes that underlie the production and reception of language" (ix). Similarly, according to Joanna Gavins and Gerard Steen, cognitive poetics studies the "psychological and social effects" of the structures of the literary text on the reader's mind (1). There is some disagreement over the question of whether the new framework needs to rely on empirical studies of real readers' responses to literary texts. Gavins and Steen argue that cognitive poetics should be complemented by "cognitive poetic reception research focusing on real readers" (8). Stockwell, on the other hand, while acknowledging the importance of attending to "the detail and quality of many different readings" (2), dismisses an empirical approach based upon informant testing because it treats literature as mere data. He believes that cognitive poetics can combine with critical theory and literary philosophy in an attempt to address the "big questions" of literary value and status (6). Stockwell's Cognitive Poetics is the first textbook available in this field. Each chapter introduces a different cognitive-poetic approach, ranging from figure/ ground, prototypes, deixis, cognitive grammar, and metaphor, to schema theory, possible worlds theory, mental spaces, text world theory, and contextual frame theory. Moreover, each chapter is structured in the following interesting and useful way: theoretical introduction, discussion questions, cognitive-poetic analysis of one or more literary texts, explorations, further reading, and references. The last chapter discusses recent trends and future directions of cognitive poetics. The book also includes a thorough bibliography and a glossarial index. As such, Cognitive Poetics is a sound introduction to a wide range of frameworks in cognitive linguistics and poetics. It also offers new theoretical insights, of which I mention just a few here: an all-inclusive cognitive-linguistic model of deixis, a questioning of the basic narratological distinction between plot (sjuzhet) and story (fabula) from a cognitive-poetic perspective; and a fascinating account-relying on Mark Turner's concept of "parable"-of how "literature alters our perspective, knowledge, and way of thinking" (127). …

What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers regarding the Status of a Theory

Abstract: What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers regarding the Status of a Theory. Ed. Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Miiller. Narratalogia, 1. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2003. vii + 368 pp. $137.20 cloth. De Gruyter's Narratologia series is subtitled "Contributions to Narrative Theory," and it has been inaugurated by a collection devoted to the useful jobs of ground-clearing and organization. The current state of narrative studies makes these jobs unavoidable. After the large-scale attempt to theorize narrative that was the centerpiece of literary structuralism in the 1960s and 70s followed a period (in the 80s and early 90s) of syntheses and summaries but few new ideas and a general downturn in the level of activity. In the past decade, however, an outburst of new initiatives in thinking about narrative has brought with it a renewed sense that interesting work remains to be done on narrative. The problem facing the narrative theorist at the present juncture is that of getting a clear overview: has any substantive knowledge about narrative been achieved and, if so, and how can it be built upon? should future research on narrative be treated as a continuation of earlier work, or as a break from it? which of the new directions will actually lead somewhere and which will prove to be trendy dead ends? These very broad questions form the background of current discussion. The essays in this volume-which come from a 2002 conference in Hamburg sponsored by the Narratology Research Group-concern the narrower issue of the identity of narratology. The problem here is that, taken generally, the study of narrative might involve a great many things, whereas the notion of narratology implies something much more limited-but what? Since Plato and Aristotle, and especially since Henry James, the topic of narrative has been addressed by literary practitioners, belletristic and journalistic critics, scholars, and theorists in a diversity of fields ranging from philosophy to folkloristics; sometimes the object of interest has been a particular narrative work, at other times it has been various features of a corpus, while at others the universal nature of narrative has been postulated as a possible object of inquiry. The term "narratology," coined in the heyday of French structuralism and associated with work by Roland Barthes, Claude Bremond, Gerard Genette, A.-J. Greimas, and Tzvetan Todorov, designated a new specialty in academic literary research: the use of more or less formalized models to endow the study of narrative with systematic procedures and testable criteria. But now, three or four decades later, not only do the articles of structuralist methodological faith stand rejected in a resolutely postmodern era, but students of narrative are interested in a range of narrative-pertinent stuff much wider than tidy-minded structuralists could ever have envisioned, much less accommodated. Briefly, it is content and context that matter to the next generation of investigators, who uniformly disparage the very idea of narrative as primarily or essentially a matter of form. So it is possible to distinguish between two generations of narrative theorists, "classical" and "postclassical" (to adopt what has become a common usage). What is Narratology? includes fourteen essays, all by German scholars except for four (by David Herman, John Pier, Gerald Prince, and Marie-Laure Ryan); of those written by German contributors, seven appear in (usually fluent) translation. Since the goal of the conference was to survey the field ("Questions and Answers regarding the Status of a Theory"), it is understandable that many of the essays include extensive bibliographies. However, they overlap considerably, and take up a seventh of the volume (54 pages out of about 360, not counting some lengthy footnotes, such as the one summarizing the translation history of French structuralists writings into German [161-62nl 12]). A single consolidated Works Cited might have been preferable, despite the editorial trouble it would have taken to assemble. …

Toward a Cognitive Rhetoric of Imagism

Abstract: "Imagism is dead; long live the Imagists!" --Glenn Hughes (Imagist 23) 1. On Imagism "What was Imagism?" is not an easy question to answer. For example, Ezra Pound called Stanley Coffman's 1951 book, Imagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry, "nuts" several times (Cole 248), and Pound would no doubt take issue with most histories of Imagism. Even so, this has not prevented critics from trying to understand Imagism. For John Fuller, although "Imagism seems absurdly provincial, its aims were at the centre of the whole modernist programme in poetry" (72). Likewise, David Perkins calls Imagism "the grammar school of modern poetry" (329), while Jacob Korg sees Imagism as a "corrective" to nineteenth-and early twentieth-century poetry (127). For his part, Joseph Frank claims Imagism "opened the way for later developments by its clean break with sentimental Victorian verbiage" (10-11). Because Imagism succeeds Symbolism yet precedes Surrealism, it is situated at the dawn of "classical" literary modernism (Zach 229), (1) which is why teleological literary histories regard Imagism as "the beginning of modern literature in English" (Pratt 75). If such claims are true, then clearly Imagism mattered regardless of whatever else might be said about the movement. Most of the poets involved with Imagism were based in London between 1912 and 1918. Three British poets (Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint, and D. H. Lawrence) and four American poets (Pound, H. D., Amy Lowell, and John Gould Fletcher) were more or less core group members (Jones 13). T. E. Hulme, a British writer who died in 1917 in World War I, was an influential figure for the Imagists before 1914. (2) The word "Imagist" itself might have been used publicly for the first time in 1912, when Pound wrote "HD, Imagiste" at the bottom of "Hermes of the Ways" before sending H. D.'s poem to Harriet Monroe at Poetry in Chicago. In 1915 F. S. Flint claimed, however, that Hulme had actually used the term first at his Poet's Club meetings before 1912 (de Chasca 75), so the origin of the term remains in dispute. What we do know for sure is that four Imagist anthologies were published between 1914 and 1918. Pound edited the March 1914 anthology, Des Imagistes, while Lowell edited the remaining three anthologies, all titled Some Imagist Poets, which appeared in April 1915, May 1916, and April 1917, respectively. Although the Imagists nearly became known as the "Quintessentials" in early 1915 when Lowell was negotiating with Ferris Greenslet, Houghton Mifflin's poetry editor, Greenslet rejected the name change due to his sense that "'Imagism' had a certain mercantile value" (de Chasca 75). This may be why some see Imagism as little more than publicity stunt even if it was more than that. To keep my terms clear for the purposes of this article, by "Imagist" I mean a poet whose poetry appeared in one of the four original Imagist anthologies. Between Pound's collection (which had eleven contributors) and Lowell's three collections (which each had the same six contributors), "we have a total of thirteen writers who may possibly be considered bona fide Imagists" (Imagist 24). There were 35 poems in the 1914 anthology, 37 poems in the 1915 anthology, 32 poems in the 1916 anthology, and 26 poems in the 1917 anthology. Thus, there were 130 Imagist poems written by thirteen "bona fide" Imagist poets. That excludes Imagist poems the Imagists published elsewhere as well as the thirty new poems published in the Imagist Anthology 1930. (3) These tallies remind us that the number of Imagist poems and the number of Imagist poets are rather limited ones. Why, then, should such a small movement receive so much attention over the years? One answer comes from literary history: Imagism, a "campaign for free verse" (Roberts, "Lawrence" 82), included some major twentieth-century writers. In his "Foreword" to the Imagist Anthology 1930, Glenn Hughes argued that many Imagists became well-known "world figures" after Imagism (24), which is one reason why Imagism has not been forgotten. …

