Showing papers in "Style in 2006"

On the Conceptual-Procedural Distinction

Abstract: 1. Introduction The distinction between two types of semantic meaning--that which encodes representational (or conceptual) information and that which encodes a specification of how to "take" or "manipulate" a structure--is not a new topic in linguistics. Recently, however, the topic has been reintroduced within the relevance-theory framework, where the distinction is couched as "conceptual meaning" versus "procedural meaning." Apparently, the first to suggest this distinction was Diane Blakemore, who in 1987, when discussing her analysis of discourse connectives such as but, after all, and so, wrote: On the one hand, there is the essentially conceptual theory that deals with the way in which elements of linguistic structure map onto concepts--that is, onto constituents of propositional representations that undergo computations. On the other hand, there is the essentially procedural theory that deals with the way in which elements of linguistic structure map directly onto computations themselves--that is, onto mental processes. (Semantic 144) Later, in 1992, she elaborated: [W]e have also seen that there are expressions whose meanings cannot be analyzed in representational [conceptual] terms at all. But, after all, moreover, and inferential so do not contribute to a propositional representation, but simply encode instructions for processing propositional representation.... [Linguistic meaning] may be either representational or procedural [bur not both]. (Understanding 150) (1) In "The movie was over so we didn't bother going to the theater," for example, the presence of so signals that the discourse segment following the so should be processed as an effect or a conclusion following from the preceding segment and has no conceptual meaning at all. This line of argument has been pursued by Blakemore (Relevance) and many other adherents of relevance theory. Since the introduction of this schism in meaning, what falls under procedural meaning has been significantly broadened beyond the narrow confines of discourse markers (discourse connectives). The distinction has been endorsed and discussed in relevance-theory literature in numerous papers, some researchers arguing for procedural status for one class of linguistic expressions (e.g., discourse markers, illocutionary markers, pronouns, tense, syntactic structures, and intonation contours), some arguing for conceptual status for another class (e.g., illocutionary adverbial, and parentheticals). In this article I will challenge the claim put forth by relevance theory, namely, that a linguistic form--a morpheme, a lexical item, a syntactic structure, or a stress or intonation contour--must be analyzed as having either conceptual meaning or procedural meaning but not both. To do this, I will first show that discourse markers/discourse connectives, some illocutionary markers, and pronouns that have been analyzed by relevance theorists as encoding only procedural meaning should be analyzed as having a conceptual component of meaning. I will then show that illocutionary adverbials, which have been analyzed by relevance theorists as encoding only conceptual meaning, should be analyzed as having procedural meaning as well. 2. So-called Procedural Meaning Only A. Discourse Markers/Discourse Connectives Discourse markers (DMs) are expressions such as but, and, however, so, and in addition which typically signal a relationship between the second segment of a sequence of messages and the preceding segment (see Fraser, "What Are Discourse Markers?"). Consider the sequence in example 1: (1) A: The water won't boil. B: Thus, we can't have tea. Here, thus signals that the second segment functions as a conclusion inferred from the message conveyed by the first segment. In discussing DMs, proponents of procedural analysis have gone to considerable lengths to attempt to demonstrate that these expressions do not have conceptual meaning. …

Kanji: The Visual Metaphor

Abstract: 1. Introduction American Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908) argues in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (as edited by Ezra Pound): the Chinese written language has not only absorbed the poetic substance of nature and built with it a second work of metaphor, but has, through its very pictorial visibility, been able to retain its original creative poetry with far more vigor and vividness than any phonetic tongue. (24) The present study tries to reevaluate this sharp insight of Fenollosa into the nature of Chinese logographs as a medium for poetry and to place it in the new context of cognitive poetics. Because of their iconic and metaphoric nature, an examination of Kanji logographs provides a deeper understanding of the cognitive role of written language in poetic texts. The formation of the shape and the meaning of Kanji is seen to be governed by iconic and metaphoric processing. Poetic language therefore exploits these iconic and metaphoric implications of Kanji to enrich the complexity and multiplicity of meaning in the text. By using the model of blending (see, among others, Turner; Turner and Fauconnier; Fauconnier and Turner, "Principles," Way), the study first argues that the meaning generation of Kanji is manifested as a conceptual integration through creative blends of the constituents. The blending process is analyzed in terms of iconicity, metaphor, and metonymy. The study further examines orthographical revisions of haiku texts as an evidence to demonstrate the cognitive role of written language in relation to Fenollosa's thesis. 2. The Japanese Writing System First, I would like to give a very brief explanation about the Japanese writing system, in which Kanji play a major role. In contrast to the Chinese writing system in which only Chinese logographic characters are used, the Japanese writing system combines both logographic (Kanji) and phonographic (hiragana and katakana) systems. Each character type has its own grammatical characteristics as shown in table 1: Table 1. Characteristics of Character Types Character Types Characteristics Kanji (Chinese logographic For words of Chinese origin and for characters the roots of such content words as nouns, verbs, and adjectives of Japanese origin Hiragana (syllabary) For words of Japanese origin for which there are no Kanji, conjugated endings, conjunctions, particles, auxiliary verbs, and so on. Katakana (syllabary) For words of foreign origin other than Chinese and for onomatopoeia. Examples: Kanji [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] [ku] ('of long duration') Hiragana [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] [ku] Katakana [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] [ku] Kanji, or Chinese logographic characters, are used mainly for words of Chinese origin and for the roots of such content words as nouns, verbs, and adjectives of Japanese origin. Most Kanji characters are built up from a limited number of basic constituents, called "radicals." Hiragana, or the moraic alphabet, are used mainly for words of Japanese origin, conjugated endings, conjunctions, particles, and auxiliary verbs. Katakana, another moraic alphabet, are mainly used for words of foreign origin other than Chinese and for onomatopoeia. All three modes of representation--Kanji, hiragana, and katakana--are ordinarily combined and used to write a sentence. Due to this mixed nature of notation, writing in Japanese involves a constant decision-making as to which character type from the three modes of Kanji, hiragana, and katakana as well as which Kanji from an inventory of synonymous Kanji one should choose in order to convey subtle shades of meaning on the visual level. …

Used to and Habitual Aspect in English

Abstract: Habituality has been much discussed in connection with the semantics of genericity and of quantification. As pointed out by Sali Tagliamonte and Helen Lawrence and by Bengt Altenberg, however, there has been little investigation of such supposed markers of habitual aspect in English as used to (1) and would (2): (1) Susan used to swim every day. (2) Susan would swim every day. In this essay I argue that used to is not, in fact, a marker of past habituality. Following Bernard Comrie's pioneering work in 1976, the habitual has generally been viewed as a species of imperfective aspect, alongside continuous aspect, represented in English by the progressive tenses. It is certainly true that used to and would translate the imperfective aspect of, say, French (3, 4), when the progressive is inappropriate, as does the simple past tense (5): (3) Quand j'etais petit, nous allions a la plage chaque semaine. 'When I was young, we used to go to the beach every week.' (4) When I was young, we would go to the beach every week. (5) When I was young, we went to the beach every week. The progressive is used when a situation is viewed with regard to its internal temporal constituency and without regard to any temporal bounds, either initial or terminal.' Hence it represents an event or process in its course, with no implication as to its completion. The habitual is similar, with the difference that instead of a single event, it concerns a series of recurring events (as in 2), or of bounded states (6). (2) Susan would swim every day. (6) I used to be awake all night thinking, "Oh God, Where am I going to go? What's going to become of me?" Under this conception of the habitual, there is clearly something wrong with characterizing used to as a marker of habituality, since, as Comrie observed (28) and unlike would, used to can be used with stative expressions referring to a single, extended state, as in example 7. Example 8 is an acceptable sentence, to be sure, but it refers to a series of bounded states and does not refer, as 7 does, to a single, continuous state. Veerle Van Geenhoven (sec. 3.2), comments that since 7 does not refer to a habit, it is "misleading or wrong to think of the periphrastic form used to as an habitual aspect marker." (I argue here that it is wrong.) (7) The temple of Diana used to stand at Ephesus. (8) The temple of Diana would stand at Ephesus (from time to time). There is something odd about 8. A sentence like this normally concerns a series of events or bounded states (episodes) involving its subject. Thus 9 reports a series of occasions on which Max stood on the corner: (9) Max would stand on the corner (from time to time). Where the individual members of the series are states, the verb or adjective is typically a stage-level predicate (Carlson), denoting a relatively temporary, changeable property. A relatively permanent, stable individual-level predicate is unusual: (10) ?Max would be tall (from time to time). What renders 8 odd is that mobility is not normally a property of temples; the most normal interpretation of 8 is therefore not that the same temple returned to Ephesus several times but that different temples stood there on various occasions. Admittedly, 8 is not a very normal sentence, even with this interpretation. But 7 is perfectly normal. Somehow, the semantics of used to differs from that of habitual would. Originally used to was, like habitual would, just the past tense of a verb (use), which was not restricted to the past tense, and could be used also in at least the present (11) and future (12) tenses, and also as an infinitive (13) (Tagliamonte and Lawrence, citing Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 155-56).2 (11) I vse not to kisse men. …

Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart, Eds. Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media

Abstract: Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart, eds. Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media. Studies in Intermediality 1. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. vii+482 pp. $135.00 hardback. Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media collects sixteen studies originally presented at a 2004 conference titled "Framing in Literature and Other Media" and held at the University of Graz in Austria. It is supplemented by an introduction by Werner Wolf and two related essays not presented at that conference. The collection inaugurates a series of publications-Studies in Intermediality-to be produced under the auspices of the Intermediality Program of the Humanities Faculty at the Karl-Franzens-Universitat Graz/Austria. As Wolf explains in his introduction, "The present volume is dedicated to the application of frame analysis to a field in which it has not found much attention to date, namely literature and other media . . ." (1). This goal is effectively divisible into two related theoretical projects: first, that of adapting cognitive studies in the social sciences to analyses of artworks; second, that of extending narrative theory to nonliterary and even nonnarrative media. Both projects have long been of interest to American narratologists and critics, but despite frequent outbursts of enthusiasm and numerous notes-toward articles, neither has thus far borne much fruit in English-language publications. Perhaps because of the abuses perpetrated by poststructuralism in the name of such interdisciplinarity (which Jonathan Culler has characterized as "a kind of nonquantitative sociology" [49] enabling the production of "an unbounded group of writings about everything under the sun" [3]), theorists have become more cautious lately in pursuing such models, and the jury seems to be out as to whether such work is on the cutting edge or on the fringe of contemporary critical theory. Framing Borders is refreshingly unconcerned with such navel-gazing, preferring to situate cognitive poetics within the critical mainstream rather than to evangelize it as a new master paradigm. While seven of the essays cite Jacques Derrida's The Truth in Painting, the collection is securely structuralist rather than post-structuralist, with Erving Goffman's Frame Analysis providing the conceptual foundation for the cognitivist project and Gerard Genette's Seuils for the narratological project. The focus on Goffman's sociological model that is announced in Wolf's introduction might initially discourage American readers interested in cognitive narratology, for whom Goffman's work is old hat, and citations of more recent cognitivist work tend to be more enumerative than analytical. But in fact only four of the essays in this volume mention Goffman at all, and none offer detailed responses to his work. The theoretical premises summarized by Wolf more or less boil down to common sense: "all of the different approaches to 'frames' converge in one frame function, namely to guide and even enable interpretation . . ." (3). If a reliance on recent research in psychology and biology is, as David Herman suggests, the marker of "postclassical narratology" (1), then Framing Borders would have to be called classical narratology. One finds little trace of the theoretical emphasis on cognitive psychology and evolutionary theory that provides the intellectual framework for recent English-language work in the field. The strength of the collection resides primarily in the second project, the extension of narrative theory-usually grounded in Genette's work on paratextuality (Seuils) and narrative embedding (Figures III)-to nonnarrative texts, and several of the essays make valuable contributions in that regard. The collection parallels (though seldom cites) Genette's own movement in his most recent work (L'oeuvre de l'art, Figures IV) beyond literary theory to aesthetics. I suspect, however, that most American theorists are much less familiar with German narrative theory than with French work in the field, and the perspectives are sufficiently different to cast new light on several issues. …

Can Fiction Become Fact? the Fiction-to-Fact Transition in Recent Theories of Fiction

Abstract: Most recent theories of fiction adopt pragmatic-contextual approaches that incorporate "fiction" as a historically variable category Accordingly, the semantic composition or stylistic properties of a given text are less essential in determining fictionality than the readers' generic expectations: texts can be given different determinants in time and in regard to different frames of reference This also means that there are no isolated features in texts such as single "fictional" sentences that could dictate whether some text is fiction What is important in defining some text as fiction is the information we gather of the text' s genre, the criteria that dictate the way we first classify and then read some text as fiction These criteria, in other words, enable us to relate new texts to other texts that we have already categorized in a certain way This is also why Tolstoy's War and Peace (1865-69) or William Carlos Williams's alternative history of the United States, In the American Grain (1925), are regarded as fiction although they document historical and social facts, or why Jules Michelet's Histoire de la France (1833-67) is history despite the invented elements that recur in it Crucial in determining the text's status vis-a-vis fact and fiction are the conception of the narrator's or the speaker's intention and the audience's generic expectations (1) The pragmatic-contextual argument also entails the possibility of historical changes between the categories of fact and fiction It is common to argue that certain historiographies or skillfully written memoirs, for instance, can attain a fictional status over a period of time Thus, History (440-430 BCE), by Herodotus, or War (431-411 BCE), by Thucydides, not only can be read as fictions today but perhaps are now first and foremost fictional Further, it is also perhaps commonplace to state that this process can be reversed, that fictional texts may cease to be fictional Ruth Ronen, for instance, argues in Possible Worlds in Literary Theory that not only can texts originally written as history or as philosophy be fictionalized (that is, converted into fiction) but that "at a later point in cultural history" the text's "fictionality and actuality can be relativized to a cultural perspective (legends about Greek gods were presumably treated as versions of reality by people in ancient Greece)" (76) In a similar vein, Marie-Laure Ryan, in her Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, emphasizes that the author and the reader may assess differently the relation between the actual world and the fictional world A text meant as nonfiction therefore may be received as fiction, or vice versa What looks like a surrealist poem could be an entry in the diary of a schizophrenic patient, or "what looks like the genuine love letters of a Portuguese nun could be the invention of a seventeenth-century French author" (46) Here Ryan must be thinking of Lettres portugaises traduites en franfais (1669) by Gabriel de Lavergne de Guilleragues, also commonly attributed to a nun called Marianna Alcoforado, supposedly translated from Portuguese (2) It is interesting that at a later point in her book, Ryan must restate her argument about the possible historical change of generic expectations owing to the lack of examples concerning fiction becoming factual Obviously, if anything could be read as fiction, or fiction as fact, the very distinction between the two would also lose its meaning Any individual, writer or reader, may of course choose to actualize fiction, or to assess the relationship between the actual world and the textual world as he or she likes, but Ryan is careful, in general terms, not to claim that fiction could become real (fact) She points out: "It is hard, however, to find convincing examples of the second possibility: I can only come up with the case of Don Quixote and Emma Bovary, who significantly happen to be themselves characters in fictions" (Possible 76) …

Reading the beatles: Cultural studies, literary criticism, and the fab four

Abstract: Kenneth Womack and Todd F Davis, eds Reading the Beatles: Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, and the Fab Four Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006 x + 249 pp $7450 cloth; $2495 paper This volume brings together an impressive collection of scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds in what sets out to be an evaluation and exploration of the work undertaken by four musicians (perhaps five, since George Martin's role is from time to time acknowledged) mostly over a brief eight-year period some forty years ago It seems written for a North American audience ("Their Englishness no doubt played a central role in their initial charm" [2]) and, as with so much contemporary criticism, from a questionably authoritative position As an exploration it is certainly successful; as an evaluation ("an aesthetic unity" [3]) less so While it contains moments of brilliance, it utilizes a wide range of contemporary methodological positions and, in doing so, exhibits what I believe to be certain methodological flaws I aim in what follows both to celebrate and to critique some of these moments Three of these essays are directly musicological and, to my surprise, I find them all effective John Covach's "From 'Craft' to 'Art': Formal Structure in the Music of the Beatles" is the most straightforward Covach makes the unproblematic assumption that the Beatles' songwriting techniques developed from what he calls a "craft" approach towards an "art" approach, until their last two years, when they balanced the two He finds the distinction embodied in their approach to formal models: whereas the craft approach utilizes standardized models, the art approach adapts these and in so doing generates novel formal approaches, although the concepts of identifiable and repeatable sections (verse, chorus, etc) remain applicable This helps explain, on a structural level, why it is that the Beatles' "experimental" music appears to attract such a label In "Painting Their Room in a Colorful Way: The Beatles' Exploration of Timbre," Walter Everett also takes a historical view, discussing such features as instrumentation (and how instruments are used), voice colorings, and electronic manipulation of sounds He argues that with Revolver and Sgt Pepper, the Beatles' timbral developments, although always innovative, become truly remarkable The essay is particularly impressive in its wealth of detail and its positively virtuosic concern with minutiae (exactly which guitar, and on exactly which fret the capo is placed, and to what effect) That said--and this is not a weakness--it is theoretically and interpretively unchallenging It confirms and helps pin down the importance of the Beatles' soundworld Like Covach's essay, it wisely avoids assuming that, in the artistry it describes, the Beatles were somehow unique The third directly musicological essay, Sheila Whiteley's "'Love, Love, Love': Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Selected Songs by the Beatles," reads the oeuvre almost as closely as Everett's, except that the focus of her attention, more conventionally, is that of lyrics and their delivery Whiteley asserts, indeed, that the distinctiveness of the Beatles' early style lies in the vocals rather than in innovative timbral approaches In the wake of Everett's essay, such a declaration requires more comparative study, while Whiteley's writing too is occasionally under-theorized, such as where she equates submediant bridge beginnings with the quality of being "stuck" (64) There is an unmistakable critical tone in Whiteley's chapter: although clearly absorbed by the music, she finds in the songs a generally conservative, repressive stance, saved perhaps by the self-mockery apparent in the journey from "'She Loves You" to "All You Need Is Love" A similarly critical tone energizes James M Decker's "'Baby You're a Rich Man': The Beatles, Ideology, and the Cultural Moment," an analysis of the successes of the Anthology project, which Decker argues developed from a cynical, purely market-driven motive, one apparent from much earlier in the Beatles' career …