Turning Words on the Page into "Real" People

Abstract: 1. The Power of Illusion In the wake of an ever-increasing interest in the characters of Shakespeare's plays since the end of the eighteenth century, John Wilson in 1829 made the following statement: "Shakespeare's characters have long ceased to be poetical creations, and are now as absolute flesh and blood as any other subject of his Majesty's dominions" (963). The striking neglect of the fact that characters tend to emerge from the page when we read novels, plays, or poems--a neglect that was strengthened by the structuralist fixation on the text--has slowly been overcome in recent times by an increased interest in the process of reading. The phenomenon is, after all, widespread enough. Not only do such figures take on a life of their own in that they repeatedly become the protagonists of new works (for example in the Hamlet novels of Georg Britting and Alfred Doblin or in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead). More important is the fact that figures like Hamlet or Lady Macbeth, Tom Jones or Huck Finn, Stephen Dedalus or Mrs. Dalloway, Blanche Dubois or Willy Loman, Holden Caulfield or Lolita tend to exist autonomously in the memory of those readers or audiences who have "made their acquaintance" in the respective plays and novels. In order to come closer to an adequate analysis of this process of figuring-forth, it will in the first place be necessary to differentiate between on the one hand "literary character" as the totality of the signs in the text that provide clues for the readers' acts of construction and, on the other hand, the dramatised "figures beyond the text" (Cohan) that readers picture on the stage of their imagination during the process of reading. Since the publication of the original German version of this essay, critics like Steven Cohan, Uri Margolin, Laszlo Halasz, Richard J. Gerri, and David W. Allbritton as well as Thomas Koch and Ralf Schneider have helped to overcome the methodological reduction of literary characters to mere "actants" in structuralist narratology and have started to pay tribute to the creative activity of the reader. What we chiefly find in these more recent studies is an interpretation of literary characters as "mental models" in the sense of cognitive psychology? This may solve some analytical problems but creates a new one--it leaves unexplained why in our imagination we do not encounter mere "mental models" but figures often as much alive as those we meet in everyday life. The experience of this encounter with literary characters will be felt most strongly by the literary scholar who still has the ability to read or to watch a film or theater performance without immediately analyzing it. The strength of the illusion becomes apparent in the fact that one almost inevitably gets involved in the fate of the protagonists despite one's theoretical insight into the artificiality or constructedness of literary characters. Admittedly, for the purpose of analysis one must not remain caught up in this illusion; however, neither should one dismiss it. On the contrary, one has to take this effect properly into account and attempt to explain it as the "primary" phenomenon. 2. The Conditions of Figuring-Forth We gain knowledge of literary characters through literary works--this seems fairly clear. On the other hand, such characters really become figured-forth only in the imagination of the reader or viewer. Since the imagining takes place during the so-called "reception" of a work, the elements or factors necessary for the figuration of a literary character are the text, the imagination of the recipient, and the interaction of the two in the process of reading or listening. The object of investigation here is precisely that interaction, the process of transformation that turns some signs or features of a literary text into characters. How is it possible that powerful figures emerge from pages filled with words and sentences as soon as we begin the process of reading? …

Limits of the Narrator's Knowledge in Fielding's Joseph Andrews: A Contribution to a Theory of Negated Knowledge in Fiction

Abstract: In the subchapter titled "Privilege" of his Rhetoric of Fiction Wayne Booth draws our attention to a "curious ambiguity in the term 'omniscience'" resulting from the apparent incompatibility of two familiar basic observations (161). Although, in principle, narratorial omniscience implies a complete knowledge of "what could not be learned by strictly natural means" (160), above all the privilege of an inside view of another character, nevertheless in narrative practice most omniscient narrators exhibit and sometimes explicitly thematize gaps in their knowledge. In view of this discrepancy between theory and practice, Booth stresses the need for "a good study of the varieties of privilege and limitation and their function." The initial step of any attempt to contribute to such a study must be the endeavor to clarify the situation by differentiating between those cases where potentially omniscient narrators openly admit the (alleged) limits of their knowledge (thus marking out the textual horizon of the verbalized "not") and those instances where unverbalized lacunae of information in a text simply result from the fact that even the best-informed and most communicative author or narrator cannot--or, even if he could, need not, and for artistic reasons even should not--tell everything he knows of might be expected to know; for evidently the notion of a total description of a state of affairs is a chimera, since any given piece of information is inevitably the product of a selection from the vast spectrum of possible utterances (the horizon of the unsaid). Both aspects of the problem as well as their interdependencies will, of course, have to be taken into consideration in the long run; but in order to establish a concrete starting-point it seems advisable and in the present state of discussion legitimate to concentrate first on the former (verbalized) case, leaving aside the trickier questions (such as, is something left unsaid because the author is unable or unwilling to say it?). Thus the following observations, based on an analysis of practical examples taken from Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742), aim at compiling some general insights that might prove useful to further studies on the matter. Fielding was primarily chosen because he is commonly regarded as the representative par excellence of narratorial omniscience, who fully exploits the technique; my choice of text has been Joseph Andrews because Booth's first and quite instructive example of negated knowledge is taken from this novel. The passage Booth quotes forms part of the scene in Book 2, chapter 12, where the passengers of the stagecoach speculate about the possible consequences of their assisting or not assisting Joseph Andrews, the victim of a robbery whom they find naked and bleeding in the ditch. In weighing the pros and cons of the question, the coachman at last agrees to let Joseph enter the coach, "partly alarmed by the threats of the one [i.e., the lawyer], and partly by the promises of the other [i.e., the old gentleman], and perhaps a little moved with compassion at the poor creature's condition" (43). What strikes us as odd here is the logical inconsistency of the "perhaps." For how can, and why does, the narrator on the one hand claim a full inside view of this person, and on the other pretend to depend on mete conjectures, and this with regard to one and the same person and situation? In drawing attention to incongruities of this kind Booth does not embark upon a systematic analysis of their varieties and possible functions. His comment on the passage under discussion only states that the scene continues with frequent excursions into the minds and hearts of the characters and "occasional guesses when complete knowledge seems inadvisable" (162). What one would like to know more precisely is, of course, on which occasions and for what reasons guesses are, or can be, more advisable than a full inside view. As regards the present example in particular, it is not hard to see why Fielding uses this technique of cognitive double standards, as it were: he thus indirectly expresses his moral scepticism as well as his inveterate philanthropy. …

Some Problems concerning a Theory of Fiction(ality)

Abstract: 1. The Linguistic Problem Problems of theory often tend to be problems of language and this is especially--though not exclusively--the case in the so-called humanities. The debate on the nature of fiction is a case in point. The problems concerning the concept of fiction start with the fact that the term "fiction" has been applied to a considerable variety of phenomena at different times and in different places. This would not, in and of itself, create too much of a problem if only scholars were sufficiently aware of this fact. In the English-speaking world, the term "fiction," when used to denote a type of text, often relates only to narrative fictional texts. This can be illustrated by reference to the German translation of Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction as Die Rhetorik der Erzahlkunst, i.e., "The Rhetoric of Narrative Art." But the book deals exclusively with narrative fiction and not with fictional texts in general, as the use of the German term Fiktion would have implied. Hence, it is primarily for terminological reasons that the debate on fictionality, which is grounded in logic and the philosophy of language, centers largely on narrative texts--after all, this approach to the issue is dominated by English-speaking scholars. Some scholars explicitly mention this "limitation" (e.g., Richard Routley (1)) without being aware, however, of the problems it entails. Jonathan Culler is one of the few scholars who actually address these problems. He, too, applies the term "fiction" in the common sense as it is used by "publishers, booksellers, and most readers, except some theoretically inclined specialists." According to Culler "fiction" is an umbrella term denoting "imaginative prose narratives [...] as opposed to poetry, on the one hand, which will not be found in the fiction section, nor on the fiction bestseller list, and to non-fiction on the other" (2). Even though Culler himself proceeds to discuss the issue of fiction only with respect to narrative texts, he does draw attention to the asymmetrical character of his terminology, which, on the one hand, contrasts fiction with poetry and, on the other, with nonfictional narratives such as reports, historiography, etc. While in the English-speaking world the use of the term "fiction" in its everyday sense has led to poetry being banned from the realm of fiction and, thus, in most cases, from recent theories of fictionality, (2) English-speaking scholars do sometimes include drama in the scope of what they call "fictional discourse." John Searle, for instance, discusses the specific conditions which constitute fictionality in dramatic texts (327-29). The vast majority of German-speaking scholars consider it natural that a theory of fictionality must in equal measure refer to narrative, dramatic, and poetic texts; this is exemplified, for instance, by the texts on which Rainer Warning bases his discussion of the pragmatic relation to fictionality. Only a few individual scholars, such as Kate Hamburger or Harald Fricke, exclude "poetry" or, more precisely, certain varieties of "poetry" from fictionality. This is the consequence of their theories of fictionality and the specific textual markers that these theories establish as signals of fictionality. (3) If a theory of fictionality can be defined by criteria deriving from the explicitly stated or implied extension (4) of this very term, it is obviously just as possible for the extension of the term to be delimited by a theory of fictionality. As I will try to show, it seems necessary to define criteria of fictionality in relation to specific groups of texts, yet it must be noted that this cannot be the exclusive approach and that one has to be aware of the differing status of various individual criteria or sets of criteria. It is obviously impossible to cover all the different concepts of fictionality within a single theory. Nevertheless, ii we wish to engage in a discussion of the nature of fictionality--and the subject seems to have gained in importance recently--it seems necessary first to take a critical look at what aspects the existing theories of fictionality actually refer to. …

The "Complementary Story": Outline of a Reader-Oriented Theory of the Novel

Abstract: We are all storytellers, even if we never write a short story or a novel. Every day we make an effort to shape our experience of reality in conversations, reports, and above all, in recollections, whether articulated silently or aloud--we try to give that experience coherence, sense, wholeness, and meaning. When we thus shape our experiences by relating them, we transform and fictionalize them. In Benjamin Lee Whorf's day, it seemed a bold generalization to speak of the fictionality of a culture shaped predominantly by orality, but for today's structuralists such a contention has almost become a commonplace. In this essay an attempt will be made to draw conclusions from the above insight for a particular aspect of literary narratology, and to do so without the help of structuralist models of explanation. If we are all narrators, then this means that we are narrators also in our role as readers of a short story or a novel. The idea of transporting the reader into the role of narrator or coauthor, however, has never even been considered, except perhaps occasionally in highly unconventional narrative works such as Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Here, as so often happens, the obvious and close at hand was first recognized in its more unusual manifestations. And yet a reader can easily become a narrator or coauthor of any garden-variety of narrative text as well, for the simple reason that the author and the narrator created by that author usually produce a story that is incomplete and full of gaps. Since they have to fulfill the readers' expectation of getting an authentic picture of the reality portrayed in the story--authentic meaning definable in terms of an infinite number of details--and since they have only a finite number of sentences and words with which to do this, large sections of the story necessarily remain indeterminate in the narrative. It is the reader who at least partly supplements the texts and fills in the missing parts, who--in other words--adds to the novel or short story his own "complementary story" (Komplementargeschichte). The easiest way to demonstrate the creation of such a complementary story is to look at the ending of a narrative. In very many short stories and novels--the numbers seem to be increasing constantly in modern fiction, one has only to think of the stories by Chekhov, Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Sherwood Anderson, and others--the ending is crafted so that the reader finds himself having to imaginatively pursue the characters' life story beyond the ending of the text: to let a situation that abruptly ends at its climax roll to a stop, to trace a little farther a connection that has only just begun to take on contours in the last sentences of the story. The reader thus continues the story past the endpoint chosen by the author. This has not gone unnoticed by narrative theory and literary interpretation. What has not been noted until now, however, is the fact that this process occurs several times in longer works of fiction, for example the Victorian novel, before the reader even reaches the end of the story. It happens at the end of a book, a chapter, a section, an episode of a serialized novel, or at any point where the reader, perhaps due to external factors, interrupts his reading without banning from his mind the current cast of characters or the plot as it stands at that point. (1) In this situation the characters of a novel, thanks to the embodiment and the gravitational force that they have attained in the imagination of the reader, will very often pursue for a while the same direction before they come to a stop. What we will therefore have to show is how those sections of a narrative that follow such an interruption and are not immediately specified by the text--or are left completely vacant--put the reader in a position to fill in the gaps in the story or to continue it as a kind of experiment based on his own experiences and insights. In other words, the reader comes up with a story that complements what he has so far read. …