Camus's the Fall: The Dynamics of Narrative Unreliability

Abstract: When Wayne Booth coined the term unreliable narration, he deemed the reader's role in identifying an unreliable narrator unproblematic (esp. 158-59). For him, the implied reader shared with the implied author an ironic distance from the norms of the unreliable narrator. Narratologists after Booth who have dealt with unreliable narration have contended that the role of the reader is not as trivial as Booth thought and hence should be thoroughly explored. For example, Tamar Yacobi uncovers the difficulties that face the reader who tries to decipher the system of norms of the implied author and offers solutions to these difficulties. She also explains the reasons that actual readers misinterpret the implied author's perspective ("Reader"). Ansgar Nunning, who rejects the term implied author as vague, incoherent, and anthropomorphic, relies on cognitive theories of the reading process (both "bottom-up" and "top-down" processes) to describe the ways in which the reader labels a narrator unreliable. Kathleen Wall, conversely, remarks that changes in the notion of subjectivity are reflected in the way unreliability is both presented by the author and perceived by the readers. These scholars hold different views concerning the essence of fictional unreliability, the principles that should be employed in the classification of unreliable narrators, and the status of the reader with relation to the text in identifying this type of narrator. Nevertheless, it seems that they all assume a cognitive and/or ethical gap between the narrator and the readers, who treat this type of narrator as inferior to them in either knowledge or morality. The readers hold themselves capable of exposing the flaws of the narrator, since they themselves are immune, or at any rate less susceptible, to these flaws; and even if in certain other situations they do succumb to them, their uninvolved position vis-a-vis the fictional world enables them to judge the behavior of the unreliable narrator as irrational or immoral. (1) Accordingly, the terminology that is most frequently used with regard to the relations between the reader and the unreliable narrator emphasizes the former's role as a detached and neutral observer, researcher, detective, and judge. The reader must follow the implied author "in judging the narrator" (Booth 158), "recognize an unreliable narrator when he or she sees one" (Nunning 54), examine whether or not he or she "has reasons to suspect" the narrator (Nunning 57), (2) establish "a secret communication" with the implied author (Chatman 233), and construct the cultural or textual norms of the text (Yacobi, "Fictional" 121). The uninvolved position of the readers leads them to the (not explicitly formulated) conclusion that they are in no way affected by the recognition of a certain narrator's unreliability. It is implied that the readers themselves are more reliable than the unreliable narrator and, thanks to this difference, capable of identifying unreliabilty. This difference between, and in certain cases even incommensurability of, the narrator and the readers leads the latter to believe that unreliability is merely one of the criteria in the typology of narrators, with no consequences or ramifications for the readers themselves. To make things clear, I do not deem this view to be utterly mistaken. It is indispensable for readers to feel, at least to a certain extent, and in a certain phase of the reading, that they indeed are superior to the unreliable narrator in order to classify him or her as such. (3) However, this feeling does not necessarily persist. It may change if the readers either find out new details about the narrator that urge them to reevaluate their classification or discover something new about themselves that encourages them to reconsider their superiority to the narrator. An interesting combination of these two possibilities is found in Camus's novella The Fall (La Chute). I believe that an interpretation of The Fall focusing on the triad narrator-narratee-reader is significant for a work whose unreliable narration both undermines the binary opposition between "unreliable narrator" and "reliable reader" and has some general implications on the position of the reader towards fiction. …

Remarks on English Long-Distance Anaphora

Abstract: The phenomenon of long distance reflexives/long distance anaphora (LDA) has been extensively discussed in recent years, with for example at least two full volumes of papers devoted specifically to this topic (Koster and Reuland; Cole, Hermon, and Huang). A notable feature of both these volumes is the absence of any paper devoted specifically to LDA in English. Given the central role which the study of English has played in the development of post-1957 grammatical investigation, this notable lacuna raises the possibility that it might be widely accepted that English simply lacksLDA! Viewed superficially, there are certain grounds for such a view. For instance, a common type of LDA in various languages involves antecedence by a main clause subject of a reflexive found in a complement clause, often subjunctive, as in the Icelandic example in 1a cited in Ruth Reeves. English analogs would be cases like 1b and c and the starred versions of 1d: (1) a. Jon(i) telur a Maria hafi sviki sig(I) 'J believes that M ha^sub SBJ^ betrayed self' b. *Roy^sub l^ insisted that you call himself^sub l^. c. *Larraine wished that they would hire herself^sub l^. d. John^sub i^ thinks Tom^sub j^ knows Bill^sub k^ likes himself^sub *i/*j/k^. (Cole, Hermon, and Lee) So English seems to systematically lack grammatical versions of sentences like 1a, giving some apparent support to a view that LDA may be an option absent from English grammar. Nonetheless, my goal here is to argue that English not only has LDA but has a number of different types.2 The principal argument for the conclusion that English has LDA will involve appeal to the feature of de se interpretation. Gennaro Chierchia claimed that it is systematically the case that LDA involves de se interpretation, a point much stressed by Reeves, who was a major stimulus of the present work.3 With respect to this notion, Reeves states: "Without going into a formal description of this difference, we can observe that the distinction between the two cases turns on whether or not the speaker asserts that a particular kind of epistemic state holds of some entity referred to in that assertion." This type of interpretation (see also Landau, "Movement" 486) can vaguely be described as closely related to a first person interpretation of a (non-first person) pronominal form.4 So consider example 2: (2) The injured veteran^sub l^ believes he^sub l^ has been mistreated. Even in interpretations where the subject of believes antecedes the pronominal subject of the complement, there are two distinct readings. On the de se reading, the example would correctly represent the veteran of relevance as saying if questioned: "Yes, I believe I have been mistreated." In other words, under the de se meaning, the subject of a verb like believe is specified as being aware of the identity of the entity referred to in the complement. On the other, the non-de se reading, in which the individual denoted by the injured veteran is unaware that the person mistreated is himself, sentence 2 would correctly characterize the situation of the veteran as saying, "Yes, I believe he has been mistreated." But under an anaphoric reading of the relation between main clause subject and he, the user of 2 indicates in the non-de se reading that the two DPs, the injured veteran and he, nonetheless denote the same individual. Reeves observes that de se interpretation depends on an animate, usually human, denotation for the antecedent nominal. This requires, as Reeves indicates, that to the extent Chierchia' s claim is correct for a class of LDA cases, these should, personification aside, be limited to animate nominals. This is of course not a general feature of reflexives as such, as 3 illustrates for English: (3) a. Such problems^sub l^ don't solve themselves^sub l^. b. That danger^sub l^ made itself^sub l^ felt soon after. c. Only badly programmed automatic power saws^sub l^ cut themselves^sub l^ into pieces. …

Margaret Edson's Wit and the Art of Analogy

Abstract: Margaret Edson's play Wit (1993) dramatizes in a simultaneously heart-rending and humorous way the suffering and illumination of Vivian Bearing, a professor of seventeenth-century English poetry who is dying of advanced ovarian cancer. The play has become a standard text in medical schools, especially in courses on medical ethics, medical humanities, and narrative medicine (see, for example, the Wit Film Project). In these contexts, discussions of Wit (or of its video version, with Emma Thompson as the main character) tend to focus on end-of-life treatment, the doctor-patient relationship, and the ethics of initialing or avoiding a resuscitation attempt after a patient's death (full code vs. DNR). Without minimizing the importance of these concerns, I wish--from a literary point of view--to put them in the framework of the complex network of analogies between worlds or spaces that seem to me to be the governing structural and thematic principle of Wit. I suggest that the interplay between contrast and similarity in these analogies creates an affinity, on many levels, between Wit and the conceit. In other words, the play not only quotes metaphysical conceits and comments on them but is itself conceitlike. In her introduction to a collection of metaphysical poems, Helen Gardner, a highly influential critic of John Donne whose authority is invoked in Wit, says: "A conceit is a comparison whose ingenuity is more striking than its justness, or, at least, is more immediately striking. All comparisons discover likeness in things unlike: a comparison becomes a conceit when we are made to concede likeness while being strongly conscious of unlikeness" (19). (1) In what follows I hope to show how the macrostructure of this play establishes contrasts, similarities, contrasts within the similarities, and further similarities within the contrasts, thus both dramatizing and interrogating wit and its instrument, conceit. 1 The play moves between two physical-institutional spaces: the hospital and the university. The space of the hospital is primarily characterized by its constriction. Once Vivian is in it, even when she can still walk by herself, she is carried from one test to another in an obligatory wheelchair. As the play progresses, her hospital existence is confined to one room, then to an isolation room, and, toward the end, to a very small part of the bed where she lies curled up with pain. While Vivian undergoes various tests and treatments, her mind asserts its freedom by remembering vignettes from her career as student, teacher, and scholar. These subjective flashbacks are performed on stage, creating a constant oscillation between the two worlds, corresponding to two temporal dimensions. These worlds are also opposed to each other in that the hospital is preoccupied with the body, while the university sees itself as contributing to the life of the mind. Although Vivian occupies reverse positions in these spaces, as my initial analysis will show, analogies--to be subsequently discussed--are established between the two contrasted worlds. Being ill, especially being hospitalized, it appears, puts the patient in a position of inferiority, stripping her of the personal and professional status she had in her former world. This process is emphasized early in the play by a confusing double reference in a conversation between Vivian and an x-ray technician: TECHNICIAN 1: Doctor. VIVIAN: Yes, I have a Ph.D. TECHNICIAN 1: Four doctor. VIVIAN: Oh. Dr. Harvey Kelekian. (16) If this scene is relatively lighthearted, at a later point Vivian finds the reversal in her position difficult to tolerate: "Once I did the teaching, now I am taught" (37). She who used to conduct seminars has become the object of study. The situation is aggravated by the impersonality and insensitive attitudes of the doctors, one of whom was Vivian's student in the past. …

Czech Poetics Today: Tradition and Renewal

Abstract: Contemporary Western literary theory is severely fragmented. Even though we can discern contours of some groupings based on theoretical affinities or cultural traditions, the individualism of personalities prevails over communal assumptions or conceptions. We are again in a period when the critical establishment accepts, loudly or tacitly, the opinion that the model of writing about literature is literature. "Fear of influence" hinders the formation and cultivation of research traditions and prevents accumulation of knowledge about literature. In this situation, it gives me great satisfaction to present a group of contemporary Czech literary scholars of three generations who not only joined together to prepare a special issue of Style but also share common theoretical assumptions and focus on one theoretical problem. This cohesion--which does not deny the existence of a wider theoretical plurality in contemporary Czech literary studies--is the result of the recent renewal of a brilliant tradition of twentieth-century Czech literary theory. In the 1920s and 1930s a number of remarkable linguists, literary theorists, philosophers, ethnographers, and legal scholars formed an interdisciplinary group, the Prague linguistic circle, later known as the Prague school. In cooperation and critical exchange with the international scholarly community of the time, they developed the first European system of structuralism. It is a historical fact that the term structuralism was coined and first defined in Prague by Roman Jakobson, in an article dated 1929, and shortly afterwards was refined by Jan Mukarovsky. Here also the first confrontation between structuralism and Marxism took place in the 1930s. The activities of the Prague linguistic circle were supressed by totalitarian regimes, first by the Nazis, then by the Stalinists. A short resurrection during the Prague spring of 1968 was quickly followed, after the Soviet-led military invasion, by an absolute suppression of structuralist thought. The scholars designated as structuralists were expelled from their academic posts or left the country. Yet the tradition was not eradicated; it survived in underground groups that met clandestinely to listen to lectures and to engage in free discussion. Only the "velvet revolution" of 1989 restituted freedom of thought and research in the Czech lands; a remarkable resurgence of humanistic scholarship followed. The expelled scholars returned to the universities and academic institutes, the emigres came home from exile or, at least, came for visits, and a stream of younger students finished their delayed education. It is this historical background that explains why Czech literary theory developed so rapidly in the postcommunist era. The literary scholars assembled in this issue share two epistemological assumptions. First, they believe that the study of literature can be pursued as a cognitive activity, governed by general, interdisciplinary principles of knowledge acquisition, representation, and transmission. Literature is interpreted not through the language of literature (by poetic language) but through a specific cognitive metalanguage. Second, the contributors to the issue learned from personal experience that dogmatic ideology is the worst enemy of humanistic research. They do not deny that every theorist proceeds from certain individual assumptions and ideological preferences. But possessing a subjectivity (all of us do) does not mean that subjectivity dominates our cognitive activities. In his or her theoretical thinking the scholar is governed by suprasubjective principles and is monitored and judged by suprasubjective criticism of the scholarly community, at present international and instantaneous. I have mentioned that all the contributions to this issue of Style have a common focus: it is the concept of fictional worlds conceived as possible worlds. At first sight, a continuity between structuralist poetics and possible-worlds semantics of fiction seems implausible. …

The Data Fetishist's Guide to Rime Coherence

Abstract: (ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes formulae omitted.) 1. Introduction This article is another installment in an ongoing linguistic detective serial. Its roots, like those of Dorothy Sayers's Gaudy Night, lie in academic England in the first third of the last century; and like that estimable novel, it has no corpse but plenty of mystery and even the odd poem. Also, like Sayers's posthumously completed novel Thrones, Dominations, investigation of this mystery is multigenerational and seems to proceed in spasms; about once every decade or so there are a few more facts brought to light and a few more theories adduced, but somehow, as in any good serial, the whole thing remains quite mysterious. As in any good detective story, the object of investigation is a real phenomenon, something that is demonstrable but unexplainable. And like any linguistic detective-especially one whose hero, Jim McCawley, declared himself quite satisfied to be described as a "data fetishist"-I'm interested in data on the extent of the phenomenon, some explanation about how it works, and-insha'allah-some way to relate it to the rest of the linguistic world. The mysterious phenomenon I'm concerned with here goes under the general rubric of sound symbolism, and in particular is often referred to with the term phonestheme, a term due to J. R. Firth and and a fairly natural outgrowth of the concepts of the phoneme, the principal unit of sound in a language, and the morpheme, the principal unit of lexical meaning. The number of phonemes in any language is usually on the order of a thousand times as small as the number of morphemes. Three orders of magnitude is a big conceptual gap, in which the phonestheme was intended to be the major unit. Kepler, and later Bode, remarked on the odd gap in the solar system between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, which was unfilled until the discovery of the first asteroid, Ceres, by Piazzi in 1800. Like a linguistic Piazzi, Firth filled a conceptual gap by discovering something unexpected in it. And, like the study of the minor planets, the scientific study of these minor word parts and their symbolism has lurched along spasmodically ever since. The phonestheme, however, is part of folk linguistics at least as much as it is of academic: the first published clue, in fact, is to be found in the syndicated graphic strip Ripley's Believe It Or Not, which (some time before the publication of Firth's paper) trumpeted the fact that "400 words in English beginning with 'SN' apply to the nose-and its activities."1 Dwight Bolinger next focused attention on the phenomenon in his 1950 article in which he came regretfully to the conclusion that the problem was not susceptible to analysis under the then-current understanding of how language (and especially meaning) worked. In the process, however, he did establish the standard terminology, distinguishing between a syllable's assonance (word- or syllableinitial consonant cluster), and its rime (concatenated vocalic nucleus and final consonant cluster); thus in the word stump, for instance, the assonance is Sf- and the rime is -ump. Bolinger's use of terminology derived from (though not quite identical in meaning to) terms widespread in poetic analysis signaled, of course, that this phenomenon was not exactly unknown to poets, whether or not linguists might be able to make anything of it. Rich Rhodes and I were responsible for the next spasm, in our 1981 Chicago Linguistic Society paper (hereafter RL81), in which we first made the claim that is perhaps best put as phonesthemes form a classifier system. Specifically, we showed that (at least) most initial bi- and triconsonantal cluster assonances in English monosyllables were semantically coherent-in the same sense that classifier systems are-to a degree (typically 70%) far beyond chance, and that rimes were also coherent, though to a lesser degree. We also proposed a theory for how this surprising state of affairs could have come to pass and for how it could maintain its stability over millennia of language history. …

Saints, Sinners, and the Dickensian Novel: The Ethics of Storytelling in John Irving’s The Cider House Rules

Abstract: In his novels, John Irving continues to experiment with a narrative voice that seeks to thwart deliberately his readers’ expectations, to upset our notions of conventionality, and to blur the boundaries that linger between good and evil, right and wrong. From the life-affirming presence of the “good, smart bears” in The Hotel New Hampshire (1981) and Owen Meany’s shrill voice of reason in A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) to the convoluted sexual politics of The 158-Pound Marriage (1974) and the conspicuous proximity of the “Under Toad” and the tragedy of the Ellen Jamesians in The World According to Garp (1978), Irving adorns his fictions with a host of ethical signifiers that challenge readers at every turn throughout his labyrinthine, deliberately Dickensian fictions. Irving makes little secret of his affinity for Dickens and in particular for the Victorian writer’s eye for complexity of narrative and literary character. In “King of the Novel,” Irving writes that “Dickens was abundant and magnificent with description, with the atmosphere surrounding everything— and with the tactile, with every detail that was terrifying or viscerally felt” (364). As with Dickens, because Irving loads his own narratives with considerable detail and description, he makes it virtually impossible for readers to render facile ethical decisions in the face of so much information about a given character’s humanity.