The Stylistics of Stasis: Paradoxical Effects in W. G. Sebald

Abstract: For all the actual, physical journeying that occurs in the works of W. G. Sebald, plot and character development are largely absent (McCrum "Characters" 17). What development does occur happens in the minds of the characters and reaches the reader in the form of reported speech from Sebald's narrators. Readers who pick up a book by Sebald and find his style appealing are compelled to read on, but not by the promise of action or resolution. Paradoxically, the narration moves forward, proceeds, yet remains static. Many critics have tried to pinpoint the defining characteristics of the technique Sebald employs to attain the remarkably original effects of his prose. (1) "It is the trembling," writes Geoff Dyer, "the hovering on the edge of infinitely tedious regress [...] that generate the peculiar suspense--the sense, more exactly, of suspended narration--that makes Sebald's writing so compelling" (18). With Dyer's insight we have already crossed into the realm of characteristically Sebaldian paradox; it is precisely the inaction described by the author that holds the reader's attention. One is "reeled in." to use Andre Aciman's expression, by the "labored flatness" of Sebald's prose (62). Sebald's writing is often described as a "hypnotizing" weave (or related metaphor, e.g., fabric, braid) of Wanderschaft, digression, hallucination, and chance encounter: "Sebald's hypnotic prose lulls you into tranced submission, a kind of stupor that is also a state of heightened attention" (Dyer 18). Out of the apparent aimlessness of the narrative emerges a cumulative sense of purposefulness suggesting intricate, barely concealed patterns of order. The British critic Robert McCrum, who also speaks of the "hypnotic" power of Sebald's prose, likens his technique to a kaleidoscope: "brightly coloured subjects blur and merge and reform, blend and reshape and re-emerge ("On W. G. Sebald" 16). But the hidden patterns of order remain--another paradox--inexplicit and unexpressed in Sebald's work. We perceive only their "kaleidoscopic" results. This suggestion of structure inside what Dyer calls a "yawning chasm" of infinite regress contributes to the impression, arising again and again throughout Sebald's prose, that characters and things--indeed, the readers themselves--are "on the verge," or "on the brink" of something. But on the verge of what? An experience? A discovery? Ultimately, and fatalistically, the answer is that things are on the brink of destruction and living beings are on the verge death. But such an answer is far too easy in view of Sebald's literary craftsmanship. The paradox of torpor made teleological and stupor rendered suspenseful is the central one in Sebald's writing, a primary hallmark of his style. I shall attempt in the following pages to identify the salient (and not-so-salient) features of what one might call Sebald's "stylistics of stasis." 1 As I have suggested elsewhere, Sebald's prose can be accurately characterized as "monistic," in the sense that his narratives weave a holistic amalgam of literary, historical, and cultural allusions, in which conventional borders--both of form and content--are penetrable and shifting (McCulloh 22, 49). Fact merges with fiction, the past intrudes on the present, mundane experience streams imperceptibly into the imaginary world of literature or dream, and individual identities threaten to flow into one another. Because of Sebald's blending of fields, concepts, and formal elements, he has often been credited with creating a "new genre." (2) Arthur Williams has identified a pedagogical bent as one of the two keys to Sebald's "holistic" aesthetics (and ethics), the second being "his interest in and exploitation of the techniques and theories of the visual arts" (99). In any case, it is the continuum of literature and learning that resides at the heart of Sebald's "holism," according to Williams, and I would suggest a confirming parallel in the writings of another writer committedly scornful of plot, Laurence Sterne. …

Reader Figures in Narrative

Abstract: Various concepts of the reader have gained currency in recent literary criticism and theory. This fact is largely due to the re-evaluation of the role of the real reader. Reception theorists like H. R. Jauss stress that subjective reader responses are historically conditioned. By contrast, Wolfgang Iser focuses on the interaction between text and reader and discusses how readers become, as it were, co-producers of a literary work in that they integrate the elements and perspectives offered by a work of prose fiction. Poststructuralist critics, who, in the United States, are much indebted to the New Critical emphasis on text-internal ambiguities, on the other hand, privilege readers who produce different interpretations and keep the text open to new readings. Given this context, it is small wonder that reader figures (both intradiegetic and extradiegetic) used by authors in narratives to control the reactions of the real reader have so far been relatively neglected. That such figures and other means of directing the audience deserve more attention becomes evident when we consider the peculiar contractual relationship between author and reader which is created in the act of reading. Such a contract does not one-sidedly favor the reader (or listener) of a story, as can be illustrated by the narrative frame of The Arabian Nights. Once Scheherazade begins to tell a story, her listener may have the power to terminate her storytelling; but if he continues to listen, he allows the narrator to live, as it were. Scheherazade dominates the scene and forces her listener to respond to her story and, to use an old-fashioned expression, to fall under its spell (see also Prince, "Notes toward a Categorization" 103-04). In the following essay I discuss two types of reader figures, the fictive (extradiegetic) and the fictional (intradiegetic) reader. I owe much to studies by Rolf Fieguth, Gerald Prince, W. Daniel Wilson, and others, but I move beyond them by distinguishing between reader figures on the level of the narrator and those on the level of the action, and by relating these figures to other concepts of readers, narrators, and authors. (1) Reader Figures In order to define these reader figures more closely, a communicative model will be used that does justice to the kinds of relationship that narratives establish between writers and their audience. (2) On the first level of communication, the author and the reader as real-life persons can be distinguished, while on the second level the author as the creator of a work of prose fiction and the reader as a prospective consumer of the narrative text can be differentiated. On both these levels various factors influence writers' narrative decisions: their estimation of the market situation and of contemporary taste, their choice of genre, their need to formulate their experiences, imaginings, and opinions in a way which their audience will find plausible, etc. Readers, likewise, are influenced by external factors on both levels of communication. Private experiences, individual habits of reading, knowledge of other works by one and the same author, the sales campaign for the book conducted by the publisher, first reactions by critics, and a host of other factors raise certain expectations and influence readers' reception of the book in question. On a third level of communication--the first one constituted in the narrative text itself--the implied author can be distinguished from the implied reader. According to Wayne Booth, the implied author is that part of the author's self which is realized in the story: this second self differs from the author as a private person and a producer of texts as well as from the implied authors in other works created by the same writer. The implied author is responsible for the text as a whole, including the narrator and the implied reader: (3) "The author creates, in short, an image of himself and another image of his reader; he makes his reader, as he makes his second self [. …

"The Tension Is in the Concept": John Ashbery's Surrealism

Abstract: [A]fter all it all came from Chirico and he was not a surrealist he is very fanciful and his eye is caught by it and he has no distinction between the real and the unreal because everything is alike to him, he says so, but the rest of them nothing is alike to them and so they do not say so, and that is the trouble with them [...]. --(Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography) Much has been written about the relationship between John Ashbery's poetry and avant-garde art, particularly the painting of the Abstract Expressionists. Two of the earliest articles dealing with this subject--by Fred Moramarco (1976) and Leslie Wolf (1980)--have considered not only Ashbery's use of objets d'art as starting motifs for his poems but also the painterly quality present in much of his poetry itself. (1) That the early-century collage aesthetic has been a major influence on him is beyond doubt, and the most controversial issue nowadays is probably the negative view still taken of his surrealist experiments. A number of annoyed critics have trivialized Ashbery with the label "surrealist" whenever the poems in a volume are unusually dark, displaying a curious fondness for fitting them into the vague category of post-surrealist surrealism. (2) For very similar reasons--and a sense of automatism that Ashbery rejects--this work has been praised by Language poets. Ashbery himself has shaken off the surrealist label with remarkable energy at times, most likely out of boredom, and has certainly tired of the reductionist connotations which--sadly enough--the term has acquired. Ashbery, who lived in France for ten years, had a first-hand experience of the country where surrealism was born, and it seems clear that his privileged access to "the real thing" has allowed him to appreciate in surrealism aspects that are neglected by the general public. We know from his art criticism that Ashbery distinguishes two kinds of surrealism, and only rejects the label in equal fear of excessively academicist or populist interpretations. Although "the term surrealism has fallen into disfavor," he praised Yves Tanguy as its embodiment on the ground that for him "the arbitrary distinction between abstract and figurative art did not exist" (Reported Sightings 27). It is clear from the context that he is referring to surrealism "not in the parochial 1920s sense of the term but in the second, open sense in which it can still be said to animate much of the most advanced art being done today" (see also McCabe 151). Although the most convincing analysis of surrealism as a twofold movement is made in the formally related terms of automatist-abstract and illusionistic-oneiric (see Krauss 91-94), Ashbery's distinction shows a greater personal involvement, not necessarily based on formal criteria. His categorization opposes the outdated and dogmatic received idea of surrealism with an empowering and liberating alternative conception. It is clear enough, though, that the former is related to Bretonian automatism, which he rejects: "The coupling of this acknowledged interest [in surrealism] with the alleged difficulty of his writing has led readers to view Ashbery mistakenly as an American Surrealist, practicing an automatic writing that [...] directly expresses his unconscious. Ashbery flatly denies the assertion that he composes by automatic writing" (Fredman 130). I would like to argue here that Ashbery's decade in France influenced him not only through his acquaintance with surrealist art and poetics, but also through his increasing knowledge of the possibilities of the French language and the linguistic experiments conducted by the Oulipo group. This will explain many obscure features of Ashbery's idiom, including the automatic aspect of his poetry and many apparently whimsical collocations. His French experience made him not an American Surrealist but a surrealist American, that is, not a writer whose main perception of the movement came from the 1940s interaction of the New York period of surrealism, but a poet and art critic who lived in Paris for a long part of his life and acquired insider's knowledge of the original movement as it was conceived. …

Cognitive Stylistics in the Classroom

Abstract: 1 Introduction Cognitive stylistics has recently emerged as a topic of much interest in university education in both literature and linguistics departments (1) Its popularity is primarily built on the success that literary stylistics has enjoyed over the past thirty years, especially in Europe, and on the relatively recent emergence of cognitive linguistics as a highly persuasive approach to the study of grammar and metaphor There has, however, been little interest in studying teaching methodology in the cognitive stylistics classroom This article will therefore seek to start to address this omission In the recent past there have been some excellent pedagogical articles written on the teaching of literary stylistics in the university classroom (see, for example, Short; Simpson; Verdonk) These articles have all sought to record the pedagogical state of literary stylistics at a particular moment in time This article will seek to add to the periodical recording of such moments In particular, it will attempt to present an overview, albeit limited, of some teaching practices in this current transitional period in stylistics, from primarily textual stylistic analysis to principally cognitive stylistic ones The very fact that stylistics finds itself at the confluence of text, context, and cognition arguably makes this an even more interesting moment to check on teaching practices and student requirements Essentially therefore, this article will seek to consider what students may need to know from the domain of mainstream literary stylistics in order to be able to fully and fruitfully access a cognitive approach to stylistic study Hence, the central question that will be posed here is whether or not a prior grounding in mainstream literary stylistics is desirable for undergraduate students who might wish to take a course in cognitive stylistics It might well be the case that students can take courses in cognitive stylistics without any prior knowledge of the workings of language and style in literature, without this having a marked effect on their capacity to learn in a cognitive environment This is what this article will hope to go some way towards discovering In short therefore, this response-based study will consider how cognitive stylistics is currently being taught in just one tertiary educational environment, namely, in the English department at the Free University, Amsterdam In doing so, it will aim to highlight some of the pedagogical shortcomings and suggest some possible solutions in order to assist undergraduate learning in the cognitive stylistic classroom 2 Methodology: Some Preliminaries As has been suggested, one of the major concerns in my own stylistics teaching at the dawn of the cognitive age of critical literary practice is to discover whether or not it is advisable to allow undergraduate students to take advanced courses in cognitive stylistics before they have taken a regular literary stylistics course In short, I am interested in finding out whether students require a more textual approach to stylistics before they move on into a more cognitive stylistic domain This then is the main question that the testing in this article will set out to determine, as none of the twelve students in my cognitive stylistics course had previously been involved in any kind of regular literary stylistics program Prior to setting up the test, I was inclined to make the tentative prognosis that students would indeed benefit from such a preparatory textual approach to stylistics As such, I predicted that the majority of the students might very well struggle to link those very cognitive concepts that they were in the process of learning back to linguistic form and function for the practicalities of stylistic analysis There are obvious pedagogical reasons for wishing to know whether or not it is beneficial to find out if undergraduate students might benefit from an essentially linguistic/textual approach to stylistics, before they are confronted with a far more abstract, and arguably far more abstruse, cognitive one …

Collocational Analysis as a Stylistic Discovery Procedure: The Case of Flannery O'Connor's Eyes

Abstract: 1. Introduction A stylistic analysis seeks to do at least one of the following: (1) advance linguistic and/or stylistic theory or methodology, (2) advance our understanding of the author(s) under discussion in a way that would not be possible without the methodology or theoretical apparatus of stylistics. By its very nature, computational literary stylistics makes possible an analysis that otherwise would be very difficult, if not practically impossible, to perform. That is, in at least one variety, computational stylistics uses the computational power and convenience of the personal computer to search, re-search, calculate, and re-calculate linguistic patterns of interest in literary works. Ideally, the analysis produces insight into the remarkably finely detailed formal level at which some literary meaning is produced. The computer is of primary value in its searching and calculating capacities. One could theoretically, but not practically, search texts by hand, or eye, for the same patterns; however, the computer can help us find without error in seconds what it might take humans without computers days, weeks, or frequently months to find in much error-prone and tedious work. The same generalizations apply to the thousands of repetitive calculations for statistics, such as collocational t-scores and mutual information scores, which are frequently indispensable in stylistic analysis today. This article illustrates computational stylistics through an examination of the use of the word eyes in the sacramentally rich fiction of Flannery O'Connor. Tools used in this study are the statistics program SPSS and my own internet-based text analysis program TEXTANT. The article also introduces the reader to the use of the first-generation Brown Corpus in computational stylistics. I have electronically scanned O'Connor's texts for this and other studies. The word eyes is an interesting test case for computational stylistics, first because the eye has been treated extensively, although nonstylistically, in the critical literature on O'Connor, and second because although eyes, as a token, is extraordinarily easy to search for with text-analysis programs, the grammatical contexts in which it appears and produces literary significance are much more resistant to computational discovery. The token eye is not considered in this article in order to keep the calculations and computation relatively simple. Once one has found all tokens of eyes and has tested the statistical significance of the frequencies, one can then use the computer as a concordancer to find all tokens in context for a detailed qualitative analysis. However, with a high-frequency word such as eyes, the analyst is still, at this stage, faced with a bewildering variety of uses. This article will illustrate the use of collocation analysis as a computational and statistical discovery procedure that helps narrow the search for interesting grammatical context. Inherent in a phrase such as "interesting grammatical context" is the inescapable qualitative core of most stylistic and literary analysis, even that which is aided by computers. Thus, the article will also include discussions of the grammatical context--voice--in which a significant number of collocations with eyes are involved. 2. Eyes in O'Connor versus Brown As Table 1 illustrates, the word eyes is more common in O'Connor's fiction (2.02 tokens per 1000 words) than it is in the Brown fiction subcorpora (1.24 tokens per 1000 words). This difference is statistically significant to the .01 level. There is quite a bit of information and more than a few assumptions contained in the form and figures of Table 1. Computational stylistics frequently relies on a comparative corpus in order to say anything meaningful, in a statistical sense, about the author(s) of concern. The Brown fiction subcorpora, used here for our comparative purposes, are collections of excerpts from written American English, all originally published in 1960-1961. …

"Little Is Left to Tell": Beckett's Theater of Mind, Ohio Impromptu, and the New Cognitive Turn in Analyzing Drama