"Discovering" the Fictional Worlds of Lyric Poetry

Abstract: 1. The Subject as the Center of a Fictional World Not trying, at least for the moment, to discriminate various hierarchical levels, functions, and communication situations of the agents who act simultaneously in the work of verbal art, I would like to examine the possibilities contained in the following thesis: the fictional world of a lyric poem, or its central part, is represented by a subject. Few theoreticians have been interested in the topic of fictional worlds in lyric poetry, some of them generally disclaiming its fictionality. The thesis on the subject as a particular world in lyric poetry was formulated clearly by Paolo Meneses, who also presents a selection of quotations to support his statement. Among them, Karlheinz Stierle's formulation seems to be promising: "the 'speaker of the utterance' is a function of [lyrical] discourse.... He or she is a speaker in search of an identity, a speaker who is articulated in the process of this quest" (436). Stierle's emphasis on the processuality of this subject has to be confronted with the opposite view. For Jan Mukarovsky, probably, the definition of lyric poetry by means of subjectivity was both trivial and too conciliatory towards the identification of the aesthetic with an expression of emotions. Therefore, he declared this subjectivity of lyric poetry to be derived from the trait that he considered to be more fundamental, namely from the "particular treatment of the theme (content)" (71). He sought this particularity because lyric poetry aims at the dissolution or weakening of the temporal dimension (which, let us add, includes Stierle's processuality of the subject). From the point of view of discriminating lyric poetry and its fictional worlds from the range of narrations, we have to agree with the Prague theoretician: the temporal dimension, compared with narrative, is surely pushed to the background in lyric poetry. In the lyric poem, the subject is not primarily presented in his or her temporal changes but rather as a "system" of both paratactic and hierarchically organized components. On the other hand, Mukarovsky's one-sided dependence of lyric subjectivity on "treating the theme" must be changed into a bilateral relation, if we take into account that it is precisely the subject where paradigms and systems are present and that precisely this presence makes possible the manifold presentation of the same theme, which for Mukarovsky is the source of the weakening of temporal linearity in lyric poetry; Mukarovsky as defender of the Durkheimian (ontologically vague) "collective consciousness" would not agree with this opinion, and it could be a reason for the dominance of temporal dimension over the subject, or its dissolution, in Mukarovsky's delimitation of lyric poetry. My view on the subject of lyric poetry is here in conscious opposition to the contemporary concept of the subject, as formulated, for example, by Jonathan Culler: "the self is dissolved as its various functions are ascribed to impersonal systems which operate through it" (Pursuit 33). If we look at the subject as an individual using systems and paradigms for his or her own functions and operations, we can probably find the way to the processuality of the lyric subject; Stierle's search for self-identity as a movement among these systems contained inside the subject, up and down through the paradigms and from one paradigm to another, is often verbally projected into a lyric work. Such a surfing of subject through the subject represents, of course, quite a different processuality than that we know from the worlds of narrative. Successivity remains, of course, an elementary dimension, one arising from the character of the material of verbal art, but the order of elements and their causal connections, which are vital for narration, are not relevant in this model of lyric poetry. The course of time is directed by the course of mental processes of the subjects and by the factors that are independent of any mimetic time, factors connected with natural and conventionalized temporal dimensions of poetic forms. …

On the Razor's Edge: A Familiar Essay

Abstract: Love your data--Haj Ross I have learned of many, many things from Haj Ross: of islands and inner islands, paths, world order and chance, squishing, gapping, tree-pruning and remnants; of poems as holograms and where the tygers dwell. At Naropa Institute we shared lodgings and talked into the night of what we were learning about languaging from, among others, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. In the spirit of those days, I'd like to combine some sentences from their book The Tree of Knowledge with a reading of an old world folk tale about languaging. My title's metaphor--the razor's edge--appears three times in The Tree of Knowledge, the book by Maturana and Varela we were reading then. The metaphor is an evocative image, suggesting pain, precision, balance, and who knows what else. The first time it appears is in the chapter "Behavioral Domains": This is like walking on the razor's edge. On one side there is a trap: the impossibility of understanding cognitive phenomena if we assume a world of objects that inform us because there is no mechanism that makes that "information" possible. On the other side, there is another trap: the chaos and arbitrariness of non-objectivity, where everything seems possible. We must learn to take the middle road, right on the razor's edge. (133) It appears again in the chapter "Linguistic Domains and Human Consciousness": "Once again we must keep our logical accounting very clear and walk on the razor's edge, keeping operation of an organism distinct from the description of its behavior" (206). And finally, in the chapter called "The Tree of Knowledge": "Again we must walk the razor's edge, eschewing the extremes of representationalism (objectivism) and solipsism (idealism)" (241). In human languaging, finding and keeping this middle way is very hard to do without metaphors. Languaging seems to require a high degree of transparency to work well socially. That is, when we use language we expect others to look through our words at something else--nature, memory, other words. That reminds me of a story. (1) It was collected by the Brothers Grimm from one Hans Truffer in 1819: The Three Languages An aged count once lived in Switzerland, who had an only son, but he was stupid, and could learn nothing. Then said the father, "Hark thee, my son, can get nothing into thy head, let me try as I will. Thou must go from hence. I will give thee into the care of a celebrated master, who shall see what he can do with thee." The youth was sent into a strange town, and remained a whole year with the master. At the end of this time, he came home again, and his father asked, "Now, my son, what hast thou learnt?" "Father, I have learnt what the dogs say when they bark." "Lord have mercy on us!" cried the Father; "is that all thou hast learnt? I will send thee into another town, to another master." The youth was taken thither, and stayed a year with this master likewise. When he came back the father again asked, "My son, what hast thou learnt?" He answered, "Father. I have learnt what the birds say." Then the father fell into a rage and said, "Oh, thou lost man, thou hast spent the precious time and learnt nothing: art thou not ashamed to appear before mine eyes? I will send thee to a third master, but if thou learnest nothing this time also, I will no longer he thy father." The youth remained a whole year with the third master also, and when he came home again, and his father inquired, "My son, what hast thou learnt?" he answered. "Dear father, I have this year learnt what the frogs croak." Then the father fell into the most furious anger, sprang up, called his people thither, and said, "This man is no longer my son. I drive him forth, and command you to take him out into the forest, and kill him." They took him forth, but when they should have killed him, they could not do it for pity, and let him go, and they cut the eyes and the tongue out of a deer that they might carry them to the old man as a token. …

How Many (Different) Kinds of Fictional Worlds Are There

Abstract: Esej porovnava dvě koncepce fikcnich světů svazane s tradici ceskeho strukturalismu: fikcni světy narativu Lubomira Doležela a fikcni světy lyriky Miroslava Cervenky.

Art, Science, and Ste. Emilie's Sunsets: A Haj-Inspired Cognitive Approach to Translating an Emily Dickinson Poem into Japanese

Abstract: (ProQuest Information and Learning: denotes formulae omitted) In the spring semester of 1983, each Wednesday would see Haj taking a late morning flight from Logan to La Guardia, where I would meet him to drive out to the State University of New York College at Old Westbury, where I was teaching at the time As a nontraditional college founded by Nelson Rockefeller in the 1960s to be the social sciences sister to SUNY/Purchase's arts focus, SUNY/COW did not have formal departments I taught in a program called Comparative History, Ideas, and Cultures (CHIC), and, in the spring of 1983, we were fortunately able to find funding to bring Haj to the college each week for a seminar course called Art and Science in a Society at the Turning Point, loosely based on Fritjof Capra's recently published book on that subject In addition to the regular seminars, three public lectures were offered- "Science in Search of Humanity," "Language in Search of Meaning," and "Poetry and the Power of Words" While students were able to take the course for credit, all the lectures and seminar sessions were open to the public and the college community without charge The three-hour long seminars started at 7:30 pm and drew upwards of forty people each week, students, faculty, and staff alike Accompanying Haj on his weekly visits was his beloved carpetbag, crammed with manuscripts, articles, and juggling balls Students, faculty, and staff learned to find Haj on his arrival at Old Westbury by the CHIC Xerox machine, where they could engage him in conversation while he ran off innumerable copies of all kinds of material that he thought everyone should know about The seminars themselves were magical, as all Haj's friends would suppose: the room was large enough to seat everyone in a circle, and halfway through, Haj would produce enough juggling balls from his bag of tricks for everyone to stand and stretch and juggle As the lecture titles indicate, seminar topics focused on Haj's interests and concerns on the nature of linguistics, art, humanity, science, and poetry, and the increasing influence of Eastern on Western thought, all of which still engage him and us to this day Haj's energy was prodigious After the seminar, we would drive home to Brooklyn for a late supper and talk into the early morning hours with my husband Don, who had known Haj since their days at MIT in the 1960s I would then drop Haj off at La Guardia for his return trip to Cambridge on my way to the college the next morning An indelible memory in my brain is the sight of sandy-haired Haj and his carpetbag on the sidewalk at La Guardia each Wednesday morning, as I arrived to pick him up Many years later, I find myself engaged in a natural development from these seminar exchanges and Haj's influence in my work with an Emily Dickinson colleague, Masako Takeda, from Osaka, Japan, who has translated many of Dickinson' s poems into Japanese We are collaborating on her translation of a short poem by Dickinson, whom Haj invariably refers to as "Saint Emily" or "Ste Emilie" (either a nod to what he thinks is my attitude or a reflection of his ownor perhaps both) One manuscript text (there are three) is accompanied by a note that says: "Please accept a sunset-" What follows are my comments on how a cognitive analysis could possibly help in translation, together with Masako's discussion of the poem as she has translated it Dickinson's poetry, as all who read her know, is challenging in its obscurity, an obscurity compounded by the complexities of her language If Dickinson's poetry is difficult for the native speaker to understand, how much more so is it to translate her poetry into another language? Whatever theoretical stance a translator takes, whether that of Nabokov's literal (word-for-word) translation, von Humboldt' s theory of adequate equivalencies, or the reception theory of twentiethcentury approaches, the translator is still very much seen as one who first and foremost must deal with "experiencing and defining the boundaries of meanings and associations surrounding each word" (Biguenet and Schulte xiii) …

Are Fictional Worlds Really Possible? A Short Contribution to Their Semantics

Abstract: Literary theoreticians refer to fictional (possible) worlds in order to grasp products of a mental creation and re-creation, products that are based on the acts of creating and perceiving literary works. These theoreticians are notorious for using the notion of possible worlds as a kind of metaphor rather than as a way to refer to the notion of possible worlds as it is employed by modal logic. The possible worlds of logic differ fundamentally from (narrative) fictional worlds. Whereas possible worlds of logic are usually consistent, necessarily infinite in number, and complete, fictional worlds of narratives can be contradictory, their number depends on the number of literary texts, and they are incomplete. This enumeration provides us with only a rough overview of the worlds' differences, and it arises only as a result of a deeper analysis and clearer typology of the two kinds of worlds. From the very beginning we accept as a matter of fact that we consider the essential difference between the possible worlds of logic and the fictional worlds of literature to be the way they are "given": the way they are given not only has a crucial impact on their ontological status but also determines their qualities. What does Sau! Kripke mean when he says: "A possible world is not a distant country that we are coming across, or viewing through a telescope. Generally speaking, another possible world is too far away.... A possible world is given by the descriptive conditions we associate with it.... Possible worlds are stipulated, not discovered by powerful telescopes" (44)? (1) Referring to Kripke's statement, Thomas Pavel, a prominent theoretician of fictional worlds, explicitly formulates the fundamental dissimilarity between possible and fictional worlds: Usually philosophers assume that possible worlds are not genuine concrete entities that could be inspected were we to possess the adequate telescope; they are abstract models, and may be thought of either as actual abstract entities or as conceptual constructions. But if so, the relation between a world and its creator matters less; to represent works of fiction as worlds involves a model that does not necessarily include a rigorous theory of the production of the fictional world.... Kripkean modal semantics offers what could be called a distant model for the theory of fiction: rather than rigorously unified semantics, fiction needs a typology of worlds to represent the variety of fictional practice. And if, on the one hand, technically impeccable possible worlds are too narrowly defined to provide for a model in the theory of fiction, on the other hand the notion of world as an ontological metaphor for fiction remains too appealing to be dismissed. (49-50) As we can see, both statements can be interpreted in several ways as regards different points of view and levels of view. The development of possible worlds of logical discourse is based primarily on the fact that classical logical systems (i.e., extensional systems with a two-value truth-valuation of statements) fail to produce an exhaustive and unified system suitable for truth-valuation of modal expressions. (2) At this moment the idea of different worlds was born: "The basic intuition is about the nature of modality, and it consists in the leading idea that possibility amounts to a pre-fabricated space of all the consistent and complete ways the world is or might have been" (Heydrich 189). (3) As much as we consider possible worlds to be firmly connected with the development of modal logic and logical discourse, it has to be emphasized that the notion of possible worlds originates in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's metaphysical notion of the universe of possible worlds from which the best one was chosen and actualized by God. Thus even the logical notion rests on a metaphysical base. (4) Although the two types of worlds we are speaking about differ in various ways on different levels, it is obvious that the main discrepancy is caused by the different ontological status of the two types of worlds. …

Representation of Being and Existence in an Epistemically Limited Fictional World

Abstract: In the vast body of Euro-American fictional texts produced in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the focus of attention is the protagonist, or the narrator, questioning the conditionality of his or her personal existence as well as the existence of other persons. Obviously, these texts are connected with existentialism, either as its anticipation or as its manifestation or as a product of this tradition and a related mode of creation. It is possible to say that a particular period of the late nineteenth century gave rise to a paradigm that through variations remained alive for practically the whole twentieth century. The most common elements of this paradigm are belief in the permanent precariousness and insecurity of human habitation in the world and belief in the fundamental limitations of human existence, in humankind's loneliness, alienation, and inability to succeed in its earthly struggle for life. Another element is the employment of a wide range of mythological and symbolical entities to depict the communicated subject. We might ask, then, how this historically determined paradigm responds to an examination informed by the logical-ontological system of fictional worlds as suggested by Lubomir Dolezel? How are existence, habitation, and being represented in texts connected with such a mode of creation? Or can a particular mode of fictional world be found even in the works that were not primarily intended as fiction yet have significantly influenced the creation of such a paradigm, specifically Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927) and Jean-Paul Sartre's L'etre et le neant (Being and Nothingness, 1953)? Admittedly, all these concerns have been inspired by Dolezel's concept of fictional worlds, but they can hardly be considered as its application. I say this because of another question: Do fictional worlds exist as entities independent of history, or do they maintain, through their mode of representation, historical contact with their period? Far from having solved this problem, I intend here to try to comprehend and to reveal what happens within texts whose protagonists or narrators are immersed in the problems of human existence, no matter whether their response is indifferent or impassioned. Within narrative modalities mentioned by Dolezel in Heterocosmica (1998, 2003 in Czech), the modality of epistemic limitations (132) seems to be most conspicuous in texts connected with existentialism. As a rule, the protagonist is, in Dolezel's terms, an "epistemic monad" and always finds the conditions of his or her habitation disagreeable and uncommon. All the protagonist's references are directed at revealing his or her epistemic insecurity. Therefore the mode of reference is constructed so as to accentuate the detachment, uniqueness, and taciturnity of objects in the protagonist's world. Such a viewpoint then invariably molds the whole fictional world, because the silence of objects, compelling the protagonist or narrator to disclose the limitedness of his or her own position, is not an objective quality of these objects but a feature produced by the character or narrator. The epistemic monad usually does not represent the uniqueness of a subjective experience; it is rather a parallel to collective ignorance, insecurity, distrust of reason, and so on. As a result, the model of fictional worlds will have other historical characteristics corresponding with a historical paradigm where the common contemporary images of ignorance, insecurity, and anxiety meet. On the other hand, the qualities of a fictional world with a dominating epistemic limitation can be found in many works that do not proclaim fictionality. For example, in Heidegger's philosophical treatise Being and Time an implied narrator constructing a "fictional world" may be discerned. As an epistemic monad, he models, through references, a specific space of his own surrounding dasein. Although Heidegger's style is apparently impersonal and "objective," as if the analyzed facts were independent of the "narrator," it is he who determines the course of events: "When Dasein reaches its wholeness in death, it simultaneously loses the being of its 'there. …