Abstract: The focus of this article is a further investigation into the already existing intersection of research in cognitive science and literary studies. Special attention will be paid to the specificity of the dramatic text, seen as both verbal and performed. Drama, a term which has traditionally been applied rather loosely to describe texts written for the theater, is characterized by dialogue between at least two actors. It presupposes conflict and its resolution; hence it is often linked to high emotional friction. Stylistic studies of dramatic works, both as text and as performance, have been scarce. (1) Most exhaustively until now theater has been studied by semioticians, who have commented not just on the linguistic aspects of a dramatic work but paid attention to the nonverbal modes of expression in this genre. My aim in this article is to utilize insights from the emerging field of cognitive poetics for an analysis of drama that engages its verbal and nonverbal aspects as well as the complex interaction between actors and audience in the act of performance. 1. The Specifics of Drama It has been noted by theorists that although theater has been intensely studied since the Greeks, no consensus has ever been reached as to what constitutes its theoretical and critical description. (2) I follow Marvin Carlson in taking "theory" in theatrical studies to mean "the general principles regarding the methods, aims, functions and characteristics of this particular art form" (Theories 9). Another important issue to be addressed is the distinction between "drama," understood as the written text of plays, and "theater," which describes the performance or staging of these written texts. The former is then a mode of fiction, written specifically to be staged and, hence, subject to specific conventions. The latter involves the totality of the performance itself and includes consideration of actors, staging, lighting, and spectators. Traditional stylistic analyses of dramatic works have understandably examined the written texts of particular authors (Culpeper, et al.) or discussed the very specificity of dramatic discourse; that is, the particular dramatic conventions of the genre (Herman; Short). A certain priority of the written text over its physical enactment has thus been assumed, if not often explicitly mentioned, by critics and stylisticians alike. The obvious fact that the written play always precedes its performance chronologically and, hence, ontologically, should not detract from the importance of its very realization in the contextualized space of the stage. Semioticians of theater have argued that this very contextualization of a dramatic work, understood as "the physical conditions of performance" including "the actor's body and its ability to materialize discourse" (Elam 209) is the defining factor for any piece of drama. Studied from these two perspectives (namely, the literary/stylistic and the semiotic), critical work on drama does not constitute a unified field, despite Keir Elam's provocative and, in retrospect, somewhat over-optimistic challenge to bring about such unification. (3) My aim in this article is to substantiate the claim that the emerging field of cognitive poetics, with its emphasis on experientiality and embodiment in meaning construction, is particularly well-suited to articulate the interpretive strategies necessary to make such a unified sense of theater, the most experientially real of the arts. Theater semiotics owes its origins to the structural linguistics of the beginning of the twentieth century, in particular to the Prague Linguistic Circle. The study of signifying systems at that time included investigations of ordinary and poetic language, art, cinema, and, of course, theater (Matejka and Titunik; Elam 5-27). Due to space limitations, there is little to say here about the disadvantages of a conception of language as a disembodied system of signs. …

The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion

Abstract: Patrick Colm Hogan. The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xii + 302 pp. $65.00 cloth. The sciences and humanities characteristically follow alternate research models, qualitative and quantitative, to achieve their scientific and aesthetic purposes, but Patrick Hogan, examining the intersection of language, literature, and emotion, integrates these models, challenging the limitations of using either exclusively. In passing, Hogan suggests parallel issues for further interdisciplinary consideration, related to literature, cognition, and emotional response. Hogan's book is a careful delineation of category, terminology, and implication, supported by a wide range of examples from literary studies and scientific research. His hypotheses and conclusions, and the structure of his text, address science's interest in objectivity, and his inclusion of literary samples accommodates the humanities' interest in subjective response. The text's strands or layers provides a systematic approach, connecting these alternate perspectives to history and theory, with conclusions succinctly presented at the end of each chapter. Hogan actively encourages further interdisciplinary research, interspersing potential topics and noting gaps in the works he cites and in his own study. Empirical researchers in the social sciences, studying emotional concepts, tend to "conduct anthropological interviews, send out surveys, analyze linguistic idioms, test stimulus response times, and so on," or they may pursue medical and biological approaches that further ignore data directly related to "feelings and ideas about feelings" (1). Hogan observes that the ignored data, especially literary narrative, effectively represents emotion as a significant social and cultural phenomenon. He argues that "literary response is as close as we can usually get to a wide range of genuine and spontaneous human emotions that are often concealed in private interactions." Hogan further notes that literature has played such a limited role in cognitive study because "science seeks generalities while literature seems to be tied to narrow particularity" (2). With both camps resistant to the idea that there may be universal patterns in literature, Hogan attempts to unify these interests around the premise that literature is perhaps the most significantly "human" activity existing, one that typically expresses the memories and goals of every culture. He extends this premise to include his belief that the psychological and cultural connections inherent in literature make itts study an essential subfield of cognitive science. Considering the alternate research strategies and world views of his intended audience, Hogan approaches the commonalities of researchers in cognitive and literary studies through their shared emotional response to stories. Judiciously negotiating two preferred research languages, he creates a readable, if challenging text. Supplying an impressive range of literary samples, and making the samples the domain of readers from both fields, Hogan convincingly justifies his use of the term "universals." A good conversationalist, he briefly refers readers to supporting studies, addressing differing interests without further complicating his primary, integrative purpose. Hogan emphasizes cognitive and emotional response to literature as scientifically and aesthetically significant, arguing that "human thought, action, and feeling are not simply a matter of rational inference. They are also a matter of emplotment in a narrow, specifiable sense" (5). Hogan observes that we write and tell stories routinely and maintains that these stories, especially those that have retained recognition across cultures or generations, say important things about the mind to cognitive science. Introducing a hierarchy of terms and categories, Hogan presents literature as cultural discourse and offers what he terms literary universals, "properties and relations found across a range of literary traditions" but not necessarily present in every work (17). …