Rimbaud's First Blood: Le Lai Du Lait De Cabaner

Abstract: In this brief expose, I attempt to right a wrong of recent literary history, demonstrating that a scandalous episode from the youth of the immortal poete maudit Arthur Rimbaud involving a certain glass of milk, a certain bodily fluid, and the bohemian composer Etienne Cabaner, recounted most recently in the authoritative biography by the celebrated Graham Robb, in fact never took place. Rimbaud is a seminal figure, the beau ideal for avant-guard artists from Picasso, Breton, and Cocteau to Kerouac, Dylan and Jim Morrison, renowned as much for the extravagance of his life (especially his capacity as a young reprobate to epater les bourgeois, not least but not only by seducing the far more senior poet Verlaine away from his wife and family) as for the genius of his poetry. On close reading, Robb’s own sources indicate that the episode in question was fabricated by Rimbaud himself, but this self-acknowledged hoax eventually—more than a century after the event in question didn’t take place—took in Robb and others. The fact that this premeditated succes de scandale has survived for 130 years is an instructive commentary on the nature of iconography. A holy vagabond, a beautiful reckless genius child for whom art could only proceed from a complete derangement of the senses and who was as much voyou as voyant, 1 Arthur

Types of Worlds: On Relations between the Prague School and the Theory of Fictional Worlds

Abstract: Any investigation into the ontological status of a literary work can result in two different ways of interpreting the work: on the one hand, it can be described as an imitation, as a spiritual reproduction of reality, as a fictional representation of the real world, or as a complexly hierarchized meaning structure; on the other hand, it can be viewed it as a concrete material fact. Nevertheless, both ways alert us to the fact that a literary work has primarily been defined and delimited with respect to reality. To sum up: a (literary) work of art as such is--in the words of Kvetoslav Chvatik--"a specific model of the world" (101). Formalists as well as structuralists have perceived a literary work as an entirety or a dynamic structure representing an organized and dialectical cluster of individual components among which there is a permanent tension. This structure, with both a systemic and a temporal dimension, is to be studied irrespective of all its external relations and liaisons, the Formalists tell us--that is, primarily as a phenomenon sui generis (Mukarovsky, "Predmluva" 9). Although we might thus assume that investigation into the issues of the relation between work and reality was a minor issue in structuralist inquiry, this is not (and has never been) the case. The aim of this paper is nevertheless not to provide the reader with a comprehensive view of the structuralist approach to the relation between work and reality but rather to outline the similarities and differences of the respective solutions to the question proposed by the poetics of the Prague School on the one hand and by Lubomir Dolezel's theory of fictional worlds on the other: With respect to this study, the category of world (svet) seems to be a central one. If I am to specify the aim of my study, I am particularly interested in (a) analysis of the relation between Dolezel's concept of "fictional world" and Felix Vodicka's "fictional-fictive world," (b) analysis of Josef Jungmann's concept of fantastic poetry, and finally (c) comparison between typologies of fictional-fictive and fictional worlds (Jungmann; Dolezel). 1. Vodicka's Theory of "Fictional-Fictive Worlds" The problem of poetic reference seems to be the central one for the investigation of the relation between the theory of fictional worlds and the structural (semiotic) poetics of the Prague School. Although the Prague School did not work with the idea that a literary work represented a specific reality, a special "model of the world" (see Dolezel, Occidental 208-09), I argue that certain ideas that can be regarded as a predecessor or an early stage of this concept can be found in the field of Czech literary history. Jan Mukarovsky, Vodicka, and Jungmann played an important role in this inquiry. A volume of university lectures delivered by Mukarovsky at the turn of the 1930s and 1940s was published in 1995, presenting the early stage of his structuralist thinking in a relatively compact form. In lectures called "Philosophy of Poetic Language" ("Filozofie jazyka basnickeho")--dated 1933 through 1934--Mukarovsky for the first time presented his opinion that language manifestations have a double relation to reality. Mukarovsky investigates in detail Roman Ingarden's thoughts about how we understand the meaning of words and of sentences and presents a short outline of sentence semantics, though attempting a semantics of all higher meaning units (paragraph, text). Mukarovsky was familiar with Ingarden's book Das literarische Kunstwerk (1931) and, naturally, aware of the fact that a literary work represents a unique world (see Mukarovsky, Kapitoly; "Genetika" 237-49); nevertheless, the problem of poetic reference is only briefly outlined in his work and has remained underdeveloped in Czech structuralism (see Dolezel, Occidental). A certain solution to the problem of reference was attempted much later by Vodicka, one of the most distinguished representatives of the second generation of the Prague School, whose approach to a literary work as a specific "fictional world" allows a more detailed comparison with Dolezel's concept of a fictional world. …

Lectures on Bubblemint and Grinding

Abstract: 1 Introduction I would like to sketch here the core conceptual vocabulary of an approach to grammatical theory that has been developed in a number of unpublished papers and lectures over the past few years and that is rather promising, in my opinion My purpose here is not to give a final and complete presentation of the theory but rather to pull together what seem to me to be the most promising elements of the research that has been circulated, all drawing on essentially the same concepts Because of the centrality of grammatical Taste, Spice, Crumbs, and related notions, I shall refer to the program as a whole as "the theory of Bubblemint and Grinding," though one should bear in mind that we are dealing here with a family of theories, none of them entirely correct, no doubt, and we must be prepared to acknowledge that fundamental flaws may be found in all of them Nonetheless, it seems to me that the revisions of our understanding of the organization of grammatical structures that these developments have brought about are important steps in the right direction As grammatical theory in the strict sense becomes more mature, we should expect that it would increasingly enter into a close relationship with theories of other psychological and biological functions In the case of linguistic theory, we can expect a priori that in the best of all possible worlds, the theory of language function will interact with the theories of other cognitive functions, especially those whose biological bases are closely linked to that of language Pursuing this possibility, we might expect that the best theory of grammar would be one which can be extended to cover the apparently diverse capacities of the mouth, tongue, and nose In view of the crucial role of the tongue in language, the central hypothesis of the theory of bubblemint and grinding is an entirely natural and unsurprising one--that the theories of grammar and cuisine derive from fundamentally the same principles; that the theory of sentence structure corresponds to that of the structure of recipes, as the theory of discourse corresponds to the theory of menus; and that the theory of empty categories in syntax can ultimately be reduced to the theory of missing ingredients This notion is not a particularly new one, and should not be surprising In fact, Descartes suggested a localization of intellectual and spiritual functions in the pineal gland, and more recent work has modified this hypothesis in only limited fashion The biological localization of language in the head, above the neck and shoulders, has been, to my mind, conclusively demonstrated in a series of recent papers Confirming this general line of analysis is the observation, for example, that linguistic utterances are uniformly emitted from the mouth, with the central participation of the tongue Ferdinand de Saussure, of course, is widely recognized for his emphasis on the systematicity of langue per se (1) It would be no exaggeration, therefore, to suggest that a new era is opened up with the development of a link between linguistic theory and culinary-gastronomic theory as provided by the recent work in Bubblemint-Grinding Theory In what follows, I shall explore some of the consequences for our understanding of grammatical competence and its biological substrate which arise from the theory of Bubblemint and Grinding 2 The Taste Filter Consider the following range of data: (1) a a man [with whom] to work b *a man [whom] to work with c a man [for] John to work with d *a man [ ] John to work with e a man to work with f a place to work g *a place [where] to work Throughout this range of infinitival relatives, we can identify one common characteristic of the grammatical cases (la, c, e, f) In each case, the head noun is followed by a preposition (to, for) In the ungrammatical cases, no preposition follows the head noun …