Expression in a Diffuse Landscape: Contexts for Jeanette Winterson's Lyricism

Abstract: Standards and Style Jeanette Winterson writes against the overused expression, the dull image, the cliche. While something of a postmodernist (continually presenting alternative realities, fragmented or genderless bodies, and textual pastiches), at the same time she resists participating in what the postmodern era calls the "literature of exhaustion"; her writing exposes the richness of both language and experience. In defying formulae, seeking precise and unique expression, Winterson's language follows a plot of its own, only somewhat tenuously related to the proairetic narrative of events. She produces endlessly quotable passages of figuration, dazzling wordplay, poetic rhythm, and double entendres: "The cities of the interior are vast and do not lie on any map" (Passion 150); "This is the one place where everybody comes" (PowerBook 205); "He cried out of the heart of him, cried up all the lost days and mortal indecisions that he had thought were gone but were still stored in the skin and bone of him, a tank of pain, tapped" (Art & lies 177); "Love cleaves through the mind's mathematics" (PowerBook 218). We might ask where to find this vast city of the interior in which an author can defy mathematics and wax lyrical about love-in an antilyrical age, where can poetic prose take root and grow? Winterson presents herself as a writer struggling to enrich the language. In 1992, during an interview about Written on the Body, she said, "Few writers achieve their own form and open up new landscapes [...]! want to encourage language in all its complexity; that's what really excites me. Too often it is just sloppy and dirty" (Thomson).1 Appropriately enough, then, when Winterson was asked to name her favorite writer working in English, she chose herself, because "No one working in the English language now comes close to my exuberance, my passion, my fidelity to words" (Pritchard 14). And when a London newspaper invited her to name their book of the year in 1992, she picked Written on the Body. However tongue-in-cheek her comments might be, she constructs herself as a zenith of stylistic achievement.2 Her achievement is a portrayal of fantastic possibility more than everyday (read: banal) reality regarding plot, setting, and mode of expression. In Written on the Body-artistically perhaps her most successful novel to date, and therefore the primary focus of this essay-the genderless narrator's love for Louise, the dazzling redhead, inspires such passages as this one, in which the lovers climb the stairs to Louise's bedroom: "It seemed that the house would not end, that the stairs in their twisting shape took us higher and out of the house altogether into an attic in a tower where birds beat against the windows and the sky was an offering" (51). The wonder here echoes some of what we find in The Passion, as when the gambler-boatwoman Villanelle describes her birth: "I was as impatient then as I am now and I forced my head out while the midwife was downstairs heating some milk. A fine head with a crop of red hair and a pair of eyes that made up for the sun's eclipse" (51 ). Both of these quotations contain elements of the fantastic: a stairway into the sky, a child with enough will and self-knowledge to orchestrate her own birth.3 Readerly belief in the fantastic image, in the artistic conceit, is possible because of the spell Winterson weaves with words: extensive use of figuration, measured rhythm, and judicious alliteration, as well as some more casual momentary slips such as omitted commas. In a review of Art & lies, William Pritchard notes that "there is, at any rate, a lot of 'poetry' in her prose" (14), thus intimating that her works belong to a genre more traditionally associated with figurative language and wordplay than novelistic narrative is. These techniques are most commonly associated with poetry, with the highly "literary," "fancy," and often "difficult" mode currently dubbed the lyrical. Some critics might say that Winterson represents a throwback to nineteenth-century discourse. …

Stylistics in France Today

Abstract: The study of stylistics in France is as varied and controversial as in many other countries. Stylisticians are tempted to subdivide it into discourse stylistics, poetics, theoretical stylistics, or even linguistic stylistics (stylistics based on linguistic theories). The same can be said about literary studies, which can easily be divided into even more subcategories than stylistics. Literary theorists know where their object lies (i.e., in literature, be it fiction, poetry, or theater). However, the corpora used in stylistics, as practiced in France, are not restricted to "literature" as expressed through novels, plays, or poems. The corpora include any piece of writing on any subject, from political speeches to the language of advertising (i.e., "literature" in the very broad sense of the word, as in the phrase "sales literature"). Foreign-language departments in France have been trying progressively to develop the study of "specialized varieties" of English (or other languages). These varieties include, for example, the study of medical, legal, commercial, or financial discourse. These fields of research have to be included in any society whose aim is to study the production of discourse in the English language. The Societe de Stylistique Anglaise, which I represent, encourages any attempt at providing a stylistic study of medical, financial, or legal varieties of English, even though the majority of the articles that we publish in our journal, the Bulletin de la Societe de Stylistique Anglaise, are devoted to literature. However, stylistics has to be more than just the study of the production of discourse in any field. What is at stake here is the theoretical background we rely on. This is where linguistics, or more generally the philosophy of language, comes in. Stylistics is sometimes regarded as a form of "applied linguistics"--that is, the application of linguistic theories, methods, and findings to the production of texts, be they literary or not. The most influential school of linguistics in France since the 1960s has involved a theory called Enonciation, which, unlike so many French theories (especially in the field of literary studies) has not found its way beyond the borders of its native land. Enonciation was heavily influenced by Emile Benveniste, the highly acclaimed French linguist, who was especially active in the 1950s and 1960s. This movement questioned the Chomskyan approach, especially the rejection of subjectivity from linguistic analysis. Enonciation is precisely about the rehabilitation of all forms of subjectivity in language, including grammar. Thus, some grammatical markers were deemed to be more subjective than others. For instance, the "auxiliary avoir + past participle" construction in French (e.g., il a fait) was considered as pertaining to the subjective plane of discourse, in which every utterance assumes a speaker and a hearer and, "in the speaker, the intention of influencing the other in some way." By contrast, the simple past (e.g., il fit) in a narrative is "the tense of the event outside the person of a narrator" (Benveniste 208). French grammarians specializing in the English language extended this notion of subjectivity to aspectual forms in English. A lot of research has been done on the relationship between the speaker (or the enonciateur) and his or her utterances. Proponents of Enonciation set great store by the speaker's viewpoint with respect to what he or she is saying and by intersubjective relations (as with pragmatics but unlike generative grammar). That is why many articles have been written about the effects produced by such-and-such a grammatical marker. The proponents of Enonciation also rely heavily on notions that Chomskyan linguistics had somewhat neglected; that is, the situation of utterance, best symbolized by the three shifters: I, here, and now. An utterance cannot be analyzed outside a specific situation of utterance, and concepts like connection/ disconnection with the situation of utterance are central to the theoretical framework of Enonciation. …

MonoConc Pro 2.0 and the Corpus of Spoken Professional American English: Resources from Athelstan

Abstract: MonoConc Pro Version 2.0, a new addition to the existing quantitative text analysis software programs such as TACT, TEXTANT, and Wordsmith Tools, is a concordance software program for Windows 3.1, 95 or higher, which became available on March 1, 2000. This new version of the MonoConc program followed the release of version 1.0 in 1996 and version 1.5 in 1998. The program was developed by Michael Barlow (barlow@ruf.rice.edu) and published by Athelstan (www.athel.com). As of October 2004, the price quote for educational use is $85 for a single-user license and $550 for a two-year, fifteen-computer site license. A demo version is available online through Athelstan (which can be contacted at info@athel.com) at http://www.athel.com/README.html. Some of the new features in version 2.0 of the software include the ability to conduct advanced text, full regular expression, and tag searches. With these advanced search features, MonoConc 2.0 could be quite useful in the field of language studies because of its ease of use and stability. As Barlow claims, "this professional concordance program is widely used in commercial and educational settings." According to John Lawler, the new version is "a last, cheap, and reliable program, and its utility is not restricted to specialists in corpora by any means." The program has an intuitive interface, operating as a simpler program than any other concordancing software programs, "yet it offers a variety of options that make it capable of complex and extensive text searches" (Barlow). Its ability to extract tokens from both tagged and untagged texts makes the program especially appealing in corpus text analysis and language-learning settings. While the program provides most of the functions and features that scholars and students might desire, it has its own strengths and weaknesses. This review describes the main features and basic search operations of the program, and offers suggestions, based on the comments of other reviewers, as to where and how the new concordance version can be used successfully in more advanced text searches. Although this review aims to give the reader some insight into the types of analysis which the MonoConc Pro 2.0 concordance program is capable of performing and also how a particular corpus, such as the Corpus of Spoken Professional American English (CSPAE), can be manipulated by users interested in language structure and lexis, it is not intended to be a thorough analysis of all possible uses of MonoConc Pro 2.0 and the CSPAE. To start using MonoConc Pro 2.0, the user needs to double-click on the file MonoPro. One of the most visible features of the software program is its "intuitive" interface, which makes the program very easy to use because of its simplicity. Upon opening the program, the user first notices a simple blank screen with only file and into menu items displayed on the top bar of the window. The into menu provides the user with contact information and assistance with topics regarding MonoConc Pro. The help menu offers a table of contents, an index, and a "find help" search feature which allows users to search on any topic, such as corpus, workspace, frequency, searching, sorting, or tags. All of these help features will allow users at any level to navigate the program and easily, teach themselves to utilize it to its fullest potential. The file menu allows utilization of several commands, including load corpus file, load corpus URL (new in 2.0 version), open and save workspace, and tag settings. In terms of the types of corpora that MonoConc Pro 2.0 can read, any alphabetic language can be used. A corpus itself can be of unlimited size and modified at any time. Once a corpus is loaded (using the file menu), the program offers a variety of options to perform large and complex text searches. Several additional options are displayed as new menu items on the menu bar and include corpus text, concordance, frequency, and window. …