Reading Prague: Narrative Domains of the Image of the City in Fiction

Abstract: The city in the actual world is an artificial, man-made structure. It is based on radical reconstruction of the natural world that brings into existence certain spatial settings and arbitrary rules that model the behavior of its inhabitants and visitors. The process of creating a fictional world in literature can draw on this ready-made artifice of the actual-world city. Thus the images of the city in literature can generally be built up with seemingly little effort. A narrator's use of a name like London, Paris, or Amsterdam seems to bring the whole sum of a cultural encyclopedia entry into the proposed fictional world: localization, urban patterns, well-known buildings or localities, demographic and cultural information, and so on. (1) Focusing on the image of Prague in modern literature of the Central European area (and employing the inevitable reductions), we can construct the story of its development. The image of Prague established during the era of the Czech National Revival of the first half of the nineteenth century presents the city as a physical embodiment of glorious but remote history. The name Prague, being grammatically feminine, gains connotations of a dignified old lady, a grandmother, the witness of long past glory. Feminine personification is strengthened through the mythological story of the princess Libussa who foresaw the founding, growth, and glory of Prague. The skyline of Prague in nineteenth-century Czech fiction is usually depicted as a suggestive row of church towers and spires; the inner space of Prague is displayed by focusing on historical places like the Old Town Square, the Castle, and Charles Bridge. The image of Prague thus embodies the regional history of the people. At the end of the nineteenth century, the image of Prague as an old and wise grandmother shifts to the other nineteenth-century cliche: Prague as a whole (in Vilem Mrstik's novel Santa Lucia, 1893) or a specific area of Prague (Jewish Town in Paul Leppin's short stories) receives the features of a merciless femme fatal, a prostitute that spoils innocent young men coming from villages and small towns, or she spreads diseases as a gesture of revenge. Such a personification reaches one of its peaks in Gustav Meyrink' s The Golem (1915): Prague functions in this novel as a living organism, as a protagonist with a physical and mental existence. The novel offers quite a coherent verbal map of Prague that calls for mimetic recognition in readers familiar with the actual topography of the city. However, the amount and structuralization of rather detailed depictions also result in creating and maintaining a specific, autonomous, textual "Prague." Meyrink, projecting his vision of the syncretistic or the synthetic into the image of the city, offers quite a coherent balance of the meanings produced through affirmative mimetic reference and through spatial specifications produced just by his text. Thus The Golem, standing on the threshold of modernist literature, offers a point of departure for the image of Prague in twentieth-century literature: Is such an image supposed to be built up through the affirmation of the mimetic reference, through reference to some presupposed cultural encyclopedia, or just through textual constructing of the fictional world? Should the appearance of the word Prague at the beginning of a novel be read and interpreted as a whole complex reference, bringing into the fictional world a stable and complex spatial domain, or should it be read and interpreted just as an act of baptism, producing thus a name whose meaning has to be fully produced by consequent narrative acts? Is the fictional world whose textual creation included the word Prague supposed to have a castle, or does it have a castle just in case such a castle is at least mentioned in the text? One of the earliest short stories of Franz Kafka, "Description of a Struggle" (first draft written 1904-05, published posthumously 1936), offers no explicit mention of the city the story is situated in. …

Disjunctive Numerals of Estimation

Abstract: 1. Introduction English contains a number of expressions of the form m or n, where m and n are numerals, with the meaning 'from m to n.' I call such expressions disjunctive numerals of estimation, or DNEs. Examples 1-4 illustrate the use of these expressions: (1) My family's been waiting four or five hours for a flight to Florianopolis. (2) This saying has fifteen or twenty meanings. (3) Let me have thirty or forty dollars. (4) Your call will be answered in the next ten or twenty minutes. Example 1 may be used to assert that my family has been waiting from 4 to 5 hours, not for either exactly 4 or exactly 5 hours. More precisely, one should say that the expression is ambiguous between, on the one hand, an exactor literal interpretation of four or five, in which my family is said to have been waiting either 4 or 5 hours and not some intermediate amount of time (such as 4 hours and 30 minutes) and, on the other hand, an idiomatic "estimation" interpretation of four or five, in which my family is said to have been waiting from 4 to 5 hours; and one should also say that the second interpretation is much more likely to be given to the sentence than the first. The range interpretation of DNEs is even clearer in examples 2-4, where the interval between m and n is greater than 1. For example, sentence 2 under this interpretation is true if the number of meanings of the saying in question has any value from 15 to 20 and is false otherwise, similarly for examples 3 and 4. The literal and idiomatic interpretations of a DNE coincide in truth value if the interval between m and n equals 1 and the DNE modifies a noun that is normally enumerated in discrete (integral) values, as in 5: (5) There are four or five people ahead of us in line. In such cases, nevertheless, the literal and idiomatic interpretations of DNEs should be distinguished. Under the latter, 5 is understood as providing an estimate of the number of people ahead of us in line, whereas under the former, it is understood as specifying a disjunction of exactly how many people are ahead of us in line. DNEs have been around for a long time in English. The following excerpt is from a report written shortly after the British takeover of New Amsterdam in 1664, quoted in Keller. DNEs are italicized: (6) There are about nine or ten three Mast Vessels of about eighty or a Hundred tons burthen, two or three ketches and Barks of about forty Tun, and about twenty Sloops of about twenty or five and twenty Tun belonging to the Government--all of which Trade for England, Holland and the West Indies, except five or six, sloops that use the river Trade to Albany and that way. (34) Not all expressions of the form m or n, qualify as DNEs, however, as the following examples show: (7) My family's been waiting two or five hours for a flight to Florianopolis. (8) This saying has eleven or twenty-two meanings. (9) Let me have forty or thirty dollars. Example 7 would be used to say only that my family has been waiting either 2 or 5 hours, and not for an intermediate period of time, such as 3 hours. Thus the expression two or five in that example behaves only as an ordinary disjunction, not as a DNE. Similarly, example 8 would be used to say that the saying in question has either 11 or 22 meanings, not some intermediate number, such as 16. Finally, example 9 would be used to request either $40 or $30, not any amount of money in between. 2. Principles of Interpretation for DNEs Genuine DNEs in English conform to certain principles of formation. For convenience in stating these principles, let M and N be the numbers that the numerals m and n respectively stand for; let D be the difference between N and M; and let R be the ratio of M to N. The principles are given in 10-12. (1) (10) D is a nonnegative power of 10 or is 1/2 or 1/5 of a nonnegative power of 10 (i. …

Postmodernist Manichaean Allegory in William Gaddis's Carpenter's Gothic

Abstract: The richness of allegorical content in William Gaddis's Carpenter's Gothic is evident in the first paragraph of the novel, where "a kind of battered shuttlecock," actually a dead dove, is being hit "over a bough," "caught and flung," and "hit again into a swirl of leaves" by small boys, one of them "wiping mud from his cheek where it hit him," until it is finally slammed into a "yellow dead end sign on the corner opposite the house" (1-2). The shuttlecock and the mud signify the scene in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre in which, while young Addle is playing with Pilot, the dog, "and her shuttlecock," the austere Rochester reveals to Jane how Adele's mother gave him her baby and he "took the poor thing out of the slime and mud of Paris, and transplanted it here" (141, 146). In the second chapter of Carpenter's Gothic, there are more than fifty lines of text taken from Bronte's Jane Eyre, bringing to Gaddis's novel the Gothic elements of women in distress, tyrannical males, and the metonymy of gloom and horror that the novel's title signifies (Gaddis 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57; Bronte 113, 115, 116, 118, 149, 150, 151, 258, 259). The themes from Bronte in Gaddis's opening paragraph foreshadow the physical and verbal battering of Liz by her husband and ultimately her own "dead end." The dove has religious significance, for when Jesus was being baptized and the heavens opened, "the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him" (Luke 3.22). The dove imagery recurs near the end of the novel when Liz dies and "a choked bleat of sound came lost from her throat in a great sigh" and again later when "a movement no more than the flutter of a wing caught [Paul's] eye through the glass at the foot of the stairs, someone on tiptoe, peering in" (253, 257). The flutter of a wing turns out to be a little girl (a phantom of Addle?) at the front door inquiring after her black dog (Pilot?) whom we already know has the strange idea that he belongs in Liz and Paul's rented Gothic house (Thornfield Hall?). The references to "yellow," "leaves," and "bough" in Gaddis's opening paragraph evoke that time of year when "yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs" in Shakespeare's sonnet 73, and the "death-bed whereon [the aging poet] must expire" (Pequigney). When Paul gruffly tells the little girl to ask "that old man over there with the broom" about her dog, he indicates the old man "bent sweeping leaves into a dustpan" that he carries "before him like an offering ... toward an open garbage can," where it is emptied "with ceremonial concern," his broom balanced "upright like a crosier"--an exquisite allegory of sacredness (35, my emphasis). Carpenter's Gothic is part of what Maureen Quilligan, as cited by Brian McHale, calls the re-emergence of "an allegorical age" during the "last quarter of the twentieth century," which she attributes to the revival of a medieval "view of language as possessing, at least potentially, a sacralizing power" (McHale 140-41). In these examples of what McHale calls "traditional allegories" (141), the mentioned image represents something different from its literal meaning. The dove in the opening paragraph to Carpenter's Gothic symbolizes both a religious presence and an innocent child; the shuttlecock, a battered woman; the combination of yellow, leaves, and bough, a particular Shakespearean sonnet; the mud on a boy's cheek, a tawdry birth environment; and the dead-end sign, death. In Gaddis's case, what is symbolized may often become in turn the frame for further allegory, vaguely evocative of McHale's "nesting or embedding" structures (112). The particular Shakespearean sonnet in Gaddis's case is a symbol for old age and death and also for the love of an older for a much younger person. Similarly, Bronte's novel is a symbol for the love of a younger for a much older person. Shakespeare's sonnet and Bronte's novel both prepare the reader of Carpenter's Gothic for the tragic love affair of the thirty-three year-old Liz and the middle-aged divorcee McCandless. …