Coda: The Next Generation

Abstract: As already indicated in the introduction to these special issues, limitations of space have prevented us from including articles by the youngest generation of German narratologists, that is, people who have recently finished their doctoral dissertations or at most their Habilitationsschrift (tenure book). We have also indicated that some of these writings are of excellent quality. The least one could do then by way of conclusion is to provide a survey of several major contributions by members of this new generation, written in the last five years or so. Some of the hallmarks of this work, like of that of the 1990s as a whole, are multidisciplinarity of theoretical frameworks, openness towards research in other languages, especially English, and concentration on contemporary, especially experimental literature. Narratology is thus conceived as consisting of at least three distinct paradigms: the classical structuralist or formal, the possible-worlds or semantic, and the functional-pragmatic, leading in its turn to issues of cognitive text processing, impact, and effect, and social contexts of reception. Another frequent feature of recent work, especially among Anglisten, is the desire to integrate formal studies with current, more theme- or context-oriented ones, such as feminism, postcolonialism, historical constructionism or cultural studies. Forms of expression are thus related to forms of content (themes, master plots), first because formal description by itself is felt to be incomplete until and unless functionalized, and second because of the firm conviction that narrative meaning-construction (Sinnkonstitution), whether textual or readerly, is crucially influenced by formal textual features and structures (focalization, multiperspectivism, etc). Analogously, major historical shifts in the selection or dominance of particular narrative procedures are correlated with, and considered indicative of, changes in worldview, cultural categories, and so on. While none of the foregoing assumptions is absolutely new as far as aesthetics of general literary theory are concerned, their consistent use as overriding methodological guidelines does mark an important new phase within narratological research. Once again, there is more available good work than space for its adequate coverage. I have therefore chosen only those studies which satisfy the following three criteria: clear theoretical emphasis, focus on a major issue of narratology, and innovative methods or results. The first work to be discussed is Andrea Gutenberg's study (2000), whose title in English translation is "Possible Worlds: Plot and Meaning Construction in the English Feminist Novel." This study seeks to define the thematic concerns of fourteen novels by and about women published in Britain between 1960 and 1994, employing the conceptual machinery of structuralist plot theory as well as of possible-worlds semantics. This machinery is reviewed in part 1, followed in part 2 by a typology of sixteen general plot patterns defined according to five aspects discussed in the first part. The third part describes in detail the individual plots of the novels in relation to the previously defined general plot patterns. Basic to this procedure are several assumptions. First, while each novel has only one plot in the sense of a specific sequence of events, actions, and character constellations, several general of abstract plot patterns (as well as narrative themes and concerns) can be embodied in it (413). Second, abstract plot patterns are schemas, which exist only in individual embodiments and may admit of variants. Third, and most important, it is neither in abstract argumentative passages nor in details of the individual plot that a narrative's thematic concerns are to be found, but rather at the level of plot pattern. Fourth, plot patterns in their turn are defined according to both representational and formal factors. And finally, since plot patterns admit of variants, the preferred of dominant variant in each period is indicative of wider cultural preferences of trends. …

Bibliography of German Narratology

Abstract: [Editors' Note] The following bibliography of German narratological work is a selection from a much wider field. The selection criteria have been to include key studies in the field which are frequently referred to in German narratological criticism and are now classics of the field, irrespective of whether they are composed in German or English. In particular, the bibliography is designed to introduce non-German speakers to major narratologists whose work has been widely influential in German-speaking academia. Secondly, we include work published in English by key German narratologists, including work published in international journals with which the reader may already be familiar. Third, we have included major contributions to narratology that appeared in English in Festschriften, proceedings, and other European collections of essays of which the American reader may not easily have been aware. In this bibliography we also include the work of scholars of non-German origin who are teaching at German, Austrian, or Swiss universities and have therefore published in these kinds of volumes, treating them as "honorary Germans." The bibliography officially starts in 1975, but we have included especially important publications (classics) published before this date. In some cases, English transliterations have been given for all or part of a German title. Abraham, Werner, and Kurt Braunmuller. "Towards a Theory of Style and Metaphor." Poetics 2 (1973): 103-48. Adams, Jon K. "Causality and Narrative." Journal of Literary Semantics 18 (1989): 149-62. --. "Intention and Narrative." Journal of Literary Semantics 20 (1991): 63-77. --. Narrative Explanation: A Pragmatic Theory of Discourse. Frankfurt: Lang, 1996. --. "Order and Narrative." Pier, Recent 111-27. Alber, Jan. "The 'Moreness' or 'Lessness' of 'Natural' Narratology: Samuel Beckett's 'Lessness' Reconsidered." Style 36 (2002): 54-75. Anderegg, Johannes. Fiktion und Kommunikation. Ein Beitrag zur Theorie der Prosa [Fiction(ality) and Communication: A Contribution to the Theory of Prose]. 1973. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1977. Bierwisch, Manfred. "Poetik und Linguistik." Mathematik und Dichtung: Versuche zur Frage einer exakten Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Helmut Kreuzer and Rul Gunzenhauser. Munich: Nymphenburger Verlags-Handlung, 1965. 49-65. Bonheim, Helmut. "Narration in the Second Person." Recherches Anglaises et Americaines 16 (1983): 69-80. --. The Narrative Modes: Techniques of the Short Story. Cambridge: Brewer, 1982. --. "Point of View Models." Bonheim, ed. 285-307. --. "Theory of Narrative Modes." Semiotica 14 (1975): 329-44. --, ed. Literary Systematics. Cambridge: Brewer, 1990. Botheroyd, Paul Francis. Ich und Er." First and Third Person Self-Reference and Problems of Identity in Three Contemporary German-Language Novels. The Hague: Mouton, 1976. Breuer, Horst. "Typenkreise und Kreuztabellen: Modelle erzahlerischer Vermittlung" [Typological Circles and Cross Tables: Models of Narratorial Mediation]. Poetica 30 (1998): 234-49. Broich, Ulrich. "Gibt es eine 'neutrale Erzahlsituation'?" [Is There a "Neutral" Narrative Situation?]. Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 33 (1983): 129-45. Casparis, Christian Paul. Tense without Time: The Present Tense in Narration. Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten, 84. Berne: Francke, 1975. Collier, Gordon. "Apparent Feature-Anomalies in Subjectivized Third-Person Narration." Pier, Recent 129-51. --. The Rocks and Sticks of Words: Style, Discourse and Narrative Structure in the Fiction of Patrick White. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992. Dannenberg, Hilary P. "The Coincidence Plot in Narrative Fiction." Anglistentag 2002 Bayreuth: Proceedings. Ed. Ewald Mengel, Hans-Jorg Schmid, and Michael Steppat. Trier: WVT, 2003. 509-20. --. …